So where were the 'good guys with guns'? Standing around doing nothing, as usual

Lucian K. Truscott IV,

 Salon
May 28, 2022

Uvalde law enforcement officers (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA for AFP)

Nearly 10 years have passed since the last school shooting that killed as many children as were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. That shooting, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, took the lives of 20 children and six adults. It was supposed to be the mass shooting that changed everything, remember? The killings were so horrific, most of the victims so young and innocent, that surely the House and the Senate could come up with some sort of "common sense" gun control measures that everyone could agree on.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Ha! Ten years have passed, and what has happened? Exactly nothing. Why? At least in part because within days of the Sandy Hook shooting, the National Rifle Association, one of the largest contributors to the political campaigns of (mostly Republican) politicians in the country, swung into action to stop any momentum for new gun laws before they could even get going.

Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA, called a press conference in Washington and with a single sentence, began a refrain about guns and gun violence and gun control that is still with us today: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said that day. What we might call the LaPierre Rule has become gospel for gun owners, gun manufacturers, and the political party that opposes any sort of gun control, the Republican Party. LaPierre's Rule devolved into sub-rules, such as this gem: The solution to gun violence isn't fewer guns, it's more guns in the hands of more people.

RELATED: Uvalde shooting timeline exposes an ugly truth: Cops have no legal duty to protect you

The NRA began a campaign after Sandy Hook to put an armed police officer in every school and to push for "open carry" laws across the country. These are state laws that allow you to openly carry a gun — of any kind, handgun or rifle — on your person or in your car without a permit. At this point, 31 states have open carry laws on their books. Fifteen states require a permit to carry a handgun, and only five, including the District of Columbia, have laws that ban the carrying of handguns in public.

Last year, the state of Texas passed its own law allowing the open carrying of handguns and other firearms without a permit. That law was passed less than two years after mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa killed 30 people. The solution to bad guys having guns is more guns, see? Texans don't want to make guns harder to buy, or to limit the times and places citizens can carry their guns. They want to make it easier. They want more guns on the street, not fewer guns.

Figures on gun ownership in Texas vary. One study I saw, by World Population Review, says that 45.7 percent of Texas citizens over the age of 18 own a gun. Another study, by the Rand Corporation, says that 37 percent of adults in Texas live in a household with a firearm. A recent report on NBC said that Texas has the highest percentage of gun ownership in the country. After the shooting on Tuesday, a tweet by Gov. Greg Abbott from 2015 surfaced in which he said, "I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans." The tweet was posted following a report in the Houston Chronicle that gun purchases in Texas had topped one million for the year.

In Uvalde, the "good guys with guns" wearing police uniforms stood around for almost an hour before storming a classroom and killing the murderer of 19 children and two teachers.

No matter which figure you use, that's one hell of a lot of "good guys with a gun" in the state of Texas, don't you think? If all that's necessary to take down a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, the question after the Uvalde shooting is, where were they? Even the good guys with guns wearing police uniforms, it was revealed on Friday, waited almost an hour before they stormed the classroom where the shooter was, and 19 of them waited until they could be backed up by a SWAT team from the Border Patrol before they finally used their guns to kill the murderer of 19 children and two teachers.

The shooter, an 18-year-old resident of Uvalde, had purchased two AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition and 50 — fifty — high-capacity magazines only days after his birthday on May 16. Texas laws require only that you be 18 years old to buy a rifle in the state, but at that age, you can buy any kind of rifle, including a semiautomatic AR-15 style weapon. The shooter was able to buy two of the AR-15s in the days after his birthday when he was apparently already making plans to kill children at an elementary school in Uvalde. Much has been made of the fact that he was not old enough to buy a beer, but he was old enough to buy a rifle capable of firing two to three bullets per second. He was also able to buy the seven 30-round magazines, containing at least 210 bullets.

On Friday we heard reports that citizens of Uvalde, including at least one parent of a child who was killed, were outside the school yelling at armed police officers to go inside and take on the shooter. Cell phone video shot at the scene at 12:37 p.m., while the shooter was inside the school killing children, show one officer holding up his hands trying to prevent a person from filming him and shooing a crowd of people away from the doors of the school. One person can be heard calling to the others that they should enter the school and storm the shooter because the cops aren't doing anything. Another video shot at the same time showed numerous police officers in full tactical gear restraining parents who were trying to enter the school to retrieve their children. One father was pepper-sprayed in the face and a mother was handcuffed. In the background, a police officer in armored gear is hiding behind the bed of a pickup truck aiming his AR-style police rifle at the door of the school.

So some of the good guys with guns were doing exactly what so many cops are accused of every day: menacing civilians and pushing them around and threatening to arrest them for doing nothing that was even remotely illegal.

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that the gunman was in the school for nearly an hour before a SWAT team from the Border Patrol arrived and was able to get into the classroom where he was and kill him. By that time, all the children in the classroom were dead.

Also absent from the scene in Uvalde were any of the 13 million people who own guns in the state of Texas, all those good guys with guns that Wayne LaPierre has told us are the only thing that can stop "a bad guy with a gun."

Watching the coverage of the aftermath of mass shootings in this country has become commonplace. The shooting at the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo happened two weeks ago, and here we are looking at images of yet another exterior of yet another building where someone carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle walked in and killed people, this time children this time. The scene is always the same: Heavily armed police officers clad in camouflage uniforms, protected by bulletproof vests and wearing helmets, along with an entire panoply of military-style tactical gear, are milling around talking to each other. A few of them are dispatched to do what the army calls "set up a perimeter," which in the case of mass shootings amounts to stringing yellow crime-scene tape around the scene and then guarding it so civilians can't get near the scene and presumably contaminate evidence. In Uvalde, at least one armored personnel carrier could be seen near the school after all the shooting was over and all the kids were dead.

There are always a lot of heavily armed police officers at the scene of mass shootings after they have occurred. It is beyond me why they think it's necessary to show up looking like they're about to be dispatched to serve on the front lines in Ukraine or some other war zone. But there they are, wearing enough body armor and carrying enough firepower to assault an infantry battalion, and what are they doing? Standing around.

It's all of a piece. Every time there is another mass shooting, more and more money floods into the budgets of police departments and they go out and buy military-spec M-4 rifles and military-spec shotguns and military-spec body armor and military-spec helmets and military-style camouflage uniforms. Why? Because they're cool, that's why. If they're going to go up against one of these mass shooters, every one of whom is outfitted in military-style tactical gear and carrying military-style AR-15 rifles, then by God, they're not going to be one-upped! Just like Greg Abbott and his exhortation to Texans to buy more guns so they could catch up with California (!), the cops are going to buy more guns and more body armor — more of everything — so they can be ready the next time they're called upon to stand around in a parking lot of a building after 10 or 20 people have been shot and their dead bodies are strewn around the floor somewhere inside.

There's a weird, ironic perfection to the fact that the NRA's convention began on Friday in Houston, offering Wayne LaPierre, who is still the CEO of that august organization of gun-lovers, the chance to come up with yet another exhortation to his masses. One year they tried "my dead hands," as in, if you want my guns you'll have to pry them from my dead hands. Then came Wayne's good guys with guns.

Maybe this year Wayne will explain to us that the reason we've had all these school shootings and mass killings is because we don't have enough good guys with guns. More good guys! More guns! That'll show these mass murderers! Next time one of them shoots up a school, we'll have even more people standing around outside picking their camo-clad asses as the bodies of the dead lie there inside submitting to the ministrations of the crime scene investigators.

More guns, and more crime scene investigators! That'll show 'em that in Texas, we're second to nobody!

THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGIN

Psycho secession: Texas’ lost-cause lawsuit was the first shot in a new Civil War

Published December 12, 2020
By Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon- Commentary
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President Donald Trump and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (Facebook).

They didn’t bother with writing articles of secession this time. No, Ken Paxton, the disgraced attorney general of the state of Texas, did that for them when he filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the presidential election. On Wednesday, Missouri and 16 other states filed a brief with the court seeking to join the Texas lawsuit, which alleges that the four decisive swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia violated the Constitution by allowing mail-in voting in the November election. On Thursday, a majority of the Republican caucus in the House, 126 members of Congress, signed on to the lawsuit along with the instigator in chief, Donald Trump. Twenty-five states and territories signed a brief opposing the Texas lawsuit. Friday evening, the Supreme Court rejected the suit out of hand.

The 18 states and 126 members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise, are seceding from democracy. It amounts to nothing less than an act of sedition by the entire Republican Party, 70 percent of whom believe that Joe Biden’s election was illegitimate, according to a Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday. In contrast, 98 percent of Democrats think Biden’s victory was legitimate, along with 62 percent of independents.

The last time anything like this happened was in 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln led almost immediately to declarations of secession by seven states between Dec. 20, 1860 and Feb. 1, 1861. Two months later, on April 12, the bombardment of Fort Sumter began, and the Civil War was underway.

It’s not a shooting war — yet — but Texas didn’t just file a lawsuit this week, it set a match to the Constitution of the United States. It isn’t just that these Republicans don’t recognize Joe Biden as our next president. They don’t want to be part of the democracy that this country was founded on. They don’t respect the votes of their fellow citizens. They don’t want what more than 80 million people wanted when they cast their votes in this election. They want what Donald Trump wants.

Thankfully, it’s not the whole country. The Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of registered voters think that Biden’s victory was legitimate. But it wasn’t the whole country in 1860, either. It was only after the election of Lincoln that the Southern states seceded from the Union over the issue of slavery.

This time there isn’t a single issue, there’s a single man: Donald Trump. In this way, what’s happening right now in this country is eerily similar to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Trump has identified and used the same sort of mass hysteria Hitler did — a sense of resentment among his supporters that somehow they have been left behind and misunderstood and humiliated, and that only he, Trump, understands them and is willing to stand up for them and will bring back their rightful way of life.

So far, Trump has only played around with the kind of violence that Hitler made use of to achieve power and then consolidate it. Trump used implied violence in the chants of “Lock her up” that energized supporters at his rallies in 2016 and throughout the campaign of 2020. By staying silent this year when armed protesters occupied the State Capitol in Michigan, Trump implied his support, and his exhortations to “liberate” states that were mandating lockdowns to fight COVID were taken by many as invitations to violence.

Now armed protesters have gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state, and Georgia election officials report that they are receiving death threats and racist voice mails. The Republican Party of Arizona has retweeted exhortations from those who say, “I’m willing to give up my life for this fight,” suggesting it’s time to “die for something.” The New York Times reported this week that the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission has said that “people on Twitter have posted photographs of my house.” Another tweet mentioned her children and threatened “I’ve heard you’ll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door.”

The conservative website The Bulwark reported this week that far-right websites have been posting addresses and other personal information about Republican elected officials in Georgia, superimposing target crosshairs over images of their faces. Right-wing Republicans are in full cheerleader mode trying to turn Kyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of murdering two people and wounding another at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest, into a hero of the Trump cause. A Democratic state representative in Pennsylvania told the New York Times that “we’ve been getting emails all the time, all hours of the day and night,” and that “they’re getting more angry, and a lot of calls are saying we won’t be forgetting.”

This kind of stuff is not a joke. The fantastic lie that has gripped the Republican Party started out with everyone going along with Trump’s fantasy and kind of humoring him. But now it’s taken a deadly turn. Trump has been calling Republican state representatives on the phone and pressuring them to go along with his demands that they ignore the votes that have taken place in swing states and appoint electors that will vote for him. If they step out of line, they’re branded as traitors, cowards, RINOs. He’s doing this kind of stuff to his own people, to loyal Republicans who have voted the party line since they were in short pants.

When you add in what’s been happening in red states with COVID, it’s jaw-dropping. Governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures are so intimidated that they won’t pass mask mandates and bar closures, not to mention rules against mass gatherings. COVID cases and hospitalizations in red states are off the charts. They are lining up refrigerated trucks outside hospitals in states like North and South Dakota. Republicans are killing their own people in craven attempts to keep Donald Trump from attacking them on Twitter. God only knows what’s going to happen in those states when the COVID vaccines become widely available, although we’re getting some idea with reports of people standing up at meetings of county commissioners pledging not only that they won’t wear masks, they’ll also refuse to be vaccinated.

http://www.rgnorman.co.uk/artphotoslife.asp?pid=275

The Mason-Dixon line is psychological this time. These people have lost their minds. They have seceded from sanity and reason. This Civil War isn’t being fought with rifles and pistols. It’s a war fought with lies and delusions. This week it passed the number of Americans killed in World War II, and its victims are just as dead as the bodies buried at Anzio and Normandy. Americans are dying every time Mitch McConnell stands up and blocks a COVID relief bill. They are dying every time a Republican senator like Ron Johnson presents testimony from an anti-vaxxer as if it were a sane person instead of an outright idiot. They’re dying by the thousands with their mask-less hubris. They’re dying for Donald Trump, but at least for now, our democracy has not died with them.

US: In Texas, Trump supporters and lawmakers threaten secession if Biden win is certified

Trump and his party have been claiming voter fraud in the November polls

Web Desk December 13, 2020 

After the US Supreme Court rejected Texas' bid to throw out voting results in four key states that president-elect Joe Biden won in November's presidential election, the Texas Republican Party issued a statement raising the spectre of secession. “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a union of states that will abide by the constitution,” said party chairman Allen West. He said the court's order had established "a precedent that says states can violate the US Constitution and not be held accountable". Trump and his allies have been claiming voter fraud in the November polls. 

A Texas lawmaker even announced plans to introduce a referendum pushing to secede from the US. Republican lawmaker Kyle Biedermann said in a statement, according to Fox News: "The federal government is out of control and does not represent the values of Texans. That is why I am committing to file legislation this session that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the state of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.”



The US Supreme Court had earlier rejected a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election in several key battleground states won by Joe Biden, effectively ending President Donald Trump's bid to challenge the outcome of the November 3 polls. The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid from Texas' attorney general, and backed by Trump, to block the ballots of millions of voters in battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that went in favour of president-elect Biden, who won 306 electoral seats in the polls. Only 270 seats are required for winning the race to the White House.

The election results will be formally certified next week by a 538-member electoral college.

The 'secession' statement raised hackles within the Democratic Party. There are increasing calls to sanction the lawmakers who supported the same, and to exclude them from the Congress, citing Section 3 of the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution.

House majority leader Steny Hoyer said the Supreme Court's decision should put an end to Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election that he lost. The results are clear, there was no widespread fraud, and Joe Biden is the next president of the United States, he said. "The 126 Republicans who signed on in support of this case should be ashamed of themselves for putting their own political interests before the interests of our nation, the Constitution, and our democratic principles," Hoyer said.

Supporters of President Donald Trump announced they will stifle Washington on Sunday with a pair of rallies. The rallies come a month after a pro-Trump demonstration that drew at least 10,000 people to the capital. The day began with Trump thrilling his supporters by driving by in his limousine and ended with scattered clashes between Trump supporters and local activists. Sunday's rallies are meant as a show of force just two days before the electoral college meets to formally elect Joe Biden as the next president.

-Inputs from agencies

The next insurrection: They don't have the votes, but they've got the guns
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
July 03, 2021




Pro-Trump protesters trying to enter Capitol building. (lev radin / Shutterstock.com)

You want to know what has doomed Nancy Pelosi's attempts to get a bipartisan agreement to investigate the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Every time she has talked about why we need a bipartisan commission or the select committee, she said they were necessary "so nothing like this will ever happen again."

This article first appeared in Salon.

Republicans aren't against investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection because they fear it will make them look bad. They're against doing anything to make sure that such an insurrection doesn't happen again.

The assault on the Capitol is already damaging to the Republican Party image, at least to outsiders. The Capitol was attacked by a violent mob of Trump supporters. It's doubtful there were any Democrats among them. The assault took place immediately after a Trump rally on the Ellipse and was incited by the then-president. Several Republican members of Congress joined Trump in addressing the crowd, along with other famous party stalwarts like Rudy Giuliani. It was a Republican rally with a Republican crowd. So was the mob at the Capitol.

Republican members of Congress know it was their supporters out there beating down the doors of the Capitol, ransacking the well of the Senate and looting congressional offices. Republicans don't want to investigate the violence at the Capitol because they want to leave the door open for it to happen again.

Most of them come from safe seats in Republican-majority congressional districts, many of them in Republican-controlled states. Republican senators, not all of them but most, come from Republican states in the South and Midwest. But every one of them can read census numbers, and every one of them understands that their days are numbered, even in states that have been Republican strongholds for decades, like Arizona and Texas. They saw the Election Day returns which showed previously Republican suburbs falling to the Democrats all over the country. They read the depressing voting numbers for millennials and younger voters that show them strongly leaning Democratic. Even a dull, lumbering beast like the Republican Party can tell when a water hole runs dry.

They can read the polls showing how popular Democratic issues are, including improved access to health care, the pandemic rescue bill, the infrastructure bill and the American Family Plan. How many calls have you heard Republicans make lately for repealing Obamacare? How many speeches have you heard them make saying we don't need to spend money on crumbling bridges, obsolete airports and ancient, failing mass transit like the Long Island Railroad or the Chicago Transit Authority or the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority? They don't dare oppose spending that is in any way grounded in reality. All they can come up with is screaming about "socialism" and "Democratic Party wish-lists," because their constituents drive across cracking bridges and commute on failing transit systems and pay a third of their income on rent and a third on child care and way more than they can afford on health care.

Electorally, Republicans are hanging on by their fingernails. In 2020, in the midst of the worst pandemic since 1918, before a single American had received a life-saving vaccination, with 230,000 already dead from the coronavirus and more deaths on the way, voters turned out in record numbers. And Republicans lost. They lost the White House. They lost the House of Representatives. After a runoff election, they lost control of the Senate. They did well locally in Republican-controlled states, maintaining control of state houses and governorships, but they lost ground in the areas where the country is growing. They lost the big cities. They lost the suburbs. They lost in population centers in the South and Midwest and West. They lost in the places where people are moving, where young people are getting jobs when they graduate from college, where many seniors are choosing to retire.

After the 2020 election, Gallup found in a December poll that 31 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, 25 percent as Republicans and 41 percent as independents. When independents were asked whether they were "Democratic leaners" or "Republican leaners," 50 percent said they leaned Democratic, and 39 percent leaned Republican. These were not good numbers for the Republican Party. Nobody knows better than Republicans that there are fewer of them than there are of us.

You've heard chapter and verse from me and others about how Republicans are passing voter suppression laws to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote. They know they don't have the votes. They don't have them now, and they'll have even fewer of them in the future.

That's why they've started to concentrate their efforts at the state level on laws that change how votes are counted and who counts them, moving the center of power from elected officials like secretaries of state and appointed officials like election administrators to state legislatures, inherently political bodies where the counting can be managed and controlled politically.

It's why they're clinging to Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him, and it's why their own efforts to "audit" the 2020 election results in places like Arizona are so shambolic and absurd. They know that if honest assessments are done of how the election turned out in battleground states, they will come to the same conclusions that a 55-page report by the Michigan state Senate did last week: There was no election fraud in the 2020 election. None. Zero. Nada.

They've been downplaying the assault on the Capitol, calling it "a normal tourist visit" as Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia did during a hearing a few weeks ago. He is among a growing number of Republicans in Congress who are making the case that nothing really bad happened on Jan. 6, so there's no need to investigate it. They blocked the creation of a nonpartisan 9/11 style commission to investigate the insurrection, and they're in the process of undercutting Pelosi's select committee by labeling it as a Democratic exercise in blame-laying.

Furthermore, they're absolutely right. When the select committee issues its report, it's going to lay the blame where Republicans want it least: on Trump for inciting the riot, and on their own constituents for committing insurrection against the government. And the select committee will likely produce evidence that Republicans are not interested in seeing in the light of day: detailed accounts of the violence committed by the mob and reports of the preparations some of the mob had taken that we haven't seen yet, such as evidence of weapons caches — and planning by some insurrectionists to use them.

Republicans don't want a report that basically comes out and says, Here's how close we came to a coup against our government, and here is what they are planning next. Laws that put partisan political bodies like legislatures in charge of counting votes make it much more likely that an upcoming election will end up in a political wrangle — not down in the states where the counting takes place, but in Washington.

Think about it: there were no controls whatsoever on that mob in Washington on Jan. 6. Estimates of the size of the crowd at Trump's rally on the Ellipse ran as high as 30,000. More than 800 rioters are estimated to have broken through police barricades and entered the Capitol, with as many as 10,000 outside. They outnumbered police by the thousands.

What if that crowd had been armed? What if instead of carrying iron pipes and bear spray and flag poles they had been carrying AR-15s and pistols? What if some of them were carrying the kinds of bombs that were found outside the Democratic and Republican headquarters? Capitol police couldn't stop them from overwhelming barricades and gaining entrance to the Capitol. Do you think they could have searched that mob for hidden weapons and bombs?

This is why Republicans don't want to see an intensive investigation of the insurrection on Jan. 6. If an investigation proves how bad the insurrection was this time, it might predict what will be possible if a mob of 100,000 or more assault the Capitol or other governmental buildings in Washington, and what that mob might be capable of if they're organized and armed next time.

The Republican Party has reached the point where it does not recognize the legitimacy of elections unless it wins them. Democratic political victories are per se illegitimate in Republican eyes. Republicans are lapping up their own lawlessness and ramping up the insanity. They are turning right-wing lunatics like Kyle Rittenhouse into folk heroes. He is the shooter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who killed two people and wounded a third during Black Lives Matter protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Republican state legislatures in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed laws granting immunity to drivers who hit protesters with their cars during demonstrations on public streets. Multiple states already have laws allowing both open and concealed carry of firearms without a license, with more such laws on the way.

These are the kinds of laws that not only allow insurrection, but encourage it. The Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers and their ilk aren't the right's political fringe anymore. They are the Republican base — and the Republican future.

Abolishing Adolescence

Says the daddy of Alberta neo-cons; Ted Byfield.

One of those old-style teachers, who died in the early '50s, was Sir Richard Livingstone, a classics prof and educational philosopher.

Livingstone defined what he called "educable ages" of human beings.

We are most educable, he said, when we're very young, least educable in the teen years and early 20s, and become highly educable again as adults.

In effect, he was abolishing the whole concept of the teen-ager, the adolescent.

If nearly everybody at 12 or 13 joined the work force, they would in fact become part of the adult world.

Wait a minute weren't he and his neo-con pals the same ones that want to raise the age of sexual consent to 16. Decrying any sexual relations between teen agers and adults as child abuse and equating it with child porn. Yep they were.

And they are of course the same ones who want the age lowered, perhaps to 10, to be able to try teen-agers and children as Adults for crimes like murder. And we recently say how effective that was with the Stephen Truscott case.

Ted is the Pater Familas of the Byfield clan, whose influence is spread through out Canada's social conservative political lobbies.

Ted created the conservative weekly St. Johns Edmonton Report, which later became Alberta Report ,as part of a tax free religious charity associated with St. Johns Boys School. A school founded on the principle's of same sex education and spare the rod spoil the child.

At least one blogger noted this would be a return to the 19th Century use of child labour. Actually child labour in Canada was abolished through Factory Acts beginning in the late 19th Century. In Alberta child labour laws were not passed until 1917. And now child labour has returned in B.C. and Alberta.

And perhaps this is the real subtext of what Byfield is saying, since Alberta and B.C. are suffering from massive labour shortages.

Adolescence and the concept of the teen-ager began after WWI with the post war boom and the consumer culture created by Fordism. It became a mass cultural phenomena world wide after WWII. It is the result of the post war baby boom and concurrent development of post war industrialization. By the late fifties and early sixties, teen agers were in news first as juvenile delinquents, then as student rebels. The rise of the student movement and an anti-war culture, would result in the development of the New Left.

For the post Viet-Nam new right it became a simple formula; abolish adolescence and you abolish rebellion. And in their political agenda there are only children and adults.

In fact this idea of children between 12-21 being adults is a throw back to an much earlier age. The Medieval Age. Which is where Byfield remains to this day.

Of all the books on childhood in the past, Philippe Aries's book Centuries of Childhood is probably the best known; one historian notes the frequency with which it is "cited as Holy Writ. " (18) Aries's central thesis is the opposite of mine: he argues that while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was "invented" in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell.

To prove this thesis Aries uses two main arguments. He first says that a separate concept of childhood was unknown in the early Middle Ages. "Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it" because artists were "unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale."(19) Not only does this leave the art of antiquity in limbo, but it ignores voluminous evidence that medieval artists could, indeed, paint realistic children.(20) His etymological argument for a separate concept of childhood being unknown is also untenable.(21) In any case, the notion of the "invention of childhood" is so fuzzy that it is surprising that so many historians have recently picked it up.(22) His second argument, that the modern family restricts the child's freedom and increases the severity of punishment, runs counter to all the evidence.

The idea that adolescence was not recognized as a category of development separate from both childhood and adulthood is a more subtle distinction, but only just. The primary evidence concerning this outlook is the lack of any term for the modern-day word "adolescence." If they didn't have a word for it, they didn't comprehend it as a stage in life.

This argument also leaves something to be desired, especially when we remember that medieval people did not use the terms "feudalism" or "courtly love." And again, there is some evidence to refute the assumption. Inheritance laws set the age of majority at 21, expecting a certain level of maturity before entrusting a young individual with financial responsibility. And there was concern expressed for the "wild youth" of teenage apprentices and students; the mischief that youth can cause was frequently seen as a stage that people pass through on the way to becoming "sad and wise."

In towns and cities, children would grow to become the laborers and apprentices that made a craft business grow. And here, too, there are signs that society as a whole understood the value of children. For example, in medieval London, laws regarding the rights of orphans were careful to place a child with someone who could not benefit from his death.

Among the nobility, children would perpetuate the family name and increase the family's holdings through advancement in service to their liege lords and through advantageous marriages. Some of these unions were planned while the bride- and groom-to-be were still in the cradle.

"The psychodynamics of mystics, their symbol formations and their actions are based on excessive early trauma. . . . There is evidence that medieval mystics
were deprived and also emotionally and sexually abused as children."
-- Childhood and Fantasies of Medieval Mystics, Dr. Ralph Frenken

". . . Frenken's mystics each attempted to achieve their desired transcendent knowledge, albeit through perverse methods resulting from their horrid childhoods -- they were merely attempting to create psychic homeostasis."

"The production of pain, bleeding, religious symbol scarification, self-flagellation
and wearing body-injuring garments all served the mystics' purpose of achieving unity with the divine as a substitute for childhood psychic abuse, of merging with an idealized Mother and as a defense against normal sexual emotions."

"Whatever ecstasy they may have achieved was short­lived because it
never addressed a resolution of childhood trauma."

-- Jerrold Atlas, Ph.D.

The idea of childhood is disappearing.

Writing a new preface three years ago for the re-released version of the book, Postman, who teaches media and political culture at New York University, confessed that, "sad to say," he saw little to change in his 1982 text. "What was happening then is happening now. Only worse."

In Postman's view, the postmodern culture is propelling us back to a time not altogether different from the Middle Ages, a time before literacy, a time before childhood had taken hold as an idea. Obviously, there were children in medieval times, but no real childhood, he says, because there was no distinction between what adults and children knew.

Postman's book recalls the coarse village festivals depicted in medieval paintings - men and women besotted with drink, groping one another with children all around them. It describes the feculent conditions and manners drawn from the writings of Erasmus and others in which adults and children shared open lives of lust and squalor.

"The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame - these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world," Postman writes.

Only after the development of the printing press, and of literacy, did childhood begin to emerge, he says. Despite pressures on children to work in the mines and factories of an industrial age, the need for literacy and education gradually became apparent, first among the elite, then among the masses. Childhood became defined as the time it took to nurture and transform a child into a civilized adult who could read and comprehend complex information. The view American settlers was that only gradually could children attain civility and adulthood through "literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame."

It was during that time, Postman notes, that public education flourished, that children began celebrating birthdays and that a popular culture especially for kids developed around games and songs. Postman places the high-water mark for childhood at between 1850 and 1950.

"Childhood was invented in the seventeenth century."

So begins chapter seven of Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. I highly recommend the entire book, but this chapter in and of itself deserves special consideration. Postman was a brilliant writer and social critic, rest his soul, and I wouldn't presume to improve on his presentation. What I can do is summarize and tantalize enough that you'll head out to the nearest library and pick up a copy of the book yourself. Or at least internalize and spread the meme.

Of course children existed prior to the seventeenth century, but that's not the same thing at all. Childhood is a social construction, a collective agreement to set aside some time between infancy and adulthood largely free of responsibilities that is enforced by behaviors, social norms, and laws. (What this time is for is a major question that we'll get to later.)

Surveying Children and Childhood

Hugh Cunningham has taken on a formidable challenge in this book: describing the history not only of the Western idea of childhood, but the actual experience of children over a span of nearly five hundred years.

The book first explores the evolution of ideas about childhood in the Western world. Beginning with a brief but lucid examination of the classical and medieval world, where the most important change in the notion of childhood came with the spread of Christianity, Cunningham turns to the period beginning about 1500. His aim here is to describe the rise of what he calls a "middle class ideology of childhood." This ideology has its origins in the thinking of a succession of figures, the first of whom was Erasmus. Erasmus's stress upon the importance of the father and of education--for boys, at any rate--was the first step in the creation of a distinctly modern vision of childhood. Interestingly, Cunningham argues that the Reformation's importance was in advancing the notion of the importance of education for Catholics and Protestants alike. Though he concedes that there were differences--the Puritan obsession with original sin and the Catholic elevation of the priest above the familial patriarch, for example--Cunningham prefers to stress continuities across the religious divide. John Locke, the next important contributor in Cunningham's view, was important for undermining the idea of original sin, and for encouraging the secularization of the western ideal of childhood. It was left for Rousseau to follow Locke's secular ideal to its logical conclusion: nature, rather than the Church, should be the director of a child's growth. These romantic ideals were immensely influential among educated Europeans, and were popularized still more after the publication of Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Mortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." This work, says Cunningham, "came to encapsulate what was thought of as a romantic attitude to childhood: that is, that childhood was the best part of life" (p. 74). And unlike Locke's own gendered notion of childhood, Wordsworth and Rousseau made no distinctions between boys and girls; children of both genders were "godlike, fit to be worshipped, and the embodiment of hope" (p. 78).

Of course these ideas were the product of elites, and until the nineteenth century rarely applied to any other children, as Cunningham recognizes. The rest of his book traces the ways in which this "middle class ideology" came to be applied to all children. In the early part of the period, Erasmian prescriptions had no place in the experience of the vast majority of children, who were trained from about the age of seven to take their place in the adult world of work. But beginning in the seventeenth century, education, sponsored by churches and lay charity, began to have a broader impact. Many of the free schools founded in English towns in the period, for example, followed, if only loosely, Lockean ideals. While their goal was usually to teach a useful trade, they also provided literacy skills and made the experience of schooling more common for the non-elite majority.

Industrialization, Cunningham argues, did little to alter the structure of the family, but it radically changed the experience of its members, as people moved from agriculture to industry. Children, accustomed to work in the fields, quite naturally took their places in the factory work force. Here the Romantic ideal began to have its effect upon the majority of children, as middle class reformers pressured Western states to limit the impact of industry upon children. A hallmark of the century after 1750, Cunningham tells us, was the dramatic increase in state intervention in child-related matters. Regulation imposed upon child labor was one feature of these policies. Eighteenth-century governments had deliberately encouraged the rapid introduction of children into the work force, teaching them trades, but by the mid-nineteenth century the goal was to exclude them from the shop floor. Most important of all was the introduction of compulsory schooling. Although feeble state efforts at requiring education had been underway since the early eighteenth century, it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth that school became a common experience for all.

While compulsory education reinforced the Romantic ideal of childhood, Cunningham points out that Western states had far more in mind than assuring fun and games for youth. Increasingly sophisticated economies required sophisticated skills. Schools served the interests of governments and their rulers: children pledged allegiance, saluted portraits of kaisers and kings, and learned about the benefits of the status quo. Moreover, the state's increased role in the lives of children--not simply through schooling, but also through public health programs and social work, both of which emerge simultaneously with the public school, "entailed an unprecedented degree of surveillance of the working-class population" (p. 168). Despite the utility of such policies for governments, there is no doubt but that the Romantic ideal of childhood dominated public action. Even science did more to serve the ideal than challenge it; pediatrics, a branch of medicine unknown much before the turn of the century, helped ensure a dramatic fall in infant mortality rates, a shift Cunningham emphasizes is of great importance.

SEE:

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Gaza’s next big threat: Cholera, infectious diseases amid total blockade

Humanitarian organisations warn deadly water-born diseases will spread in the besieged strip if aid is not allowed in.

Water sold by private vendors who run small solar-powered desalination facilities has doubled in price in Gaza since October 7

 [Mohammed Abed/ AFP]
By Federica Marsi
Published On 21 Oct 2023

Waseem Mushtaha’s four children have been out of school for almost two weeks. Instead of learning mathematics or geography, they are being taught how to ration water.

“Every day I fill a bottle of water for each one and I tell them: Try to manage this,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. “At the beginning, they struggled, but now they are coping.”

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After Israel issued an evacuation order for 1.1 million Palestinians in the northern part of Gaza, Mushtaha drove his wife and children aged eight to 15 to his aunt’s home in Khan Younis, where residents opened their doors to extended family and friends amid Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment.

As a water and sanitation officer for global non-profit Oxfam, Mushtaha sees the markers of an impending public health catastrophe all around him. “People sleep on the streets, in shops, in mosques, in their cars or on the streets,” he said. His family lives alongside around 100 people crammed in a 200-square-metre apartment and count themselves among the lucky ones.

Meanwhile, hygiene products have disappeared from the few supermarkets that are open and water sold by private vendors who run small solar-powered desalination facilities has doubled in price since October 7 – when Israel began bombing Gaza in retaliation for the surprise attack carried out by Hamas. It used to cost 30 shekels ($7.40), but is now priced at 60 shekels ($15).

On Wednesday, Mushtaha estimated that his family would run out of water in 24 hours. After that, he didn’t know what would happen. “We will go to the market and purchase whatever is available,” he explained. “We are looking to the future with bleak eyes.”

Palestinians try to buy essential goods in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip [Fatima Shbair/AP]

Collapse of water and sanitation services

Oxfam and United Nations agencies have warned that the collapse of water and sanitation services will spark bouts of cholera and other deadly infectious diseases if urgent humanitarian aid is not delivered.

Israel cut off its water pipeline to Gaza, along with the fuel and electricity provisions that power water and sewage plants, after announcing a total blockade of the Palestinian enclave following the Hamas attack.

Most of Gaza’s 65 sewage pumping stations and all five of its wastewater treatment facilities have been forced to stop operations. According to Oxfam, untreated sewage is now being released into the sea while solid waste is also ending up on some streets alongside bodies waiting to be buried.

Desalination plants have stopped working and municipalities are unable to pump water to residential areas because of the power shortage. Some people in Gaza are relying on salty tap water from the enclave’s only aquifer, which is contaminated with sewage and seawater, or have resorted to drinking seawater. Others are being forced to drink from farm wells

.

Palestinian children search for a place to refill water in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip [Mohammed Abed/AFP]
‘On the streets with no protection’

The UN says that currently in Gaza only three litres of water a day is available per person to cover all their needs including drinking, washing, cooking and flushing the toilet. Between 50-100 litres of water each day is the recommended amount for a person to meet their basic health requirements, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

An employee of the charity Islamic Relief who also found shelter in Khan Younis described a similar situation. “At my parents’ house, there are around 20 children and seven adults sheltering. Even with so many people we only flush the toilet twice a day – once in the morning, once at night – to save water,” she said, requesting anonymity.

“We cook food that uses the least water. We wash for prayers just once or twice,” she added. “We have a neighbour with a well, but he doesn’t have any electricity to pump the water. They’ve got a generator but no fuel.”

For those who have no shelter, conditions are most dire. “There are families with children and newborn babies living without a roof over their heads,” she said. “They just sit on the streets without protection, water, food or anything. They don’t have any security.”

‘We are ready to go’

Fears are growing that dehydration and waterborne diseases will lead to a humanitarian catastrophe amid Israeli air strikes that have killed 4,137 Palestinians.


Humanitarian organisations have repeatedly issued calls for the aid stocked at the Rafah crossing, the sole route for aid to enter the Gaza Strip on the only border that it shares with Egypt, to be let through.

Following a visit to Israel on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden said an agreement had been reached with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow deliveries of assistance in the coming days. Israel has insisted that all trucks must be checked and that no aid must reach Hamas fighters. Biden also said Egypt had agreed to allow an initial convoy of 20 trucks with aid through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza.



Twice last week rumours of an agreement circulated, suggesting an imminent opening of the crossing that didn’t happen.

Mathew Truscott, Head of Humanitarian Policy at Oxfam, said he felt frustration at the idea that diseases could be spreading while water and medicines piled up a few kilometres across the border.

“Cholera is just one of many waterborne diseases that can be spreading – if we can get aid in, a lot of this can be prevented,” he said. “But you can’t provide humanitarian operations where there are still bombs falling.”

UN chief Antonio Guterres called on Wednesday for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza to ease the “epic human suffering”. On the same day, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution, supported by most other members, demanding a humanitarian pause in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.



While the war continues, there are fears that there will be more incidents like the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion on Tuesday. “We are very concerned for the attacks on healthcare,” Richard Brennan, regional emergency director at the WHO, told Al Jazeera.

Four out of 34 hospitals are no longer operational, according to the UN health agency, as others overflow with injured patients and families in need of shelter. “The conditions are ripe for the spread of a number of diarrhoeal and skin diseases,” Brennan said, with ripple effects to be felt in the region.

In 2022, cholera spread across Syria and Lebanon, killing at least 97 people. While an epidemic has not been registered in Palestinian territories in decades, “it’s conceivable that the bacterium has been brought in and the conditions are now ripe for its spread,” Brennan said.


For any efforts to turn the tide, “getting aid in is vital”, the WHO representative added. “The ball is in the court of the political leaders who have to elevate humanitarian needs as a priority. We are ready to go, but we have to be given unhindered, secure, protected passage to help people in need.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

PESTILENCE 

9/11 and the birth of Trump's Big Lie

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
September 11, 2021

President Bush flashes a "thumbs-up" after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, in this May 1, 2003 file photo. Six months after he spoke on an aircraft carrier deck under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush disavowed any connection with the war message. Later, the White House changed its story and said there was a link.


What drove this country crazy after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11? Was it how vulnerable we had been shown to be, that a group of 19 men armed with nothing more than box-cutters could bring the entire country to a halt? Was it that the attack was aimed primarily against innocent civilians, with nearly 3,000 killed at the Twin Towers alone? Was it that with the 19 hijackers dead in the suicidal attacks, we didn't seem to have anyone to retaliate against? Was it that we had no grasp whatsoever on understanding why our country, the freest and most democratic ever, was hated so much that they would attack us?

I remember how disconnected things felt for days, even weeks, after the attacks. Travelers outside the country didn't have a way to get home because flights had been canceled. People stranded in cities they were visiting within the country couldn't find cars to rent, there were so many trying to get home. Everyone seemed to feel a need to gather with families and friends and hunker down, as if another attack could come at any moment.

The country's leadership was frozen, stunned. Remember the photos of George W. Bush as an aide leaned over his shoulder and whispered the news into his ear? He was the president of the United States, and he looked scared to death. In fact, he was rushed from the school he was visiting in Florida to Air Force One, and his plane took off on what amounted to a flight to nowhere as his administration tried to pull itself together and decide how they would respond. It wasn't until hours later that Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Bush hurriedly addressed the press in a windowless conference room, vowing to "hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts." Three days would pass before the president was flown to New York to appear atop the rubble of the World Trade Center at what became known as Ground Zero to take a bullhorn and make the pledge that would launch the country on a trajectory that has yet to change: "I can hear you!" he shouted to the workers at the site, "The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

A collective madness ensued. A great scrambling began to protect us against … well, against what? Box-cutters first and foremost, it seemed, as a new regime of inspections began at airports everywhere. The initial panic over the hijacked flights would lead to the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, a kind of domestic department of defense which proceeded to put us on what amounted to a wartime footing within our own country that persists even today. How many times have you had to throw a set of fingernail clippers into a bin at airport security because a TSA agent was defending us from terrorism? How about removing your shoes because a lone lunatic made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up an airplane with a "shoe bomb"?


The entire paranoid regimen under which we still live 20 years later grew out of a supposed "war on terror" begun after 9/11 that has never ended. It took a decade to find and kill the actual terrorist who ordered the attacks on 9/11, but in the meantime two shooting wars were launched, only one of which had even the slightest connection to the terrorists who attacked us. There was an elemental problem: The war on terror wasn't against an enemy, it was against an idea, and ideas don't die when you hit them with bombs and bullets.

And so, without a readily definable enemy who could be seen and shot and killed and defeated, which is what wars are usually for, lies were substituted. We were buried with lies, and not just any lies. They had to justify the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops and the expenditure of trillions of dollars in treasure and the loss of thousands more American lives than died on 9/11 and countless more lives — enemies, civilians and, my goodness gracious, even a few real flesh and blood terrorists.

Sept. 11, 2001, was when the Big Lie was born. Or should we say, Big Lies, because they came fast and furious. By now they are known to be so completely without any basis in reality, so wholly bogus, that they hardly bear recounting. Weapons of mass destruction? Connections between Iraq and its government and leaders and the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11? Ha!

And then came new Big Lies to support the earlier Big Lies: that we were "winning" the war on terror. How many times were we reassured that all those lives and all those dollars were not being pissed away for nothing? How many times were we reassured that we were rebuilding the countries that hadn't needed rebuilding until we attacked them? How many times were we told of the miraculous training of the Iraqi and Afghan armies? They even invented a new word that I never learned in the classes I took in military history at West Point, a word to describe the magic bullet that was going to win both wars: the surge. If only we sent 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 more troops, we could win the mythical war on terror.

"Shock and awe" was a lie. "Taking Baghdad was a lie. The army of Iraq just went away. The "surge," each and every one of them, was a lie. "Winning" was a lie, every single time the word was used. Every. Single. Time. The Afghan army was a lie. It didn't even bother surrendering to the Taliban. It just went … poof. The Afghan "government" was a lie. It too went poof. The Iraqi government is a lie. Everything we have done to win the war on terror for two decades, 20 long years, has been a lie. We wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent to, I don't know, feed hungry children in Arkansas? Pay for health care for poor families? Send kids to college? Reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and save our planet?

We wasted all those lives, American and Afghan and Iraqi and German and Australian and Polish and every other soldier from every other NATO country who died fighting "terror." And we killed hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi people for nothing.

For nothing.

The biggest Big Lie of them all was that it had meaning, that we accomplished something, that we somehow won the war on terror. Terror hasn't gone away. Hell, we're growing it ourselves now, right here at home.

I'll tell you another war we lost, maybe even a bigger and more important war than the war on terror. We lost the war on truth. And we were warned. Oh yes, we were warned. Take Donald Trump's first Big Lie right after 9/11 as just one example. He claimed — I hope you're sitting down for this — that he could see from his office window in Trump Tower crowds of Muslims across the Hudson River, several miles away, on the roofs of buildings in Jersey City, cheering as the World Trade Center fell.

Remember that one? It was such a patently outrageous lie that it zoomed right past without anyone noticing as the rest of the Big Lies hit one after another.

But Trump got away with it, and he learned from it. Oh, yes. He learned how the Big Lie worked. He learned from watching Bush get away with lying about WMDs, and he learned from the Big Lies that we were winning in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he started trying out other Big Lies of his own, like the one about how Barack Obama wasn't a citizen of the United States, that he had a fake birth certificate, that he was a "secret Muslim." Remember when Trump was all over the TV for days and days claiming that he had sent detectives to Hawaii? All we had to do was wait and he was going to reveal the "truth" about Obama.

He got away with his "birther" Big Lie, and he learned something that he has used ever since, something that helped him drive us into the ditch of the pandemic he lied about for a year, something that has helped him transform an entire political party, the Republican Party, from one of two normal political parties in this country into an authoritarian cult.

He learned that if he told Big Lies that were big enough, and if he repeated them enough times, that he could get away with it, just like Bush got away with lying about WMDs to get us into Iraq. And his party, the Republican Party, learned right along with him. Look at what they are doing right this minute about the insurrection he incited against the Congress of the United States in his naked attempt to overturn the election he lost. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are on a campaign to deny that it happened. They are trying to make a case that it wasn't Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, it was somebody else, and those who were arrested are political prisoners facing false charges … and on and on and on.

The legacy 9/11 has left us is that there is no common set of facts we can agree on about anything: Not about the COVID pandemic and masks and vaccines; not about the climate change that has killed hundreds and left town after town burned to the ground or under water and destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes. We cannot agree that votes counted amount to elections won or lost. We cannot even agree on the common good of vaccines that will save us, that science is worth studying, that learned experts are worth listening to.

The lies that followed 9/11 have torn us apart as a nation and put our democracy in peril. That's our legacy: Lies are now considered by an entire political party to be legitimate political currency. A man who has told so many lies we have lost count of them is now a legitimate political figure supported for the highest office of the land by one of our two political parties.

Lies began tearing us apart after the attacks on 9/11, and we have not regained our footing as a nation. The question hanging over us now is whether we ever will.

In the coming second American Civil War -- which side are you on?

Chauncey Devega, Salon
November 04, 2021

Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

(Tyler Merbler/WikiMedia Commons)

If there is a second American Civil War, which side would you choose? It may be wise to make that decision now, in the spirit of planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

A recent public opinion poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics finds that a majority of Trump voters want to secede from the Union. Alarmingly, nearly as many Biden voters, 41 percent, also feel it may be "time to split the country." This is part of a larger pattern; other polls and research have come to similar conclusions.

It's important to resist false equivalence and superficial analysis here. It may be true that a large percentage of both Democrats and Republicans are willing to consider seceding from the United States, but their reasons and motivations are very different.

Today's Republican Party has, in practice, largely surrendered to neofascism and white supremacy — currents that were not far below its surface for many years. It has embraced and condoned the violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and has come very close to directly endorsing terrorism against its perceived political enemies.

For Republicans, America's multiracial democracy is anathema to their values and must be destroyed. Public opinion research has shown that tens of millions of white Republicans, especially Trump supporters, view Joe Biden as an illegitimate president who should be removed from power by whatever means necessary.

For decades the right-wing propaganda machine has used stochastic terrorism to radicalize its public toward ever more extreme views. In the Age of Trump, that has devolved into overt and direct appeals to violence in defense of an imagined "real" America. In practice, this has led to hate crimes and other acts of violence against nonwhite people, immigrants and other targeted groups.

This was to be expected: History shows that fascism in its various forms is inherently violent and destructive, both toward its opponents and members of its own movement.

When Democrats or progressives report a desire to secede from the country, they are seeking refuge and self-preservation. To suggest any equivalence between that desire and the overtly violent yearnings of the Republican-fascist movement is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.

The prospect of a second American Civil War may seem wildly unlikely, or not even logistically feasible. But if it were to happen, such an outcome would not be based on empirical facts, reality or the complexities and nuances of public opinion polls.

A large percentage of Republicans and the larger white right actually believe that they are in an existential struggle for survival against Black and brown people and "illegal aliens" who want to "replace them," sinister "secularists" who want to outlaw Christianity, "critical race theory" aimed at brainwashing their children, a "liberal media" that deliberately lies to them, and a cabal of "elites" and "socialists" who are treasonous and determined to destroy the "real" America.

These right-wing white-identity fever dreams show no signs of breaking; if anything, the collective pathology is getting worse. Law enforcement and terrorism experts continue to warn that the country is at great risk of a violent right-wing insurgency inspired by the events of Jan. 6 and the Trump-Republican "Big Lie" about the 2020 election.

Wars begin for a wide range of reasons — often because of some miscalculation by one or more of the leaders and groups involved. Wars and other violent conflicts also happen because political leaders and other elites have talked themselves into a corner, leaving bloodshed as the only way out. Very often, civil war and sectarian violence have seemed impossible — until circumstances radically changed.

In an essay for Foreign Policy, Monica Toft explains how civil wars tend to happen, explaining that various factors are involved, including a history of previous internal conflict, "deepening cleavages" in society and a third element, "a shift from tribalism to sectarianism":
With tribalism, people begin to seriously doubt whether other groups in their country have the larger community's best interests at heart. In sectarian environments though, economic, social, and political elites and those they represent come to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is evil and actively working to destroy the community. Enemies of the state come to displace the loyal opposition, with those having been inside another tribe seen as the most disloyal. It's akin to how some religions treat apostates and infidels. Often, it is apostates, the former adherents of the faith, that are targeted more readily over infidels, those who had always been on the outside. It is hard not to see echoes of this dynamic at play as Republicans condemn other Republicans over their loyalty (or lack thereof) to former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Indeed, the United States now displays all three core elements that can lead to civil breakdown. If one described them — fractured elites with competing narratives, deep-seated identity cleavages, and a politically polarized citizenry — without identifying the United States by name, most scholars of civil war would say, "Hey, that country is on the brink of a civil war."

In a powerful essay published on Substack, Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV offers a scenario for America's second Civil War, observing that the opposing forces "will not be conveniently costumed in blue and gray as they were in the 19th Century ... making it difficult to tell who is actually on which side":
There also won't be a discernible front line or front lines, making it hard to tell which side is holding what territory. This, along with the absence of uniforms, means that a whole lot of people will be killed by mistake. It's probably likely that the MAGA side will dress itself in various camo costumes as many of them did when the mob assaulted the Capitol in January, but Trump followers aren't the only people in this country with camouflage hunting clothing. So if you shoot someone wearing camo assuming he or she is on the MAGA side, you just might be shooting someone on your side. Combatants won't be wearing "dog tags" marking them as on one side or the other, making the identification of dead bodies difficult. Is this guy one of ours, or one of theirs?

Truscott concludes with a series of terrifying possibilities:

Perhaps the grimmest prospect of all will be the sub-wars that break out within the bigger Civil War. Every prejudice will be indulged. Racist whites will target Black people. Fundamentalist Christians might target "heathens" like Muslims and Jews and non-fundamentalist Christians. Ethnic divisions will exist within the greater sides that face-off. ...

A 21st Century American Civil War would make the struggles we are currently suffering over elections and distribution of wealth and between races and ethnicities seem like the good old days when we all got along. An American Civil War will mean that we don't merely disagree with one another or dislike each other. It will mean we kill each other.
None of us, and I mean none of us, has an inkling about how horrible it would be. But if we are to have a future of any kind whatsoever, we'd better get more of a clue than the woman in the MAGA hat in Iowa who seemed to so casually look forward to a Civil War between her side and the side she was told to hate. Who you hated and why will be hard to remember when death comes to your door.

What role would Donald Trump play in such a conflagration? In a recent essay for TomDispatch, historian Alfred McCoy offers these observations:

Whether it's a poor country like the Philippines or a superpower like the United States, democracy is a surprisingly fragile construct. Its worst enemy is often an ousted ex-president, angry over his humiliation and perfectly willing to destroy the constitutional order to regain power.

No matter how angry such an ex-president might be, however, his urge for a political coup can't succeed without the help of raw force, whether from a mob, a disgruntled military, or some combination of the two….
So, in 2024, as the continuing erosion of America's global power creates a crisis of confidence among ordinary Americans, expect Donald Trump to be back, not as the slightly outrageous candidate of 2016 or even as the former president eager to occupy the White House again, but as a militant demagogue with thundering racialist rhetoric, backed by a revanchist Republican Party ready, with absolute moral certainty, to bar voters from the polls, toss ballots out, and litigate any loss until hell freezes over.
And if all that fails, the muscle will be ready for another violent march on Washington. Be prepared, the America we know is worsening by the month.

There are many expert voices who are sounding the alarm about the potential of a second American Civil War, and marshaling reasonably evidence why it likely will not happen.

But even the fact that so many public voices, and so many ordinary Americans, find themselves in a moment where such an eventuality must be seriously considered indicates how dire the country's democracy crisis really is.

At its core, these discussions of a possible second American Civil War reveal that the rise of Trumpism, and the full-on embrace of fascism by the "conservative" movement reflect a nation in existential crisis.

The distinction between "nation" and "country" is critical here. A country is an agreed-upon set of laws and governing institutions, but a nation is the symbols, ideas, stories, shared values and beliefs and other intangibles that give a people a sense of community and shared destiny that is distinct and different from other people in other places.

Trump World and the MAGAverse, and those fellow travelers who have pledged loyalty to the Republican-fascist movement, have a fundamentally different conception of the nation than do other Americans. Who "owns" the country? Who are its rightful heirs? Do some Americans have a special and privileged birthright status as compared to other Americans?

If America succumbs to a second civil war or other widespread political violence, the answers to those questions will become the dividing line. As the truism goes, no one hates like family. The American people — that is, our American family, which has endured, with considerable difficulty, for close to 250 years — may soon be reminded of that truth on a brutal massive scale.