( Tomdispatch.com ) – One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.

In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict — with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” — including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria — has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

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It was President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could “obliterate” Iran.

Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.

Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.

“Natanz,” Digital Imagining, Dream, Realistic v. 2, 2024.

Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as the Washington Post reports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”

Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad

While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.

Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.

In exchange, the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.

Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.

But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)

Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”

Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions…. We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”

Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.

Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.

“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”

Biden’s Reign of (Unforced) Error

Having long supported a deal with Iran —  in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders — Joe Biden called Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.

Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.

Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks.”

It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”

When the talks finally did resume in April — “gingerly,” according to the New York Times — they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.

That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.

It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”

Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again.  “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.

By the end of 2022, Biden reportedly declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil, and increased concern about Iranian drones being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.

Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks — helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues – resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political ceasefire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”

But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7th attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?

Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.

What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”

“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”

And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket. 

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

I turn 80 in July, which makes me just over a year-and-a-half younger than Joe Biden and almost two years older than Donald Trump. And, honestly, I know my limits. Yes, I still walk — no small thing — six miles a day. And I work constantly. But I’m also aware that, on my second walk of the day and then as night approaches, I feel significantly more tired than I once did. I’m also aware that my brain, still active indeed, does forget more than it once did. And all of this is painfully normal. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing whatsoever.

I also know from older friends that we humans can still be distinctly functional, thoughtful, and capable at age 82 (when Donald Trump would leave his second term in office) or even 86 (when Joe Biden would do the same). But honestly, what are the odds? I’ll tell you one thing that couldn’t be more obvious — not as good as for someone who’s, say, 55 or 60 years old, that’s for sure. Yes, there’s also the reputed wisdom of old age — and it might indeed make Joe Biden a more thoughtful president, were he to get a second term; Donald Trump, of course, would be Donald Trump, at 60 or 82.

And I have little doubt that, whatever age you are, you’ve been thinking somewhat similar thoughts. I mean, doesn’t the very possibility of watching a televised debate between the two of them make you anxious? After all, the oldest president to previously leave office was Ronald Reagan at 77 (and by then he may have had dementia). Before him, the oldest was Dwight D. Eisenhower who ended his second term in 1961 at 70 years old, having had a heart attack while in office. Third comes William Henry Harrison, who entered the White House in 1841 at age 68 and died, possibly of pneumonia, 32 days later.  Now, it’s also a fact that we Americans are generally lasting longer than once upon a time. But is that really where you want to put your political money? I doubt it.

Still, all of the above is too obvious to belabor, so here’s a question: Are there any other implications we can draw from the upcoming battle between those two old men that’s going to grab our attention and steal the headlines for all too many months to come? The answer, I suspect, is yes. Sometimes in our world, the symbolic is all too subtle, but every now and then it impolitely smacks you in the face. And at least as far as I’m concerned, the second Biden-Trump election campaign should more than qualify in that regard.

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I mean, the country that still passes for the greatest power on Planet Earth is going to set a limping age record for president, no matter who wins, leaving China’s Xi Jinping, now 70, and Russia’s Vladmir Putin, now 71, as relative youths in an all-American world of absolute ancientness. And that should certainly tell you something about the state of our country and this planet, too.

To be a little clearer about just what, let me add one more factor to the equation. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are preparing a fight to the wire to lead an America that, not so many decades ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was considered the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. Doesn’t that tell you something?

I think it does. I think, quite bluntly (though I’ve seen no one discussing this amid the endless media headlines and chatter about Trump and Biden), that those two old codgers offer a stunning image of the all-too-literal decline and fall of — yes! — the United States. They should make us consider where the country that still likes to think of itself as the singularly most powerful and influential one on this planet is really heading.

A World Without Peace Dividends

As you might imagine, there’s a prehistory to all of this. George H. W. Bush, president at the moment when the Soviet Union went down in 1991, had that very year ordered the U.S. military to launch Operation Desert Storm, which drove Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait. In its own fashion, it also launched what would, in the century that followed, become a set of American military operations around the globe. At the same time, with Russia in tatters and China still a modestly rising power — with, that is, no true great-power enemies left on Planet Earth — that sole superpower would do something rather surprising. It would continue to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military-industrial complex. Yes, there was talk then about a “peace dividend” for this country and its people, but none ever arrived.

Thirty-two years later, the Pentagon budget has almost hit the trillion-dollar mark annually, while the overall national “security” (yes, it’s still called that!) budget long ago soared well above the trillion-dollar mark. Meanwhile, in this century, George H. W. Bush’s son, elected president in November 2000, would the following September respond to the 9/11 attacks, planned and carried out by Osama bin Laden and his small terror group, al-Qaeda, by launching what quickly came to be known as “the Global War on Terror.” And all too global it would be with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It would also prove a disaster of the first order for the last superpower, whose military would leave literally millions dead across the planet, destroy countries, decimate economies, and create tens of millions of refugees, while costing this country a staggering $8 trillion and counting as, over more than 20 years, the U.S. military lost wars, while terrorism as a phenomenon only grew.

Yes, in May 2011, Osama bin Laden would be killed in Pakistan by a team of U.S. Navy Seals. Still, were he alive today, I suspect he would be pleased indeed. With next to nothing other than his personal wealth, a small crew of followers, and some hijacked airplanes, he managed to outmaneuver and outplay what was then the greatest power on Planet Earth. Thanks to the slaughter of several thousand Americans in New York and Washington, he also managed to draw this country into an endless war against “terrorism” and, in the process, turn it into an increasingly terrorized country, whose inhabitants are now, however symbolically (and, in the future, possibly far more literally), at each other’s throats.

In some eerie fashion, both former President Trump and President Biden might be considered creations of al-Qaeda. And so might the country itself today. I mean, could an American of 1991 ever have imagined that, in 2024, polls would show the urge for violence against fellow Americans reaching eerie highs here? Meanwhile, approximately one in 20 of us is now armed with a military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Even young people can now possess a JR-15 (for “junior”) child’s version of such weaponry that’s all too deadly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, AR-15s have proven the weapon of choice in the worst of the mass killings that have become commonplace in this country and, in recent years, have been distinctly on the rise. They could indeed be considered “terrorist” activities, involving as they do the repeated deaths of startling numbers of us. And all of this is happening without an American-style al-Qaeda yet truly in sight. Mind you, there are now an estimated almost 400 million weapons of various kinds in the possession of American civilians, a stunning arsenal for any country, no less one increasingly divided against itself. Meanwhile, according to a recent NPR/News Hour/Marist poll, 3 in 10 Republicans (or 20 million of us) claim that “Americans may have to resort to violence to set things straight” in this country, while, on the right, militarized terror-style groups are ever more the order of the day.

Consider that a brief summary of the increasingly divided and divisive American society over which those two old men are now fighting, a domestic world that could, in the end, rip apart whatever fantasies our leaders may still have about American power on this planet.

Coming Apart at the Seams?

As was true of the Soviet Union until almost the moment it collapsed in a heap, the U.S. still appears to be an imperial power of the first order. It has perhaps 750 military bases scattered around the globe and continues to act like a power of one on a planet that itself seems distinctly in crisis. It also continues to organize for a new Cold (verging on Hot) War with China in the Pacific. That explains President Biden’s recent highly publicized “summit” in Washington with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines, just as it explains the way U.S. special operations forces have only recently been “permanently” assigned to an island only a few kilometers off China’s coast. Yes, as that recent meeting with the Japanese and Filipino leaders and those commandos suggest, the Biden administration is still dealing with China in particular as if this were indeed a Cold War moment, and the sort of “containment” of a communist country the president grew up with was still the order of the day for the globe’s greatest power.

Unfortunately, that’s truly an old man’s version of the world we now live in. I’m thinking about the planet which, each month, sets a new heat record and where, despite much talk about cutting fossil fuels, the U.S. in 2023 produced more oil (13.5 million barrels a day) than at any time in its history, while China’s coal-power capacity grew more rapidly than ever. And that’s just to start down a list of fossil-fuelized bad news. On a planet that itself looks as if it might be going to hell, amid record heat, fires, storms, and the like, the urge to put such effort into organizing alliances of nations in the Pacific (led by Washington, of course) to “contain” China in an ever more warlike fashion represents, it seems to me, folly of the first order.

It’s increasingly an illusion (or do I mean delusion?) that this country has any sort of genuine control over the rest of the planet (no less itself). And today — with those two old men, one of whom is also bizarre beyond compare, wrestling each other for the presidency — this country is threatening in its own odd fashion, like the USSR in 1991, to come apart at the seams.

It’s strange to think about just how distant the America I grew up in — the one that emerged from World War II as the global powerhouse — now seems. If you had told anyone then that more than three-quarters of a century later, there would be well-armed private militias forming in a country armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry or that one presidential candidate would already be hinting at calling out the military to subdue his opponents if he ends up back in the White House, who would have believed you? It wouldn’t have even seemed like convincing science fiction.

And yet today, the greatest country on Earth (or so its leaders still like to believe), the one that continues to pour taxpayer dollars into a military funded like no other, or even combination of others, the one that has been unable to win any war of significance since 1945, seems to be threatening to come apart at the seams. Yes, this presidential campaign could turn out to be about the decline and fall of it all — and, of course, if Donald Trump (“drill, drill, drill“) ends up back in the White House that decline and fall could happen in a fashion almost beyond imagining.

The once-lone superpower, and now perhaps the loneliest power of all, could even be heading for previously unimaginable autocratic waters or who knows what else? If only it were otherwise, but unfortunately, in the months to come, we’ll be watching as an all-American world possibly spins slowly out of control, while the leftovers of the American Century fight it out in a country where all too many of us seem focused on anything but what matters.

As one old man to two others, if only you could stand down, we could face the world we’re actually in before it becomes too late.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

The court was unanimous in determining that neither Colorado – which had banned Trump from the ballot – nor any other US state is qualified to decide on the eligibility of a presidential candidate. Furthermore, a majority opinion coming from the five conservative judges – three of them nominated by Trump himself – determined that only the US Congress can disqualify an individual from running for office on the grounds of insurrection.

This majority opinion, the three progressive judges in the minority warned, risked closing the door to any possible future US Supreme Court decision to ban an insurrectionist from becoming President. An indictment against Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is still possible but the Supreme Court would probably not act on it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, media attention is focused on a judicial proceeding taking place in Münster, a city in the West of the country. At the core of the dispute, we find the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany or AfD) and the “Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz” (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), a domestic intelligence agency that has no clear counterpart in other European countries.

The agency’s role is to police anti-constitutional extremism. The BfV, however, has often been unable or unwilling to fulfill this vital task. From 2012 to 2018, when the president of the agency was Hans-Georg Maaßen, the AfD – founded in 2013 – grew more powerful and more radical. Maaßen recently founded a right-wing party called “Werteunion” (Values Union) that is willing to reach agreements with the AfD and embraces part of its agenda.

In 2021, the BfV determined that the AfD merited the category of “suspected case of far-right extremism.” The far-right party appealed against the decision and the case has dragged on until now. The hearing in Münster is the second and last appeal. The AfD is likely to lose the appeal, but that would not imply its illegalization. A win for the BfV would bring further rights to investigate and surveil the activities of the party.

Both Trump and the AfD have been following the same legal strategy when forced to appear before the courts: delay, delay, and, if possible, delay even further. CNN reporter Stephen Collinson notes that Trump “appears to want to also forestall jury verdicts until after the general election – likely because polls have suggested some voters would be less keen to vote for him if he is a convicted felon.”

Meanwhile, the AfD wants to prevent for as long as possible a final decision on whether the BfV was right in qualifying the AfD as a “suspected case of far-right extremism.” This could negatively affect its electoral performance. There are elections to the European Parliament in June and regional elections in the three Eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September. In the European elections, the AfD is polling second with around 20% of the vote, whereas in the three Eastern states, the radical right is polling first with over 30% of the vote.

After the September elections in three of the five eastern states, broad coalitions, or at least tacit alliances from the left to the center-right will be needed to avoid that the far-right reaches its highest level of power in Germany since the end of the Second World War. In this sense, it is very worrying that the leader of the center-right CDU, Friederich Merz, continues to equate the left-wing party “Die Linke” with the AfD, announcing it will reach agreements with neither of these forces. Unless the pre-election polls are wrong by a huge margin, the CDU will soon be forced to pick a side.

By delaying the legal process in Münster, the AfD does not only seek to preserve the pretense that it is just as legitimate as any other German party – if not more, according to their discourse. The far-right party also seeks to prevent the BfV from taking the next step and qualify the whole AfD as “proven right-wing extremist”. The regional AfD groups in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt are already classified in this category.

DW News Video: “Why is Germany’s far-right AfD party so successful? | DW News”

The AfD has close ties with openly neo-Nazi groups and some of its leaders, especially in eastern Germany, have adopted a language very often reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Björn Höcke, the regional leader of the AfD in Thuringia and powerbroker within the national leadership of the party, has used multiple times the expression “Everything for Germany”, the motto of the SA, a paramilitary Nazi group that was key in Hitler’s power takeover in 1933.

Höcke has said that Africans have a biological reproduction strategy different from Europeans or, about Adolf Hitler, that “there is no black and white in history.” The AfD often employs terms such as “Volkstod” (death of the German nation), as well as “Stimmvieh” (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties.

The AfD has often fantasized about the possibilities of “remigration”, a common term among far-right European groups. The concept refers to the deportation of people with a migration background and has been popularized by Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi. The Austrian ideologist is banned from entering the US because he accepted money from – and probably met – Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist. In 2019, Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in his attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. On March 19 it became known that Sellner had been banned from entering Germany.

The concept of “remigration” is not a new one, and Höcke and other members of the most radical current within the AfD have been toying with the idea for years. However, many Germans became aware of how specific the concept of “remigration” has become in recent times when it was revealed that Sellner had presented his racist theses in a secret meeting in Potsdam organized by two businessmen. The meeting was attended by high-ranking AfD cadres – among them Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Sachsen-Anhalt – and some low-ranking members of the center-right CDU, who were later forced to resign. According to research by the independent investigative platform Correctiv, Sellner proposed that a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens.

The Correctiv revelations triggered a wave of massive demonstrations in Germany against the far-right. They also renewed the discussion on whether a process should be started to ban the AfD. A call for a party ban can be issued by the German government, the parliament, or the Bundesrat, an institution where the different German states are represented. The final decision would always be in the hands of the German Constitutional Court. The process could take years and there would be no guarantee of success. The openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was deemed too politically irrelevant to be banned when the Constitutional Court decided on the matter in 2017.

There is no consensus between the different German parties on whether an attempt to ban the AfD is the path to follow. The differences of opinion are also found within the parties. Whereas a parliamentarian for the center-right CDU was one of the early proponents of banning the AfD, the leader of the party Frederich Merz is against this. The neoliberal FDP is generally against the ban. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz have not taken a clear position, as views diverge on the issue. Within the Greens, banning the AfD would probably find wider acceptance. Every case is different, but the governing coalition in the northwestern state of Bremen, where the Social Democrats lead a government with the Greens and the left-wing “Die Linke”, has asked for an AfD ban.

German society appears to be equally divided on the appropriateness of initiating a process to illegalize the AfD. According to a poll from February 2024, 51 percent of the population was against starting such a process and 37 percent was in favor. The percentages change significantly when citizens are asked whether the AfD should continue to receive public funding as the other parties do. 41 percent are in favor while 48 percent want public funds not to reach the AfD.

On February 23, I attended a counterdemonstration against Martin Sellner, the neo-Nazi who has been pushing for “remigration”, when he visited the city of Chemnitz, in the state of Saxony. The protest was organized by “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, a group that has been mobilizing against the far-right for fourteen years in a city that represents a radical right stronghold.

Before the march against Sellner, I discussed with two activists of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement their views on whether a procedure should be started to ban the AfD. They told me this had been a major issue of discussion within their group in recent times. Although more members of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement are in favor of an AfD ban than against it, there is no clear majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a ban, the activists I interviewed remarked, is the significant consequences this would have for the AfD’s financial situation, which could be forced to reduce its activities. At the same time, they fear that AfD followers could become more violent if a ban was implemented. They did not discard that something similar to the assault on the Capitol in Washington could take place in Germany if the AfD was banned. The open question for the members of “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, as for many others, is: If you ban the AfD, what about the situation afterward? A poll from February 2024 shows that only 43 percent of those who plan to vote for the AfD would be willing to consider voting for another party in the coming years.

It is certainly urgent to discuss whether Trump should be able to run again for president, or whether the AfD should be banned by the Constitutional Court. But the key issue is that broad sectors of both German and US society – a far stronger one in the latter case – have radicalized themselves to the extent that they are ready to use the instruments of democracy to undermine its foundations. This does not mean that every Trump or AfD voter is anti-democratic, and part of these voters can still be convinced to move to less extremist positions. But a considerable percentage of them, and maybe even the majority, have crossed the point of no return.

Democracy is not only destroyed through authoritarian power grabs or military coups but also through free and fair elections. While Germany has known this for a long time due to its historical trajectory, this does not necessarily imply that it is better prepared than other countries. The poor performance of the BfV in protecting the Constitution is proof of this.

While democratic systems offer many opportunities that right-wing radicals can exploit, they are not defenseless and have mechanisms to combat radicalism. If all democratic forces in Germany take the right-wing threat seriously – and here the center-right CDU needs to play a responsible role – and focus on what unites them, the AfD can still be kept away from the main centers of power in the country. It might be too late for the US, where Biden has recovered some ground in the polls in recent months but lags behind Trump in the states that will probably decide the November election. Germany, meanwhile, still has a strong anti-AfD majority but should not be too complacent.

Asked to comment on the fact that Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed to return once they were forcibly displaced from Gaza, Kushner responded, “Maybe, but I’m not sure there’s much left of Gaza at this point.” And to further discredit the enclave, Trump’s son-in-law described it as having no historical precedent – “It was the result of a war – you had tribes that went different places and then Gaza became a thing.” He’s wrong, of course; Gaza has a very long history behind it. It’s the Gaza Strip as a territorial entity that is a relatively recent construct.

The simplifications have become obscene. Gaza is the entire symbol and experience of Palestine

It holds Palestinian history and memory within a confined space that is now subjected to what is very obviously genocide according to all legal definitions, while the world debates and questions whether Israel really is, when all is said and done, committing genocide. And if it is, what about 7 October? This obscene normalisation and acceptance of genocide is built upon normalising decades of Israeli colonial violence so, unfortunately, no one should really be surprised. Nevertheless, the shame of it should stain the international community forever.

Kushner’s humanitarian pretences are equally as hypocritical as those of the international community. The international community, a euphemism for Western countries, refuses to take in Palestinian refugees on the grounds that those countries do not want to be complicit in the forced displacement of the indigenous population of Palestine. But the same countries do not appear to mind Palestinians being subjected to an Israeli genocide, which is the ultimate form of ethnic cleansing. How far fetched would it be for Israel and Kushner to have their way, and we see the international community praising settlements and real estate deals as “economics for peace”? Of course, there would be no Palestinians left to make peace with in such a scenario, or the numbers would be so low that peace would fall from the equation, leaving only economic benefits for Israel and its accomplices.

There is not much left in terms of Gaza’s infrastructure, but Kushner is wrong to say there’s not much left of Gaza. If the citizens of a country are its essence, then 2.3 million Palestinians are Gaza. His sweeping statement eliminates even the existence of Gaza — and thus its Palestinian population — which is still a territorial reality, albeit one now imbued with a new bloody history that is Israel’s doing.

Majority Report with Sam Seder Video: “Jared Kushner Sees Israel “Cleaning” Gaza And Developing Its Beachfront Property”

“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” Kushner added for context, while explaining to the interviewer what he’d do if he was in Israel. This was the epitome of how international politics plays out in Palestine, and what Palestinians have suffered as a result.

Someone sitting in Miami Beach, or anywhere else for that matter, has no right to decide the genocidal fate of Palestinians. However, as much as Kushner should be called out for his complicity, so should the UN, the international entity that recognised a colonial enterprise built upon an ethnic cleansing in process which has now morphed into the world’s most complicit genocidal action.

Waterfront real estate in Gaza when Palestinians’ homes have been completely destroyed? This is what happens when the UN only speaks in terms of purportedly isolated violations and not in terms of the ongoing Zionist colonial conquest of Palestine.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

All too many of us who now argue about the Ukraine and Gaza wars and their ensuing humanitarian crises, about police violence and extremism in the military here at home, about all sorts of things, would no longer share a common language. Basics that once might have meant the same thing to you and me, like claiming someone won an election, might become unsafe to mention. In a Trump 2.0 world, more of our journalists would undoubtedly face repercussions and need to find roundabout ways to allude to all too many topics. A moving opinion column by the New York Times’s David French, who faced threats for his writing about Donald Trump, highlighted how some who voiced their views on him already need round-the-clock police protection to ensure their safety and that of their family.

I often think about the slippery slope we Americans could soon find ourselves on. After all, from the time Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president in 1999, I spent 20 years traveling to his country and back, working there first as an anthropology doctoral student and later as a human rights researcher. I’ve followed Russian politics closely, including as a therapist specializing in war-affected populations, asylum seekers, and refugees. Friends and colleagues of mine there have faced threats to their safety and their careers amid a Kremlin crackdown on public discussion after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and several fled the country with their families in search of safety and a better life.

To be sure, there are many differences between the United States, with its robust democratic tradition, and Russia, which only briefly had competitive elections and a free press. Nonetheless, my experiences there offer a warning about how a Trumpian version of top-down rule could someday stifle any possibility of calling out state-sponsored violence for what it is, and what it might feel like if that’s our situation here someday.

Tucker Carlson’s Moscow

On first look, far-right journalist Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Moscow, covered exuberantly by Russia’s state media, might seem like an example of an American tourist’s naïve glorification of another country’s luxuries. Carlson marveled at the fancy tilework of the city’s subway system, visited the national ballet, and noted that you can buy caviar cheaply at the local grocery store. He also pointed out that Moscow’s pristine streets had no homeless people and no apparent poverty.

In the gilded halls of the Kremlin palace, he interviewed President Putin for more than two hours. Despite his guileless expression, Carlson occasionally appeared flummoxed as Putin lectured him endlessly on Russian history and the centuries-old claim he insisted Moscow has on Kyiv as its protector from aggressors near and far. Of course, he never challenged Putin on his rationale for invading that country (nor did he refer to it as an invasion) or any of the Russian leader’s other outrageous claims.

I’m of the school of thought that considers Putin’s Russia exactly the sort of anti-woke paradise the MAGA crowd craves. Anyone of Carlson’s age who grew up during the Cold War and turned on his or her television in that pivotal period when the Berlin Wall fell should certainly know that all of Russia doesn’t look anything like what he was shown. He should also have known about the recent history of economic “shock therapy” that drained Russian public services of funding and human resources, not to speak of the decades of corruption and unfair economic policies that enriched a choice few in Putin’s circle at the expense of so many.

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Of course, something had to happen to turn the Moscow that Carlson saw into a sanitized moonscape. If you haven’t been following developments in Russia under Putin, let me summarize what I’ve noticed.

Protesters — even many going to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s recent memorial service — have been arrested or at least intimidated when appearing to sympathize with anything that’s not part of the Kremlin’s official pro-Putin ideology. Many groups, from Asian migrants to the homeless, have either been rounded up by the police or at least relocated far out of the view of tourists of any sort. In fact, the imprisoned American journalist whom Carlson briefly gestured toward emancipating, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, had written on the practice of zachistki, or mop-up operations by the Russian authorities that, for instance, relocated homeless services to the outskirts of Moscow, far from public view. Of course, Gershkovich is now imprisoned indefinitely in Russia on charges of espionage for simply reporting on the war in Ukraine, proving the very point Carlson so studiously avoided, that an endless string of lies underscore Putin’s latest war.

What’s more, amid sub-subsistence wages, housing shortages, and the thin walls of so many city apartments, ordinary Russians are not always able to engage in the “hard conversations” that conservatives like Alabama Senator Katie Britt boast of having in their well-furbished kitchens. After all, neighbors are now encouraged to denounce each other for decrying Russia’s war. (You could, it seems, even end up in prison if your child writes “no to war” on a drawing she did for school.)

There are very personal ramifications to living in an autocracy with which Tucker Carlson and, of course, the Orange Jesus himself are signaling their agreement when they entertain the views of leaders like Vladimir Putin or call Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán “fantastic.” They’re signaling what their end goal is to Americans and, sadly enough, it’s not particularly far-fetched anymore to suggest that, someday, we won’t even have the freedom to talk about all of this with each other.

The Thing That Cannot Be Named

Tucker Carlson at least did his homework. He clearly knew that you couldn’t describe the war in Ukraine as an unprovoked Russian invasion, given that country’s carefully crafted censorship laws.

Since his February 2022 invasion, Putin has referred to it as a “special military operation” focused on the defense of Russia from NATO and the “denazification” of Ukraine. During that first spring, the Russian president signed a law forbidding journalists from even calling the invasion a “war,” choosing instead to frame the killing, displacement, abduction, torture, and rape of Ukrainian citizens as a surgical rescue operation provoked by the victims themselves. Broader, vaguer censorship laws were then passed, further limiting what Russians of all stripes could say, including one against “discrediting the army,” which imposed stiff fines and prison sentences, and more recently, property confiscations on anyone deemed to have said anything negative about Russia’s armed forces. While the thousands of arrests made may seem modest, given Russia’s 146 million people, it’s still, in my opinion, thousands too many.

The Russian leader’s perverse framing of his unprovoked war is undoubtedly what also allows him to admit that hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded so far, something he couldn’t otherwise say. In a country suffused with right-wing Christian nationalism, it also certainly helps his cause that most of Russia’s war dead come from remote, poor, and predominantly minority regions.

This is the sort of muddling of meaning and motives that autocratic leaders engage in to justify deaths of all kinds. American equivalents might be what the MAGA crowds do when they blame the January 6th far-right assault at the Capitol, aimed at police and lawmakers, on the “Antifa,” or extreme leftists, without disputing that people were hurt. Or consider then-President Donald Trump’s comment that far-right white supremacist Charlottesville rioters and counter-protesters included “very fine people on both sides” — no matter that one such fine person plowed down a counter-protester in his car, murdering her, or that certain of those “fine” white supremacists espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories considered by some an incitement to violence.

For their part, Russians of various political stripes enjoy an ancient tradition of using dark humor and irony to engage in the kinds of conversations they really want to have. Take as an example the way progressive journalists like those at the news stations TV Rain and Novaya Gazeta (since banned from operating) began discussing the war in Ukraine as “the thing that cannot be named.” Eventually, however, sweeping censorship laws prevented even workarounds like those.

It’s not a small thing to live in a place where you can’t say what you want to for fear of political persecution, especially when you’ve grown up in other circumstances. A good friend of mine who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall and led a prosperous, happy life in St. Petersburg, fled the country on the last train out of that city to Helsinki, Finland, her young child in tow. Her goal: to start life over from scratch and avoid having to raise her child in a place where he would be brainwashed into thinking Russia’s armed forces and police were infallible and beyond critique. I suspect that many of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who joined her in fleeing the country weren’t that different.

Imagine raising a child whose unquestioning mind you can’t recognize. (That goes for you, too, Trump supporters, because — count on it! — once in office again, he would undoubtedly move toward ending elections as we know them, not to speak of shutting down whatever institutions protect our speech!)

America and the Lie that Begot Other Lies

Events in recent years indicate that Americans — particularly those in the MAGA camp — have grown inured to the public mention of armed violence. Who could forget the moment in 2016 when candidate Trump boasted at a campaign rally before winning the presidency that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”? As racially and politically motivated violence and threats have proliferated, so many of us seemed to grow ever less bothered by both the incidents themselves and the rationales of those who seek to encourage and justify them.

My own adult life began as Vladimir Putin consolidated power in Russia, while former President George W. Bush launched his — really, our — disastrous Global War on Terror, based on lies like that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, we’ve spilled all too little ink here on the nearly one million people who died across our Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African war zones since 2001 (and the many millions more who lost their lives, even if less directly, or were turned into refugees thanks to those wars of ours). And don’t forget the more than 7,000 American troops (and more than 8,000 contractors!) who died in the process, essentially baptizing our national lies in pools of blood. And how could that not have helped normalize other lies to come like Trump’s giant one about the 2020 election?

Thankfully, in this country we can still say what we want (more or less). We can still, for instance, call out the Pentagon for underreporting the deaths its forces have caused. In other words, something like the Costs of War Project that I helped to found to put our lies in context can still exist. But how long before such things could become punishable, if not by law, then through vigilantism?

Yes, President Biden is arming Israel in its gruesome fight against Hamas while providing only the most modest aid to Gaza’s war-devastated population, but we can still hold him to account for that. If the 2024 election goes to Donald Trump, how long will that be true? If we don’t get to the point right now where all of us are calling out lies all the time, then every Trumpian lie about violence — from Republican members of Congress calling the January 6th rioters “peaceful patriots” to The Donald’s claim that he would only be a dictator on “day one” of his next presidency (a desire supported by a significant majority of Republicans) — will amount to lies as consequential as the 1933 burning of the Reichstag parliament building in Germany, which Hitler’s ascendant Nazi party attributed to communists, setting the stage for him to claim sweeping powers.

We are entering a new and perilous American world and it’s important to grasp that fact. In that context, let me mention a Russian moment when I did no such thing. I still feel guilty about a dinner I had with human-rights colleagues in 2014, including a Russian activist who had dedicated his career to documenting political violence and war crimes committed under successive Russian leaders from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin. I was sitting at the far end of the table where I couldn’t catch much of the conversation and I joked that I was “out in Siberia.” Yes, my dinner companions graciously laughed, but with an undercurrent of discomfort and tension — and for good reason. They knew the dangerous world they were in and, in fact, that very activist has since been sent to a penal colony for his work discrediting the actions of the Russian armed forces. My joke is anything but a joke now and consider that a reminder of how quickly things can change — and not just in Russia, either.

In fact, oppression feels closer than ever in America today and verbal massaging, joking, or willful ignorance can only mask what another Trump presidency could mean for us all.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

Election districts that do a terrible job identifying their voters expose their state to problems far beyond a few votes by individuals with impossible ages. Consider that in 2020 New York voters with no personally identifiable information (PII – Social Security or driver’s license numbers) in the voter database cast nearly as many ballots as Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump—more than 1.8 million votes.

Before anyone claims this is the smoking gun that proves massive voter fraud, let me assure you that no one has brought forth legally admissible proof of voter fraud sufficient to change any state election result in 2020. And I should know. I was hired by the Trump campaign to look for voter fraud in the days after that election.

These impossibly old voters and voters who lack PII represent sloppy computer systems and reveal a lack of statewide standards for how New York’s counties operate their elections. With birthdates of 1800, 1850, and 1900, those overly-aged New York voters have placeholder dates of birth, put there because election workers didn’t know the actual date. New York election officials should have flagged these voters as problematic, researched them, and either fixed the data or removed them from the rolls. These issues impact the overall integrity (and perception of integrity) of New York’s election systems and interfere with election officials’ ability to maintain the voter rolls properly.

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This is a bipartisan issue in New York. Forty-nine percent of all registered voters in the state are Democrats, while about 22 percent are Republicans. When it comes to voters who lack PII, 49 percent are Democrats and 29 percent are Republicans.

The lack of PII carries serious consequences. Not being able to sort the dead from the living via PII and valid birth dates is a monumental problem that leads to bloated voter rolls. Bloated voter rolls artificially lower election turnout percentages, waste the time and money of campaigns trying to reach voters who may no longer exist, and open the door to mischief—or worse.

It also leads to 118-year-old voters. There are obvious problems with this extraordinary bit of longevity and civic duty beyond the fact that the oldest human being still alive is 116. And yet, New York has 3,595 registrants older than 118 years (based on their recorded date of birth). Votes were cast by 269 of these registrants in 2022, and 368 of them voted in 2020. As you might have guessed, 3,474 lack PII.

But the problem is deeper than voting by the immortal elderly. Almost 1.2 million registrants have no votes recorded in the data file and have been registered to vote in New York for at least 20 years. Of these, more than 800,000 do not have PII. Many of these registrants are most likely deceased and fell through the cracks. They should have been purged from the rolls long ago. If they had, New York’s 2020 voter turnout would have improved from roughly 70 to 78 percent. Sadly, this has gone on for so long that election officials cannot uniquely identify these voters without expensive data analytics.

It gets worse. More than 3 million registrants are currently on the rolls without PII, according to data from a 2022 Freedom of Information inquiry. Of those, more than 1.8 million voted in 2020, and 1.4 million voted in 2022. Many of these date from 1989, before the federal law requiring voters to present PII when being registered. Despite the passage of the law requiring PII, New York continues to enroll voters it can’t uniquely identify. The state should backfill the missing PII for as many voters as possible.

Part of the reason for this mess is the lack of having one central state elections hub. Instead, New York’s counties are responsible for administering elections, which leads to chaos when the counties do things differently. In the 2020 election, New York counties identified votes in ten different ways. Inconsistency is the enemy of integrity.

Why is there no statewide standard for recording votes the same way by every county? This is a seemingly simple thing to implement and enforce. One might wonder about other ways New York’s counties administer their elections differently.

To show I bear no ill will towards New York, New Jersey has nearly 25,000 impossibly old voters, almost 8,000 of whom cast votes in 2020.

Our election infrastructure is a mission-critical component of our governance. The data that underpins that infrastructure should be sound. An election system that cannot uniquely identify its registrants as severely as New York’s should be unacceptable to everyone.

Chansley has written two books and produced a dozen or so videos about his political ideas; in October, 2023 he filed paperwork to run for Congress in Arizona’s Eighth District. Though he didn’t follow through and mount an actual campaign, had he run and won he likely wouldn’t have been the most extreme member of the House. And Donald Trump, whom Chanley and his fellow Q travelers believed was God’s anointed, is very much a contender for the highest office in the land.   

Chansley’s red-pill moment came, he says, when he discovered the writings of the arch conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, who was inspired in his turn by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery that purported to expose an ancient Jewish plot to destroy the Christian nations. As Chansley’s thinking evolved, he went on to embrace eco-fascism, anti-vax activism, Christian nationalism, New Age religiosity, and Libertarianism—a stew that is sometimes called “conspirituality.” I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about the deep roots of paranoid conspiracy theory in American history, but if you want to know what they come down to, his prayer sums it up succinctly. It’s about how “they” are taking what is rightfully “ours.”

Who “they” are has changed over the centuries, but what’s “ours” has always been the privileges that white Christian men believed was their birthright, but for too many, seemed to be slipping away. In colonial times, “they” were agents of the Pope. In the 1790s and the 1820s they were atheistic members of the Illuminati and the Masons. By the mid-19^th century, the enemy was the Irish and other Catholic immigrants who were competing for jobs. The fight over slavery spawned a host of rival conspiracy theories. During the post-Civil War era, which saw the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of vast economic inequalities, the focus shifted to English and Jewish bankers and the demonetization of silver. A few decades later, Jewish anarchists and reds and integrationists were also in the crosshairs. QAnon, the first conspiracy theory to be born on social media, takes bits and pieces from its predecessors, mixes and matches them with medieval blood libels and Gnostic apocalypticism, and gamifies it all by inviting believers to participate in its world-building. Donald Trump, in their telling, is secretly battling the elite cabal of pedophile cannibals who control the Deep State.

Whether they make you laugh or cry, those theories wouldn’t be as viral and sticky as they are if their believers weren’t experiencing real stresses—and if the horrible things they accuse their enemies of doing, everything from cannibalism to pedophilia and mass murder, weren’t behaviors that really do exist. Of course, Jews as a category don’t ritually torture and murder Christian babies, but human babies of all varieties—including Jewish ones—have been horrifically abused. More than 13,000 children have been killed by a largely Jewish army in Gaza in just the last several months.

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And is it altogether delusional to imagine, as QAnon believers do, that elites get away with child abuse? The Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor might not have had a sex dungeon, as the proponents of the Pizzagate theory claimed, but Jeffrey Epstein certainly kept a harem of underaged women and had a circle of socially and politically connected friends that included billionaires, geniuses, and royalty. Epstein’s story—everything from the mysterious sources of his wealth to his odd connection to Trump’s attorney general (William Barr’s father was the headmaster of the Dalton School when it hired him as a teacher in 1974), and his mysterious suicide in jail in 2019—could have leaped fully formed from the head of an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, like Athena from the head of Zeus, but it was all true.

Trump’s voters’ feelings of dispossession are not that far off the mark either, as a host of not-so-fun facts about economic inequality make clear. A 2017 study found that the richest three Americans (none of them Jewish) controlled more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the nation. The total real wealth held by the richest families in the United States tripled between 1989 and 2019, according to a 2022 Congressional Budget Office report, while average earners’ gains were negligible. The ten richest people in the world, nine of them Americans, doubled their wealth during the pandemic.

Our great national myth—that America is a crucible of equality, tolerance, and boundless economic opportunity—has never been our national reality. Though right-wing populism sees the world through a lens that is distorted by irrational hatreds, it nonetheless lands on a painful truth: that unregulated capitalism is brutal and unfair. Right wing conspiracists displace the blame for its crimes onto outsiders; progressives recognize that for all its very real gestures towards equity, justice, and universal opportunity, our constitutional order was erected on a rickety scaffolding of race supremacism, religious bigotry, involuntary servitude, and land theft and compromised by them from the very beginning.

Trump’s white male voters’ intuition that the system is rigged against them is more-or-less correct, even if the privileges their fathers were born to were undeserved, and their prescriptions to rejigger the fix in their favor could not be more pernicious. The fact that so many economic left-behinds look to Trump as their champion may be perplexing, but no one can doubt that they need one.

Whether Trump wins or loses this fall, the challenge for the center, the left, and even fair-minded members of the moderate right, is to create a reality-based narrative that can compete with Trump’s and Chansley’s—and that has reparation rather than retribution at its core.  

It was pure joy to hang out with them and remember that political struggle during which, as my partner and I like to say, we taught a generation of young people to ask, “Can you kick in a dollar to help with the campaign?” For a couple of old white lesbians who, in the words of a beloved Catherine Koetter poster, “forgot to have children,” those still-committed organizers and activists are the closest thing to offspring we’ve got. And their kids, including one now in college, who were willing to hang out with their parents’ old buddies, are the closest we’ll ever have to grandchildren. 

As people whose lives have long been tangled up in politics will do, we soon started talking about the state of the world: the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, the pain on this country’s border with Mexico, and of course the looming 2024 election campaign. It was then that the college student told us he wouldn’t be voting for Joe Biden — and that none of his friends would either. The president’s initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel $138 billion in student debt didn’t outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president’s largely unquestioning support of Israel’s destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.

Vote Your Conscience?

This year, I wonder whether only people who live in California and other dependably “blue” states can afford that kind of conscience. I’m not objecting to voting “uncommitted” in a Democratic Party primary as so many citizens of Michigan and Minnesota have done. If I lived in one of those states, I’d have done the same. In fact, I didn’t vote for Biden in Super Tuesday’s California primary either and, in truth, I wouldn’t even have to vote for him in November, because in this state my vote isn’t needed to ensure his victory, which is essentially guaranteed. But God save the world if voters in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or other swing states follow that example.

I’m less sure, however, what I’d do if, like thousands of Arab-American voters in Michigan, I had friends and family in Gaza, the West Bank, or indeed among the millions of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon or Jordan. Would I be able to mark my ballot for Joe? And if I wouldn’t, then how could I ask anyone else to do so?

In the end I would have to vote for him because, however terrible for that part of the world another four years of the Biden administration might be, a second Trump presidency would be even worse. (Trump’s recent comment about Gaza aimed at Israeli forces couldn’t have been blunter: “You’ve got to finish the problem.”) At least, unlike Trump, Biden isn’t beholden to the Christian Zionists of the evangelical right, who long to gather all the world’s Jews into the state of Israel, as a precondition for the return to Earth of Jesus Christ. (The fate of those Jews afterward is, of course, of little concern to those “Christians.”)

What We’ve Seen Already

At an educators’ conference I attended last month, a panelist discussing what Trump’s re-election would mean for those of us in the teaching profession inadvertently referred to his “first term.” Another panelist gently reminded her that the period from 2017 to 2021 had, in fact, been Trump’s only term and that we need to keep it that way. In preparation for this article, I looked back at some of my writings during that first (and God willing, only) term of his, to remind myself just how bad it was. I was surprised to find that I’d produced almost 30 pieces then about living in Trumpland.

There’s so much to remember about the first Trump term, and so much I’d forgotten. And that’s hardly surprising, given the speed with which, then as now, one unspeakable and previously unimaginable Trumpian horror follows the next. There’s simply no way to keep up. Here’s what I wrote, for instance, about living in Trumpworld in 2018:

“There’s speed and then there’s Trump speed: the dizzying, careening way that the president drives the Formula One car of state. Just when we’ve started to adjust to one outrage — say, the ripping of migrant children from their mothers’ arms (a procedure that continues to this day, despite court prohibition) — here comes another down the track. This time it’s the construction in Texas of a tent city to house immigrant children. No, wait. That was the last lap. Now, it’s the mustering of almost 6,000 troops on the border, authorized to use lethal force ‘if they have to’ against people desperately fleeing lethal conditions in their own countries.”

And he’s still at it. Not satisfied with labeling migrants as rapists the moment he came down that infamous escalator to enter the presidential campaign in 2015, he’s now comparing them to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional murderer and cannibal in Silence of the Lambs, that horror film about a serial killer who skins his female victims.

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Certain of Trump’s greatest hits do still linger in the collective American consciousness. Who could forget his pronouncement that “some fine people on both sides” attended the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where counter-protester Heather Heyer was murdered when a white supremacist drove his car into her? (We’re less likely to remember that other moment a couple of years later when the president doubled down, while hailing Confederate leader Robert E. Lee as “a great general,” by explaining that he still stood by his “very fine people” statement.)

Then there was the suggestion made in one of his daily press briefings during the Covid pandemic that, in addition to taking the anti-malarial drug chloroquine with no proven usefulness for Covid, sufferers might want to consider injecting bleach into their bodies since it did such a good job of killing the virus on hard surfaces.

You’ve probably forgotten, as I had, that back in the days when he was still a first-time candidate, he was already advocating the commission of genuine war crimes. As I wrote in 2016:

“He declared himself ready to truly hit the Islamic State where it hurts. ‘The other thing with the terrorists,’ he told Fox News, ‘is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.’ Because it’s a well-known fact — in Trumpland at least — that nothing makes people less likely to behave violently than murdering their parents and children. And it certainly doesn’t matter, when Trump advocates it, that murder is a crime.”

For me, however, some of Trump’s worst crimes were epistemological ones — crimes, that is, against knowledge. By subjecting us all to a firehose of falsehoods, he undermined people’s belief that we can ever know if anything is true. You don’t like things the way you find them? Well, in the immortal words of Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and senior counselor as president, just turn to “alternative facts.” The intentional distortion of reality is a classic authoritarian trick, designed to convince masses of people that, as Hannah Arendt wrote back in 1951, nothing is true and everything is possible. 

Worse than Déjà Vu

“Déjà vu” is French for “already seen” and it describes that sense of experiencing something all over again. We indeed already saw and heard too much that was unnerving, not to say frightening, during the four years of Trump’s presidency. The only thing that kept him from doing even more harm was his chaotic and lazy way of working. His attention span was notoriously short, and he could be easily distracted by any shiny object. Much of his daily schedule was given over to “executive time,” an apparent euphemism for watching cable TV and responding on Twitter to whatever he saw there.

A second Trump term would be very different if the forces gathering around him have anything to say about it. Carlos Lozada of the New York Times has done us an immense favor by reading and digesting all 887 pages of the plan the Heritage Foundation has produced for the next Republican presidency, Mandate for Leadership. That document details the step-by-step process necessary to transform the presidency into something resembling a monarchy, where vestigial versions of the legislative and judicial branches would serve the agenda of a unitary executive, led by an autocratic president and backed by the U.S. military. Given that someone else has done all the work to make him a king, Trump is very likely to adopt some version of that foundation’s plan. As Lozada explains:

“There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the ‘climate fanaticism’ of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the ‘administrative state,’ which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering.”

The Mandate calls for infusing all aspects of government, including its scientific functions, with “biblical” values and, from the military to the Environmental Protection Agency, excluding any taint of diversity, equity, or inclusion. More disturbing yet is its commitment to consolidating power in the hands of a single executive, or ruler, if you like. Those planners aren’t small-government conservatives like anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who used to explain, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Yes, the Heritage program includes inevitable tax cuts for the wealthy and the like, but, as Lozada observes, “The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”

If Mandate for Leadership is the theory, then the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the practice. As the New York Times reports, it’s “a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election.” Its success depends in large part on replacing tens of thousands of federal civil servants with political appointees loyal to the president. Donald Trump tried this late in his presidency, when he used an executive order to institute a new “schedule” or list of appointees to the civil service, exempting all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from competitive hiring. Immediately rescinded by President Biden, this “Schedule F” would be reinstated under Project 2025, allowing Trump to replace up to 50,000 career civil servants with his own faithful minions committed to his — or rather Heritage’s — program. (Trump himself doesn’t actually care about “entrenching ideology,” although he’s definitely a fan of “concentrating power” in his own hands.)

But, But Biden?

The news from Gaza seems to grow more dire by the day. Even so, I’ve concluded that we can’t afford to use a vote for Trump, or a refusal to vote for anyone, as a way to punish Joe Biden. His toleration of genocide is unforgiveable; his atavistic American instinct to offer a military response to any challenge is more of the arrogant Cold-War-era stance that was so much a part of his earlier political life. Witness, for example, how his use of missiles to “send a message” to the Houthis in Yemen is only driving them to attack more ships in the Red Sea. (Meanwhile, enemies that can’t be bombed into submission like climate change and drought have reduced daily traffic by nearly 40% in an even more important international waterway, the Panama Canal.)

Nor has the United States under Biden stepped back from its general role as the “indispensable” arbiter of events in the Americas, or indeed in any of the 80 or more countries where it continues to have a military presence. I hold no brief for an imperial United States under Biden or anyone else. Nevertheless, I do believe that the world can’t afford another presidency by the man who suggests that he will establish a day-one “dictatorship” in order to “drill, drill, drill.”   

Remember, this is the guy who, the last time around, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. Now, the world has just lived through the hottest February on record (something that’s been true of every month since May 2023!), one in which wildfires raged not only in the southern hemisphere, where it is, after all, summer, but in Texas, burning well more than a million acres there.

This is the man who cheered on the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, as it presided over murderous attacks on the Amazon. This is the man who is still cheering as his Republican Party abandons its support for Ukraine in favor of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This is the man who called for the assassination of his opponent in 2016, and exacerbated relations with Iran (with reverberations felt to this day) by ordering the drone assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

This is the man who, while he fails to understand how NATO actually works, has suggested that the United States will not come to the defense of “delinquent” member nations, but instead “would encourage [the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want” to such countries.

Oh, and lest we forget, this is the man who tried once before to end American democracy. It would be true madness to give him a second chance.

Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

One host, Brian Kilmeade, asked Trump, “Are you on board with the way the IDF is taking the fight to Gaza — in Gaza?”

Trump replied,

“You’ve got to finish the problem. You had a horrible invasion that took place, that would have never happened if I was president, by the way. As you know, Iran was broke, Brian, they were broke. They had no money for Hamas, for Hezbollah — they were broke. This would have never happened — and for another reason, they wouldn’t have done it to me. I guarantee you that. They did this because they have no respect for Biden. And frankly they got soft. And what happened here is incredible. That — it should never have happened. Likewise, Russia would never have attacked Ukraine.”

Vaughn Hillyard and Allan Smith at NBC called up the Trump campaign for further comment. They report that Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s national press secretary, said:

“President Trump did more for Israel than any American President in history, and he took historic action in the Middle East that created unprecedented peace . . . When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end.”

NBC recalls that Trump had said last October, that he would “fully support Israel defeating, dismantling, and permanently destroying the terrorist group Hamas.”

“Trump in Gaza,” 2024, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 2.

What is striking is that Trump’s position on Gaza is not any different from that of Joe Biden. Barak Ravid at Axios reports that Israeli politician Benny Gantz, a member of the current war cabinet, came to Washington on Monday. He wasn’t told there must be an immediate ceasefire. He wasn’t told that Hamas can’t be destroyed with Israel’s current tactics. The White House officials pleaded with him to let more food and aid in to Gaza and to establish means of distributing it safely. VP Kamala Harris and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told Gantz he can’t invade Rafah without evacuating 1.4 million Palestinian civilians first, and expressed skepticism that it could be done. But they didn’t say he couldn’t invade Rafah, and they didn’t object to ethnically cleansing a million and a half people for a second time in order to enable this military operation. They also never threatened to cut off transfers of ammunition and military equipment to Israel’s war effort, which Biden could do with a single phone call.

Both Trump and Biden, along with Antony Blinken, however, agree with the goal of Israel “defeating, dismantling, and permanently destroying the terrorist group Hamas.” That is why the US keeps vetoing UNSC ceasefire resolutions and makes sure that the Israeli officials operate with impunity.

That this goal seems plausible to the Washington Blob explains why US officials are comfortable with the Israeli total war on Gaza. They may wish that fewer than 30,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, could have been killed in the pursuit of that goal. They may wish that the fascist government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had been more circumspect and less openly brutal in its tactics and less of an embarrassment to the US. But they believe that “you can’t make omelettes without breaking some eggs.”

When Hilary Clinton, who shares the Blob mindset, was asked in February if she was shocked by the high civilian casualties in Gaza, she replied, “Of course I’m not shocked, because that’s what happens in war.”

Actually, if US soldiers did the things to civilian noncombatants that Israeli soldiers are doing in Gaza, they would be court-martialed. Airman Aaron Bushnell committed suicide over the shame of the US military being complicit in these war crimes. Veterans have burned their uniforms in protest, and active duty personnel are circulating anonymous letters of protest. Ms. Clinton once remarked of Vladimir Putin that “he doesn’t have a soul, he is KGB.” But it turns out it takes one to know one.

Meanwhile half of American adults believe Israel has gone too far in Gaza, which means half of Americans have more common sense than either Trump or Biden.

As for Trump, as usual nothing he said was true. Iran was not behind the October 7 attack on Israel, and in fact was entirely taken by surprise, according to a CIA assessment. For this reason, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Hamas official Ismail Haniya that Iran would not intervene militarily on the side of Hamas in the current conflict.

Iran is still broke, since the Biden administration has kept Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran intact. This policy is unwise, since it pushed Iran into the arms of Russia, which gained a strategic asset in its struggle against Ukraine, and because being on a permanent war footing with another country can easily spiral into a shooting war. Iran got around Trump by smuggling oil to China, and it is getting around Biden the same way.

As for destroying a clan-based resistance movement like Hamas by brutalizing the civilian population within which it operates, that was also the US plan for the Taliban in Afghanistan.