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?

The post The Immigration State and its Everyday Accomplices appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

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.

The post The Agony and Ecstasy of an Empire: The United States in the Middle East appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

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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Photo by Thomas Bormans

In a potentially game-changing move, 33,000 Boeing machinists in the Pacific Northwest, unionized with IAM District 751, are on strike after rejecting the company’s initial insulting contract offer. A stunning 96 percent of the rank and file voted to go on strike, marking a sea change for the fight of working people at Boeing. For decades, Boeing’s executives and wealthy shareholders have, with the active help from Democrats and Republicans in Washington state and Washington D.C., enforced a decades-long brutal regime that has thrown both workers and safety standards under the bus in favor of short-term profit maximization for themselves. The strike offers an opening for the company’s workers to win historic gains and begin rebuilding a fighting union with a militant, active rank-and-file membership.

Like workers everywhere, Boeing machinists are fighting for decent wages and benefits in the face of the sky-high cost of living. The workers are demanding a 40 percent wage increase, which is the bare minimum they need given the ground they have lost in past sell-out contracts from the bosses, combined with historic inflation levels and high living costs in the region. They are angry at Boeing’s shell games, including the attempt to take away their annual employee bonuses (called “AMPP”), which they were promised in return for being forced to accept higher healthcare costs in a past contract. They are also demanding an end to the intolerable regime of mandatory overtime, which is running rampant at Boeing, denying workers the right to a life outside of work. The machinists are also fighting for a restoration of defined benefit pension, and full and retroactive reinstatement of pension for all workers.

The initial contract offer from the Boeing bosses came nowhere close to meeting these demands. What Boeing touted as a 25 percent raise over four years in the contract offer is, in reality, much less. When coupled with the cost of living and the removal of the annual AMPP bonus, the proposed raises don’t even make up for recent and future inflation, much less the severe blows from past contracts. The offer also fails to restore workers’ pensions.

Since the strike began, Boeing has been forced to release a second contract offer, which includes a 30 percent pay increase over the next 4 years, up from 25 percent in the last offer. The strike has also forced Boeing to back down from their attempt to take away workers’ annual bonuses. But this new offer is still far less than what workers have been demanding and what they need, and workers immediately responded both on the picket line and in social media with their strong opposition to this totally inadequate offer, saying they must continue the strike.

The union leadership has now come out with a statement that says as much also, and which condemns the disgraceful way in which Boeing has attempted to undemocratically circumvent the union with this offer. Because of this, they are rejecting this new offer outright.

A Decade of Extorting Workers and Taxpayers

In the Seattle area, a job at Boeing used to be highly sought after — it was a path to decent wages and benefits and relative stability. A common phrase among workers was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” With the attacks over the last 15 years, many new Boeing workers are instead being paid less than the Seattle minimum wage, and the company has had higher and higher turnover. These attacks on the workforce have gone hand-in-hand with the corporation’s major struggles in recent years with safety and quality control.

The strike comes in the wake of the machinists being sold out in a spectacularly shameful deal made over a decade ago in November 2013 by Boeing executives and shareholders with the Democratic Party-dominated Washington State Legislature, and Democratic Governor, Jay Inslee. The defined benefit pension plan, won by the unionized machinists in previous decades, was eliminated in one fell swoop. A defined benefit plan, which is currently accessible only to a small proportion of the workforce in the private sector and which was won through labor struggle, is a plan that guarantees retired workers a decent income for life. This was replaced by Boeing with a far weaker 401(K) retirement system that leaves workers at the mercy of the ups and downs of the stock market. This dramatically undermines annual retirement income, as well as shifting the risk away from the executives and major shareholders of big corporations like Boeing onto the backs of working people.

The Democratic Party justified this historic attack on both the Boeing machinists and working people statewide by claiming that it was necessary to save jobs. Boeing executives had carried out public extortion, threatening to take away the final assembly of the 777X aircraft out of Washington state, which would eliminate an estimated 10,000 union jobs. State and local Democrats from across the region insisted that the machinists accept the contract, and scandalously told them that if they didn’t, they would be responsible for not only the loss of their own jobs, but also the broader economic repercussions if Boeing were to move future production out of state.

Rather than mobilize the union members and the wider labor movement into a serious strike and fightback, the IAM international leadership echoed the arguments from the Democrats. Disgracefully, even though the rank-and-file members had rejected the contract, the leadership brought the same sell-out contract back for a second vote in order to push it through. This was a highly undemocratic vote, which the union’s leadership held on January 3rd of 2014, while many of the workers were still out of town for the holidays. The contract squeaked by with a 51-49 vote and a much lower turnout than the first vote.

In addition to publicly shaming workers to accept the elimination of their pensions, Washington State Democrats voted to give Boeing an $8.7 billion tax handout in 2013 — the largest tax handout by any state in U.S. history — as an added “incentive” to keep jobs in state.

I rallied in solidarity with Boeing workers after they initially rejected the contract in November 2013. I had just been elected to the Seattle City Council as an independent socialist and working-class representative, using my campaign to launch the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage. In the following year, my office, the 15 NOW movement, and Seattle’s working people made Seattle the first major city to win the $15/hour minimum wage, despite opposition from big business and the Democratic Party. That wage is now at nearly $20/hour, and is the nation’s highest major-city minimum wage.

At the rally, I urged Boeing workers to shut down the company’s profit-making machine until their demands were met. I called Boeing’s threat to cut jobs “economic terrorism,” and warned that there was nothing preventing Boeing executives from pocketing the billions from tax handouts and pension cuts and then moving jobs out of state anyway. I said that if Boeing attempted to carry out their threat to cut jobs, that workers should take the Boeing facilities into democratic public ownership. I said that workers’ control of production was the only solution that could actually protect jobs and working-class taxpayers: “The machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”

The Democrats approved Boeing’s massive tax handout and the company succeeded in robbing workers of their pensions, but predictably, Boeing executives did cut jobs in Washington state: by 2017, they had cut nearly 13,000 jobs, or more than 15 percent of the company’s Washington workforce. And those job losses don’t even account for the tens of thousands of additional layoffs during the Covid-19 pandemic, which Boeing used as a further excuse to attack workers, including early retirements for higher paid and more experienced older workers. This culture of placing little value on the workers who build the planes is a key reason for Boeing’s ongoing safety failures, and is evident throughout company policy. This includes Boeing paying the full cost for children of non-unionized employees like managers and executives to attend a childcare facility across the street from their site in Everett, but union machinists have to pay the full $1,700/month cost out of pocket!

Since that betrayal in 2013, the machinists have faced stagnating wages and untenable increases in the cost of living. In contrast, Boeing made record profits, and engaged in billions in stock buybacks to further enrich wealthy shareholders. Meanwhile, over the same decade, Washington State Democrats and Republicans have systematically underfunded public education, affordable housing, healthcare, and social services.

A Strong Strike: Escalation, Double Strike Pay, Mass Rallies

Last year, UAW auto workers won historic victories through coordinated strike action, including increases of up to 150 percent in starting wages. This lesson — that workers’ demands can be won with a strong strike — appears not to have been absorbed by IAM’s leadership, who so far have not taken a bold, combative approach, including not organizing strong picket lines, rallies, or otherwise building on the strike’s momentum. They instead attempted to avoid striking altogether by insisting that Boeing’s initial offer was the best the workers could get, that it was even “historic,” and warning that there’s no guarantee a strike will win anything. In a statement published the morning after the strike vote, the IAM International leadership refused to even use the word “strike,” referring to it instead as “this challenging time,” hardly a characterization meant to inspire confidence or a fighting spirit.

While pledging to “make every resource available,” there was no mention of how the leadership will mobilize the 600,000-member organization to concretely support the striking members. The machinists know just how inadequate the strike fund currently is. Some have noted that the $250/week, which isn’t available until the third week of the strike, would not even cover rent. Many have reported having to scramble to line up temporary jobs to make sure their bills can be paid during the strike.

A weak strike fund leads to weak picket lines if workers are forced to take on other jobs rather than stay on the picket line. And Boeing workers need the strongest possible picket lines not only to prevent the possibility of strikebreakers from reopening the facilities, but crucially to build momentum, cohesion, and the overall strength of the strike, showing the bosses the strength of the workers in hard numbers.

The UAW’s victory last year shows that Boeing machinists have the potential to win many of their demands, but it will require a strong, united strike. The 96 percent strike approval vote proves that workers are united in their desire to win a good contract, but there is an urgent need to build on that initial vote and escalate the strike. There’s also a crucial need to actively build for strong community support and solidarity from the wider labor movement and community to let the company know that it cannot simply starve them back to work. You can hear the potential to mobilize broad community solidarity every day on the picket lines, from the constant honks of other workers driving by.

Working people from around the region should go to the picket lines to show support, and to send a message to Boeing that they have to contend with not just their own employees, but the wider community as well. Union members should pass solidarity resolutions that include strike fund donations, from tens of thousands of dollars for small unions to millions, or even hundreds of millions, from the biggest unions like UAW, the UFCW, and the Teamsters. This is what strike funds are for — to help win big victories for the working class that can empower the labor movement as a whole. Members of my organization, Workers Strike Back, are bringing such solidarity resolutions in their own unions.

The primary responsibility for a well-resourced strike lies with IAM international leadership, who need to dramatically increase the strike fund immediately so workers can go to the picket lines rather than being forced to work other jobs.

Prioritizing Profits Over Safety

At the time in 2013, Democratic Party politicians and the corporate media sneered at my points at the Boeing rally where I talked about the need for democratic public ownership of Boeing. But the dire necessity of actual democratic oversight has since become clear as day, with short-sighted and selfish Boeing executives having plunged the company into a complete crisis, with one safety disaster after another.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been working in lockstep with Boeing executives to aggressively roll back safety regulations and government oversight over the course of the last decade. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington state chairs the U.S. Senate panel tasked with overseeing the airline industry. The recipient of nearly $200,000 in contributions from Boeing’s executives and political action committee, Cantwell championed legislation rolling back safety requirements for Boeing after the 2018 and 2019 crashes that killed 346 people!

Testimony in lawsuits and investigations by Congress and Federal regulators has revealed the degree to which the bosses have willfully ignored safety concerns and even punished workers for raising them. One Boeing team captain at the 737 factory told investigators of problems of low employee morale and high turnover: “We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job…What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide.” Other workers backed this up. One explained: “As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said [an] unidentified Boeing worker. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.” Another said he told the National Transportation Safety Board that his team was “put in uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.” “The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day,” the second worker added.”

At a recent banking conference, Boeing CFO Brian West claimed that a strike by the machinists would “jeopardize our recovery” from the ongoing safety scandal. This statement is belied by the fact that Boeing’s credit rating was hovering “one notch above junk status” long before the strike, as a fallout from the spate of safety incidents, including the shocking midair blowout of a cabin door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane, forcing an emergency landing.

Instead of deploying resources into addressing urgent safety issues, Boeing executives have prioritized returning maximum profits for shareholders in the near term, exorbitant CEO pay, and shoring up their status as one of the most powerful political lobbying groups in the U.S. They’ve also been actively undermining worker efforts at fighting for quality control and safety measures at Boeing, including targeting workers trying to raise the alarms.

CEO Dave Calhoun was paid $22.6 million in 2022, $33 million in 2023, and another $45 million in stock bonuses upon “stepping down” in August, amid mounting criticism over “mishandled” (i.e., illegally suppressed) safety issues.

Boeing’s major shareholders have, in turn, pocketed a staggering $68 billion in dividends and stock buybacks over the last decade. As economist Marie Christine Duggan found:

In 2017, the year before the first deadly plane crash, Boeing’s spending on dividends and stock buybacks was 66% of total spending, while only 9% of Boeing’s cash went into new equipment to manufacture planes. In other words, payouts to shareholders were seven times larger than spending on new equipment for manufacturing.

These same major shareholders are also the ones who hire executives and decide their extravagant pay. As comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

In fact, what we’re seeing right now is the logical outcome of a major industry like air travel being run on the basis of private profit rather than in the public interest, with the limited public oversight that used to exist being increasingly unraveled.

Boeing executives’ disregard for safety isn’t just deadly to passengers on their planes but also to workers. Just last month, two Delta airlines workers were killed and a third was gravely injured when the tire on a Boeing plane exploded on the runway. Overall, 15 of the 32 whistleblower complaints filed against the company in the past three years have raised workplace safety concerns as the primary issue. Just this past May, Boeing locked out its own chronically understaffed and underpaid firefighters for three weeks in an effort to avoid raising their pay to be more in line with the industry standard. These workers are responsible for the critical task of responding to fires and medical emergencies at the company’s facilities.

Since the fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, Boeing has been forced to pay over $3 billion in criminal penalties and related fees for illegally hiding safety concerns from government regulators and attempting to silence worker whistleblowers. Until this strike, dozens of worker whistleblowers have been at the leading edge of the fightback against Boeing’s deadly corporate greed. Though undoubtedly heroic, their vulnerability as individuals could not be more evident. But as an organized force, 33,000 machinists are impossible for Boeing to silence. Their demands correctly include more say over safety and quality control procedures.

Unfortunately, the “seat at the table” of Boeing’s Board of Directors being requested by union leadership is not going to give the workers any say over safety procedures. Workers need actual democratic control and decision-making authority — like democratically elected worker-led quality-assurance committees with real power over policy and budget so  they can aggressively defend Quality Assurance (QA) and other workers from corporate pressure to overlook safety issues in the interests of corporate profits.

Opportunity is Ripe for a Big Win — Labor Must Seize it

The situation is ripe for Boeing workers to win major concessions with a strong strike. Boeing’s public image has been deeply tarnished by the ongoing safety scandals. Because of the close Presidential race, Democrats are sensitive to pressure from the labor movement. This isn’t just wishful thinking. Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein wrote in a note to clients, “We see it likely Boeing would have to make further concessions and move closer to the IAM’s initial proposal.”

When even Wall Street bankers are talking openly about a company’s weak position relative to workers in a strike, there is no excuse for union leaders not to take advantage of this leverage to win the biggest possible victory for workers.

IAM’s international leadership, with a membership of over 600,000, must immediately concretely prioritize the machinists’ strike by massively strengthening their strike fund. At a minimum, strike pay should be doubled to $500/week and begin immediately, not after 3 weeks. Striking workers need to be out in force at the picket lines to prevent scab labor from restarting production, to build momentum, ensure high morale and a strong public profile, to facilitate ongoing discussion among workers about strike strategy, and to put maximum pressure on Boeing. Unions should organize mass rallies in support of Boeing workers, which could bring out tens of thousands of working people, and maximize pressure on both Boeing and the Democratic Party, which is overseeing mediation and has huge leverage over the company, including billions in government contracts.

A victory in this strike would be a huge boost for the labor movement after a decade of gross profiteering by Boeing on the backs of workers, taxpayers, and public safety. The labor movement as a whole needs to take responsibility for ensuring an adequate strike fund so no worker has to worry about how their bills will be paid during a strike. The elected leaders of major unions nationally have a special responsibility to actively and materially support a historic strike.

Rank-and-file union members everywhere can introduce resolutions in solidarity with IAM 751, calling for their demands to be met in full, pledging large donations to their strike fund. If you’re in the Puget Sound region, mobilize your union’s members to the machinists’ 24/7 picket lines at Boeing Field in South Seattle, Boeing’s Everett Site, and the Boeing Renton Factory.

Workers everywhere, both union and non-union, should do whatever is possible to support this strike, including making trips to the picket line, donating to the strike fund, and helping organize community support rallies. Workers should also publicly demand that Democratic politicians in the state stand with striking Boeing workers and call for Boeing to immediately meet their demands in full.

Boeing Machinists have the opportunity to reset the playing field and reverse the devastating losses from their last contract. Such a shift in the balance of power against Boeing’s ruthless corporate leadership would be a huge victory for working people everywhere. Solidarity with Boeing machinists on strike!

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The first Monday in October commences a new United States Supreme Court term. This term, the court will hear many significant cases. However, the Supreme Court’s own reputation will also be up for judgment.

Part of that reputation is tied to the perception of the Court increasingly operating as a political body composed of nine politicians wearing robes. For years, the Supreme Court enjoyed significant legitimacy and public approval, far outstripping that of both Congress and the President. However, its approval has fallen in recent years, especially under Chief Justice Roberts. This is because the perception increasingly is that the Court is deciding cases not based on neutral legal principles but on the basis of ideology.

What best captures that is the public reaction to the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In that case, a six to three majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and the constitutional protection for a right to abortion. The six judges that voted to overturn Roe or limit it were all appointed by Republicans. The three opposed, appointed by Democratic presidents.

But Dobbs exemplifies a broader problem or trend in the Roberts Court. This is the proclivity of conservative justices appointed by Republicans to reject constitutional precedent.

Respect for constitutional precedent is a bedrock of American constitutional law. Following precedent promotes consistency, uniformity, and predictability in the law. It respects reliance interests, and it is meant to constrain judicial discretion. The Supreme Court is expected to follow its own constitutional precedent in the same way that it expects lower courts to follow them.

Rejecting precedent is an exception and not the rule. Former Supreme Court justices ranging from Benjamin Cardozo to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, have argued that precedent should only be rejected when it proves to be no longer workable, the conditions under which it was created have eroded, or that in some cases, when the precedent was wrong.

Over time, the Supreme Court has overturned its own constitutional precedent less than 150 times. Among notable decisions, Brown v.  Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson when the former argued that racial segregation was not constitutionally protected. In Lawrence v. Texas it overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, declaring it got it wrong when in the latter case that sexual activity among gay individuals was not protected under a right to privacy.

But the question becomes, how often has the Roberts Court overturned constitutional precedent, and with that, who is more likely to overturn precedent?

From 2005 when Justice Roberts became chief justice through the 2022 term, there have been sixteen Supreme Court cases where the Court overturned a previous constitutional precedent of their own. What we learn is that justices display various levels of support for their own Court precedent. For example, in those sixteen cases, Chief Justice Roberts voted 62% of the time to reject constitutional precedent, whereas Justice Kagan only did so 33% at the time.

If we were to look at rejection of precedent and the total number of votes that justices cast in these sixteen cases, among those justices appointed by a Republican President, they voted 75% of the time to overturn constitutional precedent. Those appointed by Democrats did so 44% of the time. Partisanship matters when it comes to constitutional precedent on the Roberts Court.

Another question to ask is whether there is any relationship between political ideology and the decision to reject constitutional precedent? Are Justices identified as liberal or conservative more likely to reject constitutional precedent? Political scientists and judicial scholars have constructed what is known as the Martin Quinn measure for judicial ideology. It is a measure that ranks how conservative or liberal justices are based on their voting behavior in relation to the rest of the Court.

Using a Martin Quinn average for all the justices during their entire term on the court, Justices O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy scored near the center. Justice Sotomayor scored the most liberal, with Clarence Thomas and Anthony Scalia among the most conservative. In using this measure of ideology and applying statistical analysis, one finds that the correlation between ideology and rejection of precedent is 0.7. This is a high correlation. The more conservative the justice on the Roberts Court, the more likely that justice is to vote to overturn constitutional precedent. Ideology matters on the Roberts Court.

Unfortunately, the court and the justices do not look politically neutral, but increasingly operate as political actors in a political institution making political decisions. Whatever fidelity the Roberts Court majority gives to originalism as a neutral tool of constitutional interpretation, the reality is their decisions clearly display an ideological bias.  That rejection of precedent also means individual rights generally lose.

Going into the 2024 Court term and the 2024 elections voters should remember partisanship and ideology matter on the Supreme Court, and both should be considered important as the public evaluates the court and their choice of presidential candidates.

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10-year-old Justin touring the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille in France with his father in 1982. Photograph Source: PBA Lille – CC BY-SA 4.0

Pierre Trudeau must be rolling in his grave over his heir’s Ukrainian policy. While other more powerful allies waver, Trudeau “le petite” said he “fully supports” firing long-range missiles deep into Russia. He said nothing about the risk of nuclear war, something about which his father was very concerned.

Already as a youth, Pierre Trudeau staked his claim as a peace activist when he spoke at a rally in 1942 in support of Montreal mayoral candidate Jean Drapeau, “candidate of the conscripted.” Like many Quebecois Trudeau was opposed to conscription, and did not volunteer for military service.

Writing in Cite Libre in 1963, Pierre Elliot Trudeau mocked Canada’s Nobel Peace winning Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for deploying nuclear weapons, calling him the “defrocked priest of peace.”

When he succeeded Pearson as Prime Minister, Trudeau made good on his anti-war activism by denuclearizing the Canadian military, which remains the case today.

In fact, Canada was the first country with significant nuclear capability to reject nuclear weapons. This policy was reinforced in 1970 when Canada signed the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in 1978 when Trudeau proposed his ambitious strategy of “suffocation in the laboratory” of the nuclear arms race to the United Nations.

I myself got involved as a student at Mount Allison University in Trudeau’s “Peace Initiative” of 1983. Perhaps intended as his final piece de resistance, Prime Minister Trudeau toured the world’s capitals in his last months in office, begging leaders to “lower the megaphones” in order to avert nuclear war after the downing of KAL 0007.

At the time I was on the Student Council, and passed a motion of support for the Trudeau “Peace Initiative.” This caught the attention of the Prime Minister’s office and the Globe and Mail! I was interviewed by Steve Paikin, now anchor of TV Ontario’s The Agenda, about our plan for an international peace dialogue at the student council level in the USA and USSR.

With this personal history in mind, you can imagine my alarm when I read that, despite claims of pursuing a “feminist foreign policy,” the current Trudeau government has loudly proclaimed support for the use of long-range weapons against Russia. Here the dangers posed by the influence of Canada’s infamous Ukrainian nationalist Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, reveal themselves in their most potent form.

President Putin of Russia has made it clear that such use of long-range weapons would, “change the very essence of the conflict.” It would no longer be a “special operation” aimed at resolving territorial disputes between Russia and Ukraine, but “would mean that NATO countries are at war with Russia.”

Strangely, the corporate media does not seem to notice the danger of nuclear escalation in such a scenario, as was the case during the Cuban missile crisis. Rather, the focus of media coverage is on the efficacy of such missile attacks as part of Zelensky’s “Victory Plan.”

Even in 1962, it would seem the media’s role was similarly to mollify public fears of nuclear holocaust. Walter Cronkite’s special report of October 24^th 1962 used such phrases as “rocket fire,” “missiles” and “offensive weapons” but studiously avoided use of the word “nuclear” weapons.

Unlike President Kennedy, who was quite explicit that “nuclear” weapons of “mass destruction” were being stationed on the “imprisoned isle” of Cuba in his televised address of October 22^nd, 1962, Prime Minister Trudeau’s only concern is that Ukraine “must win” (as if there are ever any winners in war) whatever the consequences.

And yet, if worst comes to worst, what better target for an initial Russian nuclear attack than Canada, a country that borders the USA like Ukraine borders Russia, but is not part of the USA?  It may be a matter of debate whether the United States would sacrifice Chicago for Bonn, but would they for Saskatoon? Or Iqaluit?

Canadian eagerness to support Ukraine, epitomized by the Ukrainian Nazi in Parliament scandal involving Yaroslav Hunka, is like painting a giant red bulls-eye on our back. Perhaps that is why there has been no media coverage of Canada’s refusal to accede to the Russian request for the extradition of Hunka, “charged in absentia with genocide of civilians on the territory of Ukraine during World War II, when he served in the SS Galicia division.”

As we peer across the arctic tundra toward our northern neighbor, Canadians may take some comfort in the fact that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has recently said that “nobody wants a nuclear war.” But he has also said that Moscow will “defend its interests in the Arctic both in diplomatic and military terms,” so which is which?

Luckily, the one good thing about nuclear weapons is their disciplinary power. It seems that the modern Leviathan can only restrain itself from the worst excesses of violence, as we witnessed during the world wars, because a thermonuclear “sword” hangs over its head by a thin frayed wire.

However, everything has its breaking point. If we take seriously the Russian government’s repeated claim that the “collective west” is bent on its “strategic defeat”, then it may very well start to behave like the cornered rat of Putin’s childhood:

 There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered. There were hordes of rats in the front entryway. My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks. Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me. It jumped across the landing and down the stairs. Luckily, I was a little faster and I managed to slam the door shut in its nose.

There were no rats in the corners of 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa where the entitled son of a Prime Minister grew up, unlike the “horrid” little communal apartment in St. Petersburg from which Vladimir Putin emerged. It may therefore not be surprising that Trudeau “le petite” is chasing the Russian hordes around, though with missiles not sticks, oblivious to the impending dangers.

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At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely though, since in the one kilometer from one end to the other I was besieged—albeit politely–by some 200 men and women barking, “cambio, cambio,” competing to give me the most pesos for my dollars.

It’s a seller’s market, with the “Benjamins”–$100 notes—especially valued.  When I began my walk at one end of the street, I was offered 1,100 pesos to the dollar; by the time I reached the other end, the offer had climbed up to 1,400. The online price that morning was 963 pesos. I thought I had a good deal, but an Argentine friend later told me I could have done better.

The Argentine Disease

The daily depreciation of the peso relative to the dollar is a key indicator of inflation, which everyone says is the country’s prime economic problem. The conventional analysis is that the uncontrolled rise of prices stems from the government’s equally uncontrolled printing of pesos to cover its budget deficit. Thus, the peso has lost its function as a store of value, forcing people to resort to the black market for dollars. With the private sector hoarding dollars and international creditors hesitant to lend, owing to Argentina’s having defaulted on its $323 billion sovereign foreign debt in 2020,  tourists have become a prime source of dollars for ordinary Argentines and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The inflation rate for 2023 was over 211 percent. This was not in the order of the 3,000 percent annual inflation rate in 1989 and 1990, but as in that earlier period, inflation has resulted in the coming to power of regimes touting radical stabilization policies. In the 1990s, Carlos Menem, the populist Peronist turned neoliberal, famously imposed, among other stringent measures, the one-to-one peso-to-the-dollar exchange rate. The experiment led to chaos, with the country declaring itself unable to service its sovereign debt in 2001.

Last November came the turn of the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei, who has promised not only to make the dollar the medium of exchange in place of the debauched peso but to also lop off whole ministries of government and thousands of government jobs. His controversial but winning image during the November 2023 elections was his going around with a chainsaw to symbolize his determination to radically slim down government, which he regards as a “criminal operation.”

The question on everyone’s mind is, will Milei succeed where previous regimes failed?

Milei Wields His Chainsaw 

Milei has been in office for less than a year, but he has taken his chainsaw to the government, as he promised. He chopped off half of the government ministries, devalued the peso by 50 percent, and slashed fuel subsidies. That was just the beginning. In the teeth of bitter opposition in Congress and in the streets, he got his “Bases Law” passed, which would allow him to roll back workers’ rights, provide tax incentives to foreign investors in extractive industries such as mining, forestry, and energy, reduce the tax burden on the rich, and provide him with the power to declare a one-year state of economic emergency with special powers to disband federal agencies and sell off about a dozen public companies. In order to get the Bases Law through Congress, Milei has postponed his plans to adopt the dollar as the national medium of exchange and “blow up” the Central Bank, as he puts it, deliberately invoking an image associated with Khmer Rouge’s destruction of the Central Bank of Cambodia when they came to power in the late 1970s.

As anticipated, the austerity measures are leading to the contraction of the economy, with the International Monetary Fund, which has signalled its approval of Milei’s policies, expecting a 2.8 percent decline in GDP in 2024.  Still, according to some polls, his approval ratings are above 50 percent. “This shows that despite suffering in the short term, the people are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said the Argentine ambassador who gave me an unexpected 45-minute briefing when I claimed my courtesy visa to visit the country. Others, like radio personality Fernando Borroni, assert the president’s popularity ratings reflect not no much approval of him as rejection of the failed policies and personalities of the past.

Milei is perhaps the most colorful and controversial personality to come of power in Latin America in the last few years. Though he is nominally a member of a right-wing party, he has no organized political base but acquired national influence through wide exposure on television, where he poured his vitriol on ideological opponents, indeed, on anyone proposing any kind of government intervention in the economy. He is an unabashed animal lover,  making sure to pay homage in his speeches to what he calls “mi hijitos de cuatro patas,” or my  four-legged children. There is nothing wrong with that, but people look askance when he claims that he talks to his dead dog, Conan—named after the comics character “Conan, the Barbarian”—through a medium.

He has professional advisers, but the person who controls access to him and is said to be the power behind the throne is his younger sister, Karina Elizabeth Milei, who has been criticized for lacking any previous experience in government and having a background in business that consists mainly of selling cakes on Instagram. Still, she has elicited admiration for her micromanagement of her brother’s successful electoral campaign, prompting some to compare her to Evita Peron and Cristina Kirchner, the wife and successor of the late President Nestor Kirchner.

Mileinomics

Milei is personally quirky, and so, some say, is his economics. His intellectual hero is the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. Reading an essay by Rothbard titled “Monopolies and Competition” was for Milei an experience akin to Paul’s conversion on the road of Damascus.  “The article was 140 pages long,” Milei writes. “I went home to eat and began to read it. I could not stop reading, and after reading it for three hours, I said to myself, everything I had been teaching over the last 23, 24 years was wrong.” In addition to Rothbard, those in Milei’s pantheon of intellectual heroes are the paragons of neoliberal thinking, among them Friedrich Hayek, Leopold Van Mises, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago.  (Milei has honored Lucas, Rothbard, and Friedman by naming his dogs, cloned with cells from the dead Conan, after them.)

It is not surprising that Milei condemns socialists, communists, Keynesians, and “neo-Keynesianos” like Paul Krugman. It is also not surprising that, like Friedrich Hayek, he considers the pursuit of social justice as a big mistake that is unjust and disruptive of the efficient working of the market and eventually leads to the “road to serfdom” by an all-powerful regulatory state.

What is unusual is that he includes a number of economists working in the neoclassical tradition in his sweeping condemnation of “bad influences.” Formerly an economics professor, he faults economic modelling promoted by the mathematization of economics for having led some analysts to the illusion that the market can lead to imperfect outcomes.

One fundamental tenet of neoclassical economics that elicits his ire is “Pareto Optimality,” which says that economic outcomes can be achieved that can make people better off without making anyone worse off. According to Milei, pursuit of Pareto Optimality by neoclassical economists has led them to the illusion that government action can improve market competition or make up for “market failure.”

Pareto Optimality, in his view, is the opening wedge that has led to the formulation and legitimation of other concepts such as imperfect competition, asymmetric information, public goods, and externalities—the solution or provision of which would require government intervention. The fundamental error of the economists who have generated these ideas is that they are so enamored with their models that “when their model does not reflect reality, they attribute the problem to the market instead of changing the premises of their model.”

Interfering with the operation of the market always has dangerous consequences. Indeed, breaking up monopolies to bring about a state of perfect competition is erroneous, since monopolies, instead of being aberrations, are, in reality, positive. “In fact, within a framework of free exchange, if a producer is able to capture the whole market, they have done so by satisfying the needs of consumers by providing them with a better quality product…The existence of monopolies in a context if free entry and exit is a source of progress, and the constant obesession of politicians to control them will only end up damaging the individuals they are trying to help.” In short, the market can’t make a mistake, and trying to rectify its supposed errors will only lead to a worse outcome for everyone.

Another classical economist that Milei has placed in the company of Marx, Pareto, and Keynes as an ideological baddie is Malthus, who held that the law of diminishing returns would create a situation where rapid population growth would not be supported by economic growth, leading eventually to general impoverishment. Milei claims that Malthus’ law has been disproven by the tremendous economic growth since the nineteenth century owing to technological advances made possible by the market, and Malthus’ only use these days is to provide intellectual support for the pro-life movement, whose advocacy of abortion and family planning he despises.

The Opposition

Not surprisingly, Milei’s hostility has been reciprocated by the women’s movement, which fears that their successful effort to legalize abortion in 2020 will be reversed by the president.

Another sector of society that feels threatened by the new government is the human rights movement. Milei is not so much the object of hostility of human rights advocates as his vice president, Victoria Villaruel, who has defended the so-called dirty war waged by the military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla in the late 1970s and early 1980s that took over 30,000 lives. Villaruel, whose father and uncle were members of the military during the dictatorship, has opposed the trials of those being prosecuted for crimes against humanity and has threatened to begin investigation and prosecution of members of the Montoneros and ERP (Armed Forces of the People) accused of “terrorist crimes.” At the rallies of the two groups representing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo that take place every Thursday afternoon at the Plaza de Mayo, participants are warned that Milei might allow Villaruel to pursue her vendetta against the memory of the disappeared. 

The strongest opposition to Milei is the Peronist movement, which was the base of the governments of Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, and Alberto Fernandez that have ruled Argentina for most of the last 24 years. It continues to have the support of some 30 percent of the electorate. The problem is that neither Peronism nor the rest of the opposition has a counternarrative to Milei’s, admits Martin Guzman, former minister of the economy in the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez and currently professor of economics at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.

Two obstacles lie in the way of the formulation of such a counternarrative. One is that while Peronism is a mass populist movement, its leaders have pursued conservative policies when in power, leading to the demoralization of the base. The second, and more significant obstacle, is that “the language and policies that animated Peronism’s working class base in the mid-20th century no longer connect with today’s young workers that are engaged in the gig economy perpetuated by savage capitalism,” according to Borroni, the radio journalist.

Milei and the Youth Vote

It bears noting that the strongest supporters of Milei are male voters in the 16-30 age group, 68 percent of whom said they would vote for Milei in a poll taken before the November 2023 elections. Argentines who have grown up in the last 30 years have done so in a country that has been constantly in crisis, besieged by inflation, recession, and poverty, which now engulfs an astounding 55 percent of the population, or 25 million people. To them, both the center-left governments of Kirchner and Fernandez and the center-right regime of Mauricio Macri were abject failures in turning the economy around, making them vulnerable to the inflammatory rhetoric of Milei during the 2023 elections.

Argentina is a proud country, but for many young Argentines, there is little these days to be proud of except perhaps Lionel Messi and the national soccer team (and even they have been tainted by a recent incident where some players were captured on video singing a racially offensive song regarding the African origins of many of those in the French national team that fought Argentina in the World Cup finals in 2022).

Destined to Fail?

Milei has promised to restore Argentina to its nineteenth-century status as one of the richest countries in the world. But it is difficult to see how Milei will get Argentines out of their economic conundrum and restore their morale as a country. His vision is that of an Argentina of the future purged by the fire and sword of radical austerity and shorn of the “political caste and army of parasites whose only objective is to perpetuate itself in power by sucking the blood of the private sector.” The measures he is taking, however, are likely to follow the well-trodden path of similar programs in the Global South and in Greece and Eastern Europe after the 2008 financial crisis, that is, continuing economic contraction or prolonged stagnation. What is remarkable is that despite the record of unremitting failures of neoliberal programs to deliver sustained growth over the last quarter of a century, there are still intellectual and political leaders like Milei who continue to embrace them. Milei is, in fact, vulnerable to the same error he accuses neoclassical antagonists of committing: that when theory and reality diverge, it is reality that is the problem.

At some point a program of vigorous government action to trigger growth, redistribute income, and reduce poverty may perhaps become attractive again and voters may turn on Milei’s counterrevolutionary economic project. “I have no doubt that Peronism will again come to power,” asserts Borroni. “Whether it will come to power as a a genuine popular movement or in the guise of a popular movement led by the right is the question.”  But the bigger question is: will such a new and improved version of Peronism be able to finally lick Argentina’s poisonous galloping inflation while promoting growth and reducing inequality?

“Other countries have been able to control inflation. Why can’t we?” one Argentine I interviewed asked in frustration. That same question is on everyone’s lips, but for the moment, people seem to have suspended their skepticism and given the mercurial Milei some slack.

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Image by Thomas Hawk.

My name is Frida and my community is military dependent. (I feel, by the way, like I’m introducing myself at a very strange AA-like meeting with lousy coffee.) As with people who have substance abuse disorders, I’m part of a very large club. After all, there are weapons manufacturers and subcontractors in just about every congressional district in the country, so that members of Congress will never forget whom they are really working for: the military-industrial complex.

Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD.

I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency. Who does? In my case, it’s a tough one for a few reasons, the biggest being that I’m an avowed pacifist who believes that war is a crime against humanity, a failure of the imagination, and never (no, not ever) necessary. Along with the rest of my family of five, I live below the taxable income level. That way, we don’t pay into a system that funds war preparations and war-making. We have to be a little creative to make our money stretch further and we don’t eat out or go to the movies every week. But we don’t ever feel deprived as a result. In essence, I’ve traded career success and workplace achievement for a slightly clearer conscience and time — time to work to end militarism and break our collective addiction!

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that, in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to be $849.8 billion for 2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes for “national defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculated that, since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8 trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!

It would be nice to ignore such monstrous numbers and the even bigger implications they suggest, to unfocus my eyes slightly as I regularly drive by the fenced facilities, manicured office parks, and noisy, bustling shipyards that make up the mega-billion-dollar-a-year industry right in my own neighborhood that’s preparing for… well, yes… the end of the world. Instead, I’m trying to be clear-eyed and aware. I’m checking my personal life all the time for compromise or conciliation with militarism: Am I being brainwashed when I find myself cheering for the fighters in that blockbuster movie we splurged on? Am I doing enough to push for a ceasefire in Gaza? Am I showing up with young people in my community who are backing higher salaries for teachers and no more police in schools? And of course, I keep asking myself: How are my daily consumer decisions lining up with my lofty politics?

I don’t always like the answers that come up in response to such questions, but I keep asking them, keep trying, keep pushing. Those who suffer from Militarism Abuse Disorder can’t even ask the questions, because they’re distracted by the promises of good jobs, nice apartments, and cheap consumer goods that the military-industrial complex is always claiming are right around the corner.

But here in my community, they never deliver!

New London: A Profile of Militarism Abuse Disorder

New London is a town of fewer than 28,000 people. The median income here is a little over $46,000 — $32,000 less than the state average. We are a very old community. Long part of the fishing and hunting grounds of the Eastern Pequots, Nehantics, Mashantucket Pequot, and Mohegan, the city was founded in the 1600s and incorporated in the late 1700s. You see evidence of our age in the shape of our streets, curbed and meandering, long ago carved out of fields by cows and wagons, and in our architecture — aging industrial buildings, warehouses, and ice houses in the neighborhoods where their workers once lived — now derelict and empty or repurposed as auto repair stores or barber shops.

Sometimes I watch, almost mesmerized by the ferocious energy of all those cars careening up Howard Street on their way to work at General Dynamics. Car after car headed for work at the very break of day. Every workday at about 3 p.m., they reverse course, a river of steel and plastic rushing and then idling in traffic, trying to get out of town as fast as possible.

General Dynamics Electric Boat repairs, services, and manufactures submarines armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons. And it certainly tells you something about our world that the company is in the midst of a major hiring jag, looking to fill thousands of positions in New London, Groton, and coastal Rhode Island to build the Columbia-class submarine, the next generation of nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed subs. Those behemoths of human ingenuity and engineering will cost taxpayers a whopping $132 billion, with each of the 12 new boats clocking in at about $15 billion — and mind you, that’s before anything even goes wrong or the schedule to produce them predictably stretches out and out. The company has already solved one big problem: how to wring maximum profits out of this next generation of planet-obliteration-capable subs. And that’s a problem that isn’t even particularly hard to sort out, because some of those contracts are “cost plus,” meaning the company says what the project costs and then adds a percentage on top of that as profit.

Such a cost-plus business bothers me a lot. I could almost be converted into a hard-nosed militarist if our weapons production industry was a nonprofit set of organizations, run with the kind of shoestring ingenuity that dozens of outfits in New London employ to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and care for the victims of domestic violence.

I break from my traffic-watching fugue on Howard Street to reflect on all that furious effort, all those advanced degrees, all that almost impossible intelligence being poured into making an even better, bigger, faster, sleeker, stealthier weapons-delivery system, capable of carrying and firing conventional and nuclear warheads. Why? We have so many already. And as the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war (in 1945) and has tested, perfected, and helped proliferate the technology of ultimate destruction for the last eight decades, the United States should be leading the charge to denuclearize, disarm, and abolish such weaponry. That, after all, is what’s called for in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

If we are ever going to break our MAD addiction, one place to start is here on Howard Street with people who make their living working on one tiny component of this incredibly complex system. Economic conversion, moving resources and skills and jobs from the military-industrial complex to civilian sectors, is a big project. And it could indeed begin right here on Howard Street.

You Get What You Pay For

Our small town is also home to the Coast Guard Academy and two private colleges. Add the acreage of those three non-taxpaying institutions to the nearly 30 churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship that enjoy tax-free status here; throw in the dozens of nonprofits that do all the good work and you end up with an awfully small tax base. As a result, the municipal budget leans heavily on commercial taxpayers like General Dynamics Electric Boat, the military-industrial behemoth that moved into 24 acres of prime waterfront real estate in 2009 after it was vacated by the tax scofflaw Pfizer.

General Dynamics, like other military manufacturers, essentially only has one customer to please, the United States government. That makes the cost-plus contracting scheme even more egregious, guaranteeing that, no matter what goes wrong, its profits are always assured. Such a bonkers, counter-capitalist scenario passes all the costs on to American taxpayers and allows the privately held corporation to pocket all the profits, while handing out fat dividends to its shareholders. According to Sahm Capitol, “Over the past three years, General Dynamics’ Earnings Per Share grew by 3.7% and over the past three years, the total shareholder return was 62%.”

For 2024, General Dynamics Electric Boat is paying taxes on property valued at $90.8 million — almost twice as much as that of the next highest taxpayer in our town. But it is also a bone of contention. The company, which paid CEO Phebe Novakovic $22.5 million in salary and stock awards in 2023, has no trouble taking the City of New London to court when they feel like their property is being overvalued or overtaxed. They win, too, so their property valuations yo-yo year to year when New London has been ordered to repay taxes to General Dynamics. Whether they pay taxes based on $90.8 million in property or $57 million doesn’t really matter to the company. It’s literal pocket change to the Pentagon’s third largest weapons contractor, a company that boasted $42.3 billion in revenue in 2023. But it matters a lot in a place like New London, where the annual budget process routinely shaves jobs from the schools, public works, and the civil service to make the columns all add up.

According to a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier for the Costs of War Project at Brown University, $1 million of federal spending in the military sector creates 6.9 jobs (5.8 direct jobs and 1.1 in the supply chain). That same $1 million would create 8.4 jobs in the wind energy sector or 9.5 jobs in solar energy. Investing $1 million in energy efficiency retrofits creates 10.6 jobs. Use that $1 million to build streets or highways or tunnels or bridges or to repair schools and it will create “over 40 percent more jobs than the military, with a total multiplier of 9.8 jobs per $1 million spending.”

Wait, what? Are you telling me that, with their lack of transparency, accountability, and their cost-plus contracts, while building weapons systems for the sole purpose of destruction and wasting a lot of money in the process, the military-industrial complex is a lousy job creator? Am I to understand that spending money on just about anything else creates more jobs and more economic activity, while not threatening the world with annihilation?

As I work on a local level in my small town in Connecticut, I see how municipal policy should prioritize small businesses, mom-and-pop stores made of brick and mortar, over multinational corporations or big business. I see the return on investment from a small business in granular and tangible ways: the grocery store owner who starts each day by picking up garbage in his parking lot, the funeral home that sponsors the Little League team, the woman at the art gallery and frame shop who waters the street flowers, or the self-employed local photographer who serves on the board of the cooperative grocery store.

These businesses don’t employ tens of thousands of people, but they also don’t insist on tax abatements that undermine our local budget or fill our crowded streets with commuters hell-bent on getting away from the office and our town as quickly as possible.

You get what you pay for, right? Garrett-Peltier’s Costs of War report goes on to note that “healthcare spending creates more than twice as many jobs for the same level of spending, while education creates up to nearly three times as many jobs as defense spending… The employment multipliers for these domestic programs are 14.3 for healthcare, 19.2 for primary and secondary education, and 11.2 for higher education; the average figure for education is 15.2 jobs per $1 million spending.”

These are numbers I wish my City Council would commit to memory. In fact, we should all know these numbers by heart, because they counter the dominant narrative that military spending is good for the economy and that good-paying jobs depend on militarism.

The United States is investing trillions of dollars in the military, as well as in weapons contractors like General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. Every U.S. president in modern history has prioritized the bottom lines of those corporations over a safe and healthy future for the next generation. Consider all of that as just so many symptoms of Militarism Abuse Syndrome. Isn’t it finally time to get really mad at MAD? Let’s kick the habit and get clean!

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Why should Americans trust anyone who believes Orwell’s 1984 was an ode to servility?

  “You could drop Hillary  into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former president Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy.  But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.

As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc  to rescue truth – or at least to call for hammering government critics.  But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for 15 years.

Last week, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda”  – which she made no effort to define.

Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates.  In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.”  Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs.  The U.S. denial of its role in financing coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of the biggest deceits of the decade. But Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a debacle that  contributed to millions of deaths.  The Obama administration sought to prohibit U.S. government funding for such wildly risky research but Fauci and other officials evaded the restrictions.

In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic Vice President nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?

After the New York Post shot down Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”).  Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.”  But when did criticism of female politicians become irreconcilable with democracy?  Most politicians deserve all the grief they get.

Five years ago, at a NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”  She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights.

Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election.  Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies…  concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.”  At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill is sitting on the edge of their chair awaiting an informative White House response. .

Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.

When she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored 17 FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed 75 years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”  An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers … or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits.  Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former Secretary of State.  Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.

Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s 1984 is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that 1984 revealed the peril of  critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.”  Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin?  Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them.   Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark – well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.

 Hillary was a key player in the Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11.  When she was  Secretary of State in 2012,  she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.”  But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.

To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the Durham report noted.

The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.

Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission in 2022 levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illicit surveillance of Trump campaign officials.

In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables” – the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016.  But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.  Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens.  Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclimation of the mainstream media and all decent folks – or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.

Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!”  Will Americans’ rights and liberties be caught in a federal thresher? One blade is the Iron Curtain of secrecy about government policies, including denying almost all the crimes the government commits. The other blade will be vigorous prosecution of anyone who exposes official wrongdoing.   But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who reveals their abuses, how in Hades can liberty survive?

Hillary’s latest victory lap is also a reminder of the profound changes in American politics since her husband took office in 1993.  For most of the late twentieth century, liberals championed free speech with few quibbles or asterisks.   Hillary would not be tub-thumping for censorship unless there had already been a sea change in attitudes among her target audience. Or do Hillary’s supporters retain more devotion to free speech than she presumes?

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

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An AI-generated image shared on Twitter by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, later retweeted by Elon Musk, with the caption “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy’s scheming night and day

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The King Alfred Plan” (1972)

“This is your choice America. “If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. Simple as that. Elect Joe Biden and America becomes the Third World. Elect Donald Trump, and America remains America. That’s it, America. Two choices. Choose your future: Third World or an American Century.”

—Stephen Miller

“If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist, it’s just fact.”

—Donald Trump Jr., original thinker and rumored founder of Talking Point USA

Turning on the news (an increasingly depressing addiction) is like tuning in to an episode of the late, great Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, but without the moralistic denouement.

In 1967, novelist John A. Williams wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, in which he mentioned the King Alfred Plan, a CIA plan to relocate America’s black population to concentration camps that was inspired by the McCarren Internal Security Act of 1950 and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from 1956 and 1971. The King Alfred Plan is fictional.However, Trump’s plans to massively detain and deport “illegal” immigrants are more than just “concepts,” as portions of Project 2025 make clear, and his threats to impose martial law and jail his political opponents suggest that those plans are not limited to “illegals.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they for the Haitians….” You get the idea.

The problem is that to realize this scenario for the 21st century requires a new rationale. With the rise of the media-infotainment complex, internal revolution no longer looms as a perceived threat. A new, imaginary threat must be created in its place, one that ignites racist fears rekindled by the gradual emergence of an increasingly black and brown America, a rising tide of color that would make Lothrop Stoddard blanch. The real threat to white America comes not from black militants but from pet-hungry Haitian masses yearning to breed free. This is the narrative that Trump and company have fabricated to satiate a white paranoia that, if left unchecked, promises to cleanse America of its increasingly maligned racial and ethnic diversity.

Moral panic begets existential angst, which the surreal mendacity of MAGA contrives to stoke. About 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, out of a total population of around 60,000. While media reports have stated that many were granted Temporary Protective Status that allows them to live in the U.S. on a limited basis until conditions in Haiti improve, according to CNN, those residing in Springfield have come there because of its low cost of living and employment opportunities. They are there legally and of their own volition, not “shipped” there en masse like slaves by the Biden-Harris administration. And far from turning Springfield into a Third World city, they have, according to its business owners, helped to revitalize it economically. While some problems remain, as one might expect with any city undergoing rapid demographic change, instead of recognizing the contributions Haitians have made to their community, Trump and his xenophobic minions threaten them with deportation.

Indeed, never one to be dissuaded by facts, Trump not only inflates the number of “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield to 32,000 but claims they doubled the population “in a period of a few weeks.” After spreading the lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating Springfield’s dogs and cats, alleged couch-humper JD Vance cautions, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But in true ends-justifies-the-means fashion, Vance assures us that his lies are righteous: He merely wanted to point out the real problems Springfield is facing that the “fake news” refuses to cover. In short, his goal was to combat “no” news with his own patented brand of fake news. Sadly, he has succeeded. According to NBC News, 1,100 posts on X, formerly Twitter, mentioned the pet-eating rumors on September 6; the next day, there were 9,100. After Vance took up the rumor on September 9, the number climbed to 47,000. The lie seems to be working, at least among Republicans. According to a Newsweek poll, 52% of likely Trump voters believe Haitians are eating pets, compared to only 8% of registered Democrats.

Who cares if his lies inflame racial tensions, increase divisiveness, and result in violence. Violence only matters when it (incompetently) targets MAGA’s marigold messiah. The left must curb its violent rhetoric; the right, however, is free to threaten poll workers, state attorney generals, and Democratic presidential candidates with impunity and treat actual incidents of political violence as hammer-fisted jokes.

Rumors, however, have consequences, if not for the people who spread them, then for those who are their victims. Certain groups are the go-to group for smears, even when there would seem to be no immediate benefit to slandering them. Jews have long been the victims of blood libel, a virulent canard that survives today in the guise of QAnon conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, adrenochrome harvesting, and Hollywood/media-controlling globalists. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rumors that a black^[1] man had attempted to rape a white woman ignited a race massacre that saw the total devastation of the town of Greenwood, then known as Black Wall Street, and the death of 300 black residents. In 1923, a similar rumor resulted in the same fate for Rosewood, a prosperous black community in Florida, resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 150 people.

Racist, xenophobic slander is not confined to America. An ocean away, in Japan, in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells led to the slaughter of over 6,000 Koreans. But like old soldiers, old rumors never die; they just hibernate until circumstances reawaken them. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the rumor was resurrected, this time blaming both ethnic Koreans – and blacks. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten years later, in 2021, following another earthquake and as Japan was recovering from the pandemic, the trope reappeared on Twitter, this time accusing Black Lives Matter, whose marches in Japan prompted accusations it was responsible for an uptick in COVID, of poisoning wells in Fukushima Prefecture.

So far, the rumors in Springfield have not resulted in any deaths. They have, however, produced bomb threats, closed schools, and led to marches by neo-Nazi groups like Blood Tribe, with whom, in the guise of the bearded, pseudonymously named incel “Nate Higgers” (real name Drake Berentz), the rumor began, and Trump’s favorite militia, the Proud Boys. None of this seems to have phased Vance, who has not only tripled down on the debunked claim but amplified it and, echoing the words of the man he himself once called “America’s Hitler” and who opined that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” insists that “skyrocketing” levels of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases are poisoning the blood of Springfield, a claim public health officials deny.

Smears, like cancers, are malignant. Not content with slandering Haitians, Vance has moved on to Africans at large, reposting an online article that they are grilling cats in Dayton. One waits to learn from Vance what end justifies this meme. No doubt, it stems from his fear, stoked by the words of his dementing mentor, that the once great U.S. of A. will become a “shithole” country if immigrants – undocumented and legal – are allowed to “invade” its porous borders unless, of course, they are Silicon Valley billionaires from the Global North who help launch the careers of cushiony venture capitalists and can be solicited to bankroll their mendacious political campaign. Ironically, all the while, Vance, through his vile, dehumanizing rhetoric, digs a latrine of lies deep enough to bury his beloved America under several feet of excreable bullshit. Vance’s partner in grime, the self-described “feisty Jewess,” “investigative reporter,” and right-wing influencer (or is that racist influenza – her anti-black, Islamophobic delusions appear to be more infectious than Springfield’s alleged HIV-infected Haitians), Laura Loomer has taken things to a new, if not particularly surprising, low by claiming Haitians are eating humans. Who needs imaginary cannibals like Hannibal Lecter when you can conjure up wholesale old racist tropes of anthropophagous Africans and other “sand monkeys”? One can only imagine what Goebbels would have made of the Big Lie if social media had existed during the Third Reich and Elon Musk, today’s giddy platformer of “white paranoia” and self-proclaimed wannabe Taylor Swift impregnator, was minister of propaganda. In fact, as early as March, Musk was already platforming the Haitians-are-cannibal trope on X.

Then again, Vance may be right. Perhaps you have to make up shit for the mainstream media to focus on it. Still, ironically, Vance’s slurs have done little to highlight Springfield’s “real,” since the media is now justifiably preoccupied with covering Vance’s slanders and the palpable harm they have inflicted upon the community. Not only Haitians in Springfield but across the nation, including, New Jersey, New York, and Tulsa. If he intended to shock the media into reporting on real issues affecting the community, he missed the mark by a light year, as the media’s focus has shifted to coverage of the malignant idiocy of his claims, kitschy, AI-generated memes of scared kitties and puppies, and pet-eating song parodies.

But these are distractions. The vileness of these allegations, their utter looniness, and the unnerving yet somehow nervously amusing recklessness with which Trump and his acolytes mindlessly and unrepentantly regurgitate them have made them and the vicious attacks on their political opponents all the more the focus of attention. There may have been two failed assassination attempts on Trump, but that in no way mitigates the vulgar character assassination aimed at Kamala Harris and other black Americans in positions of power, let alone the death threats they continue to receive. Although the media has covered Loomer’s odious attacks that Harris will stink up the White House with curry (actually, the last time curry was in the White House, it was a cause of celebration) and that salaciously paint her as an opportunistic fellatrix. Even in the normative vulgarity of MAGA America, repeating baseless blowjob allegations and racist talking points lie outside the comfort zone of most mainstream newscasts. Instead, it has devoted less attention to her toxic podcasts against black women, or the fact that last year she posted to X an inflammatory image of a black man wearing a “Niggas 4 Trump 2024” T-shirt presenting the white supremacy hand sign. (No, it isn’t the usual suspects – Bryon Donalds, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Mark Robinson – but, she writes, a “friend” and “supporter.”)

Mocking Kamala Harris as a “pretend black” who speaks ebonic-inflected English when talking with her rachet homegirls, the “unleashed” social media gadfly, her voice buzzing in a high-pitched nasal that makes one wish she would dog whistle her caustic hate instead of torturing listeners with her eardrum-shattering screed, rants on X:

“I’m an independent black woman, and I don’t need no man. And I’m gonna get whitey. I’m gonna get whitey, and I’m gonna lock Donald Trump up, just like Letitia James, right.”

And she goes, “Now y’all go and elect me and I’m gonna lock him up. We’re gonna get Trump.” Like the way they talk, and their little DEI Shanequa voices. They all have the same voice. I’m talking about Kamala Harris, uh, Letitia James, and Fanny Willis. Like meritless DEI Shanequas talk the same way. Very obnoxious, the way that they talk.

Loomer, the Alice Jolson of vocal blackface, continues:

Kamala Harris who of course pretends to be black, also pretending to have a, uh, black urban accent, which is pretty racist and offensive, cause look at the way she talks. She tries to use this like real ghetto talk and it’s like, okay, “You think that all black people talk like that, Kamala? You think dat we all talk like dis and we want to ax question? That we don’t know how to speak proper English? You know, we don’t ask questions, we ax. We gonna talk about this, home girl?”

 I mean, really, honestly, it is so disrespectful and racist to black people. So there’s a lot of educated black people out there that don’t talk like that. Okay, there’s a lot of black people out there who know how to speak proper English that don’t go around speaking jive. “You feels me? We wuz kangs! I’ll tell you home girl, but we get this done together, my friend, you feels me? You feels me, when we get this done together? You feels me? You feels me, home girl? We wuz kangs! You feels me? I worked at McDonald’s. I used to smoke weed. Listen to Tupac in my, in my college room.” [Squeals.]

Loomer, in case you have forgotten, called the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee a “ghetto bitch.” This is the person who has Trump’s ear, the good one.

Where was Marjorie Taylor Greene, our champion of racial tolerance, when we needed her? No doubt, out desperately searching for Jewish space lasers in Jasmine Crocket’s eyelashes and combs through peach tree dishes of Gestapo soup. Well, at least the pot has called the kettle black, albeit belatedly, something Vance has yet to do, though his reluctance has nothing to do with an aversion to hypocrisy. Instead, he interprets Loomer’s insult as a distracting, relatively benign commentary on “dietary preferences,” adding that he “makes a mean chicken curry.” Apparently, he is oblivious to the fact that curry is not a dish commonly associated with self-professed Ivy League hillbillies with alleged preferences for Ikea Esseboda two-seaters and $14.88 Mike Lindell pillows. When Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker pressed him if the statement offended him because his wife is Indian American, Vance deflected again, stating that while he disagreed with the statement, it was not because it was racist but because “whether eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken (yes, he went there), things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’] policies.” When asked to react to Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity, as he had in an earlier CNN interview, Vance redirected the inquiry to paint Harris as a “chameleon,” defending Trump’s statement as “totally reasonable.”

In some ways, the current political plays less like a Twilight Zone episode than a compilation of scenes from Amazon Prime’s The Boys, with Trump cast as Homelander, Loomer as Stormfront, and, given his rumored proclivities, Vance as Tek Knight, which might explain his awkward campaign visit to a donut shop.

Can a group sue for racial defamation? Can Haitian immigrants file a defamation lawsuit against Trump, Vance, and Loomer? Perhaps, although it would probably change nothing. Still, in a kinder, “Never Again “world, Loomer, as a member of a group that was the original target of blood libel, might be expected not only to refrain from such slanders. Then again, because Haitians and Africans aren’t Jews, some consider it inappropriate to label the abuse directed toward them “blood libel.” Not that this necessarily matters to Loomer, given the fact that she notoriously celebratedthe white nationalist “hostile takeover” of the GOP with neo-Nazi chum Nick Fuentes. “Free spirits” like Loomer are free to spew such libels through filler-filled DSLs – which, judging by the similarly inflated lips of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, are the price of admission women pay to gain entry into the Trump clan – while they vulgarly accuse Harris of literally sucking up to power.

These are the perks for those who identify with whiteness in hive-minded MAGA America. Loomer, however, is not alone in her calumny. Stephen Miller, Trump’s follicle-deprived, erstwhile chia pet, political advisor, and Roy Cohn clone, whose ancestors fled Jewish pograms in Belarus, presses for travel bans on Muslims and massive detentions and deportation of immigrants, both undocumented and legal. While a student at Duke University, he accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and co-founded the Duke Conservative Union with neo-Nazi and Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally organizer Richard Spencer. Spencer, it should be recalled, in 2018, advocated that the U.S. enslave Haitians a year after Hurricane Irma devasted their country instead of providing relief and today promotes the creation of a white ethnostate for the “dispossessed white race.”

On X, Miller complained, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, about Trump’s dismal performance in the debate with Harris. It is worth quoting at length:

The Democrat Party has subjected President Trump to eight years of dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric, vile slanders, an endless parade of sinister hoaxes, financial warfare, civil lawfare, spying, framing, defaming, raiding, and a weaponized Democrat justice system hellbent on jailing the opposition leader while wildly portraying him as an enemy of democracy –even going so far as to criminalize GOP legal advice.

In recent days, the Democrat Party and its officials – the same ones who let Hamas-loving mobs terrorize Jews – desperate to win the election, began forcefully trotting out the repugnant Nazi/Hitler smear, the vilest lyingest, most detestable smear of them all, whipping their followers into a frenzy.

What message do you think it sends to the violent, deranged or unstable when this language is used? And what kind of predicate does it establish for the future?

Kamala even made the infinitely-debunked Charlottesville Hoax a centerpiece of her rehearsed debate lines, which of course ABC let go unchallenged [….]

Kamala’s entire campaign narrative has been that Trump [… ] is a threat to Democracy, spending untold millions to program this message into impressionable minds.

After an assassins’ [sic] bullet came within a millimeter of violently taking Trump’s life, did the Democrats stop? Did Kamala stop? Did the leftwing media pull back?

No, their rhetoric only became more reckless and unhinged.

And now there has been a second assassination attempt.

A second assassination attempt. To vote for Kamala is to vote to endorse the Democrat Party tactics that have created such a frightening and dangerous environment. And it would be a vote to cement the idea that anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda is an enemy of the state who can be bankrupted, jailed and persecuted.

President Trump has put everything on the line for us again and again. It’s not enough just to vote for him. You have to organize. You have to register everyone you know. You have to get your block, your neighborhood, your church, your entire social network, to mail in their ballots en masse.

We are counting on you.

All of us are counting on you.”

The fascist doth project too much.

There’s much to deconstruct here, but let’s begin with the conclusion. Aren’t Trumpists opposed to mail-in ballots? As for Democrats inciting violence, Trump is not known for being reluctant to incite violence, as is evident in the way he handles protesters at his rallies, the fact that he encourages police to rough up suspects – excluding himself, of course – his desire to have peaceful demonstrators protesting police violence shot, and his “jokes” at the expense of Paul Pelosi.

Miller suggests that the media distorted Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement on Charlottesville, dismissing its media reports on it as another “hoax.” In fact, Trump “denounced” the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville the same way Bill Clinton denied having sex with Monica Lewinski – semantically. Charlottesville aside, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to unequivocally denounce racist rhetoric, past and present, whether from Fuentes, Kanye West, or Loomer, none of which he has utilized. Instead, he denies knowing who they are or disingenuously declares unfamiliarity with what they have said.

Miller condemns Democrats for perpetuating hoaxes, while the presidential and vice presidential nominees of his own party publicly spew debunked lies about Haitians, lies amplified by Loomer, who, not to be outdone, has, in true birther fashion, also posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, declaring that Harris isn’t black because it lists her mother as “Caucasian” and her father as “Jamaican” and that she is “the descendent [sic] of slave owners” on her father’s Irish side, as if this makes her, what, white? News Flash, Laura: A lot of black people are descendants of white slave owners; in “one-drop rule” America, that does not make them white. Still, if Loomer is a birther “literalist,” one wonders how she can insist that Harris is an “Indian” given her mother’s listing as “Caucasian,” unless it is because, according to U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Asian Indians, while technically classified as “Caucasian,” are not legally white and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1946, the latter decision one which Loomer would most likely like to see reversed.

But we’re still in Twilight Zone territory, that liminal space between insanity and inanity where not only do Haitian migrants dine on an assortment of domesticated delicacies, but children go off to school one gender and return home another, and prisons perform transgender operations on incarcerated “illegal aliens.” Forget The Apprentice, Trump is auditioning to host the reboot of Fear Factor.

The prospective Fuehrer-for-a-day’s arsenal of lies grows more bizarre every day. Not only does the would-be emperor of the U.R.A. (United Reich of America) have no clothes, he has revealed himself to be a rambling, flatulent, incontinent racist with a spray-on tan and a molting hair weave. Yet despite his monotonous tantrums, incessant whining, and petulant Mussoliniesque pouts, he is still considered mature enough to again serve as commander-in-chief.

If Harris shows even the slightest sign of emotion, she is hysterical; Trump, in contrast, no matter how bombastic and belligerent his responses, is seen by his idolaters as manly, steely-eyed reason personified. Yet, during the debate, the “low IQ” Harris, in the immortal words of former RNC chair Michael Steele, “spanked that ass.” The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with to explain their messiah’s failure is to claim that ABC gave Harris the questions in advance and she was wearing Nova H1 audio earrings.

In a normal world, rumors that Haitians are eating dogs and cats would be hard to swallow; groundless accusations of rigged elections and audio devices hidden in jewelry would fall on deaf ears.

You can’t make this shit up. Then again, they have and they do.

Note

[1] 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.

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