In case you ever had doubts about a TV show that featured a car decorated with inflammatory domestic terrorism propaganda (celebrating the blood-thirsty treasonous “monster” General Lee and the Confederate battle flag)… here is the guy on December 20 who became famous only by being paid to promote that car:

Lynching. Plain to see.

Here’s how Lincoln described such sentiments back in 1838.

Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Lynching sentiments defined much of the pre and post-Civil War periods, where horrible people sounding like this Schneider guy went about demanding hangings as a means for censoring and murdering huge numbers of Americans they disagreed with.

“[The organized terror movement after Civil War] stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.”

And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.

“It liberated the absolute worst impulses among” its members, Bordewich says, adding: “You can see this in today’s terrorist movements in other parts of the world – al-Qaida, IS. These are the organizations the Klan should be compared to. We think of terrorism today as something happening in other countries. It happened here in the 1870s.”

Intimidation and violence. They hung John Brown, they cancelled and assassinated Elijah Lovejoy, and then they lost a Civil War, before going right back to more lynchings.

That’s the real thread, that is the problem the tweet represents, as if some in America (e.g. Speaker of the House) still haven’t given up affinity for the centuries long nativist “America First” Klan threat to democracy expressed as… lynchings.

Let’s go back and ask again why did a TV show in America decide to center itself around a “monster” like General Lee and blast his treasonous, toxic Confederate hate symbol into everyone’s eyeballs as massive scale?

Ask also what kind of actor signs up to animate a mechanized General Lee as if it doesn’t mean exactly what everyone must recognize as divisive and cruel, including General Lee himself (given he asked that nobody use his name or image like this)?

It was propaganda of the worst kind. A racist mysoginyst “rebellion” designed as subtle saccharin to undermine democracy, while repudiating their own acts as both innocent and above the law.

According to the researchers, this experiment demonstrated that just seeing the Confederate flag, even subliminally, made White participants less likely to vote for a Black person. […] In their report, published in the journal Political Psychology, the research team concluded that just being exposed to the Confederate flag triggers racially biased attitudes, even among Whites who are not consciously prejudiced. Clearly, even if the Confederate flag is a symbol of pride for those who honor it, it also carries a message of racial bias that can affect people at an unconscious level.

Defenders of the show will trot out people who say they loved watching it, enjoyed seeing a fun and helpful side to some racist whites, as if to boast how successfully fascist propaganda on widespread TV could run without detection. It’s like saying “did you see the show where the Nazi in uniform held the door open for someone, cracked jokes and rescued a kitten from a tree?”

This stuff shouldn’t be hard to dismiss as fluff obscuring reality, as a new Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” explores.

The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.

And you’ll never guess what this anti-democratic “rebel” actor said next, as if he forgot to put his pointy white hood on before claiming nothing to see here or claiming to be invisible.

“Seriously, folks?,” Schneider said in a statement to Deadline. “I said no such thing. Despite headlines claiming otherwise, I absolutely did not call for an act of violence or threaten a U.S. president.”

Absolutely did not? That seems very confident for something that is so easily proven to be the opposite.

This gaslighting attempt is so sloppy it seems based in delusion. Perhaps it stems from decades of being drunk with privilege and power, profiting heavily from the glorification and promotion of General Lee’s domestic terrorism for so long, enjoying zero accountability.

General Lee was quite clearly a weak leader, and even more a treasonous monster of the worst cruelty, who led a Civil War to expand state-sanctioned rape of black women. His monuments have been proven to be directly correlated with lynchings, erected by racist mobs in the 1920s to threaten any American families and governments who dared to desire the protection of law and order.

His name is a threat, whether on street signs or schools; a precursor and warning to racist violence. Robert E. Lee, like an Osama bin Laden Avenue or Timothy McVeigh Park is the detestable name of terrorism.

Now the actor known best for gladly celebrating and spreading this evil monster’s racist hate, using a “fun loving” TV show for personal profit, has been caught on Twitter more clearly than ever doing what he always did.

Accountability finally?

Is it any wonder lynching was top of mind for the actor when he disagreed with anyone? Is him driving around waving a Confederate flag, which stands for lynching, really that different than him saying he stands for lynching? In this Twitter case he directed his words towards the President, but it’s not like the “Dukes of Hazard” hadn’t consciously preserved racist lynching sentiment the whole time on multiple communication channels from underwear to children toys.