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Thursday, October 31, 2024

Climate activist slams politicians as flash floods kill dozens in Spanish state

Jesus M Castillo, a professor in ecology at the University of Seville in the Spanish state, spoke to Socialist Worker


Jesus M Castillo, a professor in ecology at the University of Seville


By Camilla Royle
Wednesday 30 October 2024
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2929


Flash floods have killed at least 70 people in the Valencia region of the Spanish state—and politicians’ inaction on climate change is to blame.

A year’s worth of rain fell in the space of a day in some areas after extremely heavy rainfall started on Tuesday. Residents of Valencia described scenes that looked like a “zombie apocalypse” with bridges and roads completely destroyed and people trapped in their cars.

Jesus M Castillo is a professor in ecology at the University of Seville in the Spanish state. He told Socialist Worker that the flooding was predictable, but the authorities acted too slowly. “I research climate change so I know the Mediterranean Sea is warmer than usual,” he said.

“It was very risky that this would happen. A cold mass of air would come down here and meet the warm air from the Mediterranean and lead to very heavy rain.

“In the 1980s there was something similar but not as extensive as now. It covered a very wide area, not just one or two villages.”

A warming climate leads to more water in the air and makes these rainfall events “more intense, more frequent and more extensive”. “Four days ago, the State Meteorological Agency said it was very risky,” he added. “The science is very clear.

“But it’s the regional government that has to deal with this crisis—and the ruling party is the conservative PP. They knew this could happen but they didn’t close the schools or tell people not to go to work.

“Yesterday they were behaving like this was just a normal day. Employers were telling their employees to go to work.

“The government issued a warning on people’s mobile phones to tell people to stay where they are. But it was issued too late—at around 6pm.

“The regional government was saying, ‘Don’t stop the economy—continue with business as usual.’.”

The PP had been in a coalition with the far right Vox party until July this year. Vox say climate change doesn’t exist. Its leader Santiago Abascal has dismissed climate regulations as an “excuse to destroy what little is left of our national industry”.

Vox’s election manifesto talked about repealing the Spanish state’s climate change act, ending a ban on the sale of diesel and petrol cars by 2035.

The coalition shut down the emergency response service, which the previous Labour-type PSOE government had set up.

It pushed through cuts to health care and education, especially in small towns that are now on the front line of the catastrophic floods

Businesses also tried to stay open and defend their profits as the flooding hit. “Ikea runs one of the biggest shopping malls,” he said. “It didn’t close the shops and the workers had to sleep there.

“In another shopping mall 700 people had to sleep inside. Many workers had to go onto the roofs of buildings—they are probably among the dead.

“Truck drivers were also caught in the middle of it. There is an image on social media of a van from one of the biggest supermarkets—Mercadona—stranded in the floods with firefighters trying to rescue the driver.

“He had to deliver in the middle of this weather. When they put the video out, they tried to blur the image but people realised.”

Mercado’s owner Juan Roig is from Valencia. People are outraged that he pockets billions while his workers go out in all weathers.

Jesus said, “This is going to happen again and more and more frequently with climate change. That is what the models say will happen and what is happening. There is drought. There is not enough water for the crops and now flooding. We have had droughts here in the south for five years now.

“We have to change the system. We need to stop polluting and to build in safe areas.

“We are at the edge of the cliff of abrupt climate change—and if the rich don’t stop what they are doing we will fall off.”

Tuesday, October 29, 2024


The Election Looks So Close That Even You-Know-Who Could Tip It

David Faris
Tue, October 29, 2024 


This is part of Wedge Issues, a pop-up advice column about politics, running now through the election. Submit a question here—it’s anonymous!

Dear Wedge Issues,

Should I fear Jill Stein—or, really, any third-party candidate? I recently read a piece about how Stein could have contributed to edging Hillary Clinton out in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2016. I also saw, according to a poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations last month, that 40 percent of Muslims in Michigan are backing Stein too, because of her position on Israel’s war in Gaza. But I also saw that David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK, has endorsed her? Lot of confusing stuff here. I just want to know whether to be afraid of what she could do to the election!

—Still, Jill?!

Dear Still?!,

The Green Party is not a particularly serious political operation. Its candidates have never won a federal election, and its vanishingly small number of successful candidates have been mostly at the municipal or state legislative level. Winner-take-all races for nearly all seats in Congress and for most states’ electors in the Electoral College mean that small parties usually get completely shut out of power. But on top of that, as an organization the Green Party does virtually nothing to build its brand and reach between elections and emerges from a cocoon of delusion and extremism every four years to terrify liberals. It makes sense that you’re freaked out—the Green Party is a zombie that has, once again, emerged from a dark resting place.

This year in particular, the Stein campaign is taking great pleasure in serving as a spoiler. Whereas the party’s 2004 nominee, David Cobb, explicitly refused to campaign in swing states after Ralph Nader was widely (and correctly) believed to have cost Al Gore the 2000 election, the Stein campaign seems to be concentrating all of its energy in a bid to deny Democratic nominee Kamala Harris the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The New York Times reported that a speaker at a recent Stein event in Michigan admitted the obvious: “We are not in a position to win the White House.” He added, “We do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan.” OK then!

And Jill Stein, specifically, is not a serious person. The former physician is launching her sixth “campaign” for a significant position in government, having run for governor of Massachusetts twice and now the presidency three times. Her best performance was actually the 17.7 percent of the vote she received 18 years ago in the race for Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, in a contest that featured no Republican candidate. She has worked openly this year with Republicans trying to get her on state ballots for the express purpose of rat-fucking the election and will almost certainly receive a boost from Russian disinformation artists, as she did in 2016. While Stein has disavowed her endorsement by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, it is not a surprise that her increasingly fringe politics are attracting unwelcome bedfellows.

Stein is unlikely to draw north of 1 percent of the vote nationally—but unfortunately, she is a threat that we still have to take seriously. That’s because the 2024 election looks as if it is going to be agonizingly, almost impossibly close. The leading forecasts are close to 50–50, and it is difficult to imagine polling getting any narrower than it already is in the seven decisive battleground states. It is actually reasonable and understandable to do a little bit of doom spiraling about all the different things that could go wrong and lead to the future-warping catastrophe of a second Trump term. And Stein is, sadly, one of them.

But: This isn’t a situation where we can use simple arithmetic to get angry at Stein. To properly assign blame to Stein, and to figure out what she might wreak this time, we have to correctly assess what Stein’s voters would do if she were not on the ballot.

There’s a perception on the left that Stein cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016. She did not, but it is understandable why this myth has taken hold. The way that people conclude this is to take Trump’s margins in a given state and tally up Stein’s votes there. If Stein’s raw vote totals exceeded Trump’s margin, then voilĂ : She must have denied Hillary Clinton victory in that state and thus the presidency. But this is a misreading of how third-party voting works, one that political scientists like me have repeatedly pushed back on. For example, the myth that Reform Party candidate Ross Perot cost Republican George H.W. Bush the election in 1992 is not sustainable when examined closely. Perot pulled more than 18 percent of the vote in an election that Democrat Bill Clinton won by fewer than 6 points, but you can’t just take the Texas billionaire’s haul and give it to Bush. Exit polls showed that Clinton and Bush were equally likely to be the second choice of Perot voters. And the most recent analysis, from Harrison Lavelle and Armin Thomas at Split Ticket, argues counterintuitively that Perot drew more votes from Clinton.

And, perhaps most importantly, there’s the fact that many third-party voters wouldn’t show up on Election Day at all if their preferred candidate is not on the ballot.

Political scientists Christopher Devine and Kyle Kotko published a paper in 2021 looking at the 2016 election and concluded that roughly 53 percent of Stein voters simply wouldn’t have turned out if she hadn’t been on the ballot. About 35 percent of Stein’s votes would have gone to Clinton, according to the study, and 8 percent to Trump. So, yes, she may have “contributed” to his margins in some states. But the one state where Stein’s candidacy may actually have been decisive in 2016 was Michigan, which Trump carried by fewer than 11,000 votes out of more than 5 million cast, and where Stein nabbed 51,463 votes. And while I’m sure it would have been a terrible, possibly unbearable blow to Trump’s crystalline ego to have won 290 electoral votes rather than 306, that one state wouldn’t have gotten Clinton anywhere near victory.

However, in 2024 Michigan could actually decide the whole election single-handedly. Forecaster Nate Silver gives Michigan his second-highest odds of being the “tipping-point state” in the election: the one that puts the winning candidate over 270 electoral votes. The Harris campaign is privately quite worried about it. If we assume similar turnout to 2020—about 5.5 million votes—and if we believe Stein’s RealClearPolitics average of 1.0 percent in multicandidate polling of the state, she is likely to draw around 55,000 votes in Michigan. But if we also assume that Stein’s actual Election Day totals will be about half of her election eve polling, which is what we saw across the board for third-party candidates including Stein in 2016 and which has been a consistent pattern in American elections, that number gets cut to 27,000.

So here’s what we can do with all this: We can apply Devine and Kotko’s conclusions and the standard Election Day dropoff for third-party candidates and assume that Stein wins 0.5 percent in Michigan, that 53 percent of her voters would have stayed home, that 35 percent would have gone to Harris, and 8 percent to Trump. If so, then Harris would have netted just over 3,000 more votes without Stein on the ballot.

Could Michigan be that close? It certainly could. But even in an era of sharp polarization during which the share of the electorate that changes sides between elections has plummeted, only a handful of states have been decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. This century, only New Hampshire (in 2016) and Florida and New Mexico (in 2000) were that close. Bumping the margin up to 5,000 votes or fewer does not add many states to the list.

The best thing to do here, though, is not to stew in your fear of Jill Stein but to reach out to friends and family members who are considering voting for her and try to gently talk them out of it, rather than calling them names on social media or accusing them of naively helping Donald Trump. Vote shaming not only doesn’t work but almost certainly causes people to dig in their heels. And that could, ironically, make everyone’s worst recurring Jill Stein nightmare a reality.

In US swing state Wisconsin, potential Green vote irks Democrats

Maggy DONALDSON
Tue, October 29, 2024 at 7:26 PM MDT
4 min read



Chester Todd walks past campaign signs outside his home in Racine, Wisconsin, where he's running for the House of Representatives in the state's first district (TANNEN MAURY)TANNEN MAURY/AFP/AFPMore

Chester Todd is an 82-year-old running for US Congress on a platform of "equality, reparations, liberation" -- and those principles, he says, are why neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump have earned his vote.

Wearing a Palestinian flag-colored scarf at a coffee shop in his hometown Racine, Wisconsin, Todd told AFP he will instead vote Jill Stein, the perennial Green Party candidate who is on the ballot in nearly every battleground state this presidential cycle -- and who many Democrats fear could stymie their White House chances.

Stein has virtually no chance of winning in Wisconsin -- or anywhere -- but in the key swing state where outcomes are notoriously a photo finish, her ballot line could have outsized influence.

Republicans won Wisconsin for the first time in nearly three decades in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost by just under 23,000 votes to Donald Trump -- a shock defeat that had some Democrats blaming Stein for taking around 31,000 votes.

And the Green Party's message -- which centers on issues like climate change, healthcare, and, this year, ending arms support to Israel in its war on Gaza -- continues to find traction in Wisconsin's bluest pockets, areas crucial to a Harris win.

National Democrats recently ran a campaign ad attacking Stein that aired in Wisconsin as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania -- all part of the so-called "Blue Wall" critical to the Democrats' White House path.

"She's not sorry she helped Trump win" in 2016, the ad states. "That's why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump."

Pete Karas, Wisconsin's Green Party elections chair, said that "spoiler argument" simply "doesn't hold water."

"It is an excuse the Democratic Party uses when they run crappy candidates and crappy elections and they lose."

Democratic Party strategy has included legal action to remove Stein from ballots nationwide, efforts that have mostly failed.

Karas said that picking such legal fights has done little more than further aggravate Green Party operatives like himself: "We will not be pushed out of the democratic process by the Democratic Party."

- 'Not satisfied' -

Charles Franklin, who directs the nationally recognized Marquette Law School Poll, told AFP while Stein likely does pull more from Democrats than Republicans, the idea that all Stein votes "would uniformly go to Harris" is "false."

"Any third party voter by definition has already passed the option of voting for one of the major party candidates," Franklin said. "They're voting for Stein because they're not satisfied."

A smattering of Green Party-endorsed candidates have won local office over the past decade in Wisconsin, but its presence there remains tiny.

Still, "it would be silly not to think it's a threat" in 2024, said Alexia Sabor, chair of the Dane County Democrats in the state's bluest county.

She sees the Green Party figuring into national elections as more "a desire to be disruptive" than an effort towards building a successful political party -- and says even for voters who tend Green, there's a clear choice on the ballot.

"You can not love the Democratic Party and you can not love Kamala Harris," she said, but "in terms of the values, it's pretty clear that the Republican Party doesn't align with their values -- and a lot of their values do align with Democrats."

Xavier Golden, a 23-year-old student at a public university near Milwaukee who has his own future political aspirations, says he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2020, the self-identified socialist senator who caucuses with Democrats and has run for president twice.

Speaking to AFP at the Racine Public Library where he works, Golden said this time, he's for Stein.

"If the Democrats wanted to control the main spirit of the liberal front, they would do that," Golden said, pointing to what he calls their "conservative stance on Palestine" and a tendency "to be so ticky-tacky with racial issues."

Like Green Party House of Representatives candidate Todd, Golden is a Black man. And like Todd, he says the Democrats ask for support from Black voters every four years but rarely deliver on what he dubbed "empty promises."

Both men advocate ending US arms support to Israel and call for economic reparations for descendants of enslaved people. They also point to issues like universal health care and the shortage of social and economic resources in predominantly minority neighborhoods as key influences shaping their politics.

If Democrats "were to commit to actually being the social justice party that they're painted as," Golden said, "I think they would be able to sway more voters -- and there wouldn't be no need for a Green Party."




Democrats go after Jill Stein, Cornel West in digital ads aimed at young voters

JONATHAN J. COOPER
Mon, October 28, 2024 

FILE - Progressive activist Cornel West speaks at a demonstration in Union Park outside the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago.
 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

PHOENIX (AP) — Democrats are spending about $500,000 for a last-minute push to persuade voters in battleground states to reject third-party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West, warning a vote for them will help Republican Donald Trump.

The Democratic National Committee said Monday that the digital ads will run on Instagram and YouTube, targeting younger voters and college campuses. They use video of Trump from a June rally in Philadelphia, when he said: “Cornel West. He’s one of my favorite candidates, Cornel West. And I like her also, Jill Stein, I like her very much. You know why? She takes 100% from them. He takes 100%.”

Stung by narrow losses in 2000 and 2016 that they blame in part on support for Green Party nominees, Democrats have put a major emphasis this year on discouraging left-leaning voters from backing third-party candidates. They pushed back aggressively against No Labels, a nascent third-party movement, and the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before turning attention to Stein and West.

Stein was the Green Party nominee in 2016 and won 132,000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Democrat Hillary Clinton lost by a combined 77,000 votes in those states. This year, Stein has broadened the Green Party's traditional pro-environment base by fiercely denouncing Israel and its military strikes in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Critiques of Israel and support for Palestinians made up the bulk of her 45-minute appearance at a coffee shop in suburban Phoenix on Monday.

Stein urged dozens of supporters not to be intimidated by pressure to vote for the “lesser evil" between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, alleging both are “ genocidal candidates” because of their support for Israel.

“If we are to be a democracy we have to stand up for what we want,” Stein said. “We have to vote for what we want.”

“There is absolutely nothing to gain by voting for either one of them and there's everything to lose,” she added. She called the Democratic campaign against her a threat to free speech.

Her campaign manager, Jason Call, was more blunt.

“We want them to lose,” Call said of the Democratic ticket. “Genocide deserves losing.” He added that “nobody wants Trump to win,” but argued the consequences of sending another Democrat to the White House “will be worse than Trump.”

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Elon Musk Was Illegal Migrant Worker Who Abused his Student Visa

Hugh Dougherty
DAILY BEAST
Sat, October 26, 2024 

MediaNews Group/The Mercury News

Elon Musk worked illegally on a student visa and faced concerns he would be “deported” when he started life in the United States, a bombshell report revealed Saturday.

The billionaire South African-born immigrant also admitted in an email that he “had no legal right to stay in the country” when he ditched his studies and founded a company which he later sold for more than $300 million, The Washington Post reported. His brother was also here illegally, committing what one expert called “fraud upon entry.”

The revelation comes after Musk, the Tesla, X, SpaceX and Starlink CEO went all-in on supporting Donald Trump and repeatedly accused Democrats of trying to flood the country with immigrants who cross the border illegally, a conspiracy theory which has become mainstream in the Republican party. Bloomberg called him “X’s biggest promote of anti-immigrant conspiracies.”


His ally Trump is advocating the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants. The former president has also ranted about “chain migration.”

But The Post’s detailed reporting about Musk’s own immigration journey shows that the world’s richest man abused his student visa to found his first company, Global Link Information Network, which became Zip2. Investors were so concerned that he could be “deported” that they sought advice from an immigration attorney.

Musk was born in South Africa and, aged 18, obtained Canadian citizenship through his Canada-born mother, Maye. He first studied in Canada, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him a student visa.

In 1995 he moved to Palo Alto where he had a place at Stanford University, which would have given him another student visa. Student visas give holders the right to work part-time to support their studies.

But The Post revealed that Musk never enrolled at all–which would had invalidated his student visa. Instead he worked on his start-up. Dropping out of education to work, even if technically unpaid, is straightforwardly illegal, Leon Fresco, a former immigration attorney at the Department of Justice told the newspaper.

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk reacts next to Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump.

“If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you’re in trouble,” Fresco said.

Musk has said he recruited his brother to help him run the company. But Kimbal has said he actively lied to border agents, having previously been refused entry at an airport on the grounds that he was working illegally in the U.S. when he was trying to return from visiting their mother in Canada. He got a friend to drive him over the border and lied that they were going to see David Letterman’s show so that he could make what he has described in an interview with journalist Graham Bensinger as a critical meeting with investors.

“That’s fraud on entry,” Ira Kurzban, the former president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers told The Post. “That would make him inadmissible and permanently barred from the United States,” he said, unless the penalties were waived. Additionally, hiring someone without the legal right to work in the U.S. is a federal crime.

The Musks' illegal status worried one investor, Mohr Davidow Ventures, so much that when, in 1996, it put $3 million into the company the agreement included a clause giving the brothers and a third person 45 days to obtain legal status.

Derek Proudian, who was on the Zip2 board and later became CEO told The Post the sentiment of investors was, “We don’t want our founder being deported.” He added, “Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.”

Another investor told the newspaper anonymously, “Perhaps naively we never examined whether he was a legal citizen.”

The Post reported that the attorney used by the company told both men not to tell the full truth about their “leadership” roles and to scrub their resumes of American addresses.

At this 2013 panel talk, Kimbal Musk said he had Elon had been

Zip2 was sold to Compaq in 1999 for $305 million, with Musk netting $22 million. The company set him on a path which saw him become the CEO of PayPal which in turn led to his involvement in Tesla and founding of SpaceX. He is currently worth $274 billion, according to Forbes. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002. False statements about past immigration status in a citizenship application are illegal and can be grounds for revocation. It is unknown if Musk made any false statements.

In 2005, in an email to Tesla’s co-founders which was submitted to a California court, Musk wrote about going to Stanford, “Actually, I didn’t really care much for the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both issues.”

In 2013 the Musk brothers appeared on a panel at the Miliken Institute conference where Kimball said they had been “illegal immigrants,” and Musk jumped it to say it was “a gray area.”

The Beast has asked Musk‘s attorney, Alex Spiro, for comment. The Post said that he, Musk and the manager of Musk’s family office had not responded to their request for comment.

Biden calls out Musk over report that the Tesla CEO once worked in the US illegally

The Associated Press
Sun, October 27, 2024 


NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden slammed Elon Musk for hypocrisy on immigration after a published report that the Tesla CEO once worked illegally in the United States. The South Africa-born Musk denies the allegation.

“That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here. No, I’m serious. He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He wasn’t in school. He was violating the law. And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?” Biden said while campaigning on Saturday in Pittsburgh at a union hall.

The Washington Post reported that Musk worked illegally in the country while on a student visa. The newspaper, citing company documents, former business associates, and court documents, said Musk arrived in Palo Alto, California in 1995 for a graduate program at Stanford University “but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup. ”


Musk wrote on X in reply to a video post of Biden’s comments: “I was in fact allowed to work in the US.” Musk added, “The Biden puppet is lying.”

Investors in Musk’s company, Zip2, were concerned about the possibility of their founder being deported, according to the report, and gave him a deadline for obtaining a work visa. The newspaper also cited a 2005 email from Musk to his Tesla co-founders acknowledging that he did not have authorization to be in the U.S. when he started Zip2.

According to the account, that email was submitted as evidence in a now-closed California defamation lawsuit and said that Musk had applied to Stanford so he could stay in the country legally.

Musk is today the world’s richest man. He has committed more than $70 million to help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and other GOP candidates win on Nov. 5, and is one of the party’s biggest donors this campaign season. He has been headlining events in the White House race’s final stretch, often echoing Trump’s dark rhetoric against immigration.

Trump has pledged to give Musk a role in his administration if he wins next month.

There was no immediate response to messages left with X and Tesla seeking Musk’s comment.

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 




Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report

Edward Helmore
Sat, October 26, 2024

Elon Musk in Beverly Hills, California, on 6 May 2024.Photograph: David Swanson/Reuters


Elon Musk briefly worked illegally in the US after abandoning a graduate studies program in California, according to a Washington Post report that contrasted the episode with the South African multibillionaire’s anti-immigration views.

The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who has in recent weeks supported Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency while promoting the Republican White House nominee’s opposition to “open borders” on his X social media site, has previously maintained that his transition from student to entrepreneur was a “legal grey area”.

But the Washington Post reported Saturday that the world’s wealthiest individual was almost certainly working in the US without correct authorization for a period in 1995 after he dropped out of Stanford University to work on his debut company, Zip2, which sold for about $300m four years later.


Legal experts said foreign students cannot drop out of school to build a company even if they are not getting paid. The Post also noted that – prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks agains the US in 2001 – regulation for student visas was more lax.

“If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you’re in trouble,” Leon Fresco, a former US justice department immigration litigator, told the outlet.

But the Post also acknowledged: “While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.”

Musk has previously said: “I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work. I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever.”

Musk employs 121,000 people at Tesla, about 13,000 at SpaceX and nearly 3,000 at X. The scrutiny of his immigration status after dropping out of Stanford comes after Trump has touted his desire for Musk to play a high-profile role focused on government efficiency in a second Trump administration if voters return him to office at the expense of Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.

Musk in turn has accused the vice-president and her fellow Democrats of “importing voters” through illegal and temporary protected status immigration. During a recent Trump campaign appearance, he compared the US-Mexico border to a “zombie apocalypse” – even as he had also previously described himself as “extremely pro immigrant, being one myself”.

Bloomberg News recently published an analysis of more than 53,000 posts sent from Musk’s X account, finding that the entrepreneur’s output turned increasingly political this election year.

“In 2024, immigration and voter fraud has become Musk’s most frequently posted and engaged with policy topic, garnering about 10bn views,” the outlet said. “Musk posted more than 1,300 times about the topic overall, with more than 330 posts in the past 2 months alone.”

Bloomberg described Musk – who paid $44bn for X, then Twitter, in 2022 – as the platform’s single most important influencer and has reportedly ordered site engineers to push his posts into users’ feeds. That makes Musk “the most widely read person on the site today”, Bloomberg said.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Horror Movies Against War

 October 25, 2024
Facebook

Image by Kevin Woblick.

I am a lifelong antiwar activist and a diehard horror movie buff. A lot of people seem to find those two facts to be a contradiction, and I guess on the surface I can comprehend their confusion. Showing up to a Free Gaza rally in a Blood Feast t-shirt does seem to send some mixed messages. However, at their finest, horror films must be understood as unflinching investigations into what terrifies society most and nothing should be more terrifying to society than war.

This is why some of the most influential movies of the genre, some of the movies that form the very foundation of what every day Americans think of when they think scary movies, are actually the byproduct of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.

Vietnam was a real-life horror movie, the first modern war that America lost badly played out on live television too quickly to be censored for public consumption. The empire was stripped bare every evening at six for the hideous, brutish thing that it was, and this spectacle irreversibly altered the DNA of American culture on a very fundamental level. In many ways, it temporarily radicalized pop culture as we knew it and horror movies were far from an exception.

One of the least understood consequences of this cultural Vietnam syndrome was the invention of the modern-day slasher film. The first and debatably most influential picture of that grotesque oeuvre was the 1974 grindhouse classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Most of the oft repeated tropes were in place; five teenagers stranded in the middle of nowhere being stalked by a psychopath in a mask. But anyone who has actually seen this film can tell you that there is something unsettlingly different about its delivery. The entire thing feels raw and almost intimate in its depiction of young tourists at the mercy of a hostile and alien environment. The sticks and weeds of the unforgiving Texas scrublands seem to conspire with the killers and there is a pervasive feeling that we shouldn’t be watching this even as we can’t look away.

That’s because director Tobe Hooper shot the film specifically to look like the war footage that kept him up at night. This is also what convinced the young director to cast the monsters of this movie as a perverted portrait of the average American family, literally clamoring for blood at the supper table from their deranged young son, armed to the teeth with a power tool and concealing himself beneath the flesh of his own victims.

But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn’t the first bloodbath with roots that reach from the My Lai Massacre to Elm Street. One of horror cinema’s most influential auteurs and the man behind Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven, got his start shooting shocking and grotesquely misunderstood exploitation films that attempted to make sense of the horrors of Vietnam much the way that Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre did.

Craven’s 1972 directorial debut, The Last House on the Left, was also deeply influenced by the horrors on the evening news with a story loosely based on Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring. A pair of teenage girls are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of fugitive psychopaths who then unwittingly seek shelter in the nearby house of one of their slain victims’ parents. When the parents discover the crime and the criminals in their midst, they prove themselves to be every bit as capable of savagery in the service of revenge.

There are two messages to be learned by this ugly story. The first is that a society defined by violence has no right to be shocked when that violence shows up unannounced on their doorsteps. In the early seventies, Wes Craven was baffled by a nation that had found itself in the midst of a gruesome crimewave but didn’t seem capable of making the connection that perhaps this was merely a reflection of the violence that their own government was committing on a daily basis in the jungles of Indochina.

The second uneasy lesson from this deeply uneasy picture is that anyone can become the monster in their own horror movie once they begin defending violence as a means justified by its ends.

Craven explored this theme further in his 1977 follow up to Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes. This time a normal suburban family find themselves stranded in the barren Nevada desert where they are preyed upon by savage mutants. But once again, this films power comes in the form of two revelations which come far too late. The first revelation being that the mutants these milquetoast Nixonites encounter are in fact the desperate and deranged byproduct of nuclear testing committed by their own nation’s military.

The second is that these upstanding Americans find themselves as capable of the same kind of savagery when they too are tormented by forces that defy their comprehension. By the final scene the lines between the good guys and the bad guys become so severely blurred that the film can only end in still shots that fade to red.

Sadly, like much of the American counterculture of that era, the slasher film found itself a victim of commercial assimilation and so did Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven for that matter. But the greatest contribution that the antiwar movement made to horror cinema has to be the zombie movie and this subgenre continues to serve as a pliable tool for social criticism on a shoestring budget. We have the late, great George Romero to thank for this.

While this Rust Belt cult icon made scores of terrifying pictures over the decades, he is most notorious for the original trilogy of his Living Dead series. The truly fascinating thing about these movies is that they are all monster movies in which the actual monsters serve largely as a faceless backdrop for the evils of average human beings who find themselves embattled, isolated, and surrounded by an unstoppable force.

This template was set by 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, in which seven strangers hold up in a vacant farmhouse when they find themselves inexplicably surrounded by man-eating corpses who have risen from their graves to lurk and feast. But it doesn’t take long for those strangers to find greater conflict between each other than their shared enemy.

This scenario was inspired not only by the Vietnam War but by the fact that in the midst of this holocaust, America found itself hopelessly at war with itself with the violence that erupted across the country after the failures of the Civil Rights Movement. It is particularly telling that the closest thing to a hero that this movie has is a Black man named Ben (brilliantly played by Duane Johnson) who manages to survive the onslaught of the living dead only to be shot dead by the posse of heavily armed white men allegedly there to rescue him.

Romero expands upon this theme with the sequels, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1985’s Day of the Dead, each with a new batch of stranded survivalists attempting to make sense of an increasingly senseless apocalyptic American landscape.

In Dawn of the Dead, the unlucky survivors manage to isolate themselves in the luxury of an abandoned shopping mall only to find themselves crippled and despondent by depression, agoraphobia, and nihilism. Day of the Dead shows a spark of hope in the fact that the undead appear to be evolving into something more human only to have the movie’s hardened warriors double down on their forever war on these creatures that has come to define their existence.

All of these gore fests are really movies about empire, about the horrible things that society can consign itself too in an endless state of constant warfare. The war always comes home, even in a bunker designed to survive nuclear winter, and the zombies always come home to roost. As Nietzsche famously observed, those who fight monsters frequently find themselves reflecting that which they fight.

Many movies have continued to mine this unique post-apocalyptic scenario for gruesome lessons about the banality and inhumanity of western consumer culture today. The best, in my opinion, are Danny Boyle’s 2002 masterpiece 28 Days Later and it’s 2007 sequel by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 28 Weeks Later. Both of these movies involve everyday people attempting to survive an apocalyptic, rage-inducing virus by putting their faith and safety into the hands of modern-day standing armies only to find these soldiers to be far more likely to kill the innocent in a crisis than to save them.

This is the horrific world that we now find ourselves in and it’s not just a movie anymore. The western world has found itself held captive by a military industrial behemoth that creates monsters simply to justify its own increasingly nihilistic existence. Francois Truffaut once said that “every film about war ends up being pro-war.” My response is that Francois should have spent less time at Hollywood matinees and more time at the grungy grindhouses of Times Square.

Working class directors slumming it in exploitation cinema new all too well that the only accurate way to capture the horrors of modern warfare is with a monster movie.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.