📝 Must Read Op-Ed and Profiles

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Jihadist plots used to be U.S. and Europe’s biggest terrorist threat. Now it’s the far right.

An increasing percentage of plans and attacks in the U.S. are linked to far-right activity, said Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Right-wing terrorism is the biggest threat to U.S. and Europe.

LONDON — The threat of terrorism — particularly from the far right — should be a major concern for governments on both sides of the Atlantic as coronavirus restrictions continue to ease, according to multiple experts and former law enforcement officials who have experience monitoring violent extremist activity.

High unemployment levels due to the pandemic, poor economic prospects and the spread of disinformation through the internet and social media could accelerate radicalization, they said.

And after a major drive by law enforcement agencies to disrupt the organizing potential of violent Islamist movements in the United States and in Europe, where hundreds of people have returned from the battlefields in Iraq and Syria, recent analysis suggests far-right groups now pose the most significant threat to public safety.

“We see an increasing percentage of plots and attacks in the United States shifting over the past couple of years from jihadist motivations, increasingly, to far-right activity,” said Seth Jones, who directs the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Jones defined right-wing extremists as “sub-national or non-state entities” with goals that could include ethnic or racial supremacy. They can also be marked by anger against specific policies like abortion rights and government authority, as well as hatred toward women, or they may be members of the “involuntary celibate,” or “incel,” movement.

A report he co-authored recorded 14 terrorist incidents, including attacks and disrupted plots, from Jan. 1 to May 8. Thirteen of them were classified as right-wing, and the other was recorded as being religiously motivated in the context of jihadism.

The report found that the comparable figure for right-wing attacks and plots in 2019 was a little more than 60 percent, which itself was the highest level of such activity since 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building, which killed 168 people. And in both 2018 and 2019, right-wing attackers caused more than 90 percent of the terrorism-related deaths in the United States.

Jones said the threat of terrorism had probably increased in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the combined activities of those opposed to lockdowns and other restrictions, anti-federal militia members and their backers, and far-right activists energized by the country’s polarized politics or angered by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The highest-profile recent attacks came in late May and early June, when California police officers and security personnel were ambushed in separate attacks, leaving two people dead and three others injured. The FBI said one of the suspects who was arrested was associated with a loosely organized far-right “Boogaloo” movement.

“There is a growing trend of right-wing extremism in the U.K., but it is not as significant as the rising right-wing extremism in America,” said retired Maj. Gen. Clive Chapman, the former head of counterterrorism for Britain’s Defense Ministry.

He said that, in the almost two decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., more Americans — 335, according to data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies — have been killed by adherents of a form of right-wing extremism than any other terrorist ideology.

He said terrorists need more than just an ideology to act — they often nurse grievances of some kind and typically have encountered what he termed a “recruitment environment.” That could be a social activity in a real-life community, he said, or it could be online.

But Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Oslo, said that while the recent shift to far-right terrorist activity has not passed unnoticed by law enforcement internationally, the kind of websites that might radicalize right-wing actors have been subject to far less scrutiny than has been accorded to the equivalent jihadist literature.

“The threat hasn’t been perceived as sufficiently severe,” he said. “To put it bluntly, there hasn’t been enough mass casualty terrorism from the far right for Western governments to put the full weight of their intelligence apparatus into this.”

The limited censorship and law enforcement surveillance of “hard-core far-right extremist propaganda” on the internet has made it easier for users to access such material without inviting attention from government intelligence agencies, Hegghammer said — at least for now.

Meanwhile, the clampdown on online jihadist activity has significantly affected the ability of organizations like the Islamic State militant group to reach new audiences online and to recruit adherents, he said. After a spate of high-profile attacks in Brussels, Paris and London several years ago, the frequency of such incidents has fallen recently.

“In a sense, we’ve kind of taken away their communication platform. And now the coronavirus is taking away the analogue ‘in real life’ platform,” together with the media attention that Hegghammer described as the “lifeblood” of modern jihadist terrorist attacks.

“The net effect of the corona crisis is negative for the militants, for the radicals,” he said. “I would be kind of frustrated if I were a jihadi strategist in this time. And I would be looking forward to the post-corona era.”

Internet activity may have spiked during the lockdowns among would-be jihadists who are no longer interacting with people in person and who may have struggled to get involved in Islamic extremist networks in the past. But that now comes with clear pitfalls because of the heightened surveillance, said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think thank.

In a video call from Singapore, he pointed to a Moroccan man who was arrested in Spain last month after authorities observed what they described as his constant activity on social media and his anonymized access to radical jihadist content.

He was suspected of disseminating “jihadist terrorist propaganda” through the internet, according to a Europol notice published shortly after his arrest, “and demonstrated a full adherence to the postulates of terrorist groups, fully justifying their violent actions.”

Pantucci said of the man’s self-radicalization: “It seemed to be very linked to the fact that he was locked in because of coronavirus. Those kinds of cases, I think, are going to be ones that we’re going to see more problems with going forward.”

This article is worth reading… but it’s also nothing new. Right-wing attacks have been the vast majority in the U.S. for years.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

You Can Stop Cleaning Your Mail Now

People are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security.

Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time

As a COVID-19 summer surge sweeps the country, deep cleans are all the rage.

National restaurants such as Applebee’s are deputizing sanitation czars to oversee the constant scrubbing of window ledges, menus, and high chairs. The gym chain Planet Fitness is boasting in ads that “there’s no surface we won’t sanitize, no machine we won’t scrub.” New York City is shutting down its subway system every night, for the first time in its 116-year history, to blast the seats, walls, and poles with a variety of antiseptic weaponry, including electrostatic disinfectant sprays. And in Wauchula, Florida, the local government gave one resident permission to spray the town with hydrogen peroxide as he saw fit. “I think every city in the damn United States needs to be doing it," he said.

To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area.

But what if this is all just a huge waste of time?

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.

There is a historical echo here. After 9/11, physical security became a national obsession, especially in airports, where the Transportation Security Administration patted down the crotches of innumerable grandmothers for possible explosives. My colleague Jim Fallows repeatedly referred to this wasteful bonanza as “security theater.”

COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater.

Scientists still don’t have a perfect grip on COVID-19—they don’t know where exactly it came from, how exactly to treat it, or how long immunity lasts.

But in the past few months, scientists have converged on a theory of how this disease travels: via air. The disease typically spreads among people through large droplets expelled in sneezes and coughs, or through smaller aerosolized droplets, as from conversations, during which saliva spray can linger in the air.

Surface transmission—from touching doorknobs, mail, food-delivery packages, and subways poles—seems quite rare. ( Quite rare isn’t the same as impossible : The scientists I spoke with constantly repeated the phrase “people should still wash their hands.”) The difference may be a simple matter of time. In the hours that can elapse between, say, Person 1 coughing on her hand and using it to push open a door and Person 2 touching the same door and rubbing his eye, the virus particles from the initial cough may have sufficiently deteriorated.

The fact that surface areas—or “fomites,” in medical jargon—are less likely to convey the virus might seem counterintuitive to people who have internalized certain notions of grimy germs, or who read many news articles in March about the danger of COVID-19-contaminated food. Backing up those scary stories were several U.S. studies that found that COVID-19 particles could survive on surfaces for many hours and even days.

But in a July article in the medical journal The Lancet , Goldman excoriated those conclusions. All those studies that made COVID-19 seem likely to live for days on metal and paper bags were based on unrealistically strong concentrations of the virus. As he explained to me, as many as 100 people would need to sneeze on the same area of a table to mimic some of their experimental conditions. The studies “stacked the deck to get a result that bears no resemblance to the real world," Goldman said.

As a thousand internet commenters know by heart, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence . But with hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of scientists around the world tracing COVID-19’s chains of transmission, the extreme infrequency of evidence may indeed be evidence of extreme infrequency.

A good case study of how the coronavirus spreads, and does not spread, is the famous March outbreak in a mixed-use skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea. On one side of the 11th floor of the building, about half the members of a chatty call center got sick. But less than 1 percent of the remainder of the building contracted COVID-19, even though more than 1,000 workers and residents shared elevators and were surely touching the same buttons within minutes of one another. “The call-center case is a great example,” says Donald Schaffner, a food-microbiology professor who studies disease contamination at Rutgers University. “You had clear airborne transmission with many, many opportunities for mass fomite transmission in the same place. But we just didn’t see it.” Schaffner told me, “In the entire peer-reviewed COVID-19 literature, I’ve found maybe one truly plausible report, in Singapore, of fomite transmission. And even there, it is not a slam-dunk case. ”

The scientists I spoke with emphasized that people should still wash their hands, avoid touching their face when they’ve recently been in public areas, and even use gloves in certain high-contact jobs. They also said deep cleans were perfectly justified in hospitals. But they pointed out that the excesses of hygiene theater have negative consequences.

For one thing, an obsession with contaminated surfaces distracts from more effective ways to combat COVID-19. “People have prevention fatigue,” Goldman told me. “They’re exhausted by all the information we’re throwing at them. We have to communicate priorities clearly; otherwise, they’ll be overloaded.”

Hygiene theater can take limited resources away from more important goals. Goldman shared with me an email he had received from a New Jersey teacher after his Lancet article came out. She said her local schools had considered shutting one day each week for “deep cleaning.” At a time when returning to school will require herculean efforts from teachers and extraordinary ingenuity from administrators to keep kids safely distanced, setting aside entire days to clean surfaces would be a pitiful waste of time and scarce local tax revenue.

New York City’s decision to spend lavishly on power scrubbing its subways shows how absurd hygiene theater can be, in practice. As the city’s transit authority considers reduced service and layoffs to offset declines in ticket revenue, it is on pace to spend more than $100 million this year on new cleaning practices and disinfectants. Money that could be spent on distributing masks, or on PSA campaigns about distancing, or actual subway service , is being poured into antiseptic experiments that might be entirely unnecessary. Worst of all, these cleaning sessions shut down trains for hours in the early morning, hurting countless late-night workers and early-morning commuters.

As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another, New York’s subway-germ panic seems irrational. In Japan, ridership has returned to normal, and outbreaks traced to its famously crowded public transit system have been so scarce that the Japanese virologist Hitoshi Oshitani concluded, in an email to The Atlantic , that “transmission on the train is not common.” Like airline travelers forced to wait forever in line so that septuagenarians can get a patdown for underwear bombs, New Yorkers are being inconvenienced in the interest of eliminating a vanishingly small risk.

Finally, and most important, hygiene theater builds a false sense of security, which can ironically lead to more infections. Many bars, indoor restaurants, and gyms, where patrons are huffing and puffing one another’s stale air, shouldn’t be open at all. They should be shut down and bailed out by the government until the pandemic is under control. No amount of soap and bleach changes this calculation.

Instead, many of these establishments are boasting about their cleaning practices while inviting strangers into unventilated indoor spaces to share one another’s microbial exhalations. This logic is warped. It completely misrepresents the nature of an airborne threat. It’s as if an oceanside town stalked by a frenzy of ravenous sharks urged people to return to the beach by saying, We care about your health and safety, so we’ve reinforced the boardwalk with concrete. Lovely. Now people can sturdily walk into the ocean and be separated from their limbs.

By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals, we lose focus on the more common modes of COVID-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague. “My point is not to relax, but rather to focus on what matters and what works,” Goldman said. “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing.”

[Whoosie (Ray Van Houtte)]

Opinion | The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America

Paul Krugman has some insight.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Hierarchy v. Fairness

Hierarchy v. Fairness

The right-wing—which until recently loved the 10th Amendment and revered states’ rights—is now fine with sending federal troops to trample states’ rights.

Meanwhile, Trump canceled his convention because of COVID while insisting that schools open.

From Andy Slavitt’s thread yesterday: the people dying from COVID-19 are largely “essential workers” and those without the privilege of staying home.

In other words, Trump plays golf, while insisting that others go to work and expose themselves to COVID.

It’s all about hierarchy v. fairness.

Hierarchy people think there’s a natural order: Some people belong on top. Others at the bottom. They don’t believe equality is possible. For them, the purpose of government is to allocate power. When hierarchy people are in power, they try to solidify their power and grab more. They assume everyone uses government this way.

Fairness people, in contrast, believe equality is possible. For them, the purpose of government is to give everyone equal opportunity and prevent cheating. Democratic leaders, therefore, spend their time trying to do things like give everyone healthcare. Hierarchy leaders, on the other hand, try to take the healthcare away because, they argue, the people at the top shouldn’t have to pay for the people at the bottom—a policy which reinforced the hierarchy.

Ted Cruz thinks giving billion-dollar tax cuts to the rich is “good government.” Meanwhile, he tells a lie to justify forcing people to work in dangerous conditions.

The Hill (thehill)

Hierarchy also informed the Confederacy: Those at the bottom labor and die. Those at the top live in luxury. Why do you think Trump feels such an affinity for the Confederacy?

In Portland, federal officers are tear-gassing protesters and arresting people without reason to believe they’ve committed a crime.

Q: Does this take us forward into some unknown place where we’ve never been before, or is this looping us backward to a previous era?

A: Both, depending on who you are.

For most of US history, local police were completely unfettered. Before the Fourteenth Amendment—added to the Constitution after the Civil War—there were few limits on states could do. That’s why we had slavery.

After the Fourteenth Amendment, states insisted on the right to police as they pleased under the Tenth Amendment.

Police power during the first half of the 20th century was largely used to keep Black men in line. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Supreme Court heard police brutality cases (Black men were usually the defendant) and began restricting what police could do under the 14th Amendment.

The right-wing didn’t like it. At all.

Chambers v. Florida (1940) was a case in which several Black men were tortured until they confessed to a crime. The Supreme Court held that convicting a person based on a coerced conviction violates the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Supreme Court also held that defendants were entitled to a lawyer, and arrests could not be made without probable cause to believe the person committed a crime.

Right-wing hierarchy people called these decisions federal overreach and said that the Tenth Amendment allowed states to manage their own policing. They claimed that hampering the police would make it easier for people to commit crimes.

“Law and order” was code for: let the police do whatever they want so that the hierarchy can be maintained.

Now things have reversed: Under Trump, it’s the federal government that wants to maintain the hierarchy, and local governments (in some places) want fairness.

That’s why suddenly the right-wing (hierarchy people) reversed their position and are now in favor of the federal government trampling states’ rights. What remains consistent is the belief that police should be unhampered.

You see, the right-wing never really care about states’ rights or the Tenth Amendment: They wanted the police to maintain the hierarchy.

Fascism is all about hierarchy, so yes, Trump and pals are pushing us toward fascism.

The Confederacy, Jim Crow, and women as chattel were also about hierarchy, so Trump and pals are also looping us backward to a place we have been before. I’ll add women were chattel and other minority communities were targeted, but the heavy hand of the police fell most heavily on Black men.

The Portland protesters are protesting police brutality and insisting that Black Lives Matters. This terrifies the hierarchy people.

They don’t believe it is about equality, equal treatment, or equal opportunity, because they don’t believe these things are possible. They think others want to replace them at the top of the hierarchy.

It’s not 1968 anymore. The GOP scare tactics that worked in the 1960s when Nixon chanted “law and order” don’t work now. America has changed.

The majority of white people also want fairness, so the GOP— the Party of Hierarchy—is in deep trouble.

Nate Cohn (Nate_Cohn)

[dragonfly9]

What a prescient man - writing this heartfelt proclamation to be read on the day of his funeral and urging his fellow citizens to defend and stand up for what you believe in to heal the soul of this nation.

What a righteous cause and a righteous man. Please help us all.

Opinion | John Lewis: Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation

Together, You

Can Redeem the Soul
of Our Nation

Though I am gone, I urge you to

answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

By John Lewis

Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his funeral. Editorial Page Editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote about this piece and Mr. Lewis’s legacy in Thursday’s edition of our Opinion Today newsletter.

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, though decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death.

[dragonfly9]

A thought piece (opinion) from a co-founder of the Federalist Society. He thinks this suggestion is impeachable, and that all R’s should stand up and say something against T.

Inching closer to fascism daily and a few R’s are waving a white flag about it.

Hmmmmm - how about hitting the eject button pals?

Opinion | Trump Might Try to Postpone the Election. That’s Unconstitutional.

By Steven G. Calabresi

Mr. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.

I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.

But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.

Here is what President Trump tweeted:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

The nation has faced grave challenges before, just as it does today with the spread of the coronavirus. But it has never canceled or delayed a presidential election. Not in 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln was expected to lose and the South looked as if it might defeat the North. Not in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression. Not in 1944 during World War II.

So we certainly should not even consider canceling this fall’s election because of the president’s concern about mail-in voting, which is likely to increase because of fears about Covid-19. It is up to each of the 50 states whether to allow universal mail-in voting and Article II of the Constitution explicitly gives the states total power over the selection of presidential electors.

Election Day was fixed by a federal law passed in 1845, and the Constitution itself in the 20th Amendment specifies that the newly elected Congress meet at noon on Jan. 3, 2021, and that the terms of the president and vice president end at noon on Jan. 20, 2021. If no newly elected president is available, the speaker of the House of Representatives becomes acting president.

President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.

Steven G. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.

[dragonfly9]

Formerly Lt. Col VIndman, who was forced to retire after retaliatory actions (no promotion that had been due) and demotion writes eloquently about where his patriotism stands - still with the ideals that made America a democratic nation, and not one swept up under Trump-ism. He makes the case here to fight for American values by doing what is right and to get T out of office.

Opinion | Alexander Vindman: Coming forward ended my career. I still believe...

Alexander Vindman: Coming forward ended my career. I still believe doing what’s right matters.

Opinion by Alexander S. Vindman

August 1, 2020 at 5:00 a.m. PDT

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.), a career U.S. Army officer, served on the National Security Council as the director for Eastern European, Caucasus and Russian affairs, as the Russia political-military affairs officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

After 21 years, six months and 10 days of active military service, I am now a civilian. I made the difficult decision to retire because a campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation by President Trump and his allies forever limited the progression of my military career.

This experience has been painful, but I am not alone in this ignominious fate. The circumstances of my departure might have been more public, yet they are little different from those of dozens of other lifelong public servants who have left this administration with their integrity intact but their careers irreparably harmed.

A year ago, having served the nation in uniform in positions of critical importance, I was on the cusp of a career-topping promotion to colonel. A year ago, unknown to me, my concerns over the president’s conduct and the president’s efforts to undermine the very foundations of our democracy were precipitating tremors that would ultimately shake loose the facade of good governance and publicly expose the corruption of the Trump administration.

At no point in my career or life have I felt our nation’s values under greater threat and in more peril than at this moment. Our national government during the past few years has been more reminiscent of the authoritarian regime my family fled more than 40 years ago than the country I have devoted my life to serving.

Our citizens are being subjected to the same kinds of attacks tyrants launch against their critics and political opponents. Those who choose loyalty to American values and allegiance to the Constitution over devotion to a mendacious president and his enablers are punished. The president recklessly downplayed the threat of the pandemic even as it swept through our country. The economic collapse that followed highlighted the growing income disparities in our society. Millions are grieving the loss of loved ones and many more have lost their livelihoods while the president publicly bemoans his approval ratings.

There is another way.

During my testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, I reassured my father, who experienced Soviet authoritarianism firsthand, saying, “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.” Despite Trump’s retaliation, I stand by that conviction. Even as I experience the low of ending my military career, I have also experienced the loving support of tens of thousands of Americans. Theirs is a chorus of hope that drowns out the spurious attacks of a disreputable man and his sycophants.

Since the struggle for our nation’s independence, America has been a union of purpose: a union born from the belief that although each individual is the pilot of their own destiny, when we come together, we change the world. We are stronger as a woven rope than as unbound threads.

America has thrived because citizens have been willing to contribute their voices and shed their blood to challenge injustice and protect the nation. It is in keeping with that history of service that, at this moment, I feel the burden to advocate for my values and an enormous urgency to act.

Despite some personal turmoil, I remain hopeful for the future for both my family and for our nation. Impeachment exposed Trump’s corruption, but the confluence of a pandemic, a financial crisis and the stoking of societal divisions has roused the soul of the American people. A groundswell is building that will issue a mandate to reject hate and bigotry and a return to the ideals that set the United States apart from the rest of the world. I look forward to contributing to that effort.

In retirement from the Army, I will continue to defend my nation. I will demand accountability of our leadership and call for leaders of moral courage and public servants of integrity. I will speak about the attacks on our national security. I will advocate for policies and strategies that will keep our nation safe and strong against internal and external threats. I will promote public service and exalt the contribution that service brings to all areas of society.

The 23-year-old me who was commissioned in December 1998 could never have imagined the opportunities and experiences I have had. I joined the military to serve the country that sheltered my family’s escape from authoritarianism, and yet the privilege has been all mine.

When I was asked why I had the confidence to tell my father not to worry about my testimony, my response was, “Congressman, because this is America. This is the country I have served and defended, that all my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”

To this day, despite everything that has happened, I continue to believe in the American Dream. I believe that in America, right matters. I want to help ensure that right matters for all Americans.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Have Female Reporters Got Trump on the Run?

Once again, a tough question ends with the president shutting down a briefing.

Opinion | Have Female Reporters Got Trump on the Run?

It starts with a reporter, usually a female reporter, asking President Donald Trump hard, tenacious questions at a news conference. Trump’s jaw seizes up, rattled and dumbfounded by the questions that he can’t or won’t answer, he abruptly ends the presser by saying, “Thank you, very much” and stalking out of the room.

Trump threw such a fit on Saturday when CBS News reporter Paula Reid launched a volley of questions about why he once again took credit for passing a veterans program that the Obama administration pushed through in 2014. In late July, the same fight-or-flight response turned to flight again when CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins chased Trump with pointed, persistent questions about his retweets of a fringe doctor’s theories that masks were useless and hydroxychloroquine cured Covid-19. “OK, thank you very much everybody,” Trump said as he backed off, truncating the news conference. In May, it was CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang and Collins again whose questions prompted Trump to crumble and skedaddle. And in April, when Playboy White House correspondent Brian Karem barraged the president with Covid-19 questions, a flustered Trump threatened a walk-off. “If you keep talking, I’m going to leave and you can have it out with them”—meaning the other reporters—Trump said.

Trump toughed it out that time, winding down the briefing down without yanking the ejection lever. But his increasingly skittish manner with the press marks a turning point in his presidency, a new moment where his usually reliable mouth almighty seems incapable of articulating a put-down or a blow-off response. Our two-fisted brawler of a president, always ready to smash the interlocutors from the press with a virtual folding chair, has replaced moxie with pouts. In the old days, he would have had a ready answer for the much-expected question from Reid, Collins and Jiang. But now he’s like the former alpha leader of the troop. He makes a show of maintaining his dominance by beating his breast, but when challenged by somebody superior, he takes his beating then slinks off to a dark, safe place to lick his wounds.

What’s causing Trump to back down from the press after so many months of fighting them? There could be a method to his madness. As my colleagues Nancy Cook and Gabby Orr reported this summer, his aides have urged him to avoid the marathon sessions of his earlier coronavirus briefings, “straying off message and generating negative headlines.” He’s playing it safe by keeping it short. Another way to view his dust-ups with female reporters is as an act of conflict avoidance. With his support among suburban women dropping in the polls, the Trump camp thinks that dodging unnecessary clashes with women in the briefing room might help win additional votes in November. Essentially, don’t make a bad situation worse.

But that’s only a partial explanation. Trump’s problems with female reporters have become a defining quality of his presidency. NBC News’ Katy Tur says Trump turned her into a “target“ during the campaign, and he feuded with Megyn Kelly while she was at Fox. In late March, when PBS NewsHour reporter Yamiche Alcindor pursued Trump with legitimate questions about Covid-19, he cut her off, ridiculed her, and said, “Don’t be threatening. Be nice.” Two weeks earlier, Trump had accused Alcindor of asking a “nasty“ question when her query about shrinking the White House national security staff was entirely above board.

Of course, Trump has given male reporters similar thumpings. CNN’s Jim Acosta has made his career by burrowing under Trump’s skin like a chigger, and Trump has set the tone for his pressers by lashing back at Acosta. In 2018, you recall, Trump ordered Acosta to surrender the mic at a news conference, and when Acosta didn’t, Trump made a brief move to leave the podium. But he stayed and then opened fire on NBC’s Peter Alexander. The moral of the story is clear. Male reporters who contest his views make him mad. But female reporters who do the same make him melt down.

Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the recipient of Trump abuse—”You’re a third-rate reporter,” he told Karl in an April briefing—tells me that the trigger for Trump’s walk-offs appears to questions in which a reporter fact-checks him. That’s abundantly true in the Reid, Collins and Jiang instances. For somebody who has told at least 20,000 lies in the course of his presidency, Trump seems to flinch hardest when confronted with his own mendacity. There may be something about being contradicted in a group setting like the briefing that sets him off. As we saw in his recent one-on-one interviews with Chris Wallace and Jonathan Swan, he’s able to contest their exacting fact-checks without completely losing it. Group settings must make him more vulnerable to humiliation, hence his expectation that the world receive his words as the uncontested law, no matter how batty those words are.

Trumpies might think that avoiding direct and extended conflicts with detail-minded reporters during the pandemic lends his administration an edge. They might even think shutting down the pressers on no notice make him look like a bad-ass with his base. But I doubt these tongue-tied tantrums have such an effect. And so does Karl. “The walk-off is a surprising display of weakness—he allows the reporter to have the last word, ending the press conference by asking a question the president appears unable to handle,” he says.

Whether by design or by chance, Trump minimized Saturday’s embarrassment by staging his presser at his Bedminster, N.J., country club, where a “Greek chorus” of members stood in observance of the session and cheered the insults that he dumped on the journos. Regaining his composure backstage as he mentally replayed their ovations, Trump might even have thought he won the showdown—and so might his supporters who watched on TV. If so, we can expect additional walk-offs as the campaign and his presidency continue.

Women are making Trump ‘melt down’ — or turn tail and run: columnist

[anon95374541]

@Windthin

female reporters who do the same make him melt down

[GracieC]

I want reporters to challenge Kayleigh McEneny too. She has made some outrageous statements.

[dragonfly9]

Professor Snyder, who is an expert on authoritarianism suggests looking to Belarus to ward off more potential
Strongarming of an election.

Maddow has been covering these developments this week and draws the same potential outcomes if an election is overturned or corrupted.

Timothy Snyder (TimothyDSnyder)

The Washington Post: What Americans should learn from Belarus

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/16/what-americans-should-learn-belarus/

Those Americans who believe that the Democrats are their best hope for thwarting the rise of authoritarianism must confront a basic question: Given that President Trump intends to spoil the elections if he can’t win them, how do citizens ensure that November’s victors take office? As Kamala D. Harris and Joe Biden dominate the news, we have looked past Belarus, whose courageous citizens show us the way. In this post-Soviet republic, run for a quarter-century by the same man, we have a refreshing example of how to face the worst — and win.

The predicament of Belarusans after the rigged presidential election of Aug. 9 is a sharpened preview of what Americans will face this November. The local dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, responded to the outbreak of covid-19 with magical thinking. As the economy crumbled, his opponents realized that they enjoyed a majority. When Lukashenko claimed an improbable victory after the election, Belarusans took to the streets. They were beaten and detained by riot police; Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his congratulations to Lukashenko. It is not hard to imagine that Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr would be satisfied with a similar turn of events here in November.

Yet the Belarusan story did not end there, because Belarusans were prepared and did not give up. They came out again, all over the country, in smaller groups that were harder to disperse. Avoiding direct clashes with security forces, they made their presence known with the colors they wore, the flags they waved and the posters they held. Onlookers applauded from their apartments, pedestrians flashed the V sign and drivers honked their horns in support.

On Tuesday, Belarusans were horrified by footage of police beating men and threatening to rape women. On Wednesday, parents gathered outside detention centers, demanding to see their children. That same day, women wearing white formed human chains to stop violence, and doctors demonstrated in front of their hospitals. Some policemen filmed themselves throwing their uniforms into the garbage, expressed solidarity with protesters or even changed sides. The minister of internal affairs, roughly the Belarusan equivalent of acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf, apologized for the beatings and detentions.

On Thursday, four days after the election, some of the detained protesters were released. They had been forced to adopt humiliating positions while in custody and have the red, black and blue of truncheon beatings on their backs, buttocks and legs. Outrage was general. Factory workers went on strike. A factory manager tried in good old Soviet style to call his workers together in support of Lukashenko. They told him that they had all voted for the opposition candidate. Most people had. First, one election official, and then a second, admitted that the official result had been falsified.

Americans have had other things on our minds this past week, but this is no excuse for looking the other way as others defend values we claim to hold dear. Yet even if we missed what happened Minsk, people in Minsk had learned from Minneapolis. The rhetoric and tactics in the cities and towns of Belarus carried echoes of Hong Kong; Khabarovsk, Russia; and Portland, Ore. Protesters around the world increasingly learn from one another.

Just as Trump is already preparing to do, Lukashenko was counting on the support of his cronies among local election officials, police and Russia. We cannot know whether his opponents will succeed: Unlike the United States, where the most effective Russian intervention comes through the Internet, in Belarus, Putin and Lukashenko can threaten an invasion.

As Americans think ahead to November, we should learn from people who have taken risks for democracy, in circumstances more challenging than our own. Belarusans teach us what I would call “the six Ps” of defending an electoral victory against authoritarian chaos: preparation, predominance, protest, peace, persistence and pluralism.

Preparation means understanding that your local authoritarian will spoil the election and planning in advance. Predominance means getting out the vote and winning by a wide margin, so everyone will know that the authoritarian is lying. Protest means taking the streets when the authoritarian makes his move. Peace means keeping demonstrations nonviolent as the regime discredits itself with violence. Persistence means coming back anyway the next day, and the day after that. And pluralism is a summons to groups, such as those Belarusan workers, women and doctors, to make their presence and their feelings known.

Democracy is a value, so it must be valued, and it is a practice, so it must be practiced. If we want it, we must be open to learning from others, and then be prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service

The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the already-struggling U.S. Postal Service to the brink of financial collapse. But the most trusted and popular institution in America hasn’t been struggling by accident.

Since the 1970s, a concerted effort to popularize the fringe idea of privatizing the Postal Service has been advanced for nearly five decades with the support of one man: the billionaire and libertarian ideologue, Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive officer of Koch Industries.

This brief traces Koch’s connections, influence, and ideological push to weaken and ultimately privatize one of America’s most essential public services—and, along with it, the jobs of hundreds of thousands of public servants.

ITPI_USPSPrivatization_July2020.pdf

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

A look at Don Jr., who has gone all in on his father… and politics.

Donald Trump Jr. Is Ready. But for What, Exactly?

Of all the president’s children, he has the strongest connection to the politics, voters and online disinformation ecosystem that put his father in the White House. What will he do with it?

Donald Trump Jr. Is Ready. But for What, Exactly?

A case can be made that the apex of Donald Trump’s presidency occurred early this year, around the time of the State of the Union address. The Feb. 4 speech to a joint session of Congress began with Trump’s ignoring the outstretched hand of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a pointed snub of the Democrat who, two months earlier, led his impeachment. For the next 78 minutes, Trump boasted about his accomplishments, like building an economy that “is the best it has ever been”; dished out red meat to his base, such as pledging a national ban on late-term abortions; and theatrically dispensed favors, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom for the conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh.

On that February evening, the first reported death from the coronavirus in the United States was more than three weeks away, and it appeared as if Trump had bent the office of the president, its trappings, the institutions of government and, indeed, all of American politics to his will. After he finished, Pelosi, standing behind Trump on the House rostrum, dramatically ripped up her copy of his speech. It was a made-for-meme moment — and at first, the meme’s natural constituency seemed to be the left, for whom Pelosi’s paper-shredding provided a rare flash of emotional gratification in an otherwise dark time. (The next day, the Republican-led Senate would vote to acquit Trump of all the impeachment articles, mooting the Democrats’ monthslong crusade.) But then Trump’s eldest child, Donald Trump Jr., had an idea.

It came to him while he was eating lunch at the Trump International Hotel in Washington the day after the speech. Trump Jr. envisioned a video featuring the most benign and unobjectionable parts of his father’s address — hailing a Tuskegee Airman, reuniting a soldier who had just returned from Afghanistan with his wife and children, giving a private-school scholarship to a Black fourth grader from Philadelphia — spliced with footage of Pelosi ripping up the speech, as if she were objecting to these beneficent gestures and not to the president himself. Trump Jr. called Benny Johnson, a veteran right-wing meme maker who works for the conservative student group Turning Point USA, and asked him to get cracking.

A few hours later, Trump Jr. posted the results of Johnson’s handiwork to his social media accounts. “Pelosi ripped up @realDonaldTrump’s speech last night,” he wrote on Twitter with a link to the video. “In that speech were stories of American Heroes & American Dreams. Their stories are more powerful than her hate.” The video immediately went viral, with the president himself tweeting it the next day.

Pelosi demanded that Twitter and Facebook take down the video, arguing that it was deceptively edited. The social media companies refused. Trump’s allies used the spat to drive even more traffic. “It would be soooooo terrible if this video hits 10,000,000 views,” tweeted Dan Scavino, the White House social media director. In the end, the video racked up 50 million views, according to Johnson. (Thirty-seven million people watched the State of the Union address on TV.) “Don Jr. is a meme general in the meme wars,” Johnson says, “and he is commanding the D-Day invasion.”

The episode was emblematic of Trump Jr.’s role in his father’s political carnival. In one respect, the brazen disingenuousness and virality of the meme — and the way in which one led to the other — was unmistakably Trumpian. But there was a discipline and polish to Trump Jr.’s move that his father’s shambolic, logorrheic self-expressions so often lack. (Trump’s own initial reaction to the speech-ripping was to go on a late-night-into-early-morning Twitter tear, retweeting Pelosi criticism by everyone from his former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley to the 300-follower Twitter account @JonMart93888215.) And yet Trump Jr.’s gloss did nothing to soften his father’s message. It wasn’t Trump watered down. It was Trump distilled.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, Trump Jr., who is now 42, was involved but hardly central to the effort. His sister Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, exercised sweeping influence over the campaign. Trump Jr., by contrast, was assigned small, discrete tasks, like putting his outdoorsmanship on display in a pheasant-hunting photo op with his brother, Eric, before the Iowa caucuses to counter attacks that his father was a liberal city slicker. (“Don, you can finally do something for me — you can go hunting,” his father told him, according to GQ magazine.) If he tried to go outside his narrow lane, disaster tended to follow. In the summer of 2016, he arranged for a Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, an encounter that later became a focus of Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The Trump team’s defense of Trump Jr. boiled down to the argument that he wasn’t a traitor, just an idiot — “by no means a sophisticated political actor,” Chris Christie said. Michael Cohen, at the time Trump’s personal attorney, later told a Senate panel that “Mr. Trump was very quick to tell everybody that he thinks Don Jr. has the worst judgment of anyone he’s ever met in the world.” Or, as the president himself put it, according to The Atlantic, “He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

So it is one of the many surprises of Trump’s presidency that Trump Jr. has grown into arguably his father’s most valuable political weapon. “Don Jr. represents the emotional center of the MAGA universe,” says Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s re-election campaign. Before the pandemic, he was crisscrossing the country as his father’s most-requested campaign surrogate. Since the coronavirus curtailed his travel plans, he has become one of the Republican Party’s top virtual fund-raisers. His Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts have a combined 11 million followers and are vital cogs in the Republican messaging machine.

After spending much of his adult life searching for a purpose, Trump Jr. seems to have found one in politics. His siblings can often seem to be patiently waiting out their father’s presidency. Eric, who has been running the Trump Organization in his father’s absence, continues building hotels and luxury condominiums. Ivanka and Kushner went to work in the White House, but she has told friends that she’s looking forward to returning to New York and to her lifestyle brand.

But Trump Jr. does not want to go back to the way things were before. He has been electrified, and transformed, by his father’s presidency. He has largely given up the duties that go along with his title as an executive vice president of the Trump Organization in exchange for full-time politics. He has divorced — after 12 years of marriage and five children — Vanessa Haydon, who generally shied away from politics. His girlfriend of the last couple of years, with whom he recently bought a house in the Hamptons, is Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host and conservative commentator who serves as the finance chair for his father’s re-election campaign.

Now, as he works to secure a second term for Trump this November, Trump Jr. is also thinking about his own political future. He is wagering that by going all in on his father’s presidency and the tribal passions it has unleashed, he can claim his own durable place in American politics — that whether his father leaves the White House in 2021 or 2025, the answer to what comes after Trump will be more Trump.

On Saturday, March 7, about 100 people gathered in a gilded ballroom at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. The resort town was playing host to a retreat for major donors to Trump’s re-election campaign that weekend, and the highlight was a lavish party on Saturday night to celebrate Guilfoyle’s 51st birthday. The Trump family was there, save for Trump’s wife, Melania. So were a who’s who of the MAGA universe, including members of Congress, like Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; Fox News stars like Jesse Watters and Tucker Carlson; administration officials including National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Trump loyalists like Rudy Giuliani; and even, for a time, President Jair M. Bolsonaro of Brazil, who was meeting with Trump at the club that weekend. Sergio Gor, Guilfoyle’s chief of staff on the Trump campaign and Trump Jr.’s collaborator on a forthcoming book, played M.C. and D.J., standing on a stage between two spinning disco balls. “It was like a Gatsby-esque extravaganza,” one guest recalls.

Trump Jr., an avid fisherman, had been up since before dawn, unsuccessfully pursuing a hammerhead shark at a nearby inlet. Poolside at Mar-a-Lago later that morning, among the club’s guests outfitted in white linen, he showed off pictures of the six-foot nurse shark he did catch to Gaetz; with his camouflage and fishing rod, he looked as if “he just came off the set of ‘Duck Dynasty,’” Gaetz recalls. By the evening, he had traded camo for a suit and tie and was seated at the head table alongside Guilfoyle in her gold-sequined minidress. “Princess, you are the best,” he said, according to The Washington Examiner, when it was his turn for a toast. “Thank you for everything that you do. I love you very much, and get back to work, OK?”

He turned to the guests. “You are in this room for a reason,” he said. “You guys have been the warriors, the fighters, the people who have been there every time we have made a call, every time we made a request.” He added, “I’m sure Kimberly will hit you up.” As the president stood beside Guilfoyle and led the group in a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,” Trump Jr. looked on, beaming. When the song was finished, Guilfoyle shouted, “Four more years!” The president kissed her on the head and smiled at his son.

The two men had for years had a difficult relationship. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana recounts in her 2017 book, “Raising Trump,” that when she suggested naming their newly born first child Donald Jr., Trump protested: “You can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?” After his parents divorced, a 12-year-old Trump Jr. refused to speak to his father for a year. Later, he seemed intent on escaping the celebrity businessman’s shadow and reputation. At the Fiji fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump Jr.’s nickname was Ron Rump, and his fraternity brothers called him Ron. “He loved it, perhaps because it gave him an extra level of anonymity,” one of them recalls. Rather than working for the Trump Organization immediately after college, Trump Jr. spent a year and half in Aspen, Colo., skiing, hunting, fishing and tending bar at night.

In 2001, he moved back to New York City and took his place at the company. But his greatest contribution to the family business came on the set of “The Apprentice,” which he joined as an occasional boardroom judge in the show’s 2006 season. He was valued by the producers as a stabilizing presence, running interference between the cast and crew and the volatile star, his father. When Trump would berate crew members for a mistake, one “Apprentice” producer recalls, Trump Jr., speaking from a well of personal experience, would console them: “It’s not your fault; it’s your turn.”

People who worked on the show remember him often trying to lighten the mood. “He provided the comic relief, because his dad doesn’t have a sense of humor and Ivanka wasn’t someone who made jokes,” says Clay Aiken, the “American Idol” winner who appeared on “The Celebrity Apprentice” in 2012. “He was perfectly fine to take the piss out of himself, but sometimes he’d make a joke about his dad — and then you could tell he was really nervous his dad wouldn’t like it. His self-esteem was in the gutter.”

Much of the popular image of Trump Jr., especially among liberals, seems to stem from those years: “uselessly trying to impress a man who can only be impressed by himself” (GQ); “a recurring liability and a chronic headache” (The Daily Beast); the “Fredo” of the Trump family (Twitter). In the first days of Trump’s presidency, he seemed poised for more of the same. After the election, while Ivanka and Kushner headed to Washington, Trump Jr. stayed behind in New York, ostensibly to run the Trump Organization with Eric. But he had little to do. He was in charge of the company’s international portfolio, and while he could continue working on overseas projects that predated his father’s election, he couldn’t embark on new ones.

For a time, he tried to play a role in shaping the administration’s public-lands policy and other issues related to his outdoor activities, which had earned him the Secret Service code name Mountaineer. Senator Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana, used an elk-hunting trip with Trump Jr. in November 2016 to lobby the incoming administration to pick an interior secretary from the Mountain West. “I wanted a Westerner,” Daines says, “and Westerner doesn’t mean West Virginia. It doesn’t mean Oklahoma.” Trump Jr. recommended Ryan Zinke, then a Montana congressman and a friend of Daines’s, for the Department of Interior job. Zinke got the nod but resigned in December 2018 after a scandal-plagued tenure.

Trump Jr.’s relatively low public profile ended on July 8, 2017, when The New York Times revealed his role in arranging the Trump Tower meeting the previous summer between Trump campaign officials and the Russian lawyer and her associates. Though little seems to have come out of the meeting, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released this month found that the Russians had “significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”

A few days after the Times article ran, Trump Jr. went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to defend himself in a softball interview. “There was nothing to tell,” he said of the meeting. “I wouldn’t have even remembered it until you started scouring through this stuff.” His stock among conservatives rose as he proceeded to wage a sustained campaign against the news media, Mueller and congressional investigators pursuing their own Russia inquiry. (It was reported this month that in 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican and Democratic leaders made a criminal referral of Trump Jr. and several other Trump associates to the Justice Department for lying or providing contradictory testimony to the panel.) He became a frequent guest on Fox News and an enthusiastic participant in the political fights of the moment. “Don’s favorite part of politics is getting punched in the face with a jab and responding with a haymaker,” one person close to him says.

To those who know Trump Jr., his attraction to politics was not surprising. “He was the only family member who talked politics before his dad ran for president,” the person close to him says. “He’s the only one of the kids who would have found a way into politics if the dad hadn’t run for office.” And those politics have always tilted hard to the right. Speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, Stephen K. Bannon, the Trump adviser who had run the right-wing website Breitbart, said, “I’d describe Don Jr., who I think very highly of, as a guy who believes everything on Breitbart is true.” Or as Sam Nunberg, an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, says, “Don’s a real winger, and I mean that as a compliment.”

In early 2018, Trump Jr. approached Andy Surabian, a young Republican operative who worked on the 2016 campaign and then in the White House for Bannon. Trump Jr. was by then a formidable presence on social media and Fox News, but, he explained to Surabian, he wanted to move into real politics by stumping for Republican congressional candidates in the midterm elections. Surabian put together a campaign schedule for him that, from May to November, featured 70 events in 17 states. Among the candidates he campaigned for was Matt Gaetz, a young congressman from Florida who spent much of his first term loudly demonstrating his loyalty to Trump. “We need fighters!” Trump Jr. said from behind a lectern decorated with a “Make America Gaetz Again!” sign. Now, Gaetz says, “constantly candidates are begging me to get his phone number, or a photo with him, or a chance for a retweet or an endorsement.”

The president can still be brutally dismissive of his son, grousing about his enthusiasm for firearms or questioning his political intelligence, according to multiple people present for such conversations. When Trump appeared on a special Father’s Day edition of “Triggered,” Trump Jr.’s biweekly online talk show for the Trump campaign, the awkwardness between the men was painful. Trump Jr. asked the president if he liked his beard. “Get rid of it,” Trump growled, to peals of nervous laughter from Trump Jr.

But the president is, at heart, a transactional person. As Trump Jr.’s political star has risen, Trump advisers say, so has Trump’s appreciation for him. Cliff Sims, a former White House communications aide, recalls watching television with the president in the private dining room off the Oval Office one afternoon when Trump Jr. appeared on the screen. “The president stopped what he was doing and turned up the volume,” Sims says. “He literally said to me, ‘He’s really good at this, isn’t he?’ He had this kind of feeling like, He’s a chip off the old block.”

Trump Jr. is now a key player in the Republican Party’s 2020 operation. He and Guilfoyle have become fund-raising powerhouses, coaxing large donations from high-dollar donors. (Guilfoyle is reportedly paid $15,000 a month by the Trump campaign.) Email solicitations sent out by the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans’ election arm, under Trump Jr.’s name have so far raised more than $3 million in small-dollar donations. “Triggered” is the most watched of the Trump campaign’s slate of digital shows. In September, Trump Jr. plans to return to the campaign trail four days a week; in October, that’s expected to increase to six days a week.

The greatest measure of his newfound political clout is the heated competition among Republicans to offer the most sycophantic quote about him. Gaetz hails Trump Jr. as “the most dynamic voice that you hear in American politics other than when it’s preceded by ‘Hail to the Chief.’” Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, calls him “a downright rock star.” Jeff Roe, Senator Ted Cruz’s political strategist, deems him “a next-level, generational talent.” Republicans speak of Trump Jr.’s hunting-and-fishing prowess the way Red Guards once talked about Mao swimming the Yangtze. “I’ve shot with Green Beret snipers,” Daines says, “and Donald Trump Jr. is as good a shot as anybody I’ve ever shot with. He’s a remarkable marksman. And by the way, on fly fishing, too — I’m not trying to exaggerate his skills, but I’ve been around a lot of guys that fly fish, and he’s a guide-quality fly fisherman.”

In addition to Surabian, Trump Jr.’s innermost inner circle consists of Arthur Schwartz, a New York Republican operative with a reputation for the political dark arts; Tommy Hicks, a Texas private-equity scion and hunting buddy of Trump Jr.’s who’s now co-chairman of the Republican National Committee; and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA who became friendly with Trump Jr. when he served as his body man during the final months of the 2016 campaign. A little further outside are people like Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence; Cliff Sims; Sergio Gor; and young Republican congressmen like Gaetz and Lee Zeldin of New York.

Through phone calls and text chains, the group — which Gaetz calls “the wolf pack”— formulates Trump Jr.’s political moves. “It could be fairly argued that Don Jr. and his political team,” a Trump adviser says, “have a better rapid-response operation than the White House communications office has ever had.” And Trump Jr.’s favorite form of rapid response, like his father’s, is the social media post. “He stares at his iPhone all the time,” says a Republican operative who has traveled with Trump Jr. “He’s locked and loaded.”

The wolf pack is made up of some of the most cynical and situational people in G.O.P. politics, whose priorities oscillate between “owning the libs” and loyalty enforcement among Republicans. Last October, Trump Jr. began tweeting against Lindsey Graham for not doing enough, as the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, to protect his father from impeachment, raising an online army under the hashtag #WheresLindsey to demand that Graham issue subpoenas on Trump’s behalf. That month, Graham attended a World Series game with the president. “For at least three innings, Lindsey was squawking at the president to get Don Jr. off his ass,” says Gaetz, who was with them at the game. (Graham’s office declined to comment.)

In February, Trump Jr. posted to his Instagram account a picture of Mitt Romney, who had just voted to convict his father in the Senate impeachment trial, in some tragically high-waisted jeans with the caption, “MOM JEANS: Because you’re a pussy.” It was a juvenile move, and it was the subject of some debate within the wolf pack. Over lunch that day, Trump Jr. asked Surabian what he thought of the meme. (If the message is deemed too inflammatory, it will often appear on Schwartz’s Twitter account instead of Trump Jr.’s.) The two ultimately concluded that while the language and image would undoubtedly generate negative headlines, it would also grab eyeballs, and that Trump Jr.’s own attached comment, calling on Romney to “be expelled from the @GOP,” justified the post. “The meme got attention and guaranteed it went viral,” the person close to Trump Jr. says, “but it was the message that Mitt should be kicked out of the caucus that we cared about and wanted to make sure got out there.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump Jr. posted to Instagram a picture, titled “The Deplorables,” of the faces of various high-profile Trump supporters superimposed on the bodies of characters from the action movie “The Expendables”; one face was that of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that had by then been embraced as a mascot by white supremacists online. He also posted on Twitter a picture of a candy bowl with the text: “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” The trope of undesirable people hiding among good ones dates to the Holocaust, and the “poisoned candy” metaphor had become popular with xenophobes online.

In each instance, Trump Jr. professed ignorance. “I’ve never even heard of Pepe the Frog,” he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. “I thought it was a frog in a wig. I thought it was funny.” Elsewhere, he said the Skittles picture was “a statistical thing.” And yet throughout his father’s presidency, Trump Jr. has preserved his winking proximity to the far-right and conspiracist fringe, while avoiding his father’s clumsier cycles of embraces and disavowals.

The president in the past several months has routinely retweeted the Twitter accounts of followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that Trump is doing battle with a cabal of Democratic and “deep state” elites who run a child-sex-trafficking ring. When Trump was asked about QAnon, which the F.B.I. has labeled a domestic terrorism threat, at a White House news conference this month, he replied, “I’ve heard these are people that love our country.” Trump Jr. has himself avoided such signal-boosting and overt praise of QAnon, but in May he posted to Instagram a picture of Joe Biden saying, “See you later, alligator!” alongside an image of an alligator responding, “In a while, pedophile!” When Jake Tapper of CNN subsequently called out the Trumps for the smear, Trump Jr. responded on Twitter: “Jake, I’m sorry that you’re more upset (Triggered!) about a joke meme than you are @JoeBiden’s gross habit of touching & sniffing young girls.” Early this year, he posted a picture of himself to Instagram holding a custom AR-15-style rifle emblazoned with the “Jerusalem cross,” a symbol used by Christian soldiers during the Crusades that has been adopted by far-right extremist groups; the rifle’s magazine clip was decorated with an image of Hillary Clinton behind bars.

Surabian, speaking for Trump Jr., told CNN that “symbols on firearms depicting various historical warriors are extremely common within the Second Amendment community,” and that the Clinton-behind-bars image was a meme intended to “mock Hillary Clinton” and “trigger humorless liberals.” As for the Biden-as-pedophile posts, Trump Jr. maintained that he was just “joking around.” When I asked whether Trump Jr. believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory, Surabian replied, “Of course not.” But in July, Trump Jr. finally ran afoul of Twitter by tweeting a viral video making false claims about hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy in treating Covid-19. Twitter hid the post from view and suspended his tweeting privileges for 12 hours. “Big tech is activist liberal,” he complained on Fox News.

By then, he was already adept at strategically picking fights outside the conservative media bubble. Last fall, when he published his book “Triggered” — a farrago of tossed-off personal history and predictable political attacks that sold 287,000 hardcover copies, thanks, in part, to bulk purchases by the Republican National Committee — Hachette Book Group pressed him to do some mainstream media appearances. Trump Jr.’s team, seeking a spectacle, reached out to “The View.” He came prepared. When Joy Behar asked him about his father boasting on the “Access Hollywood” tape of sexually assaulting women, Trump Jr. fired back that Behar had worn blackface to a Halloween party in the 1970s and that Whoopi Goldberg had once defended Roman Polanski. “We’ve all done things that we regret,” he said, “if we’re talking about bringing the discourse down.” The only “View” host he didn’t go out of his way to antagonize was Meghan McCain, even offering her a semi-apology for his father’s attacks against hers. “We realized that the biggest headline to come out of his appearance could not be Meghan McCain confronting him about his dad,” says the person close to Trump Jr.

In February, Trump Jr. traveled to Iowa on the eve of the state’s caucuses in a show of force. Although his father faced no serious opposition for the Republican nomination, he was leading a group of some 80 congressmen, cabinet members and other Republicans to stump for Trump there and, more important, rough up the Democrats. He was just about to speak at a “Keep Iowa Great” event outside Des Moines when a Jewish protester began yelling that Trump Jr.’s father was responsible for a rise in anti-Semitism. As the protester was hauled out of the rally by security guards, Trump Jr. shouted, “I don’t think anyone’s done more for Israel and American Jews than Donald Trump!”

With the crowd cheering him on, he launched into a tirade against the reporters in the room, then pledged to do everything in his power to help his father win re-election. “We don’t just have to lose,” he said. “We don’t just have to roll over and die because the other side wants us to and their buddies in the mainstream media want us to. That’s not how it works anymore.” He added, “We will fight harder than any people you’ve ever seen for the next 10 months to make sure that this continues.”

At the time, it seemed likely that Trump would win a second term. But then the coronavirus happened, infecting over 5.5 million Americans (including Guilfoyle) and killing more than 170,000 of them, paralyzing the economy and imperiling Trump’s re-election prospects. At the end of the Democratic National Convention this month, he trailed Biden in the RealClearPolitics national polling average by 7.6 points — not an insurmountable deficit, but a daunting one.

At the White House and inside the Trump campaign, there remains a stubborn, almost defiant sense of optimism — born, they believe, out of experience — that the president will win in November. “I can say that, having been there four years ago, things looked a lot worse back in 2016 than whatever crisis politically the president might be going through right now,” Charlie Kirk says. When I asked Jason Miller about the degree of worry inside his office, he replied, “I haven’t picked up on any of the W-word that you just threw around in such a cavalier fashion.”

But Trump Jr. is apparently worried. “Don’s the only person who thinks they’re going to lose,” says a prominent conservative activist who is in regular contact with him and other key members of Trump’s political operation. “He’s like, ‘We’re losing, dude, and we’re going to get really hurt when we lose.’” An electoral defeat in November, Trump Jr. fears, could result in federal prosecutions of Trump, his family and his political allies. He has told the conservative activist that he expects that a Biden administration will not participate in a “peaceful transition” and instead will “shoot the prisoners.” (“This is 100 percent false,” Surabian says. “Don does not have these concerns.”)

Even assuming his worst fears aren’t realized, a Trump defeat in November would pose an existential question for Trump Jr. He has become a figure of genuine political value, but that value remains mostly a function of his status as the premier surrogate for his father. This is the most treasured currency there is in a Republican Party in which political fortunes now rise and fall based on proximity and devotion to Donald Trump — but what happens to that currency if Trump leaves the stage? At the same time, it is difficult to see Trump Jr. coming fully into his own as a political figure until he does what he struggled unsuccessfully to do in his younger years: escape his father’s shadow. Although he would obviously prefer that his father win in November, people close to him say that, in some ways, having Trump out of the White House would be advantageous for Trump Jr. They use words like “unshackled” and “free” and speculate excitedly about his running for office in Montana or Florida — or, a few dare to dream, even the presidency — in 2024.

Those who are familiar with Trump Jr.’s thinking, though, say that’s not going to happen — at least not in the next four years. “Don can do everything he wants to do in politics,” says the person close to him, “without running for office.” The wolf pack talks about how Trump Jr. would be a natural podcaster or talk-radio host; Fox News — or perhaps a new conservative TV channel — could give him his own show. He has expressed interest in playing a prominent role in a revivified National Rifle Association and is open to the idea of serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee. This month, he will release his second book, “Liberal Privilege,” a rehash of Biden’s various supposed sins that he wrote during the pandemic lockdown.

Trump has marveled to aides at the response Trump Jr. received when, before the pandemic, he appeared at Trump rallies, where he was typically greeted with cheers of “46! 46!” (Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States.) “It’s sort of cool if you’re at a stadium of 15,000 people and they start chanting ‘46’ when you’re speaking,” Trump Jr. told the comedian Jim Norton in February when he appeared on the satellite-radio show Norton hosts with Sam Roberts. Still, he said, “I don’t know that I’d like the day job, and that’s a big part of it.”

Later in the interview, he complained that “someone in the mainstream media will write an article” about his cursing on the show. (No one in the mainstream media ever did, but then, “owning the libs” has never required actual owning of the libs.) “Did you ever think, though, that you’d get to be an adult, and then there’d be somebody who wanted to write a newspaper article that you used the F-word?” Roberts asked.

“No, I did not,” Trump Jr. said, “because we’re not adults, guys. The reality is, like, there are no adults in the room anymore.”

There is also a link to listen to the article on the site.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Those who like government least govern worst

From the Iraq War to the coronavirus: why Republicans fail at governance.

Those who like government least govern worst

The GOP stands for Grand Old Party, but there is no past on display at the 2020 Republican National Convention: No previous Republican presidents, or previous Republican presidential nominees, are speaking. History, for this Republican Party, began on June 15, 2015, when Donald J. Trump descended a golden escalator. That suits both sides just fine. The Bush family, and the Republicans who admire them, view Trump and his followers with horror. In turn, Trump and his allies look upon the Bush wing of the party with contempt.

Trump’s rise has driven a rehabilitation of the George W. Bush brand. Bush’s personal decency, his impulse toward tolerance and inclusivity, glows against the backdrop of Trump’s casual cruelty and personal decadence. But the catastrophic misgovernance in which Bush ended his presidency, and Trump ends his first term, reveals the continuity between the two administrations.

When Bush left the White House in 2009, the Iraq War was a recognized debacle, with thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, casualties of its chaos. The global economy was in collapse, driven by a calamitous void of regulatory oversight of Wall Street, and the disastrous decision to let Lehman Brothers fall. Less than 10 years later, the next Republican president is ending his first term with nearly 200,000 Americans dead of the coronavirus — the worst pandemic performance, by far, of any rich nation — and an economy in shambles.

Bush and Trump are so personally different, and their administrations so temperamentally opposite, that it feels awkward to compare them, like trying to find the symmetries between a car crash and a spontaneous combustion. But in his new book, To Start a War , Robert Draper chronicles the internal deliberations and dynamics that led the Bush administration into Iraq. In doing so, Draper reminds us of the throughline between the two administrations: a toxic contempt for the government itself.

Draper’s narrative starts in the hours after 9/11 when Deputy Secretary for Defense Paul Wolfowitz demands an assessment of Iraqi involvement in terrorism since the Gulf War. The missive, time-stamped 1:26 am on 9/12, was carried to Gary Greco, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency officer, by a deputy, who asked, “What the hell does it mean?” Greco knew exactly what it meant. “It means we’re going to war in Iraq,” he replied.

Draper conducted interviews with more than 300 people involved in the runup to the Iraq War, and the stories they tell, assembled one after the other, find a grim, repetitive tempo. Over and over, intelligence analysts and regional experts tried to talk Bush administration leadership out of their belief that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11, that it sought an alliance with al-Qaeda, that it posed a threat to the United States, that it would be easy to invade and rebuild, that there was firm evidence of weapons of mass destruction. And over and over again, Bush administration leaders dismissed them as hidebound bureaucrats whose obsession with process blinded them to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Take the links, or lack thereof, between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The intelligence community kept shooting down the theories — and the frequently fabricated pieces of evidence — connecting the two entities. Senior Bush officials asked again and again, and the answer kept coming back the same. To Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, it was proof that “no one at the CIA had an open mind.”

His colleague Wolfowitz reached out to the UK’s Ministry of Defense. “Surely your intelligence people have got stuff on this,” he begged. They turned him down. So Wolfowitz and Feith formed their own small team to make the argument that the intelligence agencies wouldn’t. Their team put together a briefing to show Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who loved it — in part because one slide accused the CIA of neglecting a favorite adage of his, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” — and asked that it be shown to the CIA.

The meeting between the actual intelligence analysts and the ad hoc team assembled to come to the conclusions they wouldn’t is darkly comic. “This is your intelligence,” Feith tells the assembled CIA analysts — the implication being that the CIA gathered the data, but they were either too dim or too cautious to understand what it said. “They were connecting dots that weren’t even there — things we’d dismissed and which, in hindsight, never took place,” recalled one analyst in attendance. Bureaucrats, right?

Draper’s book is full of stories like this, where the catalytic ingredient is contempt for the government employees who actually had the expertise — the State Department officials who knew what it would mean to leave a power vacuum in Iraq, the United Nations weapons inspectors who had scoured suspected WMD sites in the country, the generals who understood that keeping the peace would be harder than routing Saddam’s forces, the foreign intelligence agencies who had discredited the sources the administration was relying on, the regional experts who warned against disbanding Iraq’s army and civil service. Tragically, the Bush team’s contempt for the weapons inspectors was such that when they didn’t find weapons, it became, inside the administration, part of the case for war: It just showed how canny and deceptive Saddam really was, and how little you could trust the UN to contain him.

In some cases — particularly speeches given by Dick Cheney — the Bush team was simply lying about what was known, or not known. On this, Draper’s reporting is clear: Key members of the Bush administration were obsessed with invading Iraq long before 9/11. There was no intelligence, no argument, that would have shaken their conviction. But often, the truth really was unclear, the intelligence really was uncertain, the decision-maker at least somewhat open to persuasion. In those cases, trust became the crucial question, and the Bushies always found it easy to mistrust anyone they could dismiss as a bureaucrat.

This was particularly true in the Defense Department, where Rumsfeld saw any dissent as evidence of the military’s fear of his modernization agenda. “The second a question is raised about any current policy or any current process, the response is immediate and violent,” he wrote in a memo. “‘You must not change anything.’” There was likely truth to this assessment when it came to abandoning old weapons programs, but it proved disastrous in planning for a postwar Iraq.

In February 2002, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that occupying Iraq would require “several hundred thousand soldiers.” Furious, Rumsfeld deployed Wolfowitz to the Hill to rebut Shinseki. Wolfowitz said the four-star general’s estimate was “wildly off the mark” (it wasn’t) because the Iraqis “will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down.” He added the war would be near costless, because Iraq’s oil exports would pay for the bulk of reconstruction. Shinseki was shortly thereafter forced into retirement.

Wolfowitz’s rebuttal reflected Bush’s views. The president thought the bureaucrats misunderstood human nature. They were obsessed with how to rebuild bureaucracy, share power, deliver services. Bush believed all people yearn for freedom, and warnings of a bloody aftermath were an insult to the Iraqi spirit. Planning for postwar governance wasn’t needed because America wouldn’t need to engage in much postwar governance.

Liberals often wonder how conservatives can think the government too inefficient to offer health insurance but capable of invading and rebuilding foreign countries. The answer to the riddle is simple: Bush, at least, didn’t think the American government would have to do the hard work of governance in a foreign land. All it had to do was destroy the existing government.

The Bush team’s contempt for government took a different form than the Trump team’s contempt for government. The Bushies saw themselves as reformers who knew better than the government they led. They were capable, experienced, steeped in the values of the private sector. They wanted to remake the government in their own image. But their administration was a disaster in part because they didn’t know better than the intelligence officials they dismissed, the financial regulators they later ignored, the FEMA staffers they left under incompetent leadership. They didn’t respect the institution they ran enough to listen to what it knew.

The Trump team is more outrightly hostile to the government they lead. They fear “the deep state” too much to try and reform it. They don’t want to remake federal agencies so much as corrupt them for their own gain. Where the Bush team was, at times, too interested in the minutia of the agencies they led, second-guessing even the smallest decisions from civil servants, the Trump team is detached from the agencies they run, unaware, annoyed, or threatened by the workings and responsibilities of the executive branch.

But the coronavirus disaster highlights the way different manifestations of contempt for the government can end in the same place. Like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration is led by a president who thought he knew better than the experts, and didn’t. Like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration sidelined internal critics, silencing those who said the administration was doing insufficient planning and committing insufficient resources. Like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration has been dismissive of the concerns and models offered by foreign governments and contemptuous of international organizations. And like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration’s misjudgments have led to a shocking casualty count and an economic crisis.

There are many differences between Bush and Trump as individuals, and many differences between their administrations. But both of them represent a Republican Party soaked in contempt for, and mistrust of, the federal government. When you don’t respect, or even like, the institution you lead, you lead it poorly. When that institution is incredibly, globally important — as the US government is — leading it poorly can invite global catastrophe. And sure enough, under the last two Republican administrations, it has. There is continuity here, of the most consequential sort: a continuity of terrible outcomes.

[dragonfly9]

The Washington Post’s Editorial Board fierce take-down of T’s leadership and his allegiances for autocrats and strong men, his spinning of facts, his disruption of NATO, his conspiracy theories, blaming others, fixation of calling news sources fake etc are all the more reason to get him out of office in November.

The man is not fit. He will bring down this democracy if we let him.

Opinion | Global freedom would suffer grievous harm in a second Trump term

The Post’s View • Opinion

Global freedom would suffer grievous harm in a second Trump term

Opinion by the Editorial Board

August 28, 2020

THE 21st century, like the one that came before it, has seen the emergence of a fateful struggle over the nature of human governance. Regimes founded on democracy and human rights, which 25 years ago appeared to have triumphed, now face a grave challenge from a resurgent authoritarianism, which employs new technologies to refashion the tyranny that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union could not sustain. At stake is not only which nations will dominate global affairs, but also whether individual freedoms — of expression, of assembly, of religious faith — will survive.

A 21st-century victory for democracy, like those that came in World War II and the Cold War, is inconceivable without the leadership of the United States. America must prevail in the race to develop new technologies, rally fellow democracies to counter authoritarian aggression, and reform capitalism and democracy itself to serve a new age. But President Trump cannot deliver that leadership. On the contrary, over the past three years he has done as much as any global actor to advance the cause of authoritarianism and undermine the free world.

Mr. Trump’s most conspicuous aid to tyranny has been his relentless support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who aided Mr. Trump’s 2016 election and whose foreign policy is laser-focused on weakening the United States and dividing it from other democracies in the NATO alliance. Mr. Trump has provided invaluable support for this cause, most recently by ordering a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany. While he has not hesitated to publicly trash NATO and the leaders of Germany, Canada and Britain, Mr. Trump has never uttered a word of criticism of Mr. Putin, even after receiving U.S. intelligence reports indicating that Moscow paid bounties to the Afghan Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers.

Until recently, Mr. Trump offered similar obeisance to Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, calling him a “brilliant leader” and “a great man.” Mr. Trump encouraged Mr. Xi’s cultural genocide against the Uighur population of the Xinjiang region. That campaign has pioneered Beijing’s technologies of comprehensive surveillance and other AI-aided repression — tools that are central to the new model of authoritarianism it is promoting to the rest of the world. Mr. Trump also promised Mr. Xi he would remain silent on the suppression of Hong Kong’s democracy movement while negotiating trade concessions. The administration’s belated reversals on those issues, tied to Mr. Trump’s attempt to shift blame for the more than 177,000 U.S. covid-19 deaths, has predictably altered neither China’s behavior nor the conclusion among many Asians that the United States can no longer be counted on to defend democratic values or resist Chinese aggression.

The Cold War was a grueling conflict waged country by country, often in the far reaches of the developing world. Barring the outbreak of a direct military conflict between the United States and China, the 21st-century counterpart is likely to be similar. China and Russia will peddle their authoritarian solutions while the democracies press for free speech and free elections. That competition is already well underway — and again, Mr. Trump has a record of backing the wrong side.

Aspiring strongmen who are dismantling democratic institutions in their countries have been embraced by Mr. Trump and welcomed to the White House, sometimes rupturing bans imposed by his predecessors. This sordid parade has featured Abdel Fatah al-Sissi of Egypt, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Prayut Chan-ocha of Thailand, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Andrzej Duda of Poland; the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte turned down Mr. Trump’s invitation. At the same time, Mr. Trump has shunned democratic leaders attempting to resist the Russians or Chinese — most notably Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has never received a White House invitation after resisting Mr. Trump’s demand for a politicized investigation of Joe Biden. This month, Mr. Trump has done nothing to help the Belarus democratic movement seeking to overthrow the longtime dictator of a nation Mr. Putin seeks to dominate.

The democratic leaders of South Korea and Japan, the two most important U.S. allies in East Asia, have been whipsawed by Mr. Trump’s insistence on sweeping trade concessions and vast increases in subsidies for U.S. bases on their territories. They watched with dismay as Mr. Trump meanwhile proclaimed his “love” for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a Chinese client, and scaled back U.S. military exercises with South Korea.

Mr. Trump has campaigned for democracy only in nations where he has other political interests, such as Venezuela, whose Cuba-allied regime is despised by many Florida voters. Even there his advocacy has been feckless. After an attempted uprising by a U.S.-backed opposition leader failed last year, Mr. Trump wrote him off, and he has recently expressed interest in meeting dictator Nicolás Maduro.

For all this, the greatest damage Mr. Trump has done to the cause of democracy has come at home. His assaults on the U.S. media and courts, attempts to politicize Justice Department investigations, and bald efforts to manipulate voting in November’s election threaten to degrade what has been the world’s strongest democracy while offering a model for budding authoritarians around the world. His disregard for science and restrictions on immigration have weakened the chances that the United States will win the race to develop new technologies. His incessant lying has helped to create a political culture in which wild conspiracy theories flourish and there is no consensus on basic facts, making informed legislative debate and compromise all but impossible.

Though damaged, U.S. democracy and the global cause of freedom so far have survived Mr. Trump’s term in office, in large part because they have the determined support of millions of citizens. Yet there should be no question that in a second Trump term, they would suffer grievous and perhaps irreversible harm. If the 21st century is to be a time in which human societies are grounded in individual freedoms, rather than dominated by an all-powerful state, Mr. Trump must be defeated.

[Whoosie (Ray Van Houtte)]

The Platform the GOP Is Too Scared to Publish

Insightful and oh so true.

[dragonfly9]

I cherry picked from a newsletter I read from (PeakProsperity) which has been tracing the pandemic numbers early on, and describes what the markets are doing, and what they represent on a macro level.

This MotherJones video puts in perspective the huge differences between the haves and the have-nots in terms of income levels and results in a potential all-out war between the classes.

We could/should be bracing for huge amount of civil unrest come November or sooner.

Worth watching and am putting it under opinion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2qDRBTsFCk&feature=emb_title

• Blog

Suddenly Fear Of Social Unrest Is Everywhere

2020 has revealed this truth clearly in the response to the covid-19 pandemic. With the $5+ trillion unleashed between the monetary and fiscal “rescue” stimulus efforts, the battle cry from our “leaders” has been: Defend the rich!

Despite an unprecedented decline in economic activity, asset prices have more than recovered their losses and many are now back at all-time-highs in what has been the shortest-lived bear market history:

We have been referring to these detrimental policies as the Leave No Billionaire Behind (#small-victories LNBB) program, as they’ve resulted in a massive boom for the uber-wealthy, while the rest of America has lost tens of millions of jobs and received meager to no assistance.

To get a sense of the gargantuan disparity between the haves and the have-nots, watch this 2-minute video:

And these policies aren’t going away. In fact, as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell stated yesterday, our leaders are doubling- and tripling-down on them.

In my recent interview with former Fed insider Danielle DiMartino-Booth, she interprets Powell’s comments yesterday as nothing less than a public commitment to “do even more” of what the Fed has been doing since 2009.

So if you think creating a zombie economy that enriches the elites while screwing the rest of us has been bad, boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet…

There is a line of intolerance that, once crossed, will turn the desperate masses against the small few benefitting so vastly from today’s system.

Skeptical it could happen? History begs to differ. Its list of social revolutions, uprisings and rebellions is so long it makes your head spin. Even the number that have happened just within the past decade is staggeringly large

And with an upcoming US Presidential election as divisive as this one? Not only will a large part of America be angry at the outcome, whomever wins, imagine what would happen should the results be contested in a protracted dispute (as has already been hinted at by both parties)? It would be the equivalent of tossing a grenade into the already-overstuffed powder keg.

Source: PeakProsperity Newsletter, and MotherJones video (YouTube)

[anon95374541]

@dragonfly9

asset prices have more than recovered their losses and many are now back at all-time-highs in what has been the shortest-lived bear market history

Yeah, we’re definitely seeing two very different economies through this crisis.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

How Facebook Became the Social Media Home of the Right

While the left has flowed to Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg has laid out the welcome mat to the Trump legions.

How Facebook Became the Social Media Home of the Right

Not too long after Donald J. Trump was elected president, a pattern started to emerge on Facebook that had not taken place in the company’s history. Millions of young people started to abandon the social network, either quitting Facebook entirely or deleting it from their phones and other devices. At the time the theory floating around tech circles was that Facebook was full of old people and boring posts, and other platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, were more youthful and fun. But in recent weeks it’s become clear that the exodus was likely a result of something larger. Facebook has become the home of right-wing America, while Twitter and Snap have become the home of the left.

This become clearly apparent in the past week, when Jack Dorsey finally decided to start labeling Trump’s most dangerous posts as “glorifying violence” and even fact-checking other posts where Trump lied about mail-in ballots contributing to voter fraud (they don’t). At the same time Mark Zuckerberg chose to go in the completely opposite direction, ceding that he is not the arbiter of free speech, and even going as far as to have a call with Trump himself to vociferate Facebook’s stance. Conversely, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, announced that he will no longer promote any of Trump’s posts on the platform. “We simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform,” Spiegel said in a memo to employees.

In reality, by ceding, and even groveling, to the conservatives in the way that Zuckerberg has, he has already created a divide not within Facebook itself, but within the entire internet. Facebook has become the home of the conservative right, and as a result, the most shared content on Facebook is almost always conservative in nature. For example, Kevin Roose, a reporter with the New York Times, often posts (on Twitter) a list of the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices, including Fox News, Ben Shapiro, ForAmerica, and the right-wing conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza. On the other hand, Twitter has largely become the voice of the left, where the most shared stories, content, videos, and opinions are often much more latitudinarian in nature. Think about almost every video that has gone viral in recent years showing something dumb Trump has done or said, a moment of police brutality, or someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez berating a Republican senator or CEO banker. They all found their vitality on Twitter. Or go and look at the trending topics of the day, which are almost always topics of the left. On Thursday the number one post on Facebook was a video shared by the conservative commentator and political activist Candace Owens, where Owens said that George Floyd was a “horrible human being” and that “racially motivated police brutality is a myth.” The video was viewed on Facebook 24 million times in less than a day.

Internally at these companies, employees have responded accordingly. At Twitter, current and former employees have voiced pride in the fact that Twitter has finally taken a stance against the most divisive user on its platform. “It’s about time!” a former employee told me. “I’m proud of Twitter.” In comparison, at Facebook, hundreds of employees staged a virtual walkout, while some even quit working for the company, publicly denouncing Zuckerberg’s views. The New York Times reported that internally at Facebook, employees have called out Zuckerberg’s decision as “weak leadership” showing a “lack of backbone.” In and around Silicon Valley, anyone I’ve spoken to who has worked with Zuckerberg at one point or another has called him every name in the book for his actions around allowing Trump to act this way on his platform. “Fuck Zuck” has been texted to me more than once.

The turmoil unfurling within Facebook, and the decisions by Dorsey and Spiegel, are in many ways a reflection of what’s happening in society today. There’s strife when the people on the platform don’t get their way, and celebration and pride when they do. In the same way that some employees quit at Facebook when Zuckerberg sucked up to Trump, you’re seeing the same thing happen in society, where people have abandoned one platform in lieu of another, largely because one agrees with your viewpoint and the other does not. If this is the case, it leads back to the age-old question of whether social media is a net positive or a net negative for society. As someone who has covered these companies since their earliest days, this is a question I have always struggled to answer. For example, in the same week that Trump accused a media commentator of murder, lied about voting, and incited violence against Americans, the video of George Floyd being killed largely might not have been seen had it not been for people on social media sharing it. The images and videos of protests in large cities led to more protests across America, until, in a matter of days, every single state, and even other countries, saw their streets filled with millions marching in protest against police brutality and racism.

I spoke to both a former Twitter employee and a former Facebook employee about this, and their answers were surprisingly similar. Social networks are neither a net negative nor a net positive for society, they both said. Rather, they magnify our most visceral feelings and beliefs, at a blazingly fast speed. We yell at one another and point fingers, these former employees said, until we eventually abandon the platform that does not align with our views, and instead go to the one that does. And it appears, that after Facebook and Twitter both took two completely different stances on Trump, that one has finally cemented itself as the home of the right, the other, the left. And in the same way that there is only left and right in America, on social media, there is nothing in the middle.

I follow a few liberal FB groups. In the past couple of days TWO of them have suddenly disappeared, taken down by FB. For one of them, this is the second time. Yet all of these secret groups we keep finding out about where police and ICE agents and what not are saying horrible things seem to survive just fine.

[anon95374541]

@Windthin

I follow a few liberal FB groups.

I recently deactivated my FB account, just didn’t enjoy spending any time that site anymore. It’s all clickbait, buy now, and hate Democrats. Still on the gram but I’d love to just declare total social media bankruptcy and close all my accounts.

https://youtu.be/jPCIiUAXBN4