The president’s secret police were at it again last night. Federal agents deployed to Portland — unidentified, unaccountable, and unwanted by local elected and law enforcement officials in Oregon — spent the night gassing, arresting and otherwise terrorizing demonstrators under the guise of “protecting facilities.” Protests began by demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd, but have since evolved into protests against a president sticking his nose in local affairs where it doesn’t belong.

While that was happening, Chad Wolf appeared on Fox. The acting secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security seemed to suggest during the segment that thought itself could be a potential crime. “Because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals, and we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable,” Chad Wolf said.

Though the idea of the thought police is frightening enough, Wolf did do something useful with his remarks. He connected points of causation, obliquely but still clearly, between official acts of the past and official acts of the present, illustrating the creep of authoritarianism from the margins of our society to its center, and that without broader awareness — without public acts of witness — the end can come quickly.

Recall, first, that Donald Trump ran for president promising to purge “illegal” immigrants. (His real goal was all immigration, including legal, and according to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy, his efforts have been wildly successful; since 2017, legal immigration has fallen by almost 50 percent.) For this reason, so-called sanctuary cities were a target of his rhetoric and, later, his policies.

The thing about federal immigration law is that to enforce it, you need the help of local law enforcement, but local law enforcement is under no legal obligation to help, because immigration isn’t its job. Cities and states don’t need to help if they don’t want to, and given most major cities are run by Democrats, most of them don’t.

This is maddening for a president promising to purge “illegals.” One solution is to sue in a bid to force local cops to play along. The courts have been unfriendly, though, and they are certain to get more unfriendly. The US Supreme Court refused last month to hear a case seeking to overturn a California law transforming the state in a legal haven for immigrants. The high court had previously ruled that the president can’t target states and their cities for “defunding” on account of their being uncooperative with immigration authorities. That leaves the administration with a couple of options.

Option No. 1 came naturally to a demagogue like Trump. Demonize cities as cancers of crime, violence, filth, looting, rioting and other terrible social ills that justify any kind of federal intervention. Characterize them as corrupt, maladministered, and undeserving of tax dollars for being captive to special-interests (that is, public-sector unions and Black people). Characterize them as lawless for not cooperating with ICE and Border Patrol (even though municipalities are following the letter of the law). Give the impression that sanctuary cities are leaving you with no choice but to use force.

Remember what Chad Wolf said: “Because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals.” He won’t stop from happening what must happen because you forced it to happen.

Then, Option No. 2, use force. The Trump administration dispatched 100 Border Patrol officers in February to sanctuary cities around the country for the stated purpose of boosting deportations by 35 percent. I think it’s safe to say at this point the real goal was intimating not only local cops but residents, too — anyone merely thinking it’s OK to deny the president. According to a New York Times report, they came armed with “stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification.” The officers, moreover, “typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.”

Meanwhile, DHS continued its policy of “family separation,” which means the confiscation of children, including babies, from parents seeking political asylum. The objective was deterrence, but the result was kids living in cages or in “internment camps” where they suffered from malnutrition, disease, death or even sexual crimes at the hands of Border Patrol agents. The explicit policy was making life so miserable no one would dare think of entering illegally. And such sadism was justified because the president said a misdemeanor (that’s what illegal entry is) menaced “our way of life.”

What we are seeing in Portland is part of an ongoing effort to push the envelope of acceptable behavior on the part of the Trump administration. At each stage, he has identified new enemies and found new means of crushing them. The process is ad hoc but inexorable — as long as most people, most white people, believe they are immune to an ever-expanding scope of conflict seeking to subordinate everything to a totalized state. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, first they came for the “illegals.” Then they came for the legal immigrants. Then they came for Americans who got in their way.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 July 2020

Word Count: 869

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 On April 21, in the midst of El Salvador’s hard-core coronavirus lockdown, President Nayib Bukele tweeted a photo of himself seated behind a desk in an elegant office, wearing a facemask. Accompanying the photo was the following reassurance: “The rumors of my kidnapping by aliens are completely unfounded.”

As if that weren’t odd enough, the next day he updated his profile picture to the same image of him face-masked, this time with the desk photoshopped out — and replaced by a spaceship.

Granted, Bukele had already gone orbital long before the coronavirus struck — like that time he announced: “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too … we both use Twitter a lot, so, you know, we’ll get along.” This, mind you, was after the same Trump had referred to Bukele’s country as a “shithole.”

A former advertising executive and mayor of San Salvador, Bukele assumed power in June 2019 at the age of 37, having successfully marketed his Nuevas Ideas party as a desperately needed break from ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that have dominated contemporary Salvadoran politics since the end of the bloody civil war in 1992. It seems, though, that Bukele’s ideas aren’t so nuevas — in that phenomena like unchecked authoritarianism and power-tripping have been around for quite a while.

In addition to tweeting ad nauseam and taking selfies from the podium at the United Nations, Bukele’s presidential activities have included deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly in February and threatening to dissolve it if lawmakers didn’t cooperate on a loan he was demanding for his Territorial Control Plan. According to Bukelian fantasy, this plan will resolve the country’s gang problem — and to hell with democracy. The militarization of the Assembly was a stunt unseen even during the 12-year civil war, during which the vast majority of atrocities were committed by a U.S.-backed right-wing military and allied death squads. But, you know, new ideas.

I happened to be in San Salvador at the time of the Assembly spectacle this winter and attended a brief pro-Bukele demonstration in front of the building. Demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in from outside the capital, were given black crosses adorned with a hashtag denouncing the recalcitrant lawmakers as mierda, signified by the poop emoji. The crosses were meant to symbolize how Salvadorans were dropping dead because Bukele wasn’t getting his loan; it was not clear, however, how anyone in such a fanatically religious country had deemed it prudent to put a poop emoji on a cross. The lawmakers, for their part, were given at least a temporary reprieve when Bukele called off the siege of the Assembly, informing his followers that he had spoken with God, who had told him to be patient.

Now the coronavirus has provided another opportunity for Bukele to be the big boss, again under the pretense of saving Salvadoran lives. On March 14, a state of emergency was declared in El Salvador, despite there being no confirmed cases of Covid-19. And the situation quickly deteriorated into one of the craziest lockdowns on the planet.

As Salvadorans found themselves under de facto house arrest, Bukele set about flaunting his disdain for inconvenient notions like human rights and the separation of powers. Repeatedly, he ignored Supreme Court rulings that cautioned him to respect fundamental rights and proceeded defiantly to arrest people arbitrarily for perceived quarantine violations and then stuff them all into crowded detention centers. This practice, it bears underscoring, did far more to undermine the quarantine than, say, an individual who left home to buy food for their family.

As of the beginning of May, thousands had already been arrested and jailed for alleged violations of the quarantine. Around mid-month, news articles began appearing with headlines like this one from The Washington Post: “El Salvador quarantine centers become points of contagion.” Salvadorans returning from abroad have also been placed in unsanitary containment centers. In one case reported by the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro, 67-year-old engineer Carlos Henríquez Cortez returned from a two-day business trip to Guatemala in March and was forcibly interned in a quarantine facility despite a supposed provision for persons over 60 to quarantine at home. Five weeks later, he became El Salvador’s eighth coronavirus fatality.

Meanwhile, in a country as brutally impoverished as El Salvador — where, for many people, access to food depends on whether they’ve earned any money that day — the mere act of staying at home can also be a death sentence. And while the government promised the neediest families a onetime payment of $300 in assistance, the incompetent distribution of these funds constituted a disaster in itself. Crowds of desperate people flooded banks and government offices, further eroding the protections of social distancing.

Nor, to be sure, do all the victims of femicide and domestic violence under lockdown have much reason to view Bukele as the savior of El Salvador. As reported in El Faro, the lockdown instigated a spike in domestic violence reports. “For some women, obeying the stay-at-home order has proved lethal, yet addressing this problem has not been a priority in El Salvador — the country that, in 2018, registered the highest levels of violence against women in the world.”

But the president has more important things to think about, like ordering the total shutdown and blockade of the municipality of La Libertad — which he did in April, via Twitter, after seeing a video-tweet of what he deemed to be too many people in circulation in the area. The Salvadoran defense minister tweeted back, and the job was done. Such is life in Bukelelandia.

In a recent email to me, Salvadoran anthropologist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson remarked that, while Bukele had long harbored “ambitions to concentrate the most power and resources possible in the executive branch,” the pandemic has rendered ever more visible his administration’s “authoritarian strategy.” A May 15 Bloomberg opinion article enumerated some additional Covid-19 highlights from El Salvador:

 The government abruptly closed down all public transport, leaving many doctors and other first responders on foot. Police were given broad powers to enter homes without warrants and arrest those thought to be violating quarantine; security forces mistook a young woman who’d gone shopping for a Mother’s Day present for a criminal gang member and shot her dead.

Bukele himself has railed against critics of police abuse on the grounds that these critics are simply “wanting more Salvadorans to die,” an inversion of reality of Trumpian proportions, given the Salvadoran security forces’ established tradition of extrajudicial assassinations and myriad other human rights violations, including torture. And of course, these same security forces have received funding and other forms of encouragement from the United States, whose complicity in the deaths of Salvadoran civilians is hardly new.

During the Salvadoran civil war, the United States poured billions of dollars into a conflict that killed more than 75,000 people and caused countless Salvadorans to flee, many of them to Los Angeles — where a different kind of brutality awaited. There, the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs formed as a means of communal protection. At the end of the war, the United States undertook mass deportations of gang members — which, coupled with the U.S.-backed neoliberalization of the tiny country, spelled more death for El Salvador and created the conditions for yet more northward migration. To this dubious record add the present era of harsh deportation policies in the United States, in which Salvadorans are knowingly sent back to face abuse and even death. Now, even if a returnee survives the gauntlet of unaccountable security forces and gangs who prey on deportees, the coronavirus has made the whole inhuman process even more lethal.

California State University’s Dr. Steven Osuna observes that the “punitive populism deployed in El Salvador with the support of the U.S. state has targeted a marginalized relative surplus population that has been deprived of any access to the wealth and resources of the country.” Gangs have long served as a politically useful scapegoat for El Salvador’s woes and its regular appearance on the global list of homicide capitals, justifying mano dura policies and other measures that criminalize youth and render young men and tattooed persons, in particular, fair game for abuse and/or extermination by security forces. But as Osuna emphasizes, the violence perpetrated by marginalized groups will “never equal the viciousness of what neoliberalism and transnational capital have produced for the majority of the country — alienation, domestic uncertainty and desperation.”

Enter Bukele and his mano dura response to the coronavirus, which one might be forgiven for interpreting as an attempt to just wipe out the surplus population altogether. As if the Salvadoran guardians of law and order required any more leeway, following a spike in homicides in April, Bukele authorized the army and police to use lethal force against gang members (read: people buying Mother’s Day presents). The corresponding presidential tweet specified that such force was permissible in “self-defense or in defense of the lives of Salvadorans.”

Alleging that the orders for the spike in violence had come from imprisoned gang leaders, Bukele orchestrated a show of force within the prisons, as well, and his press office tweeted images of hundreds of tattooed, underwear-clad prisoners seated crotch-to-ass on the floor with legs extended.

Indeed, things have gotten so bad that even The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady — who, as far as I know, has never met a hard-line authoritarian she didn’t love — felt compelled to call Bukele out at the end of April (although she couldn’t help getting in a jab at Fidel Castro for good measure). Describing how Bukele had just brought about the shutdown of the Legislative Assembly by tweeting a suspicion of Covid-19 contamination in the chamber, O’Grady complained that the Salvadoran president was “undermin[ing] democracy” and therefore “no friend of the U.S.”

For someone who viewed the 2009 right-wing coup d’état against the democratically elected president of Honduras as a defense of democracy — and Hillary Clinton as a Communist sympathizer — it’s not clear why exactly O’Grady has a beef with Bukele. In fact, he is a very good friend of the United States, at least in its current incarnation, and not just because of the shared presidential affinity for Twitter — or, now, a shared commitment to ingesting hydroxychloroquine as a discredited prevention measure against the virus.

Beyond presiding over a landscape of acute neoliberal misery, Bukele has also cooperated with Trump’s anti-migrant policies and last year even signed a so-called “safe third country” agreement as a preliminary step toward serving as a dumping ground for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Never mind that a ton of U.S.-bound migrants hail from El Salvador in the first place because it’s, well, super unsafe.

Bukele is furthermore on board with Trump’s policy of perpetual harassment of Venezuela, spearheaded by U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams, who unsurprisingly played a significant role in the Salvadoran civil war. Commencing his stint in 1981 as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs immediately after the U.S.-trained and funded Atlacatl Battalion massacred up to 1,200 people in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, Abrams spent his early days on the job denying any such massacre had happened. In later years, he would defend notorious Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson and praise the Reagan administration’s blood-drenched record in the country as one “of fabulous achievement.”

When the Salvadoran Supreme Court ruled Bukele’s quarantine detentions unconstitutional, he responded with the tweet: “Five people are not going to decide the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans.” The national state of emergency was extended twice, and on May 18 the Bukele administration issued an executive decree to extend it once more — just a day after the Legislative Assembly had refused any further extensions due to a lack of transparency surrounding the expenditure of emergency funds.

As always, there’s nothing like a bit of religion to distract from — or complement — the neoliberal project. Hence, perhaps, Bukele’s declaration of May 24 as a “National Day of Prayer” against the pandemic. Interestingly, as recently as January 2019, Bukele insisted in a Facebook post that he was “not a religious person.” Of course, this hadn’t prevented him from conducting a dramatic bout of prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2018, where — despite being of Palestinian origins — he had traveled on an Israeli government-sponsored trip. God can be a useful ally — and it’s presumably thanks at least in part to him that Bukele’s approval rating is still so inconceivably high.

Still, as he persists in ignoring basic human rights, undermines the independence of the judiciary, displays contempt for the constitutional authority of the legislature, presides over a downward-spiraling economy, and propels his country into ever greater emergency, maybe it’s time the young president got on that spaceship, after all.

Belén Fernández is the author of Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, published by OR Books; Martyrs Never Die: Travels Through South Lebanon, published by Warscapes; and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She has written for The Washington Spectator on a range of countries, from Honduras and Colombia to Turkey and ex-Yugoslavia.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 July 2020

Word Count: 2,141

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The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew “yovel,” meaning a “trumpet blast of liberty.” It was said that, on the day of liberation, the sound of a ram’s horn would ring through the land. These days, I hear the sound of that horn while walking with my kids through the streets of New York City, while protests continue here, even amid a pandemic, as they have since soon after May 25th when a police officer put his knee to George Floyd’s neck and robbed him of his life. I hear it when I speak with homeless leaders defending their encampments amid the nightmare of Covid-19. I hear it when I meet people who are tired, angry, and yet, miraculously enough, finding their political voices for the first time. I hear it when I read escaped slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass’s speech on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation.

I also feel Frederick Douglass’s sharp reminder, from that same speech, of the need for eternal vigilance when I learn of the death of leaders in the movement to transform this world of ours — like Pamela Rush, who lived in the Mississippi Delta with raw sewage in her yard and died from Covid-19 complications, the closest hospital being nearly an hour from her home. (She leaves behind a daughter who needs a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine to breathe, and a son.) These are, after all, times of staggering danger, but also enormous possibility, moments that should be met with unbridled imagination, absolute seriousness, and the music of those jubilee horns. Above all, in a world distinctly stacked against us, we must believe that we can succeed.

¡Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!

How to heal America On June 20th, I distinctly heard that sound of the jubilee horn, when nearly three million people tuned in for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington to express the untold stories, demands, and potential solutions of a growing social movement to a host of injustices. Alongside social media, radio, and TV (in English, Spanish, and American Sign Language), toll-free numbers broadcast the program to homeless encampments and other places abandoned by much of this society long before Covid-19 hit, and 300,000 listeners sent the agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign to their governors and Congress.

Meanwhile, that very day in Tulsa, Oklahoma, President Trump was speaking at a rally in which he trafficked, as he always does, in explicit racism and hate even as he denied the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it has induced. Only about 6,000 people sat largely maskless and shoulder to shoulder in that auditorium, which could have held 19,000. They nonetheless seem to have helped spark a surge in coronavirus cases in that city about two weeks later.

Also on June 20th, the Poor People’s Campaign (of which I am a co-chair) launched a “Moral Policy Agenda to Heal America: The Poor People’s Jubilee Platform.” It detailed not just a list of demands, but a blueprint for the moral reconstruction of a society that now looks to be failing fast. It’s meant to remind us all that ending poverty and systemic racism, working to mitigate climate change, and halting this country’s ever-growing militarism, at home and abroad, is not only possible, but that we essentially know what it will take to get us there. Among the policies needed are universal single payer healthcare, quality and free education through college, debt relief, a guaranteed income, the right to a living-wage job, true environmental protections, indigenous and immigrant rights, and an adequate standard of living for all, including the poor, in a country with a Congress and president focused mainly on the rich and on funding the Pentagon at ever more staggering levels.

This Jubilee Platform, as we call it, affirms many of the truths discovered by freedom-fighters across the ages — including the well-kept secret in America that there is actually enough for everyone and that all of us are deserving of our nation’s abundance; that when we lift from the bottom up, everyone rises; that our society desperately needs a moral revolution of values for which we’ll have to depend on the leadership of those most impacted by injustice; and that, as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once suggested, we truly “can force the power structure to say yes when they may be desirous of saying no.”

There need be no poor among us Many people have said that this platform is far too ambitious, that such demands are both politically inconceivable and ridiculously too expensive. Don’t believe them. Instead, believe me that the benefits of investing in life, not death, far outweigh the costs, whatever they may be.

After all, child poverty already costs our country, at a minimum, an estimated $700 million annually; voter suppression in just one state, Florida, added up to at least $385 million annually in administrative and court costs; failing to adequately address climate change and create a genuine green economy could, in the end, cost an estimated 15.7% of our gross domestic product a year, wiping out the equivalent of $3.3 trillion from our economy — and, if the effects of climate change arrive more quickly than expected, it could be worse. Meanwhile, endless wars, not to speak of the 800 U.S. military bases scattered across the planet, cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars a year without making our country or the world any safer.

Instead of bankrolling war and the military-industrial complex, Americans could swiftly cut $350 billion from the annual Pentagon budget, use it to enhance genuine security at home (particularly during this pandemic), and still have a larger military budget than China, Russia, and Iran combined. The government could raise the federal minimum wage to a living one and experience a ripple effect as that money circulated back through the economy, both faster and further than the billions Congress has given through tax cuts to the already immensely wealthy and corporations. And the U.S. could gain $886 billion in estimated annual revenue from fair taxes on that 1% of Americans, the most powerful corporations, and Wall Street.

Imagine a society that truly began to invest in public infrastructure, creating ever more and better jobs not related to the military-industrial complex, while accelerating a clean energy transition (and the jobs that went with it). Imagine what that would do for our country and the planet. In the process, the United States could provide health care, housing, and education for everyone. In the richest country in the world, there are, in reality, abundant resources, even if for far too long our public policies have funneled far too much to far too few.

Jubilee and justice The inclusion of jubilee in that policy platform is not meant as just another rhetorical flourish. It is meant as a rallying cry, a word that captures in the best possible way a future economic and social vision of justice, a political roadmap for our moment, and an expression of the moral heart of movements of the oppressed in this country. Indeed, jubilee has often been invoked as a shorthand for the promise of freedom in this country, from the pre-Civil War abolition movement to today.

On December 28, 1862, on the eve of the moment when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, Frederick Douglass gave a speech, “The Day of Jubilee Comes” that he began this way: “This is scarcely a day for prose. It is a day for poetry and song, a new song.” He then warned, however, that it was unwise “for the friends of freedom to fold their hands and consider their work at an end. The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.”

Two and a half years of death and struggle later, on June 19, 1865, the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, and the enslaved people of that city — the last to do so — learned that they had been emancipated. The memory of that day has since held special meaning for many Black communities, as well as others seeking freedoms of various sorts. Some know it as Juneteenth. Others call it Jubilee Day.

In my 25 years of grassroots anti-poverty organizing, from homeless encampments to welfare offices, we’ve declared jubilee countless times, whether from crushing debt and family separation or inadequate housing and healthcare systems. An understanding of what jubilee means, and the hope it represents, has always been grounded in a study of history and theology.

I’m a minister and teach in a theological seminary, so I couldn’t be more aware that “jubilee” appears throughout the Bible, including in the law codes of Deuteronomy, the most cited Old Testament book. Those codes established a covenant with God in which there was to be an unbroken cycle of jubilee years when debts were cancelled, slaves manumitted, wages finally paid, the poor and hungry given provisions, and farm land allowed to lie fallow (an early form of ecological conservation). Together, those codes served as sacred law and the people were told that, if they were followed, “there need be no poor people among you.”

None of those laws were meant to be about charity, but about the responsibilities of a land and a people. They amounted, in fact, to a call for a radical reconstruction of society. It was no accident, in fact, that the first mention of jubilee came two books earlier in Leviticus in a similar set of liberatory codes handed down by God after the Jewish people had been freed from Egypt. They were to provide a clean break with the hellish world those Jews had just escaped and the first building-blocks of a new, more just one.

What does all this have to do with the United States today? For one thing, even before Covid-19 hit, there were 140 million poor and low-income people in the richest country in the world, the richest country, in fact, in history and one in which inequality has risen to levels not seen in a century. Meanwhile, wages for most workers have been stagnating for decades and, in the Covid-19 moment, historic rates of unemployment hit, along with the threat of a massive wave of evictions amid a widening economic crisis. In addition, over the past few decades, poverty has become an increasingly endemic and permanent fixture of American life.

In that context, it should be obvious that the United States is in dire need of a new vision.

The day of Jubilee is coming The problems of 2020 clearly demand a jubilee vision for the nation, something that, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, feels more possible now than it has for generations. Reverend William J. Barber II, my Poor People’s Campaign co-chair, often says that we are on the cusp of a Third Reconstruction (after the post-Civil War one and the Civil Rights Movement). In each of those previous periods, monumental social, political, and economic changes were birthed by movements in the midst of insufferable conditions and in the face of regressive governments.

The last few months offer evidence that growing segments of society — if not the Trump administration and various Republican state governments — are willing to imagine bold solutions to issues like poverty and systemic racism and are prepared to organize what could be a new reconstruction to make them a reality. Six months into the pandemic, tens of thousands of Americans are continuing to go on rent strikes and engage in the struggles of low-wage workers and the unemployed demanding both immediate relief and permanent rights to housing and decent work at a living wage.

Those in a revitalizing labor movement are taking increasingly militant action, including the national Strike for Black Lives on July 20th by low-wage workers. Meanwhile, this summer’s racial justice uprisings have awakened one of the largest protest movements in American history, while transforming the conversation on previously untouchable institutions like the police and the military. An unprecedented debate has now opened up about how society spends its resources and why politicians have invested so much money in social control and violence, while gravely underfunding the cornerstones of a healthy society: education and environmental protection, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and food and water supplies, among other things.

The nation’s misplaced priorities are not only damaging the social fabric, but moving us toward a fundamentally unstable economy in which only the truly wealthy will truly prosper. Beneath the often-detached waves of the stock market is a roiling ocean of troubles: more than 80 million people uninsured or underinsured, for instance, within the most expensive healthcare system among developed countries. In 2019, 137 million Americans faced financial hardship thanks to high medical costs and rising debt. Meanwhile, the Pentagon awarded Boeing roughly the same amount in annual military contracts as it would cost to expand Medicaid in the 14 states that have yet to do so.

In America, scarcity is a myth and nothing more. The money is there to be found and, during a pandemic, it needs to be. Last summer, the Poor People’s Campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies released a “moral budget” outlining where this country’s abundant resources have been so disastrously funneled and how they could be redirected toward the rest of us.

Where would such moneys go? Toward making a reality of what the Constitution has always promised: establishing real justice (the right to democracy and equal protection under the law), promoting the general welfare (the right to an adequate standard of living), ensuring domestic tranquility (the right to work with dignity), securing the blessings of liberty (the right to health and a healthy environment), and providing for the common defense (reprioritizing our resources to defend life over profit and our real security over that of the national security state).

To do this, the nation would need to enshrine education, healthcare, housing, and welfare as universal rights; raise wages, while creating new labor standards and encouraging the right to unionize and organize; demilitarize the economy and our communities; protect the vote, not the gerrymander, while investing in democracy, not incipient Trump-style autocracy; forgive debts, rather than improving the ability of banks to collect them; declare climate change a national emergency; and invest in infrastructure while building a fully green economy.

Social movements, especially when first gaining ground, are often told to be “practical,” to make their demands few and modest. It’s worth noting, though, that the same is never asked of the super-rich, of the 1%, certainly not in the financial crisis of 2007-2008 when Wall Street was bailed out to the tune of nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, nor in the current crisis when Congress’s stimulus package to date has largely amounted to an even greater giveaway program. A jubilee platform is not a proposal to tinker around the edges. It is a plan for reconstruction that hopes to address the pain and hope of millions fighting every day simply for the right to live. The project of reconstructing society around the needs of the poor and dispossessed requires a movement led by those most impacted by the economic and racial disasters of our time.

When we lift from the bottom, everyone rises I have been engaged in a movement to reconstruct society led by the poor and dispossessed for more than a quarter of a century. In that time, many have come forward to claim that ending poverty is impossible, that this is as good as it gets, that the costs of addressing inequality are simply too great. Especially in my role as a member of the ordained clergy and a biblical scholar, rarely has a week passed that I haven’t heard someone quote a line from Jesus in the Bible — “the poor will be with you always” — to make the point that humanity has always known poverty to be eternal and that its mitigation is best reserved for charity or philanthropy. Indeed, that biblical passage has become yet another tool wielded by supporters of the wealthy to deflect attention from systemic failures in our country and help them further consolidate their power — to reinforce that social uplift is far too costly to imagine and change of that sort inconceivable.

In a blistering new report on the growing crisis of global poverty, Phillip Alston, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, explained the consequences well: “The overwhelming success of the ideological campaign that supports neoliberal policies is that it has succeeded in convincing people that those in poverty have no one to blame but themselves, while supporting the notion that trickle-down policies will address it.”

We may live in a time that essentializes poverty, but the irony of that line from the Bible on the poor is that Jesus was actually critiquing it (and the rich) by cleverly referencing the law codes of Deuteronomy. In his time, the Roman Empire had created a society rife with suffering and death, as well as its own predatory regime of wealth accumulation. Jesus references perhaps the most powerful prescription for justice in the Old Testament with the message that “there need be no poor people among us” and instructs nations to forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, abolish slavery, and organize society around the needs of the poor. That jubilee passage of his was never actually saying that poverty was inevitable, but that the “poor will be always with us” as long as we cater to the rich rather than build a society that cares for everyone. That’s no less true today.

May we choose another way.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 July 2020

Word Count: 2,939

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Not long ago, heavily armed white men (and a handful of white women) stood on the steps of Michigan’s Capitol. They were protesting the governor’s lock down amid the spread of the new coronavirus. Gretchen Whitmer, they said, was infringing on their constitutional rights and liberties. They were showing they would not stand for it.

It was a nice bit of political theater that has since grown nationally into a battle over wearing masks. Refuse to wear one, and you support the president. Wear one, and you don’t. But beneath the protests was something members of the press corps believed they should take seriously: a conservative ideology ever watchful of corrupt power.

It should be clear to the press corps, and to a citizenry informed by the press corps, that those protests had nothing to do with the tyranny of government. It should be clear that when they said, “Don’t tread on me,” that didn’t include you. It should be clear, to everyone, that such protests weren’t principled. I’m not going to argue what they were really about. Maybe small men with small minds need to act up. What I do know: if there’s anything worthy of armed resistance, it’s the emergence of Donald Trump’s secret police force. Yet here we are. As far as I can tell, nothing but crickets.

The secret police are real. Groups of heavily armed and unidentified federal agents in military dress have been gassing peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, under the guise of protecting “federal facilities,” meaning monuments. We now know they are with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among other agencies under the US Department of Homeland Security. These are the same agencies that gassed peaceful protesters out of Washington’s Lafayette Square so the president could do a photo shoot with a Bible in front of a church. Videos online have shown officers in Portland taking protesters into custody without reading their rights, loading them into unmarked vans, and threatening to shoot anyone attempting to follow them.

Its activity goes beyond disappearing citizens amid social upheaval. The Oregonian, the state’s paper of record, reported Monday that “protecting” monuments from protesters seeking justice for the murder of George Floyd, in addition to greater racial equality over all, now includes spying on them as well as infiltrating their ranks. It reported:

The court records provide a window into the tactics of federal agencies based at the courthouse in downtown Portland at a time when local, state and congressional officials from Oregon have roundly criticized the national law enforcement presence.

Its authority is broadly drawn. According to a classified document obtained by Lawfare’s Steve Vladeck and Benjamin Wittes, DHS is not only “protecting” federal monuments but those not under its purview, and it has authorized domestic spying as a means of pursuing that end. “The memo makes clear that the authorized intelligence activity covers significantly more than just planned attacks on federal personnel or facilities. It appears to also include planned vandalism of Confederate (and other historical) monuments and statues, whether federally owned or not” (my italics). Such an expansive view of federal police power is ripe for corruption, leading some of us (me!) to worry that a president in desperate need of winning a second term might use a secret police force to harass and intimidate Americans of color as they wait in line to vote, or even detain them under suspicion of attempting to commit voter fraud.

The question should not be whether to protect federal monuments (that’s for another time), but instead who’s doing the protecting? A conservative of a mind to protest a governor’s lock down should also be of a mind to tell the federal government to butt out of state and local affairs, whether the monuments are federally owned or not. The sovereignty of the states of the United States is the load-bearing wall of American conservatism. It is to be protected even if outcomes are harmful, as was the case when GOP attorneys general sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act. We don’t need the federal government to care for us, the thinking went. We can take care of ourselves.

At the time, that seemed principled, but the same people, as far as I can tell, now have little or nothing to say about expansive and potentially corrupt police power that blurs the line between state and national governments, undermining a principle they used to say was central to the American idea of freedom. When people walk all over values they once said were nonnegotiable, it’s time to stop taking them seriously.

Without principle, white men with long guns cannot protest legitimately, because without principle, they’re nothing but dangerous white men with long guns.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 July 2020

Word Count: 787

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Some time ago, Joe Biden said the president would try stealing the 2020 presidential election. He didn’t say Donald Trump would steal it. Biden didn’t say the election was rigged against him. He said Trump would try, one way or another, and Biden said this as a warning. If you do not want a stolen presidency, you need to vote, and you need to vote in such overwhelming numbers that the election’s outcome won’t be in doubt.

Biden’s statement was a reminder. Democracy is fragile, but it is also strong — when enough citizens take responsibility for it. Though we face threats domestically (the president and his GOP confederates), internationally (Russian and Chinese spies and saboteurs) and impersonally (a pandemic that has killed over 143,000 Americans), we can face them together, and overcome them together, when armed with the right knowledge. Just knowing it’s possible to steal an election might be enough to stop it.

Of course, political knowledge usually comes by way of a Washington press corps that has one indisputable bias encumbering our need for political knowledge. That bias is for the east coast. If it happens here (my beloved New Haven, in my humble opinion, is indeed the center of the universe), no matter how trivial or irrelevant it is to the rest of the country, it’s national news. If it happens in St. Louis, say, it might be. It depends.

The president ordered federal agents last month to gas peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, in Washington, for a photo op with a Holy Bible he didn’t own in front of a Episcopalian church he didn’t attend. That was national news automatically. The same agents later went to Portland, Oregon. Late last week and over the weekend, they again gassed peaceful protesters. That wasn’t national news. The result is that most people this Monday morning have no idea the president’s secret police are real.

“Secret police” is not hyperbole. They were dressed in fatigues and heavily armed. They did not bear identifying features, such as names, badge numbers or indicators of which law enforcement entity they represented. A video online showed two of them refusing to answer basic questions—“Who are you?” “Where are you taking her?” — as they marched up to a protester, seized her, then loaded her into an unmarked vehicle without informing her of her rights. When apparent agents of the state do not identify themselves and do not declare the authority by which they are acting — “This is the Portland police and you are under arrest” — they are, by definition, secret police.

In truth, they were connected to the US Department of Homeland Security, specifically Border Patrol, and they were acting, DHS officials later said, under a provision of law passed after Sept. 11, 2001, giving the department the authority to “send in federal agents to help the Federal Protective Service when federal property is threatened,” according to the New York Times. Portlanders have been demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd for the last 50-some days. A tiny fraction vandalized some national monuments. That appears to be the reason for deploying federal agents.

Journalist Lindsey Smith has been documenting Portland’s protests. A slice of federal land, Terry Schrunk Plaza, has never been a focus of demonstrations (the focus was on racial injustice), though people have been beaten and arrested for coming near it, she said. Last night, Smith reported scenes involving a group of mothers who confronted federal agents, shouting “Leave our kids alone.” CBS News covered it. After cameras went off, however, federal agents gassed the mothers, Smith said. The Times reported Sunday that local, state and federal elected officials representing Oregon have called for an investigation of DHS’s actions and for federal agents to get out of their state.

The Washington Monthly’s David Atkins was right, I suspect, to suggest that Portland is a preview of Election Day. If graffiti is a pretext for crushing dissent, Covid-19 is a pretext for intimidating voters as they stand in line to vote. “We could end up seeing armed private contractors hired by the RNC and affiliated conservative organizations to intimidate Democratic-leaning voters, bolstered by camouflage-wearing taxpayer-funded rifle-toting border patrol agents aggressively checking papers of every voter in line in the guise of ‘securing against voter fraud’ on the president’s orders,” he wrote.

What can we do? Among other things, do what Joe Biden did when he said the president is going to try stealing the election. Talk about the likely use of “gestapo tactics” to achieve that end, so the citizenry might prevent it from happening. Talk about it so much that the east coast-oriented press corps must give it full attention. Talk about it so much that the Democratic lawmakers in the House feel they must act now. The secret police can’t stay secret when they are the center of a national debate.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 July 2020

Word Count: 813

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On March 26th, the coronavirus accomplished what no foreign adversary has been able to do since the end of World War II: it forced an American aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, to suspend patrol operations and shelter in port. By the time that ship reached dock in Guam, hundreds of sailors had been infected with the disease and nearly the entire crew had to be evacuated. As news of the crisis aboard the TR (as the vessel is known) became public, word came out that at least 40 other U.S. warships, including the carrier USS Ronald Reagan and the guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd, were suffering from Covid-19 outbreaks. None of these approached the scale of the TR and, by June, the Navy was again able to deploy most of those ships on delayed schedules and/or with reduced crews. By then, however, it had become abundantly clear that the long-established U.S. strategy of relying on large, heavily armed warships to project power and defeat foreign adversaries was no longer fully sustainable in a pandemic-stricken world.

Just as the Navy was learning that its preference for big ships with large crews — typically packed into small spaces for extended periods of time — was quite literally proving a dead-end strategy (one of the infected sailors on the TR died of complications from Covid-19), the Army and Marine Corps were making a comparable discovery. Their favored strategy of partnering with local forces in far-flung parts of the world like Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, and South Korea, where local safeguards against infectious disease couldn’t always be relied on (or, as in Okinawa recently, Washington’s allies couldn’t count on the virus-free status of American forces), was similarly flawed. With U.S. and allied troops increasingly forced to remain in isolation from each other, it is proving difficult to conduct the usual joint training-and-combat exercises and operations.

In the short term, American defense officials have responded to such setbacks with various stopgap measures, including sending nuclear-capable B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers on long-range “show-of-force” missions over contested areas like the Baltic Sea (think: Russia) or the South China Sea (think: China, of course). “We have the capability and capacity to provide long-range fires anywhere, anytime, and can bring overwhelming firepower — even during the pandemic,” insisted General Timothy Ray, commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, after several such operations.

In another sign of tactical desperation, however, the Navy ordered the shattered crew of the TR out of lockdown in May so that the ship could participate in long-scheduled, China-threatening multi-carrier exercises in the western Pacific. A third of its crew, however, had to be left in hospitals or in quarantine on Guam. “We’re executing according to plan to return to sea and fighting through the virus is part of that,” said the ship’s new captain, Carlos Sardiello, as the TR prepared to depart that Pacific island. (He had been named captain on April 3rd after a letter the carrier’s previous skipper, Brett Crozier, wrote to superiors complaining of deteriorating shipboard health conditions was leaked to the media and the senior Navy leadership fired him.)

Such stopgap measures, and others like them now being undertaken by the Department of Defense, continue to provide the military with a sense of ongoing readiness, even aggressiveness, in a time of Covid-related restrictions. Were the current pandemic to fade away in the not-too-distant future and life return to what once passed for normal, they might prove adequate. Scientists are warning, however, that the coronavirus is likely to persist for a long time and that a vaccine — even if successfully developed — may not prove effective forever. Moreover, many virologists believe that further pandemics, potentially even more lethal than Covid-19, could be lurking on the horizon, meaning that there might never be a return to a pre-pandemic “normal.”

That being the case, Pentagon officials have been forced to acknowledge that the military foundations of Washington’s global strategy — particularly, the forward deployment of combat forces in close cooperation with allied forces — may have become invalid. In recognition of this harsh new reality, U.S. strategists are beginning to devise an entirely new blueprint for future war, American-style: one that would end, or at least greatly reduce, a dependence on hundreds of overseas garrisons and large manned warships, relying instead on killer robots, a myriad of unmanned vessels, and offshore bases.

Ships without sailors In fact, the Navy’s plans to replace large manned vessels with small, unmanned ones was only accelerated by the outbreak of the pandemic. Several factors had already contributed to the trend: modern warships like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and missile-armed cruisers had been growing ever more expensive to build. The latest, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has cost a whopping $13.2 billion and still doesn’t work to specifications. So even a profligately funded Pentagon can only afford to be constructing a few at a time. They are also proving increasingly vulnerable to the sorts of anti-ship missiles and torpedoes being developed by powers like China, while, as events on the TR suggest, they’re natural breeding grounds for infectious diseases.

Until the disaster aboard the Theodore Roosevelt, most worrisome were those Chinese land-based, anti-ship weapons capable of striking American carriers and cruisers in distant parts of the Pacific Ocean. This development had already forced naval planners to consider the possibility of keeping their most prized assets far from China’s shores in any potential shooting war, lest they be instantly lost to enemy fire. Rather than accept such a version of defeat before a battle even began, Navy officials had begun adopting a new strategy, sometimes called “distributed maritime operations,” in which smaller manned warships would, in the future, be accompanied into battle by large numbers of tiny, unmanned, missile-armed vessels, or maritime “killer robots.”

In a reflection of the Navy’s new thinking, the service’s surface warfare director, Rear Admiral Ronald Boxall, explained in 2019 that the future fleet, as designed, was to include “104 large surface combatants [and] 52 small surface combatants,” adding, “That’s a little upside down. Should I push out here and have more small platforms? I think the future fleet architecture study has intimated ‘yes,’ and our war gaming shows there is value in that… And when I look at the force, I think: Where can we use unmanned so that I can push it to a smaller platform?”

Think of this as an early public sign of the rise of naval robotic warfare, which is finally leaving dystopian futuristic fantasies for actual future battlefields. In the Navy’s version of this altered landscape, large numbers of unmanned vessels (both surface ships and submarines) will roam the world’s oceans, reporting periodically via electronic means to human operators ashore or on designated command ships. They may, however, operate for long periods on their own or in robotic “wolf packs.”

Such a vision has now been embraced by the senior Pentagon leadership, which sees the rapid procurement and deployment of such robotic vessels as the surest way of achieving the Navy’s (and President Trump’s) goal of a fleet of 355 ships at a time of potentially static defense budgets, recurring pandemics, and mounting foreign threats. “I think one of the ways you get [to the 355-ship level] quickly is moving toward lightly manned [vessels], which over time can be unmanned,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper typically said in February. “We can go with lightly manned ships… You can build them so they’re optionally manned and then, depending on the scenario or the technology, at some point in time they can go unmanned… That would allow us to get our numbers up quickly, and I believe that we can get to 355, if not higher, by 2030.”

To begin to implement such an audacious plan, that very month the Pentagon requested $938 million for the next two fiscal years to procure three prototype large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs) and another $56 million for the initial development of a medium-sized unmanned surface vessel (MUSV). If such efforts prove successful, the Navy wants another $2.1 billion from 2023 through 2025 to procure seven deployable LUSVs and one prototype MUSV.

Naval officials have, however, revealed little about the design or ultimate functioning of such robot warships. All that service’s 2021 budget request says is that “the unmanned surface vessel (USV) is a reconfigurable, multi-mission vessel designed to provide low cost, high endurance, reconfigurable ships able to accommodate various payloads for unmanned missions and augment the Navy’s manned surface force.”

Based on isolated reports in the military trade press, the most that can be known about such future (and futuristic) ships, is that they will resemble miniature destroyers, perhaps 200 feet long, with no crew quarters but a large array of guided missiles and anti-submarine weapons. Such vessels will also be equipped with sophisticated computer systems enabling them to operate autonomously for long periods of time and — under circumstances yet to be clarified — take offensive action on their own or in coordination with other unmanned vessels.

The future deployment of robot warships on the high seas raises troubling questions. To what degree, for instance, will they be able to choose targets on their own for attack and annihilation? The Navy has yet to provide an adequate answer to this question, provoking disquiet among arms control and human rights advocates who fear that such ships could “go rogue” and start or escalate a conflict on their own. And that’s obviously a potential problem in a world of recurring pandemics where killer robots could prove the only types of ships the Navy dares deploy in large numbers.

Fighting from afar When it comes to the prospect of recurring pandemics, the ground combat forces of the Army and Marine Corps face a comparable dilemma.

Ever since the end of World War II, American military strategy has called for U.S. forces to “fight forward” — that is, on or near enemy territory rather than anywhere near the United States. This, in turn, has meant maintaining military alliances with numerous countries around the world so that American forces can be based on their soil, resulting in hundreds of U.S. military bases globally. In wartime, moreover, U.S. strategy assumes that many of these countries will provide troops for joint operations against a common enemy. To fight the Soviets in Europe, the U.S. created NATO and acquired garrisons throughout Western Europe; to fight communism in Asia, it established military ties with Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines, and other local powers, acquiring scores of bases there as well. When Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Islamic terrorism became major targets of its military operations, the Pentagon forged ties with and acquired bases in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, among other places.

In a pandemic-free world, such a strategy offers numerous advantages for an imperial power. In time of war, for example, there’s no need to transport American troops (with all their heavy equipment) into the combat zone from bases thousands of miles away. However, in a world of recurring pandemics, such a vision is fast becoming a potentially unsustainable nightmare.

To begin with, it’s almost impossible to isolate thousands of U.S. soldiers and their families (who often accompany them on long-term deployments) from surrounding populations (or those populations from them). As a result, any viral outbreak outside base gates is likely to find its way inside and any outbreak on the base is likely to head in the opposite direction. This, in fact, occurred at numerous overseas facilities this spring. Camp Humphreys in South Korea, for example, was locked down after four military dependents, four American contractors, and four South Korean employees became infected with Covid-19. It was the same on several bases in Japan and on the island of Okinawa when Japanese employees tested positive for the virus (and, more recently, when U.S. military personnel at five bases there were found to have Covid-19). Add in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and Ahmed al-Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, not to speak of the fact that, in Europe, some 2,600 American soldiers have been placed in quarantine after suspected exposure to Covid-19. (And if the U.S. military is anxious about all this in other countries, think about how America’s allies feel at a moment when Donald Trump’s America has become the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic.)

A world of recurring pandemics will make it nearly impossible for U.S. forces to work side-by-side with their foreign counterparts, especially in poorer nations that lack adequate health and sanitation facilities. This is already true in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the coronavirus is thought to have spread widely among friendly local forces and American soldiers have been ordered to suspend joint training missions with them.

A return to the pre-Covid world appears increasingly unlikely, so the search is now on big time for a new guiding strategy for Army and Marine combat operations in the years to come. As with the Navy, this search actually began before the outbreak of the coronavirus, but has gained fresh urgency in its wake.

To insulate ground operations from the dangers of a pandemic-stricken planet, the two services are exploring a similar operating model: instead of deploying large, heavily-armed troop contingents close to enemy borders, they hope to station small, highly mobile forces on U.S.-controlled islands or at other reasonably remote locations, where they can fire long-range ballistic missiles at vital enemy assets with relative impunity. To further reduce the risk of illness or casualties, such forces will, over time, be augmented on the front lines by ever more “unmanned” creations, including armed machines — again those “killer robots” — designed to perform the duties of ordinary soldiers.

The Marine Corps’ version of this future combat model was first spelled out in Force Design 2030, a document released by Corps commandant General David Berger in the pandemic month of March 2020. Asserting that the Marines’ existing structure was unsuited to the world of tomorrow, he called for a radical restructuring of the force to eliminate heavy, human-operated weapons like tanks and instead increase mobility and long-range firepower with a variety of missiles and what he assumes will be a proliferation of unmanned systems. “Operating under the assumption that we will not receive additional resources,” he wrote, “we must divest certain existing capabilities and capacities to free resources for essential new capabilities.” Among those “new capabilities” that he considers crucial: additional unmanned aerial systems, or drones, that “can operate from ship, from shore, and [be] able to employ both [intelligence-]collection and lethal payloads.”

In its own long-range planning, the Army is placing an even greater reliance on creating a force of robots, or at least “optionally manned” systems. Anticipating a future of heavily-armed adversaries engaging U.S. forces in high-intensity warfare, it’s seeking to reduce troop exposure to enemy fire by designing all future combat-assault systems, including tanks, troop-carriers, and helicopters, to be either human-occupied or robotically self-directed as circumstances dictate. The Army’s next-generation infantry assault weapon, for instance, has been dubbed an optionally manned fighting vehicle (OMFV). As its name suggests, it is intended to operate with or without onboard human operators. The Army is also procuring a robotic utility vehicle, the squad multipurpose equipment transport (SMET), intended to carry 1,000 pounds of supplies and ammunition. Looking further into the future, that service has also begun development of a robotic combat vehicle (RCV), or a self-driving tank.

The Army is also speeding the development of long-range artillery and missile systems that will make attacks on enemy positions from well behind the front lines ever more central to any future battle with a major enemy. These include the extended range cannon artillery, an upgraded Paladin-armored howitzer with an extra-long barrel and supercharged propellant that should be able to hit targets 40 miles away, and the even more advanced precision strike missile (PrSM), a surface-to-surface ballistic missile with a range of at least 310 miles.

Many analysts, in fact, believe that the PrSM will be able to strike at far greater distances than that, putting critical enemy targets — air bases, radar sites, command centers — at risk from launch sites far to the rear of American forces. In case of war with China, this could mean firing missiles from friendly partner-nations like Japan or U.S.-controlled Pacific islands like Guam. Indeed, this possibility has alarmed Air Force supporters who fear that the Army is usurping the sorts of long-range strike missions traditionally assigned to combat aircraft.

A genuine strategic redesign All these plans and programs are being promoted to enable the U.S. military to continue performing its traditional missions of power projection and warfighting in a radically altered world. Seen from that perspective, measures like removing sailors from crowded warships, downsizing U.S. garrisons in distant lands, and replacing human combatants with robotic ones might seem sensible. But looked at from what might be called the vantage point of comprehensive security — or the advancement of all aspects of American safety and wellbeing — they appear staggeringly myopic.

If the scientists are right and the coronavirus will linger for a long period and, in the decades to come, be followed by other pandemics of equal or greater magnitude, the true future threats to American security could be microbiological (and economic), not military. After all, the current pandemic has already killed more Americans than died in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, while triggering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Imagine, then, what a more lethal pandemic might do. The country’s armed forces may still have an important role to play in such an environment — providing, for example, emergency medical assistance and protecting vital infrastructure — but fighting never-ending wars in distant lands and projecting power globally should not rank high when it comes to where taxpayer dollars go for “security” in such challenging times.

One thing is inescapable: as the disaster aboard the Theodore Roosevelt indicates, the U.S. military must reconsider how it arms and structures its forces and give serious thought to alternative models of organization. But focusing enormous resources on the replacement of pre-Covid ships and tanks with post-Covid killer robots for endless rounds of foreign wars is hardly in America’s ultimate security interest. There is, sadly, something highly robotic about such military thinking when it comes to this changing world of ours.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Copyright ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 July 2020

Word Count: 3,047

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At this point, it’s become conventional wisdom that the president is losing support among white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). The conventional wisdom is wrong, though. It’s based on polling by the Public Research Religion Institute showing Donald Trump with sky-high approval among WEPs in March, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, but a 10-point drop a month later. Cue predictions of doom.

The president’s approval was sky-high across all demographics in March, because he was at the time enjoying what’s called, among demographers, the “rally around the flag” effort. As the country faced an emergency, many people who would normally stand against Trump found themselves looking to him for leadership. That effect was short-lived, of course, because this president could not lead anyone out of a wet paper bag. Fact is, Trump’s approval among WEPs has returned to normal, and all things being equal, a return to normal means support among WEPs remains strong.

The thing about the debate over WEPs is that Trump can’t lose any of them. He has alienated too many other voters. He’s not right about much, but he was when he told an interviewer recently that if he loses just 1 percent of WEPs, he’ll lose. He’s so conscious of the need to hold on to WEPs he’s sounding apocalyptic, as if the “pro-life moment” will end in fire and fury, along with the rest of the world, if Joe Biden wins.

One percent is probably hyperbole, but it raises a couple of interesting questions: are WEPs gettable and if so, how many? Ronald Sider says yes, they’re gettable. In an op-ed for USA Today, the former head of Evangelicals for Social Action said progressive WEPs (yes, they exist) will vote for Biden no matter what, but if he wants more WEPs to support him, he should reach out with messages on abortion and religious freedom.

Meanwhile, Michael Wear, the faith outreach director for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, said recently that Hillary Clinton failed to reach out to any WEPs. The result was 16 percent voting for her. Biden, he said, could match Obama’s 26 percent. “Broad swaths of the faith community did not feel like the Democratic nominee was interested in their vote.” The result, he said, was Trump winning them by 81 percent.

I’m skeptical of the usefulness of outreach. Yes, Biden should do it for the sake of doing it, but are WEP voters going to vote for a Democrat based on whether or not he says the right things about abortion and religious liberty? Sider says Biden only has to say abortion should be rare, and that some religious institutions should be exempted from laws and court-rulings requiring equal treatment for the LGBTQ community. Call me crazy but that sounds a bit like gaslighting. Sider says these WEPs are not single-issue voters. If so, there are plenty of ways to rationalize voting for Biden.

If anything, it isn’t Biden who should compromise. It’s WEPs who should. Biden said last year that he supported repealing the 1976 Hyde Amendment, the provision of law barring federal funds from being used for abortions. Hyde is a traditional WEP threshold. Support it and you’re with us; oppose it and you’re against us. But that was before the new coronavirus pandemic turned everything about politics upside down. The most recent multibillion-dollar bailout aimed at shoring up the economy sent millions of dollars to tax-exempt churches and tax-exempt religious schools. If public money can float a religious institution’s payroll, it can be used to pay for abortions.

Biden won’t touch that, of course, nor should he. But the question remains: Will reaching out to WEPs, thus making them “feel like the Democratic nominee was interested in their vote,” as Wear said, result in an extra 10 points in support to match Obama’s performance in 2012? Again, I’m skeptical. Obama had to reach out, because he was the first Black man with a decent shot at winning the presidency. Clinton, for her part, was already so despised by WEPs, I don’t blame her for not bothering. Biden, however, is a totally different candidate for the plainest of reasons: he’s a white man.

No matter how “progressive” they might be, WEPs are still hidebound creatures. God’s law is the law of nature, and according to the WEP worldview, hierarchies of power are natural: God over man, white over black, men over women, parents over kids. Obama, as a Black man, put in extra hours to overcome that worldview. Clinton, as a woman, never had a chance, so didn’t bother. Biden, I suspect, can follow Clinton’s example, put in zero work, but still come out 10 points ahead just for being a white man.

So much of “political strategy” is merely finding new ways of talking about old things like prejudice and bigotry. It’s been a long time since they worked for Democrats.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 July 2020

Word Count: 813

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You have probably heard speculation that Joe Biden has a chance of winning Texas. The president won the Lone Star State by just nine points last time around. It’s highly suburban, giving the advantage to the Democrat. Moreover, the new coronavirus is rampaging through the state after its governor reopened recklessly to give Donald Trump a boost. One recent poll has Biden up by a point. Another has him up by five.

This has some Democratic partisans salivating. Texas has 36 electorate votes. If Biden wins them as well as those Hillary Clinton won, he wins the whole shebang by four electoral votes. Of course, if Biden wins Texas, he probably won’t lose Florida or Arizona. He probably won’t lose Michigan or Wisconsin for the same reason.

Texas, in other words, doesn’t matter in terms of exceeding 270 electoral votes. Winning it does matter, though, because it would snap a losing streak for the Democrats going back to 1964, and because winning Texas would signal a huge transformative political change.

That’s why I don’t like speculation about Texas. What we are speculating isn’t winning or losing the 2020 presidential election. It’s whether we have truly moved on from a conservative political regime rooted in the 1980s, and which we are all still living in, when the federal government flipped sides. From the 1930s until the the 1980s, it took the side, with a major qualification, of normal people.

After Ronald Reagan, though, it took the side of the elites. In that decade, we stopped talking about people as citizens and started talking about them as consumers. I yearn for that regime’s end as much as the next guy, but if we must speculate about Texas, let’s be clear what we are speculating.

I prefer participation to speculation, frankly. As a consequence, I think, of our ongoing occupation by a conservative political regime that defines people as consumers, not citizens, we just can’t get enough speculation. We appear to love speculating, as well as spectating, more than participating! And there’s so much data to do it with!

A new niche industry has emerged to meet, and manufacture, demand. All the elite news organizations have teams of data editors and journalists churning fascinating stories, truly fascinating stories, about this and that election, about this and that person’s chances of winning, all properly qualified, all nevertheless confident in the story that the data is telling. And the latest media narrative is that Joe Biden is going to win.

I want to believe that, but I can’t bring myself to, and I can’t bring myself to, because I also believe a media narrative in which Biden wins has the power to undo him and all of us. When enough people in the right places in a electoral college system believe something is going to happen with or without their participation, they could end up believing they don’t have to honor their civic obligations, due also to thinking of themselves as consumers, not citizens, and instead spectate. But rather than watching what they thought was going to happen, they instead watch the world going to hell.

Some say apathy won’t be an issue. The collective trauma since 2016 will prevent it. I hope so, but even if people think of themselves as citizens rather than consumers, their participation must presume the election will be fair. Do not presume fairness. Georgia and Florida have demonstrated the lengths Republican-controlled governments are willing to go to block people, especially people of color, from voting. Moreover, GOP resistance to mail-in balloting could prove decisive as the Covid-19 pandemic might keep people from showing up.

In 2016, less than 60 percent of Americans who could vote did vote. The only antidote to voter suppression is overwhelming numbers. But overwhelming numbers might not come from an electorate still living in a political regime defining people as consumers, not citizens. Democracy should be the incentive to participate. But the incentives to speculate, and spectate, might be greater still.

I like the horse race. (I wouldn’t be much of a polemicist if I didn’t!) I’m a fan of the data journalists tracking the polling and informing readers like me of the state of play. Furthermore, every one of them, without qualification, responsibly qualifies their arguments, leaving room for being wrong. But these are still human beings making judgments about what to pay attention to, and given the rapid pace of the emerging narrative of Joe Biden beating Donald Trump, there’s new incentive to pay attention to data suggesting that Joe Biden is going to beat Donald Trump, all of which can create a self-reinforcing media narrative, leading to a possible repeat of last time.

I could be wrong. Indeed, being wrong is the point of this column. If I’m wrong, perhaps we are indeed moving out of the old regime and into something unknowable and full of renewed hope. Perhaps a majority of voters really has decided that the government should be on the side of normal people, not the elites. What I do know is that if I’m wrong, you’re going to have to prove me wrong. That takes participation, not speculation. That takes the American people defining themselves as citizens.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 July 2020

Word Count: 869

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It’s July 2020 and I’m about to turn 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn’t going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white nationalist and pro-Confederate positions (right down to the saving of the rebel stars and bars), not to speak of the Covid-19 slaughter of Americans he’s helped facilitate. But then I read about his demand for a “National Garden of American Heroes,” described as “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live” and, honestly, though this piece is officially about something else, I just can’t help myself. I had to start there.

Yes, everyone undoubtedly understands why General George Patton (a Trump obsession) is to be in that garden, not to speak — given the president’s reelection politics — of evangelist Billy Graham, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and former president Ronald Reagan. Still, my guess is that most of you won’t have the faintest idea why Davy Crockett is included. I’m talking about the frontiersman and Indian killer who died at the Alamo. Given my age, though, I get Donald Trump on this one and it gave me a rare laugh in a distinctly grim moment. That’s why I can’t resist explaining it, even though I guarantee you that the real subject of this piece is Osama bin Laden’s revenge.

After all, The Donald and I grew up in the 1950s in different parts of the same bustling city, New York. We both had TVs, just then flooding into homes nationwide, and I guarantee you that we both were riveted by the same hit show, TV’s first mini-series, Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, starring the actor Fess Parker. It’s pop theme song swept the country. (“Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free… Kilt him a b’ar when he was only three… Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.”) The show also launched a kids’ craze for coonskin caps. (Who among us didn’t have, or at least yearn, for one?) So how could a statue of Fess Parker not be in the Garden of American Heroes?

And since Donald Trump is himself the essence of a bad novel (though he’s also become our reality), I just wonder: What about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, especially since there are no plans for Native Americans in his garden-to-be? They were a crew obviously put on Earth to be wiped out by white colonists, cowboys, and the cavalry in the kinds of Westerns both of us trooped to local movie theaters to see back then.

Or how about Hopalong Cassidy (Hoppy!), that other TV cowboy hero of our childhood? Doesn’t he deserve to ride in that garden next to another Trump military fixation, General Douglas MacArthur? After all, I know that Hoppy was real and this is how: When I was seven or eight, my father had a friend who worked for Pathé News and I rode in front of the tripod of his camera on the roof of that company’s station wagon in a Macy’s Day Parade in my hometown. (I still have the photos.) Somewhere along the route, Hoppy himself — I kid you not! — rode by on his white horse Topper and, since I was atop that station wagon and we were at about the same height, he shook my hand!

And here’s what makes Cassidy especially appropriate for The Donald’s garden landscape: in the 1950s, he was the only cowboy hero who dressed all in black right up to his hat (normally, a sign of the bad guy) and, in the process, created a kid’s craze for black shirts (his version of a coonskin cap), breaking its past association with either Italian fascism or mourning and bringing it back into the culture big time. Tell me honestly, then, don’t you think a garden of “heroes” in the age of Trump should have a few black shirts and an increasingly Mussolini-ish look to it?

An American Garden of Blood So Donald Trump and I both lived through the same TV world in our childhoods and youth. We also lived through 9/11, still in the same city, although unlike him, I wasn’t practically a “first responder” at the site of those two downed towers, nor did I see all the Muslims celebrating across the river in Jersey City (as he claimed he did). Still, of one thing I’m convinced: Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden’s revenge.

Of course, that was all so long ago. The new century had barely begun. I was only 57 and The Donald 55 when those two hijacked planes suddenly slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in our hometown, a third one plunged into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth (probably heading for the White House or the Capitol) crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back. Ever since, all you have to do is write “9/11” and everyone knows (or thinks they know) what it stands for. But on 9/11, there was, of course, no 9/11.

It was a breathtakingly unexpected event (although, to be fair, the CIA had previously briefed President George W. Bush on Osama bin Laden’s desire to hijack commercial planes for possible terror operations… oh, and there was that FBI agent in Phoenix who urged headquarters “to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools”). Still, the downing of those towers and part of the headquarters of the singularly victorious military of the ultimate superpower of the Cold War, the one already being called “indispensable” and “exceptional” in 2001, was beyond shocking.

Admittedly, there’s history to be remembered here. After all, it wasn’t actually that military or that Pentagon that downed the Soviet Union. In fact, when the American military fought the Soviets in major proxy wars on a planet where nuclear catastrophe was always just around the corner, it found itself remarkably stalemated in Korea and dismally on the losing side in Vietnam.

No, if you want to give credit where it’s due, offer it to the CIA and Washington’s Saudi allies, who invested staggering effort from 1979 to 1989 in funding, supporting, and training the Taliban’s predecessors, groups of Afghan Islamic extremists, to take down the Red Army in their country. Supporting them as well (though, as far as is known, probably not actually funded by the U.S.) was a rich young Saudi militant named, believe it or not, Osama bin Laden who, before that war even ended, had founded a group called “the Base” or al-Qaeda, and would, in 1996, declare “war” on the United States. Oh yes, and though it’s seldom mentioned now, when charges are flying fast and furious about the possible recent Russian funding of Taliban militants to kill at most a few Americans in Afghanistan, in those years the U.S. poured billions of dollars into… well, not to put it too subtly, empowering Islamic extremists to kill the soldiers of that other superpower by the thousands in… yes, Afghanistan. How’s that for shocking?

In 1989, the defeated Red Army finally limped home from what the Soviet Union’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” Only two years later, his country imploded and the U.S. was left alone, officially victorious, on Planet Earth (despite future fantasies of a horrific “axis of evil” to be faced), the first country in endless centuries of imperial rivalry to find itself so.

And what exactly did that triumphantly indispensable, exceptional superpower do but, a decade later, get dive-bombed by 19 — just 19! — largely Saudi hijackers in the service of tiny al-Qaeda and that wizard of terror Osama bin Laden, whose urge was then to provoke Washington into a genuine war in the Muslim world and so create yet more Islamic extremists. And did he succeed? You bet — and in a fashion even he undoubtedly hadn’t conceived of in his wildest dreams. Think of 9/11, in fact, as the greatest example of “shock and awe” in this century.

Here’s a feeling I still remember from the weeks after the 9/11 attacks when I saw where the administration of President George W. Bush was heading toward the invasion of Afghanistan and then, god save us, Iraq; when I watched our mainstream media narrow its focus to this country as the most victimized yet dominating and exceptional place on Earth and Osama bin Laden as the ultimate evil on this planet; when I watched the never-ending memorial ceremonies begin and what soon came to be called “the war on terror” be launched with up to 60 (count ‘em: 60!) countries in its gun sights, even if I didn’t yet know that, on 9/11 in the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had turned to an aide and said, “Go Massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not,” with a future invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq clearly in mind, though the Iraqi autocrat had no relation whatsoever to al-Qaeda (something you wouldn’t have known from the top officials in that administration in those years) — when, in short (though I didn’t yet think of it that way), I watched my own country become a “bleeding wound” that has never stopped flowing and, in Donald Trump’s Covid-19 moment, has turned into an American Garden of Blood.

Back in late September 2001, despite having been deeply involved decades earlier in the nightmare of the Vietnam War (and opposition to it), I could already sense war coming and it occurred to me that this was going to be the worst period I had ever experienced. Now that we’re in Donald Trump’s America, with hundreds of Americans dying daily of a disease that a reasonably responsible president and administration could have brought under control, the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 are beginning to look like a drop in the casualty bucket. (By the beginning of April 2020, Covid-19 deaths in New York City alone had already surpassed those of 9/11 by 1,000.)

And I wasn’t wrong in that hunch about this being the worst period, was I? Mind you, it was just a gut feeling then, no more — even though it would soon enough lead, almost inexorably, to the creation of my website, TomDispatch, and its focus on what turned out to be America’s never-ending wars of this century.

A passport to nowhere Let’s get one thing straight, though. If, at that moment, you had told me that this country was going to launch a series of forever wars across what would turn out to be a significant part of the planet and fight them hopelessly for almost two decades or that, the more success proved absent in those same years, the more one administration after another would pour taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military, the 17 “intelligence” agencies, and the rest of the national security state; that what’s still known, with no accuracy whatsoever, as the “defense budget” would years ago have become larger than those of the next seven best-funded military powers on the planet combined and, by 2020, the next 10, and would still be rising; that domestic investment, from infrastructure to pandemic preparedness, would be starved for money in those same years, and that just about no one would protest any of this in the halls of Congress or the streets of America, I would have thought you a madman — or rather, the world’s best writer of dystopian fiction.

If you had told me that, in those very years, of the two great powers of this century, China and the United States — one rising, the other ever more clearly falling — the latter would lose approximately 7,000 military personnel (and at least another 8,000 military contractors) and many more wounded, not to speak of those who came home with PTSD or, under the pressure of repeated deployments to the sorriest of conflicts, committed suicide, while the former, as the New York Times reported recently in the wake of a bloody (but not weaponized) clash on China’s disputed Himalayan border with India, would have lost next to none, I wouldn’t have believed you. (“In four decades,” as the Times wrote, “the People’s Liberation Army had lost just three soldiers to fighting abroad — troops who were killed in United Nations peacekeeping operations in Mali and South Sudan in 2016.”)

If you had told me that, facing a devastating virus, the leader of one would largely suppress it — admittedly using the most authoritarian of methods — while, in his search for reelection, the leader of the other, officially still the greatest power on the planet, would ignore it, open the economy, churches, schools, and institutions of every sort and watch it run wild without a plan in sight; if you had told me that fewer than 5,000 people would die in the first of those countries and more than 134,000 (and still counting) in the other, leaving the American dead of 9/11 and the bloody wars of this century in the shade, and that it was all only getting worse, I wouldn’t have believed you. Not for a second.

And if, above all, you had told me that, deep into those years of bleeding abroad and increasingly at home, a near majority of Americans would vote to (as I wrote during election campaign 2016) send a suicide bomber into the White House, I would have told you that, though Osama bin Laden had been killed by SEAL Team Six in Pakistan and buried in the briny deep in 2011, Donald Trump was his living revenge, and that bin Laden had won twice — once thanks to those ludicrous, murderous forever wars across much of the Muslim world and the second time thanks to the pandemic from hell and the president from the same place.

Imagine if, in 1991 when the Soviet Union imploded, I had told you that, in 2020, not quite three decades distant, an American passport would be, more or less literally, a document for a trip to nowhere. Talk about a bleeding, or even hemorrhaging, wound! In the years to come, I think it will be ever more obvious that Donald Trump was, in fact, proof of Osama bin Laden’s success, of the fact that 9/11 and those 19 hijackers were all that was needed to produce the world of his dreams and the wounds that went with it.

And if, by the way, you wondered why I wrote this piece with the longest sentences I could possibly create, the answer is simple enough: two decades into the twenty-first century, I think it should be obvious that Americans have been given an exceptionally, perhaps even indispensably long sentence without parole on a planet already heating to the boiling point, 94,000,000 miles from the sun.

No, this truly won’t be “the American century,” but I doubt it will be the Chinese one either. By the time this crew is done, it may be nobody’s century. Thanks a heap, Osama! This is your bleeding wound, too.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 July 2020

Word Count: 2,532

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The New York Times suffers from the same problem all elite institutions suffer from — its own elite status. I know that sounds silly, but remember that being elite comes with the immense burden, absurd as it is, of keeping up appearances. A consequence, when it comes to hiring op-ed contributors — to pick a totally random example — is not quite recognizing talent and intelligence that does not already fit into the elite view of what “talented” and “intelligent” mean. Being elite means excluding all but the “best.”

The result of this narrow-mindedness — an accurate word — is homogeneity of a kind. This is not to say bad or boring, but good and interesting are not enough for an institution keeping up appearances. Independent of attacks from partisans inside and outside the institution, the institution’s own elite status demands diversity of thought, especially when, as the Times does, it claims to be “the paper of record.” Being vulnerable to its own status, however, means being vulnerable to intellectual frauds.

Intellectual frauds, though commonplace, are identifiable when they are not obscured by an artificially constructed media apparatus in which intellectual dishonesty is not only tolerated and encouraged, but rewarded financially and handsomely. This is what happened, starting about half a century ago, when very “conservative” and very rich Americans looked at Republican Barry Goldwater’s extremist campaign for the White House and thought it made perfect sense. Moreover, they believed Goldwater failed to beat the Democratic incumbent, not because he was too extreme, but because the Washington press corps was too liberal. So they set out to manufacture an alternative.

The result of this investment, decades in the making, is a media climate in which people can commit their entire professional careers to telling very “conservative” and rich people what they want to hear while also appearing scholarly, detached and dispassionate for those whose interests are contrary to the interests of the very “conservative” and rich. An ambitious person fresh out of college can go straight to Breitbart or the Daily Caller before jumping to legacy outlets like Commentary or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, with speaking gigs over time at the American Enterprise Institute or the Manhattan Institute as well as chances to write books for Regnery and Center Street. You can live your whole life in this bubble and never face serious criticism, because free and responsible inquiry isn’t the point. The point is telling very “conservative” and rich people what they want to hear, and making their views respectable to people whose interests conflict with those of your bosses.

It’s worth repeating that this apparatus is not dedicated to determining facts, as the press corps is. It’s not committed to realizing profits, as the Times’ publisher is. Its reason for being is warping politics so that a tiny cohort of Americans — the very, very rich, who pay for the apparatus — have vastly more influence in a democratic republic than it would without it. And the general means for pulling that off is convincing as many people as possible that the profit-making mainstream media is either too liberal or not telling the truth. In other words, it’s conventional rightwing propaganda.

The power of this propaganda has grown over the decades so that one Republican president got caught stealing and spying (Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace) while another got away with treason (Donald Trump, as you know, is still president). Moreover, this media apparatus is where elite institutions turn when they are attacked for being too liberal while also being trapped by their own elite status. When the Times hired Bari Weiss, for instance, the paper thought it was diversifying its roster of opinion writers with a veteran of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. What it was really doing, however, was importing, and therefore laundering, intellectual fraud.

“Fraud” should have been the first word on people’s minds when news emerged that Weiss quit. In her letter of resignation, which she made public, she said that she experienced, as a consequence of her conservative views, “unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge.”

If that were true, she should have filed a lawsuit. Instead, she posted her resignation letter to her personal website. (Moreover, she made it a section of her website, giving it prominent play.) In doing so, Weiss was creating the appearance of “evidence” that rightwing media had been right about the Times. It’s liberal, but also illiberal, intolerant of the ideological diversity it claims to value. And as if on cue, the president wrote this this morning on Twitter: “Wow. The @nytimes is under siege. The real reason is that it has become Fake News. They never covered me correctly — they blew it. People are fleeing, a total mess!”

Weiss can deny having set out to discredit a newspaper that daily makes the president look bad by telling the truth and making money doing it. She can deny enabling the president’s authoritarian attacks on the free press. She can deny giving the impression to white GOP voters that the Times, and by extension the Democratic Party, is just as bad as the president, so they may as well vote for a Republican. All she’s doing, after all, is fighting for free speech.

She’s not, though. Neither are her peers inside and outside the rightwing media apparatus. The point isn’t the free and responsible search for knowledge. It’s warping politics, making bad things look good, perverting public morality, and exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of elite institutions like the New York Times.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 July 2020

Word Count: 921

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