Hot New Tune: "Nazi Trumps Fuck Off"... And Ice Cold Congressional Race In New Jersey

Who remembers the Dead Kennedy's classic punk anthem "Nazi Punks Fuck Off?" Well, Biafra has updated it (above). How about Steve Lonegan? Do you remember him? He's a New Jersey political on the far right GOP fringe. Anything you read about him will always mention he was the mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, a mighty metropolis of 8,000 people. Other than that, he runs for anything nd everything-- and always loses. Because he's certifiably insane. He was the head of the Koch brothers' political operation in New Jersey and he was the chairman of Ted Cruz's presidential campaign there. New Jersey Republicans weren't buying Ted Cruz's neo-fascist message and Lonegan led him to an embarrassing 3rd place finish behind Señor Trumpanzee, Lord of Bedminster (80.6%), and John Kasich (13.3%) with a dismal 6.1% of the Republican vote. Go Ted! Go Steve!

Well, yesterday, after weeks of rumors, Lonegan made it official-- he's running against the worst Democrat in New Jersey's congressional delegation, worthless Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer. If there was ever a congressional race to wish both candidates lose by landslides...! NJ-05 is New Jersey's most conservative district, most of it in Bergen County (and including The Sopranos' Bada Bing strip club). The district sits on the entire northern border of New Jersey with New York, from the Hudson River in the east to just outside of Port Jervis in the west, and the entire northwestern border with Pennsylvania from Milford through the Delaware Water Gap and beyond my old home in Stroudsburg. It's an affluent R+4 district in blue New Jersey. Over 70% of the population is in northern Bergen County's suburbs and towns like Paramus, Hackensack, Teaneck, Mahwah and Lodi (the Bada Bing club town). Politically, this is Chris Christie country although Sen. Bob Menendez won the district with 51% last time he ran. McCain won the district in 2008, 51-48% and Romney won in 2012, 52-49%. Last year Trumpanzee underperformed Romney but still managed to beat Clinton 48.8% to 47.7%.

Gottheimer-- who got more money from the banksters than any other non-incumbent running for the House this year ($889,419), outraised Garrett $4,288,192 to 2,055,513. Garrett, until recently a Wall Street fave (as the anti-regulation sociopath chairman on the House Financial Services Committee's subcommittee on Capital Markets), only got $674,888 from the Finance Sector this cycle, way down from the $1,159,579 he scooped up from them in 2014 or the $1,224,313 he got in 2012. They wanted him to lose this year.

So on November 9, Bergen County residents woke up to some good news and some bad news. The good news was that Scott Garrett was on the losing end of a 156,863 (50.5%) to 146,643 (47.2%) result. It was the Bergen County voters who had finally grown tired of Garrett's extremism and who had turned him out. In 2012 he won Bergen County with 100,874 votes. This time, which far more people voting, only 93,430 in Bergen County went for Garrett. 121,875 voted for Gottheimer. And that's the bad news, of course: Gottheimer won. It looks like this will turn out to be the most expensive House race in New Jersey history. Outside spending was through the roof. Ryan's House Leadership PAC and the NRCC refused to spent a nickel on the widely disliked Garrett. Only another of crooked hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer's PACs, the American Principles Fund, kicked in any substantial money for Garrett-- $309,025. Meanwhile, smelling blood in the water, the DCCC and it's allies, excited to get another slimeball Blue Dog into Congress, spent a gargantuan $6.4 million attacking Garrett and bolstering Gottheimer. It worked. I wonder if they still think it was worth it now that Gottheimer has become a regular supporter of Paul Ryan's agenda.

He promptly joined the New Dems and the Blue Dogs-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- and has earned one of the worst "F" scores from ProgressivePunch. His crucial vote score is 30.56, the exact same as "ex"-Republican Tom O'Halleran. Only 3 Democrats-- wretched Blue Dogs Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Collin Peterson (MN) and Henry Cuellar (TX) have worse voting records this year. Yeah Gottheimer is as bad as they come. He was one of only 5 Democrats, for example, to vote for the Great Wall of Trumpanzee. And then there's Lonegan.

Lonegan will be making the case that Gottheimer is still too far to the left of 5th District voters.

“Liberal Josh Gottheimer is not a moderate,” Lonegan said at his Thursday campaign announcement. “He is in step with this big government agenda… We need to stand up and fight that.”

At his campaign launch at a hotel in Paramus, Lonegan said Republicans need to get behind Trump’s policy agenda-- a reversal from his earlier position on the president.

During the 2016 election, Lonegan was one of Trump’s loudest critics in New Jersey. He was the state chairman for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and called on top party officials to “unbind” delegates to the Republican National Convention so that they could “vote their conscience.” That plan could have deprived Trump of the nomination.

Because of those efforts, Trump once called Lonegan a “loser.”

“Imagine if Republicans were all behind Trump’s agenda right now-- we’d be winning in Washington, D.C.,” Lonegan said, denying that he was ever part of the “never Trump” movement. “When Trump got the nomination I supported him… I am behind this president. I think what we are watching from the left is just absurd.”

Lonegan opposes abortion and leans heavily to the right on social issues. He is also a fiscal hawk in the tea party mold, supporting deep cuts to a range of federal programs. Democrats say electing Lonegan in 2018 would be step backward for the district.

“From opposing choice, even in cases of rape and incest, to his anti-gay and anti-minority bigotry, to working against law enforcement and firefighters, Lonegan’s tea party politics have no place in New Jersey,” said Evan Lukakse, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

On the other hand, some Democrats say they would be glad to have Lonegan as the Republican candidate in next year’s race. The former Bogota mayor has not found success running for higher office over the years.

...“Despite his fundraising prowess, has lost every time — it’s not often that I agree with President Trump, but he hit the nail on the head when he called Lonegan ‘a loser,’” Lukaske said.

Gottheimer is widely considered one of the most Democratic freshmen in Congress. He sells his votes to special interests and "has broken fundraising records this year for a House freshman, reporting almost $1.6 million in fundraising as of June 30." Like I said... the only rational position on NJ-05 this cycle is to wish both candidates fail miserably... or wind up in prison. I wonder which one Trumpanzee will support.

Trump May Be A "Punk," But No, Trumpism Is Not The New Punk Rock, Even If There Are Some Common Roots

I hadn't been back in America very long-- having been living abroad for nearly 7 years-- when I ran into someone I had met years before when I booked a Doors concert at my school. It was Danny Fields, who had gone from being an A&R man at the Doors' label, Elektra, to working as a journalist and managing a new band. He wanted me to see the new band. I didn't want to. He insisted and insisted until I agreed. I went down to the Bowery to a skeetzy club I had never heard of, CBGB's and saw a brand new band that hadn't recorded yet-- the Ramones. It charged my life, quite literally and completely. Along with others, I started one of the first punk rock magazines, one of the first punk rock radio shows and one of the first punk rock record labels in the U.S. Long before I wound up as general manager of the Ramones label, Sire Records, I had become close with virtually all the punk bands, from the Pistols and the Clash to locals like the Dead Kennedys and Crime. In fact, Johnny Strike of Crime just sent me this piece by Scott Galupo, Is Trumpism The New Punk Rock?

This post is meant to respond to Galupo's and Ijust want to establish that I was there and had a hand in it and understand what it was and why it was and feel confident that the Alt-Right isn't and never could be anything do do with punk rock, other than maybe being the antithesis. This goes way beyond the little dust up over American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and his assertions about his love for Depeche Mode, unrequited I might add. After writing this little piece about what Depeche thinks of neo-Nazis, I received an e-mail from Daniel Miller, head of Mute and the guy who discovered Depeche Mode, signed them and produced their early music and helped guide their career. It don't want to quote it because it was a little more violent than the way Daniel has always portraysed himself but let it suffice that he wished bodily injury on Richard Spencer.

Anyway, back to punk rock-- which has always used fascist iconology to communicate anger, irony, and, most of all, perhaps, attention-grabbing outrage. Punk bands have always drawn some equivalents of simple-minded, low-IQ Trump supporter-types (i.e., facsist dupes.) and the bands have always had to respond to it. The Clash, Morrissey and the Dead Kennedys all had mini-crises over fascist followers and all disavowed them in no uncertain terms-- the way Depeche Mode did with Richard Spencer last week. Is there anything unclear about this Dead Kennedy's underground hit and the way Jello Biafra introduced it at this 1982 show at the Ritz in Austin?

Punk ain't no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You ain't hardcore cos you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head

Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks-Fuck Off!

Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks-Fuck Off!

If you've come to fight, get outa here
You ain't no better than the bouncers
We ain't trying to be police
When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy

[Repeat chorus]

Ten guys jump one, what a man
You fight each other, the police state wins
Stab your backs when you trash our halls
Trash a bank if you've got real balls

You still think swastikas look cool
The real nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth reich you'll be the first to go

[Repeat chorus]

You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
Unless you think

Galupo writes that a young CPAC attendee explained that he'd grown up a standard-issue George W. Bush conservative Republican, but had more recently migrated to the alt-right movement. One of its attractions, he said, was that it felt like "the new punk rock." I suppose he's never seen Biafra's 1982 explanation at the Ritz. "The word 'punk,' to many, evokes images of angry hooligans and anarchic behavior," continued Galupo correctly. "Then again, it may sound blasphemous: The memory of 'punk rock,' as it has been canonized in the upper echelons of rock criticism, is associated with left-wing anti-authoritarianism. Hence it would be ridiculous to call yourself 'punk' while supporting a right-wing authoritarian like Trump." Exactly... like Trump-- an acolyte of Joe McCarthy collaborator Roy Cohen-- accusing President Obama of McCarthyism, as he did in an Adderall-fueled rage before dawn on Saturday morning on Twitter. He references his friend and former editor Daniel Wattenberg for his rejection of "any association between punk rock the alt-right, racialism, or white identitarianism. Rather, he sees parallels between punk and Trumpism more broadly. "I have to say, it does feel similar in a lot of ways, psychologically and emotionally," he says.

The first thing one must understand about the right-wing character of punk, Wattenberg says, is not that its exponents were soi-disantYoung Republicans, quoting Goldwater or God and Man at Yale. New York-centered punk began as "an intramural insurrection within the counterculture," he says. It was the punks vs. their somnolent, sententious hippie older brothers and sisters, who had for years propounded what Wattenberg calls the "reverse pieties" of anti-Americanism and anti-commercialism and white guilt.

What does this have to do with the president and his core following?

Wattenberg says Trumpism was "an insurrection against Conservatism Inc."-- a political establishment that had become flabby, complacent, and self-indulgent in the same way that 1970s progressive rock music had grown bombastic, pretentious, and long-winded. Whereas Republicans before Trump had been terrified of deviating from orthodox positions on trade, the desirability of immigration, or the wisdom of the Iraq war, Trump thumbed his nose at this orthodoxy.

Then there's Trump's seeming amateurism-- his "inexperience and rawness," Wattenberg says. Just as punks weren't trained musicians, Trump is frequently assailed for not playing politics the right way, that is, the professional way. When Wattenberg hears the media establishment pounce on Trump for falsehoods, misstatements, or exaggerations, he hears echoes of musical sophisticates belittling punk rock for its primitivism. Trump may get lost in the details, but he gets the big things attitudinally right. Put another way: He may know only three chords, but Wattenberg says his followers hear the "right three chords."

He also sees in Trump a political manifestation of punk's do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos. (By "do-it-yourself," punks don't mean changing the oil or remodeling your bathroom; it's meant as a command: Write your own song. Paint your own painting.) Punk-rock bands created their own independent labels and staged gigs in small clubs or church basements. Trump lacked support from Republican Party elites in the same way that punks lacked support from major labels and promoters. So he ran a shoestring campaign and made himself recklessly accessible to the media in pursuit of free coverage.

Finally there is the transgressive appeal of Trump's rejection of political correctness. Wattenberg says: "There's power in that. Punks were also occasionally misrepresented as harboring fascist sympathies. Once they call you a fascist, there's nothing more than they can say. That's the source of excitement Milo [Yiannopoulos] generated on campus: 'We're free again.' That's the thrill and the power of busting taboos."

Where does Trumpism lead, then? The legacy of punk rock can be looked at two ways. It could be seen as a musical movement that, outside of two bands (the potent, one-and-done Sex Pistols and the more creatively catholic Clash), ultimately didn't amount to much. Or it can be seen as a vital current that runs through subsequent movements from grunge to emo to more recent garage revivalists like the White Stripes.

Wattenberg, for his part, doesn't see Trumpism disappearing any time soon. "There are no longer any criteria of judgment independent of politics," he laments. For as long as the left gets to define the "permissible boundaries of expressive freedom," there will be some variant of Trumpism spoiling to defy it. And for as long as politics overspills into awards shows and sports pages and our personal social media, he adds, Trumpism will continue to appeal to those who want to escape its clutches.

It's enough to make you wanna be, well, sedated.

Wattenberg goes wrong in his belief that punk "as a musical movement that, outside of two bands (the potent, one-and-done Sex Pistols and the more creatively catholic Clash), ultimately didn't amount to much." This may sound blashpemous but by almost any conceivable measurement Green Day has had a bigger impact than their spiritual parents (the aforementioned Pistols and Clash). Green Day has had quite a lot to say about Trump and Trumpism to the non-Alt-Right among us. Another figure from the heady early days on punk rock in the late 70s and early 80s San Francisco punk scene was then-producer, now cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist and best-selling author Dan Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession , The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature , The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload and last year's A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age. Literally, moments after Johnny Strike of Crime sent me Galupo's piece, Dan sent me one he had just penned for the Daily Beast, The Butchering of the Age of Reason. "Our country," he wrote, "is in a crisis that threatens to set us back 400 years." He didn't even specifically reference Trump. "I’m talking about reversing the Age of Reason, which ushered in a period of unprecedented intellectual, economic, and social growth. The Enlightenment, as it is also called, drew a line in the sand between rumor and fact, between testable hypotheses and anecdote, and between demonstrable facts and nonsense. Prior to the Age of Reason, people who heard voices in their heads might have been drowned or burned at the stake as witches; by the 20th century we had identified a biological disease that causes this (schizophrenia) and developed drugs to treat it. The Age of Reason led us to the germ theory of disease, penicillin, and-- although it took a while and is still not ubiquitous-- women’s rights, child labor laws, and a reduction in racism." The essence of punk ethos is far more in tune with Dan's critical analysis than in Wattenberg's hand-wringing stretch.

[U]ntil the last few months, [the Elightenment] allowed we citizens to engage in constructive discussion with elected officials about public policy matters, based on facts. It has allowed a free and independent press, with trained investigative journalists, to help us understand what is true and what is not. If the current administration brands as “fake” facts they find inconvenient, it undermines the entire political system. If we are going to throw out facts as a prerequisite to discussion, we are reversing centuries of cognitive progress.

...Why is it that musicians and scientists reach different conclusions when considering the same data? Perhaps for the same reason that voters reach different conclusions when considering the same statements, claims, and data presented by politicians. We engage in expectation-driven perception, and opposed to evidence-driven perception.

Expectations retune neurons and change the way our retinas, our eardrums, and our brains work. They cause firing patterns in our brain consistent with what we think we saw or heard rather than what we actually saw or heard.

Simply knowing that an instrument has a certain history could alter auditory pathways so that they actually sound better to us-- that is, if we know which one we’re hearing. Simply knowing that a person whose political views usually align with ours is speaking may cause us to evaluate the information less critically. Lord Chesterfield understood, over two hundred years ago, that we form impressions of others based on what we see and what we think, and that the seeing tends to overpower the thinking simply because seeing is so much easier than thinking. But we would do well to remember the words of his friend Voltaire: Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

When we listen to someone we like, such as an elected official whom we have supported, we tend to accept what they say more trustingly, even gullibly. We filter their remarks through a cognitive bias that they have our best interests at heart. We focus on aspects of the remarks that confirm our hopes, and we discount those that confirm our fears. We do the opposite with elected officials whom we oppose, thinking there can’t be anything of value in what they say. This has led to the current polarization of political parties, and obstructionism in congress. Evidence-based thinking would have us evaluate each statement objectively, and avoid jumping to conclusions. But that’s hard to do. As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has shown, under conditions of cognitive overload, we are much less likely to be able to do this.

So it takes some work. We need role models in positions of authority and influence to show us how evidence-based thinking works. Fortunately we have three institutions to help us, institutions that are the foundation of a free and democratic society, institutions that need our support more than ever. They are the judiciary, independent press, and the scientific method. When the panel of federal judges reviewed the Trump administrations immigration ban, note the language in the ruling: “We find no evidence.” Journalists reported that there was “no evidence” of WMDs in Iraq. Science reports “no evidence” of a link between vaccinations and autism. Former Republican President George W. Bush said in an interview recently that an independent press is “indispensable to democracy.” Cutting funding to education, interfering with judges and the press should never be made political issues-- supporting them supports the power of reason.

Punk rocker Billie Joe Armstrong's immediate reaction after learning that Trump had won the election was to urge people to "treat each other with respect and kindness and love" and then to re-write a song slightly, one I don't see the alt-right kiddies embracing any time soon:

1-2-3, Anyone But Lee

by Denise Sullivan

The last time we checked in on San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee (appointed to fill Gavin Newsom's vacated seat and elected for a full term in 2011) was set to run unopposed in the November election. But as candidate, community organizer, and singer Amy Farah Weiss (also known as "YIMBY" for Yes In My Backyard) has been quick to point out, there are in fact now five official alternatives to Lee on the ballot, though local media refuses to acknowledge their respective campaigns. In response to the black-out, Weiss and her fellow candidates, educator and organizer Francisco Herrera and columnist and comedian Broke-Ass Stuart Schuffman have come together as a coalition. The trio could conceivably pose a triple threat if voters take seriously their directive to rank them 1-2-3 in a bid to oust Lee. Weiss has even adapted the old Bobbettes number, "Mr Lee"  as a campaign song, a clever attempt to give voters a catchy way to remember the strategy (candidates four and five are Reed Martin and Kent Graham of whom I could find out little).



Though all new to potential public office, Weiss and Herrera have community organizing experience in their respective neighborhoods, the Western Addition and Mission, while Shuffman, an Examiner columnist, has humor and a sharp tongue on his side.  Referring to his yet-to-be-revealed platform on his website he writes, "The thing that most people don’t get though is that platforms are rolled out throughout a campaign. Like, what’s Hillary Clinton’s platform? You have no idea, right? Hillary has been running for President for like eight years and she hasn’t even announced her platform yet…"

On Monday, the three candidates came together for a "cakewalk," organized by Weiss as a response to wags calling Lee's run a shoe-in and to call for Lee to agree to publicly debate his opposition which he has so far refused. Turn-out was small, but awareness of the candidates and their respective campaigns is growing. I asked Dale Duncan, a friend and longtime Mission District resident why he chose to support Shuffman: "He seems earnest and I didn't know of anyone else bothering to run against Ed Lee, the worst mayor in my 35 years here. If it had only been Matt Gonzalez instead of Gavin back when."

In 2005, Gonzalez (who went on to run with Ralph Nader in the 2008 Presidential election as the Green Party candidate) lost to Newsom in a run-off by a very slight margin. But what he achieved by mobilizing young and disenfranchised voters was monumental (he is presently the chief attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office). And while it might seem the population who cast their votes for Gonzalez has since been squeezed out of town, it's possible they've simply lost their advocacy and the work of mobilizing the working, immigrant and artist populations here has fallen to Herrera, Shuffman and Weiss. I'm acquainted with both Weiss and Herrera who've made themselves known to the communities for cultural preservation as advocates of arts, literacy, and education. As performing musicians, they join in a great San Francisco tradition of politically engaged artists who begin by voicing their dissent, using their stage as a platform, and reminding us all that democracy is a participatory practice, if not a theatrical one.

Readers may remember San Francisco circa 1979, when Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra emerged as the people's candidate in a race against Dianne Feinstein: Among his most practical ideas, Biafra proposed the police department be elected, that cars be banned from the city limits and squatting in vacant buildings be legalized. He also suggested businessmen wear clown suits and that statues of Dan White (killer of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk) be erected and the Park department earn revenue by selling eggs for throwing.



"One thing I will attempt to do is bring government out from behind closed doors," he said in a televised interview at the time. To naysayers who declared his candidacy a publicity stunt or a joke, Biafra replied, "They should keep in mind it's no more and no less of of a joke than anyone else they care to name." A couple of decades later in 2007,  punk rock bassist and cultural agitator "Chicken" John Rinaldi tested the city's then-new ranked choice voting system and grabbed 11 percent of the vote from Newsom. Not long after, he lead an inspired campaign to rename the local sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush. There were likely others, now forgotten, though it must be said, the City's troubles began long before Lee, Newsom, or even Feinstein. The value of campaigns like Jello's, Chicken John's and the 1-2-3 efforts by Herrera, Shuffman and Weiss-- which admittedly appeal to counterculture, revolutionary and disaffected voter sensibilities-- is to tear away the curtain of conformity and corruption that has long shrouded our local government.

In light of the recent news of the FBI probe implicating Lee, alleging he took "substantial bribes in exchange for favors" and with the substantial base of labor, neighborhood, and activist organizations working to effect necessary policy, far from a done deal, change-seeking San Franciscans have every reason to remain hopeful. Two ballot initiatives concerning limit short term rentals (Airbnb) and housing in the Mission, and a supervisor's race that could replace Lee appointee Julie Christensen with progressive Aaron Peskin in District 3 could be the things that begin to set things back on course here. And while for decades we've been hampered by a largely irresponsible and inert daily paper, uncommitted to investigative reporting or to taking a stand, our best hope has always been our citizenry, especially those willing to take on public service and a radical stand. Though they may frame matters goofily, in a confrontational way, or inelegantly, the candidates bring to the discussion issues from housing and human rights to jobs and open space that are of concern to everyday San Franciscans. I'm going to assert there's still time for three dark horses who share one vision for a more equitable, livable, and affordable San Francisco, to pick up more supporters and some steam. A vote for 1-2-3-- anyone but Lee-- could serve as an important step on the way toward reclaiming San Francisco.

Francisco Herrera, Stuart Shuffman & Amy Farah Weiss are mayoral candidates on the Nov. ballot in San Francisco