TRUMPLICAN

Lawmaker: The Constitution Says You Can Shoot Socialists

State Rep. Rodney Garcia claims it's in the US Constitution

By Neal Colgrass, Newser Staff
Posted Feb 2, 2020


State Rep. Rodney Garcia. (State of Montana)
(NEWSER) – A Montana state lawmaker claims that the US Constitution approves of jailing or shooting anyone who identifies as socialist. State Rep. Rodney Garcia framed his remark as a question at a state party gathering in Helena on Friday, then confirmed it to a reporter the next day: "So actually in the Constitution of the United States [if] they are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot," he told the Billings Gazette. "They're enemies of the free state. What do we do with our enemies in war? In Vietnam, (Afghanistan), all those. What did we do?"

The Montana Republican Party promptly condemned the remarks, saying that "under no circumstance is violence against someone with opposing political views acceptable." The state's Democratic Party added that Garcia "has brazenly flaunted his conviction for a domestic dispute, called single moms deadbeats, and was only elected because he created an illegal campaign cash scam. Now he's publicly calling for people to be shot." Garcia later said he believed socialism was rising in Montana because he'd seen it in Facebook ads, per the Washington Post. His opponent in the House District 52 race, Amelia Marquez, said she wished Garcia "would continue to focus on the issues rather than this constant worry over things that are somewhat ludicrous." (Read more socialism stories.)

F-35's Gun That Can't Shoot Straight Adds to Its Roster of Flaws

Thursday, 30 January 2020 12:45 PM

Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws.

The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has “unacceptable” accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that’s cracking, the Pentagon’s test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system.

The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, doesn’t disclose any major new failings in the plane’s flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved -- including 13 described as Category 1 “must-fix” items that affect safety or combat capability -- before the F-35’s upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase.

The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That’s down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October.

“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant‘’ ones to address, the assessment said.

Cybersecurity ‘Vulnerabilities’

In addition, the test office said cybersecurity “vulnerabilities” that it identified in previous reports haven’t been resolved. The report also cites issues with reliability, aircraft availability and maintenance systems.

The assessment doesn’t deal with findings that are emerging in the current round of combat testing, which will include 64 exercises in a high-fidelity simulator designed to replicate the most challenging Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian air defenses.

Despite the incomplete testing and unresolved flaws, Congress continues to accelerate F-35 purchases, adding 11 to the Pentagon’s request in 2016 and in 2017, 20 in fiscal 2018, 15 last year and 20 this year. The F-35 continues to attract new international customers such as Poland and Singapore. Japan is the biggest foreign customer, followed by Australia and the U.K.

By late September, 490 F-35s had been delivered and will require extensive retrofitting. The testing office said those planes were equipped with six different versions of software, with another on the way by the time that about 1,000 planes will be in the hands of the U.S. and foreign militaries.

A spokesmen for the Pentagon’s F-35 program office had no immediate comment on the testing office’s report.

Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed (LMT), said that “although we have not seen the report, the F-35 continues to mature and is the most lethal, survivable and connected fighter in the world.” He said “reliability continues to improve, with the global fleet averaging greater than 65% mission capable rates and operational units consistently performing near 75%.”

The Mattis Test

Still, the testing office said “no significant portion” of the U.S.’s F-35 fleet “was able to achieve and sustain” a September 2019 goal mandated by then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis: that the aircraft be capable 80% of the time needed to perform at least one type of combat mission. That target is known as the “Mission Capable” rate.

“However, individual units were able to achieve the 80% target for short periods during deployed operations,” the report said. All the aircraft models lagged “by a large margin” behind the more demanding goal of “Full Mission Capability.”


The Air Force’s F-35 model had the best rate at being fully mission capable, while the Navy’s fleet “suffered from a particularly poor” rate, the test office said. The Marine Corps version was “roughly midway” between the other two.

The Air Force and Navy versions are also continuing to have cracks in structural components, according to the report, saying, “The effect on F-35 service life and the need for additional inspection requirements are still being determined.”

Gun Woes

The three F-35 models are all equipped with 25mm guns. The Navy and Marine versions are mounted externally and have acceptable accuracy. But the Air Force model’s gun is mounted inside the plane, and the test office “considers the accuracy, as installed, unacceptable” due to “misalignments” in the gun’s mount that didn’t meet specifications.

The mounts are also cracking, forcing the Air Force to restrict the gun’s use. The program office has “made progress with changes to gun installation” to improve accuracy but they haven’t been tested yet, according to the report.





© Copyright 2020 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.

George Soros speaks to the media at the Swiss resort of Davos on Jan. 25, 2012. 

(VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty Images)

US NEWS

New Soros-Funded University to Combat Climate Change, Nationalism

BY MATTHEW VADUM

 

February 2, 2020 

EPOCH TIMES IS A RIGHT WING CHINESE PUBLICATION OF THE FALUN GONG CULT

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Billionaire currency speculator George Soros says he plans to spend $1 billion to found a global university to combat climate change and burgeoning nationalism in the world, two things he claims in a recent speech are “threatening the survival of our civilization.”

The preeminent funder of the activist left in the United States and a major contributor to the Democratic Party, the 89-year-old, Hungarian-born financier announced his ambitious new plan Jan. 23 at the annual globalist gathering of elite business leaders known as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Soros is an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.

This project, called the Open Society University Network (OSUN), will “integrate teaching and research across higher education institutions worldwide,” while offering courses and joint degree programs and bringing students and faculty from different countries together by way of in-person and online discussions, according to Soros’s philanthropic organization, Open Society Foundations (OSF). Soros is hoping that others will also donate to the endeavor.

OSF’s president is Patrick Gaspard, who was then-President Barack Obama’s White House political director. Before that, he was executive vice president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199 in New York.

OSUN is to provide an international platform for teaching and research and will be launched by a partnership of the Soros-founded Central European University (CEU) and Bard College of Annandale-On-Hudson, New York. CEU and Bard will, in turn, work with distance learning-focused Arizona State University, and other schools such as American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and BRAC University in Bangladesh.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, will become the chancellor of OSUN.

As of press time, OSF spokeswoman Laura Silber hadn’t responded to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.

CONSERVATIVE CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT SOROS

Conservative activist and scholar Tina Trent, a former candidate for the Georgia General Assembly, told The Epoch Times that Soros’s announcement is part of his long-term plan to advance his radical politics.

“Soros’s strategy has always been to enlist universities as Trojan horses in his worldwide crusade to undermine the rights of citizens to define and defend their own national interests,” Trent said.

“In Europe, he founded CEU as his base of operations, funding the school, its scholars, faculty, and students in order to blanket the continent with his pet ambitions: one world government, run by unelected bureaucrats drawn from his stables of select academics,”  said Trent, a former academic.

Soros said at Davos, “Our best hope lies in access to quality education, specifically an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating critical thinking and emphasizing academic freedom.”

“I consider the Open Society University Network to be the most important and enduring project of my life and I should like to see it implemented while I am still around,” Soros said.

According to OSF, Soros has donated more than $32 billion over the past 30 years “to education and social justice causes.”

In his Swiss speech, Soros outlined a litany of concerns that OSUN could be used to address, and offered caustic criticism of President Donald Trump.

Nationalism, “the great enemy of the open society,” is ascendant, he said. This has led, among other things, to Brexit, which he described as “harmful both to Britain and to the EU,” as well as to Hindu nationalism in India, and to the rise of Italian politician Matteo Salvini, whom he called “the would-be dictator of Italy.”

Soros described Trump as “a con man and the ultimate narcissist who wants the world to revolve around him.” He also attacked the president’s supporters in the United States, accusing them of buying into “his alternative reality,” which “has turned his narcissism into a malignant disease.”

Soros’s views on the People’s Republic of China have been evolving in recent years.

In 2010, he said, “Today, China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States.”

However, at Davos this year, he expressed concerns about that country, noting that China’s economic policy has lost its flexibility and inventiveness.

Soros also warned of the use of “artificial intelligence to achieve total control.”

The full implementation of the social credit system “will bring into existence a new type of authoritarian system and a new type of human being who is willing to surrender his personal autonomy in order to stay out of trouble. Once lost, personal autonomy will be difficult to recover,” he said.

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Declassified CIA Files Reveal Encounter With 'Green Circular' UFO Over Soviet Union During Cold War

The area where the alleged UFO was spotted nearly five decades ago was apparently used by the USSR to test experimental missiles and laser weapon systems.

A recently declassified CIA report sheds light on an alleged UFO encounter that took place at the height of Cold War in Kazakhstan in 1973, back when it was part of the Soviet Union.

The document, whose redacted version was first released in 1978 and which has now been made available on The Black Vault, a website that publishes declassified government files, mentions how the witness, identified in the paper as "Source", "stepped outside for some air" and spotted "an unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass" hovering "above cloud level".
"Within 10 to 15 seconds of observation, the green circle widened and within a brief period of time several green concentric circles formed around the mass. Within minutes the coloring disappeared. There was no sound, such as an explosion, associated with the phenomenon", the document states citing the witness’ observations.

According to the website, the sighting took place in the vicinity of the Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range that was allegedly used by the USSR back then to secretly launch "experimental missiles" and to test "laser weapon systems utilizing powerful antennas".

During a telephone interview with Newsweek, The Black Vault’s founder John Greenewald compared the encounter with the so called USS Nimitz UFO incident which took place in 2004.
"This is very much simliar to the context we see today, with threats on military facilities," he said. "The US Navy has gone on the record saying whatever this is, it's a concern. They're being encroached upon by this unidentified phenomena."

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Alleged al-Qaeda Leader Arrested In Phoenix On Murder Charges

WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT? WHERE?

BY KATABELLA ROBERTS February 2, 2020
An alleged leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist group was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, this week, on charges of murder, the Department of Justice said in a statement on Jan 31.

Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri, 42, was apprehended by officials on Jan. 29 and faces extradition to Iraq after a judge issued a warrant for his arrest following two charges of premeditated murder committed in 2006 in Al-Fallujah, in the Al Anbar province.

“According to the information provided by the Government of Iraq in support of its extradition request, Ahmed served as the leader of a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Al-Fallujah, Iraq, which planned operations targeting Iraqi police,” the department said.

“Ahmed and other members of the Al-Qaeda group allegedly shot and killed a first lieutenant in the Fallujah Police Directorate and a police officer in the Fallujah Police Directorate, on or about June 1, 2006, and October 3, 2006, respectively.”

The DOJ added that if Al-Nouri’s extradition is granted by the court, the decision of whether to surrender him to Iraq will be made by the U.S. Secretary of State and the case will be handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona and the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs.

Al-Nouri’s arrest comes after the United States reportedly conducted a strike targeting Qassim al-Rimi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate in Yemen that has repeatedly threatened attacks targeting the United States.

The New York Times reported that three current or former American officials expressed confidence that Rimi had been killed in a January airstrike in Yemen.

However, the Pentagon would not elaborate on the reports, and a U.S. Defense Official told CNN: “While we are aware of the reports alleging the death of AQAP leader Qassim al-Rimi, the Department of Defense has nothing to offer on this matter.”

President Donald Trump also shared a number of reports on Twitter regarding al-Rimi’s alleged death, but did not comment further.

Rimi reportedly became head of the Al-Qaeda affiliate group following a 2015 drone strike that killed former leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi. The U.S. government, through its Rewards for Justice program, had offered up to a $10 million reward for information on him.

His death, if confirmed would be the latest in a string of successes for U.S. counterterrorism operations, after Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general who had planned and orchestrated attacks on American troops in Iraq, was also killed by a U.S airstrike on Jan. 2.

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WHY IS THIS FELONIOUS TAX CHEATING EX CANADIAN STILL IN CANADA

Conrad Black: Trump is fixing the most scandalous event in U.S. policy (Part 1)

Jan 20, 2020

Guest(s): Conrad Black Financier, author, & columnist

The influx of illegal immigrants has been the most “scandalous” event to hit U.S. politics, and since that flow of migrants has dwindled, lower income American families have seen increased incomes, this according to Conrad Black, author and media mogul.
“The most scandalous event in the history of public policy in the United States in the last 50 years has been the bi-partisan toleration of illegal entry of approximately a million unskilled workers and their families, for 20 years,” Black told Kitco News on the sidelines of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. 

COMPLETE FABRICATION, INCREASED INCOMES HAVE COME FROM STATES AND CITIES PASSING MINIMUM WAGE LAWS TO MAKE $15 AN HOUR THE BASE RATE. NOT BECAUSE OF DWINDLING AMOUNTS OF MIGRANTS ENTERING THE USA.

Italian-American Emerges as New Star of Italy's Left-wing




Sunday, 02 February 2020 

BOLOGNA, Italy (AP) — A dual U.S.-Italian citizen who cut her political organizing teeth on two Barack Obama campaigns is emerging as the latest rising star in Italian politics.

Inside a week, 35-year-old Elly Schlein, a former European lawmaker who grew up in Switzerland, has gone from relative obscurity as a political operative to the face of Italy's new leftist forces.

That political front — embodied also by t he new left-wing Sardines grassroots protest movement — thwarted right-wing populist Matteo Salvini’s attempt to unseat the center-left regional government in its historic stronghold of Emilia-Romagna. That loss in the Jan. 26 regional vote also delayed Salvini's ambition to re-take power in Italy's national government.

Schlein’s visibility skyrocketed just days before the election when a video went viral of her confronting Salvini — Italy’s former firebrand interior minister — over his failure to show up for 22 negotiating sessions on migration policy when they both represented Italy as European lawmakers. He made her wait 80 seconds for a response while he looked at his phone, then said that he was present when it counted.


With just three months of campaigning for a place on Emilia-Romagna's regional council, Schlein won the most write-in votes in the region's electoral history. Her party, Emilia-Romagna Courageous, boosted the center-left Democratic Party incumbent’s 51% majority support by nearly 4%.

The stunning result has made Schlein’s political future the subject of national speculation.

She has been compared to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, for her unexpected rise and activist-outsider status. Strangers now stop Schlein to shake her hand as she walks through Bologna, the northern Italian city where she has lived for the past 15 years, including five years shuttling to and from Brussels as a European lawmaker.

During a recent interview walking through Bologna’s famed porticoes, she was stopped multiple times. One passer-by praised her as "a marvel" and declared her the next leader of the Italy’s left. Another lobbied her to stop plans to route a tram through the city center — and then acknowledged she hadn’t gotten his vote because he hadn’t heard of her, just four days previously.

‘’Something has changed,’’ Schlein acknowledged.

Her success could give her leverage to ask for a key role in regional politics. It also has forced the head of the Democratic Party, Nicola Zingaretti, to field questions about a possible role for Schlein in the party, which she left in 2015 as part of an internal schism.

‘’For now, I am clearly happy where I am,’’ Schlein said. ‘’I am watching with interest moves inside the Democratic Party. I am looking with interest and with respect for their autonomy moves within the Sardines. I believe that the whole progressive, ecological area of the left needs to be reconstructed.’’

Schlein believes her experience volunteering on two Obama campaigns boosted her organizational skills, namely bringing together ‘’diverse worlds" across generations and interests and learning to ask not just for votes but for political action.

Schlein’s goal is to help create a “political home” for the many in Italy who feel disaffected as liberal, left-wing forces have splintered into more than half a dozen parties, including the Democratic Party, with similar ideals but divided by political personalities. She also aims to unite popular movements that are growing in strength in Italian piazzas, including the Fridays for Future environmental protests, movements to welcome foreigners and reinvigorated pro-LGBT and union demonstrations.


But Schlein is also looking beyond Italy’s borders, with a larger goal of creating a united left that can tackle the climate emergency, migration and economic inequalities and counter the far-right model embodied by Salvini and far-right forces in France, Hungary, Britain and the United States.

“They reinforce each other with the same rhetoric of hatred and of walls, of intolerance that they carry to extremes,’’ she said. "But where are we? Where is the international progressive and ecological front that connects battles that we are already waging?’’

Schlein put together her civic list ‘’Emilia-Romagna-Courageous’’ in November, at the same moment that the Sardines launched their campaign in Bologna against Salvini’s anti-foreigner, anti-institutional rhetoric. The timing was coincidental, and their projects remain separate even if they shared a vision to counter the decisive rhetoric coming from Salvini, who campaigned hard for his populist League candidate in the region.


The Sardines rose to unexpected success, gathering 6,000 people in Bologna during their first protest in November, and reaching some 40,000 just before the election. Their activism is credited with sharply boosting turnout in the regional election, according to the SWG polling organization.

Yet the Sardines still remain outside politics, so for now it's not clear how their energy can be channeled into future Italian elections, including six regional votes this spring. They plan to meet in Naples in March to chart a way forward.

Schlein’s family history embodies the European experience of the last century, which she says informs her politics.

One paternal grandfather emigrated from Lviv, in present-day Ukraine, to the United States before World War II, and lost the rest of his family who stayed behind in the Holocaust. A maternal grandfather in Italy suffered insults as a lawyer defending Jews under Fascist rule.

‘’I feel like a citizen of the world, a citizen of Europe. I was born in Switzerland. I am American, but I have never lived in the United States. I am culturally Italian. But these incomplete origins that overlap have formed me in a very profound way,’’ Schlein said. ‘’They have surely informed my belief in a European federalism. I am convinced that we need true European integration to respond to new challenges.’’


© Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

Journalist injured as press covering Ramallah protests BARRAGED by Israeli tear gas canisters (VIDEO)

1 Feb, 2020 16:22 / Updated 4 hours ago

A group of journalists reporting from the scene of clashes between Palestinian protests and Israeli soldiers came under fire from the Israeli side, which apparently targeted them with a barrage of tear gas canisters.

The incident happened amid the so-called ‘days of rage’ — a series of protests against Donald Trump’s proposal to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the demonstrations against the plan was held on Saturday outside of Ramallah, near the city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank.

The confrontation between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers was quite intensive. The demonstrators pelted the Israeli side with stones and burned tires, as the soldiers fired tear gas grenades. At one moment, a barrage of gas canisters landed right next to where a group of journalists covering the event stood, sending them fleeing and scurrying for gas masks.

Journalist injured as press covering #Ramallah protests barraged by #Israeli#TearGas canistersMORE: https://t.co/E8oHz4veMVpic.twitter.com/ZUhUSRwacO— RT (@RT_com) February 1, 2020

“The soldiers deploy a large number of tear gas grenades in one go, firing them from vehicles equipped with launchers,” RT Arabic correspondent Yafa Staiti reported. “The grenades land close to each other. And the gas is really strong. It knocks your breath out.”

Footage of the incident shows a group of people carrying a man from where the clouds of smoke seemed denser. The man was an Al Jazeera cameraman, who was reportedly injured in the altercation.

The “Deal of the Century” proposed by US President Donald Trump this week would see the creation of a Palestinian state in the form of several enclaves within Israeli territory and with a capital outside of East Jerusalem. The proposal was rejected by the Palestinian side, which was not involved in formulating it and which sees it as an attempt to legitimize Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

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THE STORY OF 2019: PROTESTS IN EVERY CORNER OF THE GLOBE2010-2020 THE DECADE OF MASS PROTESTS FOR DEMOCRACY

By Robin Wright December 30, 2019

Widespread demonstrations in 2019—including a protest in Santiago, Chile—speak to a broader need for a new social contract between citizens and state power.Photograph by Alberto Valdes / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

When historians look back at 2019, the story of the year will not be the turmoil surrounding Donald Trump. It will instead be the tsunami of protests that swept across six continents and engulfed both liberal democracies and ruthless autocracies. Throughout the year, movements have emerged overnight, out of nowhere, unleashing public fury on a global scale—from Paris and La Paz to Prague and Port-au-Prince, Beirut to Bogota and Berlin, Catalonia to Cairo, and in Hong Kong, Harare, Santiago, Sydney, Seoul, Quito, Jakarta, Tehran, Algiers, Baghdad, Budapest, London, New Delhi, Manila, and even Moscow. Taken together, the protests reflect unprecedented political mobilization. The global consequences dwarf the turmoil of the Trump year and his rippling impact beyond America’s borders.


“People in more countries are using people power than any time in recorded history. Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challenges to governments today,” Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, told me. “This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent.”

Popular protests have long been part of the human story in the modern era: the Protestant upheaval (so named for its protests), in the sixteenth century; the French Revolution and the Boston Tea Party, in the eighteenth century; and the uprisings that brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire, in the twentieth, to name just a few. They have always come in waves. One of the most famous waves was in 1968, a year of social activism that included antiwar demonstrations in the United States, workers’ strikes in France, the Prague Spring’s challenge to communism in Eastern Europe, and student protests in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Britain, Germany, Italy, Pakistan and Poland. “At a time when nations and cultures were still separate and very different . . . there occurred a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the world,” Mark Kurlansky writes in “1968: The Year That Rocked the World.” “There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely there will ever be one again,” he predicts.

Until now. Civil resistance in 2019 brought down leaders—some democratically elected, others dictators long in power—in Algeria, Bolivia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sudan. Movements still threaten regimes in Ecuador, Egypt, Georgia, Haiti, Peru, Poland, Russia, and Zimbabwe. They forced governments—through peaceful means—to reverse course on controversial policies in China, Chile, and France, countries with starkly different political systems, economies, and cultures.

The difference today, Chenoweth said, is that in 1968 there was still a widespread belief that real power flowed from the barrel of a gun. “In our time, that belief is crumbling. There is a falling away from the consensus that you need armed struggle” to change political systems, and an increasing sense that violent protest leads to a disproportionate loss of life. “People are not picking up guns as they did in earlier eras. They’re instead looking to civil resistance to assert their claims and seek transformation,” she said. “It’s what binds the different movements of our time.”
 

Many of the catalysts in 2019’s protests were originally small. In Lebanon, a tax on WhatsApp usage, in October, spawned weeks of anti-government protests in Beirut and across the country.Photograph by Sam Tarling / Corbis / Getty

The triggers have been as diverse as the movements they spawned. Many of the catalysts in 2019 were originally small, even unlikely, and the initial demands modest. In Sudan, the spark was the price of bread, in January; in India, the price of onions, in October; in Brazil, it was a cutback in funding for school textbooks, in August; in Lebanon, a tax on WhatsApp usage, in October; in Chile, a hike in subway fares, in October; and in Iran, a four-cent increase on a litre of gas, in November. But virtually all protests worldwide quickly escalated, and began issuing ultimatums for their governments to embrace sweeping changes—or to move aside.

The numbers have been blinding and the energy and endurance of the protesters staggering. An estimated three million Algerians—almost ten per cent of the population—turned out in the country, in February, to demand an end to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s twenty-year rule. He resigned in April. The demands of the protesters then grew to include the ouster of “the system,” which in Algeria includes high-level military officers, politicians, and well-connected or corrupt businesspeople. Algeria elected a new president this month, but protesters are still on the streets, because the man elected, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, was a crony of Bouteflika’s.

In June, millions of protesters in tiny Hong Kong (population 7.4 million) demanded that the government—and its backers in Beijing—withdraw a controversial plan that would allow residents to be extradited for trial in China. It was the biggest challenge to Asia’s behemoth (population 1.4 billion) in three decades. In September, the Hong Kong protesters prevailed—and then daringly went on to demand universal suffrage and an investigation of police violence. In November, the pro-democracy camp of the protesters swept local elections in a record turnout. And the protests are now headed into their seventh month.

“It’s simplistic to think of these movements simply as protests,” Carne Ross, the author of “The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century,” told me. When that kind of energy is mustered, he said, it’s difficult for governments to resist unless they use repression.

Paolo Gerbaudo, a political sociologist at King’s College London and the author of “The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest,” said the demonstrations may signal an even greater crisis in the future. “These protests are popular insurgencies. They reflect the failure of nation-states in the global era. They’re not a passing crisis that can be remedied through the regular levers of the state,” he said.“These movements may be the early symptoms of a new global crisis. They are like seismographs. They are like dials that announce things that are coming on the horizon.”

Vastly different protests have borne common slogans and symbols. Hong Kong protesters adopted a phrase from the late martial artist Bruce Lee’s admonition to “Be formless, shapeless, like water,” in order to be impossible to suppress. The “Be Water” slogan was adopted in Catalonia and by student protesters in Chile, whose initial tactic was to jump subway turnstiles to protest fare prices. Since the unrest erupted in France, the term “yellow vest”—apparel used in emergencies or associated with working-class industries—has become synonymous with public demonstrations. Diverse protests have also adopted common tactics—organizing with social-media technology and wearing masks to hide identities—that have complicated the ability of governments to contain them. Together, the protests of 2019 have produced an emerging global political culture.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Why Hong Kong’s Protests Exploded


Protest movements will almost certainly be a feature of 2020 as well. “Protests are becoming part of ordinary political engagement,” Richard Youngs, a democracy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Civic Activism Unleashed: New Hope or False Dawn for Democracy?,” told me. “The range of protests is quite staggering if you think about what’s happening across Latin America, in several African countries, in Eastern Europe, in both poor and wealthy Asian nations and even in the most difficult of circumstances in Russia. It’s remarkable. There’s not a political model that seems to be doing well or that is inoculated from the kind of uprisings the world is witnessing.”

The growing array of protests has coincided with a notable decline in voter turnout around the world, despite an increase in the number of voters and the number of countries with elections, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. For five decades, between the nineteen-forties and nineteen-eighties, the average global turnout was stable: at least seventy-six per cent. By 2015, it had dropped to sixty-six per cent. The data suggests less confidence that elections make much difference, and that citizens are instead voting with their feet, on the streets.

Many of the protests of 2019 have been loose-knit and leaderless, such as the demonstrations against Chinese overreach in Hong Kong, which are now heading into their seventh month.Photograph by Anthony Kwan / Getty

“What ties Hong Kong and Lebanon and Iraq with what we’re seeing in Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador is the notion that political establishments have seized too much power,” David Gordon, a former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, who now works at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told me. “There’s a common discontent and a common disillusionment and a common sense among protesters that they deserve more—and that the political establishment is to blame.”

Whatever the original flash points or agendas of the individual protests, taken together, they speak to a broader need for a new social contract between citizens and state power that goes beyond traditional political reforms, economic adjustments, or shifts in who sits at the top, Youngs said. In 1989, another year notable for unrest in China, Eastern Europe, and southern Africa, protests were regionally centered. “Today there is something structural and global that transcends the geo-political factors that triggered unrest in Europe in 1989,” he said. Protesters are challenging the political order not only of the twenty-first century but of the modern era.

The protests of 2019 have also altered the tactics, tools, and structure of civil resistance. Many have been loose-knit and leaderless and have drawn in people who consider themselves to be neither political nor civil-society activists. “They all represent a crisis of agency—of people who feel unrepresented,” Ross said. “For that reason, philosophically, they tend to not be top-down movements. If people want their own voice, they’re not happy if someone stands up and says they represent you. ‘We represent ourselves’ is a common feature of these protests.”

Technology has accelerated the organization and efficiency of protesting in 2019. In 1968, when sit-ins swept my campus at the University of Michigan, plans for protests were spread on landline telephones, through leaflets, or by word of mouth. In 1989, protesters had the fax. In 2011, as uprisings swept the Middle East, protesters had cell phones and social media, notably Twitter and Facebook. By 2019, encrypted apps, such as Telegram, WhatsApp, and AirDrop, offered a more secure means of communicating, a degree of anonymity, and less need for a single leader to mobilize. “There may be a global contagion due to social media. Seeing protests in other places motivates people to be willing to go to the streets in their own countries,” Gordon said.

To be enduring, movements today need to succeed in four factors, Chenoweth said. They need large and diverse participation. They need to create cracks in their opponents’ pillars of support, whether in business, politics, or the military. They need to employ a diverse set of tactics, including strikes, boycotts, or other forms of noncoöperation with the state. And they need to maintain discipline when government pressure tries to control or repress them. Because many of the movements today are leaderless, they find it harder to maintain control or unity.

Statistically, protests in the twentieth century that had at least a thousand people participating had a fifty per cent success rate—twice as high as violent campaigns, Chenoweth said. Between 2000 and 2010, between sixty and seventy per cent of nonviolent campaigns were successful. From 2010 to 2019, the success rate declined to thirty per cent—but they were still far more successful than campaigns using guns, which were successful only ten per cent of the time. “One of the ironies is that, even as their absolute success has declined, the relative success of nonviolent resistance has increased,” Chenoweth told me. “The rate of success used to be two to one over armed conflict. Now it’s three to one.”

Protest movements have serious limits, however. “Movements are called movements because they are not static and therefore can’t last,” Gerbaudo said. “They tend to come in waves. They give voice to concerns that are not in the public sphere. Once they have fulfilled the function, they tend to disperse.” Leaderless movements are not designed to govern, but they often generate momentum among politicians who take up or exploit their causes. “The rise of Bernie Sanders as a candidate would have been unthinkable without Occupy Wall Street,” Gerbaudo said.

Yet popular movements may have staying power well into the next decade and even beyond, Ross said, because of three accelerating stresses on every society: starker signs of environmental degradation that will increasingly impact daily life, worsening economic conditions and inequality generated by greedy globalization, and more mass migrations. And they can overlap. “If Europe has faced such a powerful rise of the extreme right since 2015, over a few thousand Syrian refugees reaching its shore, how are societies going to handle millions of climate refugees who will knock on the door of the West?” Gerbaudo said.

Many Americans, distracted by the antics of their President, have paid little attention to the turmoil beyond their borders. Ignoring them comes at a perilous cost. The protests of 2019 have been epochal, the fury real, and the underlying message profound for the future.

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Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

Hill.TV's Saagar Enjeti: GOP attacks against Sanders would fail in general election

Hill.TV host Saagar Enjeti warned Thursday that Republican attacks against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won’t work if the Democratic primary candidate goes on to take on President Trump in November's general election.

“Half of them think that Sanders will be easy to beat and yelling ‘socialism sucks’ will do the trick,” Enjeti said. “The smarter ones — including Trump himself — know that he’s going to be a lot more formidable.”

“Trump has increasingly mentioned Bernie Sanders on the campaign trial and has a brewing war with his advisors as to how to deal with the Vermont senator,” he said,

Click on video to watch the Enjeti’s full remarks

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