Critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman in conservative circles in the United States. Right-wing groups are applying the term indiscriminately, using it inaccurately as a catch-all buzzword to stand in for everything they oppose, including any discussion of systemic racism in the classroom.
But as critical race theorist Gary Pellar recently pointed out, CRT, an academic discipline that has been around for more than 40 years, “in the real world,describes the diverse work of a small group of scholars who write about the shortcomings of conventional civil rights approaches to understanding and transforming racial power in American society. It’s a complex critique that wouldn’t fit easily into a K-12 curriculum.”
The current right-wing panic surrounding the idea of CRT speaks volumes of the impact of former President Donald Trump and of Trumpism in early 21st-century U.S. The frenzy occurring over the idea that schoolteachers would dare to discuss racism — or be in any way inspired by an academic discipline that seeks to reveal how “colorblindness” is an inadequate goal because of the many ways in which racial power continues to be exercised in supposedly “colorblind” institutions — reveals the unmistakable hold that overt racism continues to have among large segments of the white U.S.
For a better understanding of what CRT is and what it is not, Truthout reached out to one of the key founders of CRT, Richard Delgado, the John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama. Professor Delgado — the author of 30 books and one of the most-cited legal scholars on race and the law in the country — has become a target of numerous threats by racist and neo-fascist elements since the recent right-wing campaign against CRT began.
C.J. Polychroniou: Professor Delgado, I would like to ask you to describe to us where CRT comes from, and then to discuss in some detail what CRT is and what it is not.
Richard Delgado: CRT stems from critical legal studies and, a little before that, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is most closely associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. My book with Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, describes these intellectual origins.
As a self-aware, cohesive movement, CRT began when a small group of scholars of color asked the Conference on Critical Legal Studies to include a panel on race at their 1986 conference in Los Angeles. Early writing by Derrick Bell, Allen Freeman, myself and a few others had laid a foundation and demonstrated that a left-leaning exploration — like that of critical legal studies, that built exclusively on a foundation of class analysis but not race — could not fully explain modern-day currents. Other intellectual influences include Black liberationist writing, radical Chicano writers and Marxism.
CRT is primarily a graduate field of law and legal studies. Today, though, it has spread to many other disciples, including American studies, education, sociology, political science and philosophy, and to other countries. Some K-12 teachers introduce certain of its principles in high school classes, which has become a source of high controversy.
Given that CRT has been around for several decades, why has it become such a controversial issue in today’s U.S.?
Three reasons stand out, in my own view. First, some disappointed followers of Trump were upset with the results of the recent election and went in search of a boogeyman. Second, certain white supremacists are concerned over the impending demographic tipping point and fear that white American society is in danger of being replaced by one of color. The third reason is the pandemic, which saw many schoolchildren spending a lot of time at home. Many of their parents were shocked to learn that their children had attitudes and beliefs that were anathema in their social circle.
Some skeptics have wrongly asserted that CRT rejects affirmative action, while others appear anxious that CRT attacks the entire liberal order. How do you respond to such criticisms?
CRT doesn’t really reject affirmative action, although many critics think that it doesn’t go far enough. But it does question many liberal mainstays, such as “colorblindness,” or the notion that the “rule of law” is slowly but surely improving the fortunes of people of color.
Some states are proposing passing legislation to ban the teaching of a basically academic concept. Is CRT actually being taught to K-12 public school students?
I certainly hope so. How many people learned in school about the Mexican orphan train, or about the flat-out lies that led to Japanese internment or the Trail of Tears?
As a founder of CRT, you have been lately the target of scores of hate messages. Are you concerned about these hate messages turning into real-life violence against you and your wife?
A recent anonymous phone message offered to put a bullet in my brain. Another told me to go back to Mexico if I didn’t like it here. A third warned me that my subcompact car could suffer a serious accident with a truck in Tuscaloosa.
A university administrator told me they could do nothing about the threats unless they were specific and imminent but referred me to campus police.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump unleashed a civil war within the Republican Party in Georgia.
The war was a long time coming. Last year, Trump tried to pressure officials to change Georgia’s presidential election result. Remember the infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the cornered and defeated Trump urged his interlocutor to “find” just enough votes to allow him to claim victory?
Raffensperger, a Republican, not only refused to find the necessary number of votes, but he also recorded the conversation and let the world’s media know about it. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — whose campaign against Stacey Abrams two years earlier was about as Trumpian as one could get — also refused Trump’s appeals not to sign off on the Georgia results. There were, apparently, anti-democratic lines that, in 2020, even a deeply opportunistic and hyper-conservative politician such as Kemp couldn’t cross.
Now Trump is attempting to orchestrate revenge from Mar-a-Lago. Partly, he seems to be doing so as a matter of strategy, to attempt to gain control over all levels of the GOP in as many states as possible heading into the 2024 presidential election cycle. That effort to take over the entire machinery of a political party and bend it to the will of a single individual is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Partly, however, this seems to be Trump’s unrestrained schoolyard bully persona lashing out at — and seeking ways to humiliate — anyone who stands in his way or refuses to fully, unquestioningly, embrace his conspiratorial understanding of the world.
Soon afterwards, as part of a nationwide effort to buck nonpartisan or bipartisan control over the elections process, GOP legislators in Georgia, moving in lockstep with the ex-president, voted to make it easier to take down local elections officials whose work they dislike. In practice, what that means is that, in the future, were a GOP candidate — for instance, one Donald J. Trump — to refuse to accept an election loss, the candidate would have a strong chance of bringing legislators along for the ride who would be willing and now able to subvert election monitoring systems for their candidate’s own partisan advantage.
Now, as the midterm elections near, Trump, the puppeteer, has begun pulling even more strings, making his minions dance and jerk at his every command. Seeking to destroy Kemp’s governorship, former Sen. David Purdue has jumped into the ring as a primary challenger to the governor. Remember, Purdue was part of that sorry duo of defeated senators whose unwavering and fanatical fealty to Trump cost the GOP both Georgia Senate seats, and, thus, control of the U.S. Senate. Immediately after Purdue’s announcement, Trump endorsed him, calling him a “conservative fighter.”
Purdue may indeed be conservative — certainly he is reactionary — but let’s be clear: That’s not why Trump is supporting him. This isn’t about ideology, it’s about Trump’s vision of “loyalty.” The ex-president, wounded to the quick by what he saw as Kemp’s personal betrayal in late 2020, is seeking vengeance, and he doesn’t care who he takes down in this quest to ensure that, politically speaking, the governor is soon sleeping with the fishes.
What makes it all a hell of a lot more interesting, however, is that Abrams has also announced she is running, once more, to be governor. Abrams lost to Kemp in 2018 by 1.4 percent, a result impacted at least in part by the scale of voter disenfranchisement that Georgia had unleashed in the run-up to that election. Since then, Abrams has created two organizations to encourage voter participation, including, most recently Fair Fight Action. The result has been a huge upsurge in voter participation, not only in presidential votes, but in down-ballot elections as well. Roughly 1 million more Georgians voted in the 2020 presidential elections than was the case four years earlier. And even in the 2020 Senate runoff elections, 260,000 more Georgians cast votes than voted in the 2016 presidential election.
Despite Georgia’s accelerated efforts to suppress the vote, Abrams’s group will, at the very least, act as a counterweight to this in the next election cycle. In fact, there’s no red state in the country where progressives are better positioned to defeat efforts to ensure continued conservative dominance achieved via voter suppression. And there’s arguably no progressive candidate in a key swing state more able to ride this wave of newfound voter engagement than is Abrams.
The Purdue-Kemp fissure, and Trump’s stirring of the GOP rage-pot, could end up boosting Abrams, even if the Democratic Party nationally takes a beating. After all, if Kemp and Purdue spend the next six months sparring against each other in a war of attrition, as seems likely, Abrams could end up the last candidate still in the ring.
An Abrams victory would be huge nationally, making it that much harder for a Trumpified GOP to overturn election results in 2024. It would be a sweet irony indeed if the twice-impeached ex-president’s sparking of a GOP civil war in Georgia cost the party a key governorship, and if Raffensberger — who, regardless of whether he is successfully primaried, will still be secretary of state in November 2022 — is, to the horror of Donald Trump, once more tasked with the job of certifying a Democratic win.
After inaction from Democratic leaders in the House, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) introduced a resolution on Wednesday to strip Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) of her committee assignments for repeatedly waging Islamophobic attacks against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota).
As first reported by The Washington Post, Pressley is hoping that the resolution’s introduction will force leadership to take action on Boebert’s Islamophobia. Democratic leaders have been relatively quiet on the issue, condemning Boebert’s comments but so far not taking public action to pursue a formal punishment for the far right lawmaker. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has indicated that Republicans won’t be penalizing Boebert.
The resolution doesn’t carry a “privileged” status, meaning that there is nothing forcing House leaders to consider the resolution immediately; it’s up to Democratic leaders to decide when, if ever, to take up the resolution. Omar has said that she’s confident that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) will take action this week.
“For a Member of Congress to repeatedly use hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobic tropes towards a Muslim colleague is dangerous,” Pressley said. “It has no place in our society and it diminishes the honor of the institution we serve in.”
“Without meaningful accountability for that Member’s actions, we risk normalizing this behavior and endangering the lives of our Muslim colleagues, Muslim staffers and every Muslim who calls America home,” Pressley went on. “The House must unequivocally condemn this incendiary rhetoric and immediately pass this resolution. How we respond in moments like these will have lasting impacts, and history will remember us for it.”
The measure is cosponsored by 18 Democrats, including progressive “squad” members Representatives Jamaal Bowman (New York), Cori Bush (Missouri), Pramila Jayapal (Washington), Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), and others like Representatives Judy Chu (California) and Jimmy Gomez (California).
“We must be assured that no member is above accountability, and Republican leadership has failed to deliver any such accountability for Boebert,” said Bush. “It is time for Democratic leadership to act and pass our resolution to not only protect Rep. Omar, but the livelihoods and lives of Muslim communities around our country.”
It’s unclear if the resolution would pass if brought to a vote. As of last week, at least 40 Democrats have signed statements calling for Boebert to be stripped from committees.
After extremist right wing Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) posted a video depicting an anime version of him killing Ocasio-Cortez, the House took swift action to punish him, voting to censure him and remove him from committee assignments a little more than a week after the video was posted. In that instance, Gosar refused to apologize and faced additional calls to be expelled.
Although Boebert did issue a weak apology to Omar, she has shown little remorse for her comments. Since the apology, the far right lawmaker has doubled down on her hateful rhetoric, even as more videos have emerged showing her making similar Islamophobic comments about Omar.
The original video of Boebert’s hateful comments was released late last month, about 11 days ago as of Wednesday. While recounting a story about being in an elevator with Omar — which Omar later said never happened — Boebert implied that Omar was a terrorist. A video from a separate event shows Boebert calling Omar a terrorist directly, and accusing her of being a terrorist sympathizer.
“This is why so many Muslims across the country have reached out to our office and to other members of Congress. Because they know that, when anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia is unaddressed, it’s the Muslim community that ends up paying for it,” Omar said on MSNBC on Tuesday.
“I just want to make people understand how dangerous the usage of her words can be, because I am afraid that somebody like the people who have been leaving voicemails [for] my office will feel compelled to come and take out the terrorist,” she continued, referring to death threats she received after Boebert’s comments went public. “And that is not only endangering my life, but that’s endangering other Muslims.”
Two months after Republicans allowed a vote on raising the debt ceiling to cover spending through mid-December, the party is once again using obstructionist tactics to gain paltry political points, jeopardizing the health of the entire U.S. economy in the process.
This time, Republicans are going to even further extremes to threaten a debt default and subsequent recession, bucking a plan formed through negotiations with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) to pass the debt ceiling raise. The plan proposes passing the debt ceiling raise through Congress’s defense appropriations bill or creating a new process that would allow the debt ceiling to be raised with a simple majority of 51 votes.
Instead, some Republicans are insisting — as they did earlier this year — that Democrats pass the raise through the reconciliation bill, a process that would likely take weeks.
On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told NBC that there wouldn’t be 10 Republicans who would agree to McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) proposed rule change for a simple majority vote on the debt limit. “I think Democrats should raise the debt limit through reconciliation,” he said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D-California) has rejected the idea to pass the debt limit through the defense bill. “Funding our troops through the NDAA should in no way, shape, or form be tied to the debt limit in process or substance,” he tweeted on Monday.
GOP senators were similarly recalcitrant. “So if I vote for the NDAA, people are gonna say I voted to raise the debt limit? I’m not for that,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.
Republicans have rationalized their opposition to raising the debt ceiling by saying that they refuse to fund spending from Democrats. But in reality, the current debts that need to be paid were racked up by Donald Trump and Republicans, who amassed nearly $8 trillion in debt during Trump’s four years in office. This is more than any other president added to the deficit, with the exception of George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who were funding expensive war efforts.
Without the defense bill or simple majority vote avenues, Democrats have very few options left to raise the debt ceiling. In effectively rejecting all options other than the one that they favor — one that would likely allow Republicans to smear Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms — they are backing Democrats into a corner to force their hand on the raise, or else be blamed for the economic crisis that will follow.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has estimated that the country will be forced to default on its debts next week on December 15. If the country defaults on its loans for the first time in U.S. history, Yellen and economists have warned that a recession would result almost automatically.
The subsequent economic downturn, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics, could cost nearly 6 million jobs and would plummet household wealth by $15 trillion. It would also lead to long-term effects on borrowing rates and would have a disastrous effect on the U.S.’s credit rating. Moody’s economists have called this scenario “cataclysmic.”
This isn’t the first time that Republicans have threatened economic disaster over the debt ceiling. In 2011 and 2013, the party waged similar efforts. Both times resulted in economic turmoil; in 2011, Republicans’ efforts created a set of “hyperaustere” spending limits, The New Republic pointed out.
Democrats do have another option for raising the debt ceiling, however. Eliminating the filibuster would allow the party to pass the debt ceiling and anything else they want through a simple majority vote. However, as months of negotiations over even the smallest proposals in the reconciliation bill have shown, conservative Democrats who favor keeping the filibuster are unwilling to budge on the issue, even in the face of disaster.
At a virtual hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources this week, Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota, the ranking Republican, displayed a visual of President Joe Biden pointing to a gas pump with the price set at $3.49 and the words, “I did that!” Climate policies pushed by Biden and Democrats, Stauber insisted, are driving up fuel prices.
“Life is simply more expensive for Americans under the Biden administration,” Stauber said.
Blaming Biden and his modest climate agenda for everything from post-lockdown inflation to high fuel prices is all the rage among Republicans these days, but in reality, the bulk of Biden’s climate proposals have not been enacted. Experts say current fuel prices are the result of multiple domestic and international factors, including the industry’s own moves to boost returns for shareholders by limiting oil exploration as pandemic restrictions fade and demand increases.
Pieces of Biden’s climate agenda will be funded by a new infrastructure package that passed Congress with bipartisan support, but popular plans (which Stauber opposed) to update the transportation and energy grids to be more energy efficient and to withstand climate-fueled disasters were not the focus of the Republican’s attack.
Instead, Stauber pointed to orders issued by Biden shortly after the presidential inauguration to block a key permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and to pause sales of public lands and waters for oil and gas drilling while the Interior Department reviewed leasing programs that government watchdogs have long criticized as dysfunctional.
The non-partisan fact-checkers at PolitiFact recently examined the Keystone XL talking point after a viral post linking high gas prices to “shutting pipe lines down” was flagged on Facebook as misinformation. The massive pipeline would have transported heavy, carbon-intensive oil from Canada’s Alberta Tar Sands and bisected much of the country, angering climate activists, tribal governments and farmers in its proposed path.
PolitiFact determined the post — which claimed that gas prices were lower in other oil-producing countries because their governments are not canceling pipelines like Keystone XL — to be false.
“The pipeline shutdown has absolutely nothing to do with gas prices,” Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, told PolitiFact. “Prices are higher because production has lagged behind, not because there isn’t enough pipeline capacity — there is.”
Biden has come under pressure to cancel permits for other pipelines, including the Line 3 pipeline in Stauber’s home state of Minnesota, which faced fierce resistance from Indigenous activists despite intense police repression. After the pipeline went into operation in October, water protectors from across the country converged on Washington, D.C., for a mass protest demanding Biden turn the nation away from fossil fuels.
Climate activists say new fossil fuel infrastructure is unnecessary and will keep the U.S. dependent on dirty energy into the future. The U.S. has already become the world leader in oil and gas production thanks to the fracking boom and plenty of infrastructure that already exists.
U.S. crude oil production dropped sharply in early 2020 as lockdowns restricted commerce and travel. It still remains far below pre-pandemic levels, according to federal data. Facing consumer anger as the economy reboots and gas prices rise, Biden has pressured the industry to lower prices and unlocked strategic federal oil reserves.
Experts say the oil industry is cutting costs and holding back on efforts to expand crude oil production in order to boost cash returns to shareholders, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News. The fracking boom that sent U.S. fossil fuel production soaring in recent years also led to a glut of fuel and plummeting prices, especially for natural gas, which threw drilling companies into bankruptcy and angered investors looking for a hefty return. Some producers went out of business during the pandemic, which could also be contributing to higher gas prices than consumers are used to.
Some experts say the Biden’s climate agenda and global efforts to reduce emissions could chill private investment in oil and gas, but investors make decisions based on a variety of factors, including the growth of renewable energy and the myriad economic risks posed by a changing climate. When the scientists warn that extreme weather, rising seas, widespread drought and rising temperatures will undermine already struggling energy grids and transform our way of life, some financial investors undoubtedly take notice.
The international market also plays a role in setting gas prices at home, because oil is traded globally at prices shaped by speculation and geopolitics as well as increased demand as travel and commerce pick back up. Over the past month, Biden’s high-profile fight with foreign producers such as Saudi Arabia over oil production has bled over into other realms of diplomacy.
Republicans argue that any attempt by the U.S. to reduce fossil fuel production will make the nation more reliant on competitors like China and Russia, and imports from these countries will simply replace the domestic supply to meet America’s demands for energy. However, Biden and Democrats in Congress are not actually advocating for canceling the industry’s current operations. They’re mulling options for reducing future drilling, and only on public lands and ocean waters.
In fact, the Biden administration recently offered to lease more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling companies, although the industry showed only a modest interest in expanding its already wide foothold in the Gulf. The administration is also planning on leasing up to 734,000 acres of public lands across the country next year despite objections from environmental groups, which filed lawsuits to stop both lease sales.
Climate justice activists are demanding much more from the Biden administration, including a halt to new pipelines and other infrastructure expansions as well as reparations for communities harmed by climate disruption and industrial polluters.
Stauber claimed Biden’s “ban” on oil and gas leasing on public lands threw the industry “into chaos,” but a federal judge blocked Biden’s leasing moratorium earlier this year. Oil and gas companies are already leasing at least 26 million acres of public lands, and less than half of these acres are currently used for drilling, according to Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee.
Federal researchers estimate that nearly a quarter of domestic carbon dioxide emissions came from fossil fuels produced on public lands and ocean waters from 2005 to 2014, and Biden pledged on the campaign trail to ban new leasing. Still, his executive order only placed a temporary moratorium on oil and gas leasing, allowing the Interior Department time to conduct an internal review of leasing programs that the Government Accountability Office has flagged as “vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.”
Regulators released the results of the internal review in a report last week that identified “significant shortcomings” in the leasing program and recommended several reforms supported by Democrats in Congress, including an increase in royalties and rents paid by drillers to provide a “fair return” for taxpayers.
The Interior Department report on its leasing programs and the climate-warming emissions from oil and gas drilling on public lands were the focus of the House Energy and Mineral Resources subcommittee hearing that saw Republicans attacking Biden over gas prices on Thursday. For their part, Democrats on the subcommittee said they are encouraged by the Interior Department’s embrace of reform but are disappointed that the leasing report only mentions emissions — and the “climate-related costs that must be borne by taxpayers” — in passing.
“In my view, this was a missed opportunity, and it’s a critical issue we must address,” said Rep. Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat from California and chair of the subcommittee. “America’s public lands contain massive fossil fuel reserves, and Interior’s leasing practices and its management of these resources are incredibly outdated and destructive.”
Nine days later, however, Reynolds signed legislation that pays vaccine refusers to do just that: sit on the sidelines. Under the new law, anyone “discharged from employment for refusing to receive a vaccination against COVID-19 … shall not be disqualified for benefits.” Reynolds is one of many Republican politicians who openly advocate, and in some states have successfully imposed, a two-tiered system of unemployment insurance. It’s not a left-wing policy of money for everyone or a right-wing policy of money for no one.
It’s a policy of pernicious hypocrisy: welfare for vaccine refusers, tough love for everyone else.
Under these new laws, any worker who gets fired for broadly defined “misconduct,” such as flunking an employer-imposed drug test, is disqualified from unemployment benefits—but employees who refuse COVID vaccination are glorified, protected, and subsidized. The state must guarantee, in Reynolds’ words, that these reckless freeloaders “will still receive unemployment benefits despite being fired for standing up for their beliefs.”
The GOP’s coddling of vaccine refusers makes a joke of its rhetoric about self-reliance. This summer, for instance, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ended the federal government’s supplemental COVID-era unemployment benefits. “We are paying people to stay home. That needs to change,” he declared. But two weeks ago, Lee signed legislation that pays vaccine refusers to stay home. Under Tennessee’s new policy, the state’s normal rule about employees fired for “misconduct”—that they lose their eligibility for unemployment benefits—can no longer be applied to anyone who is terminated for “refusing to receive a vaccination for COVID-19.”
In fact, the Florida law says that if you’re unemployed and you’re offered a job that requires vaccination, you can turn it down and stay on the dole.
Last week, Kansas adopted the same policy: You can keep drawing unemployment checks while declining job opportunities, as long as you specifically refuse “work that requires compliance with a COVID-19 vaccine requirement.” And if you were recently fired for refusing vaccination—or if you were previously denied unemployment benefits because you refused job offers that entailed vaccination—the state now promises that you’ll be “retroactively paid benefits” going back to the beginning of September. This bonus payout is yours, as a special kind of welfare recipient, even if you have “not requested retroactive payment of such benefits.” Tennessee has enacted a similar clause promising “retroactive payment of unemployment benefits,” without a specified time limit.
Prior to the enactment of these laws, the standard policy about job termination for “misconduct” in most states—i.e., that such offenders were disqualified from unemployment compensation—was generally understood to cover vaccine refusal. Kansas law, for instance, defined misconduct as “a violation of a duty or obligation reasonably owed the employer as a condition of employment including, but not limited to, a violation of a company rule, including a safety rule.” Under Florida law, misconduct included “disregard of the reasonable standards of behavior which the employer expects of his or her employee.” Tennessee’s law was almost identical. Refusing vaccination, in the midst of a respiratory pandemic that has killed millions of people, was a pretty obvious safety violation. Now it’s been elevated to a sacred right.
The new state laws also make a mockery of religion. Under Florida’s statute, if an employee simply “presents” a statement “indicating that the employee declines COVID-19 vaccination because of a sincerely held religious belief,” “the employer must allow the employee to opt out of the employer’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate.” Iowa’s policy is similar. The Kansas law orders employers to accept such requests for religious exemptions “without inquiring into the sincerity of the request.” By framing vaccine refusal as religious freedom—while making it impossible to ascertain whether the refusal is truly grounded in religion—the GOP is wrapping its constituency of anti-social moochers in a cloak of martyrdom.
Republicans also argue that vaccine refusers deserve special treatment because it’s wrong, as a matter of personal autonomy, to let employers dictate workers’ health decisions. As DeSantis put it two weeks ago, “We are respecting people’s individual freedom.” But that’s not how DeSantis treats marijuana. Under Florida law, if you flunk an employer-imposed drug test, that’s “misconduct,” and it bars you from unemployment benefits if you’re fired. And if you apply for a new job—but you’re rejected for failing a drug test “required as a condition of employment” in that job—you’re further disqualified from unemployment benefits “for refusing to accept an offer of suitable work.”
Let’s pause to appreciate the Orwellian majesty of this sequence. 1) You, a responsible citizen, have gotten your COVID shots and want to be productive, so you apply for a job. 2) The prospective employer demands that you take a drug test. You test positive for marijuana, so the employer rejects you. 3) Based on the employer’s rejection of you—not your rejection of the employer—Florida declares that you have refused the job offer and are therefore disqualified from unemployment benefits. However, 4) your neighbor, who was fired for refusing COVID vaccination and has turned down two subsequent job offers that required COVID vaccination, continues to collect unemployment checks.
Meanwhile, under the same Florida law, employees who leave their jobs because they’re afraid of getting COVID become ineligible for unemployment benefits, unless they can prove to the DeSantis administration that this fear constituted “good cause” to quit. They’re treated more harshly than people who quit because they’re afraid of a federally approved vaccine.
This is how Republicans define “personal responsibility.”
Iowa has the same rule about employer drug tests. Its law specifically names marijuana as a substance that merits disqualification of the user from unemployment benefits. Under the Kansas statute, a “positive breath alcohol test or a positive chemical test” is “conclusive evidence of gross misconduct,” with extra penalties—beyond ordinary misconduct—for anyone seeking unemployment assistance. And in Tennessee, losing your job for “refusal to take a drug test or an alcohol test” can be “deemed to be a discharge for misconduct connected with work,” rendering you ineligible for assistance. When Republicans claim that their defense of vaccine refusers is based on a principled commitment to the physical autonomy of employees—as they did at a Senate press conference on Tuesday—don’t believe a word of it.
This isn’t a party of personal autonomy, moral responsibility, free enterprise, limited government, or self-reliance. It’s a party that has casually tossed aside each of these values, first for Donald Trump and then for COVID. Today’s GOP believes that the government should control workplace policies and should subsidize freeloaders who endanger their communities. It’s the party of socialism for anti-vaxxers.
The emergence of the new Omicron strain of COVID-19 is alarming, even if the exact danger it poses is still unclear. This development should serve as a reminder of what’s been clear from the beginning of the pandemic — that the only way to suppress the virus’s spread is to have a truly global vaccination effort. The most obvious way to increase global vaccine access is for the World Trade Organization to adopt India and South Africa’s proposal to waive intellectual property rights of the giant pharmaceutical companies that are claiming a monopoly on vaccine development. The Biden administration has opposed the waiver but now has begun to signal at least tepid support.
Last Sunday, President Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci had warned that it was only a matter of time before the Omicron strain appeared in the U.S. He was proven right on Wednesday when California reported the first known case in a traveler from South Africa.
As the Delta surge showed over the summer of 2021, the vast swaths of the United States where vaccine rates are low are incredibly vulnerable to each new variant. After an initially impressive vaccine rollout, the U.S.’s vaccination rate has dropped off considerably. As of late October, the United States had the lowest vaccination rates of G7 countries.
If there is one spot of good news here, it’s that the Biden administration has embraced strong vaccination mandates, and the early data suggest that they’re working. In September, Biden issued an executive order requiring all federal workers to get the shot with exceptions in limited circumstances. As of November 23, 92 percent of the 3.5 million federal workers had gotten at least one shot, according to a White House fact sheet.
As part of that executive order, Biden also required all employees of companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated, obtain a waiver, or face weekly testing by early January. That order was challenged by at least 27 states in various districts and was subsequently blocked by a federal appeals court. A federal judge also blocked a Biden order mandating that health care workers get the vaccine, after 10 states sued.
Still, the company 3M (the largest producer of N95 masks in the U.S.) mandated that its employees get vaccinated in response to Biden’s executive order on federal workers. More broadly, Biden’s appeal to corporate behemoths to adopt vaccine mandates has seen some key success, as Procter & Gamble, Tyson Foods, and several airlines have required their workers to get the shot.
Although national hard data is difficult to pin down, anecdotally, at least many vaccine-hesitant people have preferred to get the vaccine rather than face the prospect of losing their jobs. State and municipal mandates have been incredibly successful as well. In New York State, a mandate for health care workers saw the number of people covered jump about 10 percent — from 82 to 92 percent — in the week before the requirement took hold. Even cops, who are part of one of the most reactionary and anti-vaccine professions in the country, have largelyacquiesced to the requirement, even as their police associations have challenged the mandates in court.
The response from the right to the mandates — either those issued by Biden or by Democratic-controlled cities and states — has been predictable. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Biden’s federal mandates were something out of “communist China or North Korea.” A Fox News weekend host said they were the “beginning of a communist-style social credit system.” Right-wing website Red Statereferred to Biden’s speech as “dictatorial,” and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said it was an example of the “authoritarianism” of the “administrative state.” After the conservative television station Newsmax announced it would enforce its own mandate, host Steve Cortes tweeted that he would not comply with “any organization’s attempt to enforce Biden’s capricious & unscientific Medical Apartheid mandate.”
In the months since Biden issued his federal mandate, the reactionary backlash hasn’t subsided, exactly, but conservatives have found other boogiemen to chase. Most notably, they rallied in a panic against in-school discussions of racism and oppression (which they inaccurately describe as “critical race theory”) in the Virginia gubernatorial race. Republicans have attacked Biden’s Build Back Better social spending plan as a reckless expansion of the welfare state. Rep. Lauren Boebert called Rep. Ilhan Omar a terrorist, then refused to publicly apologize. In short, conservatives are doing what they always do, and what they would have done had Biden not issued his executive orders on vaccine requirements.
The clear lesson for Democrats here is that cowering in anticipation of a backlash is morally indefensible in addition to being political malpractice. The constant media refrain in the run-up to the Virginia election was that the Democrats hadn’t done enough with their power, or, in Beltway-speak, they didn’t have “wins” to bring home. Poll after poll shows that Biden’s political future relies on increasing vaccination rates, stemming future waves and inching the country closer to an end-state where COVID is more like the seasonal flu and less like a life-altering pandemic.
Biden, and Democrats more broadly, will obviously get zero help from conservatives in this endeavor. Not only have the vast majority of Republican-controlled states resisted mask and vaccine mandates, but the GOP response to the Omicron variant has been even more mired in lies and conspiracy theories. Texas Republican and former Trump White House physician Ronny Jackson suggested the new variant had been invented by Democrats to justify mail-in voting in next year’s midterms. Similarly, Fox News hosts Will Cain and Pete Hegseth half-joked that the Biden administration would invent new variants “every two years” for their political benefit.
In retrospect, it’s now clear that Biden waited far too long to initiate federal vaccine mandates, almost entirely because his administration was afraid of the backlash they might generate. According to vaccine expert Peter Hotez, 150,000 people in the United States have died of COVID since June, when vaccines became widely available for Americans over 18. At least some of those people could have been saved — in some cases, in spite of their own instincts — had Biden pressed for large-scale mandates earlier.
There’s a rough analogy to be made here to another subject Democrats have waffled on for years for fear of sparking a backlash, specifically health care costs. There’s no question that much of the Democratic Party’s opposition to single-payer health care — or even a public option — is due to a genuine commitment to a privatized market, both ideologically and for the material benefit they get from health care sector lobbying. But the way that that commitment is often sold to liberal voters is that moving to a single-payer system would result in cries of authoritarianism and Stalinism from the right. As the left flank of the party has said for years, conservatives will accuse liberals of being socialists no matter what they do, so why not enact good policies and deal with the inevitable backlash when it comes.
More broadly, Democrats have imposed strict limits on themselves so as not to trigger blowback from Republicans for exercising their power when they have it. This manifests in all sorts of ways — from the Obama administration settling on a stimulus that some advisers knew was too small at the outset of the great recession, to the continuing reluctance from the party’s conservative wing to abolish the filibuster (even as a limited carve-out for voting rights). The Biden administration has been dragging its feet on negotiating lower drug costs, preferring to leave it to Congress despite the fact that there is executive action Biden could take in the meantime. Activists have also argued that Biden has the legal authority to cancel student debt without going through Congress, an action the administration seems to have placed in a state of permanent review. Some experts believe Biden has the statutory authority to make college essentially free by forgiving “loans equal to average public-college tuition on a rolling basis for two- and four-year public colleges.”
Every single one of these actions — not to mention any legislation Biden signs into law with only Democratic support — will generate massive backlash from conservatives. But so did federal, state and municipal vaccine mandates. Both morally and politically, the danger Democrats face is doing too little, losing power and being called authoritarians anyway.
As Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) faces Islamophobic attacks from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) and other far-right members of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has joined a chorus of Democrats in condemning Republicans for their silence on the issue.
On Tuesday, Omar shared a voicemail she received after a video emerged of Boebert cruelly implying that Omar is a terrorist because of her faith. The caller who left the harrowing voicemail made several threats to Omar’s life while hurling racist slurs and profanities against her. This is only one of the many death threats that she received after Boebert’s video was posted online, Omar said.
Ocasio-Cortez condemned Republicans in a tweet on Wednesday. “People truly don’t understand the scale, intensity, and volume of threats targeting [Ilhan Omar],” she wrote. “Kevin McCarthy is so desperate to be speaker that he is working with his Ku Klux Klan caucus to look aside and allow violent targeting of woc members of Congress. This cannot be ignored.”
As minority leader in the House, McCarthy has consistently enabled the most virulent hatred within his caucus. Ocasio-Cortez herself was the subject of a violent threat by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), who recently posted a video depicting an anime version of him killing the progressive lawmaker and threatening President Joe Biden with swords.
The House voted to censure Gosar over the threat and remove him from his committee assignments, with only two Republicans joining Democrats in doing so. Meanwhile, McCarthy and other Republicans defended Gosar through the debacle, minimizing Gosar’s role in posting the fantasy video of him murdering the progressive lawmaker.
McCarthy has remained silent on the recent threats to Omar, signalling his tacit approval for the Islamophobia the lawmaker has been forced to endure.
“While people toss out clichés like ‘we condemn all forms of racism and bigotry,’ the fact is Islamophobia is far too often tolerated and ignored,” Ocasio-Cortez continued on Wednesday. “Bigotry is not made unacceptable by what one says about it, it’s made acceptable based on whether there are consequences for it or not.”
The New York lawmaker concluded with a warning about the consequences of allowing the GOP to continue escalating dangerous far-right tactics completely unchecked. “GOP are given freedom to incite without consequence. They don’t have to pay for the security required from their acts — we do. They make money off it,” she wrote, adding that they “are targeting those least likely to be institutionally protected first.”
Progressive lawmakers like Omar and Ocasio-Cortez have had to consider additional personal safety protocols to guard from death threats and other violent messages. These threats are not only coming from members of the public; Ocasio-Cortez has previously said that she has feared fellow lawmakers, especially during the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Republicans appear to be increasingly accepting of violence and threats toward political adversaries, including against people within their own party. One Republican representative, Fred Upton of Michigan, recently received a death threat after he voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that much of the caucus voted against. The threat came after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) posted Upton’s office number online, calling him and other Republicans who voted for the bill “traitors.”
These tactics aren’t just psychologically harmful — they can also lead to real life violence, as Omar pointed out in her press conference on Tuesday. As Islamophobic vitriol increases, attacks on Muslims also rise. This was demonstrated under former President Donald Trump, who regularly implemented Islamophobic policies and spouted hateful language.
The normalization of fascism by Republicans appears to be an extremely cynical fundraising tactic. Republicans, inspired by Trump, have been making increasingly abhorrent comments in recent years. They cry that they’re being cancelled — kicked off of Twitter for a day, or criticized by Democrats — and then send emails telling followers that the only way to fight back is to fill their campaign coffers to the brim.
In response to the attacks on Omar, Democratic leaders have been considering what action to take against Boebert. Some lawmakers have called for Boebert to be removed from her committee assignments, a punishment similar to the one faced by Gosar.
On Tuesday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) shared audio of a harrowing death threat she received after a video of far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) making Islamophobic comments about her was posted and amplified online.
Omar played the voicemail — which was laced with profanities and racist slurs — during a press conference in the Capitol aimed at urging the GOP to take action against the Islamophobia within their party. The lawmaker said she received the voicemail shortly after finishing a phone call with Boebert on Monday, in which the extremist Republican refused to apologize for her comments and instead doubled down on her bigoted attacks.
During the short portion of the voicemail that Omar played, the anonymous caller made several threats on her life. “We see you Muslim and [n*****] bitch. We know what you’re up to. You’re all about taking over our country,” the caller said, referring to hateful and false conspiracy theories. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty that will love the opportunity to take you off the face of this fucking earth.”
“You fucking Muslim piece of shit,” the caller continued. “You jihadist. We know what you are. You’re a fucking traitor. You will not live much longer, bitch. I can almost guarantee you that.”
Members of any party should find threats to a lawmaker’s life unacceptable, Omar said. “Condemning this should not be a partisan issue,” she went on. “This is about our basic humanity and fundamental rights of religious freedom.”
During her tenure as a representative, the progressive lawmaker has received and reported hundreds of threats on her life. These threats often spike after Republican attacks, as they did after Boebert’s attack this week, she said.
While speaking in the Capitol, Omar shared her experience facing Islamophobia as she sought and gained public office. On her first day as a representative, Steve King of Iowa, a Republican representative at the time, implied that she might have explosives with her because of her faith.
“The truth is, is that Islamophobia pervades our culture, our politics, and even policy decisions. Cable news hosts, leading politicians in the Republican party routinely espouse hateful rhetoric about a religion that includes a diverse group of more than a billion peaceful worshipers around the world,” Omar said.
She went on to point out harmful stereotypes about Muslims, including that Muslims want to take over the country and — most pervasively — that all Muslims are terrorists. When Boebert and other political officials spew such rhetoric, Omar said, “it is not just an attack on me. It is an attack on millions of American Muslims across this country.”
“We cannot pretend that this hate speech from leading politicians doesn’t have real consequences,” she went on, pointing to deadly attacks on mosques and Muslim families, as well as growing Islamophobic vitriol in the U.S.
The lawmaker concluded her press conference by calling on Republican leaders to condemn and take action against Islamophobia within the party. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has so far remained silent on the issue, standing by as his members wage hateful and dangerous aggression against Omar. Even as more videos of Boebert implying that Omar is a terrorist have been unearthed, Republican leaders refuse to take action.
While some Democrats like Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) are publicly calling for Boebert to be formally punished, Democratic leaders have said that they’re still contemplating the path forward. “We’re considering what action ought to be taken,” House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) told reporters.
In the voicemail shared by Omar, the caller repeated some of the bigoted language used by Boebert and other far-right politicians. Boebert referred to Omar as being part of the “jihad squad,” a hateful nickname for progressive lawmakers dubbed by Republican politicians. The use of the word “traitor” has also been pervasive among the right, with another death threat caller using the word to describe a Republican lawmaker who voted with Democrats on the infrastructure bill earlier this month.
A group of congressionalRepublicans is threatening to shut down the government this week in a last-ditch attempt to block all funding for the enforcement of President Joe Biden’s coronavirusvaccine mandatefor large employers — a policy thatright-wing judgeshave temporarily put on hold.
PoliticoreportedWednesday that Senate Republicans led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah are “planning to object to quick consideration of a stopgap measure to extend funding into early 2022 unless Democratic leaders agree to deny money to enforce the mandate.”
“Because of the tight schedule — and Senate rules that require unanimous consent to move quickly — the senators believe they’ll be able to drag out the process well past midnight Friday, when funding officially expires,” the outlet explained. “The [Senate] group has backup from the House: In a meeting Tuesday night, the House Freedom Caucus voted to pressure Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to take a harder line on the so-called continuing resolution unless Democrats strip out funding to enforce the mandate.”
The federal government will shut down at the end of the day on December 3 — in the middle of a deadly pandemic — if Congress fails to approve a short-term funding bill before then. Though Democrats narrowly control both the House and the Senate, they will need Republican votes in the upper chamber due to the archaic 60-vote filibuster rule, which the majority party has left intact despitemounting progressive pressureto abolish it.
“The stakes are high,” theWashington Post’s Rachel RoubeinnotedTuesday. “Averting a government shutdown is critical for helping fund the U.S. territories’ Medicaid programs. The current stopgap spending measure sustains federal dollars for their safety net programs. It’s also crucial to keeping government agencies running and providing paychecks to overworked staff in the federal health department.”
While it’s not clear how many GOP lawmakers intend to go along with Lee’s shutdown plan, 15 Senate Republicanssigned onto a letter last month vowing to “use all means at [their] disposal to oppose… legislation that funds or in any way enables the enforcement of President Biden’s employer vaccine mandate.”
In atweetWednesday, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) lambasted the GOP’s shutdown threat as “another hissy fit in the making.”
“Republicans plan again to take their ball and go home after not getting their way,” Connolly wrote. “Like every other GOP shutdown, this would greatly harm federal employees, contractors, and the American people who need and deserve a functioning government.”
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Republicans’ ploy to shut down the federal government over Biden’s vaccination requirements amounts to an effort to “prevent essential services from going out to people across the country because they’re upset about our efforts to save peoples lives.”
WH Press Sec. Jen Psaki hits at “absurdity” of Republicans threatening to allow government shutdown over vaccine mandates:
“They’re upset about our efforts to save peoples lives. I’ll just leave that there.” pic.twitter.com/rj1bLAe9SM
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is tasked with enforcing Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate, which compels businesses with more than 100 employees to require vaccination or weekly testing.
OSHA, which ischronicallyunderfunded and understaffed,suspendedenforcement of the requirement last month to comply with a temporary injunctionhanded downin early November by the conservative-dominated U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Biden administration is attempting to revive the mandate, which was challenged by large employers and Republican-controlled state governments.
On Tuesday, Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana — a Trump appointee — blockedthe start of a separate vaccine mandate that would have applied to healthcare workers at facilities that rely on Medicare and Medicaid funding.
“Thank you, Judge Terry Doughty, for making the world less safe today with your ruling on vaccine mandates,” responded Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. “You know-nothing ideologue, you simpering puppet following a GOP vogue for cruelty, selfishness wrapped up in the defense of liberty.”
The House is expected to vote on a stopgap government funding measureas soon as Wednesdayin the hopes of keeping the resolution on track to pass before the Friday deadline.
In a floor speech on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “Senate Democrats are ready to pass this legislation and to get it done as quickly as possible.”
“To avoid a needless shutdown, Republicans will have to cooperate and approve the government funding legislation without delay. If Republicans choose obstruction, there will be a shutdown entirely because of their own dysfunction,” Schumer warned. “We cannot afford to go down that road.”
“As winter begins,” he added, “the last thing that Americans need right now is an avoidable, Republican-manufactured shutdown that will potentially harm millions of federal workers, harm their families, and harm local communities that rely on an open and functioning federal government.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) has shared an account of a phone call between her and far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) after it was revealed that the Republican made Islamophobic comments about Omar at a recent event.
In a statement released on Monday, Omar said that she fielded a call from Boebert in which Boebert refused to relent on her hateful statements. “Instead of apologizing for her Islamophobic comments and fabricated lies, Rep. Boebert refused to publicly acknowledge her hurtful and dangerous comments,” said Omar. “She instead doubled down on her rhetoric and I decided to end the unproductive call.”
Boebert is facing a potential campaign to be removed from her committee assignments after a video posted on social media showed her likening Omar to a terrorist. At an event, the extremist conservative lawmaker told a story — which Omar has since disputed — about being in an elevator with Omar when a Capitol police officer rushed to protect her, thinking that Omar was a threat.
“Well she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine,” Boebert recounted saying. She also referred to Omar as being part of the “jihad squad,” a hateful nickname for progressive lawmakers dubbed by GOP officials.
Omar emphasized in a statement on Monday that she picked up the phone in hopes of having a civil conversation with Boebert. “I believe in engaging with those we disagree with respectfully, but not when that disagreement is rooted in outright bigotry and hate,” she said.
She concluded the statement by criticizing the GOP for refusing to rid the party of the anti-Muslim sentiment that has long been embroiled in conservatism.
“The Republican Party leadership has done nothing to condemn and hold their own members accountable for repeated instances of anti-Muslim hate and harassment. This is not about one hateful statement or one politician; it is about a party that has mainstreamed bigotry and hatred,” Omar said, calling on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) to take action.
In the press release, Omar’s office also pointed out that the progressive lawmaker is regularly subjected to death threats that are riddled with Islamophobic sentiment. Though the GOP has spewed racist and otherwise hateful rhetoric for decades, the party seems to have embraced more violent and hostile tactics to abase political opponents in recent years.
Although Boebert issued a hollow apology after facing criticism for the video over the weekend, critics have pointed out that her words were disingenuous. Her behavior after the supposed apology has repeatedly confirmed that she does not regret her actions; in an Instagram video on Monday, Boebert suggested that Omar sympathizes with terrorists in yet another blatant display of Islamophobia.
In response to Omar’s statement, establishment media outlets have framed the phone call as a spat between two lawmakers rather than a show of — and tacit endorsement of — bigotry by the GOP. Fox News and CNN emphasized that Omar hung up on Boebert; NPR’s headline on the subject emphasized that the phone call was contentious; and The New York Times’s headline seemed to give Boebert credence for calling Omar.
These sorts of headlines make it seem as though both parties are at equal fault, implying that Omar, who has faced Islamophobic comments countless times during her tenure in Congress, has also somehow done wrong in the social and political equation. This plays directly into the right wing’s hands, normalizing rhetoric that justifies their platform of militarism and imperialism, racist immigration policy and the expansion of the surveillance state. This rhetoric also has the potential to stoke violence; over the past two decades, the precipitous rise of anti-Muslim sentiment has correlated with a rise in anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes.
Omar responded to a Fox News story about the phone call on Monday, saying, “There is only so much grace we can extend to others as humans before we must learn to cut our [losses] or hang up on someone in this case.”
It’s improbable that Republican leaders will take action against Boebert, who likely issued her supposed apology in order to avoid being reprimanded like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), who was censured after posting a video depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). Gosar, who never apologized for his video and instead doubled down on its message, now faces calls to be removed.
A group of Democrats is waging a campaign to get far right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) removed from her committee assignments after it was revealed that she made Islamophobic comments about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) at a recent event.
According to Politico, the Democrats are seeking a punishment for Boebert similar to ones that have already been levied on Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) after the extremist right-wing lawmakers made hateful and violent comments toward Democrats.
A video posted on Facebook showed Boebert recounting a story about a Capitol police officer running to an elevator that Omar and Boebert were standing in. According to Boebert, the police officer thought that Omar was a terrorist, to which Boebert allegedly responded, “Well she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.” She also referred to Omar as part of the “jihad squad,” a bigoted insult waged toward progressive lawmakers by Republicans.
Omar has said that the entire story was fabricated. But Republican officials have applauded the story for supposedly reflecting the bigoted fears of the American public.
The Minnesota lawmaker condemned Boebert on Twitter, saying “Fact, this buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout.”
“Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny and shouldn’t be normalized,” Omar continued. “Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.” She then pointed out that normalizing Islamophobia in Congress can also endanger the lives of Muslims across the country.
Omar later rebuked Republican leaders for repeatedly ignoring the Islamophobia that has been waged against her, noting that on her first day in Congress, Republican Rep. Steve King (Iowa) implied on Twitter that she was a terrorist because of her faith. “These anti-Muslim attacks aren’t about my ideas but about my identity and it’s clear. [Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy,] your silence speaks volumes.”
Progressive lawmakers also condemned Boebert for the incident. The Congressional Progressive Caucus wrote that the “Anti-Muslim bigotry” expressed by Boebert “has no place in Congress or anywhere. It is past time [McCarthy] respond to the dangerous rhetoric from his caucus.”
In lieu of McCarthy punishing Boebert for the move, which is unlikely, Democrats could take action similar to what they did for Gosar just weeks ago: filing and passing a resolution to censure Boebert and remove her from committee assignments. Gosar had posted a video on social media depicting an anime version of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and moving in to attack President Joe Biden; in censuring him, Democrats sent a rebuke to Republicans.
The House also voted in February to remove Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, stripping her of much of her voting power in the chamber. The Georgia extremist had supported violence toward Democrats online and spewed baseless conspiracy theories denying 9/11, sprinkling in virulent racism and anti-Semitism along the way.
It’s unclear if Democrats have the momentum to take similar action against Boebert, who has apologized — disingenuously, as critics have noted — for her remarks. Her apology was likely politically motivated, however. Gosar stood behind his video even after it was taken down and never apologized for it, even as he was being censured. Making a small concession, however deceitful, could help Boebert avoid a similar fate.
Last week, Politico reported on a Trump-commissioned poll that shows Trump out-polling Biden in the five key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. At the same time, a national Rasmussen poll showed Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical rematch by a stomach-churning 13 percent.
If these polls are anywhere near accurate, the country — and the world — faces the all-too-real possibility that, in November 2024, the twice-impeached, coup-plotting, fascist-flirting Donald Trump could be elected as the 47th president of the U.S.
There are many reasons to be suspicious of polls three years out from a presidential election and there are, of course, myriad things that could derail a potential Trump comeback. Trump is currently under investigation in New York and in Georgia, and could, quite plausibly, be indicted or convicted for tax fraud or intimidation of election officials by the time the 2024 primary season rolls around. Public opinion has soured on Biden, but that could potentially be reversed if inflation is brought under control, if the Build Back Better Act passes, and if large numbers of people see significant benefits in their daily lives as a result of its passage. And, perhaps the greatest unknown is whether the pandemic will continue to wreak havoc on the world — in which case incumbents of all political persuasions the world over may well suffer at the hands of ever-more-frustrated electorates — or will, by 2024, be a thing of the past.
It’s also possible that Biden, who will be well into his 80s by the next election, will, despite current plans to run again, announce that he is not seeking reelection, and will step aside to allow for a younger candidate, with less political baggage from a COVID-era presidency, to step up to the plate. And it’s also possible that, if the GOP gains control of Congress next November, they will push policies that are so extreme and so unpopular that national support for the party and its presidential nominee will evaporate.
For all of these reasons and more, head-to-head polling in 2021 about an election not taking place until 2024 is an imprecise science at best. Yet, without stampeding into a panic, we would be foolish to entirely dismiss these polls, and the broader trends they suggest.
In 32 states, including all 11 of the states that are considered to be plausibly swing states, Biden’s numbers have fallen off a cliff since the summer. In a slew of recent polls, Biden’s net disapproval ratings range from a modest 1 percent all the way up to Rasmussen’s 17 percent. That doesn’t mean he can’t win reelection — Bill Clinton’s numbers were similarly dire in 1993, and yet he easily won reelection in 1996, ending his presidency with sky-high approval numbers; and Reagan was also deeply unpopular early in his presidency and won reelection in a landslide — but it does mean that, at the moment, he has a mountain to climb to restore public confidence in his administration.
Having spent the past six months fighting among themselves and failing to pass Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, along with their failure to break the GOP filibuster and pass meaningful federal voting rights protections, the Democrats are intensely vulnerable heading into the 2022 midterms. That danger is compounded by GOP efforts in numerous states to restrict the franchise; by an unprecedented level of gerrymandering in states such as North Carolina, Ohio and Texas that threatens to lock minoritarian GOP rule into place for decades at both the state level and, by gerrymandered congressional districts, increasingly at the federal level; and by the fact that the Republican Party, now entirely committed to Trump’s lies about a stolen election, has dedicated itself to undermining the integrity of the election system in order to secure, no matter the cost to the country’s democratic culture and system of governance, a GOP presidential victory in 2024.
If the GOP, with “Stop the Steal” candidates playing increasingly prominent roles, locks into place their state-level grip on power in 2022 and retakes control of the House of Representatives, the party’s ability to successfully manipulate the 2024 presidential election will have taken a giant leap forward.
Greene’s bill has, of course, a snowball’s chance in hell of passage; but that’s not the point of the stunt. The point is publicity and riling up an already angry, heavily armed base around the wedge issues of race and guns in the U.S. It’s pure Trumpist exhibitionism, and a sign of just how low Trump, his Super PAC and his Congressional allies will be going as the ex-president plots a comeback. Meanwhile, the Democratic base is increasingly unenthused with a presidency seen by many as having not delivered on racial justice and economic promises, on its more ambitious climate change goals, on immigration reform, and, perhaps above all, on protecting the franchise.
The 2024 elections are, of course, still a long way off. But Democrats, already facing powerful headwinds, would do well to get their own house in order, and to prepare as well for the gutter politics, the Trumpian theatrics, quite clearly heading their way in the coming election cycles. We all remember the consequences of the party’s leadership underestimating Trump in 2015 and 2016. It would be an act of supreme political incompetence, and a vast surrender to profoundly anti-democratic forces, were they to make a similar mistake over the coming years.
Congressional Republicans who backed the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the rich are already attacking Democrats over one provision in a bill that, in most respects, will raise taxes on the wealthy.
A group of Democrats from high-tax states, led byReps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Tom Suozzi of New York and backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, pushed to insert a provision in the House version of the Build Back Better package that would roll back a$10,000 cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction — effectively a tax break that overwhelmingly favors the wealthy. But ananalysisby the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found this week that the overall package would increase taxes on millionaires by more than 3 percentage points. Furthermore, Senate Democrats are clamoring to“fix” the House-passed bill, which raises the cap to $80,000, to reduce the windfall to the wealthy.
Republicans who supported the Trump tax cuts, which expanded the federal deficit by $2 trillion whileshowering tax breakson the top 1% of earners, are already running ads ahead of the 2022 midterms attacking Democrats for cutting taxes on the rich — in a bill that has not even passed the Senate.
Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the top Republican on the House Budget Committee — who backed the Trump tax cuts — rolled out anew adthis week calling SALT the “Democrats’ way of giving the rich a tax cut.” This blatantly hypocritical attack line has been echoed in other circles of the GOP.
The Republican National Committee, which supported the Trump tax cut, last week blasted out astatementcalling out the Democrats for trying to “give tax cuts to the wealthy.” National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Rick Scott, R-Fla., an ardent supporter of the 2017 tax gift to the wealthy, vowed to make sure that all states know about how much money Democrats“are going to give to rich people.”Republican-aligned groups, including the Heritage Foundation, are alsorunning adsattacking Pelosi for slipping a “big tax break for her wealthy friends” into the bill.
These attacks mark a dizzying turnaround for the party that just four years earlier voted to give the top 1% of earners an average tax cut of $278,000, according to a recent analysis. The 2017 Republican tax law included the SALT cap, which Democrats from high-income, high-tax states argued was a “punitive” measure aimed at hurting blue states. Democrats like Gottheimer and Suozzi pushed to repeal the cap entirely but ultimately agreed on a proposal to raise the cap to $80,000 per year.
But these Republican attacks also underscore the Democrats’ messaging problem ahead of a challenging 2022 midterm campaign. Economists from both sides of the aisleagree that the party’s SALT proposal is a regressive tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the top 5% of earners. The House proposal appears to have little chance of passing the Senate in its current form, where even Democrats from Gottheimer’s home state of New Jersey have lambasted it as a windfall for“millionaires and billionaires.”
“This bill should invest in our families and our future — not provide giveaways for the wealthy few,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.,said earlier this month. “The House’s SALT proposal cuts taxes for millionaires and billionaires on the backs of low-income and middle-income families. We should fix this in the Senate.”
“I think it gives tax breaks to the wrong people: Rich people,”complainedSen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.
Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has teamed up with Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., whose state would disproportionately benefit from a SALT cap rollback, to reduce the benefits to millionaires.
Menendezsaid their proposalwould “allow the full deductibility to middle-class working families, but it won’t go to those making over a million dollars. And therefore, the issue of millionaires and billionaires getting this tax deduction is not an issue.”
The proposal would eliminate the SALT cap entirely for those earning less than $400,000 to $550,000 per year, which would likely still be a regressive tax cut, but would maintain the $10,000 cap in place for those earning more.
“In terms of SALT, we must protect the middle class from high local and state taxes,” Sanderstweeted last week. “But we cannot provide 39% of the benefits to the top 1% — as is in the House bill. At a time of massive income inequality, we must increase taxes on the 1%, not give them huge tax breaks.”
The Sanders-Menendez plan “costs less than a third as much as repealing the cap fully and is much less regressive,”said Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the progressive-leaning Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.
Democrats initially planned to pay for much of the Build Back Better package by rolling back the Trump tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.,killed that plan, but the current version still includes a 15% corporate minimum tax on big corporations and a surtax on those earning over $10 million. Ananalysis by the JCTfound that the average tax rate for millionaires under the bill would increase by 4.1 percentage points in 2023 and 3.3 percentage points in 2025. But progressives are warning that the inclusion of the SALT cap rollback favorin g the wealthy could be suicidal for a party facing its most difficult midterm election cycle in a decade.
“I’m not worried about the perception that we’re doing too much for wealthy people. I’m worried that we may do too much for wealthy people. It’s the reality that troubles me,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., toldPoliticolast week. “I’m not here to help those at the top.”
Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has expressed concern that Republicans will“pound”the message that Democrats were too soft on millionaires in the coming months.
“You can’t be a political party that talks about demanding the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, and then end up with a bill that gives large tax breaks to millionaires,” Sanderswarned last week. “You can’t do that. The hypocrisy is too strong. It’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”
Donald Trump and the Republican Party have laid the groundwork for assuming the U.S. presidency regardless of the result of the 2024 election, and if they choose to pursue this plan, most of the conditions they would need to execute it are already in place.
If this sounds outrageous, please read on, keeping in mind that the presidential election is determined by the slates of electors that states send Congress for certification.
Given this oddity in our electoral process, here are some things that a politician would need in order to have a chance of subverting the U.S. presidential election:
Control over half of state legislatures (something that can be achieved through severely partisan gerrymandering and self-serving redistricting)
At least some swing-state legislatures radical enough to either a.) suppress voters sufficiently to achieve their preferred result; b.) replace the Board of Election if it doesn’t arrange for the preferred candidate to win; or c.) send a non-elected slate of electors for certification regardless of the election’s actual result.
Control of the House of Representatives, and preferably both houses of Congress.
The ability to purge moderates who might not go along with the ending of democracy.
Total loyalty from one’s political party and a cult-like allegiance from voters.
A compliant, complacent or cooperative Supreme Court.
Widespread skepticism among voters about the idea that elections are run fairly (a skepticism that can be fed by the constant challenging of legitimate results by the loser of an election).
And here are some additional factors that could further assist a politician bent on stealing an election in this country:
Sufficient voter suppression to make the above plan unnecessary, or at least enough to make results close enough to sow even more doubt about legitimacy of results.
Cynicism and confusion so deep that huge numbers of people don’t believe in facts of any kind.
Roving white nationalist militias that tout voter suppression and spread skepticism about the legitimacy of elections.
A sizable minority of the population that believes deep down that Black people and immigrants are not “real” Americans, and that their votes should not determine the results of elections.
Now, let’s look back at these conditions for how a politician might subvert an election. For Trump and the GOP, most of these boxes are already checked, and most of the others are well underway.
The endless repetition of the Big Lie, the sham audit in Arizona, the new voter suppression laws in 19 states, the demonization of mass media through the “fake news” mantra, the packing of the Supreme Court with Federalist Society-approved right-wing justices, the purging of Rep. Liz Cheney, the encouragement of the Proud Boys… these are sometimes covered as random and disparate strands, rather than part of a plan that makes total sense once you know what the goal is.
Assuming Trump runs for president, he will likely make countless accusations of fraud — echoed by his supporters — between Election Day and December 16, 2024, the date electors in each state meet to formally vote for president and vice president.
On that day legislatures in at least some swing states that Democrats have won could use laws passed in the wake of the 2020 elections to invalidate the results and select a slate of electors for Trump. For example, Senate Bill 202 (the Georgia law famous for prohibiting distribution of water to voters waiting in lines) less famously but more insidiously allows state officials to take over local election boards. In other words, the radical right legislature that passed the law in the first place can easily and legally manipulate the result.
On January 6, 2025, when Congress opens the envelopes, there would either be enough electoral votes for Trump, or enough states with competing slates of electors or other forms of chaos to declare that neither candidate has reached the requisite 270 electoral votes. At that point, the election would be determined by one vote per state. With Republicans having a majority of congressional representatives in a majority of states, and with moderates purged from the party, it’s hard to imagine the states doing anything but selecting Trump. This scenario is plausible even if voter suppression is insufficient to award the popular vote in swing states to Trump. It doesn’t matter how much he loses by if the state legislatures have the power to determine the electoral slate sent to Congress.
What can be done to guard against the possibility that the 2024 election could unfold in this way?
Electoral resistance: The Democrats could mobilize to hold on to a majority of the House of Representatives.
Legislative resistance: The Senate could pass federal voting legislation that would override the worst provisions in the wave of state laws recently passed. In particular, the federal law would have to reverse the takeover provisions that allow the state legislatures to replace or overrule local election boards. This could happen either by suspending the filibuster rule and getting all 50 Democratic Senate votes, or by getting 10 or more Republican senators to support it.
Judicial resistance: President Joe Biden could appoint four or more new Supreme Court justices to block this from happening during the inevitable litigation, and the Senate could confirm them.
State-level resistance: Courageous secretaries of state in swing states could invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution from holding elected office if they have participated in insurrection or rebellion against the U.S. These election officials could — and arguably would be obliged to — refuse to place Trump on the ballot.
These steps might seem extreme and even provocative, but without at least one of them, the U.S. is at serious risk of a democracy-shaking attack on its free and fair elections. And at the moment, all of them seem distant and unlikely.
This is a five-alarm fire, yet right now no elected Democrat is consistently sounding the alarm — not Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not Sen. Bernie Sanders, not Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and definitely not Sen. Joe Manchin. This is DEFCON for democracy, yet the president barely mentions it.
To be sure that democracy will survive in the United States, Democrats must take seriously the possibility of this nightmare scenario and take bold action to prevent it from happening.
A federal judge in Colorado has ordered two Donald Trump-allied lawyers to pay a hefty fee for a lawsuit over the 2020 election that the judge had panned — and dismissed.
The December 2020 lawsuit, which was dismissed in April, was brought by two Colorado lawyers as a class-action case on behalf of the nearly 160 million people who voted in the 2020 election. They alleged that Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook and several elected officials had been involved in a plot to steal the election from Trump, even though there is no evidence for this claim. The lawyers sought $160 billion in damages.
The judge panned the lawsuit, reports The Washington Post: “Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the Complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”
He ordered the duo to pay $187,000 in legal fees in order to deter similar cases from being brought in the future. The two lawyers, who were sanctioned by the judge earlier this year, will have to pay $50,000 each to Facebook and $62,930 each to Dominion and Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Facebook-affiliated organization that was also named in the case.
“[T]he repetition of defamatory and potentially dangerous unverified allegations is the kind of ‘advocacy’ that needs to be chilled. Counsel should think long and hard, and do significant pre-filing research and verification, before ever filing a lawsuit like this again,” Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter wrote. “I believe that rather than a legitimate use of the legal system to seek redress for redressable grievances, this lawsuit has been used to manipulate gullible members of the public and foment public unrest.”
The two lawyers had attempted to appeal the order, dubiously claiming that the lawsuit had nothing to do with Trump. In their original filing, the lawyers quoted a Trump tweet falsely claiming that Dominion “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”
There is no evidence for this conspiracy theory that has been largely embraced by conservatives due almost solely to attempts by Trump, his team and sympathetic media outlet to sow doubt in elections.
According to The Washington Post, this ruling is one of the first attempts by a judge to put a price tag on a punishment for the dozens of lawyers who filed election lawsuits over the past year. Trump and his team had filed many lawsuits in attempts to overturn the election, all of which failed.
Earlier this year, a judge sanctioned Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and other lawyers who had worked on Trump-allied lawsuits and ordered them to pay attorney’s fees in a Michigan case brought over false election fraud claims. Trump’s top lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred in June by a New York court for his role in perpetuating the former president’s election lies.
Though the strategy to file lawsuits over the election didn’t work out for the Trump team, the overall strategy paid out in spades, opening avenues for Republicans to openly skew elections in their favor by rewriting local laws and engaging in more aggressive gerrymandering.
The Department of Labor has finalized a rule raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour for new and existing contracts beginning in January.
The rule, which raises the minimum wage for federal contractors from $10.95 and indexes the wage to inflation, is expected to impact about 327,000 people working as janitors, cafeteria workers, nursing assistants and more. Workers on a tipped wage will also see their non-tipped wages raised, as the guidance eliminates the tipped minimum wage, which is currently at $7.65 an hour, by 2024.
The workers who will be affected by this rule “do essential work on our nation’s behalf,” Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement. “They build and repair the federal infrastructure, clean and maintain our national parks, monuments and other federal facilities, care for our veterans, and ensure federal workers and military service members are provided with safe and nutritious food,” he continued, pointing out that many of the workers who will be affected are people of color.
According to the agency, just over half of the workers who will be impacted by this order are women. On average, workers will receive a raise of $5,228 yearly. The Biden administration says that this order will have a positive effect not only on the workers, but also on federal work at large, increasing productivity, decreasing turnover and boosting efficiency.
Experts have estimated that about 5 million people work on federal contracts, with most of them already making above the $15 an hour threshold.
Biden’s order expands on an order by former President Barack Obama in 2014 ruling that federal contractors be paid $10.10 an hour minimum, also indexed to inflation.
Monday’s guidance is part of the president’s promise to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers, though Biden has done little to push Congress on the issue since it was shot down from the stimulus package earlier this year. The Senate parliamentarian had ruled that the provision couldn’t be included in the American Rescue Plan Act, despite evidence that it would have an impact on the federal budget and thus should have been eligible for a vote via budget reconciliation.
Even though Vice President Kamala Harris could have overruled the parliamentarian’s decision, the administration chose not to do so, much to the dismay of progressive lawmakers and advocates.
Economists say that although raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is crucial, the raise doesn’t go far enough. For a family of four, researchers have found that $15 an hour isn’t a living wage. For a single person without kids, a $15 minimum wage is a living wage in some parts of the country — but in more expensive states in the West and Northeast, it falls short.
If the minimum wage had kept in step with inflation and productivity since it was first set in 1938, the wage would be much higher. The first federal minimum wage in the country was $4.90 in today’s dollars, not much lower than the current rate of $7.25 for non-tipped workers — and higher than the current rate of $2.13 for tipped workers. Taking rising productivity rates into account, the federal minimum wage would be $31.67 an hour, or over four times the current minimum wage, said University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Robert Pollin earlier this year.
Just before the November 2 election, in which Trump-endorsed Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race with the help of 57 percent of white women, a right-wing dark money group called Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) spent thousands in ads to promote its new attack website, ToxicSchools.org.
The site features a scandalizing 2016 Washington Post headline: “McAuliffe vetoes bill permitting parents to block sexually explicit books in school.” But what the ad (and the headline) obscured was the actual context of the resolution: The Republican bill was a response to one mother who sought to ban Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking novel Beloved, a story about Black trauma and resilience in the decades following the end of slavery, because of a scene of sexual violence. Strikingly, it would have made Virginia the first state in the country to allow parents to censure such school books.
Much of this story is not new. As Jenn Jackson observes in Teen Vogue: “Current events may be relatively silent on the role of women in white supremacy, but history is quite loud.” The indelible image of white mothers in Little Rock, Arkansas, heckling 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, the first of the Little Rock Nine to arrive the day their public high school integrated in 1957, may come to mind. In her historical account of white women’s involvement from the 1920s to the 1970s in efforts to stop school integration, Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth McRae refers to these white women as the “constant gardeners of segregation.”
But there are differences, too. Today’s “mothers of massive resistance” appear to represent an organic local uprising of “concerned parents,” but the outcry is being stoked by dark money groups like IWV.
Attacks on public school curricula can serve many purposes, including undermining teachers’ unions, promoting school privatization and impacting elections, like Virginia’s. They also conjure outrage among the most racist elements of the Republican base.
Proposed legislation prohibiting discussions of systemic racism (which Republicans are misrepresenting as “critical race theory”) could be far-reaching, potentially banning pedagogically fundamental terms like “anti-racism,” “diversity training,” “patriarchy” and “whiteness” from schools, as one bill that recently passed the Wisconsin legislature did.
These astroturf groups are a reminder yet again that the white nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces for reproducing white supremacy. Part of the way this works is through hoarding resources, something even some liberal and progressive white women do when they declare their support for policies like school desegregation and then refuse to send their white children to integrated schools. “Tracking,” the designation of separate paths for students based on educational performance, sometimes called “modern-day segregation,” is another way.
So how have right-wing women’s groups, funded by anonymous donors, come to take an oversized role in local school politics as concerned moms?
As historian Nancy MacLean has shown, men like economist James M. Buchanan and billionaire Charles Koch, who funded Buchanan’s center at George Mason University (the impetus for which was Buchanan’s antipathy toward school integration in Virginia), have sought to intentionally hide the political nature of their libertarian-minded organizations for decades.
Dark money organizations spawned by Koch and other billionaires have since spread like a noxious, invasive weed, from the Heritage Foundation to Americans for Prosperity to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In recent years, this network has integrated women-led groups that provide a “soft” cover for a deeply political agenda.
But don’t let the fact that there are women out front fool you. The women championing today’s dark-money attacks on public schools serve a regressive political agenda, just as the women who tended the gardens of segregation did almost a century ago.
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) went on an eight-and-a-half hour long tirade starting on Thursday night and ending early Friday morning during his allotted “magic minute” on the House floor on Thursday.
The speech, which began at roughly 8:30 pm ET on Thursday, resembled a filibuster and appeared to be a tactic to delay a vote on the Democrats’ social spending reconciliation bill, which passed the chamber Friday morning. It is the longest recorded speech in the House, breaking a previous record set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).
Although McCarthy occasionally touched on the bill itself, his speech also included completely and bizarrely unrelated tangents, including one about his friendship with Elon Musk and his inability to afford a Tesla. Some have speculated that the speech served more than one purpose, saying that it not only delayed the bill, but also served as McCarthy’s audition to take over as House speaker in the event that Republicans take back control of the chamber.
McCarthy finally finished his “magic minute,” which allows party leaders in the House to speak for as long as they like, at about 5:00 am, with Republican colleagues nodding off behind him. At that point, he yielded his time back to Pelosi, who had left hours ago.
The bill that he was filibustering contains provisions like paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, Medicare expansion and a plan to lower the cost of certain prescription drugs. It passed 220 to 213 after the chamber reconvened at 8 am, and now goes to the Senate, where it will likely be revised.
Reporters who witnessed much of the speech described it as circular and repetitive, and nearly incoherent in theme.
McCarthy parroted oft-repeated Republican grievances that have taken over the party in recent weeks, like spurious concerns about inflation, which economists have said won’t be worsened by the Build Back Better Act. He repeatedly brought up China, a popular talking point among Republicans, and at one point suggested that the Chinese government wouldn’t bolster the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as the reconciliation bill proposes, using this talking point to paint the bill as extremist.
He straight out lied about the reconciliation bill, saying at one point that it would cost $5 trillion — far higher than the bill was going to cost even when it was planned to be a $3.5 trillion bill spread out over ten years. Democrats heckled him in response, yelling out increasingly large numbers to mock the GOP leader.
By at least 11 pm, the speech was essentially a stream of consciousness, as reporter Aaron Rupar noted. “Gas prices! Thanksgiving!” the GOP leader exclaimed about two and a half hours into his speech. During his rant about the fully paid-for bill, he touched on World War II and Hitler. His speech also contained countless non-sequiturs — “I can’t even afford to test drive a Tesla,” he said around 11, “and Elon is one of my best friends.”
He pondered what the country would be like if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated, said that he would love to debate Jim Crow, and said that he wished he had attended the Tiananmen Square massacre. Close to midnight, he mentioned January 6 as the day he got his second COVID shot.
At around 1 am, McCarthy reportedly asked, “Does the McDonald’s still have the dollar meal?” Later, after many reporters and fellow members of Congress had left, he informed the chamber of “the secret” behind baby carrots, which is that they’re large carrots that are carved down to shape. That was around 3 am; after that, he went on to talk for two more hours.
The speech was largely mocked by Democrats and progressives, who joked about its absurd length. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) in particular made several jokes at McCarthy’s expense, calling his tirade an “unhinged diatribe.” At 11:30 pm, when many of the Republicans behind McCarthy had fallen asleep, Raskin quipped, “We are hearing rumors that the front row of GOP hostages behind Kevin McCarthy are asking whether they can just be censured instead.”
The House has voted to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) Wednesday, sending a harsh rebuke to the far right representative for sharing a video last week depicting an anime version of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and attacking President Joe Biden.
The House voted 223-207 to censure Gosar and remove him from his committee assignments. Gosar had been seated on the Natural Resources Committee and the House Oversight Committee, which broadly oversees the government and internal congressional affairs. Ocasio-Cortez currently also serves on the latter committee.
Only two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney (Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (Illinois), voted for the censure after Republican leaders whipped representatives to vote “no” on the resolution earlier on Monday. One Republican, Rep. David Joyce (Ohio) voted “present.”
A censure is the second-harshest punishment that a member of the House can receive, after expulsion, and is meant to disgrace the representative in question. Its use is exceedingly rare; only 23 representatives have been censured since the 19th century. Removal from committee assignments can have a disciplinary influence on a member and their party, sending a message by stripping a member of some of their voting power. (Seats on the Oversight Committee, moreover, are coveted for the group’s jurisdiction over a broad range of issues.)
“It is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong and instead starts to venture off into a tangent about gas prices and inflation,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “What is so hard about saying this is wrong? This is not about me, this is not about Representative Gosar, but this is about what we are willing to accept.”
“As leaders in this country, when we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down into violence in this country,” she continued, condemning Republicans for dismissing the video as a joke or lighthearted. “And that is where we must draw the line independent of party, identity, or belief. It is about a core recognition of human dignity and value and worth.”
Indeed, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) attempted to minimize Gosar’s responsibility by saying it was the representative’s staff, not Gosar himself, that had authorized the video. McCarthy later equated Gosar’s actions to that of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), who publicly supported the movement for Black lives.
This is a willfully incorrect comparison: Gosar’s video was about inciting murder of a fellow lawmaker; last year’s protests were about stopping police violence against Black and oppressed people.
Other Republicans have lied, saying that Gosar has apologized for the debacle. But Gosar has not apologized, and has only made excuses for the video over the past week during interviews and on the House floor.
“I explained to them what was happening. I did not apologize,” the Republican recently said in an interview. “I said this video didn’t have anything to do with harming anybody,” Gosar continued, even though the video very clearly depicts him and fellow extremist Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) slashing and killing Ocasio-Cortez.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the censure as an “emergency” ahead of vote on Wednesday, saying that the issue is of immediate importance to “the lives of our members.” Other Democrats have also condemned Gosar’s action, with House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-New York) calling it “vile, hateful, outrageous, dangerous and inciting to violence.”
Pelosi further condemned the video during the House vote on Wednesday, saying, “We cannot have a member joking about murdering each other or threatening the president of the United States.” The Speaker also emphasized that the threat against Ocasio-Cortez was particularly concerning because it was a threat against a woman of color.
Other Democrats have called for Gosar to be expelled, which is also an extremely rare punishment in the House. Only five members have ever been expelled through a chamber vote, with the most recent member being Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio) in 2002, who was convicted for bribery.
Ocasio-Cortez told reporters on Tuesday that expelling Gosar would be the ideal scenario, and that it would happen “in a perfect world.”
“If he was telling the truth, he would have apologized by now. It’s been well over a week,” she said. “He not only has not apologized, he not only has not made any sort of contact or outreach — neither he nor the Republican leader of the party — but he has also doubled down.”
This week, Alabama Republican Rep. Gary Palmer had touted funding from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that recently passed the House and was signed into law. He bragged about funding for a project in Alabama that would partly encircle Birmingham and “[build] a better future for the Birmingham metro area,” he said in a statement.
But Palmer voted against the infrastructure bill, despite calling getting funding for the project “one of my top priorities.”
Democrats like Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) pointed out Palmer’s hypocrisy. In response to a tweet from Palmer promoting the funding, Swalwell said, “You mean the funding you voted against? That funding?”
A spokesperson for Palmer responded by saying that, if the funding for the project had been brought as a separate bill, he would have voted for it. As it was, “the bill was full of problems,” the spokesperson said.
The funding for the Alabama project, however, has been framed by media and lawmakers as a win for the state within the relatively small bill. The infrastructure bill allocates $550 billion in new spending for 11 Appalachian states. Alabama and West Virginia will claim about half of that, reports E&E News, with most of the $369 million for Alabama going toward the beltline.
For a highway project that’s reliant solely on funding from the federal government’s Appalachian Development Highway System, it would seem that voting for the funding would be a priority for Palmer. But, even if Palmer wanted to vote for the bill, he may have feared stepping away from the party or appearing to support a bill originally proposed by President Joe Biden, standing apart from the vast majority of the rest of the GOP.
Indeed, the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bill have faced ridicule from other GOP members. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Michigan) said that he received several death threats over his vote after extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) posted his office number on Twitter, referring to the Republicans who voted for the bill as “traitors.” One voicemail was particularly violent and vitriolic, and threatened the lives of Upton, his family and his staff, according to a recording of the message.
Palmer’s brag isn’t the first time that Republicans have taken credit for provisions bills that they’ve ultimately voted against. Many Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), touted provisions of the stimulus package passed in March, including popular provisions such as funds for struggling restaurants. But every single Republican in Congress voted against the bill, which has helped to push poverty levelsto record lows in the country.
The pharmaceutical industry and its allies in the Republican Party are reportedly teaming up to craft challenges to congressional Democrats’ drug price reform plan in the hopes of convincing the Senate parliamentarian — an unelected functionary — to help tank the proposal.
Earlier this month, Democrats struck a deal on a scaled-back plan that would allow Medicare to directly negotiate prices for a more limited subset of prescription medicines and penalize companies that raise drug prices more rapidly than inflation. The proposed fines for violating the inflation cap would apply to both Medicare and private plans, threatening the pharmaceutical industry’s virtually unchecked power to set prices as they please.
Though Big Pharma’s massive lobbying blitz appeared to have paid off after Democrats significantly weakened their original, broadly popular reform proposal, Politicoreported that “the way the plan would extend price controls beyond Medicare… is stoking another battle over” the Build Back Better package, a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s domestic policy agenda.
Drug industry lobbyists — who outnumber members of Congress by a ratio of three to one — are “urging Republican senators to scuttle the drug-pricing language with parliamentary challenges while looking for cracks in the Democrats’ ranks after the industry fought off more aggressive House attempts to impose drug price controls,” according to Politico.
“Backers fear both practical and political consequences if the inflation cap is stripped out — warning that drug companies could hike prices for the roughly 180 million people on employer health plans or other private insurance to make up for the revenue they stand to lose from Medicare price negotiations and other provisions of the bill,” the outlet added.
Under Senate rules, each provision of a reconciliation bill must have a direct — not “merely incidental” — impact on the federal budget, a highly subjective judgment that the unelected parliamentarian is tasked with handing down.
“This should never pass as normal: only in the dysfunctional U.S. can a single parliamentarian have more power than millions of voters to decide the economic wellbeing of the nation,” progressive activist Jonathan Tasini said Saturday.
In recent months, Elizabeth MacDonough — the current Senate parliamentarian — has deemed a proposed $15 federal minimum wage and a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants out of bounds for reconciliation, nonbinding opinions that Democratic lawmakers and the White House have refused to overrule.
Now Senate Republicans are hoping that, with Big Pharma’s help, they can convince MacDonough to sink the proposed inflation cap, a key component of Democrats’ plan to rein in U.S. drug prices, which are the highest in the industrialized world.
If/when Build Back Better moves to the Senate, elements of the Rx proposal — especially the inflation caps — are among those that will face parliamentary challenges. Pharma already working w GOP to craft them. Via @AliceOllstein@misswilsonhttps://t.co/dG0Yz34p8K
Politico reported that lobbyists and Republicans are hoping the parliamentarian will see the inflation cap as “more policy-based and intended to hold down drug prices in the commercial market, regardless of how much money it saves the government.” The White House estimates the provision would save the federal government $100 billion over a decade.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee and a champion of drug price reforms, told Politico that he has “insisted on” the inflation cap “applying to the commercial sector” and voiced confidence that the provision will ultimately remain in the final Build Back Better package.
“What that means is that, not just for seniors but for millions of Americans, their drug prices wouldn’t go up more than inflation unless the companies are willing to pay a penalty,” said Wyden. “I still have to go through the parliamentarian. But I think it’s going to be okay.”
The fight over Democrats’ proposed drug price reforms is heating up ahead of an expected House vote on the full reconciliation package this week. If passed, the bill will move to the Senate.
At one point last month, the drug price plan was removed from the Build Back Better proposal entirely as it faced pushback from the pharmaceutical industry and corporate-backed Democrats in the House and Senate such as Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.).
Thanks to the efforts of progressive lawmakers — including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — and grassroots advocates, Democrats inserted a more limited but still potentially impactful drug price plan that supporters hope will serve as a starting point for more ambitious action in the future.
“It is not some radical idea to suggest that Americans should not have to die because we are the only major country that allows drug companies to raise prices to whatever they want, whenever they want,” Sanders tweeted Sunday.
“While we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and one out of four Americans can’t afford the medicine they need, the top 15 pharmaceutical executives pulled in more than $470 million in salaries and bonuses last year,” the Vermont senator wrote in a separate post. “Greed. Greed. Greed.”
As if we needed any more evidence of the sorry state of our political system, the long-running battle over the ‘Build Back Better’ bill has provided it. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, an early version of this bill included many proposals that would help Americans live with a sense of security. In addition, these proposals were strongly supported by the US population.
Among these many items were negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the obscenely high drug prices, universal Preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds, support for paid family and medical leave, and the expansion of Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids and glasses. Particularly popular with the public, the funding for this bill would come from taxes and legislative changes affecting the super wealthy who have benefited enormously from previous legislation (including gigantic bailouts) from Congress and the White House.
The corporate media reported this version of the bill had a price tag of $3.5 trillion, but failed to emphasize that this cost was spread over a 10-year period, or $350 billion per year. Many politicians opposed this bill, claiming that the cost was too high.
However, these same politicians didn’t bat an eye at giving about $715 billion a year or, assuming the same funding level, over $7 trillion for 10 years to the US military. It didn’t matter that the military has not passed an annual independent audit since Congress first mandated the audit for federal agencies in 1990. In addition, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the US spending on its military is greater than the sum of the next 11 nations combined and most of these countries are our allies.
In 1957, General Douglas MacArthur, a leading US military figure during the 20th century and hardly a peacenik, explained the support for increasing military budgets:
Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear … with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
The situation is worse today than the one President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address when he pointed out the dangers of the military-industrial complex. The media, universities and think tanks now are also part of this complex and provide even more lobbying clout.
An investigation by Brown University researchers estimated that the cost of US global war on terror since 9/11 at $8 trillion with direct responsibility for about 900,000 deaths. Clearly this war has been counterproductive for the US image around the world. In addition, its illegal attacks have also caused enormous unnecessary devastation and loss of lives particularly in the Middle East. Making matters worse, these illegal interventions, particularly the war crimes committed against Iraq, had very little to do with direct US interests. What a waste of resources! The financial cost to the US would be even far higher if the US were required to pay reparations for the devastation its war crimes caused.
Yet Congress continues to generously fund the Pentagon and to enrich the merchants of death while it is a miser to agencies that actually help the American public achieve the necessities of life. These necessities include housing, education, health care, food, etc. People living in much of Western Europe live much more secure lives having had these necessities for decades. Clearly our system of legalized bribery of politicians enriches the wealthy at the public’s expense.
It is terrible that two recalcitrant Democratic senators have been able to eliminate many of the important items included in the previous version of the Act such that it now costs about $185 billion/year. It is possible that the bill’s costs will be further reduced as other provisions are stripped away. What is even worse is the role of partisan politics where not even one Republican senator will stand up for the security of their fellow Americans and support the Act. What happened to the idea of standing up for the public interest? Do they prefer to see the public continue to suffer rather than to allow the other party to claim success? This system of legalized bribery and intense partisanship is a system that dooms us to disaster.
US President Joe Biden hectored Nicaragua about their November 7 elections accusing them of “a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic.” Three days earlier, the US lavished a $650mil arms deal on Saudi Arabia, a monarchy where they don’t even pretend to have elections for higher office. Clearly more than democracy is at issue with the US offensive against Nicaragua.
At issue is what Biden described as “the arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates.” An objective investigation reveals: (1) the motivation for the arrests had nothing to do with the election and (2) the effects of the arrests had no impact on the election.
The US government, along with its political allies and corporate media, have spun the arrests into a public relations nightmare for the ruling Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The arrests are being used as a pretext for a concerted operation to delegitimize the genuinely democratic elections of a government seeking to be independent of Washington. This is part of a larger regime-change campaign against the left-leaning governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua; what former US National Security Adviser John Bolton called the “Troika of Tyranny.”
The seven presidential “pre-candidates”
The corporate press, hostile to the elected Nicaraguan government, dubbed seven of those arrested as “pre-candidates.” However, none of them were associated with the ballot-qualified political parties in Nicaragua, and not one of them had a popular following outside the Washington Beltway. In short, they were not seriously running for presidential office and, if they had been, none would have mounted a serious challenge to the ruling Sandinistas.
Even if the “pre-candidates” were legitimate presidential hopefuls, the fact that there were seven of them demonstrates that the US was unable to unify the opposition around a single candidate. Had the seven “hopefuls” run, they would have further split the opposition vote. The notion that the Sandinistas arrested the seven to ensure they would win is a fiction.
The violent opposition has been in disarray ever since their 2018 coup attempt fizzled and a tidal wave of public opinion turned against them. The US had spent tens of millions of dollars generating the opposition but was unable to get the fractious parties to coordinate amongst themselves.
Nicaragua’s electoral oversight body, the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), is an independent branch of the government. Both Sandinista and opposition party representatives are on it. Rather than suppressing the opposition, the CSE extended the deadline for parties to register to run in the November elections to encourage a diversity of voter choices. However, one far-right grouping, headed by a former Somoza general, did not get their paperwork in order on time and was therefore not certified.
The seven “presidential hopefuls” plus 30 others were arrested for another reason. Following the 2018 coup attempt, Nicaragua passed two laws that criminalized promoting foreign interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs, seeking foreign military intervention, organizing acts of terrorism, and promoting coercive economic measures against their country. They were arrested for these illegal activities; activities, it should be noted, that are similarly prohibited by the US’s own FARA Act, after which the Nicaraguan laws were modeled.
US has never supported democracy in Nicaragua
Biden castigated Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for being “no different from the Somoza family.” Perhaps Biden forgot that the US installed and supported the Somoza dictatorship, while the US regime-change campaign is trying to do exactly the opposite with the current Sandinista leadership.
If Daniel Ortega were truly “no different from the Somoza family,” the US would be supporting the Nicaraguan government rather than trying to overthrow it. In fact, an examination of the historical record indicates that the US has never supported democracy in Nicaragua.
The US Marines landed in 1912 and occupied the Central American country on and off until the Somoza dynasty dictatorship replaced direct US control. When the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the dictator in 1979, the US resurrected remnants of Anastasio Somoza’s national guard, the contras, that brutally terrorized the fledgling republic.
To this day, the US has opposed the Sandinistas. Empires like that of the US do not support democratic self-determination of vassal states. Dating back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, Latin America and the Caribbean are regarded as the empire’s “backyard.”
Popularity of the Sandinistas
Biden carped that the democratically elected Nicaraguan leadership is “long unpopular.” However, Biden’s own plunging approval rating of 42.8% isn’t anything to envy. In contrast, a reliable pre-election poll indicated 73.1% approval for President Ortega. More to the point, the popularity of a country’s politicians is an internal matter and not the business of the US.
It is noteworthy to understand why the current Nicaraguan “regime” enjoys considerable popular support. Fundamental to this understanding is a long and concerted history of grassroots organizing by the Sandinistas. They led a successful revolution and today continue deep organizing in poor urban barrios and rural areas, especially among the youth, Indigenous and Afro-descendent Nicaraguans, and women.
Second, the “regime” enjoys popularity beyond the Sandinista base as an embodiment of national sovereignty, unity, and peace in reaction to the long and lamentable history of US intervention. This is especially the case after the US-instigated coup attempt of 2018. Although this is anecdotal, just about everyone I spoke to in Nicaragua had a horror story of the recent violence.
More than other elections, this November 7th sparked celebrations lasting through the night and into the early morning on the streets of popular neighborhoods throughout the country. It marked, in the popular consciousness, an official “end to the terrible nightmare and the return to a peaceful process of nation building,” in the words of Abigail Espinosa, a small farmer from Masaya.
Third, the “regime” has achieved so much with few resources. As Nan McCurdy, a United Methodist missionary who lived in Nicaragua for over 30 years, reports:
Since 2007 [when the Sandinistas returned to power] poverty has been cut in half, maternal mortality has dropped by 70%, infant mortality by 61% with a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children 6 to 12 years old. With a high percentage of small and medium-scale farmers and much government investment in training and loans, they have achieved 90% food sufficiency.
Given this record, the current Sandinista election victory by a 76% margin, following 72.5% in 2016, 62% in 2011, and 38% in 2006 are indications of growing popular support and not of dictatorship.
The parallel reality of follow-the-flag journalists
The corporate press has been savage in its treatment of Nicaragua, echoing and embellishing the distortions of the US State Department. If Nicaragua is indeed “a slow-motion horror movie” or “a hell,” as described by the follow-the-flag journalists, at least the sinners have universal free education and health care. What these State Department scribes fail to ask is, if the second poorest country in the hemisphere can afford these social welfare measures – really human rights – why can’t the richest?
It was striking how much the corporate press accounts of the election differed from what happened on the ground in Nicaragua. The Times, gleefully spun: “The streets of the capital, Managua, were also quiet, with little to show that a significant election was underway.” That is, the newspaper of record failed to acknowledge that the election was proceeding peacefully, and the usual Sunday afternoon calm prevailed. But the literally hundreds of thousands of celebrants spontaneously taking to the streets in Nicaragua after the polls closed got no coverage. Meanwhile the corporate press reveled about a few contras demonstrating in Costa Rica.
Yes, as the New York Times reported, the government “banned large campaign events.” The ban, which applied to all political parties, was due to the COVID emergency and not to suppress political expression. No, as the Times implied, “the only candidate is Daniel Ortega.” Six candidates stood for the presidency.
After its initial report, the Times had to retract their falsehood – they called it an imprecision – that there were only Sandinista party campaign advertisements in Managua. By my count, banners for the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC) were most prevalent.
Nicaragua exercises electoral sovereignty
Months before the elections, Biden had already pronounced the vote a fraud because he anticipated that the majority of Nicaraguans would vote their choice rather than Washington’s. The US imperiously implored the Nicaraguans to boycott their own elections, which was ignored by a respectable 65% of the electorate; a turnout similar to the vote that landed Biden in office, which was touted in the US media as a “record turnout.”
On election day, Biden, acting like a schoolyard bully, then threatened to use “all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal” to punish Nicaragua for exercising its national sovereignty. This was no idle threat.
Nicaragua is already suffering from illegal US sanctions. The NICA Act of 2018, under the Trump administration, imposed sanctions, including blocking loans from international financial institutions controlled by the US. In August 2020, the Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) plan was revealed, which was a multi-faceted coup strategy by which the US contracted corporations to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. RAIN called for a “sudden, unanticipated transition” government to forestall what they admitted would otherwise be a Sandinista victory in a free election.
In a seamless handoff from the administrations of Trump to Biden, the RENACER Act, which passed Congress just days before the election and was signed into law immediately following, will visit even more misery on the people of Nicaragua. The Organization of American States, the European Union, and individual state “partners” of the US imperial project such as the UK and Canada have or are in the process of imposing additional hardships on the Nicaraguans.
Such is the price for holding what the Nicaraguans called their eclecciones soberanas, sovereign elections. Those who deny this right, disallow the Nicaraguan’s imperative to fight back against the imperialist assault.
All election bodies had by law equal numbers of men and women
Elderly voter enters polling station
Voter with special needs is directed to his voting station
Voters proudly show their inked thumbs, indicating they had voted
The “invisible hand” gives rise to a situation where it becomes natural and normal to conclude that no one knows how things work or what to expect. It renders the future unpredictable and unmanageable. Uncertainty and unpredictability become the norm because the economy as a whole is not under conscious human control. Different sectors and components of the economy do not work in harmony, free of crisis, because they are divided amongst competing owners of capital obsessed with their own narrow private interests. This inter-capitalist rivalry does not lend itself to the healthy balanced extended reproduction of society. It mainly damages the natural and social environment more. Everyone living in such a set-up is subject to constant chaos, anarchy, and violence in the economy and society. Stability, security, and peace are transient under such conditions. Thus, even in the 21st century with all the accumulated knowledge and experience of humanity, so-called “advanced” societies can turn upside down in no time at all; economic and social crises can hit at any time and leave society, the economy, and the people as a whole highly destabilized and damaged for months, years, even decades. On top of all this we are repeatedly told that there is no alternative to this outdated system. Apparently, this is the best humanity can do and no one should strive to replace existing arrangements with something better.
Last week, Jerome Powell, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is not really part of the U.S. government, delivered his latest views and predictions on the economy and outlined what actions the Federal Reserve will be taking in the coming weeks and months. “Tapering” of fiat currency printing is expected to begin this month and continue for six more months, while interest rates will remain untouched for the foreseeable future. In reality, the Federal Reserve ran out of ammunition long ago and is trapped in the world of bad policy versus bad policy; there are no good options and no good endings here. Is it even possible to “taper” a Ponzi scheme? To be sure, the Federal Reserve has dug a deep hole. The system’s internal contradictions are too severe to “rescue” anything at this point.
One statement in particular by Powell speaks volumes about the state of economic science and human cognition in the final and highest stage of capitalism:
It’s difficult enough to just forecast the economy in normal times. When you’re talking about global supply chains in turmoil, it’s a whole different thing. And you’re talking about a pandemic that’s holding people out of the labor force for reasons that we can sample, but we don’t have a lot of experience with this, so it’s very difficult to forecast and not easy to set policy. (emphasis added,)
Powell casually and publicly admits that he and those who share his old world outlook reject economic science even “in normal times;” they do not believe in planning, control, science, human cognition, and predictability. “Forecasting” economic conditions and activities even “in normal times” is far from precise and useful from the perspective of capitalist ideologues. The economy apparently cannot be controlled, known, or directed to serve the people and society. Powell openly creates the impression that fixing the economy is some sort of crapshoot, a mystery. Maybe things will work out, maybe not. Apparently, no one really knows how things are going to unfold or what impact neoliberal fiscal and monetary policies will have on the economy. Confusion and ignorance about the economy are so normal that the subtitle of a November 4, 2021 ABC News article reads: “If you find the current economy a bit confusing, don’t worry: So does the nation’s top economic official, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell”. This is hardly a good way to inspire confidence in the people. It is a scandalous thing to admit. People need leaders who know what they are doing and can reliably deliver meaningful pro-social results and solutions. Why is meeting people’s basic needs such a mystery?
Most Americans already know that the economy is in bad shape. On November 7, 2021, the New York Timesreported that, “In a Gallup poll in October, 68 percent of respondents said they thought economic conditions were getting worse”. The overwhelming majority are simply not hopeful about the future of the economy and it does not help that President Joe Biden’s poor approval rating keeps steadily falling. People from all walks of life feel overwhelmed and exhausted with the way the rich and their cartel political parties (Democrats and Republicans) are wrecking the entire fabric of society.
There is a growing need for a real alternative to existing arrangements. The current situation is untenable at all levels. More and more people are rejecting the rich and their cartel political parties and demanding real solutions to the problems confronting the economy and society. Acting in the old way simply won’t work and doesn’t work anymore. People are disgusted with irresponsible and unaccountable leaders who can’t solve any problems. People are also tired of being reduced to vote banks for the parties of the rich. Constantly begging politicians to do the most basic simple things is humiliating, exhausting, and a massive drain on social energy that could be harnessed to expedite human-centered arrangements.
As the massive divide between the rich and everyone else keeps growing, contradictions and problems in society will get sharper and more severe, giving rise to new dynamics and new realities to confront. In this situation working people must mobilize themselves and others to leverage openings to advance arrangements that favor the people. There is a need for fresh independent thinking and a new outlook of the world and the future. There is an alternative to the ruling class wrecking all known arrangements in its quest to maximize profits at all costs.
As the GOP condemns party members who voted for the infrastructure bill in last week’s House vote, Republican Rep. Fred Upton (Michigan) has shared a voicemail he received over his “yes” vote from an angry caller who threatened his life.
The message, which was obtained by The Detroit News, is riddled with profanities and expresses vitriol over Upton’s vote. “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking family dies,” the caller says, before wishing death on Upton’s staff. According to The Detroit News, the caller is from South Carolina — outside of Upton’s state.
Within the 30-second voicemail, the caller refers to Upton as a “traitor” multiple times, echoing language from a post by right-wing extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who called him and the 12 other GOP members who voted for the bill “traitors.”
Upton says that he’s gotten several death threats and over 1,000 calls to his office since Greene shared his number on Twitter and encouraged her followers to contact the members of Congress. In response to hearing about the voicemail, the Georgia lawmaker dubiously claimed not to condone death threats before posting Upton’s phone number on Twitter for a second time, appearing to encourage her followers to send even more death threats.
Upton says that threats have been pouring into his office ever since he voted to impeach Donald Trump in January. Numerous Republican representatives reported getting death threats directly before the impeachment vote, and some even said they felt they had to vote against impeachment because of the calls and voicemails threatening their lives.
Other Republicans have also expressed frustration over the infrastructure vote, condemning the Republicans who voted for the extremely watered-down infrastructure bill that was negotiated by members of their own party. Some conservatives like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) have called for punishing the members who supported the legislation by stripping them of committee assignments or mounting primary challenges against them, presumably by someone further to the right.
This is all despite the fact that the infrastructure bill was negotiated specifically to appease Republicans and Democrats sympathetic to their cause, like conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia). The bill seeks to mildly improve infrastructure like roads and highways — a goal previously championed by Trump himself. Of course, the far right Republicans are likely upset over party members backing any measure supported by the Biden administration.
Death threats and harassment have been prevalent among the far right for years. Last year, right-wingers threatened poll workers, government agencies and left-wing protesters. It’s not uncommon for progressive lawmakers to get death threats or be harassed. But concerningly, encouraging harassment appears to be an increasingly popular far right strategy to threaten political opponents and whip party members in order — and the tactic has recently been employed by members of Congress themselves.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is a common target of harassment; at least one of the far right militants who attacked the Capitol in January stated that they wanted to “assassinate AOC.” This week, however, Ocasio-Cortez was the recipient of what appears to be a violent threat from a fellow member of Congress: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona).
Earlier this week, Gosar tweeted a video depicting an animated version of him killing Ocasio-Cortez. But although the New York lawmaker often gets threatened by members of Congress, there has never been any consequences for this behavior.
After Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) tweeted a video depicting an animated version of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Monday, Democratic leaders in Congress have called for an investigation into the Arizona lawmaker.
“Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) wrote on Tuesday. She then called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) to join her in “condemning this horrific video,” asking him to “call on the Ethics Committee and law enforcement to investigate.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) also condemned Gosar’s video, calling it a “disgusting video from a pathetic man.”
The video, which Gosar tweeted on Monday, depicts Gosar’s face overlaid on an anime character slashing the neck of a character with Ocasio-Cortez’s face superimposed on it. After killing Ocasio-Cortez, the video shows Gosar — alongside Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) — preparing to attack President Joe Biden.
McCarthy has been mum on the issue so far — and it’s unlikely that the house minority leader will pursue formal disciplinary action against Gosar, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out on Twitter. “He’ll face no consequences because [McCarthy] cheers him on with excuses,” she wrote. Although this isn’t the first time that the New York progressive has faced violent language and threats from her colleagues, there has never been any action or ethics investigations in response. “All at my job,”Ocasio-Cortez continued, “and nothing ever happens.”
The House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee also called for an ethics investigation on Tuesday, saying, “In any other job in America, if a coworker made a video killing another coworker, that person would be fired.”
“Mr. McCarthy needs to decide whether he will finally stand with the American people on the side of law and order or he will continue to support violence and chaos,” wrote the committee’s co-chairs, Representatives Matthew Cartwright (Pennsylvania), Debbie Dingell (Michigan), Ted Lieu (California) and Joe Neguse (Colorado) in a statement.
Predictably, Gosar’s office has downplayed his violent threat. In a disingenuous statement released on Wednesday, Gosar said that he doesn’t “espouse violence or harm against any Members of Congress or Mr. Biden,” despite the video showing him literally espousing violence against Democrats. He then made the dubious claim that the video was meant to portray fights over bills in Congress — fights, evidently, where politically motivated murder is justified.
If McCarthy chooses to ignore this incident, it wouldn’t be the first ethics violation that he’s blatantly ignored. Multiple far-right members of his caucus have been tied to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in which several people died and the lives of many lawmakers, including Vice President Mike Pence, were threatened.
Last month, Rolling Stonereported that one of the attack’s organizers claimed a number of extremist right-wing Republican lawmakers had helped plan the attempted coup, specifically naming Gosar, Greene and Boebert. That report was met with silence from Republican leaders.
In fact, some experts say that McCarthy himself has violated ethics rules. Earlier this year, McCarthy threatened telecommunications companies, saying that if they comply with the January 6 committee request to retain call records related to the attack, the GOP “will not forget.” In an op-ed for Politico, ethics experts Norm Eisen and Fred Wertheimer said that this threat should be subject to a House Ethics Committee probe, and perhaps even a criminal referral.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are calling for Gosar to be removed from Congress. “Every day these white supremacists push the limits further and further to see how far they can go without consequences. This puts lives in danger,” wrote Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) on Tuesday. “Enough with the violent bigotry. Expel this white supremacist clown.”
Shortly before Virginia’s gubernatorial election on November 2, the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, circulated an ad in which a white woman calls for Virginia public schools to ban classroom discussions of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.
Pandering to racist fears and white racial anxiety, Youngkin also stated he would ban from schools what the right wing is inaccurately describing as “critical race theory,” a term which actually refers to a body of legal scholarship, but which right-wingers like Youngkin are using as a catch-all to describe any discussion of systemic racism in the U.S. And Youngkin made the boldface and dangerous assertion that educators are destroying America. Days later, Youngkin received 50.6 percent of the vote, defeating Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Youngkin’s attack on Virginia teachers’ ability to discuss structural racism are just one example of the GOP’s ongoing attack on public and higher education — an attack that is closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure.
The Republican Party makes clear that educational practices that inform, liberate, empower, and address systemic problems that undermine democracy are both a threat to its politics and a deserving object of disdain.
The Republican Party’s view of “patriotic education” draws directly from the playbook of previous dictatorships with their hatred of reason, truth, science, evidence and the willingness to use language as a source of dehumanization and violence. This is a language that operates in the interests of manufactured fear while producing a void filled with despair. This is a form of apartheid pedagogy that embraces the cult of manufactured ignorance, freezes the moral imagination, erases unsettling forms of historical memory and works to discredit dissent among individuals and institutions that call attention to social problems.
The attacks on suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern civil war. This is a war against reason and racial injustice that reproduces itself through the production of, as Toni Morrison herself notes, “cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies.”
Matters of conscience, social responsibility and equity have been purged from a Republican Party that feeds off the ghosts of an authoritarian past. Its disdain for justice and civic responsibility is also evident in its defense of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, its refusal to accept the election of Joe Biden as president and its immersion in a culture of lies.
The spirit of the Confederacy is obvious in the GOP’s voter suppression laws and its support of white nationalism and white supremacy. The spirit of U.S.authoritarianism is also alive in the Republican Party’s efforts to capture the machinery of state power in order to invalidate state elections along with attempts to suppress the votes of people of color. Such actions are frighteningly similar to attacks on Black voters during Reconstruction.
The legacy of Jim Crow and an updated version of the Southern Strategy are the driving forces in the Republican Party’s attempts to remove from public and higher education, if not history itself, any reference to slavery, racism and the teaching of other unpleasant truths. In this instance, white racial fears are activated, functioning like a coma to enlist the public in increasing acts of censorship, surveillance, and other practices that deaden the moral imagination and sense of civic justice.
The current policing of education in the United States cannot be abstracted from a larger strategy to identify the institutions and individuals who “make trouble” by uncovering the truth, resisting the warmongers, and exposing the violence at work by those politicians who invite the public “to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches.” Drawing on the work of Russell Banks, I believe that the currentattacks on educators who teach about the history and contemporary realities of racism are part of a broader attempt to silence those “committed to a life of opposition, of speaking truth to power, of challenging and overthrowing received wisdom and disregarding the official version of everything.”
Authoritarianism and education now inform each other as the Republican Party in numerous states mobilizes education as a vehicle for white supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision, and support for curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism and a brutal policy of racial exclusion. Republican legislators now use the law to turn public education into white nationalist factories and spaces of indoctrination and conformity. Republican state legislators have put policies intoplace that erase and whitewash history, and attack any reference to race, diversity and equity while also deskilling teachers and undermining their attempts to exercise control over their teaching, knowledge and the curriculum.
Horrified over the possibility of young people learning about the history of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have resisted long-standingforms of oppression, the Republican Party subscribes to a politics of denial and disappearance. Science, racism, truth, climate change, and dissent are now relegated to a politics of terminal exclusion and social abandonment. Attacking discussions of racism in public schools and higher education, they have made clear that “the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal.” History now repeats itself with a vengeance given that the Republican Party has a long legacy of pandering to racial resentment and white supremacy. This is a legacy that extends from Richard Nixon’s war on Black people and Ronald Reagan’s racist use of the myth of the welfare queen to Donald Trump’s birther arguments and the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, Black journalists and athletes, and Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries.
As part of the ongoing culture wars, various Republican governors have banned the teaching of what they are inaccurately deeming “critical race theory” in public schools and have also threatened to cut back state funding for public universities that introduce anti-racist issues to students, including a great deal of the founding literature of Black Studies and other sources that provoke discussions that offer a remedy to racial injustice. At the core of these attacks is a totalizing attack on critical thinking, informed judgments, truth and the core values that inform a critical notion of citizenship.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. has eloquently argued that what is at stake here is the freedom to write and bear witness, the freedom to learn that liberation and civic literacy inform each other, and to recognize that the freedom to teach and learn is under siege in a culture that is being policed by the new authoritarians. How else to explain that Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), the chair of the House General Investigating Committee, required that Texas school districts provide a list of over 800 books used in classrooms and libraries.
Not surprisingly, all of these books address important social problems. Krause also asked schools to report whether his designated list of books might make students“feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Karen Attiah notes that, “looking at Krause’s list, it’s hard not to conjure up images of totalitarian regimes and violent groups that have gone after books throughout history, from Nazi attacks on works considered ‘un-German’ in 1933 to al-Qaeda destroying precious manuscripts in Timbuktu. A gander at Krause’s list reveals an almost exclusive focus on race and racism, sex and sexuality, LGBT issues, abortion and — gasp — even puberty.”
It gets worse. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators want to banish certain wordssuch as “white supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “whiteness,” “multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.” For the Republican Party, words are dangerous, especially those that encourage critical interpretations, expand human agency, and produce sentences that open the possibilities for self-determination and a more democratic social order. Banning words and books constitutes a pedagogy of unlearning and disappearance, particularly with respect to care, empathy for the suffering of others, solidarity and the courage needed to confront injustices. Banning books and words injects ignorance into the public sphere, making reason toxic and justice irrelevant. Banning books and words is tantamount to a totalitarian dictatorship of illiteracy and politics of elimination. Even more, it both erases the genocidal brutality that such practices produced in the past and normalizes the possibility of their appearing again in the future.
Words and books that offer oppressed people the opportunity to gain self-representation and the ability to narrate themselves are now viewed by many Republicans as unpatriotic. Words that unfold in books that speak to a critical engagement with history, engage the possibilities at work in the unfolding of thehuman condition, and “bear witness to the full range of our humanity” are increasingly subject to an updated form of repression that prefigures authoritarian models of governance.
Words that encompass the far reaches of human intelligibility, offering an emancipated notion of individual and public agency are now examined with a heightened racial frenzy produced by a Republican Party and its acolytes who support the toxic principles of white supremacy and a politics of disposability. In this discourse, language functions to suppress any sense of racial justice, moral decency and democratic values. It is indebted to a politics of erasure and manufactured ignorance, and it wages a major assault on reason and justice.Moreover, it turns lethal by paving the way for a rebranded form of fascism. As part of its attack on and whitewashing of history, memory is trapped in a present that is wedded to a form of historical amnesia. Under such circumstances, words, language and thought itself are being erased or misrepresented so as to operate in an educational climate marked by what Richard Rodriguez once called “an astonishing vacancy.”
Fears about banishing books feature prominently in a number of dystopian novels that provide alarming examples of future authoritarian societies. Such lessons appear lost on a sizeable portion of the general public for whom the current historical moment imitates the horrifying fictional narratives explored in dystopian novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where books are outlawed or relegated to memory holes connected to incinerators used to destroy them.
American authoritarianism is alive and well. The Republican Party and its allies are waging an aggressive onslaught against any institution, policy and ideal that upholds democracy. In a startling statement that resonates with the previous horrors of history and the war on critical intellectuals, academics and journalists, Republican J.D. Vance, who is running for the Senate in Ohio, stated that, “The Professors are the Enemy.”
This deadly contempt for academics is present not only in the ways in which the neoliberal university has stripped them of ownership over their working conditions and modes of governance, but also in its utter disregard for their role as citizen scholars and public intellectuals. This disregard was unabashedly visible when the University of Florida prohibited four university professors from providing expert testimony in lawsuits challenging state policies endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
In this blatant act of censorship, possibly a signal of what is to come, the University of Florida administration decided that it would look to the Republican governor to decide how to regulate university speech and the public activities of its faculty. As Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor, pointed out,
The university does not exist to protect the governor. It exists to serve the public. It is an independent institution to serve the public good, and nothing could be more to the public good than a professor telling the truth to the public under oath.
Fortunately, this blatant assault against freedom of expression and academic freedom was reversed as a result of mounting public and legal outrage.
The ominous shadows of history are once again flooding the United States. Historical memory serves us well in making clear that the banishing of words, ideas and books is the precondition for the horrors that produced the fascist politics of the 1930s in Europe and later in the 1970s and ‘80s in authoritarian regimes in Latin America. Republican J.D. Vance’s attack on academics mirrors a statement made by Gen. Millán Astray, a firm supporter of Francisco Franco, who on October 12, 1936, while attending a speech given by the Dean of Salamanca University in Spain, shouted, “Long live death … death to the intellectuals!! Down with Intelligence.” This grotesque utterance occurred in the midst of a civil war in which intellectuals were tortured, murdered and sent into exile. The terror it both evokes and legitimizes has now become an organizing principle of the Republican Party.
The banning of books also has historical precedents that speak powerfully to the dangerous authoritarian spirit that now animates Republican Party politics. On the evening of May 10, 1933, over 40,000 people gathered in Berlin in what was then known as the Opernplatz. At the urging of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, more than 25,000 books labeled as “un-German” were burned. Soon afterward, book burnings took place across Germany in a variety of university towns. The purpose of the book burnings was to “cleanse” Germany of the literature of “racial impurity” and dissent and “purify” the German spirit. There was more at work here than what the novelist Andrew Motion called a monumental “manifestation of intolerance”; there was also a forecasting of the killings, mass murders, disappearances, and genocide that would follow this symbolic act of racial hatred and purification.
The banning of books in the United States, which bears a dangerous resemblance to the Nazi book burning, represents a startling vision of the Republican Party’s disdain for democracy and its willingness to resurrect totalitarian practices linked to earlier periods of censorship, repression, terror and state violence. In this case, as the great 19th- century German poet Heinrich Heine observed rightly, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” The banning of books and the dehumanizing of the writers who produce them is one step away from habituating the wider public into accepting the transition from censorship to more overt criminal acts on the part of the state. Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole perfectly captures the implications such actions have for developing into a full-fledged form of authoritarianism. He writes:
As a society the American people are being habituated into accepting cruelty on a wide scale. Americans are being taught not to see other people as human beings whose lives are as important as their own. Once that line has been crossed … then we know where that all leads, what the ultimate destination is. There is no mystery about it. We know what happens when a government and its leaders dehumanize large numbers of people.
The Republican Party is not calling for the burning of books or the imprisonment of authors they target as “un-American,” (at least not yet) but the spirit that animates their calls for censorship, historical cleansing, so-called racial purity, disposability and politics is alarming and a precondition for something much worse. The Nazi assertion and threat proclaiming, “The state has been conquered but not the universities” could very well be viewed as a central feature of the Republican Party’s war on critical race theory, the banning of books and its all-out war on higher education as a democratic public sphere.
The attacks on critical modes of thinking in the United States are at the center of a looming civil war in which the horrifying phantoms of the past have been re-energized and now threaten to appear once again. Beneath the spectacle of the MAGA hats, the criminal assault on the Capitol and an expanding culture of lies, there is a reactionary cultural politics financed by corporate interests and legitimized by powerful social media platforms, conservative foundations and other cultural apparatuses whose endpoint is the death of democracy.
At the current moment in the United States, manufactured fear is now coupled with the mass production of ignorance and the surging political power of U.S.-bredauthoritarianism. These forces work in tandem in order to destroy higher education, which is one of the few public spaces left where truth and justice can be taught, and resistance can be cultivated against the looming danger of normalizingwhite supremacy and an updated form of American fascism.
It would be wise for educators and others to heed Toni Morrison’s warning, so prophetically accurate at the present moment: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”
Clearly, faculty, students and others who take democracy seriously must work together to make higher education take on the responsibility of addressing the authoritarian cracks that have appeared in U.S. society. Critical education helps us to remember that justice and what it takes to be human are inextricably connectedand cannot be removed from a politics of solidarity. Justice is on hold in the United States, and, in part, this suggests that educators and those who refuse to live in a fascist world need to rethink the meaning of education and how it works as an instrument of empowerment, resistance and possibility. Fascist mythologies, racist social practices, misogynist governing structures, the prioritization of market values must be removed from higher education. Moreover, new structures of power must be enacted, and education must be reclaimed as a civic practice rather than a series of commercial exchanges. Only then will it be possible for higher education to operate as a democratic public sphere that takes seriously the notion democracy requires an informed citizenry and education is the foundation for that to happen.
Repressive forms of political education saturate everyday life and produce both areactionary shift in mass consciousness and a crisis of civic imagination. In part, this is due to an attack on democratic modes of education and public understanding in a variety of cultural apparatuses, extending from public and higher education to social media. Heightened racial hysteria has become normalized and needs to be challenged in all the cultural sites in which it appears. The pedagogical apparatuses of culture have turned repressive and dangerous, and need to be uncovered,resisted and overcome. The threat they expose to democracy should be foregrounded, and, in part, this is a role that higher education needs to address.
As Toni Morrison has observed, colleges and universities need to embrace“powerful visionary thinking about how the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context” of tyranny. In part, this means constructing liberating pedagogies that address the dangers of white nationalism, white supremacy, political corruption and fascist politics. It also means educating students and providing faculty with the tools, time and space to create widespread forms of resistance in conjunction with other groups outside the university in orderto fight against the authoritarian attacks that constitute what amounts to a new civil war.
The struggle over education is too crucial to ignore or lose. The stakes involve not just the struggle over history, knowledge and values, but also over the truth, justice, power and the social conditions that make democratic modes of agency, identityand dignity possible. The danger democracy faces in the U.S. is almost unthinkable given the impending threat of fascism. Given the seriousness of this impendingdanger, historian Robin D. G. Kelley rightly observes, “We have no choice but to fight.”
One entry into such a struggle is to recognize that democracy and capitalism are diametrically opposed to each other. The current racist attacks on higher education cannot be successful in the long run if capitalism remains in place. Not only is there a need for critical educators to do everything possible to develop forms of popular education and a cultural politics that challenges the corporatization of the university, but they must also produce an anti-capitalist consciousness central to any viable notion of equality, freedom, justice and social change. Predatory capitalism is incompatible with democracy given the staggering inequalities in produces in wealth, income and power. David Harvey is right in asserting that,“The fundamental problems are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we are going to go anywhere without a very strong anti-capitalist movement.”What needs to be addressed is that the most powerful big lie in the United States is not that Trump won the 2020 election, but the normalized claim that capitalism and democracy are synonymous.
The struggle for a radical democracy suggests the need to develop a new languagethat enables people to think in terms of broader solidarities, necessary for overcoming a fractured political landscape. This should be a language that touches people’s lives, provides a comprehensive understanding of politics, offers a concrete program for social change and lays the foundation for a broad-based movement that will unite around a society steeped in the principles of democratic socialism.
Democracy and education have been pathologized under neoliberal capitalism and have drifted into a space that mimics the ineffable terrors of the past. Higher education in a time of growing authoritarianism must address the question of what its role is in a democracy and whether it is willing to define and defend itself as a democratic public sphere and protective space of critique and possibility.
As Hannah Arendt once put it in her seminal essay, “The Crisis in Education”:“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
The struggle over education must be seen as part of a crucial struggle for democracy itself. As Primo Levy warned us, “Every age has its own fascism.” His words are more prophetic than ever given the current collapse of conscience and the willingness, if not glee, of the Republican Party to embrace an American-style fascism.
As Amartya Sen once argued, it is time “to think big about society” — to move beyond the despair, isolation, theoretical abysses and political silos that stand in the way of developing a strong anti-capitalist movement. The danger facing the United States is real and must be met with the utmost resistance by a mass movement of workers, young people, academics, teachers, feminists and others who believe that making education central to politics is an urgent political necessity.
Calls for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) to be removed from Congress are growing after he shared a video on Monday depicting an anime sequence of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and attacking President Joe Biden.
The video, which has since been flagged by Twitter, is an altered version of the theme song for the popular anime show “Attack on Titan.” At one point in the video, the faces of Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Georgia) and Gosar are superimposed on anime characters fighting together to defeat Ocasio-Cortez, whose face is overlaid onto a titan, a monstrous creature from the show that eats human beings.
In the video, Gosar is depicted slicing the back of Ocasio-Cortez’s neck, killing her. Shortly after, Gosar is shown moving in to attack Biden, holding two swords up to a picture of the president that enters the frame.
Interspersed with the clips of animated violence are videos of asylum seekers at the border crossing the Rio Grande, with — disturbingly — a blood splatter filter imposed over the footage. The words “drugs,” “crime,” “poverty,” “money,” “murder,” “gangs,” “violence” and “trafficking” flash across the screen, followed by videos glorifying Customs and Border Protection agents, almost as if to show the agents hunting down the asylum seekers.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is currently in Scotland attending the COP26 climate summit, responded to the video on Twitter. “So while I was en route to Glasgow, a creepy member I work with who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups shared a fantasy video of him killing me,” she wrote. “And he’ll face no consequences because [House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California)] cheers him on with excuses.”
“This dude is just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway,” the New York lawmaker went on. “White supremacy is for extremely fragile people and sad men like him, whose self concept relies on the myth that he was born superior because deep down he knows he couldn’t open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself.”
Gosar’s office dismissed criticisms of the video depicting an animated version of him murdering the popular Democratic lawmaker. “Everyone needs to relax,” a spokesperson for Gosar said.
Many lawmakers have condemned Gosar for posting the video, some calling for his removal. “Every day these white supremacists push the limits further and further to see how far they can go without consequences. This puts lives in danger,” wrote Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). “Enough with the violent bigotry. Expel this white supremacist clown.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) echoed this call, saying, “This man should not serve in Congress. Fantasizing about violently attacking your colleagues has no place in our political discourse and society.”
In a tweet thread, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that this isn’t the first time she’s faced violent or vulgar threats from Republican colleagues. Last year, a reporter overheard Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Florida) accosting Ocasio-Cortez in a stairwell over her comments suggesting that unemployment and general financial instability were causing more incidences of theft during the pandemic. After a short exchange, Yoho called Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch.”
Ocasio- Cortez also pointed out that she has been the subject of repeated harassment from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Earlier this year, Greene screamed at Ocasio-Cortez in an incident that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) categorized as “verbal assault.”
Despite pledging that they would fight to protect voting rights, major corporations like Amazon and Facebook have given $164,000 to Senate Republicans in 2021 so far — even though the party has made it a major priority to block voting rights advancement.
According to a report by the government watchdog Accountable.US, eight major corporations have donated to Senate Republicans, giving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of this year. In July, those same corporations signed a letter pledging to support expanding election access, specifically citing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Senate Republicans shot down last week.
For months, Republicans have vocally opposed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, disingenuously claiming that the expansions to the Voting Rights Act, which are aimed at reducing voter suppression for historically disenfranchised groups, are a violation of states’ rights.
The bill, which was passed by the House in August, would place restrictions on jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in elections, mandating that they gain approval from the Justice Department if they want to change their election rules.The Senate’s rejection of the bill comes in a contentious year for voting rights, as Republicans across the country have been introducing and passing laws to make it harder to vote as an extreme reaction to the 2020 election.
The letter, which is dated July 14 and signed by hundreds of businesses, claims to stand against those efforts. “[T]he undersigned group of U.S. employers urges Congress to address these problems through legislation amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the letter reads. “Last Congress, the House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We support the ongoing work of both the House and the Senate to enact legislation amending the Voting Rights Act this Congress.”
By donating to Republicans who oppose strengthening voting access, corporations directly undermine the letter’s claims. Target, which signed the letter, has donated $32,000 to Senate Republicans; Dell, also a signatory, has donated $38,500. Meanwhile, Amazon and Facebook both donated over $20,000, and Microsoft and Boston Scientific have donated more than $15,000 each.
The report found that the most common recipient of donations was Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), minority whip for the GOP. Thune received thousands of dollars in donations from Boston Scientific, Dell, Target, Intel, Amazon and Microsoft. It’s unclear what the donations are for, since federal filing guidelines don’t require such information to be divulged, but empowering the prominent Republican stands directly against the companies’ stated goals.
Thune has consistently fallen in step with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and his opposition to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Earlier this year, the South Dakota lawmaker delivered a speech claiming that the Democrats’ marquee voting rights bill, then known as the For the People Act or H.R. 1, was a “power-grab” by Democrats. In reality, the bill would massively expand voting access, with the goal of driving out dark money’s influence in politics and making it easier for everyone to cast a ballot.
Though Republicans have come up with a myriad of excuses for their opposition to voting rights advancement, some lawmakers have made the motivation behind the nationwide push for voter suppression explicitly clear: the party wants less people to vote. Even a so-called compromise bill from right-wing Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) failed to garner any Republican support; lawmakers have still yet to find any compromise that would please the party’s senators.
This is not the first time corporations have broken pledges with regard to political donations. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, 147 Republicans voted against the certification of the election results, and many companies made pledges to stop donating to those Republicans or stop political donations altogether. But so far, four dozen companies that pledged to suspend donations have broken those promises, including major corporations like Facebook and Target, according to Popular Information.
While making pledges and signing letters is an easy way to receive positive press or praise from the public, companies are ultimately looking out for their bottom line — and as long as Republicans oppose measures like raising corporate income taxes, the GOP and corporations will maintain a mutually beneficial relationship at the cost of the public.
