Chansley has written two books and produced a dozen or so videos about his political ideas; in October, 2023 he filed paperwork to run for Congress in Arizona’s Eighth District. Though he didn’t follow through and mount an actual campaign, had he run and won he likely wouldn’t have been the most extreme member of the House. And Donald Trump, whom Chanley and his fellow Q travelers believed was God’s anointed, is very much a contender for the highest office in the land.   

Chansley’s red-pill moment came, he says, when he discovered the writings of the arch conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, who was inspired in his turn by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery that purported to expose an ancient Jewish plot to destroy the Christian nations. As Chansley’s thinking evolved, he went on to embrace eco-fascism, anti-vax activism, Christian nationalism, New Age religiosity, and Libertarianism—a stew that is sometimes called “conspirituality.” I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about the deep roots of paranoid conspiracy theory in American history, but if you want to know what they come down to, his prayer sums it up succinctly. It’s about how “they” are taking what is rightfully “ours.”

Who “they” are has changed over the centuries, but what’s “ours” has always been the privileges that white Christian men believed was their birthright, but for too many, seemed to be slipping away. In colonial times, “they” were agents of the Pope. In the 1790s and the 1820s they were atheistic members of the Illuminati and the Masons. By the mid-19^th century, the enemy was the Irish and other Catholic immigrants who were competing for jobs. The fight over slavery spawned a host of rival conspiracy theories. During the post-Civil War era, which saw the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of vast economic inequalities, the focus shifted to English and Jewish bankers and the demonetization of silver. A few decades later, Jewish anarchists and reds and integrationists were also in the crosshairs. QAnon, the first conspiracy theory to be born on social media, takes bits and pieces from its predecessors, mixes and matches them with medieval blood libels and Gnostic apocalypticism, and gamifies it all by inviting believers to participate in its world-building. Donald Trump, in their telling, is secretly battling the elite cabal of pedophile cannibals who control the Deep State.

Whether they make you laugh or cry, those theories wouldn’t be as viral and sticky as they are if their believers weren’t experiencing real stresses—and if the horrible things they accuse their enemies of doing, everything from cannibalism to pedophilia and mass murder, weren’t behaviors that really do exist. Of course, Jews as a category don’t ritually torture and murder Christian babies, but human babies of all varieties—including Jewish ones—have been horrifically abused. More than 13,000 children have been killed by a largely Jewish army in Gaza in just the last several months.

The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia by Arthur Goldwag (Penguin Random House). Click here to buy.

And is it altogether delusional to imagine, as QAnon believers do, that elites get away with child abuse? The Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor might not have had a sex dungeon, as the proponents of the Pizzagate theory claimed, but Jeffrey Epstein certainly kept a harem of underaged women and had a circle of socially and politically connected friends that included billionaires, geniuses, and royalty. Epstein’s story—everything from the mysterious sources of his wealth to his odd connection to Trump’s attorney general (William Barr’s father was the headmaster of the Dalton School when it hired him as a teacher in 1974), and his mysterious suicide in jail in 2019—could have leaped fully formed from the head of an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, like Athena from the head of Zeus, but it was all true.

Trump’s voters’ feelings of dispossession are not that far off the mark either, as a host of not-so-fun facts about economic inequality make clear. A 2017 study found that the richest three Americans (none of them Jewish) controlled more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the nation. The total real wealth held by the richest families in the United States tripled between 1989 and 2019, according to a 2022 Congressional Budget Office report, while average earners’ gains were negligible. The ten richest people in the world, nine of them Americans, doubled their wealth during the pandemic.

Our great national myth—that America is a crucible of equality, tolerance, and boundless economic opportunity—has never been our national reality. Though right-wing populism sees the world through a lens that is distorted by irrational hatreds, it nonetheless lands on a painful truth: that unregulated capitalism is brutal and unfair. Right wing conspiracists displace the blame for its crimes onto outsiders; progressives recognize that for all its very real gestures towards equity, justice, and universal opportunity, our constitutional order was erected on a rickety scaffolding of race supremacism, religious bigotry, involuntary servitude, and land theft and compromised by them from the very beginning.

Trump’s white male voters’ intuition that the system is rigged against them is more-or-less correct, even if the privileges their fathers were born to were undeserved, and their prescriptions to rejigger the fix in their favor could not be more pernicious. The fact that so many economic left-behinds look to Trump as their champion may be perplexing, but no one can doubt that they need one.

Whether Trump wins or loses this fall, the challenge for the center, the left, and even fair-minded members of the moderate right, is to create a reality-based narrative that can compete with Trump’s and Chansley’s—and that has reparation rather than retribution at its core.  

IMDB’s laconic description of Glazer’s masterpiece, based on a novel by Martin Amis, goes this way: “Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.” The film is an indictment of what Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.”

The British national Glazer, however, clearly has a difficulty with the Zionist Right, which has appropriated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews as a primary plank in its platform of bestowing impunity on the Israeli government for whatever atrocity, whatever violation of international humanitarian law, whatever genocide its leaders wish to commit.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Glazer said,

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what we did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Here’s the clip:

ABC Video: THE ZONE OF INTEREST Accepts the Oscar for International Feature Film

Daniel Arkin at NBC writes, “Inside the Dolby Theatre, many in the audience could be seen cheering and applauding. Sandra Hüller, the German actor who portrayed Höss’ wife, Hedwig, appeared to be crying and put her hand to her chest.”

He adds, “Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore red pins on the Oscars red carpet symbolizing calls for a cease-fire.”

Glazer’s international platform (19.5 million people watched live) and his universalist sentiments posed a severe difficulty for the Zionist right wing. Glazer was saying that the Holocaust was an event in human history, not solely in Jewish history, and that its lesson is that dehumanization leads to atrocities and even genocide. In wartime Nazi Germany Jews were called “Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures.” And then they were murdered in their millions by the National Socialist government.

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals.”

Glazer is aware that the Hamas commandos who killed over 600 Israeli civilians on October 7, along with some 400 military personnel, also dehumanized those Jews, allowing them to mow down attendees at a music festival and left wing grandmothers at Kibbutz hamlets.

He was saying that this dehumanization, and its consequences in the casual murder of other human beings, clearly needs to be resisted. But how? How? is the existential question of the twenty-first century.

But for the current full-on fascist cabinet in Israel and its cheerleaders in the United States, the Holocaust and October 7 aren’t about universal values, they are about Jews and Zionism. They are antinomian in effect, justifying Israeli troops in committing any action, any crime. They are a get out of jail free card for Zionists. The Right denies that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, even though over 13,000 children have been killed in indiscriminate bombing and another 12,000 women noncombatants have been killed. How else, they ask, could you destroy Hamas? Even President Biden, however, has begun pointing out in public that there are other ways of targeting a small terrorist organization than killing tens of thousands of noncombatants.

Glazer also violated the tenets of the Zionist Right by saying that his film about the Holocaust is not about what people did in the 1940s but about what people do today. His clear implication is that the tactics the Israeli government is using in Gaza must be condemned for the same reason that the Holocaust must be condemned. These actions, while of entirely different scale, are atrocities that spring from a denial of our common humanity.

Glazer’s most controversial assertion was, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people.”

He was saying that the Zionist far right of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich had attempted to hijack the Jewish religion to which Glazer and some of his colleagues adhere, and that he rejects this appropriation.

This statement strikes at the core of Zionist nationalism, which insists that Judaism and Zionism are identical. Non-Zionist Jews from this point of view are traitors. Never mind that in opinion polling significant numbers of American Jews express discomfort with the right wing Zionism that has come to dominate Israeli politics.

Because Glazer’s brief, historic statement profoundly threatened the project of what some have called “Israelism,” a cult-like induction of people into the Zionism=Judaism and “Jews must support Bibi” complex of beliefs, some Zionists decided that he must be smeared and his reputation destroyed.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek deputy opinion editor, author of a book on how “woke” media is allegedly undermining democracy, and inveterate propagandist for the Israeli Right, presented a gross distortion of what Glazer said on X:

I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, "We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness."

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 11, 2024

Even X’s community comments eventually flagged the post as misleading, though it is actually a horrid lie, and it is hard to understand why anyone should ever again take seriously anything she says.

Her posting was widely reposted and paraphrased on the Zionist Right, in a disinformation campaign attempting to make it look as though Glazer were an apostate and had abandoned Jewish values rather than standing up for them.

An attempt was also made to push back against the red pins worn by numerous celebrities at the Oscars, symbolizing their call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (which in polling the majority of Americans of both parties desire).

Foreign policy expert Matt Duss pointed to another disinformation campaign:

pic.twitter.com/h2KG6p0SW1

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) March 12, 2024

Another poster saw a pattern:

Lol.

You can watch the roll out of the propaganda in real time…

As a bunch of geographically dispersed accounts amazingly arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. pic.twitter.com/tJk7NmfI7z

— Conor Hennessy (@typingduck) March 12, 2024

In fact, the red pins were distributed by ArtistsForCeasefire
who said, “The pin symbolises collective support for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all of the hostages and for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,”

Israeli propaganda, or Hasbara, as Duss points out, has reached the level of irrationality and of sheer crazy that characterizes QAnon conspiracies such as Pizzagate and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers.

That is why we increasingly have to consider what comes out of AIPAC, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and other Zionist organizations as QZionism, a form of information pollution.

Having seen every Super Bowl since 1966, this is the first one where media focus is divided between the game and America’s favorite power couple.  Republicans have abdicated ownership of the manliest game in America to the Snowflake Collective. They’re having an apoplectic fit at Fox-MAGA world for many reasons; mainly the romance of Swift and Kelce.  

Let’s connect the dots: Swift is part of the deep state conspiracy to rig the election in favor of Joe Biden. She’s a psyop (psychological operative) within the Pentagon and a tool of the deep state, who endorsed Democratic candidates in Tennessee. Swift also expressed regret over not speaking out sooner against Donald Trump, and they just hate it when globally famous female superstars diss on them. They also can’t figure out why Young Republican men have trouble finding dates.

Her steady Kelce was one of the few white players to take the kneeldown in honor of the BLM movement. He’s been a pro-vax spokesman for Pfizer and other progressive causes.

In MAGA world, the Super Bowl is a deep fix orchestrated by the Deep Left of the Deep State to sew up the 2024 Election on Super Bowl night. The Chief’s will win, and America’s new power couple will announce their endorsement of Joe Biden. I’m already collecting my popcorn for the big reveal. The fix is so deep that all other AFC playoff teams (Dolphins, Bills and Ravens) willingly rolled over for the Chiefs to set this plot afoot.

Why do Republicans hate Swift? SF Chronicle’s Ann Killion noted, “She sets up voter registration tables at her concerts and has encouraged millions of young people to register. She treats her employees great, handing out $55 million in bonuses to her roadies and staff. Her charitable contributions include food banks, survivors of sexual assault, cancer organizations, public schools, animal groups and disaster relief. She’s a force — for good and for girls. Now, all that power is benefiting the NFL.” Killion summarized, ““The entertainment star has done the seemingly impossible: Swift has made the NFL even bigger. It’s no wonder that so many men are acting like third-grade boys afraid of cooties.”

With her fan base, Swift is lining up her constituency of teenage girls to get out the vote for Biden. I hope she covers Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” so we can hear her say, “I’d like to help you girl, but you’re too young to vote.”

Video: “MAGA media targets Taylor Swift with conspiracy theories” | NBC4 Washington

Swifties are naturally offended by the GOP, especially after that Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile the Fox News Cheer Team (their female newscasters), are especially bug-eyed with their mouth-breathing assessments. Other choice panic attacks have been expressed by other MAGA supplicants:

Jack Posobiec: “They’re gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against everything: against Trump, for Biden, they’re gonna get her and all you know they call them the Swifties they’re going to turn those into voters, you watch.” OK.

Laura Loomer said, “The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open . . . It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.” Fine.

Jack Lombardi warned, this conspiracy, “. . . has one purpose, to capture and manipulate the feelings of American women.” They know Trump can’t beat the Legion of Swifties, so they’re forfeiting the 2024 Election in advance, to hasten the riots they’ve wanted since January 6.

SF Chronicle’s Scott Ostler reminds us that Taylor has all the qualifications for president that Trump does: “A president who is a preening pop celebrity who spends hours a day on their makeup and hair, whose only qualification for office is the power to draw crowds of adoring, hypnotized followers. Let’s not get sucked into that kind of silliness.” THAT’S what they’re afraid of.

For all those worried about Western Civilization and Democracy, fear not. The Fox-MAGA echo chamber is half the size of the echo chamber for the mostly civilized world. The only thing I’m betting on is that no hearts and minds will be changed between the final gun of the Super Bowl and the 2024 Election. Echo, echo, echo . . . and get out the vote!

Presenting a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom, Kennedy vehemently denied that he was an anti-vaccine advocate or that he ever “uttered a phrase that was racist or antisemitic.” His campaign manager Dennis Kucinich — the former Ohio congressman and two-time progressive presidential candidate who was sitting behind him — smiled in agreement at these head-bursting lies. In fact, Kennedy had recently suggested that the coronavirus was a diabolically engineered bioweapon that used the secret field of “ethnically targeted microbes” to attack White and Black people while sparing Chinese and Jewish people.

Kennedy has also falsely claimed that Covid-19 vaccines were part of a population control agenda, that they contain microchips that track our movements, that they alter our DNA, and that they make us more susceptible to other diseases. In early 2022, Kennedy raised his Covid-era, anti-vaxx conspiracism to new heights. He took the stage as a speaker at the Defeat The Mandates march in Washington, D.C., shouting out that pandemic restrictions arose from a C.I.A. plan to “clamp down totalitarian control” while exerting “a coup d’état against democracy and the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Since 2005, RFK, Jr. has regularly espoused debunked vaccine allegations, such as the false link between autism and childhood vaccines. He is considered a leader of the anti-vaxx movement, an icon of vaccine horror. So, his denials of anti-vaxx sentiment were beyond preposterous.

Embed from Getty Images
WASHINGTON D.C., UNITED STATES – JULY 20: Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. testifies at the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, United States on July 20, 2023. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

At the congressional hearing, Kennedy — the first MAGA Democrat — was treated as a hero by Republicans while he was unmercifully slammed by Democrats. Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett said, Republicans are using Kennedy’s “idiotic bigoted messaging” and “attacks on Biden” to “help get Donald Trump back in the White House” while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries described Kennedy as “a living, breathing, false flag operation.”

RFK, Jr. is running a surprisingly potent campaign — nationally polling at 15% to 20% — and earning higher favorability numbers in an Economist-YouGov poll than either Biden or Trump, thanks to the boosts he receives from some of the wealthiest, most listened-to people in America, such as just-asking-questions podcaster Joe Rogan and flame-thrower, Twitter-owner Elon Musk. Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before. If he succeeds in weakening Biden and helping Trump burn us all to the ground, it will be the magic of his name as well as the media culture that has protected and fawned over him.

Kennedy has concocted a diverse, dark web of supporters: Kennedy-family superfans, fanatic anti-vaxxers, Silicon Valley tech-bros, “freethinking” celebrities like Robert DeNiro and Oliver Stone, Democrats who believe Biden is too old and feeble, and hard-right authoritarians like Steve Bannon looking to boost a chaos agent. He received a voluminous, flattering tribute in the conservative National Review and his American Values 2024 Super PAC has ties to Marjorie Taylor Green, George Santos, and Herschel Walker.

The MAGA-suffused, libertarian fanbase is difficult to reconcile for anyone who associates the Kennedy name with the 1960s, Camelot era of governmental idealism. Kennedy poses as a fierce advocate for the impoverished and disempowered, attempting to channel the charismatic, populist legacy of his father when he ran for president over fifty years ago. He even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign.

Leaning hard into his family and its American royalty lineage, Kennedy asserts that his presidency will return us to the magic and majesty of a lost golden age, before the assassinations of his uncle President John F. Kennedy and then his father, Robert F. Kennedy. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he told an adoring crowd in New Hampshire, a turn of phrase with a horrifying Make-America-Great-Again ring to it. “He can look and sound so thoughtful and contemplative,” said one person who has known him a very long time. “But he’s just bursting with madness.”

Embracing Kennedy’s madness, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have championed his candidacy along with lesser known rich, anti-vaxx venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya. They not only endorsed Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, but also threw him a fundraiser. The gangster and former insurrectionist President called Kennedy a “very smart person” during a Fox News interview and complimented him for hitting a “nerve.” RFK, Jr. replied that he’s “proud that President Trump likes me.”

Fascist ring-master Steve Bannon praised Kennedy as “an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, populist who doesn’t trust the deep state. There’s a big overlap with what President Trump’s talking about.” Referring to Kennedy’s popularity among the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right, he even went so far as to suggest Trump choose RFK Jr. to be his running mate. In this, he was joined by Nixon-loving, Trump co-conspirator Roger Stone who wrote on Twitter, “Yeah. Trump-Kennedy. I said it.”

To those who see Kennedy as an anti-vaxx conspiracy spreader and populist poser, his campaign looks like either a farce or a dirty trick. Despite a liberal façade, Kennedy welcomes the hard-right support, aligning himself with MAGA immigration policies. He warns about the U.S.’s “open border,” and he told Musk that he wants to “formulate policies that seal the border permanently.” On the leftish Breaking Points podcast, he praised Israel’s effective border control measures — walls and fences that imprison Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza.

Assuming a peace candidate affect, Kennedy speaks of “endless wars abroad,” attacks Biden as a “war-monger,” and decries the humanitarian cost of the war in Ukraine. However, he fails to call out Putin and Russia for torture, abduction, looting, rape, bombing attacks on civilians and numerous other war crimes. He urges our “present leadership” to “start de-escalating, to reach out to Russia, to exercise restraint, and avoid hostile rhetoric.” He proposes a negotiated settlement without explaining how this is achieved without appeasing the invader Putin.

His anti-interventionist commitments stop at his unconditional support to Israel, one of primary beneficiaries of aid from the military industrial complex he claims to hate and a nation unwilling to entertain peace with justice. RFK, Jr. agrees with MAGA nationalists: he asserted that he wants to shift spending out of a military-industrial interventionist mind-set and into “Fortress America — arming ourselves to the teeth at home.”

In the area of environmentalism where Kennedy built a credible reputation with decades of positive activism — in the 1980s, he worked with the nonprofit Riverkeeper to preserve New York’s Hudson River among other conservation efforts, he has undergone something of a MAGA brain transplant. He told the Breaking Points podcast: “In my campaign I’m not going to be talking a lot about climate.” He absurdly suggested that the free market is the answer to the climate catastrophe. Appearing on InfoWars, Kennedy said that the climate crisis is being used to push through “totalitarian controls on society,” orchestrated “by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these mega-billionaires.”

Listening to Kennedy lie and cover up his most outlandish opinions at the Congressional hearing, he sounds almost normal. However, hearing him expand his views on multiple podcasts is a truly mind-bending, mind-numbing punishment. Speaking in a raspy, scratchy drone-voice — the result of spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that he speculates may be a side effect of the flu vaccine, Kennedy maniacally charges forward into all manner of quasi-medical phantasms, unfazed by scientific contradiction and sounding like a conspiracy-addled lunatic.

He accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of being a “corrupt and evil puppet of the pharmaceutical industry,” who profited from the COVID-19 vaccines, which Kennedy asserted were dangerous and ineffective. He blames mass shootings on anti-depressants, such as Prozac. “Almost every one of these shooters were on SSRIs,” he said, “or some other psychiatric drug.” He told Rogan that Wi-Fi pierces “the blood-brain barrier,” causing “leaky brain” and even cancer. He claimed, without evidence, that the presence of atrazine in the water supply has contributed to male gender dysphoria since atrazine chemically castrates frogs when dumped into their tanks. Though no evidence supports the contention, he is absolutely sure that the CIA killed his uncle JFK and pretty sure that the CIA, rather than the still-imprisoned Sirhan Sirhan, killed his father RFK. He actively campaigned for Sirhan’s release from prison against the wishes of most of the Kennedy family, including his mother.

All of this makes him an incoherent opportunist. He long ago entered his own pseudoscientific, X-Files world in which nothing is as it seems, everything is connected, nothing happens by accident or coincidence, and every major world event has been engineered by secretive elites. Like Trump, Kennedy can only sink deeper and deeper into his own fever swamp, and every effort to contradict him merely demonstrates that his enemies are determined to silence him.  

He has been denounced by a trio of notable Kennedys, including Kathleen Kennedy Townsend who works in the Biden administration. They called his views “tragically wrong” and “part of a misinformation campaign” that “is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines” with “deadly consequences.” Writing in support of Biden after RFK, Jr.‘s congressional testimony, his grandson Jack Schlossberg — President John F. Kennedy’s only grandson — condemned RFK, Jr.’s candidacy as “an embarrassment” and a “vanity project.”

The strategy of the Democratic Party establishment, who are supporting President Biden with no plans for any primary debates, is to ignore Kennedy and other challengers. Party unity is necessary, they argue — because Trump, abortion, the whole Republican madhouse. Progressive leaders have for the most part acquiesced to this argument, though Biden’s pragmatic reforms are a far cry from the radical change championed by those progressives: the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a strong challenge to systemic racism and more. On foreign policy, Biden has signed on to the never-ending expansion of our hideously bloated military.

Progressive environmentalist Naomi Klein called Kennedy a “flawed heretic” and wrote: “We ignore Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy at our peril. Given the strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum. Ignoring him is not an option.”

Kennedy could possibly win the first Democratic primary in New Hampshire. As a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot and must be written in. RFK, Jr. certainly will not win the Democratic nomination, but a surprising performance in a rogue New Hampshire primary might give his madness more mainstream attention, a broader audience while further eroding the legitimacy of science and facts.

Trading on his family name, Kennedy postures as an anti-establishment rebel and attracts a handful of true believers, a small percentage of low-information Democrats and Kennedy family nostalgists, who will settle for a glitchy Kennedy hologram — a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy. Beyond that, a segment of MAGA-adjacent elite allies cynically use his candidacy to damage the Democratic Party, providing him with a global megaphone so that millions hear his scratchy, long-winded, bizarre messages. When his campaign finally craters, it will leave behind an emboldened movement of conspiracy crackpots thrilling to his deranged and dangerous notions.

Apparently many Americans are so angry and distrustful that they’ll find answers in the strangest of people. They fall for liars, con-men, and self-proclaimed martyrs to the “establishment.” So here we are, eight years after Trump slithered down the escalator, listening to (or possibly trying to ignore) another narcissistic celebrity madman and this one is talking about Fauci fascism, leaky brains, and frog castration as he scams supporters in the Democratic primary.

( Tomdispatch.cm ) – For about a week in the summer of 2018, I caught an early-morning train from Washington, D.C., to the Albert V. Bryan federal courthouse in the suburb of Alexandria. Located a short drive from George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, that courthouse serves the Eastern District of Virginia. It has played host to a wide variety of closely watched cases, from terrorism trials and inscrutable cybersecurity matters to the government’s prosecution of whistleblowers Daniel Hale and Chelsea Manning.

The defendant whose trial I was covering was Paul Manafort, who had been the chairman of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. The special investigation led by former FBI director Robert Mueller probing Russian interference in the 2016 election had led to Manafort’s indictment on multiple charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and other financial crimes. He denied the allegations and decided to take his chances at trial, putting his future in the hands of 12 northern Virginia jurors.

The Eastern District — EDVA, as it’s better known — is notorious for its old-school rules. Unlike most legal venues, reporters and members of the public aren’t allowed to bring electronics of any kind into that courthouse. There are no lockers or storage units on-site. Each morning, I waited in line (along with half of the D.C. press corps) inside a small café across from the courthouse to pay $10 to store my phone and laptop underneath the cash register. Bereft of my devices, I was left to cover the Manafort case the way a reporter would have in the 1960s — with pen and paper, scrawling notes on a pad on my knee and later spending as much time deciphering those jottings as I did writing up the day’s events.

I’ll never forget the experience of covering that trial. Joining me in the courtroom gallery most days were a dozen or so self-described “trial tourists,” people who had taken a day off from work to sit in on the case. A few silver-haired retirees had traveled from other states to hear expert witnesses testify about Manafort’s money-laundering operation or his taste in lavish ostrich-skin coats and luxury real estate. But what stays with me most is the way that all the usual noise, chatter, tweets, and din of this bizarre American moment seemed to stop at the courthouse doors. Stepping into Room 900, I felt like some celestial being had pressed the “Mute” button on the outside world.

The jury would ultimately convict Manafort on eight counts of financial fraud. Afterward, one juror, a Donald Trump supporter, told Fox News that she had wanted to find Manafort innocent, “but he wasn’t. That’s the part of a juror,” she explained, “you have to have due diligence and deliberate and look at the evidence and come up with an informed and intelligent decision, which I did.”

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I remember her comments because they seemed to confirm what I had observed covering the case — in that courtroom, it didn’t matter whose tweet got the most “likes” or whose video tallied the most views. It felt, strangely enough, like a refuge from the modern mania of social media and Trumpism, an old-fashioned bastion of facts, rationality, and truth.

My mind flashed back to Paul Manafort as I watched the two recent trials of Alex Jones, the prominent conspiracy theorist and founder of the website Infowars. He faced lawsuits in Texas and Connecticut filed by parents whose children had died in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones had spent years spreading cruel lies about that mass killing, calling it a “hoax” and a “false flag” operation, while also accusing those parents of being “crisis actors” whose children were never actually killed.

In both cases, a judge had already ruled against Jones; the question before the two juries was how much he should pay to those Sandy Hook families. In the end, they would together award the families more than $1 billion in damages — money that Jones promptly claimed he didn’t have and couldn’t pay. The Jones trials also marked one of the few times that he faced any sort of accountability for his years of conspiracy theories. Unlike on his show or on social media, in court he couldn’t say whatever he wanted regardless of whether it was true. “You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble admonished him. “That is what we’re doing here…Things must actually be true when you say them.”

The Loudest Voice in the Room

We live in an era when the truth can feel like whatever the loudest voices claim it is, whether the most extreme version of events or the one that feels right (even if it isn’t). I’ve covered scores, if not hundreds, of campaign rallies and stump speeches in my 15 years as a journalist. I tend to find my conversations with people in those crowds far more revealing than anything uttered by the candidate onstage, including, of course, that ultimate on-stager Donald Trump.

Lately, I’ve noticed a familiar refrain in those interviews. Once upon a time, rival politicians or competing media pundits normally agreed on at least a modest set of shared basic facts — humans are warming the planet to dangerous levels, say, or democracy works best when everyone participates — and then competed for votes based on how they interpreted and acted upon those facts.

Nowadays, though, rallygoers tell me that it’s ever harder to know what’s true and what’s false, to sift out right from wrong. Today’s politicians and pundits — particularly, though not exclusively, on the Trumpian right — seem not only to have their own opinions but their own “facts” to go with them. In their eyes, it’s increasingly difficult to know who’s being honest anymore. And the response, all too often, is a rhetorical and sometimes literal throwing up of the hands, an acceptance that no one can be trusted, that the facts are simply unknowable.

Surveys measuring the American public’s trust in its institutions capture this phenomenon strikingly. Trust in Congress, the presidency, the news media, and — once inconceivable — even the military is steadily eroding, as fear, suspicion, and resentment become the currency of American politics in this century. But if there was one institution that, until recent years, seemed to withstand this trend, it was the third branch of government, the judicial system.

Of all the institutions vital to American democracy, the courts have held remarkably steady, even during the turbulent years of Donald Trump’s presidency. This was, after all, a man who believed himself above the law, viewed the justice system as a tool to pardon his friends and punish his enemies, and lashed out whenever a judge constrained his executive actions. From one of Trump’s earliest moves as president — a ban on citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries entering the U.S. — to the 62 lawsuits that he and his supporters filed attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, the courts proved resilient in the face of unrelenting attacks.

An independent judiciary is more essential than ever when facts are under assault. As they did in the Manafort case I covered and the more recent Alex Jones trials, the courts can act as a firewall for the truth, a last resort for sifting real from fake, nonsense from reality.

There is, of course, a long and sordid history of courts dealing setbacks to the cause of progress. Look no further than the Supreme Court’s infamous decisions in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, or far more recently Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in a truth-challenged era, the courts long remained one of the last holdouts where people could trust that they would at least get a reasonably fair hearing based on the facts, whatever their views or politics.

Or at least that’s how it looked until recently.

According to Gallup, at any given moment over nearly the last five decades, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans claimed to have a “great deal” or at least a “fair amount” of trust in the judicial branch. As recently as 2019, 69% of those surveyed expressed confidence in the nation’s courts, including the Supreme Court. And yet in the three years since then — as Donald Trump (with a big helping hand from Mitch McConnell) stacked the Supreme Court — support has plummeted to a dismal 47% this year. At the same time, a record number of Americans (58%) said they disapproved of the Supreme Court’s performance, while just 40% approved.

That steep drop in trust has no doubt been shaped by recent controversies. At the top of that list is the decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decades-old precedent to which many of the justices who struck it down had previously paid lip service as settled law.

But the dwindling faith in the courts isn’t purely a reflection of the decision to strike down Roe. It’s now all too common to see federal judges described in news stories and on TV as “Obama judges” or “Trump judges,” “Bush judges” or “Clinton judges,” as if that somehow will help the audience make sense of the decision in question. Not only does that moniker too often prove misleading, but it fuels the notion that judges are nothing more than “politicians in robes,” as the saying goes.

It’s one thing to critique the current crop of Supreme Court justices for decisions that fly in the face of longstanding precedents, especially when those same judges vowed to respect precedent during their confirmation hearings. But the trend toward describing all judges in political terms undoubtedly leaves the impression that the judicial system is little more than a dressed-up political body, just another place where the ever fiercer partisan battle lines and tribal loyalties come into play.

Admittedly, there have indeed been recent non-Supreme Court decisions, too, that seem to suggest former President Trump succeeded in creating a more political judicial system when he pushed through over 200 judicial confirmations — some of them deemed by the American Bar Association unqualified for the bench, nearly all of them deemed loyal to the conservative doctrine of originalism — in the hope that they would rule favorably for him. (“If it’s my judges, you know how they’re gonna decide,” was Trump’s classic comment during the 2016 presidential campaign.) In Florida, for instance, Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has handed down one mystifying ruling after another in the ongoing litigation over the ex-president’s refusal to hand over all the classified and non-classified documents he took with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate. But there are far more Trump-appointed judges who have reviewed and dismissed legal challenges to the 2020 election or presided fairly over the criminal prosecution of various January 6th rioters. “There was nothing patriotic about what happened that day — far from it,” Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said in August. “It was a national disgrace.”

The Speed of Truth

Thinking back to that courtroom in Alexandria in 2018, I learned a lesson: The truth moves slowly. Far more slowly than the velocity of a viral tweet or an infuriating Facebook post. The first story you encounter online about a major world event or a breaking-news story may not be the most accurate version of what happened, if it’s accurate at all. Truth takes time to reveal itself. That time can feel longer than ever in a world where we’ve become conditioned to believe that we can have all the facts at our fingerprints in an instant. Make us wait and we lose interest.

The five years I spent reporting for my just-published book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, put this lesson about truth into greater relief. The book chronicles one of the most searing truth crises of the last five years — the story of a young man, Seth Rich, whose death became a global conspiracy theory, a partisan talking point, and a Fox News rallying cry. The false and fantastical theories about Rich, a 27-year-old staffer for the Democratic Party who was gunned down on a Washington street in 2016, began spreading mere hours after his murder had been publicly announced. The amplification of those lies happened almost instantaneously, faster than anyone could keep track of them, let alone stop them.

When Rich’s family exhausted their options to correct the record through media interviews and other public statements, they decided their only remaining choice was to seek accountability in a court of law. The Riches sued Fox News and people in Fox’s orbit, and ultimately reached settlements that helped protect the truth and restore Seth’s reputation and memory.

But it took three years of litigation to achieve those outcomes in court. Put another way, it took three long years for the facts and realities of Rich’s life and death to catch up with the fantasies, memes, and conspiracy theories spread about him. Still, at least there remained a venue for Rich’s family to receive a fair hearing, a protected space for an honest accounting of what was true and what wasn’t.

And yet today, that space seems increasingly under threat.

At stake in this year’s midterm elections is control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Much has been written about what a Republican majority might do with its newfound subpoena power should the GOP retake control of the House. But when it comes to the courts, the Senate is crucial, since it controls the judicial confirmation process, approving or blocking nominees to fill dozens of openings across the federal court system. If Mitch McConnell returns to his position as Senate majority leader, it’s a good bet that he’ll thwart President Biden’s attempts to fill those vacancies before the 2024 election.

And if that next presidential contest were to usher in a Republican president (especially you know who), McConnell and his fellow Republicans will again have the power to usher onto the federal bench the next generation of Samuel Alitos and Clarence Thomases. And then, watch out!

The Supreme Court excepted, the judicial system has largely stood firm in the face of a half-decade of Trumpian attacks and a surge in conspiratorial politics. Our judicial branch still remains a refuge for the facts. The question is: How much longer can they hold on?

Copyright 2022 Andy Kroll

Via Tomdispatch.cm

Russia has long been one of the world’s most openly and aggressively homophobic states. Both the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox church have held up LGBTQ+ activism as the quintessential symbol of Western “corruption and decadence”, against which “traditional Russian values” are claimed to be the only effective bulwark. Legislation adopted in 2013 banned anything which could be construed as promoting LGBTQ+ rights to children, including any use of the rainbow symbol – even rainbow-coloured ice cream. Since the onset of its war on Ukraine in February 2022, Russia’s exploitation of this bogus threat to justify its political aims has sunk to new lows.

In announcing the “special operation” against Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the West of “aggressively imposing… attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill – who prospered as a KGB informant during the Soviet period – has been even more explicit in framing the Ukraine invasion as a form of holy resistance against an alleged LGBTQ+ threat emanating from the West. In a March 2022 sermon he described LGBTQ+ rights as the “forcible imposition of a sin condemned by divine law”.

In marked contrast to Roman Catholic Pope Francis whose condemnation of Russian aggression has been unequivocal, Patriarch Kirill has been nothing short of rabid in his support for Putin’s war, even going so far as to promise total absolution of sins for any Russian soldiers who die in battle. Presumably these sins include the rape, torture, and summary execution of Ukrainian civilians. How does a so-called “Man of God” justify such horrors? Because the alternative – a world in which LGBTQ+ people enjoy equal rights – is apparently even worse.

Although little discussed in the Western media, homophobic fear-mongering has been a cornerstone of Russia’s domestic propaganda campaign drumming up support for its war in Ukraine. In the view of Russian media tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev, “Our enemy really holds the propaganda of sodomy as the core of its influence.” And as one Russian mother expressed to a friend after her son was called up, “It’s terrible of course. But better he dies over there, than if NATO conquers us and makes him gay.”

The Russian propaganda machine has, apparently, succeeded in persuading much of the Russian public to accept three spurious claims: that 1) NATO intends to invade Russia, 2) NATO’s principal aim is to make Russian children gay, and 3) one is not born gay, but becomes so through the pernicious influence of “corrupt” others.

I became personally sensitized to Russia’s linking of the perceived threats posed by NATO and LGBTQ+ rights after fleeing the country in 2020, in circumstances frighteningly reminiscent of the nail-biting climactic scene in the film Argo. As I had merely been conducting what I imagined to be innocuous historical research on a non-Slavic minority, it astonished me to come across a nonsensical hit piece published in the Russian media shortly after my departure which accused me of being “a NATO spy”, working on behalf of “the Anglo-Saxon powers” to organize pride parades in the North Caucasus. The article warned its readers that “the first condition for recognition by the ‘international community’ is the holding of gay pride parades,” an assertion that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has repeated on numerous occasions since the war began.

The strategy of the Russian state, in tandem with the Russian Orthodox church, to use LGBTQ+ rights as a red-button issue to win knee-jerk support for their criminal war campaign has much in common with the US Republican Party’s manipulation of the abortion debate. In both cases, a deliberate policy of inflaming the ignorant and irrational passions of broad segments of the population appears to have great success in stifling science and rational discourse, along with any level of human compassion.

If he were still around he might well have plenty to say about the English language in general, and our political lexicon in particular. A number of the terms commonly used in American politics conceal more than they reveal and seem almost designed to confuse. One of the more confusing political terms out there is “conspiracy theory.”

Why this matters: Many people are confused about what “conspiracy theories” are, how they originate, and how they are spread. Partly as a result, millions of Americans live in a dark fantasy world as a result of their misunderstanding of the nature of the information that they receive. Consequently, our tired old democracy is in peril.

Let us deconstruct the term “conspiracy theory,” explain why it is confusing, suggest a common sense alternative, and outline the information crisis that we face.

Oxford provides us with a standard definition of conspiracy theory, which is, “a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event.” That is fine as far as it goes, but it does not help us to understand where those beliefs originate. It is as if conspiracy theories spring from out in the ether somewhere, and there are no human agents responsible for them. But that is not the case: Nearly all conspiracy theories are the deliberate creations of individuals, groups, and sometimes governments seeking to confuse, stoke fear and obscure the truth.

The use of the word “theory” in the phrase is similarly problematic. A theory is a proposition that can be tested against reality, or by experiment. The great majority of theories are developed in good faith with no intent to mislead. It is rare to encounter a theory that is almost entirely devoid of testable propositions, and blatantly false, unlike most of what are called conspiracy theories.

Further, the word “conspiracy” generally connotes an activity by at least several people to secretly commit an illegal act. But most of the vile rumors advanced by right-wing influencers and Q-Anon types, as vicious as they are, are not against the law.

Therefore, in the Confucian spirit, allow me to offer an alternative phrase that represents a deliberate effort to disseminate untruthful information aimed to instill hatred, fear and divisiveness.

I suggest that we go with “disinformation plot” as a preferred alternative to conspiracy theory.

Disinformation is created purposefully. Its origins are not mysterious and can be understood. It is false information created deliberately in order to mislead. (This is not the same as “misinformation,” which is incorrect information believed or spread without necessarily malicious intent.)

CBS Sunday Morning: “Alex Jones and his ‘whole world of trouble'”

Disinformation plots would not matter very much were they not believed by millions of people, including Americans, with dire consequences. The claim that there is a secret Democratic party pedophile cabal that murders and eats children has been promoted by Q-Anon and others who know quite well that it is a monstrous lie. But it is nonetheless apparently accepted as truth by millions. This and other false beliefs have already led to violence, with more sure to follow.

While there are many sensible conservatives out there, the facts are that conservatives are more likely to believe disinformation, create it, and pass it onward. There is very little on the left side of the political spectrum resembling Alex Jones, Donald Trump or Q-Anon for sheer disregard for truth and evidence. The left side of the political spectrum is also vulnerable to disinformation, but not to the same degree.

Many disinformation plots originate and are boosted by foreign governments, among the most pernicious of which are those aimed at weakening Americans’ faith in their electoral system or sowing skepticism about the Covid pandemic and science’s response to it. It has been established that the government of Russia has employed such disinformation plots against the United States.

The US government has also launched disinformation campaigns against other countries for many years. As long as our own government engages in those sorts of practices we hardly have standing to complain when other nations do it to us as well. Covert info wars that are aimed at weakening a country’s independence and institutions are wrong whoever makes use of them.

Speaking of InfoWars, Alex Jones will pay a heavy price for his vicious lies about the Sandy Hook massacre families, as, likely, will some of those who have defamed voting machine manufacturers. Let us cheer when disinformation plots are prosecuted in courts of law, and penalties imposed. Other malicious disinformation plotters also need to be brought to justice.

If Confucius were still around, I am pretty sure he would approve.

That conversation between my father and brother has been on my mind, as I’ve been experiencing America’s increasingly divided, almost schizoid, version of social discourse. It’s as if this country were suffering from some set of collective auditory hallucinations whose lead feature was nastiness.

Take cover! We’re being threatened by a revived red(dish) menace from a “rogue” Russia! A “Yellow peril” from China! Iran with a nuke! And then there are the alleged threats at home. “Groomers”! MAGA kooks! And on and on.

Of course, America continues to face actual threats to its security and domestic tranquility. Here at home that would include regular mass shootings; controversial decisions by an openly partisan Supreme Court; the Capitol riot that the House January 6th select committee has repeatedly reminded us about; and growing uncertainty when it comes to what, if anything, still unifies these once United States. All this has Americans increasingly vexed and stressed.

Meanwhile, internationally, wars and rumors of war continue to be a constant plague, made worse by the exaggeration of threats to national security. History teaches us that such threats have sometimes not just been inflated but created ex nihilo. Those would, for instance, include the non-existent Gulf of Tonkin attack cited as the justification for a major military escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965 or those non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of that country.

All this and more is combining to create a paranoid and increasingly violent country, an America deeply fearful and perpetually thinking about warring on other peoples as well as on itself.

My brother’s doctors treated him as best they could with various drugs and electroshock therapy. Crude as that treatment regimen was then (and remains today), it did help him cope. But what if his doctors, instead of trying to reduce his symptoms, had conspired to amplify them? Indeed, what if they had told him that he should listen to those voices and so aggravate his fears? What if they had advised him that sanity meant arming himself against those very voices? Wouldn’t we, then or now, have said that they were guilty of the worst form of medical malpractice?

And isn’t that, by analogy, true of America’s leaders in these years, as they’ve driven this society to be ever less trusting and more fearful in the name of protecting and advancing their wealth, power, and security?

Fear Is the Mind-Killer

If you’re plugged into the mental matrix that’s America in 2022, you’re constantly exposed to fear. Fear, as Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, is the mind-killer. The voices around us encourage it. Fear your MAGA-hat-wearing neighbor with his steroidal truck and his sizeable collection of guns as he supposedly plots a coup against America. Alternately, fear your “libtard” neighbor with her rainbow peace flag as she allegedly plots to confiscate your guns and brainwash your kids. Small wonder that more than 37 million Americans take antidepressants, roughly one in nine of us, or that, in 2016, this country accounted for 80% of the global market for opioid prescriptions.

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A climate of fear has led to 43 million new guns being purchased by Americans in 2020 and 2021 in a land singularly awash in more than 400 million firearms, including more than 20 million assault rifles. A climate of fear has led to police forces being heavily militarized and fully funded rather than “defunded” (which actually would mean a bit less money going to the police and a bit more to non-violent options like counseling and mental-health services). A climate of fear has led Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives who can agree on little else to vote almost unanimously to fork over $840 billion to the Pentagon in Fiscal Year 2023 for yet more wars and murderous weaponry. (Of course, the true budget for what is still coyly called “national defense” will soar well above a trillion dollars then, as it often has since 9/11/2001 and the announcement of a “global war on terror.”)

The idea that enemies are everywhere is, of course, useful if you’re seeking to create a heavily armed and militarized form of insanity.

It’s summer and these days it just couldn’t be hotter, so perhaps you’ll allow me to riff briefly about a scene I’ve never forgotten from The Big Red One, a war film I saw in 1980. It involved a World War II firefight between American and German troops in a Belgian insane asylum during which one of the mental patients picks up a submachine gun and starts blasting away, shouting, “I am one of you. I am sane!” In 2022, sign him up and give him a battlefield commission.

Where fear is omnipresent and violence becomes routinized and normalized, what you end up with is dystopia, not democracy.

We Must Not Be Friends but Enemies

At this point, consider us to be in a distinctly upside-down world. Reverse Abraham Lincoln’s moving plea to Southern secessionists in his first inaugural address in 1861 — “We must not be enemies but friends. We must not be enemies” — and you’ve summed up all too well our domestic and foreign policy today. No, we’re neither in a civil war nor a world war yet, but America’s national (in)security state does continue to insist that virtually every rival to our imperial being must be transformed into an enemy, whether it’s Russia, China, or much of the Middle East. Enemies are everywhere and must be feared, or so we’re repetitiously told anyway.

I remember well the time in 1991-1992 when the Soviet Union collapsed and America emerged as the sole victorious superpower of the Cold War. I was a captain then, teaching history at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Those were also the years when, even without the Soviet Union, the militarization of this society somehow never seemed to end. Not long after, in launching a conflict against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, this country officially kicked ass in the Middle East and President George H.W. Bush assured Americans that, by going to war again, we had also kicked our “Vietnam Syndrome” once and for all. Little did we guess then that two deeply destructive and wasteful quagmire wars, entirely unnecessary for our national defense, awaited us in Afghanistan and Iraq in the century to come.

Never has a country squandered victory — and a genuinely global victory at that! — so completely as ours has over the last 30 years. And yet there are few in power who consider altering the fearful course we’re still on.

A significant culprit here is the military-industrial-congressional complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about in his farewell address in 1961. But there’s more to it than that. The United States has, it seems, always reveled in violence, possibly as an antidote to being consumed by fear. Yet the intensity of both violence and fear seems to be soaring. Yes, our leaders clearly exaggerated the Soviet threat during the Cold War, but at least there was indeed a threat. Vladimir Putin’s Russia isn’t close to being in the same league, yet they’ve treated his war with Ukraine as if it were an attack on California or Texas. (That and the Pentagon budget may be the only things the two parties can mostly agree on.)

Recall that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was in horrible shape, a toothless, clawless bear, suffering in its cage. Instead of trying to help, our leaders decided to mistreat it further. To shrink its cage by expanding NATO. To torment it through various forms of economic exploitation and financial appropriation. “Russia Is Finished” declared the cover article of the Atlantic Monthly in May 2001, and no one in America seemed faintly concerned. Mercy and compassion were in short supply as all seemed right with the “sole superpower” of Planet Earth.

Now the Russian Bear is back — more menacing than ever, we’re told. Marked as “finished” two decades ago, that country is supposedly on the march again, not just in its invasion of Ukraine but in President Vladimir Putin’s alleged quest for a new Russian empire. Instead of Peter the Great, we now have Putin the Great glowering at Europe — unless, that is, America stands firm and fights bravely to the last Ukrainian.

Add to that ever-fiercer warnings about a resurgent China that echo the racist “Yellow Peril” tropes of more than a century ago. Why, for example, must President Joe Biden speak of China as a competitor and threat rather than as a trade partner and potential ally? Even anti-communist zealot Richard Nixon went to China during his presidency and made nice with Chairman Mao, if only to complicate matters for the Soviet Union.

If imperial America were willing to share the world on roughly equal terms, Russia and China could be “near-peer” friends instead of, in the Pentagon phrase of the moment, “near-peer adversaries.” Perhaps they could even be allies of a kind, rather than rivals always on the cusp of what might potentially become a world-ending war. But the voices that seek access to our heads prefer to whisper sneakily of enemies rather than calmly of potential allies in creating a better planet.

And yet, guess what, whether anyone in Washington admits it or not: we’re already rather friendly with (as well as heavily dependent on) China. Here are just two recent examples from my own mundane life. I ordered a fan — it’s hot as I type these words in my decidedly unairconditioned office — from AAFES, a department store of sorts that serves members of the military, in service or retired, and their families. It came a few days later at an affordable price. As I put it together, I saw the label: “Made in China.” Thank you for the cooling breeze, Xi Jinping!

Then I decided to order a Henley shirt from Jockey, a name with a thoroughly American pedigree. You guessed it! That shirt was plainly marked “Made in China.” (Jockey, to its credit, does have a “Made in America” collection and I got two white cotton t-shirts from it.) You get my point: the American consumer would be lost without China, the present workhouse for the world.

You’d think a war, or even a new Cold War, with America’s number-one provider of stuff of every sort would be dumb, but no one is going to lose any bets by underestimating how dumb Americans can be. Otherwise, how can you explain Donald Trump? And not just his presidency either. What about his “Trump steaks,” “Trump university,” even “Trump vodka”? After all, who could be relied upon to know more about the quality of vodka than a man who refuses to drink it?

Learning from Charlie Brown

Returning to fears and psychiatric help, one of my favorite scenes is from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” In that classic 1965 cartoon holiday special, Lucy ostensibly tries to help Charlie with his seasonal depression by labeling what ails him. The wannabe shrink goes through a short list of phobias until she lands on “pantophobia,” which she defines as “the fear of everything.” Charlie Brown shouts, “That’s it!”

Deep down, he knows perfectly well that he isn’t afraid of everything. What he doesn’t know, however, and what that cartoon is eager to show us, is how he can snap out of his mental funk. All that he needs is a little love, a little hands-on kindness from the other children.

America writ large today is, to my mind, a little like Charlie Brown — down in the dumps, bedraggled, having lost a clear sense of what life in our country should be all about. We need to come together and share a measure of compassion and love. Except our Lucys aren’t trying to lend a hand at the “psychiatric help” stand. They’re trying to persuade us that pantophobia, the fear of everything, is normal, even laudable. Their voices keep telling us to fear — and fear some more.

It’s not easy, America, to tune those voices out. My brother could tell you that. At times, he needed an asylum to escape them. What he needed most, though, was love or at least some good will and understanding from his fellow humans. What he didn’t need was more fear and neither do we. We — most of us anyway — still believe ourselves to be the “sane” ones. So why do we continue to tolerate leaders, institutions, and whole political parties intent on eroding our sanity and exploiting our fears in service of their own power and perks?

Remember that mental patient in The Big Red One, who picks up a gun and starts blasting people while crying that he’s “sane”? We’ll know we’re on the path to sanity when we finally master our fear, put down our guns, and stop eternally preparing to blast people at home and abroad.

Copyright 2022 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com