Given that Helene’s human impact was plain for all to see, what struck me was that significant numbers of headlines about that storm’s devastation centered not on those people hardest hit, but on the bizarre conspiracy theories of extremist observers: that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is funneling tens of millions in funds and supplies meant for hurricane survivors to migrants, that the Biden administration has been in cahoots with meteorologists to control the weather, or that Biden and crew actually planned the storm! One of my personal favorites came from a neighbor I encountered at the post office in our rural Maryland town: we don’t have enough money for FEMA rescue operations, she told me, because we’re funding Israeli healthcare and housing — a reference, undoubtedly, to the tens of billions of dollars of bombs and other aid this country has sent Israel’s military in its war in Gaza and beyond.

Of course, some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at their core: if only we had focused long ago on issues of human welfare here instead of funding decades of foreign wars, it’s possible we might not be living in such an inequitable, infrastructurally weak country, or one increasingly devastated by climate-change-affected weather. But why did it take the deranged rantings of figures like former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk on social media to begin a discussion about how we choose to spend limited federal dollars? If only more government relief money was indeed spent on basic human necessities like housing and healthcare, anywhere at all, and not on war!

All of this ambient chatter has had an impact as real as the 140 mile-per-hour-plus winds and severe flooding that razed communities in six states across the Southeast in the last month and killed hundreds of Americans, with more still missing. In a region where death remains so omnipresent that observers can smell human bodies as they drive through mountain passes, conspiracy theories have led to real threats that forced FEMA crews to relocate from hard-hit Rutherford County, North Carolina, after reports of armed militia members who said they were “hunting FEMA.”

Given the truly destructive nature of all that chatter, I wasn’t surprised to hear New York Times “The Daily” host Michael Barbaro open one of his podcasts about Hurricane Milton with a question to fellow political journalist Maggie Haberman that would have seemed odd in any other context: “How quickly do we expect this storm to become political?”

How quickly do we expect this storm to become political? How about: How long before the next storm hits category 4 or even 5 status and makes landfall? It seems as if the world we’re living in isn’t Helene’s or Milton’s but the alternative-factual world of former Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway and forecasting what nonsense will pop up next about the weather (or almost anything else) has become more real than the weather itself.

The Complex Identity of Rural America

At the start of the Covid pandemic, I moved to a fairly progressive rural community in Maryland after my family purchased a small farm there where we have an orchard, a large produce garden, and a flock of egg-laying chickens (all of which are, I suppose, our versions of hobbies). I remain confounded by the fact that so many Americans — especially rural ones — vote for the party whose leaders divert aid and attention from solving problems that affect their communities, including the hurricane season and other kinds of extreme weather, not to speak of the rescue work that follows such natural disasters, and the need to provide services and protection for migrants who work on such farms and in rural businesses. Case in point: Republican members of the House and Senate voted against stopgap funding for FEMA a few weeks before Helene hit, doing their part to jeopardize aid to so many of their supporters, even though such efforts may ultimately prove unsuccessful.

It’s well known that many rural Americans provide a bulwark of support for Republican candidates and far-right causes. During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump gained more backing from that group than any other president had in modern American history. The impact of rural America on his coalition of voters in the 2020 presidential elections was comparable to that of labor unions for Democrats.

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Some rural voters also have spoken up loudly when it comes to far-right causes and identity politics. Typically, Tractor Supply Company, which bills itself as the “largest rural lifestyle retailer” and sells gardening tools, feed, small livestock, clothing, and guns, among other things, succumbed last summer to a pressure campaign from its customers to stop anti-discrimination and awareness-raising diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs that had previously earned it national recognition. Its management also pledged to stop participating in LGBTQ+ pride events and eliminate its previous goals to cut carbon emissions in its operations. The campaign kicked off after a right-wing influencer in Tennessee, who ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 2022, posted on X that the company was funding sex changes, among other baseless accusations.

Rural America and Climate Change

I had to balk at such a campaign. Anywhere you look in my town, you can find evidence of how initiatives like Tractor Supply Company’s serve to benefit our community.

To consider (at least to my mind) the most pressing case in point, it’s increasingly difficult for people to farm in today’s climate because governments are not curbing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough. The Biden administration has significantly chipped away at the problem by investing in clean energy, reining in the worst corporate polluters, and curbing emissions and coal usage. Unfortunately, this country still produces record amounts of oil and natural gas, and the ravages of extreme weather in my mid-Atlantic agricultural community are plain to see, as is also true nationally.

Let me share a few small-scale, personal examples. A few years ago, I found that there was enough water locally and nighttime temperatures dipped sufficiently low to grow vegetables, meaning my family wouldn’t have to purchase much produce during the summer months. The past two summers, however, heat, wildfire smoke, and more recently, drought, have made small-scale farming prohibitively difficult, at least for my less experienced hands. My tomatoes haven’t cooled enough at night to ripen sufficiently. More than half of the new fruit trees I purchased to add to our orchard died for lack of sufficient water, and I found myself having to stay up in our barn with one of my best laying hens that I found collapsed from heat stroke one summer day. Dipping her little feet in cool water and forcing electrolytes down her beak ultimately revived her, but the near death of that tiny animal that the local Tractor Supply branch had sold me and advertised as “heat hardy” shook me.

Worse yet, earlier this spring, wildfires swept through my back woods and neighborhood, burning down one of my neighbor’s sheds, threatening numerous homes, including mine, and forcing a neighboring farm to evacuate their livestock. And even worse than that, there wasn’t enough water in my once robust creek for the local fire department to extinguish the flames quickly before the fire impacted several properties.

Our family is lucky. We each have a full-time job to sustain us and so don’t have to rely on farming to do anything but enrich our lives. Unfortunately, other families who have bravely sought to feed more people for a living can’t always say the same. Hurricane Helene is a case in point. According to the American Farm Bureau, that storm (and Milton on its heels) had a unique impact on rural communities and agriculture, with billions of dollars in fruit, nuts, and poultry lost. Food supply in rural communities across the Southeast has already been impacted and grocery price increases throughout the country will be likely.

In the U.S., where more than half of all land is used for agricultural purposes, the number of farms has been decreasing since the 1930s. And while climate change has made growing seasons longer, it’s also made the weather far less predictable. Despite farmers scaling up production and adapting their methods, doing everything from bringing horticulture indoors to using recycled human food waste as feed, yield has fallen and it’s growing ever more difficult to stay in the black. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the crucial global research body tracking that phenomenon, recently found that the largest casualty of our overheating planet is the struggle of agriculture to produce enough food for people to live, leading to growing food insecurity in regions around the world.

Worse yet, government efforts to help farmers survive sometimes create more problems than they solve. For example, financial and tax incentives for farmers who can demonstrate that they are using their crops to capture carbon require large amounts of paperwork, while climate regulations that may help farms in the long run entail red tape and restrictions that make paying the bills far harder in the short term. Yet some of the more vulnerable farmers like those in communities of color have welcomed recent government interventions as reparations for decades of discrimination in federal loan programs, as have indigenous communities who benefit from grants to develop more sustainable farming practices.

Nonetheless, if voting patterns and consumer pressure campaigns are any harbinger of the future, too many rural voters and consumers don’t seem to be thinking about how to create just such sustainable farming practices in a climate-changing world. Instead, the loudest voices in rural America seem focused on fear-based identity politics and anger rather than what elected officials have — and have not — said and done to aid their everyday lives in increasingly difficult times.

By some indicators, rural lives have only grown far more precarious in our moment and maybe that helps explain why so many farm families are frustrated with the powers that be. Farmers in this country are more than three times as likely to die by suicide as people in the general population. Factors like high rates of gun ownership and social isolation have an impact, but so do unpredictable weather, supply chain interruptions born of the Covid-19 pandemic, and our government’s slow and haphazard response to so much in the Trump years.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

I find it perplexing that the rural customers of Tractor Supply rejected diversity, equity, and inclusion campaigns from that rural retailer, since people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks make up a significant part of rural communities, just not the well-paid or well supported ones. Most farmworkers who tend crops and livestock and engage in other forms of manual labor like processing or transporting our food are, in fact, foreign born and work for only the little more than half of the year that encompasses the growing season. Those workers or others in their families need to get second jobs just to make ends meet. They are more at risk of climate- and access-related health issues because of air pollution and heat-stroke. Such risks were compounded by Trump-era policies that cut federal funding for rural health centers and curbed insurance regulations in struggling rural clinics and hospitals.

In an America where discrimination as well as pay gaps based on race, gender, and sexual orientation remain rampant, making equity a priority can only help those who actually sustain this country’s farming communities. In my county, where equity and inclusiveness are central to social policy, about a third of the children at our small rural school receive free lunches and other services. That portion of the school population consists significantly of kids whose parents are willing to do low-wage work on local farms and that’s not generally white, American-born families.

What’s clear is that Donald Trump’s politics of grievance appeals to voters who see their lives and those of their children worsening, not getting better, as time goes by. Social science research has identified emotions like anger, fear, and nostalgia as key to his appeal to rural Americans and other groups whose health indicators, isolation, and economic well-being are only worsening. If his recent seemingly unhinged “dance party” in Pennsylvania is anything to go by, I suspect he’s hearkening back to a time in American history when communities were smaller, life was simpler, and racism was rampant and — yes! — unhinged. (Note, by the way, his inclusion of “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem, on that playlist he danced to for 39 straight minutes.) While rural America certainly struggles in more ways than I can describe, it’s precisely the things that Democratic candidates are trying to do now that would bring them back to a healthier, more sustainable way of life.

In a world where the weather’s only growing worse, if my community is a good example — and I suspect it’s as good as any — rural Americans need to think hard when they go to the ballot box (or the cash register) and consider the universe of hard scientific facts rather than just listening to the latest conspiracy monger on X or Instagram. Their lives and their livelihoods may just depend on it.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.

A Deadly Glossary

Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.

Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.

As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.

Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.

How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.

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After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)

And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

To take one example: at least in my state, Maryland, Tricare, if it pays at all, compensates clinicians like me far less for mental healthcare than Medicaid (government medical assistance for low-income Americans). It also misleads military patients by referring them to me even after Tricare has acknowledged that I’m unable to take more of them. Other healthcare plans serving Americans go months without reimbursing me for services they authorized.

Over the years, I’ve written for TomDispatch about many things that military families go through — most similar to what other Americans experience, although almost invariably a little more so. That includes the struggle to feed their families and stay out of debt, the search for childcare, a growing sense of loneliness and pain, and, of course (to mention something so many other Americans haven’t experienced) exposure to the violence of war and its weaponry.

Private companies — and not just medical ones — shape the contours of American life in so many ways, even if we don’t know those companies’ names. Take arms contractors who have contributed so much to the spillover of military-grade weaponry into the hands of civilian killers. Just as all too many Americans, including schoolchildren, have found themselves forced to stare into the barrel of an AR-15 rifle, so have distressed soldiers stared into the “barrels” of companies few of us have heard of that can decide whether they’ll ever get the opportunity for therapy.

Sadly, in my world, greed all too often shapes how we live, just as it’s shaped the world of… yes, the Supreme Court. And for that you can thank the magnates who so generously gifted lavish trips and perks to Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito while they handed down morally devastating decisions on so many issues, gun control and abortion among them, that will determine the nature of life and death in this country.

In a moment, I’ll tell you a bit about my own experiences as a clinician. But let me start by saying that, for me, as a therapist, wife, and mother, nowhere is the relationship between corporations and everyday life more impactful than in the ways our government allows health insurance companies of every kind to avoid truly paying for the care Americans need. (Ask me, for instance, whether Tricare paid for my family to get flu shots this year. I’ll bet you can guess the answer to that one.)

Americans, who are getting sicker, sadder, and ever more anxious, are so often unable to access necessities like healthcare because all too many legislators, judges, and administration officials refuse to hold large companies accountable to the rule of law — when, that is, significant laws related to such corporations even exist.

An Uphill Battle to Provide Affordable Mental Healthcare

As a therapist, I accept most major insurance plans in the Washington, D.C., area, where I operate a small private practice out of my rural home. I set out to make care accessible to middle- and lower-income Americans, particularly those who fought in America’s wars, were impacted by them, or grew up in a military family — groups where suicide rates are significantly higher than in the general population and where depression, anxiety, and violence are rampant.

I have a social science PhD that has helped me figure out how complicated systems work, yet our insurance system (if it can even be called that) confounds me. I find myself turning away dozens of people every month because I can’t afford to lose more time and income dealing with the complications of their insurance.

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My standard line for those who come to me seeking care is too often: “I’m so sorry, I wish I could help, but I’m unable to take any new patients with [insert here major healthcare plan, most of them state-sponsored or, in the case of Carefirst, D.C.’s version of Blue Cross Blue Shield, contracted by the federal government for its employees].” I then wonder what will happen to that suicidal three-times-deployed Afghanistan and Iraq veteran with young kids at home, who’s been referred to me by this country’s downsized, on-base healthcare system; or the single mother whose State Department job is supposed to offer her an insurance plan to help her manage the stress of aid work in combat zones; or unnerved asylum seekers from Russia, Ukraine, and so on (and on and on and on).

Meanwhile, in a separate area of my mind, I’m starting to try to lay the groundwork for a time when my own ability to support my family won’t suddenly be thwarted because one link in some part of our country’s fragile chain of companies that finance health care breaks for months on end.

The Change Healthcare Outage

Most people I talk to around my affluent town aren’t aware that, in late February of this year, the U.S. healthcare system suffered a major setback: BlackCat, a ransomware group, hacked into Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of the corporate behemoth UnitedHealth Corporation, which (until recently at least) processed about 40% of the nation’s healthcare claims annually, including from therapists. For months after that, some major insurance companies lacked a clear route to receive medical claims from providers like me. They also lacked a way to transfer money from their own banks to doctors. Other claims payment systems take weeks or months to establish, because you have to make sure they’re in sync with the chain of companies you work with in healthcare (if you accept insurance). There’s your encrypted patient data system, your payment-processing system, the insurance company itself, and maybe a company you hire to help you with your billing. In short, the Change outage left many providers like me without a way to get paid for what we do.

Nationally, over these months, more than 90% of hospitals and many group practices (especially smaller ones) lost money — to the tune of somewhere between hundreds of millions of dollars and $1 billion daily. Tens of millions of dollars in insurance payments to providers were delayed indefinitely. Doctors, nurses, and therapists were forced to close their doors, cut staff, forego needed supplies such as chemotherapy drugs, for example, or stop seeing patients. A survey by the American Medical Association of 1,400 medical practices found that 80% had lost revenue, 55% had to use their own personal funds to cover practice expenses, and about a third were unable to pay staff. Eighty-five percent of those practices had to commit extra time to the revenue cycle. The only reason I was able to see patients is because I have a spouse with a job that covers some of our bills (as well as our mounting credit card debt).

I had a particularly difficult time getting the insurance companies that are supposed to cover the healthcare of our troops to cough up funds. Tricare took three months to begin paying me because the requirements of its subcontractor, Humana, Inc., to enroll with a new payment system were opaque even for my professional biller. Then, it took weeks more after they figured it out for Tricare to formally approve the new arrangement.

Johns Hopkins Family Health Plan, another insurance plan for military families sponsored by the Department of Defense, didn’t start paying me the thousands of dollars it owed me in backpay until late June. Maryland Medicaid went weeks or even months without covering services for three of my patients. (Lest anyone think this is unrelated to the way we treat our military families, note that Medicaid serves millions of troops, in addition to many other populations.) The only reason those patients of mine continued to receive care was because I volunteered to do it, a choice that a medical professional living in the largest economy on Earth shouldn’t have to make. A country of wealthy healthcare corporations enabled by the government, who let clinicians choose between volunteer work or turning sick people away is its own kind of banana republic.

Should we be surprised? Not in a for-profit healthcare system, where companies stand to gain by hoarding premiums long enough to garner yet more interest on them. Why would any of them feel compelled to fix such an outage in a timely fashion unless someone made them do it? — and no one did.

The Devil’s in the Details (and There Are So Many Details)

After the Change Healthcare outage, UnitedHealth’s CEO Andrew Witty testified before Congress for the first time in 15 years — a noteworthy (if insufficient) first step in raising public awareness and pressuring companies to improve their data security and prevent disruptions to healthcare. What I didn’t see was any significant discussion of why Americans need little-known companies like Change to begin with.

Change’s role is essentially to take the notes saying what we did that therapists and doctors like me write after we see patients and pass them on to insurance companies like Tricare/Humana, Medicaid/Optum, or D.C. Medicare (administered by the Pennsylvania-based Novitas, Inc.) in a format those payers are most likely to accept. If you ask me, were Change the character in the 1990s parody Office Space asked by downsizing consultants, “What would you say you do here?,” instead of responding, “I deal with the customers so the engineers don’t have to,” it might say, “I deal with the insurance companies so the providers don’t have to.” Essentially, Change takes my notes and sends them to the computer systems of insurers, which then (maybe) pay me. For a company that electronically dispatches healthcare claims from providers to payers, it’s done remarkably well. It was the most profitable of UnitedHealth’s thousands of subsidiaries and UnitedHealth was itself one of the Fortune 500’s top 25 companies in 2023.

So many cooks in the kitchen amount to confusion and lack of accountability for providers like me.

Prior to the Change outage, the reasons companies didn’t pay out to medical workers were often as arbitrary and unrelated to health care as you could imagine. UnitedHealth went months without paying me for therapy I did with several of its members because I wrote the number “11,” not “10,” on claim forms to indicate that I saw patients online. No matter that both numbers stood for the same thing. Worse yet, its representatives refused to tell me that this was the problem until government officials intervened on my behalf. Honestly, I don’t think we live in a “deep state” as much as in (and yes, I would capitalize it!) Deep Corporate America.

Deep Corporations

Much is said these days by folks on the far right about the “deep state” and Donald Trump’s plans to gut it should he return to the White House in 2025. Speaking from the bowels of the healthcare industry, I’d say that what we have on our hands are many layers of companies (like those beneath Tricare, Medicaid, and Medicare) that decide whether and how to administer funds in ways too complicated and inhuman to truly explain. Consider it an irony then that, in 2022, the healthcare version of all of that was deepened by — yes! — a Trump-appointed judge who struck down a Justice Department lawsuit attempting to prevent UnitedHealth from acquiring Change.

Many failed states rot from the inside before they collapse, when people get so fed up with not having their basic needs met that they take to the streets. Maybe before something akin to another January 6th happens in America, more people should begin to question the assumption that private is better, that billionaires are the embodiment of the American dream, and that government, on principle, is not to be trusted. Instead, isn’t it time to hold the feet of government officials to the fire and begin a genuine crackdown on corporate greed in this country?

If that doesn’t happen, our healthcare system will prove to be just one disastrous layer in a genuine American house of cards. Unless our public officials begin to place our human rights and the rule of law first, count on one thing: somewhere along the line that house of cards, medical or otherwise, is headed for collapse.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

As someone who has studied Russian culture and history for decades, I think of Nazi Germany’s nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war’s ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.

We’ve been taught since childhood that war is mainly about troops fighting, no matter that we live in a world in which most military funding actually has little to do with people. Instead, war treasure chests go disproportionately into arms production rather than troops and (more importantly) their wider communities at home. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons are being developed with little or no ethical oversight or regulation, potentially removing many soldiers from future battlefields but not from the disastrous psychological scars of war. Meanwhile, in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).

Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don’t get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war’s supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine’s war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.

America’s Post-9/11 Forever Wars

As one of the co-founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, I often think about the largely unrecognized but far-reaching impact of America’s post-9/11 war on terror (still playing out in dozens of countries around the world). Most of the college students who made news this spring protesting U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza hadn’t even been born when, after the 9/11 attacks, this country first embarked on our decades-long forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and all too many other places. By our count at the Costs of War Project, those wars directly killed nearly one million people in combat, including some 432,000 civilians (and still counting!), and indirectly millions more.

Our forever wars began long before local journalists in war zones first started to post bombings and so many other gruesome visions of the costs of war, including starvation, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media sites, as they did during the first days of the Russian bombing of Kyiv and, as I write, Israel’s seemingly never-ending assault on Gaza. Those journalists haven’t been fettered by the U.S. military’s embed programs, which initially hamstrung war reporters trying to offer anything but a sanitized version of the war on terror. In other words, Americans have, at least recently, been able to witness the crimes and horrors other militaries commit in their war zones (just not our own).

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And yet the human rights violations and destruction of infrastructure from the all-American war on terror were every bit as impactful as what’s now playing out before our eyes. We just didn’t see the destruction or slow-motion degradation of roads and bridges over which food was distributed; the drone attacks that killed Afghan farmers; the slow contamination of agriculture in war zones thanks, in part, to American missiles and rockets; the sewage runoff from U.S. bases; the bombings in everyday areas like crowded Iraqi marketplaces that made grocery shopping a potentially deadly affair; and the displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis because of U.S.-led drone attacks — to take just a few of so many examples. Of course, these aren’t problems as easily captured in a single picture, no less a video, as hospitals full of starving children or the flattened cities of the Gaza Strip.

America’s longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country’s poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.

In the U.S., we haven’t seen antiwar protests on anywhere near the scale of the recent Gaza campus ones since the enormous 2003 protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after which those hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators thinned to a mere trickle in the years to follow. Sadly, Americans have proven selective indeed when it comes to reckoning with conflict, whether because of short attention spans, laziness, or an inability to imagine the blood on our own hands.

Denials of Humanitarian Aid

So, too, the U.S. has been complicit in denying aid shipments to people in the greatest need — and not just today in Gaza. Yes, Congress and the Biden administration decided to cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because of the alleged participation of some of its Gaza staff members in Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. But don’t think that was unique. For example, in 2009, our government prevented more than $50 million in aid from entering Somalia, including aid from the World Food Program, even though aid groups were warning that the country stood on the precipice of mass starvation. In 2011, the U.N. officially declared a famine there and, to this day, Somalia’s hunger crisis continues, exacerbated by climate change and wider regional conflicts.

And that’s hardly the only way this country has been involved in such crises. After all, thanks to America’s forever wars, some 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died not from bullets or bombs but, during those wars and in their aftermath, from malnutrition, disease, suicide, and other indirect (but no less real) causes. In such situations, hunger factors in as a multiplier of other causes of death because of how it weakens bodies.

Now, Gaza is a major humanitarian catastrophe in which the U.S. is complicit. Armed far-right Israeli groups have repeatedly blocked aid from entering the enclave or targeted Gazans clamoring for such aid, and Israeli forces have fired on aid workers and civilians seeking to deliver food. In a striking irony, Palestinians have also died because of food aid, as people drowned while trying to retrieve U.S. and Jordanian airdrops of aid in the sea or were crushed by them on land when parachutes failed.

This country’s complicity in Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has been disastrous: an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.

A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.

Hunger as a Cause of War

Famine is the nightmarish version of the gift that just keeps giving. Hungry people are more likely to resort to violence to solve their problems. War-afflicted Yemen is a case in point. In that country, the U.S. funded and armed the Saudi military in its air strikes against the Houthi-led rebels that began in 2015 and went on for years (a role now taken over by my country). One child under five is still estimated to die every 10 minutes from malnutrition and related causes there, in large part because war has so decimated the country’s food production and distribution infrastructure. Since war first struck Yemen, the country’s economy has halved, and nearly 80% of the population is now dependent on humanitarian aid. A direct consequence of the unrest has been the flourishing of Islamic extremist groups like the Houthis. Countries facing hunger and food instability are, in fact, more likely to be politically unstable and experience more numerous protests, some of them violent.

Nowadays, I find that I can’t help imagining worst-case scenarios like the risk of nuclear war, a subject that has come up in a threatening manner recently in relation to Ukraine. The scale of hunger that the smallest nuclear conflagrations would create is hard to imagine even by today’s grim standards. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, for example, would distribute soot into the atmosphere and disrupt the climate globally, affecting food and livestock production and probably causing death by starvation in a “nuclear winter” of three billion people. Were there to be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, an estimated five billion people might die from hunger alone in the famine that would ensue. It’s not an outcome I even care to imagine (though we all should probably be thinking about it more than we do).

Hunger at the Heart of Empire

Though this country is not (yet) a war zone, it’s not an accident that Americans are facing high food prices and record levels of hunger. The more than $8 trillion our government has spent over the past two decades on our distant wars alone has sapped resources for investment in things like transportation and better water systems here, while ensuring that there are more than 1.4 million fewer jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, military families struggle with far higher rates of food insecurity than those among the general population. Progressives and anyone interested in the preservation of this country’s now fragile democracy shouldn’t ignore the wasting of the lives of those of us who are hungrier, have a harder time affording daily prices, and have more in common with civilians in war zones than we normally imagine.

Seen in this light, the overwhelming focus of young Americans on the Gaza war and their lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy, as they consider voting for third-party candidates (or not voting at all) and so handing Donald Trump the presidency, becomes more understandable to me. What good is a democracy if it hemorrhages resources into constant foreign wars? Certainly, the current administration has yet to introduce a viable alternative to our endless engagement in foreign conflicts or meaningfully mitigate the inflation of basic necessities, among them food and housing. President (and candidate) Biden needs to articulate a more robust vision for preserving democracy in America, which would include ways to solve the problems of daily life like how to afford groceries.

Still, while I’ll give our youngest generation of antiwar progressives kudos for holding elected officials to task for their myopic priorities, especially on Gaza, let’s also get real and look at the alternative rapidly barreling toward us: another Trump presidency. Does anyone really think that Gaza would be better off then?

What would happen to anyone protesting wars in Gaza or elsewhere? How would we pressure a president who has advocated violence to overthrow the results of a peaceful election?

Concerns about foreign wars can’t be solved by staying home on November 5th or voting for a third-party candidate or Donald Trump. The 2024 election is about preserving our very ability to protest America’s wars (or those this country is backing abroad), as opposed to creating a potential Trumpian forever hell here at home.

Think of Donald Trump, in fact, as the potential fifth horseman of the apocalypse, now riding toward us at full speed.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

He spends his other weekends right-swiping on dating apps to try to find a new partner (he’s being divorced) and watching — yep, you guessed it! — Fox News. He can be counted among a growing population of White, rural Americans who are lonely, lack people to count on as confidants, and feel poorly understood, not to say excluded from this country (at least as they imagine it).

In 2019, even before the Covid pandemic made gatherings more dangerous, social scientists and public officials had already noted an uptick in Americans who would describe themselves as lonely — nearly three in five — many from rural areas and many of them older. Today, though schools, parks, and businesses have reopened, things don’t seem much better. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently highlighted the problem, claiming that loneliness was as dangerous to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases the risk of various illnesses like heart disease and raises quality of life issues like addiction, depression, the urge to commit suicide, and the odds of premature death.

Our poor relationships, in short, are killing us.

Loneliness and a Lack of Self-Control

I’m a clinical social worker who treats Americans from all walks of life, including serving troops and veterans affected by our post-9/11 wars. Since I live in a rural area just outside Washington, D.C., I can work with both city dwellers and farmers in a single day and so get a sense of what seems to shape the wellness (or lack thereof) of an increasingly sweeping demographic. A key insight in my discipline is the value of human connection, particularly relationships with people who understand your experience and can reflect it back to you. I’ve seen the transformative power of just such relationships and how, when people feel supported and understood, they start to venture out more often, even volunteer in their communities, and cease having angry meltdowns in public. Empathy, in other words, leads to motivation and self-control.

Its underbelly, however, is alienation, loneliness, and their close cousins, anger and fear. I’ve seen a lot of anger lately in people who, like my friend, rant about immigrants and carry guns on their errands in the name of self-defense, while all too often isolating themselves at home or in solitary activities. Both young adults and older ones tend to feel more isolated than the middle-aged, especially if they’re poor and live in rural areas like mine. And many of those who feel lonely and depressed are also angry.

Trump and His Band of Lonely Followers

I’m hardly the only one who’s noticed that former President Donald Trump’s die-hard supporters tend to fall exactly into that crew of people who live in rural America, are poorer, older, and (much like the Donald himself) socially isolated. As pollster Daniel Cox wrote shortly after the 2020 election, “The share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.”

As Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender also noted, Trump rallies build a sense of community among “mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck… retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children… Trump had… made their lives richer.” He noted how Trump supporters came to share homes and transportation, form relationships, and chant the same slogans (like “Build the wall”) in unison. I would add that those slogans can get so much uglier: “Fuck those dirty beaners” and “Fuck Islam” are anything but unheard of.

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Writing in the wake of the Nazi movement that murdered more than six million European Jews, the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that those people most likely to align themselves with totalitarian movements lack a sense of their own usefulness to society and feel excluded. In my own world, Arendt’s insight feels true when it comes to the Trump supporters I know in my family and community and know about in this country at large.

What Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders have done is take emotions like loneliness and channel them into a social movement. Key evangelical Christian figures like Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, or the Reverend Franklin Graham provided the initial ideological scaffolding by selling Trump as someone who could deliver policy wins on issues like abortion and prayer in schools.

Later, when Trump’s extramarital affairs and crude sexual remarks made it clear to such figures that he was not exactly a shining example of Christian morality, they needed a different tack. As journalist Tim Alberta has pointed out, evangelical leaders then began selling Trump as one of a line of unlikely Biblical figures (if not Jesus himself) who led the Israelites out of peril. In other words, they saw him as powerful exactly because he was an outsider.

Donald Trump, in short, has provided a world in which isolated Americans can be — yes! — alone together, while embracing hate in an unabashed and distinctly public fashion. In doing so, he’s made the experience of being a resentful outcast a transcendent one in twenty-first-century America. Trump’s rallies are invariably both loud and distinctly angry, like the motorcycle gangs with Confederate flags that roar past me on the rural highway I often take, or church services with MAGA preachers. These sorts of gatherings seem to reflect what French sociologist Emile Durkheim once called collective effervescence, or shared emotional experiences that transform isolated people into something larger (if also in this case angrier) than life.

The anger of the MAGA movement is transcendent. When people act on it, their bodies trigger the release of adrenaline, which can alter behavior. I saw this outside my home once when a White male driver who had crashed his speeding car into a guardrail then threatened a group of Spanish-speaking drivers he’d just passed, calling them “beaners” and kicking and punching the side of their car, even though they’d stopped to help him. Reason and self-control prove elusive at such moments in a world infused with racial slurs as solace for peoples’ woes.

The most striking recent example of how anger can find collective social expression was, of course, the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington that came all too close to giving us a new autocratic-style government founded on a sense of rootlessness, victimhood, and rage.

Our Loneliness Epidemic

Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many of us have been scratching our heads, wondering how to explain what gave rise to his self-styled band of lonely followers. Are they the victims of global capitalism and university systems that all too few can afford? Are they a cultural movement responding to demographic shifts involving immigration and low birth rates among White families? Personally, I’d like to see more discussion about the decisions many American voters and our representatives in Washington have made to support endless foreign wars with trillions of our tax dollars, instead of investing them in protecting the places here at home that would make community more possible for more of us.

After all, even a relatively modest percentage of our wildly overblown annual “defense” budget, now heading for the trillion-dollar mark, would have funded many of the types of programs Americans need in order to work less and live in cleaner, safer environments. Military spending and where it goes can be hard to understand but, for instance, the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped to start, has broken down our disastrous war expenses — all eight trillion-plus dollars of it — in this century. And now, as defense expert William Hartung points out, a significant part of the Pentagon budget is being spent to deter a hypothetical war with China, whose military isn’t configured to threaten American safety. Meanwhile, since 2018, at least tens of billions of dollars of classified defense contracts have been transferred to some of the world’s largest private tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, in addition to tech startups, to develop surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence, and advanced weapons systems.

President Biden’s original Build Back Better Act (voted down in the Senate in 2021) would have allocated $400 billion over six years to fund universal preschool, $150 billion to be applied to homecare for elderly and disabled Americans, and $200 billion in child tax credits. So, for less than the amount we spend on defense in just one year, taxpayer dollars could have made it possible for Americans with children to stay at work (at a time when more than one in four of us have had to leave jobs or school to avoid soaring child-care costs).

Today, the vast majority of nursing homes are short-staffed, but had we decided not to fund the disastrous Global War on Terror, we could have helped seniors get high-quality care in their own homes. And just think how much more money we would have been able to devote to cleaning up pollution, investing in safer public transportation and infrastructure, restoring state and national parks, and mitigating the worst effects of the Covid pandemic on schools, houses of worship, and businesses — not to mention American lives. And if so, just think how much less isolation, loneliness, and MAGAtivity there might have been.

An incident I witnessed at my rural home last summer epitomized what it means for so many of us to lack the necessary resources to relax and enjoy life with one another in reasonably good health. While smoke from Canada’s wildfires engulfed the D.C. area last June, my children and I watched as the young, Black grocery delivery driver we’d paid to bring us food arrived in his car. A child in a car seat squirmed in the back. He wore a tiny KN95 mask. Why wasn’t he at home or at a childcare facility while his father worked? What kind of quality of life did he have driving through hills and woods he would probably never have a chance to enjoy? I cringed with guilt. The quiet appearance of isolation and alienation in that car stood in marked contrast to the angry Whites at Trump rallies, who looked a lot like me.

In such an ongoing climate of isolation, anger, and underdevelopment, there seem few safe and accessible ways for Americans to gather peacefully anymore. Much has been made lately of antisemitic chants at the student protests against the Israel-Gaza war and the American weaponry eternally being shipped to Israel. As Columbia journalism professor Helen Benedict pointed out in the case of the protests at her university, a majority of the students couldn’t have been more peaceful and less MAGA-style angry as they advocated for a cease-fire and the release of Israeli hostages, even in the face of a disproportionate law enforcement response. Such protests say everything about the ability of disaffected young voters to claim space and connect around common values, even in the face of a militarized police response. And when you think of those 2,000-pound bombs our government has been sending to Israel to devastate Gaza, they should remind us of just how far afield our spending priorities have taken us from what we should truly value.

I do try to claim space that’s positive and community-based in my world, but it isn’t easy. Even going to our church on a Sunday sometimes feels precarious to me. I find myself worrying about what I would do to protect my small children if someone as disturbed as many in my community of origin entered with a gun and started shooting the place up. (And though that doesn’t happen often, it certainly does happen.)

I recently participated with a family friend in a race in deep blue Syracuse, New York, meant to benefit local community-based healthcare. As my young companion and I moved through the starting gate together, a large banner hung above us with a “Blue Lives Matter” flag on it, signaling support for law enforcement as a counter to Black Lives Matter.

As we ran, I couldn’t help noticing boarded-up public housing and abandoned schools, potholed roads and a visible (though supportive) armed police presence to help us make our way through city traffic. I wondered what it meant that an event as innocent as a race to benefit healthcare could just as easily have been mistaken for some sort of post-apocalyptic scene.

Yes, the degradation has been gradual, caused by the bleeding out of U.S. cities, thanks at least in part to the dozens of large and small armed conflicts we’ve fought so disastrously around the world in this century and our taxpayer dollars that have been funneled in that direction.

If only we were to reshape our priorities in enough time to vote in leaders who cared about peace, perhaps our democracy and the ideas that define it wouldn’t be coming apart at the MAGA seams. Wouldn’t it be great if we all could get out more and do so together?

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

All too many of us who now argue about the Ukraine and Gaza wars and their ensuing humanitarian crises, about police violence and extremism in the military here at home, about all sorts of things, would no longer share a common language. Basics that once might have meant the same thing to you and me, like claiming someone won an election, might become unsafe to mention. In a Trump 2.0 world, more of our journalists would undoubtedly face repercussions and need to find roundabout ways to allude to all too many topics. A moving opinion column by the New York Times’s David French, who faced threats for his writing about Donald Trump, highlighted how some who voiced their views on him already need round-the-clock police protection to ensure their safety and that of their family.

I often think about the slippery slope we Americans could soon find ourselves on. After all, from the time Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president in 1999, I spent 20 years traveling to his country and back, working there first as an anthropology doctoral student and later as a human rights researcher. I’ve followed Russian politics closely, including as a therapist specializing in war-affected populations, asylum seekers, and refugees. Friends and colleagues of mine there have faced threats to their safety and their careers amid a Kremlin crackdown on public discussion after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and several fled the country with their families in search of safety and a better life.

To be sure, there are many differences between the United States, with its robust democratic tradition, and Russia, which only briefly had competitive elections and a free press. Nonetheless, my experiences there offer a warning about how a Trumpian version of top-down rule could someday stifle any possibility of calling out state-sponsored violence for what it is, and what it might feel like if that’s our situation here someday.

Tucker Carlson’s Moscow

On first look, far-right journalist Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Moscow, covered exuberantly by Russia’s state media, might seem like an example of an American tourist’s naïve glorification of another country’s luxuries. Carlson marveled at the fancy tilework of the city’s subway system, visited the national ballet, and noted that you can buy caviar cheaply at the local grocery store. He also pointed out that Moscow’s pristine streets had no homeless people and no apparent poverty.

In the gilded halls of the Kremlin palace, he interviewed President Putin for more than two hours. Despite his guileless expression, Carlson occasionally appeared flummoxed as Putin lectured him endlessly on Russian history and the centuries-old claim he insisted Moscow has on Kyiv as its protector from aggressors near and far. Of course, he never challenged Putin on his rationale for invading that country (nor did he refer to it as an invasion) or any of the Russian leader’s other outrageous claims.

I’m of the school of thought that considers Putin’s Russia exactly the sort of anti-woke paradise the MAGA crowd craves. Anyone of Carlson’s age who grew up during the Cold War and turned on his or her television in that pivotal period when the Berlin Wall fell should certainly know that all of Russia doesn’t look anything like what he was shown. He should also have known about the recent history of economic “shock therapy” that drained Russian public services of funding and human resources, not to speak of the decades of corruption and unfair economic policies that enriched a choice few in Putin’s circle at the expense of so many.

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Of course, something had to happen to turn the Moscow that Carlson saw into a sanitized moonscape. If you haven’t been following developments in Russia under Putin, let me summarize what I’ve noticed.

Protesters — even many going to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s recent memorial service — have been arrested or at least intimidated when appearing to sympathize with anything that’s not part of the Kremlin’s official pro-Putin ideology. Many groups, from Asian migrants to the homeless, have either been rounded up by the police or at least relocated far out of the view of tourists of any sort. In fact, the imprisoned American journalist whom Carlson briefly gestured toward emancipating, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, had written on the practice of zachistki, or mop-up operations by the Russian authorities that, for instance, relocated homeless services to the outskirts of Moscow, far from public view. Of course, Gershkovich is now imprisoned indefinitely in Russia on charges of espionage for simply reporting on the war in Ukraine, proving the very point Carlson so studiously avoided, that an endless string of lies underscore Putin’s latest war.

What’s more, amid sub-subsistence wages, housing shortages, and the thin walls of so many city apartments, ordinary Russians are not always able to engage in the “hard conversations” that conservatives like Alabama Senator Katie Britt boast of having in their well-furbished kitchens. After all, neighbors are now encouraged to denounce each other for decrying Russia’s war. (You could, it seems, even end up in prison if your child writes “no to war” on a drawing she did for school.)

There are very personal ramifications to living in an autocracy with which Tucker Carlson and, of course, the Orange Jesus himself are signaling their agreement when they entertain the views of leaders like Vladimir Putin or call Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán “fantastic.” They’re signaling what their end goal is to Americans and, sadly enough, it’s not particularly far-fetched anymore to suggest that, someday, we won’t even have the freedom to talk about all of this with each other.

The Thing That Cannot Be Named

Tucker Carlson at least did his homework. He clearly knew that you couldn’t describe the war in Ukraine as an unprovoked Russian invasion, given that country’s carefully crafted censorship laws.

Since his February 2022 invasion, Putin has referred to it as a “special military operation” focused on the defense of Russia from NATO and the “denazification” of Ukraine. During that first spring, the Russian president signed a law forbidding journalists from even calling the invasion a “war,” choosing instead to frame the killing, displacement, abduction, torture, and rape of Ukrainian citizens as a surgical rescue operation provoked by the victims themselves. Broader, vaguer censorship laws were then passed, further limiting what Russians of all stripes could say, including one against “discrediting the army,” which imposed stiff fines and prison sentences, and more recently, property confiscations on anyone deemed to have said anything negative about Russia’s armed forces. While the thousands of arrests made may seem modest, given Russia’s 146 million people, it’s still, in my opinion, thousands too many.

The Russian leader’s perverse framing of his unprovoked war is undoubtedly what also allows him to admit that hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded so far, something he couldn’t otherwise say. In a country suffused with right-wing Christian nationalism, it also certainly helps his cause that most of Russia’s war dead come from remote, poor, and predominantly minority regions.

This is the sort of muddling of meaning and motives that autocratic leaders engage in to justify deaths of all kinds. American equivalents might be what the MAGA crowds do when they blame the January 6th far-right assault at the Capitol, aimed at police and lawmakers, on the “Antifa,” or extreme leftists, without disputing that people were hurt. Or consider then-President Donald Trump’s comment that far-right white supremacist Charlottesville rioters and counter-protesters included “very fine people on both sides” — no matter that one such fine person plowed down a counter-protester in his car, murdering her, or that certain of those “fine” white supremacists espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories considered by some an incitement to violence.

For their part, Russians of various political stripes enjoy an ancient tradition of using dark humor and irony to engage in the kinds of conversations they really want to have. Take as an example the way progressive journalists like those at the news stations TV Rain and Novaya Gazeta (since banned from operating) began discussing the war in Ukraine as “the thing that cannot be named.” Eventually, however, sweeping censorship laws prevented even workarounds like those.

It’s not a small thing to live in a place where you can’t say what you want to for fear of political persecution, especially when you’ve grown up in other circumstances. A good friend of mine who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall and led a prosperous, happy life in St. Petersburg, fled the country on the last train out of that city to Helsinki, Finland, her young child in tow. Her goal: to start life over from scratch and avoid having to raise her child in a place where he would be brainwashed into thinking Russia’s armed forces and police were infallible and beyond critique. I suspect that many of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who joined her in fleeing the country weren’t that different.

Imagine raising a child whose unquestioning mind you can’t recognize. (That goes for you, too, Trump supporters, because — count on it! — once in office again, he would undoubtedly move toward ending elections as we know them, not to speak of shutting down whatever institutions protect our speech!)

America and the Lie that Begot Other Lies

Events in recent years indicate that Americans — particularly those in the MAGA camp — have grown inured to the public mention of armed violence. Who could forget the moment in 2016 when candidate Trump boasted at a campaign rally before winning the presidency that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”? As racially and politically motivated violence and threats have proliferated, so many of us seemed to grow ever less bothered by both the incidents themselves and the rationales of those who seek to encourage and justify them.

My own adult life began as Vladimir Putin consolidated power in Russia, while former President George W. Bush launched his — really, our — disastrous Global War on Terror, based on lies like that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, we’ve spilled all too little ink here on the nearly one million people who died across our Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African war zones since 2001 (and the many millions more who lost their lives, even if less directly, or were turned into refugees thanks to those wars of ours). And don’t forget the more than 7,000 American troops (and more than 8,000 contractors!) who died in the process, essentially baptizing our national lies in pools of blood. And how could that not have helped normalize other lies to come like Trump’s giant one about the 2020 election?

Thankfully, in this country we can still say what we want (more or less). We can still, for instance, call out the Pentagon for underreporting the deaths its forces have caused. In other words, something like the Costs of War Project that I helped to found to put our lies in context can still exist. But how long before such things could become punishable, if not by law, then through vigilantism?

Yes, President Biden is arming Israel in its gruesome fight against Hamas while providing only the most modest aid to Gaza’s war-devastated population, but we can still hold him to account for that. If the 2024 election goes to Donald Trump, how long will that be true? If we don’t get to the point right now where all of us are calling out lies all the time, then every Trumpian lie about violence — from Republican members of Congress calling the January 6th rioters “peaceful patriots” to The Donald’s claim that he would only be a dictator on “day one” of his next presidency (a desire supported by a significant majority of Republicans) — will amount to lies as consequential as the 1933 burning of the Reichstag parliament building in Germany, which Hitler’s ascendant Nazi party attributed to communists, setting the stage for him to claim sweeping powers.

We are entering a new and perilous American world and it’s important to grasp that fact. In that context, let me mention a Russian moment when I did no such thing. I still feel guilty about a dinner I had with human-rights colleagues in 2014, including a Russian activist who had dedicated his career to documenting political violence and war crimes committed under successive Russian leaders from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin. I was sitting at the far end of the table where I couldn’t catch much of the conversation and I joked that I was “out in Siberia.” Yes, my dinner companions graciously laughed, but with an undercurrent of discomfort and tension — and for good reason. They knew the dangerous world they were in and, in fact, that very activist has since been sent to a penal colony for his work discrediting the actions of the Russian armed forces. My joke is anything but a joke now and consider that a reminder of how quickly things can change — and not just in Russia, either.

In fact, oppression feels closer than ever in America today and verbal massaging, joking, or willful ignorance can only mask what another Trump presidency could mean for us all.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

Does that sound like any other armed conflict you’ve heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel’s response to the October 7th terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned.

Many Americans now see the destruction and suffering in Gaza and Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as the crises of the day and I agree. It’s hard even to keep up with the death toll in the Palestinian territories, but you can certainly give it a college try. More than 29,000 Gazans have already been killed, more than 12,000 of them reportedly children. The scale of the loss of civilian life has been breathtaking in what are supposed to be targeted missions. For example, in mid-February, in an ostensible attempt to free two Israeli hostages in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than one million civilians are now sheltering under the worst conditions imaginable, Israeli troops killed 74 Palestinians. Between December 2023 and January 2024, four strikes there had already killed at least 95 civilians. And on and on it goes. Anyone with concerns about Israel’s response to Hamas’s bloody attacks has ground to stand on.

But if war deaths among people of color in particular are really that much of a concern to Americans, especially on the political left, then there are significant gaps in our attention. Look at what’s happening in the 85 countries where the U.S. is currently engaged in “counterterrorism” efforts of one sort or another, where we fight alongside local troops, train or equip them, and conduct intelligence operations or even air strikes, all of it in an extension of those first responses to 9/11. Ask yourself if you’ve paid attention to that lately or if you were even aware that it was still happening. Do you have any idea, for instance, that our country’s military continues to pursue its war on terror across significant parts of Africa?

Given Israel’s October 7th tragedy, my mention of that date in 2001, which marked Washington’s first military response to the worst terrorist attacks on our soil, is more than a play on words. Like Israel, the U.S. was attacked by armed Islamic extremists who sought to make gruesome spectacles of ordinary Americans. Some of them, like the Israeli families smoked out of their saferooms only to be shot, flung themselves from their office buildings in New York’s Twin Towers, essentially choosing the least awful deaths under the circumstances. Yet after decades of America’s war on terror, whose benefits have been, to say the least, questionable, our tax dollars continue to fund the longest and bloodiest response to terrorism in our history.

Our own October 7th and its seemingly never-ending consequences suggest that something more sinister may be at play in shaping what violence we choose to focus on and condemn, and what violence we choose to overlook.

An International Smorgasbord of Killings

Too little ink is spilled anymore objecting to the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen who died in our global war on terror — and, of course, those are just some of the countries where we’ve fought in these years. Consider, for example, how we continue to arm and train Somali government troops in their deadly counterinsurgency war. And remember that the war on terror, as it still plays out, isn’t just President Biden’s war, though he has indeed continued it (though in 2021, he did at least get us out of the longest-running part of it in Afghanistan).

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Remember as well when you condemn the Israelis for what they’re doing that, thanks to American bombs and missiles, civilians in our own post-October 7, 2001, war zones died as they slept at home, studied, or shopped at marketplaces. Some were run over by our vehicles. Some died in NATO air strikes or in strikes by unmanned American drones, or in fires that erupted in the aftermath of such bombing and shelling. Some were run off the road, gunned down at checkpoints, blown up by bomblets left over from our use of cluster bombs, tortured or executed in U.S.-run prisons, or raped by occupying American troops.

Here are just a few examples: In 2012, an American soldier in Afghanistan shot dead 16 civilians, nine of them children, as they slept in their homes. This was anything but the first such incident of civilian targeting and would be anything but the last. In 2017, after then-President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era air strike restrictions meant to help protect civilians, the U.S. conducted more individually identifiable drone strikes than in any other year except 2012 under — yes! — President Barack Obama.

One January 2017 raid that killed more than a dozen opposition fighters in Yemen also killed Saudi and Yemeni civilians, among them children as young as eight years old. In 2021, two Yemeni families filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for the unlawful deaths of 34 relatives, including nine children, in U.S. drone strikes between 2013 and 2018, seeking recognition of harm done by the U.S. and its allies. Given that the Pentagon lacks a centralized system for tracking civilian casualties in places where our forces fight and no system at all in areas like Israel where the U.S. only provides military aid, recognition of such horrors has been a rare commodity.

Each time I write about such examples of how, in those years, my country slaughtered civilians, I need to do something like pet my cat or hug my children. That’s how much hurt I feel, especially as a military spouse, when I think about it. I always remember scholar Elaine Scarry’s insight that having to explain how war kills people (not “just” opposing forces but civilians, too!) ought to unsettle us. Only recently, just a few months late, President Biden did indeed finally caution that Israel needed to come up with a “credible plan to protect civilians” before sending its troops into the Gazan city of Rafah, and it certainly should have been a laudable message about preserving life. Unfortunately, it ignored the fact that, when they do so, they’ll be using American weaponry and that funding war — anyone’s war — necessarily means endorsing civilian deaths.

Selective Reckoning on Armed Conflict

I wonder sometimes how many of the Americans now protesting Israel’s incursions into Gaza have ever spoken up about our own country’s endless wars in this century and the human toll that’s gone with them. I suspect most Americans don’t even realize that our war on terror is still ongoing (and younger ones may know little or nothing about what we actually did in all those post-2001 years).

Perhaps such apathy can be attributed in part to the sense of righteous purpose that was first associated with launching a war in Afghanistan on that all-American October 7th of ours, while planning to democratize that country and rid women, in particular, of the Taliban’s oppressive rule. Then came our disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on President George W. Bush’s spurious claims that its ruler, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction and the initial protests of so many Americans responding to the grim, if flashy, optics of those first air strikes on Baghdad with countrywide protests that soon faded away.

After that, most Americans stopped paying attention to our ongoing mobilization of troops to send abroad, the slow-motion destruction of entire communities in distant lands, and the creation of an estimated 38 million refugees from those conflicts. A case in point: When I do a Google search of the words “Israel, Gaza civilians killed,” I get notice of 13 million articles written on the subject since October 7th of last year. When, however, I search for “War on Terror, civilians killed” without even circumscribing the time range, I get about 850,000 results. Part of the problem undoubtedly lies in semantics and search-engine logistics. After all, in some sense, there was no such thing as the war on terror but instead the war in Iraq, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Syria, and so on. A framing of our foreign wars that called more attention to the specifics might still focus our attention on the policymakers across the political spectrum who continue to vote for bloated military budgets and all the global destruction that goes with them.

Caring About the Costs of All Wars

Is it possible that one factor in the objections of some Americans to Israel’s war in Gaza isn’t just the ongoing nightmare of civilian deaths, but also a distaste for the nation and people prosecuting this particular war? Consider that the incidence of anti-Semitic attacks and threats on U.S. soil has exponentially risen in recent years, spiking especially dramatically in the months following the start of Israel’s war, or consider the recent mealy-mouthed responses of the leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to whether calls for the genocide of Jews should be censured on university campuses, or what is reportedly happening at some of the nation’s most highly ranked social-work schools where certain Jewish students have claimed not to feel safe when some of their peers call them “colonizers.” (When I was in social work school in 2017, I heard a Jewish student told in class that she was demonstrating “white fragility” in speaking up about her family’s experiences of anti-Semitism in this country.)

In light of such examples, it’s easy for me to see why a double standard might be applied here to the Jewish state and the U.S. one and, more to the point, in the wake of a rash of anti-Semitic verbal threats, physical attacks, and harassment, it’s striking how readily so many Americans now blame Israelis generally for the war perpetrated by that country’s right-wing government, but not Americans for our wars, which most of us know all too little about. What’s more, we shouldn’t forget that part of what shaped Israel’s very formation was the refusal of the U.S. government to take in Jewish refugees before, during, or after the Holocaust. In the wake of World War II, many Jews needed a safe place to go, so a place needed to be made for them.

Don’t think, by the way, that I’m suggesting we should stop holding Israel accountable for war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. We shouldn’t. Not for a second. But I’m suggesting that if we care about peace in the Middle East, then we need to focus as well on this country’s foreign policy and the racism that shapes it. If we really care about the costs of war, then we need to be equal-opportunity critics and consider not only the most highly reported conflict of the moment but also the chronic ones fought, whether we realize it or not, distinctly in our names.

Among other tasks, that means we need to think through the long-term consequences of policies that began under the Trump administration, which elevated Israel’s standing in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and exacerbated Palestinian-Israeli tensions long before the Hamas attack of October 7th. It’s also important that we ask ourselves what it means for us to agitate for an Israeli ceasefire (as well we should!) when, since our own October 7th, our wars overseas have largely been protected by American silence and so complicity. Otherwise, it’s likely that progressives and moderates alike will continue to be divided by whatever conflict rules the day in our capricious mainstream mediasphere, rather than speaking with one voice about the costs of war and how they drain our economy and our culture.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

He’s also provided some of America’s favorite headlines and jokes, even for progressives like me. As one fictional mom quipped in a Saturday Night Live skit at the end of his term in office, “If he’s gone, what am I supposed to do? Focus on my kids?” She was also mockingly lamenting the possibility that startling headlines like “‘Grab ‘em by the pussy” would disappear from our all-American world.

It turns out she needn’t have worried! It seems the media is far more eager these days to cover the former president’s endless missteps (or are they just steps?) than highlight the investments made by President Biden’s administration, which have finally started to pay off in terms of higher wages, more jobs, and lower carbon emissions. Big as we are on short-term gratification (or gloom) and the latest polls, we seem so much less interested in examining what presidents actually do.

Among Us

With the 2024 election heading toward us the way that asteroid hurtled toward the dinosaurs, while our sensationalistic political culture shows little sign of changing anytime soon, I’d suggest that we turn the conversation from the crazy stuff “Orange Jesus” loves to say to the fact that Trump and his supporters are, for the foreseeable future, going to be among us. Isn’t it time, imagining the worst to come, to start talking about what an anti-Trump resistance would look like?

To do so, we’d first have to take a closer look at what some of his most influential supporters are planning for the next time around. You may have noticed that a set of conservative think tanks and scholars, who call themselves Project 2025, have drafted a nearly thousand-page blueprint for a hypothetical Trump second term. It’s a document labeled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (though all it really purports to conserve is an abiding American focus on funding our military-industrial complex). The document covers everything from how a Trump administration ought to handle federal staffing to how it could restructure military and federal law enforcement agencies to its own benefit. Let me flag a few parts of that document that I find particularly concerning and suggest small ways in which you and I might act to preserve democratic values in a country that seems either to take them all too much for granted or care about them less and less.

“Taking the Reins of Government”

When it comes to the plans of Trump’s advisers to reshape the executive branch in an autocratic fashion, should he be reelected, the title in the relevant section of their document — “Taking the Reins of Government” — perfectly catches the top-down approach to power they envision. For years now, the Orange Jesus has made no secret of his urge to launch retribution against those in the Washington bureaucracy who opposed him and ensure that tens of thousands of career public service positions in federal agencies and the White House will, in (his) future, be held by people vetted for their loyalty to him (and only him!). So reads the first major section of that Mandate, which outlines how a second Trump administration would assert far more direct White House control over this country through the federal bureaucracy.

In fact, the document’s authors advocate that an incoming Trump administration circumvent the Vacancies Reform Act, which establishes standards for congressional vetting of temporarily appointed federal personnel. They suggest instead indefinitely using acting personnel in vacant positions, particularly ones the first Trump administration was hostile to like State Department diplomatic posts.

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Notably, the document is remarkably explicit about its recommendation to appoint acting personnel in departments already known for their abuse of American civil rights. (Think: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials kidnapping Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland during the summer of 2020.) A chilling example is the Mandate’s discussion of how a Trump White House could appoint acting personnel at DHS from scratch to “guarantee implementation of a Day One agenda.” I can’t help thinking: Is this what Trump meant when he told a Fox News Town Hall that he would be a “dictator” only on day one? Ostensibly, he could make many of the worst decisions immediately and then leave his goons to carry out the rest of the dirty work, Putin-style.

Given such a topsy-turvy reality, if you were hoping that journalists would still be close at hand to help call out any disastrous lapses in integrity, think again. Because count on something else: serious journalists wouldn’t be allowed within a country mile of Donald Trump and his closest advisers. In fact, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of the Mandate suggest the White House should have a very different relationship with its press pool, if there even were to be one at all. In describing a future Trumpian White House Office of Communications, the Mandate reads, “No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”

Right! A Trump White House undoubtedly wouldn’t have space for all too much. At another point, in a paragraph on how Trump’s future communications director would need to “navigate the mainstream media” to advance the president’s agenda, the authors write, “The new Administration should examine the nature of the relationship between itself and the White House Correspondents Association and consider whether an alternative coordinating body might be more suitable.”

An “alternative coordinating body” organized by Donald Trump and crew? What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, just imagine a Trumpian future in which those with the president’s ear on every topic will be chosen by and aligned with that very same unhinged person, while his administration attempts to transform the media into its own propaganda arm, while repressing anything that might prove hostile to him in any way. In a second Trump White House, supporting an independent media would mean more than just subscribing to the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and local newspapers that will undoubtedly come under existential threats. It’s also going to mean providing an actual safe space for journalists whose exposés of government abuse will make them prime targets for the Orange Jesus’s followers. Think, for an analogous example, of murdered Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed abuse by Russian security forces against Muslim minority communities in the south of that country.

Now imagine, in an unhinged second Trump presidency, what sorts of doxing and other nightmares writers and their families might have to endure. We’ll all have to be ready to let such figures (or their threatened children and spouses) into our homes, lock the doors, and tell no one that they’re there. Meanwhile, the rest of us would have to protest — and get others to join us – when journalists and other oppositional figures start to be arrested under bogus charges or attacked by thugs. In a second Trump era, it will be of crucial importance for the rest of us to stand with those who continue to insist on telling the truth, even if you don’t agree with them politically.

It will be no less important to elevate and celebrate the writing of people who describe acts of resistance and heroism, be it their own or of others. I’m thinking about people like Washington Post columnist and author Jennifer Rubin or former Republican politico (and truthteller) Liz Cheney, who have made a point not just of critiquing the fascists aligned with Trump but of describing how to build life-affirming new policies that would serve the very constitution a second Trump term would undoubtedly try to toss into the gutter.

“The Common Defense”

Those would-be Trump presidential advisers have been remarkably detailed in describing their hopes for how a second Trump presidency could transform the U.S. military, and that section of their Mandate, I must admit, initially sounded okay to me. After all, they seemed to want to keep this country out of yet more foreign conflicts, while making the Pentagon accountable for how it spends its money. They also want more employment and financial support to be offered to military families (like mine!). In other words, many of the things I’ve been writing about at TomDispatch for years.

I was even initially impressed that they claimed to want the military to deprioritize “manufactured extremism” — until I realized that what they’re evidently referring to is the Pentagon’s plan (largely stalled at this point) to screen new and existing servicemembers for alignment with Nazi-style and white supremacist ideologies. In fact — I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn — their blueprint goes on to describe a military remade in the very image of those Project 2025 leaders as white, cisgender, and heterosexual men, and they want to start ’em young, too. The Mandate recommends standardized testing in all federally funded schools to check kids’ aptitude for military service. They want, in other words, to offer the Pentagon increased access to children for the purpose of recruitment. And the proposal only gets “better” after that. In fact, Trump’s future would-be advisers go on to support expelling people with gender dysphoria from that very military.

How are we then to trust that the Department of Defense won’t be used against the American people, if our troops are distinctly shaped not to reflect our exploding diversity? In fact, The Donald has called the 2024 election “the final battle” and has already suggested that he might take out after his foes (“vermin”), even possibly invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military to do so. And then, it seems, the rest of us would have to live with a military that embraced the very types who sought to tear down our elected government on January 6, 2021.

Oh, and even better news! The Mandate writers also propose increasing the number and size of American companies producing munitions here in the U.S., funding arms acquisition and training at more universities, and increasing the power of the arms production industry even further.

They also propose — and what could possibly go wrong here? — that the government should enhance its ability to deploy special forces and conduct irregular (nonstate) warfare “across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict.” Hmmmm…. It’s hard for me not to recall a recent response by a Trump lawyer to a question by a federal judge in which he claimed that a president should be immune from prosecution for ordering a special forces unit to assassinate a political opponent. Welcome to 2025 and Trump 2.0!

All You Need Is Love

If former President Trump listens to his all-too-well-prepared advisers — and many think he would be more disciplined in doing so a second time around — there would be far less of a buffer of reasonable civil servants loyal to the Constitution between him and the rest of us. Given that, I’m suggesting that those of us in military communities tell our loved ones to defy any orders to brutalize other Americans who pose no violent threat to the rest of us — those exercising freedom of assembly and speech, running for public office, writing the truth. And even though this may sound counterintuitive to some of you, get rid of your guns! If the Trumpian security state that might arise did everything its would-be advisers advocate, there would be no point in taking up arms against it. After all, civil wars are the bloodiest forms of human conflict, with the worst impact on civilians.

But don’t give up either. Make sure in every way you can that elections continue, and show up to vote. Volunteer to get people to the polls and inform them of their rights as voters. Become an election worker or volunteer. Do your damnedest to keep a non-Trumpian world alive.

Change is afoot, and it could be bad, but who knows? It’s also possible that election 2024 will prove to be white supremacy’s dying gasp. Think of how readily Trump’s supporters scuttle away when the candidates he endorses lose elections. And if our very own Orange Jesus is more decisively denied access to power through a jail sentence or another big election loss, maybe all the planning of his toadies won’t mean a tinker’s damn. But that will only be true if we all show up and act, starting now.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

“Maybe I’ll work for the Department of Defense,” my companion finally suggested all too logically.

I can see just where he’s coming from since, during Trump’s first term, with some notable exceptions, “his” generals made it a point to stick to the Constitution rather than allow “their” president to govern by tweet. I also believe that, whoever’s in office, politicians from both sides of the aisle won’t hesitate to continue to fund the Pentagon in their usual profligate fashion (regardless of the long-term human and financial costs of doing so).

My friend’s plans instantly provoked my sense of cynicism. During Trump’s first term, the only thing standing between him and a political takeover of the Pentagon was the mistaken conviction that his appointees would show ultimate fealty to him rather than the rule of law. He’s already threatened the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, whom he saw as disloyal, with death in a second Trump term. Now he knows one thing: he needs to loyalty-test anyone in a future administration of his ahead of time.

With all of this on my mind, I turned to my friend and said, “I think you should just get out of government. Why not go to the nonprofit sector?” After a pause, I added, “Voters like us also better show up so he doesn’t get reelected.”

Being the ethical public servant he is, he simply responded, “It’s not really our choice” and changed the subject. Feeling grateful that we still live in a society that, at least theoretically, respects the political neutrality of public officials, I shut up.

But I’ll say one thing about that future of ours: there are all too many intelligent Americans discussing the next election as though their own lives won’t change if Donald Trump wins a second term. As a military spouse, a clinical social worker who treats war-affected military families, and a scholar of war and political violence, I’m no stranger to the ways autocratic leaders can upend daily life, particularly during times of war when people thirst for meaning.

I’m thinking about our very own country, which, 22 years later, thanks to its never-ending post-9/11 “war on terror,” still has ongoing military operations in some 78 countries, making violence — and the gaping holes it leaves in American communities and our federal budget — this country’s endless new normal. But I also know that it could get much worse.

From the heart of our empire with its legions of injured, stressed-out, and broken troops and veterans, I’ve watched Trump demean and threaten institutions like our free press and public health agencies that still prop up what’s left of our American way of life. And I worry.

Doing in “the Deep State” (and You)

In July 2022, as a former president, The Donald predicted that, in a Trumpian future, the “deep state” would be dismantled and “we will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States.” And believe me, that won’t be all. Privileges you and I take for granted — like being able to get our health care paid for by insurance companies — could disappear if Trump were to retake the presidency in 2024.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed that, since he lost the last election, he and his cronies have been working with the ultra-right think tank the Heritage Foundation, along with dozens of other like-minded groups, to create Project 2025, an alarming plan for a potential second Trump term. It’s aimed at rescuing “the country from the grip of the radical Left” and turning the presidency into something approaching an autocracy. As part of that plan, his far-right allies are already screening some 20,000 potential MAGA appointees to be placed in every agency across the federal government.

Currently, a president can legally fill about 4,000 federal political appointments. In a second term, however, Trump plans to use an executive order to put an additional 50,000 such jobs into the same category. People who have spent their careers making sure that crucial services are delivered to American homes, that research benefiting the public good is conducted, and that people get to school and work safely could be replaced by those whose most crucial qualification would be loyalty to Trump and his whims.

And don’t think that my concern here is based solely on my obvious left-leaning political affiliations: career public servants of every sort are simply more effective than private companies (no less future Trump political appointees) because they know how to distribute resources safely and quickly to hundreds of millions of people. They are also more responsive to the public.

Take health care, for example. So many of us are dependent upon the whims of private companies for it. Only a thin veneer of government bureaucracy ensures that insurance companies comply with the law so that we all can visit a doctor when we need to. As a therapist, I’ve spent months trying to contact individuals in two private companies charged with administering taxpayer funds to Medicaid, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration. My claims weren’t getting paid until I finally contacted two of my federal congressional representatives who dispatched staff members to contact those companies. Within days, thousands of dollars of back pay landed in my bank account and I was able to continue my work with patients.

And consider that only a taste of what could come in a second Trump era. The same goes for other things we take for granted like the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture ensuring that medications and food on our store shelves don’t make us sick. Our often over-nourished bodies would become sicker, more vulnerable, and more worn down if it weren’t for that “deep state” Trump seeks to replace from depths all his own.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

And the privileges of being American would become all the harder to access because our roads, bridges, tunnels, and water systems would only further deteriorate, instead of continuing to experience the green revival they’re undergoing thanks to a Biden administration infusion of cash. Under a second Trump presidency, count on initiatives requiring work and scientific expertise (rather than just bluster) not getting done. After all, his main economic campaign promise in 2016 was to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure like roads in America’s aging Rust Belt. In the process, he swore that he would bring back blue-collar manufacturing jobs. In reality, after his four years in office, spending on physical infrastructure like roads and bridges had stagnated.

And how about the infrastructure that protects the safety of our groundwater? Spending on clean water during the Trump administration fell to a 30-year low. In 2018, a major federal study reporting on groundwater contamination found that harmful chemicals called perfluoroalkyls, or PFAS, had already contaminated roughly 1% of the nation’s groundwater supply — disproportionately in military and veteran communities. Here, Trump’s appointees didn’t even pretend to do good. Instead, his White House tried to suppress the report and when the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry put it out anyway, the Trump Environmental Protection Agency’s response was to use administration-appointed scientists to write a new report minimizing the potentially harmful effects of PFAS.

Trump also rolled back a key 1970 law requiring that new infrastructure projects abide by environmental regulations that preserve wildlife and waterways, while avoiding further contamination of the environment — a change that disproportionately affected minority and military communities. All told, these and other environmental rollbacks led to thousands of more deaths annually due to pollution.

At stake in allowing our infrastructure to crumble is, of course, the condition of roads, bridges, clean drinking water, and so much else affecting everyday life. After all, to mention just one of so many problems, if roads are poor, people can’t get to the hospital as easily, which can mean the difference between life and death.

Enemy of the People

Trump has also made it clear that he sees those who oppose him politically as “vermin” and has pledged to destroy people who fall into that category. He has dehumanized journalists, in particular, calling them the “enemy of the people,” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” and “low-life reporters.” He’s questioned their truthfulness and sanctioned physical violence against them through memes like one he posted on Twitter of himself beating up a figure with a CNN logo superimposed on his face.

During Trump’s first term, his stream of verbal attacks on members of the press led to credible threats toward news organizations, among other figures whose lives, not just their ability to do their jobs, were endangered. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Trump stated at a rally that the journalists who had reported in advance on that decision should reveal their informants or face future rape in prison. And in a second Trump term, with the government and federal law enforcement reorganized along distinctly Trumpian lines, who would be there to block such horrors?

Working to destroy a free press would also, of course, have life (and death) implications. A simple case in point from recent years: after Covid vaccines became available to the public in early 2021, excess mortality in red states, where many believed Republican disinformation campaigns about such shots, soared more than a third higher than in blue states. Now imagine that happening at a national level.

It’s disturbing to contemplate what, in a second Trump administration, a chilling of the mediasphere could mean. Let me take an example close to my own heart. Military family members have relied heavily on our ability to access one another’s writings and social media posts to find validation and support for our daily struggles, involving constant moves, the mental anguish of loved ones, financial struggles, and isolation. In our world, any time a deranged Trump supporter threatens someone they disagree with, they puncture an already fragile social safety net of information-sharing and support among this country’s war-beleaguered troops and veterans. And in a second Trump era, that could happen to all of us on a national level.

The Threat from Within

Threats from the former president and his supporters would undoubtedly have real teeth in a second Trump term. Since the January 6th riots, it’s been no secret that the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and local and federal law enforcement agencies include significant numbers of extremists who sympathize with far-right groups that exhibit racist and anti-Semitic views. And keep in mind that members of the Republican Party have already successfully pressured the military not to screen its ranks for just such types.

Now, imagine an America in which Donald Trump has installed his own loyalists — and this time around they will indeed be loyal to him — in the top ranks of the Pentagon. As Axios recently reported, Pentagon officials speaking under anonymity have voiced concerns about the Trump-allied Heritage Foundation’s plan to “prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory [and] manufactured extremism.” They read into that plan’s very vagueness on the subject Trump’s intention to dramatically alter the role of the military in American life, including the possibility of employing the Insurrection Act — and so that very military — on his first day in office to suppress any civil demonstrations against him.

Electing Trump and crew, intent as they are on sowing hostility and contempt for the institutions of government, means putting into office those who embrace a future culture of violence. He and his supporters remind me of a family friend who, when we were little, used to get angry at me if I was beating him at checkers. I recall him flipping over our board the minute it became clear that my next move would mean victory for me.

The adults in our lives used to try to contain his rage by comforting him and, like sycophantic members of the Republican Party today, they effectively nurtured a bully. That kid would, in fact, grow up to become a federal law enforcement official who would indeed come under investigation for hateful social media posts. Under Trump round two, vigilantes with grudges like his would find a role model in the Oval Office and we would all face the repercussions.

If you don’t want violence to explode inside our borders against people like you and me, then each of us should do our damnedest to ensure that a candidate who prioritizes revenge over those who protect law and order, tell the truth, work hard, and play fair doesn’t make it into the Oval Office a second time. Otherwise, it’s likely that the solid ground afforded us by our imperfect union will be pulled from beneath our feet and it will be all too hard to reassemble the pieces.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com