“Congratulations President-elect Trump on your historic election victory. I look forward to working with you in the years ahead. As the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.”
Best wishes, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Okay, you’ve got me there, it wasn’t really the genocidal maniac, but sycophantic Starmer’s congratulatory grovelling message to the permatan fascist Trump, shortly after it became obvious a majority of the American electorate really do have shit-for-brains.
The human version of low fat semolina honestly believes the human version of period cramps is the slightest bit interested in “freedom” and “democracy”?
The new free trade: hand jobs for Trump across the pond
While a majority of the world is coming to terms with the immediate implications of another Trump presidency, Keir Starmer is offering Donald Trump a hand job from across the pond.
Of course, it’s not just Keir Starmer that is painfully deluded. Trump’s own campaign team recently described Keir Starmer’s Labour Party government as “far left”. No laughing at the back, please.
If predator Trump believes Keir Starmer — the freebie-loving, poor-hating, dog-whistling, granny-killing, student-stitching, ex-Trilateral Commission, Zionist fanboy — or just one single member of his bought-and-paid-for sellouts trying to wing it as a cabinet is any way “far left”, it’s not just Genocide Joe’s state of mind that should be in question.
Speaking of the cabinet, it has been painfully embarrassing to see the likes of David Lammy backtrack on their past statements about Trump.
Whilst Trump probably hasn’t got a clue who Rayner and Lammy are, the internet never forgets.
If I had a Pound for every time I’ve heard the cringey words “special relationship” from a Labour politician this past week, I would have just about enough to purchase my very own Labour politician for Christmas.
There is no special relationship. It’s a myth. Nobody believes that old nonsense now, do they?
Keir Starmer: isolated
Starmer now finds himself more isolated than any prime minister before him. A country in the continent of Europe that isn’t an active part of the European community and a new batshit US president that makes no secret of his wish to put “America first” puts Starmer in a very difficult and lonely position.
Labour desperately wanted and needed a victory for Kamala Harris. Starmer’s team had visions of the pair of them being the Thatcher and Reagan of today, imperiously strutting around on the global stage, continuing their self-appointed roles as the world’s police.
In reality, Starmer is going to have to bend over in various uncomfortable positions to accommodate Trump, although Kemi Badenoch’s laughable demand that would see Trump address the House of Commons should be filed under “f” for “fucking ludicrous suggestions”.
Trump already has a Commons mouthpiece in the shape of Nigel Farage, and you can be absolutely certain of Trump throwing his full weight behind a big push for Reform UK at the next general election.
Prime minister or deputy prime minister Farage? I wouldn’t rule it out.
Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch’s debut at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) was an absolute horror show from start to finish. The poor woman would be dangerously out of her depth in a fucking birdbath, let’s be honest.
Enter the bad Enoch
Sure, I wasn’t expecting anything special from the new Tory leader, but hasn’t she paid any attention whatsoever to what Keir Starmer has been getting up to during the past four tumultuous months?
To Badenoch’s credit, it takes some serious brass neck to bring back Priti Patel-Aviv to her shadow cabinet, considering we haven’t actually paid off the last civil servant she bullied out of their job.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like the only real opposition to Keir Starmer’s government is likely to come from the Independent Alliance of MPs, activists like Lowkey and Tory Fibs, and also genuinely independent publications such as our beloved Canary, openDemocracy, and Declassified, because you can be sure as hell that we won’t see Badenoch holding Starmer’s feet to the fire over the genocide of Gaza or the ongoing cost of living crisis anytime soon.
One of Badenoch’s most pressing issues, at least in the short term, will be to put some clear blue water between herself and Starmer, because right now, she doesn’t disagree with the disgraceful decision to force disabled people into unsuitable employment, she doesn’t disagree with Starmer’s broken pledge that will see tuition fees increased, and she certainly doesn’t disagree with putting members of the Knesset before the people of Britain.
What I think we are likely to see is Badenoch constantly attempting to position herself to the right of the Labour government, particularly on immigration. She’s a (blue) Tory, after all, and the Tory party will become more receptive to the possibility of a pact of some sort with Farage’s Reform UK extremists.
It’s the Palestinian people we should be thinking of
Despite being a deeply unpopular government, Keir Starmer does have a huge parliamentary majority, thanks to Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and an irreparably corrupted system of voting.
Does Badenoch believe she can overturn this majority, without the help of the Trump-backed Reform headbangers? What the new Tory leader says publicly to voters and privately to shadowy figures that are looking to creep their way into power through the back door are two very different things altogether.
My final words for the week belong to the people of Palestine, because they now not only have to deal with the verminous polyp upon the anus of humanity, Netanyahu, but also the devastating consequences of another Trump presidency.
Kamala Harris is already complicit in genocide. A victory for Harris meant nothing to the Palestinian people. But what will the conflicts in the Middle East begin to look like if we find Trump egging on Netanyahu to wipe Palestine off the map altogether?
Israel has already confirmed they have permanently displaced thousands and thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza, this week. This is the very definition of ethnic cleansing, and just another foundation that has been laid in place for the creation of ‘greater Israel’.
Whoever you are and whatever you do, never stop talking about Palestine. Be on the right side of history and not on the side of Trump, Netanyahu, and their pathetic and utterly complicit Labour Party lap dogs.
“We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.”
These were the words of Samoa’s Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, speaking in his capacity as chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the UNFCCC COP28 in Dubai last year.
Outside, Pacific climate activists and allies, led by the Pacific Climate Warriors, were calling for a robust and comprehensive financial package that would see the full, fast, and fair transition away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy in the Global South.
This is our Pacific Way in action: state parties and civil society working together to remind the world as we approach a “finance COP” with the upcoming COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11-22 that we cannot be conveniently pigeonholed.
We are people who represent not only communities but landscapes and seascapes that are both vulnerable, and resilient, and should not be forced by polluting countries and the much subsidised and profit-focused fossil fuel industries that lobby them to choose between mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.
Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) are the uncomfortable reminder for those who want smooth sailing of their agenda at COP29, that while we are able to hold the tension of our vulnerability and resilience in the Pacific, this may make for choppy seas.
I recently had the privilege of joining the SPREP facilitated pre-COP29 gathering for PSIDS and the Climate Change Ministerial meeting in Nadi, Fiji, to provide spiritual guidance and pastoral support.
This gathering took place in a spiritually significant moment, the final week of the Season of Creation, ending, profoundly, on the Feast Day of St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of the environment. The theme for this year’s Season of Creation was, “to hope and act with Creation (the environment).
Encouraged to act in hope
I looked across the room at climate ministers, lead negotiators from the region and the regional organisations that support them and encouraged them to begin the preparatory meeting and to also enter COP29 with hope, to act in hope, because to hope is an act of faith, of vision, of determination and trust that our current situation will not remain the status quo.
Pacific church leaders have rejected this status quo by saying that finance for adaptation and loss and damage, without a significant commitment to a fossil fuel phase-out that is full, fast and fair, is the biblical equivalent to 30 pieces of silver — the bribe Judas was given to betray Jesus.
Pacific Council of Churches general secretary Reverend James Bhagwan . . . “We are people who represent not only communities but landscapes and seascapes that are both vulnerable, and resilient, and should not be forced by polluting countries.” Image: RNZ/Jamie Tahana
In endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and leading the World Council of Churches to do the same, Pacific faith communities are joining their governments and civil societies to ensure the entire blue Pacific voice reverberates clearly into the spaces where the focus on finance is dominant.
As people with a deep connection to land and sea, whose identity does not separate itself from biodiversity, the understanding of the “groaning of Creation” (Romans 8:19-25) resonates with Pacific islanders.
We were reminded of the words of St. Saint Augustine that says: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
As we witness the cries and sufferings of Earth and all creatures, let righteous anger move us toward the courage to be hopeful and active for justice.
Hope is not merely optimism. It is not a utopian illusion. It is not waiting for a magical miracle.
Hope is trust that our action makes sense, even if the results of this action are not immediately seen. This is the type of hope that our Pasifika households carry to COP29.
Reverend James Bhagwan is general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches. He holds a Bachelor of Divinity from the Pacific Theological College in Fiji and a Masters in Theology from the Methodist Theological University in Korea. He also serves as co-chair of the Fossil Fuel NonProliferation Treaty Campaign Global Steering Committee. This article was first published by RNZ Pacific.
Billions of dollars will buy almost anything anybody wants, and on November 5 billions of dollars bought the world’s leading climate-skeptical political administration, aka: the Trump Administration, which is anti-almost-everything, except for a free reign to the almighty market. Price determines policy, and it buys political office.
According to Americans for Tax Fairness, 150 billionaire families broke all campaign-spending records by a country mile, spending $2 billion in total to get a Republican majority with $1.36 billion going to Republicans versus $413 million to Democrats and the balance to specific causes, proof positive that billions of dollars can buy anything.
The System Regulating Campaign Financing Has Collapsed
“Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. It is one of the most obvious and disturbing consequences of the growth of billionaire fortunes, as well as being a prime indicator that the system regulating campaign finance has collapsed,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “We need to rein in the political power of billionaire families by better taxing them and by effectively limiting their campaign donations. Until we do both, we can only expect the influence of the super-rich over our politics and government to escalate.” (Source: “Billionaire Clans Spend Nearly $2 Billion On 2024 Elections,” Americans for Fair Taxes, October 29, 2024)
America’s Climate Policy Cascading, into the dust bin.
It’s interesting that the Forbes’ article came out just before the most important election of all time for the future, or lack of future, for the planet’s habitability. The initial paragraph of the Forbes’ article contains a stark warning that is shared by many top-level scientists around the world: “A distinguished international team of scientists on Tuesday issued the starkest warning yet that human activity is pushing Earth into a climate crisis that could threaten the lives of up to 6 billion people this century, stating candidly: ‘We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered.”
Now the Trump Climate-skeptical administration is about to take control over the world’s leading democracy (maybe, but not). One can only wonder what impact this may have on scientists that claim we’re: “pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability” with consequences this century of 6 billion threatened because of massive uninhabitable regions of the planet. Extreme heat and dwindling food supplies will prevail. The American electorate made this possible, winning the award for the Most Ill-Informed Ignorant People on the Planet, maybe of all time. As for demonstrated ignorance, all that’s required is to look at what’s happening to the climate system, weird, unprecedented stuff that doesn’t happen, ever, until now. And it’s broadcast on nightly news (1) atmospheric rivers flooding communities within minutes (2) Category Five hurricanes laying waste outside of normal hurricane season (3) tornadoes further North than ever before (4) hailstorms like golf balls destroying siding and roofs of buildings (5) home insurers dropping coverage in Florida and California (6) insurance premiums nearly doubling for homeowners. The list could go on and on, but the point is climate change is driving ordinary people out of homes and broke. The disasters are the result of human-generated fossil fuel CO2 bringing on an overheated haywire climate system that has exceeded the Paris ’15 climate conference agreement among all nations warning don’t go over +1.5°C pre-industrial by limiting CO2 emissions that blanket the planet and hold heat because it turns the climate system into an ogre of destruction, now in its early stages, worldwide. The proof is palpable on every continent, “2024 Will be World’s Hottest Year on Record, EU Scientists Say,” Reuters, Nov. 7, 2024.
And this is only the start, with the climate-skeptical new administration in place, “it’ll get much worse.” But “getting much worse” on top of a climate system that is already exploding in our faces is destined to create havoc, destruction, and darkness like nobody can imagine possible. Trump will rescind climate-related commitments by the US such as the Paris 2015 climate agreement. The US is out, count on it as the country dusts-off its hands and walks away from tackling the most rambunctious dangerous climate system in human history just as it’s starting to brutalize major life-sourcing ecosystems, like the Amazon rainforest, drying up because of severe drought as the Mississippi River’s low depth severely diminishes barge traffic transport of crucial agricultural product: “For the third year in a row, extreme drought conditions in the Midwest are drawing down water levels on the Mississippi River, raising prices for companies that transport goods downstream and forcing governments and business owners to seek alternative solutions,” Governing, Oct. 18, 2024.
Bloomberg Green/Green Daily published an article entitled: “US Election 2024,” presented by IBM, What a Trump Victory Means for Energy: “The win empowers him to deliver on his campaign pledges to go after climate policies he’s dubbed the ‘green new scam’ while reorienting the federal government toward pumping more crude and building more power plants.”
He’ll end federal policies that encourage EV sales. The EPA regulation on tailpipe pollution, which penalizes gas-guzzlers, thereby favoring EVs will be a top target. An executive order to accomplish this has already been drafted. Additionally, going after California’s strict car pollution standards via changes to the Clean Air Act. Trump favors dirty air to stimulate more gas-powered vehicle sales.
From A-to-Z Trump will unleash the fossil fuel industry to full blast operations, including lower tax rates, literally taking off the gloves of any federal regulation. This will be comparable to the Wild West at the turn of the 19th century, no holds barred with plans to open America’s public lands for oil development. Go for it!
Offshore wind is another target for closure, impacting developmental work already underway of multi-billion-dollar wind farms up and down the US East Coast. Trump intends to target offshore wind on “day one” probably via a moratorium imposed administratively.
The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, flush with hundreds of billions of dollars of loan-backed authority readily avaiblable for clean-tech thanks to Biden’s IRA, is at risk. “Trump will be under dueling pressure to either kill off the program, ending a major source of support for green-technology commercialization, or to keep it running, just with a decidedly pro-fossil-fuel bent. Advocates of the latter approach say the office has made billions of dollars in interest for the federal government and that its support can be used to back natural gas, carbon capture and nuclear energy ventures.” (Bloomberg Green)
Additionally, Trump will terminate a suite of EPA rules that inhibit power-plant pollution, for example coal burning plants. Trump believes AI needs twice the amount of electricity currently supplied to the US. A 2024 rule limiting emissions from existing coal plants and new gas-fired units will be a top focus for removal.
Millions of members (over 70 million voters in the 2024 election) of the Most Ill-Informed Ignorant People on the Planet have sealed the fate of an abrupt enormously destructive climate system that’s already started misbehaving in earnest because of excessive levels of greenhouse gases like CO<sub>2</sub> emitted by burning fossil fuels, thus slamming the climate system down onto the mat, defeated, for the worse. How will it get better?
Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.
Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.
In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.
President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.
Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.
This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.
“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”
Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.
“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.
The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.
Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.
However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.
Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.
Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.
This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.
However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.
This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.
In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.
During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.
However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.
Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.
Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.
The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:
• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.
The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.
What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.
And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.
In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.
The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.
I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.
But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.
These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.
Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.
Trade unionist and activist Robert Reid . . . “The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.” Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.
Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.
Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.
Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.
I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.
We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.
Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.
Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.
The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies
The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).
When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.
We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.
Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.
Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!
Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.
Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.
After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.
Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.
In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.
We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.
Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.
Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.
And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”
Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary the president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.
Cambridge, UK — As the voting results started coming in here from Virginia at 4 am (GMT, which is five hours later than Eastern Time in the US), I went to bed, having seen enough to know that Kamala Harris’s crash campaign for the White House was failing.
I knew what was coming. I’d experienced it four times already. In 1968 I watched Richard Nixon, the notorious House version of Commie-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy rouse what he dubbed the “Silent Majority” of right-wing white bigots and pro-Vietnam War super-patriots and defeated Hubert Humphrey (an earlier VP who the Democratic party chose as their nominee when their incumbent president after, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election).
There was a sense of hopelessness on the left the morning after Nixon’a election.
It happened again in 1980, with the surprise win by Republican Ronald Reagan, who defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter. That morning, I got up early and went down to Broadway from my 11th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Walking down the largely empty sidewalk like a zombie, I passed a few people headed the other way, their faces looking similarly shell-shell shocked, until a neighborhood friend, John Hess, a spritely, gray-bearded retiree N.Y. Times staffer, bounded up to me cheerfully. “Isn’t it great?” He said with a smile. “The Republicans also took the Senate!”
“What’s so great about that?” I asked, astonished that this radical leftist journalist would say such a thing.
“Because,” he explained, “If the Democrats control Congress, Reagan can’t blame all his disasters on them. Now he won’t have the ability to blame anyone but himself!”
Actually, in the event, Reagan managed to serve out two terms, and even accomplished some positive things including negotiating with House Majority Leader Democrat Tip O’Neill a rescue of the underfunded Social Security program and ending the Cold War and (at least temporarily) the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court which in 2000 stole the election for George W Bush by halting the vote counting in Florida, where it was clear that Democratic Vice President Al Gore, who had already won the popular vote, would also have won the state and its Electoral College total. Instead, the feckless top court gave the White House to Bush and Dick Cheney.
And finally there was the night Donald Trump stunned the pundits and himself by winning the White House and defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
So waking up Wednesday morning to see that Trump would be president for another nightmare four-term had for me a definite “Groundhog Da” feel to it — but without the guy-gets-girl happy ending to it).
Actually, this time Trump 2.0 is worse than those four earlier Republican wins. This time the Republican president will have solid control of both houses of Congress, with a Senate so overwhelmingly Republican that it will be able to pass almost any piece of legislation without Democrats blocking it, and will likely remain in Republican hands for Trump’s full term. This time around, the Supreme Court too is solidly controlled 6-3 by hard-right justices, and Trump has made it clear that every cabinet office and every government agency will be run by “loyal’ lackeys of his choosing, with even civil service employees either replaced or cowed into submission — including at such normally independent agencies as the Pentagon, CIA, Justice Department and EPA. Even the late irrepressible John Hess would have had a hard time finding a bright side to this Election Day outcome.
Nonetheless I’m going to give it a try.
First a reality check: What we see in the 2024 election result is that a majority of Americans — men and women, rich and poor, white and people of color, educated and uneducated, religious and atheist — are either ready to gamble on a self-involved sociopathic, racist and misogynist criminal billionaire with anger issues or are too concerned with just getting by with their daily lives to to worry about elections that never seem to change their lives for the better or that even make them harder. Analysis of the voting shows that a huge percentage of late voting younger people went for Trump. And a tidal wave of women voting for Harris didn’t materialize. More women voted than men, as usual, but plenty of them went for the pussy-grabbing rapist Trump. Trump also did better with Black men than he did in 2016 and 2024 and significantly improved his tally among Latinos (or as he calls them “Hispanics”). In the end Harris’s larger share of women voters was the same as Trump’s larger share of men, making the predicted gender war a wash-out.
Here in the UK, where I am living for the next nine months, I can see what the results of such so-called populist voting trends can be. British voters in 1979 elected a hard-right Prime Minister named Margaret Thatcher and allowed her and her Conservative Party to set off a seismic shift of the country’s politics away from social democracy and a rather classical conservatism into a two-party Neo-liberal dystopia where both parties accepted the notion that capitalism, unfettered markets, and a coddled business elite managing things was the best option for society.
This narrowed political playing field has led over the ensuing decades to a long period British economic doldrums, and to a turning away by Brits from the rest of Europe, as resentment and hostility towards outsiders, including eastern Europeans, and especially people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean — all of them willing to work for less and to leave countries that had it even worse — availed themselves of the lack of borders across Europe to flock to the UK. This latter phenomenon led to the narrow victory of a referendum that resulted inBritain’s removing itself from the European Union. Called Brexit, this abrupt anti-immigrant “secession” has wreaked havoc on the nation’s economy and living standards, as well as the operation of key services like the country’s once vaunted National Health System.
Just this past July, British voters, frustrated with a country and government where “nothing works anymore,” turned out the Conservatives after 15 straight years of Tory rule and handed a landslide win to the Labour Party and its new Prime Minister Keir Starmer. How that new government will fare in its effort to right the ship of state and its stagnating economy, given the incredible decades-long disinvestment and privatization it is hoping to reverse, remains to be seen.
I suspect the US, under a second Trump administration, this time emboldened by a political realignment at least as profound as was Thatcher’s 1979 win in the UK, will soon be similarly strip-mined and privatized.
The one bright spot, however, if President-re-elect Trump, a shameless liar, can be taken at his word, would be if he actually were to brings an end to the decade of US military aid political brinksmanship in pushing Ukraine to break away from neighboring Russia’s sphere of influence and to join NATO, the US-led anti-Russian alliance created way back at the start of the Cold War of he 1950s. Trump says, quite logically, that US efforts to pull Ukraine into NATO, a mutual protection pact whose very existence is an existential threat to Russia, and the Ukraine government’s now ten-year old armed conflict with first its ethic Russian minority and then, when Russia responded by invading Ukraine, with Russia, a leading nuclear power, has led to a war in which Ukraine’s military is largely underwritten by US arms and financial banking interests. It is a war that the US knows poses a high risk of provoking a devastating and potentially world-ending nuclear conflict between ther world’s two nuclear superpowers.
During the just concluded election campaign, Trump promised to bring an end to that bloody military conflict immediately before even waiting for his second inauguration in January. He has also promised to end the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, though without specifying how.
I am no fan of Trump, but I have to say should he successfully cut short those two bloody conflicts, or even ends the Ukraine war while at least not making things worse in Gaza, his new presidency would be off to a great start. He should follow that up by returning the US to the treaty relationship on nuclear weapons that his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan worked out with former Soviet and Russia leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which effectively, if all too briefly, ended the two countries’ nuclear standoff and raised humanity’s hopes for an end to nuclear weapons altogether. Trump should also follow through with his prior effort to pull the US out of NATO, which long ago morphed into a cover for and participant in US global military actions around the world and simply serves as an excuse for ploughing over a trillion dollars a year into the coffers of the US arms industry.
Martin Luther King, a year to the day before the day in 1968 that he was assassinated (my birthday) he gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York titled Beyond Vietnam:A Time to End the Silence.” In it he correctly identified the US, at that time conducting a bloody aggressive war in Indochina, as being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” It has remained so, Indeed its endless wars and “interventions,” have reportedly killed well over 6 million people, mostly civilians, around the world in the eight decades since WWII.
Trump knows this and has talked of pulling US forces back from the hundreds of places they are based in foreign lands (though that idea was at one point linked by him to the idea of using them against American dissidents here at home — NOT a Great idea!).
He should pull them back and decommission them.
Trump has said on a number of occasions that he does not want wars — that as a businessman, he wants the US to do business with other nations, on a level playing field. That is a great sentiment, and it’s one that his base, those MAGA voters, some of whom I know and have had conversations with,. Trump should be held to that promise, and should downsize the US military to a size appropriate to a country that is not facing any threat of invasion and that stops meddling militarily in other countries and maintaining bases around the globe. That is a position a lot of Trump’s MAGA backers agree with.
For now though, all we have from President-elect Trump are promises like “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” and unless acted upon these cannot be taken seriously. But that said, I have to say the words themselves are welcome, and it’w a promise that I’ve never heard the likes of coming from any other president-elect of either party.. (Okay, Richard Nixon claimed during his first presidential race that he had a “secret plan’ for ending the war in Vietnam, but that “plan” turned out to be to massively carpet-bomb North Vietnam using B-52s. expand the war into Laos and Cambodia and to ship more US combat troops into the country. Once elected, he kept the war going until he resigned from office in disgrace.)
We on the left are facing an existential crisis with Trump’s election victory but also an opportunity
Supporting the Democrats and their chosen candidate Kamala Harris as a tactical move to preserve freedom to organize and to protest was clearly unsuccessful as her poorly performed campaign did worse than Hillary Clinton did against Trump eight years before. Indeed, she lost not just in the Electoral College tally but in the popular vote, which Clinton at least won. The Democratic Party has been shown once again to be a pathetic joke as a political opponent. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who won a resounding re-election to the Senate in Vermont, identified right before Harris’s concession speech on Thursday, the party’s problem: It is owned by billionaires and moneyed consultants wedded to corporate interests, and is dismissive or even hostile to the interests of the working class.
But the pathetic showing of third party candidates in this, as in prior elections, has shown that building a third party is also a fool’s errand in a country where the political system is structured to prevent them.
That leaves us with the option of building a large movement outside of political parties focussed around broad popular issues that would bring working-class people together common goals like peace and demilitarization, significantly raising the minimum wage, improving and protecting Social Security, making Medicare universal for all ages, passing the Equal Rights Amendment and protecting every women’s right to control her own body and health and seriously addressing the climate crisis.
Trump has made it clear that he wants unrestrained power, without the hindrances of a Constitution or a Congress composed of members who might think for themselves and perform their intended constitutional role as a check and balance on the Executive Branch. Trump’s history of lying, criminality, racism and misogyny and his willingness to appeal to American citizens’ basest instincts are well known. But we are stuck with him. He cannot be defeated in the courts because he has a bunch of sycophants packing the Supreme Court and in the lower level federal courts. Impeachment cannot happen and is a waste of time and effort. The weakened Congressional Democrats can no longer even put on a impeachment committee hearing this time.
With a mass movement we can pressure Trump and his Congressional supporters to do what they promised. If they go back on those promises, we can work to peel away those people who just voted for him as a “change disrupter,” especially as they begin to discover he really doesn’t give a damn about them.
Meanwhile we need to do the hard work of organize]ing wide support for resisting Trump’s worst ideas — the ones that will harm the defenseless and that will grievously contribute to climate change. For example, we need to support a campaign to protect undocumented people living in the USA from brutal arrest, detention and forced deportation, especially in cases that break up families. We clearly need to build a mass movement to protect programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. A key here is that most of Trump’s own voting base depend on those programs and on the Affordable Care Act. Trump and his advisers know this. This is why Trump vowed during his campaign not to cut them. He needs to be held to that promise. And we need to call out every Trump effort to worsen climate change by the reversal of what climate saving measures have been introduced, and by trying to sack or silence those civil service employees responsible for measuring or ameliorating climate change.
Trump, by making this false promises he won’t keep in order to win the election has handed us what we need to organize this same people.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to look at Donald Trump’s return to the White House, we turn now to look at what it means for the world, from Israel’s war on Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During his victory speech, Trump vowed that he was going to “stop wars”.
But what will Trump’s foreign policy actually look like?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Fatima Bhutto, award-winning author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways, New Kings of the World. She is co-editing a book along with Sonia Faleiro titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year. She writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Start off by just responding to Trump’s runaway victory across the United States, Fatima.
Fatima Bhutto on the Kamala Harris “support for genocide”. Video: Democracy Now!
FATIMA BHUTTO: Well, Amy, I don’t think it’s an aberration that he won. I think it’s an aberration that he lost in 2020. And I think anyone looking at the American elections for the last year, even longer, could see very clearly that the Democrats were speaking to — I’m not sure who, to a hall of mirrors.
They ran an incredibly weak and actually macabre campaign, to see Kamala Harris describe her politics as one of joy as she promised the most lethal military in the world, talking about women’s rights in America, essentially focusing those rights on the right to termination, while the rest of the world has watched women slaughtered in Gaza for 13 months straight.
You know, it’s very curious to think that they thought a winning strategy was Beyoncé and that Taylor Swift was somehow a political winning strategy that was going to defeat — who? — Trump, who was speaking to people, who was speaking against wars. You know, whether we believe him or not, it was a marked difference from what Kamala Harris was saying and was not saying.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Fatima, you wrote a piece for Zeteo earlier this year titled “Gaza Has Exposed the Shameful Hypocrisy of Western Feminism.” So, you just mentioned the irony of Kamala Harris as, you know, the second presidential candidate who is a woman, where so much of the campaign was about women, and the fact that — you know, of what’s been unfolding on women, against women and children in Gaza for the last year. If you could elaborate?
FATIMA BHUTTO: Yeah, we’ve seen, Nermeen, over the last year, you know, 70 percent of those slaughtered in Gaza by Israel and, let’s also be clear, by America, because it’s American bombs and American diplomatic cover that allows this slaughter to continue unabated — 70 percent of those victims are women and children.
We have watched children with their heads blown off. We have watched children with no surviving family members find themselves in hospital with limbs missing. Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. And we have seen newborns left to die as Israel switches off electricity and fuel of hospitals.
So, for Kamala Harris to come out and talk repeatedly about abortion, and I say this as someone who is pro-choice, who has always been pro-choice, was not just macabre, but it’s obscene. It’s an absolute betrayal of feminism, because feminism is about liberation. It’s not about termination.
And it’s about protecting women at their most vulnerable and at their most frightened. And there was no sign of that. You know, we also saw Kamala Harris bring out celebrities. I mean, the utter vacuousness of bringing out Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé and others to talk about being a mother, while mothers are being widowed, are being orphaned in Gaza, it was not just tone deaf, it seemed to have a certain hostility, a certain contempt for the suffering that the rest of us have been watching.
I’d also like to add a point about toxic masculinity. There was so much toxicity in Kamala Harris’s campaign. You know, I watched her laugh with Oprah as she spoke about shooting someone who might enter her house with a gun, and giggling and saying her PR team may not like that, but she would kill them.
You don’t need to be a man to practice toxic masculinity, and you don’t need to be white to practice white supremacy, as we’ve seen very clearly from this election cycle.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, Fatima Bhutto, if you look at what Trump represented, and certainly the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, Jewish progressives, young people, African-Americans certainly understood what Trump’s policy was when he was president.
And it’s rare, you know, a president comes back to serve again after a term away. It’s only happened once before in history.
But you have, for example, Trump moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. You have an illegal settlement named after Trump in the West Bank. The whole question of Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in Israel pushing for annexation of the West Bank, where Trump would stand on this.
And, of course, you have the Abraham Accords, which many Palestinians felt left them out completely. If you can talk about this? These were put forward by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, when the massive Gaza destruction was at its height, talked about Gaza as waterfront real estate.
FATIMA BHUTTO: Absolutely. There’s no question that Trump has been a malign force, not just when it concerns Palestinians, but, frankly, out in the world. But I would argue there’s not very much difference between what these two administrations or parties do. The difference is that Trump doesn’t have the gloss and the charisma of an Obama or — I mean, I can’t even say that Biden has charisma, but certainly the gloss.
Trump says it. They do it. The difference — I can’t really tell the difference anymore.
We saw the Biden administration send over 500 shipments of arms to Israel, betraying America’s own laws, the fact that they are not allowed to export weapons of war to a country committing gross violations of human rights. We saw Bill Clinton trotted out in Michigan to tell Muslims that, actually, they should stop killing Israelis and that Jews were there before them.
I mean, it was an utterly contemptuous speech. So, what is the difference exactly?
We saw Bernie Sanders, who was mentioned earlier, write an op-ed in The Guardian in the days before the election, warning people that if they were not to vote for Kamala Harris, if Donald Trump was to get in, think about the climate crisis. Well, we have watched Israel’s emissions in the first five months of their deadly attack on Gaza release more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations release in a year.
So, I don’t quite see that there’s a difference between what Democrats allow and what Trump brags about. I think it’s just a question of crudeness and decorum and politeness. One has it, and one doesn’t. In a sense, Trump is much clearer for the rest of the world, because he says what he’s going to do, and, you know, you take him at his word, whereas we have been gaslit and lied to by Antony Blinken on a daily basis now since October 7th.
Every time that AOC or Kamala Harris spoke about fighting desperately for a ceasefire, we saw more carnage, more massacres and Israel committing crimes with total impunity. You know, it wasn’t under Trump that Israel has killed more journalists than have ever been killed in any recorded conflict. It’s under Biden that Israel has killed more UN workers than have ever been killed in the UN’s history. So, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
And, you know, we’ll have to wait to see in the months ahead. But I don’t think anyone is bracing for an upturn. Certainly, people didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. I’m not sure they voted for Trump. We know that she lost 14 million votes from Biden’s win in 2020. And we know that those votes just didn’t come out for the Democrats. Some may have migrated to Trump. Some may have gone to third parties. But 14 million just didn’t go anywhere.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Fatima, if you could, you know, tell us what do you think the reasons are for that? I mean, the kind of — as you said, because it is really horrifying, what has unfolded in Gaza in the last 13 months. You’ve written about this. You now have an edited anthology that you’re editing, co-editing. You know, what do you think accounts for this, the sheer disregard for the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza?
FATIMA BHUTTO: It’s a total racism on the part not just of America, but I’m speaking of the West here. This has been betrayed over the last year, the fact that Ukraine is spoken about with an admiration, you know, Zelensky is spoken about with a sort of hero worship, Ukrainian resisters to Russia’s invasion are valorised.
You know, Nancy Pelosi wore a bracelet of bullets used by the Ukrainian resistance against Trump [sic]. But Palestinians are painted as terrorists, are dehumanised to such an extent. You know, we saw that dehumanisation from the mouths of Bill Clinton no less, from the mouths of Kamala Harris, who interrupted somebody speaking out against the genocide, and saying, “I am speaking.”
What is more toxically masculine than that?
We’ve also seen a concerted crackdown in universities across the United States on college students. I’m speaking also here of my own alma mater of Columbia University, of Barnard College, that called the NYPD, who fired live ammunition at the students. You know, this didn’t happen — this extreme response didn’t happen in protests against apartheid. It didn’t happen in protests against Vietnam in quite the same way.
And all I can think is, America and the West, who have been fighting Muslim countries for the last 25, 30 years, see that as acceptable to do so. Our deaths are acceptable to them, and genocide is not a red line.
And, you know, to go back to what what was mentioned earlier about the working class, that is absolutely ignored in America — and I would make the argument across the West, too — they have watched administration after, you know, president and congressmen give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, while they have no relief at home.
They have no relief from debt. They have no relief from student debt. They have no medical care, no coverage. They’re struggling to survive. And this is across the board. And after Ukraine, they saw billions go to Israel in the same way, while they get, frankly, nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Fatima Bhutto, we want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning author of a number of works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways and New Kings of the World, co-editing a book called Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year, writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Coming up, we look at Trump’s vow to deport as many as 20 million immigrants and JD Vance saying, yes, US children born of immigrant parents could also be deported.
Surveying the wreckage of the US elections, here are some observations that have emerged:
Campaigns based on hope do not always defeat campaigns based on fear.
Having dozens of retired high ranking military and diplomatic officials warn against the danger Donald Trump poses to democracy (including people who worked for him) did not matter to many voters.
Likewise, having former politicians and hundreds of academics, intellectuals, legal scholars, community leaders and social activists repudiate Trump’s policies of division mattered not an iota to the voting majority.
Nor did Kamala Harris’s endorsement by dozens of high profile celebrities make a difference to the MAGA mob.
Raising +US$ billion in political donations did not produce victory got Harris. It turns out outspending the opponent is not the key to electoral success.
Incoherent racist and xenophobic rants (“they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats”) did not give the MAGA mob any pause when considering their choices. In fact, it appears that the resort to crude depictions of opponents (“stupid KaMAla”)and scapegoats (like Puerto Ricans) strengthened the bond between Trump and his supporters.
‘Garbage can’ narrative
Macroeconomic and social indicators such as higher employment and lower crime and undocumented immigrant numbers could not overcome the MAGA narrative that the US was “the garbage can of the world.”
Nor could Harris, despite her accomplished resume in all three government branches at the local, state and federal levels, overcome the narrative that she was “dumb” and a DEI hire who was promoted for reasons other than merit.
It did not matter to the MAGA mob that Trump threatened retribution against his opponents, real and imagined, using the Federal State as his instrument of revenge.
“Standing up to Trump the duty of every public servant” . . . A New York Times edirtorial reoublished today in the New Zealand Herald.
Age was not a factor even though Trump displays evident signs of cognitive decline.
Reproductive rights were not the watershed issue many thought that they would be, including for many female voters. Conversely, the MAGA efforts to court “bro” support via social media catering to younger men worked very well.
In a way, this is a double setback for women: as an issue of bodily autonomy and as an issue of gender equality given the attitudes of Trump endorsers like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. Those angry younger men interact with females, and their misogyny has now been reaffirmed as part of a political winning strategy.
Ukraine, Europe much to fear
Ukraine and Western Europe have much to fear.
So does the federal bureaucracy and regulatory system, which will now be subject to Project 2025, Elon Musk’s razor gang approach to public spending and RFK Jr’s public health edicts.
In fact, it looks like the Trump second term approach to governance will take a page out of Argentine president Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” approach, with results that will be similar but far broader in scope if implemented in the same way.
So all in all, from where I sit it looks like a bit of a calamity in the making. But then again, I am just another fool with a “woke” degree.
Dr Paul G Buchanan is the director of 36th-Parallel Assessments, a geopolitical and strategic analysis consultancy. This article is republished with the permission of the author.
As many of the most mainstream mental health, autism, and learning disability charities praise the new Mental Health Bill – reforming the 1983 Mental Health Act – going to the House of Lords this week, it feels like there should be true cause for celebration in a way that many psychiatric survivors may not be experiencing.
Of course, there are aspects of the proposed reforms that are extremely important changes if they are done well – people in mental health crises should not be held in cells, and families and carers should have more rights and greater involvement. Most of the reform bill looks good on paper – but does it begin to go far enough?
Should the Mental Health Act reforms be celebrated?
There are currently 2,020 Autistic people and people with learning disabilities in inpatient mental health hospitals in England, with the average stay at 4.8 years (via National Autistic Society & NHS Digital). Many will be held unnecessarily or in inappropriate settings, and it is severely evident that something needs to be done.
However, it is also clear that the Mental Health Act reforms are likely not going to fix the issues at hand.
As an Autistic ex-inpatient, I should in theory be celebrating the changes to the reasons and ways Autistic people and people with a learning disability can be detained.
But is it right to celebrate that we will not be able to be detained long-term on the basis of our autism or learning disability, when we can be if we have a co-occurring mental health condition?
Why is it that it is still seen as appropriate to detain in inappropriate settings if someone has other mental health needs? And what about the thousands of people whose autism has gone undiagnosed (and often stays so throughout an inpatient stay), or who are misdiagnosed with a personality disorder?
It is extremely difficult to agree that this reform actually changes much for Autistic people or people with a learning disability when psychiatric spaces are so extremely hostile as a sensory and social environment – and even a 28 day section (section 2) can be a cause of severe trauma, let alone considering those who will still be held long-term.
Most units are extremely bright, loud, and do not have enough staff training on autism or learning disabilities to support us. We are more likely to experience physical or chemical restraint and seclusion due to biases and misunderstandings about our needs and communication.
Ignoring the real issues, here
Jon Sparkes, the Chief Executive of Mencap, said in their press release that the reforms are key to “placing new duties on commissioners to ensure the right community support is developed” – but there is little to no mention of community support in the release from the Department of Health and Social Care, especially concerning autism and learning disabilities.
Many reach crisis point because they have been consistently failed and unsupported, and there feels like there are no moves being made to change these inequalities in the home, in schools, or in communities.
Psychiatric units are not not set up to be spaces for proper recovery, they are for holding and policing. Incarceration often causes trauma and iatrogenic harm (harm experienced by patients during medical care) is rife, seen by many as part and parcel of the experience.
Many psychiatric units in the UK have little to no therapies or recovery-focused support in them, showing the lack of care for real recovery over simply holding people – and there’s no real notion that this would change under the reforms.
These are spaces with huge power structure issues, where levels of restraint, seclusion, and overmedication are extremely high, particularly amongst marginalised communities including Black people and Autistic people.
Although inequalities Black people face have been mentioned as an issue – being over three times more likely to be detained and 11 times more likely to receive Community Treatment Orders – there has been little to no discussion of what is actually being done around this as part of the reforms.
Little on community-based care
The way that the Mental Health Act and its potential reforms are about detainment and psychiatric inpatient care means changes are being made in a bubble not accounting for the significant lacking we see in community care.
Although there has been some commitment to crisis care in the budget, the National Survivor User Network notes how little notion we have of how this would look, and there is still little to no attention to preventative care, recovery-based support, or long-term community needs.
How do we truly change how mental health care looks when someone has to fall into crisis to get anywhere?
As an ex-inpatient I have spent years advocating for people to stop being unnecessarily detained or placed in psychiatric settings, but I have learnt that there are so few alternatives set up, and if hospital is inappropriate, people are abandoned and left to fall further into crisis.
We often see imprisonment, deaths by suicide, and families struggling to cope, ultimately begging for something, anything that would give them some support. Keeping people out of hospital is only the beginning, but it is seen by much of the system as the job complete.
We can pretend the Mental Health Act reforms will be enough, if you want
You cannot make it part of the law that all patients must have a proper care and treatment plan without committing to significant new levels of funding, nor can you when you are not doing anything to change the staffing crisis.
You cannot say that mental health patients will not be held in police cells when so many biases around addiction, psychosis, and ‘suspicious behaviour’ exist.
You cannot stop detaining Autistic people but not increase funding for sensory support, bespoke care, or neurodiversity-affirming supported living.
In the official press release about the reforms, Claire Murdoch, NHS national mental health director, said that this reform is a “once in a generation opportunity”.
If that is the case, it must go further and do more for psychiatric patients and survivors.
There must be a proper commitment to funding the changes, or this will be another set of reforms that never manifest themselves, with inequalities perpetuated for decades to come.
We can pretend that the reforms will be enough – but where is the true care for dignity or human rights?
Where is the real commitment to not leaving people locked up?
They attribute the famous quote ‘Let them eat cake’ to Marie Antoinette, Queen Consort of King Louis XIV of France. Apparently, she was told that the peasants did not have enough bread to eat. Her retort Let them eat cake, famous for all the Super Rich throughout history (and right smack dab into our present USA), shows the utter arrogance, indifference and lack of empathy for most of our low and middle income working stiffs. Last night’s disgraceful vote results to allow Trump back into power reveal just how far down the rabbit hole of immorality our nation has fallen! Why did this happen? The orchestrators of this scam called a ‘Two Party System’ have done a deed of no return towards our republic. Notice how I refuse to call what we have a democracy. To this writer a true democracy is when state power is vested in the people or the general population of that state. Sadly, what we have here in Amerika is moneyed interests AKA The Super Rich that control the ‘What and How’ people think.
One part of this scam calls itself Republicans or recently MAGA. They flood the media with half truths and outright lies to frighten the suckers… sorry, the voters. Fentanyl carrying illegal aliens AKA Brown skinned Latinos who wish to rob and rape our beautiful lily white women. Schools that groom little boys into becoming little girls. Librarians who stack those shelves with books promoting such behavior, along with anti white anger about not too important things like, duh, slavery. The other party, to these wonderful patriots, is nothing more than a bunch of Marxists and out and out Communists. Wow!
The equally reprehensible other half of the scam is the Democratic Party, once the party of FDR and progressive ideas. Not anymore. They have their own sponsors AKA donors who keep them on track to be ‘not so terrible’ as the other party. They say how terrible they feel for the low income and middle class as the Military Industrial Empire they too serve turns the screws. When it comes to issues like abortion rights and gay rights the Democrats are spot on. When it comes to workers and renters becoming Serfs in this new feudal miss mush they remain silent. Many times they actually agree on the basic crime of privatization of public means and services along with the party opposite. Isn’t democracy great?
Trump won because of a few main factors. Factor one is that most of the whites who voted for him just don’t like having blacks and browns living near them or attending school with their kids. Let’s just call a spade a spade, if you get my humor? Factor two is that his populist rhetoric received a warm reception, especially with so many working class whites who don’t have a pot to piss in. Imagine how he sold the illusion that HE was against the evil DEEP STATE, a place that he has made his home for his entire career! As this corporate empire keeps swallowing working stiffs up, one wonders how many MAGA non union workers (less than 10% of the private sector) will go to bed still thanking the Lord for Trump. Factor three are the millions of evangelical types (you know, the ones who think they own Jesus) who see abortion and LBGTQ as the first and second deadliest sins.
My query to all those seniors who voted for Trump and his party: When and If you become feeble and infirmed and need a nursing home, after the consistent cuts to Medicaid, will you have the $20k per MONTH to cover that cost? What if this new ‘Trump will fix it’ government decides to cut your Social Security and adds to your Medicare contribution? How about my query to those women who follow the leader Trump and his party: As abortion becomes either difficult or actually outlawed, what if you or your daughter or granddaughter goes out with a guy, has too many drinks and winds up becoming pregnant and he’s a ‘No show’? Now, as in the pre Rowe period, we know that a woman who had the money could always find a doctor who did the deed secretly. What if you are not that well off to afford such a fee, and it would be a pretty high one, because the doc has to be very very discreet? These are questions that need to be answered by you Trump (and Republican Party) supporters.
Finally, remember dear MAGA neighbors of mine, the old biblical saying: ” For they sow the wind and they will reap the whirlwind.”
Press freedom is a pillar of American democracy. But political attacks on US-based journalists and news organisations pose an unprecedented threat to their safety and the integrity of information.
Less than 48 hours before election day, Donald Trump, now President-elect for a second term, told a rally of his supporters that he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the journalists in front of him.
“I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much,” he said.
A new survey from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) highlights a disturbing tolerance for political bullying of the press in the land of the First Amendment. The findings show that this is especially true among white, male, Republican voters.
We commissioned this nationally representative survey of 1020 US adults, which was fielded between June 24 and July 5 2024, to assess Americans’ attitudes to the press ahead of the election. We are publishing the results here for the first time.
More than one-quarter (27 percent) of the Americans we polled said they had often seen or heard a journalist being threatened, harassed or abused online. And more than one-third (34 percent) said they thought it was appropriate for senior politicians and government officials to criticise journalists and news organisations.
Tolerance for political targeting of the press appears as polarised as American society. Nearly half (47 percent) of the Republicans surveyed approved of senior politicians critiquing the press, compared to less than one-quarter (22 percent) of Democrats.
Our analysis also revealed divisions according to gender and ethnicity. While 37 percent of white-identifying respondents thought it was appropriate for political leaders to target journalists and news organisations, only 27 percent of people of colour did. There was also a nine-point difference along gender lines, with 39 percent of men approving of this conduct, compared to 30 percent of women.
It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face.
Press freedom fears This election campaign, Trump has repeated his blatantly false claim that journalists are “enemies of the people”. He has suggested that reporters who cross him should be jailed, and signalled that he would like to revoke broadcast licences of networks.
Relevant, too, is the enabling environment for viral attacks on journalists created by unregulated social media companies which represent a clear threat to press freedom and the safety of journalists. Previous research produced by ICFJ for Unesco concluded that there was a causal relationship between online violence towards women journalists and physical attacks.
While political actors may be the perpetrators of abuse targeting journalists, social media companies have facilitated their viral spread, heightening the risk to journalists.
We’ve seen a potent example of this in the current campaign, when Haitian Times editor Macollvie J. Neel was “swatted” — meaning police were dispatched to her home after a fraudulent report of a murder at the address — during an episode of severely racist online violence.
Trajectory of Trump attacks Since the 2016 election, Trump has repeatedly discredited independent reporting on his campaign. He has weaponised the term “fake news” and accused the media of “rigging” elections.
“The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect [Hillary Clinton] president,” he said in 2016. With hindsight, such accusations foreshadowed his false claims of election fraud in 2020, and similar preemptive claims in 2024.
His increasingly virulent attacks on journalists and news organisations are amplified by his supporters online and far-right media. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.
In 2019, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more than 11 percent of 5400 tweets posted by Trump between the date of his 2016 candidacy and January 2019 “. . . insulted or criticised journalists and outlets, or condemned and denigrated the news media as a whole”.
After being temporarily deplatformed from Twitter for breaching community standards, Trump launched Truth Social, where he continues to abuse his critics uninterrupted. But he recently rejoined the platform (now X), and held a series of campaign events with X owner and Trump backer Elon Musk.
The failed insurrection on January 6, 2021, rammed home the scale of the escalating threats facing American journalists. During the riots at the Capitol, at least 18 journalists were assaulted and reporting equipment valued at tens of thousands of dollars was destroyed.
This election cycle, Reporters Without Borders logged 108 instances of Trump insulting, attacking or threatening the news media in public speeches or offline remarks over an eight-week period ending on October 24.
Meanwhile, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has recorded 75 assaults on journalists since January 1 this year. That’s a 70 percent increase on the number of assaults captured by their press freedom tracker in 2023.
A recent survey of hundreds of journalists undertaking safety training provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that 36 percent of respondents reported being threatened with or experiencing physical violence. One-third reported exposure to digital violence, and 28 percent reported legal threats or action against them.
US journalists involved in ongoing ICFJ research have told us that they have felt particularly at risk covering Trump rallies and reporting on the election from communities hostile towards the press. Some are wearing protective flak jackets to cover domestic politics. Others have removed labels identifying their outlets from their reporting equipment to reduce the risk of being physically attacked.
And yet, our survey reveals a distinct lack of public concern about the First Amendment implications of political leaders threatening, harassing, or abusing journalists. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of Americans surveyed did not regard political attacks on journalists or news organisations as a threat to press freedom. Among them, 38 percent identified as Republicans compared to just 9 percent* as Democrats.
The anti-press playbook Trump’s anti-press playbook appeals to a global audience of authoritarians. Other political strongmen, from Brazil to Hungary and the Philippines, have adopted similar tactics of deploying disinformation to smear and threaten journalists and news outlets.
Such an approach imperils journalists while undercutting trust in facts and critical independent journalism.
History shows that fascism thrives when journalists cannot safely and freely do the work of holding governments and political leaders to account. As our research findings show, the consequences are a society accepting lies and fiction as facts while turning a blind eye to attacks on the press.
*The people identifying as Democrats in this sub-group are too few to make this a reliable representative estimate.
Note: Nabeelah Shabbir (ICFJ deputy director of research) and Kaylee Williams (ICFJ research associate) also contributed to this article and the research underpinning it. The survey was conducted by Langer Research Associates in English and Spanish. ICFJ researchers co-developed the survey and conducted the analysis.
The world is reeling with the news that the US has re-elected Donald Trump as president.
Over 71 million Americans have just said they want to put the superficial citrus-tanned billionaire, fascist, and fraudster over a Black woman in the Oval Office.
That is, the US just showed once more what an utter racist, misogynistic, white supremacist shithole it is. Not that it’s anything new for the axis of imperial plunder and terror.
Welcome to the US 2024, where two self-serving white male nepo-babies can climb to the highest office. A country where the president is a literal convicted felon and rapist. And yet, why is anyone surprised?
Trump re-election: return of the baby blimp anyone?
This is of course, the same whiny little Trump-baby who threw his toys out of the pram after the last election. The former and now re-elected president has indictment charges still hanging over his head over his post-election paddy. Specifically, these are charges for attempting to subvert the election results. Of course, his puerile disinformation campaign culminated in the January 2021 Capitol coup.
Trump was set to go on trial in March, but managed to delay it. Then, in July, the Supreme Court ruled that he had presidential immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office. However, prosecutors filed revised indictment charges, broadly along the same lines in August. However, his trial hasn’t happened yet. Now he’s president, will it? The juries out – but we’re willing to bet he’ll now get the administration’s justice department to drop the case.
Did we mention he’s also facing charges for squirreling away classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago?
Since the US failed to throw Trump out with the bath water, he can now follow through on his threat to throw out special counsel Jack Smith who’s bringing both the cases too. In October, Trump boasted in a radio interview that:
Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy … I would fire him within two seconds
So that’s that then.
A US first: a convicted felon in the Oval Office
However, he is already a convicted felon for other dodgy dealings. Most notably, in May, a New York court found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records.
It was over hush money he’d bunged to porn star Stormy Daniels.
However, Trump was set to face sentencing on 26 November. Now, at minimum, the sex pest’s new rise to the office of power will probably delay his sentencing until after his presidency. More likely, he’ll find a way to quash this too.
Another trial that judges will now have to delay? The Georgia election interference case. This revolves around Trump and his right-wing MAGA-mugs spreading lies about voter fraud in the state. Did he plot to send fake electors to Washington as well? Yes, he did. He and his 18 allies face charges for criminal enterprise over this.
Again though, the slippery billionaire bullshitter won’t be getting his comeuppance on this anytime soon. At least, not now he’s head honcho of this democratic farce once more.
Make it make sense. Trump – a convicted felon and pending indictment charges from trying to overturn the results of the previous election – could stand for president. Now he is president, he’ll make damn sure he won’t be facing justice for any of it.
A sexual predator for president
If being a fraudster and flag-shagging fascist felon weren’t enough to make you president, clearly being a literal rapist clinches it.
In May 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abusing columnist E. Jean Carroll, and fined him $5m.
And following this in August 2023, a judge ruled in a defamation trial that Carroll’s allegations Trump had raped her, were “substantially true”. In short, he’s a rapist – which tracks from the “grab em’ by the pussy” president.
But of course, where there’s the misogynistic man-baby, there’s sexual assault allegations in spades. In fact, 26 women have come forward with disgusting accounts of Trump’s sexual misconduct.
This includes his first wife, Ivana, who also made rape allegations in their divorce deposition and a former business partner who described his attempted rape.
The message Trump’s return to the Oval Office sends is that powerful men can get away with it. Women already know this and live this reality every day. However, now over 71 million Americans have told survivors of sexual assault that male violence against women and girls doesn’t matter to them.
System is set up by, and for, privileged white pricks like Trump
On the same day the electorate hit the booths, California voted to pass ‘Proposition 36’ which repealed a progressive abolitionary law. Proposition 47 had redirected funds away from the prison industrial complex and into drug and mental health treatment programmes, and homelessness prevention. But in passing Proposition 36, California is ‘trumping’ up criminal charges for drug possession and small theft. It will now also gut these community-based care programmes.
So, in the same country that just basically said a rich white male rapist and convicted criminal can be president, one state has simultaneously voted to lock up more poor, marginalised people crooked capitalists are exploiting. In fact, it was union-busting, wage thieving corporations like Walmart that sponsored the proposition. Say no more.
And speaking of exploitation, California looks like it might also have voted to continue the carceral practice of “involuntary servitude“. That is, forcing incarcerated people into mandatory work placements rather and eating up the time they could otherwise use for things that help their rehabilitation. It’s state-sanctioned slavery by any other name.
None of this is unrelated. The ‘Yes to Proposition 36’ campaign gave $1m to the Republicans a week before the election. Oh, and incarcerated people can’t vote by the way. Trump though? He can and (clearly) did put a cross in the box for his own smug Sunny D-stained mug. All while the US disenfranchises 4.4 million people with felony convictions.
This is the US writ large. Its criminal justice system, its constitution, its democratic machinery are all intrinsic vestiges of its colonial, racist slave past. The structural violence against women, and poor, disabled, Black, and Brown communities is a feature, not a flaw. Not by chance, but by design.
You don’t really have to wonder how so many US citizens could vote from Trump in this context. It’s because this patriarchal, white supremacist system was made to elevate his white, male, cishet ass. Protecting him from accountability is a function of this – and now, that’s precisely what it will do.
The exact cause of the Democrats’ catastrophic loss last night was, of course, no one thing. The leader of the incumbent party, Joe Biden, was deeply unpopular, with disapproval ratings of 56% on the eve of the election. The public felt inflation had eaten away at modest income gains. And, of course, shadowy billionaires spread false narratives and juiced social media.
Everyone is going to have their own reasons in the coming days—no doubt many based on their own priors and grievances. But one reason why the Harris campaign was bogged down from the outset, I will argue, was its moral and strategic refusal to break from the White House’s deeply unpopular position on arming and funding an ongoing genocide.
Not because the issue itself was dispositive, but because it played a central role in alienating the democratic base and compelling Harris to find votes elsewhere–a disastrous choice which appears to have lowered turnout and sowed cynicism.
As much as the pollsters and consultants in charge of Democratic campaigns may dislike the so-called “base,” the base remains an important part of social media reach, campaign volunteers, and canvassers—the evangelical core of any campaign. For Biden, when his campaign was terminal last summer, this element wasalmost entirelygone, and indeed, this fact was one of the motivating factors pushing to drive him out. But Harris—at least initially—made up a lot of ground in this regard, mostly through better vibes and slightly more sophisticated HR empathy-speak.
But feigned concern and vibes can only go so far. As the honeymoon of “brat summer” gave way to a codified campaign theme, it was clear not only was Gaza going to be ignored entirely as an issue—and the death machine would churn on without pause—but Team Harris would be leaning into a strategy of attempting to woo so-called “disaffected Republicans.” She made the centerpiece of her campaign Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of George W Bush. To the Savvy Commentators this made sense—obviously, winning over fence-sitting Republicans was the right call. And few in our media questioned whether this strategy had any downsides.
Feigned concern and vibes can only go so far.
But, of course, it did. Going to the center has costs; it’s not a perpetual vote-getting machine. A campaign that embraces conservative themes and personalities, even while throwing out progressive policies here and there, is bound to alienate voters for whom politics isn’t just a platform for endless triangulation.
To be clear: The costs could have been worth it. The votes gained from sounding like 2012 Mitt Romney may be greater than those lost to non-voting or third-party voting among the base. But this calculus was never shown. The campaign and its major PAC allies driving the strategy, namely Anita Dunn and pollster David Shor, never had to show the math on how this gambit made sense. It was simply assumed to be true, obvious, and inevitable.
It wasn’t until there were two weeks left in the election that the New York Timeseven entertained the idea that, perhaps, a campaign theme built around the progeny of a deeply unpopular war criminal who, herself, had negative favorables, was not the free real estate Dunn & Co. made it out to be. “As Vice President Kamala Harris makes a broad play to the political center,” the Times would hand-wring, “some Democrats worry that she is going too far in her bid to win over moderates who are skeptical of former President Donald J. Trump. In private—and increasingly in public as Election Day fast approaches—they say she risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”
It would be very convenient for me if what I ideologically supported—in this case, ending a genocide—also happened to be what was electorally advantageous for the campaign. The moral thing and the politically useful thing are not, of course, inherently aligned. But the inverse is also true: There’s no law of nature that says tacking right, and doubling down on a deeply unpopular and morally ruinous Gaza strategy, is the smart and savvy thing to do. The burden ought to have been on those running a $1.8 billion campaign to show how their approach made sense, but they never bothered doing this. It was just dogma—dogma few ever questioned.
One can’t really bank on activist energy, youth turnout, and base-mobilizing when those involved—while canvassing together, or running phone banks at each others apartments, or getting drinks afterwards—have to awkwardly address the fact of genocide and their candidate’s support for it.
But there’s a cruel reality behind the decision to track right: The campaign, once it hitched its wagon to Biden’s policy of unqualified support for genocide in Gaza, really had no other choice. In 2020, the Biden campaign tentatively rode the progressive wave of the George Floyd protests, anger about Trump’s racist border policies, COVID activism, and anti-war protests against Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen to energize the Democratic Party base to defeat Trump. It was, in retrospect, mostly lip service, and certainly no one at the time thought Biden a firebrand progressive. But the broader theme of the campaign was that everyone would have a seat at the table, even if the plate would most likely end up being empty.
Harris made no such pretensions, because any strategy that played to similar themes would have had to address the elephant in the room: the Democratic Party’s “ironclad” support for Israel’s elimination of a people in whole or in part. And this simply would not have worked. One can’t really bank on activist energy, youth turnout, and base-mobilizing when those involved—while canvassing together, or running phone banks at each others apartments, or getting drinks afterwards—have to awkwardly address the fact of genocide and their candidate’s support for it. This isn’t to say there was no activist or youth energy in the campaign—clearly there was. But those in charge quickly decided against making this their central theme and vote-gathering strategy, given the uncomfortable questions that would naturally arise from campaigning in these spaces. So Liz Cheney and her negative-2 favorables it was.
Countless pro-Democratic Party pundits tried to warn Harris. Polls were commissioned. The Uncommitted Movement very politely, and well within the bounds of loyal party politics, begged Harris to change course. But she refused. The risk, to her, was worth sticking to the unshakable commitment to “eliminating Hamas” no matter how many dead Palestinian children it required, or the degree to which images and reports of these dead children would fuel cynicism and create an opening for Trump to win.
To the extent grassroots energy was maintained, and the awkward fact of Gaza didn’t ruin the vibes more than it ought to have, this was made possible by an elaborate responsibility-avoidance PR regime of compartmentalization built up over months by the Biden campaign and a compliant media. Key to this compartmentalization were supposed “ceasefire talks” that the White House and campaign were allegedly “working tirelessly to secure,” but could never, alas, get across the finish line. Liberals were also soothed by the vaguely true-sounding refrain that Trump “would be worse for Gaza.” Turning every party advocate into a dead-eyed trolley problem expert triaging which genocide was morally preferable may have made cold logical sense, but it was hardly an inspiring message. Making it less compelling was that, by and large, it was not a position emanating from Palestinians themselves, as virtually every major Palestinian organization and the sole Palestinian-American in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, refused to endorse Harris.
But to an unmovable contingent of liberals—motivated by a combination of self-delusion and genuine and understandable fear of a second Trump term—it didn’t matter. They just wanted not to think about Gaza. It didn’t matter that the White House could simply assert a ceasefire whenever it wished, and the whole basis for the supposed “negotiations” was equal parts fictitious and internally inconsistent. These pat lines mostly worked.
Mostly. Aside from foreclosing on a progressive track that tapped into the base and emphasized turnout over converting fence-sitting Republicans, the fact of genocide in Gaza continued angering and alienating many voters not fooled by the “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire” PR regime and patronizing I See You, I Hear You rhetoric from Harris. Further research is needed to measure the exact extent this bitterness, this enthusiasm-suppressing support for genocide played a role in losing potential Demcoratic voters, but one thing is clear: It rotted the campaign from the beginning, made going right more or less inevitable, and loomed over every brat summer selfie, phone bank interaction, and water cooler conversation. In late July when Harris took over the Biden campaign, she could have chosen to break from the White House, she could have chosen to follow international and US law, she could have chosen progressive energy and greater support from the base, she could have chosen life. Instead she chose genocide. And this was the inevitable outcome.
I fear that by the time I go to bed democracy in the United States will be imperilled by a man, the nature of which the Founding Fathers could never envisage when creating the protective elements of the constitution.
The risks will not be to Americans alone. The world will become a different place with Donald J Trump once again becoming president.
My trepidation is tempered only by the fact that no-one can be sure he has the numbers to gain sufficient votes in the electoral college that those same founding fathers devised as a power-sharing devise between federal and state governments. They could not have foreseen how it could become the means by which a fraction of voters could determine their country’s future.
Or perhaps that is contributing to my disquiet. No-one has been able to give me the comfort of predicting a win by Kamala Harris.
In fact, none of the smart money has been ready to call it one way or the other.
The New Zealand Herald’s business editor at large, Liam Dann, predicted a Trump win the other day but his reasoning was more visceral than analytical:
Trump provides an altogether more satisfying prescription for change. He allows them to vent their anger. He taps into the rage bubbling beneath America’s polite and friendly exterior. He provides an outlet for frustration, which is much simpler than opponents to his left can offer.
That’s why he might well win. Momentum seems to be going his way.
He is a master salesman and he is selling into a market that is disillusioned with the vague promises they’ve been hearing from mainstream politicians for generations.
Heightened anxiety
Few others — including his brother Corin, who is in the US covering the election for Radio New Zealand — have been willing to make the call and today dawned no clearer.
That may be one reason for my heightened anxiety . . . the lack of certainty one way or the other.
All of our major media outlets have had staff in the States for the election (most with some support from the US government) and each has tried to tap into the “mood of the people”, particularly in the swing states. Each has done a professional job, but it has been no easy task and, to be honest, I have no idea what the real thinking of the electorate might be.
One of my waking nightmares is that the electorate isn’t thinking at all. In which case, Liam Dann’s reading of the entrails might be as good a guide as any.
I have attempted to cope with the avalanche of reportage, analysis and outright punditry from CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. I have tried to get a more detached view from the BBC, Guardian, and (God help me) Daily Mail. I have made my head hurt playing with The Economist’s poll prediction models.
I am no closer to predicting a winner than anyone else.
However, I do know what scares me.
If Donald Trump takes up residence in the White House again, the word “freedom” will lose its true meaning and become a captured phrase ring-fencing what the victor and his followers want.
Validating disinformation
“Media freedom” will validate disinformation and make truth harder to find. News organisations that seek to hold Trump and a compliant Congress to account will be demonised, perhaps penalised.
As president again, Trump could rend American society to a point where it may take decades for the wound to heal and leave residual feelings that will last even longer. That will certainly be the case if he attempts to subvert the democratic process to extend power beyond his finite term.
I worry for the rest of the world, trying to contend with erratic foreign policies that put the established order in peril and place the freedom of countries like Ukraine in jeopardy. I dread the way in which his policies could empower despots like Vladimir Putin. By definition, as a world power, the United States’ actions affect all of us — and Trump’s influence will be pervasive.
You may think my fears could be allayed by the possibility that he will not return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Were Kamala Harris facing any other candidate, that would certainly be the case. However, Donald Trump is not any other candidate and he has demonstrated an intense dislike of losing.
I am alarmed by the possibility that, if he fails to get the required 270 electoral votes, Donald Trump could again cry “voter fraud” and light the touch paper offered to him by the likes of the Proud Boys. They had a practice run on January 6, 2021. If there is a next time, it could well be worse.
Sometimes, my wife accuses me of unjustified optimism. When I think of the Americans I have met and those I know well, I recall that the vast majority of them have had a reasonable amount of common sense. Some have had it in abundance. I can only hope that across that nation common sense prevails today.
I am more than a little worried, however, that on this occasion my wife might be right.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary — written before the election results started coming in — was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
The editorial, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president in the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.
“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.”
The dismissal of Trump by The Times was in contrast to two other major US newspapers, both owned by billionaires — The Washington Post and the LA Times — which last month controversially refused to make an editorial call.
“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead.” The brief editorial in The New York Times on Saturday, Image: NYT screenshot APR
The criteria for winning a presidential debate is very simple: the candidate who fumbles less, makes less mistakes, avoids too many verbal gaffes, etc., who is able to present a rosy picture for the future, and, who believes in people’s “ambition, the aspirations, [and] the dreams,” is the winner — provided all bullshitting is done with a serious face.
However, it’s entirely a different matter whether that person has any genuine solutions to the problems majority of the people face.
Exactly eight years ago, first time in US history of 240 years, a woman had a chance to reach the highest office — Hillary Clinton won popular votes by almost 3 million votes, but that rare opportunity was snatched away by the Electoral College. The victory went to Donald Trump, a slowly evolving fascist. It is to be remembered that Clinton was not that woman progressives have been waiting for.
This time, another woman, Kamala Harris, is in the race for presidency. Her opponent is none other than Trump. Harris was not in the competition but got her opportunity when the Democratic establishment realized, after the Biden/Trump debate, that the horse they have been trying to steady for three and a half years cannot any more stand on its own, and could give up any moment.
Thus, Joe Biden was pushed aside with a tribute that he left the race for a second term out of patriotic duty. Everyone knows that almost no one gives up power, whether s/he is an authoritarian or a “democrat,” without a rough push.
Kamala is the in-girl
Kamala is the in-girl — so many love and support her, not only most of the Democrats but also some prominent Republicans! Within 36 hours of Biden’s decision not to run, and his nominating of Harris as his successor, Harris campaign raised $100 million that jumped to $310 in less than two weeks, with new donors contributing two-thirds of the amount. By September 6, the number had nearly doubled to $615 million. Andrew Byrnes, a tech policy strategist and Harris fundraiser, said the amount he raised for Kamala in one week was double the amount he raised for Biden in a whole year.
Trump is no match for Harris in fundraising despite the fact that his campaign received $100 million from Miriam Adelson who likes Trump so much that she said “Book of Trump”1 should be added to the Bible, i.e. the Old Testament. Trump allied PAC also got $150 million from Timothy Mellon. Trump’s equally nasty buddy Elon Musk has contributed $76 million.
Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Democratic Party. Most Democrats never tire of ridiculing him. This enables them and the Democrat-leaning news media to keep their supporters busy in Trump’s antics and eccentricities and thus saves the party from answering hard questions.
MSNBC is also known as MSDNC or Democratic National Committee mouthpiece. MSNBC is a cheerleader for the Democrats. Biden and Harris regularly watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “A Jacobin analysis of six months of its Gaza coverage reveals an unflagging role cheering on Israel’s genocide.”
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire, is backing Kamala because he wants to get rid of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Billionaire Mark Cuban endorsed Harris too for the same reason: dump Khan.
She is an accomplished leader, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country forward.
Ron Conway, a billionaire, has asked tech community to join hands to salvage “our democracy” by getting behind Kamala, whom he has known “for decades” to prevent Trump’s reentry into White House. Conway says she is an “advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met.”
Melinda French Gates ($13 million), Reed Hastings (Netflix), George Soros and Alex Soros, Vinod Khosla, Jeffrey Katzenberg (former president of Walt Disney Studios), Bill Gates ($50 million), and other billionaires numbering 81 (or more) have joined the Kamala bandwagon, whereas, Trump has 52 billionaires with him.
Billionaires’ bribes count. Harris, who was with Biden’s plan of raising capital gains tax from 23.8% to 44.6%, opted for 33%, instead.
“Her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy. … [She] ensure[s] American businesses can compete and win in the global market. … she will strive to give every American the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”
These billionaire and multimillionaire business people have nothing to do with democracy. The main thrust of the letter is US “businesses can compete and win in the global market,” under Harris, that is, the US government either diplomatically or through military force opens up foreign markets for them like US Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open up for business in 1853. The other fallacy is that Kamala will try to provide people with “the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”
Many US presidents, have warned about the increasing corporate power and its harmful effect on country. Thomas Jefferson had hoped in 1816 to “crush” the corporate power which was challenging government and defying laws. Instead the corporations crushed the government power and as journalist and novelist Theodore Dreiser puts it, “the corporations are the government.” (China is a capitalist country but the government controls the capitalists; this is anathema to the US; it wants China to go the US way.)
Women are elated with Harris entering the race for two main reasons: one is that someone from their gender has a chance to win and the other is Harris’ support for abortion. Sadly, most of these women have no Palestinian and Lebanese women and children on their mind.
Porn actors, some of them, are spending over $100,000 in seven swing states in support of Harris because they fear Trump presidency and Project 2025 will ban the porn industry. Harris should thank them but should ask them to stop violence and degradation of women in many of their videos.
Jeff Bridges extended his support to Kamala who is “just so certainly our girl.” He proudly proclaimed: “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris.” Bridges was a part of White Dudes for Harris Zoom call; over 180,000 joined in and raised about $4 million for her campaign. The invitation to join in was based on: “Are you a white guy who believes in science, human rights, and democracy?”
There have been several similar events: such as Latinas for Harris; White Women: Answer the Call; the Black Women Zoom; Caribbean-Americans for Harris; South Asian Women for Harris; Disabled Voters for Harris; Black Men for Harris; Win With Black Women; and South Asian Men for Harris.
Salman Rushdie, an author, joined the South Asian Men for Harris virtual meet and declared he’s in for Harris “1,000 per cent.”3 One could understand Rushdie’s worry as a writer because if Trump wins and turns dictator, of which there are great chances, then he and his ministers, like Elon Musk, won’t tolerate any kind of criticism. The Kamala government would let them write in small publications and press which have limited reach and do not disturb or threaten the ruling class and the system.
Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is for Kamala too because “She is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”
Billionaire Swift resides in her own bubble and is unaware that, until now the US has been led by calm leaders, but most people have achieved nothing but decline.
In 1982, when the Forbes 400 list was initiated, one could join the list with $100 million ($300 million in today’s money). There were only 13 billionaires then. Today, you need eleven times that amount or $3.3 billion to be one of 400 wealthy in US. So, 400 billionaires made it to the list but 415 individuals couldn’t make it, including Oprah Winfrey who has $3 billion, less than the required $3.3 billion.
What about the rest of the people? A whopping 37% of people in US have less than $400 in savings!
Singer-songwriter Beyonce joined Kamala at a rally in Houston to extend her support. Many celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis, George Clooney,4 and Sarah Jessica Parker (who is voting for Kamala for 31 things, including “For our military, past and currently serving” but not for peace or ceasefire in Gaza).
Dick Cheney, the Vice President in George W. Bush regime and one of the major architects of the Iraq War, a Republican, has also announced that he’ll vote for Kamala Harris.
“He [Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.” “He can never be trusted with power again.”
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution.” “That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”
Liz Cheney, a Republican and Dick Cheney’s daughter, supports Harris too, and joined her campaign events thrice in early October. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , the progressive supporters and Democrats like Harris, are campaigning for her but have not been invited to appear with Harris, as yet.
Trump called Dick Cheney (whose approval rating, when he left office, was mere 13%) a “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars,” and blasted both father- daughter duo on his TruthSocial account.
“… Her father, Dick, was a leader of our ridiculous journey into the Middle East, where Trillions of Dollars were spent, millions of people were killed – and for what? NOTHING! Well, today, these two fools, because the Republican Party no longer wants them, endorsed the most Liberal Senator in U.S. Senate, further Left than even Pocahontas or Crazy Bernie Sanders – Lyin’ Kamala Harris. What a pathetic couple that is, both suffering gravely from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Good Luck to them both!!!”
Trump is correct about Dick Cheney. He was George H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary when US went to war against Iraq and destroyed that country. Dick Cheney was Vice President of Bush Jr., when US devastated Afghanistan in 2001, and again went to war against Iraq, in 2003.
238 staffers from four previous Republican governments and many more, including John Negroponte, one of the criminal minds of US imperialism, endorsed Kamala. Barbara Pierce Bush (daughter of former Republican president George W. Bush) is supporting Kamala with the hope the US moves “forward and protect women’s rights.”
Why so many wealthy and powerful people have gotten behind Kamala? The reasons, as we have seen vary, but the most important one is that Kamala will maintain the statue quo. She’s not going to make any drastic changes, but just the cosmetic type.
On the other hand, many rich, and not very rich, in the ruling class are scared of Trump’s unpredictable nature. The wealthy class may benefit much more under Trump than under Harris. In 2017, Trump lowered the corporate tax rate from (Obama government’s) 35% to 21% and corporations benefited a lot. (Biden raised it to 28% and not the 35% it used to be during his vice presidency.)
Trump may concentrate on domestic issues rather than waging foreign wars; but, then if something triggers him, or he is incited by his aides, or perceives a threat from foreign leader(s), then he may go unhinged.
Biden praised Liz Cheney’s “courage” to appear with Harris. “I admire her. Her dad and I worked together a long, long time.” Biden, like Cheneys, loves violence and war. Republicans and Democrats working together can screw the people within and without the US. It becomes so much easier to wage a war against “foreign enemy” when both parties are working together.
Trump will probably do within the US, what the US has been doing to the world for several decades. He will unleash the army on his opponents and critics. Here is Trump:
During the presidential debate in September 2024, Trump falsely charged Haitians residing in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs … the cats … the pets of the people that live there.”
On October 27, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist fun of Latino people by saying “These Latinos, they love making babies,” he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” and repeated the lie about Haitians eating pets.
Donald Trump and his team, it seems, is striving to lose the election. Despite that, the polls show a tight race between Trump and Harris.
“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died — I get that, but…” “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians, if you want to defend yourself.”
Harris is very popular, was able to amass great amount of money, got lot of support but somehow the polls — which may be wrong , as often happens — are not favoring her. Who knows, as investigative reporter Dave Lindorff points out, Harris could win if she gets “secret women’s vote” in rural Pennsylvania similar to what happened in Kansas in 2022 regarding the banning of abortion referendum. Julia Roberts encouraged women to exercise their right to choose, within the privacy of the election booth:
This is an election where voters will decide between possible drastic changes that result in fascism, versus, maintaining the unjust pro-war inegalitarian status quo.
However, those who are fed up with the two main lesser and greater evils, there are two other candidates to choose from who are anti-war and pro-common people: Jill Stein of Green Party and Claudia De la Cruz of Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).6
1 Miriam Adelson wrote in her paper Israel Hayom: “Would it be too much to pray for a day when the Bible gets a ‘Book of Trump,’ much like it has a ‘Book of Esther’ celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from ancient Persia? “Until that is decided, let us, at least, sit back and marvel at this time of miracles for Israel, for the United States, and for the whole world.”
2 In June 2024, Kamala Harris joined by Sandberg screened Sandberg’s documentary Screams Before Silence at the White House. The film was about alleged rapes by Hamas members — a long debunked theory. See Briahna Joy Gray’s detailed expose about the entire issue.
3 Once accepted by US mainstream, which Rushdie has been, he toned down or ignored the crimes of the US, and its ally, Israel. There was a time when Rushdie was for the Palestinian cause; he interviewed Professor Edward Said, the most prominent Palestinian in the Western world then. Last year, Rushdie repeated the Western line of argument labeling Hamas “as a “terrorist organization.” One should have asked Rushdie as to how the occupied people should fight their occupiers.
4 In March 2012, George Clooney was arrested in Washington DC while protesting in front of Sudan’s embassy for violence in South Sudan. He then boasted: “We are the antigenocide paparazzi.” But nowadays Clooney is careful what he says: “I’m very careful not to use words like genocide, occupation, colonialism, open-air prisons — despite believing they do accurately describe what’s happening in Gaza. Those put a target on your back. I also don’t use the word unprovoked. A lot of people say October 7 was “unprovoked.” Well, it’s a massive chicken-and-egg situation, this back-and-forth. Also, I didn’t know the word cease-fire would be such a problem! I would hope we don’t want wars!”
It’s a tragic sign of the times when little introductory narrative is needed to set the near-apocalyptic scene that exists in Gaza today. The world watches from a distance as Israel’s onslaught continues and the civilian death toll escalates to unimaginable levels. Now, the nightmare that Palestinian survivors are currently enduring is about to take on another dimension.
The prediction made one year ago of a man-made famine is about to be realised, though in truth, Gazans have suffered food insecurity for decades. Despite a heavy dependency on international agencies for humanitarian assistance, access to food and safe water supplies has repeatedly been denied due to blockades imposed by Israel. As is the trend in such crises, women and children are particularly affected by malnutrition. Anaemia and other manifestations of nutrient deficiency have led to adverse effects on maternal and foetal health. Miscarriage and birth defect rates are high. Suboptimal nutritional status also impairs immune function and the ability of mother and child to recover from disease.
This dire baseline has only amplified the number of civilian losses caused by violence. The proportion of deaths in Gaza attributed to trauma-related injury versus that from malnutrition is hard to define; in many cases, it’s part of the same story. Malnutrition significantly affects the ability to recover from internal injuries, limb loss, and surgery, thereby increasing the risk of infection, sepsis and death.
Obtaining accurate quantitative information on injury, disease and deaths is essential. It draws global attention, and allows humanitarian organisations to focus their resources. The tricky bit of course is that over- or under-inflation of rates can occur for political gain. Regardless, even Israeli officials admit that the Palestinian Ministry of Health are the only governmental body actively collating decent morbidity and mortality data. There are pro-Israel lobbyists who are still quick to dismiss those figures, citing that a third of the 38,000 deaths declared earlier this summer were unverifiable. However, the reality of real-time assessment in this war zone is that many of the dead are still buried under rubble. Formal ID is impossible: collected statistics unavoidably include household losses reported by family members. Any remaining deniers of data coming out of Gaza should consider satellite image analysis performed by the City University of New York and Oregon State University. Almost 100,000 buildings had been destroyed in the first two months of the current crisis, most of which were in densely populated residential areas. The World Health Organisation and United Nations have also found mortality rates quoted by the Palestinian Ministry of Health to be reliable during earlier critical periods in Gaza’s history.
Malnutrition prevalence from (neutral) aid agency field and clinic data also paints a progressively disturbing picture. In March, nutrition monitoring by UNICEF and others highlighted that around 1 in 20 children attending health centres and in shelters were at a life-threatening stage of severe wasting. In addition, over 30 percent of children under 2 years of age were classified as acutely malnourished; double that of three months earlier. By June, major nutritional concerns were no longer primarily restricted to the north. Almost 3,000 children in southern Gaza were in need of intervention to manage the effects of moderate to severe malnutrition, yet were prevented from attending clinics due to ongoing conflict. Spring and late summer saw some alleviation of food insecurity, as more convoys were able to cross the border and distribute supplies. Then September marked the month with the lowest cross-border transfer and distribution of food and bottled water.
The UN continues to monitor the situation closely. Is Gaza now ‘officially’ in famine? To meet the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) definition, at least 20 percent of the population should have significant lack of access to food; acute malnutrition prevalence should be at least 30 percent; and mortality should be at or above 2 deaths per 10,000 people daily. At the time of writing, forty-three thousand are dead. The vast majority of the surviving population are now displaced, and one in five are facing “catastrophic levels of denied access to nutrition” (another IPC classification). Three-quarters of all crop fields have been destroyed. Access to food and safe water supplies, medical care and the availability of proper sanitation continues to be impossible in most situations. As the UN have stressed, Gaza sits on the very brink of famine. Without an immediate ceasefire, this will be a forgone conclusion.
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
For one moment I was concerned I might not make the deadline for this latest, Labour budget-themed instalment of Swindon’s Sunday Sermon. You can just imagine the queues out there, now a pint of San Miguel only costs a bargain £6.49, rather than an extortionate £6.50.
What an offer. Buy 649 pints of beer and get your 650th pint for free! By the time you’ve made your way through that lot you’ll be too shitfaced to realise you are three-and-a-half grand poorer and searching for a liver transplant on the dark web.
I kind of get the increase in tobacco price. If you need to sell a fucking lung to buy a pack of ciggies, you may as well give up.
Labour: a £2.50 tax hike every time Reeves said ‘working people’
The first Labour economic statement since 2010 was the Budget that saw the second largest increase in taxes in UK history.
The surprise ‘£22 billion black hole’, which Keir Starmer once thought was a new ride at Alton Towers for him to try on yet another freebie family day out, has been stuffed to its very core with around £40 billion worth of tax hikes.
Interestingly enough, the £40 billion figure worked out at around £2.50 for each time chancellor Rachel Reeves and one of her virtually unknown colleagues blurted out the words “working people”, over the space of an eight-hour news cycle. Roughly.
Why on earth are these freeloading red stains on the fabric of society given the opportunity to define what a working person is or isn’t?
May I remind you, they are millionaires, multi-millionaires, landlords, non-executive directors, bankers, and economists dictating to you what an honest day’s work should look like.
Thoroughly dishonest
Thoroughly dishonest Reeves is never backwards in coming forwards when it comes to talking about her time, coining-it-in as an economist.
Following three junior positions with the Bank of England — where one of her former colleagues described her as “fucking useless”, according to some malignant right-wing gossipy blog site — Reeves claims she moved to the Bank of Scotland to work as an economist.
But this claim was untrue. Reeves worked in some “mundane support department”, so say more than one of her former HBOS colleagues.
So let me get this right. A “fucking useless” liar that’s spent a career predicting the state of the economy as accurately as I tend to predict the calories in a slice of chocolate cake, wants you to trust her with your money because she helped Dave in IT get Windows 2005 installed on his PC?
Despite the promise of “change”, this was a typical capitalist economy budget.
Why does this Labour Party government expect small businesses to pick up an eye-watering £25 billion tab, while not having anything to say about Google and Amazon picking and choosing what they do or don’t pay in tax?
I’ll tell you exactly why Labour backtracked on hiking the Digital Services tax, introduced in 2020, from 2% to 10%.
Sound the freebie klaxon
Now is a very good time to sound the freebie claxon.
Let’s go back to August last year when then-shadow secretary of state Jonathan Reynolds and Rachel Reeves called for an increase in the tax to 10%, claiming the extra income would be used to fund a tax cut for small businesses.
Google’s charm offensive was just too much for the gluttonous Labour Party. Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant — also known as his wife — and Starmer’s political director all attended the Glastonbury festival as esteemed guests of the streaming platform YouTube, which is owned by Google. This generous little ‘no strings attached’ package, which included accommodation and ‘hospitality’, was worth £3,377.
And you thought Oasis ticket prices were a bit steep? Who even is Reynolds? The bloke looks like a haunted pencil, not a secretary of state.
Anyway, the Glastonbury festival came to an end, and within just one day reports emerged of Labour’s Digital Services tax hike being scrapped.
Reynolds wasn’t the only beneficiary of Google’s blatant bribery.
Keir Starmer himself was treated to a £380 dinner at the World Economic Forum gathering, and Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards, which Powell put through the register of members interests at £1,170.
Not in the service of us
In total, openDemocracy estimated the Labour Party pocketed around £10,000 worth of freebies in exchange for the axing of a policy that was worth around £3 billion to the British public.
The Labour Party isn’t “at the service of working people”, it is a puppet of the corporate elite that refuses to take on vested interests, such as the big tech corporations which have already had it ridiculously easy under successive Tory administrations.
Tax them Starmer. For the love of god, just fucking tax them.
Funnily enough, that £3 billion loss to the British public might even be enough to give the country with a bit of a Nazi problem and the stand-up comedian president that “£3 billion a year, as long as it takes”, that chancellor Reeves announced during her economic statement.
Incredible isn’t it? Reeves demands nearly all government departments slash their budgets by 2% next year, while throwing at least £15 billion over the next parliament into a proxy war that even the most dimwitted of Starmerites realise is an obscene and unnecessary waste of your cash.
In keeping with Tory tradition, Britain’s first woman chancellor confirmed that Labour WILL introduce the Tory changes to the disgraceful and demeaning Work Capability Assessment, making disabled people the primary target for her attempt to slash the welfare bill by £3.4 billion.
I mean, why bother hassling Bezos for a bit more tax when you can force sick and disabled British people into unsuitable, low paid work, which can and will have devastating consequences on their physical and mental health?
Labour: steal £3bn from disabled people to send to Ukraine
The Labour manifesto, as unambitious and ambiguous as it was, made absolutely no mention whatsoever of stealing £3 billion from some of Britain’s most vulnerable people and sending it to Ukraine to fight someone else’s war.
The only foreign aid budget that needs slashing is the kind of aid that not only kills and maims human beings, but also leaves Britain entirely complicit in a foreign state’s aggression. This is not a brush that a majority of us wish to be tarred by.
This first budget from the Labour government in fourteen years could be thrown in with a majority of the previous fourteen budgets and barely anyone would blink an eye, because while the name of the party in charge of the country may well be different, the rancid and corrupt neoliberal ideology remains the same.
This story was co-published with In These Times on November 1, 2024.
Disclosure: As 501(c)(3) nonprofits, The Real News Network and In These Times do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
I went home to say goodbye to my grandpa for the last time.
His body may still be alive when we make it back to California for Christmas, and I may get to see him again. But the bulk of his self, body and mind, will be gone. When it comes to the jovial, hilarious, folksy, loving, complicated man I’ve always known, this last trip home was goodbye.
Having experienced both, I can say that losing someone all at once feels very different than watching parts of them gradually disappear. Alzheimer’s is one of nature’s cruelest causes of death for human beings, and losing a loved one to it comes with a unique mix of expected tortures and unexpected blessings.
Alzheimer’s is one of nature’s cruelest causes of death for human beings, and losing a loved one to it comes with a unique mix of expected tortures and unexpected blessings.
I got to be with him on his 85th birthday, to sit with him, and my sister, and our parents. My brothers got to be with him that week too. He still remembered us and loved us as he always has. I got to tell him how much I love him and how lucky I am to have him as a grandpa, and how I wouldn’t be who I am without him. I am so damn grateful for that. It’s a lot worse when you don’t get the chance to say what’s in your heart and spend the rest of your life regretting it.
And yet, I knew what I was saying wouldn’t stick. He wouldn’t remember those last days together like I would, and do, but it was still him there, with us, in the present of those moments. And he was happy to be with us — tired, eroding, but happy. And I was happy to be with him. I couldn’t get caught up dropping pennies down a well, hoping the things we were saying to him would reach some deeper core of his memory, and risk missing the genuine, luminous smile rippling over his face again and again as we sat there talking and listening.
These were small blessings amid an altogether devastating time for our family. And I am grateful for every second we shared together. Sitting on the bed that had been moved to the living room, I was torturously aware of how precious and fleeting and final every one of those seconds was as they passed, and I didn’t take a single one for granted.
That is also why, over the course of those last two days, I became so volcanically, quietly enraged about the fact that so much of our time was consumed by repeatedly talking about Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Donald Trump.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin visits “Fox & Friends” on Oct. 10, 2024. The Supreme Court approved Youngkin’s effort to purge thousands of voters from Virginia’s rolls shortly before the general election to root out alleged “noncitizens.” John Lamparski/Getty Images
The content of those conversations is for the family’s ears only — I won’t get into specifics here. I want to honor Gramps and celebrate the beautiful life he’s lived, to show him nothing but respect and love and support in this most vulnerable stage of his life, not reduce him to the disease that’s killing him or the things it makes him say. Suffice it to say that, as the hours passed away over those two days of conversation, reflection, laughter, and silence, rehashing the same roundabout discussion concerning the fate of the country and the only “news” channels telling the “truth,” I got to see up close how the right-wing fear machine preys on the human brain, especially when its defenses are down.
No short-term memory, no connection to the world outside his home that wasn’t filtered through a screen. A lot of love for the people he knows, a lot of fear about the future his grand- and great-grandchildren will have to face. I saw in my dying grandpa, sitting on that armchair, right-wing media’s ideal viewer.
You know those Bill Murray-coded movies where an old guy redeems his failures and stumbles as a father by loving the hell out of his grandkids and having a blast with them in his golden years? We lived it, and the real thing is so much better than the movies. To me, this oak of a man — a man who grew up dirt poor in segregated Charlotte, N.C., before hitchhiking cross country to California at age 14, becoming a father when he was still just a kid himself, making a lot of mistakes and leaving a lot of wounds — will always be the folksy charmer, joker and storyteller who would corral all his grandsons in the summer, the white ones and the brown ones alike, and take us to different theme parks and waterparks all over Southern California. Those will always be some of the best memories of my life.
I got to see up close how the right-wing fear machine preys on the human brain, especially when its defenses are down.
Gramps was always there. Always at basketball games and birthday parties, always encouraging us and being our biggest cheerleader, next to our parents. He’s a constant, warm presence in my memories from home for a reason, and I see so much of his imprint on the person I am and the life I have today. He has always been a wonderful, loving, funny and often brutally honest grandpa. We forged a strong sense of who we are and where we come from through Gramps and his stories. Any gifts I have as a storyteller, I inherited from Gramps. And when he does take his final rest, his stories and his memory will live on in us, and it will forever be a blessing.
My mom always jokingly said that we are “southern-fried Mexicans,” and we’re proud of it — I still love eating scrapple with eggs and salsa. And Gramps was our living connection to those family roots in poor white North Carolina, where he was born at the tail end of the Depression. Everything and everyone else before that were still just black-and-white photographs and stories of stories in our child minds. But Gramps was walking, talking history; his stories and tall tales of when he was our age captivated us. From the story about getting kicked off a city bus after defiantly giving up his seat to a tired, elderly Black woman, to our favorite yarn about the deadly “whip snake,” a folklore beast of the southern wild that would supposedly put its tail in its mouth to form itself into a wheel, roll towards its prey at top speed, and then use the same tail to whip them to death. We believed in the whip snake for an embarrassingly long time, probably because we just loved hearing Gramps tell the story. On this last trip, my sister MacKenna and I asked him where the story came from before saying our goodbyes. Was it part of some deep regional lore? A family fable passed down through the generations? “No,” he laughed. “I must have just made that shit up in my head.”
People are complicated, life is complicated. Gramps is too. And he’s lived a hell of a life: Growing up with parents who couldn’t read and twelve siblings; working his first job shagging balls at the golf course of a local country club when he was six, to later cutting trees in the Bayou with his brothers to make way for the phone lines, to working at a steel mill in California before making a career in real estate; meeting my grandma, Jeannie, getting married when he was 17, raising my mom, Regina, and my uncles Mark and Evan, getting divorced, remarrying years later to Mary, a truly lovely and loving woman, then losing her to cancer; playing and loving golf throughout his life; bragging about his grandkids to anyone who would listen; helplessly watching the 2008 crash and the Recession hit his family so hard and wipe away so much of the world and industry he knew; seeing his siblings and former wives and best friends pass away one by one as old age and increasingly severe health ailments ate away at his independence and freedom of movement like termites.
I’ve always known that people can have many different reasons for supporting Trump, and that Trump supporters can come in many different forms, because I have them in my own family. I never believed that the Trump phenomenon could be explained away by reducing it to the most caricaturesque qualities and racist, sexist, xenophobic, authoritarian tendencies of the true-believing “deplorables.” Gramps, the man I know and love, the man you’ve been reading about here, is a Trump supporter. My dad, Jesus, a Mexican immigrant and U.S. citizen who lost everything in the Great Recession, including the house we grew up in, voted for Trump in 2016.
I never believed that the Trump phenomenon could be explained away by reducing it to the most caricaturesque qualities.
Gramps used to be a Democrat until Reagan, and his politics, as long as I’ve known him, have always been a mixture of mainstream Republican Party and Fox News views, love and pride and concern for his family and country, and a personal philosophy of live and let live, work hard, have a good time, don’t be an asshole, and enjoy people. (Gramps loves talking to people, which is what made him such a great realtor, and he is also a gigantic flirt by nature.) But the Trump effect has been slowly reshaping his worldview for a while. And I use the word “worldview” deliberately — how he sees the world at large from his physical and social life-world in Southern California — because I have noticed a direct correlation between his heightened fear of the outside world and the state of the country, his drift towards Trump’s fascist politics, and the eight-year process of his life-world shrinking down to the one living room he’s in now.
A protester outside the NewsCorp building in Manhattan, where Fox News is based, on March 12, 2024. Activist groups held weekly protests here to draw attention to the company’s xenophobic rhetoric. Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
“Good god,” Adams said, and he thought, There are millions of them down there. … What would it be like to have the earth open and millions of humans, imprisoned subsurface for fifteen years, believing in a radioactive waste above, with missiles and bacteria and rubble and warring armies — the demesne system would sustain a death blow and the great park over which he flappled twice daily would become a densely populated civilization once more, not quite as before the war, but close enough. Roads would reappear. Cities.
And — ultimately there would be another war.
That was the rationale. The masses had egged their leaders on to war in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop. But once the masses were out of the way, stuffed down below into antiseptic tanks, the ruling elite of both East and West were free to conclude a deal …
—Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Even as a diehard fan of Philip K. Dick’s novels, I admit I was disappointed in The Penultimate Truth when I first read it around eight years ago. The writing is still gorgeous, biting, acidic, and the characters are still fascinating and morosely thought-provoking. But the basic plot, the whole Plato-infused Cold War allegory, felt way too heavy-handed for me.
“In the future,” the back of the book reads, “most of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, producing weapons for the nuclear war they’ve fled. Constantly bombarded by patriotic propaganda, the citizens of these industrial anthills believe they are waiting for the day when the war will be over and they can return above ground. But when Nick St. James, president of one anthill, makes an unauthorized trip to the surface, what he finds is more shocking than anything he could imagine.”
Spoiler alert: What Nick finds is that the war ended years ago and that he and his fellow anthill-dwellers have been lied to by “the ruling elite of both East and West,” kept underground, fearful, working diligently week after week, year after year, to produce robots and munitions to fight a war above ground that they never see with their own eyes. Carefully curated and fabricated depictions of the world on fire above are fed to people in their bunker worlds below on giant TV screens. “Everyone … [gazed] at the floor-to-ceiling windscreen. This was their window — their sole window — on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.”
Maybe in the pre-Internet days of manufactured consent, I thought, when cable TV was the dominant medium, Dick’s allegory would have more reality-explaining power. But our twenty-first-century world is too open, information is too freely accessible, and the real is too hard to hide from people to imagine the kind of control The Penultimate Truth’s villains have on their subterranean subjects. Not only have our surveilling, whistleblower-persecuting government and Big Tech oligarchs proven me wrong about that, but I also failed to grasp how Dick’s allegory would become even more sinisterly relevant 60 years later in a hyper-digitalized, techno-feudal society. By their own willful accord and through political manipulation and technological conditioning, people in the digital age have sequestered themselves in their own virtual underground anthills, enveloped in distinct, preferentially curated, and increasingly incompatible visions and experiences of reality.
“Everyone … [gazed] at the floor-to-ceiling windscreen. This was their window—their sole window—on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.”
I was there in the virtual anthill with Gramps, seeing what he sees, seeing what the world outside his window looks like through the Dickian TV screen that only plays two channels: FOX News and OAN. It was very different from the world I see. Immigrants, the “trans agenda,” “radical left lunatics,” secularism — all are hastening the demise of America from within, and all are pieces in a larger country-destroying plot orchestrated by Democrats and “woke-agenda”-pushing elites. I’m betting you know someone who lives in that same anthill. And you may be living in another one yourself, a different one. When you, like me, look to screens to access the world beyond the physical realm of your daily life-world, depending on what apps you use, what accounts you follow, what channels you watch, what sites you trust, what podcasts you listen to, etc., you may be seeing and imagining a fundamentally different world to the one the person sitting next to you on the bus sees.
What Dick understood 60 years ago, and what I think a lot of us who are not on the right need to remember in this perilous moment, is that people’s politics can and always do flow downstream from their perception of the world they believe they’re living in. That has always been true about us. It’s as true now as it was when people supported Red Scare McCarthyism or the Stalinist purges; when people in Germany supported the Nazis’ genocide back then or people in Israel support the Zionists’ genocide today; when people across this ever-expanding settler nation supported the enslavement of Black people and the extermination of Indigenous populations living on this land while it was all happening in front of them; when people believed their neighbors were witches and supported their executions. The darkest sides and most inhumane capabilities of human politics tend to come out when they seem like the natural, necessary, permissible, and accomplishable solution that will ostensibly address a real crisis people are feeling in their daily life-worlds, and that will eradicate an evil that a critical mass of people believe to be real and believe to be the source of that crisis.
Supporters watch and cheer as former President Donald Trump speaks at an evening rally on Sept. 18, 2024 in Uniondale, New York. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
That has always been the missing piece, in my opinion, when it comes to our pundits’ collective attempts to understand how this or that group of people could be driven to embrace Trump ever since the joke and the nightmare both became reality eight years ago. For certain sections of Trump’s base, the hateful ideology and manifestly fascist sides of MAGA are what attracts them, but that’s not what has drawn in so many other people who genuinely believe they’re not inclined or susceptible to fascist politics. The desire for fascist politics and the acceptance of fascist “solutions” to society’s ills develops and seeps in over time. It follows from people becoming convinced that it’s the obvious and necessary response to the right-wing presentation of reality that’s recycled on their screens over and over, hardening into the contact lens through which someone like my grandpa squintingly, fearfully observes the world beyond their daily physical sight and social connections. The same lens through which Trump and his promises appear to be the obvious and necessary answer to the crumbling world that Trump depicts at his rallies and that right-wing media and right-wing-preferenced newsfeeds redepict day after day.
What I have observed firsthand with Gramps for years, and what I suspect is true for many, many people like him, is that the worldview-defining capacity of the Trumpian lens increases dramatically the more people’s physical and social life-worlds shrink and they become more dependent on that lens to be “their window — their sole window — on the above world.” This is not a new phenomenon: American capitalist society is always pushing us in antisocial directions, making us feel more alienated from one another, and people’s social life-worlds have been shrinking for decades. (Robert Putnam’s analysis in Bowling Alone still remains one of the starkest reminders of this.) But these trends went into hyperdrive when Covid hit: People have gotten older and sicker and, thus, more fearful and resentful, their physical and social life-worlds have gotten smaller, and two years of social distancing and quarantine conditions provided a unique historic opportunity to have more of their connections to and perceptions of the outside world mediated through screens.
But I also saw within him an ongoing struggle between this world-swallowing darkness and the lights that temporarily bring him back: direct social contact with people he loves and trusts, love from his family, memories of happiness.
Those changes weren’t temporary and they didn’t simply reverse when the decision was made for us that COVID was “over” — they have lingered. Trump and the right-wing media machine have seized upon this situation and exploited it masterfully, and in their dark vision for what needs to come next, they have provided false hope to a lot of broken people who want one thing above all else on the other side: to return to a time when they recall feeling whole.
Gramps will never see that hope realized, but he will die believing it’s still coming.
I want to be very clear: I know my sick grandpa is a unique example, and I’m not saying everyone who supports Trump and watches right-wing media will end up like him. But he is the ideal subject, the perfect captive audience, the model for the right’s ideal world-viewer that Trump and right-wing media are pushing their followers to become more like. And more of us are closer to being where he is than we care to acknowledge.
But I also saw within him, and I experienced sitting in that small living room he’s now stuck in, an ongoing struggle between this world-swallowing darkness and the lights that temporarily bring him back: direct social contact with people he loves and trusts, love from his family, memories of happiness, and all manner of interpersonal interactions that can counteract the media-amplified sense of doom and remind him that people are mostly good and that your fellow man is no less human than you and not something to be feared. That struggle is playing out on a national, history-defining scale right now, and the only thing more frightening than the view of the world as seen through the Trumpian lens is the prospect of a society ruled and supported by enough people who believe it’s all true and that the obvious and necessary solution is just around the corner.
Paulo Paulino Guajajara looks down and off to one side, the Amazon forest lush and dense behind him.
His voice thickens; he clears his throat.
“My mother, she’s unwell. She told me to stop doing this work,” he says, and presses the heel of his hand against his eye to stop a tear.
He looks into the camera:
I told her I’m not scared, that she should let me fight. Because I have a son. And he will need the forest.
Paulo, an Indigenous Amazon Guardian, was shot dead five years ago today (1 November 2019) in the forest he loved – the Arariboia Indigenous Territory, in the Amazon’s north-east.
Paulo Paulino Guajajara
I was on the other side of the camera when he spoke of his mother’s fears. He wanted the world to know his people, his land, were under threat. He knew illegal loggers were paying gunmen to kill Guardians like him, but he continued to track them, leaving his infant son, wife, and his mother at home.
The Guardians are Guajajara people who protect Indigenous land. They confront illegal loggers, force them to leave, then destroy their camps. They do it to protect their families and for the Awá people, their neighbours who share the territory and some of whom shun all outside contact.
Paulo admired the Awá. They are completely self sufficient in their forest, but cannot survive without it.
Paulo and I met in 2017 when we recorded his video. In 2019 I went on a Guardian patrol as a researcher with Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights.
It was on that journey, deep in the rainforest, that Paulo and I became friends – and he asked me to call him by his Guardian name, Lobo (‘Wolf’ in English). The group assigns a name that reflects a Guardian’s personality and his place. It binds them together, protects their anonymity.
The Guardians gathered in a clearing to prepare for our patrol. They brought several motorbikes and a quad bike. About 15 men chatted casually as they honed their machetes, checked motorbike chains and calculated how much petrol to take.
They wrapped and stowed a big piece of meat – food for the journey. One man drew a map in the earth with a stick and pointed to the illegal logging camp – the object of our patrol. Well-worn bulletproof vests were distributed, then we got on the bikes and headed into the forest.
A wooly hat that will stay with me forever
Lobo was quiet and focused, pitching in with an easy smile. He insisted I travel with him and his cousin on the more comfortable quad bike.
As we rode dirt trails into the thickening forest, he taught me words in Tenetehar, his Indigenous language. He pointed and said, ‘foot’, ‘hand’, ‘elbow’. I repeated, worked to get my mouth around the unfamiliar syllables.
Later, I proudly spoke the words he’d taught me, and the Guardians guffawed. I was saying, ‘blue foot’, ‘fat elbow’, ‘laughing hand’. Lobo just grinned.
We gathered around a fire that night, kept small to prevent detection. The meat was cooked, and Lobo offered it to me on a skewer. He drew his machete, elegantly ran it down the meat’s edge, and urged me to pull away a thin, sinewy slice. It was a welcome treat, dipped in crunchy cassava farinha.
Lobo admired a woolly hat I’d brought from London, so I gave it to him. He cut eye holes and wore it pulled down over his face to keep his identity secret and protect him from the hired assassins. The group spread out and settled on the cold forest floor, wrapped in darkness and sound – the buzz of cicadas and trills of crickets, descants over the rumbling bass line of amorous bullfrogs.
Invading their territory
The next day we travelled on foot. The Guardians inspected every snapped twig – evidence loggers were nearby. They examined tire tracks, noting their age and direction of travel. Tension rose as we got closer.
We passed a pile of stacked logs and arrived at the camp – an oval-shaped clearing where blue and black tarps sheltered cooking and seating areas.
But the loggers had fled. We ate their breakfast – eggs and a pot of pumpkin they’d left cooking on their fire. And when we discovered a barrel of fresh water, Lobo insisted that I be the first to bathe.
He was angry though, disgusted at the loggers’ intrusion, the theft of trees, the destruction of the forest. And he was frustrated they’d escaped. “I want to burn and destroy this camp,” Lobo said, holding his lighter to a tarpaulin’s edge. “We don’t want anything of theirs in our territory.”
One of six
Lobo was out hunting when he was ambushed – shot and killed. Beside him, his friend and fellow Guardian Tainaky Tenetehar was also hit. The impact bent Tainaky over in pain. Straining with every part of his body, he straightened up and ran as blood poured from his right shoulder. Lobo lay dead on the forest floor, still wearing the hat that could not protect him.
Lobo was the sixth Guardian killed by loggers in the Arariboia forest.
News of his death went round the world.
Despite that, none of the killers have been caught or tried. And on this fifth anniversary of his killing, everything Lobo sought to protect is in greater peril – particularly the uncontacted Awá.
They are among more than 150 uncontacted Indigenous Peoples around the world – the most self-sufficient and most vulnerable peoples on the planet. Survival International is fighting to stop miners, loggers, ranchers, other extractive industries, and criminals stealing their territory and resources.
The loggers are still there, while Brazil’s government fails the Awá by not upholding its own and international laws which require their land be protected for their exclusive use.
Justice for Paulo Paulino Guajajara
When I think of Paulo Paulino Guajajara, I remember his easy laugh, the grin that spread slowly across his face. He always carried a pen drive loaded with his tunes. That smile grew ever wider when his favourite came on: Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. He would close his eyes and hum along.
Lobo once said, “Even if they kill me, I won’t stop fighting.”
His fight continues; for there is a little boy growing up without his marvellous father. And he still needs the forest.
Sarah Shenker is a senior researcher and advocacy officer with Survival International which fights alongside Indigenous People for their lands and human rights. Survival supports the work of the Guardians and has campaigned for the Awá’s rights since the 1970s.
An overwhelming white majority of baseball fans skeptically approached Jackie Robinson’s entrance on their well-kept baseball fields. After watching Jackie’s dazzling performances, the fans begged for tickets and attendance at Brooklyn Dodgers games soared. The racism that barred black baseball players from performing on the national stage subsided, or did it; did black ballplayers mean money and did earning bucks come ahead of racial exclusion? If Robinson was just a good player and not a superstar and crowd drawer, would the major league baseball fields have opened themselves to the marginalized black hitters? Recent events in the Women National Basketball Association (WNBA), founded on April 24, 1996 and struggling for survival from day one, revealed that Jackie Robinson only reduced the appearance of racism; a stash of cash always smashes the illusion.
Reports had Caitlin Clark, considered the college all-time greatest female basketball player and “rookie of the year” with the Indiana Fever, leaving the WNBA for the European League. Who better to ask about this sensational occurrence than political commentator, Bill Maher.
The comedian turned talk show host indicated that Clark was a victim of racism. After showing a clip of Caitlin Clark body checked by an opponent, Maher said, “We also have a racial element to this. We can’t deny that.” He followed the remark with, “Women are catty. The league is very lesbian and she’s not, and there’s race,” he said. “There’s a lot going on.”
Those words don’t proceed from logical arguments — body checks by a few aggressive players against rookie stars are not unique and appear in all sports. Holding an entire league responsible for the actions of a few hyperactive players is conspiratorial. Describing women as “catty,” and the league as “lesbian” and racial are examples of illiberal bigotry. The WBNA has predominantly black players, similar to the NBA . In the sport of ping pong, Chinese people are superior. In the sport of basketball, black people are superior.
Another comment attributed to Maher, which I have not been able to verify on any video, is, “Women’s basketball got on my radar — like everybody’s — because of Caitlin Clark,” he explained. “And the other girls and the league are delighted for her success. … I’m joking of course. They f—king hate her.”
This type of comment, that Caitlin Clark inspired many in the white world to become interested in the WBNA, which other commentators have stated, proves that Jackie Robinson’s exploits only reduced the appearance of racism. Caitlin Clark may be an excellent player but she is seventh in scoring and tied for fourth in overall efficiency in the league’s statistics. Just as the NBA is the same NBA without rookie of the year, Victor Wembanyama, the WNBA is the same WNBA without rookie of the year, Caitlin Clark. The white majority became interested in the WNBA when their great white hope entered the courts to battle black players. In the fortuitous moments, they learned that the WNBA league housed exciting basketball and entertaining basketball handlers, something their prejudice prevented them from knowing. Television and streaming services quickly observed the money flow and the WNBA, previously a sidetracked oddity of mostly black women hoopsters, became a sports rage. The next time, Maher charges others with racism, he should look in the mirror.
The rumor that started the crass statements has been body checked. ESPN announcer, Ryan Ruocco, reports, “We talked to Caitlin Clark earlier today. She said she almost definitely will not play basketball this offseason. So it is likely we will not see her play again until April.”
The decades apart racisms exhibited in the sports arenas are not isolated cases. They demonstrate that Americans look inwards and have a lack of unawareness that racisms, of many forms, are imprinted in their psyches. When the agenda of a controlling institution changes — financial, political, social, or economic — and the particular racism impedes the agenda, then Americans are told to change their attitude; an imprint is relieved.
By excessive attention to a genocide committed almost 100 years ago in a Western nation to Western people, a controlling institution has imprinted its racist attitude in the minds of Americans. The agenda assures that the World War II genocide is given consistent recognition, and the genocide by western oriented people in an Arab country does not register. Racism, as shown by Bill Maher’s remarks and attitude, is a significant factor that guides the genocide of the Palestinian people.
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.
This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.
Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.
We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.
The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.
Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.
Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.
All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.
America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.
These threats are not to be underestimated.
Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.
This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.
Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?
Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.
Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.
In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.
Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?
So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.
Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.
The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”
I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…
I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…
Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.
As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.
The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:
The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.
The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.
“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.
We are at a critical crossroads in American history.
All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.
As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?
There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Footage of Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa swaying along to the siva dance as she sat beside Britain’s King Charles III encapsulated a palpable national pride, well deserved on delivering such a high-profile gathering.
Getting down to the business of dissecting the meeting outcomes — in the leaders’ statement and Samoa communiqué — there are several issues that are significant for the Pacific island members of this post-colonial club.
As expected, climate change features prominently in the text, with more than 30 mentions including three that refer to the “climate crisis”. This will resonate highly for Pacific members, as will the support for COP 31 in 2026 to be jointly hosted by Australia and the Pacific.
Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa opening CHOGM 2024. Video: Talamua Media
One of the glaring contradictions of this joint COP bid is illustrated by the lack of any call to end fossil fuel extraction in the final outcomes.
Tuvalu, Fiji and Vanuatu used the CHOGM to launch the latest Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative report, with a focus on Australia’s coal and gas mining. This reflects the diversity of Commonwealth membership, which includes some states whose economies remain reliant on fossil fuel extractive industries.
As highlighted ahead of CHOGM, this multilateral gave the 56 members a chance to consider positions to take to COP 29 next month in Baku, Azerbaijan. The communiqué from the leaders highlights the importance of increased ambition when it comes to climate finance at COP 29, and particularly to address the needs of developing countries.
Another drawcard
That speaks to all the Pacific island nations and gives the region’s negotiators another drawcard on the international stage.
Then came the unexpected, Papua New Guinea made a surprise announcement that it will not attend the global conference in Baku next month. Speaking at the Commonwealth Ministerial Meeting on Small States, PNG’s Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko framed this decision as a stand on behalf of small island nations as a protest against “empty promises and inaction.”
As promised, a major output of this meeting was the Apia Commonwealth Ocean Declaration for One Resilient Common Future. This is the first oceans-focused declaration by the Commonwealth of Nations, and is somewhat belated given 49 of its 56 member states have ocean borders.
The declaration has positions familiar to Pacific policymakers and activists, including the recognition of national maritime boundaries despite the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce emissions from global shipping. A noticeable omission is any reference to deep-sea mining, which is also a faultline within the Pacific collective.
The text relating to reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery required extensive negotiation among the leaders, Australia’s ABC reported. While this issue has been driven by African and Caribbean states, it is one that touches the Pacific as well.
‘Blackbirding’ reparative justice
South Sea Islander “blackbirding” is one of the colonial practices that will be considered within the context of reparative justice. During the period many tens-of-thousands of Pacific Islanders were indentured to Australia’s cane fields, Fiji’s coconut plantations and elsewhere.
The trade to Queensland and New South Wales lasted from 1847 to 1904, while those destinations were British colonies until 1901. Indeed, the so-called “sugar slaves” were a way of getting cheap labour once Britain officially abolished slavery in 1834.
The next secretary-general of the Commonwealth will be Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey. Questions have been raised about the quality of her predecessor Patricia Scotland’s leadership for some time and the change will hopefully go some way in alleviating concerns.
Notably, the CHOGM has selected another woman to lead its secretariat. This is an important endorsement of female leadership among member countries where women are often dramatically underrepresented at national levels.
While it received little or no fanfare, the Commonwealth has also released its revised Commonwealth Principles on Freedom of Expression and the Role of the Media in Good Governance. This is a welcome contribution, given the threats to media freedom in the Pacific and elsewhere. It reflects a longstanding commitment by the Commonwealth to supporting democratic resilience among its members.
These principles do not come with any enforcement mechanism behind them, and the most that can be done is to encourage or exhort adherence. However, they provide another potential buffer against attempts to curtail their remit for publishers, journalists, and bloggers in Commonwealth countries.
The outcomes reveal both progress and persistent challenges for Pacific island nations. While Apia’s Commonwealth Ocean Declaration emphasises oceanic issues, its lack of provisions on deep-sea mining exposes intra-Commonwealth tensions. The change in leadership offers a pivotal opportunity to prioritise equity and actionable commitments.
Ultimately, the success of this gathering will depend on translating discussions into concrete actions that address the urgent needs of Pacific communities facing an uncertain future.
But as the guests waved farewell, the question of what the Commonwealth really means for its Pacific members remains until leaders meet in two years time in Antigua and Barbuda, a small island state in the Caribbean.
Tess Newton Cain is a principal consultant at Sustineo P/L and adjunct associate professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. She is a former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and has more than 25 years of experience working in the Pacific Islands region. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.
In September 2022, Chris Kaba was shot and killed by a Metropolitan police officer, Martyn Blake. At the start of last week, a jury deemed Martyn Blake not guilty of murder.
The jury’s decision marked the end of an embargo on information about Chris Kaba’s life and media outlets jumped at the opportunity to brand Chris as a ‘violent criminal’, quickly abandoning his previous identity as a 24-year-old father to be and deeply beloved family member.
This new narrative suggested that Chris deserved to be shot because of his past, despite police not knowing who Chris was until after he was killed.
Chris Kaba’s past does not mean he deserved to be killed. The purpose of the police is not to kill.
Trying to rationalise the police violence that ended his life only serves to exacerbate the racialised violence that Black, Asian, and Mixed Heritage communities experience every single day:
Narratives, especially those driven by the corporate media, can perpetuate racism and further traumatise Black, Asian, and Mixed Heritage people. In the summer, we witnessed first-hand what happens when a government and media consistently promote racist narratives as serious violent actions were carried out against migrants and racially minoritised people.
This week marks yet another crossroads for the government, policing, and media: they can either further entrench institutional racism and continue the systematic harm against Black, Asian, and Mixed Heritage people, or seriously commit to ending institutional racism.
Action for Race Equality encourages the new government to break the cycle and take the necessary steps to eradicate racism and reform policing.
Infamous psychiatrist Simon Wessely, involved in a history of institutional harm towards people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), has set his sights on another marginalised patient community. This time, it’s transgender kids via the NHS. Needless to say, we can’t let him get away with it.
Simon Wessely: appointment to an NHS gender services board
The NHS has appointed psychiatrist Simon Wessely as chair of the new Children and Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Research Oversight Board.
Essentially, this is set to oversee the development and redesign of the NHS’s gender services for young people.
Significantly, a core part of this revolves around a puberty blocker study. On taking office, health secretary Wes Streeting upheld the previous Tory government’s temporary ban on these. It implemented this under emergency powers – but without consulting a single LGBTQ+ group. Ostensibly then, this study will invariably feed into the NHS’s approach to services and access to gender-affirming medications for trans kids.
However, it’s Wessely’s role as chair of the board that should send alarm bells ringing on this most of all. That’s because he’s repeatedly punched down on marginalised patient groups. So now, it’s the trans community in the firing line.
Psychologiser promoted far above his station
In a truly scathing, powerful, and unflinching piece for Trans Safety Network, disabled activist and researcher Rhi Belle pulls apart Simon Wessely’s hellish history of harm.
If you needed an example of someone in the UK’s elite medical establishment promoted far above his station, look no further than Wessely.
He already sits/has sat in a number of high profile decision-making positions. For a short run-down, this includes/has included:
The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government gave him a knighthood for services to military healthcare in 2013.
King’s College London (KCL) awarded Simon Wessely the first regius professor in psychiatry. Essentially, this is a special title bestowed by a monarch.
Theresa May’s government tasking him with the 2018 review of the Mental Health Act.
Reappointment in 2020 to the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) – which chooses who heads up inquiries.
Not to mention that elite medical bodies have lavished him with multiple awards and memberships. But this is all just the tip of the iceberg – there’s plenty more influential medical roles where all those came from.
What did he do to get himself atop these lofty roles at the heart of government and NHS policy decisions? Quite frankly, not anything good.
Punching down for a past-time
The Canary has detailed some of this previously. There’s few, if any names that send one particular chronic illness community’s spines tingling more than Simon Wessely.
Specifically, Wessely has encouraged the psychologisation of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). For the uninitiated, this has meant decades of gaslighting, neglect, and abuse of ME patients. It led to flawed study after flawed study, bunk treatment, after bunk treatment.
Crucially, this is to the point where the NHS has actively dismissed – and routinely harmed – people living with the devastating disease. Worse yet, Wessely’s work on this and his biopsychosocial (BPS) model has been – and is still – at the heart of hospitals mistreating severe ME and other chronically ill patients.
The recent inquiry of 27-year-old Maeve Boothby O’Neill has brought this to the fore. Maeve died of ME, after a litany of catastrophic NHS failures, rooted in Wessely’s very psychologisation of this serious and life-threatening chronic illness.
In particular, Wessely was involved the notorious PACE trial.
It was a study, part-funded by the UK government, into treatment for ME. It found that people could recover from the disease by having cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In other words, people living with a very-real, viral-based illness should just ‘think themselves better’. Essentially, the trial pushed the notion that the disease was part-psychosomatic or ‘made up’ by patients.
While Wessely wasn’t among the principal investigators, he supported and shaped the study in a number of critical ways. For one, his previous research on ME influenced the way in which the scientists carried out the study. On top of this, he was also directly involved. In particular, he sat as a centre manager for one of the trial centres, and was on the PACE Trial Management Group. The trial credited the group as one of the authors of the study.
Perhaps most significantly, Wessely was central to pushing out the PACE trial through the media.
But more than this, we’ve also underscored how this psychologisation is Wessely writ large.
Belle delves even deeper into all this for the Trans Safety Network. They dredged up a play-by-play of Simon Wessely’s past preying on marginalised patient groups.
Significantly, in one telling paragraph, they hone in on his role restricting ME patients access to welfare benefits. Here was where another notorious name came into it. Specifically, Belle wrote that:
In 1993, Wessely wrote to Mansel Aylward who at the time was the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Social Security (DSS), now the DWP, complaining that ME would be listed under ‘other neurological disorders’ in the handbook of disabilities for Disability Living Allowance (DLA).
Notably, they highlighted passages of his letter to Aylward that read:
I believe that the Department is making an error if it accepts the partisan views put forward by pressure groups as a basis for making medical decisions. I also believe that it is a decision that the department will regret, since it seems likely the result will be an ever increasing stream of claims for permanent benefits in people who might otherwise have had a chance of recovery.
The Canary recently highlighted how the government looks set to draw on Aylward’s biopsychosocial model of disability in a new DWP work programme.
Meanwhile, DWP boss Liz Kendall has announced a separate, but similarly named scheme the government plans to role out. This involves putting job advisors on mental health wards in NHS hospitals. Why is this relevant? Well, Wessely cropped up here too – because it was the hospital he heads up that’s already done this.
It’s therefore evident that Wessely’s influence is still shaping chronically ill and disabled people’s access to benefits. On top of this, his school of thought is aiding the DWP in its campaign to push them back to work – even at detriment to their health.
In short then, he’s made a career of psychologising physical conditions, trivialising psychological ones, while simultaneously abetting the DWP in its crusade to deny patients of either their vital social security benefits. And to do this, his bullshit has rested on a whole lot of ableism, misogyny, and classism to boot.
Simon Wessely is NOT suitable for this role
So, the Trans Safety Network is right to worry that Simon Wessely likely got this latest gig as a result of all this.
Not content with wrecking the lives of countless people living with chronic health conditions, he has now turned his attention to the trans community.
Belle poignantly summed up the danger of a someone with a known history of psychologising and dismissing patients chairing this new board:
In Trans Safety Network’s opinion, there is a danger of Simon Wessely claiming that being trans is a form of socially contagious psychosomatic illness. The danger with this would be framing parental and clinical doubt as being in a child’s best interest. In trans and gender diverse youth, disbelief of this sort is linked to abusive conversion practices, such as cutting children and young people off from external support networks or otherwise attempting to suppress gender exploration.
That is, the implications for more unconscionable conversion therapy are crystal clear:
Cass stated that her recommendations should not be considered as advocating for conversion therapy – but they were.
This is a warning signal that framing trans identity as a kind of “psychogenic” condition will likely be used to justify the use of such CT “treatments”. https://t.co/nCYgELFyFr
People from the ME community on X rightly underscored how this is a call for intersectional solidarity:
I haven’t been able to read all of this yet but it looks very thorough and so far accurate. Clearly shows how important intersectionality is re trans and ME/chronic illness/didabled communities is. I was really upset to see Wessley involved in trans healthcare. https://t.co/3mGPhYCM38
Because ultimately, wherever Simon Wessely is concerned patient harm invariably follows. So, as Belle and others noted, we must all watch his appointment with vigilance – and stand together against him in the likely event he turns his psychosomatic leanings towards trans people now too. Put simply: we can’t let trans children be his next victims.
The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.
Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.
These mercenaries will be hired by the CIA. “The plan, approved by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, calls for the Israeli military to clear out pockets of Palestinian resistance. … 48 hours after stamping out resistance, they plan to erect separation walls around the neighborhood, forcing its residents, and no one else, to enter and exit using biometric identification under the CIA contractors’ control. Those who do not accept the biometric regime would be refused humanitarian aid.” In other words: they will starve to death. The Gazans who do accept “the biometric regime” won’t be starved to death. Biometrics includes fingerprinting but also other physical — and also behavioral — measurements of an individual who is being kept under surveillance.
The company at the forefront of this plan is called Global Development Company, described in its promotional materials as an “Uber for war zones.” Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana owns it and employs several top Israeli and American military intelligence officials, including retired U.S. Navy Captain Michael Durnan, retired U.S. Special Forces captain Justin Sapp, former Israeli military intelligence division head Yossi Kuperwasser, and former Israeli military chief intelligence officer David Tzur.
Kahana has played a key role in the dirty war against Syria in the 2010s and worked with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army [the “FSA,” which the U.S. Government under Obama hired to help overthrow and replace the Russia-and-Iran-supported President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad; and Dan Cohen’s FSA link is to an article in Britain’s Independent heroizing Kahana, headlining him as “Israeli man starts ‘Good Samaritan’ charity to get injured Syrian women and children to Israel for medical help.” That article opens with a video in which he speaks as a “philanthropist.”]
… GDC has also been involved in Ukraine, where it collaborated with the Zionist organization, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to operate a refugee camp in Romania near its border with Ukraine. …
Kahana’s Gaza plan has been in the works since at least February 2024. He presented the plan to establish these electronic cantons – what Jewish News referred to as “gated communities” – to the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, as well as Netanyahu. U.S. officials did not respond. While the Israeli military had agreed, the Israeli prime minister shot it down. “What’s the rush?” he quipped. …
However, as Hamas has maintained its civil control throughout Gaza and Israel has failed to defeat armed resistance groups, the Netanyahu government is relying on the U.S. to do its bidding. …
While the [original version of the] proposal called for the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia to assume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that has failed to materialize, prompting the United States to approve deployment of CIA contractors.
In other words: finally, Netanyahu, too, approved the plan.
The meticulous plan, seen by Jewish News, envisages the creation of “gated communities” in a safe space in the Strip and biometric recognition put in place for civilian recipients of aid. Those who did not pass the biometric tests would not have received aid. The gated communities are described as a Secure Humanitarian Logistics Corridor which, the plan states, “once established, can process and securely deliver humanitarian assistance from other sources across Gaza”.
In other words: the plan is as Cohen describes it, but employs euphemistic phrasings to deceive fools into believing that Kahana, his GDC, and his concentration camps for cooperative Gazan survivors, are “humanitarian,” and “gated communities,” such as that phrase is used in America to refer to protected oases of peace amidst a surrounding environment of war — like saying, “We’ll protect you Gazans.”
Cohen’s article didn’t mention the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department’s Defense Forensics & Biometrics Agency (DFBA), but this federal Agency (which he does link to without mentioning it) was, in fact, established by President Obama in 2012, and is crucially involved in what Kahana’s GDC is doing in Gaza. In 2016, DFBA’s “Overview” stated: “Biometrics and forensics are critical to identifying known and unknown individuals by matching them with automated records (such as for access control) or with anonymous samples (such as crime scene investigations).” In other words: the surviving Gazans will be tracked not by a number that is tattoed onto their arms like was done at Auschwitz to prisoners who weren’t immediately sent to their deaths, but instead tracked by the person’s “biometrics.” So: Israel’s Jews use Hitler’s — the original form of — nazism, but against different people, and with modern technology.
Furthermore: their propaganda is far more sophisticated than Joseph Goebbels’s was.
The link that Cohen provides to DFBA is to its current promotional video, their latest “Overview.”
It makes clear that DFBA is being used by the federal Government not ONLY in order to control the surviving Gazans, but ALSO in order to control the American people, as well as to extend the American empire throughout the world.
In other words: Yesterday it was the Jews who were the target; today it is the surviving Gazans who are, and also an increasing percentage of Americans are (targeted by our own Government); and, in the future, this system is to become expanded to everyone.
Cohen’s article also (at the word “worked”) linked to (but unfortunately out of context) a self-promotional youtube by and for Kahana himself, that appears to have been intended by him to promote himself to both Russians and Syrians, as being a magnanimous israeli philanthropist who rescues victims of his hated Assad, because he cares so much about the Syrian people.
We are already well beyond George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984. This is the reality of today’s U.S. empire.
On October 24 was posted to X an exposé by James Li, of the top people at the U.S. magazine the Atlantic, which opens, “Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic‘s Editor-in-Chief who compared Trump to Hitler, was an IDF prison guard at a facility known for torture and sex abuse. He also pushed the false Saddam-Al-Qaeda link that led to the Iraq War and keeps pushing for war in the Middle East.” And the magazine’s owner is Steve Jobs’s deeply neoconservative widow, and she pitches her propaganda to Democratic Party voters, to keep them backing her candidates.
On October 15, ZeroHedge headlined “US Threatens Israel With Arms Embargo As Evidence Of War Crimes Becomes Impossible to Deny.” This is how successful U.S. politicians win votes from their suckers. Biden publicly threatens Israel at the same time as he privately authorizes — and arms to the teeth — what it is doing that he publicly condemns. Both of America’s political Parties are fully complicit in this deceit — this genocide.
In February 2017, as Donald Trump took office, The Washington Postadopted the first slogan in its 140-year history: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
How ironic, then, that it should now be helping to extinguish the flame of American democracy by refusing to endorse a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election.
This decision, and a similar one by the second of America’s big three newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, disgraces journalism, disgraces the papers’ own heritage and represents an abandonment of civic responsibility at a moment when United States faces its most consequential presidential election since the Civil War.
At stake is whether the United States remains a functioning democracy or descends into a corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted criminal who has already incited violence to overturn a presidential election and has shown contempt for the conventions on which democracy rests.
Everyone should cancel their Washington Post subscription after Bezos copped out on a presidential endorsement. It is shameful how far a once great newspaper has fallen. I cancelled today.
Why did they do it? Why would two of the Western world’s finest newspapers take such a recklessly irresponsible decision?
It cannot be on the basis of any rational assessment of the respective fitness for office of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
It also cannot be on the basis of their own reporting and analysis of the candidates, where the lies and threats issued by Trump have been fearlessly recorded. In this context, the decision to not endorse a candidate is a betrayal of their own editorial staff. The Post’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, resigned in protest at the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris.
This leaves, in my view, a combination of cowardice and greed as the only feasible explanation. Both newspapers are owned by billionaire American businessmen: The Post by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, and the LA Times by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his billions through biotechnology.
Bezos bought The Post in 2013 through his private investment company Nash Holdings, and Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018 through his investment firm Nant Capital. Both run the personal risk of suffering financially should a Trump presidency turn out to be hostile towards them.
During the election campaign, Trump has made many threats of retaliation against those in the media who oppose him. He has indicated that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him, toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he doesn’t like.
Trump threatens to jail political opponents. Video: CBS News
Logic would suggest that in the face of these threats, the media would do all in their power to oppose a Trump presidency, if not out of respect for democracy and free speech then at least in the interests of self-preservation. But fear and greed are among the most powerful of human impulses.
The purchase of these two giants of the American press by wealthy businessmen is a consequence of the financial pressures exerted on the professional mass media by the internet and social media.
Bezos was welcomed with open arms by the Graham family, which had owned The Post for four generations. But the paper faced unsustainable financial losses arising from the loss of advertising to the internet.
At first he was seen not just by the Grahams but by the executive editor, Marty Baron, as a saviour. He injected large sums of money into the paper, enabling it to regain much of the prestige and journalistic capacity it had lost.
Baron, in his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post, was full of praise for Bezos’s financial commitment to the paper, and for his courage in the face of Trumpian hostility. During Trump’s presidency, the paper kept a log of his lies, tallying them up at 30,573 over the four years.
Against this history, the paper’s abdication of its responsibilities now is explicable only by reference to a loss of heart by Bezos.
At the LA Times, the ownership of the Otis-Chandler families also spanned four generations, but the impact of the internet took a savage toll there as well. Between 2000 and 2018 its ownership passed through three hands, ending up with Soon-Shiong.
Both newspapers reached the zenith of their journalistic accomplishments during the last three decades of the 20th century, winning Pulitzer Prices and, in the case of The Post, becoming globally famous for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.
This, in the days when American democracy was functioning according to convention, led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president.
The two reporters responsible for this coverage, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, issued a statement about the decision to not endorse a candidate:
Marty Baron, who was a ferociously tough editor, posted on X: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
Now, of the big three, only The New York Times is prepared to endorse a candidate for next month’s election. It has endorsed Harris, saying of Trump: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States.”
Why does it matter? It matters because in democracies the media are the means by which voters learn not just about facts but about the informed opinion of those who, by virtue of access and close acquaintance, are well placed to make assessments of candidates between whom those voters are to choose. It is a core function of the media in democratic societies.
Their failure is symptomatic of the malaise into which American democracy has sunk.
In 2018, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a book, How Democracies Die. It was both reflective and prophetic. Noting that the United States was now more polarised than at any time since the Civil War, they wrote:
America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares he might not accept the election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both potential and existing autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House.
Symbolically, that The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times should have gone dark at this moment is reminiscent of the remark made in 1914 by Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey:
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but Keir Starmer and his Labour Party are struggling to get to grips with the transition from opposition to government.
For example, a vast majority of Keir Starmer’s stupendous assemblage of freebies (bribes) landed at his feet during his tenure as leader of its majesty’s official opposition.
The only people that were highlighting these blatantly obvious attempts to purchase direct access to influence to power were the likes of openDemocracy, who revealed Keir Starmer had taken more freebies than all Labour leaders combined since 1997.
The Canary — and some two-bit Swindonian blogger — whose name escapes me at this moment in time — was screaming it from the rooftops back in August 2023 when people thought the Tories were the problem, rather than the rancid neoliberal ideology that embraces corporate monopoly power.
Glad I got that off my chest.
Starmer: getting away with whatever he can
Put simply, what Starmer and Labour could get away with in opposition, from blatant bribes to pledges they never intended to deliver on, won’t be as easy to get away with now they are in government.
Starmer’s rock-bottom, diabolical personal approval ratings haven’t happened by chance. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a new government so desperate to be taken seriously by the electorate while simultaneously doing everything within their power to prove they cannot and must not be trusted to deliver the bold and radical changes that are so desperately needed by millions of ordinary people across the country.
Look at the business with Labour activists turning up in the United States to apparently campaign for Kamala Harris.
Labour claim these activists went entirely on their own accord, and while the media and many online will focus on whether this is the truth of the matter or not, very few people seem to realise the purpose of this visit is going to be very little in the way of knocking on doors for the Democrats and a whole lot more about opening doors for the Labour Party and the huge number of American corporations that stand to benefit from Labour’s ‘Blairism on steroids’ privatisation fetish.
Liars beget liars
Do you remember that cheating, racist thug – disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson? Of course you do.
The proven liar Johnson spent the best part of five decades meticulously preparing for a job that he believed was his rightful entitlement. Within three years of benefiting from a pro-Brexit vote, he was finished.
The proven liar Starmer had the best part of five years to ‘forensically’ prepare for a job that he believed was his rightful entitlement. Within three months of benefiting from an anti-Tory vote, his personal approval ratings hit rock bottom, and his government feels just as detested as the inept and corrupt horror show that they’ve just replaced.
But Johnson isn’t the only Tory leader that Starmer is keen to emulate, as we discovered during the prime minister’s trip to Samoa for a meeting of Commonwealth leaders.
Reparations: a game of spot the difference
When asked about the longstanding issue of reparations, Starmer said we cannot “change our history”, and we should “look forwards, not backwards”.
Nice work Mr Starmer, particularly during Black History Month.
Just over a year ago, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak was asked by Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy if he would “commit to reparatory justice”, for Britain’s historical role in the slave trade.
The Atlantic slave trade saw millions of Africans enslaved, forced to work, and invariably murdered, especially on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, for centuries from around the year 1500. The British government and the monarchy were prominent participants in the trade, to our eternal shame.
We cannot change our history, prime minister, but we can go a bloody long way to ensure the world knows how ashamed we are of our ancestors, and that should be in the form of financial recognition of the legacy of slavery, via reparations.
Here’s the bit when we find out why successive British prime ministers have refused to get the cheque book out and even attempt to begin to put right the many wrongs that were committed over a three-hundred-year period.
Estimates for reparations from campaigners and academics have ranged from a conservative £205 billion to nearly£19 trillion.
Hello, is that Klarna? I have some reparations I need to spread the cost of.
Has Keir Starmer considered Klarna? Maybe the prime minister could give Zilch a call and see if they’ll stretch to a £19 trillion reparations credit line? He’ll only need to find a mere £4.75 trillion up front, and the rest can be repaid over three easy repayments.
Just think, how many pensioners would Keir Starmer need to freeze to cover that one? I’m not sure even the permanently generous Lord Alli is going to find that sort of loose change down the back of his sofa.
I went to school in the 1980’s and 1990’s, like many of you that are reading this now. I honestly don’t remember talking about Britain being the world’s leading slave-trading nation in exactly the same way I don’t remember us talking about Britain’s role in the Irish Potato Famine, nor did our curriculum teach us anything about the history of Britain’s shameful colonialism.
Maybe this has changed? I haven’t had children at school for a few years so I honestly couldn’t say, but I do know that we need to be more accepting of the unspeakable crimes committed by our ancestors in the name of British colonialism.
History will repeat itself
I’ve no doubt that in a couple of hundred years from now there will be numerous academics and political leaders apologising for Britain’s leading role in the West’s genocide of Gaza, and the people vilified for speaking the truth now, will be hailed as the visionaries who tried to make the world a safer place.
That is, of course, based on us not setting our own planet ablaze in the meantime.
And with a spineless, warmongering waste of DNA in the shape of Keir Starmer in charge of the country — but still behaving like an opposition party with limited accountability — this could well be sooner rather than later.
It is apparently not much of an exaggeration to say that Israel’s attack on Iran fizzled. Some targets were hit and at least two Iranian soldiers were killed, but the ineffectiveness of the operation was probably due to several factors:
Israel just doesn’t have the weaponry. Most of its missiles don’t have the distance, and those that do, just barely so. That’s true for a lot of its drones, too, and they are too easily detected and don’t have the carrying power.
The US didn’t aid, in particular with refueling manned aircraft. It’s just as well. It would have been a good way to lose both pilots and aircraft.
Most of the nations geographically in between Israel and Iran would not permit overflights from either Israel or the US. Iran told these nations that they prefer to remain on good terms with them, and that they would consider it an act of war to lend their airspace to Israeli operations.
Iranian antiaircraft systems were apparently quite effective.
Other factors may have been involved. It is possible that cooler heads prevailed in the Israeli and US militaries, for example, but we may never know, or at least not soon. Nevertheless, the main reason that Israel did not cause more damage appears not to be a question of intention, but of capability. There’s no question that Israel was hoping for an escalation that would widen the war and force the US to enter on Israel’s side. That appears to have been avoided. Iran will have to respond, but unlike Israel, neither Iran nor the US wants escalation. Iran’s response will therefore be measured, and they will declare the matter settled.
The Netanyahu government now finds itself squarely in check, though not yet checkmated. Nevertheless, the best it can do now is probably a stalemate. This is not good in the short run for Gaza and the Palestinians, nor for Lebanon, but it’s also not good for Israel, whose population is emigrating, whose economy is tanking, and which is generally a pariah throughout the world. Its decades of building its image as glamorous, progressive and a technological powerhouse is gone. It is now the redoubt of religious fanatics and criminals that even much of the international Jewish community is loathe to support. Its current mainstay is the international network of influence peddlers such as AIPAC, whose power has not dwindled in the US and other western governments, due to its ability to enrich the military industrial complex and to control the elective processes in these governments. With the loss of a wider base in the Jewish community, however, that power is likely to decline.
(@Dan_Wyke) 
