Will Alabama Voters Be Next to Reject 'Trumpism'?
Will Alabama Voters Be Next to Reject 'Trumpism'?
Steve Bannon’s attempted fascist
putsch in Virginia and New Jersey has failed. Is Alabama
next? Can the Democrats keep it from being
stolen? Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in the Garden
State and the state “for lovers” were soundly won by
moderate Democrats. The elections were widely featured in
the corporate media as referendums on Donald Trump. But the
knife cut much deeper. Steve Bannon, the nation’s leading
fascist activist-theoretician, offered to campaign for
Gillespie, branding him a “culture warrior” in the course of
the race. Although Gillespie refused Bannon’s direct aid in the
campaign, Bannon praised Gillespie’s adoption of far-right
Trumpist ideology and his brutally racist, anti-immigrant
ads that reflect Bannon’s extreme right-wing
ideology. ADVERTISEMENT Bannon went so far as to say
that Gillespie’s swing to the hard right was what made his
race competitive. “I do believe Gillespie’s going to
pull this thing out,” Bannon said Sunday, two days before
the vote. “The lesson of Gillespie is Trumpism without
Trump. … We now have forced the establishment to embrace
our platform.”
But once Gillespie lost, both Trump and
Bannon attacked him for not fully embracing
their positions or their presence. Trump was the first
sitting president to not campaign in a Virginia governor’s
race since Richard Nixon during Watergate. As the defeat
became clear, Trump tweeted from Asia that Gillespie did not
represent him. With immigration as a pretext, Virginia and
New Jersey voters were showered with visual and textual images
portraying blacks and immigrants in race-baiting, fear-mongering
terms.
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