Trump Rally, Juneau, Wisconsin, Oct. 6, 2024. ABC News (Screenshot).

The ideology of fascism

It would be good to be able to recognize fascism when you see it. Sight is our dominant sense (light travels faster than sound) and provides us warning. In addition, because “fascist” is an epithet as well as political term, it must be used carefully. In 1942, a New Hampshire Jehovah’s Witness named Chaplinsky was arrested after calling a Rochester city marshal a “damned fascist.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the arrest on the grounds that the expression constituted “fighting words,” excluded from constitutional protection. Recent court decisions in the U.S. have widened speech freedoms, but the word “fascist” remains highly charged, underlining the need for historical and political discretion.

Because of Hitler and Mussolini, it’s relatively easy to recognize fascism retrospectively. Though Hitler preferred the term “National Socialism” and Mussolini “fascism”, their regimes had enough in common that we can use the single word, fascism, to describe them both. They were violent, imperialist, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-individualist, and nationalist. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” a phrase coined by Roger Griffin in 1991, describes their shared, underlying ideology: interwar fascists believed they were spurring the revolutionary rebirth and modernization of a decadent nation for the benefit of racially superior citizens. Fascism is hierarchical and corporatist; it endorses existing aristocracies of birth and wealth; it is capitalism in its desperate, parasitical phase.

Fascist iconography

While the Germans worshipped ancient Norsemen and Aryans, the Italian fascists venerated the Roman Empire. They embraced its symbols – the fasces (a bundle of sticks with an ax in the middle) and she-wolf. That the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a wolf, allowed the Italian fascists to proclaim their own decent from a fierce and ruthless beast. Like the Roman emperors, Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, Mussolini and his followers were bent on imperial conquest. Mussolini was Il Duce, the name derived from the Latin dux, or Roman military commander.

The attainment of national and racial destiny, according to the fascist idea, is the result of individual will. Both Italian and German regimes were premised upon the “leadership principle” — in German Führerprinzip — the idea that power and wisdom reside in a single, great leader and that the people owe him loyalty and obedience. In 1936, Hitler and Mussolini quietly agreed to support each other politically and militarily; two years later, they openly formalized the relationship in a “Pact of Steel.” By the Spring of 1945, both were dead – the one by suicide, the other killed by a mob of ordinary Italians.

Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935.

Because of the indelible stain it left, fascist iconography is memorable: the toothbrush moustache and stiff salute, swastikas, goose-stepping troops, the SS symbol, black shirts, and the ancient fascist emblem itself. Here are two stills from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary/propaganda film Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg; And here are two propaganda photos of Mussolini reviewing his troops. Together, they represent militarism, masculinism, elitism, nationalism and the Führerprinzip,

Photographers unknown, Mussolini speaking (Rome, 1940) and Reviewing Troops (Rome, c. 1938).

This iconography was so well known that it could be satirized by Charlie Chaplin in his popular, 1940 film, The Great Dictator. The story concerns a Jewish barber (no name given) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel. Both roles are played by Chaplin. (Rather than Führer, he’s called the “phooey” of Tomania.) Hynkel is allied with, but also in comic competition with Benzio Napaloni, the dictator of Bacteria, played by Jack Oakie.

The movie is vague on the details of Nazi politics and ideology. But the best three minutes of the movie – Hynkel’s ballet with a giant balloon-globe — effectively suggests the imperial ambitions of fascist leaders. It includes many of the icons of Nazism: Hitler’s moustache, uniforms, jackboots, eagle, and swastikas (the latter so well-known they can be changed into doubled x’s). The balloon/globe — which bursts at the end — suggests both Hitler’s violence and self-destructiveness.

Still from The Great Dictator.

Not until the end of the war, did Chaplin fully learn about another Nazi iconography: piles of emaciated dead bodies, hollow-eyed survivors, showers that sprayed poison gas instead of water, industrial-sized crematoria, and the slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei (“work sets you free”), above the entrance to the forced-labor/death camp at Auschwitz. During the Nuremberg trials (1945-47), documentary films played in court showing these icons of genocide. They were edited and replayed as newsreels all over the world.

From concentration camp films, shown at Nuremberg Trials, Nov. 29, 1945.

Fascist architecture and art in Italy and Germany

If that were all there was to the visuality of fascism, the question in my title would be answered. Look for swastikas, goosesteps, stiff arm salutes, jackboots, or the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, and there you’ll find fascism. But the visual culture of interwar fascism is obviously much more extensive than that, encompassing fine art, architecture, and design. And it’s quite varied — up to a point.

Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como,1932–36. (Photographer unknown).

During their first decade in power, fascist authorities in Italy allowed a wide variety of artistic and architectural styles to co-exist and even flourish. Avant-garde modernism, with its focus on structure and function, appealed to a state striving to develop or modernize its infrastructure. Many civic buildings, schools and railway stations — such as the Santa Maria Novella (1932-35) by Giovanni Michelucci and others — present an austere, modernist aspect. The archetypal example of fascist modernism however, is Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, in Como (1932–36). The building, with its planarity, grid, and lack of ornament, draws upon Walter Gropius’s innovations at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, and Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House, among other buildings. Tarragni was part of Gruppo Sette, a coalition of Italian rationalists. In their 1926 manifesto, they rejected Expressionism and Futurism in favor of “logic and rationality.”

Marcello Piacentini, Palace of Justice, in Milan,1932-40. (Photographer unknown).

Mussolini himself in 1933 proclaimed rationalism the correct architectural style for fascist Italy, but internal and external competition forced a change, and by the middle 1930s, a more traditional and ostentatious architecture – an architecture of power — was favored. An example is Marcello Piacentini’s colossal Palace of Justice, in Milan (1932-40). It speaks the language and rhythm of classicism – tripartite horizontal and vertical division of the main facade, rusticated lower level, tripartite central portals, half columns between the windows, plus cornices and entablature. But ornamentation (capitals, fluted columns, pediments and decorative moldings) is reduced or eliminated. Classical antiquity is recalled not by detailing, but sheer monumentality — it has 1200 rooms — and lavish materials, chiefly marble and bronze.

In Nazi Germany, the modern movement in architecture – meaning the Bauhaus and its planning and design offshoots — was cast aside as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, though no theory or program of art and architecture ever took its place. Instead, modern artists and designers and more traditional ones were forced into competitions which the former could not possibly win. Thus, classicism – at once buffed-up and stripped down –was the chosen idiom for major architectural commissions such as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich (1936) by Paul Troost, and the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin by Albert Speer (1939).

Postcard of Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich, 1936.

Albert Speer, New Reich Chancellery, 1939. (Photographer unknown).

Speer was of course the kingpin of Nazi architecture. He was Hitler’s favorite and later named Minister for Armament and War Production, in which post he commanded hundreds of thousands of slave laborers. Speer claimed to have no architectural program or theory, only a desire to tailor his plans to the Fuhrer’s will. Indeed, his buildings, and Nazi public architecture in general, are not programmatic expressions of Nazi ideas about race, Lebensraum, Judeo-Bolshevism or the Führerprinzip. In both architectural and symbolic terms, they are banal in the extreme. They are however, effective instruments of political strategy, in particular, war planning. Parade grounds, Zeppelin fields, stadiums, party headquarters, the Chancellery and more were built with a speed and scale intended to drum up enthusiasm for war. They were public demonstrations that Germany was a powerful and ambitious nation. Only a state with a legitimate claim on empire would build on such an imperial scale and at such expense. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Hitler said of the Chancellery, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” Two over life-sized figures by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor, flank the entrance court; on the left is Partei and on the right, Wehrmacht. They are roughly derived from the famous ancient Greek bronze figure of Zeus, hurling a thunderbolt.

Albert Speer, New Reich Chancellery, grand gallery, 1939. (Photographer unknown.)

Arno Breker, Partei and Wehrmacht, outside, New Reich Chancellery, 1939. (Photographer unknown.)

As in architecture, so in art. There was no single aesthetic criteria guiding Nazi or fascist painting and sculpture, except the consistent preference for traditional over modern art. That, however, was not unusual. Representational art was the preference across Europe, Russa, and the Americas. It could be used for indoctrination, persuasion or entertainment, and was deployed by progressive as well as regressive institutions and states. Despite the inroads of modernism, traditional art retained its popular appeal. It was familiar – available to be seen in churches, newspapers, advertising, and movies – and therefore comforting. The great modernists on the other hand — Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, etc – despite their considerable success, were little understood by the broad public.

Where fascist or totalitarian states differed from capitalist democracies, was in their enforcement of the preference for traditional art. In Nazi Germany, this was most clearly manifested in the contest between the annual Great German Art Exhibitions, inaugurated in 1937, and the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937-38. The former arose from an open

Great German Art Exhibition, Haus der Deutschen Kunst, 1937 (photographer unknown).

Catalogue for Great German Art Exhibition, 1937; Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements, 1934.

invitation to artists in 1937 to submit works for national exhibition at the new, Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich. After seeing the submissions, which included some modern and expressionist works, Hitler was furious. A few years before, he had called modern artists “incompetents, cheats and madmen.” He thereupon fired the jurors (who had been chosen by propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels) and appointed his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman to curate the selection. In addition, he endorsed

Visitor at Degenerate Art exhibition, Munich, 1937.

Goebbels’ proposal to mount a didactic exhibition of the rejected artists and many others, under the rubric “Entartete Kunst”. The “degenerate artists” included much-derided German expressionists such as Grosz, Dix, Kirchner, Marc, and Nolde, as well as dozens of others, including Impressionists, Post-Impressionists (including Van Gogh), Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists and more. The works were hung helter-skelter among wall texts that read, for example: “nature, as seen by sick minds”, “madness becomes method”, “revelation of the Jewish racial soul” and “deliberate sabotage of national defense” (the latter displayed anti-war imagery by Dix, Grosz and others). And while the Great German exhibition was lauded in the Nazi-controlled press and the Degenerate exhibition mocked, the former was little visited while the latter attracted nearly 3 million total viewers. It was probably the most visited art exhibition of all time. Whether that represents widespread embrace of the Nazi derision of modern art, or broad endorsement of the works is unclear.

Crowd awaiting entry to Degenerate Art exhibition, Berlin 1938 (photographer unknown).

What does fascism look like today?

Fascism doesn’t have a light switch with an on/off setting. It may be found in capitalist democracy, just as democracy may be discovered in the recesses of fascist states. Maybe it’s better to say fascism is controlled by a dimmer switch. Under Donald Trump, turned up quite high. Under Biden it has been dialed down, but still glows in the background and sometimes flares up, like in the current U.S. president’s growing anti-immigrant rhetoric, or his consistent support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and now Lebanon. That’s fascism by proxy.

George Bergstrom, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, 1941-43.

However, it’s difficult to speak of fascist art and architecture in the U.S. The amount of public patronage of art is tiny, and what exists is extremely diverse in form and style. There are certainly municipal, state and federal buildings that serve deeply oppressive, even fascistic, purposes: prisons, psychiatric hospitals, military bases, and some schools. And a few buildings, like the U.S. Pentagon resemble in monumentality and style, buildings by Speer. (It was built just two years after the completion of The New Reich Chancellery, and may have been influenced by it.) But these are outliers and marked by contradiction. For example, when the Pentagon was completed in between 1943, it was the only public building in the state that had integrated lunchrooms and toilet facilities. In that respect, it may have been the least fascist building in Virginia!

Sue Coe, Rio Grande, 2023. (Courtesy the artist).

Today, the U.S. the border wall with Mexico – actually, dozens of different and colliding walls, fences, and natural barriers – is an icon of fascism. So are the concentration camps (detention centers) that temporarily house immigrants. But the image of these facilities — in photographs and memory — have also made them a resource of anti-fascism, as apparent in drawings and linocuts by British-born, U.S. artist Sue Coe. For example her linocut titled Rio Grande, depicts immigrants caught up in razor wire and drowned on the Texas/Mexico border. This actually happened on Jan. 14, 2023. (For more such images, please see our new book, The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism.)

A more clear-cut diagnostic of fascism is the MAGA hat. Trump often wears one when he gives speeches, and regularly repeats the phrase “make America great again.” Here’s a few lines from a speech he gave in 2023, that has since become standard at rallies: “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions, from all over the world. Without borders and fair elections, you don’t have a country. Make America great again.”

MAGA is today emblazoned on millions of caps, T-shirts, yard-signs, flags and more, It’s an expression of palingenetic ultranationalism — almost. By proposing the revival of an earlier time, it’s more conservative than revolutionary; and the “greatness” it promises is not imperialist. There is no discussion of “lebensraum”. Indeed, Trump’s other major slogan, “America First” is isolationist, dating back to Charles Lindberg’s America First movement, which aimed to head off U.S. participation in World War II. But given Trump’s rhetoric about Iran and China, as well as his proposals to increase military spending and massively update and expand the nation’s nuclear arsenal, I’d argue that his policies are in fact expansionist – in that sense, fully consonant with fascist militarism and imperialism. Trump’s rallies suggest he has a war strategy. They are intended to mobilize thousands of followers who will, if needed, storm U.S. voting stations, state capitals and the capital in Washington to overturn an unwelcome election outcome.

As we have seen, fascism has no settled or essential iconography. It can’t. Wherever it appears, it draws from motifs and ideologies that are distinctive to that particular nation. In 1939, a Yale professor and Methodist minister named Halford Luccock gave a lecture at Riverside Church in New York City. Observing the growing strength of Nazism and fascism abroad and a rising fascist movement in the U.S., he warned his audience:

“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’…The high-sounding phrase ‘the American way’ will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties.”

Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928-32, himself often called a fascist, said: “American Fascism would never emerge as Fascist, but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right President and Cabinet.”  Fascism, as I said at the beginning of this brief survey, is easy to see in retrospect, but not in prospect. However, when it appears right in front of you, identification becomes simple – signs and symbols appear everywhere. As we approach the U.S. election, we can clearly witness one political party’s tight embrace of fascism – but seeing it doesn’t mean we can easily stop it.

The post What Does Fascism Look Like? A Brief Introduction appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin observed of Russian history that there were “decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.”  The U.S. has entered a similar hinge moment in our history, and the next few weeks could determine our national prospects.

As a former senior U.S. national security official, I spend much time deliberating with colleagues around the world on geopolitical risks and trends. It is by now a commonplace that unprecedented uncertainty governs the international scene. Great power rivalries and regional instabilities are escalating. New technologies have changed the playing field.  Furthermore, the U.S. itself has become a major source geopolitical risk.

I tell my foreign interlocutors – sitting and former officials, clients, other analysts – that it is necessary to monitor at least three tv screens simultaneously: the electoral horserace, the perils of transition, and the policy picture amid polycrisis.  This multidisciplinary split-screen view is essential to grasp the dynamic complexity of the challenges before us and to plot course corrections.  It will not be an easy task.

The Horserace

The first screen features the domestic electoral horserace in its last weeks: who’s up, who’s down in the myriad polls, what surprises does October hold, what else could affect voter turn-out.  This drama is nothing new.

But the sheer volatility and intensity of this election cycle is new.  For the first time since 1968, a president eligible for reelection has stepped back in favor of a largely untested vice president who did not obtain the party’s nomination through a competitive process. And a bloody-minded former president hell-bent on revenge is engaging in increasingly extremist rhetoric.

Trump briefly appeared to be an electoral shoo-in – his climax occurred in the bloody, fist-pumping “never surrender” days right after the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and his dramatic coronation at the RNC.  In a spectacle reminiscent of World Wrestling Federation theatrics, Trump was so self-assured of victory that he doubled his bet on MAGA nativism rather than having truck with RINOs or other centrists.

Yet Trump has been struggling to regain the same level of confidence ever since Joe Biden was effectively forced out of the race due to perceived infirmity. Biden may have played a historically necessary role in defeating Trump in 2020, but in the eyes of his own party he had necessarily became political history in 2024.

Biden’s unceremonious ouster was achieved thanks to the months-long tandem efforts of his former boss Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, likely with the tacit cooperation of Vice President Kamala Harris herself.  After all, it was Harris who quickly seized the mantle as party nominee. This power grab is probably the most impressive feat on a resume otherwise thin in executive decision-making and suggests more moxie in Harris than commonly appreciated.

Trump has been petulant about the “switcheroo” – fulminating about what was nothing short of a political coup within the Democratic party, but an entirely lawful one. As a result Trump has been deprived of his familiar old punching bag.

Despite palpable if not universal Democratic relief at the replacement of Biden, the electoral picture remains suspenseful.  While the truculent Trump remains consumed with the quest for personal power and the need to stay out of jail, a cautious Harris avoids talking about anything that could be mistaken for a compelling strategy of national renewal, whether on economic or foreign policy. The United States, a nation with unparalleled capacity for adaptation, is badly in need of a paradigm shift in major policy areas and can ill afford drift and delay.  More on this below.

Veteran political watcher and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has archly summarized the contest as “Awful vs. Empty.” It’s clear that a reversion to the authoritarian and erratic Trump would be more than awful for the Republic, but it is not obvious that Harris has a credible plan to cure the country’s polarized malaise and reverse the incipient slide into chaos, notwithstanding her platitudes about “joy,” “a new way forward,” and “an American-built opportunity economy.” Who doesn’t want those fine things?  More worrying, erstwhile co-pilot Harris is trapped paying lip service to Biden’s shaky legacy.

To be clear, one should unequivocally prefer Empty to Awful, but it’s hard to pretend that Harris’ Chauncey Gardiner act is what compelling leadership looks like. Not being Trump might be just enough to win, but it is not enough to govern and lead. Harris may yet fill in the empty spaces and measure up.

The Perils of Transition

The second screen looks at the perils of transition – and specifically the risk that election day might not be decision day.

The period between Election Day and the inauguration on January 20, is an unduly long, fundamentally unnecessary but constitutionally-required transition as America awaits the certification of the election and eventual investiture of the new president.  The transition used to be taken for granted as a formality, but that is no longer the case.

The main drama of the transition is not merely the maddening passage of time but Trump’s preemptive threat to challenge the election results.  The former president has essentially taken the position that he cannot rightly lose this election. The “big lie” which he uses to question the 2020 result after the fact has long since morphed into a tool to try to delegitimize the 2024 election in advance as “rigged.”

The Trump team has already unleashed massive lawfare tactics to change or challenge election rules at the state level. They are also prepared to dispute certification of the electoral count with a view to final judicial appeal to the Trump-stacked Supreme Court.

Only a Blue Wave and overwhelming Harris victory in the electoral college could forestall the risk of an unstable transition. Four of the six presidential elections since 2000 have been decided by fewer than 120,000 votes in a handful of states — in 2020 it was about 44,000 votes in three states — and the 2024 ballot is likely to follow that pattern.

Of course Trump could win free and fair.  But he is also capable of trying to steal a close election he would otherwise win.

The most dire and cynical lesson Trump learned in 2020 was to strike first:  not to wait for all the votes to be canvassed and counted and for a winner in a close contest to be declared.  Instead, he knows it’s imperative to disrupt the counting in enough localities and states as quickly as possible to leave the outcome in doubt.

The underhanded goal would be to short-circuit the electoral college, maintain control of a majority in the House and force a so-called contingent election in Congress where a majority of Republican-controlled state delegations could pick the winner under the obsolete 12^th Amendment procedures, most likely against the will of the popular majority.

Some of the leading tactical scenarios for ending up with a contingent election have been described in my co-authored three-part series “Dancing in the Dark.”  Another variant of a disputed electoral endgame can be found here.  Most of these troubled transition scenarios spring from the fact that the venerable old U.S. constitution provides a shaky framework for an indeterminate election and leaves too much authority over the presidential election with the states, making ample room for mischief.

One might say Trump is going full Venezuela, prepared to bend the constitution, to incite opposition street protests and to make a Maduro-style announcement of his own victory regardless of the facts. Trump has all but declared civil war by other means on the American Republic. This fact is noticed abroad, and has an impact on U.S. creds as a lamp of democracy, a fact seemingly lost on the foreign policy types which continues to preach democracy promotion as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening at home.

The vulnerability of our long transition period should make Americans envy parliamentary systems such as the UK’s where a new prime minister can take office on the morning after an election with a simple majority of seats.

Yet Biden’s lame duck status as president with plenipotentiary powers until January 20 and a new if worrying ambit of executive immunity thanks to the recent landmark Supreme Court ruling also presents an interesting possibility to stop electoral sabotage in progress rather than wait for a January 6^th sequel.

Both the Congressional hearings in 2021 and the Jack Smith federal case against Trump have amply demonstrated that the insurrection and coup attempt were the result of a wide conspiracy as clumsy as it was brutal.  What about now, in 2024?  Is there any reason to believe a similar criminal conspiracy is not already underway in the run-up to this election?

The failure to prosecute and convict the capo for January 6^th has fueled a dangerous sense of impunity. Will the sitting President at some point feel compelled to step in, whether through law enforcement or emergency powers to protect the constitution? The fact that these are valid and pressing questions highlights the uncertainty of our national predicament.

Policy Picture Amid “Polycrisis”

The third screen we must monitor has to do with policy, particularly national security and international relations. U.S. foreign policy has seemingly been on autopilot for some time while the world is increasingly on fire, literally and figuratively.

So much time and energy are spent by the political elite on the first two screens – the topsy-turvy horserace and the novel perils of transition – that there is little coherent policy engagement with the “polycrisis” engulfing the planet, including climate change, migration, widening inequalities and continuing poverty, the unregulated rise of artificial intelligence and the cold and hot wars threatening to plunge us into deeper conflict, perhaps even WW3.

Our national policy conversation is increasingly sophomoric and unserious. Trump’s response is a series of atavistic slogans about nationalism, protectionism and promises of quick fixes. By contrast, Harris alternates between vowing to stay the course of Biden’s ineffectual foreign policy, wedded as it to a paradigm of U.S. power hat no longer corresponds to reality, and committing to building a more “lethal” military. For its part, the U.S. Congress is a theater of the absurd, engaged chiefly in grandstanding and obstruction.

But we do not exist in a vacuum. And our track record is plain to see even if we engage in selective memory.  The rest of the world noticed that after 9-11 the U.S. engaged in twenty years of failed military interventions and regime change exercises in the Greater Middle East, violating sovereignty at will and causing havoc and massive loss of life, all under cover of “the war on terror” and “nation-building.”  One of the basic rules of power is that if you use it and fail to achieve your objectives, your power diminishes. Judgment is as important as raw might.

The world has noticed that the U.S. abandoned the people of Afghanistan after making piles of high-minded but unrealistic promises of transformative support, quite similar to those currently being made to Ukraine in the name of “defense of democracy.” The Vietnam War may be a distant memory, but it too was a muscular and failed democracy promotion expedition couched in dubious metaphors such as “the domino theory” and “strategic hamlets.”

The world has noticed, too, that Gaza at the hands of an unbridled U.S. friend looks a lot like Mariupol at the hands of an unhinged U.S. foe. There are many significant differences between the two cases but a common denominator is that the U.S. has failed to find a way to stop the cycle of escalation in either place — indeed, we may be underwriting it in both places.

The Global South has noticed that the U.S. and its allies did nothing to stop Ethiopia’s slide into brutal civil war and are now doing little to deal with impending famine in Sudan on a scale not seen in modern times.

The rest of the world has noticed the U.S. walking away from the gospel of free trade after Washington concluded that a rising China could be gaining the edge in platform technologies, supposedly by stealing intellectual property, and in access to critical minerals, allegedly by plundering Africa and other sources. The message is that globalization was acceptable as long as the U.S. won the competition.

It has often been asserted that globalization is a fact, not a theory. True enough, the world is objectively interdependent. Yet the once authoritative mantras of ineluctable global cultural and normative convergence thanks to open borders for trade and investment and the pursuit of market efficiencies have long faded from the prestigious panel discussions at Davos.

None of this is to lay sole blame on the U.S. for the global polycrisis – other actors share responsibility and have been engaged in astounding geopolitical brinkmanship – but we should focus on getting our own act together before lecturing others. Choices have consequences and it’s high time for a reckoning about our own ledger over the past quarter century.

Two pillars of the U.S. global security strategy – commitment to a binary struggle between democracy vs. authoritarianism and espousal of the “rules-based international order” – are fracturing in practice and need self-critical adjustment. Credibility matters, and we are losing it.

The “Blob” – meaning the Washington foreign policy establishment comprising pious liberal interventionists and pumped-up traditional hawks who play at being Churchillian and insist that America’s wars are by definition “good wars” and our economic dominance is intrinsically beneficent – would dismiss all such criticisms as forms of whataboutism, appeasement and declinism. They are right to lobby for a better world, but wrong to tar skeptics who counsel greater strategic prudence.

Not only does the Blob tend to self-congratulate, but they manage to self-perpetuate. It is striking that so few members of the foreign policy elite responsible for what Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly called “suicidal statecraft” have lost their jobs over the past few decades. Instead, many of them have been retained and promoted across Administrations in their respective parties. The primacy of loyalty and patronage over insight and track record could be one reason foreign policy experts are held in such low regard.

Can the U.S., once a pioneering architect of multilateralism, adjust to a new power balance?  A major reckoning lies ahead if the U.S. wishes to maintain its preponderant global status, dynamism and relevance.

Make no mistake about it.  The volatility on the first two screens contributes to the risks we see on the policy screen.  And the rest of the world is watching the show. Foreign actors monitor — and often misinterpret — America’s internal disarray. They also act on those (mis)perceptions. Some of them also try to meddle in our election through disinformation and other methods, partly as payback for a long history of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

Thus, we see U.S. allies, foes and those in the vast grey middle alike hedging their strategic bets, testing the envelope, not knowing which version of America will emerge: isolationist, liberal interventionist or something new?  The policy whiplash from Bush-Cheney to Obama to Trump to the current Biden interregnum has left U.S. predictability is in tatters. The central questions now are whether and how credibility can be restored in a significantly changing world.

To do so, the US must define and pursue sustainable long-term policies based on a hard-headed assessment of national interests as opposed to abstract values alone. As other analysts have argued, an effective rethink will require a revival of the principled pragmatism of George Kennan who counseled the U.S. “to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming” in favor of “our immediate national objectives.”

The Democrats have no monopoly on wisdom on these policy issues. And, in fairness, Trump has raised numerous valid policy questions about the way the U.S. wields power in the world and minds its own affairs. Indeed, Trump’s unexpected rise within the Republican party in 2016 was based on impertinent takedowns of the post-9/11 Bush-Cheney doctrine as well as the globalist neoliberal ideology espoused by Wall Street masters of the universe. Trump, however, almost always fails to answer convincingly the strategic questions he might justifiably pose. Thus, the messenger taints the message, further crippling our national deliberation.

A meaningful strategic reckoning will include the following three elements:

First, we need a revival of robust diplomacy backed up by the judicious use of power.  Perhaps as a result of the insouciant post-Cold War triumphalism of the Clinton-Gore Administration (in which I served) and the go-it-alone bravado of the Bush-Cheney Administration, the U.S. State Department has evolved into an agency that prefers to speak only with friends, allies and mentees. Senior officials who dare to open channels of dialogue with dangerous U.S. adversaries risk professional banishment.

The U.S. is unilaterally and unnecessarily surrendering its considerable advantages in diplomatic knowhow and prowess. Today almost anybody who advocates for conflict resolution through diplomacy is liable to be labeled an appeaser.  We are weaker for it.

Every attempt at negotiation is not a repeat of “Munich,” referring to Chamberlain’s failed strategy of appeasement of Hitler or “Yalta,” referring to FDR and Churchill’s supposed betrayal of Eastern Europe. The U.S. should embrace not forget its skills and experience at diplomacy with difficult adversaries.

On the Korean Peninsula , where U.S. forces were direct combatants – my father served in the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur — we negotiated a ceasefire that has held since 1952, allowing our ally South Korea gradually to emerge from dictatorship to democratic prosperity.

Under Nixon, the U.S. was the architect of the “one China” formula to keep the peace across the Strait and allow Taiwan to emerge from dictatorship to democratic prosperity over decades, yet now Washington hawks recklessly promote Taiwan’s declaratory independence, baiting conflict with an irritable and irredentist Beijing.

At Dayton in 1995, the U.S. and Europeans and Russia negotiated with a triumvirate of Yugoslav war criminals to stop the massive killing in Bosnia and put in place a peace plan that has largely held in the Balkans since then.

These historic U.S.-led deals were all imperfect diplomatic solutions based on pragmatic compromise and prudence, both of which are moral virtues in a policy universe of suboptimal choices and necessary tradeoffs like the one we inhabit.  Our key interlocutors in all those situations were not nice people.

Second, a strong dose of unsentimental historical perspective in place of political correctness and self-righteous moralizing.  This requires knowledge of history – yes, context matters — and encouragement of open debate.

Obama, who was probably the most perceptive internationalist to occupy the White House in recent times, once commented:  “We are a superpower, and we do not fully appreciate the degree to which, when we move, the world shakes… Our circumstances have allowed us to be ahistorical. But one of the striking things when you get outside the United States is—Faulkner’s old saying, ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.’ . . . People remember things that happened six hundred years ago. And they are alive and active in their politics.”  The circumstances of America’s ahistoricism may have expired.

Ideological rigidity comes in many forms.  The 9-11 Commission identified “group think” as a major contributing cause of the intelligence failure. That problem has metastasized. Not since the McCarthy era has doctrinaire pablum quashed critical thinking and robust policy debate as it does today among the national security elite and pundit class.

A corollary of historical perspective is awareness that buying time can be strategic and that containment is often better than confrontation.  “Give me liberty or give me death” is a heroic sentiment but can be a lousy national security strategy.  In a contentious world, “die another day” is not a bad maxim for life or for foreign policy.

A third and most difficult mental challenge is that the U.S. will need to accept a new type of multilateralism if it hopes to enjoy a bigger role in reshaping it. To rebuild credibility and effectiveness in a crowded world of cultural differences with a flatter distribution of hybrid power, the U.S. must embrace multilateralism that is both more multipolar and more multicultural.

After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was intellectually spoiled by a period of essentially unipolar multilateralism in which “the rules-based international order” looked suspiciously like the rule of America’s law.  The U.S. habit of imposing the latest evolution of its own legal norms on other countries, typically via financial sanctions and conditionality, while at the same time exempting itself from multilateral treaties such as the International Criminal Court and the Law of the Sea, is a telltale sign of policy solipsism. It represents “our way,” meritorious as it may be, masquerading as universalism. The best that can be said of this foreign policy strategy is that it was viable as long as we could get away with it.

Foreign accusations of U.S. unilateralism are often self-serving but they also represent the flip side of America’s self-appointed “exceptionalism” touted by the liberals and hawks alike. Evidence suggests the hegemonic post-Cold War moment has run its course. The U.S. should get more used to the ways of reciprocity and mutuality: a world where “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

Yet this need not be the end of American leadership. It’s late in the day for a foreign policy reckoning, but not too late. The good news is that there are inchoate stirrings in both the Democratic and Republican camps (for example, see here and here), which admittedly are not monolithic. However, in the current environment of bitter national polarization, it is unclear whether and how something like a new cross-partisan consensus on durable approaches to national security can be achieved. The next president must strive for it.

The alternative to articulation of a coherent U.S. leadership vision adapted to “the world as it is” will be further descent into domestic disillusionment and international anarchy. That outcome is unequivocally not in the U.S. national interest.

Again, the three screens of America’s ongoing reality tv drama are interlinked. Continued foreign policy drift will lead to more discontent at home.  Equally, avoidance of impending election and post-election chaos at home is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for our forward progress on the wider policy front.  And Trump and Harris are the only two choices left on the menu.

To steer away from impending disasters, we will need multidisciplinary insight and bold leadership willing to change directions. The same goes for other major world powers, whom we may influence but do not control. To borrow from futurist Yuval Harari, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the stakes in the current complex nexus of political and policy challenges are existential.

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Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

That Kamala Harris and Tim Walz could lose the presidential election in November to serial fraudster, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, and Wall Street stock jobber Donald Trump does not mean that they will, but it says a lot about the sad state of the Democratic Party that this election is close, especially as Trump’s campaign speeches sound like a variation of a gig by Cheech & Chong (“Don’s not here, man…”).

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. government often claims to stand for the rule of law, but this past year has made it painfully clear that this doesn’t apply to Palestinians. The moral, financial, and security costs of U.S. support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars are adding up for Americans, too.

Since October 7, 2023, around 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, plus over 700 more in the West Bank. Over 1,100 Israelis have been killed, too. These tragedies are a direct consequence of Israel’s illegal, U.S.-backed occupation of Palestinian territory and its war on Gaza, which must both end immediately.

From the mass killing and maiming of Palestinian civilians to the forced starvation and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, Palestinians and international experts have warned from the start that Israel is committing a “textbook case of genocide” in Gaza.

Despite the International Court of Justice finding genocide “plausible” and calling on Israel to prevent it and ensure the delivery of lifesaving aid, Israel  — like the U.S. —  has ignored all of the court’s orders.

The U.S. has enabled this ongoing genocide and other crimes by providing unconditional support for Israel despite mounting atrocities. This has emboldened Israel to expand its assault to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen as it threatens to drag the U.S. into a wider war with Iran.

None of this is inevitable.

As Israel’s chief supplier of arms, the U.S. has sent billions worth of high-powered explosives since October 7, which have turned up at massacre after massacre committed by Israel’s military. That’s a violation of our own laws barring assistance to forces that commit human rights abuses or block delivery of humanitarian aid, as Israel has done.

“Our democracy is at stake” has been an ongoing refrain this election season. But it’s also a threat to our democracy when elected officials ignore the vast majority of their constituents who have rightly demanded a permanent ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel. Instead of listening to voters, our leaders have backed violent crackdowns on protests, which threatens our First Amendment rights.

The costs of war always reverberate at home. Our policymakers have expressed support for the war using racist, dehumanizing rhetoric, which has directly contributed to rising anti-Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination.

And even though most Americans oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, we’re still paying for it.

Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over the past year, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion and counting on Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and other U.S. military operations in the surrounding region. In August, the Biden administration approved an additional $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.

All this comes on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. already sends Israel in military aid each year. That same $3.8 billion a year could fund 29,915 registered nurses, 394,738 public housing units, or 39,158 elementary school teachers, according to the National Priorities Project.

As our post-COVID safety net continues to crumble, more people are left unable to afford housing, health care, groceries, education, and other basic necessities. Compounding these challenges, more states are battling climate disasters. We desperately need those funds at home, not funding wars and lawlessness abroad.

Nevertheless, many of our elected officials would rather support the military-industrial complex than their own constituents. In a particularly flagrant example, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently appeared on Fox News to plead for more U.S. weapons for Israel in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which had ravaged his home state of South Carolina.

More than statistics, law, and politics, our nation’s role in the Palestinian genocide should shake our conscience and cause us to question its morality. Are human rights and justice good for some but not others? And can we recognize our complicity in this genocide and not take action to end it?

However one answers these questions, our shared humanity hangs in the balance.

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Image by Miko Guziuk.

After a year of watching thousands of people suffer a genocide fueled in large part by U.S. dollars and technology, the usual order of life on university campuses has been upended. Students, staff and faculty have protested, picketed, rallied, and exercised a long tradition of “expressive activity” that has come to define the unique space that inhabits university life. To say that this is a novel upsurge would be to ignore the student mobilizations throughout the years, against the massacres in Vietnam, apartheid in South Africa, and racisms past and present in our backyard. Each of these struggles have become part of the glossy photos memorializing universities’ nostalgic past, and seeming proof of their reputations as bastions of free expression, even in the face of government oppression.

All manner of concerned voices have turned out to protest the countless atrocities roiling the globe, each protestor possessing different privileges and access to the halls of power. Coalitions have formed and frayed, and debates have raged over the proper strategy to bring attention to the tragedies we are witnessing and abetting with our tax dollars and silence.

One group that has formed an intimate connection to the struggles for Palestinian liberation and peace for Israel [as well as war, famine and violence all over the globe] – are international students. Their families often remain deeply connected to the regions that are only pictures that we scroll past on a news app for the rest of us. Their loved ones send them videos of not only the horrors they are experiencing, but also the news coverage and outrage unfolding everywhere else. Yet these students and their positions face an uneven set of responses, about whose suffering merits outrage and compassion. For many students – depending on where their ancestral homes sit in the U.S. global order of allies and enemies – the “rational”, quiet, scheduled, approved, and non-disruptive forms of dissent on university campuses are simply a form of silencing.

International students, like many other students, have raised their voices, at risk of suspension and other disciplinary actions in an era of increased campus suppression. But they face an additional risk in doing so. Their status in the country is tied to their status as a student, and once they have lost that student status, they run the risk of losing their permission to live – and sometimes work – in the country. What befalls these students afterwards is a cascade of sometimes uncertain consequences, including loss of work and a requirement to leave the country. They may (or may not) become a priority for removal, or they may just become another one of the 11 million people living in the shadows. Perhaps if they have the resources and ability to do so, they will go back to where they originally called home.

What does this mean for university administrators and their role in immigration enforcement? Only the U.S. government has the ability to deport, and deport it does, in racially and gendered ways that leave families and communities torn apart. But the U.S. government has a range of accomplices in doing this work, who need not even intend this handy alliance. The increased “devolution” of control over immigration enforcement has increasingly rendered state and local law enforcement as deputies to federal efforts near the border, and far into the interior. But the increasing privatization of the immigration regime has meant that not only have private detention centers increasingly stood to profit from the surge in detainees all over the country, but also all manner of private actors have been dragged into the mechanics – the banal bureaucracy – of immigration enforcement. This means that even (aspiring) sanctuary campuses, in sanctuary counties and cities, are implicated.

Employers are perhaps the clearest example of accomplices to immigration enforcement, as they, since 1986 have been handed the responsibility to verify the work authorization of their employees, a shift that even many conservatives bemoan. There are plenty of stories of abusive employers who have used this power to retaliate and clamp down on labor mobilization, often in carefully calculated and cruel ways. But more often than not, employers are simply engaging in their own official mandate to do the government’s bidding, or risk their own sanctions and penalties. Indeed, even “good employers” become an arm of the immigration state, while also enjoying the enormous power that they are afforded in this role. Employees and students need only consider the possibility and threat of losing their immigration when deciding whether to act on moral conviction and exercise their freedom of speech.

The banal reality of immigration enforcement is less spectacular than the raids that were popular in decades past, which dragged hundreds of undocumented workers into deportation proceedings and sometimes even cattle areas while they awaited being hauled off to detention – often without legal representation or any real possibility of relief. But the mundane administrative bureaucracy of immigration enforcement has been far more effective, and a handy tool for Democratic administrations seeking to seem softer on immigration. The millions of “non-immigrants” working and studying in the U.S. are in plain view of the immigration state (with the help of their employers, universities, and other sponsors) and are subject to some of the same methods that have been honed on the millions of undocumented in the shadows.

In this regard, international students rallying have an allyship with the undocumented and DACA-mented student activists throughout the country. This is true especially for those non-White and Muslim students who have been targeted by all manner of law enforcement assuming their presence a threat. Black and Brown men also face a fundamentally more severe treatment of policing – campuses are not immune to these effects.

While the situations of our non-citizen students differ, their future in our country and our campuses is similarly uncertain. High profile undocumented activists have historically been targeted by federal immigration enforcement, as was the case of Daniela Vargas who was detained soon after calling out the injustice of the ICE raids in the South following the inauguration of Donald Trump. Dairy workers in Vermont too suffered retaliatory arrests during this era, which was ultimately challenged successfully in court.

The chilling effect of immigration enforcement on immigrant students is severe, as even the Presidents Alliance for Higher Education has noted. This is especially the case for those engaging in civic engagement and political struggle. But these effects are part of a well-oiled bipartisan machine. The potential to be swept into deportation proceedings is ever present for all but those immigrants who have naturalized. Universities rely increasingly on an international student body and workforce – at Cornell University this is a quarter of the total student population, who are also hailed as a source of diversity, and are a significant source of recruitment for many programs. Many others are also international faculty, who will often rely on the university for their potential path to a green card, until when they too are vulnerable.

What do universities owe these international students and workers? What is the proportionality of the consequences they face when the university deems them noncompliant, often through a seemingly innocuous stream of bureaucratic warnings and interventions, in the name of equity and student safety? Whose safety will we champion behind the veil of civil discourse?

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Photograph Source: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – CC BY 2.0

Over the past year, mindful that I have been blessed to live under Oregon’s tranquil skies, I reflect upon the Palestinians and Lebanese who begin and end theirs days under skies fraught with drones and bombers.

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Swords Into Ploughshares Peace Center, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“I tell my children there are two ways to lie. One is to tell me something that didn’t happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen.”

–Al Tompkins

“I’ve been a reporter for 20 years; the reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out.”

–Ta-Nehisi Coates

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have accused Congresswoman Rashida Talib of antisemitism. One would have thought after nearly a month of baseless Haitian smears that CNN’s star anchors would have exercised a modicum of journalistic due diligence before themselves smearing a pro-Palestinian congresswoman. But multi-millionaire media anchors and politicians are cut from the same jaded cloth. Whether in the newsroom or the hollow halls of government, plutocracy rules and plutocrats lie.

Or perhaps, they were attempting to compensate for failing to question Trump about his own unequivocal antisemitism during their moderation of the Biden-Trump presidential debate. After all, it was President Joe Biden – not CNN’s Dream Duo, who brought up the fact that Trump has said that “Hitler had done some good things.” Previously, Trump has claimed that Biden has “turned a blind eye to the greatest outbreak of antisemitism in American history, while simultaneously accusing him of being “a servant of globalists.” He has labeled Senator Chuck Schumer “a proud member of Hamas” and likened him to “a Palestinian.” Apparently, an antisemite who, like an incontinent chimpanzee diarrheatically, flings accusations that his political opponents are antisemitic does not warrant interrogation in the political theater of televised debates.

This latest game of defamatory telephone began on September 21, when Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel posted to X, formerly Twitter, a statement accusing Tlaib of antisemitism because she questioned Nessel’s decision to prosecute pro-Palestinian campus protesters.

Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.

The statement was in response to Tlaib’s September 13 Detroit Metro Times interview, in which she told the interviewer:

We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black[1] lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.

On September 23, Tapper, in his State of the Union interview[2] with Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, informed her that Nessel had lodged charges against pro-Palestinian protesters and that Tlaib had called those charges “shameful.” During his summation, he identified Nessel as Jewish.

Quoting directly from Tlaib’s Metro Times interview, Tapper continued:

And Tlaib said – quote – It seems that the attorney general decided, if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs –unquote.

Having greased the way for the smear, Tapper lunged, asking Whitmer, “Do you think that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased is antisemitic?” When Whitmer demurred, Tapper rephrased the question-veiled accusation:

But do you think that Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job? Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel said broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not? That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

Whitmer again evaded the question, visibly reluctant to enter the accusatory hearsay fray. However, facing mounting criticism over her evasion, she issued a statement a day later that served to perpetuate the lie:

The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic. Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes.

This would have been a reasonable criticism had Tlaib actually made the statement. Ironically, the fact that Whitmer’s own statement – which piggybacks off Tapper’s bogus assertion that Tlaib’s concern over Nessel’s charges was motivated by her religion and not because of legitimate concerns about the rule of law and Nessel’s objectivity – is patently anti-Palestinian – it assumes Tlaib’s criticism of Nessel is based on Tlaib’s religion – remained unquestioned.

So much for “the most trusted name in news.”

Equally questionable is that rather than familiarizing herself with the facts, Whitmer, who had at least a day to check out Tlaib’s interview before issuing her condemnatory statement, chose not to use her own “platform and voice to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes” but, caving to political pressure, to perpetuate them.

This is how smears metastasize. In this case, however, instead of malignant slanders against Haitians spread by a hapless Ohioan who misplaced her cat (later found in her basement), third-hand hearsay Facebook posts, and neo-Nazi thugs obsessed with American racial purity, we have a smear against a congresswoman spread by trained journalists and a local government official who perhaps let her guard down to avoid being herself potentially smeared as antisemitic.

Later, on Inside Politics, Bash, Tapper’s tag-team partner in calumny, poured more fuel on the conflagration when, in a conversation with CNN Political Director David Chalian, she opined:

And now to a sad reality, and that is antisemitism is everywhere. And it comes from both ends of the political spectrum. But politicians sometimes sidestep calling it out when it comes from a member of their own party. We saw two examples on State of the Union yesterday. First, with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, when my co-anchor Jake Tapper asked about a Democratic congresswoman’s accusation that the state’s Jewish Attorney General was letting her religion influence her job.

After playing segments from Tapper’s interview with Whitmer and Senator Tom Cotton, who, when asked about Trump’s rant in which he preemptively blamed American Jews for his election loss, not only failed to criticize the GOP fuehrer but praised him as “the most pro-Israel President we’ve ever seen,” if not necessarily an ally of American Jewry.[3] Cotton also ducked questions about North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s antisemitic statements. Despite his failure to denounce the statements of Trump and self-avowed “Black Nazi” Robinson, Bash expressed her gratitude toward Cotton, who she said had spoken out against antisemitism when pro-Palestinian protesters, disrupted her book event in Washington, D.C. to accuse her of bias and complicity in the Gazan genocide. Her gratitude, she tells Chalian, is shared by “anybody who is the subject and the victim of antisemitism … hate … or any other hate. And the key is, which we have learned the hard way, you’ve got to call it out wherever it comes from. What does it tell you about the inability or unwillingness to do so when it comes from a prominent person in your own party?” Unfortunately, calling out guests who fail to call out prominent antisemites on one’s own show does not seem to count. Nor does calling out Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism, overt and implied, when it comes from prominent government officials and co-hosts.

Here, Bash and Tapper wallow in the shallow waters of false equivalency and bogus bothsidesism. Let’s be clear: Donald Trump unequivocally declared that if he loses the election, the Jews are to blame, a bone-chilling statement reminiscent of Germany’s blaming Jews for its defeat in WWI. He has made countless antisemitic statements before and will, no doubt, continue to do so. It was not Tlaib but Steve Neavling, the reporter who conducted the interview, who brought up Nessel’s faith. Despite her critics, unlike Trump, Tlaib does not have a history of antisemitism, unless one defines opposition to genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a desire for a free Palestine as antisemitic. Neavling has called out the statement attributed to her as a lie, noting that Tlaib’s issue with Nessel was not her religion but that she allegedly caved to pressure from “university authorities.” Or are we to assume that she is insinuating that they are Jews, too?

After facing a backlash, Bash issued a “clarification” – not an apology or a retraction – stating: “Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity. Her office has not responded to our requests for clarity. Her allies insist that’s not what she meant, but Nessel still says she believes it is antisemitic and repeated on CNN yesterday that quote – clearly she’s referencing my religion.”

Bash’s putative “clarification” is misleading on several levels. First, it sanitizes their original accusation. Tapper and Bash did not simply accuse Tlaib of suggesting Nessel was biased; they repeated Nessel’s assertion that those biases were based on Nessel’s being a Jew. Second, she attempts to deflect criticism by mischaracterizing objection to the misrepresentation of Tlaib’s statement as coming from Tlaib’s “allies, whom she conveniently fails to name. Again, Neavling has denied Tlaib referred to Nessel’s Jewishness, a fact easily confirmed by reading the interview itself.

Second, why does CNN have to reach out to Tlaib’s office for clarification when they can presumably read the original interview and the subsequent articles, interviews, and X postings by the Neavling that show she did not make the statement? Is it because he is　[cue ominous music] an “ally” and, presumably, an antisemite by association?

Finally, it ignores the fact that Nessel responded to Tlaib’s criticism with a false equivalency when she posted the statement that ignited the smear campaign that appeared to defend Tlaib against a vicious Islamophobic National Review cartoon that implied that Tlaib is a Hezbollah operative.

But here’s the rub: That cartoon is an actual artifact; it exists; it can be Googled and viewed in all its vile, unambiguous, racist infamy. Did CNN call out The National Review? Were the editors of The National Review and the artist called in to “clarify” their intent? Were they suspended or fired? Did the publication of the cartoon spark panel punditry on Islamophobia in general and in the media in particular? The fact is the cartoon exploits all too familiar and normalized tropes that paint Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. Nor is it the first to portray Tlaib as such. Why else would the caricatured congresswoman have a Mossad booby-trapped pager? The cartoonist’s intent is obvious to anyone save the most obtuse, which Nessel clearly is not. Then why does she equate criticism with racism? Sure, one can immediately jump to the conclusion that Tlaib’s criticism is motivated by antisemitism. However, that says more about the accuser and the state of America’s toxic anti-Palestinian political discourse that reductively labels any criticism of Israeli policies inherently antisemitic. But sometimes Occam’s scalpel cuts its wielder: In imputing an antisemitic motive to Tlaib, Nessel is guilty of precisely what she accuses Tlaib of, if only in reverse, that is, of having antisemitic intentions because she is Muslim. In all fairness, Nessel does not say this, but if we want to play the game of impute the motive, this is where we end up. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Ultimately, none of this serves the fight against anti-Palestinian hate and indifference, which is as pervasive and pernicious as antisemitism. The protesters at Bash’s D.C. book event were attacking those, including Bash, whom they perceived as complicit in the genocide in Gaza that is taking the lives of their families and loved ones. One of the women shouted at Bash that the carnage in Gaza is not a “war,” not an unreasonable assertion given the fact that, unlike Israel, Hamas has no standing army, no air force, no navy, and no nuclear weapons. Its cheap, homemade Qassam rockets are no match against 2,000-pound U.S.-manufactured bombs; U.S. navy destroyers do not shoot down Israeli missiles that rain down on Gaza; the $2.9 billion U.S.-supplied Iron Dome and U.S.-based RTX Corp. (formerly Raytheon)-co-developed David’s Sling do not protect the people of Gaza. The gross disproportionality of the conflict in terms of both military power and civilian casualties makes calling it a “war,” as we conventionally apply the term, obscenely problematic.

“My friends have been dying in Gaza,” another protester shouted at Bash, “but you have not been reporting it.” Accusing her of taking “millions from Zionists, “millions from AIPAC… to spew lies about the Palestinian people,” she voiced her frustration that pro-Palestinian protesters “have tried to sit with politicians day after day and they don’t listen to us” as their “family and friends are dying. What else are we supposed to do if this was happening to your family?” The deafness to their pleas might be because AIPAC has spent millions to deafen politicians by defeating those who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, creating a disincentive for politicians to meet with those families. Nor is it simply a matter of “deafness”: the DNC silenced the voices of pro-Palestinians when it ejected pro-Palestinian protesters after they unfurled a “Stop arming Israel” banner inside the convention hall (but allowed a Joe Biden supporter who repeatedly struck one of the protesters on the head with a “We love Joe” sign to remain) and deniedPalestinian American delegates a stage to address the convention.

Media reports, including Bash’s, have shown bias in framing these events. Bash has likened pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazis and April 30 clashes at UCLA between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters to 1930s Europe, even thoughmasked pro-Israel counter-protesters initiated the violence, physically assaulted pro-Palestinian protesters while policeidly stood by, an incident which CNN itself has described as “erupt[ing] into the worst violence stemming from the ongoing college protests around the country over Israel’s war in Gaza.” Although some of the protesters were not UCLA students, it is clear that some in the mob were, in the words of Hillel UCLA, “fringe members of the off-campus Jewish community.” Tellingly, law “enforcement” did not record the injuries, although encampment organizers state that 150 pro-Palestinian protesters were pepper sprayed and at least 25 were sent to emergency rooms with serious injuries.

In the same Inside Politics broadcast, Bash showed a clip in which a UCLA student accused protesters of barring him from entering the campus because he is Jewish. Pro-Palestinian protesters reportedly barred campus students who “would not denounce Israel” from portions of the campus, an act described as designed to discriminate against Jewish students. However, these reports fail to elucidate whether the protesters also denied entry to non-Jewish students who support Israel or admitted Jewish students who denounce Israel for its actions in Gaza. While it may be unconscionable for students to bar access to the university based on ideology, it is not necessarily an antisemitic act since Jewishness is not determined by unconditional support of Israel. Were this so, it would effectively make Jews who reject Israel or who are critical of its policies Jewish apostates, even as they identify as Jews, which itself would constitute an egregious act of antisemitism.[4]

The tactic, however, is not unique to pro-Palestinian protesters. It is part and parcel of the calculus of Israeli occupation and oppression. As Ta-Nehisi Coates told CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil, who essentially accused him of writing a “backpack extremist” manifesto for providing a voice to Palestinians in his book The Message:

I walk over there, and I walk through the occupied territories, and I walk down the street in Hebron, and a guy says to me, I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my religion… I’m working with – the person that is guiding me is a Palestinian whose father, grandfather, and grandmother was born in this town, and I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can’t ride on certain roads, he can’t get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can. Why is that okay?

Forget about the aforementioned geese and ganders; in this light, when it comes to restricting access, the chickens have come home to roost.

Flaming Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment, however, is nothing new for Bash. Previously, she went after Rep. Ilhan Omar, bizarrely twisting her statement against antisemitism into its opposite. During an April 28 interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Bash played a video of Omar in which she says she found it “extremely regrettable that individuals do not care about the fact that all Jewish children should be kept safe, and we should not have to tolerate bigotry or antisemitism for all Jewish students, regardless of their pro- or anti-genocide views,” Bash apparently objecting to the implication that Jews who support Israel’s actions in Gaza are “pro-genocide.” Sanders, to his credit, did not take the bait, instead, stressing that Omar’s “essential point” was that “we do not want to see antisemitism in this country.” But Sanders went a step further, adding he would leave it to the International Court of Justice to decide whether Israel’s actions constitute genocide, even though he did not doubt they constitute “ethnic cleansing,” a charge also made by one of the demonstrators at Bash’s book event.

“Take off your mask,” Bash calmly told one of her detractors during the event. Bash might have admonished the masked April 30 UCLA pro-Israel counter-protesters to do the same. Or better still, someone might have told Bash to take off her blinders, which, in effect, was what the impassioned protesters were chiding her to do before they were ejected from the venue.

In the end, Bash’s Manichean worldview only recognizes pro-genocide Palestinians. It refuses to acknowledge the existence of pro-genocide Jews since in the comfortable binary black-and-white world she inhabits, victims, particularly Jewish ones, can never be victimizers because it can never recognize Palestinians as victims.

Bash has shown a pattern of minimizing Israeli brutality and the reality of Palestinian suffering. In an interview in December with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Jayapal points out that 15,000 Palestinians, most of them children, had been killed in Israeli airstrikes. Not missing a beat, Bash counters, “You don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.”[5] No, we don’t, largely because the mainstream media ignores such incidents, whether they involve IDF soldiers raping Palestinian woman and girls in Gaza and the West Bank or Palestinian men in detention camps, though it appears that in Israel whether it is “legitimate? to plunge broom handles up rectums is a matter of heated debates. Perhaps, one day CNN will cover them or, like MSNBC, “uncancel” hosts that would.

It is little facts like these that corporate media and corporate politicians (after Citizens United, are there any other kind?) tend to elide, perhaps because they fear sharing the same fate as Al Jazeera and other journalists. Significantly, complaints of biased coverage of the slaughter in Gaza come from CNN’s own staff, which has accused the network of stenographing Israeli propaganda and silencing Palestinian voices.

For his part, Tapper now says he “misspoke,” although he used Whitmer’s statement to back the smear they amplified. How is this any different from Trump defending anti-Haitian smears because he “saw people on television” say that their pets had been eaten or JD Vance saying he was merely repeating what his constituents allegedly told him? In the case of Tapper, it appears he just read it on X. How can you expect CNN to credibly fact-check serial liars when it fails to check itself and refuses to retract those lies and offer a sincere apology?

This is not the only time corporate media has worn its pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian bias on its sleeve. Those who support peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters are asked repeatedly, even after they have answered the question, if they denounce Hamas, its October 7 terrorist attack, and its use of rape as a weapon of war. In contrast, those who support Israel are seldom asked if they denounce the genocide in Gaza, the IDF’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians, or the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees. Rather, corporate media prefers to argue that those who draw attention to its bias are themselves engaging in false equivalency since everyone knows that Hamas engages in terrorism. They will not even entertain the thought that Israel engages in terrorism and genocide if only because they would have to accept the cognitively dissonant reality that the victims of atrocity can become its future perpetrators. To recognize this reality would be to admit that Jews can support white nationalists, invite self-avowed “racial realists” to university campuses, or pal around with neo-Nazi influencers, and that Afro Cubans can head white supremacist groups, and black lieutenant governors can be Nazis.

Terrorism, however, is an equal-opportunity exterminator. Although he later retracted it, Ted Turner, the creator of CNN, made this point way back in 2002. “The Palestinians,” he said, “are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have. The Israelis… they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.”

However, like the plight of Palestinians, this is a chapter in the network’s history it would apparently like to erase, to banish to the corn field.

Significantly, while Tapper and Bash have both taken hits from the right for fact-checking Trump during the presidential debate, neither took the opportunity to question him about his antisemitism, to go after his proven record of antisemitism, in which he quotes Hitler and accuses American Jews of disloyalty when he isn’t repeatedly telling them that Israel is “your country” and Netanyahu “your prime minister” and characterizing Jews who criticize Israel as traitors to both the United States and Israel. Instead, they took the easy path and targeted a Muslim American congresswoman. Not only that, Trump’s most recent statements, questioning the sanity of Jews who vote for Harris and blaming them if he loses the election, have set the stage for an escalation of antisemitism should he in fact lose the election. Following the first assassination attempt, antisemitic incidents rose as rumors spread that the would-be assassin was Jewish.

However, Bash was only partially right: antisemitism is indeed everywhere and comes from both ends of the political spectrum. The same is true of Islamophobia.

In the wake of October 7, nationwide attacks on Palestinian Americans and Muslims have increased dramatically. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), it received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023, up 178% from the same period during the previous year. A week following the Hamas attack, in Illinois, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy was fatally stabbed 26 times, and his mother, who survived, 12. A month later, in Vermont, 3 Palestinian college students were shot, leaving one permanently paralyzed. That same month in California, an Arab student was the victim of a hit-and-run, the driver reportedly shouting, “fuck you and your people,” before accelerating. This year, in Texas, a Palestinian man protesting the genocide in Gaza was dragged out of his car and stabbed in the chest. (Interestingly, the grand jury did not file hate crime charges, even though the assailant reportedly repeatedly shouted “nigger” at the victim.) A woman in Texas attempted to drown a 3-year-old Palestinian girl. This is not to mention Palestinian Americans who have been arrested, detained, and killed in Gaza and the West Bank. It is not that the media has not covered these incidents; it is that they have not been covered with the same intensity or met with the same degree of outrage that has greeted antisemitic attacks. Nor is the price exacted for the expression of Islamophobia the same. Antisemites, real or imagined (including “tenured” and nontenured Jewish professors), lose their jobs. Islamophobes rarely face such consequences. They may even serve on senate committees ostensibly designed to investigate hate crimes.

Case in point: Louisiana senator John Kennedy. Kennedy proudly demonstrated his Islamophobic bono fides during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes. On September 17, when Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, along with two other experts, testified, Kennedy couldn’t help but spin some GOP, good ole boy, home-spun bigotry.

Off the bat, Kennedy used his time to engage in a series of performatively provocative questions designed to bait Berry and paint her as an antisemitic, terrorist supporter.

Kennedy: You support Hamas, do you not?

Maya Berry: Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today, in a very—

Kennedy: Let’s start first with a yes or no.

Berry: Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization, which I do not support. But you asking the executive of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.

Kennedy was not done; racists never are.

Kennedy: You support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?

Berry: Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing, senator.

Kennedy: Is that a no or a yes?

Berry: You have Arab American constituents that you represent in your grand state—

Kennedy: I understand that, but my time’s limited, and I apologize, but is that a yes or a no?

Kennedy cuts her off, demanding a yes or no answer.

Berry: A yes or no answer to do I support Hezbollah? The answer is I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that invokes it, so, no, sir.

Kennedy: You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?

Berry: No, I can say no; I can say yes. What I can say is –

Kennedy: Do you support or oppose Iran?

Berry: [Sighs]

Fortunately, the hearing was not about pet-eating. If it had been, and White House Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had been called to testify, Kennedy would have probably begun his line of questioning with “How do you like your dogs and cats? Baked or broiled?”

And following the hearing, Tapper and Bash would have asked her for the recipe.

Notes.

1. Unless used in a direct quote, I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

2. A full transcript of the broadcast can be viewed at https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/sotu/date/2024-09-22/segment/01

3. Cotton’s evasions are revealing. Not only does he not denounce Trump and Robinson, but he also seems to have persistent difficulty distinguishing American Jewish voters from the state of Israel. Although Tapper presses Cotton four times to respond to American antisemitism, the senator repeatedly conflates the two, focusing on Israel and ignoring American Jews entirely. Then again, this is the same good ole boy who can’t distinguish Singaporean CEOs from communist Chinese. Unlike Whitmer, however, Cotton has received little if any backlash for his evasions.

4. If Jewishness is contingent on supporting Israel, then what is one to make of anti-Zionist Jews and Jews who protest the genocide in Gaza and demand that the U.S. stop arming Israel? Do they somehow, magically, cease to be Jews?

5. For a discussion of the problematic nature of such statements, see Revital Madar’s “Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War: Israeli State Sexual Violence Against Palestinians,” Conflict and Society 9 (2023): 72–88. Madar notes that reports of such incidents are generally limited to Israeli soldiers and do not include police, prison guards, military court officials, Shin Bet, and other security forces. “Spatially,” she writes, “as much as Palestinian women are subject to sexual harassment and assaults at checkpoints and during house raids, their vulnerability exceeds these spaces and includes interrogation rooms, courts, and prisons.” Madar is among several Israeli scholars listed on Israel Academic Monitor, a blog that tracks “anti-Israel activities of Israeli academics and other academic-related issues.”

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Protests at Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.

When Quinn the Sniper Man gets here,
Everybody better duck and run.

Yes, this piece is about that Quinn Buckner – captain of the undefeated, 1976 NCAA champion Indiana University basketball team, NBA All Star and coach, long-time television analyst for the Indiana Pacers.

Buckner was appointed to the IU Board of Trustees in 2016, in one of Governor Mike Pence’s last official acts before becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. Today he is board president and senior board member. The six governor appointees and three alumni-elected representatives compose the Big 10 university’s governing body.

President Buckner and the trustees are responsible for everything that happens on every one of IU’s nine campuses, from website content to the deployment of state storm troopers last spring to silence free speech on the university’s flagship property.

Buckner’s hand-picked IU President Pamela Whitten, whom he says has his full support, “invited” the Indiana State Police onto the Bloomington campus to bust up peaceful pro-Palestinian protests last April 27.

Police respond to protests at Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.

***

On Buckner’s watch, the Bloomington campus made national headlines that spring day with a viral photograph of a state police sniper atop the iconic Indiana Memorial Union building overlooking campus war protests.

Three floors below the gunman’s sights, in the historic Free Speech Zone known as Dunn Meadow, armed Indiana State Police with riot shields advanced on peaceful protesters, evicted them, tore down their encampment, and arrested fifty six.

Two days before, I spent an afternoon in the Meadow observing and photographing the scene.

Pro-Israel students at the Chabad center directly across Seventh Street counterprotested by playing loud music, wrapping themselves in Israeli and American flags, and chanting their own slogans. An antiwar demonstrator paced along the sidewalk twenty feet from the pro-Israel contingent. A couple Jewish kids walked around the antiwar encampment perimeter with an Israeli flag.

It all seemed to me a refreshing, healthy sign that, fifty-five years after Buckner and Company’s trustee predecessors officially designated Dunn Meadow a Free Speech Zone – when I was a freshman protesting the Vietnam War – such civic engagement was still possible, despite twenty years of unrelenting intellectual degradation by ultra-right Republican Governors Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, and Eric Holcomb.

While confirming the sniper’s presence and defending this year’s show of force in the Meadow, the state police chief cited “disgusting, terrible, personal, hateful, vile comments made about other people.” Other than obliquely alluding to statements “encouraging the death of the Jewish people globally,” the chief refused to give examples.

The event was covered minute-by-minute by campus, city, and state media, and absolutely no one, not even antiwar Jewish students and faculty interviewed in the encampment, cited any hate speech or threats against Jews whatsoever.

Calling the university’s actions “constitutionally dubious,” the local prosecutor dropped charges against all but one protester, who allegedly bit a police officer.

Protests at Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.

+++

What Whitten and Buckner’s other underlings did on April 27 was literally orchestrated in secret, just hours before the sniper ascended the Memorial Union stairs. With the 1969 Free Speech Zone designation still in place, an ad hoc IU committee quietly changed university rules  to say temporary encampments were only allowed in Dunn Meadow with prior administration approval.

And far from being an exception or a defensible overresponse to a volatile situation, the episode is symptomatic of state Republicans unvarnished war on speech, tenure, and academic freedom under the Pence-Buckner-Whitten regime.

The Bloomington Herald-Times just did a series on the disreputable process the trustees orchestrated to hire Whitten in 2021.

“Whitten, who has a history of upsetting faculty wherever she goes, was seemingly handpicked by the Board of Trustees to lead IU,” H-T Editor Jill Bond wrote. “Her selection was done under a shroud of secrecy, with most aspects of how she was identified and why she was chosen sealed by nondisclosure agreements and hidden from public view by the use of private search firms.”

Buckner and the trustees departed from precedent by rejecting a short list of recommendations from a search committee composed of faculty, students, and trustees. Instead, apparently relying on a private search firm’s recommendations, they asked the board to consider Whitten and three others “for still unknown reasons,” the H-T series reported.

In July, the trustees approved a new Expressive Activity Policy that, the IDS reported, limits speech “to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. every day, prohibits camping at any time of day, prohibits impeding vehicle and pedestrian traffic and building entrances.” Signs and temporary structures must be approved at least 10 days in advance by the university.

Signs must now be approved by the university.

Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.

+++

Whitten’s reputation as an academic hatchet man, however, was public knowledge.

In October 2016, the University of Georgia student paper Red & Black reported that, when Whitten was provost there, a professor who had demanded the university acknowledge slavery said an administrator told him Whitten “was considering measures that would make it impossible for [him] ever to gain employment at other universities.”

In April 2019, the Kennesaw State University student paper KSU Sentinel reported, a student group there accused then-President Whitten of refusing to publicly condemn racism.

Before Whitten left KSU for IU, her provost and senior vice president chaired a committee that, according to a December 2021 post from the American Association of University Professors, ultimately “eviscerated” tenure in the University System of Georgia, the first in the nation to do so. The process started when Whitten was still in Kennesaw.

As I reported in CounterPunch in September 2022, IU President Whitten laughed out loud when asked on a public radio program why the faculty might be concerned she was coming after tenure. She said they might have been “conflating” talk in the Georgia legislature.

In March this year, NPR reported that Governor Holcomb signed a bill that allows state universities to “revoke tenure if profs don’t foster ‘intellectual diversity,’” specifically citing conservative ideals.

Whitten issued a boilerplate, milquetoast statement opposing the bill when it was before the Indiana General Assembly. But she will enforce it.

Buckner brought her to Bloomington to eviscerate tenure.

+++

Whitten’s two-year stint at IU has been marked by the same turmoil and animosity that characterized her career in Georgia, a performance for which Buckner and the Trustees have awarded her an annual $650,000 base salary – plus travel, business, and entertainment expenses. In her first two years, they gave her bonuses of $162,500 and $175,500.

In Spring 2022, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition went on a month-long, end-of-semester strike, which resulted in yearly teaching salary minimums rising from $15,000 to $22,000. They failed to receive approval to form a union.

At that time, Whitten’s salary/bonus totaled $812,500 – before benefits. According to university salary data,103 professors and administrators at the IU Kelley School of Business earned more than $200,000, averaging $270,000 apiece.

Noting that the cost of living in Bloomington is an estimated $41,441, the grad student coalition last spring held a three-day strike called “Three Days for a Raise.”

“This year, the IGWC delivered 1,300 signed union cards and a letter to IU President Pamela Whitten, urging a union election, negotiation and a living wage minimum,” the Indiana Daily Student reported in April. “The IGWC said in a press release this week despite multiple follow-up attempts, there was no response.”

Quinn Buckner, when he was an NBA analyst.

+++

Throughout her tenure, Whitten has moved several times to quell free speech on campus and has been reviled by practically the entire IU-Bloomington community for her actions.

This past January, her administration suspended political science Professor Abdulkader Sinno for helping the Palestine Solidarity Committee organize a public event on the Gaza War.

In February, for alleged security reasons, the administration canceled an exhibit of artwork by IU alumnus and Palestinian-born artist Samia Halaby, amid accusations they were censoring her pro-Palestinian views.

In March, the Trustees inched away from a plan to sever university relations with the seventy-seven-year-old Kinsey Institute, the world renowned, sex research institution that has come under attack from Penceian Christian Nationalists in the state.

In April, in response to these and daily indignities forced upon them by Buckner’s hand-picked administration, 93% of 948 faculty members passed a vote of no confidence in Whitten for “encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance.”

In April, 77% of the faculty in the Kelley School of Business likewise passed a resolution calling for Whitten’s contract to be terminated. By larger margins, the business profs also called for repeal of the structure policy and for the yearlong campus bans imposed on the fifty six arrested protesters to be rescinded.

Buckner personally responded: “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees. … She is an extraordinary leader who is crucial to Indiana University’s success and will be serving as our president for years to come.”

+++

Before the first day of class for the Fall Semester, Quinn Buckner and Company erected a chain-link Trumpian Wall around Dunn Meadow – literally fencing out free speech altogether.

A sign says the “temporary fence allows for our dedicated facilities team to restore this location to its original condition, making it accessible to the entire campus community.”

In 2009, a Victoria Secret PINK Concert turned the Meadow’s west end into a mudhole, reminiscent of an Indiana pigpen in April. The company had it resod and reopened in two weeks.

+++

Since Buckner et al have effectively declared Dunn Meadow a No Speech Zone, campus protests have been reduced to late-night vigils at the nearby Sample Gates, intentionally held in violation of Whitten’s Expressive Activity Policy.

The ACLU sued after university police referred two protesters to their deans for speaking at the rallies after 11 on Aug. 25.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, IU now ranks 243rd out of 250 colleges and universities for free speech and inquiry.

All on Quinn the Sniper Man’s watch.

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“Israeli Military Wins Back Stature Lost on Oct. 7,”

– The New York Times, October 4, 2024.

“A military asserts itself as an ‘anchor of strength’.”

– The New York Times, October 4, 2024.

Several days after the Washington Post bogusly declared that Israel has recovered the “military primacy” that it lost a year ago, the New York Times goes one step further.  It obscenely proclaims that the Israeli military has regained its “stature.”  We’re are talking about a sophisticated and lethal military force that has been facing Arab adversaries who lack air power and air defense for the past 57 years.  Israel, a superpower in the Middle East, has been facing Arab states that have not threatened Israel since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat capitulated in Jerusalem 45 years ago.  As a result of that decision, Sadat lost his life to an assassin.

The Times argues that “Israel’s display of military and technological prowess has most likely helped to reestablish itself as an ‘anchor of strength’ in the region and as a balance against Iran and its proxies.” But this has been the case since Israel’s war of independence 76 years ago.  For this entire period, Israel has held air superiority throughout the region.  Air power was the key to victory in the Six-Day War in 1967; the October War in 1973; and of course the pummeling of Beirut in 1982.  The bombing of Beirut was particularly significant because Israeli leaders had told their Arab counterparts privately over the years that they would never attack an Arab capital because of the vulnerability of their own capital in Jerusalem.

Is it possible to use the word “stature” when you confront the nature of Israel’s genocidal and scorched earth campaign in Gaza, where more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children; the use of fighter aircraft against the occupied territory on the West Bank, which violates a series of Geneva Conventions; and now the obscene bombing of Beirut, which is beginning to resemble the Israeli bombing campaigns in Gaza over the past year.  Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble, making nearly two million internal refugees.  Israel threatens to do the same in Lebanon in its so-called “limited” and “targeted” operation that already has displaced more than one million Lebanese. These are the so-called achievements that have made Israel an international pariah, and have exposed U.S. hypocrisy in condemning Russian war crimes in Ukraine but ignoring Israel’s genocidal campaign.

Let’s look more closely at Israel’s military “stature” in terms of innocent lives lost, including infants who never reached their first birthday.  As of October 4, 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalist’s preliminary investigations showed at least 127 journalists and media workers were among the more than 42,000 killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data more than 30 years ago.  More than 885 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023. This includes nurses, paramedics, doctors, and other medical personnel.  Numerous physicians with Doctors Without Borders, whose teams have had to flee 14 different health structures and endure 26 violent incidents since the start of the war, have been killed.  Several days ago, the Israelis bombed a health clinic because it was operated by Hezbollah, which is responsible for a large segment of the health infrastructure throughout Lebanon. Stature?

In a particularly obscene event in April, missiles from Israeli drones operating in Gaza struck a clearly marked convoy of the Washington-based World Central Kitchen one of the few organizations able to get supplies to starving civilians.  Seven people were killed, including aid workers from the United States, Britain Poland and Australia, along with their Palestinian driver.  The convoy had reported its travel and its coordinates to the Israeli Defense Forces, which is customary for such aid convoys.

An outraged President Joe Biden said once again that Israel “has not done enough” to protect aid workers and civilians from its attacks.  The Biden administration has emphasized to Israel that it must follow international norms in protecting civilians, but Netanyahu’s government has demonstrated that it is unable or unwilling to do so. Secretary of State Antony Blinken states that there is no evidence that Israel is blocking aid to reach Gaza, although the internal reports of the Agency for International Development have documented Israeli hindrance of food and fuel.

Once again, Israel should be faced with the task of transforming its so-called military victories into long-term diplomatic settlements, but Netanyahu has never been interested in territorial or diplomatic compromise.  Israel has never acknowledged Palestinian “right of return,” although it is part of international law, and Palestinians are specifically guaranteed that right by UN Resolution 194. This has been the problem that Israel has faced since the easy successes of the Six-Day War and the occupation of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank.  But Israel hasn’t been able to achieve diplomatic success since 1967, and now it is even further from achieving regional stability.

The current Israeli leadership is particularly uninterested in diplomatic success, and there is no reason to believe that there are successors to Benjamin Netanyahu who are willing to address Palestinian sovereignty.  Netanyahu has focused on prolonging the war in Gaza, extending it to Lebanon, and avoiding a cease-fire deal with Hamas—even at the price of abandoning the remaining hostages in Gaza, who are dying in Gaza’s tunnels.  Ironically, Netanyahu’s brother lost his life in a rescue mission to release Israeli hostages being held in Uganda in 1976.

The United States provides defense guarantees to Israel and warns against escalation, but the Israeli Defense Forces conduct massive operations without giving the United States any warning.  Israel has become a pariah nation for good reason, and it has dragged down the credibility and influence of the United States in the process.

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Photograph Source: U.S. State Department – Public Domain

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may not have anticipated October 7. But the Hamas massacre that day gave him a welcome opportunity to execute a long=held Israeli plan. Its steps are to create a Greater Israel; destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and other adversaries in Iraq, Syria and Yemen; and quash Iran’s budding nuclear program.  Over the past 12 months, that plan has unfolded successively in four principal locations: Gaza, the West Bank (and East Jerusalem), Lebanon and now Iran.

1. Gaza.

In the wake of October 7, Netanyahu vowed to eliminate Hamas, a goal that most of his military advisors deemed unachievable. Asserting “Israel’s right to defend itself,” the Prime Minister and his war cabinet proceeded to level the Gaza Strip and decimate its population with relentless bombing, missile strikes and sniper attacks. With a rising death toll, now over 42,000 (not including thousands missing and presumed dead under the rubble), Gazans have also witnessed the targeting of its journalists and health workers. Hospitals, schools and mosques have not been spared as forced evacuations have moved civilians to so-called “safe zones,” which often have become scenes of massacre with U.S.-supplied bombs and missiles.

At the same time, Israel has pursued as a war tactic, a deliberate policy of starvation.  The siege declared by Defense Minister Gallant at the war’s outset has largely deprived Palestinians of clean water, food, fuel, and essential medical supplies. As a result, Gazans (especially babies and children) are dying from malnutrition and related diseases. A full-scale famine descends over the land.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has pledged unconditional support to Netanyahu and his government. While calling repeatedly for a ceasefire and the return of hostages held by Hamas, the U.S. continues to arm the IDF with lethal weapons, including two-ton bombs and missiles tipped with white phosphorous. Unconstrained militarily and diplomatically, Netanyahu refuses to stop the bombing until Hamas surrenders and returns the hostages. With an uninterrupted supply of arms, the war goes on and innocent civilians continue to die.

2. The West Bank.

Encouraged by extremist members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, whose declared intent is to ethnically cleanse non-Jews and annex the West Bank, Israeli settlers and the IDF have escalated their attacks on Palestinian towns and villages. To date they have murdered over 6,000 inhabitants and imprisoned thousands more. They have forced many residents to flee and have destroyed their homes and enterprises. In both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel’s apparent aim is to force the exodus of Palestinians, as in the 1948 Nakba.Central to the vision of a “Greater Israel” (extending “from the river to the sea”) is a Jewish State of some seven million Jewish citizens, devoid of a similar number of Palestinian residents. As the world’s attention focuses on Gaza (and now Lebanon and Iran), residents are seeing their community infrastructure and businesses destroyed. Observers say the West Bank is beginning to look like Gaza.

3. Lebanon.

When the Israeli genocide began in Gaza, the Hezbollah militia began attacking towns in northern Israel.  In solidarity with Gaza, it pledged to continue those attacks until Israel agreed to a ceasefire. With U.S. arms flowing to the IDF. Netanyahu was not about to back down. Israel’s targeted assassinations of top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, its rigging of exploding communication devices; and its bombing and land invasion have already cost more than two thousand Lebanese lives. Hezbollah’s militia has been degraded, but it continues to put up armed resistance. Whatever the political outcome, Israel’s war on Lebanon has already caused much devastation in Beirut and elsewhere. How will this war end?

4. Iran. 

When Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress in 2015, he decried the then emerging nuclear deal with Iran, insisting that America withdraw from the multiparty negotiations Indeed, the Prime Minister has never hidden his desire to nip in the bud Iran’s near assent to nuclear power and overturn the country’s theocratic government. Now, with a significant U.S. naval presence and more than 40,000 troops in the region, Netanyahu can rest assured that America will protect Israel.

Iran sought to avenge the Israeli strike on Tehran in July that killed the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. However, its missile barrage did little damage and killed only one person. Yet Israel has promised to retaliate. The chief of the Iranian Armed Forces then declared that if Israel does retaliate, “our response will be more forceful.”  A next round of retaliations would likely unleash a major war, dragging in the Americans and giving what Israeli provocations have intended all along: an excuse to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israel’s ongoing wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are a prelude to a possible big war against Iran. Meanwhile, President Biden continues the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel. While discouraging (another “red line”) a bombing of Iran’s nuclear plants, he  appears to be okay with possible strikes on Iranian oil facilities.

In short, Bibi’s bloody game plan is on track– to destroy Palestinian populations in both Gaza and the West Bank and to sow fear and chaos among Lebanese civilians by bombing suspected Hezbollah sites. The IDF has degraded the military capacity of both Hamas and Hezbollah. Yet both organizations remain alive and likely to regroup and strengthen over time.

In providing essential arms to Israel, the U.S. has become complicit in both the Gaza genocide and the war crimes in the West Bank and Lebanon. Both Netanyahu and the Biden administration deserve to be held accountable for their serious violations of international law and moral norms.

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Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0

“Israel, in sum, has recovered the military primacy it lost when Hamas fighters surged across the Gaza border on Oct. 7 and ravaged Israeli civilians.”

– David Ignatius, oped, Washington Post, October 2, 2024.

“We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran.”

– Bret Stephens, editorial, The New York Times, October 3, 2024.

The mainstream media has been largely critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dangerous use of military power, and largely supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s equally dangerous use of military power.  The leading proponents of these contrasting views have been David Ignatius in the Washington Post and Bret Stephens in the New York Times.

Ignatius could not be more wrong about Israel recovering its military primacy.  Israel never lost the primacy it established in the Six-Day War in 1967 in the rapid sequencing of defeating the military forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in that order.  The surprise attacks of the October War in 1973 and the Hamas attacks of October 2023 were essentially aberrations that could be attributed to intelligence and political failures on both occasions.  Prime Minister Golda Meir lost her leadership because of her failures; Prime Minister Netanyahu will lose his whenever Israel gets around to holding another election.

The Middle East is facing its greatest peril at this juncture because Netanyahu now has a free hand to conduct any military operation he desires against Iran.  Netanyahu no longer has to be concerned with the responses of Hamas and Hezbollah to an Israeli attack against Iran because both organizations have been strategically defeated on the battle field.  Netanyahu no longer has to be concerned with U.S. calls for restraint because the Biden administration is tethered to the demands of an imminent presidential election and President Joe Biden has shown no interest in using the only leverage in his policy quiver—the withholding of military assistance.  Netanyahu no longer has to be concerned with domestic opposition because it has vanished, and even former prime ministers such as Naftali Bennett are calling for Israel to destroy the network of pipelines, refineries, and oil terminals on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf as well as the missile complex in Isfahan.

Stephens is the major U.S. cheerleader for Bennett’s proposed bombing campaign.  He has invoked the need to defeat the “axis of evil” (Russia, China, and North Korea) before it provides technical help for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  According to Stephens, Biden—“at a minimum”—should destroy the Isfahan missile complex as a “direct and and proportionate response” to Iran’s aggressions. Carrying out such a threat, according to Stephens, could convince Iran to order Hezbollah and the Houthis to “stand down” and even “pressure Hamas to release its Israeli hostages.”

Stephens makes no mention of the Iran nuclear accord of 2015 that placed significant limitations on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, including its enrichment of uranium, construction of centrifuges, and production of weapons-grade plutonium.  The agreement also prohibited research activities that contributed to designing and developing a nuclear device in perpetuity.  If Iran is closer to development of nuclear weapons, it is due to Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to abrogate a treaty that had significant international support, including from Russia and China.  And if Iran has enough near-weapons grade nuclear fuel for several nuclear bombs, it is due to Trump and his national security adviser, John Bolton.

Stephens (and Netanyahu) wants the completion of the “decapitation” of Hezbollah and the “evisceration” of Hamas in Gaza.  He has supported an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but makes no mention of previous Israeli failures in Lebanon in 1978, 1982, and 2006, which led to unexpected losses and an unanticipated long-term occupation.  U.S. efforts to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire led to U.S. losses in 1983.  Israel successfully forced the ouster of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon, but in doing so a far more dangerous Hezbollah emerged, a group that didn’t exist until Israel invaded the Lebanese capital of Beirut in 1982.

Greater use of Israeli military power has not provided Israel with greater security over the years, and there is no reason to believe that any retaliation—other than a symbolic response similar to the April attack—would end the current cycle of permanent occupation.  Israeli analysts continue to speak of “escalate to deescalate,” “escalation dominance,” and “restoration of deterrence,” but Israel’s “targeted assassinations,” the violence of settlers on the West Bank, and the genocidal campaign in Gaza will never serve any long-term strategic purpose.  The collusion of the Israeli defense forces, the police, and the military courts speaks to the apartheid that exists on the West Bank.  Until the United States understands the necessity of diplomatic dialogue with Iran, and Israel understands the the necessity of Palestinian sovereignty on a land that they can call their own, the cycle of permanent war will continue.

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Photograph Source: New America – CC BY 2.0

If you’re serial felon, Ponzi schemer, and adjudicated sexual abuser Donald Trump, there are only three reasons to hire a lawyer from the Yale Law School of the J.D. Vance variety: to stay out of jail, screw your partners or the IRS, or pay off a mistress.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When I first heard about the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, about twenty years ago, I thought, this makes perfect sense. Here was a way to bring international pressure to bear on Israel—a peaceful way for people of good conscience to try to stop Israel’s abuse of the Palestinian people.

I saw this campaign and other calls to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its oppressive behavior as akin to earlier efforts to compel the white South African government to abolish apartheid. Given the parallel injustices in both cases, how could anyone who supported sanctions against South African apartheid oppose sanctions against Israel?

As it turned out, I underestimated the power of pro-Israel lobbying groups and the commitment of the U.S. ruling class to protecting Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East. After some early successes in winning support from progressive, religious, and student groups, the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions—or BDS, as it came to be known—ran into a pro-Israel backlash.

Pro-Israel groups and the Israeli government itself ramped up their propaganda efforts in the U.S., seeking to paint the BDS movement as unfairly discriminatory, slanderous of Israel, and, of course, antisemitic. State legislatures soon began passing laws making it illegal to boycott Israel. Today, thirty-eight states have anti-BDS laws on their books. This seems like the opposite of progress.

As a professor, I had to wrestle with the argument that boycotting Israel threatened academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization to which I had belonged for years—in large part because it staunchly defends academic freedom—opposed the boycott, even though it had previously supported a boycott of South Africa in the 1980s.

The AAUP’s position, expressed in a 2006 statement, was that academic boycotts are bad because they impede the free creation and exchange of knowledge that might serve the common good. This was superficially plausible, but I wasn’t persuaded.

One reason I supported the boycott of Israel is that it was aimed at institutions, not individuals. The point was to refuse collaboration with Israeli institutions that were complicit, one way or another, in oppressing the Palestinian people. As Maya Wind documents in her 2024 book Towers of Ivory and Steel, this would include, then and now, most Israeli universities.

To me, the boycott seemed analogous to refusing to do business with a company that engaged in unfair labor practices—much like organizing a picket line and asking others not to cross it. Even if a company makes useful products, it might still deserve to be picketed for its mistreatment of workers. Likewise with Israel.

Critics of the boycott were right in arguing that boycotting institutions could ultimately impinge on the academic freedom of individuals. For example, a boycott could make it harder for U.S.-based academics to collaborate with academics in Israeli universities. This was true; such cases could arise. If they did, they struck me as small impediments to careerism more so than threats to academic freedom.

Moreover, advocates of the boycott never wavered in saying that academics everywhere, in all universities, should enjoy freedom in research, teaching, and extra-mural expression. In fact, this commitment to academic freedom underscored for me the best reason for a boycott: Israeli universities, and indeed the government of Israel, were complicit in denying the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students.

If faculty at Israeli universities enjoyed academic freedom in their work, this was as it should be (although, as I learned later, faculty who fight for Palestinian rights do not fare so well). But should this freedom come at the expense of Palestinian faculty and students? Why was the academic freedom of this group relegated to insignificance?

I couldn’t accept the moral calculus that prioritized the academic freedom of some U.S. and Israeli faculty over every other moral consideration, including the rights of the Palestinian people to be free from illegal occupation, free from violence, free from apartheid—and no less free to pursue research, scholarship, and learning than their Israeli counterparts.

In the case of Israel, I thought the AAUP’s opposition to a boycott was wrong. As much as one might value academic freedom in the abstract, there were conditions, it seemed to me, under which a boycott was warranted. There were far greater injustices that called for remedy than inconveniences to privileged U.S. and Israeli faculty. If a peaceful boycott could help end the suffering of a dispossessed and oppressed people, then it was the right thing to do.

Today, after a year of witnessing Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, the situation has changed, as have many people’s perceptions of what is now the greater moral imperative. Partly in response to what’s been happening in Palestine, the AAUP has revised its position. A new statement, recently approved by AAUP’s national council, no longer blanketly opposes academic boycotts.

As its drafters have taken pains to note, the new policy does not advocate for academic boycotts in general. Rather, it holds that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” In short, the new statement comes around to where many AAUP members concerned about the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students were twenty years ago.

The new statement also makes clear that it applies to boycotts aimed at “institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.” It further carves out space for individual conscience, stating that while “faculty members’ choices to support or oppose academic boycotts … may be criticized and debated, faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for participating in academic boycotts, for declining to do so, or for criticizing and debating the choices of those with whom they disagree.”

Predictably, there has been a Zionist backlash. A former president of AAUP, Cary Nelson, who has turned defense of Zionism into a late-life career, denounced the new statement as a betrayal of AAUP’s long-standing principles. Other critics chimed in—undeterred, it would appear, by rulings against Israel issued by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

But one sign of progress is that this time the backlash appears morally bankrupt against the background of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, its renewed program of violence in the occupied West Bank, and its campaign of assassination and bombing in southern Lebanon. Against this background, fewer people are willing to accept the idea that academic freedom for Israeli faculty and their U.S. collaborators inevitably yields a “common good” of such overriding importance that we must carry on relationships with Israel and Israeli universities as if genocide is normal and not reason enough for a boycott.

And yet, given the horrors Israel has perpetrated this past year, an academic boycott, though more necessary than ever, is weak tea. It seems that only a complete cut-off of military aid, combined with global divestment from Israel across the board, will make the difference that needs to be made. The alternative—allowing Israel’s right-wing extremist leaders to carry on as they have, to carry on as if genocide is normal, to carry on as if international law means nothing—looks more and more like the path to regional, if not global, war.

I have to wonder, too, how these debates in the U.S., among those for and against an academic boycott of complicit Israeli institutions, appear to the Palestinian scholars and students whose colleagues have been killed and whose schools have been destroyed. They, too, would like academic freedom, I imagine. They, too, would like to work in peace. They, too, would like to engage in civil discourse about science, the human condition, and the state of world, as professors and students are wont to do. One problem, as they might point out to U.S. defenders of Zionism and opponents of academic boycotts, is that Israel has left them no place in which to do it.

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The Biden-Harris genocide-facilitation team is celebrating the latest atrocities from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon, as is to be expected from an imperialist core power bloc lacking an iota of humanity when it comes to the peoples whom Israelis now oppress beyond comprehension.

But what also needs contemplating is a sub-set of economically-pro-Israel ruling classes where one might not expect them: within the BRICS+ bloc. Four of them are such blatant supporters that on September 27 at the United Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu painted them green with “THE BLESSING” label on a map: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and India.

BRICS+ foreign ministers typically utter platitudes about wanting a conflict-free world and post-Western geopolitical arrangements, including a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. So this public recognition by Netanyahu of their usefulness should be humiliating enough. (At the United Nations, among BRICS+ members only Ethiopia typically joins Axis-of-Genocide powers by abstaining on resolutions criticizing Israel, including a September 18 enforcement of the International Court of Justice’s ruling against abuses in Palestine.)

And although new BRICS+ member Iran was labeled “THE CURSE” in another map, one of the most respected Palestinian journalists, Ali Abunimah, pointed out on September 28: “Another question on many lips is why Iran, which vowed retaliation after Israel’s murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, has acted with such restraint. There is a growing perception that its lack of response only encouraged Israel’s ever more brazen violence.”

Beyond the obvious neighbours and India fingered by Netanyahu, there are other BRICS+ ‘blessors’ (as end-times allies of Netanyahu self-describe) witnessed in this ten-point (partial) catalogue of how war and profits make for unfortunate bedfellows:

1. Russia is the #1 coal supplier to the genocide and South Africa #2 now that Colombia and Turkey have declared Boycott Divestment Sanctions BDS against Israel;

2. Brazil supplies 9% of Israel’s oil while Russia operates the main shipping export terminal for one of the largest oil suppliers (Kazakhstan), and as Michael Karadjis points out, “Israel imports a small but regular amount of oil from its BRICS neighbour Egypt, via Sidi Kerir, near Alexandria, the terminus of the SUMED pipeline. Oil from BRICS members United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iraq, also feeds into this pipeline”;

3. in both South Africa and Brazil, leading officials have openly bragged in recent weeks that they will not impose coal and oil sanctions on Israel, with the latter’s defense minister also opposing potential cancellation of military cooperation with Tel Aviv-based Elbit Systems (currently ‘paused’);

4. India supplies vital military equipment for use in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon, including Adani-Elbit’s deadly medium-altitude, long-endurance (‘male’) drones;

5. the two main parts of Israel’s main port – at Haifa – were privatized in recent years by Shanghai International Port Group and Adani, facilitating more efficient supply of weapons and ammo to the IDF;

6. Chinese-Israeli trade hit a recent record of $20 bn/annum, including $14.4 billion of exports to Israel (#1 in the world in 2022) – in spite of December 2023 claims that Chinese Cosco ships would avoid Israeli ports (a stance reversed in February);

7. India is the #5 trader with Israel at nearly $5 billion;

8. the normalization of Arab-Israeli trade continues, e.g. a recent wartime 5% increase in UAE-Israeli commerce – thanks to increasingly crucial transshipment services following Houthi disruptions to Red Sea shipping – featuring co-U.S. sub-imperial powers Egypt, UAE and Saudi Arabia, as Netanyahu himself bragged when applauding the new land route;

9. South African arms dealer Ivor Ichikowitz (the ruling party’s leading campaign contributor a year ago, and a tireless pro-Israel propagandist this year) operates a military joint venture with Elbit Systems, has a Tel Aviv office and runs an “Ichikowitz Family International Tefillin Bank” supplying the Israel Defense Forces;

10. thousands of migrants from Ethiopia, and hundreds from India, now serve as IDF-employed draftees or mercenaries, alongside an unknown number of South African citizens, and what may be as many as tens of thousands of Russians, because there are, as Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar conceded, “one million plus Russian passport holders or double passport holders who live in Israel. This is a very very complicated affair because according to the Russian Constitution, Russia has to protect them. The fact that many of these are hardcore Zionist and with a genocidal mentality makes the problem even more unsolvable…”

Russian talk left, walk right

The BRICS+ leaders and allies meet in Kazan from 22-24 October. The immediate task for Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov is to bandage wounds suffered during a disastrous September 26 New York meeting of BRICS+ foreign ministers, shut down early due to apparent Egyptian and Ethiopian opposition to South Africa’s potential acquisition of a (veto-neutered) UN Security Council permanent seat.

But it is safe to predict that he and other foreign-ministry spin doctors will also work hard to disguise or outright ignore all these pro-Israeli economic and politico-military relations, as will the bloc’s many academic and media boosters who surely oppose the genocide yet deign from calling out some of its major BRICS+ facilitators.

One of the lead boosters, Escobar, wrote in June how a few days earlier, “Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa personally asked to help organize a peace conference on Palestine, at which Russia would be the first non-Arab nation invited… the Russia-China strategic partnership, BRICS, and the Global Majority have been mobilized to enshrine Palestine as a sovereign state.”

Rhetoric and reality diverge, because, with 1.3 million Russians contributing to Israel’s genocide by living there, paying taxes and in many cases directly serving in the Israel Defense Forces, no wonder that one of the most anti-solidaristic statement conceivable about the genocide was posted on (Johannesburg native) Elon Musk’s platform X by Alexander Dugin within hours of Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination on September 28. According to Dugin, the man sometimes termed “Putin’s brain“ (a term borrowed from Steve Bannon’s self-applied nickname “Trump’s brain”), these are “Lessons from the Zionist Playbook” for Russia:

“Once again, the faster one acts, the more justified they are. Those who act with decisiveness and boldness win. We, on the other hand, are cautious and constantly hesitate. By the way, Iran is also following this path, which leads nowhere. Gaza is gone. Hamas’ leadership is gone. Now Hezbollah’s leadership is gone. And President Raisi of Iran is gone. Even his pager is gone… in modern warfare, timing, speed, and ‘dromocracy’ decide everything. The Zionists act swiftly, proactively. Boldly. And they win. We should follow their example.”

It’s a notion sickeningly reminiscent of Lavrov, speaking last December to RT: “The goals declared by Israel for its ongoing operation against Hamas militants in Gaza seem nearly identical to those put forward by Moscow in its campaign against the Ukrainian government.” Another surreal pro-Putin voice is that of commentator Andrew Korybko, who decorated his September 29 substack post – “Five Lessons That Russia Can Learn From The Latest Israeli-Lebanese War” – with a profoundly disturbing image of Putin-Netanyahu eyeing each other. Korybko apparently wants Ukraine to get the Nasrallah treatment:

“Russia remains sensitive to global public opinion, which is another outcome of prioritizing political goals over military ones, while Israel is impervious to public opinion at home, in Lebanon, and across the world. Russia will therefore put its troops in harm’s way capturing locations block-by-block as opposed to practicing ‘shock and awe’ like Israel is doing in Lebanon. Even though Russia’s approach led to a lot fewer civilian deaths, it’s still criticized much as Israel is, if not more… Putin’s noble plan of a grand Russian-Ukrainian reconciliation after the special operation ends appears to be more distant than ever, yet he still believes that it’s supposedly viable enough to justify staying the course by continuing to prioritize political goals over military ones. He’s the Supreme Commander-in-Chief with more information available to him than anyone else so he has solid reasons for this, but maybe Israel’s example in Lebanon will inspire him to see things differently and act accordingly.”

Pretoria hides behind the WTO

Even in a South Africa whose government called out the genocide at the Hague, corporate elites and their pocket politicians are no different, as an African National Congress leader revealed on September 26. Answering questions in parliament, South African trade minister Parks Tau replied to the endorsement by a small party (Al Jama-ah) of “mounting calls from social justice activists to stop trading coal with Israel.” In contrast, Tau rejected BDS-Israel on coal and everything else, outright:

“Sanctions applied by one member against another in the absence of multilateral sanctions by the United Nations (UN), would violate the World Trade Organisation (WTO) principle of non-discrimination and would open the country to legal challenge.”

(Reminiscent of pro-WTO, pro-IMF and pro-G20 statements at the BRICS Johannesburg summit, Tau’s reply is consistent with the stance of BRICS+ trade ministers who recently reconfirmed support for “the open, fair, transparent, predictable, equitable, non-discriminatory, inclusive, consensus- and rules-based multilateral trading system with the WTO at its core.”)

In the process, Tau willfully ignores that the whole Western world is violating WTO non-discrimination processes (e.g. in imposing 100% tariffs on Chinese renewable energy equipment instead of treating this instance of capitalist overinvestment as a global public good). And he ignores that in the United Nations General Assembly on September 18, a super-majority vote (124 in favour, 14 against, and 43 abstentions) confirmed that all states have the obligation to “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

In spite of Pretoria’s strong stance against genocide in The Hague, Tau and colleagues in effect reject the International Court of Justice mandate of July 19: “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”  

Against Netanyahu’s blessors

The WTO is the worst site to see South Africa legitimizing the filthy coal trade with Israel, including a massive injection of 170 000 tons of coal into the Israeli power grid on September 27. Taking longer than usual due to the necessary rerouting around the west African coast to avoid Red Sea disruptions, the coal was delivered from Richards Bay harbour on August 11, just before a vibrant protest on August 22 against such shipments at the Johannesburg regional headquarters of the notorious commodities trading Glencore.

More such civil society protests here against Glencore and its main local ally, African Rainbow Minerals (led by the SA president’s brother in law) plus Ichikowitz and the U.S. Consulate (located a couple of blocks apart) are imminent, including on October 4. These will more tightly link the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and numerous climate justice activists. And brics-from-below debates about how to address the broader problem of West/BRICS+ imperial/sub-imperial relations – exemplified by the joint corporate empowerment of Israel – begin on October 8, with a day-long webinar tribute to Russian dissident Boris Kagarlitsky (sign up here).

Indeed the only beneficiaries of regimes that – like Pretoria – prop up neoliberal multilateralism in this manner are the multinational corporates based in the West and BRICS+ economies, the same ones nurturing Netanyahu. If the military balance of forces continues to degenerate in favour of Israel and its Axis of Genocide, then the resistance movements that put BDS pressure on Israel’s BRICS+ blessors will be all the more urgent.

Protests at Glencore Johannesburg headquarters, 22 April 2024 – Source: SA BDS Coalition

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Philip Berrigan.

“A ministry of risk goes unerringly to the side of the victims, to those threatened or destroyed by greed, prejudice, and war. From the side of those victims, it teaches two simple, indispensable lessons: (1) that we all belong in the ditch, or in the breach, with the victims; and (2) that until we go to the ditch or into the breach, victimizing will not cease.”

-Philip Berrigan, A Ministry of Risk

This Saturday, October 5th, would be the 101st birthday of legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan, who passed in 2002. As war and its ugly outcomes ravage the planet, it is good and necessary to reflect on the life, work, and witness of one who gave his life resisting empire and the awful wake of destruction it leaves behind.

Philip Berrigan was a World War II soldier, a Catholic priest, a civil rights and anti-war activist who spent 11 years behind bars for nonviolent resistance to war. From the 1950s until 2002— when he was released from prison just a few months before his passing— Phil was relentless in both articulating resistance to war and embodying that resistance by sacrificing his life and liberty for those victims in the breach.

As the suffering continues today in Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan and Syria and Somalia, in Central America and on our Southern Border, we not only are thankful for the example of Phil Berrigan, but we can recreate that example for the present age of resistance. Nonviolent resistance must always be recreated for contemporary times.

When Gandhi conceived of a march to the sea to hold up a fistful of salt in defiance of the British Empire, he was recreating nonviolent resistance for the present day. When Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues conceived of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they were recreating nonviolent resistance for the present day. When Philip, his brother Daniel, and their colleagues conceived of entering selective service offices during the Vietnam War to pour their blood on draft files or burn files with homemade napalm, they were recreating nonviolent resistance for the present day.

Philip Berrigan continued his creative nonviolent resistance once the Vietnam War ended by digging graves on the White House lawn in the 1970s under the slogan of “Disarm or Dig Graves.” He was of course arrested for this. That was an intended outcome. Going to prison was a way of going into the breach with the victims.

In 1980, Phil and his colleagues initiated the Plowshares movement when they entered the General Electric Nuclear Facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and hammered on the nose cones of nuclear weapons, symbolically and literally beating swords into plowshares. That Plowshares movement continues to this day with hundreds of people enacting similar resistance efforts.

These were all acts of great creativity designed to capture the public’s attention with their symbolic and literal effect. They were meant to stimulate conversation, shake the citizenry from its slumber, empower and energize the masses.  Nonviolent resistance not only requires courage and persistence, but it requires imagination.

Governments, corporations, the military industrial complex are devoid of imagination and creativity on the same level as humankind. This is the advantage that we must press if we are to prevail and save the planet. It is human imagination, our artistic sensitivity, that gives us the edge.

And so, how do we recreate nonviolent resistance for these times? Where is our Ministry of Risk for today?

It can be glimpsed in the brave college encampments that occurred all across the country last spring as students risked their future to stop a genocide against a people they had never met. It comes in the disrupting of so-called Business Fairs where the Merchants of Death hawk their wares for sale as if they were shiny new cars rather than malevolent killing machines. It comes in the serving of subpoenas and the organizing of a people’s tribunal against US weapons makers indicting them for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But we need more than these. We need extreme creativity, nonviolent actions from the outer borders of our imagination, ones that distill the issues to their symbolic essence. We do this by working in community, nurturing each other’s vision, stimulating our collective imagination so we can clutch in our hand the fundamental symbol of violence and raise it in resistance. We do these things to save lives, others and our own, and in so doing, we become fully human.

For Philip Berrigan, becoming fully human was the goal for himself and for each of us. To become fully human is to resist the temptation to tune out the savagery of the world and the suffering across the globe, to not divert ourselves with the easy materialism available in the United States. To become fully human is to open our hearts and our minds to all of the pain and all of the tragedy and all of the possibilities for redemption that each day presents. To become fully human is to take a risk for victims in the breach.

In a new book on the writings of Philip Berrigan, Philip’s daughter, Frida Berrigan, reflects in the Preface of how her father took care of not only she and her siblings but of the country as well. She writes, “Patch, repair, care. He did that to our bruises and scratches and ripped pant legs, too. Patch, repair, care. Is that what he did to our faith, our community, our national heart too, as he called us to peacemaking, nonviolence, beating swords into plowshares? Patch, repair, care. I think so.”

Phil possessed a great and bold love for humanity, for what he clearly understood to be his brothers and sisters across the globe. Whether it be his family, his community, his country, or the world, Phil sought to patch, repair, and care for all, to embrace a ministry of risk no matter the odds, to pursue that difficult but vital journey of becoming fully human. May we all have the courage, perseverance and creativity to do the same.

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Photograph Source: Social Justice – Bruce Emmerling – Public Domain

The immigrants were arriving on children’s bicycles and sometimes even in wheelchairs. According to Norwegian law, immigrants couldn’t cross the border by foot. So, in 2015, they were traveling from Russia to the far north of Norway on any conveyance they could find.

It was an odd choice of a place to cross into the West. Norway and Russia share a border way up north in the Arctic Circle. The 5,500 asylum-seekers were not Russians. They came from far away to the south: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, along with 43 other countries. What were they doing in this cold, remote part of the world?

The Norwegians were suspicious. Some of the new arrivals spoke Russian and had been living in Russia for some time. The Police Security Service (PST) had several theories. It believed that the Russians were using the immigrants as a wedge to disrupt Norwegian society by adding strain to the welfare state. Then there was the political angle. Norway’s far-right Progress Party, opposed to immigration from the Global South, could benefit from the crisis, disrupting the Scandinavian reputation for tolerance and complicating Norway’s relationship to the European Union. Given how integrated some of the migrants had been in Russian society, the PST also suspected that some of them were tasked with collecting information for Russian intelligence.

The strange saga of asylum-seekers from the Middle East riding bicycles into arctic Norway is not unique. Countries and non-state actors have long used migrants and refugees as a vehicle to achieve geopolitical ends. Think of how imperial states have sent their own citizens as migrants to expand colonial reach in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Nor is it unusual within countries for immigrants to be misused in this manner. The governors of Texas and Florida packed refugees onto buses and planes bound for northern cities, also to promote discord and burden social services in an effort to undermine Democratic-controlled municipalities.

Immigration is a go-to political weapon for the far right. It has used the issue to amplify the economic anxieties of the base (“they’ve coming to take our jobs”), the cultural fears of majority-white populations (“they’re coming to replace us”), and the specific political worries of conservatives (“they’re going to bankrupt our welfare state”).

The difference today is that the far right is not just using the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It is using the actual immigrants themselves as weapons.

The Russian Game

For Vladimir Putin, it’s a win-win stratagem to support a surge of migration into Europe.

From his point of view, waves of immigrants challenge the cohesiveness of the European Union—generating endless arguments among member states about how to address the problem—and boost support for his far-right political allies like the National Assembly in France and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

Putin launched his war against Ukraine to seize control of his neighbor, not with the primary goal of sending Ukrainians streaming out of the country. But the exodus has served Putin’s purposes by once again ripping the bandage off the immigration question in the EU and challenging Europe’s commitment to supporting Kyiv. It has had the side benefit of triggering the exit of many Russians from Russia, depleting the ranks of the opposition.

The country that has hosted the most Ukrainians is Germany. Anger over the state’s generous treatment of these refugees was a major factor in the far right’s electoral victory in Thuringia and its second-place finishes in Saxony and Brandenburg. A bonus for Putin is that the “left” party—Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—has adopted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Ukraine positions, which propelled it to unexpectedly strong results in those elections as well. Both the far right and this bogus left have adopted effectively pro-Russian positions around support for an immediate ceasefire in the war that locks in Russia’s territorial gains.

Putin also acts through allied intermediaries. Belarus, for instance, has used a similar strategy against neighboring Poland. In 2021, the Belarusian government attracted migrants to Minsk with promises that they could get into Europe. It then helped ferry those immigrants to the frontier where border guards reportedly cut through fences to allow them into Poland. For years, Poland has been a home for activists trying to get rid of Aleksandr Lukashenko. The dictator has struck back not with bombs and missiles but with desperate refugees.

This year the problem reemerged as attempted border crossings from Belarus jumped from a negligible number to nearly 400 a day. A knifing of a Polish border guard, who died of his injuries, prompted Poland to establish a buffer zone with various walls and barriers. Poland’s fortification of the border achieves another Lukashenko goal: cutting Belarus off from Europe. Exiled Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has appealed to Warsaw: “Initiatives to limit border traffic due to the regime’s ongoing provocations should target the dictator, not the people. We cannot abandon Belarusians to their fate behind a new iron curtain.”

Out of Latin America

Daniel Ortega doesn’t fit the usual definition of a far-right leader. After all, Ortega was a leader of the leftist Sandinistas who overthrew a Nicaraguan dictator allied with the United States. But when Ortega won reelection in 2006, he charted a different political path. He cracked down any and all opposition, including many leftists and former Sandinistas. He aligned himself with the Catholic Church and supported a complete ban on abortion. He has enriched himself and his family through corrupt practices.

But he remains consistent in one respect: he still deeply dislikes the United States. Nicaragua is suffering under U.S. sanctions, and Ortega has come up with a novel way of wreaking revenge. Ortega’s government has loosened restrictions so that around 200,000 people from a dozen countries—including Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Libya, India, and Uzbekistan—can come to Nicaragua and pay a fee of between $150 and $200 at the airport to enter the country. These mostly non-tourists who have taken advantage of the liberal visa regime do not stay for long in Nicaragua, itself a poor country. For another fee, “travel agencies” offer to bring them to the United States. Including all the Nicaraguans fleeing political repression or economic hardship, Ortega is responsible for an estimated 10 percent of the immigrant flow at the U.S.-Mexico border at peak times.

Like Putin, a close ally, Ortega wants to sow discord in the United States or, at least, force negotiations that could reduce sanctions against him and his family. As in Cuba and Venezuela, the outflow of disgruntled citizens also serves as a way of reducing the likelihood of opposition movements mobilizing enough support to force a change in government.

Why Anti-Immigrant?

Autocrats and right-wing ideologues hate diversity. They believe in political uniformity, preferably one-man rule. They also favor ethnic and/or religious homogeneity. They hold to anti-immigrant views even though they spell economic suicide for their countries. Their birthrates falling, European countries need immigrants to survive. The same holds true for the United States and most of Asia. But that hasn’t stopped these political forces from building walls, erecting bureaucratic obstacles, and even expelling people.

Autocratic regimes have used expulsions to get rid of demonized minorities and burden troublesome neighbors with the influx of immigrants. The Myanmar military, for instance, planned a campaign of intimidation and violence against the Rohingya minority that sent 800,000 desperate people over the border into Bangladesh. The Israeli government has supported an often-violent settler movement that has expelled Palestinians from their land in the West Bank. Turkey invaded Syria in 2019 and sought to clear Kurds from neighboring territory to disrupt cross-border cooperation with Kurds in Turkey.

The use of immigrant flows as a weapon is also a form of anti-globalization. The West, as Putin and his allies see it, are trying to transform their conservative societies by way of LGBTQ organizing, feminist and pro-choice messaging in movies and films, and pro-democracy campaigns that threaten the ruling parties. Although Putin and his allies criticize the “West” and “Anglo Saxons” for promoting these strategies, the far-right in the West also embraces this message. But here’s the twist—the far right argues that these emancipatory movements are in fact “anti-Western” for undermining “Western values” of family and nation.

Immigrants cannot be blamed for being confused. They are accused of being vectors of globalization, and yet the architects of globalization have never embraced the free movement of people across borders. Syrians desperate to leave a country at war, Rohingya forced out by a genocidal military, Nicaraguans escaping political repression: these are all the pawns in a chess game that Vladimir Putin, his global allies, and the far right are playing against “liberal elites” and “globalizers.” In reality, as the weaponization of immigrants demonstrates, Putin and friends are fighting a war against international law and human dignity.

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The mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test in 1954, the largest nuclear weapons test ever conducted by the United States. Photo: NOAA.

Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.

While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”

That was in 1961.

Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.

No longer 100 Holocausts.

More than 1,000 Holocausts.

If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.

What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”

What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?

In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.

The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”

But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.

China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”

Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion – by Russian military and political elites – of putting nuclear weapons in space.

We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated – ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.

On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”

That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On September 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.

The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.

We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.

Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems – programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.

Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.

And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”

Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.

Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”

Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan – formerly a supreme cold warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”

But such attitudes would be heresy today.

As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”

And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.

The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.

We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.

Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.

A zero-sum view of the world.

A one-way ticket to omnicide.

The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.

Consider what President Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”

That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

And where is this all headed?

Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of senators and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”

In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.

And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.

Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.

The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence – it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states

Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles – or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.

The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”

Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.

The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.

The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.

Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”

The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”

In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs – they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.

Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.

During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”

I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”

This article is adapted from the keynote speech that Norman Solomon gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC on Sept. 24, 2024.

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Photograph Source: The U.S. Army – Public Domain

There has been a deplorable consistency in the remarks and efforts of Robert M. Gates over the past four decades.  In the 1980s, Gates was a major player in the falsification of intelligence regarding the Soviet Union, designed to justify unneeded increases in the defense budget.  In 1986, Gates had to withdraw his name from congressional confirmation for the post of director of the Central Intelligence Agency because the majority of the Senate intelligence committee believed he was lying about his role in the infamous Iran-Contra operation.

In lying about Iran-Contra, Gates was also protecting the role of then Vice President George H.W. Bush, who nominated Gates to be the CIA director in 1991.  Gates was confirmed this time, but not before garnering more negative votes from the Senate than any of his predecessors.  The hearings exposed Gates’ role in politicizing the intelligence on the Soviet Union, and I played a role in my critical testimony to the committee.  At least, President Bill Clinton subsequently ignored Gates’ efforts to be retained as CIA director; Gates set a record for the shortest stewardship of any CIA leader.

As secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011, Gates led the unsuccessful attempts of the military to achieve its goals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates was named secretary by President George W. Bush, and retained by President Barack Obama who didn’t want to make waves at the Pentagon.  Gates was particularly active in 2011 in trying to block the efforts of President Obama to reduce our military presence in Afghanistan.  Then vice president Joe Biden explicitly warned Obama about Gates’ efforts to thwart the White House and increase the U.S. military presence, which explains Gates’ criticism of Biden in his various writings.

Last week, the Washington Post, which supports greater defense spending and modernization of our nuclear forces, ran a long oped from Gates extolling the importance of increased defense spending and force modernization.  This essay (“Failures in Washington leave U.S. defense vulnerable abroad”) has become a frequent event in the Post.  It is important to understand Gates’ role in underplaying the military might of the United States and exaggerating the military might of potential adversaries.  Gates ignores the fact that the United States has military bases and assets in more than 700 nations, while China has one military base (in Djibouti) outside it’s zone of interest.  China faces 200 U.S. military bases and facilities in the Indo-Pacific alone.

The United State has more than 50 defense treaties and arrangements with foreign nations; China has one (with North Korea).  More importantly, the United States has been very successful in lining up assets in the Indo-Pacific region that encircle China and contribute to our policy of containment that China finds strategically threatening.  The Quad arrangement includes India, Japan, and Australia in support of U.S. policies.  The AUKUS arrangement aligns the United States, Britain, and Australia in policies that oppose Chinese interests.  Also, the United States has bolstered its military relations with Japan, and has diplomatically arranged for closer relations between Japan and South Korea in order to maintain pressure on China.

Yes, China has more naval ships than the United States (234 vs. 219), but the U.S. Navy has greater lethality and greater tonnage.  The U.S. ability to project power cannot be matched by any nation or group of nations in the world.  That ability is bolstered by 11 aircraft carriers in worldwide deployments; China has three aircraft carriers.  The United States, despite a lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan, has nevertheless taken advantage of its use of the military to gain important experience.  China has used its military forces once in the past 45 years: a military campaign against Vietnam that didn’t go well for China in 1979. 

The same comparison could be made for the relative military strength of the United States and Russia, but in view of the miserable Russian performance in Ukraine it is not necessary to do so.  Just as China is encircled by U.S. allies, Russia faces NATO countries on its western borders. Gates has been wrong about Russia for the past 40 years, and in the 1980s he made sure that CIA intelligence was also wrong about the decline and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.  Sadly, he’s invoking an “axis of evil” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) to justify unnecessary increases in defense spending.  The last president to invoke an “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) was George W. Bush; it didn’t go well for the interests and security of the United States.

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Alfred Rosenberg at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, April 16, 1946. National Archives and  Records Administration, College Park, MD.

The wrong question

Faced with two wars, nuclear confrontation, extreme economic inequality, and a climate crisis — not to mention threats to reproductive rights, forever chemicals, housing shortages, gun violence, and rising educational debt – what do 82% of Republican and 39% of Democratic voters, according to a Pew Research poll, say is the most important issue in the Presidential election? Immigration. A nation of immigrants, with dying main streets, empty classrooms, and labor shortages in key industries, is about to cast its votes based in large part on which candidate can best be trusted to reduce rates of both legal and illegal immigration. The biggest news story in the past several weeks was whether or not Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio (population 58,000) have been snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. (It was quickly established they haven’t.)

How did it come to this? What individuals and institutions created and sustained the notion of a “migrant crisis”? What dangers does the myth pose to U.S. democracy and immigrants themselves? Are there historical parallels that may shed light on the false narrative, and can it be challenged? That’s what these brief observations are about.

Jews; Hitler; immigrants

Donald Trump has called immigrants criminals, gang members, murderers, rapists, invaders, diseased, insane, vermin and blood poisoners. The list isn’t exhaustive. Though he hasn’t called for them to be killed, he has proposed arresting twenty million of them, (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.), and confining them in concentration camps before deportation to parts unknown. Trump’s chief advisor on immigration Stephen Miller – channeling Alfred Rosenberg — told The New York Times last November: “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

The scheme has a familiar ring. In 1940, Hitler instructed Adolf Eichmann to plan the deportation of 4 million Jews over four years to the French island-colony of Madagascar. The idea was quickly dropped because of cost and British control over the necessary sea-routes. (Two years later, a different “solution” was agreed.) As a candidate, Trump has no power to do anything, much less mandate confinement, deportation, or genocide. And it’s possible Trump’s rants against immigrants – they become crazier every day – will cost him the election. But if he instead prevails, his rhetoric about an alien invasion will have been validated by a national referendum, and he will try to make good on his word. (Despite claims to the contrary, presidents usually do.) The recent supreme court decision granting presidents almost unlimited power in the performance of “official acts” will be Trump’s Enabling Act; that was the 1933 decree that granted Hitler unfettered power to violate the German constitution and make laws without the participation of parliament (the Reichstag). Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is Trump’s Paul von Hindenburg.

Does that all sound overheated? Consider that Trump isn’t alone in his revilement and that there exists a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure dedicated to expelling immigrants and asylum seekers and denying sanctuary to new ones, especially any with dark skin. It includes anti-immigrant think tanks, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by the eugenicist and white nationalist John Taunton; the Center for Immigration Studies, which has promoted the canard that pregnant immigrants are pouring across the border to give birth to American children; and ProEnglish which promotes laws mandating that English become the “official language” of the United States and that all federal and state initiatives promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism be halted.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, intended as a blueprint for the next Trump administration, and authored in part by key, Trump advisors, would deport so-called “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors), force states to hand over to federal authorities the driver’s license and tax ID numbers of undocumented workers, and suspend most legal immigration. The Republican controlled U.S. House of Representatives introduced a draconian immigration bill last April (the Border Security and Enforcement Act of 2023 H.R.2640) that would essentially halt all immigration into the U.S., but congressional Democrats have so-far blocked passage.

Among Trump’s most committed individual allies in the anti-immigrant onslaught is his vice-presidential running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. He has parroted his master, and sometimes gone further, falsely claiming that immigrants to Springfield, Ohio are both spreading disease and eating resident’s pets. His doggedness is such that he insisted upon repeating the libels even after the parents of a local boy accidentally killed by a Haitian driver begged him to stop. Under close questioning by CNN reporter Dana Bash, Vance admitted that: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This was a clear case of letting the cat out of the bag.

Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton have similarly extremist views. The two governors have usurped the power of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and undertaken relocations and deportations on their own initiative. The House Speaker tried passing a budget bill that includes a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections; his rationale was that hordes of illegal immigrants are being let into the country to vote and elect Democrats. The idea derives from “White Replacement Theory”, a racist fantasy that gained national attention when neo-Nazis at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” Cotton recently unveiled legislation, supported by Vance and Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, to end constitutionally enshrined, birthright citizenship.

Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, now a popular podcaster, regularly spreads the Replacement conspiracy, claiming that Democrats and “global elites”, led by Jewish billionaire George Soros, plan to replace “legacy Americans” with “a new electorate from the Third World.” Lately, he has endorsed Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, including Daryl Cooper, whom he described to his audience as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper claimed Churchill not Hitler was the reason “the war become what it did” and that the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust died because the Nazis lacked the resources to take care of them. Vance has defended Carlson’s embrace of Cooper, saying that while he may not share his views, Republicans like himself value “free speech and debate.” Vance, however, should watch his back; Carlson is positioning himself as Trump’s most likely successor as head of the MAGA movement.

Trump’s former Senior Policy Advisor, Miller, cited above, was among the most rabid white nationalists to hold a high administration position. In a series of leaked emails from 2015-6, he was revealed to have endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE (now defunct) and American Renaissance. Recent article titles in the latter include “Building White Communities,” “Fear of a White Planet,” and “Anti-White Manifesto Leaked.” Miller championed the Trump Muslim travel ban and use of Title 42 to block asylum seekers at the Mexican border during the pandemic. He remains a close advisor to the former president and will almost certainly return to government if Trump is elected again.

And there’s more: Former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon has explicitly embraced the ideas of Julius Evola, the Italian fascist philosopher who supported both Mussolini and Hitler. Evola wrote about the superiority of men over women, and “higher castes” (powerful, spiritual, “Aryan” men) over lower castes (slaves, blacks, Jews and women). He called Jews a “virus” and applauded Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws. Bannon’s fervent Zionism has largely protected him from charges of anti-Semitism by conservative Jewish organizations, despite his embrace of Evola and a history of anti-Semitic remarks. His racism, however, is open and unapologetic. He told a meeting of France’s National Front in 2018: “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists,” he said. “Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.” Bannon, who is now serving a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, recently told a BBC reporter that on “day one.” Trump would “stop the invasion” and begin the “mass deportation of 10 to 15 million illegal alien invaders”.

Finally, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., also a close advisor to his father, openly expresses racist views. He told far-right broadcaster Charlie Kirk that Haitians have congenitally low IQs and that if they continue to be admitted to the U.S. “you’re going to become the third world. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.” Don Jr. was repeating long debunked ideas linking IQ (itself a discredited measure) with ethnic or national origin. Such views were commonplace among Nazi doctors, such as Karl Brandt and Joseph Mengele, as well as Rosenberg, editor of the rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) and author of Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. That book argued that the Nordic-German soul was under attack from subversive, Jewish modernism and cosmopolitanism. It sold more than a million copies in Nazi Germany, second only to Mein Kampf. In Trump’s circle and among Republicans generally, biological and cultural racism are ascendant.

A vicious circle of hate

Trump’s popularity among many Republican voters is not despite his racism and xenophobia, but because of it. Polls and scholarly papers reveal consistently high levels of racial animus among Republicans, and strong support for Trump’s extremism. But it’s not clear how much that racism preceded Trump, and how much was generated by him. To understand the dynamic, another parallel with Nazism must be drawn.

Before Hitler’s ascendency to power in 1933, anti-Semitism was widespread in Germany, except among supporters of Social Democratic and Communist parties. But it was a dilute brew of longstanding religious and cultural prejudices, nothing like the toxic Judeophobia of Hitler and the Nazi party he directed. But after passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which restricted Jewish participation in civic and social life, and especially after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and invasion of Poland a year later, racial attitudes hardened to the point that Judeocide could be publicly espoused by Hitler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Rosenberg and others. While the details of the Holocaust were never presented to the German public – indeed an effort was made to hide them from the world – the facts of Jewish deportation, ghettoization, concentration, and murder – were an “open secret” as the historian Richard Evans writes, available to anyone who cared to know. The German public had largely internalized Hitlerian anti-Semitism and shrugged at its genocidal consequences.

The point here, is that anti-Semitism and racism may exist at relatively low levels in a society, without doing great damage. But when they are amplified by a demagogue and repeated by other politicians and the mass media, they become a powerful force. Jewish assimilation became “the Jewish question”; immigrant integration becomes “the migrant crisis.” Who’d have thought, a dozen years ago, that a major party candidate for President would propose the round-up, concentration, and mass deportation of between 10 and 20 million American residents? Trump inflames his core of racist supporters, who then encourage him to even more extreme slanders, which further excites his followers, and so on.

Can anti-immigrant views be changed?

There is a debate on the left, here in England, about whether recent anti-immigrant violence masks legitimate, working-class grievances. One side argues that the rioters in Rotherham, Hull, Sunderland, Leeds and elsewhere, were primarily poor whites whose communities have been devastated by decades of neo-liberal privatization, Tory austerity, and infrastructure disinvestment. They are badly paid (when they have work), ill housed (rents and home prices have risen to exorbitant levels across the U.K.), and in poor health (the NHS has for years been in a parlous state.) They suffer high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction and live in blighted cities and towns in the north. While attacks on immigrants are both misdirected and abhorrent, it’s unsurprising that oppressed people object to the government paying almost $3 billion a year to house migrants in hotels and guest houses. With modest adjustments to migration policy, a modicum of social spending, and considerable grassroots education and organizing – so the argument goes — these supporters of Nigel Farage and the Reform UK Party (the Trumpist, anti-immigrant party) could become a progressive, vanguard proletariat that renounces racism.

The alternative view, however, seems more persuasive. According to a recent survey, 36% of Reform UK Party voters (a bloc that largely approves the anti-immigrant riots) are upper-middle class (professionals and managers); 22% are middle-and lower-middle class (supervisory, administrative, and clerical workers); and 42% are working-class (unskilled, semi-skilled or unemployed). Just under 40% were over 65 years old and 80% say that “immigration has made life worse in Britain.” The anti-immigrant riots were not desperate outcries by an oppressed working class but pogroms by white men (and some women), schooled for decades in nationalism, xenophobia, and racial hatred, and prodded to violence by Tory and Reform UK Party politicians.

The anti-immigrant rhetoric heard on the streets in England was coarser but, in substance, little different from what has long been spouted by leading British politicians. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Home Secretary Suella Braverman, for example, pushed a policy – as impractical as it was mean-spirited – to deport to Rwanda a small number of migrants as a way of deterring others from attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats. The plan, which recalls Eichmann’s Madagascar scheme, advanced in fits and starts for about two years before finally getting binned by the new Labor Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. The latter too, however, is promising to reduce immigration, possibly by holding and processing all immigrants offshore.

Trump’s anti-immigrant MAGA base comprises about 35% of the U.S. electorate. Like Reform UK voters, they are mostly older, middle-class (or at least, in the middle of the income distribution, or Lorenz curve) and white. They have been a powerful force in U.S. politics for generations. In presidential contests, they supported Goldwater, Nixon, Wallace, Reagan, both Bushes and Trump. Because of their concentration in rural states, or ones with low populations, they have controlled a solid bloc of seats in the U.S. Senate and votes in the Electoral College, giving them an outsized role in U.S. politics. The idea that this constituency, any more than rioters in Rotherham or voters for Reform UK, can be seduced, persuaded, or cajoled into changing its stripes is ludicrous.

Solutions to the so-called “migrant crisis”

The “migrant crisis” must indeed be addressed. But the issue is not the immigrants; their positive contribution to the U.S. economy is incalculable. Without the infusion of new workers – legal and informal — productivity and living standards would be reduced and inflation would rise. Whole industries – agriculture, hospitality, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt if Trump was able to implement his promised deportation scheme. The real problem is a political and economic order that leaves masses of the population hungry, badly housed, sick, poisoned, drug addicted, isolated and angry. The best responses, therefore, to Trump’s and other Republicans’ Nazi-like calls for arrest, confinement, and mass deportation of immigrants are progressive programs that will appeal to the two-thirds of voters who do not march in MAGA goosestep. That means an increase in the minimum wage, affordable health care for all, federal housing initiatives, guaranteed higher education or job training, investment in a green transition, protection of reproductive rights, and other measures to achieve greater social and economic equality.

I admit these proposals are both predictable and common sense. Implementing them is more challenging. Doing so starts with defeating Donald Trump in November, quickly followed by mass, community organizing to inspire and empower a nation alienated from government and politics. Progress will also require registration of young voters, infiltration of Democratic party cadres at local, state, and federal levels, strategic and sustained protests of corporate titans and the billionaire class, and mobilization of support for legislation that benefits working-class voters. When that gets underway, the “migrant crisis” will magically disappear, and American Nazis recede from view.

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I read the polls (hard as it is to imagine Americans with landlines deciding the election), so you don’t have to, but about the only thing they tell me is that the country is close to electing as its next president someone who is criminally insane, and then perhaps further enabling his psychosis with a House, Senate, and Supreme Court safely in the hands of Republicans such as cinema vaper Lauren Boebert, human trafficker Matt Gaetz, and the paid vacationer, Clarence Thomas.

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