The downtown Manhattan nightclub Santos Party House will be shutting its doors for good, DNAinfo is reporting, just one day hosting the NYC Oi! Fest 2, a concert of bands that have been associated with far-right politics and neo-Nazism. A Santos employee told Gawker the closure is unrelated to the controversy surrounding the show.
Is Donald Trump a fascist? Experts, historians, and pundits have debated the question for months. One thing has been certain for a while now: He tweets like one. That’s why, last year, Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg created a Twitter bot that would post quotes from the writings and speeches of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but with all of them attributed to businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. This morning, he retweeted that account.
Marc Thiessen would like everyone in politics to please stop comparing their opponents to Nazis. Or rather, he would like everyone to stop evoking comparisons to Nazis, as the two politicians he calls out in his latest Washington Post column never actually said “Nazi” or “Hitler.” It’s not a very surprising or notable argument, really, especially from Marc Thiessen, whose continued participation in public life is dependent on enforcing a particular standard of “civility” in our political discourse.
Jörg Haider, the leader of Austria's far-right Alliance for Austria's Future party, died this month in a high-speed car crash. He was drunk. Why was he drunk? Because, of course, he'd just had a terrible fight with his gay lover, who was also his 27-year-old protege and party deputy. After the fight, Haider went to a gay club and drank heavily with male escorts. Did we mention he was the leader of the far-right party? The one that's anti-immigrant and anti-European Union and pro-traditional family values? And that Haider was married with children? Haider's successor and lover, Stefan Petzner, is now speaking openly of his love for his neo-fascist boss.
The Times finally found space to publish a nice, chummy editorial bemoaning the death of the "lively.... handsome... muckraking" New York Sun. The loss of the neoconservative broadsheet is especially sad, the Times added, because internet journalism is very confusing and hard to navigate and just generally terrifying, unlike the Sun, which again is quite pretty and edited by a swell guy called Seth Lipsky. Glossed over was Lipsky's utter shortsightedness as both a civic observer and a businessman. And though the Times editorial board has long fancied itself a staunch defender of the First Amendment, it failed completey to note the Sun's revolting 2003 editorial calling anti-war protestors treasonous and saying they should be muzzled, spied upon and perhaps thrown in jail. Slate accurately labeled it "fascist" at the time, and a tipster this week reminded us of its existence. Some highlights:
The January 14 cover of the Pat Buchanan co-founded paleo-con journal ("paleo-con" is a term that means "against the Iraq war, just like you" and also "against Amendments 13 through 26") The American Conservative just straight-up depicts Rudy Giuliani as a brown-shirt. Which is kind of hilarious except that had Buchanan been politically active in 1941 he definitely would've opposed America's meddling in Europe's fascisty affairs. The story's pretty good though. [American Conservative]
We know now that incest-taboo-defying bigamist terrorism opportunist Rudy Giuliani likes the ladies to be as maritally ambiguous as he is. Likewise, political and historical specificities aside, we have long known that non-traditional authoritarian family lives always portend the end of civil society as such. After the jump, the Post and Daily News update us on how our freedom will die.
