Chris Hedges's Blog, page 174

The White Right’s Race Denial Meets Trump the Redeemer

Liberals have been understandably aghast at Donald Trump’s recurrent claim that he doesn’t “have a racist bone in [his] body.” Who is the white-nationalist president trying to kid? His politics and presidency have consistently been monuments to white racial identity, animated by a promise to white voters that black and brown people will be put “back in their place(s).”

A fierce “us and them” politics of unashamed whiteness, replete with the embrace of policies that discriminate against people of color, has been the primary glue holding together the Trump coalition from day one. The accurate translation of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is not so much “Make America White Again” as “Make Whites Supreme Again.”

Trump is just the tip and leading beneficiary of the big white iceberg of Amerikaner racism- denial. Ask a typical white Trump supporter if they or their clearly racist president is in any way racist and you will hear passionate denials on both counts combined with outrage that anyone would think to pose the questions in the first place.

This is the racism disavowal that matters most. Without it, the transparently racist Trump could never have ascended to the White House and have a real shot at a second term.

Whence this mass white disowning of white racism? Part of it has to do with self-image. Beyond white-supremacist circles, few white Americans want to think of themselves or their loved ones, friend, and neighbors as racists in a mass culture in which racism has been given a bad name since at least the middle 1960s.

A second factor is about self-interest. Many if not most of Trump’s very disproportionately white backers know they risk alienating current and potential employers, customers, investors, listeners, viewers, voters and/or subscribers by openly embracing racist sentiments.

A third part of the equation is that many Republicans and Trumpers think they and their president are not saying or writing/tweeting/Facebooking racist things unless their statements include explicit and overt references to race and racial identity. However, much contemporary racism is cloaked in nominally race-neutral language, using technically non-racial phrases like “states’ rights,” “local control,” “law and order,” “personal responsibility,” “inner city,” “urban crime,” “welfare dependents,” “charge on taxpayers,” “super-predators,” “felons,” “illegal immigrants,” “undocumented people” and the like to confer deeply racialized meanings.

A fourth relevant factor is the widespread sense that racism is most fundamentally about interpersonal conduct and personal likes. This notion is false. Racism deeply and properly understood is about how social structures and institutions function to create outcomes that favor people of one race over and against people of other races. It’s about how housing and financial markets, the criminal justice and school funding systems, and media and electoral structures operate to perpetuate racial disparity and oppression. So what if Trump is friendly with Kanye West and Tiger Woods (and Kim Jong Un and Mohammed bin Salman) or if Joe the Plumber plays pick-up basketball with black guys? So what if your white son quarterback has a favorite wide receiver who is black on the local high school football team? So what, by the way, if you and your kids admire certain black athletes, actors, singers and/or rappers? So what even if you voted for Obama, when you back the racist War on Drugs and the mass-incarcerationist War on Drugs? Many antebellum and Jim Crow-era Southern white slaveowners and plantation owners and managers were outwardly kind to their favorite chattel and hardly meant their affection for some blacks to suggest the South’s regime of racial terrorism and exploitation should be overthrown.

By defining racism merely as a matter of how they (think they) treat nonwhite people in their daily lives (and how they embrace certain black public personalities), millions of whites get to give themselves an undeserved racial pass while backing politicians, policies and practices that consign millions of black and brown people to the bottom of the nation’s stark inequality structures.

Fourth, there’s the strange white trauma of the Obama years. In November of 2017, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer hit on something important when he credited Trump with sensing accurately that “Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that [Trump] could address by adopting a false narrative that placed the nation’s first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. [Trump] intuited,” Serwer wrote, “that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W.E.B. DuBois described as the ‘psychological wage’ of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place and could not take place.” (emphasis added)

What was the affront? Serwer did not say, but he suggested the nub of the matter by invoking the great black Marxist DuBois. For DuBois, writing in the 1930s, one way the nation’s white ruling class kept the majority white working-class population at least passively allegiant to the underlying system of class rule (capitalism) was through a form of mental and emotional divide-and-rule: even the lowliest white person was guaranteed a measure of status by being deemed superior to non-whites. By holding the nation’s (and indeed the world’s) top office for two full terms, Serwer intuited, the silver-tongued Harvard Law graduate Obama had rubbed millions of white Americans (of all classes) in the face with the fact that a person from the bottom of the nation’s racial hierarchy had risen above them. This caused shame-and anger-inducing cognitive dissonance for millions of white voters, helping make them receptive to a 21st century white Redeemer like Donald Trump.

Sewer might have gone further. A fifth major factor behind white Trump voters’ racism-denial is the combination of their false belief that blacks have pulled even or even ahead of whites economically with their equally incorrect notion that whites are now major victims of racial discrimination (“reverse racism”) in the United States. The most recent comprehensive racial attitudes survey taken prior to the 2016 election by the Pew Research Center showed that less than half (47%) of white Americans understood the elementary fact that blacks were worse off financially (far worse off in that and other ways, in fact) than whites in the U.S.

These bogus white ideas, hardly new to the Obama and Trump years, have been developing across the long post-civil rights era. They are fed among other things by the dominant media-politics culture’s bourgeois-identititarian obsession with the color of faces in high places and the parade of highly successful and affluent black sports and entertainment personalities along with black political stars, including above all the nation’s 44th president, Barack Obama.

As a Chicago-based civil rights researcher and policy advocate in the early 2000s, I was deeply concerned that Obama’s ascendency would have an ironically deadly impact on the struggle for black equality. I worried that an Obama presidency would spark precisely the DuBoisian white backlash (“white-lash”) that Serwer later sensed and that the “deeply conservative” Obama’s own victim-blaming neoliberal class-ism would merge with his fear of further triggering whites already traumatized by the simple elemental fact of his race to make him excessively unwilling to confront the nation’s racial disparities.

I feared that Obama’s captivity to Wall Street and Big Business in general would over-identify the cause of racial advancement with arrogant bicoastal and “heartland”-insulting neoliberal globalism and thereby feed the fake-populist flames of white reaction. I fretted that Obama’s race and technically Muslim nomenclature would help the American Empire rebrand and re-legitimize its murderous global power in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous (and evangelical-racist) invasion of Iraq. I worried that Obama’s dismally neoliberal and milquetoast corporatism would leave many black voters in key cities in key battleground states (Milwaukee in Wisconsin, Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina, Cleveland and Cincinnati in Ohio, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, Detroit and Flint in Michigan ) wondering why they should bother to vote for the Democrats, thereby opening the door for a reactionary white fake-populist to seize the White House in 2012 or 2016.

I worried, last but not least, that an Obama presidency would be the last nail in the coffin of most of “white America’s” ability and willingness to discern and acknowledge that American racism, deeply understood, still posed steep barriers to black advancement and racial equity in the U.S.  As far as many millions of white voters were already mistakenly concerned, I knew, whites were now the main victims of American racial discrimination (liberal and left, professional class-led “reverse racism”). It was an absurd belief that was only going to get more pervasive and intense with a black family in the White House. How was one supposed to tell millions of racism-denying whites that racism was still a grave American problem afflicting black and brown people when the nation’s nominally top position was held by a technically black individual in a nation that childishly measures racial equality through the narrow bourgeois lens of “diversity” at the upper reaches of its unmentionably steep social and political pyramids?

All my concerns were born out, including the last one. he Obama presidency didn’t just undermine the psychological wage of whiteness. It also – with no small help from white nationalist right-wing politicos and media, to be sure – gave what many whites sincerely (if absurdly and ignorantly) considered maddeningly final proof positive that black folks were not only pulling equal but now unfairly moving ahead of whites. This absurd belief is a critical part of how millions of whites can claim not to be racist while actively opposing policies that might help black and brown people advance or even sustain their current positions and while supporting a president who wants to put people of color “back in their place.” After all, these white people have been led to preposterously think that the main thrust of racism is directed now against them and that it is therefore racist to suggest that they are racists.

It’s Orwellian, as in Black is White and 2+2=5.  But it is what it is, and it is no small part of how the United States has experienced two and three-quarter years of a sloppy but in-power palingenetic white nationalism that carries no small whiff of neofascism. And it’s only going to get worse.

 

 

A Specter of Gender-Based Violence Looms Over Namibia

Writer Martha Mukaiwa—using a narrative nonfiction, or literary journalism, approach—explores a heartbreaking problem in her home country, Namibia.

In Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, Magdalena Stoffels Bridge isn’t a tourist attraction.

Photographing it draws attention from watchers faceless behind the fence of a modest house nearby. Halting their conversation, tugging at memory and prompting heated discussion that recalls a young girl’s rape and murder in the riverbed in 2010 before the pedestrian bridge was built.

Magdalena Stoffels Bridge in Windhoek. (Martha Mukaiwa)

“I always felt a certain way when I crossed that bridge,” says Jozika Kangumine, a young woman who used to hurry over it on her way to school in 2017.

The bridge was built in 2015 to reduce rape, theft, drug use and other crimes that make the city’s overgrown riverbeds notorious, but Kangumine still feels uneasy. “The energy is just off. It feels like there’s an unhappy soul. Someone had to die for this (bridge) to finally be built. It shouldn’t cost someone’s life.”

The blood cost was settled by Magdalena Stoffels, a 17-year-old whose body was found in the bed of the Arebbusch River, sparking a public outcry that sent 3,000 Namibians into Windhoek’s streets. The protesters were decrying the country’s high rate of gender-based violence—90% of which is perpetrated by men against women—and rising violence against children.

Nine years later, the bridge is a site of heavy foot traffic. Schoolgoers, workers and dawdling teens traverse a tombstone erected to prevent future crimes in the deep riverbed, and, like Kangumine, many Namibians remain haunted.

There are only 2.6 million people in this nation on the Atlantic coast of southwest Africa, but gender-based violence is widespread nonetheless. After the gruesome murder of 9-year-old Avihe Cheryl Ujaha, whose mutilated body was discovered in the Windhoek township of Katutura last August, Namibian Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila announced that police received 107,403 reports of gender-based violence between 2014 and July 2018.

Chief Inspector Catherine Walaula of the Namibian Police Gender-Based Violence Protection Unit reported that 438 cases were logged from Jan. 1 to Feb. 28 this year.

A nascent #MeToo movement is organizing—and amplifying—protests against these crimes, but core causes for the violence remain in place. Although Namibia has a high rate of income overall compared with other African countries, it has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality. It is also plagued with high rates of poverty and unemployment, both recognized causes of gender-based violence. While the most common crimes are domestic violence and rape, gender-based violence in the country also includes “passion killings”—a local and responsibility-absolving term for intimate-partner crimes. As an example, 48 women were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends during the particularly grim year 2015.

The killings occur in a tinderbox of economics and toxic, outdated thinking, says Alna Dall, a steering member of the Namibia Coalition Against Gender-Based and Sexual Violence.

The country’s unemployment rate, which topped 33% in 2018, is the second highest in Africa (behind Congo). “Many men (are) unemployed,” Dall says. “Being unable to look after their families, they feel that they are no longer men. Perpetrating gender-based violence against a loved one is often an easy way of feeling empowered again. (Also,) men with traditional mindsets of gender are jealous of women who lift themselves through education. These men feel disempowered and act out in fits of envious rage.

“The causes of gender-based violence are very complex, but I do believe that poverty, homelessness, landlessness and modernity act as breeding grounds for this type of violence.”

Whatever the particular cause, the horror continues, splashed across headlines and appearing sporadically on protest posters. Stark, black-and-white placards held aloft by Namibian women, activists and human rights advocates who railed and marched, rallied and cried as they read the names of the dead outside the Katutura Police Station in Windhoek during a demonstration in 2018.

Total Shutdown: Intersectional Women's March Against GBV – NAMIBIA

Yesterday in Katutura, we gathered for the TOTAL SHUTDOWN: INTERSECTIONAL WOMEN'S MARCH AGAINST GBV. I ran around with my camera a bit then stitched a short video together using the beat from the live drumming as a soundtrack. MANY PROMISES WERE MADE, LET'S HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE. Watch the video below and read more about on this in my column tomorrow. #totalshutdown

Posted by Martha Mukaiwa on Thursday, August 2, 2018

This year, too, Namibians remember some recent victims.

Monalisa Xoagus killed by her boyfriend on International Women’s Day and the four women murdered by their significant others during February’s macabre month of love:

25-year-old Felisia Ndamonoghenda Petrus strangled.

39-year-old Patricia Hochobes stabbed to death with scissors.

22-year-old Kalumbu Ndapandula Magano murdered by a single gunshot to the chest.

22-year-old Helao Gideon Hamuteta stabbed to death.

During a 2018 march in Windhoek, protestors carried placards memorializing victims of gender-based violence. (Martha Mukaiwa)

Namibians have their pick of other ghosts as well.

Many remember 24-year-old Alina Kakehongo, executed in July 2018 by her ex-boyfriend, a police officer who delivered a single gunshot to her head before turning the gun on himself.

The day before he barged into her place of work, Kakehongo had initiated a charge of assault.

Police inspector Christiana Simaho, presiding over dockets piled high in a dim room, shakes her head. At the Gender-Based Violence Protection Unit at Katutura Intermediate Hospital in Windhoek, she regularly deals with reports similar to the one filed by Kakehongo.

Beyond the green hall outside Simaho’s office, seven victims of gender-based violence sit with their kin, averting their eyes as they wait to see an investigating officer or social worker—seven more cases to add to the 200 reported in the first 31 days of 2019.

The victims meet with a doctor, who usually makes his way to the unit’s neat medical consulting rooms after hours of tending to higher-priority hospital patients.

Some victims then seek protection orders, which are law enforcement mandates that threaten abusers with two years’ imprisonment or a fine of $562 (U.S. dollars) should they attempt to contact their victims.

As the victims wait for the orders, expectantly, Simaho admits that documents provide little more than false hope.

“A protection order is just a piece of paper,” she says. “You can apply for the protection order, the protection order can be granted, and while having the protection order, still you can be killed.”

After 25 years of witnessing gruesome crime scenes and protesting the bail of countless accused murderers, abusers and rapists, Simaho suggests the first step toward a solution to what many consider to be a national crisis. “We have to change the laws,” she says. “If somebody has been arrested for a very serious case like murder, like rape, I don’t think that person (should) be granted bail until the case has been finalized—but that case must at least be finalized within a year.”

Simaho believes Namibia needs stiffer sentencing and a quicker turnaround for gender-based violence cases such as rape.

In the first three months of 2019, 258 rape cases were reported across the country, with 119 of the victims under the age of 18. In 2018, the reported number of rape cases was 1,121, and 500 victims were under 18. The true number of rape cases is thought to be considerably higher than what is reported.

Currently, according to Simaho, cases involving rape and other gender-based violence may drag on for up to four years.

“This is one of the things that discourage people from opening cases,” she says, her eyes flashing at the reality of a seemingly endless process, lost dockets and continuous trauma.

According to the police inspector, the details of the trauma are resurrected for rape and assault survivors who may testify long after their ordeal. “People are testifying sometimes two years after the event,” she says. “After the case has been finalized, they should come for counseling because, after testifying, those things will come back again.”

And sometimes the memories never leave. Instead taking dark, immovable residence in the victim’s psyche, feeding off a culture of silence, denial, victim blaming and shame.

Pearl Amuthenu (a pseudonym) is a 31-year-old Windhoeker who can still remember the ice cold of her brother’s hands when he first pulled down her tiny pajama pants.

She was just 7 years old and afraid of the dark. Amuthenu’s mother had sent her brother into her room to allay her phobia, not knowing he would become the cause of fear.

“Pearl, remember, don’t tell Mum,” her brother would say after raping her on vacation, during swimming lessons and in the bed she began to wet.

“I felt like it was my fault. That something must have been wrong with me for him to touch me like that.”

Then one day: “Pearl, does he touch you too?” The question uttered by her best friend was stunning.

“That night we walked together toward the kitchen, my best friend holding my hand tight,” Amuthenu says. “My mother was busy preparing dinner. My heart was beating so fast I couldn’t breathe, but my best friend courageously spoke for both of us saying, ‘Aunt Elise, John has been touching us.’ ”

That evening she heard her mother crying and yelling, and the next week her brother was sent away.

“My family pretended as if it never happened, so I also pretended that it never happened,” Amuthenu says. “I didn’t realize that, 20 years later, I would have a mental breakdown because of trying to suppress this traumatic event. I didn’t understand why my body was shutting down and why I kept reliving this event until I sought out help.”

Today, Amuthenu doesn’t let her children go to sleepovers and doesn’t allow other people around them. She’s on antidepressants. She doesn’t trust men. She struggles to have intercourse with her husband and is seeing a therapist.

Years later, her brother would serve a prison term for murder.

A sentence for murder, yes. But not for the frequent violation of a minor who would grow up to confront him via text message and receive no acknowledgment of the incidents.

Amuthenu is not alone. Not in being raped by a family member or enduring the silence around her trauma.

“I first got sexually molested and raped when I was just 2 months old,” says Ndina Erastus (a pseudonym).

“I have no recollection of this incident, but my mom told me this before she passed on. She said she left me at home with my uncle while she went to buy my food. When she returned, she couldn’t understand why I was crying so hysterically and why the end of my dress was covered with blood. She undressed me just to find blood and Vaseline on my private parts.”

A medical professional confirmed that she had been raped, and her uncle disappeared.

That was the first attack on Erastus. The second time, she was 6 and raped at knifepoint by her neighbor’s father. Then when she was 17, two men raped Erastus in her bedroom; one was a tenant in the building where her family lived.

“I kept telling them to get the hell out, but it’s like I was talking to zombies. They pinned me down. I couldn’t even scream or shout. I felt numb and paralyzed. They did the most unimaginable, disgusting things to me.”

Erastus told a friend, and together they went to the police. “But we were chased out of the police station because we apparently looked like street kids.”

Erastus then told her older sister, who told her mother.

“But all (my mom and sister) said is that the guys should buy me a fridge, a closet [a cupboard] and give me money. … Not that I cared, because all I wanted was for them to go to jail,” says Erastus, who believes this rape was the beginning of many personal problems including a sexually transmitted infection and eventually ovarian cancer.

Erastus used to go to therapy but stopped because she could no longer afford it. “I have come to a point where I believe that my purpose in life is for my body to be used however people want to use it,” she says. “I’ve developed a bad lying habit. I always wanna paint this fairy-tale picture because I feel people might see my inner scars. All this has made me not want to be a mother ever.”

A sign carried at the Slut Shame Walk in April. (Martha Mukaiwa)

A new surge of outrage against gender-based crimes in Namibia began in the spring of this year. On April 6, the first Slut Shame Walk took place to protest the prevalence of rape culture, including the myth that what women wear is a cause or justification for sexual assault. Gathering in the center of Windhoek, approximately 200 Namibians marched down Independence Avenue holding placards with rallying cries such as “My body, my choice,” “It’s a look, not consent,” “No one asked what my rapist wore” and “Protect queer black women.”

Nsozi Mwazi, one of the organizers of the walk, says the message was loud and clear: “People should now act, think and reflect about the rape culture in Namibia. Our social media has been buzzing nonstop since the walk with different comments—some positive, some negative—which creates the platform for discussion and awareness.”

About a month after the event—and after hundreds of Namibians shared harrowing stories of sexual harassment and assault on social media—#MeToo Namibia was born. Many credit the walk as the catalyst. Monica Geingos, Namibia’s first lady, tweeted: “ … and with no further ado, @slutshamewalk has started the Namibian #MeToo. Please follow them, their work is invaluable.”

#MeToo Namibia’s twitter account describes the movement as “an alliance of institutional partners and individual activists whose aim is to end rape culture in Namibia; by breaking the silence, shaming and blaming of survivors.”

As the movement gains momentum, increasing numbers of Namibian women are beginning to name and shame their sexual abusers. During two weeks in May, 200 survivors reported cases of sexual violence to the Namibian Women’s Lawyers Association (NWLA), a #MeToo Namibia alliance member.

The NWLA and other alliance members offer free legal services to rape survivors, and other groups offer psychosocial support.

In addition to encouraging rape survivors to speak out, #MeToo Namibia aids survivors of domestic violence. Police inspector Simaho says intimate-partner—or domestic violence—charges are often withdrawn because of economic reasons.

“That particular perpetrator, the one who is the abuser, may be the breadwinner, and the dependency is not only financial, but everything depends on this person,” she says. “So if this person is to be arrested, what will happen to (the victim)?”

Ultimately, some victims may end up in the morgue. Each one a headline, a salacious story, a ghost left to roam the minds of Namibians such as Esther Beukes—a young Namibian filmmaker who read about a wave of gruesome “passion killings” in 2014 and took to Facebook to post four dystopian words.

“Stay single, stay alive.”

As apt as Beukes’ sentiments may feel, inspector Simaho has hope.

“We are arresting every day. We are charging every day. They are sentencing every day, and we are going to testify every day.”

It’s noble work, but the police inspector’s voice seems to catch on the words that underscore the sheer scope of Namibia’s crisis.

“Every day.”

“Every day.”

“Every day”

“Every day.”

And, as the bodies continue to pile up in the wake of fatal domestic violence, as the headlines bleed and we’re haunted by our ghosts, it can be difficult to envision a world beyond this. The Namibia that Erastus imagines in which we’ve changed how we raise and socialize our boys. The country Amuthenu foresees after far more women stop protecting perpetrators and start calling them out so, in her words, “the next generation knows that when they speak their voices will not be ignored.”

It’s what Namibian women are fighting for through petitions, protests, community building, educational programs in the schools and recommendations issued to government ministries and the police.

As #MeToo Namibia gives survivors courage and release from blame, we wait for an updated national plan of action on gender-based violence. For functional safe houses, stiffer sentencing, effective protection orders and our daughters to get home from school. Many by taxi, some by bus, others by walking over the Magdalena Stoffels Bridge.

Donald Trump Questions Loyalty of Jews Who Vote Democratic

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says any Jewish people who vote Democratic show “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Trump commented Tuesday amid his ongoing feud with Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib (ruh-SHEE’-duh tuh-LEEB’) of Michigan. Trump has taken several steps favored by Israel, while the Muslim lawmakers are outspoken critics of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Trump calls Omar a “disaster” for Jews and says he didn’t “buy” the tears Tlaib shed Monday as she discussed the situation.

At Trump’s urging, Israel last week blocked the pair from entering the country. Israel later agreed to a humanitarian visit for Tlaib to visit her grandmother who lives in the West Bank. Tlaib declined.

Recent polling shows that a majority of Jews identify as Democrats.

The Trump Administration’s Immigration Policy Is This Sadistic

The flu was the cause in three of the at least seven migrant kids’ deaths in U.S. Customs and Border Control custody in the last year. However, CBP officials are declining to provide flu vaccines at detention facilities to stop the spread of the virus, according to a new report from CNBC.

A CBP spokeswoman defended the decision on the grounds that supposedly families wouldn’t be in custody long enough to contract the flu. In an emailed statement to CNBC, she said, “In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programs, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody.”

When asked about what CBP is doing to provide medical care, the spokeswoman pointed to what she called a “dramatic increase” in the number of medical professionals working on the U.S.-Mexico border, and emphasized that “medical personnel on site are available 24/7 to provide medical diagnosis and treatment, address infectious disease issues, and coordinate referral to and follow-up from local health system/emergency rooms,”

The “short-term” nature of migrant detention the CBP spokeswoman refers to is the maximum of 72 hours that detainees can be held in Border Patrol facilities, according to agency standards. However, as a July 2 report from the Office of the Inspector General—which is the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog—revealed, almost half of detainees are being held longer than 72 hours.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s online information on the flu, it takes much less than 72 hours of exposure for a person with the flu to be contagious: “Some otherwise healthy adults may be able to infect others beginning one day before symptoms develop and up to five to seven days after becoming sick.”

Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, the director of pediatric research for Harvard’s Tobacco Research and Treatment Center, told CNBC, “Flu deaths are particularly tragic, in my opinion, because they are almost always preventable with good public health measures.”

He added, “When I learned that multiple children had died in detention from potentially preventable causes, it truly disturbed me. The country needs urgent answers to that question so that children stop dying in detention.”

Winickoff was one of a group of doctors, including forensic pathologist Judy Melinek and Johns Hopkins public health professors Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and Dr. Paul Spiegel, who signed on to a letter to Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., encouraging Congress to investigate health conditions at the detention centers.

CBP’s decision not to provide flu vaccines exacerbates the already crowded and unsanitary conditions at their detention centers, as the above-mentioned OIG report also revealed. Per CNBC:

Department of Homeland Security reported prolonged holding of children without access to showers or laundry facilities. DHS inspectors said adults were being held in standing-room-only areas for up to a week and some had gone a month without a shower, contributing to unsanitary conditions and health risks, according to a July 2 report by the agency’s Office of Inspector General that was obtained by NBC News.

Adding to the frustration is the knowledge that when people do have access to the flu vaccine, rates of infection decline. According to a February report from the CDC, those who had the vaccine in the 2018-19 flu season were 47% less likely to get it. As Time reported, “The CDC recommends flu shots for nearly every American older than 6 months of age, with few exceptions.”

Dr. Julie Linton, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health, told CNBC that if precautions aren’t taken, the situation will only get worse. “There’s a number of things that we can do to prevent deaths and infection,” she said. “Those do not include holding children in cage-like facilities and warehouses altogether,”

 

Even Joe Biden’s Campaign Can’t Think of a Good Reason to Vote for Joe Biden

Critics are responding harshly to comments made by Dr. Jill Biden Monday in which she claimed that even if Democratic primary voters prefer the policies of other 2020 candidates over those of her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, they should vote for Biden anyway because he’s more electable.

Dr. Biden made comments to that effect on Monday in a campaign appearance in Manchester, N.H., reported first by NBC News.

“Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare than Joe is,” Dr. Biden said, “but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so and so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.”

Dr. Jill Biden urges voters to consider her husband’s electability, saying: “your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election.” pic.twitter.com/xdPk95wWnv

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 19, 2019

Splinter writer Rebecca Fishbein found those comments insulting, she wrote Monday evening.

Since the start of Biden’s campaign, his people have been pushing the line that he’s the only one who can beat Trump, even though some polls have shown most of the frontrunners would take the President in a head-to-head. That line allows Biden to lean on a milquetoast platform that offers little-to-no progress, beyond getting a bonafide enemy out of the White House, even though much of Biden’s poll dominance reflects more on his name recognition than it does on his real-life performance. If you like him, I won’t stop you from voting for him, but if you’d prefer a candidate who “might be better on healthcare than Joe is,”—and there are several of those to choose from, in varying degrees—now is absolutely not the time to swallow that at all.

Nevertheless, the former vice president has a commanding lead in national polls and in three early primary states Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leads Biden in New Hampshire. But the first contest, in Iowa, is still months away. And with a field of 23 candidates, Biden’s lead is far from a sure thing.

While national polls show Biden remains the primary frontrunner, numerous polls show that other top-tier Democrats—including Sens. Sanders, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.)—would handily defeat Trump in a head-to-head general election contest.

In her remarks, Dr. Biden acknowledged the depth of the field but nonetheless claimed her husband was best set to take on President Donald Trump.

“I know that not all of you are committed to my husband, and I respect that,” said Dr. Biden, “but I want you to think about your candidate, his or her electability, and who’s going to win this race.”

“If you’re looking at that, you’ve got to look at the polls,” she continued. “If they’re consistent, and they’re consistently saying the same thing, I think you can’t dismiss that.”

Dr. Biden’s comments come in the midst of a difficult news cycle for the former vice president. After stumbling over his words at the end of a CNN debate on July 31, questions about Biden’s mental fitness began to surface in media. Biden then mixed up the cities in which two mass shootings took place in early August, claimed he was in office during the Parkland shooting in 2017, and claimed that “poor kids are just  as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

According to an August 15 report from The Hill, Biden’s aides are trying to scale back the former vice president’s appearances, claiming that Biden is being held to a high standard.

“Yes,” tweeted The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim, “that higher standard of asking the candidate to speak in complete sentences.”

“We knew he was going to be held to a higher standard.”

Yes, that higher standard of asking the candidate to speak in complete sentences https://t.co/wwY6bfE3Rh

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) August 16, 2019

As The Hill reported, Biden’s gaffes are more likely later in the day:

Biden has a tendency to make the blunders late in the day, his allies say, particularly after a long swing on the road, like he had last week in Iowa.

A number of observers on social media pointed out that this is the definition of “sundowning,” a symptom of dementia.

“If you need to do this, then maybe your guy just shouldn’t be running,” said Boston based activist Jonathan Cohn.

Democratic activist Adam Jentleson went further.

“A candidate who can’t keep up with the pace of a presidential campaign is not electable,” Jentleson said.

Biden’s also run into trouble with former President Barack Obama, whose record Biden is leaning on in the 2020 primary. August 16 reporting from The New York Times claims that the former president tried to dissuade Biden from running.

“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Obama reportedly said.

Yet Dr. Biden may have a point. A new CNN poll out Tuesday shows the former vice president is a riding double digit lead over his rivals. And national polling shows Biden with a strong lead over Trump as well.

The electability angle provoked a sharp response from New York Magazine staff writer Sarah Jones.

“Jill Biden may have settled for her husband,” tweeted Jones, “but I’m not sure why anyone else should.”

Elizabeth Warren Takes Aim at Department of Justice

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

This article was produced in partnership with American Banker.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is demanding information from the Justice Department about actions that Trump administration officials took last year to reduce the penalties against two large banks that sold faulty mortgages to investors in the run-up to the financial crisis.

“These weak settlements send a clear message to financial institutions and white-collar criminals that they can evade accountability as long as they are wealthy and well connected,” wrote Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, in a letter Monday to Attorney General William Barr. “It is unconscionable that the Administration is refusing to hold corporate criminals fully accountable for their role in the financial crisis.”

Political appointees at the DOJ’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., overruled the judgments of staff prosecutors who wanted Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland to pay substantially higher penalties than they ultimately did, according to a story published earlier this month by American Banker and ProPublica. Warren, who is running for president, cited that article in her letter to Barr.

Warren requested copies of emails between high-level officials at Main Justice, as the department’s headquarters is known, and lawyers for the two banks. She also asked Barr to hand over written communications between Main Justice and the U.S. attorney’s offices in Boston and Brooklyn, which separately handled the two cases. And she asked the attorney general to explain whether officials from Main Justice gave suggestions, recommendations or orders to staff prosecutors.

A DOJ spokeswoman said Monday that the department has received Warren’s letter and is reviewing it. Both settlements were finalized before Barr became attorney general in February.

Neither Barclays nor RBS immediately responded to a request for comment. In the original article by American Banker and ProPublica, an RBS spokesperson said the bank had requested “fairness and parity” from the Justice Department.

Warren sent similar letters Monday to the U.S. attorney’s offices in the District of Massachusetts and the Eastern District of New York, seeking more information about the involvement of officials from Main Justice. Spokespeople for those two offices declined to comment.

The cases originated during the Obama administration and involved accusations that the banks misled buyers of residential mortgage-backed securities prior to the 2008 crisis. Mortgages that went into the two banks’ securities lost a total of $73 billion, according to calculations used by the government.

The Barclays case settled in March 2018 for $2 billion, far less than what staff prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York had been seeking. The RBS case settled five months later for $4.9 billion, about half of the amount sought by staff prosecutors in the District of Massachusetts, who were also overruled on the question of whether criminal charges should be filed.

The Aug. 2 story by ProPublica and American Banker, which cited four people familiar with the settlements, detailed how the two banks hired former high-level DOJ officials who gained access to officials at the top levels of the Trump Justice Department.

Under Obama, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston was pursuing a criminal investigation of RBS, and the bank had failed in its efforts to convince DOJ political appointees in Washington to overrule that approach. But a later meeting between then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and two former deputy attorneys general who were representing RBS, Jamie Gorelick and Mark Filip, paid off for the U.K.-based bank. In the spring of 2018, Rosenstein told Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Boston, that his office could not pursue criminal charges.

In the Barclays case, staff prosecutors filed a lawsuit seeking civil penalties after settlement talks broke down during the waning days of the Obama administration. “This complaint is probably one of the more fulsome complaints I’ve ever seen,” the judge assigned to the case commented at an April 2017 hearing.

But following communications with the Barclays legal team, which included two former high-level DOJ lawyers, officials at Main Justice told the staff prosecutors to settle the case within a narrow range around $2 billion, or the negotiations would be taken out of their hands.

Specific instructions from Washington regarding the two settlements came in spreadsheets that listed dollar ranges, according to sources familiar with the matter. Warren is asking Main Justice and the U.S. attorney’s offices in Brooklyn and Boston for copies of those spreadsheets.

“The 2008 financial crisis cost the American economy over $22 trillion, robbing millions of families of their homes and savings in the process,” Warren wrote in the letter to Barr. “A decade later, not a single big bank CEO has gone to jail, white-collar enforcement actions have hit a 20-year low, and former government officials running through the revolving door to cash in are still helping the banks responsible for the crash avoid the consequences.”

Italian Leader Conte Resigns With Scathing Attack on Far-Right’s Salvini

ROME — Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte announced his resignation Tuesday, blaming his decision to end his 14-month-old populist government on his rebellious and politically ambitious deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini.

Conte told the Senate that the surprise move earlier this month by Salvini’s right-wing League party to seek a no-confidence vote against the coalition was forcing him to “interrupt” what he contended was a productive government. He said that government reflected the results of Italy’s 2018 election and aimed to “interpret the desires of citizens who in their vote expressed a desire for change.”

The coalition included two rivals, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and Salvini’s euroskeptic, anti-migrant right-wing League party.

Conte said he will go later Tuesday to tender his resignation to President Sergio Mattarella. As head of state, Mattarella could ask Conte to stay on and find an alternative majority in Parliament. That is considered an unlikely scenario, however, given the long-festering acrimony among the coalition’s partners and the deep divisions in the opposition Democrats, who would be a potential partner.

Or, after sounding out party chiefs in consultations expected to start as soon as Wednesday, Mattarella could come to the conclusion that another political leader or a nonpartisan figure could cobble together a viable government. That government’s pressing task would be to lead the country at least for the next few months, when Italy must make painful budget cuts to keep in line with European Union financial regulations.

Failing that, Mattarella could immediately dissolve Parliament, 3½ years ahead of schedule, as Salvini has been clamoring for. Pulling the plug on Parliament sets the stage for a general election as early as late October, right smack in the middle of delicate budget maneuvers that will be closely monitored in Brussels.

Conte, a lawyer with no political experience, is nominally nonpartisan, although he was the clear choice of the 5-Stars when the government was formed.

The premier scathingly quoted Salvini’s own recent demands for an early election so he could gain “full powers” by grabbing the premiership. Conte blasted Salvini for showing “grave contempt for Parliament” and putting Italy at risk for a “dizzying spiral of political and financial instability” in the months ahead by creating an unnecessary crisis that collapses a working government.

Salvini, who sat next to Conte, smirking at times as the premier spoke, began the Senate debate by saying, defiantly, “I’d do it all again.”

Pressing for a new election as soon as possible, Salvini, who as interior minister has led a crackdown on migrants, said: “I don’t fear Italians’ judgment.”

In the European Parliament election three months ago in Italy, as well as in current opinion polls, Salvini’s League party has soared in popularity to be the No. 1 political force among Italians.

Ilhan Omar Urges Congress to Bear Witness to Israeli Occupation

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib sharply criticized Israel on Monday for denying them entry to the country and called on fellow members of Congress to visit while they cannot.

Omar, of Minnesota, suggested President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were suppressing the lawmakers’ ability to carry out their oversight role.

“I would encourage my colleagues to visit, meet with the people we were going to meet with, see the things we were going to see, hear the stories we were going to hear,” Omar said at a news conference. “We cannot let Trump and Netanyahu succeed in hiding the cruel reality of the occupation from us.”

At Trump’s urging, Israel denied entry to the first two Muslim women elected to Congress over their support for a Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions global movement. Tlaib and Omar, who had planned to visit Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank on a tour organized by a Palestinian group, are outspoken critics of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Tlaib, a U.S.-born Palestinian-American from Michigan, had also planned to visit her aging grandmother in the West Bank. Israeli officials later relented and said she could visit her grandmother after all.

But Tlaib got emotional as she told how her “Sitty” — an Arabic term of endearment for one’s grandmother that’s spelled different ways in English — urged her during a tearful late-night family phone call not to come under what they considered such humiliating circumstances.

“She said I’m her dream manifested. I’m her free bird,” Tlaib recalled. “So why would I come back and be caged and bow down when my election rose her head up high, gave her dignity for the first time?”

Tlaib and Omar were joined Monday by Minnesota residents who said they had been directly affected by travel restrictions in the past. They included Lana Barkawi, a Palestinian-American, who lamented that she has never been able to visit her parents’ homeland.

Barkawi said she had a chance to visit her father’s village in the West Bank near Nablus during a family visit to Jordan about 25 years ago, but her parents decided not to risk crossing the border.

“My father could not put himself to be in a position where an Israeli soldier is the person with control over his entry into his homeland,” Barkawi said. “This is an enduring trauma that he and my mother live.”

Before Israel’s decision, Trump tweeted it would be a “show of weakness” to allow the two representatives in. Israel controls entry and exit to the West Bank, which it seized in the 1967 Mideast war along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, territories the Palestinians want for a future state.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley kept up the administration’s criticism of the two lawmakers.

“Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have a well-documented history of anti-Semitic comments, anti-Semitic social media posts and anti-Semitic relationships,” he said in a statement. “Israel has the right to prevent people who want to destroy it from entering the country — and Democrats’ pointless Congressional inquiries here in America cannot change the laws Israel has passed to protect itself.”

Supporters say the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a nonviolent way of protesting Israel’s military rule over Palestinians, but Israel says it aims to delegitimize the state and eventually wipe it off the map.

The two congresswomen are part of the “squad” of four liberal House newcomers — all women of color — whom Trump has labeled as the face of the Democratic Party as he runs for reelection. The Republican president subjected them to a series of racist tweets last month in which he called on them to “go back” to their “broken” countries. They are U.S. citizens — Tlaib was born in the U.S. and Omar became a citizen after moving to the U.S. as a refugee from war-torn Somalia.

“There is no way that we are ever, ever going to allow people to tear us down, to see us cry out of pain, to ever make us feel like our (citizenship) certificate is less than theirs,” Omar said. “So we are going to hold our head up high. And we are going to fight this administration and the oppressive Netanyahu administration until we take our last breath.”

What Fareed Zakaria Gets Wrong About Afghanistan: Everything

Since when does a (mostly) respected press pundit sound just like an army general? Well, for a while now, in fact. Politicians and reporters will argue viciously about all kinds of issues: immigration, healthcare, race, et al. There’s only one sacred cow that mainstream insiders – both “left” and right – dare not challenge: the runaway Pentagon budget and America’s forever wars.

So it was, this Sunday morning, lounging in my hotel room in Spokane – I was in town for the national Veterans for Peace convention – that I happened to watch CNN’s Fareed Zakaria drone on about the supposed risks of “prematurely” (after 18 years?!?) pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. Fareed is, indeed, eloquent, and his soothing voice and calm demeanor seem to lend authority to his show’s opening monologue. Yet his argument was ridiculous. Here he was parading out all the old tired arguments about why its supposedly too dangerous to end America’s military commitment: Al Qaeda will come back; There’ll be another 9/11; Afghan women will suffer under Taliban rule, and on and on.

I knew I’d heard it all before, but there was something about Fareed’s impromptu lecture that seemed more familiar than usual. Then it hit me – I’d just read all these talking points. And the author? You guessed it: retired General (and disgraced former CIA Director) David Petraeus. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Petraeus chimed in with his usual scare tactics to enable all he knows: perpetual war. Zakaria and Petraeus, on the surface the two men couldn’t be any more different. Yet the pundit seemed to have lifted all his talking points from the general’s standard playbook.

This ought to concern us all. Zakaria’s apologism and justification to extend America’s longest war demonstrates, rather disturbingly, just how firmly entrenched the US military-industrial complex and warfare state has become. No one on the mainstream cable news stations, even on “liberal” MSNBC, seriously challenges the very logic, and premise, of not only the war in Afghanistan, but American forever war, writ large.

It seems there are two main reasons for this. One, the alliance between defense contractors, retired generals, fundraising-crazy politicians, and a pliant corporate press creates a systemic and vicious cycle of warfare rationalization. Two, the mainstream media (excluding Fox News) and political insiders so loathe Donald Trump that they reflexively oppose any action the president takes, including, in this case, the rather rational intention to negotiate an end to the Afghan War.

This author, at least, has dedicated (perhaps wasted) tens of thousands of words describing just why the war in Afghanistan can’t be won. Without re-litigating the case yet again, let’s just review all the inconvenient facts that neither Petraeus nor Zakaria bothered to mention in their shameless Afghan War apologism. There was no mention of the unsustainable nature of Afghan Security Force casualties, that the army can’t recruit troops fast enough to replace the tens of thousands killed annually. There was not a word about how Afghanistan’s GDP and paltry budget can’t even cover the costs of its own military and police force and is wholly reliant on foreign aid. There was no mention of Afghanistan’s record opium crop that fuels the Taliban and warlordism in general; no discussion of how the Taliban now controls or contests more districts than at any time since the war began in 2001; not a word about the corruption and legitimacy crisis of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. I could go on, but you see what I mean.

All the inconvenient details and context surrounding America’s doomed campaign in Afghanistan are erased in mainstream media and political circles. Their arguments are simplified to one basic – and easily debunked – premise, the “safe-haven myth.” Simply put, this is the idea that if any vaguely Arab or Muslim country is unstable or contains ungoverned spaces (they almost all do by the way) then that territory will harbor terrorists and lead to a new 9/11-style attack on the US homeland. Forget the fact that 9/11 was planned as much in Germany and the US as in Afghanistan, or that the US military – even with its bloated budget – can’t possibly occupy each and every unstable state containing Muslims (though it does try!). It’s just logistically impossible and, besides, recent history proves that US military intervention is often actually counterproductive and tends to fuel anti-American jihadism.

Nonetheless, you won’t hear any of that from the likes of Zakaria, Petraeus, or just about any other mainstream public voice. It’s famously been said that “tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.” That’s certainly the case when it come to America’s imperial adventurism and growing warfare state. Absent any frank discussion of context about the region or US wars, absent any mention of discomfiting facts, both pundits and generals can pretend that history began yesterday and use fear to sell forever war. I expected as much from Petraeus; I’ll admit I’d hoped for better from Zakaria. How hopelessly naive of me …

This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.comHis work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, TomDispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

 

The Biggest Obstacle to Gun Control May Be the Supreme Court

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. — Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

In the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the biggest obstacle to effective gun control may not be President Trump, Mitch McConnell or even the National Rifle Association (NRA) but the United States Supreme Court.

It’s been a long time since the Supreme Court considered a major Second Amendment case. Eleven years ago, the court delivered a landmark victory to the gun-rights lobby in District of Columbia v. Heller—a 5-4 majority decision written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia that ruled, for the first time, the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own and bear firearms.

Heller broke with the great weight of prior scholarship and legal precedent, including the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, which held the Second Amendment protected gun ownership only in connection with service in long-since antiquated state militias. And while Heller was technically limited to gun ownership in the nation’s capital and other federal venues, the court extended its individual-rights analysis to the states two years later in McDonald v. Chicago, via a 5-4 opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito.

When the court reconvenes in October, its docket will include a new Second Amendment appeal—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York—that has the potential to rival or surpass Heller for its impact on gun rights and gun regulation.

At issue is a New York City ordinance adopted in 2001 barring residents from taking their guns outside city limits. The ordinance was challenged in a federal lawsuit filed by the NRA’s New York affiliate and three city residents, who argued the regulation was unconstitutional in light of Heller.

The plaintiffs lost at both the district court level and before a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a unanimous decision in February 2018 concluding the ordinance withstood Second Amendment scrutiny under Heller. The Supreme Court agreed in January to review the case.

As the 2nd Circuit noted in its evaluation of the New York ordinance, Heller was technically limited to possession of guns in the home, and by no means precluded reasonable gun legislation outside of it. Scalia wrote in his majority decision:

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. … Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26”

 In footnote 26 of the opinion, placed at the end of the above paragraph, he added:

“We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.”

What made Heller and McDonald attractive to the NRA as test cases was that each concerned near-total bans on gun possession by private citizens. Outright prohibitions are rarely easy to justify, and the five-member conservative Supreme Court majority in each instance reinterpreted the Second Amendment to strike down prohibitions.

Like Heller and McDonald, the New York City case presents an outright ban not on ownership, but on the right to bear arms beyond the home.

Realizing it could easily lose before the Supreme Court, New York City announced in June it had amended the transportation ordinance and would henceforth permit licensed gun owners to take their firearms to second homes, businesses or shooting ranges outside city limits. In July, the city filed a formal motion with the Supreme Court, requesting that the case be dismissed because the ordinance was no longer in effect. The court is scheduled to consider the motion in its first closed-door conference of the new term on Oct. 1.

If the Supreme Court consisted of open-minded jurists committed to a fair understanding of the Constitution, the city would likely prevail. Indeed, the case might even offer an opportunity to repudiate Heller as a misguided application of “originalism,” the legal theory popularized by Scalia that posits the Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning for the Founding Fathers.

Along with many other critics of originalism, I believe the Constitution should be read as a “living document,” taking into account not only the Constitution’s text and history but also giving due consideration to contemporary values, social needs and evolving traditions.

Still, even on strictly originalist grounds, Heller was wrongly decided. As Justice John Paul Stevens explained in his Heller dissent, “the Framers’ single-minded focus in crafting the constitutional guarantee ‘to keep and bear arms’ was on military uses of firearms, which they viewed in the context of service in state militias.”

Scalia’s majority opinion not only rendered the opening “militia clause” of the Second Amendment meaningless, it also distorted and minimized the historical debate surrounding its inclusion in the Bill of Rights. Those debates, Stevens emphasized, centered on the state militias as antidotes to a burdensome and potentially oppressive permanent standing federal army, not on personal gun ownership.

As Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist Paper No. 29, militias were seen as “the most natural defense of a free country.” Prior to the Constitution’s ratification, the Massachusetts militia was called out to quell Shay’s Rebellion, the anti-tax protest of farmers in 1786-87 that exposed the weaknesses of the fledgling national government as constructed under the Articles of Confederation. Soon after ratification, the militias of New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania were federalized to put down another anti-tax uprising, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-94, that had erupted in western Pennsylvania.

In the end, the Second Amendment was worded as a federalist compromise, with the states retaining their right to organize militias and other provisions of the Constitution—for example, Article II, Section 2—clarifying that ultimate control over the militias would vest in the executive branch of the federal government. Personal gun rights were left, as they had been during the colonial period, to the police powers of local government.

Following Heller, historian Jack Rakove of Stanford University panned Scalia’s scholarship as an example of shoddy “law-office history,” while Fordham University’s Saul Cornell called it “a constitutional scam” and “an intellectual shell game in which contemporary political preferences are shuffled around and made to appear part of the Constitution’s original meaning.”

Tragically for the country, Scalia’s revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment prevailed in Heller, assuming the status of Holy Writ among judges and mainstream politicians.

With the addition of Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, today’s Supreme Court may be even more pro-gun than it was when Scalia penned Heller. Should New York City’s motion to dismiss be denied, the court could easily extend its decision in radical new directions, imperiling any serious efforts to pass and enforce federal gun control. That prospect should alarm every American anguished by the county’s escalating gun violence.