the Fascist Assault on Congress: Data, Texts, and Contexts
Hitler is to Trump as tragedy is to farce
1. "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism." paxton on fascism
2. "Some believed that for all practical purposes [Trump] was no more than semi-­literate." the atlantic

3. "  . . .  primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again. . . .  in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance aserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization"
origins of language
origins of language

language and violence
•Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian synthetic a priori.  Failure to do so has the effect of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency, intentionality, habitus, networks and contexts . . . that is, questions of history and questions of power. 

The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014) is the most important book of our time (Trump-time).  Read these excerpts now.

•Lyndal Roper and Joseph Conrad on the heart of darkness: the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity

history of reading, narcissism and the literary libido, and Beiser, The Concept of Bildung in Early German Romanticism,

McMahon on Thermidor and the historical foundations of the two-party system

biocultural niche (Schiller Hall, Fox News, MSNBC) and cognitive performativity
1. Unity
2. Progressive

from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230

The basic question remains, however: How far are aggression, violence, and cruelty in humans today the result of predisposition factors, or biological or archetypal processes, and how far are they the result of cognitive/emotional processes evoked by situational factors?
from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225

At the macrosocial level, Nell greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human cruelty.  There exist wide intercultural differences representing both warring and pacific socities with large intracultural variations and even rapid transformation of warring societies into peaceful ones.  
from Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg, and Daniel Dor, "The co-evolution of language and emotions," Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol. 367, No. 1599 (5 August 2012), pp. 2152-2159

one of the contributing factors making human cooperation and agression unique is the language-based control of emotions.  However, the ability to control emotions can lead not only to inhibitory effects but also to excitatory ones: language can be mobilized for generating aggression.  Furthermore, because words and phrases construct and stabilize human mental emotional categories, language makes it much easier to manipulate emotions for both aggressive and cooperative ends.  In humans, cooperation and aggression are therefore, at least partially, symbol-bound and symbol-controlled, and, in this respect, are qualitatively different from cooperation and aggression in other animals.
re. QAnon: (see Michael Wolf, Seige)

from  Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004)


areas of human experience . . .  realms such as fantasy, envy, and terror  xi
The hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of demonic lovers and Satanic revels.  These fantasies shared, for the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary themes.   7
They heard about cannibalistic witches and sex with the Devil, and they uncovered a world of dark and sinister ceremonies that blasphemed against every Christian value.   11
These two men (professional witch-hunters) saw themselves as engaged in a divinely sanctioned battle against godless aristocrats who were soft on witches and lax crime, and both advanced their careers in part through their pursuit of witches.  23
Witchcraft allegations were a hall of mirrors where neighbors saw their own fear and greed in the shape of the witch.  63
There was an appetite for the salacious details of the witch’s crime and her fearful end   65
In Nördlingen’s witch craze, psychic conflict of the deepest, most irrational kind merged with political factionalism.   81
Deep-rooted, inchoate fears    178
Witchcraft was more than a language for expressing what could not otherwise be said.  It created a symbolic world in which those conflicts can be lived, and where others could be drawn in to act in a relgious drama.  194
Eating babies was exactly what witches were believed to do   247
the essence of "trump" as regime type (Max Weber redux)

from Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,  2011)

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world.
from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008)

We have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual.  By contrast, the relation of the newly literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100

Indeed, without denying the real potental for tension between individual autonomy and class-based collectivism, we may conclude that genuine forms of collectivism and cooperative action are possible only where class solidarity is grounded in autonomous individuals capable of demanding the recognition due to them as thinking, feeling persons.  Without that, new forms of group coercion based on weak individuality are likely to be the result . . .  110


hh
  
Figure 0. The longue durée: from the origins of language to the end of print literacy in the United StatesXX
indexMay Note to the reader: This site is a rhizome
First Part: Establishing an Observational Orientation re. Trump and the Dissolution of Language as Biocultural Niche
Prerequisite for continuing: read these excerpts:  origins of language
"for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual"



Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 2010)

 9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830 Everyone in Paris is reading . . .  People read while riding in carriages  or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen and apprentices read in shops.  On Sundays people read while seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard.

10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.

11. New Readers and Reading Cultures The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West. . . . Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.


h


biocultural niche, cognitive performativity, and politics


Figure 1. the UAW (Unity Caucus*): three headings attached to an image


1. Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts, 1933-1943: Detroit and the lower great lakes.

2. The (formation of an action network) Geography of Agency
3. Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality and the Extended Mind: The UAW Interviews as Dialogical Field**


uu
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
the Plebeian upstart⇿Bildungs-proletarain action-nexus: the kernel of modernity as praxis
vs.
alliance of
throne and altar (Patrimonial)

(McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity): The fundamental importance of religion in maintaining political order, a preoccupation with the perils of intellectual and social license, the valorization of the family and history, the critique of abstract rights, the dangers of dividing sovereignty, and the need for a strategic alliance between throne and altar
1. UAW Lower Great Lakes
Kelsey-Hayes
Michigan Steel Tube
Midland Steel
Dodge Main
Briggs

2. Red Army
three ratios

a. the Joe Adams' ratio: 10.6%
b. the Charlie Yaeger ratio: 7.2%
c. bildunsproletarians: 0.1 %, or ≈ one in a thousand
:
the Dodge Main ratios
n=13-0.06%; (meeting of the chrysler exectuive boards and shop committees, Local 3 n=13

     n=24-0.1%/
n=34-0.16%)/21,894 members
(
e. locals 410, 238, and 350 (Silver and Anderson triangulation)

three dialogical performances

a. Minutes, Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939,Toledo Ohio (Addes Collection, Box 14.11)

b. Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees November 7, 1939--Schiller Hall (Zaremba Box 4)

c. an interview with Joe Bidinger. Detroit east side september 1975)
f
j
click here for full text


*from Charles Yaeger (Buick: Flint) Oral History transcript (Skeels), pp. 11-12

Finally the CIO group, the Addes and Reuther forces in the union at that time, called a special convention with the blessing of the parent CIO in Cleveland, and there we organized what became the UAW-CIO.

We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was there that the union was born after all this factional problem.  Then, of course, we had to go back and reorganize the plants because as much as the International was torn asunder the locals were, too.  We took over the local union with(in) our unit of the old amalgamated [Local 156], which became [local] 594.  We took it over with about 7,000 people working in the plant and 503 or 504 members.  This was all the membership we had.  We did not have the union. [7.2]%

**from Joseph Conrad's "Henry James: an Appreciation" (1905)

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.  But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. . . .  A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.







the present situation (American fascism)
A. The legitimation of violence against a demonized
internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism

QUESTION: What is Fascism?

ANSWER:    A set of texts and their problematic.

To understand the present situation (American fascism): the meeting in the tank of July 20, 2017 and  and the mob assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 must be contextualized.  Figure 0 does this.  The Tillerson quote--"he's a fucking moron"--was the Secretary of State's pithy summary of Trump's cognitive performance at that meeting. 

The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius (chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience") are the primitive cognitive performativity of Trump in that meeting, his brutish behavior toward the Joint Chiefs, and the inability of the Joint Chiefs--and the inability of the authors--to undestand what was happening in the Tank.

A close reading of chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience," can be found here.

"He's a fucking moron," the secretary of state said of the president.  The plan by Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohen to train the president . . . had clearly backfired.
PDF  and line by line analysis
SOOL to contextualize it
Line-by-line (Tank1, Tank)

the meeting in the tank through the eyes of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy: was Trump's performance below basic?
Wolfe's latest book provides an even closer look at Trump's cogitive performtivity


B. Some believed that for all practical purposes [Trump] was no more than semi-­literate

Meeting in the Tank

a. Minutes, Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939,Toledo Ohio (Addes Collection, Box 14.11)

b. Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees November 7, 1939--Schiller Hall (Zaremba Box 4)

the major problematics of this enterpise is the decline and perhaps catastrophic implosion of both individual cognitive development and cognitive performativity in real-life arenas (meetings, rallies, press conferences, "news" shows, interviews with rally attendees, Twitter, etc.): biocultural niche distended/disintegrated; and the necessity, given the shsock of Trump, of revisitng the questin of violence in history whith this recent history facotreed.  That is why the new perijodiztion--and there is no doubt that the fasicst problematic and its texts is the sine qua non of any attempt to ounderstand trump
the big three of fascism, 1922 to 2021

as can be seen in Weitz and Smith, the rhetorical and osoyvhological content of fascims was nothing new.  What was new the irruption of the forces of violnece and resetnment  in a new more vicious form

emergence
nihilism




*the Addes and Reuther forces in the union
from Charles Yaeger (Buick: Flint) Oral History transcript (Skeels), pp. 11-12

Finally the CIO group, the Addes and Reuther forces in the union at that time, called a special convention with the blessing of the parent CIO in Cleveland, and there we organized what became the UAW-CIO.

We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was there that the union was born after all this factional problem.  Then, of course, we had to go back and reorganize the plants because as much as the International was torn asunder the locals were, too.  We took over the local union with(in) our unit of the old amalgamated [Local 156], which became [local] 594.  We took it over with about 7,000 people working in the plant and 503 or 504 members.  This was all the membership we had.  We did not have the union. [7.2]%










1.  The Fascist Assault on the Congress, January 6, 2021

2.  the hidden force behind McConnell's capitulation: n=13

2.  The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State; - KE Matrix; (the big one)

-  Elites: Strategic and Otherwise, 1932 to 2021

3.  The UAW, 1933-1943: a) bild and plebs; b) Midland Steel; c) Michigan Steel Tube

 . . . .

N. Semiotic Regimes: the two-party system as discursive field Semiotic%20regimes2021


three ratios

a. the Joe Adams' ratio: 10.6%
b. the Charlie Yaeger ratio: 7.2%
c. bildunsproletarians: 0.1 %, or ≈ one in a thousand
:
the Dodge Main ratios
n=13-0.06%; (meeting of the chrysler exectuive boards and shop committees, Local 3 n=13

     n=24-0.1%/
n=34-0.16%)/21,894 members
(
e. locals 410, 238, and 350 (Silver and Anderson triangulation)

three dialogical performances

a. Minutes, Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939,Toledo Ohio (Addes Collection, Box 14.11)

b. Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees November 7, 1939--Schiller Hall (Zaremba Box 4)

c. an interview with Joe Bidinger. Detroit east side september 1975)


hh

Figure 2. intersubjectivity, shared intentionality,
and the Extended Mind:
 The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
hh
Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66,
FDR Library; and United States Government Manual 1937

for more info on Fig.2 click on Keynesian Elite: Career Matrix;
also: the
Papers of John M. Carmody
Joanna Bockman. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford University Press, 2011): three reviews

MEMO Ben Cohen to Leon Henderson, June 12, 1939
MEMO Corwin Edwards to Leon Henderson April 12, 1939
FF to FDR 11-21-34 re. Leffingwell

ee
Semiotic Regimes (2021)



h






Violence and Cognitive Performativity


The fuzzy set* category GRIFTER emerged out of conversations between PF and RB.  The first pass through the data produced a working dataset: the Mob at the Capitol

Our work on this dataset occured in the context of mainstream media efforts to make sense out of this information.  Numerous articles were published, including this from the NYT 1-26-21:  "From Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the Capitol"          

how many of its members seemed to come not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence Main Street backgrounds — firefighters and real estate agents, a marketing executive and a Town Council member.

but the capstone of those efforts so far is:

The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats

"The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement" (Update of 2=5=21).  This is the report itself; below is an article in the Atlantic by two of the investigators:

Dr. Robert A. Pape (principal investigator), and Dr. Kevin Ruby (Senior research director),  The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists (the Atlantic, Feb. 2, 2021)

The authors summarize their findings in their Atlantic article:

"40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. "

In their report, the authors provide examples of these "CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants":

▪ Business Owner: 13%
        –  Owner, Ameri-I-Can Ammo
        –  CEO,marketingfirmCogensia
        –  Owner, Wholesale Universe, Inc.
        –  Owner, Matador Sport Fishing
▪ White-Collar: 28%
        –  GoogleFieldOperationsSpecialist
        –  Regional Portfolio Manager at BB&T Bank
        –  Doctors,Attorney,Architects

As we add states and other datasets in the right-hand column, it will become increasingly evident that this analysis out of the University of Chicago (and "mainstream" media coverage in general) fails to comprehend the major features of the dataset Arrests Arising out of the Assault on Congress.**
(
As we add states and other datasets in the right-hand column, it will become increasingly evident that this analysis out of the University of Chicago (and "mainstream" media coverage in general) fails to comprehend the major features of the dataset Arrests Arising out of the Assault on Congress.)
*Charles C. Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond (U. of Chicago Press, 2008)
**by "corporate" I refer to a domain  institutions, practices, and sensibilities rooted in the Thermidorean transformation of the Progressive New Deal into the cold-war Keynesianism of the Liberal Welfare state; and to the networks of corporations that organized and sustained "think tanks" such as Brookings, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Committee for Economic Development, the Brookings Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, and others.  See:




what you see in more from Tenn.: N=4 is a new fuzzy set (or a new hermeneutical category).  Below the Radar (BTR), which is derived from NO INFO RE. WORK!  BTW means a standard google search pattern yielded nothing regarding occupation.  So far I have a spreadsheet containing 226 arrestees.

Consider an arrestee who might otherwise have been classified as BTR . . . except that in the course of a Google search for info on Jordan T. Revlett of Kentucky, I came up with this from a local news source:

Two years before allegedly storming the Capitol, Revlett took home fourth place in a country radio station’s “She Thinks Her Farmer’s Sexy” contest seeking the hottest local farmhands, WBKR reported.

Revlett, clad in a cowboy hat and a sleeveless flannel shirt in front of John Deere farming equipment, racked up nearly 8,000 votes in the contest sponsored by Ohio Valley Insurance – good enough to win tickets to see country singer Justin Moore in Louisville, the station reported.

Absent this story, we would not know that he has an occupational title: farmhand.  We would have then classified him as BTR--Beneath the Radar.


what you see in Minnetsota : N=3 is the necessity of constructing the category marginal working class.*  (in more from Tenn. I used the term subproletariat) as a counter-point to the categories BTR and GRIFTER.)  If there is any kind of occupational information at all then an arrestee cannot be categorized as BTR.  I then went back to more from Tennessee and applied the new fuzzy set category.

*Michael Walzer, "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology," History and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), pp. 59-90
For all his concern with revolution, Marx was himself the product of the same world which produced the great social novels, those elaborate, many-volumed studies of manners, status, and class relationships in which the fundamental stability of the society as a whole and of character (what would today be called 'identity') within the society was always assumed.  And Marx never questions the second of these assumptions: bourgeois and proletarian appear in his work as formed characters, free at least from psychological instability even while their struggle with one another tears apart the social order.

Some Arrestees from the Jan. 6th, 2021 Assault on the Capitol
(States) Tennesee, New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; and (Organizations) Proud Boys and Oathkeepers


Tennessee: N=10
name
hermeneutical materials
fuzzy set categories
Matthew Bledsoe
•He is the owner of Primetime Movers
•BBB:  the company's accreditation was suspended due to failure to respond to one or more customer complaints filed with the BBB.
•He was accused of kicking in the front door of his home in Cordova, chasing his wife Kathryn Bledsoe, picking her up by her throat and slamming her onto the floor.

grifter
violence

Jack Jesse Griffith
“I’m not a domestic terrorist,” Griffith said. “For all the people slandering, libeling, mislabeling my name, I’m a citizen I had nothing to do with any violence, vandalism, and I love all my fellow citizens.”
Griffith went on to promote his social media handles and Trump video game.  “Have an exuberant evening,” he said, as he hopped in a car to leave.

grifter
Eric Munchel
Munchel currently lives in Nashville most likely working at Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk bar downtown. He was accused of assaulting a man and woman in 2013.  He lists his profession as a bartender but Kid Rock’s doesn’t hire male bar staff. This means he is likely working in the kitchen or security. With his connections to others in private security, that could very well be his role there. No record of military service has been found. . . . He spent his summer hanging out with local Proud Boys* and Qanon conspiracy theorists
grifter
Blake Austin Reed
From 2004 to 2009, he attended the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee where he earned his bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership.
From 2012 to October 2013, he was the superintendent of Bluff City Operations‘ human resources management.
From February 2014 to November 2015, he was a superintendent at Regent Homes in Nolensville, Tennessee.
From November 2015 to September 2017, he was a project manager at Blalock Homes in Franklin, Tennessee.
From April 2018 to October 2019, he was a senior project manager at Vintage South Development in Nashville.
He owns Black Lion Brokers, which he established in November 2017 and is based in Nashville.

There is a Black Lion Realty in Nasvhille, NOT Black Lion Brokers
grifter
Ronald L. Sandlin
Ronald L. Sandlin, 33, a self-styled internet blogger and protest organizer from Tennessee, sobbed loudly and at one point blurted out, “Judge, have mercy on me,” during his videoconference detention hearing on multiple charges arising from the Jan. 6 breach at the Capitol.
How To Write Copy That Turns Into Cash - AWOL Elite Conference

 On December 31, 2020, he took to Facebook to announce that he was “organizing a caravan of patriots” who were going to Washington D.C., USA to “stand behind” Trump. He shared a link of the GoFundMe page asking for donations for him, Josiah Colt and Nathaniel J. DeGrave and said the three of them had already booked and paid for their trip to Washington, D.C. On January 3, 2020, he revealed on Facebook that their GoFundMe page was deleted.
On January 2, 2021, he wrote on Facebook  that in 2020, he had a “huge financial blow,” “got dumped” by his fiancé, crashed his motorcycle and lost his grandfather.

During a detention hearing in federal court in February 2021, the judge told him he owes $500,000 in back taxes.  In the same month, the I-Team found that no community where he is known to have resided can find a record of him voting in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
grifter
Eric Chase Torrens
Torrens appeared in an Instagram video with Matthew Bledsoe and Jack Jesse Griffith (GRIFTER network)
grifter
Padilla, Joseph Lino
 a company spokesperson for Wacker Chemie plant told us that Padilla worked at their Bradley County plant until 2016.
subproletariat?
former worker?
Michael Lee Roche
He works as a server at Farmers Family Restaurant in Murfreesboro
working poor?
Ronnie B. Presley
looked at 10+ local stories: NO INFO RE. WORK!
BTR
Bryan Wayne Ivey
looked at 10+ local stories: NO INFO RE. WORK!
BTR

Minnesota: n=3
NAME
AGE
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS
FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Victoria White
39
Larvita McFarquhar, a friend of White.  McFarquhar owns Havens Garden cafe, in Lynd, Minn., where White has worked.
marginal working class?
Jonah Westbury
26
Lindstrom (University of Mary North Dakota)
a former wrestler for the University of Mary Marauders in Bismarck, N.D.
BTR
Jordan K. Stotts
31
works in nurseries and greenhouses during the summer and travels in his van during the winter.
marginal working class


the troublesome state of New Jersey
New Jersey's data (n=9) presents further "problems" with categorization.  At first thought the occupational classification cosmetologist should not pose a problem to the conventional (mindlessly positivistic) scheme of categorization.  From the standpoint of agency, however (and thus, from a hermeneutical standpoint), Abual-Ragheb's occupation seems less relevant than her statements and her participation in the New Jersey chapter of the American Patriots 3% and in her right-wing chat rooms. 

I will skip Baranyi and consider Scott Fairlamb, gym owner and martial artist.  Gyms and bars and salons occur regularly in the entire dataset.  But what one also finds is that--at least in the case of gyms and bars--what we are really dealing with is social networks.  But Fairlamb is also a mixed martial artist.  Does this mean that he should be subsumed under the fuzzy category Violence?  Possibly, even likely.  But we are still in the early stages of our analysis.

Leonard Guthrie, street preacher--what's up with that?  In our working dataset, the Mob at the Capitol, we developed the category/concept of phantom.  Or perhaps the category marginal ought to be deployed.  Certainly the overarching concept that can subsume the majority of cases is marginality, not "CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants."

Hale-Cusanelli is more straightforward: a white supremacist and a Nazi sympathizer who stabbed a man, was a regular poster on anti-Semitic social media groups, and has served in the U.S. Army since 2009.  Should he be subsumed under the category Stormtrooper?  (There is no doubt that this term should be applied to the Proud Boys.  If you doubt this, read David King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany (Norton, 2017), and click on this link containing extensive excerpts from: Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).  This chapter, when used as a context for interpreting "Trump," confirms the hermeneutical utility of the ratio: Hitler is to Trump as Tragedy is to Farce.

Stefanie Hazelton is also more straighforward, or so it seems.  A prominent right-wing activist from South Jersey, an organizer against New Jersey's shutdown orders, active in the anti-vaxxer movement, and the founder of New Jersey for Medical Freedom, the state chapter of an anti-vaccine network.  This case is easily subsumable under the category Politico.

Note that, while she is not a gym owner, she was one of the loudest supporters of Atilis Gym.  Given the point already made re. Fairlamb, what we are really dealing with is social networks.  Indeed, Stefanie Hazelton should be thought of as part of the cadre* of right-wing politicos and the social networks she is in contact with as her base.  There are many of these political cadre in the by now predominantly fascist** GOP.  Thus, the question of the structure of social action comes to the fore.  Applying the "model" of social action I developed out of my UAW studies, it becomes possible not only to penetrate into the inner strucutre of actions of Jan 6, but to establish a comparative framework: then and now: from the New Deal to Donald Trump.  This is done in the row below.

To round out this survey of New Jersey we have Patrick Stedman, a self-described “dating [and] relationship strategist.”  Grifter?  For sure!  And two correctional police officers.

I haven't forgotten Thomas Baranyi, who went into basic training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged.  Without any occupation listed in the local media (or anywhere accessible) Baranyi is beneath the radar, and also a failure at his attempt to enter the performative domain of “legitimate” violence.  In this he can be taken as a poster boy for the condition of marginality that is such a  prominent feature of our dataset.  Another candidate for poster boy representing the marginal principle axis*** of this dataset is Enrique Tarrio, Proud Boy chairman at the time of his arrest.  And so, dear reader, onward to the cadre of American fascism today, the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers.

*cadre (Merriam-Webster): Merriam-Webster, the OED, and Wikipedia all define cadre in terms of either educated bureaucratic functionaries or communist lower-level functionaries.  We old-timers used the word to describe plebeian upstarts, mostly high-school graduates (this is in 1937), who were a regular and reliable part of the action-networks led by bildungsproletarians, a large number of whom had some college (again, this is in 1937).  see the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook



***When I make use of mathematical terms I do so as an aid to forming new concepts  in the human sciences (geisteswissenschaften: see Beiser, ch. 8, "Dilthey and the Foundations of the Human Sciences,"in The German Historicist Tradition) not the social sciences.  This--the human sciences--is my turf.  When it comes to the mathematics I reference, I really don't know what I'm talking about.  However, there are degrees of ignorance.  When I speak of the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity, I actually have a minimal but real enough understanding of group theory gained from reading the first few pages of Birkhoff and MacLane's chapter on Group Theory in their A Survey of Modern Algebra.  But when I use the term principle axis (from matrix theory), I am obliged to note that I never studies that chapter.  Nevertheless, I am confident that I am on the right track.  Remember, everything on the right hand side of this page is a matrix--or at least looks like one.  Principle axis refers to something fundamental about the structure of a matrix.  Where will this lead?  Is there a mathematician around?  Please advise.






the concepts that emerged: grifter, violence, sadism1--PDLV (Performative Domain of "Legitimate" Violence); and related social networks (bars, tatoo parlors, gyms (hermeneutical typologies) and occupational classification.  Attempts are continually being made to match the journalistic materials with

1.  North American Industry Classification System
2.  Standard Occupational Classification System

Certain absences are noteworthy: few were employed at the time of arrest in modern institutional settings: none in manufacturing, none in the building trades, none in the modern corporate sector
nevertheless, there is a small subset of arrestees who are employed in the modern corporate sector








New Jersey: N=9 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol
NAME
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS
FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Abual-Ragheb, Rasha N.
cosmetologist

In November 2020, a Facebook account with display name Rasha Abu participated in Facebook and Telegram group chats involving the New Jersey chapter of the American Patriot 3%. In the Facebook chat, user Rasha Abu advised the revolution will start not by standing by but by standing up. In addition, she advised civil war is coming and they need to show support, and rise up and fight for our Constitution.
cosmetologist
Baranyi, Thomas
graduated Trenton State College
In a Facebook post, Baranyi’s father said his son graduated from the College of New Jersey, joined the Peace Corps, and also went into basic training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged.
From 2018 to 2020, he served in the Peace Corps in Albania.
On December 22, 2020, his father took to Facebook to say they have not seen each other in person since 2017.
went into basic training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged.

BTR
Fairlamb, Scott
a New Jersey gym owner, Fairlamb held a protest at his Pompton Lakes gym in May in response to Gov. Murphy’s coronavirus restrictions.
Fairlamb, a mixed martial artist who turned pro in 2000, owned and operated Fairlamb Fit in Pompton Lakes. The gym's website has been taken down and the phone number is disconnected. Social media accounts for both Fairlamb and his co-workers have been removed.
gym owner
martial artist
Guthrie, Leonard
(married with a daughter; identified himself as a street preacher.
His father told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter that his son went to the rally as the chaplain for a group that met in Washington to "pray and support President Trump and the whole movement.”
a street preacher
Hale-Cusanelli, Timothy Lewis
He is an white supremacist and a Nazi sympathizer, according to an informant who contacted Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agent Daniel J. Meyers on January 12, 2021. The informant is enrolled as a confidential human source (CHS) with the NCIS.

He has served in the U.S. Army since 2009 but has never deployed.
In 2011, when he was 19 years old, he was arrested after stabbing a man he and his mother were living with in Pepperidge Court, Jackson, New Jersey. With a wound to the abdomen, the victim underwent surgery in the Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune Township, New Jersey.
As a contractor at Naval Weapons Station Earle, he maintains a secret security clearance and has access to a variety of munitions. He is enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. He is a human resources specialist with the 174th Infantry Brigade at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Trenton, New Jersey.
He was a regular poster on anti-Semitic social media groups Jackson Strong and Rise Up Ocean County.
VIOLENCE
Military
PDLV
Hazelton, Stephanie aliases Ayla Wolf and Ayla Wolfe
a prominent right-wing activist from South Jersey, one of the loudest supporters of Atilis Gym, that Bellmawr business that refused to follow New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s shutdown orders.
Hazelton has helped organize protests against New Jersey’s shutdown orders and is active in the anti-vaxxer movement.
Hazelton’s LinkedIn says she is the founder of New Jersey for Medical Freedom, the state chapter of an anti-vaccine network.
POLITICO
Stedman, Patrick Alonzo
a self-described “dating [and] relationship strategist”
In addition to offering relationship advice and touting his $500 master class—which he claims is the “fastest and most effective way to change your outcomes with women”—Stedman frequently writes about political topics and his affinity for Trump.
GRIFTER
Suarez, Marissa A.
worked as a correctional police officer in Monmouth County since 2019 but resigned after her arrest.  At the time, Suarez was a probationary corrections officer at the Monmouth County Corrections Facility
correctional police officer
Todisco, Patricia
the performative domain of “legitimate” violence
pdlv   PDO"L"V      PDLV
correctional police officer

leadership: elite, cadre, and base (1)
So far we have looked at Tennessee, Minnesota, and New Jersey.  This already gives us a a sense of the kind of problems the researcher has when dealing with a population in the process of marginalization.  The instability in their lives is manifest in the difficulty of category formation.  If we now turn our attention to the cult of sado-sexual "masculine" violence that is the fundamental principle of Trump's performativities, we must consider the vanguard of the assault on the capitol, the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys. (These Oathkeepers and Proud Boys are also included in the tables of states.)  They are our stormtroopers--no other term will do.  These are the cadre of fascism, operating in the context of and with the enthusiastic support of the GOP "base."

Regarding the Oathkeepers, we have some tentative results so far: they are not only ex-military; they are also a general manager at a car dealership, a self-employed carpenter, a window washer, a tatoo parlor . . . , the owner of a marginal day-car facility, and a former police officer.  The outlier in this table--and that by a long-shot--is Stewart Rhodes, Yale Law School, clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice, and a staffer for Ron Paul. 

Thus, the single word that could encompass this set of individuals is marginal, and that in several senses.  First, as grifters,  BTR, and low-wage service workers in very small establishments; second, as almost entirely outside the world of modern institutions; and third, arising out of the collapse of the economic basis for socialization into adulthood within the psycho-cultural framework provided by white supremacy, there results a prolongation of adolescent sadism.  This is the basis for Trump's rhetorical success.
--
Thus, at this point it is necessary to discuss the political-organizational processes that led to April 6.  WAPO/NYT and other news organizations have reached a tentative consensus that it was the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers who were the cadre that led the assault.  Democrats and the liberal media obsess over the role of Trump in this assault; some of them note the obvious complicity of the fascist vanguard in Congress: Marjorie Green et al.  (At any time the reader can go to the fascism pages on this site. remember: on this site fascism denotes primarily not the mere concept, often given as a definition, but a set of texts focused on the problematic of fascism.)

Vanguard--or cadre?  Was the "riot" organized by Trump?  Wrong question.  There is no doubt that the immanent logic of Trump's strategic orientation led directly from Charlottesville to the Capitol.  But immanent logic does not necesarilly imply "conscious" organization with the goal in mind of overthrowing the election results (a coup).  Donald Trump, as I will argue elsewhere, never entered the domain of cognitive performativity within which it would be possible to conceive of anything that modern people discuss.  It took him more than two weeks to learn how to prononce hydroxychloroquine!  And for a moment during the much-publicized solar eclipse he became the stupidest person in the world when he starred directly at the sun.  Rex Tillerson called him"a fucking moron," and we've all heard him attempt to speak English.  Trump was a pawn; others did his writing and thinking--such as it was--for him.  Recall the infamous meeeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.  The Speaker, who kept her cool throughout, nevertheless seemed struck by Trump's inability to hold a discussion of any kind.  Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig (A Very Stable Genius) describe Trump's July 20, 2017 meeting with the Joint Chiefs in "the Tank" (pp. 129-139).

But to call trump stupid (or “a moron”) is to miss the point.  Cognitive performativity is a biocultural historical phenomenon, hardly explicable within a discursive field shaped by the Cartesian synthetic a priori.  Indeed, The election of Donald Trump is a lagging indicator of the disintegration of cognitive performativities in the United States.  Preceding his election was the decline of mathematical competence indexed by Figure 3a and b.  which indicate that a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity preceded and made possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of November 2016.  (see Prelude to Trump: the end of literacy in the United States).  The coronavirus debacle that is Trump is a product of and an accelerant of that decline.

Cognitive development is not a normative, inevitable process (Wolf).  It is an effect of history and politics, as well as evolution, and can suffer reversal or collapse.    It is this collapse that is manifest in the stunningly incompetent performance of the Trump administration's response to the existential threat posed by Covid 19.  (see various cog dev pages, including semiotic regimes).

Media coverage of Trump is at best strikingly inadequate, in that its commentary on Trump's cognitive performativity proceeds under the Cartesian assumption that it's all about Trump--what does he want, what is he thinking, why did he do that to the children, doesn't he realize that he is hurting them.  Trump's cognitve performtivity is not about trump: it is about america.  It is an adequate reflection/expression of the "base": trump is the lowest common denominator of everyman


the performative domain of “legitimate” violence.
What is the performative domain of "legitimate" violence?  Certainly the police and the military.  But also correctional officers and private security guards.  And also--if you remember the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson--the entire web of local government (see photo).  And if you remember the May 8, 1970 assault on anti-war protesters by construction workers aided by the police in New York City, all of this organized from within the Nixon White House, you see an even broader proto-fascist constituency.  Max Blumenthal (Republican Gomorrah, pp. 59-60) tells the story:
bl



















Florida: N=19 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol
NAME
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS
FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Adams, Howard Berton 
Edgewater

Anderson, John Steven
Courthouse records on the Clerk of Court website show ANDERSON involved in contentious divorce litigation alleging  domestic violence, as well as dismissed charges of assault, and fines paid for driving without wearing a seatbelt, driving with an expired license tag.

Biggs, Joseph Randall
Proud Boys, Ormond Beach, Florida.  is supporting his ex-wife and child
Camargo, Samuel
Like many of the MAGA fanatics who have been arrested in the two weeks since the insurrection, Samuel Camargo implicated himself by bragging about his participation on social media, authorities said.

Counsil, Matthew
A Tampa Bay resident

Curzio, Michael
spent time in prison for attempted murder.VIOLENCE VIOLENCE
Garcia, Gabriel Augustin
ran as a Republican in District 116 in Miami-Dade
a former U.S. Army captain, ran for Florida House District 116 as a Trump backer.
STORMTROOPER
GOP
GOSSJANKOWSKI,
Vitali
a student at Gallaudet University
Katherine Jankowski, his mother, was formerly an administrator at Gallaudet.

Honeycutt, Adam Avery, 39
works as a bail bondsman in Northeast Florida
Honeycutt has three prior arrests on charges of drug possession, domestic battery and breach of peace, but he was only found guilty of that last charge.
police
Johnson, Adam
Johnson Is a Stay at Home Father Who Makes Furniture
marginal
Maldonado, Steven Omar
Maldonado alias Emilio Maldonado is a Puerto Rico native and lives in Palm Bay, Brevard County, Florida, according to Conan Daily. Previously, he was arrested for a couple of misdemeanors in 1998 and is a real estate sales associate. The site also listed him as a diver and he worked at the Treasure Coast Dive Charters as a boat captain where he offered diving and spearfishing trips on the Treasure Coast in Florida.

MARIOTTO, Anthony R. (aka, Tony Mariotto)
fort pierce

PERT, Rachael Lynn

Pert, who is the assistant manager of a Circle K convenience store in Middleberg, requested time off work to go D.C. with Winn. “We’re on our way to DC because us as American patriots, we’re tired of this shit,” Winn allegedly said in their live-stream. “It’s time to make a stand. I never really knew how deep and corrupt all this crap was and how far back it’s gone. But American needs to wake up. We’re on the verge of fucking losing it.”

RIVERA, Jesus (aka, JD Rivera, Jesus Delmora Rivera)
U.S. Marines (Former)

STEPAKOFF, Michael
Stepakoff leads Temple New Jerusalem, a Messianic synagogue in Palm Harbor. He is also a former attorney.
Palm Harbor, Florida, rabbi

Sweet, Douglas
She said Douglas was a self-employed man who does "handyman stuff" but spends most of his time with his extremist groups.  attended the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville
see photo!
“The Daughter Of A Trump Rioter Arrested At The Capitol Says She Is "Ashamed And Disgusted””

Douglas Sweet from Hudgins and Cobbs Creek resident Cindy Fitchett

Weeks, Bradley W., 43
a Clay High School graduate who attended the University of North Florida

WEEKS then sets up his camera to show his face and launches into a speech declaring both the actions he has taken and his intentions. “We’ve reached the steps. We’ve had to climb scaffolding. We’ve had to climb ladders. We’ve had to break things to get through, but we’ve gotten through. We’ve gotten through, and we are going to take back the Capitol! We’re taking back our country! This is our 1776! This is where it’s gonna happen! This is where Tyranny will fall! This is where America will rise! Look at this, America! Look at this!”

WILLIAMS, Andrew
firefighter paramedic

WINN, Dana Joe

A Lemon Bay High School graduate
see Pert.








Jan 6 riot/insurrection
campaign contribution
Keynesian elite in New Deal
UAW
DLC and Clinton Foundation
the Cleveland Connection
--
As we add states and other datasets in the right-hand column, it will become increasingly evident that this analysis out of the University of Chicago (and "mainstream" media coverage in general) fails to comprehend the major features of the dataset Arrests Arising out of the Assault on Congress.

 




Oathkeepers N=14 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol
NAME
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS PBs
FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Kelly Meggs
general manager at a car dealership

Connie Meggs


Kenneth Harrelson
Retired Army Sgt. Kenneth Harrelson

Donovan Crowl
Marine veteran, militia
a self-employed carpenter
Prosecutors said he does not have a stable address

Jessica Watkins
bartender who runs a self-identified militia, joined by three others in her unit, drove to Washington D.C. last week

Joshua James
window washer

Robert Minuta
tatoo parlor

Stewart Rhodes
Stewart Rhodes grew up in the Southwest and joined the Army after finishing high school. He became a paratrooper, receiving an honorable discharge due to an injury in a night parachuting accident. Then Rhodes attended college at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, graduating in 1998. Rhodes has said that he taught street crime survival and rape prevention at the college women’s center and also worked as a certified Nevada concealed-carry firearms instructor.

After college, his first politically oriented job was supervising interns in Washington, D.C., for libertarian Ron Paul, then a Republican congressman from Texas. Rhodes subsequently attended Yale Law School, graduating in 2004, and clerked for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael D. Ryan. A trial lawyer and libertarian, he later volunteered on Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.
more: SPLC

Tanios, George Pierre 39
a West Virginia sandwich shop owner
GROUP OF 8 PHOTO

Tarrio, Enrique
Cuban
grifter
character
Roger Stone
Grayden Young
an Army and Navy reserve veteran; a brother, husband and a small business owner; brother of Steele; Manager at Young Children's Academy

Laura Steele
a former High Point police officer; sister of Young

Sandra Parker


Bennie Parker*





Proud Boys: N=13 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol
NAME
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALSFUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Enrique Tarrio
"Arested Proud Boys chairman has history of business failure, apparently lives with mom" (WAPO JANUARY 8, 2021)

Joseph Biggs
Ormond Beach, Florida.  is supporting his ex-wife and child

Ethan Nordean
•Auburn, Washington.has been a Proud Boys chapter president and member of the group’s national “Elders Council.”  willing to stake the home where his wife and child were living (?)
•Proud Boy activist who was fired by his father, Mike Nordean, over his membership of the group. Mike Nordean owns Wall’s Chowder House and Wally’s Drive-In in Des Moines, Washington.

Zachary Rehl
Zach Rehl biography: 13 things about Proud Boys member from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Charles Donohoe
presidents of his local Proud Boys chapter

Ashlock, Ryan
Gardner, Kansas.  Kansas City metro chapter of the Proud Boys

Chrestman, William


DECARLO, Nicholas
In some photos, DeCarlo was seen with Nicholas Ochs, one of the founders of Hawaii’s chapter of the Proud Boys, neofascist group.
In addition to his work for Murder the Media, DeCarlo said he also worked trading bitcoin online currency.
DeCarlo said he was not a member of the Proud Boys. But he said the Proud Boys had raised money for his defense
posible Grifter
GARCIA, Gabriel Augustin
a former U.S. Army captain, a 2020 candidate for the Florida State House and a reported member of the Proud Boys  /  ran for Florida House District 116 as a Trump backer

GOODWYN, Daniel
A San Francisco freelance web developer who calls himself a Proud Boy and has an extensive history of COVID denialism has been charged for his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Goodwyn has a large digital footprint. According to his personal website, he attended City College of San Francisco and works as a freelance web and app developer. He lists Jews for Jesus as one of his clients and, strangely, posts links to everything from his Gab, Parler, Venmo and Pandora accounts to his dating app profiles.

On his Twitter account Goodwyn claimed in September he was "arrested and cited" for not wearing a mask on Muni. Afterward, he posted video of himself on YouTube, maskless, reading a statement in front of the Hall of Justice. In it, he repeats a number of lies about the coronavirus pandemic, including denying it outright and falsely claiming COVID vaccines will contain "a microchip.”

He used the citation to fundraise for himself on a Christian crowd-funding site used by other far-right extremists like Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander. Goodwyn raised $1,689 of his $5,000 goal.

Greeson, Kevin
On Jan. 4, Kelly allegedly wrote, “I’ll be with ex NYPD and some proud boys. This will be the most historic event of my life.”

KELLY, Christopher M.
works for a fixed wireless company in Cedar Rapids

Pezzola, Dominic
“The Proud Boy Who Smashed a US Capitol Window Is a Former Marine”                     The Aquinas Institute in a suburb of Rochester, New York.               

One person who has known Pezzola for over 20 years described him as a hardworking father of two daughters whose politics grew increasingly extreme over the last two years.  VICE News attempted to contact Pezzola via phone numbers connected to his business

  “Out of everyone in our class, I would have picked him out as a domestic terrorist,” one classmate, who asked to remain anonymous for her safety, told VICE News. “He was always a bit machismo,” remarked another, who had the same request for anonymity.

Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y., also has been named in state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000 over the past five years, according to public records. His attorney declined to comment.



president Donal Trump during his first post-presidential rally, held at the Lorain county fairgrounds in Wellington, Ohio on 26 June 26
"‘He’s not a quitter’: faithful out in force as Trump gets back to the campaign trail," the Guardian June 27, 2021
n=6.  an informal survey of the attendees at Trump's first post-presidential rally
NAME
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALSFUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Deborah Wagner, 55a retired court clerk

Gary Bartlett, 65
a retired manual worker at General Motors

Randy Weld, 53
a self-employed carpenter

David Snell, 55
a logistics specialist

Gary Sherrill, 65
a concrete mixer driver

Rose Kidd, 63
a retired nurse















MSNBC on violent extremist groups in lieu of deploying the concept fascism.  concepts/compare; not-concept--can't compare, contextualize.  cannot think.  can only accuse, defame, label

from CNN newscast, 4:00 to 6:00 PM, 9-15-07: pro- and anti-war demonstrators' signs (applying the concept of semiotic regime):

pro-war demo signs:
"Traitors Go to Hell!"
"Deport Anti-war Protesters!"
"Treason!"

anti-war demo signs:   
"End the War Now!"
"U.S. Out of Iraq!"
"Support the Troops!  End the War!"

two from Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (FSG, 2011)

It was true that Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it wasn’t used often enough; true as well that the men whose gassing or electrocution he’d called for, over dinner in Chip’s childhood, were usually black men from the slums on St. Jude’s north side. (“Oh, Al,” Enid would say, because dinner was “the family meal,” and she couldn’t understand why they had to spend it talking about gas chambers and slaughter in the streets.) p. 128


The two Lamberts were crossing the courtyard when Gary’s anger found a fault line through which to vent itself. p. 210



ee

The headline--"he's a fucking moron"--is from A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience," p. 138B.

A close reading of chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience," can be found here.

The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting are the primitive cognitive performativity of Trump in that meeting, his brutish behavior toward the Joint Chiefs, and the inability of the Joint Chiefs--and the inability of the authors--to undestand what was happening in the Tank.  Only when we place that meeting, and the assault on the Capitol, in historical context, does the awful truth of our situation begin to emerge. 

In this meeting the Joint Chiefs were stunned by Trump's primitive cognitive processes, his volatile temperament, his brutishness.  

The Joint Chiefs “tried not to reveal the revulsion on their faces” (Genius, 137A).

 The tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret.  At the Aspen Security Forum two days later, longtime NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Dunford how Trump had interacted during the Tank meeting.  The Joint Chiefs chairman misleadingly described the meeting, skipping over the fireworks. (Genius, 139A)

"He asked a lot of hard questions, and the one thing he does is question some fundamental assumptions that we make as military leaders—and he will come and question those,” Dunford told Mitchell on July 22.  “It’s a pretty energetic and an interactive dialogue." (Genius, 139B)

from Salon (excerpts from Bob Woodward's Fear):

2.  Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation's fate under Trump's command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, "There may come a time when we have to take collective action" since Trump is "dangerous. He's unfit."

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, "The president has no moral compass," to which the director of national intelligence replied: "True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It's just what he thinks. He doesn't know the difference between the truth and a lie."

4.  According to "Rage," expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci — who has been part of Trump's coronavirus task force —  expressed frustration over Trump's response to the coronavirus crisis, describing Trump's leadership as "rudderless" and complaining to others that his "attention span is like a minus number." Fauci, Woodward says in the book, told an associate, "His sole purpose is to get reelected."

from the Hill (excerpts from Bob Woodward's Fear):

Woodward also described Coats as particularly disturbed during his time in the Trump administration, which ended in August 2019. Coats, a former Indiana senator, was brought into the administration by Vice President Pence, the Hoosier State’s former governor.

Marsha Coats, Dan Coats’s wife, recounted a conversation she had with Pence in which he urged her to “stay the course.”

“I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” she said, according to Woodward. “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’ ”





on racism and the longuee duree: The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism" (April 4, 2007)
theater of resentiment
ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense (AE 3.2)
the stupid party (Stupid%252520PartyTWO.html-->this is good))
st.party link to modern pedagogical theory; stupid party, earlier version
Nietzsche redux (and what about Marx?)











This site is a rhizome
The site as a whole recognizes that the Internet is the techno-cognitive axis of a praxiological revolution in thought, where the extended mind is fused with philosophy as the critical accompaniment to empirical practice.

This site is a rhizome.  Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.  (see also philosophy and history). 

from John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (Pluto Press, 1998)

The rhizome is a figure borrowed from biology, opposed to the principle of foundation and origin which is embedded in the figure of the tree.  The model of the tree is hierarchical and centralized, wheas the rhizome is proliferating and serial, functioning by means of the principle of connection and heterogeneity.

Deleuze and Guatarri argue that the book has been linked traditionally to the model of the tree, in that the book has been seen as an organic unit, which is both hermetically sealed, but also a reflection of the world.  In contrast, the rhizome is neither mimetic nor organic.  It only ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is a method of experimenting with the real: and it is always an open system, with multiple exits and entrances.  In short, the rhizome is an 'acentred' system; the map of a mode of thought which is always 'in the middle'. p 45


"Texts" and "data" coexist in a plane of immanence governed by consilience, attunement, and affinity.  The Brandom-Sellars observation is borne in mind:

" . . . according to Sellars's view, the difference between theoretical objects and observable objects is methodologcal rather than ontological.  That is, theoretical and observable objects are not different kinds of things.  They differ only in how we come to know about them."*

Concepts are not brought in from outside the phenomenological field, but rather emerge immanently.  Concepts are not meant to subdue the empirical material, but to illuminiate it.**

*from Robert B. Brandom, "The Centrality of Sellars's Two-Ply Account of Observations to the Arguments of 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', in Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Harvard University Press, 2002)
**see the critique of the U of C study here.