Alphonse “Scarface” Capone (d. 1947) was a liquor smuggler in Chicago and head of an organized crime conspiracy in that city. When bars declined to take their covert supplies under the table from Capone, he had them blown up. Some 100 persons died in this massive terror campaign, and they were only a small number of his victims. This is how he tried to present himself in one of his mug shots — sober, unworried, defiant. In fact, he was an impetuous, vain, violent man. Like Trump, Inc., he did not pay his taxes, and ultimately went down for it.

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1920s Prison Mug Shot Of Gangster Scarface Al Capone Looking At Camera Chicago Illinois US. (Photo by Charles Phelps Cushing/Classicstock/Getty Images)

Or here’s a young John Gotti, looking distinctly unreformed and unreformable. He became an enforcer for the Gambino family in New York, specializing in narcotics trafficking and loansharking, not to mention murder. In fact, he took over the Gambino crime family after having his competition removed. In 1985, he had his rival for the top post, Aniello Dellacroce, gunned down in front of a restaurant, in the same way that Trump tried to erase Joe Biden’s presidential victory by violence on the part of his shock troops. In 1990, FBI agents and NYPD detectives, having carefully built a case against him with authorized electronic surveillance and using his close associate “Sammy the Bull” Gravano as an informant, arrested Gotti on “multiple counts of racketeering, extortion, jury tampering, and other crimes.” Here is another similarity to Trump, who was also charged with racketeering. Like Gotti, Trump was viewed as likely to threaten and tamper with the jury. In Gotti’s case the jurors remained anonymous.

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In this handout, Italian-American gangster John Gotti (1940 – 2002) in a mug shot, US, 30th March 1965. (Photo by Kypros/Getty Images)

Finally, let us consider another populist politician, this time a Democrat, James Traficant of Ohio. A sitting congressman, he was convicted in 2002 of 10 counts of racketeering, bribery and fraud. Traficant defended John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker who was accused of having been a Nazi prison camp guard and who was extradited to Germany. He stood against foreclosure on some of his constituents’ homes. But he was thought to be in the back pocket of organized crime in northern Ohio. In a different era, he hit some of the same notes of popular discontent as Trump later would. But like Trump, he was corrupt to the core and his methods were often criminal. Like Trump, no one knew what to make of his hair. He does not look so much angry in his mug shot as smug and confident, unbowed, and in a way defiant. He insisted on defending himself at his trial. There is an old saw that a man who defends himself has a fool for a client. He lost badly, and became the first representative to be expelled from Congress since the Civil War era. There may be another parallel here, in that Trump may end up being ineligible for office because of his various crimes, according to the 14th amendment.

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UNDATED PHOTO: Former U.S. Rep. James Traficant (D-OH) is seen in this undated photo. Traficant was sentenced July 30, 2002 to eight years in prison for bribery, tax evasion and racketeering. The House of Representatives voted 420-1 to expel him last week, making Traficant only the second member of Congress kicked out since the Civil War. (Photo by Summit County Jail/Getty Images)

Co-published with Documented

( ProPublica ) – A few months ago, Leonard Leo laid out his next audacious project.

Ever since the longtime Federalist Society leader helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and then received more than a billion dollars from a wealthy Chicago business owner to disburse to conservative causes, Leo’s next moves had been the subject of speculation.

Now, Leo declared in a slick but private video to potential donors, he planned to “crush liberal dominance” across American life. The country was plagued by “woke-ism” in corporations and education, “one-sided journalism” and “entertainment that’s really corrupting our youth,” said Leo amid snippets of cheery music and shots of sunsets and American flags.

Sitting tucked into a couch, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair gone to gray, Leo conveyed his inspiration and intentions: “I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’”

Leo revealed his latest battle plan in the previously unreported video for the Teneo Network, a little-known group he called “a tremendously important resource for the future of our country.”

Teneo is building what Leo called in the video “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, among authors and academics, with pro athletes and Hollywood producers. A Federalist Society for everything.

Despite its linchpin role in Leo’s plans, Teneo (which is not the similarly named consulting firm associated with former officials in the Bill Clinton administration) has kept a low public profile. Its one-page website includes bland slogans — “Timeless ideas. Fresh approach” — and scant details. Its co-founder described Teneo as “private and confidential” in one presentation, and the group doesn’t disclose the vast majority of its members or its funders.

But ProPublica and Documented have obtained more than 50 hours of internal Teneo videos and hundreds of pages of documents that reveal the organization’s ambitious agenda, influential membership and burgeoning clout. We have also interviewed Teneo members and people familiar with the group’s activities. The videos, documents and interviews provide an unfiltered look at the lens through which the group views the power of the left — and how it plans to combat it.

In response to questions for this story, Leo said in a statement: “Teneo’s young membership proves that the conservative movement is poised to be even more talented, driven, and successful in the future. This is a group that knows how to build winning teams.”

The records show Teneo’s members have included a host of prominent names from the conservative vanguard, including such elected officials as U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a co-founder of the group. Other members have included Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, now the fourth-ranking House Republican, as well as Nebraska’s attorney general and Virginia’s solicitor general. Three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, are members. Another is the federal judge who struck down a Biden administration mask mandate. The heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA — all key cogs in the world of national conservative politics — have been listed as Teneo members.

Conservative media figures like Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire, several pro athletes and dozens of executives and senior figures in the worlds of finance, energy and beyond have also been members.

Leo joined Teneo’s board of directors as chairman in 2021 and has since become a driving force.

Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr, a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative activism, said in a 2019 video for new members that Teneo had “many, many, many dozens” of members working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, State Department, Justice Department and Pentagon. “They’re everywhere.”

The goal, Baehr said in another video, was “a world in which Teneans serve in the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president.”

Here’s how “the Left” works in America, according to Baehr.

“Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in midtown Manhattan,” he said in a 2020 Teneo video: “a billionaire hedge funder,” “a film producer,” “a Harvard professor” and “a New York Times writer.”

“The billionaire says: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’” Baehr continued. “Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.’ ”

After a single lunch, Baehr concluded, elite liberals can “put different kinds of capital together” and “go out into the world” and “basically wreck shop.”

In a recorded video “town hall” held for incoming members, Baehr, a graduate of three Ivy League universities and a serial entrepreneur fluent in tech startup lingo, recalled the moment when he had the epiphany to create a conservative counter-effort.

It happened a decade earlier when he was eating lunch at a “fairly uninviting” Baja Fresh in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., with his then-boss Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic venture capitalist.

Baehr explained in the video that he had become frustrated as he kicked around right-of-center politics and activism for a few years, working on Capitol Hill, in the George W. Bush White House and for right-of-center groups including the American Enterprise Institute and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Baehr and Thiel lamented what they saw as the fragmented state of conservative networks, with their hidebound think tanks and intellectual centers that hold sway over right-of-center politics. A rare bright spot on their side, Baehr and Thiel agreed, was the Federalist Society. Thiel had, in fact, served as president of the Stanford Federalist Society. What if there were a group similar to the Federalist Society for venture capitalists or corporate CEOs or members of the media? (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2008, Baehr, Hawley and others launched Teneo — Latin for “I grasp” or “I endure.” Hawley, then an associate lawyer in private practice, authored Teneo’s founding principles, according to the new member talk hosted by Baehr, and served on the group’s board. Its core beliefs align with the broader conservative establishment’s: limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, strong national defense and civil society and belief in a “transcendent order” that is “founded in tradition, philosophy, or theology.”

For a long time, the group didn’t live up to expectations. In its first year, Teneo raised a paltry $77,000, according toits tax filing. From 2009 to 2017, the group, based first in Washington, D.C., and later in Austin, Texas, never raised more than $750,000 in a single year, tax records show. One member described in an interview Teneo’s early days as little more than a run-of-the-mill dinner club with partisan overtones: “Instead of being an organization about ideas, it was all about being a Republican.”

Enter Leo. In the early years of the Trump administration, he and the Federalist Society had remarkable influence within the new government. The Federalist Society had brought the legal doctrines of originalism and textualism — close readings of laws and the Constitution to adhere to the intent and words of the authors — into the mainstream. Leo had taken a leave of absence from the group to advise President Trump on judicial appointments, helping shepherd the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and helping to fill more than 200 other positions in federal district and appellate courts. By the time Trump left office, he had put on the bench28% of all federal judges in America.

In the town hall video, Baehr explained how he modeled Teneo on the Federalist Society. Leo’s “secret sauce,” he said, was to identify an “inner core” group of people within the Federalist Society’s 60,000 members. Leo was “identifying them and recruiting them for either specific roles to serve as judges or to spin up and launch critical projects often which you would have no idea about.”

Soon after Leo took an interest in Teneo, the group’s finances soared. Annual revenuereached $2.3 million in 2020 and nearly $5 million in 2021, according to tax records. In 2021, the bulk of Teneo’s income — more than $3 million — came from one source: DonorsTrust, a clearinghouse for conservative, libertarian and other charitable gifts that masks the original source of the money. In 2020, the Leo-run group that received the Chicago business owner’s $1.6 billion donation gave $41 million to DonorsTrust, which had $1.5 billion in assets as of 2021.

Teneo’s other funders have included marquee conservative donors: hedge fund investor Paul Singer, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DeVos family, according to Baehr.

As the group’s finances improved, its videos became much more professionally produced, and its website underwent a dramatic upgrade from previous iterations. All of this was part of what Baehr called “Teneo 2.0,” a major leap forward for the group, driven in part by Leo’s guidance and involvement.

Baehr declined an interview request. He said in a statement: “Since Teneo began, I’ve been building hundreds of friendships among diverse leaders who have a deep love for this country and are working on innovative solutions to drive human flourishing for all. Teneo has made me a better husband, father, and leader.”

Teneo aims to help members find jobs, write books, meet spouses, secure start-up financing or nonprofit donors and learn about public service. As described in a “Community Vision” report from 2019, Teneo seeks to distinguish itself by acting as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing.”

Many of the connections happen at Teneo’s annual retreat, which brings together hundreds of members and their spouses, plus allies including politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and DeSantis as well as business leaders and prominent academics. Speakers at past Teneo retreats have included luminaries spanning politics, culture, business and the law: New York Times columnist David Brooks, federal judge Trevor McFadden, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, “Woke, Inc.” author and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former Trump cabinet official and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, ultrawealthy donors and activists Dick and Betsy DeVos, and Chick-fil-A board chair Dan Cathy.

But the group’s internal documents and videos also show the widening sprawl of its other activities. Teneo currently has 20 regional chapters nationwide, plus industry working groups focused, most recently, on media, corporate America, finance and law. In April, the group is hosting a “finance summit” in South Beach that its invitation says will “convene rising conservative talent from major financial institutions, funds, and family offices to connect and discuss key industry issues fundamental to the future of our country.”

Teneo members represent different facets of the conservative movement writ large. Some Teneo members were “very strong Trump defenders,” Baehr said in the 2019 town hall video, while others have opposed Trump vehemently. Baehr said there were clear divisions within the group’s members about immigration and trade policy. “Hopefully other ones, maybe Green New Deal, I hope that’s more like 99 to 1” in opposition, he said.

It’s in the town hall video that Baehr assured new members that Teneo “is private and confidential.” He said the group will never reveal the names of its members without their permission, though they are free to disclose their membership if they want to. Members must be in their 40s or younger to join.

Baehr said Teneo’s website is crafted so as not to pique the interest of Senate staffers who might look up the group if one of its members mentions Teneo during a confirmation process for a judgeship or a cabinet position. “We think a lot about that to protect your current and future leadership opportunities,” Baehr explained.

This strategy appears to have worked. A spokesperson for Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a critic of Leo’s who has spoken extensively about dark money and the courts, said the senator’s staff was “not familiar with Teneo.” During the confirmation process of Ryan Holte, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Holte was asked several written questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal., about his membership in Teneo, but Feinstein spelled the group’s name wrong each time. (Asked what the mission of the group was, Holte responded that Teneo was a “nonpartisan, and nonprofit, organization that gathers members from a variety of professional backgrounds for dinners and social activities to discuss current events.”)

A recent Teneo fundraising email laid out how the group can bring its members’ influence together in service of a cause.

To “confront” what he dubbed “woke capitalism,” Jonathan Bunch, a longtime Leo deputy and now Teneo board member, wrote that the group had brought together a coalition of Teneans “working with (or serving as) state attorneys general, state financial officers, state legislators, journalists, media executives and best-in-class public affairs professionals” to launch investigations, hold hearings, pull state investment funds and publish op-eds and news stories in response to so-called environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies at the corporate level.

“Our members were in the rooms where it happened,” Bunch wrote.

Another project underway, Baehr explained in a 2020 presentation, was a “surreptitious and exciting” effort to map key institutions in major cities — private schools, country clubs, newspapers, Rotary and so on — and find ways to get Teneo members inside those institutions and help members connect with each other. The initiative has begun by mapping Atlanta and several cities in Texas.

For those Teneo members who run for elected office, the network offers easy access to a large pool of donors and allies. A Leo acolyte and member of Teneo’s Midwest membership committee, Will Scharf, is now running for Missouri attorney general. Campaign finance records show that dozens of Teneo members made substantial early contributions to Scharf’s campaign, including Leo, Baehr and other members of Teneo’s leadership, who last year each gave the maximum allowable donation of $2,650.

In an email, Scharf said many of his “dearest friends are members of Teneo, and it has been a privilege to be involved with such an extraordinarily talented and committed group of young conservatives.”

Leo’s own statements about Teneo suggest that his plan for the group extends well beyond achieving near-term political victories.

“When you’re fighting a battle for the heart and soul of our culture, you want to know you’re in the trenches with someone you can trust, someone you know, and someone who will have your back,” Teneo’s “Community Vision” report quotes Leo as saying. “We don’t win unless we build friendship and fellowship with other people — and that’s what you’re doing here with Teneo.”

Andy Kroll is a ProPublica reporter covering voting, elections and other democracy issues.

Via ProPublica

More than three weeks after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Ahmini for disobeying Iran’s strict laws, which make it compulsory for women to wear the hijab – or Islamic headscarf – protests continue to rage on the streets of all major cities. On Saturday, protesters even managed to hack into Iran’s biggest news channel to broadcast their message to the whole country.

A broadcast featuring supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in a meeting with state officials, was replaced by images of protesters who have died in the violent crackdown on dissent in Iran. The popular chant, “woman, life, freedom”, which has become the slogan of the protests, had been incorporated into a song, an excerpt of which was broadcast as were calls for viewers to “join us and rise up”.

It is estimated that 185 people, including at least 19 children, have been killed since news of Amini’s death emerged on September 16. It has been reported that 14 members of Iran’s security forces have also been killed.

The “hijab protests” have grown from the outrage of Iranian feminists at the country’s oppressive morality police to a general expression of resistance and discontent with the Islamic Republic itself. There have been reports of general strikes in several cities.

There are parallels with the 1979 revolution that toppled the last shah of Iran. Women played a major role in that uprising, too, wearing the hijab to show their rejection of the ban on the head covering decreed by the shah’s father in 1936 – later overturned, but still a symbol of the repressive monarchy.

But, if the 1979 revolution delivered the long-sought-after independence from western imperialism, it also delivered the people of Iran to an authoritarian brand of patriarchy. And the hijab, which many women had taken to wearing in defiance of the shah’s regime, quickly became a tool of the Islamic Republic’s oppression of women.

But the rise of the Islamic Republic’s morality police, enforcing gender separation in public, and increasingly in private, affected everyone’s freedom: men and women alike. As in 1979, protests have been fiercest in schools and universities, but there are signs they are spreading to a broader cross-section of society. Many people are angry at the regime’s handling of the economy in the face of western sanctions and the hardline government’s seeming incompetence in negotiating a deal with Washington that could lessen the impact of those restrictions.

This is not a revolution

I’ve been asked several times in the past three weeks the same questions as I was asked during the mass protests of 2009: “Is this a revolution? Will it bring down the regime?” My answer has to be analytical. In the so-called “Green Movement” of 2009, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Then too, the killing of a young Iranian woman, 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan – who was shot during an anti-government protest – enraged the populace even further.

At the time, I wrote an article for The Guardian, which was given the headline: Iran: This is not a revolution. The article pointed out the differences between the mass protests that year and the revolution of 1979 that had toppled the late shah – not only the problem the protesters had in identifying a “bad guy” to blame, but also pointing out that the regime was open to a degree of flexibility and concession. The same headline could be used now to describe recent events. And here’s what my research suggests to me.

For a start, governments in general have become more adept at using technology to manage populations. There has been widespread use of social media in Iran, which has high internet penetration and a generation of tech-savvy youth learning how to use online tools to mobilise opposition. But the Islamic Republic is also adept at controlling cyberspace, even those who try to use virtual private networks and other technology used by Iranians to escape censorship.

And, unlike in 1979, there is no charismatic leader ready to assume the revolutionary mantle. This is, thus far, a movement without leaders – and revolutions tend to need a figurehead for whom people are prepared to take risks – a Lenin, Mao, Castro or, as in 1979, an Ayatollah Khomeini.

I must just add one caveat here. One of the main enforcers for the Islamic Republic is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). If the IRGC decided to remain in its barracks or refused to fire on protesters if ordered, this could change everything. This refusal to cause further bloodshed would need to be widespread and not merely sporadic.

There is, so far, no indication that this is likely to happen. But the popular fury at the killing of Mahsa Amini – along with the deaths of several other young women for the crime of demanding justice and freedom – can only undermine the crumbling edifice of Iran’s increasingly unpopular theocracy.

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, SOAS, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

That isn’t enough. Congress needs to legislate explicitly so that if a Trump wanna-be becomes president in 2025, he can’t just impose such a measure again. The Democrats can do this now, for about 18 months before they likely lose the House of Representatives in 2022 and should put a rush order on it.

Moreover, the Arab press is pointing out that the visa ban could nevertheless have a long arm and harm its victims even after abolition, and that the Biden administration must prevent ongoing harm. For instance, when you apply for a visa, you are asked if you were ever denied a visa before. Obviously, a previous denial could look suspicious and be grounds for being turned down now! You’ve got millions who could be affected.

Trump’s Muslim visa ban wrought enormous harm to innocent Americans. It kept grandchildren from visiting their grandparents. Some died alone and far away. It separated not only families but close friends. It separated colleagues. It broke up research teams. It ruined careers and businesses. It had no basis in fact. Immigrants from the countries singled out were not responsible for any acts of terrorism in the US. All the while, Trump was coddling the real terrorist threat, of white supremacists.

The Executive Order was clearly discriminatory and a violation of the First Amendment (see below). The Republican Supreme Court that prides itself on upholding religious liberty against Democratic Party secularism gave in to the most hateful attack on freedom of religion in decades.

It is worth reviewing what judges said about the first two attempts at a Muslim ban, which failed in the lower courts because they were so egregious. Trump won on the third try by including a few officials in Venezuela and North Korea, while mainly targeting Muslim-majority countries, and SCOTUS let Trump get by with this sleight of hand. What judges said about versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the executive order was also true of 3.0, whatever Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (two of the worst justices in history) might say. Thomas is inexplicably married to a white nationalist who cheered on the Capitol insurrection.

I wrote in February, 2017, when the first of the three Muslim visa bans was issued by Executive Order (EO) in February, 2017, about the first time it was struck down:

“US District Judge James Robart of Seattle, a Bush appointee, issued a judgment suspending the Executive Order on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and places an undue burden on the state of Washington and on its 25,000 residents from the 7 countries that Trump singled out…

Robart wrote, according to the Seattle Times:

“The executive order adversely affects the state’s residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and freedom to travel,” Robart wrote, adding that the order also harmed the state’s public universities and tax base. “These harms are significant and ongoing.”

Robart stood up for the residents of Washington state who were unconstitutionally deprived of basic rights by the EO. He also stood up for the economy of Washington state and its “tax base,” playing turnabout with Trump by arguing that what he did is bad for the economy!

He even mentioned the harm to the state’s great universities, a point I have made in the past.

Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the Neofascists who wrote the EO, were hoping that immigrants would be treated by the US courts as foreigners with no rights or standing.

Robart is saying that residents of a state in the US have rights that the president cannot simply erase by fiat. He is further saying that institutions of the state itself, including universities, have a right to pursue their work unmolested by discriminatory policies . . . The court also accepted the state’s argument that the EO has “inflicted upon the operations and missions of their public universities and other institutions of higher learning, as well as injury to the States’ operations, tax bases, and public funds. These harms are significant and ongoing.”

Then the fascist racists came back with a revised version of the visa ban, which was struck down by Judge Derek Watson in Honolulu. I wrote,

“It is delicious that Hawaii stepped up here, as the most ethnically diverse state in the nation, where the quarter of the population that is Japanese-Americans well remembers the internment camps to which their families were consigned during WW II. Hawaii has a lot of immigrants, and those immigrants found companies and act as entrepreneurs, adding enormous value to the Hawaii economy. 1 in 6 residents of Hawaii is foreign-born, and 20% of business revenue is generated by 16,000 new immigrant businesses. Trump’s white nationalism is completely out of place in Hawaii. And by the way, Hawaii and California, the diverse states, are the future of America. Trumpism can only slow that down, not stop it…

Judge Watson notes, “The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228, 244 (1982). To determine whether the Executive Order runs afoul of that command, the Court is guided by the three-part test for Establishment Clause claims set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612-13 (1971). According to Lemon, government action (1) must have a primary secular purpose, (2) may not have the principal effect of advancing or inhibiting religion, and (3) may not foster excessive entanglement with religion. Id. “Failure to satisfy any one of the three prongs of the Lemon test is sufficient to invalidate the challenged law or practice.” Newdow v. Rio Linda Union Sch. Dist., 597 F.3d 1007, 1076–77 (9th Cir. 2010)….

The Establishment Clause says that Congress shall make no law affecting the establishment of religion, which is 18th century English for “Congress shall make no law designating a particular religion as the state religion of the Federal Government.” The Clause mandates that the Government be neutral as between religions. Obviously, a Muslim ban is not religiously neutral.

Watson finds that the EO targets six countries with a Muslim population of between 90% and 97% and so obviously primarily targets Muslims…

Judge Watson notes that the State of Hawaii alleged two major harms of the EO. The first is the University of Hawaii system, which is an “arm of the state.” The University, which has 55,756 students, pointed out that it “recruits students, permanent faculty, and visiting faculty from the targeted countries.” The EO harms the whole state of Hawaii “by debasing its culture and tradition of ethnic diversity and inclusion.”

The Iranian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, Yemeni and Sudanese students who are excluded from the country “are deterred from studying or teaching at the University, now and in the future, irrevocably damaging their personal and professional lives and harming the educational institutions themselves.” …

Not only would some of these persons, and others, be dissuaded from continuing their search for knowledge in the US, “The State argues that the University will also suffer non-monetary losses, including damage to the collaborative exchange of ideas among people of different religions and national backgrounds on which the State’s educational institutions depend.” The EO is interfering not just in finances but in the very purpose of the University, which is the free exchange of ideas.

The EO also interferes with the University’s ability freely to recruit the most qualified faculty and students and with its commitment to being “one of the most diverse institutions of higher education” in the world. Moreover, the university envisages it as difficult to run its Persian Language and culture program without the ability to have visitors from Iran.

The State’s summary of the harm to the University of Hawaii includes educational and intellectual harms (and ethnic diversity is itself an intellectual advantage) as well as financial and monetary ones. In the Lockean tradition, property harms are typically the ones taken most seriously.

Hawaii’s second argument is that the EO will harm its tourism industry, a central component of its economy. The chaotic and arbitrary way the first EO was rolled out, and the uncertainties attending the second one will “depress tourism, business travel, and financial investments in Hawaii.”). Middle East visitors in the month after the first EO fell by 1/5. Tourism brings in $15 billion a year to the Hawaii economy (it is a small state of 1.5 million people).

Hawaii has a point, and Judge Watson recognized it.”

——-

Bonus Video:

Justice for All: “Struggles of Muslim Ban”

Results are still rolling in but it looks as though Prime Minister Boris Johnson has secured a big victory in the British general election. He looks set to have gone from a minority government to a very large parliamentary majority. Projections based on exit polling and early results indicate his Conservative Party will secure around 360 seats – and a majority of 86.

The Labour Party appears to be on course for its worst loss since 1935 and is projected to win just 191 seats in the 650-seat parliament. The Scottish National Party looks to have significant gains in Scotland and is predicted to gain 20 seats. That would now appear to strengthen the case for a second Scottish independence referendum, posing another huge constitutional question for the UK.

While the polls had generally pointed towards a victory for Johnson, it had been predicted to be small and a hung parliament looked like a possibility according to some pre-vote opinion polling. So how did the UK come to this decision and what happens now with Brexit? Over the campaign, academic experts have been analysing the policy platforms of each party and can shed light on the current situation.

Brexit is go …

The projected Johnson majority would put him in a position to comfortably pass his Brexit deal through parliament after several years of stalemate. He can now be expected to plough ahead at speed, given that all his parliamentary candidates agreed to support the deal’s passage through parliament ahead of the election. His plan is to leave the EU by 31 January 2020.

This is therefore a good moment to read over what exactly that deal entails. In brief, it is a relatively hard form of Brexit. The UK will leave the single market and customs union, ending free movement with a plan to introduce a points-based immigration system. But it also raises questions about potential trade friction between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. All this was outlined by Oliver Patel, research associate at the UCL European Institute, who combed through the documents a few days before the vote.

Patel looked ahead to the next stages too, since departure marks the beginning of an intense period of negotiations with Brussels. He noted that there is much still to be agreed – and on a tight timetable.

The UK and the EU have between the withdrawal date and December 31 2020 (the end of the transition period) to negotiate and ratify the full agreement on their future relationship, which should govern relations in a vast range of areas such as trade, migration, security, foreign policy and data.

… but Brexit is not ‘done’

It’s hard to deny that this election appears to have been won at least partly because of one promise – that Johnson will “get Brexit done”. He repeated his three-word mantra over and over again, at every opportunity. But as multiple experts have pointed out in recent weeks, this is an optimistic take. Even if Johnson does meet his self-imposed deadline of 31 January, the story is far from over.

Helen Parr, professor of history at Keele University’s school of social, global and political studies, sees a long road ahead, and one that could still end in what is effectively a no-deal Brexit.

The reality is that government resources will be tied up on Brexit for the foreseeable future. Equally, the idea that the UK will be free to do as it pleases the moment the withdrawal bill passes through the House of Commons is an illusion. Rather, Britain will find its freedom of action constrained by what sort of future relationship it can agree with the EU and other trading partners. Those questions will take years to answer, if they are ever satisfactorily resolved.

Johnson has ruled out extending the transition period so if sticks by that and then can’t strike a trade deal by the end of 2020, the UK may depart without one.

A new political identity

This election has dramatically redrawn the electoral map in the UK. It looks as though a chunks of the country that have traditionally been considered Labour strongholds have turned Conservative. This is a switch of allegiances that would have been considered unthinkable just a few years ago.

But as Geoffrey Evans, professor in the sociology of politics, at the University of Oxford, revealed, political identities in the UK are now as often defined by your position on Brexit as by which party you support. He has conducted surveys charting this shift in the years since the 2016 referendum and watched as people steadily change to prioritise their Brexit identity.

Tellingly, even in mid-2018, two years after the referendum, only just over 6% of people did not identify with either Leave or Remain. Compare this with party political attachment, where the percentage with no party identity increased from 18% to 21.5% over same period – in part due to the decline of UKIP. Only one in 16 people don’t have a Brexit identity whereas more than one in five have no party identity.

This election is arguably the culmination of this process. So many voters in Labour’s so-called “red wall” in the midlands of England and northern England appear to have voted in a way they probably wouldn’t have countenanced just five years ago, delivering the biggest Conservative majority in years.

What went wrong for Labour?

This loss will certainly force some deep soul searching within the Labour Party. Its leader Jeremy Corbyn opted to fight this election on an ambitious platform of reform, pledging to nationalise utilities and even offering free internet access for all. He proposed a radical green agenda that would have put the UK miles out ahead of other nations while Johnson didn’t even bother turning up to a debate on climate change. So how could such a bumper package deliver such a dismal return?

Labour will need to look particularly closely at the working class voters it has lost in the country’s former industrial bases. David Etherington, professor of local and regional economic development at Staffordshire University explored the party’s recent history with these supporters and found its approach lacking. Years of decline, followed by the financial crash of 2008 left many people in these “left behind” regions wanting change. And many saw their opportunity in 2016:

In the absence of a coherent alternative to austerity and, more importantly, a previous lack of active engagement by the Labour Party with its core electorate, a vote to leave the EU was a vote for change. And for some it was as an expression of protest.

Labour has struggled for years to define its position on Brexit. Even though it has more recently solidified its stance, pledging a second referendum, it also sought to make the 2019 election about anything other than Brexit. There will certainly now be questions about whether these were the right decisions.

Is Scotland on the way out?

The exit poll showed a surge for the Scottish National Party, which looks set to represent nearly every constituency in Scotland after this vote. The nationalists have put calls for a second independence referendum at the centre of their campaign. As William McDougall, Lecturer in Politics at Glasgow Caledonian University, explains, first minister Nicola Sturgeon is capitalising on anti-Brexit sentiment to push for another go at breaking away from the United Kingdom:

The reason why support for independence has risen is perhaps that a section of Remain voters have switched sides: the SNP’s Remain credentials help the party to distance its brand of civic and cosmopolitan nationalism from the anti-EU, anti-immigrant nationalism that we see in a number of countries. As a result, the pro-independence vote which was already largely pro-EU is now even more solidly in favour of Scotland staying in the EU.

A strong Conservative majority in Westminster certainly makes it hard to see how another independence referendum would actually come about, but for now, a big statement has been made in the shift towards Sturgeon’s party.

Who is Boris Johnson, really?

Johnson has been prime minister for a few months already but he can be a tricky character to pin down – especially when he’s hiding in fridges. Chris Stafford, a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, gave it a good go when he first took office, painting by numbers to find the man beneath.

From his chequered 14-year career in journalism to his tenure as London mayor, during which time he showed a penchant for vanity projects, Johnson has made some surprising choices in his various careers.

But this all appears to have been priced into the 2019 vote. Johnson is regularly accused of hiding who he really is, but maybe that’s not actually the case at all. He has left enough clues along the way for us to build a picture of the man he is – and the British public has decided they are fine with it.

Laura Hood, Politics Editor, Assistant Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Arirang News: “Exit polls predict strong Tory win after UK votes on “Brexit Election””

We live in a world of violent challenges to the status quo, from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, Catalonia and the Extinction Rebellion. These protests are usually presented in the media simply as expressions of rage at “the system” and are eminently suitable for TV news coverage, where they flash across our screens in 15-second splashes of colour, smoke and sometimes blood.

These are huge rebellions. In Chile, for example, an estimated one million people demonstrated last month. By the next day, 19 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured and more than 2,800 arrested.

How might we make sense of these upheavals? Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger? And are they doomed to fail?

Key characteristics of a revolution

As an historian of the French Revolution of 1789-99, I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world – the English Revolution (1649), American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Russian Revolution (1917) and Chinese Revolution (1949).

A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary.

A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories. The key characteristics are:

• long-term causes and the popularity of a socio-political ideology at odds with the regime in power

• short-term triggers of widespread protest

• moments of violent confrontation the power-holders are unable to contain as sections of the armed forces defect to rebels

• the consolidation of a broad and victorious alliance against the existing regime

• a subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary alliance as competing factions vie for power

• the re-establishment of a new order when a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating power.

Why today’s protests are not revolutionary

This model indicates the upheavals in our contemporary world are not revolutionary – or not yet.

The most likely to become revolutionary is in Iraq, where the regime has shown a willingness to kill its own citizens (more than 300 in October alone). This indicates that any concessions to demonstrators will inevitably be regarded as inadequate.

We do not know how the extraordinary rebellion in Hong Kong will end, but it may be very telling there does not seem to have been significant defection from the police or army to the protest movement.

People grow angry far more often than they rebel. And rebellions rarely become revolutions.

So, we need to distinguish between major revolutions that transform social and political structures, coups by armed elites and common forms of protest over particular issues. An example of this is the massive, violent and ultimately successful protests in Ecuador last month that forced the government to cancel an austerity package.

The protests in Hong Kong and Catalonia fall into yet another category: they have limited aims for political sovereignty rather than more general objectives.

All successful revolutions are characterised by broad alliances at the outset as the deep-seated grievances of a range of social groups coalesce around opposition to the existing regime.

They begin with mass support. For that reason, the Extinction Rebellion will likely only succeed with modest goals of pushing reluctant governments to do more about climate change, rather than its far more ambitious aspirations of

a national Citizen Assembly, populated by ordinary people chosen at random, to come up with a programme for change.

Mass protests also fail when they are unable to create unity around core objectives. The Arab Spring, for instance, held so much promise after blossoming in 2010, but with the possible exception of Tunisia, failed to lead to meaningful change.

Revolutionary alliances collapsed rapidly into civil war (as in Libya) or failed to neutralise the armed forces (as in Egypt and Syria).

Why is there so much anger?

Fundamental to an understanding of the rage so evident today is the “democratic deficit”. This refers to public anger at the way the high-water mark of democratic reform around the globe in the 1990s – accompanied by the siren song of economic globalisation – has had such uneven social outcomes.

One expression of this anger has been the rise of fearful xenophobia expertly captured by populist politicians, most famously in the case of Donald Trump, but including many others from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Victor Orbán in Hungary.

Indeed, there are some who claim that western liberalism has now failed).

Elsewhere, the anger is popular rather than populist. In upheavals from Lebanon and Iraq to Zimbabwe and Chile, resentment is particularly focused on the evidence of widespread corruption as elites flout the basic norms of transparency and equity in siphoning government money into their pockets and those of their cronies.

The broader context of today’s upheavals also includes the uneven withdrawal of the US from international engagement, providing new opportunities for two authoritarian superpowers (Russia and China) driven by dreams of new empires.

The United Nations, meanwhile, is floundering in its attempt to provide alternative leadership through a rules-based international system.

The state of the world economy also plays a role. In places where economic growth is stagnant, minor price increases are more than just irritants. They explode into rebellions, such as the recent tax on WhatsApp in Lebanon and the metro fare rise in Chile.

There was already deep-seated anger in both places. Chile, for example, is one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries, but has one of the worst levels of income equality among the 36 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Rebellions with new characteristics

Of course, we do not know how these protest movements will end. While it is unlikely any of the rebellions will result in revolutionary change, we are witnessing distinctly 21st century upheavals with new characteristics.

One of the most influential approaches to understanding the long-term history and nature of protest and insurrection has come from the American sociologist Charles Tilly.

Tilly’s studies of European history have identified two key characteristics.

First, forms of protest change across time as a function of wider changes in economic and political structures. The food riots of pre-industrial society, for instance, gave way to the strikes and political demonstrations of the modern world.

And today, the transnational reach of Extinction Rebellion is symptomatic of a new global age. There are also new protest tactics emerging, such as the flashmobs and Lennon walls in Hong Kong.

Tilly’s second theory was that collective protest, both peaceful and violent, is endemic rather than confined to years of spectacular revolutionary upheaval, such as 1789 or 1917. It is a continuing expression of conflict between “contenders” for power, including the state. It is part of the historical fabric of all societies.

Even in a stable and prosperous country like Australia in 2019, there is a deep cynicism around a commitment to the common good. This has been created by a lack of clear leadership on climate change and energy policy, self-serving corporate governance and fortress politics.

All this suggests that Prime Minister Scott Morrison is not only whistling in the wind if he thinks that he can dictate the nature of and even reduce protest in contemporary Australia – he is also ignorant of its history.

Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Protesters celebrate as Lebanon parliament session postponed”

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. What better place to celebrate than that fabled era’s epicenter, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where the DeYoung Museum has mounted a dazzling exhibition, chock full of rock music, light shows, posters, and fashions from the mind-bending summer of 1967?

If you tour the exhibit, you might come away thinking that the political concerns of the time were no more than parenthetical bookends to that summer’s real action, its psychedelic counterculture. Only the first and last rooms of the large show are explicitly devoted to political memorabilia. The main body of the exhibit seems devoid of them, which fits well with the story told in so many history books. The hippies of that era, so it’s often claimed, paid scant attention to political matters.

Take another moment in the presence of all the artifacts of that psychedelic summer, though, and a powerful (if implicit) political message actually comes through, one that couldn’t be more unexpected. The counterculture of that era, it turns out, offered a radical challenge to a basic premise of the Washington worldview, then and now, a premise accepted — and spoken almost ritualistically — by every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt: nothing is more important than our “national security.”

And believe me, “national security” should go in those scare quotes as a reminder that it’s not a given of our world like Mount Whitney or the buffalo. Think of it as an invented idea, an ideological construct something like “the invisible hand of capitalism” or even “liberty and justice for all.” Those other two concepts still remain influences in our public life, but like so much else they have become secondary matters since the early days of World War II, when President Roosevelt declared “national security” the nation’s number one concern. 

However unintentionally, he planted a seed that has never stopped growing.  It’s increasingly the political equivalent of the kudzu vine that overruns everything in its path. Since Roosevelt’s day, our political life, federal budget, news media, even popular culture have all become obsessively focused on the supposed safety of Americans, no matter what the actual dangers in our world, and so much else has been subordinated to that. The national security state has become a de facto fourth branch of the federal government (though it’s nowhere mentioned in the Constitution), a shadow government increasingly looming over the other three.

It says much about the road we’ve traveled since World War II that such developments now appear so sensible, so necessary.  After all, our safety is at stake, right? So the politicians and the media tell us. Who wouldn’t be worried in a world where the constant “threats to our national security” are given such attention, even if at the highest levels of government no one seems quite sure just which enemies — ISIS, Iran, Qatar, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Russia, North Korea — we should fear most.  Who suspected, for example, that Qatar, for so long apparently a U.S. ally in the war against ISIS, would suddenly be cast as that enemy’s ally and so a menace to us?

To judge from the increasingly dire warnings of politicians and pundits, the only certainty is that, whoever may be out to get us, we need to be constantly on our guard against new threats. That’s where our taxpayer money should go. That’s why secrecy rules the day in Washington and normal Americans know ever less about what exactly their government is doing in their name to protect them.  It’s “a matter of safety,” of course.  Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes, and even in a democracy better ignorant than sorry, too. 

The most frightening part of living in a national security state is that the world is transformed into little else but a vast reservoir of potential enemies, all bent on our destruction. Immersed in and engulfed by such a culture, it may be hard to remember, or even (for those under 65) to believe, that half a century ago a mass social movement arose that challenged not only our warped notion of security, but the very idea of building national life on the quest for security. Yet that’s just what the counterculture of the 1960s did.

The challenge reveals itself most clearly in that culture’s psychedelic light shows with their “densely packed, fluid patterning of shapes and fragmented images… [which] literally absorbed audience members into the show,” as the DeYoung’s website explains. They were events meant to break down all boundaries, even between audience and performers.  Posters advertising rock music and light shows displayed the same features and added “distorted forms and unreadable, meandering lettering,” all meant to “create an intense visual effect similar to that experienced by the shows’ attendees.”

In them, a vision of life and a message about it still shines through, one that gives us a glimpse, half a century later, into the most basic values and cultural assumptions of that moment and that movement.

Tear Down the Wall

Novelist Ken Kesey, impresario of the Trips Festival that presaged the Summer of Love, summed up the message in three memorable words: “Outside is inside.” When the Beatles kicked off that season with the first classic psychedelic record album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, George Harrison echoed Kesey’s vision in his song “Within You Without You,” a haunting meditation

“About the space between us all
And the people
Who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth…

We’re all one
And life flows on within you and without you.”

What could this possibly have to do with “national security”?  Applied to our moment, think of it this way: if we’re all one, if outside is indeed inside and within you is without you, then it makes no sense to blame our problems on foreigners and build walls to keep “those people” out of our land and our lives. In Summer of Love terms, it would instead make perfect sense to tear down every wall enclosing our Trumpian world — walls that are supposed to divide Americans from foreigners, Anglos from Latinos, straights from gays, men from women, elites from the working class, and so on into an endlessly “secure” future.

The Jefferson Airplane, a house band of the Summer of Love, put the message of that moment in an explicitly political context. Presenting themselves as patriotic “Volunteers,” they urged Americans to “tear down the walls” so that “we can be together.” To be sure, most people remained deaf to such calls. But two summers later, at the Woodstock Festival, a new nation would take an initial step toward creating itself through the revolutionary act of tearing down its own walls and fences. “There was no security,” a photographer at Woodstock recalled. “The idea was that it wasn’t necessary.” By logical extension, today’s political borders of all sorts deserve the same treatment because they, too, are unnecessary.

As the hippies came to see it, all the walls and fences we create are more than just unnecessary. They are, as George Harrison sang, illusions born of and built around the fiction of separateness. Recognize that illusion and another one immediately becomes obvious: the fears that spark the obsession with “national security” are largely illusory, too. Yet they are endless because what we are truly trying to fend off is not an external enemy but, in the famed words of President Roosevelt in his first inaugural address, “fear itself.” 

At about the time Ken Kesey was hosting his Trips Festival, John Lennon of the Beatles discovered The Psychedelic Experience, a book co-authored by LSD gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.  It moved him to sing that there really was nothing to be afraid of: “Turn off your mind relax and float down stream, It is not dying, it is not dying.”

The psychedelic rock shows, light shows, and posters were all meant to turn life into that single swirling stream, dissolving every imaginable boundary line, and so teaching that reality itself is just such a stream. To quote the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman (as so many did in the Summer of Love), let yourself be “loos’d of limits and imaginary lines” and “you are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.”  

The most widely read San Francisco intellectual of that year, Alan Watts, caught the moment (and pushed it yet further) in the very title of his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity. He spelled out what the light shows and posters communicated in a flash: what we think of as separate places, inside and outside, are merely two intertwined parts, two different ways of describing a single reality. Ditto for self and other, friend and enemy, life and death. The pursuit of security, he suggested even then, creates an illusory separation between friend and enemy in an effort to protect the self and life against the other and feared death. It is, he insisted, always doomed to fail, since all those opposites are inseparable. And ironically, the more we fail, the more frightened we become, and so the more frantically we pursue both the walling off of others and the illusion of security. Far wiser and more life-enhancing, Watts concluded, was to accept the inevitability of insecurity, the truth that in the stream of life, the next moment is always as unpredictable as it is uncontrollable.

Why worry about security at all if, as Lennon announced just as the Summer of Love was reaching full swing,

“There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where
You’re meant to be,
It’s easy.
All you need is love.”

The English language has no word to describe the state where love (if you’ll excuse this word) trumps both security and insecurity. The hippies had little interest in finding a new word to describe how life was truly to be experienced, but perhaps, until something better comes along, a term like non-security — a state of being unconcerned with the whole issue of security — will do.

The gospel of non-security went forth from Haight-Ashbury (and New York City’s East Village) across the land. Hippies everywhere (even in Nebraska, my wife, who comes from there, assures me) assiduously cultivated such a state of mind.  It was perhaps the most essential byproduct of their counterculture and it helped underpin a mass movement, seldom considered in the context of national politics, that remains the most radical and powerful challenge yet to Washington’s present ruling passion for “national security” and the vast panoply of 17 intelligence outfits, tens of millions of classified documents, a surveillance apparatus that would have stunned the totalitarian states of the twentieth century, and a military into which taxpayer dollars are invested at an unparalleled rate.

When the Counterculture Met the New Left

Fifty years later, the counterculture’s thinking on the subject of security may sound like little more than a quaint and spacy fantasy. Even then, non-security was light-years away from the reality of most Americans in a country that would soon elect Richard Nixon president. California, always at the cutting edge, had already made former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan governor and so began to pave the superhighway that has now led Donald Trump to the White House.

President Trump and his minions are visibly eager to take money from people in need and lavish it on what is already the world’s largest military budget, larger than those of numerous other major powers combined. They are just as eager to spend money on a wall stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, high, wide, and forbidding (or as the president likes to say, “big, fat, [and] beautiful”) enough to keep Spanish-speaking foreigners out of the U.S.A. They would also expand the electronic eavesdropping network that can track our every word. And so — as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once have said — it goes.  They justify such plans and so much more in the name of — yes, you guessed it — “national security” or (more tellingly yet) “homeland security.” With such people in power, the very idea of non-security seems beyond utopian, like a concept from outer space.

In some ways that was true in the Summer of Love, too, and not just because, even then, it was so far removed from the reality of a dominant culture that would handily survive its challenge. There was also the brute fact that, when thousands of young people heeded the siren call and traveled to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to experience that season of love in person, it essentially became another crime- and poverty-ridden inner-city slum. Look magazine journalist William Hedgepath, for instance, found the hippies there “working toward an open, loving, tension-free world,” but also found himself “spending the night in a filthy, litter-strewn dope fortress.” 

Before we rush to judgment, however, it’s important to remember a reality often overlooked in the history books on hippiedom: most people whose countercultural lives were touched by the gospel of non-security were also touched by, and sometimes swept up in, the much larger political movement to end the war in Vietnam. This meant that their largely unspoken challenge to “national security” was woven together with another kind of challenge, one that came from the more overtly political New Left leadership of that antiwar movement.    

Unlike the hippies, the New Left had no particular interest in experiencing the unsaid and undefined. They were eager instead to find precise words to make their anti-establishment case. And they first did so in 1962. That year, members of a group that called itself Students for a Democratic Society drafted a manifesto at a United Auto Workers retreat in Port Huron, Michigan. It, too, ran against the security thinking of that moment by proclaiming that “real security cannot be gained by propping up military defenses, but only through the hastening of political stability, economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education.”

Nonetheless, the writers of the Port Huron Statement remained worried about security in a sense that any American of the time would have understood instantly.  They, too, divided the world into us and them, friends and enemies, good guys and bad guys. “Economic institutions should be in the control of national, not foreign, agencies,” they declared, critiquing America’s imperial role in the world. “The destiny of any country should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders.” The best their manifesto could foresee in the world arena was “coexistence” between America and its foes, fueled by economic rather than military competition.

In that sense, radical as it was, the statement offered no direct challenge to the bipartisan consensus that security was every American’s most important concern. Indeed, its language on security issues might easily be endorsed today by the most progressive voices in the Democratic Party, and on the issue of national sovereignty, eerily enough, by Donald Trump and his supporters.

Still, the New Left was focused on using rational planning to move toward a future of more genuine security and less fear for all. In such a future, everyone would be able to develop his or her potential to the fullest, free from a major source of insecurity seldom mentioned more than half a century later: rampant technology deployed by a rabid capitalism that values profits above people. 

The counterculture went further, even if rather incoherently, aiming to create a present in which the whole question of security, if it didn’t simply disappear, would at least become a distinctly secondary concern.  It would be a present in which, adapting a phrase of that moment, all you needed was love. Charles Perry, the historian of Haight-Ashbury, recalled one hippie who summed up the difference between his tribe and the more political types this way: “They talk about peace. We are peace.”

Each of these sixties critiques of “national security” was, in its own way, utopian in terms of the realities of its moment, and most radicals of the time, however unconsciously, did their best to negotiate a path between the two. Non-security — an escape from the usual Washington concerns — remained an ideal then, and today it’s hard to even remember that anyone ever challenged the idea that “national security” should dominate our lives, our fears, and our dreams.  

Half a century later, it should be clear that Washington’s present quest for “national security” can never end.  The national security state itself is a machine that constantly fuels the very fears it claims to fight.  In doing so, what it actually condemns Americans to is nothing less than a permanent state of insecurity.

The quest for a more balanced (or even unbalanced) approach to security in the 1960s pointed a way toward at least the possibility of an American world of diminished fears.  Now, with a man in the Oval Office who sees enemies everywhere and declares that he alone can save us from them, and with nearly 4 in 10 Americans still approving of the way he’s trying to “save” us, if only there were a radical critique of “national security” somewhere in our world.

Perhaps it’s time to take a retrospective look at that Summer of Love moment, half a century ago, and reacquaint ourselves with the two kinds of radicalism of the time, one promoting a more humane idea of security and the other aimed at building a new kind of life that transcended the question of security altogether. Perhaps between them they might spark some truly new thinking about how to respond to the power and dominance of our national security state and to a way of life that shuts us down, locks us in, ratchets up our terrors, and offers us a vision of more of the same until the end of time.

Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of the online “MythicAmerica: Essays.” To read his earlier TomDispatch look at the 1960s and today, “Trump, a Symptom of What? A Radical Message From a Half-Century Ago,” click here.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Ira Chernus

Via Tomdispatch.com

In his opening remarks at the Never is Now! Anti-Semitism Summit in New York, Anti-Defamation League National Director Jonathan Greenblatt pledged today that he would register as a Muslim should the Trump Administration move forward with its plans to put all foreign-born Muslims on a watchlist.

“As Jews, we know the righteous and just response. All of us have heard the story of the Danish king who said if his country’s Jews had to wear a gold star…all of Denmark would too.

So I pledge to you right here and now, because I care about the fight against anti-Semitism, that if one day in these United States, if one day Muslim-Americans will be forced to register their identities, then that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim. Because fighting prejudice against the marginalized is not just the fight of those minorities.

It’s our fight. Just as the fight against anti-Semitism is not only the fight of us Jews. It’s everyone’s fight.”

This comes as a spokesman for the pro-Trump “Great America” PAC cited Japanese internment camps a precedent for the registry in an appearance with Megyn Kelly on Fox News yesterday:

Greenblatt’s full remarks can be found here.