Border resident says she never felt unsafe until 'God’s Army' convoy showed up

David Edwards
February 4, 2024 

Photo: Screencapture/Twitter video

Residents of a small Texas border town are feeling uneasy after a right-wing convoy showed up to protest immigration policies.
According to NBC News, the so-called "God's Army" border convoy began on Friday and was set to visit three border spots over the weekend.

On Sunday, the group of vehicles came to Eagle Pass, TX.

Residents gathered in the city and called for the convoy to leave. One woman said she felt unsafe in her town for the first time.

"I've always felt very safe here, so I would say it's a good place to raise your children," the woman explained. "Today, downtown, was the first day that I felt unsafe just walking down the street in broad daylight."

A clip of the woman's remarks was shared on X (formerly Twitter).

See the image below or at the link here.

Goofy 'God's Army' convoy on Texas border shows Trump's MAGA movement is just one long con

Convoy riders came, in underwhelming numbers, and accomplished little beyond showing everyone how tragically gullible they are. That's MAGA in a nutshell: loud and, in the end, impotent.

Rex Huppke
USA TODAY

It’s time for non-brainwashed Americans and the media at large to accept something: Former President Donald Trump’s “MAGA movement” is a tissue-paper tiger.

This was on vivid display in Texas over the weekend. A much-ballyhooed convoy of MAGA patriots descended on a town near the southern border, ostensibly ready to protect America from what right-wing politicians like Gov. Greg Abbott cynically, dangerously and falsely call “an invasion.”

The “God’s Army” convoy was supposed to be a mighty force of 700,000 or more people from every corner of America. It wound up being maybe a couple hundred vehicles parked at a rural ranch in Quemado, Texas – basically a Trump rally without a Trump, but with plenty of hucksters selling MAGA merch and grifting the easily grifted.

MAGA was promised a Texas border 'invasion,' but it wasn't there

Some actually visited the border in nearby Eagle Pass, Texas, and were surprised to not witness the invasion they had been promised.
Convoy-goer Misty Gregory told MSNBC: “It’s not what I expected, but then again I don’t know what I expected. I can tell you it’s not as bad as what I thought, so that’s kind of eye-opening in itself.”

Abbott and about a dozen other pro-razor-wire GOP governors were in Eagle Pass on Sunday, hollering and whatnot. Some residents said the recent invasion of Trump supporters from the convoy had been downright scary.

“We are constantly being told that we’re being invaded, and that never felt true until today, when the convoy came to town in anticipation of the governors’ event,” Jessie F. Fuentes told WOAI NBC News Channel 4. “This is political theater by outsiders. The reality is that it has brought dangerous, violent groups into our beautiful, peaceful city. Eagle Pass is safer than most cities in America if you look at crime statistics. This is just a fact. We don’t appreciate these staged events that dramatically misrepresent our reality on the border and that invite extremist groups that pose a real danger to people in our community.”

In Texas, the MAGA movement again reveals its impotence

So God’s Army's foot soldiers came, in underwhelming numbers, and accomplished little beyond showing everyone how tragically gullible they are and making the locals twitchy. That’s MAGA in a nutshell: loud, threatening and, in the end, impotent.

Trump won the presidency in 2016, and he hasn’t won a thing since. He’s the face of this supposedly forceful political movement, but the movement mirrors its creator, a loudmouth con artist who overpromises and rarely delivers a thing.

The wall? Mexico paying for the wall? The border crisis fixed? Nope, nope and nope.

Why politicians take action:

Fixing the border crisis is bad for Trump and good for Biden. That's the problem.

The 'God's Army' convoy, like all things MAGA, was a grift

MAGA is and always has been a con to line the pockets of Trump and others who saw a swath of Americans waiting to be fleeced. The fact that our border is not now lined with big, strong, gun-toting patriots willing to defend America at all costs is not surprising.

MAGA says: “WE ARE COMING BY THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS!” Then MAGA delivers a crowd that resembles a small county fair on a slow day, populated by a mix of conspiracy theorists, angry xenophobes and slightly befuddled hangers-on who didn’t get what they were promised.

Bipartisan border bill shows actual attempt to address crisis

On Sunday in Washington, D.C., a bipartisan Senate bill to address the border crisis was released. It’s a serious piece of legislation that includes about $20 billion in border funds. It deserves strong consideration, but the Trump loyalists in the House have already declared it dead on arrival.

After the Senate bill was released, President Joe Biden said: “The United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?”

Oh, they’ll definitely want to keep playing politics with the border. Because that’s what Trump – the MAGA king – has told them to do.

People treat MAGA like an unstoppable force, but it's not

But they are being cowed by a weenie movement that’s all smoke and mirrors. There are loud influencers who puff up the strength of MAGA, and there are, sadly, many in the political press who buy in and amplify that belief.

But MAGA, at least since Trump first took office, has been a losing movement. It’s not unstoppable. It’s not a 700,000-person convoy of devoted citizen soldiers descending on Texas in a show of force.

Biden's woke economy:True MAGA patriots must remove themselves from Biden’s booming economy, cash out 401(k)s

It’s a comically disorganized and useless parade of con artists and the conned, drifting from one apocalyptic grievance to the next.

The border is a serious issue. But God’s Army and Trump and his slavish enablers in the House are not serious people.

MAGA, for all its bluster, is a joke without a punchline. The sooner people recognize that the better.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

DeSantis and Florida GOP targeting kids with cuts to food, healthcare, work protections

David Badash

, The New Civil Rights Movement
February 5, 2024

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)


A central theme of Ron DeSantis' reign as Florida's culture war GOP governor and in his now-defunct presidential campaign has been "parental rights," a far-right movement that began by empowering right-wing parents' political and social grievances at the expense of children's rights to a complete and well-rounded education, while ignoring the rights and needs of children.

Governor DeSantis' infamous "Don't Say Gay" law, first launched to include just children up to third grade, then expanded to all public school grades, was just the beginning.

Now, Florida Republicans including Governor DeSantis are moving to take healthcare, food, and workplace protections away from children.

"DeSantis and conservative/Trumpian/MAGA public officials" are "disassembling Florida’s social service safety net," according to an op-ed by Barrington Salmon at the Florida Phoenix.

They are "refusing to allocate money or enough of it for school lunch programs to feed hungry children; rejecting no-strings-attached federal government dollars to expand Medicaid that would allow the state to enroll 1.4 million people; not prioritizing access to quality healthcare; continuing to siphon off money from traditional public schools to give to church-affiliated and private schools, and passing punishing draconian laws to further alienate and marginalize gay, transgender and LGBTQ children and teens," Salmon writes.

Indeed, last week, after having already kicked 420,000 children off Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Governor DeSantis sued the Biden administration over a new federal law that requires children be allowed to stay on Medicaid for at least 12 months, regardless of challenges to their eligibility or their ability to pay, Axios reported. The governor wants the ability to remove even more children from the life-saving healthcare program.

READ MORE: ‘Mutiny’: Far Right GOP Senators Start to Give McConnell the McCarthy Treatment

At issue is the federal government's policy that even if a child's parents cannot or do not pay, the child cannot be kicked off or denied benefits for at least 12 months.

DeSantis, in his federal lawsuit, says that amounts to a "free-for-all," but Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, is warning what DeSantis is doing is "harmful."

“If he is successful, the Governor will ensure that more children in Florida will spend more time being uninsured. He’s not stopping there – he’s seeking to remove the protection for all children in separate CHIP programs that charge premiums. This is harmful and puts children’s health and educational outcomes at risk in both the short and the long term," Alker said in a statement.

“This comes on top of Medicaid unwinding where Florida has the second worst performance in the country having terminated Medicaid coverage for over 400,000 children. (Only Texas has a worse record.) The new federal protection for children was designed in part to mitigate against inappropriate losses of Medicaid and CHIP for eligible children resulting from red tape and shoddy customer support for families renewing coverage – problems which have been on stark display recently in Florida,” she adds.

The attacks on children and their safety net in Florida continues to expand under DeSantis' leadership.

"Gov. Ron DeSantis and state administrators have rejected at least $11 billion in federal funds in the past few years, saying there were strings attached, they 'politicized' roads or fought climate change," the Orlando Sentinel reported last month. "The programs affected include an expansion of Medicaid, rebates for energy-saving appliances and upgrades, a program to cut motor vehicle emissions, and summer lunches for children from low-income families. Millions of mostly low-income Floridians could have benefited from the funding, the governor’s critics say."

READ MORE: Ex-Florida GOP Chair Asserts Crime Victim’s Law Shields Him Amid 3-Way Sex Scandal

U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) last month in a statement blasted DeSantis for rejecting nearly $250 million in federal funds for summer school lunches for Florida's children, calling it "cruel and unnecessary," and "mean and irresponsible."


“Just last year, 47 percent of Florida parents reported difficulties keeping food on the table for their families — a startling reality that has pushed too many families to skip meals or go an entire day without eating. However, instead of confronting this growing crisis, Governor DeSantis will deprive Florida children of nutritious meals," Rep. Castor wrote.

Meanwhile, also last week, Florida Republican lawmakers passed legislation greatly reducing workplace protections for Florida's children.

The Florida House "passed a measure allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work more than 30 hours a week and as late as 11 p.m. on a school night," Florida Politics reports.

The bill's sponsor, state GOP Rep. Linda Chaney, "said the bill merely offered opportunities for teens to work more flexible hours."

“This bill is about choice and opportunity for families. I trust that our families and our teens will make the right choice for them,” Chaney said, while House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell denounced the legislation..

“This is 2024 this is not the 1900s, this is not the 1800s,” Driskell said. “Just because our kids like to play Minecraft doesn’t mean we should send them back into the mines.”


The Florida Senate has a "more expansive," bill, "allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work starting at 5:30 a.m. and until midnight on a school night." There is also an alternative version "that would bar 16- and 17-year-olds from commercial construction sites while allowing them on jobs with scaffolding, roofs and ladders under six feet."

READ MORE: ‘Each Person’ Will ‘Serve’ Jesus: Embattled Republican’s Christian Nationalism Revealed

Amnesty Condemns Israeli Military's 'Shocking' Violence Against West Bank Civilians

"These unlawful killings are in blatant violation of international human rights law," said the rights group.


Relatives mourn over the body of Palestinian Yazan Al-Najmi during his funeral on January 18, 2024. Nine Palestinians were killed in an Israeli drone strike that targeted two camps in the West Bank.
(Photo: Ayman Nobani/picture alliance via Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY
Feb 05, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

While Israeli officials continue to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Israel Defense Forces are targeting Hamas in their bombardment of occupied Palestine, a new report from Amnesty International on Monday details the extent to which the military has frequently used lethal force against civilians across the West Bank in addition to the more than 27,000 people it has killed in Gaza.

Calling for an investigation into possible war crimes, the group said it had analyzed four cases in which the IDF has used "unlawful lethal force" against people in the occupied West Bank and blocked medical professionals from reaching injured residents, with Amnesty's Crisis Evidence Lab verifying 19 videos and four photos of the incidents.

The events documented in the report account for the deaths of 20 Palestinians, including seven children. Since October 7, when the IDF began attacking the West Bank and Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, at least 360 people have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, including 94 children, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).




Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty's director of global research, advocacy, and policy, said the surge in unlawful deadly attacks in the West Bank have been perpetrated "under the cover of the relentless bombardment and atrocity crimes in Gaza."

"These unlawful killings are in blatant violation of international human rights law and are committed with impunity in the context of maintaining Israel's institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination over Palestinians," said Guevara-Rosas. "These cases provide shocking evidence of the deadly consequences of Israel's unlawful use of force against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli authorities, including the Israeli judicial system, have proven shamefully unwilling to ensure justice for Palestinian victims."

The report was released days after a team of Israeli forces disguised themselves as medical staff and civilians and raided Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin, killing three Palestinians who they claimed—without evidence—were planning an attack on Israel.

OCHA has recorded a sharp increase in "search and arrest operations" by the IDF in the occupied West Bank since October 7, with 54% of the 4,382 Palestinians injured in Israel's assault sustaining their injuries during raids.

In the early days of the Israeli onslaught, 13 people, including six children, were killed during a raid on Nour Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem that began on October 19 and went on for 30 hours. IDF soldiers "stormed more than 40 residential homes, destroying personal belongings and drilling holes in the walls for sniper outposts" during the operation, which Israel said was in response to an improvised explosive device that was thrown at border police by Palestinians.

Israeli authorities cut off water and electricity to the camp and used bulldozers to destroy infrastructure, while stopping at least two ambulances from reaching people who were injured.

One person killed in the raid was 15-year-old Taha Mahami, who was "unarmed and posed no threat to the soldiers at the time he was shot, based on witness testimony and videos reviewed by Amnesty International."

"They did not give him a chance. In an instant, my brother was eliminated," said Fatima Mahamid, the victim's sister. "Three bullets were fired without any mercy. The first bullet hit him in the leg. The second—in his stomach. Third, in his eye. There were no confrontations… there was no conflict."

When the children's father, Ibrahim Mahamid, tried to carry his injured son out of the line of fire, he was shot in the back by the IDF, sustaining damage to his internal organs.

"Neither Taha nor Ibrahim Mahamid posed a threat to security forces or anyone else when they were shot," said Amnesty. "This unnecessary use of lethal force should be investigated as possible war crimes of wilful killing and willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health."

In another "egregious" incident in October in Tulkarem, two eyewitnesses interviewed by Amnesty described Israeli forces opening fire from a watch tower on a crowd of at least 80 people who were holding a peaceful protest in solidarity with Gaza.

IDF soldiers opened fire on journalists wearing clearly visible "Press" markings as well as on a Palestinian man who was riding past the protest on a bike.

By carrying out such attacks, said Amnesty, Israel is violating international standards including the U.N. Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials.

"These standards prohibit the use of force by law enforcement officials unless strictly necessary and to the extent required for the performance of their duty and require that firearms may only be used as a last resort—when strictly necessary for military personnel or police to protect themselves or others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury," said the group. "Willful killings of protected persons and willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to protected persons are grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and war crimes."

Guevara-Rosas said the incidents documented in the report, and the Israeli onslaught in the West Bank and Gaza as a whole, "is a litmus test for the legitimacy and reputation" of the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes war crimes, and that "it cannot afford to fail it."

"In this climate of near total impunity, an international justice system worth its salt must step in," said Guevara-Rosas. "The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court must investigate these killings and injuries as possible war crimes of willful killing and willfully causing great suffering or serious injury."

Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and Authoritarian Backlash

Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.

By Bob Berwin

February 4, 2024

Source: Inside Climate News




As Earth’s annual average temperature pushes against the 1.5 degree Celsius limit beyond which climatologists expect the impacts of global warming to intensify, social scientists warn that humanity may be about to sleepwalk into a dangerous new era in human history. Research shows the increasing climate shocks could trigger more social unrest and authoritarian, nationalist backlashes.

Established by the 2015 Paris Agreement and affirmed by a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 1.5 degree mark has been a cliff edge that climate action has endeavored to avoid, but the latest analyses of global temperature data showed 2023 teetering on that red line.

One major dataset suggested that the threshold was already crossed in 2023, and most projections say 2024 will be even warmer. Current global climate policies have the world on a path to heat by about 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would threaten modern human civilization within the lifespan of children born today.

Paris negotiators were intentionally vague about the endeavor to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the goal in the context of 30-year global averages. Earlier this month, the Berkeley Earth annual climate report showed Earth’s average temperature in 2023 at 1.54 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, marking the first step past the target.

But it’s barely registering with people who are being bombarded with inaccurate climate propaganda and distracted by the rising cost of living and regional wars, said Reinhard Steurer, a climate researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.

“The real danger is that there are so many other crises around us that there is no effort left for the climate crisis,” he said. “We will find all kinds of reasons not to put more effort into climate protection, because we are overburdened with other things like inflation and wars all around us.”

Steurer said he doesn’t expect any official announcement from major climate institutions until long after the 1.5 degree threshold is actually crossed, when some years will probably already be edging toward 2 degrees Celsius. “I think most scientists recognize that 1.5 is gone,” he said.

“We’ll be doing this for a very long time,” he added, “not accepting facts, pretending that we are doing a good job, pretending that it’s not going to be that bad.”

In retrospect, using the 1.5 degree temperature rise as the key metric of whether climate action was working may have been a bad idea, he said.

“It’s language nobody really understands, unfortunately, outside of science,” he said. ”You always have to explain that 1.5 means a climate we can adapt to and manage the consequences, 2 degrees of heating is really dangerous, and 3 means collapse of civilization.”

Absent any formal notification of breaching the 1.5 goal, he hopes more scientists talk publicly about worst-case outcomes.

“It would really make a difference if scientists talked more about societal collapse and how to prepare for that because it would signal, now it’s getting real,” he said. “It’s much more tangible than 1.5 degrees.”

Instead, recent public climate discourse was dominated by feel-good announcements about how COP28 kept the 1.5 goal alive, he added.

“This is classic performative politics,” he said. “If the fossil fuel industry can celebrate the outcome of the COP, that’s not a good sign.”

Like many social scientists, Steurer is worried that the increasingly severe climate shocks that warming greater than 1.5 degrees brings will reverberate politically as people reach for easy answers.

“That is usually denial, in particular when it comes to right-wing parties,” he said. “That’s the easiest answer you can find.”

“Global warming will be catastrophic sooner or later, but for now, denial works,” he said. “And that’s all that matters for the next election.”
‘Fear, Terror and Anxiety’

Social policy researcher Paul Hoggett, professor emeritus at the University of the West of England in Bristol, said the scientific roots of 1.5-degree target date back to research in the early 2000s that culminated in a University of Exeter climate conference at which scientists first spelled out the risks of triggering irreversible climate tipping points above that level of warming.

“I think it’s still seen very much as that key marker of where we move from something which is incremental, perhaps to something which ceases to be incremental,” he said. “But there’s a second reality, which is the reality of politics and policymaking.”

The first reality is “profoundly disturbing,” but in the political world, 1.5 is a symbolic maker, he said.

“It’s more rhetorical; it’s a narrative of 1.5,” he said, noting the disconnect of science and policy. “You almost just shrug your shoulders. As the first reality worsens, the political and cultural response becomes more perverse.”

A major announcement about breaching the 1.5 mark in today’s political and social climate could be met with extreme denial in a political climate marked by “a remorseless rise of authoritarian forms of nationalism,” he said. “Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

An increasing number of right-wing narratives simply see this as a set of lies, he added.

“I think this is a huge issue that is going to become more and more important in the coming years,” he said. “We’re going backwards to where we were 20 years ago, when there was a real attempt to portray climate science as misinformation,” he said. “More and more right wing commentators will portray what comes out of the IPCC, for example, as just a pack of lies.”

The IPCC’s reports represent a basic tenet of modernity—the idea that there is no problem for which a solution cannot be found, he said.


“Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

“However, over the last 100 years, this assumption has periodically been put to the test and has been found wanting,” Hoggett wrote in a 2023 paper. The climate crisis is one of those situations with no obvious solution, he wrote.

In a new book, Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition, Hoggett says the climate emergency is one of the big drivers of authoritarian nationalism, which plays on the terror and anxiety the crisis inspires.

“Those are crucial political and individual emotions,” he said. “And it’s those things that drive this non-rational refusal to see what’s in front of your eyes.”

“At times of such huge uncertainty, a veritable plague of toxic public feelings can be unleashed, which provide the effective underpinning for political movements such as populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism,” he said.

“When climate reality starts to get tough, you secure your borders, you secure your own sources of food and energy, and you keep out the rest of them. That’s the politics of the armed lifeboat.”
The Emotional Climate

“I don’t think people like facing things they can’t affect,” said psychotherapist Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. “And in trauma, people do everything that they possibly can to stop feeling what is unbearable to feel.”

That may be one reason why the imminent breaching of the 1.5 degree limit may not stir the public, she said.

“We protect ourselves from fear, we protect ourselves from deep grief on behalf of future generations and we protect ourselves from guilt and shame. And I think that the fossil fuel industry knows that,” she said. “We can be told something over and over and over again, but if we have an identity and a sense of ourselves tied up in something else, we will almost always refer to that, even if it’s at the cost of pretending that something that is true is not true.”

Such deep disavowal is part of an elaborate psychological system for coping with the unbearable. “It’s not something we can just snap our fingers and get ourselves out of,” she said.

People who point out the importance of the 1.5-degree warming limit are resented because they are intruding on peoples’ psychological safety, she said, and they become pariahs. “The way societies enforce this emotionally is really very striking,” she added.

But how people will react to passing the 1.5 target is hard to predict, Weston said.

“I do think it revolves around the question of agency and the question of meaning in one’s life,” she said. “And I think that’s competing with so many other things that are going on in the world at the same time, not coincidentally, like the political crises that are happening globally, the shift to the far right in Europe, the shift to the far right in the U.S. and the shift in Argentina.”

Those are not unrelated, she said, because a lack of agency produces a yearning for false, exclusionary solutions and authoritarianism.

“If there’s going to be something that keeps me up at night, it’s not the 1.5. It’s the political implications of that feeling of helplessness,” she said. “People will do an awful lot to avoid feeling helpless. That can mean they deny the problem in the first place. Or it could mean that they blame people who are easier targets, and there is plenty of that to witness happening in the world. Or it can be utter and total despair, and a turning inward and into a defeatist place.”

She said reaching the 1.5 limit will sharpen questions about addressing the problem politically and socially.

“I don’t think most people who are really tracking climate change believe it’s a question of technology or science,” she said. “The people who are in the know, know deeply that these are political and social and emotional questions. And my sense is that it will deepen a sense of cynicism and rage, and intensify the polarization.”
Unimpressed by Science

Watching the global temperature surging past the 1.5 degree mark without much reaction from the public reinforces the idea that the focus on the physical science of climate change in recent decades came at the expense of studying how people and communities will be affected and react to global warming, said sociologist and author Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University and director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity.

“It’s a fool’s errand to continue down that road right now,” she said. “It’s been an abysmal ratio of funds that are going to understand the social conflict that’s going to come from climate shocks, the climate migration and the ways that social processes will have to shift. None of that has been done.”

Passing the 1.5 degree threshold will “add fuel to the fire of the vanguard of the climate movement,” she said. “Groups that are calling for systemic change, that are railing against incremental policy making and against business as usual are going to be empowered by this information, and we’re going to see those people get more involved and be more confrontational.”

And based on the historical record, a rise in climate activism is likely to trigger a backlash, a dangerous chain reaction that she outlined in her new book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period,” she said. “And it will lead to clashes.”

Looking at the historic record, she said, shows that repressive crackdowns on civil disobedience is often where the violence starts. There are signs that pattern will repeat, with police raids and even pre-emptive arrests of climate activists in Germany, and similar repressive measures in the United Kingdom and other countries.

“I think that’s an important story to talk about, that people are going to push back against climate action just as much as they’re going to push for it,” she said. “There are those that are going to feel like they’re losing privileged access to resources and funding and subsidies.”


“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period.”

A government dealing effectively with climate change would try to deal with that by making sure there were no clear winners and losers, she said, but the climate shocks that come with passing the 1.5 degree mark will worsen and intensify social tensions.

“There will be more places where you can’t go outside during certain times of the year because of either smoke from fires, or extreme heat, or flooding, or all the other things that we know are coming,” she said. “That’s just going to empower more people to get off their couches and become activists.”
‘A Life or Death Task For Humanity’

Public ignorance of the planet’s passing the 1.5 degree mark depends on “how long the powers-that-be can get away with throwing up smokescreens and pretending that they are doing something significant,” said famed climate researcher James Hansen, who recently co-authored a paper showing that warming is accelerating at a pace that will result in 2 degrees of warming within a couple of decades.

“As long as they can maintain the 1.5C fiction, they can claim that they are doing their job,” he said. “They will keep faking it as long as the scientific community lets them get away with it.”

But even once the realization of passing 1.5 is widespread, it might not change the social and political responses much, said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and activist in California.

“Not enough people care,” he said. “I’ve been a climate activist since 2006. I’ve tried so many things, I’ve had so many conversations, and I still don’t know what it will take for people to care. Maybe they never will.”

Hovering on the brink of this important climate threshold has left Kalmus feeling “deep frustration, sadness, helplessness, and anger,” he said. “I’ve been feeling that for a long time. Now, though, things feel even more surreal, as we go even deeper into this irreversible place, seeming not to care.”

“No one really knows for sure, but it may still be just physically possible for Earth to stay under 1.5C,” he said, “if humanity magically stopped burning fossil fuels today. But we can’t stop fossil fuels that fast even if everyone wanted to. People would die. The transition takes preparation.”

And there are a lot of people who just don’t want to make that transition, he said.

“We have a few people with inordinate power who actively want to continue expanding fossil fuels,” he said. “They are the main beneficiaries of extractive capitalism; billionaires, politicians, CEOs, lobbyists and bankers. And the few people who want to stop those powerful people haven’t figured out how to get enough power to do so.”

Kalmus said he was not a big fan of setting a global temperature threshold to begin with.

“For me it’s excruciatingly clear that every molecule of fossil fuel CO2 or methane humanity adds to the atmosphere makes irreversible global heating that much worse, like a planet-sized ratchet turning molecule by molecule,” he said. “I think the target framing lends itself to a cycle of procrastination and failure and target moving.”

Meanwhile, climate impacts will continue to worsen into the future, he said.

“There is no upper bound, until either we choose to end fossil fuels or until we simply aren’t organized enough anymore as a civilization to burn much fossil fuel,” he said. “I think it’s time for the movement to get even more radical. Stopping fossil-fueled global heating is a life-or-death task for humanity and the planet, just most people haven’t realized it yet.”

“Let Us Vote”- A Movement to Lower the Voting Age to 16

By Ken Bank

February 4, 2024
Source: Medium




More than 50 years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, millions of young people who could not vote were nevertheless energized to become politically active and demand an end to the War as well as other issues involving social and economic justice.

As a result of the anti-war, civil rights, and environmental issues, many young people who were politically active even though they could not vote demanded a change of the voting age from 21 to 18. By 1971 they had succeeded in persuading Congress to pass an amendment to the Constitution to accomplish that change, and within a few months the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the required number of states.

As political turmoil and reactionary backlash swept the nation after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, some progressive activists concluded that it would be beneficial to allow younger voters most impacted by the effects of reactionary policies in government to vote and have a say in democratic elections where they would be most vulnerable. As a result a movement started in the State of New Jersey to let 16 year olds vote in local elections, especially for school board candidates. Recently members of the City Council in Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, passed an ordinance supported by Mayor Ras Baraka that lowers the voting age to participate in school board elections at 16 years old. Newark is now the second largest city in the country after Oakland to allow 16 year olds to vote.

At the state level the New Jersey legislature passed, signed into law by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a bill to allow 17 year olds to vote in primary elections if they will become 18 by the general election in November. With this new law and other laws passed during the Murphy Administration with support from Democrats and opposed by Republicans, New Jersey leads the nation with a longstanding commitment to expanding democracy, building on previous voting rights expansion measures including automatic voter registration, in-person early voting, online voter registration, and the restoration of voting rights for individuals on probation or parole, among other reforms.

Leading the movement in New Jersey to lower the voting age to 16 is the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, a group of professional academics and activists committed to social, economic and political empowerment of low-income individuals, disadvantaged groups and communities, especially racial minorities that have suffered greatly from past discrimination and alienation. The NJISJ is committed to achieving equality of opportunity and the right to fully participate in the political process, especially minority youth from disadvantaged families who are affected by political outcomes but unable to gain self-determination in deciding their future outcomes.

Lowering the voting age to 16 makes perfect sense in giving some semblance of participation in the political process, especially elections for school board, that will greatly affect the status of minority youths in their family and community.

In August 2023, before the Newark City Council voted to lower the voting age, The NJISC issued a detailed and comprehensive report on the advantages to the community and at the state level to allow 16 year old citizens the right to vote, especially in elections for school board that have a direct impact on outcomes and opportunity for students to participate in American democracy. The report emphasizes the benefits for not only students, but the community and school district as well. They estimated that in the city of Newark thousands of young voters would contribute to higher turnout, especially for local elections where turnout was extremely small, especially when compared to wealthier communities.

Also in the report is the expressed concern about efforts, not only in New Jersey but the rest of the country as well, to eliminate and repeal protections for minority students in many school districts, the attempt to enable and even justify discrimination especially affecting LGBTQ students and students of color as well.

The majority of voters in many states, especially in suburbs and rural areas, are determined to stop any effort to promote diversity, acceptance and inclusion for minority students, and to oppose the teaching of many subjects affecting current and historical perspectives about past persecution and denial of civil rights against minority groups, especially LGBTQ and persons of color. Some states have even criminalized the teaching of those subjects in public schools. That is why the necessity for allowing 16 year old students to vote, especially in high schools where these issues have the greatest impact, becomes so much more imperative.

New Jersey is not the only state where laws to lower the voting age to 16 are being considered. There is a national movement to advocate for a 16 year voting age. In fact, several local districts and municipalities have already allowed 16 year olds to vote in school and local elections. Maryland already allows local communities to enable voters 16 years old to participate in local elections, and several towns have passed local ordinances to implement voting rights.

Communities in other states, notably Oakland, California, also allow for 16 year old voters. There is also a national movement to lower the voting age, and Representative Grace Meng of New York has introduced a bill in Congress which would amend the Constitution to allow 16 year old citizens to vote in all elections including federal, state and local. At least 100 members of Congress have endorsed her legislation.

The most compelling argument to lower the voting age comes from the knowledge that younger voters are more likely to vote on issues that will affect them and society for years to come. This is especially true with regard to issues affecting the future and security of youth in America such as climate change, gun safety, reproductive freedom, and protection for vulnerable groups, particularly those identified as LGBTQ+.

It’s also a safe bet that younger voters will be less susceptible to and affected by societal prejudices including racism, bigotry, homophobia, and intolerance based upon religious beliefs. A younger voting population is the best guarantee that future elections will not be clouded by the prejudices of an older generation.


Ken Bank  is a semi-retired business executive, part-time playwright, and freelance writer with masters degrees in business and history. He lives in New Jersey and is active in the local Democratic Party organization in support of progressive policies.

We Ignore the Ongoing Collapse of American Democracy at Our Peril

Fascism can happen here and we know this because it is happening here. And unless more people wake up and fight back, it will be too late.

By Thom Hartmann

February 4, 2024

Source: Common Dreams


Like an alcoholic family that won’t discuss alcoholism (proving Don Quixote’s warning never to mention rope in the home of a man who’s been hanged), far too many Americans are unwilling to acknowledge or even discuss the ongoing collapse of democracy in the United States.

We see it in everything from our last two Republican presidents having lost the national vote but taking office anyway, to the extreme gerrymandering happening in every Red state in the country, to the naked bribery of our legislators and Supreme Court justices.

And our media exclude it from almost every conversation. Networks run promotions mentioning Trump’s indictments, but completely fail to point out that he is calling for the end of democracy in America, the suspension of the Constitution, and playing the role of a “dictator” on day one.

The extent of the problems within our political and economic structures are laid bare with startling and sometimes frightening clarity.

President Jimmy Carter took it head-on when he told me on my radio program that the Citizen’s United decision, which brought us this crisis:

“[V]iolates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

This “complete subversion of our political system” grew, in large part, out of Richard Nixon’s 1972 appointment of tobacco lawyer and rightwing extremist Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court.

Powell, in 1971, had authored the infamous Powell Memo for the US Chamber of Commerce, strongly suggesting that corporate leaders needed to get politically involved and, essentially, take over everything from academia to our court system to our political system.

In 1976, in the Buckley case, Powell began the final destruction of American democracy by declaring that when morbidly rich people or corporations own politicians, all that money that got transferred to the politicians wasn’t bribery but, instead, was Constitutionally-protected First Amendment-defined “Free Speech.”

Powell expanded that when he personally authored the decision in the 1978 Bellotti case, which acknowledged corporations as “persons” with full access to the Bill of Rights, including their own “free speech” right to own politicians. Five corrupt and in-the-bag Republicans on the Supreme Court radically expanded that doctrine in 2010 with Citizens United.

As a result, there’s really very little democracy left in our democracy.

— Our votes are cast in districts so gerrymandered that a 50/50 electorate can produce an 70/30 outcome in congressional representation.

— Our laws are written, more often than not, by corporate lawyers/lobbyists or representatives of billionaire-level wealth.

— And our media is owned by the same class of investors/stockholders, so it’s a stretch to expect them to do much critical reporting on the situation.

In his book The Decline of the West, first published in German in 1918 and then in English in 1926, Oswald Spengler suggested that what we call Western civilization was then beginning to enter a “hardening” or “classical” phase in which all the nurturing and supportive structures of culture would become, instead, instruments for the exploitation of a growing peasant class to feed the wealth of a new and strengthening aristocracy.

Culture would become a parody of itself, average people’s expectations would decline while their wants would grow, and a new peasantry would emerge, which would cause the culture to stabilize in a “classic form” that, while Spengler doesn’t use the term, seems very much like feudalism — the medieval system in which the lord owned the land and everyone else was a vassal (a tenant who owed loyalty to the landlord).

Or its more modern incarnation: fascism, a word that didn’t even exist when Spengler wrote Decline.

Spengler, considering himself an aristocrat, didn’t see this as a bad thing. In 1926 he prophesied that once the boom of the Roaring Twenties was over, a great bust would wash over the Western world. While this bust had the potential to create chaos, its most likely outcome would be a return to the classic, stable form of social organization, what Spengler calls “high culture” and I call neofeudalism and/or fascism.

He wrote:


“In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which is assertively and emphatically ‘in form.’ It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is world history at highest potential.”

Twentieth and 21st century cultural observers, ranging from billionaire George Soros in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, to professor Noreena Hertz inThe Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, have pointed to deep cracks in the foundational structure of Western civilization, traceable in part to the current legal status of corporations versus humans.

More recently, Jane Mayer has laid out in painful detail in her book Dark Money how the Koch Network and a few other political-minded billionaires have essentially taken over the entire Republican Party, as has Nancy MacLean with her book Democracy in Chains. The extent of the problems within our political and economic structures are laid bare with startling and sometimes frightening clarity.

As a result, of all these changes in our politics (most driven by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court putting oligarchy above democracy), Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise,” whereas what they referred to as “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.

They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:


“[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

It seems that America has arrived at the point Spengler saw in early 20th century Europe, and, indeed, there are some concerning parallels, particularly with the late 1920s and early 1930s. Italy, Germany, and Spain all lost their democracies and moved to fascism during that era, while Spengler and his acolytes cheered.

And, indeed, it was one of FDR’s biggest challenges in the early 1930s: steering America through a “middle course” between communism (which was then growing popular) and fascism (also growing popular). He pulled it off with small (compared to Europe) nods to democratic socialism, instituting programs like Social Security, the minimum wage, and establishing the right to unionize (among other things).


American democracy can’t afford many more years of corruption before it’s dead

Mark Twain is often quoted as saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Many look at the all-out war being waged against American government by the hard right, from Trump and his cronies to the billionaire networks funding right-wing propaganda and lobbying outlets, and think “it can’t happen here.”

They’re wrong. It can happen here.

We now have police intervening in elections, privatized corporate voting systems, and a massive voter suppression campaign to prevent elderly, young, and non-white Americans from being able to vote.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians and the billionaires who own them are now dropping any pretense at all to caring about the fate and future of our country’s fiscal health, so long as they get and keep their tax cuts.

In summary, what’s left of our democratic institutions are under siege.

Add to that a largely billionaire-funded/owned right-wing media machine that’s willing to regularly and openly deceive American voters (documented daily by Media Matters), and you have the perfect setup for a neofeudalist/fascist takeover of our government.

Or, as President Carter so correctly called it, oligarchy.

This year’s election may be our last chance to push back against the oligarchy that the GOP has been constructing for the past forty-three years. President Biden and Democrats in Congress made a valiant try with the For The People Act that would have expanded voter rights, outlawed gerrymandering, and reversed Citizens United to strip dark money out of our electoral system, but were stabbed in the back by Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.

If Biden is re-elected and Democrats can take the House and hold the Senate, there’s a very good chance — particularly without Manchin and Sinema to sabotage the process like they did in 2022 — that such legislation can be brought up again and pass.

Double check your voter registration — particularly if you live in a Blue city in a Red state, where they’re already purging millions of voters every month — and help everybody you know get their registration up to date.

American democracy can’t afford many more years of corruption before it’s dead: our time to act is now.

The Fundamentally Conservative Worldview of Matt Taibbi

By Chris Green

February 4, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




When Matt Taibbi agreed in late 2022 to become part of Elon Musk’s handpicked group of “Twitter Files” reporters, it was only the latest sign to his left wing critics of the progressive journalists’s inexorable drift further down a right wing rabbit hole. In receiving tens of thousands of internal company documents from Twitter’s archives, Taibbi and the other handpicked reporters sought to present a case in Twitter threads that Twitter, prior to Musk’s ownership, discriminated in its content moderation policies against groups like Trump supporters and Covid skeptics. They also sought to prove that Twitter’s content moderation policies were heavily shaped by improper behind-the-scenes influence from the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agents on the federal government’s Foreign Influence Task Force. They also highlighted what they deemed improper influence on Twitter’s content moderation by academic researchers studying the flow of misinformation at government funded think tanks.

Parts of Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files seemed to indicate that he was over-selling what he found in Files documents in order to appeal to the right wing audience both toward which his Substack site Racket News was increasingly oriented and which Musk clearly aimed to appeal to in marketing the Files. Mehidi Hassan brought up some of Taibbi’s errors and exaggerations in his Twitter Files reporting when he brought him on his MSNBC show for an acrimonious debate in April. For example, in one Twitter Files thread, Taibbi claimed that the Department of Homeland Security funded academic non-profit Election Integrity Project (EIP) flagged 22 million posts for removal as “misinformation” during the 2020 election season across all social media platforms. Hassan pointed out that the actual number was 2890–these were flagged for social media companies to examine for possible violations of the companies’ Terms of Service. The 22 million figure was the number of election related posts the EIP studied during the 2020 election season.

In another instance, Hassan pointed out the problem in Taibbi’s initial Twitter Files thread where he sought to prove the pro-Democrat bias of pre-Musk Twitter officials by featuring a case of Twitter removing a handful of tweets at the Biden campaign’s request prior to the 2020 election. The implication was that the Biden campaign got Twitter to remove political speech it didn’t like. Taibbi felt no need to inform his readers that the tweets contained nude images of Hunter Biden taken from the infamous laptop and thus violated Twitter’s Terms of Service by being shared without Hunter Biden’s consent. Asked by Hassan why he did not inform his readers that the tweet URLs contained in the screenshot he shared in his Twitter Files reporting featured Hunter Biden “dick pics”, he blustered “because I didn’t need to!”

Taibbi is a frustrating character. It is tempting to pigeonhole him as a charlatan in the style of Glenn Greenwald or Jimmy Dore, an ostensible leftist peddling a MAGA friendly “anti-establishment” pose to credulous persons on the internet. Yet that would not be completely fair. For all his alignment with MAGA on key issues–his arguments about the left wing cancel culture menace, criticism of Covid vaccine mandates and trumpeting of the populist virtues of the MAGA movement–Taibbi is clearly still capable of sometimes doing compelling work, as segments of his Twitter Files work showed. For all the right wing slant and exaggeration of aspects of the Twitter Files, Taibbi and his colleagues made a compelling case that there was something inherently problematic about government officials using their privileged positions to shape social media content moderation without any transparency or democratic oversight.

After the Twitter Files, among other journalistic projects, Taibbi began a series of articles on NewsGuard, a Pentagon funded “reliability” grader of news outlets. Late last year, he was interviewed about NewsGuard on Greenwald’s System Update podcast and made a case that was concisely incisive and happily free of the right-wing claptrap that has marked his recent writing.

So recently as the year 2019, Taibbi published a book of considerable merit. The book was called Hate Inc.: How Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. The author offers it as an updated version of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent and states frequently throughout the book how much he has been influenced by the Chomsky/Herman analysis. There is even a transcript of a friendly interview of Chomsky by Taibbi in one of the book’s appendixes.

Hate Inc. is not as radical, not as in-depth and, frankly, not as good as Manufacturing Consent. But it is still a book of much merit, full of intelligent analysis and deep information about issues occurring in mainstream media.

One thing stands out about Hate Inc: it describes problems created by the control of American media by for profit corporations but offers no coherent suggestions about how the problems might be fixed.

Manufacturing Consent doesn’t offer much either in suggestions for media reform but, in its final chapter, at least offers a few: expansion of public access media, expansion of publicly funded media to give voice to marginalized populations and a strengthening of the media capacities of progressive economic and social movements.

Taibbi since the publication of Hate Inc. has been more forthcoming with media reform suggestions. In a January 2021 piece in Canada’s National Post he opined that “we need a new media channel” that embraces four principles. The latter were 1) “not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans” 2) “employ a Fairness Doctrine inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at least occasional explorations of alternative points of view” 3) have an operational philosophy that stresses professional journalistic “credibility” over securing high viewer ratings and 4) operate “on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn’t depend on the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.”

This extraordinarily banal proposal illustrates the limitations of Taibbi’s thinking. In Hate Inc. he describes the problems of mainstream media as structural. As cable media channels and internet politics sites have expanded since the 90’s, the profit motive has encouraged media platforms to keep the attention of niche audiences by delivering hollow demagoguery, clickbait and scaremongering in large doses. For Taibbi, both MSNBC and FOX display this dynamic, the former targeting Democrats, and the latter Republicans. In his National Post piece, he proposes to solve the problem by hoping that an individual or multiple persons with enough capital will magically appear and start a corporate television channel operating under the august principles outlined above that can somehow avoid entanglement with Big Tech platforms “as much as possible.” He wants to solve the structural problems of corporate media by starting another corporate media channel to compete within the existing corporate media structure.

In Taibbi’s discussion of the themes of Hate Inc in various media forums, the book’s mildly radical edges—inspired by Manufacturing Consent—have disappeared. Instead, we’ve gotten a series of cliches about the divisiveness and extremism of FOX and MSNBC, criticism of media slander of Trump during Russiagate and a longing to return to the days when everyone, including the stereotypical “crazy right wing uncle” trusted the objectivity of Walter Cronkite. Indeed, Taibbi has frequently referred to Cronkite with admiration—although he allows that Manufacturing Consent exposed serious flaws in Cronkite’s journalism.

Taibbi’s Conservative Inclinations

To me, Taibbi is an utterly fascinating figure. It interests me greatly how one can go from publishing a book (Hate Inc.) inspired by Noam Chomsky in 2019 to, roughly four years later, teaming up with the vile Zionist fanatic Douglas Murray to debate Macolm Gladwell and the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg about the problems of US media in Toronto’s prestigious Munk Debates. This debate was a dull affair,sometimes enlivened by the back and forth sniping between Taibbi and Murray on one side and Gladwell on the other. Gladwell implied that Taibbi always invokes Walter Cronkite because he wants US media to go back to a time when it was entirely controlled by white men. Meanwhile, Taibbi devoted part of his speaking time to one of his favorite themes of recent years, one that has endeared him to many right wingers: the extensive mainstream media distortions about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. To be clear, his points about Russiagate are often fair enough–his chapter on Russiagate in Hate Inc. is excellent.

Taibbi’s criticism of the US media’s coverage of Russiagate is a prime example of his increasingly deep disillusionment with mainstream US media in recent years. This disillusionment has not led him to drift further leftward into the arms of Marxists, anti-war, anarchist or other radical leftists. Rather his politics have moved from his traditional liberal populism towards an increasing orientation to right wing populism. He has found himself aligned with the “anti-woke” anti-cancel culture denizens of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web like Bret Weinstein. He frequently collaborates on journalistic projects with Michael Shellenberger, a right wing populist who is fervently pro-police, a strident enemy of the “woke matrix” and one who has smeared American radical leftists as pro-Hamas terrorism. Taibbi has also aligned with Silicon Valley oligarchs like Elon Musk and David Sacks: right wing, anti-union, wealthy elite who brand themselves as “anti-establishment,” are obsessed with the menace of “wokeness” and occasionally mouth anti-war and anti-corporate phrases but are otherwise leading beneficiaries of the American system of corporate exploitation and war-making.

There is not a much better illustration of Taibbi’s drift to the right politically than his June 2020 rant against left wing cancel culture published on his Substack site, Racket News. “The American left has lost its mind,” he wrote. It “rejected traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry and even racial harmony.” It had become a mob of cultural revolutionaries marauding across academia, media and business using “shaming, threats, and intimidation” to force the deplatforming, firing and thorough reputational destruction of persons who disagreed with them ideologically.

Taibbi thought that this extreme anti-social fanaticism of leftists shone through in the George Floyd protests. Protestors were right, he thought, to attack police brutality both during and prior to the protests. But where were the leftists who condemned the burning of buildings and other violence by protestors?

Protestors themselves were incredibly rude to people who expressed sympathy for the protest goals but did not fully agree on everything the protestors advocated. A prime example of this for Taibbi happened when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey “skulked out” of a town hall after protestors shouted “get the fuck out!,” chanted “shame!” and threw refuse at him as he left. This ghastly treatment of the mayor occurred despite his arguments “for police reform” and the fact that he had “attempted to show solidarity with protestors in his city.” The protestors objected to the mayor’s refusal to support police defunding—but, Taibbi pointed out, the mayor was joined in this by a large majority of Americans, including a large majority of black Americans.

The following month on Racket News Taibbi continued on this theme, directing his increasingly hysterical fury at the militant anti-racism emerging from the George Floyd protests that was also expressed in the New York Times’s 1619 Project. According to Taibbi, this anti-racism was not rooted in authentic grassroots movements. Rather it was promoted by mainstream corporate media and other “people who run this country,” an attempt to “stoke civil war” through the Floyd protests to distract from the American ruling class’s complicity in neoliberal era economic inequality and institutional corruption. Taibbi wrote with patriotic horror that the media was promoting the theme of “modern America as a Nazi apartheid state.” The founding of the United States in 1776 was portrayed as primarily motivated not by noble ideals of freedom as Taibbi obviously thought; but by a desire of American elites to escape potential future British restrictions on slavery. American elites, he ranted, in promoting the George Floyd protestors’ militant anti-racism were encouraging attacks on “the one thing no thinking person ever considered a problem, i.e. the Enlightenment ideas that led to the American Revolution.”

My point in cataloging the above deeply reactionary and paranoid reflections of Taibbi—as well as his non-threatening stance on corporate control of news media—is that Taibbi, for all his reputation as an anti-establishment gadfly, is a fundamentally conservative person. It is obvious that a big part of Taibbi believes that despite the widespread presence of corruption and inequality in American life, American institutions are fundamentally sound. It is as if he believes that–apart from the cancel culture menace–there really is an orderly marketplace of ideas where everyone can get a fair hearing and processes are offered by the legal system and governmental bureaucracy that allow an equitable redress of every grievance. There is no understandable reason why any person might be driven to the point where they would burn a building or shout obscenities at a politician like poor Mayor Frey.

It seems clear in my mind that Taibbi’s rightward trajectory is driven by a fundamental sincerity. Putting aside the factual unreliability in his account of some of the incidents underlying the supposed cancel culture menace, there is no doubt that he is sincerely upset by it. His cancel culture obsession has also unquestionably been influenced by his own experience at being dropped by his publisher Penguin Random House in 2017 after sexist and misogynist passages came to light in a book Taibbi co-wrote years earlier with Mark Ames about their adventures as journalists in 1990’s Russia. Ames and Taibbi both claimed the sexism was satire.

Overall, Taibbi’s recent work suggests less similarity to a populist internet charlatan like Jimmy Dore and more towards an establishment liberal in the 1960’s writing for publications like Commentary and Encounter. Many of those sorts of liberals turned toward neoconservatism in reaction to ghetto riots, rowdy anti-war protests and widespread questioning of traditional patriotic myths about American society. Similarly, it seems Taibbi has drifted toward the right, at least in part, because of genuine discomfort at the manner in which traditionally marginalized groups have sought to gain respect and the ability to get their voices heard. This is what the largely overblown right wing hysteria about “woke” cancel culture is about.

The most likely future drivers of real enhancements to free speech and the democratization of media in this country will be progressive and radical left members of movements for social and economic equity. Taibbi these days is a long distance away from those movements: you are not likely to see him on a picket line in front of a Starbucks store or Amazon warehouse but you can definitely catch him schmoozing with David Sacks.

Javier Milei’s Freak Show Act Is a Taste of Things to Come

Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei was enthusiastically received at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The warm welcome extended to Milei is a sign of where free-market radicalism is headed amid the deepening crisis of neoliberalism.

By Dennis Kölling

February 5, 2024

Source: Jacobin

Imabge credit: World Economic Forum/Flickr



Javier Milei’s warm welcome at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos was the latest stage in the seemingly baffling rise of radical right-wing libertarianism to political respectability. The recently elected president of Argentina, who brandished a chain saw during campaign rallies to symbolically cut through regulatory red tape, has become the new hero figure of the libertarian right.

Libertarianism has long been underestimated as a fringe political movement. We should see its bid for the political mainstream in relation to the development of its closest ideological ally, neoliberalism, alongside which it emerged as a right-wing phenomenon in the 1930s. The fact that libertarian leaders are gaining popularity just as the neoliberal era appears to be coming to an end points to a consolidation of market-radical ideologies rather than their dissolution.
Star of the Show

Schmoozing with the economic elite in Davos, Javier Milei used his podium at the WEF to caution his listeners that the “Western world is in danger.” Greeted by WEF founder Klaus Schwab as an “extraordinary person,” the Argentine president launched into a tirade against feminists, climate activists, and much of the academic establishment, whom he described as enemies of freedom and prosperity.

Ignoring attempts that the WEF has made to buy into topics of social responsibility and ecological transformation over recent years, Milei sought to reduce economics to the simple Randian clash between the “makers” and the “takers.” Closing on a nod to all the businessmen in the audience, he concluded: “You are heroes . . . let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral.”

Milei’s speech was quick to generate a buzz in the ultraliberal community around the world, which was unsurprisingly flattered by such compliments. WEF participants lauded him for sounding the alarm bells “just in time.” Elon Musk promoted his speech as a “good explanation” of the economics of prosperity, going on to share memes about Milei’s popularity on Twitter/X. Historian-turned-right-wing-pundit Niall Ferguson praised the talk as “a magnificent defense of individual liberty and the free market economy.”

The sight of Milei’s hard-core market radicalism taking center stage at the most important gathering of neoliberal stakeholders offered a rallying point to those on the Right who feared that economic liberalism had lost its edge when it attempted to greenwash its image by including social and environmental concerns in its call for a new capitalism.

While inclusion in the WEF marks a new high point in its fortunes, Milei’s brand of radical right-wing libertarianism had already seen a creeping resurgence over the last decade or so. The works of Ayn Rand, the ur-popularizer of American libertarianism and “Goddess of the Market,” experienced a notable revival following praise from Donald Trump and an array of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, a concerted effort by libertarian activists and investors has brought the idea of autonomous “seasteading” communities, beyond the reach of any state legislation, closer to realization than ever before. More subtly, the influence of libertarian utopias, such as those imagined by science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, have permeated recent revivals of classic hard science fiction on popular streaming platforms.
Libertarianism and Neoliberalism

At the same time that libertarian ideologies began to gain mainstream popularity, commentators on the Left were starting to debate the end of an era dominated by free-market economics. Neoliberalism, libertarianism’s slightly more respectable brother, appeared to have received its death knell in the global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to unprecedented forms of government intervention and new state-based approaches to problems of social welfare and environmental crisis.

Others saw the end of neoliberalism augured in the election of Donald Trump and the isolationist, xenophobic, and plainly illiberal policies that his administration embraced. As the 2020s progressed, neoliberalism was considered by many to be a spent force.

It might very well be true that what we are seeing right now marks the end of a moderate, centrist version of “open society” neoliberalism, so appealing for decades even to many on the erstwhile social democratic left. But the rising popularity of more extreme forms of libertarianism around the world should caution us that market radicalism isn’t simply going to disappear. Instead, it is consolidating its ideology and returning to its cultural roots.

Milei’s dramatic warning that Western civilization faces grave peril is no mere rhetorical trope designed to garner more attention in today’s polarized social media landscape. It is deeply embedded in a fatalistic tradition that Milei shares with the earliest neoliberal and libertarian thinkers of the 1930s and ’40s. Friedrich Hayek’s pamphlet The Road to Serfdom (1944), similarly directed against the threat of “collectivism,” opens by speaking of an “unexpected turn” that has led the “course of civilization” to reverse toward “past ages of barbarism.”

The statement of aims drafted at the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international gathering of neoliberal intellectuals, politicians, and business figures, put it in equally blunt terms: “The central values of civilization are in danger.” Economic planning, according to these early neoliberals, would inevitably lead us down the “road to serfdom” and totalitarianism.

While they may have branched out into intellectually distinct movements over time, both neoliberalism and right-wing libertarianism shared a moment of conception and a foundational myth. Born from the intellectually pessimistic climate that characterized the mainstream liberal response to the rise of totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s and ’40s, those favoring a revival of liberalism in bleak times sought to do so by styling themselves as bulwarks against the totalitarian threat.

While European neoliberals like Hayek put a stronger focus on the “collectivist” danger of communism and fascism, American libertarians like H. L. Mencken, Rose Wilder Lane, or Isabel Paterson included staunch opposition to the politics of the New Deal in their assessment of totalitarianism from an early stage. Both sides, however, initially embraced a dramatic fatalism that presented any appeal to collective action as a threat to civilization at large.
Zombie Neoliberalism

The “specter of totalitarianism” invoked by Hayek and many of his fellow travelers became a discursive tool to fend off discussions of inequality and stop any concerns for social justice in their tracks. It was soon used to attack even popular democracy as such. In a series of books, neoliberal historian Jacob L. Talmon sought to deconstruct the legacy of the French revolution, warning that it had resulted in the rise of a dangerous “totalitarian Messianic democracy.”

Talmon’s intervention was part of a larger debate around the historical determinism that was supposedly inherent to emancipatory understandings of democracy, with Hayek and Karl Popper among the leading protagonists. What neoliberals and libertarians embraced instead was the notion of market democracy, pioneered by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, in which each purchase or sale in a marketplace should be considered a vote that represents the ideals of democracy far better than a state-centered approach ever could. In this framework, the market, ironically praised as the savior of democratic civilization, was at the same time expected to gradually replace popular democracy.

Only in the 1960s, in reaction to the emancipatory politics of the New Left, would the proponents of moderate neoliberalism and radical libertarianism truly split. Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard dismissed the egalitarian protest of the decades on the basis of a racialized notion of human nature. This would gradually lead him and his followers to the far-right fringes of American politics, forming the basis of today’s alt-right, as historian Quinn Slobodian has recently shown.

A decade later, neoliberals under the supervision of Milton Friedman got the chance to test themselves in active policymaking when they became key economic advisers in the government of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Conveniently ignoring their creed’s anti-totalitarian past, neoliberalism found its way to the intellectual mainstream — powerfully underlined by the award of Nobel Prizes for economics to Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976 — on the backs of the Chilean people and the long-lasting impact of the economic shock doctrine pursued by the Pinochet regime.

In his idiosyncratic self-stylization, Javier Milei has paid tribute to both of these concurrent ideologies. One of his five beloved English Mastiffs is called “Murray,” another “Milton.” His revival of the specter of totalitarianism on the platform of the WEF in Davos may be a sign that the schism between more moderate neoliberals and radical libertarians is healing.

While the ostensible antistatism of this current of thought conceals the myriad ways in which neoliberal policymakers actually sought to use the state instead of abolishing it, it also drives home the point that market radicals have no qualms about doing away with democracy for good.

They might come for it under the pretense of defending “Western civilization,” embracing authoritarian leaders like Milei, Donald Trump, or Jair Bolsonaro along the way.

It is unlikely that in the face of a new crisis of liberalism, they are simply going to abandon the neoliberal legacy and let it die. Instead, the next wave of “zombie neoliberalism” is about to break. Brace for impact.