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Liz Cheney: A Profile in Courage

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2024 //
14

Liz Cheney is a conservative. She supported Trump during his term in office. She is opposed to abortion. But, unlike other conservatives, she was outraged by what Trump did on January 6, 2021. She was outraged that he refused to accept his loss and the peaceful transfer of power. She was so outraged that she agreed to co-chair the January 6 Commission.

And now she has announced that she will vote for Kamala Harris. Trump has threatened to prosecute her for treason if he regains office. She is not afraid of Trump. She is, she said in this interview with ABC News, afraid for her country.

She sacrificed her career and stood on principle. Her principle is the dominance of the Constitution and the rule of law.

She is a profile in courage.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The Russian Campaign to Destroy Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2024 //
9

In this post, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes about the Russian effort to buy the voices of rightwing “influencers,” as well as the right’s apologetics for Nazism.

She writes:

One of the things that came to light on Wednesday, in the paperwork the Justice Department unveiled to explain its seizure of 32 internet domains being used by Russian agents in foreign malign influence campaigns, was that the six right-wing U.S. influencers mentioned in the indictments of the Russian operatives are only the tip of the iceberg. 

Since at least 2022, three Russian companies working with the Kremlin have been trying to change foreign politics in a campaign they called “Doppelganger,” covertly spreading Russian government propaganda. “[F]irst and foremost,” notes from a meeting with Russian officials about targeting Germany read, “we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain, and NATO.” Through fake social media profiles, their operatives posed as Americans or other non-Russians, seeding public conversations with Russian propaganda.

In August 2023 they launched the “Good Old USA Project” to target swing-state residents, online gamers, American Jews, and “US citizens of Hispanic descent” to reelect Donald Trump. ​​”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” one of the propagandists wrote. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Using targeted ads on Facebook, they could see how their material was landing and use bots and trolls to push their narrative in comment sections. 

“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the propagandists told their staff. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”

According to the documents, one of the three companies, Social Design Agency (SDA), monitors and collects information about media organizations and social media influencers. It collected a list of 1,900 “anti-influencers,” whose accounts posted material SDA workers thought operated against Russian interests. About 26% of those accounts were based in the U.S. 

SDA also identified as pro-Russian influencers more than 2,800 people in 81 countries operating on various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram. Those influencers included “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” About 21% of those influencers were in the U.S. 

YouTube took down the Tenet Media Channels associated with the Justice Department’s indictments, and last night, Tenet Media abruptly shut down. In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last noted that the Tenet influencers maintain they were dupes, although they must have been aware that their paychecks were crazy high for the numbers of viewers they had. He asks if, knowing now that their gains are ill-gotten, they are going to give them to charity. 

Earlier this week, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his X show, where Cooper not only suggested that the death of more than six million Jews was an accidental result of poor planning, but also argued that British prime minister Winston Churchill, who stood firm against the expansion of fascist Germany in World War II, was the true villain of the war.

Cooper’s argument puts him squarely on the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who insist that democracy undermines society. During the recent summer Olympics, Cooper posted on social media an image of Hitler in Paris alongside another of drag queens representing Greek gods at the Olympic opening ceremonies, an image some on the right thought made fun of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. “This may be putting it too crudely for some,” Cooper wrote, “but the picture [of Hitler in Paris] was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.” 

The idea that Churchill, not Hitler, is the villain of World War II means denying the fact of the Holocaust and defending the Nazis. It lands Carlson and Cooper in the same camp as those autocrats journalist Anne Applebaum notes are “making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.” Elon Musk promoted the interview, saying it was “very interesting,” and “worth watching,” before the backlash made him delete his post. The video has been viewed nearly 30 million times. 

Carlson told Lauren Irwin of The Hill that the Biden administration is made up of “warmonger freaks” who have “used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history.” Carlson is on a 16-day speaking tour, on which he will interview Trump allies, including Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr. 

Trump today continued his effort to undermine the democratic American legal system in a “news conference” of more than 45 minutes, in which he took no questions. Although Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts, decided today to delay sentencing until November 26 to avoid any appearance that the court was trying to affect the 2024 election, Trump nonetheless launched an attack on the U.S. legal system and suggested the lawsuits against him were election interference. 

He spoke after he and his legal team were in court today to try to overturn a jury’s conclusion that he had sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, a decision that brought his judgments in the two cases she brought to around $90 million. He began with an attack on what he said was a new “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, and promised he had not “spoken to anybody from Russia in years.”

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded what amounted to close to an hour of attacks on the American Justice Department and the laws of the country, and also on American women (he not only attacked Carroll, he brought up others of the roughly two dozen women who have accused him of sexual assault). He attempted to retry the Carroll case in the media, refuting the evidence the jury considered and suggesting that the photo of him and Carroll together was generated by AI, although it was published in 2019.

Attacking women was an interesting decision in light of the fact that he will need the votes of suburban women if he is to make up the ground he has lost to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.

For her part, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) appears to see this moment for what it is. Although a staunch Republican herself, she is urging conservative women to admit they’ve had enough. Referring to both Trump and Vance in a conversation sponsored by the Texas Tribune, she said: “This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs.” She assured listeners, quite accurately, that Trump “is not a conservative.” “Women around this country…we’ve had enough.” “These are not people that we can entrust with power again.” 

Her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, agreed that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” and announced today that he will be voting for Harris. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said. Eighty-eight business leaders also endorsed Harris today, including James Murdoch, an heir to the Murdoch family media empire. Citing Harris’s “policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment,” they said in a public letter, “the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy” is by electing Harris president.​​

Meanwhile, at his event with Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel yesterday, Trump embraced the key element of Project 2025 that calls for a dictatorial leader to take over the U.S. That document maintains that “personnel is policy” and that the way to achieve all that the Christian nationalists want is to fire the nonpartisan civil servants currently in place and put their own people into office. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025, but last night he said the way to run the government is to “get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success, and I know now the people, and I know them better than anybody would know them.”       

One of those people appears to be X owner Elon Musk, whom Trump has promised to put at the head of an “efficiency” commission to audit the U.S. government. 

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that the arguments against democracy and in favor of a few people dominating the rest were always the same. In his era, it was enslavers saying some people were better than others. But, he said, those were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” 

In our era, Indiana Jones said it best in The Last Crusade: “Nazis. I hate these guys.” 

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Funding, International, Media, Republicans

Tucker Carlson Interviews Holocaust Denier

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2024 //
25

Tucker Carlson lost his popular show on FOX News, but he now has a podcast on Elon Musk’s Twitter platform (X). Recently he invited a Holocaust Denier to appear on his show.

This is personal to me because every member of my extended family in Europe was murdered. As a child in Houston, I remember meeting people who had a blue tattoo on their arm–a string of numbers. They were survivors, and they told stories and wrote books about the atrocities they saw and experienced. In fact, there are countless videos taken by the Nazis to document the atrocities that Holocaust Deniers now claim are fiction.

It’s one of the strange ironies of our time that right wingers like Tucker Carlson now look sympathetically on fascists like Viktor Orban of Hungary and dictators like Putin. Carlson scored an exclusive interview with Putin and visited a supermarket to showcase the quality of life in Moscow. Trump praises Putin and the dictators of China and North Korea.

Who is Darryl Cooper? I looked him up on Google. Checked Wikipedia. I could find no evidence that he had gone to college. He is no historian.

Then I found historian Niall Ferguson’s commentary, which he called “The Return of Anti-History.”

He wrote:

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none. 

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.” 

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history. 

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism. 

Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, was taken aback by Carlson’s latest foray into historical revisionism.

She wrote:

This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast (and newsletter) called “Martyr Made,” considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.

This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.

Long before 4Chan existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers, in an early 1990s speech, to break through the “appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by being aggressively tasteless. “You’ve got to say things like: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,’” he said.

Until quite recently, American conservatives mostly maintained antibodies against Irving-style disinformation. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride at America’s role in it and viewed Hitler as metaphysically wicked. Rather than recognizing the way right-wing politics, taken to extremes, could shade into National Socialism, they would hurl Nazi comparisons at the left, as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”

[Jonah] Goldberg’s approach was dishonest, but it was representative of a broad antifascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies

North Carolina: Republican Candidate for State Superintendent is an Extremist and Crackpot

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
2

CNN reported that Michele Morrow, the GOP candidate for State Superintendent of Schools in North Carolina, filmed a video on January 6 urging Trump to “put the Coonstitution to the side” and use the military to stay in power. Morrow was in DC for the January 6 rally but she says she never entered the Capitol.

In a deleted Facebook livestream she filmed from her hotel room, Morrow called for mass arrests of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election. “And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act,” said Morrow. “In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”

Morrow was at the Capitol as the attack occurred, according to public videos reviewed by CNN that show her in a restricted area on the northwest side of the Capitol. CNN has seen no evidence that Morrow entered the Capitol building that day or that she engaged in violence, and she was not charged with any crimes.

In March’s Republican primary, Morrow defeated the incumbent North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that manages the state’s $11 billion budget for K-12 public schools and helps set education priorities and implement curriculum standards.

That same month, CNN’s KFile reported Morrow had previously called for the public execution of Barack Obama and the death of Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats in comments on a since-deleted X account.

“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a since-deleted post from May 2020 about Obama. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”

Morrow home-schooled her children. She previously lost a local school board election. She is running now to take control of the education of all the children in North Carolina.

A terrifying prospect.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, North Carolina, Privatization, Trump

Jim Hightower: The Real Purpose of Project 2025

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
14

Jim Hightower is a Texas Democrat who spent some time in state government, back in the days when Democrats had a shot at winning statewide offices in Texas. He warns here about the real purpose of Project 2025: to turn our country into a white Christian nation. The Founders never said that. In fact, the only things they said in the Constiturion was that there should be no religious test for office. And the First Amendment barred any establishment of any religion and guaranteed freedom of religion. So what these extremists are doing is a blatant violation of the Constitution.

Hightower writes:

We’ve seen a ton of social media posts and emails in the last week or so about Project 2025, and although we’re still working on a fuller analysis to give you the lowdown on what it means to you, as well as tools to fight it, we felt it was urgent to get some solid info into Lowdowner’s hands as soon as we could. Y’all are quite the army of activists (we see the results when you take action!) and we know that if we offer up the goods, you can take them and run with them.

Here’s our brief primer on what this mess is, what’s at stake, and what you can start to do.

What is it?

If you don’t know what Project 2025 is, or would like a brief summary to use to alert others about it, here you go:

It’s a painstakingly detailed, 922-page step-by-step plan to impose an American dictatorship of moneyed authoritarians and Christian nationalists, removing your and my democratic rights. Yes, this is an actual coup.

It sounds insane, yet there it is—a document written and being loudly promoted by a power-mad cluster of Trump bosses, Putin-esque despots, Reagan-loving economists and Ayn Rand-ian academics, moneyed corporate donors, and general far-right quacks and media blowhards. It’s innocuously coded “Project 2025” because the intent is to launch their full assault on the democratic fabric and structure of our national government next January, on Day 1 of another Trump presidency.

This scheme has been devised by The Heritage Foundation, a DC think tank set up in 1973 to promote the elitist economic and cultural doctrines of its über-rich founding funders, Joseph Coors (yes, that Coors) and Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, that Mellon). In recent years, Heritage has gone from merely being right-wing zealots to off-the-charts Trumpists… and now they’re going deep into the distant extremist cosmos. Thus, the head cosmonaut, Kevin Roberts, has megalomaniacally exulted that Project 2025 is “the second American revolution.” Unfortunately, it’s a dangerous devolution, with little tin-hat Kevin acting out what he pretends is a heroic coup.

This would be silly and inconsequential, except the Trump Party has become alarmingly treacherous. Ominously referencing the January 6th violent assault on democratic rule, Kevin said that his coup “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Of course, “the left”—i.e., sane democracy fighters like you and me—do not acquiesce to tyrannical wannabes.

But his ace is that The Donald, despite his denials, has hailed Heritage’s authoritarian agenda as his own and has cheered its plan to fire thousands of public employees on Day 1, replacing them with a lockstep army of enforcers that Heritage and others say they’ve already recruited to seize and Trump-ize every federal agency. This, combined with Trump’s own pledge to use the US military to enforce his political will, is where Project 2025’s subversive coup gets real. 

Here are just a few of the steps we’ve learned so far that Heritage autocrats intend to implement: 

  • Nearly eliminating abortion access altogether at the national level.
  • Cutting Social Security benefits.
  • Giving ever-more tax breaks to corporations and gabillionaires. 
  • Selling off national parklands, wetlands, wildlife sanctuaries and other public properties
  • Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR, PBS).
  • Imposing a “biblically-based” definition of marriage and families.
  • Eliminating the Department of Education.
  • Preventing LGBTQ+ couples from adopting children.
  • Eliminating the food stamp program (SNAP) and the free school lunch program.
  • Putting the Department of Justice and other independent agencies under the direct political control of the President.
  • Eliminating organic food promotion, conservation programs, and most climate policies of the Agriculture Department

For more in depth reading, check out this series from the Center for American Progress.

Why is this different from previous right-wing agendas?

One, they were piecemeal proposals, like Bush the Second’s failed attack on Social Security, or they were just sloganeering war whoops, like Grover Norquist’s empty call to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub. 

Two, Project 2025 is a comprehensive, all-in-one blueprint for a radical plutocratic and theocratic takeover of our government, surreptitiously advanced by many of the same anti-democracy corporate supremacists and billionaires who’ve already seized control of the judicial branch.

Three, the Republican Party is perfectly willing to submit to and grovel at the feet of moneyed extremists, media demagoguery, and political thuggery—even in support of stupid, poisonous policies the American people overwhelmingly reject.

Four: Donald.

What can I do?

Right now, the most important thing you can do is to tell your friends and family about this terrifying agenda. Right-wingers are currently attacking the media reporting on this, calling progressives and even moderates who oppose the coup “Chicken Little”-types, trying to minimize this elitist assault on America itself. We cannot let them.

The most important people to share it with are not your super conservative relatives that drive you nuts, but rather people who may be feeling ambiguous about voting for a Democrat (whoever that is ends up being) for President. You’re not going to change the people who’ve already gone over to the crazies, but you have a chance at inspiring more undecided voters to at least vote against an explicitly un-American, Christian Nationalist, fascist ideology.

Categories Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

David Frum: Violence: You Reap What You Sow

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
34

David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. His views evolved, and he is now a Never-Trumper. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where this article appeared.

Frum wrote:

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.

Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptlyturned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.

One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subordinated to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Will Saletan: The GOP Is Now a Fully Isolationist Party

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2024 //
22

Will Saletan describes how the GOP is not only a Trump party but is now fully isolationist. Saletan writes for The Bulwark, which is a Never Trumper site with some of the best political writing on the web. Trump’s friendship with Putin must frighten our European allies. Trump’s return will destabilize Europe and leave our allies to Putin’s tender mercies.

He writes:

THE OPENING NIGHT OF THE 2024 Republican National Convention sent a clear signal: The balance of power within the GOP has shifted. This is now an isolationist party. And if Republicans win this year’s presidential election, the first victim of this retreat from the world will be Ukraine.

The party’s base was already moving in this direction. In recent polls, most Republicans—unlike most Democrats and independents—have consistently said that the United States is giving too much support to Ukraine. The gap between the parties is enormous, with Republicans about 40 points less supportive than Democrats.

A few hours before the primetime speeches began on Monday, Donald Trump announced his running mate: Senator J.D. Vance. Trump is already well known as a Putin sympathizer and opponent of aid to Ukraine; his selection of Vance reinforces that disposition. Vance was by far the most anti-Ukraine candidate on Trump’s vice-presidential short list. As a senator, he has fought against aid to Ukraine and has made clear that he isn’t particularly interested in defending Europe. Two years ago, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vance shrugged, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

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The convention’s organizers gave a coveted evening speaking slot to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ukraine’s fiercest opponent in the House. Greene doesn’t just oppose aid to Ukraine; she also parrots Russian smears against its government. In her prepared remarks, Greene denounced “globalists” and protested that “the Democrats spent over $175 billion of your tax dollars to secure Ukraine’s borders.” The delegates—not waiting for her next line, about how the money wasn’t being spent on a wall to seal the Mexican border—immediately began to boo.

In his own primetime address, tech investor and CEO David Sacks went further. He blamed President Biden for Russia’s invasion.

He provoked—yes, provoked—the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion. Afterward, he rejected every opportunity for peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after it broke out. . . .

Hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars have gone up in smoke. President Biden sold us this new forever war by promising it would weaken Russia and strengthen America. Well, how does that look today? Russia’s military is bigger than before, while our own stockpiles are dangerously depleted. Every day, there are new calls for escalation, and the world looks on in horror as Joe Biden’s demented policy takes us to the brink of World War III.

This speech—presumably cleared for delivery by the convention’s organizers—explicitly shifted blame from Putin to America. In effect, it excused Putin by faulting Biden for every stage of the crisis: for causing the invasion, for risking escalation, and for failing to agree to Putin’s conditions for ending the war. It’s particularly rich that Sacks said we should give up on Ukraine because our military stockpiles are depleted—after Trump, Vance, Greene, and other Republicans opposed Ukraine-aid legislation to replenish those stockpiles.

Sacks also boasted that Trump, unlike Biden, would be

a president who understands that you build the most powerful military in the world to keep America safe, not to play the world’s policeman; a president who is willing to talk to adversaries as well as friends, because that is the only way to make peace; a president who will stand up to the warmongers instead of empowering them.

“A president who is willing to talk to adversaries” was an obvious allusion to Putin. He’s the only U.S. adversary—particularly in a context where peace might have to be discussed—with whom Trump, unlike Biden, is known to be friendly.

Half an hour after that speech, Trump arrived at the convention. As the crowd cheered, he stood in a row of VIPs in front of his family. To Trump’s left stood Vance. To his right stood Rep. Byron Donalds, a consistent opponent of aid to Ukraine. And next to Donalds, basking in Trump’s glow and the delegates’ adoration, stood the most avidly pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine propagandist in right-wing media: Tucker Carlson.

This is the Republican party in 2024. Two years after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as Russia continues to kill civilians, seize land, and threaten Europe, the GOP has opened its convention with an emphatic message. To American isolationists—and to the Kremlin—the signal is: We are your party.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Fascism, International, Trump

Warning! Dangerous Hate Group Threatens the Future of Our Democracy!

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2024 //
15

Christopher Mathias wrote on Huffington Post about the latest warning of rising extremism. Another hate group has appeared to blight our nation, according to the Southern Poverty law Center. There are so many of them. Just a week or so ago, Nazis marched through the streets of Nashville. They call themselves the “Parriotic Front.” Their faces were covered, of course. Apparently they don’t object to face masks when they are acting as Nazis. It’s hard to distinguish them from the Ku Klux Klan, except the Klan wore masks and dressed in white hoods.

Mathias writes:

A growing Christian supremacist movement that labels its perceived enemies as “demonic” and enjoys close ties to major Republican figures is “the greatest threat to American democracy you’ve never heard of,” according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The SPLC, a civil rights organization that monitors extremist groups, released its “Year In Hate And Extremism 2023” report on Tuesday. A significant portion of the report, which tracked burgeoning anti-democratic and neo-fascist movements and actors across America, is devoted to the New Apostolic Reformation, “a new and powerful Christian supremacy movement that is attempting to transform culture and politics in the U.S. and countries across the world into a grim authoritarianism.” 

Emerging out of the charismatic evangelical tradition, the NAR adheres to a form of Christian dominionism, meaning its parishioners believe it’s their divine duty to seize control of every political and cultural institution in America, transforming them according to a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. 

NAR adherents also believe in the existence of modern-day “apostles” and “prophets” — church leaders endowed by God with supernatural abilities, including the power to heal. In 2022, a handful of these “apostles,” the report notes, issued what they called the Watchman Decree, an anti-democratic document envisioning the end of a pluralistic society in America. 

The apostles claimed they had been given “legal power and authority from Heaven” and are “God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth,” who “are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy.”

And who’s the enemy? Basically anyone who does not adhere to NAR beliefs. NAR adherents see their critics as being literally controlled by the devil.

“There are claims that whole neighborhoods, cities, even nations are under the sway of the demonic,” the report states. “Other religions, such as Islam, are also said to be demonically influenced. One cannot compromise with evil, and so if Democrats, liberals, LGBTQ+ people, and others are seen as demonic, political compromise — the heart of democratic life — becomes difficult if not impossible.” 

This rhetoric has become increasingly widespread among Republican lawmakers, including former President Donald Trump, who last year referred to Marxists and atheists as “evil demonic forces that want to destroy our country.”

That Trump would use NAR-inspired rhetoric is unsurprising considering his relationship with Paula White-Cain, an NAR figure who delivered the invocation at Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and at the kickoff of his 2020 reelection campaign, as noted by Paul Rosenberg in Salon. White-Cain also delivered the invocation at Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. — the event that eventually became the insurrection at the Capitol. 

The attack on the Capitol was largely inspired, the report suggests, by NAR’s theology of dominionism. “NAR prayer groups were mobilized at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as supporting prayer teams all over the country, to exorcise the demonic influence over the Capitol that adherents said was keeping Trump from his rightful, prophesized second term,” the report states. 

Major Republican figures took part in such events on or around the day of the attack. Mike Johnson, who is now the speaker of the House, joined the NAR’s “Global Prayer for Election Integrity,” which called for Trump’s reinstatement as president, in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol. Johnson has also stated that Jim Garlow, an NAR leader, has had a “profound influence” on his life.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has ties to the extremist New Apostolic Reformation movement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has ties to the extremist New Apostolic Reformation movement. 

Ultimately, the SPLC report is an attempt to ring the alarm bells about the NAR, ”the greatest threat to U.S. democracy that you have never heard of.

“It is already a powerful, wealthy and influential movement and composes a highly influential block of one of the two main political parties in the country,” the report continues. “So few people have heard of NAR that it is possible that, without resistance in our local communities, dominionism might win without ever having been truly opposed.” 

The SPLC’s report, according to a press release, also documents 595 hate groups and 835 antigovernment extremist groups in America, “including a growing wave of white nationalism increasingly motivated by theocratic beliefs and conspiracy theories.” 

“With a historic election just months away, this year, more than any other, we must act to preserve our democracy,” Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center and SPLC Action Fund, said in a statement. “That will require us to directly address the danger of hate and extremism from our schools to our statehouses. Our report exposes these far-right extremists and serves as a tool for advocates and communities working to counter disinformation, false conspiracies and threats to voters and election workers.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Fascism, Religion

Chris Hayes: What Is Project 2025? A Frightening Plan for Trump’s Next Term: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
50

It occasionally happens that I forget to add a link. I forgot to add the link for this great segment by Chris Hayes. I was embroiled in a computer glitch all day (my computer and printer are not communicating). Please watch the segment to learn what horrors Trump has in store for us.

Chris Hayes has a regular evening news program on MSNBC.

In this short video, he explains Project 2025, which spells out plans for major changes in the government and in our freedoms.

It’s a short video. Please watch.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Civil Rights, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Shame, Trump

The New Republic: If Joe Biden Were as Ruthless as Trump

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2024 //
46

The New Republic published a hypothetical speech by Sidney Blumenthal that Joe Biden might give if were as ruthless as Trump. However, he won’t because he is an institutionalist. He believes in the law and the Constitution. He believes, despite the Roberts Court, that no one is above the law, not even the President.

Here is the hypothetical Biden speech:

Good evening, my fellow Americans. With the close of the current session of the Supreme Court, I want to report to you on my compliance with their decisions, especially in the case involving presidential immunity, United States v. Trump.

When I took the oath of office, I swore that I would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Supreme Court has now reinterpreted that document. The court, for all intents and purposes, has also reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to replace the “absolute tyranny” of a king. 

I have read the court’s majority opinion that an official act of the president is “presumptively” immune from all prosecution during and after his term, and that the president’s motive cannot be questioned. I have read, according to the majority, that a president who orders the Department of Justice and his vice president to commit election fraud is immune. I have read that a president who incites a mob to attempt to assassinate the vice president for failing to follow those instructions is immune. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Fellow Americans, I have taken the court’s opinion to heart. I am not one to defy the court. I am, as many have remarked, an institutionalist. I believe with all my soul in our institutions. And now, following the letter and the spirit of the court’s ruling, I have acted swiftly, decisively, and enthusiastically to enforce it. I will not, I cannot, shirk my constitutional duty. As Justice Sotomayor states, “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.” 

To begin with, certain “gratuities,” as we shall call them, have been paid to the court majority as a token of appreciation. In their ruling in the case of Snyder v. United States, the majority decided that James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, who cajoled $13,000 from a trucking company after he granted it a city contract, was not liable for bribery. The court stated that it was a “gratuity.” “Gratuities are typically payments made to a public official after an official act as a reward or token of appreciation,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority opinion.

Payment of “gratuities” to the justices who ruled in the majority in y follows the court’s decision in Snyder. It cannot be considered a bribe because it was not promised beforehand. But I do hope, as Justice Kavanaugh wrote, that there is “appreciation.” 

Now, following my strict construction of the court’s ruling on immunity, I can report to the nation that the threat to national security posed by my former political opponent, my late predecessor, has been eliminated. It was an official act. It was, to quote the court, “presumptive.”

The reasons for his removal do not need to be explained. Under the court’s decision, as an official act, it is more than privileged. I hope you understand that I need not disclose the reasons. I must respect the Supreme Court. I can assure the American people that there will be a thorough report that is currently being written by the intelligence community. It is classified. The substance cannot be disclosed—and never can be.

But I do want to tell you that he did have sex with a porn star. She didn’t like it. And he lied about his golf handicap.

Why am I doing this? That’s not admissible. The state of mind of the president, according to the court, is not admissible. My state of mind falls under an official act, so it’s nobody’s business but my own. I am proud of my official acts. I must respect the precedent of keeping secret all my reasons. Otherwise, I would be damaging the presidency for others who might follow in this office.

I regret to inform you that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been arrested. A number of other members of the House Republican Conference have been taken into custody. Jim Jordan, unfortunately, attempted to resist arrest. After wrestling with an FBI agent, he met a tragic fate. In the sudden absence of those members, there is a new majority in the House. I look forward to a long and cooperative relationship. I can say proudly, gridlock is at last broken. And we can all give thanks to the Supreme Court.

I further regret to inform you that 10 members of the Republican Senate caucus have been arrested. Again, unfortunately, Josh Hawley attempted to run away and was wounded in the leg. The incident was entirely his fault: if only he had submitted to the authorities. Lindsey Graham was arrested in his office. He has renounced all of his former allegiances, and I have issued him a pardon—a conditional pardon. There will be no more obstruction from filibusters. Again, we can thank the court. 

Now, about the court itself, with the present available members of the Congress, I have proposed that the Supreme Court be expanded by 26 justices. I can report that those new justices have already been nominated and approved. Advise and consent is on the fast track. All 26 will be here tomorrow. A longer bench is already under construction.

Tragically, Chief Justice John Roberts has been arrested for his treasonous comment that the president is doing something illegal, based on his very own opinion. I will name a new chief justice after the new 26 members take their posts.

More reform is on the way. The Twenty-Second Amendment prohibiting the president from holding more than two terms will be replaced by the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, which rescinds it. The new amendment has been proposed in the states. I have no doubt that three-quarters of the states, through their legislatures, will be cooperative. In fact, I can promise you that I expect 100 percent cooperation from each and every state legislature on a bipartisan basis. I have alerted FBI offices in every state to assist in our plan to extend democracy. 

To that end, I am creating a new Cabinet department, the Department of Official Acts, to coordinate, simplify, and centralize the far-flung activities of the Department of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Defense, and other departments and agencies. I am committed to eliminating waste and abuse in official acts.

Moreover, the vice president will head a new office here at the White House, the Office of Reimagining Official Acts, to spur innovation, creativity, and efficiency, and above all the execution of justice. That office will review all of the acts that I take so that they qualify as official.

The Office of Reimagining Official Acts has already held a Zoom conference this morning with all of the Fortune 500 CEOs. Each and every executive without exception has released a statement in support of my official acts and promised full cooperation, with gusto. By the way, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee will hold a press conference to announce the details of the amazing news that our campaign has just received new contributions of $43 billion and counting. 

I can also report that Rupert Murdoch has been arrested for seditious conspiracy, along with his accomplices at Fox News, who have previously been liable for defamation. They have been spewing libels every hour of every day since. That’s as much as I can say. I cannot give another reason without breaking the strictures laid down by the court.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision has also had a big impact on international relations. I have had a conversation with Vladimir Putin, who told me that he misunderstood me all along, and that after the day’s events here at home, he has decided to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine. He told me he has the greatest admiration for our form of government now. He said, we can do business, strongman to strongman. 

As for the rest of the campaign, when the Republican National Committee decides on its candidate, I would consider a debate with the ground rules that candidates adhere to national security guidelines, which will be presented as needed—before, during, and after such an event, consistent as official acts.

If any reader of this column can show where anything described here would be illegal under the Supreme Court immunity ruling, please turn yourself in to the nearest FBI bureau to avoid yet another tragic result. Thought is mother to the deed. Thought must be included among the potential threats to be countered by presidential official acts. “Presumptive,” as the court stated, must mean presumptive. And the reason? The president does not need to explain. 

As we celebrate this Fourth of July, in a fervent prayer that the court’s ruling will work out for the best of all possible worlds, I want to say in conclusion, what goes around comes around.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Justice, Trump
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