Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – These are parlous times for people who speak out against injustice, and I cannot thank our loyal readers enough for their continued devotion to this site and for their spiritual and material support. I got a call recently from University of Michigan campus police warning me to be careful, since I had been put on a watch list by the late Charlie Kirk, who was wrongfully and horribly murdered at a young age. The police were worried that his followers might lash out against the persons he had targeted, in the wake of his tragic death. I’m not sure what I can do about that. I’m devastated by Kirk’s murder because I don’t think people are irredeemable and I wish we could have gone on arguing with him. Many of the people who did cheer leading for Bush’s illegal war on Iraq have come around to be my political allies now, and in some cases my own Iraq analysis helped them see where they had gone wrong.
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Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:
Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
Those supporters who donate $150 or more by Paypal and provide their address will receive a signed copy of my Gaza Yet Stands via Schuler’s Books in Ann Arbor (a good place to order all your books).
Juan Cole, Gaza Yet Stands (Ann Arbor: Informed Comment KDP, 2024). CLICK HERE TO BUY.
All royalties from this book are donated to charitable organizations helping the Palestinians.
The problems we face aren’t just the vigilantes. White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is attempting to configure any criticism of the extreme right wing that has captured the Republican Party and much of the country as a form of terrorism. Donald Trump himself issued a dangerous and crackpot National Security Presidential Memorandum (NPSM-7) (I mean more dangerous and more crackpot even than his demented norm) threatening to use Federal Agencies to go after those who engage in constitutionally protected speech, listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
These weasel words translate into menacing anyone who objects to the creeping Christian theocracy being imposed by Trump allies, or to the insidious reign of monopoly capitalism in the form of our new overlords, the quarter- and half-trillionaires, or the dismantling of our multi-racial democracy, established in the law in 1965, or media consolidation, or to the demonization of LGBTQ+ people. I should hope that Informed Comment has been a steady contradiction of NPSM-7, except for the anti-American part. People are always accusing you of anti-Americanism when they actually mean that you disagree with their darker impulses. Now even being against fascism is being declared un-American, which would come as a big surprise to Ike Eisenhower, or to my late uncles, Lee McIlwee and Don Orndoff, who fought Hitler’s minions in the Second World War.
IC regular Dan Dinello warned us, as well about the assault of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on America’s health provision systems, and on the very principle of vaccination, which has saved millions of lives in a provably safe way.
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An attempt is also being made by extreme-right organizations such as Betar and Canary Mission, in alliance with the Trump administration, to criminalize criticism of the Israeli government. As you all know, I am critical of Israeli policies toward the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the current government’s complete disregard for International Humanitarian Law. Informed Comment has been one of the few news and commentary sites you can find at Google News that has covered the ongoing Gaza genocide in detail, and has had straightforward headlines about the genocide there that name the Israeli military and do not resort to the passive mood. I am also interested in Israeli push-back against the Netanyahu government, which we have covered fairly intensively, and alongside Palestinian voices, we have published Israeli historians and analysts who critique the current policies.
We will continue to report on Israel-Palestine, from the best primary sources and with the best possible tools of political and historical analysis. Few will make that pledge today in America. We do.
Although IC has been shadow-banned on Facebook and gets a fraction of the hits from that platform that it used to, I’m convinced we still have a wide reach because people email the posts around. We have no metrics for how many people see them this way, but the number could be very large. By the way, this is a reason you should *not* try to subscribe to IC via Facebook (or, heaven forfend, X/ Twitter). Subscribe for the email Newsletter to make sure you don’t miss any of our hard hitting analysis of current affairs.
Trump and his allies are also attacking the science of climate change and attempting to gut the green energy sector in the United States. Informed Comment has long reported on climate and energy issues, subjects into which I was led by my Middle East expertise and knowledge of oil markets. We will vigorously underline advances made in sustainability, and point to the increasing challenges facing us all from climate breakdown — challenges that we can overcome by being aware and active citizens.
By the way, if you like an essay at Informed Comment, do copy it and its URL (in the window above the post) into an email and send it to friends. Or better yet, subscribe to the daily newsletter and send it back out to friends. Email is one of the last means we have of defying the information monopolies that are gobbling up television (as with the Ellisons’ takeover of CBS) and the algorithms that have been used by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others to suppress progressive journalism.
Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:
Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
All American institutions — cities, universities, states, hospitals, newspapers and other media — are being stress-tested by an un-American extremism that has captured all three branches of the federal government. Informed Comment will stand for the Constitution when others bend. And while we are small potatoes — the blog of a Midwestern college teacher — we can hope to model what a peaceful, reasoned standing of our ground looks like. Please help us do that, and please join the irenic struggle.
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