Communist Party USA
It’s sometimes said in politics you can go so far left that you end up circling all the way around to the right. French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye called it the “horseshoe theory.” Typically, centrists and conservatives use the idea to trash the left and progressives, to compare them to Nazis. Serious political analysis doesn’t have much use for the horseshoe metaphor. But occasionally, some who claim to be on the left come so close to mimicking the far right that you can’t help but wonder whether they’re working together. Recent discussion around the anniversary of the deadly January 6th, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is one such occasion. On Feb. 4, the Republican National Committee ratcheted up its campaign to rewrite the history of that assault on democracy. In a resolution, the GOP declared the armed riot “legitimate political discourse.” They even slammed two of their own, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, for assisting in the Congressional probe, saying they were participating in “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens.” The GOP is working overtime to make people forget what they saw on their televisions Jan. 6th: a violent mob unleashed by a losing presidential candidate as part of a plan to derail a democratic election and illegally hold onto power. For a party that regularly seeks to strip people (especially people of color) of their right to vote and re-draws district lines to rig elections in their favor, the GOP’s lies about January 6th come as no surprise. That’s about what you’d expect from a Republican Party increasingly dominated by its fascist-leaning wing. The disappointment, however, comes when you realize that some people supposedly on the left are assisting in this historical revisionism. Trump’s helpers Chief among the GOP’s helpers lately: journalist Glenn Greenwald. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, famous for his takedowns of George W. Bush’s Iraq War WMD lies and exposés of U.S. and British surveillance around the world, appears to have effectively switched sides. Appearing regularly on Fox News as a “progressive commentator,” Greenwald praises right-wing journalists out to cripple Black Lives Matter, denounces “antifa” as a violent leftist threat, and repeats Trump talking points about a “Deep State” operating in league with the “liberal left.” He’s become a useful tool for the likes of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham to say to their viewers, “Look, even one of the left’s own guys thinks they’re all crazy!” On the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6th insurrection, Greenwald went all in for the right wing, downplaying the attack on democracy that Trump and his supporters launched. Instead of targeting the coup plotters, Greenwald attacked Democrats, the left, the media, and, by implication, Black Lives Matter. Here are just a few quotes from his long article, which is garnering attention across the political spectrum: Where is this ‘insurrection’? What happened to it? Where did it go? The January 6 protest barely lasted four hours until it was easily subdued. That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start . . . . The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol . . . zero. [There is] an element of truth. . . . There are right-wing extremists in the U.S. bent on using violence to advance their political agenda, just as there are left-wing extremists and anarchist insurrectionary movements and many other types eager to do the same (more destruction was caused by the latter…
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Trump’s useful idiots on the left