CONSPIRACY THEORIES NES PAS

A Bizarre Kind of Executive Action: The Suppression of Epochal Documentaries

by Edward Curtin / November 14th, 2024

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country”)

– Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est“

Yes, it seems fitting that I am writing these words on November 11, Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, a day that began as Armistice Day to celebrate the ending of World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

That phrase has become a sardonic joke in the century that has followed as wars have piled up upon wars to create a permanent condition, and the censorship and propaganda that became acute with WW I have been exacerbated a hundredfold today. The number of dead soldiers and civilians in the century since numbs a mind intent on counting numbers, as courage, love, and innocence wails from skeletons sleeping deep in dirt everywhere. The minds of the living are ravished at the thought of so much death.

Almost a year ago I reviewed a film – Four Died Trying – about four American men who were assassinated by the U.S. government because they opposed the wars upon which their country had come to rely: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I wrote of this documentary film, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, that it was powerful, riveting, and masterful, the opening 58 minute prologue to a film series meant to be released at intervals over a few years. This prologue was released at the end of 2023 to great applause.
I wrote of it:

Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.

But they lie, and this series of films, beginning with its first installment, will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, colonialism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

This 58 minute prologue touches on many of themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war. Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Then in March of this year I wrote about the second film in the series, The World As It Was, that explores the very disturbing history of the 1950s in the U.S.A., a decade that lay the foundation of fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and from which we now are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

But I was hopeful that if enough people got see to see these illuminating and brilliantly done films, built on more than one hundred and twenty interviews over six years with key historical figures, including many family members of the four men, change was possible because more people would demand accountability. That the movies were also entertaining, despite their profoundly serious content, boded well for their reaching a wide audience.

Just recently, I was again asked by the filmmakers, as were others, to preview the third film, Jack Joins the Revolution, about John F. Kennedy, from his youth to the hope he inspired when he entered politics in 1947 until his death on November 22, 1963 and the shock and despair that overtook the nation and the world. This third film matched the brilliance of the first two, but I did wonder why there had been a lapse of more than six months between this one and the previous.

It seemed to me that this was the perfect time for these films to be released in quick succession to have a profound effect.

But having watched this third film, I discovered to my great surprise that it has not been released, nor, even more shockingly, has the second one that I previewed eight months ago. Why?  I do not know, but it is very odd, to put it mildly. I do know that by not releasing them now a significant opportunity is being lost. These films would be of great help to the country, because they depict what a truly populist presidency looks like and the malign forces that oppose him.  But alas, for reasons that are hard to fathom, the films are being suppressed by someone.  We can only hope that the filmmakers will be successful in their efforts to free the films in time for them to be of value at this crucial moment in our history.

It is well known that JFK was a naval war hero in WW II, but less well known that his war experience turned him fiercely against war, that to end all wars was a fundamental theme of his for the rest of his life.

Jack Joins the Revolution explores this and reminds the viewer that Kennedy was well acquainted with death, having almost died eight times before he was assassinated, something he knew was coming. He was courageous in the extreme. Thus my earlier reference to Veterans Day, for JFK was a veteran of exceptional courage who not only saved his comrades when their PT boat was sunk by the Japanese in the south Pacific, but tried to the end to save his country and the world from the madness of the endless wars that have followed his death at the hands of the CIA and the U.S. warfare state.

This film clearly shows why he became such an obstacle to the imperial war machine and the CIA that to this very day have a huge stake in suppressing the truth about the man. If the film (and the others) is not released, these forces will have been successful. It will be another posthumous assassination.

For what is most striking about this episode is the light it sheds on John Kennedy’s forceful, long-standing anti-colonial and anti-imperial convictions for which he was attacked by politicians of both parties. It is suggested, and I think rightly, that this grew out of his Irish roots, for Ireland’s long fight for independence from British colonial occupation was dear to his heart and also a fundamental inspiration in the following decades for anti-colonial freedom fighters everywhere. It still is.

To listen to the film’s clips of his speeches on these topics is a revelation for those unfamiliar, not only with his radical views for a politician, but to his passionate eloquence that is sorely missing today. Attacking the policies of support for dictators and the coups against foreign leaders under the Eisenhower administration and the CIA led by Allen Dulles, JFK called for freedom and independence for people’s everywhere and the end of colonialism supported by the U.S. and other nations. Algeria, Iran, Cuba, Latin America, Africa – it’s a long list.

Even before he became president, in 1957, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. and around the world. He came out in support of Algerian independence from France and African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism.

As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African and Asian independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He believed that continued support of colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they be.

That speech caused an international uproar, and in the U.S.A. Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded in Africa and the Third World.

Yet JFK continued throughout his 1960 presidential campaign to raise his voice against colonialism throughout the world and for free and independent African nations. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960; this juxtaposition revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents, as the pressure for war became structurally systematized and Kennedy was removed through a public execution for al the world to see.

Many voices speak to this and other issues in the film: Oliver Stone, James W. Douglass, RFK, Jr., Robert Dallek, Monica Wiesak, his niece Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Peter Dale Scott, James Galbraith, his nephew Stephen Smith, David Talbot, Peter Janney, and others.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks about the 1953 U.S. coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh of Iran and of the approximately 72 CIA-led known coups the United States engineered between 1947 and 1989; author Stephen Schlesinger of the Dulles brothers’ work for the United Fruit Company and their subsequent involvement in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz who was instituting land reform that threatened United Fruit’s hold on so much of the country. In both cases, and many others, the U.S. supported vicious dictators and decades of terrible bloodshed and civil wars. We see a clip of JFK himself condemn the U.S. support of the Cuban dictator Batista, who was finally overthrow by Fidel Castro and his rebel compatriots, the Cuban Revolution that Kennedy understood and sympathized with.

All this just leading up to Kennedy’s presidency, which will be covered in the next film.

Watching this riveting documentary, one cannot but be deeply impressed with a side of John Kennedy few know – his hatred of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, war, and his love of freedom for all people. One comes away from the film knowing full well why the CIA had branded him an arch-enemy even before he took office, and then when in office he rattled their cage so much more in the cause of peace.

And one is left asking: why then has this film (and its predecessor about the right-wing witch hunt and crackdown on dissent in the 1950s) not been released to the public at a time when nothing could be more timely?

It is a very strange kind of executive action, considering the brilliance and importance of these films for today – this very moment in history.FacebookTwitteRedditEmail

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

Right’s lesson from US election is ‘culture wars work’

By dividing and confusing the left, culture wars enable the wealthy to pose as anti‑establishment despite benefitting from the system



By Judy Cox
Saturday 09 November 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER

The far right in Britain celebrated Trump’s victory. Tommy Robinson claimed he had turned cartwheels in his prison cell. Nigel Farage cheered at Trump’s watch party in Pennsylvania.

The Conservative Party too shared this delight. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch could not wait to nail her colours to Trump’s mast. She demanded that Labour foreign secretary David Lammy apologise for having once called Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”.

Keir Starmer and David Lammy offer no challenge to this right wing juggernaut. Their only strategy is to make concessions, to promise action on illegal immigration and to ramp up state racism. This will only feed the beast.

Others on the left see the election as a reason to stay away from “identity politics” and concentrate instead on economics. But the right will seize on Trump’s election success to stir up ever nastier culture wars.

It believes that Trump has established a new model of success with his vicious attacks on migrants and women and his posing as an insurgent outsider boldly standing up to the “elite”.

Culture wars are about forging new alliances between groups of people with different aims. They have the potential to unite racists and Islamophobes, sexists and anti-abortionists, transphobes, climate change deniers, anti-vaxers and apologists for the British Empire into one movement.

Those drawn to the right get a purpose and a sense of importance. The right tells them they are defending their families, their country and Western civilisation from “enemies within”.

Culture wars also create a bridge between the far right and the mainstream right.

The Great Replacement Theory, for example, promotes the idea that global elites are replacing white people with black and brown immigrants. The theory was spawned by Nazi ideologues but is now regularly trotted out by conservative politicians.

Tory former home secretary Suella Braverman speaks about “cultural Marxism”, a revival of a Nazi conspiracy theory. It suggests Jewish intellectuals are attacking the West.

Kemi Badenoch gushed over US billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk, saying, “I think Elon Musk has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech. I will hold my hand up and say, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.”

This was after Musk fed Britain’s racist riots by repeating claims of police collusion with the Palestine movement.

Culture warriors claim that the left has captured all the key institutions in society—universities, the media, the civil service, public services and even the cops. And, if the establishment is run by the left, only the right wing can be anti-establishment.

Badenoch argues that Western civilisation is in decline, strangled by the “liberal elite”. This bureaucratic elite dominates society, stifles entrepreneurial spirit and risk‑taking, she says.

“In every country,” Badenoch asserts, “the rise of ‘safety‑ism’, stifling of risk, and a bureaucratic class to regulate and control us and protect the marginalised is rising steadily.

“The result of this has been a collapse in average advanced economy growth rates, from 2.7 percent in the 1980s to 2.1 percent in the 1990s and just 1 percent in the 2000s and 2010s.”

This is the height of economic illiteracy, but it makes for easy‑sounding solutions. Just tear up the red tape, drive out the lily-livered civil servants and free the bosses to conjure up economic growth.

The aim of culture wars is to divide and confuse. They demobilise opposition to slashing the welfare state, to tax cuts for the rich and to enriching the very elite they claim to stand up to.

They allow the super-rich to pose as insurgent outsiders. And they have the danger of becoming far more than a debate among politicians and commentators.

Some among the culture warriors know that, sooner or later, these “battles of ideas” will have to be settled with fists and boots.

Trump and the American Nightmare

Tomáš Tengely-Evans explores why Trump’s lies proved so persuasive in the election

Friday 08 November 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

The Rust Belt a damning indictment of the US governments’ failures (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, he dismissed Donald Trump as an “aberrant moment” in United States history. Trump’s landslide victory this week showed he is anything but.

Its scale was a shattering confirmation of a society in advanced stages of decay. Out of that decay and the Democrats’ failures, Trump and the far right are growing and pulling it rightwards.

More than 40 years of ­neoliberalism have built a traumatised, fearful and ­violent society. The US presents itself as a leader of the “free world”, but it’s a world leader in ­suicide rates, locking people up in prisons, gun violence and drug deaths.

Free market policies, pushed by Republicans and Democrats, depressed ­working class people’s wages, destroyed decent jobs and fuelled inequality.

The US is now one of the most unequal societies in the world. Some 20 percent of wealth flows to the top 1 ­percent—and the top 0.1 ­percent holds roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Human suffering and pain lie behind those economic statistics. In 2022, a record 49,500 people killed themselves and the suicide rate was as 14.3 per 100,000 people. That was the highest rate since 1941—until the following year when it rose to 14.7.

Addiction rates are on a ­similar trajectory. The US death rate from drug misuse is the highest in the world at 18.75 per 100,000 people. The world average is 2.08 per 100,000. An epidemic of opioid addiction—flowing from Big Pharma drug-pushing—claimed the lives of over 100,300 Americans in the year ending in April 2021.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is a city that knows the toll of drug deaths all too well. For decades its ­skylines were dominated by the vast plants of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, once an icon of US capitalist prowess.

They shut in 1992 and very few of the thousands of steel jobs are left today. Vape stores, fast food ­franchises and boarded-up shops dominate Main Street.

Johnstown is one of many towns and cities that symbolise US decline and form the ­heartlands of “Trump country”. Trump has successfully fed off the accumulated anger and grievances at the effects of neoliberalism.

“Career politicians like Joe Biden lied to you,” Trump told people in Johnstown. “He abused you. He crushed you, your dreams and ­outsourced your jobs to China and distant lands all over the world.”

But Trump, a billionaire backed by a substantial section of big business, offers ­nothing for working class people whether white, black or Latino. So why has the far right, not the left, benefited from the crisis of the neoliberal centre?

First, Trump simultaneously feeds off the crisis caused by the neoliberal centre and builds on its ideas. Politicians justified those neoliberal policies with a liberal ideology that market competition and dog-eat-dog individualism were the basis of human flourishing.

In Neoliberalism’s Demons, US writer Adam Kotsko argues it “confronted us with forced choices that served to redirect the blame for social problems onto the ostensible poor ­decision making of individuals”. So, the response to the deep social crisis in the US can be more right wing solutions, rather than looking to a collective class response.

Mainstream politicians ­pushing racism to deflect blame for their own failures gives the likes of Trump fertile ground. For example, Kamala Harris celebrated the Democrats ­presiding over “lower undocumented immigrants and illegal immigration than Trump when he left office”. She criticised Trump for only building “about 2 percent” of the US-Mexico border wall.

Second, Trump and the far right play on nostalgia for the “American Dream”, a period most associated in the decades that followed the Second World War. It was an era of full ­employment, rising living ­standards and economic boom—the apex of US power in the world. But it was always a nightmare for black people, women and LGBT+ people.

The 1950s was the era of the racist Jim Crow laws in the Southern states, segregation and lynchings. It was the era that ­idealised the “nuclear family” with strict gender roles for women in particular. The ideology of the American Dream presented prosperity as a “birthright” for white Americans.

Many working class people did win the higher living ­standards they had in the 50s off the back of struggles. Workers’ militancy, such as the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936-37 in Flint, Michigan, had forced the US ruling class to make concessions.

Fear of greater revolt pushed the US government and sections of big business to come to an accommodation with trade union leaders. At the same time, they smashed the left for a generation in the “anti-Communist” witch-hunts of the 1940s and 50s. The idea of prosperity as a “birthright” chimed in the popular consciousness.

Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden’s speech in New York this month dripped with racism and sexism and revealed the far right play book. He tapped into the social crisis facing millions of people, slamming Harris for ­“shattering our middle class” in “less than four years”. He latched onto that deep pain and twisted it against migrants.

“I will protect our workers. I will protect our jobs,” he said. In the next breath he said, “I will protect our borders. I will protect our great families.

“I will protect the ­birthright of our children to live in the ­richest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth.” The American Dream’s notions of birthright were ­interlaced with the deep racism of US society used to divide workers and the poor.

In 1965 Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King said the “Southern aristocracy gave the poor white man Jim Crow”. “When his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not ­provide, he ate Jim Crow, a ­psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man,” he said.

That too is part of Trump’s strategy. He has channelled a lot of people’s anger through whipping up racism, scapegoating migrants and deflecting it onto ­“liberal elites”. It diverts anger and ­attention away from the real elite—­billionaires, bosses and ­bankers—that Trump belongs to.

Four years ago, he promised a Johnstown rally, “We’re going to bring in tremendous numbers of factories.” That was a lie he didn’t deliver on, but he hasn’t lost support.

He promises to restore ­people’s worth and sense of status by going after criminals, drug dealers, migrants and the “woke left”.

This US crisis doesn’t have to benefit the right. Powerful social movements have rocked US society—for example, Palestine on the campuses, Black Lives Matter and the mass opposition during Trump’s first term as president.

Millions of people looked to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the “Squad” who call themselves democratic socialists.

They promised a Green New Deal that would invest billions into decent, well-paid jobs for working class people. That became Biden’s Build Back Better programme that curtailed those promises.

Then, Bidenomics effectively turned into an armaments programme with very few green jobs attached. But Sanders, AOC and Co. all defended Biden and the politics of working through the Democratic Party. They lined up behind an administration that deepened the crisis and did little for workers.

In the election, Trump’s message was “Make America Great Again”. The Democrats claimed that “America” was already great. People saw this lie—and the Democrats’ vote collapsed from 2020.

Instead, to combat Trump’s racist agenda, we need a left that doesn’t line up behind the Democrats and looks to struggle on the streets and workplaces.

We saw a glimpse of that with the recent Boeing and dockers’ strikes and there are big class battles ahead with Trump’s agenda. Alongside fighting the far right and racism, the left needs to pose a genuine alternative to capitalism.

In the 1930s Langston Hughes, the great black American poet, poked at those who used nostalgia for an imagined American past. “America was never America to me,” he said.

He said the real task was to “make America again”—to build a different sort of society free from the ravages of exploitation and oppression. “Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,” the people “must redeem” the country and its vast wealth.

We can only win that through struggle against the far right—and the system that produces it.

AMERIKA

The resistance starts now

Robert Reich
November 8, 2024


Photo by visuals on Unsplash

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too.

Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.


Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.


We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.


But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.


We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.


We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

The real reason behind Trump's surprise win

John Stoehr
November 8, 2024

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 26, 2024. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado

I was wrong about this election. I was wrong about a bunch of things. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was

I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.

We can and will argue about why this happened. Some will say that Joe Biden should have decided sooner against running for reelection. Some say that Harris didn’t take this or that policy position to appeal to this or that voting bloc. Some say that a woman, especially a biracial woman, was never going to win anyway. Some say that the Washington press corps failed to inform the electorate properly. And so on.

While all of these complaints have merit in and of themselves, I think none of them explains what happened on their own. Bottom line: most people, which is to say, most white people in this still majority-white country, wanted what Trump was offering them, even though what he was actually offering was little more than machismo and vengeance.

Trump is, as a shrewd observer put it, the whitest white man we have ever seen. That can erase a multitude of sins. “So am I to understand that leading a coup, promoting the Big Lie, being found liable for rape and guilt of fraud, growing more extreme, threatening to be a dictator and suffering dementia actually strengthened Trump politically?” David Rothkopf said. “It does not compute.” But it kinda sorta does.

If it was hard for my liberal and Democratic brethren to hear before the election, it shouldn’t be now. Lots of Americans do not believe in democracy in any universal sense. They believe in democracy that is exclusive, indeed that is punitive. Trump has promised retribution against his enemies and lots of Americans liked the sound of that.

My hope was that there were more people who wanted our democracy to be inclusive than there were those who wanted it to be exclusive. My hope was that the story of progress in America, with expanding rights and opportunities for all, would continue the way it seemed to after Joe Biden’s election. It’s moments like this, in the aftermath of a shocking election, when I find myself second-guessing such hopes.

Some are already saying that the Democrat Party needs to soul-search. The election, said Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, “was a real wake up call for Democrats. It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”

But I don’t think the Democrats need to change who they are and what they stand for to reach just enough white people in just enough swing states. The Biden presidency put the federal government on the side of the working and middle classes. Indeed, Biden talked endlessly about the dignity of work, a clear signal to “a lot of males.” The Harris campaign aimed to build on that by expanding Medicare, cutting taxes for families, helping small businesses grow, fighting for labor rights and so on. The Democratic Party as it stands is a multiracial party oriented economically toward everyone who works for a living.

In other words, the Democratic Party is populist in that it stands for and advances policies that are popular. The Republicans know and fear that. Otherwise, they would not have taken credit for infrastructure projects nationwide that Biden and the Democrats enacted and that nearly every congressional Republican voted against. Moreover, when pollsters ask respondents which policies they like best, majorities usually favor Democratic policies over policies that the GOP offers.

What the Democrats do not do, but that the Republicans do do, is single out to ridicule a subgroup or subculture for the purpose of making just enough white people in just enough swing states feel better about themselves. To be precise, the Democrats do not tear down immigrants or trans people or anyone to give the impression of justice being served to voters who believe that minorities are taking something from them. They do not dance around that gray area between bigotry and “the economy.” They don’t do that and never should. If they do, they will collapse, as a party, from the inside out.

But what should the Democrats do?

For now, I’ll say this: whatever they do, it had better be with the understanding that we are now living in a new age of fear, ignorance and superstition to such a staggering degree that we will go back, to paraphrase Harris, if the Democratic Party doesn’t take it seriously. Lies, propaganda and disinformation are coming from all corners of the globe, including from places like Russia, China and Iran, but the clearinghouse here is the GOP and the rightwing media apparatus.

Joe Biden and the Democrats saved the economy and made it the envy of the world. They pulled us out of a pandemic that killed a million of us. They brought prosperity back to every one of the so-called “left behind” counties. They tamed inflation post-covid without triggering a ruinous recession. But none of that mattered to swing-state voters awash in lies. The Forward’s Alex Zeldin put it this way: “If your media consumption is a Fox morning show, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, Prager, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, rightwing memes on reddit, Twitter and Instagram, and your nightly consumption is Fox, you will have no way of knowing anything good Democrats do.”

Jon Stewart’s election postmortem: Trump 'used our electoral system as it is designed'

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 8, 2024

Actor turned activist Jon Stewart gives remarks at a PACT Act rally to support funding veterans who are victims of burn pit related illnesses. (Shutterstock.com)

Donald Trump's critics on both the left and the right were hoping that Election Night 2024 would bring a repudiation of the former president.

Instead, Trump's detractors — from Democratic strategist James Carville to author Mary Trump (his niece) to conservative attorney George Conway — were horrified when Trump enjoyed a decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris despite awaiting sentencing on 34 criminal charges and promising to rule like an autocrat if given a second term.

Comedian/late-night television host Jon Stewart weighed in as well, expressing shock that Trump is returning to the White House without engaging in the type of election denial that characterized his 2020 loss to now-President Joe Biden.

On his podcast "The Weekly Show," Stewart explained, "Each one of those scenarios, it was, 'How is Donald Trump going to finagle his way back into the White House? How is he going to use undemocratic principles? What measure of intimidation and underhanded shenaniganery will this man use to worm his way back into the Oval Office?' And it turned out, he used our electoral system as it is designed."

Stewart compared Trump's 2024 victory to "vertigo" (the physical condition, not the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film).

"I'd love to sit back and think about the autopsy and where you move from there, but I think I still feel as though I'm in that moment of vertigo to some extent," Stewart told "Weekly Show" listeners. "In the same way that I, when I decided to stop drinking I didn't do it while the room was still spinning. I didn't stop doing booze and drugs in that moment of lying on the floor facedown trying to wonder if I just move my hand here, will the room stop. And I think that’s a wise way of looking at it."

Stewart went on to say, "I think you have to be more clear-eyed, have your balance, and your feet underneath you before you can start really thinking about what it was that made what you think your worldview is, and the things that you were certain about, not certain."

Why millions of Americans just voted against their own self-interest

Michaelangelo Signorile, The Signorile Report
November 7, 2024 

Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash

In 2016, when Pennsylvania was called for Trump and he won the election in the early hours of the morning, I had tears in my eyes as I lay in bed and posted on social media that we would fight. It was a complete aberration, I remember thinking, a jarring anomaly.

Last night, as the returns were coming in, again stunning so many of us, I felt differently.

I didn’t see it as some fluke in the making, as in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton was hounded by the exaggerated email story, which surfaced again, thanks to FBI Director James Comey, days before the election, only to be a nothingburger. Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin at all. There was deep Russian interference from early on in the election.

Trump was a celebrity who had no political record, and a lot of people just voted for him without knowing much about his positions. Many people didn’t vote at all, thinking Clinton would win, because the polling was so out of whack. Third parties took just enough of the vote to pull from Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote, but the injustice of the Electoral College brought Trump to victory.

This time, however, Donald Trump won a majority of American voters in the popular vote. He won after having been a dangerous, brutal president who harmed many people, stripped the rights of Americans, put extremists on the Supreme Court, and mismanaged a pandemic, allowing millions to die. I could go on, but the bottom line: we can’t say people didn’t know him.

So last night, I didn’t cry. I felt anger and outrage, more than anything else, at those millions of Americans who willingly voted for someone who would harm this country and hurt others and even themselves. And I’m still feeling that anger right now.

Trump was even more cruel, racist, and misogynistic in his 2024 campaign than in any prior campaign. And yet, he won the majority of voters expanding his rural vote but also cutting into some of the suburban counties and urban counties just enough.

Exit polls are to be taken with a grain of salt, as they're always off and often revised later. But we can look at them directionally rather than precisely. According to those polls, Trump improved upon his 2020 results with Black voters, just a little, and with Latino voters—particularly Latino men—by a more substantial amount, in both rural areas and urban areas. And he improved quite a bit with young voters and people voting for the first time.

That was all enough to put him over the top. He started with his floor, his base of support. Unlike losing presidents of the past, who just faded away, very unpopular with their parties, Trump had used the Big Lie to make his base see Democrats, not him, as the losers and, more nefariously, as degenerates who stole the election. This kept his base with him for four years, even after first being jarred by January 6th. They pushed aside the attempt to overturn the election and the violence, already predisposed to forgive him. And stuck with him. Then it just became about adding a few more people here and there.


As a con man, he was able to do that. But we can’t overlook that his base and any new voters backed him knowing 100% what Trump was about. They backed him even though the Democrats had a very good candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris who ran a pretty flawless campaign—and no, I’m not going to get into the blame game I’m already seeing some Democrats engage in—a candidate who spoke to their needs at the moment regarding the economy, offering actual, detailed plans.

Trump’s misogyny, his cruelty, his racism, and his history of hate were embraced by those voters. You can say many overlooked them, but that’s still an embrace. Some may have liked his bigotry more than others—getting off on his attacks on the left, on his perceived enemies in Congress, on marginalized groups—but that doesn’t make those who didn’t like it any less responsible for their actions.

Much of what happened last night can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and how our whole world was turned upside down. The isolation and then the economic turmoil caused real shockwaves for many Americans. President Biden did an enormous, historic job at passing legislation to bring this economy back to a juggernaut, the envy of the world. GDP is surging; unemployment is 4%. Wages are up.


But for too many voters, the jolt of inflation—and the fact that prices would never come down even if the inflation rate itself slowed dramatically—was heavy. This election split along education lines, even as it cut across racial ones—non-college educated vs. college-educated—and obviously then across income brackets and those who could buffer the shock of inflation better than others.

Those most affected just didn’t grasp how inflation soared as a result of the economic turmoil of the pandemic and supply chain shortages and just blamed Biden—with the help of Republicans fanning exaggerations about spending and falsehoods, and a corporate media that was complicit. And they didn’t see how Biden was revitalizing the economy as Trump and Republicans played into their unease and promised to make things better.

Too many of them believed that because their own finances were in a better place before the pandemic it was somehow due to Trump—who, in reality, did nothing to make their lives better and, in fact, caused more economic inequality with his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The fond memories of the economy in the pre-pandemic Trump years were actually because of the rebuilt economy that President Obama left Trump.

Republicans and Trump exploited these voters’ short memories—many of the youngest voters today, don’t forget, were 15 or 16 years old during Trump’s presidency, and, like most teenagers, weren’t paying much attention to national news. Republicans exploited the lack of awareness among many about how the economy works, how Covid shocked it, and what Biden was doing.

Again, we could blame the media for this too, as I have many times, but it still doesn’t absolve these voters of their responsibility. They were warned many times in this campaign, and the truth was laid out for them. Many simply got caught up in the cult and became unreachable.

Millions of Americans voted for a man who will cause prices to spike dramatically when he imposes his 20% tariffs across the board on foreign goods. They will see members of their families, their colleagues, their neighbors and their friends, taken from their homes and sent off to camps to be deported. They will themselves experience the horrors of the Dobbs decision on women’s health, either personally or with regard to women in their lives. They will see their transgender family members or friends demonized and harmed.

They will watch discrimination against minorities—Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people of color—play out before their eyes, and sometimes it will affect them personally, as members of those groups themselves. They will see marriage equality weakened and may see entire departments of the government abolished—like the Department of Education—as Project 2025 is put into action.

Part of me wants many of those who voted for Trump to experience this as punishment—particularly those who voted on the economy and now will see prices soar from the tariffs. That’s how angry I am.

But I realize we have to fight to protect the vulnerable, no matter how uninformed they are. And the truth is, millions more among the groups that will be affected by a Trump presidency—the majority of most of the groups I mentioned—voted against him and for a new future with Kamala Harris. Many of them worked day in and day out to get her elected, worried about their own rights and the threat to democracy.


So, we have to realize that, while also realizing that the country has changed, that through a few votes here and a few votes there, Trump has remade his coalition and willingly got people to vote for his authoritarian agenda even as it will hurt many of them. We have to face that we’re in a different landscape, and our duty now is to protect people who will be hurt, stand for the truth, and still fight for democracy, as painful as this will be to do.

Grieving is important—and the anger I’m feeling is part of that—but in a short time we have to get beyond it because transformations will happen rapidly. As in other countries that faced authoritarians, we’ll need to be the pro-democracy movement. And we have to steel ourselves for the fight ahead.

On Divesting–and Voting–in “The End Times”

Desiree Hellegers

 November 6, 2024
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Image by Unsplash+.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like these days all the right and the left can agree on is that we’re living in The End Times. We’ve got a world of right-wing mega churches and home school militias just jonesing to belly up to the bar for another shot at transforming the U.S. into a theocratic, transphobic, patriarchal hellhole presided over by none other than the pussy-grabbing, Bible-hawking, daughter-ogling, wannabe King Leer. A guy who demonstrates less moral awareness than your average Peeping Tom, and who, if elected, will have far greater capacity for organized sexual violence. (Who imagines Trump wouldn’t love to preside over his own personal Abu Ghraib?) We’re talking a guy who might as well be wearing a T-shirt with an arrow pointing upwards that reads “I’m with Beelza Bubba.” A guy who spews so much bile, It seems like only a matter of time before his head starts spinning like Regan’s in The Exorcist.

And then there’s the odd AK-wielding, trash-talking Christian Gun Moll Moms in Congress, who, judging from their Christmas cards, run a substantially higher legal risk than the average American of being charged as accessories when one of their little darlings decides to cosplay the Columbine shooting. One can only surmise their plan is to flash their cash at the pearly gates, and if St. Peter still won’t cave, just Rambo his ass.

Given the state of the planet, perhaps it’s no wonder that so many Christians are desperate to get raptured up. And let’s acknowledge that for all their current embrace of Netanyahu, far right Christians view a Jewish convergence in “the Holy Land” as the requisite celestial semaphore needed to summon their muscular Bad-Daddy-Trump-Jesus. As the Bible must surely saith somewhere, once enough Jewish people are assembled, the Christian right’s Personal Savior and Candyman can be counted on to use his intergalactic light saber and transporter to whisk them all off to their all-white, all-gentile-all-the-time country club in the sky, and simultaneously banish Jews, Muslims, Jains, Buddhists, Rastafarians, et al, along with various Christian heretics and riff-raff, to be tortured for all eternity.

Speaking of hot places, we really are in quite a deep planetary pickle, having rapidly ripped through the 1.5 degree Celsius limit recommended in the toothless Paris Climate Agreement. The world, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently warned, is “teetering on a planetary tightrope.  Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster — with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most.”

Millions of young people are being born into a world that’s starting to hemorrhage methane, a world where tornados and “once in a century” hurricanes, typhoons, and historic floods are becoming routine occurrences. A world in which their personal data is routinely surveilled, marketed, and monetized before they graduate high school. A world in which social media has enabled millions of them to watch the bone-crunching child- annihilating genocide unfold in real time in Gaza, brought to you by U.S.& Israeli Bombs & Surveillance R Us.

In the past year alone, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, “U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting.“ Since 1959, “[a]djusted for inflation, total U.S. military aid to Israel stands at $251.2 billion….” And so, many young Americans are starting to ask how else that money might be spent in their own communities, what it might buy in the way of universal healthcare, Head Start programs, and tuition-free college education. The good news is The National Priorities Project enables people to see just how that kind of “trade-off” might work. Check it out, kids, and see what you’ve been missing!

In contrast to the U.S., Israel has had universal healthcare since 1995. And, according to a website recruiting new settlers, in Israel, “tuition costs are regulated by the government at around $3,000 per year,” and, as the site goes on to explain, the cost of university in the U.S. is “nowhere near the low price of college in Israel.” But particularly since the start of the “War on Terror,” more and more money in the U.S. has been siphoned off from domestic spending and redirected to subsidize the world’s largest carbon-sucking, global death-delivery vehicle.

One of the few hopeful developments in the midst of the unspeakable violence being committed in our names and with our tax dollars is that more and more university students and professors, at substantial risk to themselves, are taking a magnifying glass to their own university investment portfolios and demanding that they divest from death-dealing corporations in both the U.S. and Israel. How can we remain silent while tax dollars that could fund universal healthcare and free higher education in the U.S. have instead been used to kill or maim thousands of students, teachers, and professors in Gaza and to raze schools, universities, libraries, and archives? All twelve universities in Gaza were bombed within the first 100 days of the war alone. According to The Lancet, as of June, the death toll in Gaza was already approaching 40,000, not including the more than 10,000 believed to have been buried under U.S. and Israeli-made rubble.

It only makes sense both morally and strategically for activists pressing for universities to divest from fossil fuels to also throw their support behind campaigns for divestment from U.S. and Israeli companies that are profiting from the genocide in Gaza. Divestment organizing needs to take up concerns with not only the domestic costs of U.S. militarism, but also its carbon impacts. A January 2024 study in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) conservatively estimates the carbon “emissions from the first 60 days of the Israel-Gaza war [as] greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.” So, the same bombs that are laying waste to Gaza are blowing huge holes through our collective planetary carbon budget.

The carbon-intensive militarized gauntlet that has laid siege to Gaza has also reduced water access in Gaza to a mere trickle.­ UNICEF estimated that in December 2023, “displaced children in the southern Gaza Strip” had access to between half and two-thirds of what’s needed “[f]or survival alone…” let alone to feed children’s growing bodies. And the carbon impacts of all those bombs and all that military infrastructure are contributing to water shortages that are hitting far closer to home. The U.N. Environment Programme notes that “Two of the largest reservoirs in America, which provide water and electricity to millions, are in danger of reaching ‘dead pool status,’ a result of the climate crisis and overconsumption of water.”

As I’ve written elsewhere in Counterpunch, “Who can blame anyone whose families have been burned or buried alive by 2,000 -pound bombs, if they cannot bring themselves to vote for Harris?” But as morally bankrupt as the Democrats have, in the main, shown themselves to be with respect to Gaza, a Trump presidency-cum-monarchy promises to rapidly foreclose any semblance of democratic norms and pathways to change course on Gaza and the climate.

Universities today are critical sites of social struggle for both Gaza and the planet with endowments that collectively approach a trillion dollars. They are also high on Herr Trump’s encompassing hit list of “enemies from within.” Is anyone surprised that Trump, Roy Cohn’s eager acolyte, is eager to fan the flames of a McCarthyite witch hunt in higher education? As Henry Giroux recently noted in Counterpunch, J.D. Vance “has publicly branded  professors as ‘the enemy’ while Trump has pledged to cleanse universities of so-called ‘leftists,’ whom he denigrates as ‘vermin.’ “As Giroux also notes, for Trump, “labels like ‘leftists’ and ‘Marxists’ serve as sweeping condemnations for anyone who dares engage in critical thinking or challenges the status quo.” And why wouldn’t Trump jump at the chance to carve out, privatize and sell off these public assets at fire-sale prices to corporations for his own personal profit?

Domestically, fossil fuel companies that routinely push for draconian penalties for civil disobedience are likely to find a more than eager ally in Trump. Herr Trump’s bloodlust for violence against just about anyone he disagrees with–and certainly against protesters–is well-documented. As reported in a 2021 book by Wall Street Journal reporter Mike Bender, General Mark Milley put the kibosh on Trump’s orders to “’crack skulls,’” “’beat the fuck out of’” and “’just shoot’” protesters involved in the George Floyd racial justice uprising. But Project 2025 is an indication that the second time around Trump will be far better prepareagainst such constitutional restraints. Protesters going up against Trump-appointed judges stand a far better chance of incurring draconian sentences.  And prospects for appeals or reprieves may recede into the distant future if Trump keeps his promise to Christian theocrats and other allies that they “won’t have to vote again.”

Far too little has been said, moreover, about the links between the unfolding genocide in Gaza and oil and gas just off the coast in the Levant Basin. Trump’s complete disregard for the Emoluments clause in the Constitution, and the carte blanche he’s been given by his pussy-grabbing cronies on the Supreme Court, give him every incentive to want to profit from the unfolding genocide and “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza. And, as Patrick Wintour reported in The Guardian, at a 2024 talk at Harvard University, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner “praised the ‘very valuable’ potential of Gaza’s ‘waterfront property’ and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it ‘cleans up’ the strip.”

The Biden administration’s actions on climate have definitely fallen short of his rhetoric and far shorter still of what’s needed to pull us back from the edge into a habitable world. But his policies have also been a far cry from those of the climate-denying Trump, with his mantra of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and his open, unabashed invitation  to fossil fuel CEOS–during a lavish dinner at Mar-a-lago–to eviscerate climate regulations in exchange for $1 billion dollars in support for his reelection.

The $391 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Biden signed within two years of taking office is definitely, at best, a mixed bag. It opens up public lands to drilling and offers subsidizes to companies peddling nuclear power as “green.” But Earthjustice also credits the bill with “supercharg[ing the] process of replacing our deadly fossil fuel economy with clean energy while investing in critical air monitoring technologies, pollution reduction programs, environmental justice priorities, and efficient permitting processes.”

But let’s be clear that whatever legislative inroads were made under Biden were not the product of his largesse, but rather were hard-won by a diversity of tactics: from local legislative and electoral victories to sustained environmental lobbying, lawsuits and other legal challenges, to people putting their bodies on the line in direct actions in an exhausting game of fossil fuel whack-a-mole. Still, if you want to get a sense of the key differences that all those oil executives chowing down at Mar-a-Lago likely see between Trump and Biden’s would-be successor Kamala Harris, check out The American Petroleum Institute’s list of grievances against the Biden administration. Personally, having had the sphincter-bracing experience in Portland in 2015 (alongside dozens of far braver kayaktivists) of trying to stop Shell’s Fennica icebreaker on its way up to the Arctic, I have a hard time being dismissive of Biden’s decision–on his first day in office–to cancel drilling leases in the Arctic.

A May “Open letter by Gaza academics and universities administrators to the world” calls for domestic and global support to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza.” The letter also asserts Palestinian resilience in the face of unspeakable horrors made possible by U.S. tax dollars: “We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.” In the U.S., our integrity as educators and as humans mandates that we redouble our efforts to stop the genocide and redirect funds from the U.S. and Israeli war economies to rebuilding Gaza.

And alongside rebuilding Gaza’s schools and universities, let’s commit to reinvesting in and revitalizing schools and universities in the U.S. As Giroux has argued, “Today, the role of educators as public intellectuals aligned with broader social movements has never been more vital, especially when far-right extremists around the globe seek to turn education into a force for indoctrination.” Whatever the results of this election, it’s provided vivid and chilling examples of the lethal cost of ignorance in the U.S.

And finally, even if it sometimes looks like we’ve definitively answered the question of whether the world will end in ice or fire, let’s not short-change the apocalyptic possibilities of a nuclear winter. Seriously, isn’t there a biblical adage like, “Knoweth ye not that if thou canst not trust a man with his own daughter, thou definitely canst not trust him with the nuclear codes”?

Desiree Hellegers is affiliated faculty with the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University  Vancouver; director of The Thin Green Line is People History Project and a member/producer with the Old Mole Variety Hour  on Portland’s KBOO Radio. Their web series “How I Learned to Breathe Thru the Apocalypse” is airing on Portland’s Open Signal Cable TV .  More information on their work can be found at https://labs.wsu.edu/desiree-hellegers/