The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages (the Outrages)

Moving on to the outrages, on September 3, the Tweetie-pie administration proposed rule changes to the Endangered Species Act, changes that Noah Greenwald, director of the endangered species program at the Center for Biological Diversity, called "a disaster for endangered species and the natural world."

One of the purposes of the Act is to protect endangered species by labeling certain areas "critical habitat," areas necessary for the species' well-being and continued survival.
 
The proposed changes would require the US Fish and Wildlife Service to "assign weight" to industry claims of an economic impact if a given area is to be declared critical habitat and to on that basis exclude federal lands essential to the recovery of species from protection of the Endangered Species Act. To make that clearer: Currently, areas may be excluded from protection of the Act if that exclusion would have no impact on the survival of the species; the changes, as I understand them, would allow for such exclusion even if there is such an impact, thus raising the economic interests of polluters and despoilers over the preservation of nature.

Even worse, according to Greenwald, the polluters and despoilers would not even have to prove the economic impacts they are claiming.

It's just another of the thousand cuts, the thousand outrages, the Tweetie-pie gang has inflicted on protection of the environment and those who live in it - including, yes, people - just to make sure their fat cats pals can afford to put another addition on their mansions.

As a footnote to that, I'll just mention there is a movement developing called Rights of Nature that looks to obtain for ecosystems legal status in our court system as rights-bearing entities. The idea is not, as sarcasm would have it, giving every tree a lawyer, but rather that an ecosystem is to be regarded in court as a party with legal interests. The big asset here is that this would enable organizations and even individuals to sue polluters on behalf of an ecosystem without having to prove that they themselves individually were injured and where, if successful, the damages involved and so the remediation  involved would be to the ecosystem rather than just to the particular individual. Toledo, Ohio actually tried it in 2019 but lost in trial court this spring and the city felt it didn't have the financial resources to push the matter further.

Suing on behalf of some third party is hardly new, even suing on behalf of some defined non-living entity is not new. So Rights of Nature at the very least isn't outside the reach of legal theory. But yes, it is radical. And for that reason it is worthy of respect and our attention.

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Next is the Outrage that never seems to end. It's an asymptote - which, if you don't know, is a curve on a graph that keeps getting closer and closer to zero but never gets there. The value gets smaller and smaller but never actually disappears.

I am talking about the death penalty. Even as public support continues to decline, even as fewer states even have the death penalty on the books and most of those that have it use it less and less, still it persists like some noxious weed.

On August 28, Keith Dwayne Nelson became the fifth person the Trump administration has legally murdered this summer.

Before this summer, the federal government has not had an execution in 17 years. Since July there have now been five, with two more scheduled for late September and new dates rumored to be on their way. Even without those, our Killer-in-Chief has already carried out more federal executions in 2020 than his predecessors had in the previous 57 years combined.

The death penalty is notoriously ineffective in controlling crime and notoriously racist in its operation, not only in who is sentenced to death but in who is convicted: If you are a white person accused of killing someone and are claiming self-defense, you are 2.5 times more likely to succeed if your victim was black than if they were white.

I started to say that the death penalty is a lingering remnant of a barbarous age - but then I thought that we're really not that far removed from barbarity, are we? We just find politer ways to do it.

In any event, the death penalty remains what it always has been: an outrage.

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Finally for this time out, on August 11, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene won a GOPper primary for Georgia's 14th congressional district.

She won with the backing of GOPper megadonors along with such as the chair of the board of the Heritage Foundation and groups connected to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his wife.

Her win makes her the odds-on favorite to fill the seat in the heavily-GOPper district come November. Despite the fact that she is, again, a racist, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic QAnon devotee.

Perhaps to celebrate her victory, on her Facebook page, Greene recently posted an image of herself holding a gun alongside images of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar and wrote: "We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists."

That transparent incitement to murder was too much even for Facebook, which has bent over backwards to prove it is "fair" to the right wing but took this one down as a violation of terms of service.

The outrage here is even not so much at her victory and her bigotry and her violence-promoting fear-mongering but at how far the amorphous blob of conspiracy fables that is QAnon has penetrated the body of the GOPper party and how eager some among that body - including some megadonors - are to embrace it while others in that party sit in cowardly silence for fear of losing their position and their perks.

But an even deeper point here is that while almost any right-wing fever dream can be made to fit under the heading of QAnon, there is a core that reveals something older and more let's call it familiar.

Consider what QAnon claims, notes Gregory Stanton, an expert on genocide, writing at justsecurity.org on September 9: A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, finance, and the news media. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They want to marginalize the white race so it will lose its power.

Except, wait. Yes, that is what QAnon claims - among other fantasies. But in the original, it was not "marginalize" but "mongrelize" and with that one change you now have the plot, if you can call it that, of the notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a work fabricated around 1902 by piling together whatever anti-Jewish tropes were lying around.

The Nazis had their hero, Adolph Hitler, to rescue them from this "plot." QAnon fanatics have Tweetie-pie.

In short and despite, yes, some differences in the details of the fantasies, QAnon is nothing more than a rebranding of the most notorious anti-Semitic work in history, right down to Hitler's "storm troopers" that helped him come to power and QAnon's awaiting of "The Storm," the day when supporters of this fantastical cabal will be rounded up and executed. And it could well lead to the same bloody result.

Stanton's insight, drawn from his experience studying genocide and the conditions leading up to it, brought to mind the old saying that "nothing is as obvious as the truth - once someone has said it."

The targets may have moved from - or more properly expanded beyond - Jews to include "socialists," immigrants, and any other opponents of the dream of a lily-white society that never actually existed, but the meaning is the same and the threat just as real.