The opinions expressed in audio and on this web page are these of the writer.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump posted a video on Fact Social that includes army bombers set to a Seashore Boys parody calling to “Bomb Iran,” reviving decades-old racist propaganda as marketing campaign fodder.
It wasn’t a gaffe or an accident. It was a deliberate spectacle by a sitting president calling for mass loss of life in sunny harmonies designed to make the risk really feel protected, even nostalgic. The video didn’t simply threaten violence towards Iran; it turned anti-Muslim hate speech into sing-along leisure for his base.
This so-called parody has an extended, ugly historical past. Variations of “Bomb Iran” first appeared in the course of the Nineteen Eighties hostage disaster, blaring from conservative radio reveals to stoke anti-Muslim worry and rage. Even “respectable” politicians joined in. John McCain infamously crooned “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” at a marketing campaign cease in 2007, treating the homicide of civilians like an oldies cowl band.
Trump’s newest submit drags that custom again into the highlight. It’s not overseas coverage. It’s a loss of life risk carried out as kitsch. It’s the fantasy of racial violence set to the soundtrack of white American innocence. The selection of the Seashore Boys isn’t incidental. By pairing their harmonies with requires bombing brown Muslims, Trump isn’t simply promoting violence. He’s making it really feel righteous. Acquainted. Even enjoyable.
What Trump is doing isn’t coverage, and it isn’t technique. It’s psychological warfare for an getting old, frightened demographic. It’s empire in decline, buzzing to itself about mass loss of life as a result of it could’t think about residing in a world the place it doesn’t rule unchallenged.
Trump’s video is greater than a humiliation. It’s a confession. An ideal artifact of an empire that may’t cease dreaming about killing whereas it pretends to be harmless.
On this episode of The Covfefe Chronicles, we’re not simply calling out Trump’s grotesque nostalgia act, we’re breaking down how white supremacy turns genocidal threats into catchy singalongs, how the media helps launder that hate as “politics,” and what it says about an empire that’s prepared to hum itself to sleep whereas plotting mass loss of life.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and writer of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Kids Gained’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
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