Why 'I was just being sarcastic' can be such a convenient excuse

Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis
Sat, January 1, 2022

Oh come on, you could tell it was sarcasm ... right? AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

After President Donald Trump said during a rally in June 2021 that increased testing was responsible for the surging number of infections, the condemnation of the inaccurate claim was swift.

Six days later, during a Fox News town hall, Sean Hannity asked Trump about those remarks on increased testing.

“Sometimes I jokingly say, or sarcastically say, if we didn’t do tests we would look great,” he replied.

This seems to be a pattern. Two months earlier, the president had mused about the beneficial effects of injecting disinfectants into the body to combat COVID-19. After many health officials expressed their dismay, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was just being sarcastic.

That same month, after he misspelled “Nobel Prize” in a tweet – writing it out as “Noble Prize” – he deleted the tweet before falling back on on a familiar excuse: sarcasm.

What is it about sarcasm that makes it such a convenient excuse for people who are trying to distance themselves from what they’ve said?

As I describe in my book on irony and sarcasm, most cognitive scientists and other language researchers think of sarcasm as a form of verbal irony. Both ways of speaking involve saying the opposite of what you mean. But the goals of irony and sarcasm are actually different.

For example, if someone slowly intones “What beautiful weather!” on a cold and rainy day, it’s clear they’re speaking ironically about a disappointing state of affairs. In general, irony is used to provide commentary on unexpected and negative outcomes.

Sarcasm, on the other hand, is most frequently used to disparage the actions of other people. If someone tells you that you’re a real genius after you forgot to meet them for an important appointment, they clearly don’t mean that you’re mentally gifted. Simply put, irony is commentary, but sarcasm is criticism.

That seems straightforward enough. But in actual practice, the line between irony and sarcasm is blurry and confusing. Many people assert they are being sarcastic when they are in fact being ironic, as in the previous example of the weather.

The enlargement of the domain of sarcasm – at irony’s expense – is a linguistic shift that has been going on for some time. In fact, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg called attention to this phenomenon 20 years ago. So it’s hard to fault the president for conflating the two.

Another element that makes sarcasm tricky to grasp has to do with saying the opposite of what is meant. The recipient of such a statement isn’t supposed to take it literally.

For this reason, when we use verbal irony or sarcasm, we might employ cues to signal our nonliteral intent. We may, for example, speak in a tone of voice that’s slower, lower and louder than how we speak normally. Our pitch may swoop up or down. Ironic statements are also frequently accompanied by facial displays, such as a smirk or the rolling of the eyes.

And that’s why, when being sarcastic over text or email, we’ll use emojis to relay nonliteral intent. Of course, even then, there’s no guarantee that the recipient will interpret the message correctly.

President Trump does, at times, clearly make use of sarcasm. For example, at a December 2019 rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he said, referring to the House’s imminent decision to initiate impeachment proceedings, that the Democrats “also understand poll numbers, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.” He signals sarcasm by using absolute words like “sure” and “nothing” and by gesturing broadly with both hands. He also pauses to give his audience a moment to interpret his remark as the opposite of what he has said – that, in fact, “my high poll numbers have everything to do with impeachment.” The remark is sarcastic because there’s a clear target: the Democrats in Congress.

But at both the Tulsa rally and his April press conference, the president’s controversial remarks didn’t have such accompanying verbal and nonverbal cues. He wasn’t being critical of anyone; he was simply asserting that testing leads to more infections, or asking what appeared to be sincere questions about the use of disinfectants to combat the virus. Chances are he literally meant what he said

As the president has repeatedly demonstrated, a claim of intended sarcasm can be used to walk back a remark that has been criticized or otherwise fallen flat. Thanks to our slippery understanding of the term, along with the way sarcasm can be easily missed, it can function like a “Get Out of Jail Free” card: The speaker can take a conversational mulligan and try to make things right.

We’ve all said things that we later regretted and appealed to “just kidding” or “I was being sarcastic.” However, if we habitually reach for such excuses to absolve ourselves of linguistic sins, it becomes, like the little boy who cried wolf, less and less effective.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Roger J. Kreuz, University of Memphis.

Read more:

What makes something ironic?

The rhetorical brilliance of Trump the demagogue

Why is sarcasm so difficult to detect in texts and emails?

Guest Opinion: These facts bother me. Do they bother you?


David D. Jones
Sat, January 1, 2022, 2:57 AM·3 min read

Does it bother you that a very small percent of the top 1% of our population owns 40% of the wealth? It bothers me. Does it bother you that the military industrial complex is in business partly to sell weapons of war to foreign countries, weapons that could one day be used against us? It bothers me. Does it bother you that 50% of our taxes go to finance the military, when many of these weapons will never be used by us and the money could be put to much better use? It bothers me. Does it bother you that the Senate of the United States so often votes against House-sponsored bills that are in the best interests of the average American? It bothers me very much.

Does it bother you that the Republicans in the Senate vote as a block instead of for what’s best for the American people? It bothers me. Does it bother you that so many members of the Republican Party favor an ex-president who wants to create an autocracy with himself as the head of state? It bothers me.

Does it bother you that our current president hasn’t found a way to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory rather than allowing each person to decide for himself or herself, when to do so means many thousands more will suffer or die, and that, at the very least, the pandemic may be prolonged?

These facts bother me. Do they bother you?

What do you think of an ex-president who obtained the allegiance of many lower and lower- middle class individuals in our country, implying that he would help them financially, but then lowered the tax rate for millionaires and billionaires and did little for his followers except give them promises? This bothers me. What do you think of a political party that helps pay for over a hundred military bases around the world while at the same time votes down a bill that gives the average man the chance of a better life such as improved health care and other benefits by passage of the Build Back Better Act. Does that bother you especially when the United States is the richest country in the world and while other lesser nations do much more in the way of spending for social needs? Does that bother you as much as it bothers me?

Does it bother you that so many members of the Republican Party put our need for structural improvements to the environment before human needs as evidenced by their voting patterns with regard to the Build Back Better Act. That bothers me. Does it bother you that the Republicans in the Senate prevent the American people from having what they want, irrespective of the many polls that indicate that this party consistently votes against what Americans both want and need?

I have given you important facts about our country. How will you vote in the coming elections? It’s up to you to decide what kind of a nation you want to live in.

David D. Jones lives in Warminster.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Guest Opinion: These facts bother me. Do they bother you?

Convicted murderer who used Scientology as defense found dead in Arizona prison

Joshua Bowling, Arizona Republic
Thu, December 30, 2021

Kenneth Wayne Thompson sits in the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott, where he was on trial in a 2012 double murder.

Kenneth Thompson — the Missouri man who traveled to Arizona, killed his sister-in-law and her boyfriend and used Scientology as a defense — died Wednesday, according to the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry. Officials are investigating his death as an apparent homicide.

Thompson was pronounced dead shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday, the department announced. He was found in his "assigned housing unit where life-saving measures were conducted," the department said. He was an inmate in the Arizona State Prison Complex Eyman, in Florence.

The department has identified two suspects, also inmates, "for the attack," but did not offer more details.

Thompson's crime was shocking, and the subsequent northern Arizona trial was gripping. In 2012, he traveled to Arizona from his home in Missouri and used a hatchet and a knife to kill his sister-in-law and her boyfriend. He poured acid on their bodies, set the Prescott Valley house on fire and fled.

A Prescott jury in 2019 found him guilty of first-degree murder, burglary, arson, criminal damage and tampering with evidence. He was sentenced to death.
Thompson's attorneys said his roots in Scientology explained the killings

Whether Thompson killed his sister-in-law and her boyfriend — Penelope Edwards and Troy Dunn — wasn't up for debate in his 2019 trial. His attorneys didn't dispute that.

But they took issue with the prosecution's portrait of Thompson as a premeditated killer. He was concerned about the two children in his sister-in-law's care, they argued.

Thompson's wife had taken care of them while Penelope Edwards was in prison. Once she was released and got the children back, Thompson and his wife often worried about them. When Thompson learned one of the children was receiving psychiatric treatment at a children's hospital, that was the last straw.

Thompson was raised as a Scientologist and his attorneys argued that Scientologists view psychology as "evil and a scam." He believed he was on a mission to rescue these children from spiritual death, they argued.
What happened in 2012

Court testimony helped piece together a narrative of what happened in Prescott Valley in 2012.

Thompson took off for Arizona. His attorneys said even his then-wife, Gloria, didn't know about his plans. He had told her he was heading to Memphis to deal with legal issues surrounding his parents' estate.

His attorneys said he arrived at a junction at Interstate 40 and impulsively decided to bear west, heading to Arizona. As he drove to Arizona, which court testimony said took him just more than one day, Gloria began texting him. But Thompson left his phone at home.

He stayed at a motel. He went to Walmart the next morning to buy a hatchet and a change of clothes. His attorneys maintained the hatchet was for a camping trip he planned.

He took a taxi to his sister-in-law's house. Details became much more muddled after that.

Thompson told the jury he wanted to bribe his sister-in-law into letting him bring the children back to Missouri with him. The Prescott Daily Courier reported he testified to the jury for almost four hours.

He claimed the conversation turned violent. His attorneys said he struck in the heat of passion. They asked for a manslaughter verdict.

Hours after he arrived at his sister-in-law's home, neighbors reported a house fire. Responding crews discovered the victims' bodies. Police pulled Thompson over on I-40 heading east.

A search revealed a hatchet with human hair and blood on its blade.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Man who used Scientology as murder defense found dead

Former Black Panther Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz Dies 52 Days After Being Released from 50 Years In Prison

DIED A FREE MAN, REST IN POWER

Nicole Duncan-Smith
Fri, December 31, 2021

Former Black Panther and political prisoner Russell “Maroon” Shoatz has died at the age of 78. The activist, who was also a Black Liberation Army member, succumbed to cancer on Dec. 17, 52 days after being released from prison.

The death announcement on Dec. 23 revealed a judge granted him a “compassionate release” on Oct. 26 due to stage 4 colorectal cancer. The court allowed him to relocate from a Pennsylvania state prison to hospice care for treatment.

Russell “Maroon” Shoatz

Shoatz’s son, Russell Shoatz III, spoke to the press about the prison’s inability to properly care for his father and that his release speaks to that inadequacy. He said, “What’s in the transcripts are the evidence that the prisons don’t have the capabilities to take care not just of their healthy prisoners.”

“They definitely don’t have the ability to take care of their geriatric prisoners,” he continued. “And that they have effectively killed my father.”

His funeral service and Janazah prayer were held on Monday, Dec. 20, at the Philadelphia Masjid in West Philly. He was laid to final rest at the Friends Southwestern Burial Ground in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.

Shoatz had been incarcerated for 50 years after receiving a life sentence for an attack on a Philadelphia police station in 1970. The altercation left one officer wounded and another one dead.

Advocates working to change life without parole rules call such sentences Death by Incarceration. Shoatz dedicated much of his life to this work. In 1983, the Amsterdam News reports, he became president of the Pennsylvania Association of Lifers (PAL). This collective lobbied to abolish life-without-parole sentences and solitary confinement.

During his imprisonment, he earned the nickname “Maroon,” based on the African-Jamaican group that self-emancipated from Spanish slavery in 1655 (after the British acquired the land) and established a community in the mountains of the island. Shoatz escaped twice: once in 1977 and again in 1980. After being brought back the second time, he was placed in solitary confinement.

He stayed in solitary confinement for 22 consecutive years from 1992 to 2014.

After release from solitary confinement, he sued the Department of Corrections for cruel and unusual punishment. From the state, he received $99,000 in damages and a permanent reprieve from solitary confinement.

THIRD WORLD USA
Yosemite is forcing homeowners to leave without compensation. Here’s why

Carmen Kohlruss
Sat, January 1, 2022

LONG READ

The week before Christmas, residents of the El Portal Trailer Park got letters from Yosemite National Park saying they have to remove or surrender their homes by early 2022 because Yosemite has other plans for the trailer park and is worried about power lines there that Yosemite owns.

“Thank you, Park Service,” Luke Harbin said sarcastically, shortly after heavy snowfall recently covered the mountains surrounding his mother’s home near Yosemite with a thick coat of white.

Yosemite is not paying for mobile homes that residents own or moving expenses. Letters dated Dec. 13, signed by Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon, informed them for the first time that authorized tenants have to leave within 90 days.

Harbin said his mother has worked in Yosemite for over 40 years and has lived in the trailer park for 38 years – 34 years in her current home.

“It’s sad. Imagine losing your home after 40 years,” Harbin said while standing beside a community playground built by his father, who died a couple years ago, and other parents.

An old playground stands near the edge of the El Portal Trailer Park near Yosemite on Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. At one time, kids of employees were abundant in the trailer park, but now only older residents remain.

The 32-year-old has fond memories of growing up in the small community for Yosemite workers, including learning to swim in a swimming hole near his family home. Tranquil El Portal, mostly populated by oak and pine trees, sits beside the Merced River and is about a five-minute drive from the west entrance of Yosemite National Park along Highway 140.

Yosemite owns land in El Portal, but not many of the homes that sit upon that land.

Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, Harbin said his mother spent at least $5,000 on a new metal roof for her double-wide mobile home that’s guaranteed for 10 years. She wouldn’t have done it had she known she’d be forced out without compensation two years later.

There are around a dozen mobile homes remaining in the community, along with some other smaller trailers. Many tears have been shed there since the December letter that told residents to leave.

Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said unauthorized tenants, including renters who aren’t supposed to be there, only have 60 days to leave. It’s unclear how many homeowners and others live there. Gediman estimated there are about 12 residents, “plus or minus.” One homeowner estimated there are at least over 20 residents who are actively working for Yosemite.

Mobile homes in the El Portal Trailer Park near Yosemite on Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. Residents of the park are being told to move out in 90 days or less without compensation.

Gilbert Domingues is among those who will soon be displaced. He was born in Yosemite Valley and spent most of his life living and working there. His aunt is Julia Parker – the face of Native Americans in Yosemite for many park visitors because of her longtime service at the Yosemite Museum.

“I just look at it as like I’m a Native American, and the government can take my land, so they are,” Domingues said.

Like the others, he’s not sure where he will go.

“There’s not much I can do really except just pack up and go,” Domingues said. “The government wins again.”

Gilbert Domingues, a resident of the El Portal Trailer Park near Yosemite, talks about having to find a new home on Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. Residents of the park are being told to move out in 90 days or less without compensation.

Why do El Portal Trailer Park residents have to leave soon?

Trailer park residents received another letter from Yosemite’s superintendent in October, cautioning that the overhead electrical system was found to be in “very poor condition” in September and Yosemite “has contracted PG&E to fully assess the condition” – adding that “one potential outcome” might be Pacific Gas & Electric Company determining the power lines should be de-energized.

“If requisite repairs are not feasible, particularly in the context of the NPS’ long-term plan for the site,” then the National Park Service would “accelerate” the relocation of residents, giving them at least 60 days notice, the letter from Muldoon continued.

The letter said the site will be converted to a public and administrative-use campground for recreational vehicles, with campground construction slated to begin in 2024. Several residents interviewed for this story said the letter was the first time they were informed of the 2024 date.

“We are not requesting tenants to vacate housing at this time,” the October letter reads. “This letter serves only as a notice about the conditions of the Trailer Court’s electrical distribution system.”

A subsequent Dec. 13 letter, titled “NOTICE OF TERMINATION,” does tell them to go: “Based on follow up assessment of the electrical utilities and input from PG&E, park management confirmed that long-term operation of the current infrastructure is not viable. Given the safety risks of continued operation the NPS is accelerating the closure of the Trailer Court and requiring authorized tenants to vacate their sites within 90 days of this notice.”

Some residents were told by others that the real reason they’re being forced to leave so quickly is because Yosemite wants to use the land as a staging area for construction equipment for various Yosemite projects starting this spring.

A deer forages around the El Portal Trailer Park near Yosemite on Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. 

The recent letters to residents don’t mention that, but Gediman confirmed it when asked for this story. The site being used as a construction area is ironic to some who recall residents being punished with community service for disturbing dirt in their yards and park rangers there trying to protect elderberry longhorn beetles. The area is also an archaeological site, with ancient mortar holes on boulders – circular depressions created by Native Americans while grinding food.

Gediman said some major, multi-million-dollar Yosemite projects that might benefit from the trailer park being used as a construction staging area include a new planned wastewater treatment facility in El Portal, work on Glacier Point and Tioga roads, and campground rehabilitation.

“This is the administrative site,” Gediman said of El Portal. “The area is designed to meet the administrative needs of the park. Again, with our budgets coming up and a need for staging area and temporary camping for the construction workers, this is the use that we need in order to operate the park.”

Yosemite recently redid power lines from Yosemite Valley to El Portal, but that didn’t include the El Portal Trailer Park.

PG&E spokesman Denny Boyles said the company looked at El Portal power lines for Yosemite as a courtesy, not as a contractor. Boyles said the company isn’t sharing what it told Yosemite but that “there would never be a time where we would have any kind of authority to recommend a tenant be evicted for any reason.”

A worker who inspected the lines told residents there aren’t safety issues that warrant evictions. But if the infrastructure really is that bad, “why haven’t they been maintaining them?” Harbin asked. “We’ve been paying them this whole time, for years. Why aren’t they out here doing their job?”
History of the community for Yosemite workers

The El Portal Trailer Park – also called the El Portal Trailer Park Village and El Portal Trailer Court – has been around since the 1950s.

Homeowners of the trailer park, who have to work in Yosemite to live there, were no longer allowed to sell their homes after the flood of 1997. Annual lease agreements for the land beneath them changed to say the closure of the trailer park would “continue to be implemented through attrition.”

Several residents said they understood that to mean they had to leave when they no longer worked for Yosemite.

One resident said there was once 58 occupied spaces in the trailer park.

Mobile homes in the El Portal Trailer Park near Yosemite on Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. 

There were plans to close the trailer park in 2000, but that changed in 1999. At that time, a previous Yosemite superintendent wrote, “Since the closure of the trailer village is dependent upon available funding, the January 1, 2000 closure date has been postponed. No new date for closure has been identified.” Another NPS letter in 2003 said, “this statement continues to be fact.”

Several residents said Yosemite didn’t share plans for the site with them – or a new move-out deadline or construction timelines – aside from the termination letters received in December.

Yosemite’s 2014 record of decision to preserve the wild and scenic Merced River – now a guiding document for park management and construction projects – talks about adding employee housing in El Portal. Within El Portal’s trailer park/adjacent Abbieville, parking and camping spaces will also be added, the plan states, while employee housing facilities there within the floodplain “will not be removed.”

There’s also plenty of contradictions within the 200-page document, which, in another section, addresses removing or relocating some homes in the trailer park/Abbieville and restoring a 150-foot riparian buffer. The plan says to “remove development, asphalt and imported fill” right after noting a 300-space parking lot would be added in that area – an archaeological site.

Changing and uncertain plans have left many residents unsure what to expect. Harbin said Yosemite was recently redoing sewage lines in the trailer park.

Gediman said park officials communicated with residents numerous times about plans to close the trailer park through letters and community meetings and that “our intentions have been this way for almost thirty years now.”

Harbin has a very different take: “They’re pulling a fast one on us.”
Challenges include little time, no compensation, narrow roads

Most who live in the trailer park now are older people who have worked in Yosemite for decades, residents said. They thought Yosemite would have given them more time to find a new place to live and move out – and not in the middle of winter.

Most of the homes in the trailer park can hardly be considered “mobile” anymore. Some have been there since the 1950s and have been retrofitted with various add-ons, like covered porches and attached sheds.

The chances are slim that many could be moved, even if residents have the money and want to, due to narrow sections of road past the trailer park. There’s been a one-lane bridge down the Merced River canyon since the massive Ferguson rockslide buried part of Highway 140 in 2006.

Cars cross a one-lane bridge near Yosemite National Park in 2006 that was constructed after the massive Ferguson rock slide buried part of Highway 140 leading to Yosemite.

Going the other direction, the road just past Yosemite’s west entrance narrows to one lane as it squeezes through an opening between boulders.

For those who can’t or don’t want to move their mobile homes, Muldoon told residents that “you have the option of surrendering your trailer and/or belongings to the NPS. Recognizing that the property holds no value and is not considered a donation to NPS.”

Residents recall others in the past having to cut up and discard their homes themselves before leaving the trailer park.

A letter sent to residents over 20 years ago from another Yosemite superintendent said trailer park residents might be eligible for possible relocation benefits under Public Law 91-646.

There was no mention of compensation in recent letters. Why not? Gediman said that the National Park Service is terminating the lease agreement, and “we’re not addressing anything beyond” that.

It’s a harsh reality for those now scrambling to find new homes.

“We have rights and benefits as displaced people,” Harbin said, “and they’re trying to ignore all that.”

Most soon-to-be displaced residents now face either potentially renting a dorm room in Yosemite Valley or driving along the often-icy Merced River canyon to Mariposa, 40 minutes from El Portal. Housing is limited in rural Mariposa County, especially at the rate trailer park residents were paying, around $400 a month for trailer space.

Some hope Yosemite will offer more time to move and said Rep. Tom McClintock’s office offered to review and endorse letters requesting time extensions.

“Congressman McClintock’s office is aware of the issue,” said Jennifer Cressy, a spokesperson for McClintock, “and expects YNP to fairly consider the circumstances in each letter request for a time extension.”
Shock, pain and neglect near Yosemite National Park

Two Yosemite employees and trailer park residents asked not to be identified in this story out of fear of losing employment opportunities at the park.

One said they were offended by comments attributed to Gediman in a recent Mariposa Gazette story, in which the trailer park and its residents were described multiple times as “hodgepodge.”

“It’s the humanity part of it.”

The resident has lovingly worked on their small house for decades to make it a beloved home.

Plus, “How can they do this when COVID is still going on? It’s still active. It’s still spreading.”

About not getting compensated: “It’s just wrong. I know that eminent domain happens everywhere – it’s progress – but people get paid.”

Even a little compensation from Yosemite would be helpful, they said. This resident recently saw similar mobile homes in Mariposa being sold for over $100,000.

Residents also talked about wanting their community to look nicer. Harbin said after some previous trailers were torn out, there was trash littered across the trailer park for five years before Yosemite cleaned it up. In another instance, Harbin said he cleaned up some neighboring mess himself after Yosemite failed to do it after a couple of years.

“It’s messed up. It’s not fair,” Harbin said of the state of the trailer park. “If you go over to the elementary school, it looks prestigious, and you come over here, and it looks like, literally, a dump.”

Harbin said the Park Service owes trailer park residents at least some more time to leave.

“It’s just not right how they went about doing all this.”

The Ugly History of New Year’s Is Too Real for White Republicans

Kali Holloway
Fri, December 31, 2021

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

On this New Year’s Day, it’s a good bet that Rhode Island state Rep. Patricia Morgan and the one Black person she knows will not be sitting down to eat black-eyed peas and collard greens together.

It’s an even safer bet that she and her fellow Republicans will spend zero mental energy on the history of the New Year as a terrifying time for enslaved people in America.

Rep. Morgan, you may recall, tweeted a few days ago that she “had a black friend”—emphasis on the past tense—but this unnamed Black token had recently become “​​hostile and unpleasant,” which the Rhode Island lawmaker concluded must be because of critical race theory, because she herself hadn’t done “anything to her, except be white.”

CRT, according to Morgan, is the issue that’s really “divid[ing] us because of skin color.”

This is really quite the take during an era in which Confederate flag-waving insurrectionists have stormed the U.S. Capitol building, the FBI identified white terrorists as the greatest threat to national security, members of Congress openly aligned with self-identified white nationalists and promoted their ideologies, hate crimes against Black folks rose precipitously, and Rep. Morgan herself proposed one anti-CRT bill and stonewalled another that would incorporate the teaching of Black history in Rhode Island schools.

It’s tempting to think that Morgan is just misinformed about CRT—an esoteric legal concept for examining systemic racism that no Rhode Island school is teaching, and that the far right has become obsessed with over the last year. But in a later appearance, Morgan unwittingly admitted that her issue isn’t with CRT, but with the idea that history might be taught in a way that fully acknowledges how anti-Black racism has defined every aspect of America, taking full stock of the devastation caused by white American supremacy. That would be too much of a bummer, according to Morgan, who claims that “with CRT, there’s no redemption,” because it does not focus on the “good part of our history.”

That’s really just a way of saying that she opposes a history that isn’t filled with supremacist fables and other ahistorical nonsense. Not to mention that she also isn’t a fan of white folks—after centuries of omitting Black folks from the historical record—having to share the historical spotlight.

“I’m genuinely concerned that critical race theory—this centering of the Black experience, this making race the center of everything in our society—is really dangerous,” Morgan said in an interview. “And it’s chipping away at the things that bind us together as Americans.”

Rhode Island Lawmaker Who Sponsored Anti-CRT Bill Whines That Black Friend No Longer Likes Her

This is what CRT opponents truly fear, summed up by Morgan. Perhaps because she would prefer that Rhode Island schoolkids not know that their home state’s “General Court of Election”—meaning Morgan’s own legislative predecessors—passed a law in 1652 that ended lifelong Black enslavement in two cities, and would pass another law proscribing Native slavery in 1676, only to completely ignore that legislation in favor of racial capitalism.

Laws curtailing slavery would also be passed in the state in 1774, 1784, and 1787, though those didn’t end the barbaric system either. In fact, “almost half of all of Rhode Island’s slave voyages occurred after trading was outlawed,” as USA Today reported. When the American Revolution began in 1775, “Rhode Island was the largest slave trading colony in British America,” according to Leonardo Marques, author of The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas. Newport, and then Bristol, were major ports in the trans-Atlantic importation of human beings trafficked from Africa to the colonies in the 18th century, and had more enslaved Black folks per capita than any New England state of the colonial era.

The state would finally constitutionally abolish slavery in 1843.

While it’s now considered a celebratory moment across the U.S., the end of the year was filled with trauma and trepidation for Black folks living under the yoke of slavery. Enslavers would settle their accounts as the year came to a close, and that meant those they enslaved might be hired out to other enslavers, or sold on the first day of the year. Among enslaved Black folks, New Year’s Eve was spent worrying that they might be ripped from family and loved ones, auctioned off to the highest bidder to erase an enslaver’s debt.

And as such, New Year’s Day was known as “Hiring Day” or—in words that more precisely named the cruelty they experienced—“Heartbreak Day.”

“Of all the days in the year, the slaves dread New Year’s Day the worst of any,” Lewis Clarke, who fled enslavement and became an outspoken abolitionist, stated in 1842, one year before Rhode Island banned legalized racial bondage. “For folks come for their debts then; and if anybody is going to sell a slave, that’s the time they do it; and if anybody’s going to give away a slave, that’s the time they do it; and the slave never knows where he’ll be sent to. Oh, New Year’s a heart-breaking time in Kentucky!”

Clarke’s account is an American truth, as historically relevant as those stories that Morgan and many other Republicans might prefer we continue to center on this and every day. It’s a history that Morgan wants to be whitewashed until it fades from collective American memory. But it’s critical that these stories—which tell us how we arrived at the present moment, and why we can’t seem to ever get beyond the residual impact of a past Morgan would like to forget—be told.

There’s an old Black saying, borne of Hiring Day, that states New Year’s will define your coming year.

“Slaves went to a place [on Hiring Day] called the hiring grounds to hire their labors out for the next year,” Sister Harrison, a formerly enslaved freeperson told an interviewer in 1937. “That’s where that sayin’ comes from that what you do on New Year’s Day you’ll be doing for the rest of the year.”

That likely means that Morgan and other white conservatives, who’ve been using CRT as a boogeyman for the last year, will continue to do so straight through 2022. But it’s all more white-supremacist propaganda. Here’s hoping in the new year there will be more pushback against the racist campaign to legally ban the teaching of verifiable history. And that Morgan’s absurd efforts to block those truths loses her yet more “friends” who were just barely tolerating her anyway.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools

Jonathan M. Katz
Sat, January 1, 2022

Smedley D. Butler, Smedley Butler - Credit: AP Images

Award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American military imperialism in the early twentieth century. At its center is one of the United States’s most fascinating yet little-known characters — Gen. Smedley Butler, a Marine who fought in nearly every U.S. overseas war in the early twentieth century. In this exclusive excerpt, Katz documents how Butler played a pivotal role in an equally little-known episode, in which a cadre of powerful businessmen tried to overthrow the government of the United States, in an episode that anticipated the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Read the exclusive excerpt below.

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Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved in many himself. He had overthrown governments and protected “friendly” client ones around the world on behalf of some of the same U.S. bankers, lawyers, and businessmen apparently now looking for his help.

For 33 years and four months Butler had been a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict back to the war against Spain in 1898. Respected by his peers, beloved by his men, he was known as “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s Friend,” and the famous “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. Bestselling books had been written about him. Hollywood adored him. President Roosevelt’s cousin, the late Theodore himself, was said to have called Butler “the ideal American soldier.” Over the course of his career, he had received the Army and Navy Distinguished Service medals, the French Ordre de l’Étoile Noir, and, in the distinction that would ensure his place in the Marine Corps pantheon, the Medal of Honor — twice.

Butler knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio Somoza — men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He had done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. P. Morgan, and the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. Murphy.

And now a bond salesman, who worked for Murphy, was pitching Butler on a domestic operation that set off the old veteran’s alarm bells. The bond salesman was Gerald C. MacGuire, a 37-year-old Navy veteran with a head Butler thought looked like a cannonball. MacGuire had been pursuing Butler relentlessly throughout 1933 and 1934, starting with visits to the Butler’s converted farmhouse on Philadelphia’s Main Line. In Newark, where Butler was attending the reunion of a National Guard division, MacGuire showed up at his hotel room and tossed a wad of cash on the bed — $18,000, he said. In early 1934, Butler had received a series of postcards from MacGuire, sent from the hotspots of fascist Europe, including Hitler’s Berlin.

In August 1934, MacGuire called Butler from Philadelphia and asked to meet. Butler suggested an abandoned café at the back of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

First MacGuire recounted all he had seen in Europe. He’d learned that Mussolini and Hitler were able to stay in power because they kept soldiers on their payrolls in various ways. “But that setup would not suit us at all,” the businessman opined.

But in France, MacGuire had “found just exactly the organization we’re going to have.” Called the Croix de Feu, or Fiery Cross, it was like a more militant version of the American Legion: an association of French World War veterans and paramilitaries. On Feb. 6, 1934 — six weeks before MacGuire arrived — the Croix de Feu had taken part in a riot of mainly far-right and fascist groups that had tried to storm the French legislature. The insurrection was stopped by police; at least 15 people, mostly rioters, were killed. But in the aftermath, France’s center-left prime minister had been forced to resign in favor of a conservative.

MacGuire had attended a meeting of the Croix de Feu in Paris. It was the sort of “super-organization” he believed Americans could get behind — especially with a beloved war hero like Butler at the helm.

Then he made his proposal: The Marine would lead half a million veterans in a march on Washington, blending the Croix de Feu’s assault on the French legislature with the March on Rome that had put Mussolini’s Fascisti in power in Italy a decade earlier. They would be financed and armed by some of the most powerful corporations in America — including DuPont, the nation’s biggest manufacturer of explosives and synthetic materials.

The purpose of the action was to stop Roosevelt’s New Deal, the president’s program to end the Great Depression, which one of the millionaire du Pont brothers deemed “nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.” Butler’s veteran army, MacGuire explained, would pressure the president to appoint a new secretary of state, or “secretary of general affairs,” who would take on the executive powers of government. If Roosevelt went along, he would be allowed to remain as a figurehead, like the king of Italy. Otherwise, he would be forced to resign, placing the new super-secretary in the White House.

Butler recognized this immediately as a coup. He knew the people who were allegedly behind it. He had made a life in the overlapping seams of capital and empire, and he knew that the subversion of democracy by force had turned out to be a required part of the job he had chosen. “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers,” Butler would write a year later. “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

And Butler knew another thing that most Americans didn’t: how much they would suffer if anyone did to their democracy what he had done to so many others across the globe.

“Now, about this super-organization,” MacGuire asked the general. “Would you be interested in heading it?”

“I am interested in it, but I do not know about heading it,” Butler told the bond salesman, as he resolved to report everything he had learned to Congress. “I am very greatly interested in it, because, you know, Jerry, my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.”

Eight decades after he publicly revealed his conversations about what became known as the Business Plot, Smedley Butler is no longer a household name. A few history buffs — and a not-inconsiderable number of conspiracy-theory enthusiasts — remember him for his whistleblowing of the alleged fascist coup. Another repository of his memory is kept among modern-day Marines, who learn one detail of his life in boot camp — the two Medals of Honor — and to sing his name along with those of his legendary Marine contemporaries, Dan Daly and Lewis “Chesty” Puller, in a running cadence about devotion to the Corps: “It was good for Smedley Butler/And it’s good enough for me.”

I first encountered the other side of Butler’s legacy in Haiti, after I moved there to be the correspondent for the Associated Press. To Haitians, Butler is no hero. He is remembered by scholars there as the most mechan — corrupt or evil — of the Marines. He helped lead the U.S. invasion of that republic in 1915 and played a singular role in setting up an occupation that lasted nearly two decades. Butler also instigated a system of forced labor, the corvée, in which Haitians were required to build hundreds of miles of roads for no pay, and were killed or jailed if they did not comply. Haitians saw it for what it was: a form of slavery, enraging a people whose ancestors had freed themselves from enslavement and French colonialism over a century before.

Such facts do not make a dent in the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Most Americans prefer to think of ourselves as plucky heroes: the rebels who topple the empire, not the storm troopers running its battle stations. U.S. textbooks — and more importantly the novels, video games, monuments, tourist sites, and films where most people encounter versions of American history — are more often about the Civil War or World War II, the struggles most easily framed in moral certitudes of right and wrong, and in which those fighting under the U.S. flag had the strongest claims to being on the side of good.

“Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.

And it is. It was no coincidence that thousands of young men like Smedley Butler were convinced to sign up for America’s first overseas war of empire on the promise of ending Spanish tyranny and imperialism in Cuba. Brought up as a Quaker on Philadelphia’s Main Line, Butler held on to principles of equality and fairness throughout his life, even as he fought to install and defend despotic regimes all over the world. That tension — between the ideal of the United States as a leading champion of democracy on the one hand and a leading destroyer of democracy on the other — remains the often unacknowledged fault line running through American politics today.

For some past leaders, there was never a tension at all. When the U.S. seized its first inhabited overseas colonies in 1898, some proudly wore the label. “I am, as I expected I would be, a pretty good imperialist,” Theodore Roosevelt mused to a British friend while on safari in East Africa in 1910. But as the costs of full-on annexation became clear, and control through influence and subterfuge became the modus operandi of U.S. empire, American leaders reverted seamlessly back to republican rhetoric.

The denial deepened during the Cold War. In 1955, the historian William Appleman Williams wrote, “One of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American Empire.” It was essential for the conflict against the Soviet Union — “the Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan would call it — to heighten the supposed contrasts: They overthrew governments, we defended legitimate ones; they were expansionist, we went abroad only in defense of freedom.

As long as the United States seemed eternally ascendant, it was easy to tell ourselves, as Americans, that the global dominance of U.S. capital and the unparalleled reach of the U.S. military had been coincidences, or fate; that America’s rise as a cultural and economic superpower was just natural — a galaxy of individual choices, freely made, by a planet hungry for an endless supply of Marvel superheroes and the perfect salty crunch of McDonald’s fries.

But the illusion is fading. The myth of American invulnerability was shattered by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The attempt to recover a sense of dominance resulted in the catastrophic “forever wars” launched in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. The deaths of well over half a million Americans in the coronavirus pandemic, and our seeming inability to halt or contend with the threats of climate change, are further reminders that we can neither accumulate nor consume our way out of a fragile and interconnected world.

As I looked through history to find the origins of the patterns of self-dealing and imperiousness that mark so much of American policy, I kept running into the Quaker Marine with the funny name. Smedley Butler’s military career started in the place where the United States’ overseas empire truly began, and the place that continues to symbolize the most egregious abuses of American power: Guantánamo Bay. His last overseas deployment, in China from 1927 to 1929, gave him a front-row seat to both the start of the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists and the slowly materializing Japanese invasion that would ultimately open World War II.

In the years between, Butler blazed a path for U.S. empire, helping seize the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, and invading and helping plunder Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and more. Butler was also a pioneer of the militarization of police: first spearheading the creation of client police forces across Latin America, then introducing those tactics to U.S. cities during a two-year stint running the Philadelphia police during Prohibition.

Yet Butler would spend the last decade of his life trying to keep the forces of tyranny and violence he had unleashed abroad from consuming the country he loved. He watched the rise of fascism in Europe with alarm. In 1935, Butler published a short book about the collusion between business and the armed forces called War Is a Racket. The warnings in that thin volume would be refined and amplified years later by his fellow general, turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, whose speechwriters would dub it the military-industrial complex.

Late in 1935, Butler would go further, declaring in a series of articles for a radical magazine: “Only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria, and the African attack of Mussolini.”

Butler was not just throwing stones. In that article, he repeatedly called himself a racketeer — a gangster — and enumerated his crimes:

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.…

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

Butler was telling a messier story than the ones Americans like to hear about ourselves. But we ignore the past at our peril. Americans may not recognize the events Butler referred to in his confession, but America’s imperial history is well remembered in the places we invaded and conquered — where leaders and elites use it and shape it to their own ends. Nowhere is more poised to use its colonial past to its future advantage than China, once a moribund kingdom in which U.S. forces, twice led by Butler, intervened at will in the early 20th century. As they embark on their own imperial project across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Chinese officials use their self-story of “national humiliation” to position themselves as an antidote to American control, finding willing audiences in countries grappling with their own histories of subjugation by the United States.

The dangers are greater at home. Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-20th-century imperial chestnuts — militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood — with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made, by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.

To those who did not know or have ignored America’s imperial history, it could seem that Trump was an alien force (“This is not who we are,” as the liberal saying goes), or that the implosion of his presidency has made it safe to slip back into comfortable amnesias. But the movement Trump built — a movement that stormed the Capitol, tried to overturn an election, and, as I write these words, still dreams of reinstalling him by force — is too firmly rooted in America’s past to be dislodged without substantial effort. It is a product of the greed, bigotry, and denialism that were woven into the structure of U.S. global supremacy from the beginning — forces that now threaten to break apart not only the empire but the society that birthed it.

On Nov. 20, 1934, readers of the New York Post were startled by a headline: “Gen. Butler Accuses N.Y. Brokers of Plotting Dictatorship in U.S.; $3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared; Says He Was Asked to Lead 500,000 for Capital ‘Putsch’; U.S. Probing Charge.”

Smedley Butler revealed the Business Plot before a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities. The executive session was held in the supper room of the New York City Bar Association on West 44th Street. Present were the committee chairman, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, and vice chairman, Samuel Dickstein of New York.

For 30 minutes, Butler told the story, starting with the first visit of the bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire to his house in Newtown Square in 1933.

Finally, Butler told the congressmen about his last meeting with MacGuire at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. At that meeting, Butler testified, MacGuire had told him to expect to see a powerful organization forming to back the putsch from behind the scenes. “He says: ‘You watch. In two or three weeks you will see it come out in the paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera.’” The bond salesman told the Marine this group would advertise itself as a “society to maintain the Constitution.”

“And in about two weeks,” Butler told the congressmen, “the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be.”

The Liberty League was announced on Aug. 23, 1934, on the front page of The New York Times. The article quoted its founders’ claim that it was a “nonpartisan group” whose aim was to “combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the Constitution.” Its real goal, other observers told the Times, was to oppose the New Deal and the taxes and controls it promised to impose on their fortunes.

Among the Liberty League’s principal founders was the multimillionaire Irénée du Pont, former president of the explosives and chemical manufacturing giant. Other backers included the head of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, as well as executives of Phillips Petroleum, Sun Oil, General Foods, and the McCann Erickson ad agency. The former Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and John W. Davis — both of them foes of FDR, the latter counsel to J.P. Morgan & Co. — were among the League’s members as well. Its treasurer was MacGuire’s boss, Grayson Murphy.

Sitting beside Butler in the hearing room was the journalist who wrote the Post article, Paul Comly French. Knowing the committee might find his story hard to swallow — or easy to suppress — Butler had called on the reporter, whom he knew from his time running the Philadelphia police, to conduct his own investigation. French told the congressmen what MacGuire had told him: “We need a fascist government in this country, he insisted, to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”

MacGuire, the journalist added, had “continually discussed the need of a man on a white horse, as he called it, a dictator who would come galloping in on his white horse. He said that was the only way to save the capitalistic system.”

Butler added one more enticing detail. MacGuire had told him that his group in the plot — presumably a clique headed by Grayson Murphy — was eager to have Butler lead the coup, but that “the Morgan interests” — that is, bankers or businessmen connected to J. P. Morgan & Co. — were against him. “The Morgan interests say you cannot be trusted, that you are too radical and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow,” he said the bond salesman had explained. They preferred a more authoritarian general: Douglas MacArthur.

All of these were, in essence, merely leads. The committee would have to investigate to make the case in full. What evidence was there to show that anyone beside MacGuire, and likely Murphy, had known about the plot? How far had the planning gone? Was Butler — or whoever would lead the coup — to be the “man on a white horse,” or were they simply to pave the way for the dictator who would “save the capitalistic system”?

But the committee’s investigation would be brief and conducted in an atmosphere of overweening incredulity. As soon as Butler’s allegations became public, the most powerful men in media did everything they could to cast doubt on them and the Marine. The New York Times fronted its story with the denials of the accused: Grayson M.P. Murphy called it “a fantasy.” “Perfect moonshine! Too unutterably ridiculous to comment upon!” exclaimed Thomas W. Lamont, the senior partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. “He’d better be damn careful,” said the ex-Army general and ex-FDR administration official Hugh S. Johnson, whom Butler said was mooted as a potential “secretary of general affairs.” “Nobody said a word to me about anything of the kind, and if they did, I’d throw them out the window.”

Douglas MacArthur called it “the best laugh story of the year.”

Time magazine lampooned the allegations in a satire headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” The writer imagined Butler on horseback, spurs clinking, as he led a column of half a million men and bankers up Pennsylvania Avenue. In an unsigned editorial, Adolph Ochs’ New York Times likened Butler to an early-20th-century Prussian con man.

There would only be one other witness of note before the committee. MacGuire spent three days testifying before McCormack and Dickstein, contradicting, then likely perjuring himself. He admitted having met the Croix de Feu in Paris, though he claimed it was in passing at a mass at Notre-Dame. The bond salesman also admitted having met many times with Butler — but insisted, implausibly, that it was Butler who told him he was involved with “some vigilante committee somewhere,” and that the bond salesman had tried to talk him out of it.

There was no further inquiry. The committee was disbanded at the end of 1934. McCormack argued, unpersuasively, that it was not necessary to subpoena Grayson Murphy because the committee already had “cold evidence linking him with this movement.”

“We did not want,” the future speaker of the House added, “to give him a chance to pose as an innocent victim.”

The committee’s final report was both complimentary to Butler and exceptionally vague:

In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country There is no question but that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

The committee said it had “verified all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.” But it named no one directly in connection with the alleged coup.

Was there a Business Plot? In the absence of a full investigation, it is difficult to say. It seems MacGuire was convinced he was a front man for one. (He would not live long enough to reveal more: Four months after the hearings, the bond salesman died at the age of 37.)

It seems possible that at least some of the alleged principals’ denials were honest. MacGuire’s claim that all the members of the Liberty League were planning to back a coup against Roosevelt does not make it so. The incredulity with which men like Thomas Lamont and Douglas MacArthur greeted the story could be explained by the possibility that they had not heard of such a plan before Butler blew the whistle.

But it is equally plausible that, had Butler not come forward, or had MacGuire approached someone else, the coup or something like it might have been attempted. Several alleged in connection with the plot were avid fans of fascism. Lamont described himself as “something like a missionary” for Mussolini, as he made J.P. Morgan one of fascist Italy’s main overseas banking partners. The American Legion, an alleged source of manpower for the putsch, featured yearly convention greetings from “a wounded soldier in the Great War … his excellency, Benito Mussolini.” The capo del governo himself was invited to speak at the 1930 convention, until the invitation was rescinded amid protests from organized labor.

Hugh S. Johnson, Time’s 1933 Man of the Year, had lavishly praised the “shining name” of Mussolini and the fascist stato corporativo as models of anti-labor collectivism while running the New Deal’s short-lived National Recovery Administration. Johnson’s firing by FDR from the NRA in September 1934 was predicted by MacGuire, who told Butler the former Army general had “talked too damn much.” (Johnson would later help launch the Nazi-sympathizing America First Committee, though he soon took pains to distance himself from the hardcore antisemites in the group.)

Nothing lends more plausibility to the idea that a coup to sideline Roosevelt was at least discussed — and that Butler’s name was floated to lead it — than the likely involvement of MacGuire’s boss, the banker Grayson M.P. Murphy. The financier’s biography reads like a shadow version of Butler’s. Born in Philadelphia, he transferred to West Point during the war against Spain. Murphy then joined the Military Intelligence Division, running spy missions in the Philippines in 1902 and Panama in 1903. Then he entered the private sector, helping J.P. Morgan conduct “dollar diplomacy” in the Dominican Republic and Honduras. In 1920, Murphy toured war-ravaged Europe to make “intelligence estimates and establish a private intelligence network” with William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan — who would later lead the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. This was the résumé of someone who, at the very least, knew his way around the planning of a coup.

Again, all of that is circumstantial evidence; none of it points definitively to a plan to overthrow the U.S. government. But it was enough to warrant further investigation. So why did no one look deeper at the time? Why was the idea that a president could be overthrown by a conspiracy of well-connected businessmen — and a few armed divisions led by a rabble-rousing general — considered so ridiculous that the mere suggestion was met with peals of laughter across America?

Credit: St Martins Press

It was because, for decades, Americans had been trained to react in just that way: by excusing, covering up, or simply laughing away all evidence that showed how many of those same people had been behind similar schemes all over the world. Butler had led troops on the bankers’ behalf to overthrow presidents in Nicaragua and Honduras, and gone on a spy run to investigate regime change on behalf of the oil companies in Mexico. He had risked his Marines’ lives for Standard Oil in China and worked with Murphy’s customs agents in an invasion that helped lead to a far-right dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, Butler had done what even the Croix de Feu and its French fascist allies could not: shut down a national assembly at gunpoint.

In his own country, in his own time, Smedley Butler drew a line. “My interest, my one hobby, is maintaining a democracy,” he told the bond salesman. Butler clung to an idea of America as a place where the whole of the people chose their leaders, the “little guy” got a fair shot against the powerful, and everyone could live free from tyranny. It was an idea that had never existed in practice for all, and seldom for most. As long as Americans refused to grasp the reality of what their country actually was — of what their soldiers and emissaries did with their money and in their name all over the world — the idea would remain a self-defeating fairy tale. Still, as long as that idea of America survived, there was a chance its promise might be realized.

The real danger, Butler knew, lay in that idea’s negation. If a faction gained power that exemplified the worst of America’s history and instincts — with a leader willing to use his capital and influence to destroy what semblance of democracy existed for his own ends — that faction could overwhelm the nation’s fragile institutions and send one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen tumbling irretrievably into darkness.

Twenty-one U.S. presidential elections later, on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood before an angry crowd on the White House Ellipse. For weeks, Trump had urged supporters to join him in an action against the joint session of Congress slated to recognize his opponent, Joe Biden, as the next president that day. Among the thousands who heeded his call were white supremacists, neo-Nazis, devotees of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory, far-right militias, and elements of his most loyal neo-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. “It is time for war,” a speaker at a warm-up rally the night before had declared.

On the rally stage, the defeated president spoke with the everyman style and bluntness of a Smedley Butler. He mirrored the Marine’s rhetoric, too, saying his purpose was to “save our democracy.” But that was not really his goal. Trump, and his faction, wanted to destroy the election — to dismantle democracy rather than cede power to a multiethnic, cross-class majority who had chosen someone else. Trump lied to the thousands in winter coats and “Make America Great Again” hats by claiming he still had a legitimate path to victory. His solution: to intimidate his vice president and Congress into ignoring the Constitution and refusing to certify the election, opening the door for a critical mass of loyal state governments to reverse their constituents’ votes and declare him the winner instead. In this, Trump echoed the French fascists of 1934, who claimed their attack on parliament would defend the popular will against “socialist influence” and “give the nation the leaders it deserves.”

Trump then did what the Business Plotters — however many there were — could not. He sent his mob, his version of Mussolini’s Black Shirts and the Croix de Feu, to storm the Capitol. “We fight like hell,” the 45th president instructed them. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

It was not just Trump’s personal embodiment of fascist logic and authoritarian populism that should have prepared Americans for the Jan. 6 attack. Over a century of imperial violence had laid the groundwork for the siege at the heart of U.S. democracy.

Many of the putschists, including a 35-year-old California woman shot to death by police as she tried to break into the lobby leading to the House floor, were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some wore tactical armor and carried “flex cuffs” — nylon restraints the military and police use for mass arrests of insurgents and dissidents. The QAnon rioters were devotees of a supposed “military intelligence” officer who prophesized, among other things, the imminent detention and execution of liberals at Guantánamo. A Washington Post reporter heard some of the rioters chanting for “military tribunals.”

Even many of those opposed to the insurrection struggled to see what was happening: that the boundaries between the center and the periphery were collapsing. “I expected violent assault on democracy as a U.S. Marine in Iraq. I never imagined it as a United States congressman in America,” Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote as he sheltered in the Capitol complex. George W. Bush, the president who ordered Moulton into Baghdad, observed: “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic.” Watching from home, I wished Smedley Butler was around to remind the former president how those “banana republics” came to be.

A few weeks after the siege, I talked to Butler’s 85-year-old granddaughter, Philippa Wehle. I asked her over Skype what her grandfather would have thought of the events of Jan. 6.

Her hazel eyes narrowed as she pondered: “I think he would have been in there. He would have been in the fray somehow.”

For an unsettling moment, I was unsure what she meant. Butler had much in common with both sides of the siege: Like Trump’s mob, he had often doubted the validity of democracy when practiced by nonwhites. (The most prominent Trumpist conspiracy theories about purported fraud in the 2020 election centered on cities with large immigrant and Black populations.) Like many of the putschists, Butler saw himself as a warrior for the “little guy” against a vast constellation of elite interests — even though he, also like most of the Capitol attackers, was relatively well-off. Moreover, the greatest proportion of veterans arrested in connection with the attempted putsch were Marines. An active-duty Marine major — a field artillery officer at Quantico — was caught on video pushing open the doors to the East Rotunda and accused by federal prosecutors of allowing other rioters to stream in.

But I knew too that Butler had taken his stand for democracy and against the Business Plot. I would like to think he would have seen through Trump as well. Butler had rejected the radio host Father Charles Coughlin’s proto-Trumpian brand of red-baiting, antisemetic conspiratorial populism, going so far as to inform FBI director J. Edgar Hoover of an alleged 1936 effort involving the reactionary priest to overthrow the left-leaning government of Mexico. When a reporter for the Marxist magazine New Masses asked Butler “just where he stood politically” in the wake of the Business Plot, he name-checked several of the most left-leaning members of Congress, and said the only group he would give his “blanket approval to” was the American Federation of Labor. Butler added that he would not only “die to preserve democracy” but also, crucially, “fight to broaden it.”

Perhaps it would have come down to timing: at what point in his life the attack on the government might have taken place.

“Do you think he would have been with the people storming the Capitol?” I asked Philippa, tentatively.

This time she answered immediately. “No! Heavens no. He would have been trying to do something about it.” He might have been killed, she added, given that the police were so unprepared. “Which is so disturbing, because of course they should have known. They would have known. They only had to read the papers.”

From Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Click here to pre-order.

ROLLING STONE 

ECOCIDE

Massive sewage spill closes California beaches

Fri, December 31, 2021

(Reuters) - A massive spill of raw sewage in California on Friday forced the city of Long Beach to close all swimming areas at nearby beaches, officials said.

Between 2 million and 4 million gallons (7.6 million to 15 million liters) of raw sewage leaked into the Dominguez Channel, which empties into the Los Angeles harbor, it was discovered on Thursday, according to a press release from the City of Long Beach.

The leak occurred in the city of Carson and was caused by the failure of a 48-inch sewer main line, the release stated. It was not immediately clear why the line failed.

City water quality teams from Long Beach are testing the level of pollutants in the affected areas, which includes 7 miles (11 km) of beaches. Swimming in the waters will remain prohibited until the amounts of pollution return to within normal levels.

Tourists in the area for New Year's celebrations were disappointed with the news.

"You come all this way and you don't get to play in the sand or the ocean? That doesn't seem fair," Sandi Williams, who had traveled from suburban Massachusetts, told the Los Angeles Times. "We were so looking forward to this change in scenery, but like everywhere, there's catastrophe."

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Massive sewage spill closes California beaches


(Reuters) - A massive spill of raw sewage in California on Friday forced the city of Long Beach to close all swimming areas at nearby beaches, officials said.

© Reuters/DAVID SWANSONMillions of gallons of untreated sewage closes Los Angeles area beaches

Between 2 million and 4 million gallons (7.6 million to 15 million liters) of raw sewage leaked into the Dominguez Channel, which empties into the Los Angeles harbor, it was discovered on Thursday, according to a press release from the City of Long Beach.

The leak occurred in the city of Carson and was caused by the failure of a 48-inch sewer main line, the release stated. It was not immediately clear why the line failed.


© Reuters/DAVID SWANSONMillions of gallons of untreated sewage closes Los Angeles area beaches

Rains pound Southern California amid major storm

City water quality teams from Long Beach are testing the level of pollutants in the affected areas, which includes 7 miles (11 km) of beaches. Swimming in the waters will remain prohibited until the amounts of pollution return to within normal levels.


© Reuters/DAVID SWANSONMillions of gallons of untreated sewage closes Los Angeles area beaches

Tourists in the area for New Year's celebrations were disappointed with the news.

"You come all this way and you don't get to play in the sand or the ocean? That doesn't seem fair," Sandi Williams, who had traveled from suburban Massachusetts, told the Los Angeles Times. "We were so looking forward to this change in scenery, but like everywhere, there's catastrophe."


© Reuters/DAVID SWANSONMillions of gallons of untreated sewage closes Los Angeles area beaches

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)