While I hadn’t seen the person under investigation for years, my memories of him and of some of the things he’d done scared me. For example, when we were young teens, he threatened to bury me alive over a disagreement. He even dug a hole to demonstrate his intent. I knew that if I were to cooperate with this investigation, my testimony would not be anonymous. As a mother of two children living on an isolated farm, that left me with misgivings.

There was also another consideration. A neighbor, herself a retired police officer, suggested that perhaps the investigation could be focused not just on him, but on me, too. “Maybe it’s because of stuff you’ve written,” she suggested, mentioning my deep involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which I co-founded as a way of dealing with this country’s nightmarish wars of this century.

Indeed, the American version of the twenty-first century, marked by our government’s devastating decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks with a Global War on Terror — first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then in other countries across the Middle East — has had its grim effects at home as well. It’s caused us to turn on one another in confusing ways. After all, terror isn’t a place or a people. You can’t eradicate it with your military. Instead, as we learned over the last couple of decades, you end up turning those you don’t like into enemies in the bloodiest of counterinsurgency wars.

I’ve researched for years how those wars of ours also helped deepen our domestic inequalities and political divisions, but after all this time, the dynamics still seem mysterious to me. Nonetheless, I hope I can at least share a bit of what I’ve noticed happening in the conservative, privileged community I grew up in, as well as in the military community I married into.

Around the time I co-founded the Costs of War Project in the early 2010s, I fell in love with a career military officer. Our multitrillion-dollar wars were then in full swing. At home, the names of young Blacks killed by our police forces, ever more ominously armed off the country’s battlefields, were just seeping into wider public consciousness as was a right-wing political backlash against prosecutions of the police. Anti-government extremist militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, some of whom would storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to violently block the certification of an elected president, were already seething about the supposed executive overreach of the Obama administration and that Black president’s alleged foreign birth. But back then, those guys all seemed — to me at least — very much a part of America’s fringe.

Back then, I also didn’t imagine that men in uniform would emerge as a central part of the leadership and membership of such extremist groups. Sadly, they did. As journalist Peter Maass pointed out recently, of the 897 individuals indicted so far for their involvement in the January 6th violence, 118 had backgrounds in the U.S. military and a number of them had fought in this country’s war on terror abroad. Nearly 30 police officers from a dozen different departments around the country similarly attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot and several faced criminal charges.

What also sends chills down my spine is that federal law enforcement agencies turned their backs on the warning signs of all this. Had the FBI acted on information that extremist groups were planning violence on January 6th, it might not have happened.

A Nation Rich in Fear

If one thing captured the spirit of the post-9/11 moment for me, in retrospect, it was the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has defined itself as a “whole-of-society endeavor, from every federal department and agency to every American across the nation.” Expenditures for that new department would total more than $1 trillion from 2002 through 2020, more than six times expenditures for similar activities at various government agencies during the previous 20 years.

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With its hundreds of thousands of workers, DHS often seems susceptible to overusing its authority and ignoring real threats. Case in point: of the approximately 450 politically motivated violent attacks taking place on our soil in the past decade, the majority were perpetrated by far-right, homegrown violent extremists. Yet all too tellingly, the DHS has largely remained focused on foreign terrorist groups — and homegrown jihadist groups inspired by them — as the main threats to this country.

Thanks to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, federal authorities were also empowered to obtain the financial and Internet records of Americans, even if they weren’t part of an authorized investigation. In the process, the government violated the privacy of tens of thousands of citizens and non-citizens. Authorities at government agencies ranging from the FBI to the Pentagon secretly monitored the communications and activities of peace groups like the Quakers and Occupy Wall Street activists. Worse yet, in June 2013, Americans learned that the National Security Agency was collecting telephone records from tens of millions of us based on a secret court order.

Such practices only seemed to legitimate vigilantism on the part of Americans who took seriously the DHS’s mantra, “If you see something, say something.” Incidents of racial profiling directed towards people of Muslim and South Asian background spiked early in the post 9/11 war years and again (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn!) after Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017.

Sometime before that, a relative visiting me noticed a darker-skinned man, a tourist, taking photos of historic buildings in my community, while speaking on his phone in Arabic. To my shame, she began questioning him, based on “a feeling that something was wrong.” In other words, well before the Donald put “fake news” in the contemporary American lexicon, feelings and not facts all too often seemed to rule the day.

“Is that the Russia?” or Dangers Near and Far

Terrorism was at once everywhere and nowhere for those who were supposed to be fighting that war on terror, including members of the military. In 2013, when my husband was on a months-long deployment at sea, another wife, whom I had texted about having a party for the crew on their return, texted me back a warning. I had, she claimed, jeopardized the safety of my husband and other crew members on his boat. After all, what if some foreign enemy intercepted our exchange and learned about the boat’s plans?

Four years later, in the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, it only got worse. A stressed-out, combat-traumatized commander, who took over the vessel to which my spouse was next assigned, emailed us wives weekly warnings against sending messages just like the one I had dispatched years earlier. He also ordered us not to email our husbands anything that could be imagined as negative, even if it reflected the realities of our lives: sick children, struggles with depression, financial troubles when we had to miss workdays to single parent. According to him, to upset our spouses in uniform was to jeopardize the security and wellbeing of the boat and indeed of America. He could read our e-mails and decide which ones made it to our loved ones. It was an extreme atmosphere to find myself in and I started to wonder: was I an asset or a threat to this country? Could my harmless words endanger lives?

One summer evening toward the end of another long deployment at sea, a fellow spouse tasked with disseminating confidential information about the boat our spouses were on arrived at my home unannounced. I was feeding my older toddler at the time. She whispered to me that our husbands’ boat was returning to port soon and swore me to silence because she didn’t want anyone beyond the command to know about the vessel’s movements. It was, she said, a matter of “operational security.” Then she took a glance out the window as though a foreign spy or terrorist might be listening.

“Oh! That’s great!” I replied to her news. Later, I tried to explain to my bewildered child what “operational security,” or keeping information about daddy’s whereabouts away from our country’s enemies, meant. He promptly pointed toward that same window and said, “Is it the Russia? Does the Russia live there?” (He’d overheard too many conversations at home about nuclear geopolitics.) The next day, pointing to a mischievous-looking ceramic garden gnome in a neighbor’s yard, he asked again, “Is that the Russia?”

It was not Russia, I assured him. But six years later, in a weary and anxious country that only recently gave The Donald a true body blow, I still wonder about the dangers of our American world in a way I once didn’t.

The 2020s and the Biggest-Loser-in-Chief

Eventually, my family and I settled into what will hopefully be our final stint of military life — an office job for my spouse and a home in rural Maryland. But somehow, in those Trump years, the once-distant dangers of our world seemed ever closer at hand.

This was the time, after all, when the president felt comfortable posting a meme of himself beating up a CNN journalist, while his Homeland Security officials detained peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. I soon began to wonder whether returning to something approximating normal civilian life was ever going to happen in this disturbed and disturbing land of ours.

Motorcyclists sporting confederate flags drove by on the rural highway in front of my house. Blue Lives Matter flags fluttered in a nearby town after the police murdered George Floyd. Even years after Trump left office, as the polls leading up to the midterm elections seemed to indicate a coming red wave, I wondered if I had been wrong to imagine that our fellow Americans would choose democracy over… well, who knew what?

As part of that election campaign, I wrote nearly 200 letters to Democratic voters in swing states urging them to get to the polls as I was planning to do. Remembering a trend my friends and I had started on social media in 2020, I considered posting a funny photograph of my sweet, excitable rooster, Windy, sitting next to piles of letters, with the caption, “Windy is vigilant about the state of our democracy! Are you?”

Then I thought twice about it, another sign of our times. It occurred to me that if I did participate in an investigation against an angry person in uniform, the one I had once known, I risked retaliation and — yes, I did think this at the time — what better target was there than our strange outdoor pet? On realizing that it was I who was now starting to think like some fear-crazed maniac, I forced myself to dismiss the thought.

Of course, that predicted red wave turned out to be, at worst, a ripple, while election denialism and voter intimidation seemed to collapse in a post-election heap. None of the most extreme MAGA candidates running for top election positions in swing states won. Was it possible that Americans had started to see the irony, not to say danger, of voting for public officials who attack the basic tenets of our democracy?

In the end, I told the guy investigating my childhood acquaintance that I couldn’t help him, feeling that I had nothing new to add for a crew with such sweeping powers of surveillance. To my relief, he simply wished me the best. The normal tenor of that conversation changed something in my thinking about the government and this moment of ours.

I found myself returning to an older (perhaps saner) view of our times, as well as the military and law enforcement. Yes, our disastrous wars of this century had brought home too many unnerved, disturbed, and damaged soldiers and small numbers of them became all too extreme, while over-armed police forces did indeed create problems for us.

However, it was also worth remembering that the military and the police are not monoliths. They aren’t “blue lives” or “the troops,” but individuals. They are part of all our lives, as fallible as they are potentially capable of helping us form a more perfect union instead of the chaos and cruelty that Donald Trump exemplifies. Were Americans — all of us from all walks of life — more willing to stand up to bigotry and extremism, we might still help change what’s happening here for the better.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

“The conversation in the nation has changed,” said Michael Podhorzer, former chief political adviser to the AFL-CIO and chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that conducts extensive public polling. “In 2021, the conversation was about what Democrats were or were not doing — inflation, Afghanistan, crime — the classic context for a party-in-power rout. Since June, the conversation has shifted to what returning Republicans to power would mean.” That shift in the conversation, he argues, is “reminding the 81 million people who voted against Trump in 2020” about why they turned out to oppose him and increasing the odds that more of them will show up again in 2022. The towering red tsunami, predicted by the media, now looks like a polluted puddle circling the sewer drain.

That conversational change occurred when five MAGA collaborators in black robes — three of them benefactors of a disgraced president not elected by a majority — voted to overturn Roe, undermining a fundamental right that for decades had been the fabric of people’s lives. The decision created a Class 9 magnitude earthquake that tectonically shifted the political landscape. It turns out that American women don’t like being told that they don’t have a right to make decisions about their own bodies. The backlash became clear when, in conservative Kansas, voters decisively rejected a constitutional amendment that would have nullified a state supreme court decision guaranteeing the right to an abortion.

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Demonstrators with signs of U.S. Supreme Court Justices during an abortion-rights protest in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, May 3, 2022. Abortion rights suddenly emerged as an issue that could reshape the battle between Democrats and Republicans for control of Congress, following a report that conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court were poised to strike down the half-century-old Roe v. Wade precedent. Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Learning to embrace their inner culture warrior, Democrats are going hard at Republicans on the forced birth issue, stressing that reproductive rights will be on the ballot. Supporting abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest demonstrate how extreme MAGA Republicans have become. The GOP candidate for Illinois Governor — religious zealot Darren Bailey — said that the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to abortion, which he called “one of the greatest atrocities of our day.” In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano — the far-right Trumpist nominee for governor — said in a debate: “I don’t give a way for any exceptions.”

Trump puppet Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz declared that abortion at any stage of pregnancy is “still murder” because “I do believe life starts at conception, and I’ve said that multiple times.” Oz further argued that incest isn’t a problem “if you’re more than a first cousin away.” A true believer when it comes to the oppression of women, incumbent MAGA Senator Ron Johnson — who is anti-abortion without exception — told the women of Wisconsin to move if they didn’t like the total abortion ban. Even Republicans who express support for limited abortion rights are getting hit, as Democrats successfully paint the entire GOP as a threat to women’s bodily autonomy — which it is.

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Mehmet Oz, who is running for the US Senate, speaks as former US President Donald Trump stands behind him during a campaign rally in support of Oz and Doug Mastriano for Governor of Pennsylvania at Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on September 3, 2022. (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images).

Some extremist Republicans have been forced on the defensive, scurrying around, trying to avoid getting swallowed by the backlash over Roe. Several nefarious MAGA candidates scrubbed hardline, anti-abortion language from their campaign websites. For example, Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters — a darling of MAGAverse — removed language that said he was “100% pro-life,” he supported a “federal personhood law” that grants rights to fertilized eggs, and he backed the nationwide criminalization of abortion.

A truly loathsome politician, Masters called the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson a “pedophile apologist,” insisted that Democrats celebrate looters, arsonists, and pedophiles as heroes, while turning brave people like Kyle Rittenhouse into villains, and called for the dismantling of American democratic institutions, which he described as a “dystopian hell-world.” Like other Republicans trying to conceal their radicalism, Masters can’t hide his MAGA toxicity.

Democrats will be positioned to preserve reproductive freedom by enshrining it into federal law if they can upset historical midterm trends and overcome the GOP’s partisan gerrymandering and plans to subvert voting. Correcting the rogue Supreme Court’s abortion ruling requires them to not only keep their majority, but to expand it — a challenging prospect in an off-year election.

“Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before,” said Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart a data and polling firm. “I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.”

Aside from abortion, the most politically potent anti-GOP issue is the former president’s stranglehold on the throat of the GOP. Democrats’ effort to make the election about Trump, rather than inflation or border security, has received a strong assist from the Con Man since he was dragged kicking and screaming from the White House after attempting a coup and inciting a treasonous paroxysm of violence that swallowed the Capitol.

His theft of classified documents has dominated headlines; his worse-than-Nixon corruption is detailed in a book Holding the Line — published Tuesday — by fired US attorney Geoffrey Berman that prompted a new Senate investigation; and, the repellent Clown Master continues to lead circus rallies for his crowd of racists, sociopaths, and celebrity worshippers who — against all self-respect and common sense — blindly adore this detestable anti-American. All of this provides a non-stop reminder of Trump’s malignant impact, of his danger to democracy, and of the need to stop him and his Republican Cult.

Bowing to the feral horde, also known as the Republican base, GOP leaders rushed to defend the brazen traitor after the FBI executed the search warrant on his Florida club. Florida Senator and spineless groveler Marco Rubio set the pace for abject devotion when he tweeted the day of the search: “Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships. But never before in America.” Rubio and Republican toadies have hitched themselves to the crime boss demagogue and will ride him to the bitter end. “We’re just waiting for him to die,” said a former Republican congressman, quoted in Mark Leibovich”s book Thank You for Your Servitude.

Threatening democracy, MAGA voters elevated legions of Trump-endorsed election-deniers. A recent CNN tally found that at least 20 GOP nominees out of this year’s 36 gubernatorial races — including Wisconsin, Kansas, and Maryland — have questioned or outright dismissed the 2020 election results. In Michigan and Nevada, the Republican party’s nominees for secretary of state — people who will oversee the 2024 election — have completely disappeared down the Stop-the-Steal rabbit hole.

Yet, for overall Mar-A-Lago madness, it is tough to beat Arizona, where GOP voters went all in on reality-challenged MAGA psychos. Election-deniers rode Trump’s Hellship to a clean sweep of all the top GOP nominations in Arizona, including governor, attorney general, secretary of state and US senator. These lunatics argue not only that loser Trump won the election in 2020, but also that the state’s results should be decertified.

In the midst of this anti-democratic menace, Democratic intensity and confidence is on the rise. President Biden’s job approval ratings have ticked up. Democrats over-performed in multiple special elections, including one in deep red Alaska where Native Alaskan Mary Peltola — abortion rights supporter and environmental activist — defeated the abominable, proto-Trumpist Sarah Palin.

Democrats have made steady gains on the generic congressional ballot and now have a slight advantage, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. Political handicappers, like the Cook Political Report, have tweaked their predictions in Democrats’ direction. On Tuesday, Trumpist Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a nation-wide ban on abortions that would eliminate abortion access everywhere and reminded voters of the extremism that will come if Republicans take back the Senate and House. Further, the Biden-supported Ukrainian offensive against MAGA hero Vladimir Putin demonstrates that, with dogged persistence, the seemingly impossible is possible.

Assuming a massive voter turnout, Democrats expect to hold the Senate with strong candidates such as progressive Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Representative Tim Ryan in Ohio, and Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia running against flawed, unqualified MAGA zealots Ron Johnson, Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, J.D. Vance and accused domestic abuser Herschel Walker. Unthinkable just a few months ago, Democrats now believe they will also retain their majority in the House of Representatives.

The vengefulness, veniality, and sheer lunacy of so many Ultra MAGA House members terrifies all rational people. Democrats must make clear that electing more vile Trump-lackeys like Marjorie Taylor Green, Gym Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert will increase the House ranks of white nationalists who will spout boundless stupidity and cause non-stop chaos.

If they win a majority, this MAGA Goon Squad will abuse the House’s power to launch probes of the Justice Department and the FBI for investigating Trump. They will impeach Biden. They could use the House’s fiscal powers to defund or hobble any prosecutions of Trump’s criminality. They are even capable of shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt-ceiling, which would send the global economy into turmoil.

Biden recently described MAGA Republicans as representing an extremism that threatens the foundations of the American republic. He also likened the MAGA ideology to “semi-fascism.” This rhetoric re-framed the 2022 election as a high-stakes contest between democracy and a return to Trumpism. He made clear that if you want to beat Trump in 2024, you need to beat him in 2022. With Trumpism, democracy, and abortion on the ballot, rational humans should be enthused about voting and even optimistic about winning because losing is unthinkable.

At the rally on the mall, Trump told his minions, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.”

Instead, Pence had headed over to the Capitol to certify Biden’s win.

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) presided over the presentation and further questioning on Thursday, revealing, as well, that the secure location to which the Secret Service had spirited Pence, in an underground loading dock, was still only 40 feet from the murderous “paramilitary wing of the GOP” (in the phrase of Patrick J. Coolican), calling for him to be hanged.

As McCaskill points out, Aguilar showed video of insurrectionists saying that they had heard that Pence had declined to decertify Biden’s win, with one shouting aggressively, “I’m telling you, if Pence caved, we’re gonna drag motherf— through the streets,” the man said. “You f— politicians are gonna get f— drug through the streets.”

We’ve all seen another clip played, with chants of “Hang Mike Pence” against the backdrop of a placard with a noose and gallows pictured on it.

Trump was watching obsessively the news coverage of the insurrection and there is no way that he did not know by 2:24 pm that his goons had murder on their minds should they have gotten hold of the vice president.

In fact, AP says Liz Cheney alleged that Trump was told by a staffer about the chants to hang Mike Pence and he replied, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves it.”

So the question must be raised of whether Trump was attempting to threaten Pence’s life, either in revenge for his blocking of Trump’s self-coup, or in hopes of scaring him into changing his mind and sending the certification back to the states. Pence did not have the authority to do the latter.

The Rasputin-like role of former law professor at Chapman University, Peter Eastman, crystallized even more clearly with Thursday’s testimony, much of it from Pence’s legal staff at the vice president’s office. Eastman thought the easiest path to overthrowing Biden was to have Pence refuse to certify the election on the (specious) grounds that disputed states such as Arizona recounts were still being conducted. But, witnesses said, Eastman also thought the same end could be achieved if Pence would turn the vote back to the states. He is alleged to have admitted that perhaps no justices on the Supreme Court would support the first, but to have asserted that there would be some support for the second way of proceeding.

Since, as Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine reports, it is now clear that Eastman, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, was in close contact with Clarence’s wife, Ginni Thomas. All this raises the question of whether Thomas himself helped plan the coup and was actively colluding with Eastman, tipping him through his wife to the procedures most likely to win approval at the Supreme Court. Ginni Thomas has now agreed to testify before the Jan. 6 committee.

Since Eastman’s crackpot plot pivoted on the actions of the vice president, he thereby put a target on Pence’s back from the Trump paramilitaries should Pence decline to cooperate.

Pence served Trump faithfully for four years, helping him gain the evangelical vote and giving him the imprimatur of the non-crazy wing of the Republican Party. What he may have discovered in the end was that Trumpism is not the sort of predator that is ever satisfied, and in its voracious hunger it will devour all those not in lockstep with the great leader.

January 6 was a counter-revolutionary event.

Why do I say this? The chief feature of the Declaration of Independence was not that it announced an insurrection (or rather confirmed one already announced by some 90 councils and other local bodies). Insurrections are a dime a dozen. It is the grounds of the insurrection in a demand for the rule of law and respect for the rights of the people that make it distinctive. January 6 was counter-revolutionary because it stood for cult of personality, authoritarianism, and arbitrary rule.

2. The Fourth of July’s Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was not an ideal that the signers (or author) all lived up to, but it was a high ideal that made space for people to struggle for it.

The January 6 insurrectionists stood for racial and gender hierarchy and the principal that white men are superior. Some wore t-shirts lauding the genocide of Jews at Auschwitz or belonged to groups whose t-shirts sometimes say “6MWE,” meaning Six Million Wasn’t Enough. Kristin Romey at National Geographic explains, “The Confederate flag, first swung on the country’s battlefields by secessionist states who saw their future in the enslavement of others; the gallows and noose, shorthand for the terrorization of African-Americans under Jim Crow as well as quick and dirty frontier justice.”

3. The Declaration of Independence insists on representative government: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”

The Trumpists are all about voter suppression, ensuring that the majority of the governed cannot give their consent. The Capitol insurrection aimed at overthrowing a government that the majority of the electorate voted for. When the majority is disenfranchised, the government no longer derives its powers from the consent of the governed. The insurrectionists sought to make Trump a new King George III.

4. The Declaration of Independence castigates King George III for attempting to curtail immigration to North America: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

The Trumpists uphold Trump’s anti-immigration policies, which if they became permanent would quickly lead to a decline in the US population and standing in the world, as well as harming the economy and leaving the aged with no younger generation to pay into programs such as social security. NPR reports of insurrection arrestees, “At least 32 of the defendants appear to have links to the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violent rhetoric and street violence. Their values have been widely described as racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant and hateful against other minority groups.”

5. The Declaration of Independence slammed the king: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”

The Trumpists so defer to the military brass, and Trump put so many in top policy roles, that the key principal of civilian control of the military was eroded. Polina Beliakova at The Texas National Security Review quotes former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders as saying ““[I]f you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.” Beliakova goes on to observe,

“the increased reliance on the military in policymaking became a salient feature of U.S. civil-military relations during the Trump administration and is likely to have lasting consequences. Trump’s initial set of appointees included Gen. (Ret.) James Mattis as secretary of defense, Gen. (Ret.) John Kelly as secretary of homeland security, and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Flynn as national security adviser. Even before Trump’s inauguration, scholars of civil-military relations voiced concerns about the growing influence of former military members in his administration.4 It did not seem, however, that the new president shared this concern. Regardless of the retired or active-duty status of his team members, Trump referred to them as “my generals,” underscoring their connection to the military profession and institution.

Trump’s intention to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use the military in response to the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, as well as the subsequent statements of Mattis, Adm. (Ret.) Michael Mullen, and Gen. (Ret.) Martin Dempsey condemning this move, once again brought to the fore the increased role that the armed forces play in U.S. politics today.”

Our July 4th celebrations this year take on some elements of a Thanksgiving, as well– that the vice president was not hanged, that the Speaker of the House was not kidnapped, that the representatives elected by the people were not brutalized, and that our democracy was not endangered by a violent intervention against the routine certification of the 2020 election, among the fairest and most secure in the country’s history.

This Fourth of July, we have declared independence from the mad Donald John Trump and his Neonazi mobs.

——

Bonus Video:

MSNBC: “Frank Figliuzzi On Breaking New York Times’ Insurrection Reporting”

White supremacist and militia organizations are exploiting the government’s chaotic response to the coronavirus for recruitment efforts.

Whatever his intention, these groups interpret President Donald Trump’s tweets to “LIBERATE” states and calling armed protesters “very good people” as support for their cause.

Recent research by the Tech Transparency Project into social media accounts of white supremacists, a nonprofit that researches “the influence of the major technology platforms” on politics, policy and people’s lives, found that “some members of private … Facebook groups reacted to the president’s rhetoric (about lockdown protests) with memes of celebration.”

The white supremacists’ response reflects the United States’ history of local, state and national political leaders encouraging white supremacist groups to challenge or overthrow democratic governments.

During Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period of forming interracial governments and reintegrating former Confederate states into the Union, white city and state leaders in the South tacitly encouraged violence against black voters by state militias and groups like the Ku Klux Klan. They did it in a way that allowed those leaders to look innocent of any crimes.

Those groups used that chaos to end federal power in their states and reestablish white-dominated Southern state governments.

Today, white supremacists hope the political chaos they contribute to will lead to race war and the creation of their own white nation.

Reconstruction violence

Moments of changing social and political power in U.S. history have led to clashes – often armed – between white supremacists and interracial alliances over voting rights.

That history includes the period following the Civil War, when white supremacist organizations saw the postwar rule over Southern states of Radical Republicans and the federal government as illegitimate. They wanted to return to the prewar status quo of slavery by another name and white supremacist rule.

As a historian of protests and Reconstruction, I study how those paramilitary groups or self-proclaimed “regulators” consequently spread fear and terror among black and white Republican voters with the support of the anti-black Democratic Party in Southern states.

They targeted elections and vowed to “carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”

Still, many courageous black and white voters fought back by forming political organizations, daring to vote and assembling their own armed guards to protect themselves.

‘Gentlemen of property and standing’

Then, as today, white supremacists received encouraging signals from powerful leaders.

In the 19th century, “gentlemen of property and standing” often led or indirectly supported anti-abolition mobs, slave patrols, lynch mobs or Klan attacks.

Federal investigators in Kentucky in 1867 found that “many men of wealth and position” rode with the armed groups. One witness in the federal investigation testified that “many of the most respectable men in the county belong in the ‘Lynch’ party.” Future South Carolina Governor and U.S. Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman reflected on his participation in the Hamburg massacre of 1876, arguing that “the leading men” of the area wanted to teach black voters a lesson by “having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many as was justifiable.” At least six black men were killed in the Hamburg attack on the black South Carolina militia by the Red Shirts, a white rifle club.

White supremacists knew that they would not face consequences for their violence.

An agent of the federal Freedmen’s Bureau – set up by Congress in 1865 to help former slaves and poor whites in the South – stated that the “desperadoes” received encouragement and were “screened from the hands of justice by citizens of boasted connections.”

President Ulysses S. Grant condemned the Hamburg massacre, arguing that some claimed “the right to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputation.”

Facing community pressure, and without the presence of the U.S. Army to enforce laws, local sheriffs and judges refused or were unable to enforce federal laws.

Witnesses were often afraid to challenge local leaders for fear of attack. The “reign of terror” was so complete that “men dare not report outrages and appear as witnesses.”

When the U.S. District Court in Kentucky brought charges against two men for lynching in 1871, prosecutors could not find witnesses willing to testify against the accused. The Frankfort Commonwealth newspaper wrote, “He would be hung by a [mob] inside of twenty-four hours, and the dominant sentiment … would say ‘served him right.’”

State militias

As Southern states threw off federal military occupation and elected their own white-dominated governments, they no longer had to rely solely on white terror organizations to enforce their agenda.

Instead, these self-described “redeemers” formed state-funded militias that served similar functions of intimidation and voter suppression with the support of prominent citizens.

At political rallies and elections throughout the South, official Democratic militias paraded through towns and monitored polling stations to threaten black and white Republican voters, proclaiming that “this is our country and we intend to protect it or die.”

In 1870 the Louisville Commercial newspaper argued, “We have, then, a militia for the State of Kentucky composed of members of one political party, and designed solely to operate against members of another political party. These militia are armed with State guns, are equipped from the State arsenal, and to a man are the enemies of the national government.”

By driving away Republican voters and claiming electoral victory, these Democratic leaders gained power through state-supported militia violence.

White militias and paramilitary groups also confiscated guns from black citizens who tried to protect themselves, claiming “We did not think they had a right to have guns.”

White terror groups and their allies in law enforcement were especially hostile to politically active black Union veterans who returned home with their military weapons. Local sheriffs confiscated weapons and armed bands raided homes to destroy their guns.

Guerrilla race war

During Reconstruction, paramilitary groups and official Democratic militias found support from county sheriffs up to state governors who encouraged violence while maintaining their own innocence.

Today, white supremacists appear to interpret politicians’ remarks as support for their cause of a new civil war to create a white-dominated government.

These groups thrive on recent protests against stay-at-home orders, especially the ones featuring protesters with guns, creating an intimidating spectacle for those who support local and state government authority.

Beyond “dog whistle” politics, as in the past, these statements – and the actions encouraged by them – can lead to real violence and hate crimes against any who threaten supremacists’ concept of a white nation.

[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Shannon M. Smith, Associate Professor of History, College of Saint Benedict & Saint John’s University

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

Steve Bannon insists that there’s “no room” for neo-nazi’s and white supremacists in the alt-right movement, Buzzfeed just called bullshit. Brett Erlich, Nando Vila and Hannah Cranston discuss on The Young Turks.

After a white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville ended in a killing last August, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK. But throughout the 2016 presidential campaign under Bannon’s leadership Breitbart cultivated the alt-right — the insurgent, racist far right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist admitted that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.

The Young Turks: “Buzzfeed Exposes Breitbart’s Neo-Nazi Roots”

I recently sent my last kid off for her senior year of college. There are rituals to such moments, and because dad-confessions are not among them, I just carried boxes and kept quiet. But what I really wanted to say to her — rather than see you later, call this weekend, do you need money? — was: I’m sorry.

Like all parents in these situations, I was thinking about her future. And like all of America, in that future she won’t be able to escape what is now encompassed by the word “terrorism.”

Everything Is Okay, But You Should Be Terrified

Terrorism is a nearly nonexistent danger for Americans. You have a greater chance of being hit by lightning, but fear doesn’t work that way. There’s no 24/7 coverage of global lightning strikes or “if you see something, say something” signs that encourage you to report thunderstorms. So I felt no need to apologize for lightning.

But terrorism? I really wanted to tell my daughter just how sorry I was that she would have to live in what 9/11 transformed into the most frightened country on Earth.

Want the numbers? Some 40% of Americans believe the country is more vulnerable to terrorism than it was just after September 11, 2001 — the highest percentage ever.

Want the apocalyptic jab in the gut? Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said earlier this month that the threat remains just as grave: “Those people, those enemies, those members of that terrorist group, still intend — as they did on 9/11 — to destroy your freedoms, to kill you, kill your families, they still intend to destroy the United States of America.”

All that fear turned us into an engine of chaos abroad, while consuming our freedoms at home. And it saddens me that there was a different world, pre-9/11, which my daughter’s generation and all those who follow her will never know.

Growing Up

My kids grew up overseas while, from 1988 to 2012, I served with the State Department. For the first part of my career as a diplomat, wars were still discreet matters. For example, though Austria was a neighbor of Slovenia, few there were worried that the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s would spill across the border. Suicide bombers didn’t threaten Vienna when we visited as tourists in 1991. That a war could again consume large parts of the globe and involve multiple nations would have seemed as remote to us vacationers that year as the moon.

Even the big war of the era, Desert Storm in 1991, seemed remarkably far away. My family and I were assigned to Taiwan at the time and life there simply went on. There was no connection between us and what was happening in Kuwait and Iraq, and certainly we didn’t worry about a terror attack.

It’s easy to forget how long ago that was. Much of the Balkans is now a tourist destination, and a young soldier who fought in Desert Storm would be in his mid-forties today. Or think of it this way: either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on entering the Oval Office next January will be the fifth president in succession to bomb Iraq.

When September 11, 2001, arrived, I was on assignment to Japan, and like everyone, as part of a collective trauma, I watched the terrible events on TV. Due to the time difference, it was late at night in Tokyo. As the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I made sandwiches, suspecting the phone would soon ring and I’d be called to the embassy for a long shift. I remember my wife saying, “Why would they call you in? We’re in Tokyo!” Then, of course, the phone did ring, and I ran to grab it — not out of national security urgency, but so it didn’t wake my kids.

My daughter’s birthday falls on the very day that George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I missed her celebration in 2003 to stay at work preparing for the embassy to be overrun by al-Qaeda. I missed her birthday again in 2005, having been sent on temporary duty to Thailand to assist the U.S. Navy in setting up a short-term base there. When the naval officers mentioned the location they wanted to use to the Thai military liaison accompanying us, he laughed. That’s taken, he said, but you didn’t hear it from me, better ask your own people about it.

Later, I would learn that the location was a CIA black site where the country I then represented was torturing human beings.

Looking back, it’s remarkable to realize that, in response to a single day of terror, Washington set the Middle East ablaze, turned air travel into a form of bondage play, and did away with the best of our democracy.

Nothing required the Patriot Act, Guantánamo, renditions, drone assassinations, and the National Security Agency turning its spy tools inward. The White House kept many of the nastiest details from us, but made no secret of its broader intentions. Americans on the whole supported each step, and later Washington protected the men and women who carried out each of the grim acts it had inspired. After all, they were just following orders.

Protocols now exist allowing the president to select American citizens without a whit of due process for drone killing. Only overseas, he says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported a drone strike in San Bernardino or at the Pulse club in Orlando? Didn’t many support using a robot to blow up a suspect in Dallas?

Back in the Homeland

The varieties of post-9/11 fear sneak up on us all. I spent a week this summer obsessively watching the news for any sign of trouble in Egypt while my daughter was there visiting some old embassy acquaintances. I worried that she was risking her life to see a high school friend in a country once overrun with tourists.

So I want to say sorry to my daughter and her friends for all the countries where we Americans, with our awkward shorts and sandals, were once at least tolerated, but that are now dangerous for us to visit. Sorry that you’ll never see the ruins of Babylon or the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq unless you join the military.

Arriving back in the U.S., my daughter called from the airport to say she’d be home in about an hour. I didn’t mention my worries that she’d be stopped at “the border,” a new name for baggage claim, or have her cell phone confiscated for daring to travel to the Middle East. An immigration agent did, in fact, ask her what her purpose was in going there, something even the Egyptians hadn’t bothered to question her about.

I also wanted to apologize to my daughter because, in our new surveillance world, she will never really know what privacy is. I needed to ask her forgiveness for how easily we let that happen, for all those who walk around muttering that they have nothing to hide, so what’s to worry about. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that she’s now afraid of the police, not just for herself but especially for her friends of color. I wanted to tell her how badly I felt that she’d only know a version of law enforcement so militarized that, taking its cues from the national security state, it views us all as potential enemies and believes that a significant part of its job involves repressing our most basic rights.

I’m sorry, I want to say to her, that protesters can be confined in something called a “free speech zone” surrounded by those same police. I want to tell my daughter that the Founders would rise up in righteous anger at the idea of the police forcing citizens into such zones outside a political convention — and at the fact that most journalists don’t consider such a development to be a major story of our times.

As I sent her off to college, I wanted to say how sorry I was that we had messed up her world, sorry we not only didn’t defeat the terrorists the way Grandpa did the Nazis but, by our actions, gave their cause new life and endless new recruits. Al-Qaeda set a trap on 9/11 and we leaped into it. The prison American occupiers set up at Camp Bucca in Iraq became a factory for making jihadis, and the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib remain, like Guantánamo, an infomercial inviting others to pick up a weapon.

The New Normal

My daughter is not naïve. Like many of her classmates, she’s aware of most of these things, but she has no point of comparison. What fish truly sees the water around it? And imagine how much harder it’ll be for her future kids. Her adult life has been marked by constant war, so much so that “defeating the terrorists” is little more than a set phrase she rolls her eyes at. It’s a generational thing that’s too damn normal, like Depression-era kids still saving aluminum foil and paper bags in the basement after decades of prosperity.

I’m truly sorry that her generation copes with this by bouncing between cynicism and the suspension of disbelief. It was, in a way, that suspension of disbelief that allowed so many, including older people who should have known better, to accept the idea that invading Iraq was a reasonable response to an attack on America by a group of Saudis funded by Saudi “charity” donations. By now, “well, it wasn’t actually a crime” is little short of a campaign slogan for acts that couldn’t be more criminal. That’s a world on a path to accepting 2+2 can indeed equal 5 — if our leaders tell us it’s so.

We allow those leaders to claim that the thousands of American troops now stationed in Iraq are somehow not “boots on the ground,” or “ground troops.” Drone strikes, we’re told, are surgical, killing only bad guys with magic missiles, and never purposely hitting civilians, hospitals, children, or wedding parties. The deaths of human beings in such situations are always rare and accidental, the equivalent of those scratches on your car door from that errant shopping cart in the mall parking lot.

Cleaning Up After Dad

If anyone is going to fix this mess, I want to tell my daughter, it’s going to have to be you. And I want to add, you’ve got to do a better job than I did — if, that is, you really want to find a way to say thanks for the skating lessons, the puppy, and that night I didn’t get angry when you violated curfew to spend more time with that boy.

After the last cardboard boxes had been lugged up the stairs, I held back my tears until the very end. Hugging my daughter at that moment, I felt as if I wasn’t where I was standing but in a hundred other places. I wasn’t consoling a smart, proud, twenty-something woman, apprehensive about senior year, but an elementary school student going to bed on the night that would forever be known only as 9/11.

Back home, the house is empty and quiet. Outside, the leaves have just a hint of yellow. At lunch, I had some late-season strawberries nearly sweet enough to confirm the existence of a higher power. I’m gonna really miss this summer.

I know I’m not the first parent to grow reflective watching his last child walk out the door, but I have a sense of what’s ahead of her: an American world filled with misplaced fears.  Fear is a terrible thing to be sorry for, and that in itself can be scary.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the “reconstruction” of Iraq in We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at We Meant Well. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work will be Hooper’s War, a novel of World War II in Japan.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Peter Van Buren

Via ( Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: “Right-wing Terrorists Kill More Americans Than Islamic Extremists”

In an attempt at a foreign policy speech in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday, Donald Trump attempted to get back to his fearmongering roots by focusing on the threat of ISIL, which he depicted as a hydra-headed menace with tentacles in a range of Western countries including the US.

In fact, Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) is a relatively small organization that has been shrinking in both personnel and territory. It has lost its footholds in Diyala, al-Anbar and Salahuddin provinces in Iraq and a campaign against its remaining stronghold in that country, Mosul, by Kurdish and Shiite forces is now building. It is possible that it will be finished as a holder of territory in Iraq before the November election in the US. Likewise, in Syria, Daesh has just lost Manbij, which sits astride one of its major smuggling routes. It has also lost most of northern al-Raqqa province, the city of Palmyra, and other important real estate. In Libya, its fighters in Sirte have fled the city under US bombardment. As for Sinai, those are mistreated Sinai residents– some of them Bedouin tribes, who have been fighting the Egyptian army for some time and only declared themselves ISIL to gain the benefits of franchising, sort of like a local burger joint putting up golden arches and pretending it is a McDonald’s. The terrorism it has pulled off in Europe has been of the lazy soft-target variety, and while the deaths it has caused have been traumatic and are horrific, the incidents haven’t actually been a challenge to national security anywhere outside the Middle East.

Trump supported the interventions he now condemns, including the Iraq War and the no-fly zone in Libya, so his picture of a Middle East in flames as a result of President Obama’s policies is ignoring his own positions.

Trump said he wanted to ally with Russia against ISIL. De facto, that is an arrangement President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have already worked out.

Having tried to scare people with an ISIL clearly in rapid decline, he went on to bash ordinary Muslims again. He wants to exclude immigrants from “volatile” parts of the world, and wants to exclude those who question gay marriage e.g.

He called for extreme vetting of those admitted. But US visa procedures, unbeknownst to Trump, are already extremely strict. His vague addition of the modifier “extreme” to “vetting” won’t make them more strict.

He said,

“We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people. . . In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted.”

Sharia law is just Muslim religious law, akin to Roman Catholic canon law or Jewish religious law (Halakhah). It isn’t a substitute for the US constitution. Aside from a few countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, it isn’t even part of the constitution of most Muslim countries (Turkey’s constitution is based on that of Switzerland; even Tunisia’s party of the religious right, al-Nahda, declined to push for putting shariah in the Tunisian constitution; etc., etc.)

Would believing in these things religiously make you ineligible to come to the US?

Marriage age for girls of 12

Stoning adulterers to death.

Death penalty for gay sex

Burning at the stake for incest

If so, Trump would actually be excluding fundamentalist Jews from the US. Some American Jews are worried that Trump would exclude Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews from Israel.

Likewise, a lot of Ukrainians, who are also from a volatile part of the world, likely don’t subscribe to some of the values Trump wants to make litmus tests.

Trump hopes for a bounce in the polls via this ugly religious bigotry. I am hoping that Americans are better than that.

—–

Related video:

PBS Newshour: “Trump reveals his national security plan — while Clinton says he doesn’t have one”

An analysis of the Twitter conversation over 12 hours on the day of the shooting reveals deep animosity against politicians for not legislating tougher gun controls.

Twitter users responded to the shooting in Orlando, Florida, with an abundance of love and prayers for the victims, their families, and the gay community in America, fury against political leaders for failing to institute stricter gun controls – and very little by way of Islamophobia despite the shooter’s Muslim identity and apparent allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS or IS).

Forty-nine people were killed and nearly an equal number injured when Omar Mateen, a U.S.-born national of Afghan origin, opened fire at a gay nightclub in the wee hours of Sunday. The body count made it one of the worst incidents of mass shooting on American soil.

The response to the tragedy on Twitter was immediate and massive. I mined all tweets with the hashtag #Orlando beginning just before noon Eastern Time on Sunday – soon after the shooter’s identity was publicly revealed. Over the next 12 hours, I collected a total of 50,000 tweets divided into five batches of 10,000 each. Every batch spans roughly two-and-a-half hours of Twitter activity. I then analyzed these tweets to understand how the Twitter conversation evolved over the course of the day using a computerized technique called Topic Modeling, which breaks down large textual datasets into groups of keywords representing different “topics” of conversation.

Five broad “topics” regarding the Orlando shooting emerged from the analysis.

Guns N’ Roses

The first topic, which dominated Twitter all through the day, includes the keywords “orlando,” “victims,” “shooting,” “people,” “prayers,” “loveislove,” “love,” “thoughts,” “hate,” “families,” “lgbt,” “gun,” “gay,” “america,” and “obama.” I label this topic Guns N’ Roses (see Figure 1). These keywords indicate that this topic focuses on the act of the shooting itself along with messages of love and prayers for its victims, their families, and the gay community. For example, one tweet read: “Our hearts break for the victims and families of this horrific act of violence. We stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ community #Orlando #LoveIsLove.”

The presence of the keyword “gun” in this topic suggests that Twitter users saw the tragedy as yet another instance of unrestrained gun violence in America. One such tweet read: “Not sure what to think about #Orlando except in 2016 we still not safe. LGBT legislation doesn’t keep us safe, gun laws don’t keep us safe.” The keywords also suggest that President Obama’s speech after the shooting was frequently commented upon. Although users were mostly supportive of the president’s pro-gun control message, many pointed out that he has delivered the same message after every tragedy but has failed to act on his own words.

Although Guns N’ Roses dominated the Twitter conversation all through the day, it proportionally declined in use from above 70 percent between noon and 4:40 pm to about 50 percent after 9.30 pm (see Figure 1).

The IS (Dis)Connect

The second biggest topic of conversation varied in almost each of the five batches of tweets collected (see Figure 2). Between noon and 2:20 pm, the second biggest topic (28 percent of Twitter conversation) included the keywords “ISIS,” “Pakistan,” “kamalfaridi,” and “violence.” This was soon after the media revealed the shooter’s name, and his Muslim identity featured prominently in tweets.

A casual look at the topic may suggest an upsurge of Islamophobia in this period, and indeed there were several tweets that linked Mateen’s action to Islam and to blaming Muslims as a community. But a large number of tweets also pointed out the folly of such an attitude. One tweet, for instance, read: “Whether this was ISIS or not, to respond with hate and prejudice is exactly what they want. To alienate Muslims around the world. #Orlando.” Therefore, I label this topic The IS (Dis)Connect.

Several Twitter users retweeted a post by the user @KamalFaridi that read “Our heart goes out to the victims and families in #Orlando. Love and peace can never be extinguished. #Pakistan #Muslims.” Others questioned how, despite Mateen’s known IS sympathies, he could be allowed to purchase guns—thus putting the blame once again on U.S. gun laws rather than IS or Muslims per se. A commonly retweeted post, by journalist Piers Morgan, read: “FBI interviewed this guy TWICE about ISIS sympathies but he could still legally buy his guns 2 weeks ago???? Unbelievable.”

Art Versus Politics

In the next two-and-a-half-hours or so, that is until 4:40 pm, the second most prominent topic of Twitter conversation (22 percent) included keywords such as “tonyawards,” “politicians,” “fifa,” “gaysbreaktheinternet,” “action,” “egnjyd,” “endgunviolence,” “everytown,” “prayfortheworld,” and “ecuvhai.” Much of this conversation hailed the art world’s response to Orlando. The Tony Awards for theatrical performances, held on Sunday, came in for special praise in tweets such as “’Hamilton’ cast won’t use musket props in #TonyAwards performance after #Orlando shootings” and “Silver ribbons at @TheTonyAwards in observance of #orlando.”

Many users retweeted Lady Gaga calling on followers to donate to the Pulse Victims Fund (“egnjyd” was part of the link to the fund’s website). The minute of silence observed during Sunday’s soccer match between Ecuador and Haiti (“ECUvHAI”) was also frequently tweeted about.

Many tweets contrasted the response of the art and sports world with that of politicians. This common refrain was reflected in retweets of user @Everytown’s post: “We need more than thoughts & prayers from our politicians to #EndGunViolence. America needs action. #Orlando.” Another user posted, “Hard to take seriously these #Orlando ‘solidarity’ tweets from politicians + religious leaders who’ve fought the LBGTQ community for years.”

The Vigil

This topic became the second most dominant in the next two batches of tweets— from 4:40 pm to 7 pm (21 percent) and from 7 pm to 9:30 pm (38 percent). It included keywords such as “victims,” “vigil,” “love,” “center,” “lit,” “trade,” “colors,” “rainbow,” “prayfororlando,” “tonight,” “trump,” “listen,” “cut,” “world,” and “watch.”

As these keywords suggest, the Twitter conversation over these five hours prominently featured vigils being organized around the world to pray for the victims. A user from Toronto, for instance, tweeted: “Heading to the vigil for #Orlando. I need to be with other folks who have felt afraid they might get killed just for being who they are.” Several users also posted about 1 World Trade Center being lit with the colors of the pride flag to honor victims.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s announcement that he had been warning the nation against the dangers of “Islamic terrorism” was another prominent trope within The Vigil. It was both praised and panned. Although supporters insisted that Trump was the only leader who could keep terrorists at bay, detractors such as @thelittleidiot posted, “Shame on you @realDonaldTrump trying to use the heartbreak and tragedy in #orlando for your political gain.”

Luis Vielma

Author J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, tweeted that one of the Orlando victims had been a member of the film crew. She posted: “Luis Vielma worked on the Harry Potter ride at Universal. He was 22 years old. I can’t stop crying. #Orlando.” Twitter users retweeted her extensively and Vielma’s death became the second most dominant topic of conversation (42 percent) from 9:30 pm until midnight, including the keywords “orlando,” “worked,” “universal,” “luis,” “harry,” “potter,” “years,” “jk,” “crying,” “rowling,” “vielma,” “ride,” and “stop.” It closely trailed Guns N’ Roses, which was still the most dominant topic at 50 percent.

To the extent that the Twitter conversation represents the public mood in the wake of the shooting, the trends identified here have three important implications. First, the prevalence of Guns N’ Roses as the dominant topic all through the day indicates that Americans keenly desire more gun control. Public opinion polls have indicated that a majority of Americans are tired of the influence the pro-gun lobby wields over lawmaking: the Twitter reaction to Orlando reinforces this finding.

Second, despite Mateen’s Muslim identity, Americans are largely unwilling to give in to Islamophobia in the wake of this tragedy. Mateen’s Muslim faith and IS allegiance was discussed briefly and in a fairly balanced manner on Twitter, and then the conversation moved on to other topics. This absence of anti-Muslim animosity is especially notable as it follows months of efforts to ramp up the fear of and hatred for Muslims during this election cycle.

Third, if Twitter users displayed any animosity, it was toward their political leaders who do not reform gun laws despite repeated tragedies. This sentiment came up again and again in various topics of conversation over the course of the day. Even users who noted Mateen’s IS link remarked that, his motivation aside, it was eventually their leaders’ failure to tighten gun control that allowed him to purchase assault rifles.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus/ Lobelog)

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Channel 4 News from last week: “Orlando shooting: terrorism and gun control debate in USA”