“Is That Orwellian Or Kafkaesque Enough For You?”

The Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s "Letter To America"   

by Media Lens / November 28th, 2023

The Guardian has long promoted itself as a valiant publisher of news and analysis that holds the powerful to account. It is a thing of wonder that the Guardian appends the following comment beneath news pieces:

Our quality, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more.

For over twenty years, Media Lens has shown how false is this claim.

A new, significant example occurred just last week. On 15 November, the paper removed Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” which it had hosted on its website for almost 21 years. What was suddenly so problematic about the letter that it had to be abruptly removed by the Guardian after being on its website for so long (an archived version can be seen here)?

The deleted text was an English translation of bin Laden’s letter, first published on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda, in November 2002, over one year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Guardian website published a full translation on its website on 24 November 2002. The letter, addressed to the American people, contains a detailed list of grievances against the US shared by many in the Muslim world, explaining what motivated the 9/11 attacks.

The letter has been ‘rediscovered’ during Israel’s current genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza, with people around the world discussing relevant issues online. The Guardian link to the letter went viral, particularly among young people on TikTok, with 14 million views of videos tagged with #lettertoamerica. Many of these videos were posted by young Americans, shocked to find that people around the world hate their country because of strong grievances rooted in real issues.

To properly understand why this response is so remarkable, and why it was quickly followed by an Orwellian act of Guardian censorship, requires some vital context.

‘They Hate Us For Our Freedoms’

In a recent edition of System Update, a widely-watched online politics programme, the US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up the belief system of most Americans, of all ages:

The people who live in the United States believe and are told that we are a nice, good, benevolent, democratic, free country. We don’t want to bother anyone in the world. We’re not here to conquer anyone. To the extent that we involve ourselves in the world, it’s to help; like we’re doing now in Ukraine, we’re told. We just want to spread democracy, want to defend people…So, why would anyone possibly want to perpetrate an attack on the United States of that brutality and savagery? Americans rightly wanted to know.

Greenwald continued:

And they were fed a complete bullshit answer: by the neocons, by the media, by the government: “They hate us for our freedoms”.

The letter was written by bin Laden, who was loudly blamed for the attacks by the US and other governments, and who was extrajudicially executed by US special forces in Pakistan in May 2011. Greenwald pointed out that there are interviews with bin Laden where he had spelled out the grievances explaining the actual reasons why many in the Muslim world hate the United States.

Greenwald added:

And yet, after 9/11, the US government instructed the television networks – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox – do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden, because they didn’t want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were. They didn’t want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that causes “blowback”, to use the CIA’s term.

As with any statement from an influential or powerful figure, bin Laden’s letter needs to be read critically. There is much to revile in the letter, not least its antisemitism and homophobia. But consider some of the grievances he detailed against the US government, summarised below:

• Palestine was ethnically cleansed to allow the state of Israel to be set up in 1948. Since then, the Palestinians have been subjected to an Israeli military occupation, suffering for decades as a result of massacres, imprisonment, torture, shootings, bombs, destruction of homes and livelihoods: all backed with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the US.
• Sanctions against Iraq, pushed heavily by the US, led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, 0.5 million of them children under 5.
• US attacks in Somalia, support for Russian atrocities in Chechnya, and support for Israeli aggression against Lebanon.
• Oppression of the populations of US client states in the Middle East, ruled by authoritarian monarchs, or where democratically elected leaders were removed and replaced by US-friendly dictators.
• The exploitation of the Middle East’s natural resources, especially oil, by Western corporations at paltry prices secured through economic and military threats.
• US military bases spread across the region, protecting what the US sees as its own assets.
• The leading US role in destroying climate stability – in particular, its refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement made at the 1997 UN Climate Summit – in order to preserve the profits of US fossil fuel giants.
• US power and influence has been used, not to defend universal humanitarian principles and values, but to secure US geostrategic interests and profits.
• The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.

The now blatant US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza – and the genocidal nature of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians – seemingly underpins the explosion on social media of attention directed towards bin Laden’s letter. Young Americans are waking up to the fact that the US has long supported Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians.

Another significant factor is the awful realisation among young American people, especially, that US government policy has made them targets as retribution for the crimes committed by Washington.

“Removed Document”: Guardian Censorship

So why did the Guardian, which proclaims its credentials in supposedly enabling readers to understand the world, remove bin Laden’s letter from its website? The decision was ‘explained’ in a piece by Blake Montgomery, the tech editor for Guardian US in New York City. In fact, the headline, and most of the article, focused on TikTok:

TikTok “aggressively” taking down videos promoting Bin Laden “letter to America”.

The Guardian quoted TikTok:

Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got on to our platform.

But what did the article report about the Guardian itself?

In response to the letter’s renewed spread, Guardian News and Media removed it on 15 November 2023, replacing it with the statement: “The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.”

Significantly, the Guardian article closed with a statement from the White House, as though this should be literally the last word on the matter:

There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.

As Greenwald observed, US ‘Big Tech’ companies – Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) – are already subjected to censorship in accordance with the dictates of the US security state, as the ‘Twitter files’, a cache of leaked documents, showed. TikTok, a Chinese company, was the only major platform outside the reach of the US. But, noted Greenwald, they were told that, as a condition of being able to continue to operate in the US, they would have to agree to the censorship demands of the US government. Hence, TikTok’s determination to ban TikTok clips discussing #lettertoamerica.

In other words, the censorship actions taken by both TikTok and the Guardian align with the requirements of the US government. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the long history of the Guardian acting as a liberal gatekeeper for establishment power. Moreover, the paper’s ever-closer relationship with UK state security services, themselves subservient to US state power, is abundantly clear.

Piling irony upon irony, one article that the Guardian has not removed from its website, is the fake front-page ‘news’ story in November 2018 claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, supposedly held secret talks with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Such reprehensible journalism unjustly besmirched Assange’s reputation and may well have been part of a state-sponsored propaganda campaign in advance of his forcible removal from the embassy by British police in April 2019, to be thrown in Belmarsh Prison where he remains to this day, awaiting likely extradition to the US.

What about the Guardian’s decision to redirect readers to their 2002 news article that ‘contextualised’ the letter? The article was titled, ‘Osama issues new call to arms’, and was written by Jason Burke, then the Guardian’s chief reporter and now the paper’s international security correspondent. The opening sentence made explicit the state-friendly pitch adopted throughout:

A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the “Islamic nation” as “eager for martyrdom”.

Burke continued:

Britain, with its close support for America in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein would provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as “jumpy”.

Recall that this article was published in November 2002, as the West was mounting a propaganda blitz to ‘justify’ its imminent invasion of Iraq which began in March 2003.

Burke added:

Most of his letter comprises a lengthy list of grievances against the West.

But which grievances? Surely the Guardian would spell out several examples from this ‘lengthy list’? Amazingly Burke did not cite any of them, other than bin Laden’s ‘sustained attack on the “immorality” of Western society.’

In other words, the Guardian article that supposedly ‘contextualised’ bin Laden’s letter, which the paper has now removed, does nothing of the sort, obscuring US crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan and elsewhere.

Because the letter had gone viral, but then been removed, the most viewed link on the Guardian at one point last week (on 15 November) was actually, ‘Removed – document’; the place-marker with its risible ‘explanation’ that the Guardian had provided.

As Greenwald noted:

Is that Orwellian enough, or Kafkaesque enough, for you? The article in which most people had an interest in reading was the [letter hosted by the] Guardian [which], precisely because too many people were interested in it, [the editors] decided to remove, so that people couldn’t read it any longer. It’s a document by a major historical figure. The person we’re told was responsible for the 9/11 attack explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.

And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, that now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Gaza from Israel, and US support for it, you can no longer read it.

One of our recent media alerts focused on the phenomenon of Orwellian ‘memory-hole journalism’. That the Guardian had been caught in the act, arguably attracting even more attention to what it had tried to conceal (known as the ‘Streisand effect’), is noteworthy.

What is so encouraging about the fact that this went viral among young people is that it suggests they are beginning to look beyond the benevolent platitudes of US government public relations and are seeking to understand the reasons why so many people around the globe hate, not US ‘freedoms’, but US foreign policy.

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

America’s Disastrous 60-Year War: Three Generations of Conspicuous Destruction by the Military-Industrial Complex

WILLIAM J. ASTORE

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win that must now be counted as a loss because its promise was so quickly discarded.

America’s war in Vietnam was waged during the Cold War in the context of what was then known as the domino theory and the idea of “containing” communism. Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the Global War on Terror, a post-Cold War event in which “radical Islamic terrorism” became the substitute for communism. Even so, those wars should be treated as a single strand of history, a 60-year war, if you will, for one reason alone: the explanatory power of such a concept.

For me, because of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in January 1961, that year is the obvious starting point for what retired Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich recently termed America’s Very Long War (VLW). In that televised speech, Ike warned of the emergence of a military-industrial complex of immense strength that could someday threaten American democracy itself. I’ve chosen 2021 as the VLW’s terminus point because of the disastrous end of this country’s Afghan War, which even in its last years cost $45 billion annually to prosecute, and because of one curious reality that goes with it. In the wake of the crashing and burning of that 20-year war effort, the Pentagon budget leaped even higher with the support of almost every congressional representative of both parties as Washington’s armed attention turned to China and Russia.

At the end of two decades of globally disastrous war-making, that funding increase should tell us just how right Eisenhower was about the perils of the military-industrial complex. By failing to heed him all these years, democracy may indeed be in the process of meeting its demise.

The Prosperity of Losing Wars

Several things define America’s disastrous 60-year war. These would include profligacy and ferocity in the use of weaponry against peoples who could not respond in kind; enormous profiteering by the military-industrial complex; incessant lying by the U.S. government (the evidence in the Pentagon Papers for Vietnam, the missing WMD for the invasion of Iraq, and the recent Afghan War papers); accountability-free defeats, with prominent government or military officials essentially never held responsible; and the consistent practice of a militarized Keynesianism that provided jobs and wealth to a relative few at the expense of a great many. In sum, America’s 60-year war has featured conspicuous destruction globally, even as wartime production in the U.S. failed to better the lives of the working and middle classes as a whole.

Let’s take a closer look. Militarily speaking, throwing almost everything the U.S. military had (nuclear arms excepted) at opponents who had next to nothing should be considered the defining feature of the VLW. During those six decades of war-making, the U.S. military raged with white hot anger against enemies who refused to submit to its ever more powerful, technologically advanced, and destructive toys.


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I’ve studied and written about the Vietnam War and yet I continue to be astounded by the sheer range of weaponry dropped on the peoples of Southeast Asia in those years — from conventional bombs and napalm to defoliants like Agent Orange that still cause deaths almost half a century after our troops finally bugged out of there. Along with all that ordnance left behind, Vietnam was a testing ground for technologies of every sort, including the infamous electronic barrier that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sought to establish to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail.

When it came to my old service, the Air Force, Vietnam became a proving ground for the notion that airpower, using megatons of bombs, could win a war. Just about every aircraft in the inventory then was thrown at America’s alleged enemies, including bombers built for strategic nuclear attacks like the B-52 Stratofortress. The result, of course, was staggeringly widespread devastation and loss of life at considerable cost to economic fairness and social equity in this country (not to mention our humanity). Still, the companies producing all the bombs, napalm, defoliants, sensors, airplanes, and other killer products did well indeed in those years.

In terms of sheer bomb tonnage and the like, America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were more restrained, mainly thanks to the post-Vietnam development of so-called smart weapons. Nonetheless, the sort of destruction that rained down on Southeast Asia was largely repeated in the war on terror, similarly targeting lightly armed guerrilla groups and helpless civilian populations. And once again, expensive strategic bombers like the B-1, developed at a staggering cost to penetrate sophisticated Soviet air defenses in a nuclear war, were dispatched against bands of guerrillas operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Depleted uranium shells, white phosphorus, cluster munitions, as well as other toxic munitions, were used repeatedly. Again, short of nuclear weapons, just about every weapon that could be thrown at Iraqi soldiers, al-Qaeda or ISIS insurgents, or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, would be used, including those venerable B-52s and, in one case, what was known as the MOAB, or mother of all bombs. And again, despite all the death and destruction, the U.S. military would lose both wars (one functionally in Iraq and the other all too publicly in Afghanistan), even as so many in and out of that military would profit and prosper from the effort.

What kind of prosperity are we talking about? The Vietnam War cycled through an estimated $1 trillion in American wealth, the Afghan and Iraq Wars possibly more than $8 trillion (when all the bills come due from the War on Terror). Yet, despite such costly defeats, or perhaps because of them, Pentagon spending is expected to exceed $7.3 trillion over the next decade. Never in the field of human conflict has so much money been gobbled up by so few at the expense of so many.

Throughout those 60 years of the VLW, the military-industrial complex has conspicuously consumed trillions of taxpayer dollars, while the U.S. military has rained destruction around the globe. Worse yet, those wars were generally waged with strong bipartisan support in Congress and at least not actively resisted by a significant “silent majority” of Americans. In the process, they have given rise to new forms of authoritarianism and militarism, the very opposite of representative democracy.

Paradoxically, even as “the world’s greatest military” lost those wars, its influence continued to grow in this country, except for a brief dip in the aftermath of Vietnam. It’s as if a gambler had gone on a 60-year losing binge, only to find himself applauded as a winner.

Constant war-making and a militarized Keynesianism created certain kinds of high-paying jobs (though not faintly as many as peaceful economic endeavors would have). Wars and constant preparations for the same also drove deficit spending since few in Congress wanted to pay for them via tax hikes. As a result, in all those years, as bombs and missiles rained down, wealth continued to flow up to ever more gigantic corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, places all too ready to hire retired generals to fill their boards.

And here’s another reality: very little of that wealth ever actually trickled down to workers unless they happened to be employed by those weapons makers, which — to steal the names of two of this country’s Hellfire missile-armed drones — have become this society’s predators and reapers. If a pithy slogan were needed here, you might call these the Build Back Better by Bombing years, which, of course, moves us squarely into Orwellian territory.

Learning from Orwell and Ike

Speaking of George Orwell, America’s 60-Year War, a losing proposition for the many, proved a distinctly winning one for the few and that wasn’t an accident either. In his book within a book in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote all-too-accurately of permanent war as a calculated way of consuming the products of modern capitalism without generating a higher standard of living for its workers. That, of course, is the definition of a win-win situation for the owners. In his words:


“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed [by the workers].”

War, as Orwell saw it, was a way of making huge sums of money for a few at the expense of the many, who would be left in a state where they simply couldn’t fight back or take power. Ever. Think of such war production and war-making as a legalized form of theft, as Ike recognized in 1953 in his “cross of iron” speech against militarism. The production of weaponry, he declared eight years before he named “the military-industrial complex,” constituted theft from those seeking a better education, affordable health care, safer roads, or indeed any of the fruits of a healthy democracy attuned to the needs of its workers. The problem, as Orwell recognized, was that smarter, healthier workers with greater freedom of choice would be less likely to endure such oppression and exploitation.

And war, as he knew, was also a way to stimulate the economy without stimulating hopes and dreams, a way to create wealth for the few while destroying it for the many. Domestically, the Vietnam War crippled Lyndon Johnson’s plans for the Great Society. The high cost of the failed war on terror and of Pentagon budgets that continue to rise today regardless of results are now cited as arguments against Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal arguably would have never been funded if today’s vast military-industrial complex, or even the one in Ike’s day, had existed in the 1930s.

As political theorist Crane Brinton noted in The Anatomy of Revolution, a healthy and growing middle class, equal parts optimistic and opportunistic, is likely to be open to progressive, even revolutionary ideas. But a stagnant, shrinking, or slipping middle class is likely to prove politically reactionary as pessimism replaces optimism and protectionism replaces opportunity. In this sense, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House was anything but a mystery and the possibility of an autocratic future no less so.

All those trillions of dollars consumed in wasteful wars have helped foster a creeping pessimism in Americans. A sign of it is the near-total absence of the very idea of peace as a shared possibility for our country. Most Americans simply take it for granted that war or threats of war, having defined our immediate past, will define our future as well. As a result, soaring military budgets are seen not as aberrations, nor even as burdensome, but as unavoidable, even desirable — a sign of national seriousness and global martial superiority.

You’re Going to Have It Tough at the End

It should be mind-blowing that, despite the wealth being created (and often destroyed) by the United States and impressive gains in worker productivity, the standard of living for workers hasn’t increased significantly since the early 1970s. One thing is certain: it hasn’t happened by accident.

For those who profit most from it, America’s 60-Year War has indeed been a resounding success, even if also a colossal failure when it comes to worker prosperity or democracy. This really shouldn’t surprise us. As former President James Madison warned Americans so long ago, no nation can protect its freedoms amid constant warfare. Democracies don’t die in darkness; they die in and from war. In case you hadn’t noticed (and I know you have), evidence of the approaching death of American democracy is all around us. It’s why so many of us are profoundly uneasy. We are, after all, living in a strange new world, worse than that of our parents and grandparents, one whose horizons continue to contract while hope contracts with them.

I’m amazed when I realize that, before his death in 2003, my father predicted this. He was born in 1917, survived the Great Depression by joining Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked in factories at night for low pay before being drafted into the Army in World War II. After the war, he would live a modest middle-class life as a firefighter, a union job with decent pay and benefits. Here was the way my dad put it to me: he’d had it tough at the beginning of his life, but easy at the end, while I’d had it easy at the beginning, but I’d have it tough at the end.

He sensed, I think, that the American dream was being betrayed, not by workers like himself, but by corporate elites increasingly consumed by an ever more destructive form of greed. Events have proven him all too on target, as America has come to be defined by a greed-war for which no armistice, let alone an end, is promised. In twenty-first-century America, war and the endless preparations for it simply go on and on. Consider it beyond irony that, as this country’s corporate, political, and military champions claim they wage war to spread democracy, it withers at home.

And here’s what worries me most of all: America’s very long war of destruction against relatively weak countries and peoples may be over, or at least reduced to the odd moment of hostilities, but America’s leaders, no matter the party, now seem to favor a new cold war against China and now Russia. Incredibly, the old Cold War produced a win that was so sweet, yet so fleeting, that it seems to require a massive do-over.

Promoting war may have worked well for the military-industrial complex when the enemy was thousands of miles away with no capacity for hitting “the homeland,” but China and Russia do have that capacity. If a war with China or Russia (or both) comes to pass, it won’t be a long one. And count on one thing: America’s leaders, corporate, military, and political, won’t be able to shrug off the losses by looking at positive balance sheets and profit margins at weapons factories.


Copyright 2022 William J. Astore
Via Tomdispatch.com

About the Author

William J. Astore , a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His personal blog is BracingViews.com. He can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.

Pro-Palestine Voices Face Threats, Harassment As Gaza Death Toll Grows

Rowaida Abdelaziz, Matt Shuham
Updated Wed, November 15, 2023 

On the day of Hamas’ Oct. 7attack and the beginning of Israel’s ongoingretaliation, Reema Wahdan, a cancer researcher who for decades has advocated for the humanity of Palestinians, including as director of the Colorado Palestine Club, attended an emergency rally at the Colorado state Capitol, calling for de-escalation and “advocating peaceful security for both sides,” she told HuffPost.

A few days later, on Oct. 11, an unidentified person or persons called her family’s business several times, saying some variation of, “Death to Arabs, all Palestinians are going to die,” she said.

Two days later, Wahdan found a bullet lodged in her living room wall.

Wahdan said she’s been frustrated with the police response to the bullet; the Greenwood Village and Denver police departments, she said, have told her their investigation is inactive and that they believe the 9mm bullet lodged in her wall was actually fired 3 miles away from her house. The Denver Police Department referred HuffPost’s questions to the Greenwood Village Police Department, saying they were the lead investigating agency. A spokesperson for that department didn’t respond to emails.

Wahdan, whose parents were both born in Al-Bireh, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, told HuffPost she believes she was targeted because of her activism. Now, she’s taking unnerving security steps that are brand new to her ― planning routes ahead of time, ensuring she isn’t being followed to her car, and planning to check in with friends after arriving at each destination. “In all my 40 years of advocacy, I’ve never had to look over my shoulder,” she said.

Wahdan is one of the many Americans who’ve said they have been threatened, intimidated or doxxed over their pro-Palestinian activism since the the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the retaliation campaign initiated by Israeli forces that has killed more than 11,000 Gazans, according to Palestinian authorities.

Activists, students and regular people said they are paying the price for their advocacy. College students, particularly Arabs and Muslims, said they felt unsafe and unsupported by their universities. Some said they have lost their jobs for their social media posts.

“We’ve been extremely overwhelmed and are understaffed in just trying to support everyone from students to professionals of all ages, who are facing backlash and feel unsafe in their workplaces and or being fired for speaking out for Palestinian human rights,” said Jasmine Hawamdeh, the communications manager at the Arab American Discrimination Committee, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Despite her sense of unease, Wahdan is stillspeaking up for what she believes is right.

“If someone was intentionally targeting me so I cannot speak up to what’s going on, then they failed,” she said. “I’m going to keep on doing it. If I have to die for that work, that’s fine too. But I’m not going to be silent.”

Across the country, people standing up for Palestinian rights have faced similar attempts at silencing and intimidation.

Last month, a Hilton hotel in Houston, Texas, canceled a conference set to be hosted by the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), citing “escalating security concerns.” Right after the cancellation, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) falsely referred to the group as “Hamas supporters.” An Islamic Center in Rochester, New York, also pulled out of an event that was set to feature USCPR’s executive director as keynote speaker because of threats it received, Jewish Currents reported.

Such venue issues have become commonplace: The Council on American-Islamic Relations moved its annual banquet from a Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, to an undisclosed location because anonymous callers “threatened to plant bombs in the hotel’s parking garage, kill specific hotel staff in their homes, and storm the hotel in a repeat of the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol if the events moved forward,” the group said. Another event, hosted by the Palestine Literary Festival at Union Theological Seminary and featuring well-known speakers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mohammed El-Kurd, struggled to find a space in New York City.

“This is the fifth space we approached to host us this evening,” co-producer Yasmin El-Rifae said on stage. “The difficulty is not because of availability.”

Demonstrators hold Palestinian flags as they march through Brooklyn Bridge during a rally supporting Palestinians in New York City on Nov. 7.

Demonstrators hold Palestinian flags as they march through Brooklyn Bridge during a rally supporting Palestinians in New York City on Nov. 7.

Several people told HuffPost that they had been kicked out of Facebook groups and threatened to have their social media posts sent to their employers; one person told HuffPost that someone called their employer after they’d posted online about the conflict ― to ask what their work schedule was. A Muslim woman told HuffPost that after she posted “I stand with Palestine,” the pharmacy that she owns was inundated with negative reviews and harassment. One imam, after sharing activists’ videos on the conflict, received a slew of negative and abusive comments ― including two messages from an unknown sender that included his home address and a photo of his 12-year-old daughter.

Ayat, a Palestinian restaurant in New York, criticized Israeli “apartheid” on Instagram and was soon flooded with one-star reviews and “nonstop” threatening voicemails, forcing it to disconnect its phone, its co-owner Abdul Elenani told The Associated Press.

Among Jews, the backlash to pro-Palestinian activism can be especially harsh.

A dispute recently broke out on a large email listserv of U.S. Jewish leaders concerning the now-ubiquitous posters showing photos of Hamas’ Israeli hostages. Rafael Shimunov, a longtime activist and an American Jewish critic of Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza, had published a video highlighting a cluster of the posters next to a Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn, suggesting an alternative poster that “shows everyone, or calls for a cease-fire and says ‘missing: peace.’” That led others on the listserv to falsely claim he’d endorsed tearing down the posters.

The argument escalated to the point that someone messaged Shimunov a screenshot of a Google Street View image of his home. “I wish no harm on your family, even though you address is publicly available maybe you should have thought of that before siding with Hamas,” another message said. Shimunov said he is concerned the tenor of the broader debate is discouraging fellow Jews from calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

“What we need right now is radical solidarity with each other,” Shimunov said. “The [right’s] goal is to break this coalition, and our goal must be to radically maintain it.”
The Truck

Across college campuses, students said they have experienced first-hand the impact of advocating for the Palestinian cause.

At Harvard University, the conservative group Accuracy In Media has targeted pro-Palestinian activists by featuring their names and faces on a digital mobile billboard truck under the banner “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites.” Similar trucks have visited other colleges around the country ― including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Berkeley ― as well as students’ parents’ homes as far away as Texas.

“There were points where, from my own bedroom window, I could see the truck and my face on it,” said Sara, a Harvard student who is being identified by a pseudonym because she’s concerned for her safety. “It was Orwellian to look out my window and see my headshot under the title ‘leading antisemite.’ It was just so jarring because, obviously, none of us are antisemitic. It was crazy to have my own face looking into my room with this claim under it.” On the day HuffPost interviewed her, Sara said she’d been called a terrorist twice while grocery shopping.

Another student, Diya, who is identified by a pseudonym, first saw her face on the truck as she walked to class. “You suddenly feel so hypervisible, so vulnerable,” she said. “A lot of us were skipping classes, not wanting to eat meals in the dining hall, because you feel so perceived in a really negative light, and you feel as if everyone’s eyes are on you,” Diya said she’d received online threats that included specific information about her.

Accuracy in Media says the students it’s targeting “issued a statement in support of Hamas.” However, the Oct. 7 statement from several student groups just said its signatories “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” and an Instagram post from Harvard’s Palestine solidarity groups stated, “We lament the devastating and rising civilian toll.” Sara and Diya told HuffPost that “unfolding violence” referred to Israel’s retaliatory attack, which began the same dayHamas attacked Israel, well before the full death toll in Israel ― now at around 1,200 people, in addition to over 200 hostages held in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities ― was known.

“We do not refer to the ‘right to resist,’ and that’s not language that has shown up in [Palestine Solidarity Committee] statements or will show up in PSC statements,” Sara said, referring to the concept that the use of violence against Israel is justified.

Sara and Diya also said they knew of students featured on the truck who weren’t involved in crafting or signing onto the statement, as well as students who’d already graduated.

The targeting of students critical of Israel has happened for years, though the past month has seen an explosion of such activity. Canary Mission, a website that compiles digital dossiers of students it believes hold anti-Israel or antisemitic views ― including many who’ve simply been involved in pro-Palestinian activism ― told HuffPost, “Outing Hamas supporters and apologists at Harvard is just the beginning. When we say Never Again, we mean it.” Sara and Diya said individuals who were featured on the truck and Canary Mission appeared to be disproportionately Muslim, Arab, South Asian, brown and Black students.

The students, who’ve faulted Harvard for not condemning Accuracy in Media more forcefully, wondered why a similar statement hadn’t received the same backlash: An Oct. 8 Haaretz editorial proclaimed, “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Diya said, “I think the fact that we’re being put in an environment where people are afraid to speak out about things that they believe strongly in ― for fear of violence against their person, their communities, their families ― is definitely a threat to free speech, and it happens specifically when you’re speaking about Palestine.”

 

Israel’s Military Is Part of the US War Machine

by Norman Solomon Posted onNovember 08, 2023

The governments of Israel and the United States are now in disagreement over how many Palestinian civilians it’s okay to kill. Last week – as the death toll from massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza neared 10,000 people, including several thousand children – top U.S. officials began to worry about the rising horrified outcry at home and abroad. So, they went public with muted misgivings and calls for a “humanitarian pause.” But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that he would have none of it.

Such minor tactical discord does little to chip away at the solid bedrock alliance between the two countries, which are most of the way through a 10-year deal that guarantees $38 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. And now, as the carnage in Gaza continues, Washington is rushing to provide extra military assistance worth $14 billion.

Days ago, In These Times reported that the Biden administration is seeking congressional permission “to unilaterally blanket-approve the future sale of military equipment and weapons – like ballistic missiles and artillery ammunition – to Israel without notifying Congress.” And so, “the Israeli government would be able to purchase up to $3.5 billion in military articles and services in complete secrecy.”

While Israeli forces were using weapons provided by the United States to slaughter Palestinian civilians, resupply flights were landing in Israel courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Air & Space Forces Magazine published a photo showing “U.S. Air Force Airmen and Israeli military members unload cargo from a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III on a ramp at Nevatim Base, Israel.”

Pictures taken on Oct. 24 show that the military cargo went from Travis Air Force Base in California to Ramstein Air Base in Germany to Israel. Overall, the magazine reported, “the Air Force’s airlift fleet has been steadily working to deliver essential munitions, armored vehicles, and aid to Israel.” And so, the apartheid country is receiving a huge boost to assist with the killing.

The horrific atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 have opened the door to protracted horrific atrocities by Israel with key assistance from the United States.

Oxfam America has issued a briefing paper decrying the Pentagon’s plans to ship tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells to the Israeli military. The organization noted that “Israel’s use of this munition in past conflicts demonstrates that its use would be virtually assured to be indiscriminate, unlawful, and devastating to civilians in Gaza.” Oxfam added: “There are no known scenarios in which 155mm artillery shells could be used in Israel’s ground operation in Gaza in compliance with international humanitarian law.”

During the last several weeks, “international humanitarian law” has been a common phrase coming from President Biden while expressing support for Israel’s military actions. It’s an Orwellian absurdity, as if saying the words is sufficient while constantly helping Israel to violate international humanitarian law in numerous ways.

“Israeli forces have used white phosphorus, a chemical that ignites when in contact with oxygen, causing horrific and severe burns, on densely populated neighborhoods,” Human Rights Watch senior legal adviser Clive Baldwin wrote in late October. “White phosphorus can burn down to the bone, and burns to 10 percent of the human body are often fatal.”

Baldwin added: “Israel has also engaged in the collective punishment of Gaza’s population through cutting off food, water, electricity, and fuel. This is a war crime, as is willfully blocking humanitarian relief from reaching civilians in need.”

At the end of last week, the Win Without War organization noted that “senior administration officials are increasingly alarmed by how the Israeli government is conducting its military operations in Gaza, as well as the reputational repercussions of the Biden administration’s support for a collective punishment strategy that clearly violates international law. Many worry that the U.S. will be blamed for the Israeli military’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians, particularly women and children.”

News reporting now tells us that Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken want a bit of a course correction. For them, the steady large-scale killing of Palestinian civilians became concerning when it became a PR problem.

Dressed up in an inexhaustible supply of euphemistic rhetoric and double-talk, such immoral policies are stunning to see in real time. And, for many people in Gaza, literally breathtaking.

Now, guided by political calculus, the White House is trying to persuade Israel’s prime minister to titrate the lethal doses of bombing Gaza. But as Netanyahu has made clear in recent days, Israel is going to do whatever it wants, despite pleas from its patron.

While, in effect, it largely functions in the Middle East as part of the U.S. war machine, Israel has its own agenda. Yet the two governments are locked into shared, long-term, overarching strategic interests in the Middle East that have absolutely no use for human rights except as rhetorical window-dressing. Biden made that clear last year when he fist-bumped the de facto ruler of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship that – with major U.S. assistance – has led an eight-year war on Yemen costing nearly 400,000 lives.

The war machine needs constant oiling from news media. That requires ongoing maintenance of the doublethink assumption that when Israel terrorizes and kills people from the air, the Israeli Defense Force is fighting “terrorism” without engaging in it.

Another helpful notion in recent weeks has been the presumption that – while Hamas puts out “propaganda” – Israel does not. And so, on Nov. 2, the PBS NewsHour’s foreign affairs correspondent Nick Schifrin reported on what he called “Hamas propaganda videos.” Fair enough. Except that it would be virtually impossible for mainstream U.S. news media to also matter-of-factly refer to public output from the Israeli government as “propaganda.” (I asked Schifrin for comment, but my several emails and texts went unanswered.)

Whatever differences might surface from time to time, the United States and Israel remain enmeshed. To the power elite in Washington, the bilateral alliance is vastly more important than the lives of Palestinian people. And it’s unlikely that the U.S. government will really confront Israel over its open-ended killing spree in Gaza.

Consider this: Just weeks before beginning her second stint as House speaker in January 2019, Rep. Nancy Pelosi was recorded on video at a forum sponsored by the Israeli American Council as she declared: “I have said to people when they ask me – if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it aid – our cooperation – with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.”

Even making allowances for bizarre hyperbole, Pelosi’s statement is revealing of the kind of mentality that continues to hold sway in official Washington. It won’t change without a huge grassroots movement that refuses to go away.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

 

Oh, Wow, It’s Raining JDAMs and White Phosphorus Again

by Randy Shields / October 31st, 2023

I’ve been thinking for quite awhile how the most depraved position of the Israeli government becomes the baseline view here in the United States, particularly in politics and media. It makes sense that the genocidal, racist, colonial project of Israel would find admiration in the ruling class of a nation founded on indigenous genocide and built by black slavery.

Here in the United States of Israel media, Hamas commits “massacres” but the Israeli government never “massacres” anyone – they do “ground operations.” (The latter typically kills 50-100-1,000 times more civilians than do the Hamas “massacres.” See Wikipedia for “Operation Cast Lead” and “Operation Protective Edge.”) Israeli Jews are “killed” (mostly occupation soldiers) but Palestinians “die” from unknown causes and are kept from food, water, medical supplies, building materials, electricity and the internet by mysterious forces of nature – genocide as a weather event. Oh, wow, it’s raining JDAMs and white phosphorus again.

Strangely, even though Israel has killed over 10,000 Palestinians in three weeks in real life, it never actually killed any Palestinians in mainstream media headlines. Nicholas Maduro and Daniel Ortega are often referred to as “Hitlers” but the Israeli government just murdered over 4,000 Palestinian children in three weeks but this was neither a massacre nor Hitler-like to the US Congress or the New York Times. There are worthy and unworthy victims as Chomsky said.

The US is a stinking trash heap of lies. Its media act as lawyers to frantically justify every Israeli atrocity while its politicians compete to see who is the most bloodthirsty toward Arabs and Persians. When the US empire finally implodes there will be Nuremberg-like trials for many commentators and “reporters” who are nothing but pint-sized Julius Streichers and Eichmanns promoting endless wars, justifying atrocities and vilifying innocents to be exterminated. Every article and news report takes for granted that no number of Palestinian lives have as much value as one Jewish Israeli life.

The racist war criminal Joe Biden says the Gaza Health Authority is lying about how many people Israel is killing even though the world sees on Twitter entire city blocks being flattened, mosques, churches, hospitals, bakeries and UN facilities obliterated, individual homes in northern Gaza already being bulldozed by Zionist soldiers for the upcoming land theft and ethnic cleansing, the second Nakba, 35 Palestinian journalists killed and – not the bare-faced lies of Zionists about beheaded Jewish babies – but real video of Palestinian children with their heads blown off from US-supplied bombs dropped by Israelis. Biden kills innocents then he slanders them. Psychopathic empire filth like Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan won’t be traveling to many countries because there will be arrest warrants for crimes against humanity.

One of these days millions of Americans are going to get tired of living in Israel’s world, the world of censorship where we can’t criticize a foreign country or are penalized for supporting a peaceful, 1st Amendment-covered boycott movement (BDS), where US police forces are trained by Israelis in the latest fascistic techniques, where college professors are drummed out of teaching or denied tenure because they dared to note Israel’s inhumanity and crimes.

Americans are going to get tired of all the Orwellian efforts to protect and promote a goddamned racist genocidal enterprise – charitably called the last apartheid state in the world – normalizing something that’s always been completely abnormal, a state that can’t exist without constant infusions of blood, money, munitions, lies, violence and repression, a tumor implanted in the Levant over 100 years ago by some British imperialists who were themselves antisemites. Americans are going to get tired of politicians who are supposed to be working for us but are much more responsive and animated by slavishly serving a foreign government.

My fellow US serfs, wake the fuck up. What do you think is going to happen in the coming months and years? Do you imagine that the joint US/Israeli genocide of Gaza will result in less “terrorism” and a more peaceful world?

Or you can close your eyes. Go to sleep. Dream on. And when you awake on a bloody street or in a bombed out cafe or a shot up concert, you can say stupid clueless infantile shit like “Why do they hate us?”

Randy Shields just released second book is Barackodile Tears: Obitchuaries on the Obama Years. He is also the author of Some Fantastic Place: Essays on Non-humans and Yahoomans. He can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. Read other articles by Randy, or visit Randy's website.

 

Cultish Element of American Empire

by Philip A. Faruggio / October 7th, 2023

In 2015 Alex Gibney had an insightful documentary on Scientology, Going Clear. What really got to me was how utterly foolish and chronically masochistic many of those former members of this so called Church were. I have studied various cults, and even dabbled within one myself during my younger days. I have seen, firsthand through my own vulnerability, how the need to either belong to or feel needed by a group of others can drive one to enter into these cults. The sad reality is that few people, and this is key, ever realize that it is in fact a cult that they are joining. What made me literally shout at my television screen while listening to some of those interviewed by Gibney was “How much **** did you have to take for so many years before you finally saw the light?” Watch the film and see for yourself how far people allow themselves to be manipulated and exploited and even tortured. Mind you, my experience with cults like Scientology, including my brief visit with LifeSpring (an offshoot of EST), revealed to me the vast number of highly educated and (seemingly) intelligent people who allow themselves to be taken in. I myself was taken in too… all the way up to LifeSpring’s advanced training course which consisted of two weeks of intensive (and expensive) mind control. As I began to speak one-on-one with some of the others sharing this experience, I realized how many overly sensitive and “needy” folks like myself (including many recovering addicts and alcoholics) that were there. The need to “belong” and to “feel wanted” can be so powerful.

Having gone through three years of intensive Freudian analysis in the early 80s I can see how cults like Scientology and EST and LifeSpring copied much from standard psychoanalysis, then tweaked it a bit and renamed it something else. Having studied how our own government has used various techniques of outright torture, especially in regard to the Orwellian War of Terror, I can see how cults copy those techniques and refine them a bit. This is all for the same heinous purpose: Control. Having also spent over half my adult life studying the entire Nazi movement right through WW2, I can see how much of what Hitler’s gang did with their mass rallies and pomp and circumstance has been mirrored by cults like Scientology. Seeing the leaders of this cult and its top executives dressed in uniforms that resemble those worn by movie ushers from the 30s and 40s, one has to laugh at the audaciousness of it all. Yet, it is real! Thousands attend these spectacles and cheer and applaud… just like those fools did in 1930s Germany! How about the overflowing crowds who follow the so called Televangelist preachers and send their hard earned savings for “Prayer cloths” and other nonsense?

Now, allow me to go one step further. One year from now we will have our next Presidential Horserace. Check out the conventions they hold for these two major political parties. You will then realize why cults like Scientology have been so successful. To this writer, the two-party system here in our dear America has been the longest lasting cult in our nation’s history. As with the inane British “Tory vs. Labor” con job, our own “Republican vs. Democrat” garbage has for so long scammed so many good, decent Americans. Do the research and see how the really key issues and policy decisions that keep this Military Industrial Empire going full speed always have the consensus of the two parties. It has to or the wizards behind the curtain would do some pruning to make certain of it.

Cults, any and all, SUCK! Isn’t it time for more Americans to connect the dots?

Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the It’s the Empire… Stupid radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Philip.

"How you lose your democracy": Shocking new research shows Americans lack basic civic knowledge

Chauncey DeVega

SALON
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Republicans are systematically eroding the basic civil rights of the American people. As we are seeing in other countries that are experiencing what experts describe as "democratic backsliding," Republicans are doing this by undermining and corrupting America's democratic institutions from within. If Republicans get their way, free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, equal protection under the law, the right to privacy, the right to vote, and other basic freedoms and rights will be severely restricted.

In an example of Orwellian Newspeak, Republicans present themselves as defenders of freedom, when they actually oppose it. More specifically, Republicans believe that freedom is the ability and power of a select group of White Americans (rich, white, "Christian" men) to take away and otherwise deny the rights and liberties of other Americans and people in this country they deem to be less than, second-class, not "real Americans" and the Other, such as Black and brown people, the LGBTQI community, women, non-Christians, and other targeted groups.

Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of their basic constitutional and other guaranteed rights and liberties – and how the country's democratic institutions are ideally supposed to function. How can the American people defend and protect their democracy and rights, if they lack such basic knowledge?

Such an outcome is not a coincidence: it is the intentional outcome of how the American right-wing and conservative movements have undermined high-quality public education for decades with the goal of creating a compliant public that lacks the critical thinking skills and knowledge to be engaged citizens. Now new research by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center provides insight into the extent of this crisis. Some of the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey's findings include:

[W]hen U.S. adults are asked to name the specific rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, only one right is recalled by most of the respondents: Freedom of speech, which 77% named.  
 
Although two-thirds of Americans (66%) can name all three branches of government, 10% can name two, 7% can name only one, and 17% cannot name any.

I recently spoke with Matthew Levendusky, who is a Professor of Political Science, and the Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, about this new research. His new book is "Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide."

In this conversation, he explains how America's democracy crisis is connected to a lack of basic political knowledge and civic literacy, the role that education can play in equipping Americans to defend their democracy, and why contrary to what many "conservatives" like to believe, America is not a "republic".

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

How you are feeling about the country's democracy crisis, given your new research that shows a lack of basic civics knowledge among a large portion of the American public?

I am worried, with occasional glimmers of hope. But mostly I worry. Why? Our data show that people lack key civics knowledge, continuing a trend from recent years. A new report from Pew confirms what many suspected: Most Americans are fed up with government and don't think it's working. Those two things are deeply related.

To understand why, it's helpful to take a step back and think about why civics matters, broadly speaking. The main reason is that we want people to understand how they can make their voices heard in our democracy. But you can't make your voice heard if you don't understand our system of government. For example, if you don't know the three branches of government and their roles, then you won't know why President Biden and Congress are sparring about spending, immigration, green energy, etc. If you don't know what rights are protected by the First Amendment or what they mean, then you won't understand why the government can't censor the New York Times, but Facebook can make you take down a post that violates its community standards policy. If you don't know which branch has the responsibility of determining whether a law is constitutional, you won't understand why the Supreme Court and its rulings are so important and influential. In short, without some basic civic knowledge, you can't even follow the news of the day to be an informed citizen. If you can't do that, then you cannot know what to expect out of your government. That is not—at all—to say that a lack of knowledge is the root of dysfunction (it is not). But it is to say that they are related.

The concepts of civic literacy and engaged citizenship are not commonly discussed among the news media and general public. Can you explain those two concepts in more detail and why they matter?

What we can measure in a survey is civic literacy, which is your comprehension of basic facts about our system of government. So, for example, we ask if people know the three branches of government, what rights are protected by the 1st Amendment, who is responsible for determining the constitutionality of a law, and so forth. This gets at the pre-requisite knowledge you need to understand government and to participate in our system. But engaged citizenship—having people really how know to function in our governmental system, and make their voices heard—is the deeper goal.

This matters because we do not just want people to vote, we want them to cast an informed vote. This means, at a minimum, that they know where the candidates stand on the issues that matter to them, and they understand the office's role in our democracy. For example, if you don't know that the president is responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices who are then confirmed by the Senate, you won't know to investigate the types of justices that a candidate might nominate. Likewise, if you don't know the candidate's positions (or have been misled about them), then you cannot effectively cast your vote on the issues that matters to you.

But even more importantly, we want people to participate in government more broadly. This can be many things: going to a community meeting (such as a school board meeting), volunteering for an election or civic activity (shout out to poll workers, the unsung heroes of democracy!), or working to solve problems in your community. For most of us, local participation is more important than national participation. Few people can meaningfully participate in national politics beyond voting (this is just as true of political scientists as it is of regular folks). But we can all participate locally, and for most of us, that is where we interface with government the most: local governments help pave our roads, police our streets, teach our children in schools, and so forth. What would this knowledge look like?

Take the case of Philadelphia. Here, the information needed to participate could be identifying your councilperson, knowing what they can resolve, and how to contact them. It could be knowing who controls the schools, and what are the roles of the mayor vs. the school board. You could also investigate what should be reported to 311 to get a response from a city agency, and what a registered community organization can help to address. These would differ from place to place, but the core idea is that it would help citizens see how they could uncover how the government can help them solve problems in their lives.

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I went to a very good public school system.  I remember taking social studies and civics courses. Obviously, given my career path, those courses and teachers had a great influence on me. Are such courses still taught today? What is their content?

Many states—including Pennsylvania—have civics requirements, and that's helpful for teaching this sort of civic literacy. But it is on all of us, as citizens, to help the next generation learn how to participate more meaningfully in our democracy. Happily, there are so many great resources for those who need to do this. For example, the Civics Renewal Network provides thousands of free, non-partisan, high-quality learning materials about civics that anyone can use. For example, Annenberg Classroom provides 65 high-quality videos about various key Supreme Court decisions, as well as extensive materials about our system of government. While much of this is aimed at teachers, who can use it directly in their classrooms, parents and others could also make use of this material. [In full disclosure, both CRN and AC are part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, but I would endorse their content even if I did not work there.]

If I could add something to civics education in our current moment, it would be teaching people skills on how to have conversations across lines of difference. This is something that I discuss in my new book, and I show can reduce animosity and improve understanding between the two sides.

What does this look like? There are many ways of doing this, but they tend to share a few things in common. These are conversations centered on genuinely listening to the other person and their point of view, what some scholars call "perspective getting" so you can understand why they believe what they believe. The goal is to understand those with whom you disagree, not to persuade them. This means asking probing questions and keeping an open mind. These are also conversations grounded in what Keith and Danisch call "strong civility," basically the idea that we treat each other as political equals and respect the other person's right to take part in the political process.

But this takes practice, and can be intimidating, so it's something we all need help to do well. Happily, there are a number of groups working to do this, but it is a vital civic skill as well that we all should try to master.

What measures of political knowledge and civic literacy were used in the new research? What do those measures help to reveal (or not) about a person's relationship to democratic citizenship and its demands and requirements?

Surveys like ours ask about the key ingredients of civic literacy. Do you know what the three branches of government are? Do you understand their roles? Do you know key rights guaranteed by the various key amendments?  Do you know what a 5-4 Supreme Court decision means? And so forth. These are some of the benchmark pieces of information people need to know to be informed citizens.

And our survey—like many others—finds that many Americans do not. For example, one-third do not know the three branches of government. While most people know that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of speech, they don't know the other rights protected by it (freedom of the press, freedom of religion, right to petition the government, and right to peaceably assembly). And even though most people know that free speech is protected by the First Amendment, they don't understand what that means: roughly half think (incorrectly) that it requires Facebook to let you say whatever you'd like on its platform.

This sort of lack of basic information is quite troubling, as it highlights that citizens lack that core civic literacy.

Many Americans do not have a basic understanding of politics and government. Yet, we are also in an era of 24/7 news media and the Internet. The high levels of civic ignorance and lack of knowledge among the American people is an indictment of our country's political culture, political elites and the news media, the educational system, and other key agents of political socialization.

This is why the well-documented decline of local media is so important. If you like politics, there's never been a better time to be alive. You can read Politico, First Branch Forecast, subscribe to Ezra Klein's podcast, etc. You can consume politics all day, every day. But if you don't like politics (and most Americans do not!), it's never been easier to avoid it, so scholars have found that civic knowledge similarly polarizes based on political interest.

In the days of a robust local media, that was less pronounced: if you subscribed to the local paper to get the sports scores, you also flipped past some national stories, and at least glanced at them. Now, you don't even get this sort of by-product coverage. This is especially consequential for coverage of sub-national politics. All of the sources I discussed above focus on national politics, covering the minutiae of the debates between McConnell, Schumer, Biden, and so forth. But there is far less attention to state and local issues, and indeed, there are just far fewer reporters covering that today than a generation ago.

Given that the business model of local journalism has collapsed, I don't have a great solution to this problem, but it is an important one that many scholars are working to solve.

As a function of a deep hostility to real multiracial pluralistic democracy, there is a right-wing talking point that America is actually a "republic" and not a "democracy". Of course, this is not true. What intervention would you make against that disinformation and propaganda?

As someone who has taught core undergraduate American politics classes at Penn for many years, this is a perennial question that comes up every year. When people ask which is right—are we a republic or a democracy—the correct answer is that we're both.

For the Founders, "democracy" meant some sort of direct democracy, where the people themselves rule. Functionally, that doesn't exist anywhere in the modern world, at least not at scale (the closest we get are ballot initiatives and referenda in some states). But we have elements of that spirit animating our government today, most notably when we talk about the "will of the people" and public opinion, which is central to our modern understanding of how our government functions.

But we are also a republic, where it is not just what the people want directly that matters, but how that is filtered through our institutions that shapes outcomes (the Electoral College being perhaps the most striking element of that). I try to emphasize to students that our system has both elements, the key is to harness the best of both without succumbing too much to their weaknesses.

Imagine that you are a doctor of American democracy. What is your diagnosis and prognosis for the patient in this time of crisis? How does your new research (and related work of course) help to inform your conclusion(s)? 

Like many others, I fear for our system, and there are real signs of trouble for American democracy. What, then, is to be done? The first, I think, is to put pressure on elites to a bulwark against backsliding. As many scholars—myself included—have shown, backsliding is more the fault of elites than voters (i.e., it is less about voters demanding elites break norms than it is elites breaking norms that voters then rationalize as unimportant). Our job as citizens is to demand better of them. In 2020, despite real threats—including January 6th—the guardrails of democracy held. They need to be strengthened and reinforced to ensure that they can continue to flourish.

At the outset, I said that I occasionally see glimmers of hope. Those glimmers are the people who are working to make our democracy better. They are working to help us better understand one another, build bridges, and make America live up to its founding promises to all Americans, not just some of them. That is hard, difficult work. But it is the work we need at this moment.