An aspect of white supremacy, reserved for men only, is that it’s always someone else’s fault. It doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t matter what decisions I make. I can blame anyone for my errors in judgment, and the best part? White people are going to believe me! I get all the power but none of the responsibility! It’s a grand ole boy’s system.

I was reminded of this while reading reports about Ron Johnson, US senator of Wisconsin. He’s the Republican chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It voted along party lines to subpoena records related to Hunter Biden, the son of the next Democratic nominee. (Hunter Biden used to work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma when his dad, Joe Biden, was the vice president.)

I was reminded of this while reading reports about Lindsey Graham, US senator of South Carolina. He’s the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee. He’s seeking a list of Obama administration officials involved in understanding Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin and its efforts to violate US sovereignty in 2016. According to the Washington Post, Graham is helping “advance a narrative that the former president and his allies conspired to inappropriately target Trump, one that Trump has dubbed ‘Obamagate.’”

Johnson seems ready to go where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t go, picking up where Trump left off in attempting to betray the US electorate. Graham seems prepared to whitewash the Kremlin’s sabotage of our sovereignty and its role in electing an illegitimate president. Both men are enabling Trump’s purge of career officials more loyal to truth, justice and the American way than they are to him. Yet from what I can tell, neither is being held accountable for his actions. It’s as if they don’t have agency of their own. According to one member of the Washington press corps, whose perspective I take as conventional wisdom, “they’re cowed by Trump.”

Now, the thing about Johnson and Graham (as well as their colleague Chuck Grassley) is they used to be vocal champions of a transparent and accountable presidency — when Barack Obama governed. Whiffs of resistance to congressional oversight by the executive branch were met with sniffy intolerance. Johnson and Grassley even wrote the book (at least a really big report) on the need for empowered inspectors general.

The same can’t be said of the trio now that a Republican president is mounting a shameful and conspicuous campaign to rid himself of irritating law-abiding good-government gadflies who have the habit of speaking truth to power and humiliating him in public. Trump has quietly fired an array of inspectors general, saying he’s “lost confidence” in them. During the Obama years, Johnson would request reams of documentation justifying unimportant administration decisions. During the Trump years? The president’s word is good enough for him, and that’s all there is to say.

It’s understandable that senators feel enormous pressure to be aligned with presidents from the same party. But there are a thousand ways to uphold the principle of a thing — for instance, that it’s wrong to fire inspectors general in a fit of caprice — without arousing the executive’s enmity. US Senator Susan Collins of Maine has made a virtual art form out of doing just that. She agrees with Trump, but is “concerned” about his statements or is “worried” about how he acts, all the while doing little or nothing to stand in his fitful way. Johnson, Graham and Grassley could follow suit but don’t.

Johnson and Graham, however, are doing more than ho-humming or staying mum. They are advancing authoritarianism, driving its roots deep into the republic’s soil. Graham in particular stands to undermine the special counsel’s investigation that, first, implicated the president as an unindicted co-conspirator (in Michael Cohen’s criminal case) and, second, established the fact of Russia’s covert cyberwar against the United States. Graham seems ready moreover to undermine the Senate’s own bipartisan assessment that Vladimir Putin was expressly on Donald Trump’s side.

Johnson and Graham aren’t being cowed by Trump, because it takes much more than being cowed to turn your back on your own country in a moment when more than 95,100 of its people have died from Covid-19, about 38 million of them seek unemployment benefits, and the real jobless rate could be as high as 25 percent. These confederates are aligning not only with the president but with America’s enemy. That requires more than pressure. That requires a choice, one they are making, willingly.

White supremacists in this country have always thought of themselves as more American than anyone else. They believe they represent the authentic nation within a nation. OK, whatever. But that ends at the water’s edge. If patriotism calls for an alliance with foreign powers seeking to wound the nation, that’s no longer patriotism.

It’s the opposite.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 802

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There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.

Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.

Iraq redux? Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated to fabricating intelligence on Iraq.

Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.

In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.

To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.

To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.

Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.

It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.

The Wuhan lab lies As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.

On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared in London’s Daily Mail the previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.

A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)

Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, while he began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”

Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”

On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.

A finger on the scale The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.

Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.

There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.

Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.

Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.

John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”

Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.

Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.

By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

Copyright ©2020 Bob Dreyfuss — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 May 2020

Word Count: 2,332

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I still believe no one should presume fairness in this year’s election. Indeed, our best understanding depends on presuming that it won’t be. But it’s worth imagining what our current politics might look like years from now. From a future vantage point, it might be that most people already made up their minds about Donald Trump, and it might be that they made up their minds about him from close to the beginning.

As you know, Trump has never been popular, and his unpopularity has been amazingly stable. The only time his job approval (in the aggregate) fell below the norm of 40 to 44 percent was early last year when he shut down the federal government. The only time his job approval came close to even was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic when polling indicated what some call the rally-around-the-flag effect. Other than that, the electorate’s opinion of him has been remarkably steady despite what he does.

Some people gnash their teeth at the sight of polling unmoved by news of a president extorting a foreign country into an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. Some people rent their garments after seeing a major political party with majority control of an anti-democratic institution acquitting the president of treason. These people might be right in believing the US is slouching toward Gomorrah. Then again, maybe Americans have already made up their minds, and there’s almost nothing he can do, or fail to do, that’s going to change how they vote.

Consider today’s tweet-storm in which the president threatened to illegally withhold funding from states issuing mail-in ballots to registered voters in anticipation of the current pandemic forcing voters to stay home on Election Day. What Nevada and other states are considering is perfectly legal, not to mention totally moral, but mail-in voting is bad for Trump, because it overcomes the Republican Party’s carefully constructed state-by-state system of voter suppression. Knowing this, the president did what he has done many times over, especially with respect to the subject of his impeachment. Extortion is in his blood. Mafioso tactics are his go-to. He did it to Ukraine. He’s doing it to the United States. And it’s not going to change minds that are already made up.

Consider also that the new coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, which has killed more than 93,700 people (as of this writing), has moved from the coasts into the heartland, where the president’s support is strongest. Some of my liberal brethren appear to believe Republican voters will think twice before voting for him as they witness firsthand the devastation of the disease. That’s unlikely to happen, but I could be wrong — if Trump’s aggregate job approval falls below 40 percent. If so, we’ll know Americans have not already made up their minds. Suffering can move people to reconsider commitments, but it’s just as likely their suffering affirms them.

Other liberal brethren appear to believe Republican voters will reconsider now that the US economy is in a recession (or a depression, depending on whom you ask). This presumes that material self-interests are stronger than partisan attachments, and that has not been the case for many years. Republican voters believed the economy was terrible under Barack Obama. Their “economic anxiety,” however, went poof in the month leading up to Inauguration Day. Even if they’re jobless and hungry, supporters are likely to believe the economy is jim-dandy, as long as Trump is the president.

The exception to my theory, which threatens to undermine it entirely, is the elderly. Not once in our lifetimes have we seen support for a Republican president go soft in the spring of an election year. Not once. And by “soft,” I mean a 14-point drop among voters 75 years of age and older, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s polling.

When we look back at this moment years from now, it might be clear by then that the only Americans willing and able to change their minds about Donald Trump were seniors who rarely change their minds about anything, and they changed their minds not out of concern for their material interest, but because Trump was ready to sacrifice them. Lots of old people live in Florida, and no Republican has ever won reelection without it. A new poll found Donald Trump behind Joe Biden by nearly five points.

My point in this humble exercise isn’t to predict the election’s outcome. Instead, it’s to understand the most constant aspect of an otherwise chaotic presidency, which is Trump’s unpopularity, and why that constancy remains so despite extortion, treason and other manifestations of a criminal mind. Yes, it could be that the American people just don’t care anymore. But it’s equally plausible that they do care, and that there’s nothing this president can do to change a majority of minds made up a long time ago.

Does that mean he’ll lose?

That question presumes a fair election.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 825

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I don’t fault the press corps (too much) for misunderstanding the dynamics of the American class system. In addition to believing the myth of a nation without caste, most of its members are highly paid and highly educated, blessed with good luck and good parenting, and wouldn’t see a working class person if she were in front of them.

I mean this literally. The real working class is ubiquitous. Real working class people are everywhere. They make our bagels. They take our gas money. They bring us our packages. They do the real labor demanded of an advanced capitalist society — real, as in: an advanced capitalist society would cease functioning without it. Yet for all their ubiquity, for all their essentiality, real working class people and their political interests are virtually invisible in coverage by America’s largest, most influential news media.

There are many historical reasons for this, good as well as ugly, but there’s no longer a justifiable excuse for continued blindness to the truth of our economy. The new coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 92,100 people and unemployed 36.5 million others, is revealing, first, that a class system does exist in the United States, and second, that the US economy cannot endure without exploiting those at the very bottom of it. Workers in grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, delivery and distribution services, among others fields, are essential — yet they are paid least and disposed first.

I do fault the press corps for not putting good parenting and good schooling to good use. It doesn’t take much work for intelligent people to see that class in America is multicultural and multiracial — and that it should not be a trope with which to write about white people as if they suffer politically the way black people do. (White people do suffer, but their suffering isn’t equal; white supremacy is too beneficial.) “Class politics” used to be inseparable from “union politics” but thanks to four decades of government-backed union-busting, they scarcely coexist. Reporters typically do not recognize (or even see) class politics if it isn’t connected to what’s left of the unions.

Making matters worse is the press corps’ habit of defining socioeconomic class according to education. If you earned a college degree, you’re middle class and up. If you didn’t earn one, you’re working class. There are problems with this, first and foremost that some “working class” people take home middle-class wages or better. They might be white baby boomers still benefiting from egalitarian policies officially abandoned long ago, or they might be “tiny feudal lords ruling tiny feudal fiefs,” as I said Monday. The “working class revolt” that powered the president to the White House, as I and others have said, was actually a “revolt” of the petty bourgeoisie.

Another problem is that the country is packed with people who earned college degrees but can’t possibly take home middle-class wages, because jobs matching their educations do not exist, or if they do, they exist in such small numbers these people must compete with each other like no generation has competed before. (They are also shouldering a debt load that older non-college educated colleagues never did.) Even so, it wouldn’t do to identify them as working class. Income is as unhelpful as education.

The best way to define class is the simplest — and it jives with my experience growing up in a rural, highly religious, and working-class community. If you have any measure of power in the workplace, you are not working class. This is how Michael Zwieg, a professor of economics at SUNY Stony Brook, defined “working class” in 2006:

It [has] relatively little power at work — white-collar bank tellers, call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar machinists, construction workers, and assembly-line workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and home-health care workers skilled and unskilled, men and women of all races, nationalities, and sexual preferences.

Importantly, Zweig said, there are two forms of power that separate the working class from every other socioeconomic class. One, the power to control where, when, for how long, and how you work. Two, the power to work without constant supervision. If you have the power to demand — and command — respect from a boss, you’re not working class.

The implications are obvious. It isn’t so much skill or education, or character traits like perseverance and pluck, that justify how much people earn annually as how much power they have. The more you have, the more money you make, and, of course, the more money you make, the more power you have. It’s a virtuous cycle that members of the press corps tend to recognize as right and true (it worked for them!), but flipped around it’s a vicious cycle that for many spirals downward, grinding them to dust.

The conventional wisdom is that suffering is a natural part of life. Some people are going to be left out of an advanced capitalist society. That’s either acceptable (the Republican view) or a problem for liberal policy makers to address (the Democratic view). But if nothing else, the pandemic has shown how wrong the conventional wisdom is. It’s not that some people might suffer. It’s not that some people might face injustice as a result of broader prosperity. It’s that some people must suffer, because without their suffering our advance capitalist society would cease functioning.

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: 19 May 2020

Word Count: 887

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This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s Iran and Donald Trump’s America.

On the U.S. side of things, New Orleans pastor Tony Spell, for instance, has twice been arrested for holding church services without a hint of social distancing, despite a ban on such gatherings. His second arrest was for preaching while wearing an ankle monitor and despite the Covid-19 death of at least one of his church members.

The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s famed Origin of the Species, arguing as it did for natural selection (which many American evangelicals still reject), might be considered the origin point for the modern conflict between religious beliefs and science, a struggle that has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Unexpectedly, given Iran’s reputation for religious obscurantism, the science-minded in the nineteenth and twentieth century often took heart from a collection of Persian poems, the Rubáiyát, or “quatrains,” attributed to the medieval Iranian astronomer Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131.

Edward FitzGerald’s loose translation of those poems, also published in 1859, put Khayyam on the map as a medieval Muslim free-thinker and became a century-and-a-half-long sensation in the midst of heated debates about the relationship between science and faith in the West. Avowed atheist Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney at the 1925 “monkey trial” of a Tennessee educator who broke state law by teaching evolution, was typical in his love of the Rubáiyát. He often quoted it in his closing arguments, observing that for Khayyam the “mysticisms of philosophy and religion alike were hollow and bare.”

To be fair, some religious leaders, including Pope Francis and Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, have followed the most up-to-date science, as Covid-19 spread globally, by supporting social-distancing measures to deal with the virus. When he still went by the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and lived in Buenos Aires, the Pope earned a high school chemical technician’s diploma and actually knows something about science. Indeed, the Catholic Church in Brazil has impressively upheld the World Health Organization’s guidelines for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, defying the secular government of far right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, that country’s Donald Trump. Brazil’s president has notoriously ignored his nation’s public-health crisis, dismissed the coronavirus as a “little flu,” and tried to exempt churches from state government mandates that they close. The archbishop of the hard-hit city of Manaus in the Amazon region has, in fact, publicly complained that Brazilians are not taking the virus seriously enough as it runs rampant in the country. Church authorities worry about the strain government inaction is putting on Catholic hospitals and clinics, as well as the devastation the disease is wreaking in the region.

Here, we witness not a dispute between religion and science but between varieties of religion. Pope Francis’s Catholicism remains open to science, whereas Bolsonaro, although born a Catholic, became an evangelical and, in 2016, was even baptized as a pastor in the Jordan River. He now plays to the 22% of Brazilians who have adopted conservative Protestantism, as well as to Catholics who are substantially more conservative than the current pope. While some U.S. evangelicals are open to science, a Pew Charitable Trust poll found that they, too, are far more likely than the non-religious to reject the very idea of evolution, not to speak of the findings of climate science (action on which Pope Francis has supported in a big way).

Death in the Bible Belt In the U.S., a variety of evangelical religious leaders have failed the test of reasoned public policy in outrageous ways. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, railing at “tyrannical government,” refused to close his mega-church in Florida until the local police arrested him in March. He even insisted that church members in those services of 500 or more true believers should continue to shake hands with one another because “we’re raising up revivalists, not pansies.”

As he saw it, his River Tampa Bay Church was the “safest place” around because it was the site of “salvation.” Only in early April did he finally move his services online and it probably wasn’t to protect the health of his congregation either. His insurance company had cancelled on him after his arrest and his continued defiance of local regulations.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis muddied the waters further in early April by finally issuing a statewide shelter-in-place order that exempted churches as “essential services.” Then, after only a month, he abruptly reopened the state anyway. DeSantis, who had run a Facebook group dominated by racist comments and had risen on Donald Trump’s coattails, has a sizeable evangelical constituency and, in their actions, he and Pastor Howard-Browne have hardly been alone.

It tells you all you need to know that, by early May, more than 30 evangelical pastors had died of Covid-19 across the Bible Belt.

Two epicenters of the pandemic In the Muslim equivalent of the Bible Belt, the clerical leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, stopped shaking hands and limited visits to his office in early February, but he let mass commemorations of the 41st anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic go forward unimpeded. Then, on February 24th, he also allowed national parliamentary elections to proceed on hopes of entrenching yet more of his hardline fundamentalist supporters — the equivalent of America’s evangelicals — in Iran’s legislature. Meanwhile, its other religious leaders continued to resist strong Covid-19 mitigation measures until late March, even as the country was besieged by the virus. Deputy Minister of Health Iraj Harirchi caught the spirit of the moment by rejecting social-distancing measures in February while downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak in his country, only to contract Covid-19 himself and die of it.

The virus initially exploded in the holy city of Qom, said to have been settled in the eighth century by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s filled with a myriad of religious seminaries and has a famed shrine to one of those descendants, Fatima Masoumeh. In late February, even after government officials began to urge that the shrine be closed, its clerical custodians continued to call for pilgrims to visit it. Those pilgrims typically touch the brass latticework around Fatima Masoumeh’s tomb and sometimes kiss it, a classic method for passing on the disease. Its custodians (like those American evangelical pastors) continued to believe that the holiness of the shrine would protect the pilgrims. They may also have been concerned about their loss of income if pilgrims from all over the world stopped showing up.

Despite having a theocratic government in which clerics wield disproportionate power, Iran also has a significant and powerful scientific and engineering establishment that looks at the world differently, even if some of them are also devout Shiite Muslims. In the end, as the virus gripped the country and deaths spiked, the scientists briefly won and the government of President Hassan Rouhani instituted some social-distancing measures for the public, including canceling Friday prayers and closing shrines in March, though — as in Florida — those measures did not last long.

In this way, as the U.S. emerged as the global epicenter of the pandemic, so Iran emerged as its Middle Eastern one. Call it an irony of curious affinity. Superstition was only part of the problem. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif blamed the Trump administration’s sanctions and financial blockade of the country for the government’s weak response, since the Iranians had difficulty even paying for much-needed imported medical equipment like ventilators. Indeed, the U.S. government has also had Iran kicked off global banking exchanges and threatened third-party sanctions against any companies doing business with it.

President Trump, however, denied that the U.S. had blockaded medical imports to that country, a statement that was technically true, but false in any other sense. The full range of U.S. sanctions had indeed erected a formidable barrier to Iran’s importation of medical equipment, despite attempts by the European Union (which opposes Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran) to allow companies to sell medical supplies to Tehran.

Still, as with Trump’s policies in the U.S. (including essentially ignoring the virus for months), Iranian government policy must be held significantly responsible for the failure to stem the coronavirus tide, which by early May had, according to official figures, resulted in more than 100,000 cases and some 7,000 deaths (numbers which will, in the end, undoubtedly prove significant undercounts).

A Rubáiyát world Whether in America or Iran, fundamentalist religion (or, in the U.S. case, a Trumpian and Republican urge to curry favor with it) often made for dismally bad public policy during the first wave of Covid-19. Among other things, it encouraged people, whether in religious institutions in both countries or in American anti-shutdown protests, to engage in reckless behavior that endangered not just themselves but others. Ironically, the conflict in each country between defiant pastors or mullahs and scientists on this issue should bring to mind the culture wars of the early twentieth century and the place of the Iranian poetry of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in what was then largely a Western debate.

That makes those poems worthy of reconsideration in this perilous moment of ours. As I wrote in the introduction to my new translation of the Rubáiyát:

 

The message of the poems… is that life has no obvious meaning and is heartbreakingly short. Death is near and we might not live to exhale the breath we just took in. The afterlife is a fairy tale for children… The only way to get past this existential unfairness is to enjoy life, to love someone, and to get intimate with good wine. On the other hand, there is no reason to be mean-spirited to other people.

Some of the appeal of this poetry to past millions came from the dim view it took of then (as now) robust religious obscurantism. The irreverent Mark Twain once marveled, “No poem had given me so much pleasure before… It is the only poem that I have ever carried about with me; it has not been from under my hand for 28 years.” Thomas Hardy, the British novelist and champion of Darwin, wove its themes into some of his best-known fiction. Robert Frost wrote his famous (and famously bleak) poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night” with Khayyam’s quatrains in mind. Beat poet Jack Kerouac modeled Sal Paradise, the unconventional protagonist of his novel On the Road, on his idea of what Khayyam might have been like.

Although compilers have always attributed those poems to that great astronomer and mathematician of the Seljuk era, it’s clear that they were actually written by later Iranian figures who used Khayyam as a “frame author,” perhaps for fear of reaction to the religious skepticism deeply embedded in the poetry (in the same way that the Thousand and One Nights tales composed in Cairo, Aleppo, and Baghdad over centuries were all attributed to Scheherazade). The bulk of those verses first appeared at the time of the Mongol invasion of Iran in the 1200s, a bloody moment that threw the region into turmoil and paralysis just as Covid-19 has brought our world to an abrupt and chaotic halt.

As if the war’s urban destruction and piles of skulls weren’t enough, historians have argued that the Mongols, who opened up trade routes from Asia into the Middle East, also inadvertently facilitated the westward spread of the Yersina pestis bacillus that would cause the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, a pandemic that would wipe out nearly half of China’s population and a third of Europe’s.

A fifteenth-century scribe in the picturesque Iranian city of Shiraz would, in fact, create the first anthology of quatrains entitled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, many composed during Mongol rule and the subsequent pandemic. The dangers of what we would now call religious fundamentalism, as opposed to an enlightened spirituality, were trumpeted throughout those poems:

 

In monasteries, temples, and retreats
they fear hellfire and look for paradise. But those who know the mysteries of God
don’t let those seeds be planted in their hearts.

While some turn to theology for comfort during a disaster, those quatrains urged instead that all of us be aggressively here and now, trying to wring every last pleasure out of our worldly life before it abruptly vanishes:

 

A bottle of Shiraz and the lips of a lover, on the edge of a meadow —
are like cash in hand for me — and for you, credit toward paradise.
They’ve wagered that some go to heaven, and some to hell.
But whoever went to hell? And whoever came back from paradise?

The poetry ridicules some religious beliefs, using the fantasies of astrology as a proxy target for the fatalism of orthodox religion. The authors may have felt safer attacking horoscopes than directly taking on Iran’s powerful clergy. Astronomers know that the heavenly bodies, far from dictating the fate of others, revolve in orbits that make their future position easy to predict and so bear little relationship to the lives of complex and unpredictable human beings (just as, for instance, you could never have predicted that American evangelicals would opt to back a profane, womanizing, distinctly of-this-world orange-faced presidential candidate in 2016 and thereafter):

 

Don’t blame the stars for virtues or for faults, or for the joy and grief decreed by fate! For science holds the planets all to be
A thousand times more helpless than are we.

Wars and pandemics choose winners and losers and — as we’re learning all too grimly in the world of 2020 — the wealthy are generally so much better positioned to protect themselves from catastrophe than the poor. To its eternal credit, the Rubáiyát (unlike both the Trump administration and the Iranian religious leadership) took the side of the latter, pointing out that religious fatalism and superstitions like astrology are inherently supportive of a rotten status quo in which the poor are the first to be sacrificed, whether to pandemics or anything else:

 

Signs of the zodiac: You give something to every jackass. You hand them fancy baths, millworks, and canals —
while noble souls must gamble, in hopes of winning their nightly bread. Who would give a fart for such a constellation?

In our own perilous times, right-wing fundamentalist governments like those in Brazil and the United States, as well as religious fundamentalist ones as in Iran, have made the coronavirus outbreak far more virulent and dangerous by encouraging religious gatherings at a time when the pandemic’s curve could only be flattened by social distancing. Their willingness to blithely set aside reason and science out of a fatalistic and misguided faith in a supernatural providence that overrules natural law (or, in Donald Trump’s case, a fatalistic and misguided faith in his own ability to overrule natural laws, not to speak of providence) has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world. Think of it as, in spirit, a fundamentalist version of genocide.

The pecuniary motives of some of this obscurantism are clear, as many churches and mosques depend on contributions from congregants at services for the livelihood of imams and pastors. Their willingness to prey on the gullibility of their followers in a bid to keep up their income stream should be considered the height of hypocrisy and speaks to the importance of people never surrendering their capacity for independent, critical reasoning.

Though you might not have noticed it on Donald Trump’s and Ali Khameini’s planet, religion seems to be in the process of collapsing, at least in the industrialized world. A third of the French say that they have no religion at all and just 45% consider themselves Catholic (with perhaps only half of those being relatively committed to the faith), while only 5% attend church regularly. A majority of young people in 12 European countries claim that they now have no religion, pointing to a secular future for much of the continent. Even in peculiarly religious America, self-identification as Christian has plunged to 65% of the population, down 12% in the past decade, while 26% of the population now disavows having a religion at all.

In post-pandemic Iran, don’t be surprised if similar feelings spread, given how the religious leadership functionally encouraged the devastation of Covid-19. In this way, despite military threats, economic sanctions, and everything else, Donald Trump’s America and Ali Khameini’s Iran truly have something in common. In the U.S., where it’s easier to measure what’s happening, evangelicals, more than a fifth of the population when George W. Bush was first elected president in 2000, are 16% of it two decades later.

Given the unpredictable nature of our world (as the emergence of Covid-19 has made all too clear), nothing, secularization included, is a one-way street. Religion is perfectly capable of experiencing revivals. Still, there is no surer way to tip the balance toward an Omar Khayyam-style skepticism than for prominent religious leaders to guide their faithful, and all those in contact with them, into a new wave of the pandemic.

Juan Cole writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. His new book is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian (IB Tauris). He is also the author of Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment.

Copyright ©2020 Juan Cole — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 May 2020

Word Count: 2,849

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I’d rather not talk once again about the so-called protests being staged for the benefit of cable-news cameras. I feel I must, however, because public intellectuals like Peggy Noonan (respectable voices, unlike the click-bait bottom-feeders at Breitbart and Fox) keep insisting on two things. One, remaining misinformed about the nature, shape and power of socioeconomic class; and two, understanding these but pretending not to.

Noonan, of course, is a Pulitzer Price-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Last week, she wrote about the “class struggle” being revealed by a pandemic that has killed, as of this writing, over 91,000 people and unemployed 36.5 million others.

Noonan didn’t mean class struggle vis-à-vis inequities of access to health care (vast majorities of Covid-19 victims are people of color). She didn’t mean class struggle vis-à-vis a silent majority staying home and doing its part. She did, however, mean class struggle vis-à-vis white people “protesting” for the freedom to go shoe shopping.

Noonan’s dialectic is between the “overclass” (Michael Lind’s useful nomenclature) and “everyone else” — with the “everyone else” (we are asked implicitly to intuit) being a working class “pushing back” against state shelter-in-place orders, a working class that has lived “harder lives than those now determining their fate,” she said. “They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder.”

When someone like Noonan explains class to actual working-class Americans, I’m reminded of a man who misunderstands sexism explaining sexism to women, or a white person who misunderstands racism explaining racism to people of color. It’s not only embarrassing. It’s not only disrespectful. There’s a depth of hubris and contempt that goes into such demonstrations, a contempt worsened by plausible deniability. It’s a form of gas-lighting, and it’s reasonable to believe the intent is to drive you crazy.

Let me offer an anecdote. I grew up in a trailer “park” in Yorkshire, barely a town on the western end of New York, south of Buffalo, with a human population smaller than the population of cows in the tricounty area. Trailer “parks” are cut up into lots. Each lot has access to sewer, water and power. That’s it, though. It’s a wedge of land you rent but can’t develop or upgrade. Nor can you do a host of things, because each lot is subject to a multitude of rules legally enforced at the pleasure of the trailer “park”’s owner.

You might say that’s no big deal. Condos have rules too. Don’t like them? Sell and leave. But trailers do not appreciate in value. They depreciate. Selling means losing money, even if you bothered improving the interior. Yes, you can move them, but that’s an enormous expense. Mobile homes are almost never mobile. Condos are also not located, as the Stoehr family trailer was, next to a leach bed that bubbled and stank in hot months. Freedom to choose is central to a market economy. But once you’ve made up your mind to live in a trailer “park,” you can’t change your mind. You’re trapped.

The landowner isn’t trapped. His freedom is boundless. Yet all he did was invest the bare minimum (water, sewer, power). Then he let the rents flow. The owner of our trailer “park,” Bill S., was a textbook example of a rent-seeker — a person or entity growing fat on rents without contributing good to the broader society. While my family enjoyed the aroma of summertime shit, Bill S. and his family enjoyed an ostentatious mansion adjacent to riding stables, a fact that cemented forever in my mind that anyone with access to horses understands little to nothing about the working class.

Bill S. didn’t work (his profligate sons ran the business). So he ran for public office. To this day, he is a Cattaraugus County legislator able to enact laws ensuring his freedom to seek rents from workaday families who virtually sign away their own freedom. Bill S. is rural-dwelling non-college educated self-made man beloved of the Wall Street Journal with contemporaries all over the US — tiny feudal lords ruling tiny feudal fiefs. They suffer none of the burdens (or life-threatening dangers) of the working class but they have working-class credibility with the likes of Peggy Noonan, public intellectuals believing they are locked in a “class struggle” against America’s tyrannical “overclass.”

They aren’t. Not, anyway, in the way Noonan means. It’s not the working class, white or otherwise, that’s revolting against government control. The real working class, white or otherwise, needs government on their side, not off their backs. Without the power of government, they are politically powerless — the marker of the working class.

The people wanting government off their backs are the same familiar faces we have seen protesting “government overreach” since at least 2009 — the tiny feudal lords, the petty bourgeoisie, the moguls of minor monopolies, the demi-captains producing little or nothing of value imagining themselves running with the big corporate dogs, whose political power is inversely proportional to government being of, by and for the people.

Noonan may not know what she’s talking about. Yet maybe she does.

If the point is driving you crazy, it works.

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: 18 May 2020

Word Count: 866

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

Everyone is working remotely — except Congress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 May 2020

Word Count: 651

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Remember the song Over There?

Over there, over there

Send the word, send the word over there

That the Yanks are coming,

The Yanks are coming,

The drums rum-tumming everywhere…

Maybe not, since it was popular so long ago, but it was meant to inspire American troops saying goodbye to their country on their way to a Europe embroiled in World War I. Written by George M. Cohan, the song paid homage to an American wartime urge to do good in the world, to take what was precious about this country and spread it to less fortunate, endangered peoples elsewhere. As Jon Meacham and country music star Tim McGraw reminded us, that song’s message couldn’t have been simpler: The good guys are coming.

A century later, that sentiment in Cohan’s lyrics had merged with a related but ultimately contrary message: the supposed determination of America’s leaders to keep at bay and away the dangers rife in so much of the rest of the world. As President George W. Bush repeatedly assured Americans after the 9/11 attacks, this country would keep the threat of terrorism “over there” — and so away from our shores. “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America,” he typically told American legionnaires back in 2007.

More than a decade later, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham offered a reminder of the lingering persistence of such an “over there” mindset. Defending President Trump’s decision to keep American forces in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, he explained: “I want to fight the war in the enemy’s backyard, not ours.”

Trump’s version of keeping danger “over there” manifested itself most notably in his attempts to keep the immigrant version of the dangerous Other over there. Beginning with his “big, fat, beautiful wall” and his Muslim ban, such efforts, including most recently his April 22nd proclamation of a 60-day suspension on immigration by those seeking green cards, have never ended.

One “immigrant” he could not keep out, however, was the coronavirus, which — owing significantly to his acts (or lack of them) — has played havoc with the over-there conceit. When it comes to Covid-19, undeterred by a military presence abroad or border walls, keeping the threat to this nation at bay is no longer a possibility. Instead, an array of dangers, deprivations, and fears that have long beset the rest of the world — and from which the United States considered itself largely immune — have now entered our supposedly separate, well-guarded, very exceptional American world. Like the giant “murder hornets” from Asia detected for the first time in the United States in April, perils once reserved for places abroad are now squarely in our own backyard.

Like it or not, Over There is now Right Here.

America as a war zone The stage for bringing “there” to the homeland was aptly set when President Trump declared the country at war with a disease. Suddenly, America’s forever wars of the twenty-first century were no longer distant affairs. “War” was here and now, and this time we weren’t the invaders, but the ones who had been invaded.

Appropriately enough, in these last months, New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in this country, has been described by many in terms normally reserved for a war zone: the bodies of the dead laid out in rows as after battlefield encounters; tents like those seen at the outskirts of battle zones serving as makeshift hospitals in parks; sirens screaming day and night as emergency vehicles transport severely ill casualties of the virus to exhausted and overworked medical teams. And in the context of such a war at home, the military — along with the various National Guard units — has been on hand to help build temporary hospitals and distribute food and supplies.

Inside this new war zone, the basic circumstances of life have begun to resemble those long considered forever distant. For years now, we’ve been reading about casualty figures from places where Washington has pursued its “over there” war on terror. As Brown University’s Costs of War Project has reported, since 9/11 more than 800,000 people have been killed in U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani borderlands alone.

Now, by far the largest numbers of deaths are no longer over there but right here in the United States, thanks to the invisible virus among us. The world watches us as we lose Americans by the thousands on an almost daily basis. Health systems worldwide, and particularly in Africa, have long been a focus of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other medical groups. For decades, specialists have tried to ameliorate a lack of doctors, an absence of medical equipment, a need for more hospitals and greater access to healthcare on that continent. That was over there. No longer.

Life in the U.S. becomes precarious Alongside images of war, the U.S. healthcare system is now experiencing the kind of shortages and incapacity that had previously been associated with those in impoverished countries. As a 2017 WHO report concluded, “Half the world lacks access to essential health services.”

This past month, as Covid-19 patients overwhelmed New York City hospitals, conditions there began to resemble those in such lands. The most basic things like access to emergency rooms or to urgent care for people with the virus (but also for those with other problems entirely) became less certain. As the numbers of Covid-19 patients soared, those experiencing other life-threatening symptoms began to be treated according to a new, far grimmer calculus. At the same time, individuals in need of emergency care for other reasons came to fear going to ERs and exposing themselves to the pandemic, sometimes dying at home instead.

In these months, for instance, the number of organ transplants fell precipitously. On March 31st, the Regional Emergency Medical Advisory Committee of New York City announced that adults in cardiac arrest were not to be transported to the hospital for additional attempts at revival if their hearts had not restarted after 20 minutes. Many cancer surgeries have been delayed until further notice.

And it’s not just emergency care that’s under siege. Doctors have become unavailable for non-urgent matters. Messages like this one from a medical group tell it all: “If you are young, healthy, and sick but otherwise stable at home, please limit your calls to your doctor’s office so we can manage the high volume of calls incoming from high-risk patients.” While tele-health appointments with your general practitioner have become a way of life, they are no substitute for a yearly physical, let alone in-person attention to medical disorders and diseases. Dentists are, of course, not performing regular services. How many of us will have to forego our yearly mammograms, our regular dental check-ups, our annual physicals during this pandemic?

If lack of access to adequate healthcare is a measure of a country under wartime-like stress, the United States is no longer an exception.

An American world of deprivation Other normal expectations about American life are also breaking down in ways once associated with foreign lands. As George Packer recently wrote in the Atlantic, the federal government now looks more like a failed state than a vibrant democracy. As he put it, the Trump administration’s reaction to the coronavirus crisis was more “like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” In fact, the government’s response to the crisis has failed in a striking set of ways, ranging from the unpreparedness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the failure of diplomatic and domestic efforts to procure ventilators and protective masks or implement the distribution of stockpiles of medical equipment.

Meanwhile, the socio-economic level of the country has plummeted as middle-class Americans lose their jobs and begin the long fall into another existence. Since March, significant parts of the economy have been shut down and more than 33 million people laid off with 6% of the labor force filing for unemployment in the last two weeks of that month alone. Official U.S. unemployment recently hit 14.7%, a figure unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment claims have surged catastrophically and are still climbing weekly.

For an increasing number of Americans, food insecurity has become a fact of life. Empty shelves for some products are increasingly common in grocery stores nationwide. While predictions of shortages and price increases vary from cautious denials to measured concern, certain aspects of the usual food chain do seem to be breaking down. As Shub Debgupta, an economist who focuses on supply-chain risks to food, has pointed out, supplies from other countries that the United States depends on are likely to dwindle in the coming months. So, too, will farm labor, often made up of guest workers from across the southern border.

In the food industry and elsewhere, from grocery stores to hospitals, safe working conditions have deteriorated as the pandemic spreads, heading in directions previously associated with exploitative, impoverished, and corrupt countries. The proximity of workers inside the country’s meat-processing plants has, according to the CDC, already led to the infection of an estimated 5,000 workers (1,000 in a single plant).

Meanwhile, as the homelessness rate grows, many shelters have closed and those that remain open, social distancing being impossible and sanitary conditions bleak, are now potential hotbeds of infection, or as Emma Grey Ellis put it in Wired, “Homelessness is incompatible with health.” And let’s not forget the nightmare of nursing homes, some of which have become literal graveyards for the aged and infirm.

Prisons and detention centers have similarly become incubators for the spread of the disease, as our incarceration system suffers the kinds of deaths that might once only have been possible in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Peru, or elsewhere in Latin America (where notoriously overcrowded prisons have led to the rampant spread of Covid-19). Authorities in Arizona, for instance, now predict a 99% infection rate in its prison system and, despite the release of prisoners and immigration detainees across the country, unsanitary conditions and overcrowding still make prisons, as one expert remarked, “a ticking time bomb.”

In these and other areas where deprivation is being enhanced as the coronavirus runs wild in America, the burden has fallen overwhelmingly on low-income groups, blacks and Hispanics in particular. In doing so, it has heightened an already all-American reality. Though billionaires continue to prosper, low-income groups with heightened health-risk factors are now suffering disproportionately from Covid-19.

Blacks, for instance, have so far made up 25% of the deaths in this country from the virus, nearly twice their numbers in the general population. In New York alone, as the disease engulfed the city, black and Latino residents are estimated to have perished at twice the rate of whites. In states like Michigan and Illinois, the disparities have been similarly pronounced, while unemployment rates among African Americans now overshadow that of whites to a degree that is breathtaking. William Rodgers, former chief economist at the Department of Labor, has estimated that, as early as March, the real unemployment rate for African Americans may already have climbed to 19% and has only increased since.

The world, in other words, is coming home.

Long-simmering realities In many ways, the current crisis has, of course, just exposed conditions that should have been attended to long ago. Much that suddenly seems broken was already on the brink when the coronavirus appeared. If anything, the pandemic has simply accelerated already existing trends. As a December 2019 Century Foundation report on “racism, inequality, and health care for African Americans” concluded, “The American health care system is beset with inequalities that have a disproportionate impact on people of color and other marginalized groups.” In fact, in 2019, the London-based Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index had already ranked the American healthcare system 59th in the world for its standard of services.

As bad as Donald Trump and his administration have been, the growing American coronavirus disaster can’t simply be blamed on them. Covid-19 has brought home to the rest of us how over here over there really was. And now, the pathetic White House leadership in this crisis has raised another possibility: autocracy.

The Trump administration’s failure to handle the crisis competently stems in part from the president’s perception that whatever he says, in autocratic fashion, goes — or, as he has often put it, “I can do whatever I want.” From his early assertion that the virus was destined to go from 15 cases to one or disappear in the warmth of April to his fantasy numbers when it came to virus testing or obtaining crucial medical equipment to his recent advocacy of ingesting disinfectants as an antidote for Covid-19, the leader of the United States has come to resemble a run-of-the-mill autocrat spreading disinformation in his own interests. It’s one thing to point to the power-grabbing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the underhanded machinations of the dictator of North Korea, or the ruthlessness of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. It’s quite another to have a power-hungry leader as our own head of state. Once again, we are not immune. There is here.

With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country’s engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. Now, we are inside the community of nations in a grim new way — as fellow patients, grievers, and supplicants in search of food and shelter, in search, along with so much of humanity, of a more secure existence.

The world, in other words, has turned upside down. Perhaps it’s sadly time to change those famed lyrics of George M. Cohan accordingly:

Over here, over here

Send the word, send the word over here.

Whether from there or from here, the sooner the good guys arrive, the better.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, the editor of Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink, and host of the Vital Interests Podcast. Julia Tedesco and Sofia Cimballa contributed research to this article.

Copyright ©2020 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 May 2020

Word Count: 2,357

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Ned Lamont is the Democratic governor of Connecticut. He’s  done a pretty good job leading my state through the pandemic, though he (understandably) seeks cover from Charlie Baker, Republican of Massachusetts, and Andrew Cuomo, Democrat of New York. Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has killed more than 3,200 Nutmeggers. Our nursing homes and senior living facilities have been hit hardest.

Some business owners in the state, particularly proprietors of restaurants, night clubs and bars, seem to believe that the worst is over and that the disease is mostly a problem for the sick and old, not their clientele. For this reason, it appears, they have been leaning on Lamont to permit indoor seating after next week’s statewide reboot.

I’m sympathetic to small business owners (I am one), but focusing on the governor is focusing on the wrong problem. Reopening for business does not mean consumers will show up, not in the absence of a viable vaccine. The question shouldn’t be whether and when any governor permits such-and-such business activity. The question should be how to rebuild public trust in an economy that will succeed or fail depending on how seriously all of us take our commitments to collective action and the common good.

The problem is made more difficult by people, including a few business owners, who do not recognize the need for collective action in the service of the common good. They do not recognize that need, because they are either acting in bad faith or, more commonly, they embrace a political worldview in which their freedom does not depend on the protection of everyone else’s freedom. Instead, it depends on everyone else honoring their civic duty and individual responsibility. They don’t care about your liberty. They care about theirs. If they must do what everyone else does out of concern for public health, for instance, they chafe at the perceived violation of their freedom.

It’s greedy. It’s selfish. It’s me-me-me. But it’s more than that.

Consider masks. Wearing one in public is for your benefit as well as everyone’s. The coronavirus is transmitted mostly by water droplets so weightless they float in the air. These droplets are produced not only by sneezing or coughing but by laughing or merely talking. Wearing a mask in public is a form of collective action in the service of the common good, which, when you really think about it, maximizes individual liberty.

Some people are ignorant, misinformed or plain lazy. But others, like the president of the United States, understand the dangers yet choose not to wear a mask. They choose not to, because they do not believe—or indeed, they are hostile toward the idea — that they share common bonds with or bear common responsibilities to others, and their insistence to the contrary justifies sabotage as a necessary exercise of their liberty. People who refuse to wear a mask are not freedom fighters. They are freeloaders.

To some degree, they must know it. Most Americans are in fact wearing masks in public. According to the Post, 73 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Republicans do so. That’s not as high as it should be, obviously, but that’s a majority. (Most churches, by the way, have been compliant with their state’s stay-at-home orders, according to an unrelated report in the Washington Post; compare that with the TV-mugging few that don’t.) Not doing the work when most responsible law-abiding people are doing the work could be seen as, well, getting something for nothing — a free hand out!

Moochers are not usually presumed white — because, you know, racism — but in this case they are indeed. The same Post report showed larger percentages of non-white Americans wearing masks compared to white Americans. (This is partly explained by inequities in health care. If you’re already sick, your chances of dying are higher. Non-white Americans tend to be sicker than white Americans. The Post said people who know someone who has died from Covid-19 are most likely to wear a mask in public.)

This is important to note, because white Americans who decide against wearing masks in public don’t see themselves as free-riders. They see themselves as principled “lovers of liberty” resisting “tyrannical governments” violating their “personal sovereignty.” That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s not enough to say that it’s nonsense, because saying that it’s nonsense does not show the proper degree of contempt for irresponsible, reckless and life-threatening behavior.

Instead of leaning on my governor, or any governor, to permit such-and-such business activities, private enterprise would be better served calling on governors to prevent moochers from spoiling things for everyone. I’ll patronize a business when I feel it is safe to. Not wearing a mask is like carrying a semi-automatic rifle. It spells danger.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 792

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The president and his confederates in the United States Congress have spent the last four days manufacturing a controversy for the press corps to report and debate. Donald Trump has dubbed it “Obamagate.” I’m not sure what it means. It has something to do with the previous administration’s lawful handling of the case of former Trump aide Michael Flynn, who confessed twice to crimes that would land him in federal prison.

Flynn is off the hook now, thanks to Trump’s goons in the US Department of Justice. That’s the extent of what I know. I don’t need to understand more than that. Neither do you, frankly. What we do need to understand is that the president and his confederates do not themselves understand it, and they do not understand it, because the point of a manufactured controversy isn’t establishing the facts through a rigorous process of inquiry. The point is inventing a scandal out of thin air to bludgeon enemies with.

This manufactured controversy says more about Trump’s confederates than about anything else. His attorneys have twice argued Trump is immune, by dint of being the president, to the normal rule of law, as normal people are not. During his impeachment trial, and in oral arguments this week before the US Supreme Court, lawyers invoked “temporary presidential immunity,” a concept that does not exist and that revives Richard Nixon’s belief that nothing is illegal when a president does it.

What “Obamagate” reveals is the fraudulence of this legal argument. If nothing is illegal when a president does it, then even if the Obama administration’s criminal investigation of Michael Flynn were unlawful (wrong: it was lawful), what’s the problem? Barack Obama was then president. Presidents should be immune to the rule of law, according to Trump’s lawyers. Nothing is illegal when a president does it.

What “Obamagate” exposes is the Republicans’ imperious double standard. It’s OK for a Republican president to break the law. It’s not OK for a Democratic president. The impeachment of a GOP president is “presidential harassment.” The impeachment of a Democratic president, however, “is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office,” said US Rep. Lindsey Graham in 1998.

Something else we need to understand. By affixing “gate,” to “Obama,” the current president is attempting to invoke the memory of what had been the biggest political scandal in US history, namely Nixon’s complicity in burglary and espionage at Washington’s Watergate Hotel in the 1970s. But that scandal has since been dwarfed many times over by the one that’s been unfolding over these last four years, namely, the imposition of an illegitimate president by a hostile foreign power, the committing of treason by said illegitimate president, and the acquittal of the same by a separatist movement, disguised as a major political party, bent on advancing a decades long soft-civil war that now includes appeasing an “invisible enemy” rampaging the landscape.

As of this writing, over 85,300 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. News came this morning that 36.5 million workers have now filed for unemployment benefits. That’s almost certainly an undercount (same for the death toll; experts told the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof it could be as high as 110,000). All those numbers will likely go up as states and localities try to return to a semblance of normalcy. Yet the current president yammers about the former president, as if Obama had anything to do with the worst societal calamity since the Great Depression.

For many of us, this may seem like a last-ditch effort, as if Trump were desperate to change the subject. For many of us, appearing to be desperate to change the subject inspires thinking that he’s toast. After all, two presidents in recent memory (Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992) were ousted amid economic downturns. This being the mother of them all seems to suggest that Trump is a goner. While this seems reasonable, it presumes too much — namely, that the 2020 election will be fair.

I’ll count the ways of voter suppression, foreign interference and general skullduggery another time. For now, let’s say presuming a fair election in the time of Trump and the coronavirus is an unconscious act of distorting political reality. If he loses, Trump and his confederates will do everything they can to sabotage the winner’s legislative agenda. Even that, however, presumes there will be an election. I’m not suggesting he will “cancel” it. I am suggesting states, like, say, Texas, might “postpone” theirs, sending the national process of picking a national leader into chaos. Even if Joe Biden is determined to be the actual winner, the created disorder will cloud his legitimacy.

Which is another thing the “Obamagate” thing reveals. If you thought Trump was bad, Biden’s just as bad, and since Biden’s just as bad, I might as well stick with my party: The point is less about bludgeoning one’s enemies than poisoning values, elevating nihilism and reducing ordinary relations to craven considerations of power. It’s not just anti-democratic. It’s anti-republican. A despoliation of human morality.

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: 14 May 2020

Word Count: 855

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