I continue to believe too many people outside the world of white evangelical Christianity give too much credit to actors inside that world. Normal people, let’s call them, continue to look at this world believing they understand it, probably because they hold in common a variation of the Christian faith or because they read about the teachings of Jesus, which are essentially the teaching of equality and human rights.

Normal people, including virtually everyone in the Washington press corps, continue to look at white evangelical Christians as if they are just one of a multitude of groups within the constitutional order of a liberal democracy that fights hard to advance its principles and protect its interests. And indeed, leading figures of evangelical Christianity have spent years and years building an organizational structure that gives exactly that impression: that all they are doing is what everyone else is doing.

But they are not doing what everyone else is doing any more than Patrick Crusius was doing what the average gun owner does. Though gun owners may hold opinions you might disagree with, most are mindful of rules and procedure. They believe they have the right to bear arms. They fight to exercise that liberty. But most do not believe they have the right to take matters into their own hands.

Patrick Crusius, however, felt “the Mexican invasion” posed a threat to America so great it demanded extraordinary political action in El Paso. His goal wasn’t legitimate politics. His goal was murder.

I do not mean to suggest that the political goals for white evangelical Christians is murder. I do mean to suggest the goal is not what normal people tend to believe it is.

Normal people, working inside the normal American system, fight hard for something. They see an objective — say, tax cuts or a new law protecting the quality of drinking water — and they work toward that end. White evangelical Christians do not fight for things. They fight against things. I’m not talking about fighting against, for instance, tax increases. I’m talking about fighting against a human being’s right to be what that human being wants to be in this life. White evangelical Christians fight against that right, because they deny that some human beings are as human as they are.

Democracy demands recognition of the legitimacy of everyone who participates in a political community. White evangelical Christians, however, do not recognize the legitimacy of various out-groups. They do not recognize various out-groups as consisting of human beings. Out-groups, by dint of being out-groups, consist not of people but aliens, criminals, perversions, animals, or some species of subhumanity.

These out-groups include women defying the authority of the “natural” hierarchy of the sexes. (They use birth control or seek abortions.) These out-groups include anyone on the LGBTQ-plus continuum defying the authority of the “natural” binary of straight cisgender men and women. These out-groups include brown people defying the authority of the federal government. White evangelical Christians do not demand punishment for these people breaking the laws of Man and God. They demand punishment for these people being who they are. They derive pleasure from the punishment of sin. Being punished for being trans, for instance, is divine justice.

They are not doing what everyone else is doing, because their goals are not rooted in democratic legitimacy or even devotion to Christ’s teachings, which, as I said, are essentially the teaching of equality and human rights. Their goals are rooted in sadism — in the pleasure, sanctified by God, that’s derived from the suffering of others. And their goals are rooted in the resentment that the sadism historically afforded to them, and that was once codified into law or at least socially acceptable, no longer is. Normal people should stop giving white evangelical Christians the benefit of the doubt.

Ralph Reed is one of the leaders who helped build an organizational structure over decades that gives the impression to normal people that white evangelical Christians are doing what everyone else is doing in American politics. Reed told the Washington Post recently that white evangelical Christian voters support Donald Trump’s bid for reelection because, he said, they believe the president will fight for them no matter what.

Trump looked to many like a protector, a brash culture warrior who would take their side. “He said, ‘I’m gonna fight for you. I’m gonna defend you,’” said Ralph Reed, the chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Georgia, which will distribute millions of voter-guide pamphlets at churches to drive evangelical turnout in 2020.

He gets it.

Yes, he does.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 August 2019
Word Count: 764
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One afternoon in New York City in the spring of 1964, I marched at the head of a small civil rights demonstration, one of the few white people in the group. I was carrying a watermelon. It was a Dick Gregory joke.

To say the least, not everyone liked that joke, but I thought it was hilarious, a jab by the hottest comedian in the country at one of the oldest racial stereotypes. Some of the black demonstrators in that little parade felt that Gregory’s version of guerrilla theater (in which I was a bit player) diminished the seriousness of the occasion — and they said so. Some of the white bystanders had another opinion entirely. In words that couldn’t have been more blunt, they suggested I was a traitor to my race.

More than a half-century later, as Gregory’s jokes and accomplishments are being revisited, that watermelon bit still seems brilliantly mocking to me. Yet it is also quaint, almost antediluvian, symbolic of a once-thrilling sense of progress. The current struggle against racism faces an orchestrated resistance led from the White House. The racists on the twenty-first-century sidewalk are emboldened, having found a malicious leader impervious to comedy. Too many others realized too late that Donald Trump was no joke after all. And now they’re squabbling among themselves over such important but often diverting topics as cultural appropriation, white male privilege, and plain old bad taste — instead of uniting to fight a truly dangerous enemy of equality and democracy.

Nigger, the title of the book Greg (as most of us called him then) and I wrote together in that distant year (and his autobiography), is even more controversial than it was then and so is my own race. People question the appropriateness — even the right — of a white man to write about, as well as with, a black man. The book, published in 1964, has never been out of print and this year, for the first time, a trade paperback has been issued along with an audio version. A documentary, a feature film, and a formal biography are on their way, much of it thanks to the energy generated by Greg’s son Christian, a Washington, D.C., chiropractor.

Greg, who died in 2017 at 84, is now gaining the full recognition he long deserved as a pioneer of political black comedy who sacrificed a superstar career on the ramparts of 1960s civil rights activism. In these last years, he’s risen into the pantheon of America’s most famous satirical commentators alongside Will Rogers and Mark Twain.

I met Greg on the evening of September 16, 1963. His publisher set up the appointment. He had signed a contract for a rats-to-riches autobiography to capitalize on his new fame as a comedian and then rejected every writer the publisher sent around. Nearing the bottom of the barrel, they came up with a 25-year-old New York Times sportswriter who, to be honest, was more interested in meeting this sudden sensation than actually writing a book involving the — for me — then-exotic worlds of comedy and racial politics.

An education

When I arrived at his hotel suite that first time, Lillian, his wife, and Jim Sanders, his gag writer, told me he wasn’t seeing anyone. But young and full of myself, I just barged into his room. He was on his bed, curled in a fetal position, clothed only in his underwear, crying. I sat down and asked him what was wrong.

He slowly rolled over and glared at me. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“Sure,” I said. “I work for one.”

“Didn’t you read about the four little girls who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?”

“That was terrible,” I said. “Now about this book…”

But he had rolled back, even as he continued to talk, this time to the wall: “How could the white man be so evil as to kill little girls who weren’t even demonstrating for their civil rights? You people are the racial cancer destroying America. You stunt the lives of children, break up families, you have the power to wound the innocent just by calling them ‘niggers.’”

Because I was a reporter, I began taking notes, but mostly I listened, fascinated. I was in the presence of a soul in rage and pain, hardly the cool 30-year-old hipster who had become the first black comedian to make it in major white nightclubs. His one-liners — “’Leven months I sat-in at a restaurant, then they integrated and didn’t even have what I wanted” — were already being repeated as social commentary, not to speak of uncomfortable truths in that world before social media. (“We won’t go to war in the Congo ‘cause we’re afraid our soldiers will bring back war brides.”) At $5,000 a week, he was then being hailed as the Jackie Robinson of topical comedy.

Late that night, I finally got up to leave and, to my surprise, he asked me to come back the next day so we could start writing the book.

It went badly from the beginning. He was sometimes an hour or more late for an interview session and when I complained, he’d say, “I can tell you been waitin’, baby, you sound colored.” He always called me “baby.” He couldn’t seem to remember my name. His diatribes against white America were based on strong arguments and solid facts, but they were hardly the human stuff of autobiography. I was fascinated. For me, it was an education, but I soon realized it was fruitless to continue.

So after about two weeks of sporadic sessions, on a day he showed up three hours late, I hit him with a prepared monologue. I told him that I didn’t need to put up with an irresponsible, selfish fool trying to hang me up in reverse prejudice. In fact, I declared pompously, the only thing I didn’t have against him was the color of his skin. I marched out to the elevator. He followed me and got in. On the way down he said, “Your name’s Bob Lipsyte, right?”

“Too late,” I replied.

He said he was going to have a sandwich at the hotel coffee shop. Would I join him? I figured I might as well get something out of all this.

While we ate, he kept repeating my name. When we finished, he said, “Let’s go back up. I think we’re ready to write a book. A real book, one they’re not expecting.”

And it was terrific. For the next few months, usually very early in the morning, after a club date, in a hotel room curtained against the dawn, he would lie in bed and take me into the pit of his St. Louis childhood. We cried and laughed about this skinny welfare case named Richard Claxton Gregory, born on Columbus Day, 1932, who fantasized that school closed in honor of his birthday. When he was hungry enough, he told me, he ate dirt. He started telling jokes to keep the bullies at bay. He talked about his “monster,” by which he meant that combination of ego and ambition that drove him to become a high-school and college track star and then a headliner on the honky-tonk “chittlin’ circuit” of black nightclubs.

The monster was ready on January 13, 1961, the night the Chicago Playboy Club called him as a last-minute replacement. And it was the same monster that refused to be sent home when the club manager panicked moments before Greg was to go on stage after realizing that the place was packed with white southern conventioneers. Greg thanked the first heckler for calling him “Trigger” — he said he always admired Roy Rogers’ horse — and he asked the second one to keep using that word because his contract stipulated $50 extra every time it was spoken. He killed that audience. Playboy owner Hugh Hefner was called out of bed for the second show and gave him a long-term contract.

The monster needed more

But success on stage wasn’t enough for the monster. Between club dates and appearances on TV’s top-rated The Tonight Show, where he successfully demanded to be the first black comic to sit on the couch beside, and actually talk to, late-night host Jack Paar, he ended segregation in a Maryland prison by refusing to perform unless black and white prisoners were in the same audience. He also helped free a falsely accused black man from a southern jail and he always made sure there were black waiters in the clubs in which he performed.

As his celebrity grew, any civil rights demonstration for which he was scheduled to show up could count on television news crews following him, which usually lessened the odds of police brutality against the demonstrators. So he began to believe it was his obligation to show up. So he started missing club dates and then began to lose them when bookers realized that the nightclub stage was not his priority.

By this time, we were well into writing the book, whose working title was Callus on My Soul. I thought it sounded too gospel-y, however, for a funny, gritty, remarkably candid personal story. At the time, though, neither of us could think of anything else.

Usually, after a club date and before we settled into our all-night taping sessions, we would have a post-midnight dinner, often with friends of his or other entertainers. Greg, a drinker and smoker who was overweight, would order huge amounts of food for everyone and taste everything. A childhood marked by hunger had left him with an obsession with food, which he talked about incessantly.

Late one night in Chicago, after a gig at the nightclub Mister Kelly’s, he began to riff about opening his own restaurant. It would be small and luxurious, only one sitting per table per night, five waiters, and an orchestra. The diners would deserve all this, because the name of the restaurant — in neon on the door — would be Nigger.

“Every white man in the South will be giving me free publicity,” he said, working himself up in his typical fashion. “We could bust that word. It wouldn’t have the power to hurt us anymore. Anytime anybody said, ‘Nigger,’ it would be about something really fine.”

I think that may have been how we got the idea for the title of his autobiography. So much for Callus on My Soul, which he used for a later memoir.

The publisher, Dutton, was not amused, but Greg stood his ground. He threatened to take the book back and they were, in the end, somewhat mollified by his dedication:

“Dear Momma — Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”

In those years when, of course, it seemed inconceivable that a black president, no less a first lady, would ever grace the White House, he would make endless jokes about that title: “Sent a copy of my book to President Johnson. About time there’s a nigger in the White House… Lady Bird Johnson’s been reading my book at night, so now she goes to bed with a nigger.”

The white interpreter

In 1964, when the book was done and off to the publisher, I finally asked him the obvious question: Why, in the world, had he chosen me, a white man, to help him tell the story of his life? His response was quick and straightforward and surprised me. He had picked me, he said, partially because I seemed so open and interested in his story, not one that I might want to tell, but above all because I was white. Black folks, he assured me, would understand his life. They had already lived it. White folks, on the other hand, needed an interpreter, someone who could make sure the story was told in ways they could relate to.

I’ve held on to that explanation through 55 years of self-questioning and, of course, questions from others. Sometimes, I’ve thought about that watermelon, too. I wish, back then, I had asked Greg exactly what he had in mind besides a racial joke in which I was proud to participate, even if there was a hint of mockery (of me) and humiliation in it. Didn’t whites deserve it? Beyond that, wasn’t carrying the watermelon a symbolic way of sharing a terrible burden that had been the essence of this country since the first enslaved black set foot on these shores so many hundreds of years ago? Wasn’t it, at that far more hopeful moment, a way of reminding white people that we — and the history that went with us — were all in this together, even as racists tried (as they and President Trump still do) to divide us?

The book was published in 1964 to good reviews even as Greg’s career as a stand-up comic was swirling down the drain. His TV and nightclub income dropped — he lost a reported $100,000 in bookings in 1964, a fortune then, and twice as much in 1965 — because he so often left those bookings in the dust, rushing off at the last moment to one dangerous place after another with the Huntley-Brinkley Report news crew close behind. He was accused of doing it all for publicity, even after being badly beaten in Birmingham, Alabama, and shot in the leg while trying to calm a crowd during the riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in 1965.

The comedic path Greg blazed would be followed by Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Chris Rock, even as the civil rights movement settled into its endless, grinding struggle. Our book kept selling but obviously never came close to busting that word, our title, which has become a kind of Tourette’s tic for rappers and basketball players (often modified as “nigga”). Greg and I agreed that the politically correct alternative, “the n-word,” seemed both coy and somehow even more objectionable in its implication that the original is really just too powerful to say aloud.

Sometime in the late 1970s, he and I began to see less and less of each other as his food obsession took a sharp turn into non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarianism, and frequent fasting. He was constantly on the road. His true home, his son Christian once told me, was an airport terminal. He became a fervent advocate of proper nutrition, which, he insisted, was the foundation on which battles against racism could be fought. Only healthy people, he would say, have the strength to make substantive change. Then that sly, conspiratorial smile of his would break out on his face and he’d ask: How come the government spends so much time and money regulating vitamins without ever banning cigarettes?

Two years ago, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I stood before two audiences in two days, one made up of mostly middle-aged African-Americans who wanted to share memories of Greg, the other mostly African-American teen-agers hosting a 50th birthday party for The Contender, a young adult novel with a black teenage protagonist that I wrote back in 1967 and which they had read in school. I never mentioned the watermelon to either audience, but in both cases that moment and the melon weighed on my mind. I still felt haunted by that symbol of American racial hell and the unresolved question: What did it really mean then? What does it really mean now?

Without prompting, I told the older crowd how we had come up with the title of that book and why Greg picked a white man to tell his story. There was a lot of nodding and murmurs of assent in the audience. They understood. I hadn’t ever been appropriating his story. I had been helping to explain it to an often-clueless white readership.

Emboldened, the next day I posed a question to the kids. How did they feel about a white guy writing a novel about a black kid? They looked confused. They had loved the book, they said, related to the characters, what did it matter? One boy said that their teachers told them they could write about anything they wanted, including aliens from outer space.

I have to admit I was touched because I instantly knew that Greg would have dug that answer. Time to put the watermelon down, I thought, cut it up, and share it.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch — where this article originated — and is the author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2019 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 August 2019
Word Count: 2,719
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There’s a good reason why moral clarity is getting so much attention on social media. Demand for it outstrips supply. That’s why Beto O’Rourke’s outrage over coverage of the El Paso massacre was so refreshing. Jesus Christ, he said, of course the president is a racist. Of course, he inspired mass murder. Stop putting all of that on me, he said. Look around. You reporters already know the answer. Why keep asking the same question?

Moral clarity is in short supply in part because the Washington press corps tends to be nihilistic. When everything is as good or bad as everything else, nothing really matters. If nothing matters, there’s no reason not to — in fact it’s much easier to — give Donald Trump a never-ending benefit of the doubt. Sure, he’s lied more than 10,000 times. Sure, he established his power by denying the legitimacy of America’s first black president. But no one’s perfect. Others lie. Others pander. Nothing matters.

But moral clarity is in such short supply in part because the Republican Party wants it to be that way, and makes it so. The party’s ability to persuade people to accept its version of reality is key to its political success. It’s in fact to their advantage if people can’t quite figure out what’s what on their own, and if they depend on the party to tell them “the truth.” That’s why the GOP is hostile toward science, universities, free speech, free press and the whole truth. These threaten to undermine their power.

If the president is going to get blamed for a mass murder, Republicans believe, the Democrats ought to be blamed too. So they will search for a reason to blame them for the very thing they are being blamed for. The Republicans will do this not because they believe in right and wrong — remember: nothing matters — but because the Democrats must be wrong, because they are Democrats.

Eventually, the Republicans will find a reason, even if it’s absurd. Absurdity, however, is merely relative in an amoral world in which everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters.

Patrick Crusius, the El Paso killer, was clear about his motives. He posted a document echoing Trump’s rhetoric about invading hordes of immigrants that, if permitted to continue and proliferate, would replace “real Americans” with something altogether horrible. So he set out to do something about it. To wonder, as the Washington press corps has, if a president who has maligned immigrants, racial minorities and Muslims inspired an act of mass murder is to behold the sky above and wonder if it’s blue.

Connor Betts, the Dayton killer, had motives far less clear—if he had any discernible motives at all. He reportedly made a list of women he wanted to rape. He reportedly made a list of people he wanted to murder. He also evidently claimed to be a “leftist” on Twitter, even declaring a preference for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. None of this coheres into a recognizable political ideology in the way that Patrick Crusius’ white supremacy does. Even so, some of these facts were cherry-picked by the president’s defenders. If Trump is to blame for one mass murder, then the Democrats — one of them anyway, it doesn’t really matter who — are to blame for the other.

One outcome of such nihilism is simple cynicism. “Don’t blame us for being awful. They’re are awful, too.” Another is fraudulent civility. “No one knows why bad people do bad things. Let’s stop playing politics and try to get along.” In both scenarios, everyone shares the blame, no one is held responsible, and as a result, nothing matters. Except for all the dead bodies. It’s not really surprising, once you think about it, that Beto O’Rourke’s outrage over the nihilist press coverage in El Paso went viral.

Americans are starved for moral clarity. They are starved for the truth.

The Republican are less inclined to do something about their bigotry problem than they are in finding ways to suppress complaints about their bigotry problem, and they are willing to do that by accusing their enemies of — wait for it! — bigotry. US Senator Ted Cruz wants to declare anti-fascism a form of domestic terrorism even though that makes no sense at all. Anti-fascist activists (or antifa, as they’re called) are against fascism, which is precisely the racist ideology that animated Patrick Crusius.

Instead of doing the moral work of figuring out what speech is dangerous — like the president’s demagoguery — and what speech is central to democracy — like calling out the president’s demagoguery — Cruz and his Republican allies would rather outlaw political dissent altogether in the name of national security. That would in turn deepen people’s dependence on the GOP to tell them what to believe while weakening people’s ties to the Democrats, which again is all the better for the Republicans.

Truly, nothing matters — if the Republicans get 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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 August 2019
Word Count: 823
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The president condemned white supremacy after the bloody massacres in El Paso and Dayton. Does anyone believe him? I hope not. Donald Trump long stopped deserving the benefit of the doubt. Continuing to give him that is enabling his toxic bad faith.

“Our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul,” the president said this morning.

I’m not buying it. Neither should you.

The president has told thousands of lies since taking office. This is a fact. He also plays coy when it comes to the racist ideology that lifted him to the land’s highest office. If under pressure from his party and the press corps, he’ll deliver a scripted condemnation. He’ll sound very sober and very serious on TV. That will be enough for the Republican Party, but also for a political press too amoral to judge for itself.

Later, he’ll say there are good and bad people on all sides, undermining whatever good faith he earned with his formal statement. But by then, his party and the press corps will have moved on. Few will be listening, except enemies and the white supremacists operating in the shadows who are already highly attuned to the president’s rhetoric. They know Trump didn’t mean a word of his condemnation. They know he said it because he was goaded into saying it. They know he’s really one of them.

The president also said this weekend’s double massacre is more about mental illness than it is about guns and gun violence. That’s another whopping lie. More guns means more death. It’s as simple as that. Saying it’s about mental health is cover for the Republicans, especially those in the Senate. The Democratic House already passed gun-control legislation. Senate Republicans facing reelection do not want to be forced into voting against the NRA. Trump is helping them by focusing on mental health.

The temptation among liberals and leftists might be to accept this framing—mental illness v. gun control—as if is were true. I’m not suggesting there’s no truth in it. I’m suggesting, actually outright saying, that that’s playing by Trump’s rules. Liberals and leftists should make the whole truth more obvious. By their inaction, Trump and the Republicans are telling us they want people to die, especially people they dislike. Why would they want people they dislike to die? Because they’re American fascists.

The president spent last week maligning cities as cesspools of crime, corruption and much worse. During the entire time, the Republican Party establishment was silent. In doing so, the president was following the same playbook other fascists have used successfully. Rural Germans were for Hitler — the real German nation. Rural Germans worked hard, worshipped God and loved their country. City residents, on the other hand, were corrupt politically as well as genetically. Under Jewish influence, people of different religions and ethnicities mingled together, even had sex with each other, and in the process not only desecrated a pure Aryan race but threatened to replace it.

Sound familiar? It should.

El Paso and Dayton, it will be noted, are cities. So is Pittsburgh and so is Charleston. So is Las Vegas and so is Parkland (Greater Miami). In these cities are liberals and Jews and other “cosmopolitans” as well as racial and sexual minorities—all of them lazy, criminal, decadent and/or diseased. Real Americans pay taxes. Urban Americans are dependent on the state. We are “real.” They are “dangerous,” and they must be dealt with. Fascists don’t hate cities because cities are liberal economic success stories.

They hate cities, because they’re cities.

They kill, because they want to kill.

Hitler didn’t just demagogue the German people into accepting his racist and antisemitic worldview. He beat it into them. He organized a militia called the Sturmabteilung, or brownshirts, at first to provide security. But as the paramilitary grew, it became a means by which Hitler terrorized the population, especially in cities where Jews and other “undesirables” were targets. Brownshirts rioted, vandalized, assaulted and murdered in cold blood until there was no political resistance left.

Trump and the Republican Party don’t need a party-aligned paramilitary group to advance their interests. They don’t need actual brownshirts to terrorize the population. All they need to achieve both is send the right signals to the right people who are already embedded with one kind of white supremacist group or another. When these “lone wolves” hear the president talking about infested cities, invading and diseased immigrants and the like, they are ready, willing and able. It’s unorganized, unattached to the GOP and untraceable but very effective. Some call it “stochastic terrorism.”

All of this may sound shocking. I have qualms typing these words.

But if Trump and the Republicans are not American fascists who want to see people die, they should prove it. As it is, they are asking us to trust them, and like I said, this president has long since stopped deserving the benefit if the doubt. Given the GOP’s years of inaction and indifference to mass death and suffering, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude they are not just for gun rights. They are for people dying.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 August 2019
Word Count: 865
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The Trump administration has decided on the Temporary Protected Status given by the United States to approximately 7,000 Syrians. The designation, granted by the US Department of Homeland Security, is meant to help people from countries affected by war, environmental disaster or other extraordinary conditions. The 18-month extension announced August 1 merely defers the uncertainty.

It stays in place until conditions in the refugees’ home countries improve but for the Syrians in Donald Trump’s America, their legal right to stay is uncertain.

In the name of getting tough on fraudulent claims for refuge, the Trump administration has been making it harder for people fleeing violence and trafficking to enter the United States and lodge asylum claims.

Trump recently met a Yazidi woman from Iraq and a Rohingya Muslim, along with other victims of religious persecution from around the world. It was a set-piece event and there is little sign Trump would do anything to provide refuge.

Reports stated that the administration was considering a total shutdown of refugee admissions next year, a policy change that could affect thousands of Iraqis. The US Department of Defence has championed their admission because they risked their lives assisting US forces.

The issue of migrants seeking asylum is hardly less fraught in Europe. The European Union has promised to check into a BBC investigation into the brutal treatment of migrants trying to enter the bloc via Croatia.

The report said that even a minor — 17-year-old Mustafa from Egypt — was not spared a beating. He and other migrants were robbed by Croatian police, who are apparently engaging in so-called “pushback” operations meant to prevent people from seeking asylum in the European Union.

Is the idea of asylum and refuge all but over? It was always subject to an individual state’s willingness to comply with the 1951 Geneva Convention, which defined the status of refugees, set out rights of individuals granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations.

The convention is legally binding but compliance is not enforceable by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. That agency cannot make Trump accept asylum-seekers or grant them refuge. It cannot force the United States to maintain protections for Syrian refugees already in the country. Were the United States to renege on its promises of resettlement of Iraqi translators, there is nothing anyone can realistically do about it.

The post-World War II international consensus on asylum and refuge was always about goodwill. The rights promulgated by the convention were interpreted in very different ways by disparate countries but the overall thrust of the convention has generally been accepted. Until now.

A more piecemeal approach to refugees has been in evidence in recent years. Bangladesh allowed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from neighbouring Myanmar to remain on its soil but initially refused to recognise them as refugees. Last year, the United Arab Emirates, which is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention, regularised the residency status of Syrians in the country. However, the Emirates uses bespoke terminology for the situation and the remedies it offers.

As for the United States, since Trump became president denial rates for asylum-seekers and visas for victims of human trafficking have skyrocketed. US Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman Jessica Collins recently explained it as a response to a grim “reality.” She said: “Our asylum system is being abused by those seeking economic opportunity, not those fleeing persecution.”

The same sort of view is increasingly taking hold in Europe, all of which suggests waning support for an internationally accepted obligation to provide a safe haven to those fleeing conflict.

What comes next? What should come next? What might conceivably replace the old order? How to fashion a new paradigm?

One thing is clear. If the rich Western world no longer feels obliged to provide refuge to desperate people from poorer, conflict-ridden countries at the very least it should cease destabilising Arab and African countries for geopolitical gain and the profits of defence manufacturers.

Second, rich countries should stop the continuing impoverishment of the global south. This occurs mainly through the machinations of large Western multinational companies, which deprive governments of poor countries of tax revenue by means of remarkable accounting contortions.

The United States has long opposed progressive changes to global rules that would force multinationals to pay tax where economic activity is actually occurring but the so-called Mauritius Leaks, a recently released cache of 200,000 files from a law firm in the Indian Ocean tax haven of Mauritius, showed that billions of dollars in revenue were being withheld by Western companies from some of the world’s poorest governments.

We are at a fork in the road on the issue of asylum and refuge. Those who do not want to provide succour have the right to refuse it. Equally, they shouldn’t be stoking the conditions that create refugees in the hundreds of thousands.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 August 2019
Word Count: 807
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There was a mini-scandal on Twitter Wednesday so small it might not matter, but I think it does. It speaks to an issue I’ve raised before, which is that very smart people overrate their ability to identify obvious idiocy and thus make the mistake of looking for concrete reasons why the president attacks major cities like Baltimore.

Donald Trump does not attack cities, because, as smarty Will Wilkinson said, they are proof that “the liberal experiment works—that people of diverse origins and faiths prosper together in free and open societies.” He attacks them because they’re cities.

The fascist mind is dumb.

It all started when Jonathan Weisman, a Times’ politics editor, posted this:

“Saying @RashidaTlaib (D-Detroit) and @IlhanMN (D-Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying Lloyd Doggett (D-Austin) is from Texas or @repjohnlewis (D-Atlanta) is from the Deep South. C’mon.”

He deleted that tweet before posting a mea culpa of a sort: “Earlier this morning I tried to make a point about regional differences in politics between urban and rural areas. I deleted the tweets because I realize I did not adequately make my point.”

Actually, he did make his point adequately. He was inferring that people of color in the Deep South or the Midwest don’t count. Because they don’t count, Democratic presidential candidates need not bother with them while courting their white counterparts. Weisman’s whitewashing drew the ire of what seemed like the entire black commentariat. It was a deluge of outrage forcing Weisman to say sorry.

Greg Sargent did not defend Weisman, but the Post columnist did try to suss out the greater political context of Weisman’s post, which he said is the urban-rural divide in the country that some say explains white working class resentment for being left behind in an economy rigged by global elites living in cosmopolitan cities. He said:

“Cities are both home to elites and places of terrible urban poverty — decline and suffering coexist with rebirth and human flourishing.

“But they are in some ways multicultural and economic success stories.

“That’s what Trump’s reacting to.”

I have no doubt Sargent is right that there is a real urban-rural divide. The social science seems pretty convincing. According to Mark Muro, a senior policy wonk at the Brookings Institution, the president’s “Baltimore bile speaks to racial animosity but also to the deep grievances of rural and small-town interests of his base that are increasingly being left behind by successful, dynamic, and diverse cities.”

But I doubt something.

I doubt Trump voters are animated by a resentment caused by economic conditions. The president’s base is middle class, not working class, if we define class by annual income, not education. People who are truly working class, including lots of white people, didn’t vote for Trump. They voted, as they have historically, for the Democrat. To the extent that Trump voters feel resentment that’s economically based, it’s the resentment of a petite bourgeoisie for not being able to be more bourgie.

So to say that Trump voters are motivated by resentment as a result of economic conditions may be to give more credence to their claims than those claims actually deserve. The president is not attacking cities because they are “multicultural and economic success stories.” He attacks them for reasons far dumber than that.

It seems clear, to me anyway, that Trump voter resentment is not caused by economic conditions as much as it’s caused by plain-old politics. They believe cities are taking advantage of them—and they won’t stop believing that even if a Democratic president somehow improved their rural economies. That’s because evidence and reason have nothing to do with it. These people believe cities are bad. Therefore, cities are bad.

They believe cities are taking advantage of them, because the Republican Party has for decades been telling them we are real Americans while they who live in urban centers are atheist, criminal, lazy, parasitic, or even diseased. Meanwhile, “real Americans” are pure, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying and virtuous. “We” are the makers in other words. “They” are the takers. The more very smart people find an empirical reason for such fascist thinking, the more they legitimize fascist politics.

According to Jason Stanley’s now seminal How Fascism Works, cities are a classic fascist target. Fascism—or white nationalism or white supremacy or whatever you want to call it—rejects pluralism and tolerance, two keystones of urban life. He wrote:

“Everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs. … Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic and sexual minorities … characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.”

As I said, evidence and reason don’t matter. Fact is, blue states and their big cities actually subsidize red states and their rural economies. The former sends more in federal tax dollars to Washington than the latter, and the latter receives more in federal tax dollars than the former. If anyone is a taker it’s “real Americans.”

Understanding this is important to the 2020 election but also to its press coverage. If Weisman is any indication, the media’s narrative is: What economic policies can Democrats propose that will entice Trump voters to support them? That question, however, is based on a yuge assumption—that their claims are based in reality.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 August 2019
Word Count: 895
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Mitch McConnell is mad.

He’s mad that people called him names last weekend. His feelings are hurt.

But he’s not mad just for himself.

He’s mad for his beloved country. People should be able to disagree in America, he said Monday on the Senate floor, without the insults and the name-calling.

“Here we are in 2019,” he said. “The Russians seek to provoke fear and division in our country. American pundits calling an American official treasonous because of a policy disagreement, if anything, is an asset to the Russians. It is disgusting behavior.”

There you have it.

When you call the Senate Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch,” as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough did, or “a Russian asset,” as the Post’s Dana Milbank did, you’re doing the bidding of Russian Mafia Boss Vladimir Putin. It’s unreasonable and it’s un-American.

It doesn’t matter that the Russians targeted elections systems in all 50 states, according to a bipartisan Senate report released July 25. It doesn’t matter that Robert Mueller said other countries are copying the Russian playbook. (The Post reported last week that Iran is now in the propaganda business.) It doesn’t matter that on the same day Mueller told us this McConnell blocked a bipartisan bill aimed at securing election systems. It doesn’t matter that McConnell really is enabling enemy sabotage of our sovereignty, and thus helping to foment a crisis of legitimacy.

What matters is the insults and the name-calling. “Moscow Mitch” is a “smear,” McConnell said. Calling him “a Russian asset” is “modern-day McCarthyism,” he said. And that, he said, is just what the Russians would do. Blocking a bipartisan bill to protect and secure elections systems in all 50 states was merely a “routine occurrence,” McConnell declared. None of that makes “Republicans traitors or un-American.”

Actually, it does.

That McConnell was visibly upset as he spoke should tell us the “insults” and “name-calling” are having their intended emotional effect. The truth, as they say—it hurts.

Don’t stop though.

Don’t stop saying what needs saying. The temptation, among liberals and Democrats anyway, is that we should rise above to encourage McConnell to follow suit. If we’re going to hold the Republicans to a higher calling, we must do the same. I understand the impulse, I really do, but make no mistake: that’s just what McConnell hopes for. Meanwhile, he’ll sabotage our country, over and over, and not lose a second’s sleep.

You see, McConnell isn’t a hypocrite. I know—he looks like one! Sure, he shattered the norm of presidents getting their jurisprudential due, and now he’s trying to shame two milquetoast pundits for speaking plainly about his treachery. No, no. It doesn’t work like that. Once you betray American political norms, there’s no going back.

But again, he’s no hypocrite.

Hypocrites are people who believe in something higher than power and fail to live up to it. Hypocrites can be shamed into doing the right. Not so with Moscow Mitch. He does not believe in anything that does not begin and end with his tribe. There is no there there. There’s only power. Only when he’s losing does he trot out norms he’s already shattered in a cynical attempt to shame critics for naming the whole truth.

Honesty, I would never have written any of this five years ago. I knew McConnell abused the Senate filibuster. I knew he sandbagged Barack Obama’s constitutional right to nominate judges and justices. I knew his prime directive was making Obama a one-term president. I hated everything about McConnell, but I never thought he was acting out of bounds. I thought he was terrible but I never thought he was traitorous.

Things changed after 2016.

Things changed after McConnell knew the Russians were helping Donald Trump but did everything he could to prevent the public from knowing; after the Russians succeeded by moving public opinion in key states against Hillary Clinton; after an illegitimate president placed two justices on the Supreme Court; after the Senate stopped being a law-making body and started being a judge-making body to establish, serve and protect minority rule in a liberal democracy; and after the GOP made normal the treasonous act of accepting aid from enemies overseas in order to win at home.

McConnell is now shedding crocodile tears, pained as he is by the “insults” and the “name-calling.” I feel no sympathy. I feel no impulse to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel no obligation to hold myself to a higher standard. What I feel is a white-hot patriotic rage. What I feel is what you are no doubt feeling. McConnell is mad.

But we’re madder. And we’re right to be.

 

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 August 2019
Word Count: 776
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Jonathan Bernstein said that the worst part of Robert Mueller’s testimony was hearing Republican conspiracy theories. That’s not the worst part.

The worst part is a political press that can’t or won’t say that House Republicans did little but repeat conspiracy theories they had heard from the right-wing media.

The worst part is a press corps that can’t or won’t recognize the amazing fact that a former FBI director said amazing things about the president, for instance:

•  That Donald Trump welcomed Russian interference and lied about welcoming it.

•  That Trump hoped, as a candidate, to profit from a real estate deal in Moscow.

•  That Trump is not exonerated of obstruction of justice

•  That Russia’s interference is not a hoax or “fake news.”

•  That the office of the president shields Trump from indictment (according to 40-year-old DOJ guideline) but he could be charged with crimes after leaving office.

•  That Russia interfered to help Trump win; that foreign interference as well as presidential candidates asking for foreign help may be the “new normal.”

Most of this isn’t news. There was important news, though: Mueller said all this before Congress under oath for the entire country to see. And what’s news depends on who you are. If you’re a normal person with normal worries and normal responsibilities, what Mueller had to say might be new, and for that reason alone, it was news.

But the worst thing of all was the reaction of many in the political press, and by this, I mean the highest-profile reporters from the most influential outlets and publications, so-called professional truth-tellers who listened to Robert Mueller not with concern or worry or even fear, but with indifference. Everything is as good or bad as everything else in Washington, so nothing truly matters. Welcome to moral relativist hell.

1 The Post’s Aaron Blake said the star witness wasn’t much of a star.

2 Politico’s Kyle Cheney and others called his testimony a flop.

3 The Times’ Glenn Thrush called it “a yawn.”

4 The Times’ Maggie Haberman said it would be quickly forgotten.

5 NBC’s Chuck Todd misrepresented the goal of Mueller’s testimony. When he did not rise to that false standard, Todd called it “a disaster” for the Democrats.

Trump does not need a Soviet Politburo. He does not need a Nazi Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda. He does not need an army of Russian saboteurs. He doesn’t even need House Republicans repeating conspiracy theories. All this president needs to make war on the truth, break the law, profane the US Constitution and undermine the will of the people is a press corps as aggressively anti-moral as ours.

However much he doddered, make no mistake that Robert Mueller was saying to the Congress that the president committed crimes; that future presidential candidates might not be as loyal to this country as we want them to be; that future presidents, as a result of getting foreign help, might be vulnerable to blackmail; that Mueller can not, and should not, be the sole person holding a president accountable; that only Congress can perform that duty; and everything lawmakers need is in his impeachment referral.

And yet the political press saw more of the same. This is like saying hurricanes don’t matter. This is like saying you’ve seen one natural disaster, you’ve seen them all. Sure, people are killed and injured, property is destroyed, local economies are damaged, but who really cares? The story is always the same so why bother paying attention to it?

No reporter would ever say such a thing. Indeed, saying such a thing about disasters of any kind in any newsroom in any part of the country might be a firing offense, because saying such a thing would reveal an utter lack of professionalism, and it would reveal an utter lack of character and morality. No one would ever say “why bother?” to people in need of information to rebuild their lives. Yet elite reporters were looking last Wednesday at the political equivalent of a once-every-hundred-years flood and doing what?

They were shrugging.

I explained last week what’s wrong with fascist politics in a republic. Fascists sort society into in- and out-groups. Within this structure and hierarchy, nothing matters, not even morality, except who’s in and who’s out. So even when the out-group does the right thing, doing the right thing is the wrong thing because the out-group did it.

I do not suggest that the press corps sorts society into in- and out-groups, but it clearly sorts society into political parties. Within this structure and hierarchy, nothing matters, not even morality, except who’s in which of the parties. So even when the Republicans do the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing doesn’t matter, because it’s all politics. Conversely when the Democrats do the right thing, it’s all politics. Everything is as good or bad as everything else, so nothing matters. This anti-morality is deadly.

Trump is wrong in calling the press the enemy of the people. But they aren’t his enemies either. Power is all that matters. Fascists have a way of finding each other.

 

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 July 2019
Word Count: 850
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Mitch McConnell once sent liberals into a tizzy. If a Supreme Court justice died in 2020, an election year, the majority leader said the Senate would confirm a nominee.

This was in direct contrast to what he said after Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in 2016. McConnell said the Senate would not confirm Barack Obama’s nominee. Why? Because it was an election year. He said the people should decide.

Liberals complained mightily about that, accusing McConnell of hypocrisy. But from his point of view, there was no hypocrisy. One is hypocritical only if one holds values that are higher than power. If power is one’s highest value, voila! No hypocrisy!

I thought of McConnell while reading about the current president’s claim this week that four citizens of color whom he said “hate America” should consider leaving it.

This would appear to be another example of hypocrisy. After all, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton with a message of “American carnage.” Yet no one has suggested that he leave. Only when four citizens of color complained about historical institutional racism in this country did anyone demand that they love it or leave it.

This, of course, was racist. This, of course, was hypocrisy. But we should not leave it there. What Mitch McConnell did and what Donald Trump is doing are not only hypocritical. Both men are illustrating a vision of American democracy.

A horrible vision.

In complaining about McConnell’s hypocrisy, liberals were in essence mad that he did not play according to a set of agreed-to values. McConnell never had any intention of doing any such thing. That’s what Democrats would do. But he’s a Republican.

This is not to say liberals were naive. It’s to illustrate the depth of McConnell’s betrayal. Liberals tend to think of society in universal terms, meaning what’s good for one person is good for all. This universalist mindset jives well with a democracy in which the nationalist ideal, per the Declaration of Independence, is equality.

Equality is the political expression of what Jesus taught his disciples. Along with loving God with all your heart and soul, Jesus said that everyone should treat everyone else as they would be treated. He was of course teaching the Golden Rule, which is the ancient value system that now informs our notion of the social contract. Though we are individuals, we are also a society. We’re all in this together. We are one nation.

McConnell and the Republicans do not believe we are all in this together. They do not believe in equality. They do not believe we are one nation. They do not believe even in the Golden Rule. They do not believe what’s good for one person is good for all.

They therefore do not recognize your legitimacy as a citizen or your legitimate claim to the American franchise. They therefore reserve the right to fool you into thinking they are willing to participate equitably in collaborative democratic effort. They therefore reserve the right to erode or even sabotage that effort. Indeed, if the Republicans’ policies are any indication, your death would be their preference.

Once you understand this, you understand why equality—the Golden Rule—is so very dangerous to the Republican program. Do unto others as I would have done unto me? Don’t be ridiculous! I want to command and control what others do. I want to be the richest, the strong, and the most powerful. I want to screw people over. I don’t want them screwing me over! I’m going to do everyone I can to prevent that from happening.

Getting mad at McConnell for hypocrisy is like getting mad at your cat for not understanding English. He does not hold values higher than power, so expecting him to respond to charges of hypocrisy is like expecting your cat to talk. The proper response therefore is to stop giving McConnell, Trump or the Republicans the benefit of the doubt. Expect them to sabotage democracy. Democracy threatens them.

If liberals stop at hypocrisy, they aren’t going to reach people they need. Liberals must meet a horrible vision of American democracy with a moral vision of their own.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 July 2019
Word Count: 693
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