When I wrote Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, I decided that it would be my final treatise on the subject. I had already spent a quarter-century of my life writing and lecturing about the need for diversity in journalism and how the lack of it had resulted in the stilted and often demeaning portrayals of African Americans and other people of color. These portrayals excite the bogeyman in the American imagination that results in police brutality, mass incarceration, and the everyday bigotry that defines the lives of black people.

My previous book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, tells the story of a young African who was kidnapped from the Congo and exhibited in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. My first book, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, published a little more than two decades ago, chronicled the uphill battle of black journalists to portray the multidimensionality of African American life in mainstream newsrooms that crave stereotypes.

Despite the decades I and countless others have spent illustrating the consequences of racial injustice, many institutions are having the same conversations they had when I began my journalism career, in the early 1980s. The radical underrepresentation of African Americans and other people of color persists in practically every profession, from journalism, tech, and fashion to Hollywood and higher education. Meanwhile racial injustice, a trademark of the current presidency, is as pronounced and prevalent as ever, powered by the indifference of white America.

Now, as I watch the nation explode over the egregious videotaped police murder of yet another unarmed black man, I think about the legions of African Americans throughout history who have eloquently appealed for justice and a semblance of equality that for centuries have eluded black people. I wonder what more can be said that hasn’t already been stirringly expressed by our best and brightest: from Benjamin Banneker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells to James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wonder, too, about the works of art that might have been created had brilliant writers like Baldwin not been distracted by racism. And I think about how much of my own life has been consumed (squandered?) by the same preoccupation, to little avail.

As black America grieves the loss of yet another irreplaceable life, I cannot conjure new words to convey what so many have already said following the deaths of Amadou Diallo, Michael Stewart, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. “Black Lives Matter?”

I have been heartened by the presence of so many white protesters around the country and across the globe. I’m also encouraged by the rare words of outrage from leading white politicians. This is, after all, a battle for the soul of white America, which has, through conditioning, become detached from its own humanity. Perhaps the grotesque murder of George Floyd was graphic enough to break through the malaise and complicity of silence. Perhaps these officers will suffer consequences most do not. (Then again, perhaps they won’t.)

Through centuries of oppression, African Americans have learned how to navigate the maddening hypocrisy and brutality of American racism. We know well the antics of the Amy Coopers who callously — and strategically — weaponize race. We’re not surprised to learn we die of Covid-19 at four times the rate of whites. Such disparities are par for the course. Through all of the trauma and blatant injustice, most of us continue to play by rules perpetually rigged against us and somehow manage to preserve our sanity while performing beyond reasonable expectation. But we cannot cure the pathology of American racism.

Now that the curtain has again been ripped back, and no one can any longer claim innocence or ignorance, it’s time for white America to demonstrate, through its deeds, the principles of fairness, decency, and justice it claims to hold dear. African Americans have done enough, said enough, documented enough, and sacrificed enough of our fleeting hours to the cause of justice. It’s now time for white America to put some skin in the game. This one’s on you.

Pamela Newkirk is a professor, journalist, and award-winning author whose most recent book, Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, examines the five-decades long quest to diversify the American workplace. She is a trustee of the Public Concern Foundation, publisher of The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 June 2020

Word Count: 701

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Nearly everyone has found a way to stay connected and keep operating during the Covid-19 crisis. Doctors are consulting with patients online. Senior citizens in assisted living facilities have learned how to Zoom on iPads to talk with their families. Even the U.S. Supreme Court is continuing to deliberate and hold oral arguments, using old-fashioned teleconferencing.

Everyone is working remotely — except Congress.

Our Democratic and Republican leaders have refused to accept the possibility that they can convene and deliberate online. Mitch McConnell has forced the Senate to reconvene in person. And, so far, all House Democrats have been willing to do is set up a commission to study the issue, while House Republicans are refusing to try Zoom or other videoconferencing tools, claiming they’ll be hacked. Instead, they’re insisting that Members return to their offices, even though the close quarters of the U.S. House would endanger many and the House’s own resident physician has advised against any such move.

What this means is committees can’t meet, mark up legislation, or conduct oversight by calling witnesses. The Constitution explicitly set up our system to provide for checks and balances between the three branches of government, but now one leg of that system is largely disabled.

Our representatives are, of course, still working day and night to try to respond to their constituents’ needs during this crisis, but the point of having elected someone to Congress is so they can use their full powers to advocate for us.

Other reluctant governments are inching their way into new digital territory. The New York City Council held its first-ever digital meeting April 22nd using Zoom. The United Kingdom’s venerable House of Commons just held a hybrid session with many members joining via Zoom.

We are in the middle of a once-in-a-century crisis—and Congress isn’t passing another needed emergency spending bill, conducting oversight hearings, or preparing the federal budget that needs to be passed by September.

There is no time to waste right now, and yet, Congress is doing just that. There are at least opportunities for experimentation in this moment. To his credit, Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two Democratic leader in the House, has called on his colleagues to start videoconferencing and committee chairs have gotten the green light to hold unofficial “forums” or “roundtables” via Zoom. But that’s not the same thing as a formal committee hearing.

Security is a legitimate concern. No one wants the indelible image of a hearing on a vaccine for Covid-19 interrupted by a troll spamming people’s screens with porn. And there will be enormous attempts by hackers to make that happen. However, the Defense Department and White House regularly host discussions via video conference without interference. The federal government has the ability and know-how to make this happen. And certainly the private sector knows how to do it.

But there’s no reason to worry about a congressional vote held over Zoom getting hacked. Members can recognize each other, and votes declared during a publicly viewable video conference can be easily verified.

I know from my work on introducing technology to support and strengthen democracy that concerns about security are often just excuses made because of the unnamed fear of change. This isn’t a technology problem, it’s a human problem.

If the Senate cannot move itself into the 21st Century, the House could alone. What better way to demonstrate that the Democratic majority is more in step with the pace and concerns of the country, than to work differently during a national emergency.

C’mon Congress, step up and adopt time-limited emergency legislation to get back to work like the rest of us are doing.

The cost of refusing to convene remotely is either to put the lives of Members and their staffs at risk by insisting that they can only work in person, or to have an unnecessarily impaired legislature. The choice is obvious: Let Congress Zoom.

Allison Fine is a pioneer and advocate for the use of technology for social good. She has written three books on the topic and most recently has been working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on harnessing artificial intelligence and automation for social justice. She is currently a candidate for the Democratic nomination to Congress in New York’s CD-17, which includes Westchester and Rockland counties.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 May 2020

Word Count: 651

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SAN ANTONIO — Under a waning sun this week, a neighbor and I were quaffing takeout craft beers from an otherwise shuttered brew pub on the banks of the San Antonio River, contemplating the looming end of our city’s five weeks of plague-enforced hibernation.

Jim Wyatt, 73, is an asthmatic retired economics teacher, union organizer, and reserve Coast Guard captain. Though a bit younger, I’m asthmatic as well, with a history of even mild colds becoming serious chest infections.

Neither of us figures himself certain to survive a tangle with the coronavirus. Neither of us relishes having to try.

As I eyed a dozen laughing 20-somethings huddled with beers and without masks at an outdoor table a hundred yards away, Jim said he was “moderately scared, but not terrified,” of the consequences of the lockdown ending.

“I have to get out,” he said, sitting a few yards from me on shaded limestone blocks perched on the riverbank. Joggers, cyclists, dog walkers, and stroller pushers streamed past, most of them also sans-masks.

“I can’t stay trapped at home all day.”

Although testing for the virus still falls woefully short in Texas and though rates of infection continue to rise, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state to begin a staggered reopening beginning today, May 1. Texas becomes the largest of a handful of states moving to reopen as political and economic considerations prevail over scientists’ warnings.

“Now it’s time to set a new course . . . that responsibly opens up business in Texas,” Abbott said recently in announcing his reopening plans, which have drawn praise from President Trump and business leaders.

Jim and I, and some 30 million other Texans, are being thrown into the breach.

Under Abbott’s plan, retail stores, malls, restaurants, and movie theaters open their doors first, but only up to a quarter of their normal customer capacity. If by mid-May data shows no increase in the virus’ spread, capacity can climb to half of normal. And even more contagion-risky venues like bars, gyms, barber shops, and beauty salons will then be allowed to open.

Abbott’s orders override the much more meticulous rules of many cities and towns, which include the mandatory wearing of face masks by anyone entering a store or otherwise coming in close contact with anyone else.

“It’s hard to get rid of this virus because it is so contagious,” Abbott said. “So, we’re not just going to open up and hope for the best.”

The arguments for re-opening are clear enough.

Texas, with a population 1.5 times that of the New York City metro area, has had just shy of 800 known virus-related deaths so far. The tri-state New York City area has seen more than 33,000 people succumb.

At the same time, the pandemic shutdown — combined with the collapse of petroleum prices exacerbated by demand being sapped by the lockdown — has sucked at least 1.5 million jobs from the state since mid-March. Houston alone looks to lose some 300,000 energy jobs as the oil industry collapses.

Nationwide, at least 30 million people have lost their jobs in less than two months.

But the relatively low death toll in Texas owes much to the state’s aggressive lockdown in March. Many fear that easing restrictions now will prove disastrous.

Movie theater chains, restaurants and shop owners say they fear unleashing a renewed outbreak among customers and employees alike. Many express doubt that working at a quarter of capacity, even for a short while, will prove profitable enough to justify the risk.

The mayors and county executives in the state’s largest urban centers — all but Fort Worth, governed by Democrats — have condemned the governors’ strategy as moving too fast.

“We are not through with this virus and the virus is not through with us,” warns San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who along with leaders of other big Texas urban centers has led the lockdown efforts.

Many, if not most, Texans agree.

A recent poll by the University of Texas at Austin and The Texas Tribune, a non-profit publication focused on politics and social issues, found that more than nine in 10 respondents see the virus as a crisis or very serious threat. More than half the survey’s respondents said they were very worried about infection in their communities.

Still, some two-thirds of those polled said they also are very or extremely worried about the state’s economy.

Views of the virus and responses to it were sharply defined by political leanings, with most Democratic voters favoring continuing the lockdown until conditions are optimal and most Republicans wanting the opening accelerated.

“There are more important things than living,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a conservative former talk radio host and failed business owner from Houston, told a Fox News interviewer. “And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.”

Most Texans live in fast-growing towns and cities in the central and eastern stretches of the state — a wetter, greener triangle roughly bounded by San Antonio, Austin, Dallas-Ft Worth and Houston. Dallas County, at some 2,600 people per square mile is the state’s most crowded, has less than a twentieth the population density of Manhattan.

A fifth of Texas’ 252 counties claim fewer than five inhabitants per square mile. Presidio County, anchored by the town of Marfa that has become a mecca for artists, celebrities, and not a few New York City natives, has just two people per square mile.

Frustration with the lockdown has been enhanced by the state’s short, but glorious spring. Recent days have been sunny, windy, and — topping at 85 degrees Fahrenheit — reasonably brisk for late April and early May. A few weeks hence, that glory will be burned away by a brain-addling scorch that will last through October.

In my neighborhood — little more than a mile south of downtown’s Alamo memorial — the frenzied restaurant and bar tourist mecca of our city’s famed Riverwalk gives way to a leafy greenway. Herons, egrets, ducks, and hawks flock here, sharing the riverbank with anglers who pull bass from the shallow, usually clear, stream.

From where Jim and I were enjoying our beers, a paved bike and jogging trail runs 10 miles further south, connecting sprawling parks, small reservoirs, and four other 16th-century missions like the Alamo.

Always popular, this so-called “mission reach” of the Riverwalk has proved a godsend for many during the quarantine. So too have the other aquifer-fed rivers that run clear and cold through the limestone Hill Country to the west of San Antonio and Austin.

I joined scores of other people last week lining the banks of a deep, shaded stretch of the Medina River in the town of Bandera. Though most of us kept to ourselves as we fished, swam, or just enjoyed the day, teenagers clustered around a rope swing or climbed 30 feet into the cypress trees to plunge into the river.

State officials reopened state parks in late April, so people could enjoy the rivers and lakes many of them offer.

“As we navigate through these challenging times, it is essential that outdoor experiences and opportunities are available for Texas families,” Carter Smith, the head of the state’s Parks and Wildlife Department said.

That many Texans’ take on the virus cuts along political lines is hardly surprising.

After 40 years of voting Republican in presidential elections, Texas has been sliding back toward a decidedly purple — if not yet blue — hue.

Though Trump won the state four years ago by a comfortable 9-point margin, his victory badly trailed Mitt Romney’s 16-point advantage over Barack Obama in 2012. The UT-Texas Tribune poll puts the president just five points ahead of Joe Biden in November’s match up, with a 2.8 percent margin of error. Another survey, by a Democratic polling firm, puts Biden ahead by a point.

Trump opponents understandably see opportunity in this crisis. His most fervent backers do as well.

“Texas is leading the way against the tyrants,” Alex Jones, the conspiracy monger and right-wing internet mogul, shouted to several hundred people gathered on April 18 at the state capitol in Austin to demand an end to anti-virus lockdown.

A few protesters unfurled a banner rejecting any anti-corona vaccine as a Satanic plot. “Texas will not take the mark of the Beast,” it vowed, calling on God or a righteous public to “deliver up treasonous men,” including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“Let us work!” the protesters chanted. “God bless Trump.”

And God help Texas.

As a staff correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers, Dudley Althaus has spent his career reporting on politics and other issues in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico border, and across Latin America.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 May 2020

Word Count: 1,418

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I want to address this note to Trump supporters and others who may be considering voting for him. You are the ones stereotyped by critics as being all alike in your hatreds, resentments, closed minds, prejudices, and fears. While you may hoot and holler at his mass rallies, people like you defy these stereotypes back home where you live, work, and raise your families. When asked, you may call yourselves Republicans, conservatives, or patriots. Yet you want many of the same things in life as neighbors who call themselves liberals or progressives.

Both want clean and fairly counted elections. Both want law enforcement against businesses that cheat, bully, and harm their families, often by directly selling things on television that are bad for their children, bypassing parental authority. They are angry over big business and the superrich not paying their fair share in taxes, even as they can afford to buy politicians. (Who doesn’t object to all the maddening fine print in the credit card agreements, health insurance policies, and pension contracts that deny customers the benefits and services they’ve already paid for?)

Both want their cars recalled when there is a manufacturing defect. Both want safe medicines, clean food, air, water, and a safe, respectful workplace. They expect their taxes to be used to repair and upgrade their community’s roads, schools, drinking water, and public transit systems. Probably many Walmart workers voted for Trump, but that doesn’t mean they think it’s fair for them to be paid a wage they can’t possibly live on while their top boss makes $12,000 an hour plus huge benefits. During his campaign, by the way, Trump, the vastly overpaid failed gambling czar, asserted that American workers were “overpaid.” How do his supporters let him get away with that?

The commercial drive to overcome more important civic and human values doesn’t distinguish between conservatives and liberals, between Republicans and Democrats. They are all fodder for profit. Did you know that every major religion warned its faithful not to give up too much power to the merchant class? More than two thousand years ago, merchants, even then, were running roughshod over civilized values in their quest for profits or riches.

Today they know how to get you in so many ways and to get away with it. Only a democratic society can make these big corporations our servants, not our masters, by subordinating their commercial greed to the supremacy of the law and to civic values that allow people to enjoy freedom, justice, and decent livelihoods.

I’ve always been amazed at the success that so many politicians have with voters just using a few repeated phrases. Is it because they are boldly saying out loud what certain voters have been thinking about unpopular segments of the population, and keeping it to themselves? So someone like a Trump, even as he lavishes tax breaks on corporations, can make the quick sale exploiting real resentments about job losses by blaming them on imports and immigrants.

Many Trump voters blame their labor union leaders as well. Trump may be losing the trade war, with arbitrary tariffs costing us jobs, raising consumer prices, and losing farmer markets, but, hey, at least he’s trying to make sure foreign countries don’t take us to the cleaners. For “five minute voters,” who don’t give themselves a chance to dig deeper, as they do with the details of their sports teams, the key role of U.S. corporations who exited America for those foreign countries with their cheap labor may be missed.

And recall when Trump told them during the campaign that “the drug companies are getting away with murder” and yet has done nothing as president, well hey, at least he is talking about the rip-offs. (Drug companies are laughing as they collect more subsidies and tax breaks from Uncle Sam. Their “pay-or-die” business just got 13 percent more expensive on the average this year.)

Trump scoffs at the climate crisis. All those intensifying heat waves, hurricanes, rising sea levels, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and wildfires are no evidence of massive man-caused climate disruption, which he calls a “hoax.” Whom do you trust — your eyes and the climate scientists, whose warnings have been accurate for years, or the “beautiful, clean coal” booster — Donald Trump?

Presidential behavior, in a modern social media age, can be very contagious. And not just for preteens sassing their parents in ways imitative of Trump’s outlandish behavior or talk. For example, when talking politics with people, if I mention his chronic, pathological lying in tweets and speeches day after day, saying things that just clearly aren’t so, somebody always says, “Well, all politicians lie” — which may well be true. But just as there is a difference between coffee that is hot, boiling, or scalding, a difference in degree can become a deadly difference in kind. Especially when the lies and their false scenarios are stacked and baked by the power and delusions of the president of the United States.

But the price of a Fake President is a continuing betrayal — betrayal of the people who believed and put him in office. When he says the economy is so rosy, and it clearly isn’t for a majority of people having trouble paying their bills even after going into deep debt, they’ve been betrayed. Trump then acts as if there were nothing he can do to provide health care for 80 million people without insurance or underinsured … when in reality he is pushing Congress to repeal or reduce critical health insurance benefits for millions of people. You can look it up and see for yourself. Or when he says industrial jobs are coming back and factories are returning, and they have not, his lies hide his broken campaign assurances and evade accountability. And the cycle of betrayal continues … for which his voters pay a big price when the cheering stops. His repeated lies about too many government regulations help his corrupt and conflict-saturated deregulators to sabotage public health and safety. Sure, there is sometimes too much paperwork, just as there are poorly conceived regulations that are sometimes too weak. But overall, for example, aren’t you glad to learn there is less lead in your children’s blood, no more lethal asbestos filling your lungs, and far fewer fatalities, broken bones, or amputations in motor vehicle crashes? Chalk all that up to federal regulatory law enforcement finally saying NO to corporate profits over people’s lives.

Sometimes it’s useful to know a little history about other people, no better than us, who stood up together for justice and got a better living standard across the board. I’m speaking of the people of Western Europe who pulled themselves together after their countries were destroyed during World War II. With their multiparty systems (more choices and voices), their larger and stronger labor unions than we have in the United States, and their many consumer cooperatives, as voters they demanded and received full health care; four weeks or more annual paid vacation; decent pensions, wages, and public transit; tuition-free higher education; paid child care; paid individual and family sick leave; and paid maternity leave.

Today in the United States, nearly 75 years after World War II, which we helped to win, we have scant few of these necessities for all our people. To these Europeans, the logic was simple. They earned their pay, sent their tax payments to the government, and wanted them returned in the form of these necessities that make a more decent life. You don’t find many conservatives in those nations wanting to turn the clock back. The famed conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher kept that country’s national health insurance.

Then there is our northern neighbor, Canada. In the 1960s, while our country was wasting lives and money in Vietnam, the peaceful Canadians were laying the groundwork for full Medicare for All. Soon all the Canadian provinces had a health insurance structure called “single payer” (meaning the government provided universal, high-quality care). Everybody in, nobody out, with free choice of physician or hospital. No nightmarish networks. Lower drug prices. The Canadians cover everyone for half the price per capita that we pay in our gouging, profiteering system that still manages to leave 29 million people uninsured and double that number in underinsured fright.

If you’ve been to Canada, you’ll note they act and look a lot like Americans. But at a certain time in their history, without being absorbed in the quicksand of costly foreign wars, Canadians said, “enough is enough,” and created a very popular health care insurance system that reduced a lot of anxiety, dread, and fear from their quality of life and work. (Again, you can look it up — visit singlepayeraction.org for 25 ways full Medicare improves Canadian livelihoods compared to their counterparts in the United States.)

To get votes in 2016, Trump on the stump repeatedly promised that he would abolish the “disastrous” Obamacare and replace it with “great” health insurance. For two years, with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, he did neither. In fact, he had no replacement plan for Obamacare. Had he persuaded Congress to repeal Obamacare, he would have left 20 million additional people without health insurance. In a sense, he was lucky. There are lots of Trump voters in that group.

Let’s face it, Western Europeans — from Scandinavia to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and others — had higher expectations for themselves and their political systems than we do. Sure, their politics are fractious; they fight with one another and endure all kinds of shifting coalitions in their parliaments. But eventually they returned to their people a lot for their taxes — decent livelihoods; income security through retirement; paid leisure and sick time; and far less anxiety, fear, and dread than our trapdoor economy allows.

Many Trump voters read about the great labor leader, Eugene Debs, in their high school and college American history books. One day, near the end of his career in the 1920s, a reporter asked an exhausted Debs what was his greatest regret? He looked at the reporter and said, “My greatest regret? … My greatest regret is that the American people under their Constitution can have almost anything they want, but it just seems that they don’t want much of anything at all.”

I thought of Debs when I observed the muted reaction from the American people to the $4.7 trillion budget Trump sent to Congress in March 2019. It contained another staggering increase in the already bloated, wasteful, unaudited military budget. But he also wanted, dangerously, to cut Medicaid; food stamps; consumer, environmental health, and safety protections against cancer and other diseases; and Medicare (breaking his campaign promise). And he gave the superrich over a trillion dollars in tax cuts and handed your children the debt. “How Dare He!” did not ring out from all corners of our land.

And whatever happened to Trump’s big plans for repairing and upgrading America’s failing infrastructure or public works? His proposed budget barely even pays lip service to the problem. As a builder of hotels and casinos, he knows his proposal falls short, but he isn’t telling you. Fortunately for the people, the House Democrats declared his budget dead on arrival. The question remains: Whose side is he really on? Clearly not the side that truly loves America and Americans.

He is not on the side of struggling blue-collar workers who are abandoned or mistreated by their bosses. Even when confronted with Trump’s massive fakery, most of his victimized supporters say a version of, “Yes, but” — “but” meaning any excuse to justify their intuitive embrace of him. Trump loyalists may feel bolstered by low unemployment numbers (which actually began their steady descent back in 2010, several years before he came into office), but they overlook stagnant real income, the absence of benefits, and the lack of investment in public works and their communities.

They may be bemused by his antics with Kim Jong Un, the erratic dictator of nuclear-armed North Korea. And they may choose to ignore his transparent commercial ties with Russian crooks and oligarchs. (Don’t believe it? Again, you can look it up!) Why? Perhaps because his reckless behavior doesn’t appear to directly affect their families? They may revel in his intimidating attacks on our free press … or applaud when he attacks hardworking immigrants … but these are core features of our democracy; they need to be defended and not undermined, especially by the president.

They may see his abhorrent personal behavior with women as distasteful, but then … he’s only human, like many men they know. As far as his failed business career, cheating workers, including undocumented ones, customers, creditors, and the IRS — that, to many of his supporters, is Fake News. Besides, to them he is so rich that he can’t be bought (though, still, he refuses to disclose his tax returns, so while we know he has something to hide, we just don’t know what). As for his evangelical voters, they know about his infidelities, his many sins and non-churchgoing life, and his past support for abortion. They shrug. To them, it’s enough that Trump is vocally championing their values and policies from the biggest bully pulpit in the land.

Finally, they may be what Matt Taibbi, in his new book, Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, calls “grudge voters.” One Wisconsin voter told him, “I usually don’t vote, but I’m going Trump because f*** everything.”
Pessimism never won a battle or an election. I am asking you to learn about what Trump has really been up to. I’ve co-authored a book, Fake President,which I hope will (a) better equip those who refuse to reward such a miserable person with cruel policies, (b) perhaps activate some of the 120 million nonvoters—nearly as many as all those who do vote, and (c) encourage betrayed supporters to vote with their heads rather than their fears.

Keep all this in mind, dear Trump supporters. Spend some hours studying the actual words of the presidential candidates and your congressional candidates. Politics is not entertainment. If you like politicians because they say what you think, also question whether they will do what you need.

A president who excites angry voters with racist rants while rewarding his wealthy friends with policies that further enrich them is not a populist, but a phony — the opposite of someone who “tells it like it is.” Did you know that the Trump presidency has brought us the first-ever reduction of life expectancy in the United States, the stagnation of wages, and an avalanche of cancerous particulates in the water and air of our country? Including his coal-country base!

It’s time to persuade a segment of reasoning Trump voters that he is fundamentally a Fake President who can’t be trusted and is destroying the best in America while bringing out the worst. That’s a theory of the case that will sway the jury of voters, if they are registered and informed. For the Fox Corporation isn’t America. We — the progressive majority — are.

With high hopes for our future,
Ralph Nader

A pioneer in consumer advocacy, Ralph Nader was named by Atlantic magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures in American history. Together with Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate, he is co-author of Fake President (Skyhorse Publishing), which aims to raise the bar of what all voters deserve.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 February 2020
Word Count: 2,521
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When a well-known person denounces a specific group of people — claiming for instance they don’t deserve full citizenship, or they are a threat to the nation — the result can be a violent act against any person perceived to be in the targeted group. How do we know this?

Sadly, the answer emerges from the horrific mass murders in Europe in the 20th century and the role of mass media in speeding information to a large audience. We saw the awful outcome of this process in October 2018, when 11 Jews were murdered at a synagogue in Pittsburgh by a gunman who believed in conspiracy theories. In December 2019 another homicidal attack, also based on conspiracism, targeted a Kosher grocery in Jersey City, N.J. Our nation grieves. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the process of demonization and scapegoating that painted targets on the backs of the victims.

It’s too easy to blame the mass media, however. As consumers, we as a society take time to adjust to new forms of information dissemination and to learn how to judge them. An instructive and more benign example occurred in 1938, when Orson Welles produced a radio program based on the early science fiction book War of the Worlds, by the British author H.G. Wells. Some people hearing the radio play thought it was a live news broadcast and began calling police and other emergency forces, asking how to escape the attack from outer space. We laugh now about Welles’s hoax, but generations later, there are a lot of us on this planet who have yet to adjust to the internet as a new information source.

Scholars theorizing about how mass media information can lead to violence sometimes start with the genocide of the Armenian people, begun during the First World War in what is now Turkey. The scope of the murders during that genocide was enabled by the mass media network of the telegraph. This communications medium not only allowed false, derogatory, and inflammatory information to spread throughout a vast geographic area and to surface in newspaper articles, but it was also used to direct the killing machinery of the military seeking the expulsion or elimination of the targeted sector of the population.

In Germany in the 1920s, radio reports and newsreel films combined with newspapers to spread lies about Jews, leftists of all stripes, homosexuals, and other targets of Adolf Hitler’s venom.

In 1933, Hitler’s mass media propaganda coordinator, Joseph Goebbels, turned radio into the tool of the Nazi Party, to broaden its political base and identify its targets. According to Goebbels, “What the press has been in the 19th century, radio will be for the 20th century.” Radio broadcasts fueled the genocidal murders in Germany and more than a dozen other countries in Europe.

Television was the new media platform in the early 1950s when the egomaniacal and histrionic Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin used the congressional pulpit to investigate American citizens and their political affiliations. McCarthy held hearing on persons and organizations alleged to be a threat to the United States because of their participation in a range of political and cultural groups in which socialists and communists were said to be active — and sometimes held leadership positions. Protesters objecting to these hearings were physically attacked. In one famous incident, in May 1960, police used fire hoses to sweep angry students down the steps of City Hall in San Francisco, where a hearing was being held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC).

Today the new mass media platform is the internet, and any high-profile and popular figure can reach tens of millions of people. The technology is new, but the process of blaming scapegoats for societal problems remains the same. As in previous eras, people targeted by malicious verbal falsehoods end up vilified, injured, or killed.

The ringleaders of these sorts of attacks are called “demagogues.” They can be engaged in politics, religion, or entertainment — as long as they are known by a large segment of a population through mass media. Before World War II, the basis for this analysis emerged from what is called the “Frankfurt school” for social science research, which explains the December 5, 2016, headline for an article by Alex Ross in the New Yorkermagazine: “the Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming.” As Ross explains, several “Frankfurters” (as graduate students gleefully call them) moved to the United States, and in 1950, two of them, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote a study on The Authoritarian Personality. Ross explains how the authors “constructed a psychological and sociological profile of the ‘potentially fascistic . . . individual.’ The work was based on interviews with American subjects and the steady accumulation of racist, antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments.”

Timothy Snyder is a professor at Yale University who was moved by the ascent of Donald Trump to write a booklet titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. Snyder explains these processes are not new. “Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.” Snyder expanded these themes in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom.

As a journalist writing about inequality and human rights, I was enlisted by sociologists and other scholars studying the approach of the millennial year 2000. They wanted to know if any far-right movements in the United States were preparing for a possible conspiratorial “New World Order” coup. I ended up on the advisory board of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University and working with scholars in the American Sociological Association. In both venues, we discussed the process in which stories about an impending attack by evil forces leads to the mobilization of social and political movements using conspiracy theories identifying the alleged “enemy.”

Out of many discussions emerged the idea of “scripted violence.” This is violence sparked by a storyline or script used by a high-profile public figure identifying sinister threats by evil enemies of the “real” nation. This happens all over the world. The result is now called “stochastic terrorism” in academic studies.

A stochastic terrorist is a demagogue who uses the rhetoric of scripted violence (such as demonization or scapegoating) to imply that a target group is involved in a malevolent conspiracy to destroy the pure society. This type of rhetoric can prompt acts of stochastic terrorism, the process that leads many “lone wolf” terrorists to choose a specific target. There is typically no direct connection between the actual terrorist and the national leader who identifies the wrongly blamed culprits. Such acts of violence are unpredictable — yet the actual type or class of victim has been identified by the demagogic leader. The process itself was identified after World War II by scholars such as Hannah Arendt in her masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice (1954).

In the United States today, there are white nationalist demagogues who defend racial inequality by claiming white people are the real “producers” of the wealth of the nation but are being dragged down by a heavy anchor of conspiratorial and “parasitic” nonwhite, or immigrant, “undeserving poor.” This caricature of political economy is called “producerism” by scholars. Matthew N. Lyons and I discussed the phenomenon in detail in our book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, published in 2000.

The producerist narrative is found in exclusionary racial and religious populist movements now taking over governments in nations around the world. Populism can appear anywhere on the political spectrum, as the scholar Margaret Canovan pointed out back in 1980; all it requires is the idea of a social or political movement defining itself as promoting the interests of “the people” against corrupt “elites.”

When authoritarianism is mixed with right-wing populist rhetoric and producerism, it can lead to the crafting of fascist social movements. Professor Roger Griffin, one of the leading theorists of right-wing social and political movements, considers “populist ultra-nationalism” to be a core building block of fascism. The experience of the 1930s in Europe demonstrated how nasty demonizing rhetoric that targets a specific religion or race (or any identifiable characteristic) can lead to violence by people who have consumed a steady diet of conspiracy theories fed to them by high-profile leaders.

The process is simple. Well-known political or religious leaders suggest there is a subversive conspiracy dragging down a once-great nation. The conspiracy is linked to people with a particular identifiable race, religion, class, or gender identity. Therefore “we” must crush “them” before they can crush “us.”

In late 2015, I wrote a preelection article, for which I interviewed Professor Paul Bookbinder of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Bookbinder studies German civil society during the Weimar Republic period, prior to World War II, as the country eroded into fascism.

“Right now, our society is facing some of the same tensions as seen in the Weimar Republic,” warned Bookbinder. “People didn’t take seriously the threat to democracy when they could have; and when they did see the dangers, it was too late.”

Chip Berlet, an independent scholar and investigative journalist, specializes in the study of extreme right-wing movements in the United States. His book, Trumping Democracy: From Reagan to Alt-Right, was published by Routledge.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 January 2020
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