newrepublic--2020-05-29--Mark Zuckerberg Comes to Trump’s Defense

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2018 , a contrite Mark Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook was still a force for good , as long as the company ensured that its tools were not used for nefarious purposes .
“ Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company , ” he said .
“ For most of our existence , we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.… But it ’ s clear now that we didn ’ t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
” That was arguably Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ platform ’ s dubious role in the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal , Zuckerberg needed to appease an increasingly skeptical public and lawmakers keen on regulations that could cut into his company ’ s profits .
He promised that it wouldn ’ t happen again and left Washington with little more than a slap on the wrist .
Appearing on Fox News on Thursday , Zuckerberg had a rather different message .
There was little talk of Facebook as a company with distinct values , let alone a core ethical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Twitter ’ s decision to fact-check and place a warning on tweets by President Trump , Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook had no intention of interceding in political speech , no matter how vile or inaccurate .
Chastising his competitor , Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey , Zuckerberg told Fox News , “ I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn ’ t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.
” It was a wet kiss for Trump , quickly reciprocated both by press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as part of the White House ’ s larger campaign against Dorsey and Twitter .
It was a milestone in Facebook ’ s increasing rightward tilt .
Now Zuckerberg is casting himself as a free speech absolutist , seemingly in an attempt to woo Republicans and stave off regulation .

Zuckerberg is privileging a supposed commitment to free speech over his company’s own policies. In the years after the 2016 election, Facebook made an effort to at least appear to take issues like election interference seriously. These policies were attempts to woo critical Democrats, just as many of Zuckerberg’s public statements—to say nothing of his private meetings with Tucker Carlson, Lindsey Graham, and Hugh Hewitt—are intended to woo Republicans. But Zuckerberg has since deprioritized his company’s efforts to restrict election interference and is ignoring the president’s voter suppression efforts.
It just so happens that this position helps Facebook’s business model the most. Carefully scrutinizing statements from public officials would be expensive; holding them accountable would also jeopardize relationships with the very politicians Facebook is spending millions of dollars to court in Washington. Zuckerberg, whose only real ambition seems to be to oversee the largest and most profitable company on the planet, is not interested in making Facebook less toxic if the cost is too high.
At the same time, Zuckerberg continues to cast Facebook in messianic terms. His insistence that it not be an “arbiter of truth” replaces the communal idealism of the company’s early years with something like Fox News’s cynical “fair and balanced” approach toward news. Never mind that Facebook acts as an “arbiter of truth” all the time, recently labeling 50 million posts relating to the coronavirus as being untrue. It also took down the “Plandemic” video that alleged that “wearing a mask can make you sick and could lead to imminent harm.”


newrepublic--2020-05-29--Trump’s One Constant Is a Fetish for Bloodshed

Earlier this month , armed white protesters bearing Confederate flags and semiautomatic rifles strode through the halls of Michigan ’ s capitol building to challenge the state ’ s stay-at-home order .
State lawmakers , fearing violence , canceled their legislative session to defuse the crisis .
President Donald Trump sympathized with those who sought to intimidate the legitimate government of an American state .
“ The Governor of Michigan should give a little , and put out the fire , ” he wrote on Twitter .
“ These are very good people , but they are angry .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
See them , talk to them , make a deal.
” The president struck a different tone toward another outburst of civil unrest on Thursday night .
Protesters in Minneapolis set a police precinct building on fire as demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd intensified .
Floyd ’ s brutal death at the hands of four local police officers , which was captured by footage from a bystander , drew condemnation from across the political spectrum , including from Trump himself .
But while other political leaders urged calm on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things worse .
“ I can ’ t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City , Minneapolis .
A total lack of leadership , ” he wrote .
“ Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor , Jacob Frey , get his act together and bring the City under control , or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.
” He went on : “ These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd , and I won ’ t let that happen.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way .
Any difficulty and we will assume control but , when the looting starts , the shooting starts .
Thank you !
” ( Trump claimed on Friday , somewhat unpersuasively , that this was a mere statement of fact instead of a threat . )
Trump , like many weak men , sees threats and acts of physical violence as a means to project strength .
His combative personality is not a healthy way for any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump himself once seemed to acknowledge .
“ It makes me feel so good to hit ‘ sleazebags ’ back—much better than seeing a psychiatrist ( which I never have ! )
, ” he boasted on Twitter in November 2012 .
It would be nice to have a president whose instinctual response to a crisis is reducing tensions instead of fueling them , but the United States is not so lucky right now .

It’s no surprise that Trump embraced this kind of rhetoric once more. His rise through public life to the White House is fueled by stoking racist sentiments among white Americans. During his presidential tenure, the most visible examples of this animus have been his actions toward Hispanic and Muslim immigrants. But from full-page ads, in the 1990s, demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were later found to be innocent, to falsely claiming Barack Obama wasn’t actually born in the U.S. for most of the last decade, his opportunistic diatribes have frequently targeted black Americans.
That animus also came with an unflinching support for police officers. On the campaign trail in 2015, Trump told a New England police union that he would issue an executive order to mandate the death penalty for suspected cop killers if elected president. “One of the first things I’d do in terms of executive order if I win would be to sign a strong, strong statement that will go out to the country, out to the world, that anybody caught killing a policeman, policewoman, police officer, anybody killing a police officer: death penalty,” he said. “It’s gonna happen. OK? We can’t let this go.” Such an executive order would be unconstitutional in at least three or four different ways, but Trump rarely acts with the Constitution in mind.
From time to time, Trump tries to act as if he were some different sort of person. In recent months, his campaign has worked to court black voters, ahead of the November elections, hoping to capitalize on former Vice President Joe Biden’s flawed record on criminal justice and other issues to weaken the Democrat’s support among black voters. The strategy already worked well for him in 2016: Though black voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump by a 9-to-1 ratio, black turnout also fell far below its levels under Barack Obama. That decline helped give Trump an edge in Midwestern battleground states and propelled him to a narrow Electoral College victory.


newrepublic--2020-05-29--The Racist Gatekeepers of American Land

The Racist Gatekeepers of American Land

The way many white Americans consider others in relation to public spaces , public lands , and nature is inherently proprietary .
This is in large part because the history behind all of these spaces , and the forces that are paid to defend them for the state , are defined by discrimination and exclusion .
It ’ s a regime that ’ s enforced every day , in ways that are both subtle and explicit .
What happened in New York City earlier this week was explicit .
After Amy Cooper , a white woman , refused to follow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being asked to by Christian Cooper , a Black man out bird-watching , she called 911 and told dispatchers , “ There ’ s a man , African American , he has a bicycle helmet , he is recording me and threatening me and my dog.
” The exchange brought back into focus a larger , ongoing conversation about public space and racism , particularly as it relates to green space , public parks , and national parks .
Amy Cooper called the police because of an unquestioned sense of entitlement to open @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for her .
She felt this way because , for the most part , this is how these spaces have been constructed .
Black , Native , and Latinx residents are all underrepresented in national park attendance , a trend , fed by racism and classism , that the federal government has reported on publicly since as early as 1962 .
Looking to urban green spaces , where access to nature is already limited , people of color face issues of zoning and police discrimination .
Although criminal justice reform in recent years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ penalties attached to “ park after dark ” summonses , the pandemic and city governments ’ supposed unbiased enforcement of social distancing has instead been a reminder that the rules are enforced along these same lines .
The wealthier , whiter parkgoers in the West Village were allowed a day in the sun , while the folks in Harlem found locked park gates .
So who are America ’ s public spaces and land for ?
Are they even America ’ s to start with ?
We are given the answers to these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Funez wrote for Earther , “ The outdoors were never made for people of color.
” The city , state , and national parks ; the beaches ; the town squares—were designed as havens for white citizens of a certain financial status .
In Chicago , in 1919 , white teenagers at Lake Michigan stoned a black teenager named Eugene Williams to death when his raft drifted onto the “ white side ” of the lake .
Fifty years later , Black residents in Connecticut staged wade-ins up and down the state ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wealthy , white residents had privatized 65 of the 72 available miles of beaches .
This , too , is the work of white supremacy .

I’m thinking about all this in relation to the racist Central Park incident and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, because in each we are confronted once again by both individual action and broader structures. The attention that Amy Cooper’s false report has been granted over the past several days is notable for many reasons—among them the fact that the police did not respond to Christian Cooper’s presence in the park with violence and the swift (and rare) consequences Amy Cooper faced for her racism. Over the past few years, social media has expanded from exposing regular police violence to capturing the everyday acts of racism committed by people not on the public payroll. Watching white people cavalierly dangle the lethal threat of law enforcement on people of color otherwise trying to enjoy themselves peacefully in a public space has turned into something of a twisted national pastime. BBQ Becky stumbled so Amy Cooper could fall flat on her face.
No one should feel particularly bad about the fact that Amy Cooper, unlike many offenders of her ilk, actually had to deal with the consequences of her actions. There’s no real reason to. But too much individualizing of the conflict can lead to tunnel vision: You can fire Amy Cooper, but there’s another Amy Cooper in the same park, waiting to call the same cops, who are policing those parks in the same racist ways anyway.
So you hold the structural and individual in your hands at the same time: Thinking back again to Indian Country, Native citizens should explode with fury on South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s anti-sovereignty pipeline-protection play against the Sioux nations’ checkpoints and direct their energy at rebuilding the blatantly corrupt Department of Interior that makes it possible. They should shake with anger over the mother who called armed police to detain two Mohawk teenage brothers taking a tour of Colorado State University and they should call for the repatriation of the 89,001 acres of Indigenous land the university received and capitalized on through land grants. And likewise, Native citizens should recognize that any individual or structural actions of anti-Blackness are not entirely separate from the issues faced by Indian Country. These acts are in fact another prong of the same discriminatory mindset America continues to perpetuate, and they underscore the need for our unwavering expression of solidarity if they are ever to be changed.


newrepublic--2020-05-29--No More Cop Unions

No More Cop Unions

When Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department killed 46-year-old George Floyd in cold blood last week , he showed the world exactly what kind of man he is .
Chauvin has been cited multiple times for using excessive force on the job ; he has been involved in at least two other police shootings , including that of Ira Latrell Toles , who is Black , in 2008 .
Chauvin has repeatedly abused his power , privilege , and authority to menace and terrorize—and he ’ s now been shown killing a human being on camera .
Even so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his house and order delivery while demonstrators protest outside .
And thanks to the tangled auspices of union affiliation , he ’ s also someone who technically counts as my “ union brother.
” Today just 12 percent of the American workforce is unionized , and labor laws bar a vast swath of workers ( particularly those who are classified as independent contractors or who are undocumented ) from basic labor protections .
But police are a high-density union profession—which creates no small amount of distress to labor activists in a moment like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision on public-sector union organizing had some cop unions nervous about their membership rolls , but police forces remain heavily unionized throughout the country .
Police unions represent hundreds of thousands of members in state , federal , and local jurisdictions .
( The Fraternal Order of Police , the nation ’ s largest cop union , has more than 340,000 members . )
And most of these union members are independent from any other labor organizations—which means , in turn , that they ’ re at best marginally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ today ’ s labor movement , which concentrates on organizing many of the same low-wage , service-sector communities of color who are disproportionately abused and harassed by police .
It wouldn ’ t make any sort of strategic sense for police-affiliated unions to try and make nice with the rest of the movement .
So that leaves one obvious , if tricky , option : abolishing police unions as part of the broader fight to defund , demilitarize , and ultimately dismantle the U.S. police force as it currently exists .
Labor leaders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fully embrace this aim—and some already have .
However , it ’ s not exactly a simple or straightforward proposition .
The International Union of Police Associations , which represents over 100,000 law enforcement employees as well as emergency medical personnel , is officially affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations , the largest federation of unions in the United States .
Its membership comprises 55 national and international unions , and it counts 12 million active and retired members .
But if the federation wants to prove @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racial justice and true worker solidarity , the AFL-CIO must permanently disaffiliate from the IUPA and sever its ties with any and all other police associations .

For example, on its official website, the IUPA linked to a May 27 Police magazine article that characterized George Floyd’s killing as “the death of a suspect during an arrest in which a Minneapolis officer put his knee on the back of the man’s neck to pin him to the ground.” This was a naked attempt to mislead readers and convince them that Chauvin has to be categorically innocent. It’s also in keeping with the “thin blue line” model of deference to the life-and-death authority granted by reflex to most municipal cops: The law enforcement community—and especially its unions’—first response, when one of its officers is caught red-handed, is to circle the wagons, vilify the victim or survivor, and bat away any criticism or dissent as virtual sedition. If and when reforms are introduced in the wake of an abuse of police powers, police and their unions remain in wagon-circling mode, determined to shoot them down. The bottom line here is all too plain: The police do not want reform; they want the freedom to operate with impunity.
The article IUPA boosted also took care to note that, in Minneapolis, kneeling on a suspect’s neck is apparently considered a “non-deadly force option” (albeit one that is banned elsewhere in Minnesota). And in a gruesome twist, Lieutenant Bob Kroll, the president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, has not only allowed his membership to continue utilizing these violent, fear-based training tactics but also has actively encouraged their use. After Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned such tactics in 2019, Kroll pushed back and went so far as to offer free “warrior-style” classes to the union’s 800 members over the remaining three years of Frey’s term. Now Kroll and the union have George Floyd’s blood on their hands and are finally facing some much-needed and long-overdue scrutiny. (Mohamed Noor, a former Minneapolis police officer, was the first Minnesota police officer in decades to be convicted of a fatal on-duty shooting after he killed Justine Ruszczyk, a white woman.* At the time, Kroll drew criticism for throwing said officer, who is Black, under the bus.)
One of the only public statements that Kroll has made following Floyd’s murder has been to correct the rumor that Chauvin took part in a recent Trump rally. The photos actually depicted Mike Gallagher, the president of the police union in Bloomington, Minnesota.


newrepublic--2020-05-29--I Gave Birth While Incarcerated During a Pandemic

I got to Bedford Hills in the beginning of February , but I was hearing a little bit about coronavirus beforehand .
It really didn ’ t seem to be that major .
It had been a good week or so that I was in Bedford Hills before I was hearing other female inmates talking about it , because they were the most concerned , being so close to one another .
Trying to take the extra precaution to keep ourselves safe and keep each other safe , it was almost becoming a battle .
Toward the end of April @ @ @ @ @ @ @ getting access to masks .
We were restricted on how many gloves we could grab each day .
The only time we had access to hand sanitizer was when we were leaving the unit we were housed in—for pregnant women—to go to general population and get medical care .
When we got moved to that unit for pregnant women , they weren ’ t set up for anything .
There was a night , a pouring-down rainstorm , when they pulled all the pregnant women out from each unit that they were in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The plumbing didn ’ t work .
Everything backed up if you flushed a toilet .
The showers weren ’ t working .
Nothing was set up .
There was no phone access .
There was no kiosk to email or to receive any type of pictures from our family .
For our meals , they would bring our trays to us , but there were times when trays were being forgotten .
Sometimes it was just a cheese sandwich that they were giving us—two pieces of bread and maybe one or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ juice that was already all fermented .
Seeing the medical staff , it was more nerve-wracking and—I would say—more harmful to a pregnant woman than anything , because it was the same medical staff that was seeing the general population , including individuals that were diagnosed with Covid , coming into our unit or making us go to the medical building .
( They always would tell us if we went there that they had everything bleached down and cleaned , but there were a lot of times that you would go and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hint of the smell of bleach . )
Between the hospital or through the corrections officers who would take us , there was fear of being exposed .
There were something like 40 cases already .

Seeing the medical staff, it was more nerve-wracking and—I would say—more harmful to a pregnant woman than anything, because it was the same medical staff that was seeing the general population, including individuals that were diagnosed with Covid, coming into our unit or making us go to the medical building. (They always would tell us if we went there that they had everything bleached down and cleaned, but there were a lot of times that you would go and you wouldn’t even catch a hint of the smell of bleach.) Between the hospital or through the corrections officers who would take us, there was fear of being exposed. There were something like 40 cases already.
It got to the point where us pregnant females were denying our medical treatment. It was almost like a boycott. We came together as a unit and we discussed our fears. We only had each other. We had nobody else. We had no access to the news. We all came together, and every time one of us was told that we had an appointment, we were like, “Nope. Not going.” The officers would almost make us feel guilty and try to talk us into it. We stood by our decisions, and we didn’t go. Me, personally, before I made my decision, I spoke to my fiancé about it because it’s his daughter, too. Plus, he has access to the media and the public knowledge of the coronavirus, where we didn’t. I mean, we knew about it. We knew it was severe. We knew it was getting bad, but without having the news or access to really the radio, we were going off of what family was telling us.


newrepublic--2020-05-30--The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience

A fear is setting in in some corners that this message could resonate with voters—just as it was feared that the right would capitalize on the activities of antifascists and hostile confrontations with Trump officials during the midterm elections , which Democrats ultimately swept .
Of course , white backlash shouldn ’ t be discounted as a political force .
In fact , it doesn ’ t seem altogether trivial that Donald Trump ’ s presidential campaign and journey to the center of American life began less than a year after the protests in Ferguson .
But overall , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country offers few straightforward doctrines .
The riots at Stonewall marked a new beginning for one civil rights movement .
The riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King , after spurring the passage of the last major civil rights act , brought the apex of another to an end .
A recent paper from Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow found that protester-initiated violence in that period bolstered support for repressive measures and may have contributed to Nixon ’ s victory in the 1968 election .
Another paper from Harvard ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s Aaron Kaufman , and UC Merced ’ s Melissa Sands found that the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King in 1992 led to the registration and mobilization of Democratic voters and boosted local support for liberal policy initiatives .
On the right , the list of murderers and would-be terrorists inspired by racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric over the past several years is too long to offer even in brief .
None of them have toppled Donald Trump and his party as political entities , although they probably haven @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A mass shooting by a pro-life activist left three dead and nine injured in 2015 , and the National Abortion Federation has documented over 400 instances of vandalism against abortion providers and advocates over the last decade .
Both of these facts have been immaterial to mainstream abortion discourse and electoral politics .
The most that can be decisively taken from all this is that the factors that render radical action productive or counterproductive , effectual or ineffectual , are complex .
Most of the people we can expect to try that calculus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ground where action actually happens , and the actors may well have a different sense entirely of what political success—in the moment or in the aggregate—actually means .
On Thursday night , a precinct was burned and the police fled .
To the people who burned it , this was a victory , of a kind , against one of the public institutions least accountable to the public and responsive to democratic will .
For all the awareness that has been raised about the inequities of the criminal justice system and for all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attempted over the last decade , policing in America has not fundamentally changed .
Police killings haven ’ t declined and body cameras have succeeded mostly in providing evidence that abuses are still common .
We ’ ve made modest progress within the carceral institutions where people are sent once the police are done with them , and have narrowed , here and there , the list of things the police might confront someone for to begin with .
But if you are confronted by the police—even if you are unarmed and most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chance that you will have your throat pressed into asphalt until you are dead .
That is what the protests are about .

The history of violence and unrest in this country offers few straightforward doctrines.
A fear is setting in in some corners that this message could resonate with voters—just as it was feared that the right would capitalize on the activities of anti-fascists and hostile confrontations with Trump officials during the midterm elections, which Democrats ultimately swept. Of course, white backlash shouldn’t be discounted as a political force. In fact, it doesn’t seem altogether trivial that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and journey to the center of American life began less than a year after the protests in Ferguson. But overall, the history of violence and unrest in this country offers few straightforward doctrines. The riots at Stonewall marked a new beginning for one civil rights movement. The riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, after spurring the passage of the last major civil rights act, brought the apex of another to an end.
A recent paper from Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow found that protester-initiated violence in that period bolstered support for repressive measures and may have contributed to Nixon’s victory in the 1968 election. Another paper, from Harvard’s Ryan Enos, New York University’s Aaron Kaufman, and UC Merced’s Melissa Sands, found that the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King in 1992 led to the registration and mobilization of Democratic voters and boosted local support for liberal policy initiatives. On the right, the list of murderers and would-be terrorists inspired by racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric over the past several years is too long to offer even in brief. None of them have toppled Donald Trump and his party as political entities, although they probably haven’t helped them much, either. A mass shooting by a pro-life activist left three dead and nine injured in 2015, and the National Abortion Federation has documented over 400 instances of vandalism against abortion providers and advocates over the last decade. Both of these facts have been immaterial to mainstream abortion discourse and electoral politics.
The most that can be decisively taken from all this is that the factors that render radical action productive or counterproductive, effectual or ineffectual, are complex. Most of the people we can expect to try that calculus are going to be far from the ground where action actually happens, and the actors may well have a different sense entirely of what political success—in the moment or in the aggregate—actually means. On Thursday night, a precinct was burned, and the police fled. To the people who burned it, this was a victory, of a kind, against one of the public institutions least accountable to the public and responsive to democratic will.


newrepublic--2020-05-31--America’s Social Contract Is Broken

America’s Social Contract Is Broken

In 1992 , George H.W .
Bush was president , presiding over a Republican Party that had not yet divested itself of all decency and common sense .
While Bush condemned the rioters in Nixonian law-and-order fashion , insisting that their actions were “ not about civil rights ” and that the authorities would use “ whatever force necessary ” to bring them to heel , he expressed shock and sorrow that King ’ s assailants were not found guilty .
He also vowed to address the “ underlying ” issues that had amassed in Los Angeles like so much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is police brutality , ” then–Attorney General William Barr said .
“ It ’ s reprehensible.
” It could be argued that Donald Trump has , in his vulgar way , performed a similar two-step , describing Floyd ’ s death as “ sad and tragic , ” while attacking the protesters as an anarchic mob .
But in the perfectly cursory tone of his condolences , and in the glee with which he has advocated a crackdown on the protests , he has really made no concessions to the awful reality under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live .
He has called the protesters “ THUGS ” and , echoing the arch-segregationist George Wallace , threatened that “ when the looting starts , the shooting starts.
” He has blamed the chaos on “ Liberal Governors and Mayors , ” who he says must get “ MUCH tougher ” on crowds .
Current Attorney General William Barr , meanwhile , has delegitimized the protests by claiming that they have been “ planned , organized , and driven by anarchic and far left extremist groups using antifa-like tactics.
” These people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going on in this country .
It has become a commonplace to describe America as a failed state , but I ’ m not sure that term quite captures what is happening here , this strange combination of decadence and suffering .
It is not just that the federal government is doing almost nothing to address the pandemic , relying instead on the bluntest of measures—an economy-destroying lockdown—and praying schools and businesses will reopen in time for the election in November .
It is not just that the pandemic has exposed every institution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. military , as being hopelessly incompetent .
It is the wanton greed and corruption on display : the insider trading by U.S. senators ( and their subsequent exoneration by Barr ’ s Justice Department ) ; the wealthy hospitals with venture capital funds that are pocketing aid from Congress while poorer hospitals struggle ( did you even know that hospitals had venture capital funds ?
I didn ’ t ) ; the large chains gobbling up small business loans from a program that is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help many actual small businesses .
Meanwhile , the unemployment insurance programs of many states are so sclerotic from decades of official contempt for those who have been left behind by the market system , that people who have lost their jobs have to go through insane hoops just to get a modest amount of assistance .
So much wealth , so many resources , and yet so little help .
It is every person , every family , for themselves .
As my colleague Osita Nwanevu has written , “ We do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be solidarity among discrete groups ; there may be common feeling between like-minded people who , to name one example , agree to wear masks or shelter in place for the benefit of everyone .
But it is not enough , not for a pandemic .
It is difficult to describe the feeling of helplessness this engenders—its vastness , the crushing weight of it .
Even if we know , on an intellectual level , that government is broken , that our society ’ s privileges extend only to a lucky few , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us , it is another thing entirely to feel it as soon as you wake up in the morning .
The surreal drift of the quarantine era , its neverendingness , is the essence of our political situation .

So little has changed. Nearly 30 years have passed since the Los Angeles riots, and yet we find ourselves in a near-identical situation: a black man brutalized by police; the incident caught on camera, extinguishing any doubt that a horrendous crime has been committed; then an eruption of violence, fueled not only by the crime itself but by a long history of racial discrimination. Observers in both cases split into two camps: those who sympathize with rioters who have been terrorized by police and abandoned by their government and those who are calling them criminals and demanding that peace be restored. Even the attorney general who oversaw the Justice Department’s response to the Los Angeles riots occupies that office today.
There are differences between then and now, between Los Angeles in 1992 and Minneapolis in 2020—the greatest being that the Minneapolis riots, which have since spawned anti-police protests in cities across the country, occurred amid a deadly pandemic. This cannot be mere coincidence. People are frustrated, trapped in their homes, eager to bust out. “They’re in a different space and a different place,” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told The New York Times. “They’re restless.” African Americans have had a particularly tough time of it. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote for the Times, “The coronavirus has scythed its way through black communities, highlighting and accelerating the ingrained social inequities that have made African Americans the most vulnerable to the disease.” To douse salt in the wound, black people are far more likely to be arrested for supposed infractions of pandemic safety protocols.
But there is a sense that the protests are tapping into a more ambient anger. There is a sense, too, that the appropriate precedent for the coronavirus pandemic isn’t, say, the “Hong Kong flu” of 1968 (which killed some 100,000 people in the United States) but the utter collapse of society that occurred in convulsions like the Los Angeles riots. The spasms of violence we saw in Minnesota and elsewhere, this collective scream of rage, is what happens when the social contract between citizens and their government is so thoroughly, irredeemably broken.
There are other, telling differences between the 1992 riots and the ones we see today. In Los Angeles, the riots began after the officers who brutally beat Rodney King were acquitted by a jury. It’s almost quaint the way people expected that justice might actually be served, that genuine change might come for America’s pathologically violent police forces. In Minneapolis, though the officers were quickly fired and George Floyd’s killer was charged with murder, the protesters didn’t bother to wait for a trial, because what would a trial do? What have all the other trials, as well as all the other videos of blatant police brutality, done? They certainly didn’t save the life of George Floyd. We have learned, as William Gaddis once wrote, that “you get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
In 1992, George H.W. Bush was president, presiding over a Republican Party that had not yet divested itself of all decency and common sense. While Bush condemned the rioters in Nixonian law-and-order fashion, insisting that their actions were “not about civil rights” and that the authorities would use “whatever force necessary” to bring them to heel, he expressed shock and sorrow that King’s assailants were not found guilty. He also vowed to address the “underlying” issues that had amassed in Los Angeles like so much dry tinder. “We know there is police brutality,” then–Attorney General William Barr said. “It’s reprehensible.”
It could be argued that Donald Trump has, in his vulgar way, performed a similar two-step, describing Floyd’s death as “sad and tragic,” while attacking the protesters as an anarchic mob. But in the perfectly cursory tone of his condolences, and in the glee with which he has advocated a crackdown on the protests, he has really made no concessions to the awful reality under which African Americans in Minneapolis and elsewhere live. He has called the protesters “THUGS” and, echoing the arch-segregationist George Wallace, threatened that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He has blamed the chaos on “Liberal Governors and Mayors,” who, he says, must get “MUCH tougher” on crowds. Current Attorney General William Barr, meanwhile, has delegitimized the protests by claiming that they have been “planned, organized, and driven by anarchic and far-left extremist groups using antifa-like tactics.”
These people obviously do not care about what is going on in this country. It has become a commonplace to describe America as a failed state, but I’m not sure that term quite captures what is happening here, this strange combination of decadence and suffering. It is not just that the federal government is doing almost nothing to address the pandemic, relying instead on the bluntest of measures—an economy-destroying lockdown—and praying schools and businesses will reopen in time for the election in November. It is not just that the pandemic has exposed every institution in American life, including the once-esteemed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. military, as being hopelessly incompetent. It is the wanton greed and corruption on display: the insider trading by U.S. senators (and their subsequent exoneration by Barr’s Justice Department); the wealthy hospitals with venture capital funds that are pocketing aid from Congress while poorer hospitals struggle (did you even know that hospitals had venture capital funds? I didn’t); the large chains gobbling up small business loans from a program that is too poorly designed and inadequately funded to help many actual small businesses. Meanwhile, the unemployment insurance programs of many states are so sclerotic from decades of official contempt for those who have been left behind by the market system that people who have lost their jobs have to go through insane hoops just to get a modest amount of assistance.
So much wealth, so many resources, and yet so little help. It is every person, every family, for themselves. As my colleague Osita Nwanevu has written, “We do not have a country.” There may be solidarity among discrete groups; there may be common feeling between like-minded people who, to name one example, agree to wear masks or shelter in place for the benefit of everyone. But it is not enough, not for a pandemic. It is difficult to describe the feeling of helplessness this engenders—its vastness, the crushing weight of it. Even if we know, on an intellectual level, that government is broken, that our society’s privileges extend only to a lucky few, that no one is going to save us, it is another thing entirely to feel it as soon as you wake up in the morning. The surreal drift of the quarantine era, its never-endingness, is the essence of our political situation.
But others have always lived with this feeling, and they sense it most acutely in their interactions with the most conspicuous representatives of the state: the police. The police, at long last, have shed the adulatory glow they enjoyed in the years after September 11. (It is hard to believe now, but The Strokes even dropped their song “New York City Cops” from their 2001 album, Is This It, because it contained the laughably innocuous line that “they ain’t too smart.”) In urban areas throughout the country, the police have proven themselves to be corrupt and violent, impervious to reform, and hostile toward both the citizens they are supposed to protect and the politicians who dare to criticize them. They are, naturally, an important constituency for Donald Trump. But it must be said that Democratic politicians are as much to blame for this rotten state of affairs as anyone, as well as voters who are willing to accept the regular unnecessary deaths of minorities as long as it keeps their cities “safe.”
And what have the cops done for us in this time of crisis? It is the nurses and doctors and EMTs who have been at the front lines of the pandemic and who are celebrated every night at 7 p.m. with hoots and applause and banging pans. In New York, when the cops are not defying the open streets program in order to fill up on bagels, they are arresting mostly African Americans for flouting lockdown guidelines. When I drive through the eerily empty spaces of Manhattan, I see the police idling in groups, often maskless, while the homeless eddy about the streets. I see them patrolling Prospect Park, scolding people through their Robocop megaphone, rolling past the graffiti that says, “Cops Are the Pandemic.” And now they are beating up protesters. Yet while this city faces austerity cuts to deal with the cost of the pandemic, including to health care of all things, the police department will no doubt be spared the brunt of the damage.
When I watch President Bush’s 1992 address to the nation about the Los Angeles riots, what strikes me is his unshakeable confidence, his optimism. The violence would pass; so, too, would the hatred it unleashed, in America’s long but steady march toward progress. “None of this is what we wish to think of as America,” he said. “It’s as if we were looking in a mirror that distorted our better selves and turned us ugly. We cannot let that happen.” He also said, “In a civilized society there can be no excuse—no excuse—for the murder, arson, theft, and vandalism that have terrorized the law-abiding citizens of Los Angeles.” I agree, but the sorry fact is that we do not live in a civilized society. What I admire about the protesters is that they still have enough belief in this country to demand one.


newrepublic--2020-05-31--The Flawed Politics of a Law-and-Order Campaign

Largely forgotten is how close the 1968 election was , thanks to a dramatic late charge by Humphrey and the partial collapse of George Wallace ’ s third-party campaign .
As Rick Perlstein writes in Nixonland , “ A few thousand more votes for Wallace in North Carolina and Tennessee , a shift of 1 percent of the vote in New Jersey or Ohio ... and the election would have been thrown into the [ Democratic ] House of Representatives.
” In a tight election , almost everything is decisive .
But the thing that probably did the most to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ race and riots : Nixon , using Anna Chennault as an intermediary , convinced South Vietnamese officials to scuttle their peace talks before the November election .
The riots in 1968—the cities burning after the April assassination of Martin Luther King and the pitched battles in the streets of Chicago as mostly white antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention were pitted against Mayor Richard Daley ’ s thuggish police force—were clearly significant , but in The Making of the President 1968 , Theodore White gives almost as much weight to the cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ universities like Columbia as he does to Nixon ’ s attempts to stir up racial animosity .
( The student protests , he wrote , symbolized “ the rejection of society by people who were brought up to inherit that society.
” ) The Nixon campaign artfully combined the two aspects of the law-and-order issue in powerful TV ads that depended on pictures and music far more than words .
A typical spot showed angry white faces , while burning buildings were the only symbol of the violence that devastated the inner cities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Nixon says solemnly , “ Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence .
”

In a tight election, almost everything is decisive. But the thing that probably did the most to doom Humphrey had nothing to do with race and riots: Nixon, using Anna Chennault as an intermediary, convinced South Vietnamese officials to scuttle their peace talks before the November election.
The riots in 1968—the cities burning after the April assassination of Martin Luther King and the pitched battles in the streets of Chicago as mostly white antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention were pitted against Mayor Richard Daley’s thuggish police force—were clearly significant, but in The Making of the President 1968, Theodore White gives almost as much weight to the cultural war provoked by student takeovers of elite universities like Columbia as he does to Nixon’s attempts to stir up racial animosity. (The student protests, he wrote, symbolized “the rejection of society by people who were brought up to inherit that society.”)
The Nixon campaign artfully combined the two aspects of the law-and-order issue in powerful TV ads that depended on pictures and music far more than words. A typical spot showed angry white faces, while burning buildings were the only symbol of the violence that devastated the inner cities. In the voice-over for that ad, Nixon says solemnly, “Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.”


newrepublic--2020-06-01--Living in Your Car as a Pandemic Consumes Your City

Topher Bloomquist had been living in his car for nearly a year when California imposed its stay-at-home order to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic .
Bloomquist , a 43-year-old former IT worker from San Diego , was scraping by as a food courier for delivery apps like Postmates and DoorDash .
“ I was keeping my head above water , but it was just above water , ” Bloomquist told me .
That was , until a Shop-Vac fell from a truck while he was driving and smashed into his car .
The engine limped along but eventually stopped running @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deliveries , he was not only homeless , but out of work , too .
Bloomquist traced his spiral to homelessness to another auto accident , in October 2017 .
Before then , life was normal .
He rented a house with a yard where his dog , a Goldendoodle named Stellabelle , could play .
He had a job that allowed him to support his children .
But one day , a car slammed into his body while he was crossing a street .
Still conscious after the impact , he used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asphalt out of the way of oncoming traffic .
“ I was holding my leg , and it was just a bag of blood and bones , ” he said .
While recovering , he negotiated a deal with his landlord to let him stay and repay his debt once he got back on his feet .
The arrangement fell through , and in April 2019 , he and Stellabelle spent their first night sleeping in his car , a burgundy 2006 Audi A-3 hatchback he had purchased back when times were better @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Diego County .
He was grateful to have tinted windows , at least .
In California , a state with the nation ’ s largest population of unhoused people , it ’ s not uncommon to see people sleeping in their cars at night .
Of the state ’ s 130,000 unhoused people , thousands find shelter in vehicles .
Los Angeles County , where car dwelling is also illegal , counted 16,500 people doing so in 2019 .
These include not only chronically unhoused people , but full-time workers , couples , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state ’ s high cost of living .
The sheer number of unhoused Californians left them particularly vulnerable to the threat of Covid-19 , and many are struggling to stay safe in the face of an inadequate state response .

Topher Bloomquist had been living in his car for nearly a year when California imposed its stay-at-home order to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic. Bloomquist, a 43-year-old former I.T. worker from San Diego, was scraping by as a food courier for delivery apps like Postmates and DoorDash. “I was keeping my head above water, but it was just above water,” Bloomquist told me. That was, until a Shop-Vac fell from a truck while he was driving and smashed into his car. The engine limped along but eventually stopped running. Without a functioning vehicle to make deliveries, he was not only homeless but out of work, too.
Bloomquist traced his spiral to homelessness to another auto accident, in October 2017. Before then, life was normal. He rented a house with a yard where his dog, a Goldendoodle named Stellabelle, could play. He had a job that allowed him to support his children. But one day, a car slammed into his body while he was crossing a street. Still conscious after the impact, he used his arms to drag himself across the asphalt out of the way of oncoming traffic. “I was holding my leg, and it was just a bag of blood and bones,” he said. While recovering, he negotiated a deal with his landlord to let him stay and repay his debt once he got back on his feet. The arrangement fell through, and in April 2019, he and Stellabelle spent their first night sleeping in his car, a burgundy 2006 Audi A-3 hatchback he had purchased back when times were better. Vehicular living is illegal in San Diego County. He was grateful to have tinted windows, at least.


newrepublic--2020-06-01--Barbara Ehrenreich Still Wants to Be Surprised

“ Two things guide my writing , ” Ehrenreich told me .
“ One is anger , and the other is curiosity .
Just curiosity .
I don ’ t have an ax to grind , for example , about Paleolithic cave art .
I just wanted to understand something.
” Ehrenreich first studied to be a scientist , and the laboratory as influence is all over her work—in her attempts to get to the bottom of a truth , she tests a hypothesis , relying on empirical evidence and collaborative efforts to confirm what becomes the final piece of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in some way or another , been an organizer : of her neighbors , her communities , and against injustice .
Some of her books are very clearly delineated between these two qualities : For Her Own Good : Two Centuries of the Experts ’ Advice to Women is a analytical survey of all the ways authorities have tried to control women ’ s behavior , inquisitive and incisive , while Witches , Midwives , and Nurses : A History of Women Healers is a brief and provocative book arguing against contemporary medical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ healing practices .
Every book and every essay finds a way to intertwine those experiences and emotions until they are as inextricable on the page as they are in life .
All of her work is a sincere attempt to prove it—the scientist ’ s guiding principle—to show , beyond doubt , how evidence can become an understanding .
In looking back , there is a clear shift between the writing in which Ehrenreich appears as an observer and when she is a character .
Sometimes she is the subject , other times @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if she knew when a piece of writing called for an “ I , ” a question she admitted she didn ’ t always have an answer to .
To be a reporter like Ehrenreich requires thinking of oneself as a narrator , while remembering that an audience is not captive and that their attention might not hold .
In writing about socialist feminism specifically , Ehrenreich recalls trying to speak to people who were new to the concepts of feminism and class , thinking not just about the sound of her voice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in different rooms .
“ In the 1980s and 1990s , I really tried to influence feminist organizations to be more concerned about welfare reforms , health care , to think about local organizing .
I tried to bring the classes together—including anyone who wants to defect from the ruling class and be a class traitor .
Our big problem is not finding minute differences to argue about , ” she said , talking about forty years ago and today , “ Our big problem is to pull together enough people who want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she changes tack , moving between simplicity and sarcasm to different effects—the anger , especially , comes through in her satire , and Had I Known contains newspaper columns or blog posts in which she mocked the middle-class sensibilities or liberal sentiments of class , race , and gender .
Lately , however , Ehrenreich has been less inclined to choose irony in her writing , whether it ’ s a thought published in a book or on Twitter .
She will be the first to point out that satire itself can ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and it often confuses rather than clarifies , such as her since-deleted tweet about Marie Kondo ’ s use of a translator in her Netflix show , which she first defended as satirical in nature and then ultimately apologized for , calling it “ a terrible mistake.
” Ehrenreich writes bluntly about her race and gender when she writes about labor , economics , culture , and politics .
She ’ s known for having a radical morality , as well as an imperative to get the story right .
Cynics often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disappoint us , which is a banal prediction based on trying to avoid admitting a bad feeling .
More succinctly , online parlance refers to this phenomenon as a “ milkshake duck.
” To dismiss this disappointment as somehow fated requires a readership that doesn ’ t want to experience those same emotions Ehrenreich described—anger and curiosity , the force of a feeling that makes one want to speak up .
Missteps and mistakes matter ; when they happen the relationship between a writer and their readers becomes less passive or fixed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who wrote it and who read it .

The material realities of trading off between commerce and critical inquiry made an impression, but it was also in part that trade itself that led to Nickel and Dimed. Once Ehrenreich tried to pitch a story to a women’s magazine about marrying blue-collar men—a pause here to imagine how such a piece might have read—but the editor instead asked if those men could talk. While listening to Ehrenreich recount these stories, I can hear the echo of what is another consistent quality in her writing. Her books contain a chorus of voices, saying what is too often too easily ignored. Can they talk? is devastating as a dismissal, but there’s a statement hidden inside that question: I won’t listen.
“Two things guide my writing,” Ehrenreich told me. “One is anger, and the other is curiosity. Just curiosity. I don’t have an ax to grind, for example, about Paleolithic cave art. I just wanted to understand something.” Ehrenreich first studied to be a scientist, and the laboratory as influence is all over her work—in her attempts to get to the bottom of a truth, she tests a hypothesis, relying on empirical evidence and collaborative efforts to confirm what becomes the final piece of writing. She has also always, in some way or another, been an organizer: of her neighbors, her communities, and against injustice. Some of her books are very clearly delineated between these two qualities: For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women is an analytical survey of all the ways authorities have tried to control women’s behavior, inquisitive and incisive; while Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers is a brief and provocative book arguing against contemporary medical authorities and their condescending dismissal of historical healing practices. Every book and every essay finds a way to intertwine those experiences and emotions until they are as inextricable on the page as they are in life. All of her work is a sincere attempt to prove it—the scientist’s guiding principle—to show, beyond doubt, how evidence can become an understanding.
In looking back, there is a clear shift between the writing in which Ehrenreich appears as an observer and when she is a character. Sometimes she is the subject, other times she is the messenger. I asked if she knew when a piece of writing called for an “I,” a question she admitted she didn’t always have an answer to. To be a reporter like Ehrenreich requires thinking of oneself as a narrator, while remembering that an audience is not captive and that its attention might not hold. In writing about socialist feminism specifically, Ehrenreich recalls trying to speak to people who were new to the concepts of feminism and class, thinking not just about the sound of her voice but the way her voice would carry in different rooms. “In the 1980s and 1990s, I really tried to influence feminist organizations to be more concerned about welfare reforms, health care, to think about local organizing. I tried to bring the classes together—including anyone who wants to defect from the ruling class and be a class traitor. Our big problem is not finding minute differences to argue about,” she said, talking about 40 years ago and today, “Our big problem is to pull together enough people who want to see our species survive.”


newrepublic--2020-06-01--How the Democrats Should Imitate the Republican Party

It ’ s long been an article of faith among Democrats that they have nothing to learn from Republicans .
Democrats tend instead to believe that the GOP is the party of evil that achieved power through underhanded methods such as suppressing the votes of minorities .
While this is true to some extent , Republicans have also used and mastered methods that are simply Politics 101 .
Democrats could copy any number of these techniques without reservation—and with no small benefit .
Here are a couple cases in point .
For many years .
Republicans embraced the conventional wisdom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ middle of the political spectrum .
Presidential candidates ran to the right during primaries and pivoted left—toward the middle—after the convention .
Richard Nixon was probably the master practitioner of this strategy .
But even as recently as 2000 , George W. Bush ran in the general election on “ compassionate conservatism ” in order to reach out to moderates and centrists .
In 2004 , however , Bush ’ s principal political adviser Karl Rove convinced him to adopt a new strategy—instead of reaching out to those in the middle , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those who were already Republicans .
Polarization , not compromise , was the key to victory .
According to exit polls , 35 percent of voters identified as Republicans in 2000 and 39 percent as Democrats , with 27 percent independent .
Bush captured 91 percent of the votes of Republicans while Al Gore got only 86 percent of the votes of Democrats .
They roughly split the independent vote .

To his credit, Newt Gingrich realized how vulnerable many of these Southern Democrats were—in effect, the GOP was giving a pass to Democrats holding precisely those seats that were most likely to flip under more concerted pressure from the right. Many Democratic incumbents were complacent from years of running unopposed and had done little to raise money or maintain a political organization in their states and districts. After Gingrich was elected to Congress from Georgia in 1978, he made it his mission to go after these legacy officeholders and make them work hard for reelection. And unlike smokers in the old TV commercial, they often chose to switch (parties) rather than fight. Their seats fell into the hands of the GOP like ripe fruit.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there was a steady stream of Democrats who became Republicans, following in the footsteps of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who defected in 1964. Republicans were generous to those crossing the aisle. Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado were allowed to keep their seniority after going over to the GOP, rendering the decision all but cost-free to their careers. By contrast, when Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon switched from the GOP to the Democratic Party in 1955, he lost all his seniority and went to the bottom of the seniority list, losing valuable committee assignments in the process.
In a similar vein, conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s eagerly embraced former Communists, such as Whittaker Chambers. Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin says that these apostates from the left were extremely valuable because they understood the left’s vulnerabilities much better than those on the right did. When I went to work on Capitol Hill as a Republican in the 1970s, much of the best political and policy advice I could find came from a group of former leftists affiliated with a small journal called The Public Interest, edited by one-time Trotskyite Irving Kristol.


newrepublic--2020-06-01--The Right’s Reign on the Air Waves

The Right’s Reign on the Air Waves

Like the moralizing broadcasters of the 1960s , Limbaugh ’ s managers took advantage of the industry ’ s low ebb , allowing smaller stations to air the show for free in exchange for a few minutes of advertising time .
But a moralizer Limbaugh was not : He may have believed that “ there are no better ten things to teach people ... than the Ten Commandments , ” but his show was about as far from morally enriching as one can imagine .
He would drown out liberal guests with screaming sound effects he called “ caller abortions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ congressman Barney Frank with the song “ My Boy Lollipop , ” and pepper news updates with machine-gun blasts and explosions .
As one executive put it , he was “ always looking to turn somebody ’ s sacred cow into some delicious hamburgers and a couple of steaks.
” Needless to say , listeners loved it .
Within two years he had 5 million listeners on hundreds of stations , not to mention dozens of imitators .
Limbaugh once said that people tune into talk radio for “ three things : entertainment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but from the start he acted as the de facto coxswain for a new generation of conservative politicians .
Tapping into a broad swath of voters who had remained alienated and dissatisfied even in the wake of the Pax Reagana , he cast current events as a high-stakes contest between those who wanted to save America and those who wanted to destroy it—the gays , the peaceniks , the ACLU , you name it .
In his early years this ardent commitment to conservative causes sometimes brought him into tension with the Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when he boosted Pat Buchanan ’ s primary challenge against George H.W .
Bush in 1992 , but once Bill Clinton was elected , all bets were off .
Heading into the 1994 midterms , he amplified dozens of congressional races and ballot initiatives .
When Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that year for the first time in a generation , they declared Limbaugh an honorary member of their freshman class .
Rosenwald takes great pains throughout the book to argue that the alliance between conservative politicians and hosts like Limbaugh was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ there was no Republican plot to create talk radio , ” that the alliance between the medium and the message represented less a faithful marriage than an uneasy strategic bond .
The goal of conservative hosts “ was to make money , and certainly they never took marching orders from Republicans , ” he writes , arguing that “ ideology was the lesser factor in [ Limbaugh ’ s ] success ” and even suggesting ( rather half-heartedly ) that he would have been just as successful if he had been a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marriage was a complicated one from the start ” he cites Limbaugh ’ s long-standing habit of slandering moderate Republicans and supporting far-right primary challengers ; Limbaugh needed to maintain an independent image , he says , since “ what mattered most was the quality of his show and his relationship with his audience.
” Even if Matzko ’ s research did not undermine this conception of Limbaugh ’ s success as an historical accident , Rosenwald ’ s own narrative undermines it as well , since it less than five years elapsed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show and the National Review cover labeling him “ The Leader of the Opposition.
” Limbaugh himself laid out the stakes as early as 1992 , when he said that after Bill Clinton ’ s victory there was “ going to be a huge battle for the soul of the Republican Party , ” led by ardent conservatives .
He won this battle quickly and decisively , wielding his listeners ’ outrage to hold Republicans to an obstructionist line , encouraging his audience to bombard senators ’ phone lines if the senators wavered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ judicial nominations .

But Matzko is far less interested in the rise of the “Radio Right” than he is in its fall: He devotes most of the book to exploring the Kennedy administration’s response to the new broadcasters, which he styles as “the most intense episode of government censorship of the past half century.” Curiously enough, this censorship effort began with Walter Reuther, the head of the United Automobile Workers union: After the Polish ham affair, Reuther sent Kennedy a 16-page memo recommending he go on the offensive against McIntire and Hargis. Using remarkably prescient language, Reuther urges Kennedy “to contain the radical right from further expansion and in the long run to reduce it to its historic role of the impotent lunatic fringe.” When the broadcasters got wind of the memo, they cast Reuther as a “ruthless, reckless, lawless labor goon,” but Kennedy took all his suggestions. First, the administration contracted the ominously named “Group Research Inc.” to conduct surveillance and research into the Radio Right, then Kennedy directly pushed the IRS to conduct selective audits of conservative radio stations, stripping them of tax-exempt status on the grounds that they engaged in overtly political activity.
Most significantly, though, the Kennedy administration leaned on the Federal Communications Commission in 1963 to expand the Fairness Doctrine so that if a right-wing broadcaster like McIntire attacked Kennedy or the Democrats, any station that hosted him would be legally obligated to give those parties time to respond on air—for free. The DNC and its associated organizations then bombarded hundreds of stations with response-time requests, and since most of the stations were operating on shoestring budgets, dropping broadcasters like McIntire and Hargis quickly became a financial necessity. Kennedy died in 1963, but the plan had already been set in motion, and Lyndon Johnson maintained it: The station reach of Hunt and McIntire’s programs plummeted in the years after the FCC changed the rules, and McIntire went out of business by 1973. (He held a “funeral” for the station, where pallbearers dressed in judges’ wigs placed a prop radio antenna in a coffin labeled “Freedom of Speech.”)
McIntire held a “funeral” for his station, where pallbearers dressed in judges’ wigs placed a prop radio antenna in a coffin labeled “Freedom of Speech.”
Notwithstanding Matzko’s potential bias in approaching the subject—he has worked for the Cato Institute and is a guest editor at Libertarianism.org—the facts of the matter are damning. Kennedy’s response to the radio right does seem more or less to fit the definition of a targeted censorship campaign. More than that, though, it goes a long way toward explaining why the far right’s influence on national politics waned in the following decades. The conventional wisdom is that the temporary waning of the far-right movement was caused by Barry Goldwater’s resounding defeat in 1964, but another possible explanation was that extreme conservatives had lost the main vehicle for their ideas. With a great deal of effort, Kennedy and his successors had snuffed it out—but only for a while.


newrepublic--2020-06-01--Trump Is Bailing Out Big Meat—and Further Screwing the Planet

At an event announcing $ 16 billion in federal relief for food producers on May 19 , Donald Trump spoke at a podium flanked by tables stacked with corn , onions , apples and other fruits and vegetables .
“ The American farmer is the backbone of our country , ” Trump said .
“ There ’ s no president that ’ s treated the farmers like Trump.
” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue briefly donned , and then removed , an American flag facemask .
Farmers who ’ ve suffered large losses due to price drops and market disruptions from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ federal funds .
But to critics who track the U.S. agricultural industry ’ s massive environmental footprint , the produce stage props seemed disingenuous : The stimulus will prop up a U.S. agricultural system where more than two-thirds of crops become animal feed .
The ultimate winners will be industrial meat companies like Cargill and Tyson .
That ’ s disastrous news for the climate .
In 2018 , watchdog groups GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy ( IATP ) estimated that the world ’ s top five industrial meat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cargill , Dairy Farmers of America , and Fonterra—were together releasing more emissions than fossil fuel companies like Exxon .
Factory farms have contributed to a 14.4 percent spike in climate-destabilizing U.S. methane emissions since 1990 , EPA calculations suggest , while at the same time leaking tens of millions of tons of raw sewage into the country ’ s waterways .
And that ’ s before you get to their other potential public health issues .
Much of this pollution can be traced back to a small group of powerful businesses such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ privately held company in the U.S. , bigger even than Koch Industries .
“ They run agriculture , ” Patty Lovera , a policy advisor for the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment , told me , referring to the factory-farming giants .
“ They run the supply chain.
” And the current stimulus contains no provisions for changing that .
“ Overall , it ’ s more subsidies to lock in the meat-based U.S. agriculture system , ” said Glenn Hurowitz , executive director of the Washington , D.C.-based environmental watchdog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be locking in polluting practices for much longer .
”

Much of this pollution can be traced back to a small group of powerful businesses such as Cargill, which is the largest privately held company in the United States, bigger even than Koch Industries. “They run agriculture,” Patty Lovera, a policy adviser for the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, told me, referring to the factory-farming giants. “They run the supply chain.” And the current stimulus contains no provisions for changing that. “Overall, it’s more subsidies to lock in the meat-based U.S. agriculture system,” said Glenn Hurowitz, executive director of the Washington, D.C.–based environmental watchdog group Mighty Earth. “That could be locking in polluting practices for much longer.”
The stimulus package isn’t actually a direct subsidy to industrial meat producers. But the logic of arguments like Hurowitz’s goes like this: Since the majority of U.S. crops become animal feed, and since the meat industry is so consolidated—Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and National Beef control 80 percent of all beef slaughtered—the $16 billion of stimulus money that the Trump administration is making available largely as direct payments of up to $250,000 to struggling farmers is a de facto subsidy to the factory farming model. And when you include the additional $3 billion the federal government is spending to purchase produce, dairy, and meat, that’s a $19 billion investment in climate chaos.


newrepublic--2020-06-01--The Rebirth of Red Power

The Rebirth of Red Power

On an early November morning in 1969 , Richard Oakes , shirtless but with his boots still strapped on , leaped off the side of the three-masted boat carrying him and a group of Native student activists to Alcatraz Island .
Three others followed , racing ahead of the boat that slowly trailed them .
It was perfectly cinematic , the kind of thing people might tell stories about 50 years on , which was the point .
As Kent Blansett pointed out in his biography of Oakes , Journey to Freedom : Richard Oakes , Alcatraz , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fellow organizers had amassed a throng of local media to witness their attempt to occupy and reclaim the former federal prison island .
Oakes , a Mohawk ironworker and activist , alongside fellow leaders of the Indians of All Tribes movement like Lanada WarJack , saw the Occupation of Alcatraz as an opportunity to publicly reckon with the federal government ’ s urban relocation program—which had clustered Indigenous people in places like Oakland as part of an assimilationist project—and the erasure of Indigenous history and culture within the California university system .
Viewed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the perfect encapsulation of the kinds of nonviolent direct action that defined the time period in American history : As the occupiers grew in numbers , they opened their own school for the children on the island , began a radio show hosted by activist and artist John Trudell , and wrote what would become a foundational curriculum of Native history for the institutions the occupiers had become disillusioned with .
Though the demands would vary as the occupation extended , the IAT wanted the United States to adhere to the treaties it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanted the island returned to them so that they could build Native-focused cultural and educational centers as well as a museum .
( Oakes famously offered to buy it for “ $ 24 and glass beads and red cloth , a precedent set by the white man ’ s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago.
” ) Fundamentally though , they were fighting for sovereignty—a demand that bridged their movement to its past and future .
Oakes ’ s dive and the 18-month occupation of Alcatraz signaled the beginning of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that functioned as commentary on the intertribal nature of the organizations that made up the movement .
It was the natural development from the Native nationalism that had defined prior movements , and an attempt at establishing solidarity among hundreds of tribal nations .
Through the power of direct action and partnering with popular non-Native public figures like Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando , Red Power vaulted conversations about self-determination into the mainstream American zeitgeist .
But it also , in its messy ambitiousness , revealed the limits of a pan-Indian movement that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ split on the use of violent force as a way to achieve sovereignty .
While the movement as defined by historians ended in the mid-1970s , the tenets of Red Power linger in modern pushes for sovereignty in all forms , from the struggle for protection of Lakota waters and land during the Standing Rock protests , to the legal challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act , to the attempts at securing the traditional lands of the Mashpee Wampanoag .
But the politics that define these modern battles are now much clearer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Red Power .
Conservatism has almost wholly aligned with the privatization of Native lands and the extraction of the natural resources in and underneath them .
Yet the American left , even in its current resurgence , continues to lag behind on the issues of sovereignty and nationhood , leaving left-leaning Native peoples organizing their own multiracial , intertribal coalitions , trying to understand how best to infiltrate the American institutions of power to protect their lands and achieve true autonomy as nations .

The term Red Power is attributed to the late Vine Deloria Jr., the foremost intellectual to spring from the movement, thanks in part to his hugely influential manifesto, Custer Died for Your Sins. In the months after its 1969 publication and the beginnings of the Alcatraz occupation, several Native-led organizations formed or launched their own direct actions. Over a span of three years, occupations at Wounded Knee and the Bureau of Indian Affairs forced the same questions of sovereignty and broken obligations by the federal government, their supposed trustee.
They also demonstrated the necessarily fraught nature of the activism: The colonizing institutions that were its target—which had been and continue to be weaponized against Native people—were also necessary to bring about change needed in Indian Country. Among the many products of colonization is what’s called the trustee status that the U.S. maintains with tribal nations. This relationship is not a promise or a handshake deal or some moral obligation; it is the result of the federal government entering legally binding agreements with sovereign states. In exchange for the tens of millions of acres of ceded land, many of these treaties stipulated that the government would provide funding for health care, schooling, political representation in Congress, and essential supplies for as long as the U.S. held the land. In all of this, sovereignty was and is everything. In terms of a working definition, its better-known by-products—writing one’s own laws, developing community-specific economic models, engaging in nation-to-nation negotiations—are what Native people are forced to use to define it to outsiders, because expressions of legislative action and the pursuit of capital are the easiest ways for Americans to grasp the concept.
But American policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and still today, sought to circumvent both these treaties and sovereignty. Congress forced tribes onto land that was unsuitable for building self-sustaining economies and underfunded programs like the Indian Health Service and Bureau of Indian Education; when it realized it had given many of the tribes land with access to valuable natural resources, it attempted to entirely erase Indian Country. Children were taken from their homes and placed in boarding schools where their languages were beaten out of them. Land was taken out of trust and parceled, sold away to the highest bidder. Entire communities were uprooted and moved to Brooklyn and Oakland and the Twin Cities. Until the presidency of Richard Nixon, the official American stance toward Native nations was one of political termination. Post-Nixon, America’s Indian Country approach has marginally improved, but the imbalance imposed by the federal system still looms.


newrepublic--2020-06-01--The Political Elites’ Pointless Calls for More Leadership

It is only a slight exaggeration to say America is burning .
Protests over the killing of George Floyd by police have led to destruction of property in many cities across the country over the past few days ; in Washington , DC , fires were set near the White House .
These protests were characterized by endless incidents of the police deploying aggressive force against the crowds , using batons , rubber bullets , tear gas , and even their vehicles—frequently , according to attendees , unprovoked .
Cops targeted the press , even when clearly marked .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see America in this state , and to be eager for a return to peace ; it ’ s certainly uncomfortable to see the violence that is usually implicit and hidden spill out into full public view .
In response to this anxiety , many called for “ leadership , ” a familiar yearning cry during the Trump presidency .
CNN ’ s S.E .
Cupp tweeted : “ America is broken , and needs love , healing , and most of all leadership.
” The New York Times columnist Kara Swisher had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ former presidents Obama , Clinton , George W. Bush ( though she erroneously tagged his late father ) , and Jimmy Carter , along with Joe Biden , to “ address the nation together.
” She added that “ we are at a moment where we need some unity of leadership , ” and later clarified that she was “ not thinking of them slinging platitudes , but honestly discussing their own role in this too.
” The idea of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton getting together to talk about how they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the stuff of cartoons .
You might as well embrace what you ’ re doing and say you wish Dumbledore could be here to sort it all out , too .
Imagine what this Super Smash Bros. of former presidents would actually say , if they were to hop on the same call and address the nation .
They would call for love and hope and togetherness , for healing and progress .
They would call for an end to violence , without ever saying that it is the police who are being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And it is certainly impossible to imagine they would be able to endorse any sort of concrete measures to end police violence and eradicate white supremacy ; if Barack Obama voices support for defunding the police , I will retract my skepticism .
This fixation on leadership , pining for either specific former presidents or some nebulous concept of a Good Leader to save us , is as far from what we need right now as it could possibly be .
The evidence at hand strongly suggests that the leaders we currently have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that they need to do ; if they were to Lead More , they would take us directly down the wrong path .
We need these leaders to stop leading , and start listening .
We do not need to hear another empty condemnation of racism that fails to identify the police as the problem .
I am certainly not interested in hearing George W. Bush muse on how racist his presidency was , unless it is being done at a war crimes tribunal .

Swisher’s fan-fiction idea is obviously funny, but it also tells us something about how useless the appeal to the concept of leadership is. Bush enjoyed dizzyingly high poll numbers after 9/11; perhaps this is the period of strong leadership that Swisher feels qualifies him to join the Leadership Zoom session. The collective madness and naïveté of that period, in which the frightened American people gave George W. Bush a blank check to begin his global war on terror, in turn spawning the Iraq War and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi people as well as thousands of dead American soldiers, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and ISIS. Enough bodies to populate a large American city; a region in chaos and despair. This is to say nothing of how he responded to his own home-grown crisis, Hurricane Katrina: He said that the horse association guy who he had appointed to oversee FEMA was doing a “heckuva job.” If this man can be held up, even if only in comparison to Trump, as a better kind of leader, something has gone wrong.
The liberal amnesia over Bush (and his father) should not obscure how little the other former presidents might have to offer here. Barack Obama was president when Michael Brown’s killing led to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and when Freddie Gray’s death at the police’s hands led to unrest in Baltimore. (At the time, Obama condemned the “criminals and thugs” who looted and destroyed property in Baltimore.) Obama was undoubtedly a better leader than Trump, in both actions and words. It’s very likely that Trump’s predecessor, with his more humane rhetoric and his soothing voice, is exactly the leader that people are imagining, if only because the obvious contrast lives so rivetingly in our short-term memory.
Yet Obama’s statesmanship did not save those lives or the lives of unarmed black people who have been shot by police since then. His ability to speak and make the nation listen did not make the cops listen—which should tell you something about the limitations of the bully pulpit. The solution to this crisis is not to cry out for a leader to quiet the disruption. It’s for the protesters to get what they want. That means throwing this current crop of so-called leaders out, not asking for them to sing us back to sleep.


newrepublic--2020-06-01--Tear Gas Doesn’t Deploy Itself

Tear Gas Doesn’t Deploy Itself

Save for the rare clip of someone like Cornel West speaking God ’ s honest truth on CNN , mainstream media coverage of the nationwide protests against racist policing largely follows the same rules : mealy-mouthed language when describing police violence ; clear , active language when describing confrontation initiated by protesters ; and a both-sides approach to escalation that frames militarized police and protesters with lighters and water bottles as equally positioned .
Responding over the weekend to a particularly egregious example of this kind of reporting , Vox writer Katelyn Burns observed : “ Dang where did the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tends to look like this because the media focuses on looting and property destruction to entice viewership and fulfill the outrage cycle , but also because mainstream news outlets are institutions that often have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo when it comes to policing , racist violence , and other systems that are disproportionately deadly for Black people and people of color .
They don ’ t want to lose their imagined sense of objectivity or piss off their older white viewers , and so they do everything they can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ room : Police are , and have always been , violent as hell .
As 60 Minutes correspondent and former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery put it , because so few people in America fully understand how its history of racism is ongoing and not locked in the past , “ it ’ s impossible to say objectively true , historically neutral things grounded in research , reporting & expertise without a large swath of [ people ] ( including journalists ) interpreting them as ‘ political opinions.
’ ” While this kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Fox News and similarly conservative outlets , it ’ s maybe more useful to point out the failures in institutions relied on and looked to by liberals , since ostensibly they care about these issues .
The most egregious offender to date is The New York Times , which is leaning on a tried-and-true favorite : passive voice .
Passive voice removes a subject from the focus of a sentence , instead choosing to look at the action or reaction caused by the subject .
Effectively , when describing something like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to evasively describe who , exactly , is causing the violence .
Take this example , from Saturday :

Save for the rare clip of someone like Cornel West speaking God’s honest truth on CNN, mainstream media coverage of the nationwide protests against racist policing largely follows the same rules: mealy-mouthed language when describing police violence; clear, active language when describing confrontation initiated by protesters; and a both-sides approach to escalation that frames militarized police and protesters with lighters and water bottles as equally positioned. Responding over the weekend to a particularly egregious example of this kind of reporting, Vox writer Katelyn Burns observed: “Dang where did the pepper spray come from?”
Coverage tends to look like this because the media focuses on looting and property destruction to entice viewership and fulfill the outrage cycle, but also because mainstream news outlets are institutions that often have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo when it comes to policing, racist violence, and other systems that are disproportionately deadly for Black people and people of color. They don’t want to lose their imagined sense of objectivity or piss off their older white viewers, and so they do everything they can to talk around the elephant in the room: Police are, and have always been, violent as hell. As 60 Minutes correspondent and former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery put it, because so few people in America fully understand how its history of racism is ongoing and not locked in the past, “it’s impossible to say objectively true, historically neutral things grounded in research, reporting & expertise without a large swath of [people] (including journalists) interpreting them as ‘political opinions.’”


newrepublic--2020-06-02--A Profound Experience of Art

A Profound Experience of Art

A young woman stands in front of a canvas , painting a swan nestling in tall reeds .
The canvas is bigger than she is , so she must travel around its surface to fill in the details .
Finally , after several days , it ’ s finished : “ The Swan Song.
” The bird is curled up on the ground , safe in her own home , but there is a sense of danger , too—anything could come barreling through the greenery .
These are the first moments of The Painter and the Thief , a documentary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After graduating from a Special Jury Prize at Sundance to wide online streaming release in May , Ree ’ s film has proved a hit with viewers in search of a strong dose of raw human emotion .
An unlikely film about beauty , fate , and the radical politics of forgiveness , The Painter and the Thief will restore your faith in human intimacy , no matter how battered that faith might be .
The titular painter is Barbora Kysilkova , a young Czech woman who painstakingly reproduces photographic images in oils @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Swan Song ” exhibited at a crowded gallery party—Kysilkova smiling , shy but thrilled—the film cuts to closed circuit television footage of two thieves taking the “ The Swan Song ” out of its frame , rolling it up , and walking away .
Kysilkova ’ s paintings are worth €10,000 to €20,000 each , and the movie initially masquerades as a who-dunnit .
But we quickly learn that the titular thief is a man called Karl-Bertil Nordland .
After his arrest , Kysilkova confronts him gingerly in the courtroom about the whereabouts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he can ’ t remember where he put it , but that he took the painting because he thought that it was beautiful .
Instead of pressing the matter , she asks if she can paint his portrait .

When Kysilkova shows Nordland his first portrait, something truly unusual happens: Nordland’s eyes widen, the lines on his gaunt face deepen, and his mouth falls open in a wail. In shock over the proof that somebody has seen him so closely—witnessed him as he is, not as a criminal or a junkie, but as a person—Nordland breaks down in a crisis of self-recognition.
The scene is reminiscent of a passage in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the protagonist, Adam, witnesses another man break “suddenly into tears, convulsively catching his breath” while looking at Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent From the Cross in the Prado Museum. Adam is baffled that anyone could have such a “profound experience of art”; Ree’s movie, in contrast, is a dispatch from inside that moment of collapse. Whereas Lerner’s book is about our estrangement from beauty, other people, and, ultimately, ourselves, Nordland’s face rejects the idea that art is difficult to access or feel. Nordland’s harrowing reaction to his portrait is natural—an unmediated response to seeing himself faithfully reflected.
Ree’s documentary falls in a tradition of intensely emotional art that worries at the boundaries between artist and subject, fiction and reality. Kysilkova and Nordland are engaged in a symbiotic relationship facilitated by art. “She sees me very well,” Nordland says, “but she forgets I can see her, too.” Because of the effort and support Kysilkova pours into Nordland’s fragile well-being, he does not remain a passive subject but blossoms into a narrator in his own right. When it is Kysilkova’s turn to be vulnerable, having fallen on hard times, she shies away from intimacy with Nordland. It’s not so easy to be the subject of somebody’s gaze, it turns out.


This Is Fascism

“ Ur-Fascism is still around us , sometimes in plainclothes , ” Umberto Eco wrote in 1995 .
“ It would be so much easier , for us , if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying , ‘ I want to reopen Auschwitz , I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.
’ Life is not that simple.
” Eco , the great theorist and novelist , had been an adolescent in northern Italy under Mussolini ’ s fascist regime , and half a decade later , as ultranationalist demagoguery and violence were set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last European embers , he began to wonder how to recognize , and mobilize against , a nascent fascist regime .
“ We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that ‘ They ’ must not do it again , ” he wrote .
“ But who are They ?
” To many Americans—mostly white Americans—Eco ’ s question has long felt academic .
It ’ s obvious who “ They ” are , isn ’ t it ?
Hitler and the Nazis , of course , and perhaps Islamist terrorists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cults , but specifically alien ones—to be kept away from our superior shores , and occasionally to be vanquished by our incomparable military .
Eco knew better , and he had America ’ s number , even in the world wide web ’ s infancy .
“ There is in our future a TV or Internet populism , in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People , ” he wrote .
He could be describing the rise of online @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republican Party apparatus , buttressed by the right-wing media ecosphere and its funders , all in the service of an authoritarian gangster state , which reached an important stage of fascist maturity in the streets of dozens of cities last weekend .
The country has entered a moment in which the frog notices it is getting boiled .
In Philadelphia on Sunday morning , the first thing the authorities cleaned up was a statue of former police commissioner and Mayor Frank Rizzo , a race-baiting demagogue who spent his life pitting white residents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Cincinnati , county sheriff ’ s deputies replaced the U.S. flag ( which they said had been taken by looters ) with their own gang colors , a Thin Blue Line banner ; the city council chairman blasted that move as insensitive , saying the sheriff “ has only made things worse .
Again.
” Further upstate in Columbus , Ohio , cops pepper-sprayed Congresswoman Joyce Beatty , along with other elected officials .
In Cleveland , officials attempted to ban any journalists from traveling downtown to the heart of the protests @

The message of this federal government is unambiguous. It has been conveyed in part by Customs and Border Protection, the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.—a force shot through with racism and tyranny, now charged with carrying out Trump’s most knee-jerk nativist impulses—which announced Sunday that it was mobilizing officers to augment police forces “confronting the lawless actions of rioters.” It has been conveyed by local authorities in pro-Trump strongholds, who defend police chokeholds of the sort that killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. “If you say you can’t breathe, you’re breathing,” a Mississippi mayor said in a tweet so thick it had a drawl and carried a rope. “Most likely that man died of overdose or heart attack.”
It was conveyed again on Monday by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a war veteran and folksy violence addict who has evolved into the Republican Party’s preferred delivery vehicle for rolling out new xenophobic or militaristic product. In recent years, he has single-handedly tried to make war with Iran and China, but this week, he wants to parachute into a hot zone in a city near you. “Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight,” he tweeted, grabbing America by its posse comitatus. “If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division. We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.”
When challenged on the abject stupidity of his unconstitutional bloodthirst, the senator clarified his statement to make it more violent and threatening. He’d use not just the 101st, but “if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” Cotton, the former Army officer, could name-check a few of its storied divisions, and his “insurrectionist”-hating must have excited the pulses of more than a few men whose preferred army wore gray, but he seemed to forget that “no quarter” was a violation of his old military code of conduct: This advice to federal law enforcement officers was an overt call to commit war crimes.


newrepublic--2020-06-02--Is Puerto Rico About to Give Another Terrible Energy Contract to an American Company?

On January 6 and 7 , a 6.4-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks struck Puerto Rico , killing at least one person , injuring more , and causing mass blackouts across the island ’ s already hobbled electrical grid .
Citing damage to the Costa Sur power plant , the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority , or Prepa , said in late January it would need to purchase some 500 megawatts of temporary generating capacity .
Now it looks like an American natural gas company could win this contract , flooding the island with fossil fuels rather than investing in the renewable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both earthquakes and hurricanes .
The company ’ s prior business in Puerto Rico has been conducted with minimal public oversight and a seemingly lax relationship to legal standards governing maritime fuel transport .
On its quarterly earnings call in early May , New Fortress Energy announced that it had been shortlisted by Prepa , the island ’ s sole electric utility , to fill the gap left by damage to Costa Sur .
For at least one year , NFE would supply 500 MW worth of generating capacity , reportedly at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month .
There ’ s also a possibility that Prepa could end up permanently purchasing this generating capacity .
This would all be a pretty good deal for NFE , which is looking for a place to stash and burn extra fossil fuels that appear to be sourced largely from third-party providers , in addition to its liquefaction facility in Miami .
As the company ’ s founder and CEO , Wes Edens , said on the call , “ We ’ ve got a couple of cargoes extra that we have contracted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right now .
And I think that what we will do is , either sell those on an outright basis or swap them into cargoes that we can then use in Puerto Rico .
”

It remains to be seen how any potential agreement between NFE and Prepa for temporary power generation, with FEMA potentially footing the bill, might relate to another somewhat mysterious deal between Prepa and FEMA that José Ortiz, Prepa’s CEO, hinted at last week to Puerto Rican newspaper El Vocero. Ortiz suggested it would be the largest in FEMA history—so large, in fact, that President Trump wanted to announce it himself, according to Ortiz. While there are few details beyond initial news reports, Santiago told me that it’s possible Ortiz is referring to a long-discussed grid modernization plan between FEMA and Prepa, the idea for which was developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Ortiz has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
There’s an ugly history of grid recovery work in Puerto Rico involving little-known outside contractors. While FEMA wasn’t involved in the controversial $300 million contract Prepa entered into with Whitefish Energy in 2017—a congressional investigation later showed Whitefish had charged unusually high rates—two former FEMA officials were arrested in September 2019 on charges of taking bribes to hire the novice utility contractor Cobra Acquisitions to repair downed energy infrastructure after Hurricane Maria. The former president of Cobra Acquisitions was arrested, as well. While Cobra’s parent company said FEMA was “in the room” and present “every step of the way” in striking its 2017 deal with Prepa, Litzow, asked about the most recent bidding process, said that “FEMA does not play a role in the selection of contractors. That is the sole responsibility of the Applicant,” in this case Prepa.
NFE, should it win this contract, wouldn’t be new to Puerto Rico’s energy system. In March 2019, just a few months after going public, the company won a bid and signed a five-year contract to convert Units 5 and 6 of the San Juan power plant from diesel to run on natural gas, and then supply that gas.