Hands up, conservatives: Who among you, who were sooooo upset about Hillary’s emails in 2016, would have predicted that, four years later, her victorious Republican opponent might refuse to cede power regardless of the upcoming vote?

Anyone? Bueller?

This is the most fundamental sin against democracy, and we are staring it in the face.

And who among you can muster up even a fraction of the outrage for this that you had for that?

No one? Huh. I’m stunned. 

That Republican president has gone even further, of course. He is deliberately undermining the integrity of the election, starving the Postal Service to hobble the vote, fomenting violence in the streets, and generally precipitating a constitutional crisis that has experts deeply worried about civil war and even the potential breakup of the United States. Last week, Barton Gellman, in a widely circulated piece in The Atlantic, summed it up well:

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum (the 79 days between Election Day and the Inauguration) and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance….will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.

It didn’t require Kreskin to foresee this state of affairs; it’s been looming almost from the start of Trump’s reign, and I do mean reign. Indeed, we long ago moved from worrying whether Trump will leave the White House if defeated (see my piece on that way back in 2018, the first of many) to a far more insidious threat, which Gellman’s article—aptly titled “The Election That Could Break America”—lays out:

The worst case…..is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

So how do we go about stopping that….especially when a third of the country is fine with it? And worse, how do we go about stopping it when, with the skill of the practiced grifter he is, Trump has already convinced that third of the country that his foes are somehow guilty of his own crime? 

THE PERILS OF PRINCIPLE

We are in conundrum a worthy of Kafka, or at least Lewis Carroll.

Donald Trump has spent the last two years doing everything he can to undermine confidence in the election so as to prepare the public to accept his claim it was fraudulent, and thereby assert his “right” to remain in power. This unprecedented, disgraceful, profoundly dangerous campaign is a ploy right out of the tinpot dictator’s playbook, and something no modern president has ever tried, not even Nixon.

At the same time, Trump and the GOP are engaged in an aggressive campaign to monkeywrench the vote themselves. This effort includes the usual Republican slate of voter suppression and disenfranchisement, disinformation and propaganda, three card monte with polling places, voter intimidation, destruction of ballots, and possibly even actual tampering with the count. (Looking at you, Diebold.) And, course, the GOP and the Trump administration are happy to have the help of the Russian secret services as well. (Bill Barr said it was OK!)

This sort of sabotage is a longstanding Republican crusade, but in the past five years it has been taken to a new extreme….now further weaponized by Trump’s assertion that he ought not be bound by the results of the vote.

Trump may yet succeed in creating the kind of chaos necessary to cling to power—and in another bitter irony, if he does, it will be in large part because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, a pandemic that he criminally botched, resulting in the deaths of more Americans than our last five wars put together.

In the worst case scenario, he may even be able to skew the count to support his claim…..and if he does, we will be in the awkward position of having to say the precise thing that Trump is saying now: “The election was fixed!”

No matter how egregious and obvious these offenses, any complaints we make will leave us open to allegations of massive hypocrisy…..and unlike Republicans, Democrats and other decent Americans have the unfortunate Achilles’ heel of principle that makes them vulnerable to such charges in ways that shameless, single-celled Trump supporters lack. This is the evil genius of Trump’s demagoguery all around.

A fair question is: do we care? Ultimately no. If they cheat, we are going to call them out, loudly. But it would be helpful if we could do so in the most convincing possible way, one that neuters the inevitable howls from the right of the aisle.

BALL OF CONFUSION

Unlike Trump, I will not say that the only way the other side can win is by cheating. It is possible, if unlikely based on the current numbers, that Trump could somehow win legitimately. I am painfully aware—painfully aware—that there are millions of Americans who eagerly support this troglodyte. People could be lying to the pollsters, the turnout could be unexpected, Jim Comey could issue another public statement, and so on.

But right now the numbers suggest that Biden is likely to win. If on the night of November 3rd and in the weeks that follow it appears that he has not, we will need to see highly credible, airtight proof to that end. (And not Larry Kudlow-style “airtightness” either. The real thing.) Because Trump has made the integrity of the election his signature issue, and because the Republican record of ratfucking is so shameful (more on that in a moment—remember the phrase “consent decree”), the onus will be on him and his party to prove that any victory they claim is bonafide.

Of course, Trump doesn’t need a definitive mathematical victory when mere confusion may be sufficient.

Here’s David Farris, writing in The Week:

It would unfold like this: The election result is closer than expected, and the ultimate winner remains unknown on election night, with millions of mail-in ballots to be counted in the decisive swing states. Trump declares victory when the (incomplete) election night count favors him, and then launches legal maneuvering to force states to stop counting mail-in ballots, papered over with some feeble pretext about the fraud the president himself keeps encouraging his own supporters to commit. Thanks to post-2010 gerrymandering, Republicans control both houses of the state legislature in nearly every contested state, and the president would presumably direct them to pass laws certifying Trump’s slate of electors, even if updated counts show Democratic candidate Joe Biden ahead. Et voila, a second Trump term.

Before you succumb to a stroke, Farris goes on to note the unlikelihood that Republicans will be able to carry out this scheme successfully. It would require them to (pick your metaphor) run the table, conjure a perfect storm, get super fucking lucky, etc etc. But we’ve seen it happen before.

Irrespective of the GOP’s odds of success, the real outrage is that are trying it at all—openly, and brazenly—and that so few Americans can even muster a shrug of the shoulders. That is how beaten down, numb, and cynical we have become. Which is just how the GOP likes it.

Farris goes on with his nightmare scenario:

Suppose that caravans of Trump supporters, adorned in Second Amendment accessories, converge on big-city polling places on Election Day. They have come, they say, to investigate reports on social media of voter fraud. Counter­protesters arrive, fistfights break out, shots are fired, and voters flee or cannot reach the polls.

Then suppose the president declares an emergency. Federal personnel in battle dress, staged nearby in advance, move in to restore law and order and secure the balloting. Amid ongoing clashes, they stay to monitor the canvass. They close the streets that lead to the polls. They take custody of uncounted ballots in order to preserve evidence of fraud.

There are variations of the nightmare. The venues of intervention could be post offices. The predicate could be a putative intelligence report on forged ballots sent from China.

This is speculation, of course. But none of these scenarios is far removed from things the president has already done or threatened to do….no one familiar with Attorney General Bill Barr’s view of presidential power should doubt that he can find authority for Trump.

THE RED MIRAGE

Apparently, Trump’s fixation on mail-in balloting stems from his freakout over the Florida midterms, when a post-election “blue shift” nearly wiped out what first appeared to be Republican victories in the Senate and gubernatorial races. (In the Arizona Senate race, it did.) In that sense, it is equally well described as a “red mirage,” a term coined by Josh Mendelsohn, the CEO of the Democratic data-modeling firm Hawkfish.

Trump has spent the two years since attacking the idea, with his own re-election very much in mind. But it’s a deceptive strategy, especially when one considers that such attacks on might actually hurt Republican turnout too. But that’s beside the point. Gellman again:

The president is not actually trying to prevent mail-in balloting altogether, which he has no means to do. He is discrediting the practice and starving it of resources, signaling his supporters to vote in person, and preparing the ground for post–Election Night plans to contest the results. It is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count.

In terms of specific mechanics, one of the chief things Trump and GOP may try to do is delay the certification of the vote long enough for it to be thrown into the House of Representatives, where (through arcane rules that you can read about elsewhere, including Gellman’s article, and this one by Jeffrey Toobin), the Republicans hold a state-by-state majority that could award Trump a second term. Or he may be angling to get it decided by the Supreme Court and its conservative majority—a third of whom will likely be Trump appointees—and he is betting will do likewise.

(Another good analysis of this scheme is to be found in Isaac Chotiner’s New Yorker interview with UC Irvine law professor Richard Hasen, author of Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.)

But Farris notes that “Mail balloting procedures are fully legal in all states that use them, so asking Republican legislatures either to stop the counting of ballots cast under agreed-upon procedures, or to certify a totally different winner than the people chose, is nothing short of extra-judicial election theft.”

It should not ultimately be a legal question. And in a healthy democracy, these efforts would not come before the courts at all nor should they be casually floated by a sitting president as the plan. Any attempt to do so is no different than having Biden and his vice presidential pick, Kamala Harris, abducted and dropped out of a helicopter. A slightly better ending for the two of them, I suppose, but the functional outcome for the rest of us would be identical: an election stolen brazenly by unapologetic authoritarians who would no longer have any check whatsoever on their rule.

CONSENTING ADULTS

In his Atlantic piece, Gellman notes that the 2000 electoral debacle did not really end with a Supreme Court decision, as conventional wisdom and memory holds: it ended because Al Gore publicly accepted that decision on December 13.

All the Court decided was that the recount in Florida should stop. Gore could have continued the legal fight from other angles, and many felt he should have. But that was a different time, when the stakes did not seem so high…..even though a presidency was at stake, and even though they turned out to be very high indeed. (Which way to Iraq?) But Gore and many others felt the respect for the peaceful transfer of power—a cornerstone of American democracy, as important as any other aspect you care to name—were more important.

I’m sure Donald Trump agrees.

As Gellman writes, “We have no precedent or procedure to end this election if Biden seems to carry the Electoral College but Trump refuses to concede. We will have to invent one.”

Another thing that has flown mostly under the radar is the consent decree that the GOP has been under four decades, limiting its ability to intimidate voters on Election Day. Gellman again:

The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any ‘ballot security’ operations at the polls.

This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking.

In late 2019, a senior lieutenant in the Trump re­election campaign named Justin Clark gave a private talk to an audience of Republican lawyers in Wisconsin that was surreptitiously recorded and later leaked. Clark spoke about the importance of “EDO”— Election Day operations—gleeful that “first and foremost is the consent decree’s gone,” which he went on to describe as a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal.”

He has since been made deputy campaign manager. Guess they liked what he was doing.

PANIC ROOM

Gellman’s piece caused a collective panic in the left. (As The Atlantic knew it would. Heather Cox Richardson reports that it was slated for the November issue, but rushed into print early, which I consider a public service.) Richardson also reports that Trump’s own reaction to it did not soothe any progressive fears:

Amidst the flurry of concern over The Atlantic piece, a reporter this afternoon asked Trump if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster.” He went on to say: “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very—we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”

In response to this shocking rejection of the basic principles of our government, Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted, “This is how democracy dies.” He said: “This is a moment that I would say to any Republican of good conscience working in the administration, it is time for you to resign.” But only one Republican, Mitt Romney (R-UT), condemned Trump’s comments as “both unthinkable and unacceptable.”

That’s the same Mitt Romney who last February was the sole Republican vote to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors, yet now is down with letting that same unfit, criminal head of state put another justice on the Supreme Court, even in defiance of his own party’s self-established precedent.

Mitt sure runs hot and cold when it comes to fascism.

EIGHT STEPS TO FREEDOM

If ever a Western democracy needed to be put under new management, it’s this one. The problem is, the very people we need to oust from power have control of the levers governing—or undermining—a fair election.

So how do we stop Trump from pulling off this bank robbery? In the words of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” I’ll tell you:

I don’t know.

Per above, the challenge for us is that the gang trying to carry out this caper is also in charge of the bank itself, the cops, the DA, and the judge. But we are not powerless.

At the institutional level, the DNC is already girding for battle with an army of lawyers, already mounting legal challenges, already pushing back against the administration and RNC’s efforts. Presumably there will be no repeat of the Dems’ feather-duster-to-a-flamethrower-fight approach of Florida 2000.

For those of us in the general public, our weapons are few, but they are pretty simple and easy to implement:

ONE: Sound the motherfucking alarm. The more we publicize what Trump is up to—and true to form, he’s not really trying to hide it—the harder it will be for him to pull it off. Obviously, this process has already begun, but we need that awareness—and vigilance—to trickle down from The Atlantic and The New Yorker to Kardashian-like ubiquity in every household in America.

TWO: Let the GOP know that we’re on to them and that there will be hell to pay if they go through with it. I’m not talking about an appeal to honor or principle—don’t make me laugh—only self-serving pragmatism. Behind closed doors, most sentient Republicans know (or at least worry) that Trump is toast, or will be sooner or later. The Ben Sasses and Tim Scotts and others who imagine that they will have a political future ought to be reminded over and over that we are not going to forget (let alone forgive) their shameful subservience to this cretin….and complicity in a heist like this will ensure their permanent pariah status, outside of the minority community of MAGA Nation.

Do we imagine they’re scared by that? Maybe not. But they should be….unless they’re banking on pulling this off and establishing a permanent one-party rule. That’s kind of the whole problem here.

THREE: Get out and vote. Do it in person if it’s safe, and early if you can. Landslide-like numbers for Joe on Election Night will be the best bulwark against Trump’s attempt to gaslight us.

If you need to vote by mail, get your ballot now and send it in, in the safest way possible. In some places you can drop it off in person, if you’re worried about the mail.

FOUR: Did I mention that getting out and voting? Do it.

FIVE: Go into Election Night knowing that we are unlikely to have a winner that evening, but fully expecting that Donald Trump will declare himself the winner no matter what.

SIX: Be prepared to disregard Trump’s claim unless there is overwhelming proof. (Which seems unlikely.) Push back against the falsehoods and the lies he will sling at us.

SEVEN: Brace for a weeks- and even months-long legal fight. (Groups like Protect the Results are already organizing.) Per above, the other side will try to curtail the vote count, and resort to complex constitutional maneuvers, and generally screw with the process in every possible way, legal and illegal, using every possible means. Don’t let them.

And when they try….

EIGHT: Be ready to get out in the streets. Right away. Don’t wait for Trump, Barr, McConnell, and the rest to succeed in their legal and extralegal shenanigans. We need to make them feel the pressure right off the bat, and in ways that have never been seen in these United States. Last summer’s BLM protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd provide a model.

It is this last step above all, save #3 above (did I mention we all need to vote like our country depends on it?) that may prove most important of all.

VELVET DIVORCE COURT

Writing about the Supreme Court in The New Yorker, Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor has advice that applies to the election as well:

Those with the most to lose from a reactionary Trump Court have the least access to the levers of power that could slow this fast-moving process. But they can still attempt to interrupt it with popular protest and resistance. Even if popular resistance is not successful in stopping Trump’s nominee, it will be crucial in the long, ongoing struggle to expand the rights of the people of the United States….

(O)rdinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives. But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence. It is through acts of solidarity and struggle that we have been able to secure our rights and liberties in the United States, and, from the shape of things to come, that is how those rights and liberties will have to be defended.

David Farris gets the final word:

It is one thing if Trump wins the Electoral College while once again losing the popular vote, a nightmare outcome that would further erode the legitimacy of democracy and would likely lead to some half-serious talk about secession. But if Republicans halt the counting of perfectly valid ballots and have their gerrymandered state legislatures try to illegally pick GOP electors when it is obvious that Biden has won, and if congressional Republicans go along with this despicable madness, it will break this rapidly unraveling country in two. There will be massive protests in every city. Those half-serious calls for secession will instead be actual bills passed by legislatures in blue states from coast to coast. There will be general strikes and tax strikes and debt strikes. It will make our long summer of discontent look like Sunday Funday. And as much as many of us might fantasize about a velvet divorce, the reality of this heavily armed country tearing itself apart after nearly a year of isolation and sickness and fear would be violent and disastrous.

I’m sure he’s right. But we better get ready, because it’s coming whether we like it or not.

*************

Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez—AFP/Getty Images

Let’s be clear: the position of the Republican Party is that it alone has the right to name Supreme Court justices, to utilize mail-in ballots, to occupy the White House, and to rule full stop.

The modern GOP has no shame. Its tortured excuses for reversing itself on positions it took in the recent past, like filling a SCOTUS seat in the last year before a presidential election, or for doing things it once excoriated Democrats over (deficits, executive orders, handling of classified material, committing impeachable offenses, etc etc etc) goes well beyond mere hypocrisy. These are the deliberate actions of an organization that has openly declared its contempt for democracy and dedicated itself to the brazen pursuit of authoritarian one-party minority rule at all costs…..and guess which party they have in mind to fill that role?

But all that ought to have been clear four years ago when it sold what was left of its soul to Donald Trump.

THIS MASQUERADE

McConnell and the Republicans are currently tying themselves in knots promoting convoluted reasons why it’s hunky dory for them to seat a new Supreme Court justice just weeks before a presidential election, when five years ago they refused even to even to meet with Merrick Garland on the grounds that ten months out was too short, and the decision should be left to the American people via the new president we were about to choose at the ballot box.

This reversal comes as no surprise. In May 2019 McConnell openly announced—with a snickering, weasely smile—that should a vacancy in the Supreme Court appear during Trump’s final year in office, he would absolutely fill it. Moscow Mitch long ago made it abundantly clear that he is the owner of not a single principle except the ruthless pursuit of brute power. He is the gravedigger of democracy and will go down in history as one of the most destructive influences on our republic in modern times.

So first things first. Let’s dispense with the absurd claim that the GOP has a leg to stand here.

One risible claim the GOP is making is that this case is different because now the president’s party controls the Senate. Bullshit. That control means nothing in terms of the law. It just means that this time the GOP has enough votes to ram their own nominee through, whereas last time it feared it would be unable to block the Democrats’ choice; otherwise they would have held an up-or-down vote with confidence that they could reject him. Not that they care a whit about showing their brutality—they relish it, in some ways. But even monsters prefer the path of least resistance, when it’s available. 

You’ll also hear Republicans talk about the so-called Biden Rule, which wasn’t a rule at all, but simple speculation, and would have been fine if applied fairly and consistently. The McConnell Rule, by contrast, is “I do what I want and you can fuck off.”

You may also hear about the Reid Rule, which refers to 2013, when then-Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats exercised the “nuclear option” and eliminated the filibuster for all judicial nominees…..except the Supreme Court. That may have been tactically wise or unwise, but it was McConnell and the GOP who in 2018 expanded that rule to include SCOTUS nominees in order to get Brett Kavanaugh through.

No one except the most benighted, Kool Aid-drunk red-hatted partisan can possibly take any of these rationalizations seriously.

Disagree? Remember this:

In November 2016, when the blocking of Garland looked like little more than a futile delaying tactic ahead of an inevitable win by Hillary, several prominent Republican senators suggested that, should she win, they would continue to block ANYONE she nominated to the SCOTUS for four years or more.

So the rationalization surrounding replacing Justice Ginsburg are so much kabuki. Any sentient person can see that the GOP will simply do anything and everything, no matter how unjust, to keep any Democratic nominee off the Supreme Court…..part of its broader scheme to eviscerate the mechanisms of a functioning democracy altogether, from undermining fair elections to denying Congressional oversight of the executive branch (NB: GOP-controlled only) to partnering with hostile foreign powers, all in the interest of maintaining its own power in defiance of the will of the majority.

WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ REASONS

Of course, coming up with a plausible justification is not necessary and ultimately irrelevant: the GOP intends to nominate a justice anyway, no matter how self-evidently flimsy and irrational the excuse. They don’t even seem to be putting much effort into the charade.

Republicans often sneer, “Everything Trump and McConnell are doing are within the rules. You Democrats are just a bunch of crybabies.”

Again, bull-shit. A functioning democracy depends on the good faith of its participants, and the GOP routinely acts in the worst faith possible. The Garland incident is a prime example.

In 2016 McConnell flagrantly flouted the Senate’s duties and the clear intent of the Founders (so much for originalism) by inventing this counter-constitutional idea that there was some “use by” date past which a presidential nominee to the Court was invalid. Had the roles been reversed, you can be sure that the GOP would have screamed bloody murder at a Democratic attempt to do likewise, and not been deterred by Chuck Schumer insisting on technicalities or inventing new rules.

That was plenty outrageous all on its own. But it would have been one thing if Mitch had at least been consistent and stuck to that invented principle. (Ha—just kidding!) In terms of following the letter of the law, the current rush to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat is actually not nearly as onerous as the Garland fiasco……but the hypocrisy of doing so after what the GOP did to Garland, and the absolutely dishonest, faux highminded rhetoric that accompanied it, now conveniently forgotten, makes it much much worse.

But as Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker, “(A)nyone familiar with the Republican senator from Kentucky’s long political career knows he couldn’t care less about hypocrisy; like President Trump, he is immune to shame.”

(B)ehind closed doors McConnell has been raising money from big conservative donors for months by promising that no matter how close it might be to the election, he would install Trump’s Supreme Court pick. As a former Trump White House official told me, “McConnell’s been telling our donors that when RBG meets her reward, even if it’s October, we’re getting our judge. He’s saying it’s our October surprise.”

The only part of the GOP defense that is remotely true is that Democrats have long played softball, partially an admirable function of their respect for the rule of law and the spirit of democracy, and partially a naïve and self-sabotaging refusal to recognize the threat we are facing and meet the ruthlessness of the other side in kind. We see it even now in the media’s reflexive treatment of the Supreme Court vacancy as another horserace to be handicapped, rather than what it is: the latest attack on our core democratic values.

The time for that sort of thinking is long over.

AN INSIDE JOB

Many an authoritarian party came to power through entirely legal means, then slowly strangled democratic rule from within. Now we are seeing that very thing happen in these United States.

We are in a horror movie where the call is coming from inside the house.

In 2015 Noam Chomsky opined that the GOP had ceased to be a conventional political party at all in the conventional American sense of the term and become a radical insurgency—and that was before Trump. But we need not go that far left to find almost identical criticism. Way back in 2012, Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote that the Republican Party had become “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The GOP’s lack of principle is now at a level that beggars fiction. Indeed, the issue goes well beyond hypocrisy and into the very ideology of power characteristic of a totalitarian state. In such a state, there is no such thing as a “loyal opposition.” Rival parties and politicians cannot be countenanced; they must be demonized to a degree usually reserved for foreign enemies in wartime.

In that regard, Trump’s reign accelerated a Republican trend that had begun in earnest in the Clinton years, as pioneered by Newt Gingrich, and accelerated under Obama by the Tea Party: the notion that Democratic governance is by definition illegitimate. With the Merrick Garland outrage, McConnell marked a defining moment in that process: a stark announcement, papered over with the thinnest and most absurd parliamentary pretense, that only Republican presidents had the right to name justices to the Supreme Court. The Ginsburg vacancy bookends that in the most painful possible way, marking how far our democracy has already fallen.

Trump has taken that Gingrichian ethos to its logical, chilling extreme, wherein a President of the United States can suggest that his opponents ought to be jailed merely by virtue of opposing him, or hint that his followers ought to use “Second Amendment remedies” to unseat Democratic governors, or to defend his ostensible right to remain in office, or anything else they (or he) wanted. Under Trump, the “Democrat Party,” as Republicans insisting on calling it, denying its foe even the right to choose their own name, is not simply a group of fellow Americans who happen to hold differing views within our communally agreed upon system of representative democracy. They are traitors and criminals. Nothing they do is allowable.

That, my friends, is the fundamental operating principle of authoritarianism.

The right wing riposte, of course, was the left is demonizing them in the same way. But two people arguing whether the earth is round or flat are not both correct simply because of their entitlement to their opinions. That counter is itself part of the insidious tautology of anti-democratic movements, one that deploys false equivalences to create a facade of respectability, exploiting the goodwill of the very system it is in the process of destroying.

LET’S DO THE NUMBERS

Without losing sight of the greater Republican threat and the need to address it, let’s talk short term tactics on this latest battlefront.

Can we find four Republican senators with both the principle and the backbone to stop this travesty?

(The magic number goes down to three if we can delay the vote until after the election, even just into the lame duck period, and if Mark Kelly wins in Arizona, whose state law allows him to be seated immediately. He’s leading right now.)

Speaking just hours before word of RBG’s death, Lisa Murkowski indicated she would oppose a vote before Election Day, and has since re-affirmed that. Susan Collins too has issued a statement saying she would not support a vote. Will she fold? It’s the understatement of the year to say that her record’s not good. There’s a lot of speculation that once again Mitch is “allowing” her to take this stance, in this case to try to save her rapidly slipping chances to hold onto her seat, and that if the vote is held after November 3rd, she’ll have nothing to lose either way and will vote to confirm.

Romney? Maybe, but far from a sure thing. Mitt’s (partial) act of principle during the impeachment does not erase the fact that he is a dyed-in-the-wool old school conservative eager to entrench right wing control of the Court. Let’s see if his flash of integrity has legs.

Who else? Sasse? No. Tillis? No. Cory Gardner, who’s in a tough reelection fight in an increasingly blue state? Unlikely. Lamar Alexander? You mean the retiring Republican eminence grise who had nothing to lose but still led the voted to acquit Trump last February, promising us that he’d learned his lesson?

How about Chuck Grassley? Last August, Iowa’s senior senator said he couldn’t support a confirmation in an election year after supporting McConnell’s blockage of Garland in 2016. Though technically what he said was, “If I were chairman of the committee and this vacancy occurred, I would not have a hearing on it because that’s what I promised the people in 2016.” Of course, he’s not chairman of the judiciary committee, Lindsey Graham is, so maybe that offers Chuck a loophole through which to weasel his way out.

Speaking of which, what of Senator Graham, who is on video proclaiming that, in the interest of consistency, that he would not support confirming a Supreme Court nominee in the year before the 2020 election, even boasting that he should be held accountable for his comments. (He made a similar claim two years before, in 2016, also caught on tape.)

Hold on to your hats: Lady G has now reversed himself. I’m shocked, shocked!

The fact that his promise is on film carries no more weight than the videotape of his speech during the Clinton impeachment did during Trump’s trial, when he did a similar partisan 180.

In terms of the election, Justice Ginsburg’s death has jolted what until now was a remarkably stable race, but it’s not clear how much, or which side will benefit most in terms of energizing its respective base. We’ll know in November; my guess is that it’s probably a wash. (Since Friday, ActBlue has raised more than $100 million, a huge sum, but Republicans are equally motivated. I’ve even heard of anti-Trump conservatives—or Trump-skeptical ones—who support him ramming through a new justice, and then losing in November.)

One thing that’s clear, however, is that the American people have more integrity and common sense than the GOP: new polling reports that that 62% of Americans think the vacancy should be filled by the winner of the election. (Even half of Republicans feel that way.) So the smart move for the Trump and the GOP would be to announce his nominee and use that as a promise for his second term and a chit to drive Republican voters to the polls, rather than trying to foist someone on us before the election and risking blowback. After all, even if he loses, McConnell will have no compunction about ramming a new justice through before January. (Unless he is counting votes and worried about Mark Kelly.) 

But Trump’s never been big on delayed gratification.

The more pertinent point, however, is that the GOP expects Trump to lose.

The fact is, McConnell wants to retain control of the Senate much more than he wants another conservative justice on the Supreme Court, so in the interest of selfishness and simple gamesmanship he might indeed delay the vote until after November 3rd, then push it through afterward regardless of the result. Should Trump lose, a lame duck confirmation would be an even more outrageous middle finger to the will of the people—not that McConnell cares—but as it would be safely after Election Day, Moscow Mitch will have zero fucks to give.

METHODS OF COUNTERATTACK

Right now Democrats have very little leverage, and if recent history is any guide (NB: it is), none of it will deter the Republicans one whit. But the Democrats should rattle those sabers anyway.

Jeffrey Toobin suggests a fourfold path if Biden wins and the Democrats take back the Senate, including an end to the filibuster (to deprive McConnell of his chief weapon to obstruct the new administration); statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (to bring four more Democratic votes into the Senate); expansion of the number of lower court federal judges; and the big gun, a much-discussed expansion of the Supreme Court.

Might that start an arms race that results in a Senate-like 100-member Court someday? Maybe. But it’s one of the few ways the Democrats have to pressure—or punish—the GOP, and the long term risks might be worth the short term tradeoff. (Reforms to the confirmation process and antiquated lifetime appointment policy would help.) If we don’t do something, there will be no more democracy left to worry about.

Is there also the danger that such threats will help the Republicans energize their base by allowing them to claim that the Democrats are usurping the rule of law? Sure, but they’re already claiming that….in fact, they’re already claiming that the DNC is some sort of Marxist Illuminati puppeteering radical anarchist terrorists in the streets. How much worse can the rhetoric get?

(Objective reality doesn’t enter into it, in case you’re wondering. I happened to be in Pennsylvania this past weekend where Trump is running TV ads saying that the “economy is in ruins” thanks to Joe Biden. That’s Joe Biden, Private Citizen, accused of ruining the economy by the man in charge of the economy.)

Would a Supreme Court unilaterally expanded by a Democratic administration have no credibility? Let’s hope that’s our biggest problem. Moreover, the current Court has already been thoroughly discredited by the Garland/Gorsuch and Kennedy/Kavanaugh maneuvers. If McConnell and Trump push through yet another nominee, its credibility will be degraded even more.

To be clear, I’m not advocating a “be just as bad as they are“ methodology. But the Marquise of Queensberry rules that we were playing by in 2016 are what led to the Merrick Garland debacle in the first place. (That and the overconfidence that Hillary would win anyway, and the failure to believe that the GOP wouldn’t carry out its then-unthinkable threat of four years of filibuster.) Hindsight is 20/20, of course; I’m not blaming anyone for failing to understand that the entire game had shifted into a far more brutal phase. But now that shift is clear and we have no excuse for fighting back just as hard.

ANGELS AND DEMONS

Among the many sorrowful things about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing is that all this Machiavellian politicking has crowded out what should be a period of deep national mourning and tribute to this American titan. RBG more than deserves her rock star status; it will take decades for history to fully appreciate her impact. To lose a pair of towering human rights figures like her and John Lewis in a two-month period is gutting.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller unaccountably continues to live and breathe and draw a federal salary at taxpayer expense. There is no God.

It must be said that the conservative response to RBG’s death has been mostly polite and respectful in public. (In private, I suspect there has been a festival of high-fiving.) But of course, this being the American right wing we’re talking about, there have been some notable exceptions.

A friend reports that the day after RBG’s death, at the wealthy lakeside community where he has been holed up during the pandemic, a flotilla of boats and yachts appeared flying Trump Pence 2000 / MAGA flags, bearing passengers openly celebrating Justice Ginsburg’s death. Such despicable behavior is self-condemning, for any decent human being. These of course are the same kind of Trump flotillas that have recently materialized in numerous waterfront locales, including my own summertime haunt of Atlantic City, as well Texas, where several Trump-flagged boats sank earlier this month. (Attention: metaphor.)

Though it was prefaced with perfunctory praise for her, McConnell’s statement announcing that he intends to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat might also be included in this catalog of disrespect, coming as it did less than two hours after word of her death.

But leading the way on that bush league front was Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), the snarling toady whom you may remember from the impeachment, who tweeted:

RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defended pro-abortion laws. With @realDonaldTrump nominating a replacement that values human life, generations of unborn children have a chance to live

Despite being a great humanitarian (source: Collins himself), this modern day Gandhi has refused to apologize for his remarks, insisting he wasn’t celebrating Justice Ginsburg’s death (his boat must be in for repairs). He also argued that Trump and McConnell should absolutely fill her seat immediately. In another tweet, Collins accused the Democrats of “eroding the integrity of our nation’s highest court” (Projection 101), and grandstanded with a proposed constitutional amendment to block such court packing. (Chances of ratification: zero).

Collins, btw, is running for the Senate in Georgia against another vile Republican Kelly Loeffler, the richest member of Congress, who is embroiled in conflict of interest  and insider trading scandals of her own, thus offering Georgia Republicans a choice between pneumonia and bronchitis. (Georgians: vote for Democratic candidate Dr. Raphael Warnock.)

But it could be worse. In Delaware, Republican Senate candidate Lauren Witzke posted a racist, counterfactual meme so vile I won’t even dignify here. (Since deleted….but the Internet is forever, Lauren.) Witzke was once an opioid and heroin addict who claims to have worked for illegal Mexican drug cartels, as well being a QAnon supporter, self-described flat earther, and 9/11 truther. In another only marginally less awful tweet, she wrote:

I will not praise the woman who spearheaded the total destruction of Western Civilization. I refuse to cheer the career of a woman with the blood of millions of dead babies on her hands. David didn’t mourn the death of Goliath. I will not apologize for standing up for life.

I guess perspectives on who’s destroying Western civilization vary.

INSIDE THE ABATTOIR

If McConnell succeeds in this latest SCOTUS armed robbery, Donald J. Trump will have been allowed to put fully a third of all the justices on the Supreme Court, including the one that may well decide whether or not he gets a second term. That would be infuriating in any event, but even more so when the President in question is an unfit monster who himself ascended to his position under a black cloud of foreign interference.

All three of those seats will have been acquired under shady circumstances at best, given that the only quasi-legitimate one—Kavanaugh replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy—was engineered by Kennedy’s well-timed retirement, followed by the memorable shitshow of Barfin’ Bart crying and whining and throwing a self-pitying temper tantrum over credible allegations of sexual assault, and mocking a mockery of judicial nonpartisanship in the process. (And shall we talk about Anthony Kennedy’s son arranging suspicious loans for the Trump family from his position at Deutsche Bank?)

Jane Mayer again:

(Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute) foresees the potential for a historic political rupture if Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016, and McConnell successfully seize a Supreme Court seat for a second time. “If McConnell gets away with this again, this will be a Court like none we have ever seen in our lifetime. We will be back to the pre-New Deal era,” Ornstein said, referring to one of the most conservative courts in the last century. He predicted, “If McConnell does this, it’s not just an act of hypocrisy, it’s one of the most dangerous breeches we’ve seen in our lifetime. There will be consequences. I think there would almost be revolution in this country.”

Herein lies the real point.

Progressives naturally bemoan the current right wing chokehold on the Court and the kind of decisions it will hand down, even as conservatives celebrate that very thing. A 6-3 right wing majority would be even more extreme, of course. But those gleeful conservatives ignore the cost of their victory and the underhanded means they have used to achieve it. They may get the kind of decisions they crave, and for generations to come, but they have already gravely undermined the credibility of the Supreme Court in the eyes of tens of millions of Americans—a majority perhaps. That is not an abstraction, but a grim fact that goes directly to the health of the nation and our communal faith in its institutions.

Not that the GOP cares one whit. But it’s a terrible loss for our democracy, and another step on the road to banana republichood.

Well done, Mitch.

The GOP has enjoyed an incredible run of luck, beginning with Scalia’s death, running through Trump’s razor-thin Russian-aided win (asterisk for the history books), Bob Mueller’s narrow view of his remit, and this administration’s thus far largely successful obstruction of justice. RBG‘s death may turn out to be another lucky break for them. If Trump manages to win this November, legally or otherwise, that will be an even bigger one.

But that lucky streak will not last forever. The six out of ten Americans who are not down with this despicable regime will eventually tire of being shit upon, treated with contempt, victimized, and generally being forced to watch this criminal gang masquerading as a political party run roughshod over our ideals. Trump and the GOP are currently busy trying to scare the hell out of the conservative base with fearmongering about antifa and radical leftist mobs in the street. If enough of these egregious, blood-boiling outrages continue, their fever dream might come true.

Republican lust for power knows no bounds, but the GOP would do well to remember: pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.

A reckoning is coming, and sooner or later, one way or another, this Republican reign of terror is gonna come to an end.

*********

RIP RGB.

Issues related to the Supreme Court are a regular feature of this blog. See also: The Ghost of Merrick Garland, November 25, 2017; Five Blind Mice , July 11, 2018; “Blessed Be the Fruit”—Patriarchy, Tyranny, and the Supreme Court, August 13, 2018; and The Ghost of Merrick Garland, Part II, October 10, 2018.)

A few weeks ago in these pages, I interviewed my friend, the filmmaker Ramona Diaz,  whose new feature documentary A Thousand Cuts (out now) details Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s persecution of his chief domestic critic, the dissident journalist Maria Ressa. He hasn’t yet had her poisoned, like Putin did to Sergei Navalny, but he’s arranged for her to be convicted of libel in a kangaroo court and sentenced to six years in prison. (She is out on bail while appealing.)

This week Ramona sent me a note about the upcoming US election:

As a person who grew up under martial law, I saw that Marcos needed the full support of the military. Which he did get but that had grave consequences for the morale of the military and hard lessons learned. So much so that today they don’t fully support Duterte. As someone told me, they’re tired of all the adventurism. And that’s why Duterte has not proclaimed martial law, because he’s not fully backed by the military. (Though now the pandemic has helped him consolidate power.)

So in the US, how will this work? I cannot imagine Trump has the support of the military, seeing as how he despises vets, right?

Her question is especially pertinent as we approach the most consequential US presidential election of modern times, only 49 days away, with an incumbent who has spent four years undermining the most fundamental precepts of our democracy, moving us closer to autocracy than almost anyone could have imagined, to include announcing that he will view any victory by his opponent in November as evidence that the election was rigged. 

The possibility that Trump will refuse to respect the results of the election and precipitate a constitutional crisis—once the ridiculed purview of far-out “alarmists”—has now become a regular topic on the front pages of our major newspapers. That’s shocking, of course—unthinkable, in fact, in any presidency since Rutherford B. Hayes. But it’s at least encouraging that the public has at last woken up to the threat.

Specifically, Ramona’s question of what the US military will do or not in such a crisis is on the minds of many, as well it should be.

The bad news, and the short answer, is: not much.

THE CAVALRY AIN’T COMING

As Ramona notes, in most countries, an aspiring autocrat aiming at president-for-life status requires a critical mass of backing from the armed forces.

Not so in the United States. In order to pull off a de facto coup d’etat, Trump doesn’t need the support of the military, since in the US, the usual paradigm works backwards.

As we saw in the aftermath of the St. John’s debacle, when a bevy of retired generals and admirals led by former Secretary of Defense and retired Marine four-star Jim Mattis rejected the notion of deploying active duty troops against American civilians (was that really up for debate?), the US military is loath to even give the appearance of involvement in partisan politics. That’s a good thing….one of the basic principles that the Founding Fathers were adamant about, in fact, having witnessed the uniformed military misused by many a crowned head.

But the downside of that aversion is that it allows a wannabe tyrant like Trump to neutralize the military as a force that will check his own despotism.

Since the default position of the US military is to stay out of domestic political affairs at all costs, all Trump has to do is give the illusion of victory in the election—or create enough doubt and chaos about the legitimacy of a Biden win, which is the same thing. The Pentagon does not want to be what Bush used to call “the decider.” If Trump can get the decision thrown into the House, or wind up before the Supreme Court, the US military will stay on the sidelines….even if the GOP majority in those august bodies manages to shamelessly award Trump a victory he didn’t win. In that regard, he will have neutered the power of the US military to intervene by using its own integrity against it. 

IMHO, in order for the US armed forces to step in this November and prevent Trump from illegally holding onto the presidency, things would have to reach the point of a blatant Pinochet-like power grab such that I simply can’t imagine in the US. (Even though there have been plenty of things that no one could imagine happening in the US that have already happened in the past four years.)

Not that there couldn’t be an unfair election—there certainly could be. In many ways we’re watching one unfold right now, though ironically, in a way that favors Trump, even as he howls about how it’s rigged against him. It’s simply that I am quite sure that Trump is so good at creating doubt and chaos and deceitfully using the norms of democracy to his own advantage that he can conjure the appearance of credibility that he needs, an illusion convincing enough to deter the military from stepping in. No need to get the XVIIIth Airborne Corps on his side.

That is the scariest part of all.

FLIPSIDE

Of course, we are looking at this from a progressive perspective, in which the military steps in to enforce the rule of democracy and remove Trump…..by his fingernails, presumably, with a death grip on the door jamb of the Oval Office, his body fully horizontal as four Army Rangers bodily try to carry him out.

(Don’t tell me you can’t picture it. Though actually I think the task of dragging his fat white ass out of the People’s House will probably fall to the Secret Service or US Marshals.)

But the opposite scenario is equally worth considering: that the US military might rally to Trump’s side.

There is enough Trumpism in the armed forces to make this a plausible concern. If Trump declared victory in a disputed election and called on the military to come to his aid, would the brass agree and give the order? I doubt it, for the same reasons cited above. The Pentagon is no more likely to order active duty troops into the streets Tiananmen style to enforce Trumpian Year Zero than it is to deploy its forces to combat it.

But that is not particularly reassuring either.

As in the other scenario, some civilian authority higher up the chain will have to make the call as to who is the rightful winner of the election, and I believe the brass will follow its lead. (Might certain units break ranks and rally to the United States of Trump? Almost certainly not. If we reach that point of dissension and mutiny, we are really in trouble.)

In that sense, the more pertinent question is not what the US Army will do, but what our political institutions like Congress and the courts will do when principle collides with partisanship. Above all, the question is what will the leadership of the Republican Party do? And that is really terrifying, because I think we all know that answer.

Again, this is all the more reason why Trump will arrange matters so that military force is not necessary. It won’t be, if he can successfully create sufficient smoke and fog that enough Americans take his side, or buy the lie that there is doubt about who’s the real victor, or otherwise throw up their hands while our institutions are paralyzed (or willfully abused for his ends) and the chattering classes clutch their pearls and pen forcefully worded op-eds about how we have to let the system work, even though an armed robber has jammed a crowbar into said system while he steals us blind and manages to get the police to stand by and let him, or even assist in the crime.

Don is very good at all that.

REPUBLICANS LOVE THE PRIVATE SECTOR

Some on the left have scoffed that the “military” has already employed force against peaceful protestors, pointing to Lafayette Square, Portland, and elsewhere. The claim is off base, but fed by right wing rhetoric and actions that deliberately muddy the waters.

Trump and his advisors would like us to believe that our military is already all in on using deadly force on fellow Americans. But that ain’t the case. The federal and local law enforcement agents who have engaged in violence against peaceful protestors are not the active duty US military. The militarized look of these police officers confuses matters (one of many issues with that phenomenon), but the distinction is crucial, even as the administration would like to blur it.

Likewise, the National Guard is not the active duty military either. For those who don’t understand the difference (and apologies for being pedagogic), the National Guard is a part time reservist organization under the control of the governor of a given state, and often used for policing civil disturbances, among other peacetime applications. (It was Ohio National Guardsmen who shot and killed four at Kent State, for instance.)

That is something very different than the domestic use of the active duty US military, under command of the Pentagon, a force designed and configured solely to fight and kill enemy combatants on the battlefield. (The NG can, however, be federalized by the POTUS, which is part of where this could get complicated.) During the BLM/George Floyd protests in early June, the mere dispatch of an active duty military police battalion from Ft. Bragg to DC, even if its members ultimately never left their garrison, was worrying enough that it prompted the pushback from Mattis et al. (The MPs are at least trained in riot control, which many of the anonymous federal agents in unmarked uniforms—rumored to be repurposed Bureau of Prisons officers, on the model of Putin’s “little green men”—were not.)

But the use of these paramilitary police units shows how Trump can apply brute force even if active duty soldiers are not available to him. Most notoriously, his DHS sent more of those anonymous feds in to the streets of Portland to engage in brownshirt-style violence toward protestors there.

Trump is also big on freelance thuggery. Note his cheerleading for white power vigilantes armed with semi-automatic weapons, like the “Liberate” mobs (don’t call people with guns “protestors”) in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, and even homicidal teenagers like Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin. Trump has regularly encouraged political violence for the past five years, all the way back to the campaign trail. If he can’t have the 82nd Airborne, he will settle for the Proud Boys, Duck Dynasty-style militiamen, and the smirking, tiki-torch carrying frat boys of Charlottesville.

His enthusiasm for the First and Second Amendment rights of armed citizens left of the political center is considerably less vigorous.

Roger Stone has already encouraged Trump to declare martial law. As reported by the Guardian, Stone told InfoWars’ Alex Jones:

Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act and arresting the Clintons, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, (Mark) Zuckerberg, Tim Cook of Apple and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”

He also said: “The ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state. They are completely corrupted. No votes should be counted from the state of Nevada if that turns out to be the provable case. Send federal marshals to the Clark county board of elections, Mr President!”

Similarly, last week, on September 11^th (nice touch), shock jock Mark Levin called for Trump to use the military against Black Lives Matter protestors and others, whom he called “traitors” and “punks.” (You kids get off my lawn!)

Yeah, I know, Stone is a lunatic and convicted felon who rightly ought to be in prison, and Levin is the poor man’s Limbaugh (who is the poor man’s Father Coughlin) and both are showbiz hucksters who deserve exactly none of our attention.

But what about Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, who went on a 26 minute video rant on Facebook that included the suggestion that “there are (left wing) hit squads being trained all over this country” preparing for violent opposition to a second Trump term, “and when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin. He added, ““If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,” he urged his followers.

This is a high-ranking federal official in a Cabinet department. (Caputo, by the by, is also in charge of messaging for the CDC, which in that same Facebook rant he claimed contains a Deep State cell of “seditious” anti-Trump scientists deliberately driving up the COVID death toll.) This is the kind of talk that is bouncing around Trump Nation ahead of the election. We ignore it, or scoff at it, or dismiss it as a joke at our peril.

Particularly because what Michael Caputo is saying is almost exactly the same thing that the President of the United States is saying.

THE LOSERS AND SUCKERS SPEAK

So how much support does Trump really have among the US military community?

I spent the first 28 years of my life steeped in that world, from being born in an Army hospital in Germany in 1963 to the day I left active duty in 1991 and put Ft. Bragg in my rear view mirror. But that was almost thirty years ago; I don’t pretend to have my finger on the pulse of the contemporary US military.

That said, my experience from talking to people I know is that Trump’s support there is less solid than generally assumed. Sure, the military is a largely conservative world, and Cadet Bone Spurs’ chestbeating faux patriotism has won him a fair share of uniformed (and retired) supporters who have bought the con that he is a strong leader and tough on matters of defense.

But plenty of professional military people, especially senior officers and NCOs, are openly appalled by the man and his actions, much like their civilian counterparts in the national security and foreign affairs communities, the State Department, and US intelligence agencies. The damage Trump has done to the United States’ security and standing in the world are patently evident and don’t bear repeating here.

The recent bombshell story in The Atlantic— that Trump denigrated US war dead as “losers and suckers,” amid a longstanding pattern of other insulting remarks about the American military—has brought this dynamic to a head. It comes as no surprise, atop his draft dodging, his personal vendetta against a genuine war hero like John McCain, and his attacks on Gold Star families.

Oh, also: he’s a bought-and-paid for vassal of a hostile foreign power. Which the US military tends to frown on.

And it’s not just retired flag officers with PhDs and jobs at think tanks who have a dim view of our Dear Leader. Recent polling by Military Times shows nearly half of active duty military personnel (49.9%) have an unfavorable view of the president*, compared to about 38 percent favorable. 41.3% say they plan to vote for Biden, compared to 37.4% for Trump. And that poll was taken four days before the Atlantic’s story dropped.

But again, the issue of how much love there is for Trump in the armed forces is, in a way, irrelevant. He is the commander-in-chief, and the bedrock principle of the American military is its subordination to the civilian leadership. There was not a lot of respect for Bill Clinton among the US military of the 1990s, but respect for the authority of the office did not appreciably waver. Whatever individual US military think of this president or any president, they are duly sworn to obey his or her lawful orders.

The only question is what happens if his orders are not lawful.

HOW TO SAVE A DEMOCRACY

Of course, we really don’t want the military to have to step into domestic politics. When that has happened in other countries, it has usually been to crush democracy, not save it. Generally speaking, tyrants are removed by popular uprisings, which the military may join, but rarely leads.

Anything that changes that longstanding precedent and taboo in the United States, even in the interest of a short-term good, brings long-term dangers. I would not want a Christian supremacist and right wing fanatic like retired General Jerry Boykin, who recently suggested that radical feminism was to blame for the murder of George Floyd, staging a dinner theater revival of Seven Days in May. Boykin was a fine soldier, but is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. If he wants to turn America into Gilead, let him run for office, not seize power by force.

So given that the US military will almost certainly not play a part in the coming election in the conventional banana republic way, we the people have to be prepared to step up apply the necessary pressure should the worst come to pass. That doesn’t mean taking up arms, Michael Caputo. But it is damn serious nonetheless.

I humbly a propose a very obvious three-step plan.

Step 1: Sound that alarm now that Trump intends to pull this con and cling to power regardless of the vote. Trump has shown over the past four years that he excels at perverting the mechanisms of American democracy—impeachment, DOJ investigations, the appointment process, and so on—all in the service of his neo-autocracy. Come November, December, and January, I am quite sure he will use every available lever, legal and illegal, to keep Joe Biden’s hand off the Lincoln bible.

Per above, this clarion call is already going out. Let’s keep up the volume.

Step 2: Vote for Biden in such numbers that it’s a landslide that no reasonable person can deny. Since Trump’s not a reasonable person, we know that he will proclaim victory no matter what the numbers. So Biden has to be ready to declare victory swiftly on Election Day, should the vote count support that claim, putting himself in a position of strength rather that of the challenger trying to overturn the result—even a fake result—like Al Gore in 2000.

Step 3: Be prepared to get into the streets, Belarus-style, because we all know that no matter how big the Biden win, or how fast he justifiably declares victory, there will be elements both in the GOP leadership and in the red-hatted Republican rank-and-file who will go along with Trump’s scheme, whether out of true belief or mere cynicism.

It may come down to a massive mobilization of patriotic Americans taking to the streets to oppose this perversion of democracy and demand that the will of the people be obeyed. Will there be violence? I hope not. We won’t start it. But we won’t be cowed by it either, if this criminal administration and its supporters deploy it.

Events in Minsk point the way. Just this weekend the financier turned human rights activist Bill Browder retweeted an amazing video of non-violent women protestors pulling the balaclavas off state security goons during a public demonstration there. Watch these cowards scramble to hide their faces.

Rule of thumb: when you’re afraid to show your identity, you’re not on the side of the angels.

The bad news is that Lukashenko is still in power at the moment, albeit under pressure. We shall see what happens. Overthrowing tyranny takes time, patience, commitment, and determination.

That is a lesson for America in the months to come, one we may need.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not the job of the uniformed, active duty US military to enforce the rule of law and democratic norms on our own shores.

That’s up to us.

*******

Illustration: US Marines running past the body of a fallen enemy soldier during the Korean War, September 1950. Credit: David Douglas Duncan

I apologize for a blog post that sounds like a feminine hygiene product. But lately I’ve had that not-so-fresh feeling.

TWO TICKETS ON THAT COAST CITY BUS

After the first three grim months of the quarantine, when the weather finally began to improve, and New York—where I live—succeeded in flattening the curve, summer came as a welcome relief.

Though many people we know had understandably already fled the city, my wife and daughter and I, like many others, had been riding it out at home out of necessity. That was a profound experience. But when the temperatures turned warm and school was out, we endeavored to get out of Brooklyn as much as we could, thanks to the kindness of family and friends.

(That alone speaks to White privilege. Even for people of modest means like us—freelancers who are always struggling financially, and whose livelihoods and professional future are in jeopardy—we were still able to avail ourselves of some luxuries that were otherwise beyond us, simply by virtue of the people we know.)

Mostly we went to the Jersey shore: Atlantic City, where Ferne, Philly girl that she is, had grown up spending her summers.

In the best of times AC is right out of the eponymous Springsteen song (“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact”), junkies and hookers and syringes strewn on the sidewalks outside casinos filled with broken hearts and empty pockets. And this ain’t the best of times.

Atlantic City is also the place where in the 1980s a brash young real estate developer from Queens arrived promising the moon, swindled and stiffed everybody he came in contact with, then fled town, leaving it in ruins.

But I digress.

We were down there with our friends Joe—an AC native—and Amy and Tom and Jess when the lockdown hit in March, and returned again for the first time in May. The weather was still raw, and the boardwalk was a ghost town, spooky and depopulated. A Cessna flew over towing a banner reading TRUMP PENCE 2020: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Irony, thy name is Donald. 

But by June the shore had made a miraculous comeback, and soon resembled its usual self, albeit with (mostly) good social distancing and mask-wearing. The best kept secret in the tri-state area is that Absecon Island, where Atlantic City sits, is actually very beautiful, and so is the carnival life surrounding it, if you embrace it. (For that, see The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.) The sheer intensity of everything else going on made us appreciate it—and summertime full stop—more than ever.

Rod Rosenstein has a house down there too, in Ventnor (check your Monopoly board)—I’ve seen him on the street—and so do Kellyanne and George Conway. In fact, the local community Facebook group recently felt compelled to issue a post begging folks to give the Conways their privacy while they try to work things out, as there are children involved. Fair enough. Though I notice Kellyanne didn’t give much of a shit when other people’s children were at risk.

Of course, in some ways this was a rough, hot summer that will surely rival the infamous ones of the recent past: 1976, and 1968, and 1964, to name just a few. (Election years all, by the by.) COVID-19 continued to kill thousands of Americans every week; the economy remained in a historic tailspin, Trump carried on with his wanton destruction of American democracy, and our streets were the scene of a dramatic and ongoing confrontation over the cancer of systemic racism and state-sponsored violence against people of color.

I don’t count that final item, painful as it is, as a negative, however: on the contrary, it is a necessary and long overdue reckoning with the legacy of slavery that is the original sin of these United States. In that regard, the Uprising—or what the filmmaker Pete Nicks calls the Awakening—was cheering, and part of what made this summer a period of rejuvenation.

But sure as God made little green apples, winter is coming.

ONE OF THESE MORNINGS, YOU’RE GONNA RISE UP SINGING

Even in normal times, summer’s end always fills me with melancholy.

As a boy I relished unstructured free time, and grew up in an America where kids had a lot of it, especially when school was out. Ironically, on that count, my nine-year-old daughter’s summer of 2020 resembled those of my own childhood more than in any previous year, far and away.

As an Army brat, I moved frequently and usually changed schools every fall, so the end of summer and the prospect of being the new kid (again) always filled me with dread, which even in adulthood lingers like a phantom limb. In my mind, Labor Day looms like a gallows.

So for the past three months I have been in a kind of willfully imposed mental bubble, enjoying the respite from a rough spring, and trying not to think about the fall…..all but unable to think about it, in fact, or realistically contemplate what it will look like. As we have all experienced, the uncertainty is one of the hardest parts of this public health crisis.

There are several specific things that worry me.

After New York worked so hard to make it through (what we hope was) the worst part of the pandemic, I fear a second wave, with outbreaks in other parts of the country inevitably blowing back on NYC, by mere virtue of the city being what it is. Even if New York avoids that, I am concerned that various other places are going to get slammed.

I worry about the resumption of school, even though I know many people are longing for it (if it’s in something resembling its regular form, which it almost certainly won’t be). Even though my wife and I have been fortunate in that our daughter’s school has navigated the current challenges superbly, and our kid has done well with remote learning, it’s still fraught.

On a purely visceral level, I dread the cold dark winter, when all the ad hoc outdoor cafes that have popped in my neighborhood and made it feel like a non-stop street fair will be forced to close and life will recede back into the chilly, depressing isolation that marked last March and April. I worry about the economic impact of that, and the psychological one as well. I have confidence in the fortitude of our country, and faith that we can handle that if we have to—previous generations have endured much worse, of course. But the prospect doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm.

Perhaps more than anything else, I fear the coming election, the outcome of which is far from certain. Given the poll numbers and the general state of play right now, I would be very confident if this were a normal presidency, a normal time, and a fair fight. But it is none of those things.

The best case scenario—let’s not fool ourselves—is a protracted legal battle and constitutional crisis; the worst, a new civil war. Alarmism, you say? I invite your attention to the news. Increasingly frequent clashes between armed supporters of the two sides—the most recent just last weekend, in Louisville, on Kentucky Derby Day—has made that once absurd and unthinkable possibility feel more and more plausible.

And of course Trump might win, legitimately or not. But it will be a disaster of another kind even if he loses, because he has openly announced that he will view any Biden victory as fraudulent by definition.

Ejecting Donald Trump from office is the issue above all others that keeps me up nights. The pandemic is terrible, it goes without saying, but there is cause for optimism if we are under new and competent management come midday January 20, 2021. The battle for new national leadership is the decision point from which all else flows.

SUMMER KISSES WINTER TEARS

On that front, the big news last week was Jeffrey Goldberg’s blockbuster story in The Atlantic that Trump called American war dead “losers and suckers.” As someone with the military in my marrow, I was as appalled and offended as anyone, though hardly surprised. Trump’s history of denigrating and insulting the US military goes way back. For that reason, MAGA Nation’s predictable dismissal of the story—“Fake news!” “Hearsay!” “He would never do that!”—rings especially false. (The story has since been corroborated by all the major outlets, and even Fox News.)

As David Frum writes, also in The Atlantic, “Everyone Knows It’s True.”

You can tell how panicked the Trump campaign is over this by the carefully worded pushback that it initially deployed, as opposed to Trump’s usual knee jerk, flaming-bag-of-dogshit response. Of course, he soon came unshackled and returned to standard form. Even when he held a publicity stunt of a Labor Day presser to try to prove how much he loves and respects the armed forces, Trump insanely turned it into an attack on his own senior military leadership, and, remarkably, on John McCain. (Who’s dead, according to the best reportage.) The result, naturally, was that he only proved the point he was trying to rebut. The guy truly can’t help himself.

I’ll confess that I didn’t think this story would have legs. No previous scandal has stuck to Donald; why should this one? But it has, and I’m as delighted as I am surprised.

But did we really need this to break the camel’s back? Was stealing children from their parents and caging them in concentration camps not enough to outrage us? Wasn’t “grab ‘em by the pussy,” or Helsinki, or a hundred other atrocities? What does that say about us as a people? There is some irony that a military matter might finally be a bridge too far for an administration where faux patriotism and jingoism are second only to racism and misogyny in its DNA. But it’s also pathetic.  

Remember in the early days of the Trump reign, when there was speculation that he’d said the “n-word” in outtakes from “The Apprentice,” the implication being that the publication of that audio would sink him? We know better now: the GOP leadership would find a way to dismiss it, and his red-hatted fans would actively applaud it. But if there’s one thing that’s sacrosanct in mainstream American life, it’s valorizing the troops. That deification is partially a function of collective guilt over the inequitable distribution of the burden of the defense of our nation, which is a matter for another day. But at least it’s now helping deliver some bodyblows to this monster. It’s a rare case of Trump getting the Trump Treatment, which he is usually on the doling-out end of: a simple, sticky, schoolyard-style allegation that the flummoxed victim can’t readily refute. When Trump does it, it’s usually a lie (“Biden is against God!”) In this case, it happens to be true.

Again, it won’t cost him any votes from the Kool-Aid brigade, but it might sway some wavering conservatives, especially in the military community, and every little bit helps. (The passionate denunciation by retired Major General Paul Eaton, a highly admirable officer with whom friends of mine served in Iraq, was especially powerful.)  If nothing else, it has kept Trump on the defensive, which is a joy to watch and eats up precious time and space in the 55 days remaining before Election Day.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MENTAL ILLNESS

The best news for Trump this week was that Losers-and-Suckers-Gate did eventually recede. The bad news for him is what displaced it.

Bob Woodward’s new book Rage revealed that from the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump, by his own admission, deliberately misled the American public about how deadly the novel coronavirus would be.

Wow.

For months some public health experts like Greg Gonsalves have been saying that Trump’s handling of the pandemic approaches the level of a crime against humanity that ought to have him standing in the dock in the Hague. Not merely his bungling and incompetence, which were bad enough, but his willful decision not to fight the virus with the full might at his disposal, as it was disproportionately decimating communities of color whom he scorns and wants to hobble anyway, in the interest of his re-election prospects.

And that was before this public confession of willful criminal negligence on an even greater scale.

Predictably, Trump immediately claimed that he was just trying to suppress panic. (And Trump Nation of course believes him, the same way they believe him when he says he didn’t disparage fallen American soldiers, or that the economy is booming, or that 2+2=5.)

Except, as Scott Matthews notes, he didn’t try to avoid panic. He didn’t say, “Be cool—I got this.” He intentionally spread disinformation, called the whole thing a hoax, mocked mask wearing, refused to endorse social distancing, held super-spreader public events, and actively made it all worse….on purpose, when he knew better. And at the same time—to state the blindingly obvious—was DOING NOTHING behind the scenes to stop the virus.

I’m still trying to get my head around this.  

In some ways, this is not news: we know Trump was repeatedly warned about COVID-19, well in advance, by every possible expert. But until now the portrait has been of a mental defective in infantile denial. Now we know, from Trump’s conversations with Woodward as far back as early February, at the very least, that he was very much aware of how bad it was, and that his public statements to the contrary were less self-denial than outright deception that cost tens of thousands of American lives, if not more.

What was he thinking?

Just from a venal and selfish point of view, it was a priceless opportunity to be a hero, to say, “This is dangerous, but I alone can fix it.” Why didn’t he do that?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a coherent answer. Spoiler alert: there ain’t one, only more deceit, depravity, and avarice that is almost unfathomable in a person entrusted with the welfare of the republic and its citizens.

Even he really was trying to avoid panic—P.S., he wasn’t—why didn’t he simultaneously do anything to stem the coming tide of death? Because he couldn’t, not even in his own self-interest. Because he is a sociopath incapable of anything but short-term, shortsighted, transactional thinking.

Perhaps his willful blindness came into play in magically thinking that somehow it all really would just miraculously vanish without any effort on his part. Even now he continues to insist that the virus will disappear of its own free will, that the spread is contained, that all is well—all lies that make actually fighting the threat harder. I’m surprised we have not yet heard him say this latest revelation is proof of his claim, of March 17, that he knew this was a deadly pandemic before anybody. Maybe he’s losing a step, or off his game amid all his other problems. But I’m sure it’s coming.

So the extent of Trump’s sociopathy is unaltered by this new reporting. Bob Woodward has only affirmed that his monstrous Neroism is even worse than we knew.

Joe Biden—correctly—is already hammering Trump on this and ought to continue to do so, over and over, especially during the debates. Trump will say, “I banned travel from China!” Biden has to say, “Too late, not the main threat, and you otherwise fiddled.”

Fittingly, the damage Trump is suffering here stems almost entirely from his own egotism, in his eagerness to talk to Woodward. The WaPo reports:

Trump advisers said that the president reacted with fury after Woodward’s last book, blaming former counselor Kellyanne Conway and other advisers for not bringing Woodward in for interviews. “It would have been a better book if I talked to him,” Trump said in 2018, according to a former senior administration official. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions, said Trump complained for more than a week about Woodward’s last book, interrupting meetings with broadsides about the author.

For this latest book, Trump encouraged others to speak with Woodward and would often mention the journalist in conversations with other advisers, suggesting that he might call him again. Some of the conversations between the two men, a White House official said, were precipitated by Trump—who thought Woodward was more receptive to a favorable narrative about his presidency.

But not even a narcissist like Don can fail to notice how that has backfired. The Post reports that Trump and his advisors know that this story is really bad for him. Let’s seize on it.

DEAR KIM: I LIKE YOU, DO YOU LIKE ME?

Woodward’s new book is full of other revelations, less incendiary but no less headspinning, including Trump’s poutiness that Black people don’t like him enough, and his childish delight that Kim Jong-un called him “Your Excellency” but thinks Obama is “an asshole” (NB: Don’t you WANT the dictator of North Korea to think that of the US president?).

What else this week?

The metaphor police are working overtime. First a bunch of boats sank during a “Trump flotilla” in Texas, then reports came that the Republican Convention did thousands of dollars of damage to the South Lawn of the White House and the Rose Garden. Would that the other damage to the White House could be repaired as quickly.

As reported by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, a Bible signed by Trump in his serial killer handwriting is being sold online for $37,500. Buy now before it bursts into flame.

A DHS whistleblower asserted that he was instructed to suppress US intelligence reports about Russian interference in US elections because it “made President Trump look bad,” while newly released HHS emails showed how the White House tried to muzzle Dr. Anthony Fauci.

And lastly, the federal government is now the defendant in a rape charge that pre-dates Trump’s entire political career, never mind his assent to the presidency. (And our taxpayer dollars are paying for his defense.)

The gall of this regime continue to astonish me…..and I thought my astonishment meter was pegged. A cornered rat, Trump has abandoned even the pretense of the rule of law, distorting the most basic principles of our system of government in order to serve and protect him alone. L’etat c’est him. As we have witnessed for four years, he views the entire federal government as his personal fiefdom—and worse, so does his pathetic criminal excuse for an AG, Bill Barr.

Which brings us back to the shortening days of autumn, and the uncertainty that looms ahead.

WHICH BERGMAN MOVIE ARE WE IN?

Soon will be the winter of our discontent, with no sun to bring summer back to New York. Will it be as bad as the nightmares that wake me at 3 a.m., or will we get a few breaks, do the right thing, and be able to navigate it successfully? 

As with all things, the answer is to be found in arthouse Swedish cinema.

When I was fourteen, every Friday night the local PBS station in Honolulu showed a Bergman movie, and I became obsessed with them. (This should give you some idea of my social life in high school.) I’m sure I didn’t really understand what I was watching, and I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles—Trump-autographed or not—that I do now. But the stark black & white aesthetics, the existential Scandinavian angst, and the ponderous symbolism were all tailor-made for a certain kind of teenager….the arty, virginal kind. (Speaking of, that time also saw the beginning of my lifelong crush on Harriet Andersson. Not sure if the TRO is still in effect; I have to check with my lawyer.)

At the risk of sounding dull, the two Bergman films that had the biggest impact on me were the most obvious candidates, The Seventh Seal (1957) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955): the latter Ingmar’s lightest offering, the former his most iconic and famous allegory, almost to the point of parody.

The question is, which Bergman film are we in right now? The Seventh Seal—set in medieval Sweden as a plague ravages the land—is the natural favorite. But as I bathed in sunshine and denial of my own this summer, I felt like I was in Smiles. Now, with fall upon us, I can see that pale figure in the long black cloak standing on the rocky beach, beckoning me back into that other theater again.

(Another strong candidate: the little-seen The Serpent’s Egg, from 1977. Look it up.)

On the public health front, I’ve heard numerous calm, knowledgeable-sounding medical professionals and public health experts opine that we know a lot more than we did six months ago, and have more precise tools with which to fight the virus, so the prospect of a full-scale, draconian lockdown like last spring’s is unlikely.

That’s great. Just the limited normalcy and human interaction of the past months with protocols and precautions in place has been a tremendous boon mental health wise, and economically as well, even as so many businesses continue to suffer. With some heat lamps, maybe outdoor cafes can stay open into November (if we’re not in a civil war), and perhaps by the new year the situation will be good enough that there can be indoor dining and other commerce. Will the average restaurant be able to stay afloat at only 30% capacity? Different question.

But I’ve also heard estimates that we’ll be at 400,000 dead by the new year, which is the same number of Americans who died in World War II. We’re halfway there now, and as we all know, the official count is probably low.

THE DEAD OF WINTER

So is the future Harriet’s winning smile under the midnight sun, or Max von Sydow matching wits with the Grim Reaper?

(Anyone upset about that Harriet Andersson/TRO joke earlier, in the post #MeToo world? Fair enough. Although I will remind you that I was 14 at the time, and Harriet Andersson is now 88, so we are into Harold and Maude territory.)

Politically speaking, the recent flood of bad news for our faux president has me guardedly optimistic, which is as high as my optimism meter goes these days. (It broke in November 2016.) But I am still deeply worried that he will still manage to ratfuck his way to a second term, even if it means fighting in the streets.

Legitimate hopes for a COVID vaccine collide with concerns that Trump will try to rush an untested one out as an October surprise. More stories like Jeffrey Goldberg’s and Bob Woodward’s are likely to come out, but they may wind up having no more impact that Billy Bush and Access Hollywood. I don’t want to look back ruefully on this period of hope and optimism and bitterly recall how high our hopes were before they got cruelly dashed, again. The only way to avoid that fate is to keep working as hard as we can for an electoral blowout that minimizes Trump’s intention—the one that he has overtly been signaling—that he intends to remain in office regardless.  

Only 258 days till next summer.

********

Illustration: Final scene of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, photographed by Sven Nykvist

Germany, the saying goes, is The Only Country That Ever Learned Anything.

It came at a steep price.

But today Germany is perhaps more vigilant than any other country on two fronts in particular: the demonizing of vulnerable minorities—especially outsiders—and the danger of hate speech.

For that reason, Angela Merkel and the BRD led the way in welcoming Syrian refugees fleeing that wartorn country, even as the United States has turned its collective back both on those suffering human beings and our own principles.

It is also for that reason that Germany—again unlike the US—has some hard limits on freedom of speech, rejecting the absolutist view in favor of policing particularly extreme and incendiary expression. (Specifically banned: the display of Nazi iconography, including the swastika and the Bellamy salute.)

So it is fascinating and ironic that the Federal Republic of Germany recently saw the confluence of these two issues in a landmark court case involving a Syrian refugee named Anas Modamani who sued Facebook over its abetting of hate speech and the spread of fake news. The story is told in a superb new short documentary called Anas vs. the Giant by filmmakers Adrienne Collatos and Karen K.H. Sim, which premiered at SXSW in 2019. (You can watch it here.)

Anas’s story is a seminal one for our times: a David and Goliath tale of one brave individual—an immigrant and refugee no less—standing up to the toxic alliance of right wing hate groups and Big Tech. But it is also a story that goes to crucial questions about freedom of speech in an age when technology has dramatically altered every aspect of that debate, and in the process, put the very foundations of democracy at risk.

YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU WANT TO BELIEVE

Anas Modamani fled the violence in Syria in 2015 at the age of seventeen. In September of that year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the refugee camp in Berlin where he was living and Anas took a selfie with her. Teenager that he was, he posted it to his Facebook page.

Initially, the photo brought him some renown and good fortune. But in March 2016, right wing trolls seized on Anas’s six-month-old picture and used it to allege that he was the terrorist behind the bombing of the Brussels airport that month. (He was later linked, equally falsely, to the attack on a Berlin Christmas market in December of that year.)

Anas was not remotely associated with either crime; he had been viciously smeared by alt-right provocateurs. But neither was he the real target of their campaign. Apart from sheer sadism, what did a bunch of neo-Nazis care about ruining the life of one Syrian refugee? Their real aim, naturally, was to suggest that Merkel was cozy with terrorists and soft on radical extremism.

Anas immediately reported the posts and asked Facebook to take the photo down. Facebook refused, arguing that it didn’t violate its “community standards.”

The image—in various doctored forms—soon spread like wildfire around the Internet, garnering millions of views. (The original poster, no surprise, was a Russian account.) Soon the far-right German political party AfD—Alternative für Deutschland—gleefully joined in.

Fearing for his life as the picture continued to go more and more viral, Anas went into hiding. Through the Austrian NGO Mimikama, which polices fake news online, he was eventually put in touch with Chan-jo Jun, a German attorney who specializes in social media and users’ rights.

Together they sued Facebook in the German court system.

D IS FOR DEFENSE

Facebook’s defense was an ever-changing game of three-card monte in which all the cards were counterfeit.

First it claimed that it didn’t have the technical ability to take down the photo. That, any FB user will tell you, is risible. When I can have a conversation with a friend about, say, doughnuts—not even on an electronic device—and then come home to find my social media feed deluged with ads for doughnuts, you can’t tell me that Facebook can’t find a given photograph.

“Eventually Facebook said it would remove the photo from being visible in Germany,” Adrienne Collatos explains, “and at one point they did do that. But you could still mimic the VPN of a different country and see the posts. Basically all they offered was a Band-Aid.”

When Anas and Chan-jo sued for redress, Facebook challenged the authority of the German legal system to hear the case. “Their defense was, ‘We’re an American company, our headquarters are in Ireland, we don’t speak German, so we can’t answer your questions,” says Karen Sim. (Facebook was represented by one of the biggest law firms in the world, White & Case.) “They tried everything from radio silence, to dirty tricks, to attempts to intimidate, to ploys like ‘Oh, maybe we’ll give you a settlement,’—all to try to get Anas to drop the case. It was just insane.”

Team Zuckerberg did not even formally respond to the charges until minutes before courtroom arguments began, when its lawyers wired a 60-page written rebuttal in an attempt to make Chan-jo look unprepared in front of the three-judge German panel. Even that was devious, Collatos says. “It would have been too obvious to send the form at 11:30 am the day of the trial, which is when Chan-jo got it. Instead, White & Case sent it at 9:00 pm the Friday night prior, so that the court wouldn’t discover it and forward it until the last minute, and they could essentially blame it on the judges.”

Things didn’t get better once arguments began. “Facebook’s German lawyers didn’t conceal their anti-immigrant sentiment. They did a lot of posturing in the courtroom, like saying to Anas and Chan-jo both, ‘Oh, we don’t know how to pronounce your name.’”

One of the most gutting scenes in Collatos & Sim’s film comes when a member of Anas’s legal team explains that the judges don’t use Facebook themselves and don’t even understand what the lawyers were talking about.

They ruled against Anas.

“WE WERE ONLY FOLLOWING THE ALGORITHM”

Facebook’s standard claim is that it is not responsible for the content that its users post. This default dodge hinges on the notion that it’s not a publisher in the conventional sense, but merely a platform. Suing it would be like suing Verizon when someone tells a lie over the phone.

That position is utterly dishonest, of course, as Facebook most certainly regulates speech as it sees fit. I’m sure everyone reading these words knows someone who’s done time in “Facebook jail,” or at the very least had posts rejected, sometimes for something as mild as the use of profanity. I have. So Facebook’s decision not to stop—or even spank—the right wing trolls making statements that would have been actionable acts of libel in any other medium, not to mention putting the life of at least one human being at risk, doesn’t obtain.

But for the sake of argument, let’s accept that self-characterization.

OK, Facebook: If you’re like the phone company, then you’re a public utility, and a monopoly to boot, and we’re going to treat you like one and regulate you.

It’s true no one HAS to be on Facebook….but you don’t HAVE to have a phone or use electricity or gas or water either. (Approximately a third of the planet uses The Beast That Zuckerberg Built or one of its products at least once a month.)

“I think approaching it from the antitrust level is very interesting,” says Sim. “Yes, you can opt not to be on Facebook. But social media has become like electricity. Practically speaking, can you really not be on it, or on Instagram, or not engage with Amazon? If everybody needs you, you shouldn’t be allowed to hold us hostage and say, ‘We’re going to feed you QAnon conspiracy theories until your head explodes…..or doesn’t explode, and you vote for Trump.’”

“And it’s not like Facebook has a competitor that could say, ‘Come over to us, we don’t tolerate this sort of behavior.’ Right now there’s no incentive for Mark Zuckerberg to be better in any way that will benefit his consumers.”

(Business opportunity here, MySpace!)

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT (WING)

In October 2019, Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning screenwriter of The Social Network, published a scathing “Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg” in the New York Times.

Mark:

In 2010, I wrote “The Social Network” and I know you wish I hadn’t.

I didn’t push back on your public accusation that the movie was a lie because I’d had my say in the theaters…..(but) It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended—on free speech grounds—Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates….

hile you were testifying before a congressional committee two weeks ago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked you the following: “Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?” Then, when she pushed you further, asking you if Facebook would or would not take down lies, you answered, “Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves.”

Now you tell me. If I’d known you felt that way, I’d have had the Winklevoss twins invent Facebook.

The fact of the matter is, Facebook doesn’t want to police hate speech because it makes money off it. Its insistence that it’s merely a neutral “bulletin board” is obliterated when one understands that it actively prioritizes and abets the spread of the most incendiary material.

Collatos: “One of the biggest problems with social media in general is that it feeds off extremism. I don’t consider myself an extremist, but if I’m going to engage with something on social media, it’s probably because something made me extremely angry or extremely unhappy.”

Facebook’s business model is driven by traffic, and right wing fanatics comprise a not insignificant, lucrative revenue stream. Even people pushing back against the right wing constitute clicks that put money in Mark’s pocket. “Facebook and its ilk want interaction,” Collatos adds. “They sell ads, so they want your eyeballs, and they can guarantee that they’re getting those eyeballs if people are super angry and choosing to like, or comment, or reshare.”

“Facebook’s whole way of doing things has also really undermined traditional news sources’ ability to make money—especially print news—which has caused those traditional sources to radicalize their headlines as well. That’s an old practice, obviously, but it’s somewhat interconnected. The attitude is ‘We need to get those eyeballs, and wrest them away from these other websites when and if we can.’”

“Ad tech—advertising technology—is essentially the business model running underneath everything online,” Collatos explains. “It was really created and proliferated because of Google, who started out saying, ‘We’re going to inventory all the information out there and make it accessible at your fingertips.’ But what they did to monetize it was to analyze the searches that you’re doing and get you into these tiny personal groups and then sell that information to advertisers for a ton of money.”

“But there’s some research that kind of debunks the efficacy of ad tech, so if that’s true, then the whole model is broken and no one’s benefiting. Obviously Google’s users aren’t benefiting, but also the people buying the ads are not really getting the product that they think they’re getting.”

“It’s like all advertising, in some ways,” says Sim. “You never really know if it’s working. Who knows if this Coke ad on TV is the thing that got you to buy Coca-Cola, or if it was some billboard, or the taste testing, or whatever? It’s such a blunt instrument. Tech companies tell their customers, ‘We have the ability to get you 50 million clicks in an hour.’ But the eyeballs they’re getting could be click farms, they could be trolls, they could be bots, so there’s no distinguishing. A click is a click, and everybody’s gaming the system.”

ALT-WRONG

At a time when free speech is under attack all over the world, and the press is being demonized as the “enemy of the people,” it’s especially ironic that forces like Facebook that are facilitating hate speech—and rightly ought to be regulated—are hiding being a free speech defense, one which allowed neo-Nazis to attack Angela Merkel (and Anas) on the model of their ideological forbearers.

And of course it’s not just lunatic fringe extremists spreading lies and hate on social media; it’s people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin too, who have weaponized the technology as a new means of authoritarian control, undermining some of the fundamental precepts of liberal democracy.

We see the effect in the AfD’s campaign to smear Merkel. Previously a marginal force at best, the party’s popularity had soared as a result of migrant crisis, part of a wave of right wing extremism—don’t call it “populism”—sweeping the globe. In 2017, a year after the Anas scandal, AfD became the first far-right party to be represented in the German parliament since World War II. Prior to that election, it had never held even one seat in the Bundestag. Today it has 94 out of a total of 709, and is the third largest party in the country.

Sim: “The argument always in the US is that you want to let the Nazis to march down the main street, because you want to know that they exist. In Germany, it’s illegal to do that, but it doesn’t prevent those groups from arising. You still have this neo-Nazi movement, but it’s totally underground.”

One might question which is worse: a society where racist thugs are subterranean and hard to identify, or one where they feel emboldened to show their faces and run for office?

In Germany, those far-right forces are now migrating from the former category to the latter. Since taking their seats, AfD members of the Bundestag have behaved like trolls, often disrupting parliamentary sessions in a way chillingly reminiscent of a certain other German political party that will go unnamed here. And its vile ethos has found purchase elsewhere in German society. Recently the Merkel government disbanded a company of KSK, (Kommando Spezialkräfte), its most elite special operations unit, after it was revealed that it was riddled with far-right extremists. While that scandal is especially disturbing in Germany, to Berlin’s credit, it did take swift action to address it. It’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump doing the same if a similar situation were revealed in an elite US unit.

On the contrary: he does the opposite, encouraging right wing fanatics and pardoning war criminals.

INVASION OF THE SOUL SNATCHERS

With the German legal system refusing to come to his aid, Anas was left without any real options for combating the slander tarring him as a murderer, short of endless legal appeals in his adopted country, or pursuit of the case in other nations like the US, both of which required resources that an indigent teenage refugee did not have. Instead, he has been forced to live with the results of that slander to this day.

So how long can an image live on the Internet? Consider the story of a Swedish woman named Lena Forsen.

In 1972, when a group of (almost exclusively male) software engineers at USC were developing what became the JPEG format, they tested their compression algorithm by feeding into their computer a Playboy centerfold for which Lena had posed. The resulting digital image—cropped at the shoulders—became the industry standard, permanently embedded in the Internet, and shared bazillions of times. (Trivia: It is also the centerfold presented to Woody Allen’s Rip Van Winkle-like character in Sleeper, suggesting it will endure at least until 2173.)

No one asked Lena Forsen—now a 67-year old grandmother living in Stockholm—her permission.

It wasn’t the first case of revenge porn, but it opened the door to it, and was a harbinger of what would happen to Anas Modamani and many others in a far darker version of that kind of appropriation and re-purposing. It’s also a testament to the durability of the Internet, where everything lives forever, whether it’s soft porn from the ‘70s or fake news tarring someone as a terrorist. (The story is well told in the documentary short Losing Lena, whose website is part of a campaign to obliterate the misappropriated image.)

We’ve all heard the old folktale about lost Amazonian tribes shunning photography as “stealing the soul.”

Wait till they hear about Mark Zuckerberg.

WHAT’S “BOOKFACE”?

In 2006 or so, my wife Ferne and I went to speak to a film class at my alma mater, Lafayette College, and to look at some undergraduate work. One of the students got up in front of the class to show her short documentary, which she said was “about how people are obsessed with Facebook.”

Ferne and I looked at one another, baffled. “What the hell is ‘The Facebook?’” we asked each other. Even after the film was over we still didn’t have a clue.

That was the first time either of us had ever heard of the thing. Who, those fourteen short years ago, imagined that this frivolous online time-waster that people mostly used to post pictures of cats would become an all-consuming cancer that would eat the soul of global democracy? Only the same seers who foresaw that a D-list game show host and serial con man would become President of the United States and bring a 250-year-old republic to the brink of extinction.

Tech/anti-tech guru Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018), has speculated that ‘“Facebook might have won already, which would mean the end of democracy in this century.”

It’s possible that we can’t quite get out of this system of paranoia and tribalism for profit—it’s just too powerful and it’ll tear everything apart, leaving us with a world of oligarchs and autocrats who aren’t able to deal with real problems like pandemics and climate change and whatnot.”

By way of example, Lanier points to COVID-19, suggesting that “the sway of media is more powerful than the experience of reality—that people can be watching hundreds of thousands die from this virus and yet believe it’s a hoax at the same time, and integrate those two things. That’s the food for evil.”

But my own ignorance about social media is one thing; that of someone who controls your fate is far more terrifying…..like a judge, or a Congressman.

When Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in 2018, members of that august body—most of them far older than the average American—asked him things like, “Why does my email go into the spam folder?” as if he was the world’s highest paid IT guy. Karen Sim says that Zuckerberg’s recent testimony went a little better, as some of the Congressmembers were better informed this time around. But there are still many many elected officials who don’t use social media or understand the most basic things about it, even as they are charged with regulating it—or not.

Adrienne Collatos: “From what we can tell, Congress seems to be moving towards regulation, because antitrust is a language that they do understand, and they know how to legislate. So that’s encouraging. It isn’t just this idea of algorithm and ad tech targeting, which is so beyond their understanding.”

That is encouraging indeed, because until it is forced to do so, Facebook is unlikely to self-police. On the contrary, as Anas’s experience showed, the company has been VERY reluctant to accept any responsibility for anything, or to take down even the most grotesque, false, or dangerous posts…..so much that it was big news when—finally—it pushed back against Donald Trump when he recently offered the patent lie that children are immune to the coronavirus.

It’s one of the few Trumpian lies that have not been allowed to take root and fester online, as Zuck and Don seem to share the same attitude toward truth and moral responsibility.

Last week, a Facebook post by a militia group called the “Kenosha Guard” called for armed volunteers to confront Black Lives Matter protestors in Wisconsin, in a listing for “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property.” Facebook received 455 separate complaints reporting the post and asking that it be taken down, but the company refused, again arguing that it did not violate its “community standards.” Four different Facebook adjudicators all came to that same conclusion.

But after the 17-year-old right wing vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse subsequently murdered two BLM protestors and wounded a third with an AR-15 in Kenosha, Zuckerberg was forced to make an apology and acknowledge that Facebook should have removed the post. Even then, he was tone deaf enough—or arrogant enough—to describe his company’s failure as “largely an operational mistake.” (“My bad.”)

Of course this was far from the first time that social media had been implicated in fomenting acts of violence. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d wager it won’t be the last.

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT

“There are two schools of thought,” says Sim, speaking of efforts to regulate social media and the power of Big Tech. “One is that the laws are already in place, they’re just not being applied correctly. That school views Facebook more as a publisher than just a neutral platform, however you define those things. The other school is that we need a whole new set of laws because this is the new frontier.”

As my own Facebook friends will attest, I myself scorned all social media before January 2017, out of a combination of contrarianism, Ludditism, and old age, which kept me busy yelling at the neighbor kids to get the hell off my yard. But Trump’s rise made me feel the need to commune with like-minded souls. I went into Facebook fully embracing exactly what is said to be wrong with social media: shouting into the echo chamber, which for all its obvious faults, is also a way of organizing, sharing information, and just plain venting. But it’s a tool—or more precisely, a weapon—that both sides can use.

Jaron Lanier has said that “(Social media) is worse than cigarettes in that cigarettes don’t degrade you. They kill you, but you’re still you.” Writing in GQ, Zach Baron summarizes some of Lanier’s main precepts:

That anytime you are provided with a service, like Facebook, for free, you are in fact the product being sold. That social media companies are basically giant behavior-modification systems that use algorithms to relentlessly increase “engagement,” largely by evoking bad feelings in the people who use them. That these companies in turn sell the ability to modify your behavior to “advertisers,” who sometimes come in the old form of people who want to persuade you to buy soap but who now just as often come in the form of malevolent actors who want to use their influence over you to, say, depress voter turnout or radicalize white supremacists. That in exchange for likes and retweets and public photos of your kids, you are basically signing up to be a data serf for companies that can make money only by addicting and then manipulating you. That because of all this, and for the good of society, you should do everything in your power to quit.

But there is hope, beginning with the dawning recognition of these dangers…..and in some cases turning social media’s own power against it.

“One of the things I love about Anas and Chan-jo’s story,” says Sim, “is that here we are in the midst of this terrible anti-immigrant moment, and yet they are immigrants who are using the very tools of the society that hates them to fight that society and fight for what’s right and to make a life there. It gives you some hope. But it’s a huge effort. And that’s Chan-jo’s life.”

The founders of Western democracy, steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment, could not possibly have conceived of the challenges posed by the Information Revolution. Whether it’s by means of antitrust legislation or a revised view of privacy rights or something else, we need a new paradigm for a new age. If that democracy is to survive, 20th century concepts of freedom of speech—which are in reality 19th century and even 18th centuries concepts—have to adapt or become handmaidens of tyranny.

Feel free to share on the web.

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Photo: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters. Syrian refugee Anas Modamani taking a selfie with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin in 2015.

Further reading:

Ramona Diaz on the Persecution of Maria Ressa – August 7, 2020

“The Modern World Starts Here”—The Birth of Silicon Valley – March 30, 2018

We begin the week with an issue that has dogged our country for four years.

Two weeks ago, a bipartisan report of over a thousand pages from the Republican–led (I’ll repeat that: Republican-led) Senate Intelligence Committee offered the most thorough account yet of the extent to which the Trump campaign coordinated with a hostile foreign government to help put Trump in office in 2016.

That coordination is not in doubt. We know that nearly everything Trump says is the polar opposite of the truth, so when he bleats “No collusion!” you can bet there is collusion aplenty. Evidence of it is mountainous, having been thoroughly documented in the open source media by dogged investigative reporters, by the US Intelligence Community, and by the special counsel Robert Mueller. Anyone who cares to take an objective look at the facts cannot plausibly come away arguing to the contrary. (Lots of folks continue to do so implausibly, however.)

The Senate Intelligence Committee just added to that mountain in a profound way.

The report contained explosive information about the actions of Roger Stone and Wikileaks and the Trump campaign’s connections to both, Trump’s own vulnerability to blackmail, and Russian intelligence’s’ salivation at the prospects for exploiting the inexperience and hubris of the Trump team. Its most startling revelation, however, was to confirm what heretofore has only been speculation: that Paul Manafort’s close associate Konstantin Kilimnik was an active Russian intelligence agent.

Manafort, no naïf, surely knew this, or at the very least had to presume it was a strong possibility, having worked since 2004 for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who often functioned as a proxy for Putin and his intel services, helping install pro-Kremlin governments around the world.

Kilimnik was Manafort’s conduit to Deripaska. As such, the Senate report concluded that “Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

The report portrayed Mr. Manafort as deeply compromised by years of business dealings with those oligarchs. Collectively, they had paid him tens of millions of dollars, lent him millions more and may also have owed him millions. These complex financial entanglements apparently figured in Mr. Manafort’s decision to give Mr. Kilimnik inside campaign information, including confidential polling data and details of Mr. Trump’s campaign strategy….

“What did the Russians do with all this information, how did they use it, did they use it?” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s top Democrat, asked in an interview on Tuesday. “Those are serious counterintelligence questions we may never get the full answer on.”

Mr. Manafort recognized the Kremlin’s interests, the report said. “This model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitments to success,” he wrote in a memo to Mr. Deripaska.

The report called Mr. Manafort’s efforts for the oligarch “in effect, influence work for the Russian government and its interests.”

Ask yourself what the GOP, Sean Hannity, and the rest of Fox Nation would say if Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager had been regularly passing information to Russian intelligence and coordinating with it to help get her elected.

I’ll save you the trouble: She would have been burned at the stake before the metaphorical ink was dry on the story.

A PHANTOM INVESTIGATION

Yesterday yet another incredibly damning piece of this story broke, as Michael Schmidt of the New York Times reported this:

The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.

The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.

But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career FBI counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.

(Schmidt’s article is excerpted from his book Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, which will be published tomorrow, September 1. See also Jeffrey Toobin’s new book, True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump.)

Rosenstein, you’ll recall, is the guy who wrote the letter justifying the May 2017 firing of Jim Comey in the first place, on the laughable grounds that he had allegedly been unfair to Hillary Clinton in his investigation of her. Rod is now emerging as an even more villainous figure than we first thought.

At the time Rosenstein was painted as a tortured soul, an “institutionialist,” we were told, who was tricked into drafting that letter. He must have been an “institutionalist” under the same definition that Bill Barr is one.

In this telling, Rosenstein—a lifelong Republican, let’s remember—was subsequently so horrified at how the White House misused his letter that he quickly appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to carry on the Russia investigation that the FBI had begun. That narrative itself was always suspect, as Rosenstein clearly understood that Trump was directing him to create a pretext for firing Comey. (And I’ll remind you that, as Deputy Attorney General, it fell to Rosenstein to do so because his boss, AG Jeff Sessions, had rightly been forced to recuse himself due to his own implication in the Trump campaign and the Russia affair.)

Mueller’s appointment was framed as Rosenstein’s pushback to Trump, when really it was a desperate attempt at spin and damage control after the public outcry over the hamhanded dismissal of the FBI director proved far greater than the administration had anticipated.

Now we learn that the truth was even worse: that it was all misdirection, as Rosenstein restricted Mueller from doing a full investigation from the very start.

As the Times reports:

Many Democrats embraced the appointment as a sign that law enforcement would complete a full accounting of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.

But privately, Mr. Rosenstein instructed Mr. Mueller to conduct only a criminal investigation into whether anyone broke the law in connection with Russia’s 2016 election interference, former law enforcement officials said.

But that ain’t all. With Mueller effectively circumscribed, Rosenstein also made sure the FBI could not fully investigate the matter either:

Mr. Rosenstein concluded the FBI lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary. Mr. Rosenstein determined that the investigators were acting too hastily in response to the firing days earlier of James B. Comey as FBI director, and he suspected that the acting bureau director who approved the opening of the inquiry, Andrew G. McCabe, had conflicts of interest. Mr. Rosenstein never told Mr. McCabe about his decision, leaving the FBI with the impression that the special counsel would take on the investigation into the president as part of his broader duties. Mr. McCabe said in an interview that had he known Mr. Mueller would not continue the inquiry, he would have had the FBI perform it.

In other words, Trump’s DOJ kneecapped the Russia probe from the get-go, in ways we are only now beginning to fully understand.

The handcuffing of Mueller was bad enough. (Ask yourself why Rosenstein and the DOJ never made that public.) But the neutering of the FBI was especially crucial, as it sidelined the nation’s lead counterintelligence agency in the biggest counterintelligence case in American history, one that went to the very heart of US national security:

“It was first and foremost a counterintelligence case,” Mr. McCabe said. “Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government? Could the president actually be maintaining some sort of inappropriate relationship with our most significant adversary in the world?”

For the next ten months, Andrew McCabe remained in charge of the FBI, the whole time believing that Robert Mueller was investigating Mr. Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia and that his agency did not have to.

But Rod Rosenstein had unilaterally decided the FBI should not investigate Trump’s connections to Moscow, and ordered it not to do so, giving the director the FBI the impression that the special counsel was on that. Meanwhile, he had told the special counsel not to investigate it either.

This is flat-out sabotage of the rightful prosecution of justice that the Office of the Attorney General is charged with overseeing. It is shameful beyond belief.

It’s also important to remember that, before Rosenstein curtailed it, the FBI was conducting two separate investigations, even though they are usually conflated in the public mind: a broader inquiry (codenamed Crossfire Hurricane) into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and its efforts at electoral interference, opened in the summer of 2016 before Trump was even elected, and one launched in 2017 to determine if Trump was actively compromised by the Kremlin.

Seems like something the American people would want to know, no? So what reason would the Trump administration have for suppressing and undermining it?

I can’t possibly imagine.

SPARE THE ROD

It ought to go without saying that this is an atomic bomb of a story, in many ways far worse than the revelations about Kilimink or anything else in the Senate report, damning and informative as that was. Paul Manafort is a sleazy dirty trickster going back to the Reagan era; Rod Rosenstein was Deputy Attorney General of the United Sates.

In light of this revelation, Trump’s entire hysterical, two-year long smear campaign against the Mueller probe looks like mere kabuki. He knew from the start he was going to skate.

But there is another interpretation, of course:

That Trump truly was terrified, even with the strict limits which he privately knew had been imposed on Mueller and the FBI, because he knew that he and his team likely did commit literal crimes for which he could be prosecuted, in addition to impeachable acts that might justify his removal from office even if he could not be proven to have violated any laws.

But by obstructing the investigation in the egregious manner that he did, Trump was able to hide evidence of that, and has kept if from the light of day even now.

To that end, as bad as the Senate Intel Committee report was, it could have and should have been even worse, had they not been denied access to Trump’s tax returns and other financial records. Schmidt again:

Senators depicted extensive ties between Trump associates and Russia, identified a close associate of a former Trump campaign chairman as a Russian intelligence officer and outlined how allegations about Mr. Trump’s encounters with women during trips to Moscow could be used to compromise him. But the senators acknowledged they lacked access to the full picture, particularly any insight into Mr. Trump’s finances.

Yet slowly but surely, bit by bit, the evidence is seeping out.

BENEDICT DONALD

In the midst of the pandemic, a historic economic collapse, a painful reckoning with the legacy of slavery playing out in the streets, and the unprecedented threat of neo-fascist authoritarianism at the highest levels all roiling these United States, Russiagate feels like ancient history, a canceled show that few wish to watch again. But it is part and parcel of the malevolent incompetence—and incompetent malevolence—of the regime that gave us those four horsemen (particularly the last).

Trump partisans to this day cling to the rock-ribbed belief that the entire Russia thing was a hoax, and that they and the president were proved right. (See also Barr’s openly deceitful handling of the SCO report, beginning with his dishonest and outrageously misleading four-page public summary of it in March 2019.)

They have to hew to that belief, as any honest accounting of the facts leaves their hero exposed as the epic traitor that he is. (Please don’t email me about the dictionary definition of treason. File that along with the argument that we weren’t really at war in Vietnam because it was never formally declared.) They will surely be unmoved by these latest revelations, and their impact on the election will be slight at best, or even nil. That willful denial, however, does not make this information any less explosive or damning.

Over the past four years of this national nightmare, I have often said—by way of consoling myself—that history will have the final say, as it always does, and that its judgment on this man, this administration, its supporters, and the America that allowed all this to unfold will be harsh. That refrain has grown tedious….but that doesn’t make it any less true.

We are already beginning to see history’s verdict revealing itself.

***********

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

So much for an upbeat, optimistic convention.

I could only bear to watch some of the cut-rate Triumph of the Will that passed for the 2020 Republican National Convention—maybe a third of it—but I’d be surprised if what I missed redeemed what I saw. Because what I saw was absolutely grotesque.

As Andrew Marantz writes in The New Yorker, “To some extent, all party conventions are pageants of paradox and puffery.” But what we saw this past week went far beyond that. Here’s Dan Rather:

Even to call it a convention is to miss the point. This was propaganda, the pageantry, power, and symbolism of our federal government—OUR government, we the people—exploited by a president who feels unbound by the constitution in his desperate desire to hold on to power.

A secretary of state from foreign soil pledges sycophantic fealty to his boss with hopes of bolstering his own standing in a political party that has become a personality cult. Immigrants are used as props in the White House by a president who has demonized, restricted, and mistreated even legal immigrants and asylum seekers. Uniformed military personnel are employed in this charade. A first lady, who is an unrepentant birther, mouths teleprompter platitudes in front of an unmasked crowd of true believers during a deadly mismanaged pandemic in a re-imagined rose garden and is heralded by some for her tone.

All quite correct. But the real eyepopper was they extent to which almost every word uttered by the speakers at the convention was a lie…..and not just garden variety political prevarication, but howlers that were in 180 degree diametrical opposition to actual reality. Orwell would never have dared go this far.

We’ll get back to that in a minute.

First, I feel compelled to review some of the lowlights, even as they have already been well worked over:

+ Don Jr’s bizarre speech, which was driven either by Bolivian marching powder, or by a lifetime of humiliation and desire to please daddy….

+ Pam Bondi, who as the Florida Attorney General took a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump and then (by sheer coincidence!) stopped pursuing a case against Trump University. This week Pam’s task was to lecture us about the Biden family’s supposed nepotism while the chyron beneath her announced the upcoming speakers: Eric Trump, Tiffany Trump, and Melania Trump….

+ Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, who said the Trump family are “warm and caring, hardworkers, and down to earth.”(Also: there’s a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.)

+ Mike Pompeo, speaking from Jerusalem on the US taxpayers’ dime, claiming that Trump has made America stronger and stood up to our enemies…..which is true if you count letting Vladimir Putin pay for American scalps and thanking him for the privilege “standing up.” (In the New Yorker, Robin Wright took Pompeo’s risible claims apart piece by piece.)

+ Internet troll turned former acting DNI Richard Grenell proudly embracing the term “nationalist,” while promoting the right wing fever dream of “Obamagate,” and suggesting that Angela Merkel has a crush on Don.

+ An anti-abortion activist named Abby Johnson railing against Planned Parenthood……oh, and PS Abby also believes in one vote per household with the husband having the final say. (Another scheduled speaker was a post time scratch after she retweeted an anti-Semitic QAnon thread. I’m surprised they didn’t give her a better slot.)

And there was more—much much more. As I say, I only saw about a third of the trainwreck.

For many, the blue ribbon went to Don Jr.’s girlfriend and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle for her unhinged, widely ridiculed Disney villain speech, which is destined to be a classic. It was indeed headspinning, very much in an Exorcist way.

But for my money the most disturbing moment was Nick Sandmann, the student at a private Catholic high school in Kentucky who last year was filmed wearing a MAGA hat during a confrontation with a Native American senior citizen at an anti-abortion rally at the Lincoln Memorial. That incident itself was complex and an object lesson in partisanship. But Nick’s partially successful (and partially correct) efforts to defend himself were obliterated when he went all in for Team Trump last week.

Young Nick’s Children of the Corn-style address—in which he painted himself as the real victim, lashed out at the media, “professional protestors,” “cancel culture,” and generally sang the praises of the Dear Leader, was truly chilling, especially as he barely blinked the whole time.

What’s that you say? He’s just a kid who didn’t ask to be thrust into the national spotlight? That may have been true last year at the Lincoln Memorial, but now he’s a willing and eager volunteer in the Trump media campaign, so the court of public opinion is going to try him as an adult.

Being a teenager has not done much to protect kids like Tamir Rice.

AFTER THE FINAL ROSE

It goes without saying that there was a distinctly neo-fascist tenor to the convention: in the content, the iconography, the mind-numbing repetition of the word “freedom,” the ostentatious religiosity, and of course the cult of personality.

To that end, it was almost beyond satire that the GOP elected not to have a platform at all this election year, pledging instead that “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.” In other words, its platform is “Anything Donald wants!” Which is exactly the way it has behaved for the past four years.

Many observers have noted that the conservative movement at large no longer even pretend to have any ideas or goals in its governance beyond pleasing Trump, which is but a waystation on the path to trying to consolidate raw political power purely for its own sake and utterly divorced from anything remotely resembling principle.

What do you call it when a party has no ideology whatsoever except blind loyalty to its leader? There’s a word for it—damn, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Maybe it will come to me later.

Aesthetically, the entire spectacle was staged like a reality TV show. (It was crafted in part by producers from “The Apprentice.”) That might be tactically smart, given how popular that format is, and a natural fit, given the current president’s CV, but it doesn’t exactly speak well of the state of political discourse in 21^st century America. At one point, CNN’s graphics promised a “Convention Pardon,” as if that’s a thing we’re all familiar with. There were also TV-ready “special surprises” like Trump trying to prove he’s not a xenophobe by naturalizing five new American citizens. (“Kwame, will you accept this rose?”)

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted the hypocrisy in play, not merely in light of the administration’s long record of egregious anti-immigrant policies, but even on the specifics of naturalization ceremonies, which are currently halted due to COVID-19, “which may mean that hundreds of thousands of potential citizens won’t actually be able to vote in November.” No shock there.

(In case you weren’t already appalled enough, turns out Trump copied his grand entrance for that ceremony directly from his hero Mr. Putin. “Steal from the best,” Melania must have advised him.)

Lithwick continues:

We knew, going into this convention, that Trump would make use of the grounds of the White House as he made his bid for reelection. But he has actually gone further, by using the actual powers his office bestows on him to perform presidential acts as part of the convention….

He casually deployed two powers of the presidency—intended to be considered, and judicious, and life-altering—not to promote justice or correct wrongs, but because he can, because it’s television, and because he wants to win an election.

But abusing the powers of the presidency for personal gain is 100% on brand for Mr. Trump—indeed, it’s his signature move, even as co-mingling official presidential matters with partisan politicking has heretofore streng verboten and diligently avoided by both parties. In fact, it is explicitly illegal, under the Hatch Act. But as Lithwick also notes, “The Hatch Act has been the toilet paper on the shoe of this administration for a long time.” And, of course, Trump Nation relishes him doing that; you can imagine for yourself what they would say if an Obama or a Clinton or a Biden did so.

Morgan State professor Jason Johnson was even more pointed, noting that for two and a half hours the American people watched a literal crime unfold on national television, and the perpetrators reveling in it.

None of this is accidental. The White House and its subordinates know very well that they are violating the law. That, indeed, is the point. They are gleefully aware that they can do so with impunity, as the Republican Senate proved last winter that it will not hold them to account, and delight in demonstrating (as authoritarians love to do) that the rules just don’t apply to them, and that they create their own reality.

Need more proof? This past Wednesday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows publicly scoffed that “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares.” This was a remarkable reversal, as the Daily Beast reports, since “before joining an administration famous for its casual disregard for the Hatch Act, Meadows was one of the federal law’s biggest supporters. Meadows co-sponsored multiple pieces of legislation intended to strengthen punishments for violations of the law, and was a hawkish investigator of purported Hatch Act violations by minor members of the Obama administration.”

The final norm-breaking—sorry, scratch that, law-breaking—was of course Trump giving his acceptance speech from the South Lawn of the White House, a tableau right out of a banana republic, with campaign signs pasted across the once hallowed building, one that is increasingly barricaded against protestors just like the palaces of despots in those forlorn fake democracies.

As Joy Reid remarked, if American democracy falls, “this is what it will look like to have a decrepit, corrupt monarchy.”

(Having 2000 people in the audience without masks and not social distanced was another act of performative authoritarianism, attempting to assert—or at least feign—supremacy even over science. But the coronavirus wasn’t impressed; more Americans died of COVID during the four days of the RNC than died on 9/11.)

Trump’s actual speech—which had the unmistakable feel of Stephen Miller’s syntax—was surprisingly flat and boring. It’s a great irony that Trump is so leaden when reading from a teleprompter, rather than winging it full bull goose looney style. Maybe Kim Guilfoyle can give him some tips. No surprise, the speech was also full of wall-to-wall lies—Rachel Maddow’s post-mortem listing the falsehoods sounded like the narrator of an erectile dysfunction ad speed-reading the side effects. (“Discontinue using Trumpoxychloroquine if delusions persist.”)

The lies were far too many to detail here, but I will seize on one of the smallest and pettiest, as it was also one of the most brazen and psychotic. Trump repeated (again) the easily refuted lie that the DNC removed “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance during their own convention, when video clearly proves that his pants are on fire.

But Trump knows his followers believe anything he says, even over their own eyes and ears. Like the abuse of power, the shameless mendacity is a deliberate demonstration of uncontested dominance, designed to delight his followers and inform his opponents that they are helpless to stop it.

Except we’re not.

LIONIZE, PART 1

In that regard, Trump’s (anti-)climactic speech was merely the cherry atop the cake, for the whole Republican Convention was a non-stop litany of lies. If one was a newly arrived extraterrestrial tuckered out from traveling 50,000 light years across the universe and without access to any other information, it might have sounding pretty convincing. But anyone familiar with capital “R” reality would instantly recognize this shitshow as a parade of what the soon-to-depart Kellyanne Conway once memorably called “alternative facts.”

Which is to say, bullshit.

The Post’s factcheckers called the second night of the RNC “a tsunami of untruths;” they referred to Mike Pence’s speech on the third night as “a cascade of false claims;” and of the fourth night said “Trump’s speech was a tidal wave of false claims and revisionist history.”

Aquatic metaphors abound. But the lies fell into two general categories.

The first was the incessant attempt to paint a counterfactual portrait of Donald Trump as:

+ A deeply empathetic humanitarian who really really cares about you as a person

+ The first person on Planet Earth to recognize the dangers of COVID-19, and the man who took smart, decisive action to stop its spread, saving millions of lives!

+ A financial genius (very stable variety) who is not at all responsible for the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, 30 million Americans being out of work, and a historic contraction of the GDP. (Ask TV and radio’s Larry Kudlow. All is well!)

+ A stalwart patriot who has solidified NATO, brought the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs to their knees through sheer charisma, and totally doesn’t give Vladimir Putin handjobs whenever his master’s voice calls.

+ A feminist champion. Just look at how much he loves broads!

+ Definitely not a racist (some of his best friends are Black!).

+ And much much more!

If you don’t recognize this Donald Trump, it may be because he doesn’t remotely exist, unless it’s on a mirror image Bizarro World on the other side of the sun were day is night, up is down, and Dan Snyder is a progressive hero. (You thought WFT was an acronym for Washington Football Team? I think they have the last two letters transposed.)

But this is the Fox News world in which redhat nation bathes, with the convention offering the rest of us what the Washington Post’s Brian Klaas called “a glimpse into the alternate reality where Trump and the die-hard supporters within his base have lived for years.”

Way back in April, in a piece called “The Super Bowl of Gaslighting,” I wrote:

If you live in the reality-based community, you may be unaware that in MAGA World there are millions of people who firmly believe that Donald Trump is a great humanitarian, a world-beating philanthropist, and a selfless benefactor of mankind.

Not for these people the Donald Trump who had his charitable foundation shuttered by the state of New York for stealing money from children suffering from cancer. Fake news! No, their Trump is a latter day Albert Schweitzer who also knows more about ISIS than the generals and more about epidemiology than Anthony “Dr. Doom” Fauci with his fancy book learnin’.

But if you’ll believe that Donald Trump has a heart of gold, you’ll believe anything…..including the howling lie that Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic like a champ. (Just ask him.) Because that is very much the narrative Trump and his amen corner in the right wing media are attempting to spin.

And that was April, when only a few thousand Americans had yet died from the pandemic. That alternate reality had metastasized dramatically by the time of the RNC.

The reliably bootlicking Mike Pence took the lead in lavishing praise on Trump’s response to the coronavirus, as reported by The New Yorker’s John Cassidy:

In Pence’s telling, “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.” Under his leadership, the Administration reinvented testing, coordinated the delivery of billions of pieces of personal protective equipment, and “enacted an economic rescue package that saved fifty million American jobs.”

This is like saying Vladimir Putin is a great defender of a free press, or Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was a terrific fire marshal, or Son of Sam was the best thing that ever happened to New York City tourism. But as Cassidy wryly notes, “With the national death toll approaching 180,000….Americans can see reality with their own eyes.”

LYIN’ EYES, PART 2

The second category of lies was an equally absurd attempt to paint Joe Biden (and that colored girl he put on his ticket) as a Satan-worshipping communist who drinks the blood of Christian babies.

Ginning up panic about the opposition is an old tradition among demagogues. But the GOP broke the meter.

Joe is a radical leftist, a cheerleader for Red China, and a socialist who will defund the police. He will let mobs run lose in the streets, side with criminals over victims, “destroy the suburbs” (whatever that means), take your guns, abolish your church, open the borders and lodge illegal aliens in your rec room where they will drink all your Fresca and put the empty cans in the mixed paper bin instead of the aluminum and glass one.

Former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz said Biden isn’t a real Catholic (I guess God told Lou that), and that you have to have politicians you can trust! “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Mike Pence informed us.

Can fearmongering get any more blatant?

Per Pam Bondi, corruption was a huge theme in the Biden-bashing—in keeping with the projection that is the bread & butter of this administration—accusing Joe, as the New York Times editorial board wrote, “of secretly doing what Mr. Trump has accomplished overtly during the past three years—using his office to enrich himself and his family.”

A nun accused Biden of favoring infanticide. Now, I know that Sister Deirdre Byrne is a retired Army colonel and a doctor, and has worked extensively with refugees in the developing world. Respect to her. But I’ve known plenty of Army colonels, and plenty of doctors, and plenty of Army doctors, and I’m here to tell you that none of that inoculates a person from holding vile views, or spreading hatred while masquerading as a paragon of virtue.

Nor does being a nun. The fall of Falwell notwithstanding, the willingness of religious people to support Trump—evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and others—brings shame upon their faiths. Anyone who supports Trump ought to be ashamed, for that matter, but especially those who position themselves as models of moral rectitude.

I remember well Jesus’s words: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, so they can be ripped from their parents and put in cages.”

But frankly, what found more objectionable than Sister Deirdre’s comments on abortion was her winking comparison of today’s retrograde conservatives to Jesus Christ, on the grounds that he too was “politically incorrect.”

The image of her in her habit, standing in front of a placard reading “TRUMP PENCE 2020” was like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. All her other accomplishments and claims on virtue are rendered moot, and her judgment and credibility destroyed, when she says things like this:

Donald Trump is the most pro-life president this nation has ever had, defending life at all stages. His belief in the sanctity of life transcends politics. President Trump will stand up against Biden-Harris, who are the most anti-life presidential ticket ever, even supporting the horrors of late-term abortion and infanticide. Because of his courage and conviction, President Trump has earned the support of America’s pro-life community. Moreover, he has a nationwide of religious standing behind him.

If you believe that, you’ll believe a virgin can give birth.

But no allegation was too absurd to be leveled against Biden.

Speaker after speaker described the hellscape into which the Democrats have dragged the United States. Some of that is imaginary—like the abolition of the police and its replacement with Khmer Rouge-brand re-education camps where you will be force-fed “Free to Be You and Me” via the Ludivico technique. But some—like 180,000 dead, a cratering economy, and militarized police in the streets—is very real. The issue of who’s responsible, however, is another matter.

An incoherent Rudy Giuliani—looking like he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest and as flopsweaty as Albert Brooks in Broadcast News—painted a picture of American cities in violent chaos. Damn straight! Get it together, President Biden, or we’ll vote your ass out!!!!

Oh, wait.

What’s that you say—that it’s the fault of progressive “Democrat” big city mayors?

But even if one accepts that completely dishonest portrait, if Donald can’t control those mayors, does he deserve four more years?

Trump himself called for Biden to be drug tested before any debates, to make sure he’s not taking “performance enhancing” drugs. I don’t know if he thinks Joe has been hanging around with Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service bicycle racing team, but maybe he can get Louis Dejoy to defund it.

His remark, referring to Biden’s debate with Bernie earlier this year, was couched in classic Trump ass-covering: “Somebody said to me, ‘He must be on drugs.’ I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m asking for a drug test.”

Trump said he’d take the test too. Given the aforementioned projection, I think we can take that as an admission of his own addiction. (A classic cry for help, folks.)

THE MAGIC OF MISDIRECTION

The right wing punditocracy was predictably thrilled with the Republican show. Hugh Hewitt, who is rivaled in his sycophancy toward Trump only by his fellow WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen, called the first two nights “superb” and “nearly flawless.”

But the bottom line is that neither party’s convention is likely to have much impact, so calcified is the partisan divide. Few Americans even watch these events, other than political junkies and hardcore partisans, and our views are already set in stone. Accordingly, both conventions were mere Rorschach tests in which the faithful saw and heard what they wanted. (I’m guilty of it, for sure; have a look at my fanboy reaction to last week’s DNC.)

To the extent that either convention had any impact on that tiny sliver of undecideds, I must say I am baffled how at this point anyone who is not newly emerged from a four-year-long coma (or arriving on that alien spaceship I mentioned earlier) could be undecided about Donald Trump.

But let’s pause to note that while we were distracted by the circus that was the RNC, police in Kenosha, WI recently shot a Black man in the back seven times at point blank range, paralyzing him. (Jacob Blake’s previous troubles with the law are irrelevant; as far as I know, our police are not supposed to be extrajudicial execution squads.)

In the ensuing protests, Kyle Rittenhouse, a Trump-supporting vigilante, shot and killed two protestors and wounded a third with an AR-15 variant semiautomatic rifle. On Fox, Tucker Carlson offered praise for Kyle, to whom, in his view, it has fallen to restore “law and order.” Ann Coulter and various other right wing swine did likewise.

When people talk idly of a coming second civil war in America, this is precisely the sort of thing that makes that seem plausible rather than alarmist.

(In this video you can see police in Kenosha thanking vigilantes like Kyle, saying “We appreciate you guys” and giving them water bottles.)

In light of those murders, Mark and Patricia McCloskey—the wealthy, gun-toting St. Louis couple who brandished weapons at BLM protestors and for their efforts won a speaking slot at the Republican convention—look a lot less comic and a lot more chilling. With its tokenist display of Black speakers attesting that Trump is actually MLK in whiteface, the GOP seems determined to prove that it isn’t racist…..but not to the point of actually not being racist, just enough to make its more moderate members feel OK about voting red in the fall, while at the same time continuing to stoke the politics of white resentment for partisan gain.

It’s an incredibly dangerous and criminally reckless strategy.

How much of a leap is it from the creepy, pro-Trump vibe of Nick Sandmann to the homicidal pro-Trump vibe of Kyle Rittenhouse? A leap. But not an Olympic one.

PROMISES PROMISES

We have entered a perilous moment in American history, one where disinformation has reached toxic levels and the survival of the republic is legitimately in doubt.

In politics, there is always spin…..but then there’s the effort to cast Trump as the hero of the pandemic (not its superspreader), the man who can save the economy (instead of the one who presided over its epic collapse), and a champion of law and order (instead of a wanton crook himself).

We should hardly be surprised that the convention renominating Trump for a second term would be a festival of deceit, reflecting as it does a party that is in thrall to one of the most untrustworthy and mendacious figures in modern times.

Here’s the real deal, and what posterity is already recording: Donald Trump is a malevolent incompetent whose criminal mishandling of the coronavirus cost over a hundred thousand lives and still counting, and turned the United States into a piteous global embarrassment. And that’s just one front of his multi-faceted criminal unfitness. The self-delusion necessary to suggest that he is instead a bold, forward-thinking hero who saved untold lives is a strong candidate for the biggest con in the history of cons. But we are about to see how gullible the American people really are.

Trump is a living embodiment of Mary McCarthy’s quip (originally slung at Lillian Hellman) that every word he says is a lie, including “and” and “the.” But every rule has an exception, and recently Trump said something that I believe was undeniably true…..and it scares the pants off me.

For three years I and others have been speculating about whether Trump will willingly leave office in January 2021 should he lose the election. Of late that speculation has turned to certainty that he will at the very least challenge the results of the vote if he doesn’t win (or if he doesn’t succeed in skewing it so that he can plausibly claim victory).

But until recently that was still an assertion—however confident—by Trump’s critics. Now Trump himself has bluntly announced, outright, in public.

Speaking on August 20th in Scranton, PA—Joe Biden’s hometown—Trump said of mail-in voting:

So this is just a way they’re trying to steal the election, and everybody knows that. Because the only way they’re going to win is by a rigged election.

There you have it. If Biden wins, the election will have been fraudulent by definition. A perfect tautology for a wannabe president-for-life.

As I say, I generally don’t trust Donald J. Trump as far as I can throw him (NB: he weighs almost 300 pounds), but in this case I take him at his word a McGovernesque 1000%.

(Sidebar for sticklers: Is this the same as Trump saying he will contest the result, or merely that it won’t be fair if he loses? It’s true that, technically, one might still argue that he has not said specifically that he will refuse to abide by a vote he doesn’t like. The possibility remains that he might just grumpily slink off to Mar-a-Lago to play golf, muttering that he wuz robbed. But in practical reality his making-of-trouble is implied.)

We better get ready. Promises made, promises kept.

The irony, of course, is that Trump is claiming the election will be “rigged” while doing everything within his considerable power to rig it himself…..much as he howls that voting-by-mail will be a catastrophe, even as he and his shameless minion DeJoy labor mightily to make that come true. Recently he suggested that he would send armed law enforcement officers to “protect” polling places (read: intimidate voters). Even a reliable lickspittle like acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf (now nominated for Senate confirmation in that job) had to push back and tell the press the administration won’t really do that.

Unless—gasp!—Chad is lying!!

Speaking to The Recount, Hillary Clinton recently advised Joe Biden that he should not concede a close race until a true vote count is resolved, as the delay due to mail-in balloting and other complications will almost surely require days or even weeks before we know the actual result. The Republicans set their collective hair on fire over those remarks; funny how they are totally cool with Trump’s far more outrageous comments to that end. The Trump campaign posted the video on its website; he is thrilled any time he can fundraise and gin up his base by hating on Hillary.

But she is completely correct. Picture Florida in 2000 times fifty.

A group called Protect the Vote has been stood up to gird for this battle; I encourage anyone who is interested to check it out.

For if there is one takeaway from the Republican Convention, it ought to be that Trump sees himself and the state as one—which we’ve known for a while, though rarely on such blatant display—and will shamelessly marshal the full power of the presidency to preserve his hold on power.

There ought to be no more discussion or debate. Trump has bluntly announced that he intends to remain in office in January 2021 no matter what. Is there any simpler definition of an autocracy?

American carnage indeed.

*********

Photo: RNC/Handout via REUTERS

 

 

 

A lot has happened since last week’s blog, which is true most every week. But this week might have had even more headspinning activity than usual.

Another of Putin’s critics got poisoned.

Belarus continues to offer a preview of the US post-November 3^rd. (An exaggeration? Only a little.)

A federal judge told Trump he has to turn his taxes over to the Manhattan DA, Cy Vance.

Seventy highly esteemed Republican national security officials—including former generals, ambassadors, and William Webster, the only man ever to lead both the FBI and the CIA—published a scathing public letter calling Trump “dangerously unfit” and announcing that they will vote for Biden.

Trump’s own sister—a retired federal judge—was caught on tape calling him cruel, unprincipled, a liar, and someone who panders to his religious base but really cares only for himself (no, you say!). She also corroborated reports that he had someone take his SATs for him, which might put him in hot water if he were still a Hollywood B-lister and not the President of the United States. In reply, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tellingly didn’t even try to rebut the allegations, only expressed his shock—shock!—that his niece Mary Trump recorded them.

In other news, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy dishonestly told Congress that the White House wasn’t trying to sabotage the mail, and promised to stop sabotaging mail, even though it is very clear that he is going to continue to sabotage the mail.

Trump refused to denounce QAnon, and going further, actually expressed appreciation for the support of Q disciples, thereby cheering fans of the lizard king pizza parlor conspiracy theory, which holds that Satan-worshipping pedophiles are secretly running the world, and only Trump can stop them. In response, the White House press office presented the argument that the very stable genius and most informed person on Earth doesn’t even know what QAnon is.

Ironically, there really is (or at least recently was) a high profile cabal of elites sexually exploiting children…..and Donald Trump was besties with its leader, the late and unlamented Jeffrey Epstein, who met a grisly end in a Metro Correction Center jail cell in Lower Manhattan. But never mind.

So all in all, that was quite a week.

Oh wait, I almost forgot: Steve Bannon got arrested for bilking people who gave money to build the border wall, proving that he is not only a racist swine (not news), but also willing to cheat the other racist swine. Also caught up in this irony-breaking story were inveterate shitbags Curt Schilling, Erik Prince, and Kris Kobach. It’s so perfect that you’d get laughed out of the Writers Guild if you put it in a script, like one of those crappy ones Steve-o used to produce. But as Michelle Goldberg writes, Trumpism has been a racket from the start, and in it you’re either a predator or a mark.

For those of you scoring at home, that makes three out of three Trump 2016 campaign managers who have since been charged with crimes…..or as Sarah Silverman tweeted, “We’ve got to stop the White House to prison pipeline.”

And looming over all this, as always, is the pandemic, which continues to ravage our country as violently as the wildfires menacing Northern California, or the hurricanes bearing down on the Gulf Coast, or any of the other climate change-driven disasters that make these feel like the end times. House Democrats passed a bill that would provide $3 trillion in desperately needed relief, recovery, and stimulus—the HEROES Act (Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions)—last May, but Mitch McConnell has refused to take it up. Even now he won’t recall the Senate from vacation to deal with it, because…..well, you know. He’s evil.

The death toll, in case you’ve become numb to it, passed 180,000 this week and is on track to hit 300,000 by the end of the year. And still Trump does nothing to stop it, and indeed makes it worse and worse by the day.

UNCONVENTIONAL

So that happened.

Then there was the Democratic Convention, pioneering a new virtual paradigm for the covid era, accidentally moving us past an anachronistic institution that ought to have been put out of its misery years ago. (Clint Eastwood and the empty chair, anyone?)

How did it go? Well, I know I’m in the choir, but I thought the preaching was pretty good. To name just a few highlights:

Bernie, admirably and capably doing what he ought to do to rally his supporters…..Colin Powell, Cindy McCain, John Kerry, and John Kasich working the other end of the spectrum…..the inspirational Gabby Giffords, Tammy Duckworth, and Keisha Lance Bottoms…..the savvy use of Bruce’s “The Rising” to recall 9/11….. historian Jon Meacham, who gives me hope as an old white male….the wit of Julia Louis-Dreyfus…..the harmonies of the Chicks….and Billy Porter breathing new life into Stephen Stills’ iconic 1967 protest anthem.

Yeah, inevitably, there were some awkward moments and other bumps, but all in all a damned good show that convincingly made the case why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are better suited to lead this country than Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Within it, for me, two moments stood out.

One was an Arizona woman named Kristin Urquiza, whose father died of covid, with heartbreaking testimony that his “only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump.”

The other was the incredibly courageous appearance of a 13-year-old boy named Brayden Harrington. Subsequently a video surfaced of Biden’s first encounter with that boy, which irrespective of your politics, ought to make you cry, unless you have anti-freeze in your veins.

As Maureen Dowd wrote—in a column that almost made me forgive some of her previous sins—simple decency is Joe Biden’s secret weapon.

When it came to the speeches by the pros, there was Kamala, picking up the torch—and not the kind from a Lowe’s in suburban Charlottesville—and Biden’s own acceptance of the nomination, which was powerful, delivering everything Joe needed at the moment he needed it most.

Thus far Trump’s plan to paint Joe Biden as a radical leftist has failed to find traction, because even his own followers find it absurd. The irony, of course, is that real leftists find Biden (and Harris) insufficiently progressive. The challenge for the Democrats then is to make a legitimate case to the Bernie/AOC faction that a Biden administration will pay serious attention to the progressive agenda, without scaring off too many moderate Republicans who might be willing to cross party lines, and without giving credence to Trump‘s otherwise laughable line of attack. That dilemma is well represented by the double-edged sword of a recent piece like “Angela Davis is Voting for Biden, But You Think You are Too ‘Revolutionary’ for That?” in TestSet.

Trump’s plan for attacking Kamala, meanwhile, which he went to on Day 1, was to reprise the birtherism that launched his political career, questioning whether she can legally be president because her parents were immigrants. (Spoiler alert: of course she can, per the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.) His real subtext, of course, as with Obama, was to imply to his racist base that she ain’t a real ‘Merican on account of she’s Black.

THE CLOSERS

And then there was the Obama household, whose occupants know a thing or two about being the target of the most vile racism imaginable, and how to face it with principle and honor.

By virtue of her manifest integrity and open distaste for politics, probably no living American— not even Barack—has the power and credibility of Michelle Obama when she speaks of the existential crisis facing our country. I’m going to quote her at length, because her words demand it:

(L)et me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.

Now, I understand that my message won’t be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I’m feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children.

So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it…..(and) in numbers that cannot be ignored. Because right now, folks who know they cannot win fair and square at the ballot box are doing everything they can to stop us from voting. They’re closing down polling places in minority neighborhoods. They’re purging voter rolls. They’re sending people out to intimidate voters, and they’re lying about the security of our ballots. These tactics are not new.

But this is not the time to withhold our votes in protest or play games with candidates who have no chance of winning. We have got to vote like we did in 2008 and 2012. We’ve got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same. 

I look forward to Melania’s verbatim delivery of the same speech next week.

Michelle’s marginally famous husband possesses some skills of his own, which he also deployed masterfully last Wednesday night (after cannily insisting that Kamala have the closing spot).

Barack Obama marshaled the full force of his presidential gravitas to denounce his successor in a way that no former commander-in-chief ever has—or had to. In his homestretch he echoed the thinking of others like the Rev. William Barber II in noting how our current challenges ought not intimidate us, in light of what our forefathers overcame:

Some years ago, I sat down with John (Lewis) and the few remaining leaders of the early Civil Rights Movement. One of them told me he never imagined he’d walk into the White House and see a president who looked like his grandson. Then he told me that he’d looked it up, and it turned out that on the very day that I was born, he was marching into a jail cell, trying to end Jim Crow segregation in the South.

What we do echoes through the generations.

Whatever our backgrounds, we’re all the children of Americans who fought the good fight. Great grandparents working in firetraps and sweatshops without rights or representation. Farmers losing their dreams to dust. Irish and Italians and Asians and Latinos told to go back where they came from. Jews and Catholics, Muslims and Sikhs, made to feel suspect for the way they worshipped. Black Americans chained and whipped and hanged. Spit on for trying to sit at lunch counters. Beaten for trying to vote.

Obama then delivered the knockout:

If anyone had a right to believe that this democracy did not work, and could not work, it was those Americans. Our ancestors. They were on the receiving end of a democracy that had fallen short all their lives. They knew how far the daily reality of America strayed from the myth. And yet, instead of giving up, they joined together and said somehow, some way, we are going to make this work. We are going to bring those words, in our founding documents, to life.

When I was at Punahou School in Honolulu in the late ‘70s (briefly), there was a required class for all 9th graders on how to give a speech. I took it. But I think Barry—who was two years ahead of me—mighta gotten a little more out of it than I did.

76 DAYS

I know we live in deeply polarized times when almost nothing moves the electorate from our respective battlements. But even so, Joe Biden and the Democrats made an empirically strong case for their side. Many deep red Republicans will dismiss it out of hand without giving it a fair shot. But no thinking person of any ideological persuasion can sincerely take it in, and measure it against the record and rhetoric of Donald Trump, and honestly come away without giving it props.

So we shall see what the GOP counters with next week during Honkytown Grievance Fest 2020. It promises to be absolutely vomit-inducing, with a lineup that includes the likes of Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Rudy Giuliani, St. Louis’s gun-waving Ken and Karen, the president of the UFC, every member of the Trump family except Donny’s sister and niece, and a special appearance by the bat that started the coronavirus (not to be confused with Rudy). Unlike last time, however, I don’t know anyone on the left who is snickering over how this Republican shitshow will match up against their own professionally produced A-list revue. We learned the hard way that mainstream showbiz—to say nothing of substance—can get (OK, I’ll say it) trumped by “The Apprentice”-meets-Triumph of the Will.

Let’s give Barack the final word, and score one for the Punahou public speaking curriculum:

This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win. So we have to get busy building it up—by pouring all our effort into these 76 days, and by voting like never before—for Joe and Kamala, and candidates up and down the ticket, so that we leave no doubt about what this country we love stands for—today and for all our days to come.

*********

Illustration: Brian Cahn/ ZUMA Wire/Mother Jones

Click here for full transcripts of Barack and Michelle Obama’s speeches.

 

In January 2018 I spoke with the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Nicks about The Force, his feature documentary about Oakland’s deeply troubled police department and its history of violence. (That interview was reprinted here in June.)

The Force is the second film in his trilogy exploring the interconnected narratives of health care, criminal justice, and education in America. It won the Documentary Directing Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, was released theatrically by Kino Lorber, and aired nationwide on PBS’s Independent Lens. The previous film in the series, The Waiting Room, was set in Oakland’s Highland Hospital, and won the Truer Than Fiction Independent Spirit award in 2012. Nicks is currently at work on the final segment, Homeroom, set in an Oakland public high school.

The following is a new interview with Pete, discussing those issues in the post-George Floyd world.

AMERICAN TECTONICS

THE KING’S NECKTIE: I went back and looked at the interview we did a couple of years ago, and it was astonishing. The issues we talked about were exactly the same issues that are on the front page right now. So I really wanted to talk to you about how things have changed, if they’ve changed, and your take on the whole picture.

PETE NICKS: Clearly something has shifted in terms of how people are framing these things. And not just how they’re framing them, but how they are feeling about the urgency to act.

I’m speaking of what I would call “the allies.”

It’s not just white people. I think there are people—people who oftentimes are comfortable or privileged or whatever—who were in a space where making a sacrifice was too abstract to figure out. The actions that were presented seemed too radical, like defunding police or eliminating police altogether, or removing the Confederate flag from NASCAR, things like that. So I think the most tangible difference with this moment is that now we’re seeing the world taking the next step in a variety of different ways, both nationally and locally. The fact that defunding police or abolishing police is actually in the conversation is pretty astonishing.

My theory is that the pandemic kind of primed it, sort of cracked us open in a way that we hasn’t been done before and has now set the table for some of the reflection or inquiry that needs to happen.

Immediately after George Floyd’s murder, I got a call from one of the cops in The Force, and he asked me, “What do I do? How am I supposed to be in this moment?” I found it remarkable that he was reaching out to me for that. I had to tell him that, in my opinion, any kind of real change requires sacrifice. And that’s the same for politicians, for cops, for the privileged class. We all have to figure out what sacrifices we’re willing to make, because without that nothing’s gonna change.

Even for me personally, I’ve been trying to grapple with how I feel about the whole thing, because I spent two years filming inside the Oakland PD, and I got to know a lot of these cops very well, and I have a great affection for a lot of them. At the same time, I think that we need to reach a little bit deeper in terms of thinking about some of these things we’ve witnessed. That’s going to be uncomfortable—it’s always uncomfortable. But that’s where we’re at.

TKN: Can you be specific about the kinds of sacrifice that you think are in order?

PN: This is where you get into the abstraction. It seems like politically and culturally a lot of the fear is around losing things, like losing a sense of what it means to be an American in your mind, based on your history—that “Make America Great Again” idea. But we’re also talking about economic policies that will require sacrifice, whether that means less money in your bank account, or sharing more resources, or a sort of Bernie/AOC policy direction. I think reparations are a very tangible thing, if we’re going to give every African-American $150,000 or whatever it is. Various numbers have been floated about. I think that conversation’s probably going to be on the table, and that will require sacrifice: less money in our pockets.

I think another tangible thing that we’ve talked about in the documentary field is, if you’re a white ally, take a step back and not raise your voice louder than a Black person trying to speak their own history and their own story. Because historically, privileged white documentary filmmakers have told the stories of the poor and the under-resourced, going back to Robert Flaherty and Nanook of the North. I think that is starting to change and filmmakers can be active in that, in trying to give opportunities to other people to tell their own stories.

DEFUND VS. ABOLISH

TKN: I also wanted to talk about the defund issue, because as you say, it’s like Confederate flags at NASCAR. A month ago it was impossible, it wasn’t even on the menu, and now it’s happening. But at the same time, to a conservative audience, “defund the police” is still an incendiary phrase.

PN: I think it’s a semantic problem in part. There’s defund and then there’s abolish. Defunding, in my understanding of it, is about allocation of budgets, policy framework, moving social programs out of the police department and to other agencies. Defunding doesn’t mean abolish, it means reappropriating and rethinking the police force, potentially all the way down to police not having weapons. And that’s a radical idea, but even ideas like that are now starting to gain some traction. Maybe certain officers don’t need weapons. Maybe there’s tiers of officers. Maybe you have more of a social worker type of officer. So that conversation is going to evolve and we’re going to get a better understanding of what it means as we go, but it’s an important starting point.

When we started making The Force, I met with the mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf, because we’d been toying with the idea of maybe doing a film about her. She was very adamant that she didn’t want to make a film about just police reform: she wanted to look at systemic change. And that’s something that I believe in 110% because you can’t just go and abolish the police without understanding that the context of the police is generations of American history, slave patrols and so on. So I think that police reform has to be approached in the context of systemic change, and that does lead toward certain policy or platforms that certain political candidates are now putting forward, that even the more moderate candidates are starting to recognize and listen to. So is that going to filter into the general populace? That’s the question.

Do you know what the annual budget is for the New York City Police Department?

TKN: No.

PN: It’s $6 billion. Three billion of it goes to salaries and I would bet a huge amount is going to pensions. So unions are one issue. Police unions are there to protect the police at all costs. I’m not an expert, but I’m an observer, and one of the things I observed with this new film about education, and also with the police film before that, is that the unions have a lot of power and are tied to the politicians—who are often liberal politicians—and they help these politicians get elected. So there’s a really difficult, tricky relationship. So in order to reform, you definitely have to look at the union leadership.

TKN: It’s interesting, a friend of mine recently sent me an article—you may have seen it—about lessons learned from Northern Ireland. It was written by a guy who’d been a police officer there during the Troubles, and then came to the US and was a cop here. A lot of it had to do with things you were just talking about—even what the police are called, the way they’re dressed. Simple but symbolic things.

PN: Right. So how are these departments deploying their resources when in theory they could take some of that money and direct it toward things like restorative justice, or training, or identifying ways that you can engage the community in ways that really emphasize de-escalation, and mental health, and all these things that the public just doesn’t totally grasp.

The public has a distorted sense of the threat that police face, because the police culture is all about telling that story. Every cop knows someone who’s been killed in the line of duty. Lots of cops, particularly in cities like Oakland, have seen or been in dangerous situations. So those stories get told and retold, and the public doesn’t see the rest of it, that these communities are more than just what the police see every day, which is sort of the distillation of all the failures resulting from generational injustice and poverty and racism, et cetera.

TKN: The question I was going to ask you was about the chances this moment offers for substantive reform in police departments, as opposed to broader cultural change. But what you just said suggests to me that they’re the one and the same. There can’t be one without the other.

PN: That’s the key. That’s why we’re doing the trilogy. We didn’t just do a film about a public hospital waiting room. One of the first people I met on The Waiting Room was a 12 year old girl who had been shot outside her middle school. She wasn’t in school learning, she was in the hospital waiting to get her gunshot wounds treated. And that’s a profound idea. So then you start thinking about the relationship between health care, criminal justice, education, community, the American Dream, and you realize that you have to look at it holistically.

THERAPEUTICS

PN: I think that’s been one of the problems with police departments for generations, the inability to dig deeper and to think about the history of the police.

The officer that was holding George Floyd’s back while the other officer knelt on his neck, is mixed race, just like me, and like Kaepernick for that matter. It was only his third day on the force. And learning his story was remarkable.

His mom’s white, like my mom, and his dad’s black. His dad was not in the picture. His mom was a single mom, and he wanted siblings, so she adopted four black kids. And those four kids grew up amidst Trayvon Martin and all these other stories, and they became activists. So when their brother made the decision to become a cop, there was some tension in that relationship. So I find that to be a really remarkable and telling metaphor for the country.

When the murder happened, these siblings did speak out. I don’t know how vocal they’ve been, but they have said some things publicly, and one of them was that they believe that their brother should have stopped this other officer who killed George Floyd, and he needs to be held accountable. And if that means charged with murder and incarcerated, then that’s what that means.

That’s a tough one. You know, it’s his third day, he’s a rookie…..for him to do that would have been pretty remarkable. But on the flip side of it, and this is the digging deeper thing, is the question of “Yeah, why didn’t he stop that other officer?” We have to ask ourselves that.

His siblings also said that their mother never talked about race growing up. And their mother—this white woman—said she didn’t know how to do it. Again, that’s digging deeper. Why did you adopt four black children? Maybe it’s because your eldest son is black, but still being afraid to dig into that.

For me personally, not just because I’m mixed race, but I was born into a Black family and grew up very Black in the Black church, went to Howard University, but I’ve always had a fascination with the duality of African Americans and the European founders of our country. I know it’s not just a duality, but narratively, I still do believe that duality is the controlling narrative of our country. Just like we learn in therapy, our narratives control us in ways that are subconscious, and if we don’t engage and dig deep we can veer off and lose our perspective. So that’s kind of how I see this moment. It’s an opportunity that sort of do some therapy. 

TKN: Well, that controlling narrative you’re talking about would be broken if that divide between black and white on economic issues was breached. If poor white people identified with poor black people because of the “poor” part, as opposed to identifying with rich white people because of the “white” part, that would be exactly what the powers-that-be do not want.

PN: Maybe white poverty needs to be talked about too, because white poverty is so very rarely discussed in this country. But there are a lot of similarities, culturally, between poor white people and Black people. It’s like that “Black Jeopardy” sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”

Some people believe that’s why Fred Hampton was killed. He had the potential to be the most charismatic, powerful leader ever, and he was building coalitions between the Panthers and poor white people, meeting with the coal mining unions in West Virginia and southeast Ohio. It was beginning to resonate and he was starting to make those connections and some people believe he was assassinated because of that. So those are some powerful ideas.

Police exercise their power in ways that transcends race, but then there’s the race dynamic in particular. When a policeman sees a black person, they’re already devalued that person’s life, and that then enables that policeman to put their knee on that person’s neck for eight minutes 46 seconds while they’re crying out for their mom, and what allows that other officer to not intervene, even though he’s black himself. So that speaks to the complexity of the issue.

And where do you start? What’s the thing to hone in on? It could be that defunding is a nice starting point. I’m about to start working on this film about the National Anthem and Francis Scott Key, who was a slaveholder, but also tried to repatriate Africans in America and send them back to Africa. That’s how Liberia started. It’s all ripe for storytelling, and I think that is going to be a big part of this whole process. It’s like sort of what Nikole Hannah-Jones did with the 1619 Project, what all us storytellers have been trying to do for a number of years, which is to connect the present to the past, because that’s really the whole thing. It’s become abstract in people’s minds, connecting police violence to our history.

We’re starting to see some of that dialogue coming into the police academies, but then those same recruits hit the street and it’s the Training Day thing. They learn in the academy, but they learn how to be cops on the street. You can teach them anything in the academy—about the Panthers, about slave patrols, about implicit bias, everything—and they could be crying in there and having revelations. But then day one, they’re out there in a different environment, and their real world instructor is the cop who killed George Floyd—I blocked his name out of my head. So if nobody had filmed what happened that day in Minneapolis, that rookie cop would have learned in that moment, “Oh, this is what you do.” So now he’s being taught, “You can’t do that.” That’s why his siblings are saying he must be prosecuted and he must go to prison.

It’s hard to argue against that. But it’s sad. And that’s going to be difficult for a lot of cops. But if we’re willing to prosecute, that’s a first very tangible step, and that’s part of the sacrifice in a way. I don’t know if sacrifice is the right word; you could also say justice. That’s the conversation that’s happening amongst a lot of police unions and police officers—more on the conservative side of the equation—that feeling that it’s an overreach similar to #MeToo. It’s uncomfortable. It’s difficult. But we have to have it. #MeToo has had a profound impact on how men think about themselves and how they think about women, and how they think about their power.

A FEW BAD APPLES OR A WHOLE ROTTEN ORCHARD

TKN: In the wake of George Floyd, I had a big argument with an old college friend, a conservative guy. His son’s a cop, and he was adamant that there’s no such thing as systemic racism in the police or anywhere else—that we’re only talking about a few bad apples, which is the standard dodge. So what do you say to somebody like that?

PN: I think the “only a few bad apples” argument dismisses the point entirely. You could have no bad apples and still have injustice happening because it’s the institution, and the power dynamic of it in connection to the history of the country.

But you don’t have to go too far back to connect to the present to the past. I actually wrote down…..(reads from a family tree) In 1857 my great great grandfather was born a slave, and was owned by the Nix family, n-i-x. This is a child who probably witnessed his father being whipped bloody. So trauma. Then in 1881 my great grandfather was born a free man, his family were sharecroppers, and they changed their name to “Nicks,” spelled c-k-s, which a lot of former slaves did when they became sharecroppers. Then in 1904 my grandfather was born and in 1930 my father was born, and he suffered from alcoholism and died at age 75 from a esophageal cancer. He was the first in his family go to college, faced tremendous racism growing up because he was an achiever and a striver, both in the Black community and in the establishment. Then I was born in 1968. So you sort of realize that the history is close.

King is one of the best at articulating very specific ways that barriers were placed in front of Black people to achieve. Being a slave is Exhibit A. You’re not even a human being. There’s a reality and a history that led to the problems that these communities are facing. And then you intersect that with the police and you’re going to have all kinds of problems, because these are generational trauma leads to trauma leads to trauma. Part of that is violence. Part of that is self-hate. Part of that is apathy.

Are there some bad cops? Yeah. There’s bad cops, bad teachers, bad doctors, bad soldiers. I’m watching “Billions” right now, and it’s like, man, there’s all kinds of like bad people on Wall Street doing all kinds of damage and rape. So yeah, they’re all around—bad people. But those are also systems too.

I don’t know how to get through to folks who don’t see that, like the guy you were talking to. But clearly, we create narratives in our head that are very, very powerful, and that can be very disconnected from the facts. We’re seeing that now with the people who refuse to wear masks. Part of the problem is leadership probably, but leadership’s also just a reflection of the country. It’s frustrating, but as storytellers, all we can do is tell these stories and really try to put the foot on the pedal in terms of exposing each other to different points of view.

And sometimes you have be sneaky, and come in the back door. That’s why I love that Saturday Night Live skit, the “Black Jeopardy” one. I bet you could show that sketch to some conservative white folks and they would laugh, they would get it. Maybe that gets them to think a little bit deeper. So we need to be creative and clever with how we approach this, because nobody’s going to change their mind based on an argument on a social media. So where are there real spaces for dialogue? 

TKN: At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, the whole word “racism” is so loaded for white people. Like this guy, we went back and forth and I made zero headway because he just kept saying, “My son’s not racist. My son’s not racist.” And I’d say, “Well, I’m sure he’s not, but we’re talking about something beyond personal prejudice. We’re talking about institutionalized bias, etc etc.”

But what I didn’t say to him— and maybe I should have, if I was braver—was, “Your son probably is racist. I’m racist, you’re racist. We’ve all gotta look at ourselves.” But he was not even close to having that conversation.

PN: Can you separate your individual identity from the country’s identity? I don’t know.

Racism is a virus of sorts: it’s something that been plaguing this country from the beginning, and we’re all on the spectrum. Even Black people, because slavery was enabled by Africans, there was a culture of slavery in Africa that already existed, they enslaved each other. So when Europeans came along, they just sort of went, “OK.” So these are things that I think can maybe get us closer to each other, as opposed to pointing fingers.

I think that this moment is also about asking the allies to kind of take a step back and allow some other voices to come forward and reframe some of these conversations. That’s a form of sacrifice too. The allies have to continue working, and showing up and just being very conscious of where you’re situated and what you’re telling and how you’re telling it, who you’re telling it with. I even go through that process of thinking about who am I hiring, who am I working with? Everybody’s got blind spots.

HOMEROOM

TKN: You already touched on this a little bit, but is there anything you want to say about your new film in terms of how these are all connected?

PN: The whole concept of the film was to complete the trilogy by going into the space of education in Oakland. Not necessarily to do an expose on the education system, because I feel like that story’s been told; just to be in that space and see it from the perspective of the kids over the course of one year.

But the whole thing kept iterating. Eventually we decided that it was going to be through the eyes of the seniors. And as we moved along, it became clear that it’s not just the seniors, it’s this one particular senior who sits on the school board who represents the 36,000 kids in the district, and then weave that with the story of other kids who are more at risk, who are not engaged politically, who are not leaders, who are failing out, who are struggling. So we wanted to juxtapose those two perspectives, but keep the film firmly rooted in the kids’ perspective.

This is a school of mostly kids of color: it’s about one third black, one third Asian, and one third Hispanic. Very few white kid—and you could just do a film about them, and that would be a film in and of itself. And as we went, we started realizing that was about kids’ voices and how does this generation that was born in the wake of 9/11 find its voice, in a way. So that worked thematically because it’s a coming of age story and all that.

But then the coronavirus happens and the kids experience this trauma, and things that some of them have been thinking about since they were in kindergarten—like prom, and graduation—all got taken away. And that was a crushing moment for them. But then the Awakening happened and they sort of emerged out of that with a very strong voice and an almost optimistic propulsion into the future, though not all of them are being propelled into the future in a good way, a lot of them still are struggling. So we’re trying to figure out how to weave those two stories together.

And now that the Awakening has happened, our one kid who’s on the school board has become the main storyline, and it’s very strong, so how do we bring in the perspective of the other kids who aren’t political, who aren’t leaders, who aren’t going to college? In some ways it’s just kind of telling itself. All this stuff happened, we didn’t anticipate it—as happens in nonfiction—and the fact that it all happened in the year that we were filming…..I can’t explain it. We’re just trying to make sense of it.

But there’s something about this generation that’s different. Because if you think about, being born in the wake of a national trauma like 9/11, and then coming of age amidst this moment, that’s a pretty remarkable framing. I think it’s relevant to the larger idea of why we’re even talking today, which is understanding and recognizing the impact of trauma. It’s something that is difficult to talk about, but really necessary. I think there are ways that you can do it and allow people to see each other rather than having this continual division persist.

I don’t know what the answer is other than to keep telling these stories. And this story of the kids, I think it’s gonna have a hopeful tone. They succeeded in two huge measures: they got the age to vote on school board members in Oakland lowered to 16, and they got the school police department disbanded, which also happened in Minneapolis. Just the fact that they were able to succeed in these two initiatives is pretty remarkable, for them to have had such vision. In some ways, they are that rookie cop who’s witnessing an injustice, but they spoke up, they actually had the courage at a very young age to make their voices heard. So I think that’s going to be very hopeful and a very powerful idea to put out there right now, as we search for the leadership of the future that’s gonna get us through this very difficult patch I think we’re about to go through over the next couple of years.

**************

Photo: KQED

PETER NICKS

Peter Nicks is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California, and the director and cinematographer of The Waiting Room, The Force, and the forthcoming Homeroom. He received his BA from Howard University and his MA from UC Berkeley’s Documentary Film Program in its School of Journalism. He is a 2015 United States Artist Fellow and the founder of Open’hood, a non-profit storytelling entity dedicated to exploring complex social issues—in particular, the vital yet under-funded public institutions that serve us all.

THE FORCE

http://theforcefilm.com/

THE WAITING ROOM

http://www.whatruwaitingfor.com/

INDEPENDENT LENS / “THE FORCE”

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-force/

OPEN’HOOD

http://openhood.org/about-us/

You may not be able to tell, but I start a lot of these blog posts thinking, “Well, this is a pretty narrow, confined topic; this oughta be a short one.“

10,000 words later, the Random Vitriol Generator is still running without human supervision while I have retreated to the couch to eat peanut butter out of the jar with a butterknife while watching the Premier League. (#YNWA.)

(Hey, you get through the pandemic your way, I’ll get through it mine, OK?)

But this one truly promises to be short, because it couldn’t be simpler:

What does it say when the government openly tries to hobble your ability to vote?

I think we all know.

It means they’re scared shitless that they are gonna lose, and are therefore pulling out all the proverbial stops to avoid a fair election.

It goes without saying that the Grand Old Party has been engaged in a relentless, decades-long campaign to suppress the vote and disenfranchise millions of Americans in order to achieve its deeply desired goal of permanent, countermajoritarian, one-party rule. This campaign, Whitman-like, contains multitudes: skewing the Census, taking gerrymandering to a new extreme, undermining Democratic governors, spreading the vile lie of voter fraud, stumping for racist “voter ID” laws, plus of course the usual dirty money, disinformation, and—oh yeah—willingness to conspire with hostile foreign powers.

But rarely has there been a more blatant example of that contempt for democracy and hamhanded willingness to subvert it than what Trump did last week with the US Postal Service.

DELIVER THE LETTER, THE SOONER THE BETTER

Thanks to the pandemic, voting-by-mail will be critical in November. Therefore Trump— knowing that he is as popular as a cold sore at an orgy—has been savagely attacking the very idea for months in order to avoid a fair reckoning on reign. Even as he is trying his hardest to rig the election in his favor, he is shrieking that it’s rigged against him and that mail-in voting is a scam (even though he himself has often voted by mail), all by way of laying the groundwork to delegitimize the vote if he loses……which is likely unless the Russians really ratfuck this thing in a way that makes 2016 look like child’s play.

OK, I get that. It’s un-American as humanly possible, but I get it.

But how brazen, shameless, and just plain evil is it to try to sabotage the US Postal Service itself?

Trump has been starving the USPS of cash, trying to bust the postal union, and in April threatened to withhold future pandemic relief funding from it unless it raised its prices sharply. (Trump suggested a factor of four of five.) And it’s been working: the mail service is suffering severe problems, including slowed delivery and financial losses—and they are not all caused by the coronavirus. Some are very much manmade and deliberate.

It’s unconscionable of course, but it’s the same rapacious, wannabe mobster tactics that Trump has used throughout his career as a disreputable businessman and con artist.

And now, this:

In what’s being called another Friday Night Massacre, last week the new Postmaster General—a prominent Trump donor named Louis DeJoy—removed 23 USPS executives including, Slate reports, “some who had been at the Postal Service for decades. Among the targets of the reorganization were the two top executives who oversee daily operations.” He also instituted a hiring freeze for senior leadership.

No surprise, the move consolidates DeJoy’s power and gives him more personal control over the actions of the agency. (Trump installed him in that position only three months ago, presumably to do precisely this kind of dirty work.)

Slate also reports that the purge came mere days after Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and DeJoy had a “heated” closed-door meeting (Schumer’s word). Democrats have called from the USPS inspector general to investigate…..unless Trump fires them first, as he has done with five other Cabinet level IGs in recent weeks.

This is banana republic stuff at its most blatant.

NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT

Postal carriers come in for a lot of ridicule in American pop culture, from Cliff Clavin to the mononymic Newman. (Newman!) It’s all in good fun and hope they take no offense. For one of the great lessons of the pandemic is that letter carriers are among the most essential of essential workers. As most of us had the luxury of hunkering down in our homes (yes, it’s a luxury, whatever its hardships), postal workers were among those on the front lines who have had to risk their lives day in and day out to keep this country functioning. They are doing it still even as I write this. We owe them an enormous debt. Now, as a reward, they and the organization for whom they work are being attacked and undermined by the very man who is supposed to be the leader of our nation.

The Postal Service’s unofficial motto, famously, is, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Maybe not. But they can damn sure by stayed by the malevolent doings of a piece of shit quisling president whose rapaciousness knows no bottom.

(The words, by the by—chiseled over the entrance to the main post office on 8th Avenue at 33^rd Street in New York City—are from The Persian Wars by Herodotus, in tribute to the Persians’ horse-mounted couriers.)

So who is this Louis DeJoy dude anyway? Who did Trump choose to make Postmaster General and put in charge of this august organization during these trying times?

DeJoy is the first postmaster general in decades who did not rise through the ranks of the USPS but is a purely political appointee. He and his wife, Aldona Wos, formerly the US Ambassador to Estonia under George W. Bush, have given more than $2 million to the Trump campaign. (Trump has now nominated her to be the new US Ambassador to Canada.) DeJoy, not coincidentally, was also head of fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte before it was moved to Jacksonville and then canceled altogether.

Oh, and also, the Wos-DeJoys have between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in USPS competitors or contractors, like UPS and trucking company J.B. Hunt.

I’m shocked, shocked.

IT’S WAFER THIN

The evisceration of the Post Office is just the latest sordid episode in the debasement of the American electoral process. Last week also brought confirmation by the US Intelligence Community of what we have long known, that multiple foreign players are trying to meddle in the upcoming presidential election. Chief among them of course is Russia, which is working to keep Trump in office with the eager collaboration of the GOP, while China is said to favor Biden if only because it so loathes Don.

You know that feeling when you’re a functionally incompetent country that lets other nations compete to decide who your leader will be?

Personally, I’m rooting for China to be our new rulers. It’s time for a change.

Of course, the whole report is a bit of a farce, as the references to China and others (like Iran) are only meant to mollify Trump over the Russian allegations. The extent of Chinese electoral interference—as far as has been declassified—is simple propaganda, not aggressive, state-of-war ratfucking on the Russian level. But Trump’s fragile ego must always be coddled, so the truth cannot be spoken by his lieutenants, even in the service of the common good.

(Dear China: I know you’re a hateful autocracy in your own right, but can you please come rescue us from Trump, because we’re a bunch of whining infants who can’t get our own act together to do it, even in the midst of an existential crisis. Thx.)

Similarly, news also leaked out of the State Department last week that in mid-July someone in the federal government—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—finally got around to clearing his throat and complaining to the Kremlin about its program to, you know, um, pay the Taliban bounties on the heads of American GIs in Afghanistan. (We frown on that.)

Why did it take so long for that complaint to be lodged, and even longer for it to be made public?

Because Pompeo knew it would enrage Trump.

In the words of Python’s Mr. Creosote: “Better get a bucket. I’m gonna throw up.”

POP QUIZ

The kind of government that feels it’s necessary to erect a Potemkin village around the erratic ruler is not one that can be counted on conduct a fair and impartial election, so the war on the Post Office ought not to surprise us. But it is bloodboiling nonetheless, and ought to be a clear sign to any sentient American about who exactly has our best interests at heart. and who does not.

So, America, let me ask you: When the leaders of a given political party makes it abundantly clear that they don’t want you to vote, what does that say?

It says they don’t have a viable platform that appeals to the electorate.

It says they don’t believe in democracy.

It says they have not even an iota of respect for you as a citizen.

It says they think you’re a dumbass sucker.

It ought to be abundantly clear by now that Trump is openly afraid of the will of the American people.

As Jamelle Bouie writes, not only doesn’t Trump have the most votes, he doesn’t even want them. That would require policies that genuinely do good for the public, and therefore generate appeal.

Trump, him not so good at that. Trump, him much better at sowing divisiveness and making us worse as a people.

As Bouie writes:

President Trump and his allies embraced this plainly anti-democratic feature of our political system to liberate themselves from majoritarian politics and coalition building. It’s not just that they can win with a plurality, but that they intend to, with no interest in persuading the majority of American voters and no concern for the consequences of that choice.

That is an exceptionally dangerous state of affairs for a putative democracy.

The debilitating effects of the Electoral College have long been considered a bug by most reasonable people, but to Team Trump they’re a feature. A counter-democratic system where he can retain power by appealing only to a very narrow slice of the electorate and fuck the rest of us, a slice he can hold in his thrall with fear, and hatemongering, and venom, and lies, is precisely the kind of system he needs.

Lucky for him, he was born in the USA.

SATIRE IS DEAD

Hey, so this has been pretty short, by my standards, after all, hasn’t it? Will wonders never cease.

Speaking of ego, In closing, let me take a quick tangent into one other bizarre story that hit late this week, which is the report that Donald Trump and his White House staff made serious inquires about adding his visage to Mount Rushmore.

There is no need for comment on this, as everything about this absolutely mind-boggling, batshit idea is self-evident. Future generations will shake their heads in bafflement that we ever made this guy our leader and didn’t immediately eject him as soon as we woke up from being blackout drunk.

Then again, we’ve got two slaveholders already carved into the mountain (that 50% of the honorees, for those of you scoring at home), not to mention the sculpture’s white supremacist connections. So maybe Trump does belong there.

************

Photo: Mail carrier Oscar Osorio in Los Angeles, California. (Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images and WBUR)

Wikipedia’s entry on the song:

“Please Mr. Postman” is a song written by Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, Freddie Gorman, Brian Holland, and Robert Bateman. It is the debut single by the Marvelettes for the Tamla (Motown) label,^[1] notable as the first Motown song to reach the number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart. The single achieved this position in late 1961; it hit number one on the R&B chart as well.^[2] “Please Mr. Postman” became a number-one hit again in early 1975 when the Carpenters‘ cover of the song reached the top position of the Billboard Hot 100. “Please Mr. Postman” has been covered several times, including by the British rock group The Beatles in 1963.

(Did they really feel it necessary to explain that the Beatles were a “British rock group”?)