Paranoia runs deep

This kind of thing creates an opportunity for all sorts of further authoritarian outrages and florid conspiracy theories:

The gunman who shot and critically injured two National Guard members near the White House is an Afghan who worked with C.I.A.-backed military units during the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the agency said on Thursday.

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near a metro station in downtown Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon by a lone gunman who was also injured and later detained, officials said.

The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, said that the suspect had come to the United States in September 2021, after the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, through a Biden-era immigration program for Afghans who had worked with the U.S. government. People familiar with the investigation identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29.

The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and other law enforcement officials were expected to address the news media at 9 a.m. Eastern.

After officials disclosed the suspect’s nationality on Wednesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency overseeing immigration in the United States, said that it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan. The pause will affect Afghans seeking to remain in the United States through immigration avenues like asylum and permanent residency, or those trying to enter the country.

In a video address late Wednesday, President Trump said he had ordered 500 more National Guard troops to Washington, though it was unclear when they would arrive or where they would come from. The president framed the shooting as an “act of terror” and launched a broadside against immigration, saying it “underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation” and vowing to redouble his mass deportation efforts.

Trump’s second term is fueled by pure hatred and the quest for vengeance. As he deteriorates physically and mentally, the assortment of fanatical crackpots and grifters in his inner circle are going to take whatever chances they get to pursue their various agendas. For instance it’s a truism by this point that Stephen Miller and Russell Vought are supposedly running things on a day to day basis. And while the analogy can be too facile, students of Nazi Germany will be struck by certain similarities. Hans Mommsen’s summary:

Hitler represented “human mediocrity and professional incompetence” and avoided most tasks associated with sound governance. The fact that Hitler last convened his cabinet in February 1938, symbolizes the absence of method in his regime. The Führer hated bureaucrats and, accordingly, thwarted administrative reform; he abetted “Bonzocracy” (Boznen — profiteering members of the party) and allowed corruption to develop; he avoided decisions of principle and refrained from systematic study of matters of state and their treatment. He took only a sporadic interest in administrative affairs, left his satraps to contend with one another without taking an explicit stance, and intervened only when confronted with the need to express his preferences explicitly. The rule is this: Hitler facilitated a system of “orderly temporary chaos” (i.e., “organized disorder”) and the so-called Nazi policracy and its “neo-feudal” structure.

This is really an elaboration of the view first put forward in 1944 by Franz Neumann in Behemoth.

I’m currently reading John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, his social history of the early 1990s, which highlights how certain figures from that time, such as Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and David Duke, were precursors of the metastasizing of Trumpism a quarter century later. Duke in particular, although in many ways an absurd and marginal figure, can be seen in retrospect as a kind of bridge between proto-fascist demagogues of the New Deal era such as Huey Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, and Father Charles Coughlin, and the neo-fascist 21st century revival that is Trumpism.

The potential parallels between Trump, Long, and Duke seem particularly under-explored. Ganz digs up the amusing or maybe not so amusing fact that, after Duke appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live in 1989, where he tried to convince Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer that he just wanted white people in America to get a fair shake, the next guest on the program was none other than Donald Trump, who ranted about the need for tariffs to combat the Yellow Peril of Japanese economic imperialism.

All this just further illustrates the willful blindness of bien pensant elites when they treated Trump’s rise as some sort of inexplicable catastrophe, as opposed to the latest eruption of the American berserk in its native habitat.