White racists burning something: the common notion of white supremacy

The gunman who opened fire with an AR-15 at a Dallas mall on May 6th, killing eight including numerous members of one Korean family, was clearly targeting Asians. Perhaps it was the shooter’s name, Mauricio Garcia, that confused Texas governor Greg Abbot, who told reporters that the killer’s motivations were “unclear.” Within hours, however, investigators had discovered the extent of Garcia’s white supremacist views and connections, which included being an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

The very idea that a member of an ethnic or racial minority could be a white supremacist continues to boggle the minds of far-right pundits. Don Trump Jr. mockingly posted on Truth Social, “Because the name Mauricio Garcia screams white supremacy.” Elon Musk tweeted images of carnage from the shooting as well as disinformation, including a conspiracy theory that a Hispanic white supremacist just had to be a “psyop.” His speculation seemed to resonate with Musk’s far-right followers. When NBA-to-Twitter personality Rex Chapman called Clarence Thomas a white supremacist, FOX News mocked it as a typical liberal reaction to overturning Roe v. Wade (we will return to Justice Thomas shortly).

So don’t you have to be white to be a white supremacist?

The far-right insists that we now live in a post-racial society free of white supremacy and bias. Sure, there may still be a few overt haters out there – but not us! Denial of racism is such an important weapon of the far-right that now even speaking of America’s history of racial crimes is itself a crime in numerous states.

References to slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, white-only water fountains, lynchings, genocide of Native Americans, colonialism, racist immigration laws, redlining, disparities in healthcare, life expectancy, education, or generational wealth – all this is regarded as “divisive,” intended only to make white school children feel bad about being white, and therefore something to be censored.

Still, the far-right is equally clear that White Christian Nationalism is their political platform. Republicans point to Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s regime as their model for a white, Christian America. Former Congressman Steve King, an unrepentant white supremacist, granted an interview with Austrian fascists. Former president Trump, now looking like the leading GOP presidential candidate, has embraced neofascists in Italy, France, and Brazil. Trump’s one-time campaign advisor Steve Bannon has made the creation of a fascist Internationale one of his projects.

In July 2022 Marjorie Taylor Greene came out as an unapologetic Christian nationalist. Ditto her moral and intellectual equal, Lauren Boebert, who told a group of white fundamentalists, “The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church.” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, once thought to be a “moderate” Republican, echoed the sentiment, stating that government ought to be “bowing the knee” to the church. And by “church” Scott does not mean Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Quakers, or once-mainstream Christian denominations.

Just this week Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville defended white nationalists in the military, calling them good Americans. This recalls Trump’s characterization of the Tiki torch-bearing white supremacists as “very fine people.”

Despite its obsession with white Anglo-Saxon “culture,” the dangers of multiculturalism, the Great Replacement of white people by people of color, and its perverse, nationalist conception of “Christianity,” White Christian Nationalism is also increasingly being embraced by people of color.

A few examples: former HUD secretary and denier that racism exists Ben Carson; South Carolina Senator and Christian Nationalist Tim Scott; perennial presidential candidate and antisemite Kanye West whose campaign advisor is a racist, misogynistic British fascist; North Carolina gubernatorial aspirant, Islamophobe and homophobe Mark Robinson; convicted seditionist and Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio; self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes; and domestic terrorist and repeat seditionist Brandon Rapolla.

It came as a surprise to no one in Memphis’ Black community that the five officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death were Black. Turns out, how Black police officers approach policing is shaped by policies based on lingering structural racism in law enforcement institutions. Again, white supremacy is much more than overt hatred.

Such observations are nothing new. In the wake of the Dallas shooting Joan Walsh wrote an excellent piece in the Nation. Frank Vyan Walton published a short piece in the Daily Kos. Philip Bump offered an explanation in the Washington Post of why non-whites embrace white supremacy.

One factor is self-identification with a dominant racial and ethnic group. Increasingly, some non-white communities now identify as white. Another is placing one’s self closer to the sources of political power. Hispanic Americans now increasingly identify with white supremacy. And that includes Mauricio Garcia, the Dallas shooter.

A new TV series “Beef” features two Asian characters acting out their very “white” grievances with each other and America. In a piece in Electric Lit Frankie Huang dissects the two protagonists and their complicated relationships with white society. He parenthetically blasts members of his own community for cultural expropriation, exploiting “model minority” status, and a lack of solidarity with other minorities – all of which applies to every other ethnic group throughout American history that has embraced “whiteness” by turning its back on egalitarian ideals in order to stand nearer the sources of power and money.

Clarence chose his side and it pays pretty damn well

In an old article in the Nation, Randall Kennedy asks “Whose Side is Clarence Thomas On?” and proceeds easily to a conclusion. Quoting Corey Robin, who has written a number of books on far-right ideology, “Thomas has rationalized nearly all of his efforts to maintain the legal architecture under which African Americans have suffered most because ‘adversity helps the black community develop its inner virtue and resolve.’ Robin adds, ‘It’s astonishing how openly Thomas embraces not just federalism but a view of federalism associated with the slaveocracy and Jim Crow.'”

Ouch.

Thomas then, regardless of race, turns out to be the ideal Supreme Court justice for the far right and its white supremacist agenda. In a new PBS documentary, Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court, we learn that Thomas has a whole list of his own grievances meshing improbably with White America’s.

Add to this Thomas’s marriage to one of America’s most zealous far-right activists and arguably a seditionist, as well as Thomas’s selling himself to Sugar Daddy Harlan Crow, and it becomes clear that white supremacy is not so much about spewing racial epithets as the preservation and concentration of political and economic power.

White supremacists of whatever race know exactly which side they’re on.

It is Black History Month and there are a couple of streamed documentaries I heartily recommend: Jeffery Robinson’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (Netflix); and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, a six part docuseries (Hulu).

I watched Robinson’s film last night on Netflix and it is excellent. At the beginning of the film Robinson meets a man standing in front of a Confederate statue waving a Confederate flag. The two have a conversation about whether that flag was a symbol of slavery and even about the nature of slavery itself. The Neo-Confederate maintains that slaves were just like members of slave-holders’ families and his flag had nothing to do with slavery. But in less than a minute the Harvard Law-trained film-maker demonstrates the contradictions of the flag-waver’s contentions. This confrontation with willful ignorance frames the film’s narrative.

Robinson, who is from Memphis and whose personal story is interwoven into the documentary, goes on to show — using the words of politicians of the time, state and federal laws and rulings, and historical documents — that America most definitely was founded on slavery. He quotes former president Donald Trump — yes, America’s chief racist ignoramus and a fan of Jackson — who says that Andrew Jackson would never have let the US slide into civil war, then points out that Jackson died 16 years before that war. Robinson goes on to show that Jackson in fact was a slave-owner himself who even posted an ad for the return of one of his own slaves — promising to pay the finder a little extra for giving the slave 300 lashes with a whip. This is who is on our $20 bill.

We wait for Robinson to complete the sentence with “this is who we are” but his stealth title “Who We Are” instead does that job for him. Robinson not once mentions the usual bromide that White America uses on the occasion of some new racial atrocity (“this is not who we are”). Robinson just knows. And we all ought to know by now: this is exactly who we are.

In perhaps the most moving segment of the film Robinson, who worked with the ACLU for many years, returns to Memphis with his brother and visits their boyhood home — a house that had to be purchased with a little subterfuge by a white couple and then transferred to Robinson’s parents. He talks about how that home made him who he is today and how everyone on that street worked hard, did their best for their children, and had all the same hopes his parents did. It is not a bitter reminiscence, but Robinson points out that what white supremacy really means is that the playing field will never be level for everyone on that street — because of government institutions that created land-grant colleges for whites, redlining for blacks, land dispossession for indigenous people, and the recycling of slave-catching practices in police institutions. Robinson methodically shows us how many of our racialized institutions are still working as designed years after the Civil Rights movement ended. And the damage to their victims continues.

The 1619 Project has become a lightning rod for people who can’t accept that America was founded on slavery and continues to do everything it can to preserve slavery’s vestiges and inequities. FOX News predictably wrote the series off as “fan fiction” and “slander.” The New York Post called it “cartoonish” and a “pretense” and wrote off one of the interviewed academics as a “Marxist.” And of course, the 1619 Project has been banned in Florida by racist governor Ron DeSantis and his appointees to the state Board of Education.

The series consists of six episodes, the last of which will air tomorrow: Democracy; Race; Music; Capitalism; Fear; and Justice. While Jeffery Robinson never indicts Capitalism outright for the sins of slavery, Hannah-Jones does so explicitly and this is the most likely reason for her rough treatment. But let’s be honest: slavery was a commercial enterprise. The value of slave labor made Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia among the richest in the nation. When slavery ended these states instantly ended up at the bottom of the American economic barrel because human capital (that is humans as property) had been instantly struck from the ledgers. And it wasn’t just Southern plantations which profited from the products of slave labor. Massachusetts textile factories depended on cotton that had been harvested for free by humans under the whip. The New York stock exchange, companies like Lehman Brothers, and insurance industries like AIG — as Robinson shows, too — fed off slavery and toyed with declaring themselves neutral in order to continue to profit from human bondage.

In what is most certainly one of the great ironies of history, while the 1619 Project has been banned and its use in Florida schools now constitutes a felony, it is now available in Germany — a country that knows something about white supremacy and book burnings — and is now ashamed of it.

The Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried a review of the 1619 Project in its book section, pointing out that Americans are woefully (even willfully) ignorant of their own history. Andreas Eckert cites a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study which shows how ignorant of American history, particularly its ugliest aspects, American High School students are. Only 8% of American high schoolers could identify correctly the reason the Civil War was fought: slavery. Eckert quotes Yale history professor and Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight, who wrote the introduction to the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History.” Blight observes that Americans always prefer to view our history in the most positive light, regarding ourselves as a beacon unto the world, bringing progress, freedom, justice, prosperity, and happiness to the benighted. This certainly seems to constitute the “patriotic curriculum” that Ron DeSantis is now about to jam down the throats of Florida public school students.

One of the greatest controversies over the 1619 Project is whether the American Revolution was fought (even in part) to preserve slavery. Hannah-Jones unapologetically says it was. In the same SPLC preface to “Teaching Hard History,” Hasan Kwame Jeffries writes, “In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals of their radical experiment in democracy; racial justice, however, was not included in that list. Instead, they embedded protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the founding document, guaranteeing inequality for generations to come.” It doesn’t take much to verify these facts.

For starters, 34 of the 47 signers — a majority — of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. Among the most famous slave owners: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and (a distant relative on my mother’s side) Charles Carroll. So don’t even try to convince me these morally compromised men created a nation for all the beating hearts in it.

The Declaration of Independence has always rung hollow to Black people. Frederick Douglass delivered a scathing oration “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Aside from its authors and its hypocrisy, the Declaration calls indigenous people “merciless Indian Savages” and whines that King George is inhibiting the theft of indigenous land.

William J. Aceves, in “Amending a Racist Constitution,” shows us precisely where slavery was baked into the Constitutional cake:

While the Constitution never uses the words “slave” or “slavery,” the shadows of these malignant words inhabit its text. Four constitutional provisions reflect a legal architecture that treats Black people as property. Two of these provisions are substantive, and two are procedural.

Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 is the notorious Three-Fifths Clause. This provision is used to determine the number of congressional representatives apportioned to a state as well as its corresponding tax obligations. Free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, were included in the calculation of state populations. In contrast, slaves would be calculated as three-fifths of a person. Native Americans who were not taxed would not be included in these calculations. While the Three-Fifths Clause did not directly affect the rights of slaves, it served as clear evidence of their inequality. The Clause also had a profound impact on the power structure in Congress by providing slave states disproportionate political influence in the House for decades. Because of this, the slave states were even less inclined to end slavery.

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 represents the Fugitive Slave Clause. It provides that any person who escapes from servitude and flees to another state may not gain their freedom. Instead, that person must be returned to the custody of their owner. This clause was used on countless occasions to perpetuate slavery. Individuals who had escaped from bondage by crossing state lines were subject to capture and returned to slavery. Those who aided such efforts were subject to civil or even criminal liability. While there was some resistance to its application, this pernicious clause made anti-slavery states and the federal government complicit in slavery. This complicity even extended to the Supreme Court.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 limited the ability of Congress to adopt legislation prohibiting the migration or importation of slaves until 1808. Congress drafted around this restriction in 1803, when it adopted An Act to Prevent the Importation of Certain Persons into Certain States, Where, by the Laws Thereof, Their Admission is Prohibited. This statute was adopted at the request of the slave states, which were concerned with the rise of free people of color in the United States and viewed the successful slave rebellion in Haiti with trepidation. Four years later, Congress took a more significant step with the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves Into Any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States. While the statute was drafted to end the slave trade in the United States, the practice of slavery remained legal.

Finally, Article V addresses the process for constitutional amendments. These amendments can be proposed for state ratification by a two-thirds vote in both Houses. Alternatively, amendments can be proposed through a constitutional convention called by a two-thirds vote of the states. Either process then requires approval by three-fourths of the states. Reflecting one of the central compromises to the Constitution, Article V prohibited any amendment to Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 until 1808. Working in tandem, these provisions ensured that the slave trade would remain legal in the United States for at least twenty years.

In Robinson’s film, Black students sing the third stanza of the American National Anthem (“the Star-Spangled Banner”) by Francis Scott Key, a Maryland slave owner. This stanza sings of the depravity and deserved slaughter of slaves who try to escape:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And the last stanza implies that the republic is meant only for non-slaves:

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!

American Conservatives may be incensed at scholarship that at long last proves our nation was founded on and built by slavery, but there is no getting around the fact: it was. The battle for the nation’s soul may be on some people’s lips but it means little without recognition, repair, repentance, restitution — and major revision of our laws. But we can’t even begin if we can’t agree on facts of history that can be easily and objectively verified.

In our hearts of hearts we know the contents of our nation’s soul and who we are as a people. And, if we’re honest, it isn’t very pretty.

This is who we are.

If you have been worrying about the white supremacy now openly-displayed within Republican Party ranks, you’re not alone. Last week the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), a research group that keeps an eye on America’s far right, issued a report, Breaching the Mainstream, listing 875 legislators (almost all Republicans) with ties to nationalist groups or ones promoting conspiracy theories. Don’t feel smug, Bay Staters — you’ll find a number of Massachusetts Republicans among them.

Unfortunately, the news just keeps getting worse.

Last week Republicans took one of their conservative political conferences to Hungary — possibly the most anti-democratic Western nation of all — and literally rubbed elbows with European fascists — while only days before in Buffalo, New York a white supremacist tried to launch a race war by slaughtering Black people as they went about their grocery shopping.

On May 19-20, Hungary’s Center for Fundamental Rights hosted the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest. After prayers, of course, Hungary’s antisemitic prime minister Viktor Orban and American white supremacist commentator Tucker Carlson joined the organizers in opening the event, which was off-limits to U.S. reporters.

Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz, the Hungarian Civic Alliance, began life in 1988 as Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Young Democrats), a liberal center-left organization that rejected Hungary’s ruling Communist government. Its members were quickly joined by Hungary’s far right. In 1994 an unlikely mix of centrists and far-right elements led Fidesz to adopt “liberal-conservativism,” driving real liberals out of the party. Within less than a decade Fidesz became a nationalist, then a hyper-nationalist, then an authoritarian party riddled with neo-fascists, antisemites, and open racists. Orban has been Hungary’s president for four terms now.

Orban set about stomping on all vestiges of the liberal order. He did everything possible to smear fellow Hungarian George Soros as both a “globalist” and a Jew, and to drive Soros’s liberal philanthropies out of Hungary. So normalized is antisemitism now within Fidesz that Day Two of the conference featured a close friend of Orban’s, Hungarian writer Zsolt Bayer, who has calls Jews “stinking excrement” and the Roma “unfit for coexistence.” Bayer has also not been shy in voicing his contempt for Black people.

After coffee the program proceeded with: former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, fired from CNN for his homophobic, racist, and pro-colonial comments; former Member of British Parliament Nigel Farage, an endorser of neo-Nazi parties in France, Austria, and Germany; Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s president, member of parliament, curiously present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th; and Ben Ferguson, who broadcasts racist, homophobic, and nationalist bile from a home studio.

Quite the group to set the tone.

For the last 45 years the CPAC conference has shaped the direction that American conservatism takes. CPAC was the launchpad for Reagan-style politics after Watergate and CPAC still defines the path of the American Republican Party. It is significant, then, that CPAC now promotes Hungary — a state no longer a democracy and one with less freedom than even Brazil — as the Republican Party’s model for America’s future.

After lunch, the program turned to “Western Civilization under Attack.” The themes were indistinguishable from those of the Buffalo, NY shooter, who in a long manifesto had written that he feared low white birth rates, the “replacement” and “genocide” of white people by inferior Blacks, and the invasion of America by foreign migrants. Amid the shooter’s Great Replacement worries, he leveled accusations of Jewish and globalist cultural contamination and fears of the erosion of white Christian values. George Soros was mentioned.

CPAC speakers in their “under Attack” session were: Balazs Orban, a long-time friend of the American far-right; Francesco Giubilei, writer and head of far-right think tank Nazione Futura, which is close to far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy); Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group created by white supremacist John Tanton; Frank Furedi, a Hungarian-British sociologist who rants about “woke” identity politics; and Valerie Huber, an American anti-abortion and pro-abstinence zealot. Their topics were stopping abortion, promoting Christian values (over corrupt, “woke” globalists) and preventing invasions of migrants. It goes without saying that many of the speakers were antisemites. And, of course George Soros was mentioned.

Long before the Buffalo shooter invoked the Great Replacement theory, Viktor Orban enunciated it at his fourth inauguration: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations — migrants.”

At the Budapest conference Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union which produces CPAC each year, not only connected Orban’s views on “replacement” with the shooter’s but explained why ending abortion rights was such an important goal of white nationalists: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved. […] You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

In a segment called “In God We Trust” the conference pushed white Christian Nationalism masquerading as self-determination. Cynically, or perhaps strategically, CPAC chose an Israeli speaker, Eugene Kontorovich, who shills for a number of right-wing think tanks including the Hoover Institute, to defend Christian Nationalism for all the same reasons he supports Zionism: national self-determination. By Kontorovich’s logic, if 51% of a nation’s citizens are Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, everyone else must be forced to live according to the majority’s belief system.

“Culture Wars in the Media” was up next, featuring, among others: David Reaboi of the Claremont Institute; Matthew Tyrmand from Project Veritas (permanently suspended by Twitter) who is also involved in the “paleoconservative” journal Chronicles magazine; and George Farmer, CEO of Parler (whose app was suspended by Apple and Google) and husband of moon-landing and COVID denier Candace Owens. Hungarian news anchor Balazs Nemeth, who shares Orban’s views of the Ukraine as Hungary’s enemy, discussed fake news in the globalist media.

The following morning’s theme was “The Father is a Man, the Mother is a Woman.” Candace Owens was introduced as “the favorite influencer of Donald Trump.” Antisemite Zsolt Bayer did his thing. Péter Törcsi, who wrote “the Gay lobby has society firmly in its clutches,” also spoke. Birgit Kelle, the author of Gender Gaga, discussed the topics of her book: the ills of hiring quotas for women, liberal relaxations of binary concepts of gender, toilets for trans teens, and liberals whose goal is “the destruction of the family.” Gregor Puppinck, a lawyer who has written numerous attacks on George Soros as well as disputations of democratic rights, particularly abortion as a right, led with abortion. Andrea Földi-Kovács, who survived Orban’s purge of liberal Hungarian TV anchors, frequently slams abortion in her pieces.

Ending the program was Gladen Pappin, who has written that “deracinated, gnostic deformations of Christianity […] can’t sustain a true cultural Christianity, precisely because both the ‘Christianity’ and the culture it engenders are immaterial, disembodied, individualistic — which is to say, perfectly suited to liberal order.”

Forget sissified liberal Christianity; what’s really needed is a muscular, authoritarian-approved version of Christianity stuffed down everybody’s throat — but, of course, for their own good: “It is time for American conservatives to grasp what their European counterparts already know. The deep wellsprings of Christian culture offer a permanent source upon which good government can draw, so that, as the psalmist sings, ‘we may know thy way upon earth: thy salvation in all nations.'”

In fact, American conservatives ought to know what European liberals already know — that fascism hasn’t been particularly good for Europe.

After coffee the theme turned to “Conservative Revival” with talks by: Mark Meadows, Trump’s disgraced Chief of Staff; Rojo Edwards, an American-born Chilean fascist; Spanish fascists Jorge Buxade and Santiago Abascal, from the Vox party; and an authoritarian roundtable.

After lunch the theme was “Homeland, Security.” Maria Schmidt, historian and former Orban advisor, frequently writes about the dangers of socialism. Next up was David Azerrad, who worries too much about changing demographics and who teaches at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college that fights “Critical Race Theory.” As one might expect, Azerrad was not received well when he delivered a speech entitled “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria” at Saint Vincent College. Then there was Chris Farrell, director of Judicial Watch and a member of the Muslim-bashing Gatestone Institute. He was followed by John Fund, an anti-immigration zealot who claims that undocumented immigrants risk everything to vote illegally. James Wharton, a member of the British Conservative Party and the House of Lords, finished up the session by unctuously praising Orban.

Finishing up the day was “CPACS All Around the World.” The CPAC conference in Hungary was the American Conservative Union’s first stop in a series of international conferences that include Brazil (June 10-11), Mexico (September 2-3), Australia (October 1-2), Japan (December), and South Korea (TBA). Several speakers talked about plans and opportunities in these countries.

The American far right has long had a white Christian nationalist “internationale” in mind. Steve Bannon may be the poster boy for such efforts, having spent the last several years wooing European fascists like France’s Rassemblement National, the Italian far-right, promoting and creating curriculum for the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in an Italian monastery, networking with German neo-Nazis, hanging out with the Bolsonaros and other Boys from Brazil — so ardent and so persistent that even Austrian neo-Nazis spurned him. But CPAC’s international conferences, organized by what are now mainstream Republicans, may gain better traction.

Ending the conference were speeches by Laszlo Kover, speaker of the Hungarian national assembly; Jordan Bardella, president of France’s Rassemblement National; Polish nationalist Patryk Jaki, who created legislation making it a crime to suggest Poland was complicit in the Holocaust; retired German academic Werner Patzelt, whose book on the neo-Nazi group PEGIDA showed a bit too much admiration and argued for Germany’s mainstream conservative party, the CDU, to accommodate the far-right; and Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA, a “Pizzagate” conspiracy nut with innumerable white supremacist connections.

Although the CPAC conference was closed to most U.S. journalists, the full CPAC Hungary program can be found here and online there is an assortment of video clips of the conference.

Hannah Arendt, in her masterful “Origins of Totalitarianism” described perfectly the function of organizations like CPAC: “The world at large […] usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”

This is the future of the Republican Party. And if the GOP gains power in the Fall this could also be the dark future of the United States.

Update May 24, 2022 – Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has neutered the Hungarian Constitution to permit him to rule by decree.

When someone like Payton Gendron walks into a Buffalo supermarket intent on murdering as many Black people as possible it’s natural to want to dismiss him as an outlier, a lone wolf, an aberration.

But, like bacteria on an agar plate, an entire culture of white supremacy landed on Gendron’s petri dish. Rather than being an example of a lone, sick individual, Gendron simply put into motion the genocidal impulses and white supremacist rage that exist within a very sick White America.

Gendron — like New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant — invoked the supposed “replacement,” “invasion,” and “genocide” of white people as his rationale for trying to kick off a race war. As many articles published in the aftermath point out, white victimology is a common theme in MAGA politics and particularly immigration policy (see this and this and this and this and this and this and this for starters).

But besides “replacement theory,” I wondered what else was in Gendron’s manifesto. Since over half of it is actually a “how-to kill” guide, I will not link to the full version but to a redacted version here. True, the document is an artifact of an act of terror. But reproducing it does not glorify a twisted ideology so much as it indicts a toxic culture of white nationalism that spawned Payton Gendron. It really should be read.

Similarities with the New Zealand shooter’s 74-page manifesto are obvious: Gendron used the same white supremacist Sonnenrad (also used by the Ukrainian Azov Battalion), the same document structure, and he stole many of Tarrant’s own words. But Gendron’s 180-page document was not just a manifesto but a “how-to” manual for mass murderers.

Over half of his document discusses the pros and cons of certain firearms, weapon modifications, and body armor — as well as where a future killer might obtain such gear. It was shocking to discover how many thousands of dollars this teenager spent on weaponry, how readily available it was, and how its presence failed to raise alarms in a home Gendron shared with his parents and two brothers.

Gendron’s “manifesto” consists of the following sections: a Q&A about his beliefs and motivations (13 pages); his hatred of Black people (10 pages); hatred of Jews (30 pages); Arabs and whites (2 pages); cryptocurrency (2 pages); plans for carrying out his attack (5 pages); a how-to weaponry buying guide (94 pages!); messages to various political groups (2 pages); and his general thoughts, which are basically Tarrant’s (22 pages).

The ten pages devoted to portraying African Americans as a mongrel race are beyond ugly and cite questionable, discredited, and retracted scholarship. One article written by Philippe Rushton in a Canadian psychology journal brought up this disclaimer:

“Although Rushton ceased teaching for the Department of Psychology in the early 1990s, he continued to conduct racist and flawed studies, sometimes without appropriate ethics approval [1], for two more decades. There are other ethical concerns surrounding Rushton’s research. In particular, much of this research was supported by the Pioneer Fund, a foundation formed in 1937 to promote eugenicist and racist goals.”

Another Rushton article Gendron cited had been retracted:

“Rushton and Templer (2012) contend that animal studies show that dark skin pigmentation is reliably related to increased aggression and sexual activity. They speculate that the same may be true in humans, and claim that the psychological literature supports this contention that is grounded in evolutionary theory. Their thesis is that genetic differences, related to darkness of skin colour, explain supposed racial differences in sexual behavior and violence. Both authors are now deceased, and so we cannot speculate about their motivations and intents when publishing this work.”

On the whole, Gendron’s main point is that Blacks are inferior to whites and that, owing to white superiority, coexistence is impossible. People should go back to where they came from — well, everyone except for white people who after all this time might as well be regarded as natives (arguably, indigenous and African-American people have a greater claim here).

One of Gendron’s graphics depicts a mud hut with the nonsense claim that Africans have contributed nothing of value in 6000 years (ignoring Egyptian, Kush, Nok, Aksum, Mali, Songhai, and Zulu civilizations). But isn’t that precisely what Iowa’s white supremacist Congressman Steve King said?

Now, if Black people are simply inferior, then discrimination, structural racism and civil rights violations are all lies. And white privilege too must be a fake and fraud. And, what the hell, let’s turn it around and declare that Black privilege actually exists. And if the Civil Rights movement, or Black Lives Matter, chafes at inequality, well, then it’s simply an abuse of power, an example of [Jewish] propaganda, or reverse racism. Such is the way a white supremacist’s mind works. But, again, how are these views significantly different from Donald Trump’s half century of overt racism? Or Christopher Rufo’s attacks on the reality of white privilege?

Billions of specks of lethal airborne bacteria like Trump’s, King’s, Rufo’s and Rushton’s, and toxic particles from discredited studies like the Moynihan Report which blamed Black Americans for their own mistreatment, continually swirl around in the American atmosphere, eventually settling on the agar plates that grow citizens like Payton Gendron.

Perhaps not totally unexpected was the vehemence of Gendron’s antisemitism. If you are a white supremacist who believes African-Americans have no intellect and no agency but you are also a conspiracy nut, then you need to blame someone for all the world’s problems. And what better people than Jews?

But now we have stumbled upon the white supremacist’s dilemma: if both are enemies, but Blacks are completely inept, how do Jews and Blacks together create so much misery for god-fearing white Christians? Simple: Blacks are simply a Jewish tool for dividing white America.

“‘The elite’, ‘The 1%’, ‘The bankers’, ‘The capitalists’, (((them))), ‘The marxist’s’ they all refer to the same group: THE JEWS!! […] The real war I’m advocating for is the gentiles vs the Jews. We outnumber them 100x, and they are not strong by themselves. But by their Jewish ways, they turn us against each other. When you realize this you will know that the Jews are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had. They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We can not show any sympathy towards them again.”

Note that “they turn us against each other” is precisely the same formulation that MAGA Republicans have chosen to justify bans on teaching CRT or acknowledging LGBTQ+ realities. To the white supremacist mind, “globalists” — not America’s social inequities themselves — are responsible for sowing division, and this has apparently necessitated bans on “divisive concepts” in schools throughout America.

If you can’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.

Gendron actually spent three times the pages describing “Jewish ways” than he did African-American “inferiority.” I won’t reproduce his crudest images — especially the one with the Hitler quote — but he used cartoons depicting a Jew stuffing African-Americans down the throats of non-Jews, another poisoning the well of white culture, and another identifying “Jews” as a stand-in for anyone with power or influence. And, if course, they are responsible for most of the problems of the Western world:

“The Jews are responsible for many problems that we in the western world face today. They will stop at nothing to ensure that they have full control over the goyim. The most common way the Jew does this is by weakening us with their propaganda. Since they mostly own mainstream media, this is easy. They will create infighting between our people and races so we are fighting each other rather than them. For example, currently the Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people. For our self-preservation, the Jews must be removed from our Western civilizations, in any way possible. I should also mention that not all “Jews” are ethnic or religious Jews. Jeff Bezos for example is not a religious or ethnic Jew, but may be considered a Jew. All elitists and globalists may be considered a “Jew” simply because they act like one.”

Funny he should mention Critical Race Theory. If you have read any of Christopher Rufo’s anti-CRT materials, you will recognize the same Christian nationalist bacilli that ended up on Gendron’s agar plate. Christian nationalist animus toward “globalists” and “elites” betrays its origins in classical antisemitism.

Another graphic implies that African-Americans were not bright enough to create the NAACP themselves (in fact, its primary founder, W.E.B. DuBois, was arguably the brightest of them all), and that the NAACP was not only a Jewish tool but a Communist plot.

According to Gendron, Jews are responsible for pornography, abortion, the grooming of gay kids, and converting children from potential Christian breeders into atheist transsexuals. This is apparently a plot to reduce white Christian demographics. Gendron wrote that he learned the “truth” of all this from following 4Chan, World Truth Videos, Daily Archives, and the Daily Stormer.

The mass-murderer’s choice of neo-Nazi websites may at first appear to be a departure from more mainstream MAGA news and opinion sources like the Federalist, WorldNet Daily or the Daily Blaze. But they all share precisely the same white supremacist and Christian nationalist preoccupations with Communists, “globalists,” Eurocentrism, and rejecting any acknowledgement of the racist society we live in.

But white supremacy is not just for MAGA Republicans.

Ajamu Baraka, contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report, tied together the Buffalo massacre with the concierge service that NATO (and naturally the present Democratic administration) has shown a white European nation — in contrast to their 2011 invasion of Libya:

“Zelensky talks about the need to ‘defend the West,’ ‘Europeanness,’ ‘Western values,’ and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and [that] is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.”

It is ironic that American Liberals, in embracing eurocentric chauvinism in the Ukraine via relaxed immigration caps and steroid-infused defense spending not offered on this scale to any other country, are on exactly the same page as MAGA Republicans celebrating their own eurocentric white chauvinism at their CPAC convention in Hungary.

Baraka connects all the dots:

“Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not be ‘replaced.’ This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe.”

All of which raises the question: if the GOP is based on white supremacy, and white Liberals won’t reject the inherent white chauvinism and white supremacy in their own foreign policy, how can Democrats ever hope to fight the cruder versions from the GOP?

Race and sexuality.

At first these two words seem to have no connection. But ask yourself why both were woven into the racist “chivalry” that the Confederacy cobbled together from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and tales of German nobility — or why race and sexuality were invariably connected in lynchings of Black men accused of talking to white women. Ask yourself why — long after slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow — there were still laws on the books against miscegenation. Ask yourself why racial purity and misogyny are so abundant in far-right groups.

Now ask yourself why men like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz were so fixated upon and could so easily segue between race and sexuality when they tried to put the first Black woman ever nominated to the Supreme Court “in her place.”

Republicans, in their heart of hearts, their dream of dreams, relish the power that white slave masters exercised over people who their slave laws decreed were property — some whose wombs they made property through sexual violence. Slave owners’ wives were property as well, and woe to a woman who cast an admiring, or simply a kind, glance at a Black man.

Male white ownership and control of both race and sexuality was implicit in slavery. The use of religion to establish the “proper place” for both women and Blacks was also implicit. As a system of production by slaves optimized by the production of more slaves, slavery had no use for unproductive sex and relied on selective bible readings which condemned homosexuality.

You don’t have to be a scholar to read for yourself some of the perversions of scripture Southern clergymen came up with to justify slavery. Apologists for the “peculiar institution” were just as prolific as abolitionists. Project Gutenberg has a great (and free) collection you can access online.

In one Gutenberg collection entitled “Cotton is King” Mississippi clergyman E.N. Elliott defended slavery by denying it had anything to do with ownership of human bodies; no, he wrote, it involved a relationship established by God.

But many such defenses of slavery were equally bizarre or inhuman. S.A. Cartwright MD, writing in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, stated with absolute certainty that “the physiological fact that negroes consume less oxygen indicates the superior wisdom of the precepts [enslavement] taught in the Bible regarding those people.“

As to beating slaves, “You hear of the poor negroes […] being beaten with many stripes by their masters and overseers. But owing to the fact that they consume less oxygen than white people, and the other physical differences founded on difference of structure” … well, they can hardly feel it, Cartwright concluded.

The denial of Black humanity was echoed by Chancellor Harper of South Carolina, who wrote, “Will those who regard slavery as immoral, or crime in itself, tell us that man was not intended for civilization, but to roam the earth as a biped brute?”

Intentionally or not, Harper spilled the beans on the real reason that slavery existed — simple Capitalist greed. In fact, Marx couldn’t have expressed it any better:

“Property–the accumulation of capital, as it is commonly called–is the first element of civilization. But to accumulate, or to use capital to any considerable extent, the combination of labor is necessary. In early stages of society, when people are thinly scattered over an extensive territory, the labor necessary to extensive works cannot be commanded. Men are independent of each other. Having the command of abundance of land, no one will submit to be employed in the service of his neighbor. No one, therefore, can employ more capital than he can use with his own hands, or those of his family, nor have an income much beyond the necessaries of life. There can, therefore, be little leisure for intellectual pursuits, or means of acquiring the comforts or elegancies of life. It is hardly necessary to say, however, that if a man has the command of slaves, he may combine labor, and use capital to any required extent, and therefore accumulate wealth.”

Dr. [of Theology] Anthea Butler, in her great little book “White Evangelical Racism,” describes the long history of misuse of religion to justify slavery. She acknowledges the diversity and complexity of white Evangelicals, noting that some later participated in the Civil Rights movement.

But when Republicans pushed their “Southern strategy” and wooed formerly Democratic white Evangelicals with dog-whistles — if not overt racist appeals — the seduction was too easy. Republicans were offering white Evangelicals something they had long desired — political power.

In an interview with Religion & Politics, Butler explained, “It’s not just that the movement is led by a bunch of white guys. It’s that there is a cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive. I try to show, from Billy Graham onward, how this inherent whiteness works, often by way of color blindness. Officially, evangelicalism claims to be committed to a series of beliefs and values that are higher than and so uninvested in questions of race, and yet their political conservatism really seems to limit their tolerance for non-white input, even from peers and leaders who share their belief system.”

Butler links white paternalism in the home, on the plantation, and in American foreign policy: “In the Reconstruction period, the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause’ lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were ‘heathen’ in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity.”

As white Christian Nationalist assaults on secular society mount, it is not surprising that almost all involve the twin Republican obsessions of race and sexuality. Ground zero today is the nation’s schools, where Republicans attack diversity curriculum and district efforts to make schools safe and welcoming places for gay and trans students.

January 6th should have been a wake-up call, but we are failing to take the threat that white Christian Nationalism poses to democracy seriously. Within a generation the Republican Party has become an openly proto-fascist political organization based on white Christian Nationalism. Republican political institutions like CPAC openly flirt with European fascists. Many of its members are white supremacists who make no effort to conceal their neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi sympathies.

And why should they? This is exactly what Republicans now stand for.

Like compulsive gamblers, spouse abusers, and alcoholics, White America has a racism problem it refuses to acknowledge. People with problems like these often tell their relatives that they either don’t have the problem — or that it’s actually the fault of family members. Interventions rarely go well. More often than not, families don’t even intervene. This is precisely how White America deals with racism: it doesn’t.

On Wednesday Tim Scott, a Black Republican Senator from South Carolina, went on air following Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress to deliver the Republican response. Although for four years Scott rarely objected to any of Trump’s numerous racist Tweets or cruel executive orders, he attacked Biden for “pulling us further apart” in a matter of 100 days.

White Republicans no doubt enjoyed watching a Black member of their party doing their dirty work for them, defending a party that is 89% white, rushing to institute new Jim Crow voter suppression policies in dozens of states, trying to crush protests over police killings through new and likely unconstitutional laws, writing laws to protect people who run over BLM protestors or get liberal teachers fired, and enacting “religious protection” laws mainly to privilege White Christians.

These mint julep sipping White Republicans must have especially enjoyed watching Scott dutifully delivered the line: “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” The Senator took some well-deserved heat for his nonsensical talking points. Michael Harriot, writing in the Root, tore Scott a couple of new orifices, laying out just how ridiculous Scott’s denial of a racist White America really is.

Of course, Democrats didn’t want to upset America’s racist white majority either, so they mouthed precisely the same words. Vice President Kamala Harris told Good Morning America, “No, I don’t think America is a racist country.” And on the Today Show President Joe Biden said those words as well, suggesting that racism of the past has left wreckage in its wake: “but I think after 400 years African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight ball in terms of education and health, in terms of opportunity.”

In an editorial on WBSM’s website, local bloviator Barry Richard not only rejected white racism but hung the label of racist on those who acknowledge its reality. “I think the real racists are the ones who call racism at every turn. They see racism under every bed and around every corner.” That, of course means most Liberals and most Black people — except for Scott and Candace Owens.

But there’s really not enough distance between Richard and Biden here. Neither want to confront a meth head relative with his problem. And neither is ready to insist on a family intervention.

With such glaring inequities in policing, prosecution, incarceration, housing, education, wealth, health, political power, and longevity, playing semantic games and trying to deny reality is a dangerous game. America has a serious white supremacy problem that neither Republicans nor Democrats want to address. Like any disease, if left untreated the patient is going to die. We’re not going to make it as a country unless we go into rehab immediately. But that requires first acknowledging that you’ve got a problem.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there are now 253 pieces of legislation in 43 states that limit voting rights and access. A massive voting rights bill, H.R.1 – For the People Act of 2021, was just passed in the House and is now before the U.S. Senate.

Republicans predictably oppose the legislation because expanding voting hours, access to the polls, and absentee ballots cost them dearly in 2020. To preserve their power in Red States and return to glory in Blue ones, they need to put a serious crimp in the last exercise of democracy available to most Americans. The Heritage Foundation has already promised to take H.R.1 to the Supreme Court if it manages to survive a filibuster, claming that it violates the Constitution.

When the Arizona Republican Party went before the Supreme Court to defend ballot disqualification in that state, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked what the party’s interest was in such measures. The party’s lawyer, Michael Carvin, answered a little too candidly: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”

GovTrack.us predicts that H.R.1 has an 87% chance of being enacted. But some Democratic Senators are on the fence. None of the 8 Democrats who opposed the $15 per hour minimum wage have signed on to H.R.1, and fivethirtyeight.com names two of them — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — as weak on opposing voter suppression.

If you think voter suppression is found only in states where not so long ago lynchings took place, or if you think voter suppression is a strategy only Republicans can love — well, you would be wrong on both counts. Massachusetts is one of this states.

Here are some of the bills now before the 192nd General Court of the Massachusetts Legislature. Read the bills, identify the sponsors, and then help get them out of office.

• HD.503 – sponsored by Colleen Garry (D-36th Middlesex) and others of both parties
• HD.642 – sponsored by Donald R. Berthiaume (R-5th Worcester).
• HD.1349 – sponsored by Alyson Sullivan (R-7th Plymouth)
• HD.1393 – sponsored by Mark Lombardo (R-22nd Middlesex) and Nicholas Boldyga (R-3rd Hampden)
• HD.2703 – sponsored by Lenny Mirra (R-2nd Essex)
• SD.1096 – sponsored by Barry Finegold (D-2nd Essex and Middlesex). Barry Finegold’s bill purports to expand voting rights but contain provisions which do the opposite, which may be why it is included on the Brennan list.

Dec 10 March for Voting Rights by Michael Fleshman under CC BY-SA 2.0

Trump’s second impeachment was, precisely as Republicans termed it, a show trial. Though it was not of the Stalinist variety, in which the full fury of a despotic regime is turned on the innocent. No, the Democratic impeachment managers, to the contrary, mounted a moving, professionally staged version of To Kill a Mockingbird in which prosecutors attempted to defend the Constitution. Jamie Raskin, reprising the role of Atticus Finch, mounted a convincing case and delivered an uplifting summation. But it fell on deaf ears of the GOP and the client, Justice, was condemned precisely like Finch’s client, Tom Robinson.

In the end, though, the Senate impeachment trial was nothing more than theater.

It hadn’t helped that the Democrats backed down at the last minute and refused to call witnesses. It hadn’t helped that several of the Maycomb, Alabama jurors — Klan members themselves — had been huddling with opposing counsel. It hadn’t helped that the impeachment process, as designed by the framers of the Constitution, is a joke. So much of a joke that during Trump’s first impeachment trial humor columnist Andy Borowitz joked that when El Chapo found out how impeachment trials were actually conducted he was outraged that his had witnesses!

This staged performance did reveal how broken the United States Constitution is. Operating precisely as designed, the Constitution shields America’s rulers from the whims of the little people. In addition to its broken courts, its broken presidency, its toothless House, and the highly undemocratic Electoral College, we have all seen in the last year alone how a partisan Senate can destroy accountability by any other branch of government. Indeed, the Senate is American democracy’s Achilles heel.

The almost religious reverence for the founders of the Constitution, who as Senator Ted Cruz put it, “fought and bled for freedom and then crafted the most miraculous political document ever conceived, our Constitution,” should really be questioned. The system they created is not merely showing its age. It’s just not working.

After the Senate’s impeachment theater, President Biden issued a bland statement lamenting the “trial” as a “sad chapter in our history” and naming the defense of truth the solution to re-uniting the United States.

But our problems go well beyond truth, as Atticus Finch might have argued — to recognizing and overturning centuries of white impunity. Not to mention ditching our dysfunctional form of government through a Constitutional convention — that is, before it self-destructs.

Speaking for many of us, Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation: “I Don’t Just Want Trump Impeached. I Want Him Jailed.” Mystal pointed to the racial injustices of recent arrests and selective prosecutions by courts, courts and legislators unwilling to pursue the many counts against Trump from the Mueller investigation and, finally, to the coup attempt that had no consequences.

Los Angeles Times editors have called for a Department of Justice investigation, impeachment or not. Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway suggested that the DOJ appoint a special counsel, a view shared by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. And New York Magazine ran a piece reminding readers of what the prosecution of a former leader might look like: in 2012 Italy prosecuted its former authoritarian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a man very much like Trump, on a host of charges ranging from sex with an underaged prostitute to bribery and tax fraud, even sentencing him to jail.

Although President Biden told the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists last August that he would not stand in the way of prosecuting Trump, in the next breath he said that it would be a “very unusual thing and probably not very … good for democracy.” By November Biden was telling advisors that prosecuting Trump wasn’t even an option. “I will not do what this president does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happened.”

Maybe Biden believes he can create bipartisan results, or even save the House from a Republican take-back in 2022. Maybe he thinks appeasing members of a party, 40% of whom believe in political violence, will brake what some see as an inevitable [cold?] Civil War. Good luck, Mr. President, but you’re kidding yourself.

But for all his reticence to prosecute a seditionist coup plotter, Biden still plans to pursue the extradition and prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for publishing evidence of American war crimes. We may eventually get that Stalinist show trial after all.

Since being almost completely exiled from mainstream Social Media networks after his failed coup attempt, people are asking where Donald Trump has gone. Some Americans are actually experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the absence of Trump’s daily crack pipe.

Along with Trump, many of his unhinged supporters have been banned from Twitter, Facebook, and others. But this has just inflamed white grievance and their warped perception that white racists are the real victims. Conservatives have been treating the 25,000 National Guard troops at the Capitol as a sort of Tiananmen Square moment, and their exile from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has now become, for them, the American imposition of the Great Chinese Firewall. While these developments are no such thing, they are overreach and overkill, and Liberals proceed down the road of heavy-handedness at their own, great peril.

So where has the Far Right and all their sewage gone? To answer that question I did a little sewer diving, and here is what I found.

Donald Trump can now be found on Gab and Telegram, although he is rumored to be toying with the idea of creating his own social network — which, based on the history of Trump Water, Trump Steaks, and Trump University, may not end so well. Trump has established an Office of the Former President, which so far does not have a website but did announce its existence on Telegram.

Telegram, a messaging service with channels that users can subscribe to as easily as Twitter, has recently attracted a large number of Far Right voices. They include familiar names like Trump himself, former First Heirs Ivanka and Don Jr., Steve Bannon, Dinesh D’Souza, Sheriff David Clarke, Michelle Malkin, Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Breitbart News, Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, Right Side Broadcasting, Epoch Times, the Bannon War Room, One America News, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Rudy Giuliani, Jack Prosobiec, Scott Presler, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kayleigh McEnany, Andy Biggs, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Ted Cruz, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and others.

American Conservatives frequently supplement an unhealthy, unholy diet with intravenous vitamin drips from QAnon’s Q-Tip, the Boogaloo Boys Intel Drop, the Daily Groyper, and other white supremacist groups. These supplements are entirely unncessary because American Conservatives have been getting far more than their minimum daily requirements of fascism, nazism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy for many years. And the content, it is important to note, is not all that different from the more “mainstream” Conservative views.

Other “victims” of internet moderation have moved to Parler, though it has been unable (or at least slow) to reload its Amazon cloud data to a new site. While inspired by mainstream Republicans, the January 6th coup was coordinated via social networking by extremists, and Parler was instrumental in the effort. With YouTube cracking down on hate speech, Rumble has become the go-to site for uploading videos filled with hate speech and conspiracies.

Since the pandemic, Liberals have been calling for more “moderation” (if not outright censorship) of crackpots spreading dangerous information. For their part, “mainstream” Republicans have been getting nuttier and more extreme. A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the “Capitol Insurrection Shows How Trends On The Far-Right’s Fringe Have Become Mainstream.” This belated revelation has frightened even the GOP. Today RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel distanced herself from election conspiracies Rudy Guilani delivered from RNC offices, wondering “what is the liability of the RNC, if [Giuliani’s] allegations are made and unfounded?” It will be interesting to see if the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party will join Democrats in calling for forms of internet censorship.

Yesterday the New York Times published an article called The Coup We Are Not Talking About by Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff, to her credit, faults surveillance capitalism for monetizing data that ought to be protected from “data mining” by internet services like Google or Palantir. She also faults surveillance capitalism for selling or patriotically donating that data to America’s vast security state. Zuboff is in favor of anti-trust actions to break up large, dangerous monopolies. And Zuboff is also a strong proponent of privacy legislation to protect citizens from facial recognition and other forms of exploitation of personal data.

But Zuboff is also in favor of measures that go well beyond regulation into governmental intrusions into the proprietary algorithms that search engines use, “comprehensive audits” (whatever that means), and most frightening of all — copying European laws like the British Online Harms Bill, which make companies responsible for “public harms.”

The American Security Establishment (NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, DHS, etc.) has long demanded weakened encryption protocols in order to “protect Americans from harm” by snooping on everything transmitted over the internet. But, of course, one person’s “harm” is another’s freedom. If Wikileaks offers a roadmap for what’s coming, censorship and persecution based on “public harm” will soon extend to more whistleblowers the government doesn’t like and those espousing unpopular sentiments, such as defunding police, burning flags, or socializing Medicine.

This is the slippery slope that Zuboff — and many Liberals — want to descend.

At the heart of the “censorship” (or “moderation”) debate is compromise language inserted into the 1996 Communications Decency Act. One section, 47 U.S. Code § 230 — “Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material” — does two main things: (1) it holds internet providers harmless from prosecution for inflammatory or libelous posts by their customers; and (2) it also holds internet providers harmless from lawsuits by their customers if they attempt to block or censor inflammatory or libelous content posted on their platforms.

Liberals and Conservatives both hate Section 230 — for different reasons. Liberals don’t want to hear hate speech and they don’t care much about the Civil Liberties implications of censorship. Conservatives don’t mind hate speech, or they routinely traffic in it, and they too don’t really care about the Civil Liberties implications.

Former president Donald Trump wanted to repeal Section 230, going so far as to threaten to veto the National Defense Authorization act if 230 were not revoked. And our new president is on the same side of the issue. When asked one year ago by the New York Times what he thinks of Section 230, candidate Joe Biden betrayed his ignorance of the law, saying, “[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] can. […] And [Section 230] should be revoked. It should be revoked because [Facebook] is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy.”

Trump’s and Biden’s views are shared by a large bipartisan crowd from Nancy Pelosi to Josh Hawley, and by Centrist Democrats and even a few progressives.

But as Ars Technica internet policy reporter Timothy B. Lee explains, “Biden is wrong to suggest that Section 230 treats Facebook differently from The New York Times. If someone posts a defamatory comment in the comment section of a Times article, the company enjoys exactly the same legal immunity that Facebook gets for user posts. Conversely, if Facebook published a defamatory article written by an employee, it would be just as liable as the Times.”

Those who want to impose more censorship (“moderation”) forget that if legislators can constrain internet freedom of speech, then constraints on print and broadcast media could easily be next.

In September 2020 former Attorney General William Barr weighed in on revoking and/or revising Section 230. One of Barr’s rationales was to permit more federal “oversight” of internet content and to give prosecutors greater latitude to prosecute indecency, terrorism, cyber-stalking, and “illicit content.” Barr also wanted backdoors into social networks and encryption keys the government could use to snoop on internet traffic.

But Barr also wanted changes that held online publishers like Twitter and Facebook to their own Acceptable Use policies — not arbitrary, capricious decisions to permit one user to abuse published policies while banning another:

“Section 230 […] should not hinder free speech by making platforms completely unaccountable for moderation decisions. A platform that chooses not to host certain types of content would not be required to do so, but it must act in good faith and abide by its own terms of service and public representations. Platforms that fail to do those things should not enjoy the benefits of Section 230 immunity. [My] proposal adds a provision§ 230(c)(l)(C) to make clear that online platforms can continue to take down content in good faith and consistent with their terms of service without automatically becoming a publisher or speaker of all other content on their service.”

As much as I revile William Barr, this last suggestion made more sense than convoluted and antidemocratic proposals to enforce “good citizenship” and “prevent harm” through what can only in the end be called by its proper name: censorship.

Legal remedies for willfully spreading lies, slandering or threatening people, or cyber-stalking already exist. Dominion Voting Machines had the right idea when it slapped Rudy Giuliani with a $1.3 billion lawsuit. And guess what? Fears of further liability from Giulani’s lying seem to have gotten Ronna McDaniel’s attention, too.

Ultimately it is up to laws to correct these injustices and to prosecutors to go after internet crime. But if the FBI can only muster the half-hearted prosecution of white supremacist coup plotters, and no one ever attempts to stop the steady stream of interstate phone scams ringing our phones at dinnertime, you can bet that new laws will also be enforced selectively, or not at all.

Liberals believe that the toxicity of the internet is responsible for the January 6th coup attempt. It seems to escape their notice that it was rallying calls by the former president, aided and abetted by numerous speakers and Far Right organizations who showed up on Pennsylviania Avenue on January 6th to urge a mob to lay siege to the Capitol. It was Republican legislators who conducted prohibited tours of the Capitol, informing the plotters where Democratic offices were located, where the safe rooms and tunnels could be found, and about the emergency signals in Congressional offices.

It was Trump’s Acting defense Secretary Christopher Miller who issued “stand down” orders to the National Guard, and the Metro Police. It was Miller who barred the use of weapons, air support, surveillance, who limited National Guard troops to 340 people, who basically de-fanged the police against a violent insurrectionist mob. If we really want to look at how the coup attempt could have been prevented, don’t look at censoring social media — which merely echoed the false claims of Trump and his Congressional co-conspirators — but to those who called the mob to “stand by” and then on the day of the siege urged them to go to war.

Once again, existing law is quite capable of holding plotters and seditionists responsible. But enforcement of existing law is always a matter of political will.

Finally, no matter the medium, there has always been a steady stream of crazy, racist sewage Americans consume, and it will continue to be produced even if its authors must resort to using mimeograph machines again. If we pursue the recommendations of people like Ms. Zuboff, William Barr, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden to attack social networks instead of pursuing prosecutions, we will punish the public instead of coup plotters. And we will still have failed to fix the white supremacy at the heart of the coup attempt — while irrevocably destroying what’s left of our democracy.

In the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency all hell was breaking loose. A friend, equally alarmed at what seemed on the surface to be a national break with reality and severe psychosis, recommended Four Threats by Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman. It was a good read and I don’t regret the time spent with it. The publisher’s blurb is a solid summary of what the book attempted to present:

In Four Threats, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman explore five moments in history when democracy in the U.S. was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound — even fatal — damage to the American democratic experiment. From this history, four distinct characteristics of disruption emerge. (1) Political polarization, (2) racism and nativism, (3) economic inequality, and (4) excessive executive power — alone or in combination — have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived — so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment in American politics is that all four conditions exist.

Despite its promise to get to the root of our democratic rot, Four Threats could not bring itself to name the primary cause of economic inequality — capitalism. Four Threats could not bring itself to indict the Constitution itself for the gridlock, frustration, dysfunction, and attenuated democracy that perpetuates political polarization. Mettler and Lieberman acknowledge unequal representation of the Senate, the undemocratic Electoral College, but then they just throw up their hands:

“These and other features of the Constitution certainly do make American politics less democratic because they render elections less fair and discourage accountability to the majority of citizens. Many have made cogent calls for them to be changed. But such changes are unlikely to happen. Amending the Constitution is difficult under the best of circumstances, and probably next to impossible in today’s polarized climate. Moreover, those in power are the beneficiaries of current constitutional arrangements, so they have little incentive to change them. As beneficial as some of these reforms might be for American democracy, we need to look elsewhere in the short term to restore democracy’s promise.”

The book never takes us to that “elsewhere.”

In their impassioned plea to save democracy, the authors cite a Pew opinion survey showing that Conservatives and Liberals both share a strong commitment to democracy. But they ignore the glaring fact that today’s Conservatives have quite a different notion of democracy than the rest of us. Conservative “democracy” more resembles Margaret Atwood’s Gilead than the Iowa caucuses.

In order to deal with polarization, Mettler and Lieberman argue, we need dialog. We need to talk openly about issues that really matter, with the preservation of democracy in mind, and cognizent that we have not yet extended democracy to all. It’s a sweet, noble — and damned naive — sentiment. One wonders if the authors have personally ever tried to argue for democracy for everyone with a white supremacist, listened dispassionately to conspiracy nuts hoping for a “storm” to usher in mass executions, or tried to agree on facts with people who don’t believe in science or in protecting fellow citizens by using face masks?

Four Threats was empty of the pragmatic prescriptions promised when discounting more radical solutions. Changing the Constitution? Why not? Letting the South secede? Bringing down the entire corrupt system through national strikes or protest in order to rebuild something that actually works? Again, why not? We’re long past the point that we need to place a “do not resuscitate” notation in the patient’s chart. Software is periodically refactored, shacks are bulldozed to make way for more solid structures. We even change our underwear. Why the hell not government?

An especially glaring omission in Four Threats was its failure to address American imperialism — a factor responsible for much of 20th and 21st century executive overreach. The Bush administration’s dismantling of Constitutional laws and norms, for example, were not sufficiently covered in the book, as they were in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. We are still living with global surveillance, an American gulag, secret courts, and violations of several of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

While Four Threats to its credit spends time on Reonstruction and touches on Jim Crow, it never really indicts White America itself for white supremacy. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law provides a similarly dispassionate look at the institutions of white supremacy. But we [white folks] created this system, and if you really want to understand where it came from Carol Anderson’s White Rage will gladly hand you a mirror.

To truly understand the Capitol riots, read Carol Anderson. White America can never stand for an improvement in the status or power of Black Americans. So when Georgia turned the tides of the 2020 presidential election and thwarted control of the Senate by America’s openly white supremacist party, that was a bridge too far for White America. It was White Rage we were witnessing at the Capitol, threatening to bring down the entire national project. It very well could have, and they’ve promised to bring their guns next time.

Mettler’s and Lieberman’s blindness to the profound perversity of America’s citizens is possibly the book’s worst deficit. Why do snake oil and bible salesmen repeatedly prey upon — and originate in — White America? We fancy ourselves a nation of dreamers and builders, but in fact we are a nation of deranged, self-destructive, science-denying, racist, hating, religious fanatics. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: Who America Went Haywire makes the case that this insanity is embedded in our national DNA. So if you think the violent mobs you saw on the news on January 6th were something new and unexpected, just read Andersen’s profiles of those who built this country.

This is who we are.

In my almost 70 years on this planet, this is my first American coup. And I had been thinking that 2020 was the interesting year. I was certainly wrong.

I was going to write about the similarities between last Wednesday’s coup attempt and its precedents in the Munich coup of 1923 or Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922. I though I might mention that the Mar-a-Lago Führer had long been fascinated by his fascist forebears, even keeping a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches in his nightstand, a fact confirmed by multiple sources including Trump himself.

It occurred to me I should also mention the differences between these coups — that, unlike Trump’s 2021 attempt, the Munich police actually fought the 3,000 Bierkeller fascists, killing a number of them. Instead, it was reported today that off-duty police from around the country may have participated in Trump’s attempt to derail the certification of Electoral College votes and physically intimidate lawmakers.

Or that Capitol police, some who appeared in selfies with the mob, appear to have actually invited the insurrection into chambers, some armed, some carrying plastic ties to take lawmakers hostage, some erecting gallows, fixin’ to lynch the Vice President and House and Senate leaders. Videos show police actually opening the doors. And now we read that the deployment of Maryland National Guard troops may have been slow-walked by Trump loyalists in the Pentagon. There are a lot of questions to be answered in the investigations I hope are coming.

Unlike Mussolini, who triumphantly entered Rome with his fellow blackshirts, Trump retreated back to his bunker for another cheeseburger, despite promising the mob he would be marching with them. Unfortunately, America’s First Fascist didn’t even show the courtesy of committing suicide in his bunker like the man whose speeches he loves so much.

But who can say today that they were really suprised by this coup — coming from a man whose administration built concentration camps for children, proposed putting DACA recipients in boxcars and shipping them out of the country, never once distancing himself from his white supremacist base and in fact speaking for them? Who could say they were truly suprised at any of this — from a man who managed to corrupt everyone around him and never once encountered anything but impunity for even the most treasonous actions?

Yet what upsets me the most are the reactions the coup attempt has provoked.

Even after four years of the most egregious corruption and authoritarianism, the mainstream press still finds it difficult to pronounce Trump’s attempt to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes a failed coup. Instead, this retrospectively ham-handed effort is variously described as an insurrection or a riot — as if it were a fraternity party or a Superbowl celebration that got out of hand.

It was, of course, no such thing.

I had planned to mention that the all-too-frequently published photo of the Norseman with his spear provided an undeserved comic veneer to what was actually a deadly coup that cost the life of six people, including two Capitol police officers. Anyone who watches the videos now surfacing understands that many of the participants thought they were part of a “revolution” liberating Congress, just as they had been instructed to “liberate” state capitals by the President.

Despite all this, Republicans have refused to invoke the 25th Amendment and we now hear from Jim Clyburn that Democrats will likely conduct an impeachment inquiry 100 days into the Biden administration. Some voices gravely warn us that pursuing justice at all will only divide the country.

In the face of all this bending-over-backwards to avoid prosecuting white supremacists and rich white guys, the only concrete response to Trump’s coup has been for three social network giants to de platform Parler, the far right version of Twitter, and to ban Trump himself from Facebook and Twitter. There is a long precedent for this. Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been cancelling accounts of terrorists since 9/11, and telecom giants have on occasion blocked entire websites like Wikileaks. Social networks — precisely like members of the Trump administration now writing their resignation letters — simply didn’t care about lies, white supremacy or the threats of violence they suborned until they were forced to care.

But punishing one undemocratic action with another is not going to fix what’s wrong with American democracy.

Trump’s calls to invade the Capitol and disrupt the Electoral College ought to have had immediate consequences. But those who swore to uphold the Constitution violated those oaths. A bunch of pitchfork-wielding white supremacists — even when calling for lynching — apparently did not alarm authorities as much as BLM’s calls for police reform this Spring. Support for overturning the Electoral College vote from Republican legislators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should also have set off alarm bells. Well-telegraphed plans to disrupt the election should have resulted in immediate investigations and extra protection for Congress members. Instead, impunity for legislators driving and supporting the coup and violating free speech for everyone else are the only solutions we can come up with.

If overturning the results of a democratic election has no consequences, if coup attempts are trivialized and any thought of prosecuting ringleaders is not pursued, then autocracy will have won.

There have to be consequences for last Wednesday’s coup attempt. People must serve some serious time in prison for it, including the President, several Senators and a number of Congressmen, and thousands of white supremacists and conspiracy nuts who broke into Congress and attempted to crush police to death. Some of these spineless Congressmen are now blaming their actions on their own constituents. Michigan Republican Representative Peter Meijer claimed that many Republicans went along with the President’s attempt to subvert the election because their constituents had threatened them.

But if none of these instigators, ringleaders, or the organizations responsible for ground operations are held accountable, then let’s simply open the nation’s prisons — which contain tens of thousands serving life sentences for trivial drug and property offenses. Seriously, just let them go. If there are no consequences for ringleaders of a large-scale coup to overturn an elected government-in-waiting, then why should there be any consequences for a guy who arrested with a little too much weed on him?

The American Constitution has made many of the anti-democratic maneuvers we’ve seen in the last four years possible, granting excessive power to the Executive, undermining fair elections that everyone must have faith in — and these are all worries of both Liberals and Conservatives. It’s something we should all agree on.

If we really want to fix our democracy, we must start by rewriting the awful rule book that governs its operation.

First line

It’s hard to know what Massachusetts Democrats really believe in — besides power. One would be hard-pressed to find a lot of concern for racial justice. MassDems certainly don’t believe in immigrant rights, or they would have supported the Safe Communities Act. They don’t believe there is a problem with Native American mascots or a racists state flag, or they would have decisively fixed both by now. Recently the MassDems overwhelmingly re-elected a party chair who will keep steering the party toward the rocks of irrelevance and decline. When the 420-member state Democratic committee did so, it also rejected two challengers who had both pledged to make the party truly more diverse.

Massachusetts Democrats show unquestioning support for police and correctional officer unions — even the Trump-iest among them, the Massachusetts Correctional Officers Federated Union, got one progressive senator to file legislation to give officers a $100 million raise. No, what keeps legislators up at night is the nightmare that prosecuting bad cops for murdering people of color will somehow undermine police morale.

No surprise, then, that Massachusetts Democrats removed ending Qualified Immunity (impunity) for police from a Police Accountability bill that just barely survived being deep-sixed by the Massachusetts House.

If this isn’t bad enough, Bristol County’s Democratic House Representatives are among the worst of the Democratic Party’s morally-flexible do-nothings.

Thanks to Progressive Mass we can view the results of the December 2nd vote on the Police Accountability bill, S.2693, which now awaits Governor Baker’s signature. Of 14 representatives from Bristol County, only six voted for Police Accountability — even after Qualified Immunity had been stripped from the bill.

What was so wrong with a POST Commission that professionalizes and certifies police officers? What was so upsetting about giving school superintendents discretion to decide whether they want SROs in their schools instead of letting police chiefs decide? The legislators won’t say — only that they get most of their information from the police.

Below is a table of how Bristol County legislators voted.

Remember their names when they ask for your vote in 2022.

I don’t mean to veer into satire — it’s not really a strength and this is hardly a joking matter. But yesterday, as I was checking out the limitations of a piece of “freemium” software (as opposed to buying the full “Pro” plan), it dawned on me that our “justice” system is exactly like software with the Freemium model.

The justice most Americans receive — unless they are white, well-connected, tasked with keeping the poor and people of color in their place with state-sanctioned violence, or can buy impunity — is the inferior “Lite” version.

The way many viewed the 2020 elections, it was supposed to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 virus. Instead it turned out to be a referendum on how much Americans care about the lives of their neighbors and children, racial justice, science, and democracy.

Well, we don’t.

That such significant numbers of people voted for white supremacists, QAnon wingnuts, and xenophobes showed that Trump correctly grasped how much Americans worry about criminality, fascism, and corruption in their electeds.

Again, we don’t.

An editorial in last night’s Tageszeitung hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that not only do Americans not care, “they know exactly what they’re doing.” Trump voters knew full well last night that they were burning down the house with everyone in it. And that there would be no survivors.

But this is who we are. Trump didn’t burn down the house. White American did.

Democratic pollsters told us that America needed a steady voice from the “middle.” It turned out their prescriptions were no better than their polling. Pinning all their hopes on Biden’s character and promising a reset to the halcyon days of 2008 backfired on Democrats. in the end Biden’s only strategy was running on Trump’s COVID failures. It wasn’t enough.

After the death of 3,000 people in 911, Americans were ready to invade the world, gut their own Constitutional protections, seal the border, and then bring their foreign wars back to America’s cities. But now, with a quarter of a million deaths directly attributable to Trump’s denials and sabotage, there is barely a peep of outrage from his supporters. The Coronavirus is just the flu and, anyway, Trump’s not responsible, China was. No, America hit an iceberg and we just have to throw women and children overboard and crowd as many billionaires into the lifeboats as we can.

One obvious takeaway from this election is that it was less a referendum on Trump’s corruption and impunity — which Americans obviously admire — than on the Democratic Party’s inability to offer something different. The DNC’s idea of “new” was a 78 year-old with hair plugs and dentures. A piece of meatloaf from the ice box with just a hint of freezer burn.

It may be hours or days until we know who won the election. I don’t share the view that both candidates were equally terrible. Trump is a fascist. If he wins, or the presidency is handed to him by the Supreme Court (for the 3rd time in my life), it will be the final nail in the coffin of our ersatz democracy. If Biden manages to prevail, Lady Democracy will still be on life support, her funeral delayed but relatives encouraged to book quick flights to visit her while she moves in and out of consciousness. Still, it’s the better option.

But the greatest lesson of this election for me was that White American may not vote their interests but we certainly vote for people who look like ourselves. Time after time the white voter looks into the mirror and refuses to see the ageing, racist sociopathic bully on the other side of the glass — yet each time he invariably looks like Donald Trump.

Legislators are elected to help people. Some think their responsibility stops with constituents; others have a broader sense of responsibility to the earth, humanity, and global concerns. This is who I want representing me.

When it comes to immigration issues, I want legislators to take action against the Trump administration’s enlistment of local police in increasingly brazen and cruel roundups of desperate and paperless refugees. But the majority of Bristol County legislators are profound disappointments. Most coast to re-election without challengers. Instead of democracy we have political machinery and patronage in Bristol County. And with a few exceptions, we get hacks instead of leaders as a result.

Hall of Fame

I am grateful to the following state representatives and senators for stepping up to support the Safe Communities Act. It takes guts and principle and that broader sense of responsibility to help suffering human beings, whether they can vote for you or not.

• Rep. Antonio F. D. Cabral, 13th Bristol (H.3573)

• Rep. James K. Hawkins, 2nd Bristol (H.3573)

• Sen. Paul R. Feeney, Bristol and Norfolk (S.1401 is the Senate version)

• Sen. Rebecca L. Rausch, Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex (S.1401)

Wall of Shame

The Republicans on the list below all belong on the Wall of Shame. Their party has become a rotting husk and a personality cult whose immigration policy is literally written by white supremacists. No surprise that Massachusetts Republicans march in lockstep with White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller, who proposed deporting Central American DACA recipients in railroad boxcars.

But the Democrats on this list? To be charitable, if they don’t share the xenophobia of their Republican friends, then their only excuse is that they are cowardly machine politicians afraid of angering rightwing police unions and some of their more racist constituents. Everyone on the list below will protest that they’re not racists or xenophobes — and a few can even point to programs they’ve funded which help disadvantaged communities.

But when it’s time to show their mettle, they are invariably too timid to help refugees whose lives have been upended by war, climate change, political instability, or hunger. Their love of humanity is conditional and narrow, reserved only for campaign contributors and potential voters. For refugees they look away, and for that — Democrat or Republican — they ought to be deeply ashamed.

• Rep. Jay Barrows

• Rep. Carole Fiola

• Rep. Patricia Haddad

• Rep. Christopher Hendricks

• Rep. Steven Howitt

• Rep. Christopher Markey

• Rep. Shaunna O’Connell

• Rep. Norman Orrall

• Rep. Elizabeth Poirier

• Rep. Paul Schmid

• Rep. Alan Silvia

• Rep. William Straus

• Senator Michael Brady

• Senator Mark Montigny

• Senator Marc Pacheco

• Senator Michael Rodrigues

• Senator Walter Timilty

Sometime after midnight on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor was sleeping when plainclothes Louisville narcotics officers, acting on faulty information, executed a “no-knock warrant” — a violation of almost everything in the Fourth Amendment — breaking down her front door with a battering ram and killing her in the hallway of her own home.

According to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, police were looking for a drug stash owned by Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who did not live with her and had already been arrested. During the botched raid, Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, assumed it was a home invasion and fired what he said was a warning shot. Police then unleashed a fusillade of 35 rounds on both occupants of the apartment. Taylor was hit six times and several shots were fired into adjacent apartments, endangering three people. As Breonna Taylor bled out, police stood around watching her die, offering her no aid.

Breonna’s killing has brought some changes to Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) procedures and also resulted in a $12 million wrongful death settlement with the City of Louisville.

But holding police to account was a bridge too far.

A Kentucky grand jury presented Judge Annie O’Connell with its recommendation that none of the three officers who shot Taylor ought to face charges. Although former Det. Brett Hankison was indicted on three charges of wanton endangerment — for shooting up the apartments next door — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove will not face any charges for killing Taylor.

Police have been less than honest. Although at least one officer, Tony James, was photographed wearing a body camera, and another officer was filmed wearing a bodycam mount on his vest, LMPD at first insisted there was no bodycam footage. Then Todd McMurtry, Sgt. Mattingly’s attorney, miraculously produced bodycam footage of the raid that showed that his client, who was shot in the leg, could not possibly have shot Taylor.

Likewise, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s whitewash makes a mockery of fact and law. Cameron claims that Walker was the only one at the scene who could have shot Mattingly because all the officers were carrying .40 caliber handguns. But Det. Brett Hankison — the one who shot up the neighboring apartments — had a 9 mm weapon. Worse, Cameron turns justice on its head by declaring that the police had a right to defend themselves from Walker — even after breaking in, unannounced, in error, and plainclothed. Whatever Cameron’s tortured rationale, officers were not defending themselves from a little 26 year-old EMT when they fired almost two dozen rounds at her.

Following the release of Cameron’s findings, on September 21st the same police department that killed Breonna Taylor declared a state of emergency, announcing that in anticipation of protests they would be shutting down traffic, limiting parking, and setting up barricades — to protect property.

Breonna Taylor’s killing has left Louisville in turmoil. Hearts are broken and in the absence of justice many windows are going to have to be broken to vent outrage at a system that values property more than human life, and black lives least of all.

Breonna Taylor. Say her name. Honor her name.

If we truly believe in justice in this country, there must also be justice for Breonna Taylor.

After decades of shielding police from prosecution for the murders of Black and Brown people, and four centuries of systemic racism, many Americans have had enough of police impunity.

But state violence is just one symptom of a society founded on white supremacy. The upwelling of protests demanding police reform is not simply about the police. After four years of unprecedented presidential criminality and corruption, the protests are as much about the Trump administration’s impunity as they are about his friends in law enforcement.

Since the George Floyd murder there have been over 100 days of protests. Despite the rare occasions of rioting, almost all have been peaceful. To White America, however, such unrest is a frightening reminder that white supremacy’s days are numbered. Race, like the Coronavirus, is on everyone’s mind.

But having failed to save the lives of what are projected to top 400,000 COVID-19 victims by year’s end, Trump is (again) running on race and avoiding the subject of his incompetence in dealing with a national emergency.

Racialized Law and Order

In June Trump announced “I am your president of law and order.” Forget the pandemic, Trump was saying. What White America should really fear is accountability for both his administration and America’s unfettered Police State. Accordingly, “gun couple” Mark and Patrica McCloskey were invited to address the July GOP convention after they aimed weapons at Black Lives Matter protestors in Saint Louis, Missouri. Other GOP speakers, including Rudi Guilani and Michael McHale, president of the National Association of Police Organizations, painted an apocalyptic image of America under Biden and Harris. Mike Pence comforted the white base: “We will have law and order on the streets of this country.”

But if that appeal to authoritarianism and racism were not sufficiently obvious, after the convention Trump warned supporters that holding police accountable would threaten white suburbia. Having traded in an inaudible dog whistle for a racist bullhorn, Trump went for broke by issuing a September 4th memo banning anti-racism and anti-bias training as “un-American.”

So, if anti-racism is anti-American, what then is “American?”

The Killer of Fifth Avenue

Maya Angelou had it right when she said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” In January 2016 Trump made the now-famous statement: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.”

And it was incredible. The Killer of Fifth Avenue was letting everyone know that laws and norms — which everyone else is obliged to follow — don’t apply to him or his base.

No one should have been surprised then by the epidemic of corruption and criminality that followed.

Donald Trump is “a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

These are the words of Trump’s own lawyer, Michael Cohen.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base. […] He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this. […] His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God. […] The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit. […] It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Those were the words of Trump’s own sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.

Trump’s astounding collection of criminal associates

The assortment of con men and sociopaths who committed crimes in Trump’s behalf is astounding: Cohen, who pled guilty to tax evasion, lying to a bank, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress; former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI; ex Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, convicted of “conspiracy against the U.S.” and lying to the FBI; former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, conspiracy against the U.S., tax evasion, bank fraud, hiding bank accounts, and obstruction of justice; former Trump campaign advisor George Papadapolous, lying to the FBI; former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone, lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering; and most recently, Steve Bannon, Trump campaign manager and White House advisor, arrested and charged with defrauding investors in a border wall crowdfunding scheme.

Pardon me — and my pals

Even if you wave away the Mueller investigation or ignore the astounding collection of criminals Trump has hired and surrounded himself with, then look at his presidential commutations and pardons — beginning with the murderers and war criminals.

War crime and murder

In May 2019 Trump pardoned war criminal Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of committing murder and assault in Iraq. In November 2019 Trump pardoned Mathew L. Golsteyn, convicted of another war crime, a murder in Afghanistan. The same day Trump also pardoned Clint Lorance, convicted of killing two Afghanis and ordering his unit to shoot civilians. And, to highlight that impunity for murder was the basis for his pardons, Trump just slapped economic sanctions on International Criminal Court officials investigating American war crimes.

Civil rights abuses

If war crimes deserve impunity, then why not civil rights abuses too?

Trump’s first Presidential pardon in August 2017 was for Joe Arpaio, convicted not of the many civil rights abuses and racial profiling he committed over decades as Maricopa County Sheriff but ultimately for contempt of court. By pardoning Arpaio Trump was signaling to a white supremacist base that laws don’t apply to them. Senator John McCain noted that Trump’s pardon “undermines his claim for the respect of rule of law “

Treason and sedition

Trump, who was photographed fondling an American flag at a CPAC Convention, and whose faux Christianity seems equally dubious, may play an uber-patriotic Commander-in-Chief on TV, but the evidence suggests he has stronger attachments to cronies who actually undermine national security.

In April 2018 Trump pardoned Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted for “outing” CIA agent Valerie Plame for political purposes, and whose sentence was commuted by George W. Bush. Most recently, Trump pardoned Libby for convictions on obstruction of justice and perjury. Likewise, Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, who was a Trump operative coordinating 2016 Russian election interference and was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.

Trump may scream “law and order” at the sight of unruly people protesting police murders, but Trump’s actual support for sedition by far-right white people casts the whole “law and order” shtik into question.

In 2012 Dwight Hammond and his son Steven were convicted of arson on federal property. Their sentences were stiffened in 2015, which led to the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by far-right extremists, including milias and sovereign citizen groups. Trump pardoned the Hammonds in July 2018.

Election fraud and interference

Trump claims that GOP voter suppression and the rejection of absentee ballots is done to protect the sanctity of the voting booth. But it’s clear he has no respect for election integrity.

In May 2108, Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a Fox News crony, who was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to a Republican Senate campaign. In May 2019 Trump pardoned Pat Nolan, another Republican, who was convicted of soliciting illegal campaign contributions. And in February 2020 Trump pardoned Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy, attempted extortion, perjury — all related to his offer to literally sell the gubernatorial Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Looting and lying

And despite Trump’s staged tour of the site of arson and looting in Kenosha, he doesn’t oppose corporate looting — or individual acts of looting committed by his cronies.

In December 2017 Trump commuted the sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, who ran America’s largest kosher meat-processing plant in Iowa. Rubashkin had been charged with immigration violations, sexual harrassment, and child exploitation, but it was the 86 counts of bank fraud that did him in. Son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Trump for Rubashkin’s commutation. Another of Trump’s cronies, Conrad Black, former media mogul and author of a glowing biography of Donald Trump, was pardoned (only after the book appeared, of course) in May 2019 for mail fraud and obstruction of justice related to embezzling funds from the newspapers he owned. Edward DeBartolo, Jr., was pardoned in February 202 after being convicted of extortion and a quid-pro-quo involving a casino license. Michael Milken, whose name is virtually synonymous with financial corruption, was pardoned the same day for securities, mail, and tax fraud. To these names add Paul Pogue (tax fraud), disgraced cop Bernard Kerik (tax fraud), Ted Suhl (bribery), and Judith Negron (health care fraud and money laundering).

Two Americas

There are two Americas. One is the idealized America taught in Social Studies and naturalization classes. In this version, government operates like a well-oiled machine, humming along nicely thanks to fail-safe checks and balances. In this America everyone is equal under the law. This fictional America has never really existed. But there’s no reason this “more perfect union” should and could not exist.

But in the twisted kleptocratic oligarchy that does exist, big cats prey upon smaller animals. The only real law is the Law of the Jungle. Power and privilege, and maximizing that power and privilege, strangle democracy. Checks and balances only get in the way. Laws are insults and inconveniences to white men in power. And their power is only sustained by impunity for those who wield power in their name.

We can thank Donald Trump for making it undeniably clear what type of America we really live in — a nation where the President has completely corrupted the legislature, the judiciary, and his own executive office. Where personal loyalty subverts Constitutional accountability. Where presidential crimes go unpunished and where the President’s cronies and bag men literally receive “Get out of Jail” cards. A nation on the brink of fascism, if it hasn’t already arrived.

The 2020 election boils down to a simple choice between the aspirational America most of us want — an imperfect, loud and messy democracy with accountability for public servants — or a police state in bed with a kleptocracy.

This is the simplest and most stark choice any American voter will ever have to make.

These are interesting times. Suddenly many White people are looking at racism and capitalism with much more critical eyes. In a perverse sort of way, COVID-19 has opened avenues for change and given White people an unexpected opportunity to reflect on how our society fails all but a handful of us.

With the economy going down like the Titanic, suddenly many White Americans have noticed who’s being escorted into the First Class lifeboats, and it’s been an eye-opener to see how the whole system is rigged. Overnight, multiple crises have generated a little more understanding and sympathy for people who have been in coach or steerage their whole lives. Sitting at home during an enforced “time-out” White Liberals have had a chance to do some much-needed and long-postponed introspection. Everyone is learning more about the depths of depravity and dysfunction of a system built around White Supremacy.

But there is a certain tendency of White Liberals to start with introspection and stop there. Robert Kuttner, writing in the American Prospect (“Beyond White Navel-Gazing”) gives an example of dutiful but hollow Yom Kippur apologies a few of us offer, where the resolve to change and repair is absent from the apology.

Unless an apology is specific and accompanied by a specific plan to repair the injustice, injury, or insult, most Talmudic scholars don’t regard it as serious. The requirements for Jewish Tshuvah are very similar in the Muslim world. Depending on the offense, repentance often includes restitution or reparations.

Many of the anguished White tears we’ve been seeing lately are empty gestures unless accompanied by work for racial justice. Book groups and discussion groups are important, don’t get me wrong. Most of us have an incredible lack of understanding of structural racism, much of our own history, many of our own laws, and we know surprisingly little about the lives and cultures of a third of our American friends and neighbors. Discussion groups help provide understanding and strengthen resolve to join the fight.

But, above all, White people mostly need to just choose sides. We either choose justice and equality — or we continue, comfortably and complacently, failing to change a system that works better for some of us than others. This country really is going down like the Titanic. And, in a time of crisis, action ought to supersede navel-gazing.

I think of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who described marching in Selma as “praying with his feet.” Though I completely lack any religious impulse, I admire the Jewish Prophetic tradition of challenging unjust kings and laws. Heschel literally wrote a book about it, and he was aware of the connections between the Jewish tradition and the African-American prophetic tradition. But at the end of the day it wasn’t history or scripture or even common cause that motivated Heschel. He was just a White guy who understood that what went on inside his own heart and head was much less important than fixing a broken world.

I woke up strangely optimistic this morning. At times it seems like we are floating in a vast sea, no winds to return us home or to take us to another port. Just stuck, waiting either for rescue or for a change of weather.

This week almost felt like a change of weather.

Yes, our Führer-wannabe is still in the White House, but as a sign of his decreasing power and increasing fear of his own subjects, he turned his executive complex into something resembling the Green Zone, surrounding himself with generals, lackeys, and his own Republican Guard. Orange Saddam even retreated to his bunker (aren’t mixed metaphors great?).

Here in Dartmouth, an overwhelmingly white town, a high school student organized a parade against racism and local businesses donated water to marchers. It was only last year that the Black Lives Matter movement was considered too extreme for most of White America. But now, here the locals were, marching and shouting “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” with gusto.

Now, if only they would get rid of the racist Dartmouth school mascot.

Sometimes White America hops on movements in the same spirit as attending a fiesta: many hashtags are consumed and a good time is had by all. Then everybody goes home — to read about it with their support system or their reading group, with the emphasis on personal growth (there’s got to be something in it for me).

Sometimes a hashtag movement gains a bit of traction and actually results in something. Let us hope that the fight against structural racism is more than a passing fad and that proposals for police, criminal justice, and economic reform are daring, sweeping, and radical — in the sense of dealing with the root causes of these problems.

But so far I am seeing White Americans pretty much buying up anti-racism books, scheduling Zoom coffee klatches, and having deep and abstract conversations with one another. There seems to be a lot of discussion about reforming police training — but a lot of push-back against progressive efforts to reduce funding for police departments; wrest control from police unions of discipline, hiring and policy; and using taxpayer money for social services for distressed, police-occupied communities — while “defunding” the police at local, state, and federal levels.

Kaffee klatches for discusting racism are certainly no substitute for working for meaningful reform, but (as one person texted me): “To be charitable, they need to work their feelings out and that is important in its own way.” Ouch.

And as anemic as White America’s response has been, it is still cause for cautious optimism.

But we — fellow white people — we ought to be able to do a hell of a lot better than this.

Like everyone I have been watching events of the last few months with horror. I don’t mean the Corona virus, which most civilized nations, even the hardest-hit, have managed to confront with strength, medical science, and social responsibility — while the United States instead has chosen denial, lies, and finger-pointing.

No, as bad as it is — and it’s not over by a long shot — the world will survive this as it did the 1918 Spanish flu.

It’s our “democracy” — and the word is in quotes because I’m not convinced we actually have one — it’s our democracy’s demise that’s making me lose sleep.

No need to recite the long list of crimes and usurpations from the fascist playbook that the current President has committed in only the last few months. No need to point out the erratic, disturbing behavior on display daily. Encouraging acts violence, threats to the press, the Justice Department run by a gang of cronies defending criminals. All part of a four year nightmare from which we have not yet awakened.

Even the steady approval the President receives from his “base” of White Christian nationalists, anti-government militias, overt white supremacists and treasonous grifters — this, in one form or another, has been with us since the founding of this slave republic. Historians can fill you in on past centuries, but if you don’t know what’s transpired in your own lifetime, you haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve been relatively silent these last months. Truth is, I’ve said just about everything I’ve had to say about Capitalism, American imperialism, foreign policy, militarism, white supremacy, inequality, immigration, press freedom, democracy, criminal justice, and police accountability.

If, after the second collapse of the American economy in little more than a decade — and if, after seeing precisely on what kind of foundation American Capitalism is based, the kind of people running the show, the total disregard they have for the lives of citizens and how easily they will abuse the power of the state for their own advantage — if after all this inescapable reality people cannot recognize America’s true face, then what’s the point of hurling more words into the void?

Hardly surprising, my conservative friends and relatives don’t understand why I have a problem with things that have been working so well for them — for us, for white America — these last 400 years. But it is American Liberals that worry me the most.

Here we are, on the cusp of a national election, and Democrats — correctly identified as the party of upper middle class elites — don’t know what side they’re on. Of the several trillion dollars of COVID-19 bailout money allocated, little is actually finding its way into human hands. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the amount “crumbs” when refusing to support one rescue bill.

Here we are, faced with the loss of 50 million jobs and the Democratic nominee is still clinging to Obamacare — employer-based healthcare — and his party has never debated generational poverty.

Here we are, faced with a resurgence of lynchings and police abuse, viral infection of prisoners in tightly-packed prisons — and Democrats have said almost nothing about mass incarceration and police accountability.

Here we are, faced with the obvious connections between global pandemics and global environmental crises, and the need to address them urgently — and the DNC still thinks environmental policy and the Green New Deal are too controversial to discuss in public.

My Liberal friends expect me to support a gaffe machine who was just pulled out of storage and still smells of mothballs — this after watching younger, better, smarter candidates of color being systematically flicked off the primary chess board.

But of course I’ll vote for him. What’s the alternative? A neurosyphilitic white supremacist? Liberals are not wrong to describe the 45th president as a toxic menace. But he’s only a menace because he has so successfully exploited every loophole in a Constitutional government designed by slaveholders to thwart a functional democracy.

My Liberal friends tell me their man is just the guy America needs to return things to “normal.”

And this is precisely the problem. The “new normal” in America is really just the unavoidably, undeniable cartoon version of the “old normal” Democrats would have us return to. And it does nothing to address underlying problems of economic inequality, racism, militarism, and systemic exploitation and injustice that have made a lot of Democrats financially very comfortable.

Among Democrats there is an obsessive preoccupation with quashing “divisiveness,” a disturbing avoidance of committing to specific policy positions, and an even more disturbing kinship with Republicans — the obsession with “leadership.” Maybe it’s because in a Capitalist society every chief executive is a mini-Stalin, and it’s just another convention we never question. One friend wrote that a detailed party program was wrong, that we should elect Biden and then let him write it: “once elected, then comes the hard work of determining the specifics.”

What my friend describes is a very American, very corporate, fundamentally undemocratic, and frankly patronizing, process of leaving heavy thinking to a leader who doesn’t have to follow party principles. In fact, in this world parties don’t have any principles. By the time political decisions are made lobbyists are already running the show — because they were the ones whispering into the candidate’s ear from the beginning.

A recent example of the Liberal preoccupation with “leadership” is a Washington Post article by Karen Tumulty attempting to connect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 remarks with Robert Kennedy’s after Martin Luther King’s assassination: “Though Kennedy was a white man of enormous privilege, he spoke with the moral authority of one who had lost his own brother to a murderer’s bullet […] Barely two months later, Kennedy himself would be slain. But the words he said still live. They speak not only to what this country can still become, but its need for a leader who can point the way in that direction.”

But nostalgia, name-dropping, and ham-handed metaphors don’t cut it for a lot of Americans. If you hadn’t noticed this week, African Americans are fed up with being killed and fed up with meaningless verbiage.

From Bakari Sellers to Derecka Purnell to Van Jones to Trevor Noah Liberals have had a recent opportunity to hear (again) from black intellectuals and notables in media outlets they are familiar with. And these men and women are not saying anything past generations haven’t told white Liberals. The question is: why haven’t we been listening?

Van Jones took aim at Liberal hypocrisy: “It’s not the racist white person who is in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about. It’s the white, liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park who would tell you right now, ‘Oh I don’t see race, race is no big deal to me, I see all people the same, I give to charities,’ but the minute she sees a black man who she does not respect, or who she has a slight thought against, she weaponized race like she had been trained by the Aryan Nation.”

I guess some of us are just a special sort of stupid. If Trump was promising “shooting” for “looting,” New York City major Bill DeBlasio was shooting himself in the foot. After NYPD police officers actually ran over demonstrators with patrol cars, the mayor defended their actions, attributing unrest in the city to “out-of-towners” — apparently the Northern version of “outside agitators.”

Liberals just don’t know (without running a focus group or consulting pollsters) whose side they’re on.

An article in the Root ridiculed the White need to “contextualize the anger, frustration and desperation that forced protesters to recreate the lawlessness and chaos that black people experience on a daily basis.” “Alright,” it began. “August 1619…”

It is not a single person, a particular president, or a specific “leader” who is the cancer destroying the United States. It is not bad leadership but Capitalism and White Supremacy that are killing people, impoverishing families, oppressing people.

If Liberals think that replacing one old white hair-plugged, dental-veneered geezer with another is the only remedy for what ails us, I have some hydroquinone I’d like to sell you.

The issue is not leadership, but the system that the leader leads.

Each day we are reminded how corrupt, incompetent, mentally ill, and cognitively impaired Donald Trump is. His administration is a nightmare from which we awake only to discover that the new day’s reality has become even more frightening than the day before.

With over 1.2 million COVID-19 cases and over 73,000 deaths [as of today], Trump is more concerned with “reopening” the country than saving lives, providing testing and masks, or issuing a national shutdown order. Trump’s leadership has been as lacking as with every other GOP response to a natural disaster.

Trump has hawked snake oil cures, peddled multiple conspiracy theories involving China and the World Health Organization, his scientists have been muzzled, he has sidelined and censored the CDC, and his son-in-law is in charge of phantom ventilator contracts. Just as with deals involving the mafia, when doing business with the White House Don it seems it pays to “know a guy.”

In the midst of all this chaos, ineptitude and deep division over how (or whether) to socially distance, people have no recourse but to fend for themselves, make their own masks, help their neighbors, try to nurture social connections, and somehow keep body and soul together. Trump’s followers, however, are prepping for the apocalypse, stockpiling weapons and ammunition, placing their neighbors in the crosshairs, and putting them in spitting (and coughing) distance — all because it’s their “right” as God-fearing White Americans.

In Michigan, armed militia members opposing the governor’s stay-at-home orders entered the state capitol, forcing legislators to don kevlar vests. In contrast, the full weight of the State has come down on any Black person found ignoring masks or social distancing orders. That is, when Black folks aren’t being harrassed for actually wearing a face mask. In Texas, a white woman refused to obey an order to close her salon and became a hero in a state that objects to asylum seekers crossing the border because “we are a nation of laws.” But laws only for some.

The Coronavirus has also illuminated America’s festering racial, class, and economic inequalities. For Republicans the pandemic has been a bonanza for extracting greater tax and loan advantages for Big Business, enacting bans on travel and abortion while the public is distracted, and for returning the country to the 1950’s. For Democrats, the economic and health crisis on our doorstep hasn’t fully registered. Democrats managed to choose a 78 year-old Centrist with a massive #MeToo problem who just wants to return the world to 2012 and to tweak Obama’s flawed health plan as little as possible. In the meantime, the world has completely changed. Even with Biden’s candidacy in shambles, they’re still sticking with their man and his vision for the past.

Although people of color and America’s working poor have borne the brunt of the pandemic, there is little indication that help is on the way. Although $3 trillion has been disbursed to save American jobs, most of the money is predictably not finding its way into human hands.

Black Americans account for a staggering number of Coronavirus deaths. In Louisiana, the percentage of African American mortality among all COVID-19 deaths is 70%. The same percentage describes the situation in Chicago. Black Americans have long had high rates of asthma (lack of environmental protections), diabetes and heart problems (lack of healthcare and insurance) — and these are all “underlying conditions” which reduce COVID-19 survivability. It’s no exaggeration to say that America is literally killing Black people.

Despite the fact that the the Navajo Nation has the third highest infection rate in the country, it has not received emergency funds for testing. Similarly, the Seattle Indian Health Board, a Native American health center, “asked for tests, and instead they sent us a box of body bags,” according to the center’s CEO. White America seems to be trying to tell Native Americans something.

LatinX workers in the nation’s meat processing plants have been forced to work-while-sick at their jobs despite massive infection levels. Likewise, people in the jails and prisons of this nation with the greatest incarceration rate in the world — overwhelmingly poor and people of color — are at risk of contracting the virus in crowded, unsanitary conditions, deprived of soap, face masks and testing.

Many Americans are now literally starving, people are unable to pay for rent or food, and everyone wants an expansion of antibody testing and vaccine development. But corporate immunity is about the only immunity the Trump administration and its collaborators in the Senate really care about. Democrats just signed off on the greatest corporate giveaway in American history, and only one House representative protested the “crumbs for our families.”

I am confident that America will survive a global pandemic — just as it did 102 years ago. Whether we end up with a quarter of a million or several million deaths is largely up to the lunatics running the asylum. Some of us will be statistics; others will be survivors. Life will go on.

But it’s the survival of anything resembling a democracy that’s got me worried. Unless a substantial number of Americans have had enough, the world of 2025 will be run by the same Capitalists who have profited the most from a series of corporate bailouts beginning in the Seventies. For all the lofty Liberal expressions of “rethinking America” and “reconsidering” who is actually an essential worker, don’t expect to see any change unless we — collectively — decide that an essential worker ought to be paid at least as much as a supply chain consultant. But please, somebody, tell me how that happens in a Capitalist economy.

We don’t have a democracy now, and we won’t have one in 2025 unless everyone is equal under the law. Without a serious effort to erase long-standing economic and racial injustices and completely restructure criminal justice and policing in America, cops will still be harassing and even lynching Black men in America in 2025, and the jails will still be full of poor people who can’t make bail. Without health care as a right, some of us will live decades longer than others. Without reparations or a plan to lift up generationally disadvantaged communities, many Black and Native and LatinX Americans will still live in a Third World America while White America continues to live in its dreamy version of Pleasantville.

A new society is possible. But I fear White America, comfortable in its privilege, really has no incentive to tinker with what’s been working for them so well all these years.

In late March Donald Trump told the press corps, “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down […] This is not a country that was built for this.” Since then Trump seems to have backpedaled on his notion to open the nation for business on Easter Sunday — presumably to the peals of church bells announcing the resurrection of the nation and his own polling numbers. But in a move calculated to sideline the nation’s infectious disease experts — including some of his own advisors — Trump is back at it again.

You never thought the pit bull was going to let go of your pants leg, did you?

Trump recently announced the formation of an “Opening Our Country Council.” He indicated that neither his son-in-law and daughter nor the Vice President would be involved, and it is still unclear who will actually be on the council, or why it is really necessary. Regardless, Trump claims that he — not state governors — has “total authority” to decide when workers will be forced to return to work — without testing, without masks, and without sufficient ICU beds or ventilators to let them survive the COVID-19 infections they will receive by returning too soon to the germ pool.

Trump may not have a plan for dealing with the Corona virus, but he claims total authority to carry out that plan.

Naturally, the nation’s governors are pushing back. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that before anyone talks about “opening” the nation for business the first order of business will be testing. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont announced that social distancing would remain in effect until at least May 20th, and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy said that economic recovery depends entirely on public health safety.

As for Trump’s “total authority,” Cuomo told CNN, “The president does not have total authority. We have a constitution, we don’t have a king, we have an elected president.” University of Texas Constitutional Law professor Stephen Vladeck agreed, slamming Trump’s authoritarian move: “Nope. That would be the literal definition of a totalitarian government–which our traditions, our Constitution, and our values all rightly and decisively reject.”

With the nation in the grip of both a deadly pandemic and an incompetent fascist wannabe, the nation’s governors have been left to their own devices.

California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his nation-state of California had no choice but to fend for itself given Trump’s inaction and incompetence. California, together with Oregon and Washington, has formed a regional alliance to plot its own course for economic recovery. The same strategy has been adopted by an alliance of Northeast governors from New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

When Hong Kong temporarily suspended its lockdown after a few weeks, it experienced a spike in new infections and was forced to lock down citizens again. The same sort of spike occurred in Singapore after it prematurely relaxed social distancing. So we know that keeping people sheltered in place must go on much longer, and we know that only testing will tell us how much of the population has been exposed and how much has recovered.

Fifty million Americans receive Social Security payments and many workers are either salaried or still manage to draw an income. These lucky enough to own their homes and have health insurance have a sense they will probably survive the pandemic. For the most part, this segment of America has enjoyed a healthy life of adequate and nutritious food, clean water and a clean environment, and does not have disproportionately high rates of diabetes, hypertensions or asthma. This privileged segment of America does not live in crowded apartments in polluted neighborhoods for which they must pay rent, is not forced to commute during a pandemic on crowded subways or buses, and can afford to have someone else deliver food and supplies to their homes.

But for the rest of America, life is incredibly precarious — and has always been. African Americans, Latinos, Indigenous people, the working class, the working poor, and the disabled are at elevated risk and are dying in shameful numbers. There is an old saying something like, “When white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia.” By sending America’s most vulnerable back to work without adequate protections, we are sending some to their deaths — all for the sake of corporate greed. And because their lives do not hold particularly great value by policy makers.

As we now contemplate the frightening lack of hospital beds and ventilators — and who must die for lack of one — the rules for triage are revealed as decidedly racist. On April 7th Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders released a memo entitled “Crisis Standards of Care Planning Guidance for the COVID-19 Pandemic” which described state guidelines for making decisions about who receives care and who doesn’t during the global pandemic. The memo describes the recommendations of a panel of medical professionals in which those with the lowest scores have the highest priority for treatment. “But among the factors giving patients a higher score, and therefore, a lower priority for medical intervention are health conditions common to black, Latino and Asian people including diabetes, hypertension and obesity.”

Oh, well, they’re just going to die anyway.

Similarly, Alabama’s 2010 triage handbook for ventilator use puts a low premium on the lives of disabled people: “persons with severe mental retardation, advanced dementia or severe traumatic brain injury may be poor candidates for ventilator support.”

We are not so very far away from the world of 1935, when a magazine called “New People” published by the new German “Racial Politics Office” pointed out to subscribers:

“60,000 Reich Marks is the cost to society of caring for those with congenital diseases. Citizens, this is your money.”

Democracy did not die today with the Senate rubber-stamping the President’s “innocent.”

For a democracy to die, it must have first lived. There are many precedents for Trump’s sham impeachment trial which point an accusing finger at a nation that has never believed in the florid promises of democracy found in its own Declaration and Constitution.

Slavery, genocide, and subversion of democratic elections in other countries have been a steady feature of American “democracy.” Creating a society of equals with equal opportunity and equal representation has never been its object, as Jim Crow, voter suppression, mass-incarceration, censorship, and ever-new variations of McCarthyism show.

As central to our sick society as these are, I don’t want to talk about history, colonialism, capitalism, or white supremacy today. We know these are the root causes of so many of our ills. I would rather talk about the blatant impunity and injustice which occur daily in our courts and which have culminated with the rigged Senate trial of Donald John Trump on February 5th, 2020. And though there are four centuries of our history to consider, let me simply point to events that have occured in my own lifetime.

In 1955, Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was lynched and his body discovered three days later in the Tallahatchie River. The identities of his killers and the ringleaders of his lynching were never in doubt. Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam were arrested. But an all-white jury found them not guilty.

In 1963 Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1964 an all-white jury somehow could not reach a verdict. It took thirty years of fighting by Evers’ family, and finally his exhumation for additional evidence, to reopen the case against De La Beckwith.

In 1964 Ku Klux Klan “Kleagle” Edgar Ray Killen participated in the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. When Killen was finally arrested, an all-white jury refused to convict a “preacher.” Twenty years later Killen was again charged with murder, but a mostly-white jury again refused to hold him directly accountable for the murders, instead convicting him on lesser conspiracy charges.

The War in Vietnam slaughtered up to two million Vietnamese and left behind birth defects from Agent Orange and ruined bodies from land mines long after the U.S. beat a hasty exit from Saigon. But it was the My Lai massacre in 1968 that indicted the American justice system that failed to prosecute it and the government officials who covered it up. Hundreds of civilians — the US said 347, the Vietnamese government counted 504 — were raped, bayoneted, and shot execution-style, including children, and left in ditches full of blood. Only one platoon member was ever convicted. William Calley was sentenced to just three years of prison, but Richard Nixon ordered this commuted to house arrest. The matter was quietly closed. We have a long history of impunity for war crimes going back to the nation’s founding.

Tens of thousands of black people were lynched from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and one would have thought this gruesome chapter of our history was over. But it doesn’t take much to revert to barbarism in this country. A case in point was the lynchings of African Americans immediately following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2019 The Nation and ProPublica reported on a significant number of unsolved homicides of black people in Algiers Point and elsewhere, and of the emergence of white supremacist militias that had organized the killings. After the articles were published, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said he’d “look into” it.

Most of us will not forget the name Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who in 2012 was shot after punching George Zimmerman, who had been harrassing and following him. Zimmerman’s lawyers had planned to defend their client on the basis of so-called “stand your ground” laws, and the case was under intense public scrutiny. Alan Dershowitz — that Dershowitz — attacked Florida’s State Attorney Angela Corey for even daring to prosecute Zimmerman. In the end a Florida jury let Zimmerman walk.

In 2013, when rich white boy Ethan Couch crammed seven of his friends into his hot red pickup truck and then totaled it, killing four of them, Couch’s defense lawyer claimed he was a victim of “affluenza” — a word the lawyer said described the coddled teen’s irresponsibility resulting from his family wealth. Even though Couch had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and had killed four people, the defense strategy worked. Couch was released on probation — until he fled to Mexico with his mommy.

And who can forget former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown in 2014 and was never prosecuted? This was a case that launched the Black Lives Movement — a fight against precisely the sort of impunity I’ve been enumerating.

Or Stanford swimmer Brock Allen Turner, who in 2015 was discovered by two graduate students in the process of raping a woman behind a fraternity house dumpster. Turner’s lawyer wrote that “he is fundamentally a good young man” and Turner’s father argued it was unfair that he should go to prison for “20 minutes of action” by his rapist child. The Golden Boy was given six months in jail by Judge Aaron Persky.

Or the refusal to prosecute Baltimore police officers for the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who died an excruciating death in the back of a police van. Not even Obama’s Justice Department found sufficient grounds to charge any of the officers with civil rights violations. In fact, a 2016 national study which examined civil rights violations of 21,000 policemen found that only 3% were ever convicted of crimes against the public.

In 2018 Georgia white supremacist William Christopher Gibbs showed up at an emergency room afraid he had exposed himself to ricin, and he and his car tested positive for the deadly agent. But prosecutors refused to charge Gibbs with domestic terrorism, cititing “technical” reasons they couldn’t charge a white terrorist. To this day, the U.S. government is largely unwilling to admit any danger to society of white supremacists.

Each year roughly one thousand people are shot by police, most of them people of color and many of them unarmed. But 98% of the officers are never charged for murder and police frequently claim “reasonable” fear for their safety as a justification for killing an unarmed civilian. I find it ironic that police can claim “I feared for my life” — and White America believes them — while any refugee seeking asylum because “I feared for my life” is regarded as a liar.

When Brett Kavanaugh appeared before a Senate confirmation committee in 2018, witnesses cited his sexual predation as a teenager as a reason he was unfit for the Supreme Court. Yet the Senate — as it was when Anita Hill had made similar charges about Clarence Thomas — was not disturbed by any of the allegations. Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, “Boys will be Supreme Court Justices,” and she was right. Rebecca Solnit wrote that the old white men of America simply don’t want to know, and she was also right.

American Justice may be blind — but it is wilfully so. Our entire legal system, from top to bottom, is nothing more than concierge service for rich and powerful, mainly white, men.

And how is a system of impunity possible without pardons?

In 2019 Donald Trump pardoned SEAL commander “Eddie” Gallagher and promoted him. Members of Gallagher’s platoon, SEAL Team 7, claimed he had killed innocent civilians and murdered an unconscious prisoner, then posed for pictures with the corpse. One platoon member who testified said of Gallagher, “The guy is freaking evil.” According to testimony, when the SEALs captured an injured ISIS fighter Gallagher began stabbing him in the neck. Another platoon member turned off his helmet cam right before the fighter died. Besides Gallagher, Trump also pardoned convicted civil rights abuser Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted of federal campaign violations.

We say we are a “nation of laws” — for some — but in an oligarchy, a kleptocracy, or a kakistocracy the usual rules of law don’t apply to men with high-level connections. Whatever we call this system, let’s not call it a “democracy.”

The 2008 financial crisis was another example of the American justice system revealing itself as an agent of impunity for financial criminality. In 2014 — six years after the financial crash — ProPublica and the New York Times reported that the only Wall Street executive to ever be prosecuted as a result of the crisis was Kareem Serageldin. Meanwhile, there are people still serving life sentences for marijuania possession in prisons all over the United States. To add insult to injury, rather than hold Wall Street accountable for its losses, a bipartisan group of rich and powerful men decided to make citizens cough up the almost two trillion dollars necessary to bail them out.

Last week a friend sent me a piece by Andy Borowitz from the New Yorker — “El Chapo outraged that his trial included witnesses.” It was funny at the time. Or would have been if it hadn’t so painfully highlighted the hollowness of the culture of impunity we mistakenly call “democracy.”

So let us not weep. Democracy did not die today. We never had it in the first place.