Overshot and Kaput: Humankind Wears Out Its Welcome

John Kendall Hawkins

 November 6, 2024

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When Noam Chomsky deflected questions about 9/11 — refused to speculate like a common theorist of conspiracies — but, in short, directed us to the Truth: We have bigger fish to fry and have to get to it ASAP.  No doubt, he wouldn’t deny that there were such men in the world who would be happy to be Insiders with sticks of dynamite. That shit built the world we know. People who spread opines like, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. This election is too important for the people to decide.” The Kissinger Doctrine, once so beloved, now junk.

Kissingers have been breeding like quazy wabbits since “we” double-tapped the Japs in ‘45. That is the way of the world.  The world we must change. What Chomsky wanted to draw our attention to was what we still had limited time to do something about, his Three Big Concerns: Climate Change, nuclear war, and the end of democracy. Any one of these could bring an end to the experiment/accident called human life on planet Earth. How do we force our leaders to address this problem?

In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso 2024) by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, we get a clear picture of where we, as a globe, are at regarding Climate Change policy. What we knew, when we knew it, and what we are doing about the crisis that definitely has Doom as a consequence of limited or non-action.  Malm and Carton begin by telling the reader that mitigation is what they mean by overshoot.  They write,  “Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to. It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.” This strikes Malm and Carton as hideous and maybe insane.

If mitigation, such as it is, doesn’t work, and it won’t, there is a post-mitigation plan.  “The dominant classes have to come up with secondary, backup measures for managing the consequences of excess heat.” Reassuring, isn’t it? they seem to enquire of the reader. The backup includes three options (or phases of bankruptcy, depending on how you look at it): Adaptation, carbon removal, and geoengineering.  “All three are also replete with repercussions, ranging from the annoying to the apocalyptic,” write the pair, who plan on publishing a separate analysis of the three backup options, already calling it The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late. “It will pay special attention to the psychic dimensions of the climate crisis,” they write, “notably the tremendous capacity of people in capitalist society to deny, and, when this no longer works, repress it.”

The authors focus on fossil fuels.  They can see that warnings fall on deaf ears.  They note that the world had a chance to take advantage of the proverbial silver lining that came with Covid-19 and its lockdown regimen.  They write,

“In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, something highly unusual took place: global CO2 emissions fell…The lockdowns that closed the highways of the world economy cut their total by some 5 or 6 per cent…coincidentally, the pandemic broke out just as the wave of climate mobilisations on streets from Berlin to Bogotá and Luanda to London crested – in 2019, this had been ‘the fastest-growing social movement in history’ – and so proposals were floated for using the pandemic to start the transition by then long overdue. These came to nothing.”

Came to nothing.  Miracles from God have been precious few for  millennia — this we all know — but seeing the CO₂plummet in 2020 was almost like a sign from heaven that our so-called covenant since Noah was still solid. But no. Selfishness rules.

The authors continue the chronicle of our planet’s demise.  In 2021, “CO₂ emissions rose by 6 per cent, or two gigatonnes.” Then the authors got trippy.  To picture an abstract gigatonne as a concrete image, they wrote, see a gigatonne as a unit of mass “which equals the weight of over 100,000,000 African elephants.” Two gigatonnes, then, would be the equivalent of 200,000,000 African elephants. Phew, I whistled. That would be heaven on Earth for the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest, but then I actually pictured two-thirds of the American population replaced by African elephants. That’s a lot of elephant shit. And methane. Phew, I held my nose.

The authors list the damage done already by climate catastrophe ignored for what it is — potentially eschatological in scope — “The double blow of a cyclone and an early monsoon …one third of Bangladesh under water…Pantanal, the planet’s largest wetland..enveloped in flames…in the Atlantic – thirty named storms; within a fortnight, two hurricanes lacerating Nicaragua…for the first time, a hurricane struck Somalia…(cities more deeply flooded) or introducing novelties (wetlands ablaze)…Swathes of ,,,Turkey and Greece…aglow, while in the Chinese province of Henan, a year’s worth of rain fell in three days – downpours ‘unseen in the last 1,000 years’ – but in southern Madagascar, drought forced eight in ten inhabitants to fill their stomachs with leaves, cacti and locusts.”  Almost there. Almost at the point where a plague of locusts arrives and is welcomed as a much-needed meal served up.

Overshoot is divided into a Preface and three main sections: The Limit Is Not a Limit; Fossil Capital Is a Demon, and Into the Long Heat. What we have going as mitigation is not enough; it’s not even a start. The culprit is the one we all know: Big Oil. The Long Heat means our children and children’s children will have to live underground to survive.  That’s what the book tells. Methodically. With detail. Last Chapter, like in its resignation to our fate. But — it does hold out the notion that some shock to the system’s dominant classes’s control of the shituation (h/t Peter Tosh) can lead to real mitigation.

I recall reading Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir, The Doomsday Machine. In it he relates how he and a RAND colleague went to see Dr. Strangelove when it came out, and how he and his companion agreed that the crazy shit they’d just seen came across as “essentially a documentary.”  In the film, one of the strangest scenes is the one where Dr. Strangelove explains how everyone, after the war, will have to live underground, but the good news is each man will be given a set of 10 beautiful women to restock the world with humans. Preferably of Nordic persuasion and pedigree. It is crazy thinking.

Some public policies are way too important for the elites and bloviators and technocrats to be put in charge of or to be ceded implicit control by the state in exchange for more and more money and power. In his most recent book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book co-written by ex-Google wonk Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, wherein Schmidt writes, “AI…is being applied to more elements of our lives; it is altering the role our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions.” Schmidt, who, in his previous book Empire of the Mind (later re-titled to The New Digital Age), envisioned hologram machines in the dens of dominant class families, so that spoiled kids could go on field trips to the slum of Mumbai, is all for ceding control of mind to machines.

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a planet go to shit due to the irresponsibility of its elites. This crisis – these myriad crises — are too important for the dinosaur people to deride. It’s time to get tough, pinky. Where up against false Darwinism and stolen plans. The time for clownin’ around and making faces is over.

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.

AMERIKA

‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

Jason Wilson

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 28 October 2024

A man in Washington DC holds leaflets falsely claiming that Trump won the 2020 presidential election, in November 2020.Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.

The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.

Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.


Related: The far-right megadonor pouring over $10m into the US election to defeat ‘the woke regime’

The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.
From the media to far-right conspiracy

The materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.

At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.

They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.

On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”

Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”

Clean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.

During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.

The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.

The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.

The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.

The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.

Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote, or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting”, she said.
From disinformation to violent threats

Beirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.

The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.

On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.

A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”

On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit,

The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.

In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”

In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”
Fueling paranoia

Over the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.

On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.

The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.

The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.

The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”

One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.

Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.

On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.

The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.
‘Millions of illegals’

On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.

The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.

As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.

On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”

On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.

On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.

The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.

In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.

Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.

Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”.

Nagasaki, the Gaza Strip, and the Denial of 

Truth

by Lawrence Davidson

 August 21, 2024
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Photograph Source: Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr. – Public Domain

On 6 August 1945, President Harry Truman announced to the world that one U.S. airplane, named the Enola Gay, had “dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.” The bomb had the equivalent “power of 200,000 tons of T.N.T.” That single bomb killed 140,000 people in a matter of minutes. Truman went on to say that “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.” And to prove the point, a few days later another U.S. airplane, named Bockscar, dropped a similar bomb on Nagasaki. That one killed 74,000 people. The Japanese then rapidly complied with the Allied ultimatum to surrender unconditionally. Truman said that by doing so, the Japanese would be “spared utter destruction … the raining of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.” 

Subsequently, there has been a lot of ambivalence over the dropping of the atomic bombs. In the U.S. there has been heated debate on the need, in 1945, to use these weapons. At least one member of Truman’s team of advisers, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, suggested ways around using the Atomic Bomb. In any case it was, of course, used and subsequently there has been a real sensitivity to questions and criticism. For instance, in January 1995 the Smithsonian Institution was forced to cancel a planned exhibit of the Enola Gay due to opposition from both veterans groups and members of Congress. Their objections were, in part, to the exhibition’s “dwelling in excess on horrible effects of the atomic bombs” and “raising the question as to whether the bombings were necessary to end the war.” Efforts at compromise on the content of the exhibition program could not silence the opposition of what veterans groups labelled “revisionist history” and so the entire program was dropped.

In Japan, of course, commemoration of the bombing of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki is never questioned. Their anniversaries are the occasion for solemn ceremonies that are also pleas for world peace. Much of the rest of the world at least superficially honors these pleas by diplomatic attendance at the ceremonies. In so doing, they recognize the sheer brutality of such acts of war without having to officially address the question of their necessity.

This year, 2024, marked the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs. It also brought forth another controversy. This one was not about whether such horrific bombing should take place. Rather, more simply, should the Japanese invite to their ceremonies a representative of a country presently using air power to commit genocide?

Controversy Anew

Here is the background to this issue. This year the mayor of Nagasaki, Shiro Suzuki, declined to invite the Israeli ambassador to Japan to the city’s commemoration ceremony, but did invite the Palestinians. Simultaneously the organizers in Hiroshima did invite the Israelis, but under “outside pressure,” failed to invite a Palestinian representative. 

Suzuki stated that, because the violence in the Middle East may expand, “we are currently faced with the possibility of losing the peace we have long taken for granted.” By singling out the Israeli ambassador, the mayor was explicitly indicating who he believed was the instigator threatening the peace. It would just be hypocritical to follow the Hiroshima lead. That is the controversy in a nutshell. 

When it came to their reaction, it made no difference to the U.S. government and its partners that Suzuki’s judgment was objectively accurate. That according to every reputable human rights organization on the planet, the Zionist regime is culpable of not only genocide, but also being an apartheid state. Nor did it seem to matter that a good majority of the Jewish population of Israel is gung-ho for wholesale exile, or outright annihilation of the Palestinian people. And why? Because, like the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, they (the Palestinians) have fought back against their persecutors. Not true, said Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Suzuki has, in essence, made a category mistake. He sees Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip in the same light. But, Emanuel explained, Israel is fighting in Gaza in self-defense, and you shouldn’t confuse the victims with the perpetrators. This was all dissimulation on the part of the Israeli ambassador and the mayor of Nagasaki knew it—the Israelis stayed uninvited and the Palestinians had reserved seats. 

Emanuel’s argument is actually “a shroud of talk” to hide us from the truth, but it isn’t an isolated one. It was all too familiar. In fact it was much like the argument of those who opposed the Smithsonian program years earlier. Now, as then, there was/is a need to rationalize the massacre of the innocent. Both at Nagasaki and Gaza, it is all about “self-defense” against a “sneaky enemy” who carried out a surprise attack. And, if the mayor of Nagasaki won’t adhere to that allegation, the U.S. was not going to his ceremony. 

Hocus-Pocus

Saying that something is true (such as the Israel’s Gaza campaign is a defensive act or the dropping of the atomic bombs was an unquestionable necessity), doesn’t make it so. It may not even make it logical or sensible. But then the Big Lie has always been a force in history. So, in a hocus-pocus sort of way, it is a con that governments are often able to pull off. And, it is easier to do so if the audience lives within a relatively closed system. In other words, if you are brought up in a community that holds itself together with one or more repetitive themes, chances are pretty good that you aren’t going to analyze them. Rather, you are just going to believe them. That is certainly the case of most Israeli Jews and their Zionist supporters in the diaspora (like Joe Bidden).

When such a theme (in this case, that Israel is an innocent party in constant danger from Palestinians) is used to rationalize the need to eliminate the threat, the resulting actions, supported by group solidarity, can override everyday ethics that make for a livable society. It frees up the predatory  potential embedded in our genetic makeup and directs it outward, often indiscriminately. Subsequently, we speak of strategies and tactics as if they were an exercise in map making. We mix up offense with defense in order to make things easier on our conscience. To gloss over such facts is to falsify history, but after all, that is the whole point of the exercise.

Perhaps, that is why many Americans cannot abide “revisionist history” when it comes to the annihilation of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It certainly contributes to the fact that, having grown up in an informational bubble that equates Palestinians with Nazis, the Israelis now “swarm” into Gaza “with passion, like a plain devoured by locusts.” It takes poetic language to find the right analogies.

Where does this leave us? Well, with total lack of faith in U.S. government spokespeople, to say nothing of Israeli representatives. Here is how great English essayist Samuel Johnson put it, some 266 years ago: “The law of truth, sacred and necessary, is broken without punishment, without censure, in compliance with inveterate prejudice and prevailing passions.” When you become aware of this sort of lying you have to ask yourself, as to the spokespeople at the State Department, Defense Department, etc. how much do they pay these people to speak in contradiction to observable facts? Do they really believe what they say? Then you can move down the line and ask the same question of college and university presidents, police chiefs, and most local politicians. For instance, when it comes to defending Israel from protesters, they all sound like they are justifying 74,000 dead at Nagasaki. 

Conclusion

The denial of responsibility has become an official art. And, it is practiced worldwide. We not only deny the obvious nature of our offensive actions as a group (say, as a nation), but also are determined to deny the documentable consequences of those actions. The folks who objected to the Smithsonian contextualization of the use of the atomic bombs literally refused to countenance any presentation that did not relieve the U.S. and its collective leadership of responsibility for the observable—visible—consequences of the use of a weapon that may yet destroy civilization. The case is the same for the Israelis. They deny the apartheid character of their society, they deny that 79 years of dispossession, de-development and “lawn mowing” (assassination, etc.) could possibly justify Palestinian resistance—resistance which, in an act of linguistic hocus-pocus, is transformed into “terrorism.” They thus deny all responsibility for the present program of genocide in Gaza and express shock and indignation when others call them on their Big Lie. Most nations of the world likewise deny any responsibility to stop Israel’s genocide, though they do a lot of verbal hemming and hawing. 

When you deny the facts, the impact of the facts, and accountability for those facts, there is, conveniently for you, nothing left of truth. As a result, “we can look on, almost unmoved, at the most appalling … exhibitions of human stupidity and wickedness.” 74,000 dead at Nagasaki and 40,000 and counting in Gaza. Well, not everyone can look on unmoved—the world’s relatively small cadre of protesters against genocide insist there be no denial of responsibility. For this we get furious and criminalize them. Yet, the future of truth now lies in their hands.

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.