( Tomdispatch.com ) – Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” nearly 2,000 years ago for the extravagant entertainment the Roman Empire used to distract attention from imperial policies that caused widespread discontent. Imagine the lavish banquets, gladiatorial bouts, use and abuse of young men and women for the pleasure of the rich, and so much more that characterized the later years of that empire. And none of it seems that far off from the situation we, in these increasingly dis-United States, find ourselves in today.

Although the Roman Empire described itself as being in favor of life and peace, the various Caesars and their enablers regularly dealt death and destruction in their wake. They spread the Pax Romana (the Roman Peace), including a taxation system that left the poor in debt servitude, a military that caused terror and violence across the then-known world, and a ruling authority that pitted whole communities against each other, while legislating who could associate with whom (passing marriage laws, for instance, that banned gay, inter-racial, or even cross-class marriages). The emperor in power in Jesus’s time, Caesar Augustus, was known for ushering in a Golden Age of Moral Values that went hand in hand with that Pax Romana, and it meant war and death, especially for the poor.

Fast forward millennia and that world bears a strange resemblance to the media distractions, violence, and regressive policies that MAGA and other extremists are pushing forward in our times. Whether it’s Donald Trump’s assertion that “I alone can fix your problems”; Supreme Court and state legislative attacks on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and trans youth in the name of family values; cuts to welfare, healthcare, worker’s rights and other life-sustaining programs to protect corporate interests; the militarizing of endless communities by allowing guns (especially AR-15 rifles) to proliferate, while offering only thoughts and prayers to the victims of violence, the MAGA movement is promoting culture wars and extremist policies under the banner of Christian nationalism. In doing so, its leaders are perfecting a disdain for the excluded, exploited, and rejected that hurts the poor first and worst, but impacts all of society.

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And now, after decades of neoliberal plunder and the coronation of an avowed Christian nationalist — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson — to the third most powerful position in the government, the Christian Right and its wealthy patrons have their eyes set on an even more ambitious power-grab: Project 2025. Articulated through the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, it’s a sprawling plan to maximize presidential power with hundreds of newly trained and deployed political operatives during Donald Trump’s next presidency. It was seen in full display recently at the Republican National Convention and made all the more likely by the recent assassination attempt against him with (yes!) an AR-15! The nearly 900-page document outlines a plan to ramp up U.S. military might, slash social welfare programs, and prioritize “traditional marriage.” A reflection of the Republican Party today, including several Christian nationalist organizations and billionaire funders listed among its 100 institutional sponsors, Project 2025 is a roadmap for what could be thought of as a new Pax Romana.

The Formal Project 2025 Takeover

As Project 2025’s official website explains (and doesn’t this sound like it could come directly from the mouth of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance?): “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Although its authors unabashedly deploy the language of conservative populism — decrying wokeness and “cultural Marxists” — the plan is chiefly concerned with how to put ever greater control of both people and resources in the hands of a small minority of mostly white, mostly male, wealthy Christians.

The wholesale capture of the state is the ultimate goal of its Christian nationalist architects. Project 2025 simply clarifies just how they plan to implement their drive for power.  Each of its sections — from “taking the reins of government” by centralizing executive authority in the office of the President to securing “the common defense” by expanding every branch of the military — is worth reviewing.

The longest section focuses on “general welfare” and it should be no surprise that the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development are subject to significant cutbacks, including:

• Imposing yet stricter eligibility standards, work requirements, and asset tests to constrain access to Medicaid, even though more than 23 million Americans have been unenrolled from that program since 2023;
• Revisiting how the “Thrifty Food Plan” is formulated to minimize food-stamp allocations, while imposing onerous work requirements on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), even though most of its recipients work and/or are in households with children, elderly people, or people with disabilities;
• Ending universal free school meals by removing the “community eligibility provision,” which allows school districts with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch programs to all children in need;
• Eliminating Head Start, which has served 39 million children and families since 1965 and currently serves more than 800,000 poor families with young children, while shuttering the Department of Education;
• Ending “Housing First” programs and prohibiting non-citizens, including mixed-status families, from living in low-income public housing; and
• Imposing a “life agenda” and a “family agenda” that will restrict access to abortion and reproductive rights, and otherwise curtail LGBTQ+ rights.

Such proposals would undoubtedly be deeply unpopular. In fact, as people learn more about Project 2025, opposition is growing, even across party lines. Most Americans want a government that would provide for the down-and-out, who are a growing segment of the population and the electorate, as well as one that supports abortion rights, voting rights, and the freedom of expression. At least 40% of us — 135-140 million people — are either poor or one emergency away from economic ruin, including 80 million eligible voters. Project 2025’s social welfare cuts would, in fact, push significant numbers of people across the poverty line into financial ruin.

Even Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as attention has moved toward its distinctly (di)visionary agenda. However, more than half of the project’s listed authors, editors, or contributors were once part of his administration — and no one doubts that his vice-presidential nominee is 100% pro-Project 2025!

The Informal Takeover Already Underway

Perhaps scarier than either Trump’s or Vance’s connection to this regressive plan, however, is the fact that, despite popular distaste for such policies, it may not take a second Trump presidency to implement significant parts of Project 2025. In this sense, it reflects the ancient world of the Pax Romana.  Rather than being dependent on particular emperors, its “peace” was a political and ideological program that punished the poor and marginalized so many, while keeping all its subjects in line.

From its recent rulings, it’s clear that the Supreme Court is hastening Project 2025’s agenda judicially, both in terms of specific future policies and the executive power grab at the heart of that mandate (and now of that court’s rulings). In June, for instance, it ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, which enacted a law to fine, jail, and ultimately expel its unhoused residents. That precedent will only exacerbate the already hostile terrain confronting unhoused people, seeding firm ground to 2025’s plan to eliminate even more housing projects.

Worse yet, as the Nation’s Elie Mystal recently made clear, in just a few weeks of rulings, the court “legalized bribery of public officials, declared the president of the United States absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for ‘official acts,’ and made the power to issue regulations subject to the court’s unelected approval.” As he warns, “There’s no legislative fix for the problems the court has created… [and] they will continue to do all the things Republicans want that nobody elected them to do.”

In addition, in the legislative arena, Congressional debates around the Farm Bill echo Project 2025’s plan to cut food assistance by limiting updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, the current formula that determines SNAP allocations. For example, at the state level, a Republican supermajority in Kansas voted last year to override the governor’s veto and enact work requirements for older recipients of SNAP benefits.

Overall, various Project 2025 priorities are already being implemented at the state and local level, with reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, public education, social welfare programs, and unhoused people under serious threat in Republican-run states across the country. Since the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, 21 states have enacted full or partial bans on abortion. Meanwhile, far-right groups like Moms of Liberty are seeking to capture local school boards as part of a “war on wokeness.”

There is also a multi-state strategy underway to preempt community-led efforts to implement guaranteed income programs. At least 10 states have challenged basic income programs with legislative bans, funding restrictions, constitutional challenges, and court injunctions, while four Republican-led states — Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, and South Dakota — have already completely prohibited such programs.

And in lockstep with Project 2025’s call for military expansion, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker recently released a report proposing that $55 billion be added to the Pentagon’s already humongous budget in fiscal year 2025 while raising military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars in the next five to seven years. The report, “Peace Through Strength,” revives the false idea that spending ever more on war preparations makes us safer. Not only is Wicker distorting Cold War history, but his prescriptions ignore our experience of the past 20 years of military buildup and the disastrous Global War on Terror. According to the Costs of War Project and the National Priorities Project, this country’s post-9/11 wars have cost at least $8 trillion, taken millions of lives, and displaced tens of millions of people globally, while precipitating climate chaos through their polluting emissions. If implemented, Wicker’s plan would only increase the risk of yet more destabilizing conflicts, offering a modern Pax Romana promise for yet more war and death.

Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace

While extremist Republican politicians and appointees are leading the way on Project 2025, both major parties align around building up the war economy. Indeed, bipartisan support for military aid to Israel is contributing to what the United Nations has labeled a genocide in Gaza.

Nor is this new. Every year, the Pentagon budget invariably passes with widespread bipartisan support, even if a few representatives vote otherwise. Since the 9/11 attacks, in fact, $21 trillion has been funneled into war, surveillance, policing, border control, and incarceration. In Fiscal Year 2023, nearly two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget funded the military-industrial complex and militarized spending. This year, a Democratic amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act will automatically register every male citizen and resident aged 18-26 in the selective service database. This measure has only passed in the House of Representatives, but it suggests interest across party lines in increasing the number of individuals who could someday be called up for military service. While this is not (yet) a draft, it hints at one — and it was introduced by Pennsylvania’s Democratic Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan.

The state and local counterpart to militarism is support for the police. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers seem intent on adopting “tough on crime” legislation, including hiring more police officers, deploying the National Guard more widely, expanding surveillance measures, and recriminalizing drug possession. Of course, the 1033 program allows local police forces to be armed and trained by the U.S. military.

This remarkably bipartisan consensus for a war economy shouldn’t just be considered another “issue,” but an approach to governance that relies on force and violence, rather than consent, to establish social control. And as noted above, the nation may have automatic registration for the selective service system before we have automatic registration to vote. After all, the same Congress that supports ever more resources for war has failed to stop voter suppression, expand voting rights, or adequately protect our democracy.

Jobs and Homes, Not Death in the Streets

The greatest violence of the Pax Romana was always borne by the poor, who were often ripped from their families, enslaved in back-breaking labor, and dispossessed of their land and resources. To maintain its authoritarian rule over millions of people, the Roman Empire relied on its military might and the fear inspired by its brutal army. And yet it was from the ranks of the poor that Jesus and his disciples led a non-violent revolution for peace.

Today, tens of millions of poor people in this country are on the front lines of our failing democracy and increasingly militarized society. They are the true canaries in the coal mine, already living through the violence of a society that has prioritized war and profits over addressing the pain and toll of low-wage jobs, crushing debt burdens, polluted water and land, and lives cut short by poverty, the police, and the denial of basic human rights. They can undoubtedly also foresee the drive toward an ever-deeper warfare state and the possible fallout from Project 2025 if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance win this year.

Forged in the crucible of violence, the criminalized and impoverished still call out for a true peace.

On June 29th, Reverend Savina Martin, a military veteran and formerly homeless mother, took to the stage of the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Assembly in Washington, D.C., and shared these thoughts:

“I am a US Army veteran and I was impacted by homelessness many years ago. Today, thousands of homeless veterans are fighting for [their] benefits, housing… navigating a complex system while sick and suffering, trying to survive the war waged against the poor. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson permits cities to criminalize homelessness by enforcing bans on sleeping outside when no shelter is available. How can sleeping while homeless be against the law? If you sleep, you get arrested?

“This system depends on us to fight their wars, but we can’t depend on [our government] to guarantee housing or healthcare? Instead, [our government] allocates $1.1 trillion to war, weapons, and a system that criminalizes the poor, leading to mass incarceration, deportations, and detentions. We want jobs and homes, not death in the streets.”

Savina was speaking of the war on the poor, the power of the military-industrial complex, and an extremist agenda that will connect her in unsettling ways with 140 million poor and low-income people in this country — and billions more around the world. As in other moments of history, the struggle of the poor for life and dignity in a world that denies them both is a struggle for the best that we can be as a society. In their leadership lies the hope for us all — not in Project 2025, a future Trump administration, or the all-too-devastating version of a Pax Americana that would go with it, but in the peace (and justice) that Savina and so many others are demanding, and will continue to push for, until it is ours.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes

Via Tomdispatch.com

(Florida Phoenix) – WASHINGTON — Emboldened by the mainstreaming of hard-right politics ahead of a presidential election cycle, white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups increased to record levels in the United States last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest annual report on hate and extremism.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has published the annual report since 1990, documented 835 active anti-government groups, up 133 from 2022’s count, and 595 hate groups, an increase of 72 over the previous year’s figure.

Accounting for a large portion of the increase was a 50% surge in white supremacy hate groups in 2023, the highest jump ever recorded by the SPLC, growing to 165 over 109 in 2022. White power and neo-Nazi rallies across the U.S. totaled 143 in 2023, down from 191 in 2022.

SPLC saw a 33% rise in anti-LGBTQ+ organizations over last year, bringing the total to 86. The group said the growth was largely attributable to the anti-trans movement on the far-right.

“What we’re seeing now should be a wake-up call for all of us,” Margaret Huang, SPLC’s president and CEO, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday. “Our 2023 report documented more hate and anti-government extremist groups than ever before. With a historic election just months away, these groups are multiplying, mobilizing, and making, and in some cases already implementing, plans to undo democracy.”

Hate groups have increased in-person events and leafleting, according to the report. The SPLC tracked nearly 7,000 flyering incidents last year, many including language derived from racist and antisemitic conspiracies.

The groups launched campaigns to gain influence in mainstream politics, according to the report, namely through the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, which outlines aspirations for anti-abortion, anti-free press, and anti-LGBTQ+ priorities should presumed GOP presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump win in November.

Nine of the anti-government and hate groups tracked by the SPLC are part of the coalition that supports Project 2025, the organization reports.

Florida a leader in anti-government, hate groups

Among the states leading in numbers of anti-government and hate groups are California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Washington, and Ohio.

California topped the list with 51 hate and 66 anti-government groups.

The SPLC recorded the second-most groups in Florida, which has become a leader in book-banning incidents and restrictive policies on teachers. The Sunshine State is home to 43 hate and 71 anti-government organizations, according to the report, and is the birthplace of recently influential “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty.

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice was invited in March 2023 to testify before a U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary subcommittee then chaired by Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who is now House speaker. 

“When Fascism comes to America,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v 3, 2024

The annual survey of hate groups tracked 116 hate-leafleting incidents in Florida, in which antisemitic groups rallied and flyered on multiple occasions, including over Labor Day, when groups named the Goyim Defense League, The Order of the Black Sun, and the Maine-based Blood Tribe marched in Orlando wielding flags with swastikas, making Nazi salutes.

Antisemitism, already on the rise, became more pronounced following Israel’s continuing offensive on the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Antisemitic conspiracies seeped into mainstream narratives at an alarming pace in 2023. Specifically, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, the far right blurred the lines between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s actions and outright antisemitism,” R.G. Cravens, SPLC’s senior research analyst for its Intelligence Project, said during Tuesday’s call with reporters.

Following the Hamas attack, the so-called Goyim Defense League distributed a flyer online and in person that read “FREE PALESTINE,” as a “not-so-thinly-veiled attempt at stoking more antisemitism and using Palestinian people to further their own aims,” according to the report.

Christian ‘dominionism’

The SPLC report cites the expanding influence of extreme Christian nationalism as a driver for the growing number of anti-government organizations.

The report expresses concern over the rise in the Republican ranks of Johnson, a former senior lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group behind the U.S. Supreme Court case that precipitated the overturning of the federal right to abortion.

Johnson’s far-right politics, including his anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ positions and his advocacy to blur Christianity and the state, are well documented.

Spokespeople for Johnson did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The Alliance for Defending Freedom describes SPLC as a “discredited” and “scandal-ridden group,” and denounces the organization’s “hate map.” The SPLC publishes an interactive U.S. map pinpointing locations of anti-government and hate groups.

“Eventually, their definition of hate included huge swaths of well-respected, mainstream, conservative America,” according to a post on the Alliance for Defending Freedom website.

The SPLC report specifically warns about the rise of the National Apostolic Reformation, a Christian movement made up of “dominionist leaders” that aim to “seize control” of seven areas of society, including government, education, and business.

Decline in militias

One area in which the report documented a decline is in the “militia,” or paramilitary, movement, which suffered after the hundreds of Department of Justice prosecutions following the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The numbers of these groups dropped to 52 in 2023, from 61 in 2022.

One of the most prominent paramilitaries, the Oath Keepers, significantly diminished its presence following the 2023 conviction and sentencing of its leader Stewart Rhodes for seditious conspiracy leading up to and during the Jan. 6 attack.

The Oath Keepers active chapters dropped to 10 in 2023 from 79 in 2022.

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

(The Conversation) – A new conceptual tool is required to fully understand the most recent rhetorical strategies of far-right activists and politicians, including former U.S. President Donald Trump. This is precisely what the concept of “intersectionality of hate” aims to do.

Analysts and academics have been talking about the intersectionality of hate for several years now. In doing so, they draw on the notion of intersectionality developed by African-American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to designate a reality shaped by sexism, racism, classism and other categories (there are some 30 in all).

Crenshaw points out that African-American women have always been aware of this complex reality. Mary Church Terrell, a Black suffragist, declared around 1920 that “a white woman has only one handicap to overcome, that of sex. I have two: sex and race.”

While researching anti-feminism and discourses of men’s victimhood related to a so-called crisis of masculinity, I became aware of how the new concept of intersectionality of hate makes it possible to understand the interweaving of hateful discourses. The French historian Christine Bard, with whom I have the good fortune to collaborate, rightly points out that “anti-feminism practises intersectionality, but it’s the intersectionality of hate,” which brings together sexism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and homophobia.

This interweaving of hate speech can also be viewed from different points of view, for example, from the racist and xenophobic or “anti-gender” and transphobic movements.

Conceptual innovation

The popularity of the concept of intersectionality no doubt explains the synchronous appearance of the intersectionality of hate on both sides of the Atlantic.

The article “How Trump Made Hate Intersectional” appeared in New York magazine on November 9, 2016, the day after Trump’s election. It was signed by the African-American intellectual Rembert Browne, who explained how the Republican candidate federated voters. “Trump won the presidency by making hate intersectional. He encouraged sexists to also be racists and homophobes, while saying disgusting things about immigrants in public and Jews online.”

Hatred is mixed here with the fear of being robbed of one’s country, institutions and personal achievements, and with anger at not having what one thinks one is entitled to simply by virtue of being a heterosexual white male. This attitude is reminiscent of that of the “Angry White Men” that was much talked about just a few years ago: it is no longer limited to blaming a single group for real or imagined personal problems but blames all minority groups. That means there is no longer a single scapegoat, but a whole herd.

At the same time, in France, Bard, who has shown that anti-feminism and lesbophobia are intertwined and mutually reinforcing, analyzed 1,367 articles dealing with women, gender and sexuality published in the far-right weekly Minute.

MSNBC: “‘He’s broke’: AOC roasts Trump for hosting a campaign rally in the Bronx”

She found that “the intersectionality of hate is practised, associating feminism, homosexualism, Islamism and immigrationism.” She notes that political and media figures are targeted with particular intensity if they are women, and also if they are Jewish, Muslim or of African origin. The historian concludes that this intersectionality of hate runs counter to any egalitarian or inclusive perspective.

Attacks on progressives

Shortly afterwards, the journal Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice devoted a short special report to the intersectionality of hate, associating it with the far right, which attacks progressives and accuses them of imposing their values and defending “minorities.”

In addition to racist and sexist attacks, there are also virulent accusations against “cultural Marxists” (or “wokes”) who allegedly control the State in order to develop “positive discrimination” programs and influence the education system to be able to indoctrinate young people with “political correctness.”

Each attack is an opportunity to point out that the essence of the United States is European, Anglo-Saxon, Christian, heterosexual, capitalist and meritocratic. The attacks also serve to distract attention from the elite that really dominates the country, which is made up of multi-billionaires in the White House, as well as heads of big business and media.

The intersectionality of hate is disseminated by influential traditional (Fox News) and web (Daily Stormer and Daily Wire) media, think tanks like the National Policy Institute and polemicists like Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro.

Terrorism

The notion of intersectionality of hate is taken up again in the analysis of hate speech and those associated with terrorist attacks. For example, a study in Europe, Intersectional Hate Speech Online, concludes that “Women remain the group of people most often targeted by intersectional hate speech […], for example Muslim women, Roma women or Women of Colour. […] Another target group for intersectional hate speech is women in public positions.”

Europol also mentions the intersectionality of hate in its 2020 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report. The agency presents a list of attacks motivated by anti-feminism, racism and xenophobia. It gives the example of the one perpetrated in 2011 in Norway by the Nazi Anders Breivik, who claimed in his manifesto to be defending Christian European civilization, and who massacred 76 young socialists.

Europol also mentions Elliot Rodger, who committed one of the first mass murders associated with involuntary celibates in California in 2014, and who also expressed sexist and racist hatred in his manifesto.

“I was anti-everything,” answered a former French gendarme when the court asked him if he was homophobic, during a trial for having planned attacks on several targets. The defendant had also written a neo-Nazi manifesto celebrating Breivik.

Other Islamophobic attackers had planned to attack feminists. The one who targeted the Québec mosque in 2017 was interested in feminist groups at Laval University, and the one who decimated a Muslim family in Ontario, in 2021, had scouted abortion clinics.

Finally, British journalist Helen Lewis points out in her article “The Intersectionality of Hate”, published in The Atlantic, on a mass killer who targeted Buffalo’s African-American community in 2022, that his manifesto included antisemitic cartoons.

Victim rhetoric

So, the intersectionality of hate works by superimposing similar analytical frameworks that systematically deduce the same dynamics from reality, and always lead to the same conclusion: the white heterosexual male is a victim of “minorities” he must resist.

This rhetoric helps to legitimize even the most obvious abuses, such as voting for the would-be dictator for a day Trump, or imposing one’s vision of things through terrorist violence.

The intersectionality of hate also targets progressives and reflects the refusal to recognize that the “majority” of white heterosexual men is, in reality, a minority whose claim to superiority, or even supremacy, is well and truly contested in the name of social justice.

Francis Dupuis-Déri, Professeur, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

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

Previously, I argued for the impeachment of Justice Clarence Thomas based on his own ethical reckless and brazenly partisan behavior. Justice Alito wears his political sentiments on the flagpoles of his two homes. Trump-appointed Justices Brett Kavanagh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch all lied during their confirmation hearings, about their devotion to preserving Roe v. Wade. So five of the six-person majority in this decision have demonstrated serious ethical lapses, and expressed contempt for Congress. Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, has run interference for all of them. Senator Mitch McConnell broke Senate rules, and used legislative sleight-of-hand to stack ALL the US courts with Republican appointees, while sabotaging appointees of President Barack Obama.

Alito and Thomas should be legally compelled to recuse themselves from any cases involving Trump or the January 6 defendants. Reps. Adam Schiff and Mike Sherrill have already demanded that Alito recuse himself. Rep. Steve Cohen introduced a motion to censure Alito for what he called, “a knowing and shameless demonstration of his political bias.” Cohen added, “What’s more, he continues to participate in litigation directly related to the 2020 election and the Insurrection, in direct violation of the federal recusal statute and the Supreme Court’s own ethics rules.” The censure motion would be raised if Alito refuses to recuse himself, as demanded by Congressional Democrats.

The same pressure must be applied to Justice Thomas, who has been just as arrogant in expressing his similar partisan preferences. Rep. Jamie Raskin called for a Federal Ethics Panel for the Courts, which Republicans are fiercely resisting. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez demanded a Senate investigation into Alito saying, “Samuel Alito has identified himself with the same people who raided the Capitol on Jan. 6, and is now going to be presiding over court cases that have deep implications over the participants of that rally. And while this is the threat to our democracy, Democrats have a responsibility for defending our democracy. And in the Senate, we have gavels.”

The Young Turks Video: “You Won’t BELIEVE Justice Alito’s Latest Far-Right Flag ”

Alito’s behavior almost makes Thomas appear naïve and guileless. Both have the same “conflict” problem, having accepted lavish gifts and vacations from corporate titans with cases before the court. Now comes Mrs. Alito to argue that the inverted flag was a “distress signal,” because one of her neighbors had a yard sign that personally insulted her. No, that is for ships at sea in distress, or kidnapping victims. As The Guardian points out, “But these days it (inverted flag) is more often associated with activists making an extremist sign of protest, and at the time of the January 6 insurrection it had been adopted by some on the far right amid efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.”  She’ll say anything to deflect, divert, distract and obfuscate. That’s the Republican strategy when they’ve been called out and exposed for support to overthrow the US Government, and install Trump as President for Life. Just as Mrs. Thomas did.

The inverted flag was Alito’s first red flag. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag raised at his beach house is now the second. This illustrates an escalating trend of empowerment-entitlement, when coupled with Justice Thomas’ brazen vertical integration with Harlan Crow.  Republicans feel a misplaced sense of self-righteous justification, to dispense with ethical and legal boundaries that don’t help their agenda. It illustrates how elected and appointed Republican office holders and judges feel beholden to, and empowered by Trump, to dispense with the legal boundaries, as it suits their agenda.

Justice Alito holds enormous power to decide the fate of Trump and Democracy in the US. The expressions on his home flagpoles illustrate a clear “partisan” devotion to Trump over the Constitution. If he refuses to recuse himself, he should face impeachment. Same for Thomas. Not only can SCOTUS justices be impeached, but Alito and Thomas have made compelling cases that their abuses of standing and arrogance demands the process. Their ruling to allow a gerrymandered and racially motivated re-districting map to stand in South Carolina, illustrates the depth of the Republican “deep fix.” Their loyalties are no longer to the US Government and Constitution, but to Donald Trump and by extension, Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban and his other autocratic role models. Over 100 Republican Members of Congress voted to NOT certify the 2020 Election, out of fealty to Trump. Why shouldn’t they all be expelled according to House and Senate Rules, and the Constitution?

The Christian Nationalist movement fuels this dynamic, and piles on self-righteousness. Millions of Evangelicals have “anointed” Trump as their modern day King Cyrus, despite his deeply UN-Christian lifestyle. Why? Because he promised them to end legal access to abortion in the US, which is all they care about as a fast-track element toward Christian theocracy in the US. They want to believe he actually cares about that, though he paid at least one woman to have one. Six of the nine SCOTUS justices are devout, ideological Catholics, which comprise 20% of the US population. McConnell’s fear and devotion to Trump has given this minority outsized influence on our judicial system, with Alito and Thomas abusing their legal standing to make the US a Christian Theocracy, and Trump President-for-Life. Alito and Thomas must recuse or face impeachment; they drew the lines and raised the battle flags.

The court was unanimous in determining that neither Colorado – which had banned Trump from the ballot – nor any other US state is qualified to decide on the eligibility of a presidential candidate. Furthermore, a majority opinion coming from the five conservative judges – three of them nominated by Trump himself – determined that only the US Congress can disqualify an individual from running for office on the grounds of insurrection.

This majority opinion, the three progressive judges in the minority warned, risked closing the door to any possible future US Supreme Court decision to ban an insurrectionist from becoming President. An indictment against Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is still possible but the Supreme Court would probably not act on it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, media attention is focused on a judicial proceeding taking place in Münster, a city in the West of the country. At the core of the dispute, we find the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany or AfD) and the “Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz” (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), a domestic intelligence agency that has no clear counterpart in other European countries.

The agency’s role is to police anti-constitutional extremism. The BfV, however, has often been unable or unwilling to fulfill this vital task. From 2012 to 2018, when the president of the agency was Hans-Georg Maaßen, the AfD – founded in 2013 – grew more powerful and more radical. Maaßen recently founded a right-wing party called “Werteunion” (Values Union) that is willing to reach agreements with the AfD and embraces part of its agenda.

In 2021, the BfV determined that the AfD merited the category of “suspected case of far-right extremism.” The far-right party appealed against the decision and the case has dragged on until now. The hearing in Münster is the second and last appeal. The AfD is likely to lose the appeal, but that would not imply its illegalization. A win for the BfV would bring further rights to investigate and surveil the activities of the party.

Both Trump and the AfD have been following the same legal strategy when forced to appear before the courts: delay, delay, and, if possible, delay even further. CNN reporter Stephen Collinson notes that Trump “appears to want to also forestall jury verdicts until after the general election – likely because polls have suggested some voters would be less keen to vote for him if he is a convicted felon.”

Meanwhile, the AfD wants to prevent for as long as possible a final decision on whether the BfV was right in qualifying the AfD as a “suspected case of far-right extremism.” This could negatively affect its electoral performance. There are elections to the European Parliament in June and regional elections in the three Eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September. In the European elections, the AfD is polling second with around 20% of the vote, whereas in the three Eastern states, the radical right is polling first with over 30% of the vote.

After the September elections in three of the five eastern states, broad coalitions, or at least tacit alliances from the left to the center-right will be needed to avoid that the far-right reaches its highest level of power in Germany since the end of the Second World War. In this sense, it is very worrying that the leader of the center-right CDU, Friederich Merz, continues to equate the left-wing party “Die Linke” with the AfD, announcing it will reach agreements with neither of these forces. Unless the pre-election polls are wrong by a huge margin, the CDU will soon be forced to pick a side.

By delaying the legal process in Münster, the AfD does not only seek to preserve the pretense that it is just as legitimate as any other German party – if not more, according to their discourse. The far-right party also seeks to prevent the BfV from taking the next step and qualify the whole AfD as “proven right-wing extremist”. The regional AfD groups in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt are already classified in this category.

DW News Video: “Why is Germany’s far-right AfD party so successful? | DW News”

The AfD has close ties with openly neo-Nazi groups and some of its leaders, especially in eastern Germany, have adopted a language very often reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Björn Höcke, the regional leader of the AfD in Thuringia and powerbroker within the national leadership of the party, has used multiple times the expression “Everything for Germany”, the motto of the SA, a paramilitary Nazi group that was key in Hitler’s power takeover in 1933.

Höcke has said that Africans have a biological reproduction strategy different from Europeans or, about Adolf Hitler, that “there is no black and white in history.” The AfD often employs terms such as “Volkstod” (death of the German nation), as well as “Stimmvieh” (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties.

The AfD has often fantasized about the possibilities of “remigration”, a common term among far-right European groups. The concept refers to the deportation of people with a migration background and has been popularized by Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi. The Austrian ideologist is banned from entering the US because he accepted money from – and probably met – Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist. In 2019, Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in his attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. On March 19 it became known that Sellner had been banned from entering Germany.

The concept of “remigration” is not a new one, and Höcke and other members of the most radical current within the AfD have been toying with the idea for years. However, many Germans became aware of how specific the concept of “remigration” has become in recent times when it was revealed that Sellner had presented his racist theses in a secret meeting in Potsdam organized by two businessmen. The meeting was attended by high-ranking AfD cadres – among them Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Sachsen-Anhalt – and some low-ranking members of the center-right CDU, who were later forced to resign. According to research by the independent investigative platform Correctiv, Sellner proposed that a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens.

The Correctiv revelations triggered a wave of massive demonstrations in Germany against the far-right. They also renewed the discussion on whether a process should be started to ban the AfD. A call for a party ban can be issued by the German government, the parliament, or the Bundesrat, an institution where the different German states are represented. The final decision would always be in the hands of the German Constitutional Court. The process could take years and there would be no guarantee of success. The openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was deemed too politically irrelevant to be banned when the Constitutional Court decided on the matter in 2017.

There is no consensus between the different German parties on whether an attempt to ban the AfD is the path to follow. The differences of opinion are also found within the parties. Whereas a parliamentarian for the center-right CDU was one of the early proponents of banning the AfD, the leader of the party Frederich Merz is against this. The neoliberal FDP is generally against the ban. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz have not taken a clear position, as views diverge on the issue. Within the Greens, banning the AfD would probably find wider acceptance. Every case is different, but the governing coalition in the northwestern state of Bremen, where the Social Democrats lead a government with the Greens and the left-wing “Die Linke”, has asked for an AfD ban.

German society appears to be equally divided on the appropriateness of initiating a process to illegalize the AfD. According to a poll from February 2024, 51 percent of the population was against starting such a process and 37 percent was in favor. The percentages change significantly when citizens are asked whether the AfD should continue to receive public funding as the other parties do. 41 percent are in favor while 48 percent want public funds not to reach the AfD.

On February 23, I attended a counterdemonstration against Martin Sellner, the neo-Nazi who has been pushing for “remigration”, when he visited the city of Chemnitz, in the state of Saxony. The protest was organized by “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, a group that has been mobilizing against the far-right for fourteen years in a city that represents a radical right stronghold.

Before the march against Sellner, I discussed with two activists of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement their views on whether a procedure should be started to ban the AfD. They told me this had been a major issue of discussion within their group in recent times. Although more members of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement are in favor of an AfD ban than against it, there is no clear majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a ban, the activists I interviewed remarked, is the significant consequences this would have for the AfD’s financial situation, which could be forced to reduce its activities. At the same time, they fear that AfD followers could become more violent if a ban was implemented. They did not discard that something similar to the assault on the Capitol in Washington could take place in Germany if the AfD was banned. The open question for the members of “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, as for many others, is: If you ban the AfD, what about the situation afterward? A poll from February 2024 shows that only 43 percent of those who plan to vote for the AfD would be willing to consider voting for another party in the coming years.

It is certainly urgent to discuss whether Trump should be able to run again for president, or whether the AfD should be banned by the Constitutional Court. But the key issue is that broad sectors of both German and US society – a far stronger one in the latter case – have radicalized themselves to the extent that they are ready to use the instruments of democracy to undermine its foundations. This does not mean that every Trump or AfD voter is anti-democratic, and part of these voters can still be convinced to move to less extremist positions. But a considerable percentage of them, and maybe even the majority, have crossed the point of no return.

Democracy is not only destroyed through authoritarian power grabs or military coups but also through free and fair elections. While Germany has known this for a long time due to its historical trajectory, this does not necessarily imply that it is better prepared than other countries. The poor performance of the BfV in protecting the Constitution is proof of this.

While democratic systems offer many opportunities that right-wing radicals can exploit, they are not defenseless and have mechanisms to combat radicalism. If all democratic forces in Germany take the right-wing threat seriously – and here the center-right CDU needs to play a responsible role – and focus on what unites them, the AfD can still be kept away from the main centers of power in the country. It might be too late for the US, where Biden has recovered some ground in the polls in recent months but lags behind Trump in the states that will probably decide the November election. Germany, meanwhile, still has a strong anti-AfD majority but should not be too complacent.

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

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

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

Tucker Carlson’s Moscow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Thing That Cannot Be Named

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America and the Lie that Begot Other Lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

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

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

Among Us

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

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

“Taking the Reins of Government”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Common Defense”

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

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

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

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

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

All You Need Is Love

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

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

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

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

I remember first reading The New Abolitionists in the 1990s when I was a college student and activist. I had grown weary of hearing older people complain about the inactivity of my generation, decrying why we weren’t more involved in the social issues of the day. Of course, even then, such critiques came in the face of mass protests, often led by the young, against the first Iraq war (launched by President George H.W. Bush), the Republican Contract With America, and the right-wing “family values” movement. Such assertions about the apathy of youth were proffered even as young people were waging fights for marriage equality, the protection of abortion, and pushing back against the attack on immigrants, as well as holding mass marches like the Battle for Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting as well as protests at the Republican National Convention of 2000, and so much more.

Another quote from Zinn remains similarly etched in my mind. “Theirs,” he wrote, “was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they gave it up for… the fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.”

And if it was true that, in the 1990s and 2000s, young people were so much less complacent than was recognized at the time, it’s even truer (to the nth degree!) in the case of the Millennials and Gen Z today. Younger generations are out there leading the way toward justice in a fashion that they seldom get credit for.

Don’t Look Up

Let me suggest, as a start, that we simply chuck out the sort of generalizations about Millennials and Gen Z that pepper the media today: that those younger generations spend too much money on avocado toast and Starbucks when they should be buying real estate or paying down their student loans. Accused of doing everything through social media, it’s an under-recognized and unappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading the way in on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, as well as continued conflict and war, not to speak of defending economic justice and living wages, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Take, for instance, the greatest social upheaval of the past five years: the uprising that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with #BlackLivesMatter protests being staged in staggering numbers of communities, many of which had never hosted such an action before. Those marches and rallies, led mainly by teenagers and young adults, may have been the broadest wave of protests in American history.

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When it comes to the environmental movement, young people have been organizing campaigns for climate justice, calling for a #GreenNewDeal and #climatedefiance from Cop City to the March to End Fossil Fuels to a hunger strike in front of the White House. At the same time, they have been bird-dogging politicians on both sides of the aisle with an urgency and militancy not previously associated with climate change. Meanwhile, a surge of unionization drives, whether at Walmart, Starbucks, Amazon, or Dollar General, has largely been led by young low-wage workers of color and has increased appreciation for and recognition of workers’ rights and labor unions to a level not seen in decades. Add to that the eviction moratoriums, mutual-aid provisions, and student-debt strikes of the pandemic years, which gained ground no one had thought possible even months earlier.

And don’t forget the movement to stop gun violence that, from the March for Our Lives in Florida to the protests leading to the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee, galvanized millions across racial and political lines. Teenagers in striking numbers are challenging this society to value their futures more than guns. And most recently, calls for a #ceasefirenow and #freepalestine have heralded the birth of a new peace movement in the wake of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and the Israeli destruction of much of Gaza. Although university presidents have been getting more media attention, Palestinian, Jewish, and Muslim students have been the ones organizing and out there, insisting that indiscriminate violence perpetrated against Palestinians, especially children, will not happen “in our name.”

From Unexpected Places

An observation Zinn made so many years ago about young people in the 1960s may have lessons for movements today: “They came out of unexpected places; they were mostly black and therefore unseen until they suddenly became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. And they were committed. To the point of jail, which is a large commitment.”

Today’s generation of activists are similarly committed and come from places as varied as Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and Durham, North Carolina. Below the surface, some deep stuff is brewing that could indeed continue to compel new generations of the young into action. As we approach the first quarter mark of the twenty-first century, we’re stepping firmly into a new technological era characterized by unparalleled levels of digital power. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as elite economists and think-tankers like to call it, promises a technological revolution that, in the words of World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, is likely to occur on a “scale, scope, and complexity” never before experienced. That revolution will, of course, include the integration of artificial intelligence and other labor-replacing technology into many kinds of in-person as well as remote work and is likely to involve the “deskilling” of our labor force from the point of production all the way to the market.

Residents of Detroit, once the Silicon Valley of auto manufacturing, understand this viscerally. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ford River Rouge Plant was the largest, most productive factory in the world, a private city with 100,000 workers and its own municipal services. Today, the plant employs only a fraction of that number — about 10,000 people — and yet, thanks to a surge of robotic innovation, it produces even more cars than it did in the heady days of the 1930s. Consider such a shift just the tip of the spear of the kind of change “coming to a city near you,” as one veteran auto worker and union organizer once told me. All of this is impacting everything from wages to health-care plans, pensions to how workers organize. Indeed, some pushback to such revolutionary shifts in production can be seen in the labor strikes the United Auto Workers launched late in 2023.

Overall, such developments are deeply impacting young people. After all, workers are now generally making less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy. Growing parts of our workforce are increasingly non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. And not surprisingly, such workers struggle to afford housing, childcare, and other necessities, experiencing on the whole harsher lives than the generations that preceded them.

In addition, the last 40 years have done more than just transform work and daily life for younger generations. They have conditioned so many to lose faith in government as a site for struggle and change. Instead, Americans are increasingly dependent on private, market-based solutions that extol the wealthy for their humanitarianism (even as they reap the rewards from federal policymaking and an economy rigged in their favor).

Crises upon Crises

Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger generations. When compared to other advanced countries, the United States lags perilously behind in almost every important category. In this rich land, about 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million are uninsured or underinsured, close to 10 million live without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while the education system continues to score near the bottom compared to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And in all of this, young people are impacted disproportionately.

Perhaps most damning, ours is a society that has become terrifyingly tolerant of unnecessary death and suffering. Deaths by poverty are an increasingly all-American reality. Low-wage jobs that have been found to shorten lives are the norm. In 2023, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that poverty was the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, right after heart disease, smoking, and cancer. While life expectancy continues to rise across the industrialized world, it’s stagnated in the U.S. since the 2010s and, during the first three years of the Covid pandemic, it dropped in a way that, according to experts, was unprecedented in modern world history. That marks us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but among poorer ones as well. And again, its impact was felt above all by the young. What we call “deaths of despair” are also accelerating, although the label is misleading, since so many overdoses and suicides are caused not by some amorphous social malaise but by medical neglect and lack of access to adequate care and mental-health treatment for the under- or uninsured.

Nor are low wages, crises of legitimacy, and falling life expectancy the only significant issues facing our younger generations. Just last week, the New York Times reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record (with climate chaos worsening yearly and little chance of the elimination of our reliance on fossil fuels in sight). Add to that the fact that anyone born in the last three decades can hardly remember a time when the United States was not in some fashion at war (whether declared or not) and pouring its taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget. In fact, according to the National Priorities Project, this country has spent a staggering $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001, including increased border patrols, a rising police presence in our communities, and various aspects of the Global War on Terror that came home big-time. Add to all that, the rise of Trumpian-style authoritarianism and attacks on our democratic system more extreme than at any time since the Civil War.

What Time Is It?

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time — and the times in which we live. Chronos was quantitative time, the measured chronological time of a clock. Kairos, on the other hand, was qualitative time: the special, even transformative, time of a specific moment (and possibly of a movement). Kairos is all about opportunity. In the days of antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. In the Bible (and as a biblical scholar I run into this a lot), Kairos describes a moment when the eternal breaks into history.

German-American theologian Paul Tillich introduced the modern use of kairos in describing the period between the First World War and the rise of fascism. In retrospect, he recognized the existential stakes of that transitional moment and mourned the societal failure to stem the tide of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain. There was a similar kairos moment in apartheid South Africa when a group of mainly Black theologians wrote a Kairos Document noting that “for very many… in South Africa, this is the KAIROS, the moment of grace and opportunity… a challenge to decisive action. It is a dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss… will be immeasurable.”

2024 may well be a kairos moment for us here in the United States. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

“Trump Insurrection,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3,/ IbisPaint, 2023

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

Embed from Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: Protesters supporting U.S. President Donald Trump gather near the east front door of the U.S. Capitol after groups breached the building’s security on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Pro-Trump protesters entered the U.S. Capitol building during demonstrations in the nation’s capital. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

Mark A. Graber, University System of Maryland Regents Professor of Law, University of Maryland

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