Chris Hedges's Blog, page 182

American History for Truthdiggers: Bush II and the Birth of Forever War

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 36th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, who retired recently as a major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 36 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22; Part 23; Part 24; Part 25; Part 26; Part 27; Part 28; Part 29; Part 30; Part 31; Part 32; Part 33; Part 34; Part 35.

* * *

George W. Bush’s presidency forever changed the lives of millions at home and around the globe. (I, as a career Army officer, was one of those impacted.) Were it not for him, there would never have been long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The profound policy decisions of Bush prove the importance of presidential agency, the power of a single man to forever alter history. It was all rather ironic. Bush had run, in the 2000 election, on a platform of “compassionate conservatism”—a softening, of sorts, of the Republican dogma that had characterized the culture wars of the 1990s. He had even criticized the military interventionism of his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, and eschewed “nation-building” missions around the globe. Yet Bush would be one of the most zealous, and polarizing, conservatives in presidential history and would unleash American military might on an unprecedented scale. On his watch, it can be said without exaggeration, the U.S. shifted from covert to overt imperialism.

So weighty were Bush’s decisions, especially in foreign policy, that even his “liberal” Democrat successor, President Barack Obama, would end up doing little to dismantle the invigorated national security state or lessen the momentum of perpetual war that reigned during Bush’s two terms, from 2001 to 2009. Empire abroad and militarism at home was the new American way. No one, it seemed, could alter that reality. The profound, yet surprisingly effective, cynicism of 21st-century conservatism transformed the political and cultural landscape of the United States. In such a time, Bush was more symptom than cause of America’s ills. Nevertheless, this man and his team of scoundrels demonstrated the contingency of history and the power of individuals’ decisions to drive history in one tragic direction or another. And, to think: Bush’s election would never have occurred if the U.S. had truly been a representative democracy of “one-man, one-vote.”

Election’s Long Detour: Neoconservatives Ascendant

For decades, resurgent Republicans and conservatives of various stripes had trumpeted the importance of localism and states’ rights over federal power. It had long seemed suspicious, a cover for dog-whistle racism and the dismantling of the social safety net. Yet never was the prevailing conservative philosophy shown to be so hypocritical as when five right-leaning Supreme Court justices invoked federal power to hand a presidential election to a like-minded candidate. And that’s exactly what happened over three dozen days at the end of 2000.

George W. Bush—President George H.W. Bush’s son and a former alcoholic turned born-again Christian—had run a dirty campaign in winning a tough GOP primary contest with Sen. John McCain, the prominent Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war. He would face off with Bill Clinton’s relatively lackluster vice president, Al Gore, in the 2000 general election. They both were privileged men, were from wealthy families and held Ivy League pedigrees. Bush was a legacy and C student at Yale and later attended Harvard Business School before leading a group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and eventually becoming governor of Texas. Vice President Gore, a former member of the House and Senate, was the son of a prominent senator from Tennessee and had spent much of his youth in Washington, D.C.

Bush campaigned on standard Republican policies of tax cuts, arguing that the Clinton-era budget surpluses were “not the government’s money” but “the people’s money” and even called for the partial privatization of Social Security. He also advocated drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. As for foreign policy, he ironically (given his later proclivity for starting wars) criticized Clinton’s use of the military for “nation-building” in Haiti, Bosnia and Somalia. In one debate Bush asserted that he would “be very careful about using our troops as nation-builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war. … I don’t want to be the world’s policeman.” Nevertheless, both he and Gore promised increased defense spending despite the absence of a genuine global threat to U.S. security.

Neither candidate was particularly inspiring. Bush struck many as unsophisticated, uniformed and prone to gaffes. He had proclaimed “Our priorities is faith” and “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dreams.” Gore was portrayed by the media as overconfident and condescending. He was variously described as “stiff,” “wooden” and “pompous.” The Democrat was initially predicted to win in a landslide but squandered his advantages; among other things, he presented an off-putting image by rolling his eyes and audibly sighing during debates. Furthermore, he distanced himself from the incumbent president, fearing—despite Clinton’s 60 percent job approval rating—that the Lewinsky affair and other character questions would taint his campaign. This would be a grave mistake.

In the end, only 55.6 percent of eligible voters turned out. Gore beat Bush by a margin of some 500,000 votes, but due to third-party candidates Ralph Nader of the leftist Green Party and Patrick Buchanan on the right, neither received a majority of votes. Besides, the peculiar U.S. Electoral College system overrode the will of the people as expressed in the popular vote. Bush carried every Southern state (including Gore’s home state of Tennessee) and every Mountain and Plains state except New Mexico. Gore took just about all of the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic and West Coast. The outcome of the election, under the Electoral College, would turn on the swing state of Florida.

Initially, the major media outlets announced that Gore had won Florida, and thus the election. Then, early the next morning, most networks reversed themselves and gave the state to Bush. It was all rather confusing and uncertain. Either way there was an extremely close contest in Florida. The first “final count” showed that Bush led by a paltry 1,784 votes out of 5.9 million cast in the state. For the next 36 days, partisan political and legal disputes unfolded before Americans knew who would be their new president. Democrats insisted on a manual recount, and they had a point. In Palm Beach County, more than 3,000 voters—mostly Democratic-leaning elderly Jews—mistakenly voted for the far-right Pat Buchanan because of confusing and non-uniform ballot cards. Furthermore, other statewide ballots failed to register because of “hanging chads.” Worse still, thousands of African-Americans were incorrectly labeled as felons, thus, under Florida’s draconian law, blocking them from voting. Nearly all would have cast a vote for Gore.

None of this mattered given the strengths and discipline of the Bush legal team, spearheaded by Papa Bush’s effective former secretary of state, James Baker. Florida’s governor was none other than Bush’s brother Jeb, and its secretary of state was the highly partisan Republican Katherine Harris. The state Legislature was Republican-dominated. However, on Nov. 21 the Florida Supreme Court unanimously approved the Gore team’s request for a manual recount. Only then did Florida Republicans—traditionally champions of states’ rights—appeal to the federal Supreme Court. By that point, Harris had stopped the recounts; Bush’s lead was only 537 votes. In a 5-4 vote along partisan ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a final halt to the recounts and essentially declared Bush president.

It was a major blow to the credibility and supposed independence of the courts. All five justices in the slim majority had been appointed by either Ronald Reagan or Bush senior. The decision conflicted with the conservative majority’s many recent rulings in favor of federalism and states’ rights. The key, and most eloquent, voice of dissent on the court flowed from John Paul Stevens, a Republican appointed by President Gerald Ford. “Although we may not know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election,” he wrote, “the identity of the loser was perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” And so it was. The court’s decision would be monumental.

‘Compassionate Conservatism’: A Contradiction in Terms?

Bush, in the campaign, had promised to follow a path of “compassionate conservatism” that diverged from the hyperpartisan culture wars (over gay marriage, abortion and school prayer) that had characterized Republicanism for decades. In the end, however, he proved to be one of the most doctrinaire conservatives in the history of the American presidency. Admittedly, his position on immigration was rather centrist and starkly difference from that of later Republican legislators and presidents (i.e. Donald Trump). And, sure, he did break with previous conservative calls for the abolition of the federal Department of Education. Still, he ultimately did little to make U.S. border policy more humane, and his No Child Left Behind Act served only to punish low-income schools and embattled teachers and to gear primary education to standardized test-taking at the expense of the arts and humanities. Furthermore, the feds never released the funds necessary to bolster poorly performing schools. It was no accident that critics took to joking that the money was the only thing “left behind” in the bill.

Bush also hewed to the long-discredited principles of Reaganomics. He squandered the Clinton-era budget surpluses with a massive tax-break giveaway to the super rich and even amplified Bill Clinton’s war against financial regulation. This, combined with the later expenditure of trillions of dollars on hopeless foreign wars, led to enormous federal debt and deficits and, eventually, the massive financial crisis of 2008-09, the worst since the Great Depression. Huge taxpayer-funded bailouts of corporations resulted, in some cases benefiting companies that had engaged in criminality; meanwhile, the wages of working people continued to stagnate and the rich got richer. Bush also cut the social safety net, relying instead on the ineffective “generosity” of what he called “faith-based organizations.” That policy was stillborn, and the poor, well, were ever poorer. But when Bush tried to partly privatize Social Security—a highly popular program—the people, and their congressional representatives, balked. It was yet another policy failure for the administration.

In the 2004 election, Bush abandoned “compassionate conservatism” and played the religious and culture card. He specifically ran against gay marriage and abortion, thereby gaining even more of the evangelical vote than he had in 2000. His opponent, longtime U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, was yet another privileged son of wealth and largesse. Both he and Bush, reportedly, belonged to the secretive and exclusive Skull and Bones Society while they were Ivy League students. Kerry, though, unlike Bush—who had avoided combat duty by serving in the Texas Air National Guard under circumstances that were highly controversial when he ran for re-election as president—was a decorated Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, albeit one who famously turned against that war. It seemed Bush would be unable to play up his own national security “toughness” against such an opponent. Still, he did. Karl Rove, Bush’s sneaky and ruthless political adviser, helped Bush wage one of the dirtiest smear campaigns in modern memory. They attacked Kerry’s war record, even parading disgruntled veterans of Kerry’s “swift boat” teams who claimed that the onetime naval lieutenant hadn’t truly earned his many medals. It was an embarrassingly low blow, but it worked, and the term “swift boating” entered the political lexicon. Some, though, said the election turned on whom the average American would rather “have a beer with.” Kerry seemed stiff and aloof. Bush, on the other hand, despite his decades of teetotaling Christianity, was pictured as a congenial drinking companion by many voters.

Some of the painful consequences of Americans’ choice made themselves known when a Category 5 hurricane hit the New Orleans region in 2005. Undoubtedly, hurricanes and other storms are worsened and made more common by human-caused climate change, a theory accepted by some 98 percent of accredited scientists … but not by then-President Bush, who in early 2001 pulled the U.S. out of the international Kyoto Protocols, meant to tamp down global carbon emissions. Bush would become the most prominent in the long line of Republican “climate deniers” that followed.

In New Orleans, local and federal officials had failed to fully heed professional warnings about the effects of a catastrophic storm. Levees broke, over a thousand people died and most of the city was quickly submerged. Bush had earlier gutted the personnel and funding of the Federal Emergency Response Agency (FEMA) and placed an unqualified political appointee—who had previously been the legal counsel of an Arabian-horse organization—to lead the agency. FEMA was inept, and Bush didn’t visit the disaster area for many days. The president came across as aloof and unsympathetic when he declared that his FEMA director, whom he nicknamed “Brownie,” had done “a heck of a job.” The sound bite defined Bush’s track record of domestic failure.

Wars of Choice: America’s Imperial Endgame

Beyond the crushing effects that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks inflicted on the American psyche, the tragedy advanced the agenda of leading U.S. “neocons.” In September 2000, a prominent neoconservative think tank, aptly named the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), had published a report that concluded that without a “catastrophic and catalyzing event”—a “new Pearl Harbor”—it would be difficult to implement the organization’s proposals for military modernization and “transformation.” The 9/11 attacks provided that “new Pearl Harbor,” precisely the catalyst for the increased military spending and the eventual invasion and regime change in Iraq that PNAC had long championed. The core signatories of PNAC’s statement of principles formed a veritable who’s who of senior figures in Bush’s administration. They included future Vice President Dick Cheney, future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, future Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and future U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. All would lend passionate support for Bush’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The neoconservative aspiration for American military intervention and hegemonic power in the Greater Middle East did not begin as a response to the tragedy of 9/11. Rather, a vocal minority of D.C. policymakers had long dreamed of U.S. empire, a “Pax Americana” of sorts. The ascendance of a pliant president combined with an unprecedented act of terrorism provided the perfect storm necessary for these zealots to implement their imperial schemes.

The 9/11 attacks were an outgrowth of ill-advised American foreign policies in recent decades. The Central Intelligence Agency had backed Arab jihadis waging expeditionary war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden, a scion of a Saudi construction magnate, was one prominent “Afghan Arab” within the U.S. orbit. After the Afghan rebels and their less effective Arab allies forced the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, the West had a resentful, and still angry, group of opponents on its hands. By 1998, bin Laden and his newly formed al-Qaida terror group had turned on the U.S. and literally declared war on America. Bin Laden gave three main justifications in the declaration. The U.S., according to bin Laden, had militarily occupied Saudi Arabia (true), starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with sanctions (true) and long reflexively backed Israel at the expense of stateless Palestinians (true). This does not justify the attacks that brought down New York’s Twin Towers, heavily damaged the Pentagon and killed nearly 3,000 American civilians, but the U.S. was far from being without fault in its dealings in the region.

Bush’s response was profoundly pivotal. He mistakenly treated the attacks as a declaration of conventional war rather than an isolated criminal incident. Within three days, while the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldered, he pushed through, and Congress rubber-stamped, an open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force that sanctioned the president to wage war on any organization, individuals or nation-state that he deemed had been complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Only one member of Congress, Rep. Barbara Lee of California, dissented and voted against the bill, presciently (and courageously) declaring, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Death threats and character assassinations were her thanks at the time.

CIA operatives and military special operations forces quickly toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had harbored bin Laden and al-Qaida. Because the U.S. didn’t seal the Pakistani border, bin Laden escaped. Afterward, Washington’s quick decision to pivot from counterterror to nation-building led to a never-ending military mission in an unwinnable war that continues to this day. What’s more, before the mission in Afghanistan was even half complete, the Bush team shifted the focus to its favored target from the start: Saddam’s Iraq.

The neocons who authored and signed the 2000 PNAC statement of principles had hankered for an invasion and occupation of Iraq for many years. In fact, on 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld sent a handwritten instruction to his staff to “sweep up” everything “big and small” in the aftermath of the attacks to see if Iraq could be blamed and then attacked. For the next year, the Bush administration, spearheaded by the extraordinarily hawkish Vice President Cheney, lied, equivocated and fabricated evidence to falsely link Saddam to al-Qaida (even though the two were sworn enemies) and wrongly assert that Iraq possessed a vigorous program for weapons of mass destruction. No WMDs were ever found, and soon enough the U.S. military—though it quickly defeated Saddam’s army—became bogged down in a deadly insurgency and sectarian Iraqi civil war. (This development could easily have been predicted if Washington had consulted regional experts.) Thousands of U.S. troops, and hundreds of thousands of local civilians, would die in the maelstrom unleashed by Bush’s aggressive war of choice.

Then, in 2006, after purportedly antiwar Democrats swept the midterm elections and took control of both houses of Congress, Bush confounded nearly everyone. Rather than downsize the U.S. military presence, the president demonstrated his unilateral control of foreign policy and “surged” nearly 30,000 additional troops into Baghdad and the surrounding regions within Iraq. Bush appointed a new, allegedly “intellectual,” military leader, Gen. David Petraeus, to command the renewed effort in Iraq. Within a year, violence did indeed decrease, but the alleged purpose of the surge—a power-sharing government agreement between factions and sects—never came to pass. For all its efforts, the U.S. military failed in its purported mission. Nevertheless, Petraeus, and Bush, declared the surge a victory. It was anything but. Violence had, in fact, decreased due to three factors unrelated to the new “strategy” and troop infusion. First off, the 2006 civil war had run its course. Once-integrated neighborhoods and towns were ethnically cleansed of Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish minorities. After this bloody work was done, all sides settled into fortified camps. Additionally, Shiite nationalist insurgents led by Muqtada al-Sadr called a unilateral cease-fire with the U.S. military to reorganize the militia and strategically pivot to electoral politics. Finally, the American Army cynically bribed Sunni former insurgents in western Iraq to turn on al-Qaida and paid those former insurgents (who had American blood on their hands) to switch sides. In the short term, this lowered violence and U.S. casualties. In the long run, the Sunni fighters on the U.S. payroll were never (as had been promised) folded into the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces. Many would later switch sides again, in 2014 joining the jihadi bastard offspring of the U.S. invasion and fracturing of Iraq: Islamic State, or ISIS.

What did it all mean? Well, simply put: tragedy. Bush left office not only with the American economy in ruins but with the bloodied U.S. military overstretched in chasing “terrorists” from West Africa to Central Asia. American “victories” were literally nonexistent, and Islamist “terror” outfits grew exponentially. Bush had given the greatest victory possible to bin Laden, turning al-Qaida and its ideology from the Islamic fringe to the mainstream. U.S. military men and women literally couldn’t kill the insurgents as fast as these foes were now recruited. The wars would continue, bequeathed to Barack Obama in 2009, with no end in sight. Bin Laden, by the way, still lived. One could argue, in fact, that he had won.

* * *

Donald Trump, his coarse ego and his ascendance to the presidency proved to be the best thing that could have happened for George W. Bush’s legacy. It was amazing, and disturbing, to watch liberal mainstream media pundits pine for the “presidential” character and values of Bush in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election. It has been said, accurately, that most Americans are ignorant of their own history. Beyond that, Americans barely know their quite recently lived present. Bush’s presidency was one of the most disastrous ever. He was responsible for huge numbers of military and civilian deaths, both American and foreign. His policies of torture, rendition, enemy “detention,” drone assassination and domestic surveillance forever stymied civil liberties at home and sullied the reputation of the United States abroad. The world, and America, would never be the same. Bush nudged domestic politics rightward and laid the groundwork for forever war abroad. No amount of relative politeness or sentimental painting of veterans’ portraits during retirement can absolve Bush of his war crimes and disastrous legacy.

When George W. Bush gracefully handed power to Barack Obama in January 2009, he bequeathed his (ultimately disappointing) successor a dangerous and shattered world and an economy in free fall. Bush’s ruinous tenure ought to have forever discredited “trickle-down” economics at home and neoconservative interventionism abroad. That it fundamentally did not demonstrated the persistence of militarism, imperialism, racism and hyper-capitalism in America’s troubled history. These national “original sins” had been perpetuated by one American president after another (and a generally complicit Congress), a condition that laid the groundwork for the buffoonish Bush to take American empire and economic inequity to the next level. The people, more powerless and apathetic than ever, bore the consequences. So did millions abroad who were never even consulted. Perhaps that was the real tragedy.

* * *

To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

• Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974” (2019).

• Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018).

• James T. Patterson, “Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore” (2005).

Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

Jeffrey Epstein Reportedly Taken Off Suicide Watch Before Death

NEW YORK—Jeffrey Epstein, the well-connected financier accused of orchestrating a sex-trafficking ring, had been taken off suicide watch before he killed himself in a New York jail, a person familiar with the matter said.

Attorney General William Barr said he was “appalled” to learn of Epstein’s death while in federal custody. The FBI and the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General will investigate, he said.

“Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered,” Barr said in a statement.

Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Fire officials received a call at 6:39 a.m. Saturday that Epstein was in cardiac arrest, and he was pronounced dead at New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital.

Epstein, 66, had been denied bail and faced up to 45 years behind bars on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges unsealed last month. He had pleaded not guilty and was awaiting trial on accusations of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls.

A little over two weeks ago, Epstein was found on the floor of his cell with bruises on his neck, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. At the time, it was not clear whether the injuries were self-inflicted or from an assault.

A person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that Epstein had been taken off suicide watch. The person wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. It wasn’t immediately clear when he was taken off suicide watch.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that he had been housed in the jail’s Special Housing Unit, a heavily secured part of the facility that separates high-profile inmates from the general population. Until recently, the same unit had been home to the Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is now serving a life sentence at the so-called Supermax prison in Colorado.

Epstein’s death is likely to raise questions about how the Bureau of Prisons ensures the welfare of such high-profile inmates. In October, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger was killed in a federal prison in West Virginia where had just been transferred.

Cameron Lindsay, a former warden who ran three federal lockups, said the death represents “an unfortunate and shocking failure, if proven to be a suicide.”

“Unequivocally, he should have been on active suicide watch and therefore under direct and constant supervision,” Lindsay said.

Epstein’s arrest last month launched separate investigations into how authorities handled his case initially when similar charges were first brought against him in Florida more than a decade ago. U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta resigned last month after coming under fire for overseeing that deal when he was U.S. attorney in Miami.

On Friday, more than 2,000 pages of documents were released related to a since-settled lawsuit against Epstein’s ex-girlfriend by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers. The records contain graphic allegations against Epstein, as well as the transcript of a 2016 deposition of Epstein in which he repeatedly refused to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself.

Sigrid McCawley, Giuffre’s attorney, said Epstein’s suicide less than 24 hours after the documents were unsealed “is no coincidence.” McCawley urged authorities to continue their investigation, focusing on Epstein associates who she said “participated and facilitated Epstein’s horrifying sex trafficking scheme.”

Other accusers and their lawyers reacted to the news with frustration that the financier won’t have to face them in court.

“We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed the pain and trauma he caused so many people,” accuser Jennifer Araoz said in a statement.

Brad Edwards, a Florida lawyer for nearly two dozen other accusers, said that “this is not the ending anyone was looking for.”

“The victims deserved to see Epstein held accountable, and he owed it to everyone he hurt to accept responsibility for all of the pain he caused,” Edwards said in a statement.

Epstein’s arrest drew national attention, particularly focusing on a deal that allowed Epstein to plead guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida and avoid more serious federal charges.

Federal prosecutors in New York reopened the probe after investigative reporting by The Miami Herald stirred outrage over that plea bargain.

His lawyers maintained that the new charges in New York were covered by the 2008 plea deal and that Epstein hadn’t had any illicit contact with underage girls since serving his 13-month sentence in Florida.

Before his legal troubles, Epstein led a life of extraordinary luxury that drew powerful people into his orbit. He socialized with princes and presidents and lived on a 100-acre private island in the Caribbean and one of the biggest mansions in New York.

___

Sisak reported from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Balsamo from Jacksonville, Florida.

Geena Davis Uses Film to Call Out Hollywood’s Gender Bias Issues

Shortly after “Thelma & Louise” was released in 1991 and quickly became a far bigger deal than anyone involved in the film had imagined it would, Geena Davis started hearing the same refrain over and over: “This changes everything.” In other words, the cinematic glass ceiling had been smashed, and women in Hollywood were finally going to get their due, both in front of and behind the camera.

Guess again. Ridley Scott’s modestly budgeted feature about two best friends’ spontaneous bid to break free from lives stifled by noxious men was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, sparking debates among the commentariat, galvanizing and polarizing audiences in strong numbers, and picking up heat in that year’s awards circuit. Much more than just A Buddy Movie for The Ladies, “Thelma & Louise” rose to iconic status, thanks in no small part to Davis’ and co-star Susan Sarandon’s gobsmacking turns as unlikely feminist vigilantes road-tripping their way through 130 minutes of the most unsettling, unapologetic rebuke of patriarchal control to hit the local multiplex. Still, it’s not exactly a spoiler by now that all that buzz and applause didn’t cause a meaningful shift to happen for women, even in the supposedly liberal bubble of Hollywood.

Nearly three decades later, Davis has a much better grasp on why “Thelma & Louise” didn’t really change everything. Nor did “A League of Their Own,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Daughters of the Dust,” or a litany of other films about women, directed by women, taking women seriously as cultural producers and as the subjects of stories worth telling. She also has the hard data, pulled from studies conducted at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, to help her colleagues grasp how the prevailing sense that gender bias is a thing of the past in their industry is dead wrong.

All the better to speak their language, and Davis is doing just that as the executive producer of a new documentary called “This Changes Everything,” in which she and a host of women — including actors Natalie Portman, Tiffany Haddish, Sandra Oh, Jessica Chastain, Meryl Streep, and Taraji P. Henson and directors Kimberly Peirce, Julie Dash and Catherine Hardwicke — make their case for closing the vast gender gap in the movie business. Among the many forms of bias the documentary covers, it also schools viewers about how, historically, female directors weren’t always the tiny minority they are now, a topic taken up by Truthdig contributor Carrie Rickey in her vital five-part series. That Kathryn Bigelow is still the only woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, and that happened nearly a decade ago, is just one indication that it’s well past time to stage an intervention.

That’s where Davis comes in. At a recent screening in Hollywood of “This Changes Everything,” she told the audience at a panel assembled by the Los Angeles Press Club that she chalked some of the problem up to unintentional ignorance, since data about on-screen representations of women, for example, hadn’t previously been so closely tracked and reported. Davis recalled early conversations with colleagues in which, “Every single one of them said, no no no, that’s not a problem anymore — that’s been fixed! And most often they would name a movie with one female character as proof that gender [inequality] was over … I couldn’t find one human being who said, ‘I know, right?’”

As to why anyone who isn’t in show business ought to give much consideration to Hollywood’s gender gap, not to mention the cash to see a documentary about it, director Tom Donahue was ready with an answer. In short, as he told Truthdig at the L.A. Press Club screening, problems in the offscreen world are related to what happens, and doesn’t happen, onscreen. “It’s all related to the same issue,” he said. “I think our problem today is toxic masculinity, and I think it’s propagated by Hollywood movies and by media that’s created all around the world,” he continued. “It’s because the media is created by the patriarchy.”

Peirce also stressed that representation matters. “I think we make art that reflects our experiences in our aspirations of the world, and it has a profound effects on the people view it,” she told Truthdig, “so that’s why it’s so vital that we have authentic, empowering, empathetic images of not only women but people of color, and all people.” Currently, she said, “we’re in the corrective mode, since we’ve all been denied the chance to see reflections of ourselves and make reflections of ourselves.”

Donahue, who started the project before the #MeToo movement began and later joined forces with Davis, thought the solution would look like “50-50” representation on-screen and behind the scenes, for starters. Then, he said, “I think we’ll see real change around the world.”

Below, Geena Davis (third from left) tells panelists (from left) Donahue, Peirce, Hardwicke and moderator Devra Maza how she came to work on the gender bias problem (all videos by Kasia Anderson): 

 

Kimberly Peirce tells Truthdig’s Kasia Anderson why onscreen representation is important:

“This Changes Everything” director Tom Donahue weighs in:

 

 

Trump-McConnell 2020? Senate Leader Glues Self to President

WASHINGTON — It’s not quite “Trump-McConnell 2020,” but it might as well be.

As he runs for reelection, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is positioning himself as the president’s wingman, his trusted right hand in Congress, transformed from a behind-the-scenes player into a prominent if sometimes reviled Republican like none other besides Donald Trump himself.

“In Washington, President Trump and I are making America great again!” he declared at a rally in Kentucky, his voice rising over protesters.

Related Articles











Mitch McConnell Is Single-Handedly Destroying the Senate



by Robert Reich

















GOP Halts Twitter Spending After McConnell's Account Is Locked



by

Other than Democrat Nancy Pelosi — and more recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — no current politician has so quickly become such a high-profile object of partisan scorn. McConnell was heckled last weekend at his home state’s annual “Fancy Farm” political picnic, and protesters outside his Louisville house hurled so many profanities that Twitter temporarily shut down his account for posting video of them online.

Undaunted, he revels in the nickname he’s given himself — the “Grim Reaper,” bragging that he’s burying the House Democrats’ agenda — though he seems stung by one lobbed by opponents, “Moscow Mitch.”

But the Democrats’ agenda includes gun legislation to require background checks that Trump now wants to consider, forcing McConnell to adjust his earlier refusal to do so. The Senate leader has been here before, pushing ahead with a Trump priority that’s unpopular with most Republicans. But this will test both his relationship with the president and his grip on the GOP majority.

All while he’s campaigning to keep his job.

McConnell is even more dependent on Trump’s popularity in Kentucky than on his own, a different political landscape from the one he faced in 2014, before the president took the White House.

“They need each other,” says Scott Jennings, a longtime adviser to McConnell.

The new McConnell strategy shows just how far Trump has transformed the GOP, turning a banker’s-collar-and-cufflinks conservative into a “Fake News!” shouting senator.

Theirs was not an easy alliance in Trump’s first year, and they went a long stretch without talking to each other. But two years on, McConnell has proven a loyal implementer of the president’s initiatives, and Trump no longer assails the senator on Twitter.

Perhaps no issue has drawn the unlikely partners together more than the current reckoning over national gun violence. Republicans, long allied with the National Rifle Association, have resisted stricter laws on firearm and ammunition sales. But the frequency of mass shootings and the grave toll are intensifying pressure to act.

Trump on Friday revived his interest in having Congress take a look at expanding federal background checks and other gun safety laws long pushed by Democrats, insisting he will be able to get Republicans on board. McConnell, in a shift, said he’s now willing to consider those ideas “front and center” when Congress returns in the fall.

Said Trump, “I think I have a greater influence now over the Senate.”

But McConnell doesn’t call himself the Grim Reaper for nothing. He is well known on Capitol Hill for his legislative blocking skills, having stopped much of the Obama administration’s agenda when he first became Senate leader and more recently halting bills coming from the Democratic-controlled House, including one to expand background checks.

“We’ve seen it before,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a tweet after the weekend mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “An awful shooting occurs. @realDonaldTrump expresses interest in helping. Republicans try to get him off the hook with lesser measures. Nothing happens.”

In fact, McConnell and his allies have taken on Trump’s style, lashing out at media and political opponents. When campaign volunteers came under criticism for appearing to choke a cardboard cutout of Ocasio-Cortez at the picnic in a photo circulated online, McConnell allies said the high schoolers were being treated unfairly by opponents trying to maliciously shame them in public.

The shift in McConnell’s strategy is not lost on Democrat Amy McGrath, the former fighter pilot and the leading Democrat hoping to win the party’s nomination to challenge him next fall, her campaign said.

McGrath is telling Kentuckians that McConnell is part of the problem, a long-serving leader who has stood in the way of gun safety, health care and other legislation for years, and hardly the one to fulfill Trump’s promises. Democrats and Republicans say she is expected to attract plenty of fundraising dollars and volunteers in a race that could easily approach $100 million, second only to the presidential contest.

“It almost feels like we have a mini-presidential campaign going on here,” said Jennings.

Kentucky remains a GOP stronghold, and Trump is extraordinarily popular, which is part of the reason McConnell is tying his own political future to the president. But it’s unclear if his is the right strategy for the times.

With a national profile, McConnell’s record is coming under more scrutiny.

A Russian oligarch’s investments in a Kentucky aluminum plant and McConnell’s refusal to allow the Senate to consider a House-passed election security bill have resulted in opponents calling him “Moscow Mitch” following Russia’s 2016 campaign interference. His campaign tries to make light of questions surrounding the shipping business run by the family of his wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary.

The state’s lone Democratic congressman, John Yarmuth, whose district includes liberal Louisville, said McConnell has never been especially popular in Kentucky but has managed to keep winning elections.

“He’s a survivor,” Yarmuth said. “He’s in good shape only because Trump’s at the top of the ticket.”

At the weekend events in Kentucky, McConnell was relishing his Senate post, telling voters that as the only member in congressional leadership not from New York or California, “I’m the guy that sticks up for middle America.”

At breakfast before taking the stage, he said he was ready to take on all comers.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “There’s nothing I like better than engaging these crazy left-wingers and saving this country,” he said. “And we’re going to do precisely that.”

___

Associated Press writer Bruce Schreiner in Louisville contributed to this report.

Who Is Ayn Rand?

“Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed”

A book by Lisa Duggan

In the preface of her new book, “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” New York University professor Lisa Duggan writes that her cultural study of Ayn Rand “is focused on illuminating the ‘how did we get here?’ questions’’ about our current politics, “via analysis and speculation about the role of feeling, fantasy and desire in maintaining political economies.”

Duggan’s clever title suggests a contemporary look at Rand, tracing cultural inroads she paved to the disaster capitalism of these times. (“Mean Girl” refers to the movie—and later Broadway play—“Mean Girls,” about teen girls and their power plays in high school cliques.) Rather, the book is a zoom through political history and Rand biography, in a sort of on-the-one-hand-vs.-the-other way, without delivering cohesive evidence to support the stated inquiry.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Mean Girl” at Google Books.

If “Mean Girl” is an introduction to Rand’s work, it will save readers some time, but Duggan’s cultural analysis is disappointingly thin. For the most part, the book reads like a thesis paper from a survey course, reliant on previous research, ideas, and writing. Thankfully, the author chose not to stretch her study past its 90 pages (plus notes,) in sharp contrast to the voluminous meanderings of her subject.

Early in the third of the book’s seven short sections, Duggan does cover a less-rehashed detail from Rand’s life that provides creepy context to her fiction and philosophy. Rand admired the killer and pedophile William Edward Hickman, and used him as a model for an early fictional character in her first, and unfinished, novel, called “The Little Street.” She drew from his “wonderful sense of living” for her central character Danny Renahan. Mean Girl, indeed. (Rand contended she didn’t admire crimes, only certain exceptional antisocial qualities.)

Duggan says Rand’s core contributions to neoliberal politics are not ideas, and here I agree. However, she calls Rand’s novels—especially “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”—“conversion machines,” and sees their primary power in eroticized capitalism played out through virile heroes and appreciative heroines in lust. Young people can be forgiven for being enthused by the novels’ steamy melodramatics that elevate pure talent and bold nonconformity. But it’s hard to view sex-as-delivery-system as unusual, even if, for its time, it was less veiled in romantic language. (Predating Rand’s surge in notoriety, “Casablanca” wove cynicism, sex and romance to captivate its viewers, but settled on sacrifice as key, not only to the victory of goodness, but to the peace a clean conscience affords.)

Characters like Ellsworth Toohey are recognizable weasel types, who wheedle for position and power, and earn the disdain of readers and Rand’s heroes and heroines alike. So too, Rand’s ambivalent disillusionment with Hollywood, after realizing its studios were not led by firebrands, just box office chasers, has long been shared by many, including those who disparage her ideology. Like the future Fox News, Ayn Rand seized on fractional truths and wound them into diatribes, igniting passions while ignoring disconnections to logic or overarching facts. But as with 24/7 news cycles, there’s not much there (or new).

Duggan references economists and philosophers, such as Alan Greenspan, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who admired Rand and helped promote her thinking. Those who touted Rand may have been foolish, but they were not stupid; she was useful. As with Mitch McConnell, who blathers about responsible government and fairness, many people can discern the truth from his actions or inactions that he hasn’t the slightest interest in responsibility and fairness, much less democracy.

Scathing critics, like William F. Buckley, are also discussed, and Duggan notes that Rand’s popularity waned at times over the decades. But she supersizes Randian influence in what has come to pass politically and economically. The move to radical capitalism took effect slowly, and Rand was often out of sync with political and economic history. (When “The Fountainhead” was released in 1943, most critics rejected it. Eventually, an audience grew, making it a bestseller.) Post-World War II American culture was full of entertainment vehicles such as popular Western movies that served as propaganda for another kind of individualism: progress-oriented, altruistic and good-hearted.

Generally, these powerful movies posed a mythic west notable for heroic individuals who assisted society and commerce through community-building—though they stood outside—without resorting to greed, theft and destruction. Violence came from so-called savages, and heroes only reacted to it, defending the community. Men were macho; women looked longingly at them, fearing for their safety. This romantic exceptionalist myth aligned with Rand’s hatred of communism and Cold War politics, but not the extreme avarice of super-capitalism. (Rand claimed to favor free markets and revile crony capitalism. But ego-drenched individualism of the sort she admired often pairs with the clubs and exceptions made and protected by crony capitalism, which quashes free markets.)

America’s self-perception as reflecting ethical, communal values was still dominant when “Atlas Shrugged” appeared. Duggan writes: “The world of the contemporary United States, the setting of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ has fallen heavily under the sway of collectivist government regulation. The result is civilizational regression, a slide back to more ‘savage,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘primitive,’ or Asiatic modes of life.” (Footnoted to Rand’s journals, edited by David Harriman.)

That world, and John Galt’s Gulch setting, had little in common with the political, economic life of America of 1957. Significant racial and historic injustice notwithstanding, the white middle class—the demographic that Rand and most entertainment targeted—enjoyed strong economic growth and fruits, and its collapse was not imminent. Randian rants, her characters’ lengthy speeches, were as likely to bore readers as create followers. And while her exclusion of nonwhite populations lined up with a consistent current of American racism, her anti-religious, anti-family attitudes held no sway with most citizens, as evidenced by the church-going, baby-booming times.

It wasn’t until the Vietnam era that antiheroic subversions of pop propaganda sifted noticeably into the culture. As personified in hit movies like “The Graduate,” “Easy Rider,” “M*A*S*H” and others, these antiheroes were more disaffected than driven, more brooding than brilliant.

The right-wing accumulation of power since Reagan was more a reaction to youth rebellion and conservatives’ subsequent lost clout in the ’60s and ’70s than a result of Rand’s cultural heft. Sexual freedom was a major cultural outgrowth of the ’60s. Was this connected to Rand, too? That’s doubtful; more likely, it followed access to birth control and the relative freedom that afforded women.

Rand packaged her greed somewhat palatably, enlisting the language of morality. Despite her atheism and promotion of free sex, connecting capitalism and morality proved irresistible to ideologues, and they propelled her as their salesgirl.

Still, the evolutionary trail for today’s apostles of aggressive acquisition points more solidly to the furtive efforts of the right to increase representation throughout the states, and within every branch of government. It took 30-plus years, and steady power consolidation through media and political contributions for the worst inclinations of Rand’s worldview to become “hot” again, and stick. Growth of inequality paralleled the “successes.” (Rand’s resurgent popularity after the 2008 crash was as contradictory and confounding as many of her arguments. Tea partyers and Peter Thiel types make the most incongruous of comrades.)

Though Duggan places Rand’s work as pivotal to the world today, her never-quite-dead writing didn’t change others so much as provide cover for what was desired all along.

After all, the dominant classes in America were greedy from the get-go, stealing and raping people and land, under the guise of creating a democratic land of liberty. As Christopher Hitchens, all smiles and snark, commented in 1996 at the Manhattan Institute, on Rand’s impact on the American right: “I always thought it quaint and rather touching that there is in America a movement that thinks people are not yet selfish enough. …They think that America is already rotten with too much socialism and compassion. It’s so refreshing that there are people who manage to get through their day actually believing that.”

Rand’s ideas and philosophy were guided more by bitter personal experience and exaggeration than reason and rationality—attributes Rand insisted were of the highest value in life. Lacking both reason and rationality, as well as complexity, there is little to grapple with in her work. Objectivism, an Orwellian label she employed to elevate some of America’s destructive tendencies, upends the word “objective” and renders it meaningless.

Famous followers of Rand, some of them inveterate liars, abuse language daily. The explosion of this technique to subvert reality has come through aimed media, repetition and dark money, not Ayn Rand. Without power brokers, her feelings, fantasies and desires would have fully faded from view long ago.

Maxine Waters Puts Corporate Democrats to Shame

Rep. Maxine Waters won praise Friday from critics of the cash-for-access U.S. political system amid reports that some Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee are frustrated at her refusal to raise money from the industry she regulates.

Politico reported that Democrats on the committee have been disappointed with Waters’s decision to focus on consumer protection legislation and Wall Street oversight—the stated purpose of the panel—rather than raising money at fundraisers and through direct contributions from wealthy banks and then doling out that cash to her fellow lawmakers.

Because she ‘has focused the committee’s agenda on consumer protection and Wall Street oversight’ exactly what she said she would do— Democrats complain Waters is slow to spread Wall Street wealth – POLITICO https://t.co/OCPkCWzdEF

— tarell ‘wilding’ (@octarell) August 9, 2019

At least one critic on social media wondered why the news outlet highlighted the Democrats’ displeasure instead of questioning why “Members of Congress [expect] to raise money from those they’re there to regulate.”

WTF is this story, and why isn’t it about Members of Congress expecting to raise money from those they’re there to regulate? https://t.co/zzuPCje9k2

— Matt Gianquinto (@quintoCT) August 9, 2019

“D.C. is sick,” added Jack Mirkinson, deputy editor of Splinter News.

Maxine Waters is apparently prioritizing consumer protection over raking in Wall Street cash…so of course Democrats on her committee are complaining. DC is sick https://t.co/ieBX77fUWz

— Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson) August 9, 2019

While the top Republican on the panel, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), has raised nearly $160,000 for his members, Waters has distributed just $10,000 to Democrats.

But the 15-term California Democrat told the outlet that the lack of funds being distributed throughout the committee’s ranks is deliberate.

“This committee is no longer simply a ‘juice committee,'” Waters told Politico.

Other House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) chairs have spent significant time and energy on raising money for upcoming elections to give their members a better chance of retaining their seats.

Although Waters still accepts corporate PAC money, she argued that working in the interest of voters is primarily what will help representatives to win their elections in 2020—not amassing funds from Wall Street interests who are used to contributing to lawmakers and being treated favorably in Washington in return.

“Waters said her primary focus during the first months of this year has been on organizing the panel and building a record of legislative accomplishments, including those that members can bring home to their districts,” Zachary Warmbrodt reported in Politico.

Under Waters’s leadership, the HFSC has held hearings on the persistent housing crisis in Michigan, state efforts to oversee student loan service companies, and the abuses of the payday loan industry.

The committee has also recently passed bills to make the federal Bank Secrecy/Anti-Money Laundering framework more transparent and efficient and to provide insurance discounts for first-time home buyers.

“We must never lose sight of why we were elected to office,” Waters told Politico. “We were all elected to office to address the public policy needs of our constituents.”

One social media user expressed hope that other committee leaders in Washington would take the same approach to their powerful positions.

Sounds like @RepMaxineWaters is doing a great job. She works for the people, not the special interests. The members in the hard fought districts should use Maxine as an example of how the @HouseDemocrats are working for you, unlike the Republicans.

— Kyle (@WhelchairScienc) August 9, 2019

Is Trump Building a White Ethnostate?

On Saturday, a 21-year-old white man entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, with an automatic rifle and opened fire. By the time he was finished, 20 people were killed and dozens of others were gravely wounded. Two more would die as a result of the injuries they suffered during the carnage.

The suspect left behind a manifesto citing the shooter at a Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque in March as the inspiration for his massacre. Similarly, the document made repeated reference to the “great replacement,” a theory among white nationalists that immigration threatens the demographic future of their race. As “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate” author Alexandra Minna Stern would likely attest, this sudden eruption of violence is part of a larger trend across the West, facilitated in no small part by the presidency of Donald Trump.

In the latest episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” Stern traces the origins of this poisonous ideology with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer. While groups like the Proud Boys are fundamentally racist in nature, they are fueled by misogyny and a broader anxiety about evolving gender roles, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor professor notes. “I would say that the gendered elements of this are, for me, some of the most resounding neofascist elements of what white supremacy is today. Because it’s about traditionalism, it’s about patriarchy and it’s about anti-egalitarianism in its most stark [and] primordial forms.”

They’re also nothing new. Stern acknowledges that contemporary white nationalists are beholden to the eugenicists of the 20th century, as well as such regressive thinkers as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. “What was called race suicide in 1910 would be called white genocide in 2020,” she continues. “So there’s very similar logics at play, and there’s a rehabilitation of these ideas in an attempt to kind of update and repackage them—not always in the most effective way, sometimes quite clumsily—but nonetheless to do that for our current moment.”

For Stern, the fascist threat is much larger than any single American organization or movement. “This is part of a transnational phenomenon, and the alt-right is part of a transnational network,” she concludes. “And I think it’s important to be aware of that, because [it] gives alt-righters energy and gives them points of connection.”

Listen to Stern’s interview with Scheer, or read a transcript of their conversation below.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where of course the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Alexandra Minna Stern. And she’s written a number of books, [she’s a] great scholarly expert, professor of American studies and history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But the two books that I want to talk about today, one that she did about four years ago called Eugenic Nation, and now her most recent book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. And they are in similar subject, or related subject, of this drive to have white supremacy, really, the white ethnostate. And the subtitle is How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination. And for those familiar with the Trump story, we know about the alt-right; we know about Steve Bannon and so forth.

Let me just begin with questioning your title: Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination. Hasn’t the American imagination always been warped on matters of race and white supremacy? 

Alexandra Minna Stern: Yeah, well first, thanks for having me. I’m glad to be on to talk to you about both of the books. And yeah, you make a good point. You know, it always has been warped. And you know, this is a country that’s built on structural and racial inequalities. I think, you know, when you’re talking about a subtitle for a book, you want something that’s catchy and that also captures, really, the sense that–what I wanted to capture with that is that in many ways, the discourse and the language around politics and culture that we are using now has shifted kind of dramatically over the past few years, in terms of what is permissible to say and what is not permissible to say–what kind of new vocabulary is out there that is connected to white nationalism, or what is called the alt-right, or even the alt-lite. So my book is really attuned to thinking about language and words and the power that they have to shape and frame discourse.

I think, you know, last night on the—it was one of the debates of the democratic candidates, and I think it was Sanders who responded to one of the questions and said, “Wait a second. What you’ve just asked me is a republican talking point. I want to turn this around and answer it a different way.” So I think this whole issue of how we’re using language, and how that’s framing how we are allowed to think about things or not think about things, or have a progressive imagination—you know, that’s being squelched by some of this changed discursive terrain. So that was the idea. And then the title, proud boys both refers to an actual organization, but also speaks to the male chauvinism of the alt-right. And the ethnostate speaks to the racism and the xenophobia of the alt-right.

So I wanted to put those two pieces together, the misogyny and the racism, and flag them both at once. Much of the literature on the alt-right has focused primarily on racism and xenophobia, which of course is really important, and there’s good works out there that are unpacking that and allowing us to understand it. But as a feminist scholar, you know, I kind of put that—let’s focus on women, let’s focus on gender, let’s focus on the role of patriarchy in shaping what this aggrieved, white male entitlement looks like. And so that was important for me to have it in the title, because I think it’s an integral piece, and we’re not going to be able to really counter this unless we take that on as well. 

RS: You know, it’s interesting. I want to pick on one aspect of this, because some people would think, oh, this is an old issue. But what you make clear is the whole Trump phenomenon is an extension of a persistent idea—that’s why I was talking about the subtitle—a persistent idea that this is basically a northern European extension of culture, civilization, of whiteness, and that’s what makes America great. And to the degree that others get in on the act, wherever they come from, that dilutes it.

Now of course, we know the reality is quite the opposite; immigration, you know, from all over the world, obviously has nourished the country. But I want to pick on one person that you discuss in your book, Jordan Peterson. And the reason for that is that his name comes up in a lot of polite circles that I visit. And he seems to be more acceptable in terms of his—what is the right label, white chauvinism, or—than others. So could you just—because people might have heard of Jordan Peterson, he gets huge audiences and speaking fees. And he’s somebody you discuss in your book. 

AMS: Yeah. I mean, he’s a very interesting person in this constellation of characters that make up the alt-lite and alt-right. Jordan Peterson is not interested, first and foremost, in pushing for white nationalism, and has spoken out against certain types of authoritarianism. So I’m not trying to put everyone in the same bucket in this book. But what Jordan Peterson does is he endorses a set of rigid gender binaries, a very strict understanding of traditionalism and patriarchy. And his thinking revolves around binaries and what we might call genetic or biological essentialism. So he thinks that due to biology, women should play one role, men should play another role; due to biology, whites are smarter than blacks, Asians are often smarter than whites, and there is a hierarchy in terms of [inaudible], or you know, the general factor of intelligence.

Those ideas and that kind of binary thinking is part of the bedrock of what is warping the American imagination. And this kind of alt-right, alt-lite thinking, it’s antithetical to some of the ideas that we might support in terms of thinking of equality, opportunity and a kind of a more expansive American society. He’s interesting not only because if you unpack his ideas, you know, that’s what you get to—but he has been mentioned by those who are drawn to the alt-right as someone who has red-pilled them.

That means that they have found him, often on YouTube or on a social media platform, maybe they read his book—and the ideas resonate with [them]. It’s often younger white men, but not exclusively, who follow him. And they feel that, you know, his proclamations about order over chaos and traditional gender roles really make sense to them, and allow them to kind of manage their world and put it in some kind of a cohesive understanding. But if you follow his thinking along, it leads to things like, certainly, attacks on leftism, which is seen as corrupting American and Canadian society, universities; certainly anti-feminism.

And he’s someone for whom transphobia, and real kind of discomfort and hostility towards trans folks and anyone who is kind of gender nonbinary, that’s kind of core to his thinking. And again, that gets back to why he is so focused on these dichotomies. 

RS: Well, I just want to jump in about a false consciousness here for the white male. And what you have is a situation in which the problem is that many white males do not register successfully in today’s economy. You can say as a proposition they’re smarter, but there seem to be a lot of people who can come from India or China and play a very significant role in Silicon Valley and the new wired world and so forth. And increasingly, you know, the slogan used to be “free, white, and 21 and you got it made in America”—you know, that’s not true. That, in fact, there’s a desire in the high-tech industry in particular, and also in manufacturing, that goes abroad to find other workers; that in fact, you know, maybe the white male is not the indispensable ingredient to economic success.

And the false consciousness is one that says: You are, but you’ve been excluded by identity politics, by—right? By all this language that came out of the university. And so, ironically, they’re saying that the white male no longer has a level playing field on which to compete. Isn’t that the sort of nut of the whole thing? 

AMS: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve summed it up, you know, very well. And that really captures that sense of white male aggrieved entitlement. I’d add to that cisgendered white male aggrieved entitlement. And feeling both that they are being left behind as a society that they increasingly don’t recognize moves forward, and that all of these new things coming down the pike—such as diversity. Which, you know, you see endorsements of racial and ethnic diversity in a range of different areas in society, including marketing and television, and also legal dimensions—although that’s more contested, we have to unpack that at greater length. And they feel like they are being, you know, erased. And, in fact, that’s one of the great concerns of white nationalists, is they’re being erased, whites will go extinct, and the great replacement is afoot, both in the United States and in Europe, and also in Australia and New Zealand and a few other places.

So indeed, I mean, I think that that is certainly part of it. And you know, it is—the demographics of the United States is changing. We are becoming an ethnoracial plurality in different parts of the country at different rates. So in California, where you are, California is already an ethnoracial plurality state. Texas is; a few others are heading that way. It’ll take longer in other parts of the country. But that kind of sense of demographic crisis and, you know, ringing the bells of kind of this demographic devastation, is one of the paramount issues for white nationalists.

And it’s something that, if you look at how do people end up kind of allying with these movements, it can start by watching a Jordan Peterson video—I mean, it doesn’t have to; it could end there. But often you can start going down the rabbit hole of these ideas and end up in kind of a very ugly place that we would recognize as racist and xenophobic, not to mention sexist and anti-leftist and the rest of it. So that’s kind of the construction in a nutshell.

RS: And fascist, as well. Because after all—

AMS: Well, indeed. And I would say that the gendered elements of this are, for me, some of the most resounding neofascist elements of what white supremacy is today. Because it’s about traditionalism, it’s about patriarchy and it’s about anti-egalitarianism in its most kind of stark, and in their eyes, primordial, forms. 

RS: So I want to get at the—why it works. I mean, you know, I’m not going to hold Trump responsible for all of this, but he is the president of the most powerful country the world has ever seen. And he can change a lot of things—trade policy, he can go to war, he can do a lot of stuff. And it seems to me the critical issue is the identification of your well-being with your place in the economy. And if you think about it, you know, say in terms of trade and so forth, if everybody’s making out—and I’m going to connect this to the debate in the Democratic Party, with what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I think, are saying—is it should not be a win-lose situation.

If we can do well by all of our people, then you know, you’re not left out. And it’s only if you think that there’s some ego drive—and I want to connect it with your first book on eugenics. Because as I say, that’s sort of always been with us. And I don’t want to mis-characterize your book, but as I understand it, it basically was to take the superior white male gene—right?—and make it be dominant by sterilizing, by eliminating others. Whether it was killing Native Americans or sterilizing Latinos and so forth. So could you connect your two books, because I’m trying to get listeners to be familiar with the, sort of a part of—the body of your work, actually. 

AMS: Yeah, well, thank you for that invitation. I would say one thing is, you know, there tends to be an assumption that economic resentment breeds racial resentment and xenophobia. But some of the more interesting work—especially that’s come out in light of the 2016 election, and some of the patterns that were at play there—by political scientists and survey researchers who’ve looked at this, actually shows that racial resentment is first and foremost. And that, in a way, is—the economic resentment is secondary to that.

So we’ve seen a shift where racial resentment is really a driving force in political decision-making, electoral politics—now, that’s been brewing for a while; it’s something that’s been happening over the past 30 or 40 years–really begin to intensify under Obama, and then was so starkly manifested in the 2016 election.

And so one of the questions is, how is that going to play out in the 2020 election? And if Trump’s most recent comments about, you know, sending people back where they came from, and a whole range of other things he said, including his associating Baltimore with, you know, racial associations of Baltimore with disease and so on and so forth—it’s likely that that is going to continue to play out. So that’s one thing that I think it’s really important to keep in mind.

In terms of connections between the two books, you know, one of the reasons I wrote my most recent book is because I was aware by 2015—I had kept tabs on some of these neo-Nazi, white supremacist organizations. I was aware that there was a continuous thread of thinking around things like race and intelligence, or gender and intelligence. You know, these ideas have been around for quite a long time, and there is an element of kind of like, you know, the old wine in new bottles type of phenomenon.

But as I was getting to know, you know, this kind of motley crew of writers and social media platforms, webzines associated with what came to be called the alt-right, I realized that eugenic ideas were first and foremost among them. So, really, ideas about, as you were mentioning before, breeding. You know, who should be part of the white body politic. And when that’s driven by a white racist logic, that means that immigration should be stopped so certain people can’t come in. And breeding, you know, should be controlled so that certain people will reproduce more and other people will not reproduce at all.

Which obviously resonates with, it’s the same thinking that was at play in the early 20th century with the eugenics movement and the passage of sterilization laws. Which, as you know, in California was a really big deal; over 20,000 people were sterilized in California in the 20th century. So that’s one thing. But not only were these ideas embraced—and if you look at, like, the Christchurch manifesto, the first three sentences that are just repeated are—it’s all about, it says something, I don’t want to amplify what he wrote. But really, the focus is on reproduction, it’s on breeding, it’s on control of reproduction of certain groups over other groups with a white supremacist logic.

And you will find that white nationalists, and others—kind of even who are on the, straddling the kind of alt-right—tend to embrace this, eugenics ideas and also eugenic authors. So they’re often paying homage to people like Madison Grant, who wrote The Passing of the Great Race, or Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote The Rising Tide of Color, and other books, which were all about—you know, it’s the same language.

It’s “hordes,” “onslaughts,” of brown people, of black people, of immigrants, of racial others; it needs to be stopped to protect America. Because you know, what was called race suicide in 1910 would be called white genocide in 2020. So there’s very similar logics at play, and there’s a rehabilitation of these ideas in an attempt to kind of update them and repackage them—not always in the most effective way, sometimes quite clumsily—but nonetheless, to do that for our current moment. 

RS: OK, we’re going to return in a minute, because this is fascinating. And I’m talking to Alexandra Stern, and we’re talking about both of her books. One, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate—current alt-right description in great detail, much better than I’ve seen anywhere else. I applaud you, although I don’t envy you for spending a lot of time on these websites, but you’ve been willing to do it. And the other book that I want to return to right now is Eugenic Nation, because I think that’s where you have the seeds of this sort of white arrogance. And we’ll be right back after we take a break. [omission for station break]

I’m back with professor, University of Michigan professor of American studies and history, Alexandra Minna Stern, the author of two books. And one is Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, the alt-right now, which is very important because of the Trump administration and what have you. And the book that I think shows some of the antecedents of this, Eugenic Nation. And just when we broke off the discussion, you were talking about this history of idea of the right people should give birth, and they are white, and so forth—breeding.

And it is uncomfortable to bring up the fact that that also had a lot to do with the birth control movement, and even Margaret Sanger. I know, you know, it’s not a simple connection. But you see it in other policies; you see it in welfare reform, the wrong people are having children, you know, and so we have to discourage that. You saw that—and it’s not just white people, because after all, they didn’t want the Irish—I assume they’re white—but they didn’t want Catholics to breed, they wanted Protestants to breed.

So why don’t you just introduce a really ugly aspect of America—which came to, by the way, be adopted by the Nazis—that the wrong people are being born? And that leads to a real contempt for people around the world who are of a different color, and therefore you don’t mind killing them in wars and so forth, because their life is clearly expendable; in fact, should be curtailed. 

AMS: Yeah, there’s so much to talk about there. I mean, I think just your last point—you know, really, who has the authority to decide whose life is worth living, and who is likely to have quality of life, and quantity of life as well. I mean, those are kind of general justice issues, bioethical issues, that are talked about today in the context of new genetic technologies and things like that. And we could have a whole long discussion about that as well.

But going back to the early 20th century, when the eugenics movement took off, you know, you’re right: The ideas were, you know, the kind of reigning ideas and frameworks were about who should be breeding and who shouldn’t be breeding, who should come into the body politic and who should be barred from the body politic. And these decisions were being made by white elites.

Let’s just take California; we’re talking about, for the most part, white male Protestant transplants. And that’s something that is actually kind of ironic, is if you look at, for example, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University; John R. Haynes, who’s a big name in Los Angeles—these are men who were physicians and professionals and elites who came to California, often from the East Coast or the Midwest, and wanted to implant their own idea of what this new Mediterranean utopia would look like. And it would be one in which there, in the ideal world, there was white purity, and in which Mexicans and the Mexican past would be purged.

And so that played out in the early 20th century in California, and was kind of interwoven into deportation policies, into the ways in which sterilization was carried out in state institutions, and in racist propaganda that was common among groups like the Commonwealth Club of California. They probably don’t like to recognize that today, but they were a hotbed of eugenic racism in the 1920s and 1930s. So that was very much, that was very much at play then. 

RS: You know, what’s so fascinating about this is clearly, I mean, you know, I like white people; I guess I am one of ’em. But the whole idea that we are superior, white men are superior in a way, is just contradicted by human history. And also that somehow, that white people will take us in the right direction; I mean, the fact is the greatest mayhem in the world came in Germany, with the most well-educated, you know, solid white people.

And yet they embraced a notion of eugenics which caused them to become the most primitive, brutal, ugliest regime we’ve ever seen in modern history. And so it’s interesting how these ideas cross over. They start out saying, “We’re enlightened, and we’re going to breed more enlightened people, and you’ll go to the right schools,” and so forth, and you end up being savage in your policies. You bomb people at random, kill millions of them because they’re of the wrong color.

And I want to get back to a point I raised at the very beginning, and that is that maybe this whole identification of success with the economy—I know you said the order is a bit different. But I, you know, we’re getting it now with trade policy and everything else. What if it turns out that Chinese workers, “yellow” workers, who when they came to California were not allowed to be citizens—we had the [Chinese] Exclusion Act—were not allowed to breed, were not allowed to marry, were not allowed to do anything because they were considered inferior and dangerous and so forth. What if it turns out that this large Chinese population can produce brilliant doctors and physicists and be more effective?

One way you could approach it—or India, or Africa, or any other place—you could say, great. Welcome to the dance. We’ll all live better, right? We’ll benefit from your discoveries and your productivity and so forth. And the sickness of racism is a denial of the value of others, even when they help us. Right? It’s, if it didn’t come from white people, it’s somehow inherently defective. Isn’t that what the alt-right is all about? 

AMS: Yeah, I mean, I would say that those ideas are shot through the alt-right to a great extent. And certainly the, you know, aspect of dehumanizing certain people because of their national origin, the color of their skin.

And I just want to go back to a point that I meant to make earlier, which is that you were talking about the connection between Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement. And there is, at points throughout time, noticeable manifestations of eugenic thinking in white liberalism. So it’s not like white liberals should be let off the hook, because some of these ideas, for example, about population policy—what is the right-sized family, who should be targeted for birth control and so on—I mean, you can find some of those same ideas, not in the extreme form that you would find with the kind of eugenic sterilization brigades, but you could find it in Johnson’s policies in the 1960s around kind of new society and things like that.

So I think it’s important to keep that in mind, and that’s also important because one of the things, I think, that I really tried to do in the book, in terms of understanding the alt-right, is not to sensationalize it, but also not to trivialize it. So to find that middle ground, so that we can really kind of deconstruct it on its own terms. So you know, I think that there are definite points of connection between the eugenics of the early 20th century and some of the ideas that are happening today.

And one other point I’d like to add in is that it’s interesting to look back at—so 32 states passed eugenic sterilization laws in the U.S. in the early 20th century—from 1907 to 1937—with Indiana being the first and Georgia being the last. But none of those laws, unlike what was passed in Germany, targeted specific racial, religious, or ethnic groups. They all were couched in the language of disability. So it was about people who were feeble-minded; it was about people who were mentally defective, about people who were likely to breed unfit progeny. But that language of disability became kind of, was refracted, then, for the enactment of racism and sexism.

So I think that another key point about studying the history of eugenics is if one really wants to unpack it and to understand it, it’s definitely connected to disability history, and kind of righting those wrongs as part of what is disability justice. And that is often left out of these discussions, and it’s interesting to think back.

You know, one of the many of the kind of unpleasant things that Trump has done, one was kind of making fun, in a kind of a body-language way, of someone—I think, you know, I think his presumption was the person had a physical disability, perhaps cerebral palsy or something like that. And that was just one instance of how he is demeaning a person with a disability, and there are, I’m sure, there are probably other instances as well. But that’s not just something to be seen in isolation. That’s part of this kind of bigger package, from my perspective at least.

RS: Yeah, and people of his family origin—and my own; my father was from Germany—killed—their government; their government, they couldn’t control it anymore, but Hitler was elected—their government deliberately killed anybody with physical disability that, you know, that they cared to. But I want to push this, we only have a few minutes, say 10 minutes left, five minutes left.

Let me just push this a little further. I think what your books, your two books—and I would really recommend that people get ahold of them—they should be the basis of a discussion. Because if we don’t understand that America has not always been great, that there is actually a sickness as part of the great westward expansion, a contempt that begins with contempt for the people who lived here, who we killed, and didn’t want to see them breed, and thought they were incapable. And moving on to the contempt for the slaves that we brought here, and so forth. There’s been a sickness to this whole thing, you know.

And it shows itself in two categories that come to mind right away. One is the prison population. [inaudible words] Enhancing people’s skills and so forth, improving their education, making up for a poor education—no. We were going to punish them. That was certainly true with the welfare reform. And the main thing we’re going to do is to get them to not have children.

So we’ve got this big war that the statistics were all wrong based on supposedly an explosion of teenage pregnancy and what have you. And you’re right, those two programs had considerable liberal support. Also, somebody like Ehrlich and the whole population bomb, you know, and the whole idea that the wrong people were having children. And I think that’s the thing that connects the alt-right—your second, you’ve written other books, but the two that we’re talking about, the eugenics book and the alt-right book—they’re based on an idea that there’s only one set of people that are really worth preserving and caring about, and the rest are an inconvenience. And those are the nonwhites. 

AMS: Well, I would say that that speaks to one of the issues that I’ve been trying, tried to track in the book, which is the extent to which this thinking is creeping into what we might call the mainstream. It’s not exactly clear what the mainstream media is these days, there’s so many media echo chambers.

But there has been an alt-right creep, both in terms of on the one hand, you know, the recognition of the language or even just knowing what some of these words are. And some of them are acronyms and some of them are very much like memes. So, it’s not necessarily even words, it’s memes that are circulating. So, think for example of Pepe the Frog and what happened with the alt-right seizing upon that meme, and you know, kind of playing with it and twisting it around and making it kind of one of their mascots for the upsurge, and the effect that they had on the 2016 election.

Now, since then, the guy who, the artist who designed that has actually won a copyright battle, I think against The Daily Stormer that was using it. And he won that, so they’re not allowed to use it anymore. Now, stuff proliferates all the time on social media, and I guess that’s one thing that I, in addition to thinking about the alt-right creep and really, like, keeping track of it. So we need to keep tabs on it, and we need to be aware of the way in which this language is being used, and the issues are being framed, so that we can reframe them.

And I say “we” here in terms of, you know, progressive Americans who embrace a multicultural vision, a multiracial vision—reclaim them for the society that we want instead of always being on the defensive, or having them creep up on us, and then we’re in a situation where we’ve kind of surrendered that space. And so that seems to me, that’s something that’s very important.

And another thing about the alt-right that I learned from writing this book is that yes, it’s—to a great extent, as we were talking about before, there is the phenomenon of old wine in new bottles. But the social media terrain has changed the way things are done, and the way in which ideas and memes circulate. And have just—you know, it’s a different media ecosystem these days. And we, I think as both scholars and journalists, we really need to understand it, and understand the kind of like twisted and unpredictable ways in which it can work. That’s one thing.

And the other thing is that, you know, the alt-right—we’ve talked about the U.S., and a little bit about Nazi Germany, and the context of history. But you know, where are we in 2019? We’re in a world where there are rising authoritarian and national populist movements around the globe. And so the alt-right is, you know, one of many in that regard. It’s not as successful politically as, you know, kind of sister or analogous movements in places like Italy, or for example what’s happening in Poland these days. Even with the rise of groups like, you know, the democrats, the Swedish democrats, and the National Front in France.

So I just—this is part of a transnational phenomenon, and the alt-right is part of a transnational network. And I think it’s important to be aware of that, because that is—you know, that both gives it energy, and—gives alt-righters energy, and gives them points of connection. And it also raises really important questions about where are we heading, you know, writ large as humans, as we kind of barrel towards the later years of the 21st century and are facing things like climate change and refugee dislocation and all those kinds of issues.

I just like to have that really big-picture, transnational scope to this, because I think you can’t understand the emergence of the alt-right without putting it in that broader frame. 

RS: You know, just in sort of wrapping it up, let me just suggest that one problem—well, you know more about this than I do—is what we mean by the male ego. Because it would seem to me if you didn’t have a particularly screwed-up idea that you have to be central to your family, to the world, and so forth—that’s sort of the A-male personality—you could enjoy the success of others. Right?

If it turns out, whatever country in the world, they make good inventions, they deal with medical problems, they make better products, and we live in a multinational world economy—we’d all benefit from that. And that goes to climate change. If they could figure out better ways of doing solar, for example, in China—you know, we’d benefit from it. Because after all, the Chinese are polluting the atmosphere more effectively than almost anybody else by virtue of their population, their dependence on coal.

So what really, the sickness here, is that male ego, that idea that if you’re not central to the whole human experience, then you’re missing out and you’re a failure. And I think it goes to this dependence on your place in an economy which is unrealistic. White males will simply not be, by virtue of numbers alone, the indispensable ingredient to human progress. They never were, but they certainly visibly will not be that. Whether we talk about the internet world, health science, what have you. And it seems to me your theme here has come up against that.

And when you try to make the white male indispensable, you get into this sickness of sterilization, eugenics, and so forth. Is that not the real warning? And therefore, if that’s true, what’s happening in America or in the other countries is not an accident, and it’s not an exception. And I would disagree with you only on one thing: It seems to me the alt-right has been more successful in America than anywhere else. Because we are the most powerful nation in the world, and we do have a president who seems wedded to the idea that the white male is very, very special, is enlightened, is our savior, and has to be listened to.

AMS: Well, I would say that in terms of the circulation of the ideas, and this reverberation effect that Trump’s tweets have, for example, you know, across the country, and the way in which they—you know, he has thrown dog whistles to the wind, and is just embracing unabashed racism. I would say in that sense, yes, there has been alt-right creep. There has been, you know, in—I don’t like to use the word “success,“ but they’ve been effective to some extent.

Although I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily so consciously designed or choreographed; it’s a kind of amalgamation of a bunch of different things that have come together. What I was referring to more is in terms of actually—because we have, you know, we don’t have a parliamentary system in this country. You know, you now have the alternative for Germany—I don’t remember the exact number, but you know, holding I think it’s like 15 percent of the seats, you know, in the German government, you know, as representatives. And you find, you have similar things at play in Italy, you know, with, I think it’s Salvini, and certainly what’s going on in Poland. So I would say on the level of kind of like political representation and political leadership, and more across the board.

Think of Steve King, for example. Now, that was like, you know, a very mealy-mouthed censure that the republicans gave him. They stripped him of his committees—I don’t know if he’s, he might have been reassigned to them by now, I can’t quite remember. But you know, basically, he was such a white nationalist in his tweets, and he was so out of control, that they had to put their foot down. I don’t think they—maybe some of them cared, but I don’t think they really cared that much. But they knew they had to do something. So I don’t know.

It depends on how you define what has been effective. What I would say is that, you know, I’m very concerned going into—I’m very concerned with where things are right now, if you look at what’s happening on the U.S.-Mexico border, and you think of the kind of racial logics of building an ethnostate, and how those are kind of playing out on the U.S.-Mexico border, in terms of how populations and people are being treated, how families are being separated.

But I’m very concerned going into the 2020 election, because of the ways in which political discourse and culture have shifted, things have become so ugly. And yes, you have, you know, Trump’s tweets, and you have a presence of these ideas and these groups that some people think have kind of fallen apart post-Charlottesville, but I would say not. Not at all.

And in fact, you know, there was kind of a reckoning among those groups after Charlottesville, but in a way, that kind of debacle helped some of them figure out how to organize more effectively. And so it would be really naive to assume that that was enough to kind of—you know, a few sentences, a few jail sentences, a few deplatformings is going to be enough to get rid of these groups. No, that’s not the case.

RS: And that is discussed in great detail in your book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. The author is Alexandra Stern, a professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan. And her previous book that we’ve been discussing, also very important, Eugenic Nation. The two of them, I think, form indispensable reading if you really want to understand why we have this persistent strain of racial madness in the country. And it has its intellectual pretensions that appeal to, evidently, a fairly wide audience.

And a shout-out to Peggy Watson at Michigan Public Radio for engineering this on their end. And on our end at KCRW, we had Kat Yore and Chuck P engineering the program. The producer is Joshua Scheer. And this is Robert Scheer. Back next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

Michael Brown’s Father Seeks New Investigation Into Killing

CLAYTON, Mo. — On the fifth anniversary of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, his father is urging the top St. Louis County prosecutor to reopen the investigation into the white police officer who fatally shot the black and unarmed 18-year-old.

Michael Brown Sr. spoke Friday outside the St. Louis County Justice Center.

“Justice has not been served,” Brown, 41, said as he was surrounded by about three dozen supporters. “My son deserved to live a full life. But a coward with a badge … chose not to value his life.

“My son was murdered in cold blood, with no remorse and no medical treatment.”

Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, St. Louis County’s first black prosecutor, took office in January after his stunning defeat of seven-term incumbent Bob McCulloch.

McCulloch drew criticism for his handling of the investigation into the Aug. 9, 2014, shooting. Detractors accused McCulloch of guiding the grand jury to its decision, announced three months later, not to indict Darren Wilson.

The U.S. Department of Justice under then-President Barack Obama also declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November 2014.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Bell would not say if the case may be reopened but said his office “is doing everything we can to understand the underlying issues that contributed to the tragic death of Michael Brown.”

The statement said Bell’s office is working with police “to implement policies and reforms that meaningfully address those issues, and help this community and this region heal.”

Bell also is forming a special unit within his office to look at officer-involved shootings and potential cases of wrongful convictions.

Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, also has urged Bell to reopen the case.

Brown and a friend were walking down the middle of Canfield Drive when Wilson told them to move to the sidewalk. An exchange of words led to a fight inside Wilson’s SUV. Brown got out and began to ran, then turned around to face the officer.

Wilson told investigators that he shot Brown — who was 6 feet, 4 inches tall and 290 pounds (131 kilograms) — in self-defense. Some people in the Canfield Green apartment complex near the shooting initially claimed Brown had his hands up in surrender, but the grand jury found no evidence to confirm that.

The shooting led to weeks of protests that included looting and violent confrontations between demonstrators and police officers, many in riot gear and with military-style weapons. Protests escalated again after the grand jury announcement on Nov. 24, 2014. Wilson resigned days after the announcement.

While the Justice Department declined to indict Wilson , it issued a report citing racial prejudice in the Ferguson Police Department and a municipal court system that made money through court fines and legal fees, costs largely borne by black residents. A consent agreement signed in 2016 requires significant reforms.

Bell, 44, is among a wave of progressive prosecutors elected in recent years. His office seeks alternatives to incarceration when possible, such as some non-violent drug crimes. He has ended prosecution of most marijuana possession cases and reduced use of cash bail.

Bell would face no restrictions in re-examining Brown’s death for potential murder charges. Wilson was never charged and tried, so there is no double-jeopardy. There is no statute of limitations on filing murder charges.

It would be unusual for a prosecutor to reopen an old case that’s been so thoroughly examined, but not unheard of. A Philadelphia prosecutor initially declined to charge actor Bill Cosby with sexual assault, but a new prosecutor was elected and Cosby was charged and convicted.

The Climate Crisis Is Coming for Your Food

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

The sources of the climate emergency are often framed with regard to electricity generation and transportation, while the impact of global heating through burning of fossil fuels is of discussed with regard to extreme weather and sea level rise.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just issued a Report that looks especially at land – as both a generator of greenhouse gases and as the object of climate changes. The news is bad.

It’s getting hot in here.

About 25% of greenhouse gases are emitted by human agriculture. That means we could take our grids 100% green and all drive EVs powered from wind and sun, and if we don’t fix agriculture we’d still be putting out nearly billions of metric tons of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) a year and boiling the earth.

Still, obviously, most of our effort has to be devoted to eliminating the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural gas, since they produce the lion’s share of global heating. We can’t save the earth by skipping a hamburger if we drive in a gasoline-fueled car to a vegetarian restaurant with the air conditioning blasting (the electricity for which is produced by a coal plant).

“Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) activities accounted for around 13% of CO2, 44% of methane (CH4), and 82% of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from human activities globally during 2007-2016, representing 23% (12.0 +/- 3.0 GtCO2e yr-1) of total net anthropogenic emissions of GHGs21 (medium confidence). The natural response of land to human-induced environmental change caused a net sink of around 11.2 GtCO2 yr-1 during 2007-2016 (equivalent to 29% of total CO2 emissions) (medium confidence); the persistence of the sink is uncertain due to climate change (high confidence).”

That is, vegetation and land also reabsorb some (a minority) of carbon dioxide emissions. The balance between greenhouse gas emissions and their absorption going forward is hard to predict. The permafrost could emit a lot of such gases as it thaws. The bottom line is that we need to create more carbon sinks with forestry and best-practice land use, but there is no guarantee that we will, and nature won’t take care of the problem alone.

People are affecting 70% of the land on earth that isn’t covered with ice. We’re wasting a quarter to a third of all the food we produce, and we produce it in high-carbon ways. Since 1960 we’ve increased the global production of food by 1/3, but at the cost of substantial and unsustainable degradation of the world’s ecosystems, with large numbers of habitats and species annihilated.

We’re actually destroying the soil that feeds us at alarming rates, with tillage degrading the soil 100 times faster than it can form, and one fourth of all the ice-free land on earth is now being degraded by human beings.

On top of all that, the greenhouse gases we are spewing into the atmosphere at the tune of billions of metric tons per year are causing desertification:

“The annual area of drylands in drought has increased, on average by slightly more than 1% per year, with large inter-annual variability. In 2015, about 500 (380-620) million people lived within areas which experienced desertification between the 1980s and 2000s.”

A rate of 1% increase of desertification per year every year is extremely alarming. That stuff builds up over time.

Desertification doesn’t affect everyone equally:

“In some dryland areas, increased land surface air temperature and evapotranspiration and decreased precipitation amount, in interaction with climate variability and human activities, have contributed to desertification. These areas include Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of East and Central Asia, and Australia.”

East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are two of the more populous regions in the world, and Africa’s population is expected to quadruple over the next century. All those new human beings in Africa are going to run right up against limits on agricultural production that are being produced in part by the climate emergency, which spells trouble for everyone. Likewise, East Asia has a lot of mouths to feed.

And that problem of 1/4 of the land on earth being degraded by humans is going to get worse as a result of the climate crisis. Hurricanes, extreme precipitation and flooding will rip the topsoil in some areas. Rising sea levels will eat away at arable land along the coast. In other regions, the earth will turn to a dustbowl and fly away:

“Climate change can exacerbate land degradation processes (high confidence) including through increases in rainfall intensity, flooding, drought frequency and severity, heat stress, dry spells, wind, sea-level rise and wave action, permafrost thaw with outcomes being modulated by land management. Ongoing coastal erosion is intensifying and impinging on more regions with sea level rise adding to land use pressure in some regions (medium confidence).”

What can we do? The IPCC says we can do things with immediate impact, and things with long-term impact:

“Examples of response options with immediate impacts include the conservation of high-carbon ecosystems such as peatlands, wetlands, rangelands, mangroves and forests. Examples that provide multiple ecosystem services and functions, but take more time to deliver, include afforestation and reforestation as well as the restoration of high-carbon ecosystems, agroforestry, and the reclamation of degraded soils (high confidence).”

Some news outlets are leading with “eat less meat.” That might help a little, and it may even be better for your health, but it isn’t the main gist of what the IPCC is saying.

The main takeaway from the IPCC reports is that we need a global emergency action plan to stop fossil use. We also need to stop destroying natural carbon sinks (which absorb CO2), and indeed, we should expand them.

Joe Biden’s Latest Gaffes Raise New Questions About His Mental Fitness

Former Vice President Joe Biden provoked alarm and outrage after telling a largely minority audience in Iowa that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” the most galling in a series of gaffes the presumptive 2020 Democratic frontrunner committed on the campaign trail on Thursday alone.

Appearing to recognize that he, mistakenly or not, equated poor children with minority children, Biden added after a pause, “Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”

“Yikes,” said one online commenter, summing up a common reaction to Biden’s remarks. Notably, it was also the reaction of Andrew Clark, President Donald Trump’s rapid response director for his 2020 reelection campaign who pounced on the comment.

Biden in Iowa: “Poor kids are just as smart as white kids.”

Yikes.

pic.twitter.com/opMbfAZOnA

— Tania Singh (@TwinklingTania) August 9, 2019

Trump’s “war room” seizing upon Biden’s remarks heightened concerns that the former Vice President’s propensity to misspeak could hand ammunition to Trump and the right-wing media.

“If Democrats nominate Biden, he could end up out-gaffeing Trump in the general election campaign,” tweeted Intercept columnist Mehdi Hasan.

Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall called Biden’s comments “embarrassing” and said the former Vice President is a “walking gaffe machine.”

Biden misspoke on several other occasions during campaign events in Iowa on Thursday.

During a speech at the Iowa State Fair, the former Vice President said “we choose truth over facts,” sparking confusion on social media.

Oops: Biden says “we choose truth over facts” pic.twitter.com/bkohPsOmJC

— Natasha Korecki (@natashakorecki) August 8, 2019

Biden also mistakenly referred to former British Prime Minister Theresa May as Margaret Thatcher. CNN reporter Daniel Dale noted on Twitter that Thursday night was the second time Biden has committed that misstep since May.

In response to Biden’s series of gaffes, commentators raised serious concerns about Biden’s mental acuity and fitness to be the Democratic nominee.

“Someone who is losing their ability to think and speak is not the best person for the job,” tweeted Parker Molloy, editor-at-large for Media Matters for America.