Chris Hedges's Blog, page 228

Lies Liberals Tell Themselves About the Second Amendment

You’ll have heard it said by many liberals and even progressives that the Second Amendment centers on arming militias in a post-colonial America. But the reality behind the legal statute that enshrined gun rights in the Constitution is more nuanced, and far more sinister. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes in her book, “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” the arming of state militias (which ultimately became the National Guard) was already noted elsewhere in the Constitution, so why was there a need to stipulate the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights, which pertains to individuals? That’s because, according to Dunbar-Ortiz, the Second Amendment can be traced directly back to settler colonialism.

“Basically, the Second Amendment is about killing Indians, taking their land and, increasingly, slave patrols,” Dunbar-Ortiz tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” The author lays out the genocidal genealogy of the right to bear arms, and explains that, at its root, it ensured the ability of white men to oppress people of color in order to steal or keep stolen land, and to control slaves through slave patrols. To top it off, she goes on to argue, our current police forces are essentially just modern-day slave patrols.

So why, she asks, do liberals, including her own representative, Nancy Pelosi, insist on the erroneous idea that the Second Amendment stems from the outdated need to arm militias? According to Scheer, the reason is quite simple.

Related Articles











7 Racist Exclusions that Reveal America's Ugly Side



by

“[Political leaders] have a theory that works for them, because it does not force an examination of the ugly aspect of American history that is a settler colonialism—that slavery was the norm, that destroying indigenous people was the norm,” Scheer says.

This lack of honest examination of U.S. history, along with American myths about “cowboys and Indians” that are still perpetuated, are the foundation of the violent, gun-obsessed society that constitutes America today. It holds liberals and even progressives back from an effective approach to gun control, and it may be what inspired D.H. Lawrence, whom Dunbar-Ortiz quotes, to write, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Listen to the full discussion between Dunbar-Ortiz and Scheer as they talk about how this American ideology extends to the nation’s foreign policy. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

—Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an author of 15 books, largely centered around the exploitation of indigenous people in America and other vulnerable groups, based on color and race and so forth. Been a professor of history, got your doctorate at UCLA, an institution we respect, even though I teach at USC. And I just want to admit, a little bit of self-criticism here: I knew of you; I had no idea of the power of your prose. And I say this advisedly, and now I’ve gone back and reread some of your work. But when I–you know, got the idea of this book, Loaded, because I was fascinated by the title: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. And I read some of the reviews and analysis of it, and everyone’s surprised, here’s this person on the left side of things who’s actually trying to understand the Second Amendment as a complex part of American history, as a profound part of American history. And the, you know, simplistic argument is only nutcases care about having the Second Amendment, and they want to go create mayhem in churches and elsewhere, and therefore there’s no reason or rhyme for it. And the fact is, your book is the most compelling, profound analysis of why we have a Second Amendment, and it’s not all good news. It’s actually a product of settler colonialism. And by way of introduction to the big idea of this book, is that it basically defines America, not in Donald Trump’s terms of “great” or Hillary Clinton’s–he’s going to make it great again, and Hillary Clinton said we were always great. That was the big debate in the last election: do we have to be made great again, or are we a continuing exercise in greatness? And reading your book, one is disabused of that notion by the second chapter. And the fact is that we are a country, despite all our proclamations about Jeffersonian democracy and, you know, the great limited government, it wasn’t an experiment in limited government as far as indigenous people, it was an experiment in genocide. Let’s just cut to the chase of it. Benjamin Madley at UCLA has written a profound book; I did a podcast with him. But you trace the right to bear arms, the Second Amendment, not to the idea of an official state militia–yes, there’s that, which is the way people try to interpret–no! You trace it–let me just begin with the big idea here–to guaranteeing the right of angry white men, primarily, out to kill indigenous people, out to capture runaway slaves, out to assert their power, as they expand an empire across the whole continent. And you point out that, very interesting history here, that this existed in various state constitutions before we had our federal constitution. And that it was supported by people we otherwise admire in many ways, like a Thomas Jefferson. So why don’t you give us the origins of the Second Amendment in American history?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: You know, it was already in the constitutions of Virginia, South Carolina, Massachusetts, about five of the colonies, of the 13 colonies. You know, they were formed, the states were formed in 1775, 1776, and it was a whole decade later before the Constitution. During the war, they operated under the Continental Congress. So they already had these, and they had imported them from their colonial practices. So what you have to look at, since they didn’t really argue about the matter of the Second Amendment, why they put it in under the rights of men, individual rights–and second only to freedom of speech–is, you have to look at what was going on at the time. And this was a country, a nation state, formed as an imperialist state, as a kind of knockoff from the British empire. So you have to see it as pushing, as a split in the empire, and the beginning of another one, and not some kind of democratic–it was a republic only because they overthrew a king, and you know, they talked about having another king. But George Washington–our presidency is more or less a kind of operative kingship, the executive. But what they imported was the already practice of settler militias organizing themselves. And they were very well-regulated, with great motivation, because that’s how settler colonialism works. They take the land, and then the federal government is set up basically to then indemnify it, legalize it. And that’s the story of the next hundred years, and the United States taking the continent. It’s not that much different than New Zealand and Australia and Canada, except none of those have, well, constitutions until recently, because they’re still a part of the commonwealth. But they certainly don’t have a Second Amendment. So when we say, well, why can’t we do like Australia, you know, and confiscate all the guns after a big massacre? Which is, in the 1990s–well, they don’t have any kind of constitutional restriction on guns; it’s just whatever people decide to make up.

RS: Yeah, but I want to take you back to what your book stresses in its first chapter on the history, which precedes the Constitution. And you describe the–yes, well-ordered, in the sense I guess they can keep formations when they’re marauding around. But the existence of bands of armed white men, conquering, pushing people out, terrorizing people–that’s the pre-constitutional history, where the Second Amendment comes from. And so when they are surrendering to a new federal power, which is what this Constitution is, the reason they want in the Bill of Rights, which is supposed to be a check on that federal power, is the guarantee, particularly the slave-owning states, or states that are bordering on Native American communities, the right for these white men to continue to go out and kill people and grab their land. Is that an oversimplification? Because that’s what–it’s a history that, to me, was shocking in its clarity, and yet your book is well-documented, it’s very thoughtful. And as a result, I couldn’t put it down, for that reason. I thought I’m, you know, a pretty sharp and maybe cynical observer of our history; I don’t think I’m naive about, you know, how violent it has been. But reading your book–and again, the tone of it, the logic, the, how informative it is, was compelling. In the same way that I would bring up Benjamin Madley’s book on the genocide, primarily against California, of the northwestern indigenous culture. So why don’t you take us through that whole earlier period first?

RDO: Yeah, and Benjamin Madley’s very important, because he’s taking the endgame; you know, the Pacific, when they reached the Pacific, and those militias in operation in northern California. Basically, the Second Amendment is about killing Indians, taking their land, and increasingly, slave patrols. Because the cotton kingdom immediately–once they clear out, ethnically cleanse the whole eastern part of North America to the Mississippi, all of the native peoples, who were all agriculturalists, and force them into Indian territory, that’s when the cotton kingdom–and that wasn’t complete until 1845–but during that process of pushing them out, that the cotton kingdom blossomed. So that was where the Indian militias then, that had operated, moved west. And the militias east of the Mississippi were used for slave patrols. And I have a whole chapter on slave patrols, and that’s probably–I think, you know, when they’re making the Second Amendment, given that almost all of them are, if they’re not slave owners like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Monroe–they’re slave traders. Or land–they’re all land speculators, including the good ones, John Adams, and all–they’re all involved. There’s no way to get out of it. Just like those of us now who oppose capitalism, we’re still–we’re still, it’s still a part of our lives every day. So this was, the slave system was the basis of the economy, and land. So the slave patrols are very important in the present because the police that exist now in the United States police forces, sheriffs, are direct descendants of slave patrols. So I have the whole genealogy–I didn’t make this up; there’s a wonderful book on slave patrols and how they came about. They started in this late, the late 17th century, 1680 or so, whereas the Indian militias existed from day one, 1607, John Smith, you know, organized the very first kind of–he had been a mercenary in Turkey, you know, fighting the Muslims, and then came to America. So, yeah, it’s basically for Indian-killing, and then repurposed for slave patrols, and continued as Indian-killing with the army of the west, once the Civil War was finished.

RS: So, OK, just to cut to the chase here, when they wrote the Second Amendment, they knew this was going to be a license for a lot of angry white men to go out and kill innocent people who happened to be indigenous or were runaway slaves or whatever, just to grab land. That it was a lawless concept from day one; it was not–and I think a strong point you make from a legalistic point of view, you didn’t need a Second Amendment to guarantee the right of states to have militias. That was not the reason for the Bill of Rights; the Bill of Rights was about individual rights and restraint on government. And that Second Amendment is telling these basic, you know, these guys who want to hop on their horses and go out and kill Native Americans and grab their land, you’re telling them that there’s nothing in this new government, this unity, that’s going to prevent them from doing that. Lawlessness was actually–I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but the way I read it, and it shook me up, is that lawlessness, in the sense of hurting, exploiting innocent people, was built into the very writing of the Second Amendment. And you point out it existed before the Bill of Rights; it was in the other, what, four or five other state constitutions, right?

RDO: Yes, and it is, it’s a legalization of lawlessness, like slavery. But it was law; it was legal. You know, it was mandated. In fact, early on, when they first started these citizens’ militias, they actually required colonists, white men, to be armed all the time. If they stepped out of their home, they had to have arms, and measured so much gunpowder, so many shells to load. That they had to be in good condition, and if they couldn’t afford that, they got subsidies. These were the colonies. And even to go to church or go into the field. And what was around, these were cleared territories; this was where they already had killed the Indians off, you know, in Virginia and in South Carolina. There’s nothing else around except native people trying to get their land back, or to keep the colonists from coming. There were no bears around; there was nothing else, it was completely, you know, farmland, agricultural land. There were no enemies, not even creatures, animals, to require that kind of requirement, to be armed. So when you look in those documents, you see that it was required, and then it became a kind of, it morphed into a right, you know, by the time of the independence. Because these colonists wanted to make sure that they kept these rights that had already been granted to them, without any kind of laws, that it be made law. But one thing that really bothers me, my own congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, keeps repeating, as do most democrats and most people, even gun-rights people who should at least read the Constitution and see what the Second Amendment is about–is they say it was meant for National Guard, what is National Guards now. But that’s provided for in Article 8 of the Constitution. Why would they then put it as an individual right, when it’s already created? State militias, they’re called, in the Constitution. That’s what became the National Guard. So that’s a completely–it mystifies me, you know, that they would say this. And I’m pretty sure they think it’s true, but I don’t know why. Didn’t they take constitutional law when they went to law school, you know, and read it?

RS: Well, I don’t think–I think you’re being too charitable. I think it’s, you know, too good to check. They have a theory that works for them, because first of all, it does not force an examination of the ugly aspect of American history, that it is a settler colonialism. That slavery was the norm, that destroying indigenous people was the norm. So whether you’re a democrat or republican, if you’re an establishment thinker, this idea that America was always great, or was great and now we have to make it great–you’re really talking about power of a minority, a racially constructed minority of–because it wasn’t just white people, but they had to be somewhat prosperous. You know, they couldn’t be indentured servants, or what have you. And it’s an entitlement program for such people. And I don’t think they want to examine the Second Amendment. But I want to connect it with another part of American mythology. That most children in America, until quite recently, were raised on a variant of cowboy and Indian mythology, where the Indians were the bad guys, the treacherous, the sneaky, and the cowboys were the good. And in your book, you discuss that. And that’s–the role of mythology in the support of empire is very critical. If you’re not a superior people–and it’s very difficult in a society that claims to be egalitarian and democratic to hold on, we held on to the idea of white superiority right through World War II; we had a segregated armed forces, we had a segregated South. And by the way, the Democratic Party was only successful because it was the part of segregation in the South. Everybody manages to forget that. But mythology here is really critical, and in your book you do remind us that the virtue of the cowboy, as defined as a white gun-bearing person, as opposed to the indigenous, was assumed in the education of most Americans. Right? There were very few people who objected to that narrative. And the reason I’m pushing this on the Second Amendment is that mythology still governs the thinking of a lot of people who support the Second Amendment. They want these guns, not so they can have the right to shoot squirrels–you mention somewhere when you finally had the affection of your father was when you could shoot a squirrel in the eye. I don’t know if you could do it, but the goal was to shoot a squirrel in the eye at 400 yards, I think you said? Some long, is it 400 yards or feet, I don’t know. It seems to me a very difficult thing to do. But that was a rite of passage that your own father, finally you had some common ground that you could do this. But the point is, the reason the Second Amendment remains a vibrant issue is not because they want the oddball nutcase to shoot up a church and then discredit the NRA. They actually believe that there are black people, and foreigners, and brown people, that are going to threaten their individual sovereignty, and they better have a gun, or eight guns. And you have some statistics in your book, and I’ve been reading other books about gun control in preparation for this. But I think we have an average of eight guns in the house of each gun owner, or something. And there is an extension of that settler mentality. They are still besieged. Even though we think of the U.S.–that’s the, the pro-gun-control people say, oh, well, you need that, you have the police, you have–well, they don’t see it that way. They see these foreigners and black people and brown people and poor people and so forth as an enemy that has to be kept at bay, right? And that’s why they want, you know, to be able to strap a gun and go to church. Well, as you point out, that’s as American as apple pie. Racism.

RDO: Yup. It’s white nationalism. This is why I really decided to write the book. I’ve been irritated for years, myself knowing what the Second Amendment was about, these arguments. But I kind of ignored it; I said, I’m not going to get into that, you know. And I got into it in another book, and that’s actually why I decided to write this one, as one editor paid attention to that and said, why don’t you write more about that. So I said, OK, I guess I will.

RS: The publisher this time is City Lights Books.

RDO: City Lights, yes.

RS: A great publisher.

RDO: Great publisher.

RS: And so people should get this book. I should give you the title again. It’s called Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. It’s not disarming in the sense of being disingenuous; it’s incredibly well-documented and logically worked out. It’s disarming in that it goes against the prejudice of many liberal people, that somehow only nutcases would want this thing, or that it’s misinterpreted, because after all it’s only about the right of states to have militias. As you point out, that right was guaranteed in the Constitution without the Bill of Rights. And so it’s really something else. And it’s something very current. That we have a large number of people in our society, correctly or incorrectly, who feel besieged by the other. We are not a melting pot, and that is simply nonsense; we are a fragmented society. And people are holding on to the Second Amendment because they think that the upheaval will come. And whether they believe it in biblical terms or they believe it in terms of, you know, you can’t go into New York City, it’s very dangerous, white nationalism–who would have ever thought, this late in the day of this republic, that white nationalism would be potentially a dominant force?

RDO: Yeah, and you know, 70 percent of those who are polled in the population actually say they honor the Second Amendment. And when they’re interviewed, they say, but–you know–yeah, well, the “but.” But the thing is, they really shouldn’t honor it. That’s the main point of my book. You should not honor the Second Amendment; you should do away with it, because of its sources. And secondly, I think there is a definite relationship, and statistically, between those who own guns–and they do own an average of eight each–70 percent of our population does not own a single gun, not one. Seventy percent; that’s only 30 percent of the population that owns even one gun. And the average gun owner owns eight. So if we put that in perspective, you know, that we’re leaving the police out of that particular–and it’s important to also deal with disarming the police, but–there’s 30 percent. So that’s exactly the basic, hard core support for Trump. Which I think is white nationalists, at its very base, you know, the support for Trump. It always, it never goes below 30 percent, even in the worst things that he does, you know. It’s that 30 percent, which is a huge, hegemonic power in the kind of electoral democracy that we have. Because they all pay attention, and they pay attention to one thing, and that’s the Second Amendment. And that’s–of course, there are the evangelicals, but they overlap a lot, too. So those 30 percent, 30 percent of the population owns guns, and probably half of them own 40, 50 guns. You know, not just eight. Because a lot of people just own one gun. So I think we’re talking about not just white nationalism rhetoric, which is bad enough, or taunting people, or doing racist acts, or mass killings, but actually being an armed force. So when I hear Trump, like he did today, say that he needs two more years because these last two years have been wasted, taken away from him, and he wants two more years. And Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeting that that’s true, and his whole base getting behind that, I’m thinking in my mind, these are armed people. And part of it is I come from rural Oklahoma, and I know these people; they’re my relatives. So I–I know–you know, anger is, I don’t think it’s the right word. I think there’s, you know, D.H. Lawrence had this thing about the cold soul of the American male. That he really nailed it, I think, that hardened character, you know, of this genocide, and slavery. And we don’t face these kind of nightmarish, this kind of nightmarish past, and bring it out in the open. Only African-Americans, you know, tell these stories; Native Americans tell, and a few friendly allies listen. But it’s so miniscule compared to the whole culture.

RS: What was the phrase you used, the cold soul of–

RDO: Yeah, the cold–I don’t have the quote right now, I have it in the book. But it is, like, something like a soulless character. And it’s sort of like William Burroughs in The Place of Dead Roads.

RS: [omission for station break] We just were talking about the soulless character of a certain part of America, at least. But I think in your book you’re really on to something, because the Second Amendment is treated as a cartoonish idea by most liberals. They don’t have guns, they don’t know why you need them, they think the police work for them, they don’t expect the country to be taken over by people who are going to be alien to their interests, and so forth. They–and what some people have referred to–Hofstadter, who you take on in your book, but had the, I think he had the paranoid imagination, or was that someone else. But there’s a strain, a strain in America–and you trace it brilliantly, I think, in this book, that, and that’s why it relates to ownership of guns–is the idea you can’t really trust the commonweal. You can’t trust even your neighbors too far. You certainly can’t trust your government, because it’s basically a fight for individual survival and power, right? And then sometimes you have your posse, your groupings, your people of common class, and race, and religion. Sometimes not; sometimes you’re just the lone nut. But at the heart of it is a certain soullessness, a lack of charity, a lack of affection, a lack of reaching out. And the cowboy-Indian image, which we take–somehow we treat it as a game; it wasn’t a game, it was a game of genocide. Genocide’s not a game. The idea was to eliminate a whole bunch of people because they were living on land you thought god had given you by virtue of your skin color, right? Or the language you spoke. And it goes into, like, the Daniel Boone myth, the myth of–

RDO: The hunter.

RS: Jesse James, the whole image of the strong white male is basically an image of a killer.

RDO: Right.

RS: Sometimes that killer is transformed to doing charity, like Jesse James, leaving some money for the widow, or something. But it’s basically a killer culture, based on the gun, based on extreme violence, disproportionate violence, because you’re assuming that the indigenous people that were killed by these heroic white men, you know, did not have the same kind of guns, same kind of firepower. So one white man could wipe out hundreds of them, you know. And there’s something very sick at the heart of our culture. There are a lot of healthy things at the heart of our culture, too; that’s why we have a women’s movement, that’s why we’ve had a civil rights movement. And we do have assimilation, we do have foreigners coming in. But we never want to–and this goes back to your Nancy Pelosi point–we don’t want to examine the past. Nancy Pelosi is an idiot when it comes to thinking about our history. And I say that without meaning to be unflattering to her personally. We have an idiotic culture. You know, and then I read a book like yours, and I realize I have fallen for these myths. Among other things, I have–I early on fell for the myth of Thomas Jefferson. Early on I believed, yes, you know, somehow in that primitive, technologically primitive society, with candlelight, were these wigged men who had brilliant ideas, you know? Well, actually, most of those ideas, I should have known from reading Charles and Mary Beard a long time ago, really were self-serving. Sustained their power, allowed them to keep their influence and wealth, as some people, you’ve pointed out George Washington was the richest guy in the country at one point. And yet, in that mythology, there’s the savior of the white man, almost descended from god, empowered by a god, who can kill endless numbers of these people. And which is, of course, our foreign policy; we bomb with impunity. No one questions bombing people all over the world; that’s just sort of all right. And you know, I’m going to wrap this up, but I mean the power of your book is you put us in touch with a soulless history related to the Second Amendment. So it’s a challenge to pro-gun-control people; it’s a challenge to liberals to think, yes, the Second Amendment should be eliminated, you know. However, you cannot do it without examining why we have a Second Amendment, and challenging that this was basically something put in to empower people catching runaway slaves. Catching freedom fighters, catching people trying to have control over their families, right? That was the main purpose of it. And if Nancy Pelosi will not understand that, she will not understand why it is so supported in the mythology of America.

RDO: Yes, that’s a–it is really gun control advocates that I, you know, wanted to direct this to, but also to us on the left, that I think we have stayed out of this argument a lot. Because we have mixed feelings; we wouldn’t mind an armed revolution; I really wouldn’t, you know. That’s not the same as, I don’t have to have the Second Amendment to help with an armed revolution. Because I would be, you know–you’re going to be criminalized anyway. You say, oh, they gave me the right to overthrow them–you know, it’s an absurd argument that you need the Second Amendment to make a revolution. That, you know, that’s a contradiction in terms. So that–I think that’s because we’ve ignored it, that we have not put our minds to how can we offer something to this endless debate that goes nowhere, and people keep getting killed. Because there are huge gun deaths, and half of the gun deaths in the United States are suicides. Because of this proliferation of guns, and people having them in their homes, or being able to go, and without any, really anything, or go to a gun show, and get a gun and then kill themselves, you know, on the spot. I know three people who have committed suicide that way, who weren’t gun nuts at all. They went and got a gun, and then shot themselves. Suicide. And there’s no other weapon–I mean, you know, you could try to hang yourself, someone will catch you or interrupt, or you might change your mind. But with a gun, it’s final.

RS: Let me wrap this up by saying I want people to read this book, Loaded–City Lights Books–A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. But it’s not disarming as far as underscoring the danger of white nationalism, and how it’s informed by this gun culture. And I think liberals are kidding themselves; I mean, we’ve been arguing about gun control forever, and every time you have a mass shooting, often–most often–they’re racist in tone. Or they’re aimed at a vulnerable group, you know, whether black people or Jews in a synagogue, or Muslims, you know, in a mosque. But the fact of the matter is, we’re missing the main point. Why is America so violent? And the violence grows out of a settler–I want to get back to the big idea of your book. The big idea of your book is you cannot understand the American experiment in strictly Tocquevillian terms. That that is a romance. You have to understand the dominant strain of a settler culture, of a superior people. Even when they are laced with immigration and different religious and so forth, there is a notion of the superiority of a certain dominant culture. And it invests in that dominant culture the right to kill people anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world wantonly, without much justification, with great contradictions, and sometimes genocidally, as was done with Native Americans in this country. And the Second Amendment represents that, in a tight set of words, in represents that arrogance of our culture. So if one wants to get rid of violence in America, one has to go back to its source, which was exploitation of the other. Is that not–?

RDO: Absolutely, that–if we go back to what, how the country was formed, and for what purpose, in settler colonialism, it’s inevitable–genocide is inevitable. It was successful, settler-colonialism, because it’s replacement; replace people, and the land itself is more valuable than the people. Then import enslaved Africans to also replace, to create the workforce. So it’s a–you know, people say that the, a lot of leftists now want to say the U.S. is not exceptional. You know, it’s just as bad as others–well, it is exceptionally–it is exceptional as sort of like all good families are the same, and all bad families are different, but in different ways. And the U.S. is different, in many different ways, than any other countries in the world. And I think that should be scary to us, because this chanting always that it’s the greatest country in the world, is a kind of–we have to look at the reverse of that. Why do we have to say that all the time? I don’t hear French people saying oh, France is the great–they’re always complaining, you know. And the Brits don’t say, oh god, Britain’s the greatest country in the world. I don’t–no other country I know of–I mean, some pitiful little countries like to say, well, we’re not as bad as you think we are. But the United States, this is the greatest country in the world. So it makes you think, you know, in psychological terms, well, what’s the opposite of that? You know, and to look into that. Because it’s shrouding–otherwise you sort of, you slice and dice it; well, some things are good and some things are bad. You know, and rather than getting to that core–

RS: It’s a particularly dangerous notion, because we are in the same moment the most powerful country militarily that the world has ever seen. At a whim, we can send drone attacks and destroy whole villages and so forth. So nothing, nothing in human history compares to the military power of the American empire. And at the same time, we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into thinking it’s a benign power. So anything bad happens, it was a mistake, it was an accident, or a few bad apples got in and tortured some people at Abu Ghraib. Or you know, we had to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we made some calculations about how long a–but it’s always benign, or it’s accidental, or so forth. And what your book reminds us–I’m going to end on this–the book is Loaded. And the history it tells, and it uses the Second Amendment as the organizing idea, is that settler colonialism, ramped up to the level of American power or the American empire, is a truly frightening spectacle. Because it’s righteous, it’s uncritical, it’s endorsed by even liberal people like Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton. And its extreme behavior goes unexamined and unchallenged, beginning with the genocide against Native Americans. And I guess the lesson of this book is if you don’t go back and look at the genocide, and then follow, that you don’t understand your current culture. You’re just whistling Dixie in the dark. So I’ll leave you on that note, and say goodbye to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

RDO: Thank you, Bob.

RS: Thank you. And our engineers at KCRW in Santa Monica are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. Joshua Scheer is the producer of Scheer Intelligence. And here at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the North Gate Studios, we’ve had an able assistance from William Blum. Thank you, and see you next week with Scheer Intelligence.

 

 

 

Federal Watchdog Agency Recommends Kellyanne Conway Be Fired

WASHINGTON—Taking unprecedented action, a federal watchdog agency recommended Thursday that President Donald Trump fire one of his most ardent defenders, counselor Kellyanne Conway, for repeatedly violating a law that limits political activity by government workers.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which is unrelated to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, said in a letter to Trump that Conway has been a “repeat offender” of the Hatch Act by disparaging Democratic presidential candidates while speaking in her official capacity during television interviews and on social media.

Federal law prohibits employees of the executive branch from using their official authority or influence to affect the result of an election. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are exempt from the Hatch Act, but there are no exceptions for White House employees.

Related Articles











An In-Depth Look at Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s ‘Pervasive Female Double’

The agency does not have the authority to fire Conway, who was appointed by Trump, so it would be up to the president to follow its recommendation and dismiss one of his most unwavering defenders. Conway is known for her fiery television appearances in support of the president and his policies. She helped him win election in 2016 as his campaign manager.

The recommendation to fire Conway is the first time the watchdog office has recommended the removal of a White House official over Hatch Act violations.

Special Counsel Henry Kerner’s letter to Trump states: “Ms. Conway’s violations, if left unpunished, send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act’s restrictions. Her actions erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law.”

Conway told reporters who encountered her in the White House press office, “I have no reaction.”

White House spokesman Steven Groves called the agency’s decision “deeply flawed” and said it violated Conway’s constitutional rights to free speech and due process.

“Its decisions seem to be influenced by media pressure and liberal organizations — and perhaps OSC should be mindful of its own mandate to act in a fair, impartial, non-political manner, and not misinterpret or weaponize the Hatch Act,” Groves said in a statement.

A summary of the investigation into Conway stated that beginning in February, Conway engaged in a pattern of partisan attacks on Democratic presidential candidates. She called Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey “sexist” and a “tinny” motivational speaker. In another interview, she accused Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts of “lying” about her ethnicity and “appropriating somebody else’s heritage.” And she attacked former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas for not thinking the women running “are good enough to be president.” It also cited her description of former Vice President Joe Biden as lacking “vision.”

The summary also noted that she used her Twitter account to conduct political activity. For example, she retweeted a March 31 message that referred to Biden as “Creepy Uncle Joe” and “took it upon herself to outline other faults she found in Mr. Biden’s candidacy,” the report said.

The Office of Special Counsel also noted that, during a May 29 media interview, Conway minimized the significance of the law as applied to her.

When asked during the interview about the Hatch Act, Conway replied: “If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work,” and “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

Kerner told Trump in his letter that career staff at his agency have long conducted thorough and impartial investigations of alleged Hatch Act violations by senior officials in administrations from both parties.

“Never has OSC had to issue multiple reports to the President concerning Hatch Act violations by the same individual,” Kerner wrote. “Ms. Conway’s actions and statements stand in stark contrast to the culture of compliance promised by your White House Counsel and undermine your efforts to create and enforce such a culture.”

Kerner said he therefore would “respectfully request” that Conway be held to the same standards as other federal employees and that “you find removal from federal service to be the appropriate disciplinary action.”

In reaction to the report, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, announced he would hold a hearing on June 26 to hear from the Office of Special Counsel about its findings. Conway will also be invited to testify.

“Allowing Ms. Conway to continue her position of trust at the White House would demonstrate that the president is not interested in following the law_or requiring his closest aides to do so,” Cummings said.

The White House said it takes seriously the principles in the Hatch Act. It released a letter from Pat Cipollone, legal counsel to the president, who had called for the Office of Special Counsel to retract its report in a letter dated Tuesday. Cipollone argued that Conway’s media appearances don’t violate the Hatch Act.

“It cannot supply a basis for prohibiting an adviser to the President from commenting on a competing policy proposal or the individual who offers it simply because that individual is also running for President,” Cipollone said.

In March 2018, the Office of Special Counsel found that Conway violated the law during two television interviews in which she advocated for and against candidates in the 2017 Alabama special election for U.S. Senate.

The Office of Special Counsel is an independent agency that protects federal employees from prohibited personnel practices, especially reprisal for whistleblowing.

Career government officials found to have violated the Hatch Act can be fired, suspended or demoted, and fined up to $1,000. The 1939 law allows government officials to personally donate money to political committees or engage in a variety of partisan activities, so long as they do so during their personal time and don’t use government resources.

Tankers Struck in Strait of Hormuz; U.S. Blames Iran

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—The U.S. blamed Iran for suspected attacks on two oil tankers Thursday near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, denouncing what it called a campaign of “escalating tensions” in a region crucial to global energy supplies.

The U.S. Navy rushed to assist the stricken vessels in the Gulf of Oman off the coast of Iran, including one that was set ablaze. The ships’ operators offered no immediate explanation on who or what caused the damage against the Norwegian-owned MT Front Altair and the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous. Each was loaded with petroleum products, and the Front Altair burned for hours, sending up a column of thick, black smoke.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. assessment of Iran’s involvement was based in part on intelligence as well as the expertise needed for the operation. It was also based on recent incidents in the region that the U.S. also blamed on Iran, including the use of limpet mines — designed to be attached magnetically to a ship’s hull — to attack four oil tankers off the nearby Emirati port of Fujairah and the bombing of an oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia by Iranian-backed fighters in May, he said.

Related Articles











War With Iran Is America's Endgame



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

“Taken as a whole these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation and an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension by Iran,” Pompeo said. He provided no evidence, gave no specifics about any plans and took no questions.

At the United Nations, the United States asked for closed Security Council consultations on the tanker incidents later Thursday.

Iran denied being involved in the attacks last month and its foreign minister called the timing of Thursday’s incidents suspicious, given that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was meeting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran.

Pompeo noted that Abe had asked Iran to enter into talks with Washington but Tehran “rejected” the overture.

“The supreme leader’s government then insulted Japan by attacking a Japanese-owned oil tanker just outside Iranian waters, threatening the lives of the entire crew, creating a maritime emergency,” Pompeo added.

Iran previously used mines against oil tankers in 1987 and 1988 in the “Tanker War,” which saw the U.S. Navy escort ships through the region. Regardless of who is responsible, the price of a barrel of benchmark Brent crude spiked as much as 4% immediately after the attack, showing how critical the region remains to the global economy.

“The shipping industry views this as an escalation of the situation, and we are just about as close to a conflict without there being an actual armed conflict, so the tensions are very high,” said Jakob P. Larsen, head of maritime security for BIMCO, the largest international association representing ship owners.

The suspected attacks occurred at dawn Thursday about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the southern coast of Iran. The Front Altair, loaded with the flammable hydrocarbon mixture naphtha from the United Arab Emirates, radioed for help as it caught fire. A short time later, the Kokuka Courageous, loaded with methanol from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, also called for help.

The U.S. Navy sent a destroyer, the USS Bainbridge, to assist, said Cmdr. Joshua Frey, a 5th Fleet spokesman. He described the ships as being hit in a “reported attack,” without elaborating.

In Washington, senior U.S. officials said the U.S. had photographed an unexploded mine on the side of one of the tankers. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, said the U.S. will reevaluate its presence in the region and is considering a plan to provide military escorts for merchant ships.

Frontline, the firm that operates the Front Altair, told The Associated Press that an explosion was the cause of the fire. Its crew of 23 — from Russia, the Philippines and Georgia — was safely evacuated to the nearby Hyundai Dubai vessel, it said.

BSM Ship Management said the Kokuka Courageous sustained hull damage and its 21 Filipino sailors had been evacuated, with one suffering minor injuries. All 21 were placed aboard the Bainbridge, according to Lt. Col. Earl Brown, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command.

Earlier, Iranian state television said 44 sailors from the two tankers were transferred to an Iranian port in the southern province of Hormozgan. The discrepancy could not be immediately reconciled.

The Front Altair had been bound for Taiwan, the Kokuka Courageous for Singapore, according to the data firm Refinitiv.

According to a U.S. official, initial evidence suggested the attack against the Kokuka Courageous was conducted by Iran with a mine similar to what was used against oil tankers off the UAE last month. The official, who declined to provide additional details or evidence, spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss initial findings that have not been made public.

Like in Fujairah, dozens of ships ranging from massive oil tankers to smaller pleasure boats, traditional dhows and cargo vessels ply the waters of the strait and the Gulf of Oman. The navies of Iran, Oman, the UAE and the U.S. regularly patrol, but the waters are vast and lit only by the moonlight at night, allowing small vessels to approach without warning.

Tensions have escalated in the Mideast as Iran appears poised to break the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, an accord that President Donald Trump repudiated last year. The deal saw Tehran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of crippling sanctions. Now, Iran is threatening to resume enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels if European nations don’t offer it new terms to the deal by July 7.

Already, Iran says it quadrupled its production of low-enriched uranium. Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have cut off opportunities for Iran to trade its excess uranium and heavy water abroad, putting Tehran on course to violate terms of the nuclear deal regardless.

In May, the U.S. rushed an aircraft carrier strike group and other military assets to the region in response to what it said were threats from Iran.

As tensions have risen, so have calls from some members of Congress warning the U.S. administration that they do not have the authority to go to war with Iran under the authorization passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

But Pompeo sees it differently, according to U.S. Reps. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, and Matt Gaetz, a Republican, who said Thursday they have heard the secretary of state argue in briefings that the administration can authorize war on Iran.

For nearly two decades the 2001 authorization has been stretched to justify combat with Islamist militants in the Middle East and beyond, mostly recently the Obama administration used it during the fight against the Islamic State.

___

Associated Press writers Aya Batrawy in Dubai, David Rising in Berlin, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Lolita C. Baldor, Zeke Miller and Susannah George in Washington and Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed.

All Criminal Charges Dropped in Flint Water Scandal

DETROIT—Prosecutors dropped all criminal charges Thursday against eight people in the Flint water crisis and pledged to start from scratch the investigation into one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The stunning decision came more than three years — and millions of dollars — after authorities began examining the roots of the scandal that left Flint’s water system tainted with lead. Michigan Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud, who took control of the investigation in January after the election of a new attorney general, said “all available evidence was not pursued” by the previous team of prosecutors.

Officials took possession this week of “millions of documents and hundreds of new electronic devices, significantly expanding the scope of our investigation,” Hammoud and Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement.

Related Articles











Fraudulence in Flint: How Suspect Science Helped Declare the Water Crisis Over



by Jordan Chariton

The efforts “have produced the most comprehensive body of evidence to date related to the Flint water crisis,” they said, putting investigators “in the best possible position to find the answers the citizens of Flint deserve.”

Hammoud’s team recently used search warrants to get state-owned mobile devices of former Gov. Rick Snyder and 66 other people from storage.

Among those who had charges dismissed: Michigan’s former health director, Nick Lyon, who was accused of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly failing to alert the public in a timely fashion about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease when Flint was drawing improperly treated water from the Flint River in 2014 and 2015.

The dismissal came a day before a judge planned to announce whether a 2018 decision to send Lyon to trial would stand. Dropping the charges with just hours to spare killed the possibility of an adverse ruling and still gives prosecutors the freedom to haul Lyon into court again.

Nonetheless, defense attorney Chip Chamberlain said they “feel fantastic and vindicated.”

“We’re confident that a just and fair investigation, done properly, will yield no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing,” he said.

Hammoud said she would not speak to reporters until after a June 28 town hall-style meeting with Flint residents. Her boss, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, said a “fearless” team was still on the case.

“Justice delayed is not always justice denied,” Nessel said in a statement.

Some residents were skeptical.

“We don’t know if new charges will be filed,” LeeAnne Walters, who is credited with exposing the lead contamination, told The Associated Press. “It feels kind of degrading, like all that we went through doesn’t matter. Our city was poisoned, my children have health issues and the people responsible just had all the charges dropped against them.”

While waiting for a new pipeline to bring water from Lake Huron, Flint, a majority-black city of 100,000, pulled water from a river without treating it to reduce corrosive effects on old pipes. Lead contaminated the distribution system in a community where 41% of residents are classified by the government as living in poverty.

Because of its poor finances, Flint was being run by financial managers appointed by Snyder. The uproar over water quality reached a peak by fall 2015, when a doctor reported high levels of lead in children, which can cause brain damage.

Some experts also have linked the water to Legionnaires’ disease, a type of pneumonia caused by bacteria that thrive in warm water and infect the lungs. People can get sick if they inhale mist or vapor, typically from cooling systems.

Flint’s water no longer comes from the river and has significantly improved, but some residents are so distrustful that they continue to use bottled water.

The criminal probe began in 2016, when Bill Schuette was attorney general. He hired a Detroit-area lawyer, Todd Flood, as special prosecutor. Andy Arena, the former head of the FBI in Detroit, was a key investigator.

No one is behind bars. Seven of 15 people charged pleaded no contest to misdemeanors. Their records will eventually be scrubbed clean.

Charges were pending against eight people, including former Michigan chief medical executive Eden Wells and two men, Gerald Ambrose and Darnell Earley, who were state-appointed emergency managers in Flint. Like Lyon, Wells was charged with involuntary manslaughter.

“We understand that there will be further investigation, but do not expect it to justify any further prosecution relative to her,” Wells’ attorneys, Steven Tramontin and Jerold Lax, said.

Through March, the investigation and prosecution had cost about $9.5 million, records show. State agencies separately have spent millions of dollars to provide defense lawyers to public employees.

Hammoud dismissed Flood in April and put together a new team. Flood told Detroit television station WJBK on Thursday that he wishes “all the luck in the world” to Hammoud, but he did not directly address the dismissal of cases that he had filed.

“We had an experienced, aggressive and hard-driving team. Everything we did was for the people of Flint,” Schuette, Flood’s former boss, said on Twitter.

How the Pentagon’s Forever Wars Are Killing the Planet

It’s been a harrowing couple of weeks for climate change observers. First, as Vice reported, there was an analysis from an Australian think tank, co-written by Ian Dunlop, a former fossil fuel company CEO, that posits that the planet is “reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.’ ”

Then, on Wednesday, Brown University released a report revealing that the Department of Defense is “the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.” According to the report, the DOD released approximately 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, between 2001 and 2017.

Burning diesel and jet fuel for troop and weapons transport and usage causes 70% of the emissions, the report said.

In other words, the same institution that has kept America at war since 2001 is not only killing people, but also the planet. As CNBC pointed out, “The findings showed that if the Pentagon was listed as a country, its emissions would make it the world’s 55th largest contributor of greenhouse gases”—bigger than Portugal or Sweden.

CNBC called the report “the first of its kind to compile such comprehensive data.”

The Pentagon’s energy use was fairly stable from 1975 to 1990, and declined after the Cold War. Then came 9/11 and fighting in Afghanistan. After that, researcher Neta Crawford writes, “energy consumption by the DOD increased, and in 2005 hit its highest level in a decade. Since 2001 the DOD has consistently consumed between 77 and 80 percent of all US government energy consumption.”

“Unlike other elements of the current US administration,” she writes, the DOD acknowledges that climate change is an ongoing and dire issue. Crawford says that the department has made some improvements in terms of fossil fuel emissions, “[emphasizing] what it calls energy security — energy resilience and conservation” in its operations. Still, the agency remains a significant consumer of fossil fuel energy,” and ”there is room for much steeper cuts” to its carbon emissions and energy consumption.

Among Crawford’s suggestions for making those cuts are designing equipment with greater fuel economy, switching to alternative fuels, restructuring training, base closures, and reducing military operations worldwide.

If the DOD doesn’t cut its emissions and fuel consumption, Crawford warns that the consequences will be dire:

Absent any change in US military fuel use policy, the fuel consumption of the US military will necessarily continue to generate high levels of greenhouse gases. These greenhouse gases, combined with other US emissions, will help guarantee the nightmare scenarios that the military predicts and that many climate scientists say are possible.

Read the full report here.

Sarah Sanders to Leave White House Post, Trump Says

WASHINGTON—White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, whose tenure was marked by a breakdown in regular press briefings and questions about the administration’s credibility, as well as her own, will leave her post at the end of the month, President Donald Trump announced Thursday.

Sanders is one of Trump’s closest and most trusted White House aides and one of the few remaining on staff who worked on his campaign.

“After 3 1/2 years, our wonderful Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be leaving the White House at the end of the month and going home to the Great State of Arkansas,” Trump tweeted just before she accompanied him to a White House event on prison reform.

Related Articles











Living in a Country Where Credibility Is Ancient History



by

Trump suggesting her as a future candidate for Arkansas governor. “She would be fantastic.”

Under Sanders’ tenure, regular White House press briefings became a relic of the past. She has not held a formal briefing since March 11. Reporters often catch her on the White House driveway after she is interviewed by Fox News Channel and other TV news outlets.

Her credibility has also come under question.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report revealed that Sanders admitted to investigators that she had made an unfounded claim about “countless” FBI agents reaching out to express support for Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey in May 2017.

Sanders succeeded Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, in mid-2017.

Democrats Worry as Trump Unleashes Money on 2020 Digital Ads

WASHINGTON — While Democrats wage a wide open primary, President Donald Trump is blanketing battleground states with online advertising that could help set the narrative heading into the 2020 campaign.

The blitz of ads run recently in states including Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania alarms some Democrats. They’re worried by the more than $10 million Trump and his allies have already spent on digital advertising, a drop compared with the $1 billion his campaign could spend by Election Day.

For now, the ads are going largely unanswered as Democrats focus on their primary that’s just getting into full swing. But Trump’s early head start combined with his massive fundraising operation has stirred concern that it could be difficult for the eventual nominee to catch up.

Related Articles











Fox News Exposed as Trump's Personal Mouthpiece



by Ilana Novick

“The real concern here is that Trump is able to have unchallenged positions when it comes to issues that a lot of voters care about,” said Tara McGowan, the founder and CEO of ACRONYM, a progressive group that specializes in digital campaigns. “We are going to see outside (Democratic) groups start to spend with offensive and defensive messages, but I worry that it’s still not going to be enough to compete with the infrastructure the right has.”

Many of the ads are chock full of conservative red meat, focused on building a border wall with Mexico, vilifying Democrats’ investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign as a “witch hunt” and attacking the news media. A recent series that could resonate in manufacturing states portrays Trump as tough on China by declaring that the “days of cowering down to China are over.”

Others appear aimed at softening his image, especially on issues related to race. The ads are unlikely to persuade African Americans to support Trump by large margins but could ease concern among moderate and suburban voters the president will need to win reelection — many of whom voted for Democrats during last year’s midterms.

One battleground ad, viewed as many as 1 million times, shows footage of a White House event commemorating Trump’s signature of a criminal justice overhaul. The president grins as Gregory Allen, an African American former prisoner who was released under the law, praises him for “continuing to make America great again.”

In another, a middle-aged black actor plays “Howard from New Mexico,” who thanks Trump for restoring his faith in the country. And in a third, a multiracial collage of people are all seen liking a social media post by “Melissa from Florida,” who tells Trump that he makes her proud to be an American.

Trump’s campaign denies they are trying to soften his image.

“We are happily sharing the president’s record on improving health care, protecting preexisting conditions, enforcing the border and laws on the books, and giving 90% of Americans more money in their paychecks,” said campaign spokeswoman Erin Perrine.

Few expect Democratic candidates enmeshed in the primary to compete with Trump head-on when it comes to digital advertising. That will fall to outside groups and the Democratic National Committee until a nominee is chosen.

But while groups like Priorities USA and American Bridge plan to spend big, they have yet to ramp up. The DNC was carrying $6.2 million in debt with just $7.5 million on hand at the end of April, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $34.7 million. And many donors have yet to go all in on a specific candidate.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has outspent each individual Democratic candidate by more than fourfold since January, when the primary unofficially kicked off, according to an analysis of data compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive. In many battlegrounds, he’s outspent most by at least double since March, the data shows.

“Now is the time you have to fire people up, explain the stakes and tell them what the other side is doing,” said Rufus Gifford, who was finance director for President Barack Obama’s campaign in 2012. “Scaring people is absolutely appropriate because the threat is real.”

Still, others say such dire predictions are premature.

“Party fundraising is always difficult when you are out of power and a year and half out from the election,” said Tom Nides, a prominent fundraiser and former Hillary Clinton adviser. “We will not win or lose because of money.”

Priorities USA, the largest Democratic outside group, says it plans to launch an initial $100 million phase of its anti-Trump effort this summer. The group declined to say how much it has raised but spent about $200 million during the 2016 race.

Others worry donors are neglecting the DNC, which was roiled by turmoil and distrust in 2016 after hackers with ties to Russia leaked emails revealing the party favored Clinton over her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Robert Zimmerman, a prominent donor and DNC committeeman from New York, said the fundraising and spending gap is real. He says donors need to overcome their misgivings and step up contributions to avoid a repeat.

“It’s profoundly worrisome, but right now it’s not getting attention because everyone is focused on the presidential race,” he said. ”(Chairman) Tom Perez has got to make the case that the DNC is an essential piece of the equation and we can’t wait for our nominee to be picked.”

Following the discord of 2016, DNC officials say Perez has worked to rebuild the operation after inheriting an organization that had only three fundraising staffers. Although their Republican counterparts regularly outraise them, that doesn’t always translate into winning, they say.

“Will the RNC outraise us? Yes, they will. Does that mean they are going to win? Absolutely not,” said DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa. “That didn’t happen in 2018, that didn’t happen 2017, that didn’t happen in Alabama. Time and time again, they have not proven to us since 2016 that they can win with the resources they have.”

Daniel Ellsberg: ‘I Wanted to See the War Ended’

What follows is a conversation between author and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SHARMINI PERIES It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.

On June 13, 1971, the New York Times made a courageous move to publish what is known today as the Pentagon Papers. The documents covered the Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson administrations. The official document was titled The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam. It was a collection of communiques, recommendations, and decisions regarding the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had stolen the 47 volume, seven thousand page top secret document that unveiled the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was a Defense Department analyst. He stole and distributed the papers to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and 12 other newspapers. He joins us today from his home in Berkeley, California. Great to have you here, Daniel.

DANIEL ELLSBERG Thanks for having me back here, Sharmini.

Related Articles











Daniel Ellsberg: Assange's Arrest Is the Beginning of the End



by

SHARMINI PERIES: Daniel, tell us about the day in history, huddled with your wife, who was quite the figure, herself. I understand she was an anti-war activist who encouraged you to bring those documents home. And she helped you copy those documents in the basement of your home. Now, tell us about your thoughts and feelings about what was about to happen when the New York Times published those documents.

DANIEL ELLSBERG Sunday the 13th, there was a Sunday–Saturday night the New York Times used to come into Harvard Square late at night, around midnight. The Sunday Times. And I had been tipped off by a friend at the New York Times inadvertently that this was coming out. The Times officially had not told me at all when, if ever, they were going to print this. I had given it to Neil Sheehan of the New York Times back in February. And he had told me they weren’t working on it for reasons–I’m not clear why he misled me on that point. So I’d been trying to get it out through other people, like Senator Mathias, or Pete McCloskey, a representative in the House; unsuccessfully, so far.

So when I learned that the Times was locked down, that there were armed guards, I keep checking who came in and out because they were fearing an injunction because of a study they were printing. I identified that as the one I had given them. So I went eagerly to the kiosk in Harvard Square, and my wife and I were just overjoyed that at last this was coming into print. I started copying it back at the RAND Corporation at the end of September, early October 1, really, 1969. So that was 19 or 20 months earlier. And for that time we had been, or I had been, trying to get it out. And my wife had joined me after our marriage in mid-1970. She was part of it. So that was an exciting day for us.

The headline was rather discreet. Didn’t try to sensationalize it at all. I don’t know why they hope to get it under the radar a little bit. And about the Times study, they were pretty–and it was under the radar. I don’t think it was mentioned on the evening news programs on Sunday, or during the day, to their surprise. They were all waiting for a reaction. And Monday, the Attorney General John Mitchell relayed a request from the president and from the attorney general to stop publication of the study, which was endangering national security, and was illegal, he claimed. He had asked, by the way, the president had asked him the day before on Sunday, John, have we ever done this before? You know, enjoined a newspaper? and Mitchell, who is a former bond lawyer who had managed Nixon’s campaign didn’t know much about law, constitutional law, said, oh, yes, many times. And that was a fatal mistake that he made there. It had never been done once in our history. The First Amendment had always been regarded as precluding any freedom of the press, and precluded a prior restraint; that is, an injunction against the press keeping the public from learning something. And that was a basic purpose of the First Amendment. So this was the first time that the president, any president, had tried to enjoin publication.

Well, the Times refused that request, and did publish again on Tuesday the next, the third installment. And they were served with an injunction which was backed up by a court order, then. It had to stop publication. So on–that was Tuesday. On Tuesday night, I guess it was, I met with a friend of mine who was the national editor of the Washington Post. I’d known him from the–he spent a year at the RAND Corporation. Ben Bagdikian. And he arrived, eventually, in Cambridge. And we spent all night going through the papers. I wanted to keep it going now, despite the injunction. He took it off to the Post. And they published, I think, for the first time on Friday. They were then enjoined. And I gave it to the Boston Globe.

At this point, by the way, we’d seen the morning news. I guess that was Wednesday morning. My wife and I were leaving Ben Bagdikian’s room at a motel in Cambridge where we–where I’d been giving him papers. He’d gone off. We put on the news and saw live that there were FBI agents knocking at our door on 10 [inaudible] Street in Cambridge. So we couldn’t go home.

Had we–had we not seen that, we would have gone home and been nabbed, basically, and no more papers would have come out. And I think, actually, if the Supreme Court, when it went to them, had had the opportunity to actually stop the publication of these papers, even though they’d never been asked before, they would have done so 5-4, probably, judging by the final decisions of the nine judges. Several of them complained about being rushed to this, and the government should be given more time to look at it.

So if it had only been the Times and The Post, I think it would have gone that way, and the injunction would have stayed–the public would not have seen the Pentagon Papers. But as it was, having seen the FBI agents, we didn’t go home. We called some friends, went to a motel, and for the next 13 days eluded the FBI in Cambridge. They went all over the world looking for me, actually, I think, on some junket places they wanted to go, I have a feeling. But in any case, they didn’t find us. We were going from house to house in Cambridge, and getting a new copy out virtually every day. First to the Globe, as I said, and then eventually the Christian Science Monitor, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Globe and the Post-Dispatch were also enjoined. But eventually the prosecutors realized that that was just not working. One of them said it was like herding bees. They couldn’t stop them. And ultimately, 19 papers published parts of this top secret study of the history of U.S. decision making from 1945 to 1968, and no way to stop it, as I say.

So when it got to the Supreme Court, the issue of actually stopping it was kind of moot. And I think that was critical in the result of 6-3 against the injunction, and saying that the Constitution did not permit this, at least that no evidence had been presented it showed such an immediate danger to the United States in revealing this basically historical study, which had ended in ’68. This was now ’71. It started in ’45. So it really couldn’t show that it was damaging at the moment, as the attorney general or the president claimed.

So there had been, when they started publication again after that decision by the court, there had been a wave of what amounted to civil disobedience across the country. I don’t think there was anything ever like it in any country that I know of, not in the United States, of such defiance of the executive branch in the course of a war which was still going on, and with the president saying that any day of publication this was endangering the public. And the editors decided otherwise when they read it, and simply went ahead in what amounted to civil disobedience–a description that not one of them has ever used, and I’m not sure they ever faced to themselves they had been acting like the nonviolent resisters that had inspired me to copy the papers a couple of years before. They had joined the civil disobedience movement, in effect. But they don’t like to think of themselves that way, and they don’t. They don’t celebrate it. I’ll bet that not one newspaper that mentions the 50th anniversary of this will focus on the fact that the newspapers were simply defying the executive branch.

SHARMINI PERIES Daniel, on this historic day, Daniel Ellsberg became synonymous with whistleblowers. Now, given that the term whistleblowers is a loaded term that is despised by governments for releasing secret documents and secrets of the government, they are also treated sometimes favorably by the presses, because it brings a lot of attention to the press when you release these kinds of documents. But there are also times when the press actually attack whistleblowers. And then of course there’s the public perception of whistleblowers. Tell us about how this term has evolved over the time from the Pentagon Papers to today. And of course, also talk about, you know, Edward Snowden, and also Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Chelsea Manning, the kind of role that they play as whistleblowers and the importance of it.

DANIEL ELLSBERG The word ‘whistleblower’ is rather obscure, obviously. No one is sure just where it initiated. The main guess is that it was the bobbies of London, who didn’t carry guns. In the 19th century they were armed with a whistle to tell other civilians to nab a fleeing criminal of some sort. They had clubs, I think, also, but no guns. That’s the best guess. And that’s not a very close analogy to the way it’s used today, because that’s a–it’s someone in authority who is blowing the whistle on somebody who has allegedly committed a crime.

The way it’s used today is someone not an authority, someone who may have been or generally was an insider, indeed in the structure of authority, but not near the top, who is revealing criminality or wrongdoing, or simply deception or dangerous policies; policies that he or she thinks the public needs to know about, especially in a republic, a democratic republic like America, where the people nominally, at least, in the Constitution, are sovereign. So they are the ultimate authority, supposedly, but they can hardly exercise that if they don’t have information as to what the executive branch, which is nominally a servant of the people and of the Congress, is actually planning to do. But they foresee what the costs will be, what the risks will be, and what the arguments against and for a particular policy are. The public can’t be informed and in any way, really, influential on that policy without knowing more about it than government officials want them to know.

And what the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages, each stamped ‘top secret,’ revealed, that for the 23-year period from ’45-’68, president after president, four in that telling, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, had systematically lied to the public every time they spoke about policy in Vietnam–about what the prospects were, why we were there, what the costs were and were likely to be, both the human cost and the material costs. Every aspect of it was concealed from the Congress and the public by lies and by secrecy, and by the silence of people in it, which had included me. For years I’d been involved in Vietnam policy, from ’64 on. I went to Vietnam during the escalation. I went to Vietnam in ’67 as a Foreign Service reserve officer, and I had seen the war up close for two years, using my background as a Marine Company commander, platoon leader and company commander, to walk with troops. And the only way you could see that guerrilla war up very close. On point, actually, as I walked a number of times.

Came back realizing from two years that the war was hopeless in the sense there was no prospect of progress; no progress had been made, despite what was coming on to being 500,000 troops in Vietnam. The public was being misled about this. And that no legitimate purpose was being solved, either by killing Vietnamese or by losing Americans. That these deaths were unjustified. Continuing deaths. And therefore we ought to get out. Well, that was very widely believed inside the ranks. I can’t speak for the soldiers particularly, even though I walked with them. But we didn’t discuss these larger issues. But I knew that in the government, in fact the people who had worked on the Pentagon Papers, about 33, had all been–nearly all had been either officials or military in Vietnam, and were all essentially agreed, even those that were quite right-wing Republican and right wing in general terms, know that we ought to get out. But no one was saying that from inside. And people who did on the outside were called ignorant or anti-war activists, upstarts, or insolent; we weren’t paying attention to them.

So when these documents showed that what the anti-war people had been saying about the history of Vietnam, in part, which they knew better than people in the government on the whole, we didn’t study that, what they’d been saying was right, basically what the origins of the illegitimacy of the war, but in particular–and also how unlikely it was we would overcome the Nationalist Movement led by communists in Vietnam for the unification of their country. We did get many Vietnamese to work for us for a salary which the Viet Cong didn’t get, not from their government, and to live in not good conditions, but not in holes in the ground like the Viet Cong. We could get them essentially to collaborate with us as the French had gotten Vietnamese to collaborate with them.

But in fact, these are much the same people, especially the officers who had fought with and for the French against the their own country before our troops arrived. And they were willing to work for foreigners. And they didn’t–there was nothing wrong with them as people. But that isn’t as powerful a motivation to work for foreigners, for a salary, than to work for nationalism and for unifying your country, especially the Viet Cong, as we call them, the Vietnamese Communists, were under the leadership of people who had driven the French from their country and had that extreme cachet, that honor, and that made them a very powerful [political] force. When I put them out, first to the Senate in 1969, Senator Fulbright on the Foreign Relations Committee, the war was still going on under a new president, Richard Nixon, who was not featured in, at all, in the Pentagon Papers. He wasn’t incriminated by it. In fact, on this day, June 13, when they began coming out, Henry Kissinger’s first reaction in speaking to the president as his national security adviser said this actually helps us a little bit, because it shows it’s a Democrat’s war. Which was true.The Democrats have mucked it up. And it had been my hope, actually, that if it came out early enough when I first copied it in 1969, that Richard Nixon would see the opportunity to use these very documents and say the war has been ruined by years of Democratic mismanagement of it, and there is no choice but to get out at this point. He could say whatever he wanted about the origins of the war, he could lie and say, like all the others, and say that it was a noble cause for freedom, but it was not practical now to keep it going.

That’s what I had hoped he would say. It didn’t come out in ’69 because Nixon misled the Senate and the public into thinking that he was on the way out. And what he actually meant by that was he was reducing the number of ground troops steadily, which is what people most focused on, even though there were over 20,000 deaths, American deaths, under Nixon, but increasing, continuing the bombing, and ultimately re-extending it back to North Vietnam. So in the end he dropped more bombs than Johnson and Kennedy have done, for a total of nearly four times the tonnage of World War II, in which we dropped 2 million tons of bombs in all theaters in Europe and Japan. We dropped nearly 8 million tons of bombs on this one country. Well, Indochina, including Laos and Cambodia, and Vietnam. Four times World War II, and more than half of that was after I copied the Pentagon Papers.

So in the course of that process, I wasn’t feeling a great success. I was very focused on the air war, which I knew was killing civilians very heavily. I wanted to see the war ended before another million tons of bombs, half of World War II, were dropped in the next year. And I failed. In 1969, and ’70, and ’71, ’72, the bombing went on. And when it ended in ’73, in January–February, rather–with the Paris Accords, I was sure Nixon was going to renew it, restart the bombing, as soon as American troops were out. And indeed, I was not wrong. That was his plan. I was on trial at that point in Los Angeles. [Inaudible] we now know because of the Watergate hearings that on April 15 he was–he had, in fact, according to Time magazine, given the order to renew the bombing, which would have kept the war going at least through his term.

The successful offenses in ’75 after he had been, had to resign, succeeded where the others had not because there was no American bombing going on. Congress had ordered that there be no renewal of American bombing. And I think when they ordered that, they thought it was almost pro forma, that there was no intent, really, to renew the bombing. That was mistaken. As I say, the order had been given and had to be rescinded at a point that Nixon knew that he was facing impeachment proceedings, and that was as early as April 15, as I say, 1973, when I was on trial. When he heard that it had been revealed and was supposed to be revealed in court that my former psychoanalyst had bee–had his office burglarized by agents of the White House, they were seeking information to get me to shut up, blackmail me into silence about what I knew about the ongoing campaign, the plans for renewed–for continued bombing, indefinitely. And when he knew that he was going to be facing essentially a trial for domestic crimes, rather than merely millions of tons of bombs on civilians in Vietnam, a war crime, presidents don’t have to worry about that on the whole, but a domestic crime of breaking into a doctor’s office, that was regarded as more criminal than invading a neighboring country to Vietnam like Laos or Cambodia, which he had done.

And those points, by the way, were brought up in his impeachment proceedings, and they couldn’t get Republicans to go forward that a president can do what he wants when it comes to bombing other countries. And to get the Republicans on board they had to limit it, essentially, to domestic crimes, including this one.

So it took still another month for my trial to end, because Nixon kept the attorney general and the acting criminal–the head of the criminal division from revealing to the court what had been revealed to them by John Dean, that my doctor’s office had been broken into. And finally they said they were in obstruction of justice–a familiar term, right? Going on right now, including–involving the president. And they went to him said they would have to resign, lest they be subject to trial themselves for obstruction of justice, for not giving this information to the court. So Nixon then reluctantly said, OK, go ahead, do it, but tell the judge it was a national security problem here. He doesn’t have to reveal it openly in court. It’s for his information. And that night he was talking to the acting attorney general Kleindienst, we have it on the tape, and saying, I’ll take–they’ll talk about impeachment–by the way, is the first time the word ‘impeachment’ appears in the White House tapes–they’ll talk about impeachment. And then they’ll get Agnew. How will they like that?

SHARMINI PERIES All right, Daniel, let’s leave it there for now. But please join us for the next two segments with Daniel Ellsberg about the Pentagon Papers, and about the period in which these papers were released and the significance of them today. Thanks for joining us for now, Daniel.

DANIEL ELLSBERG Thank you for having me.

SHARMINI PERIES And thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.

Why Venezuela Is the Vietnam of Our Time

On April 30, 1975, the United States learned an important lesson. The capture of Saigon by the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) would mark the defeat of the world’s most powerful military force by an army of guerrilla fighters. No matter the scale of its military, or the weight of the iron fist it used to maintain its power, brute force would not always be enough to win wars. The guerrillas possessed a key weapon that the U.S. did not: the support of the people.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam caused a cataclysmic shift in its strategy of warfare, which today has morphed into hybrid warfare. To avoid another embarrassing defeat, the United States would need to win over hearts and minds. Blowing people to bits would not be enough. This strategy combines “conventional” warfare—namely military force—with “unconventional” warfare—such as covert campaigns to destabilize the economy of targeted nations; misinformation campaigns that spread fake news and pave the way for intervention; and violent attacks taking the form of targeted assassinations, road blockades, and the incitement of violence.

The result of these hybrid wars is seen clearly today as a series of right-wing governments sweeps across Latin America. Venezuela, however—which borders both Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Iván Duque’s Colombia—has remained a sharp thorn in the side of U.S. imperialism and, consequently, at the center of U.S.-led hybrid wars. It is the domino that will not fall.

Related Articles











The Real Reason the U.S. Wants to Overthrow Venezuela



by

The unconventional war waged against Venezuela and its neighbors is a war that seeks to win over the hearts and minds of the people, convincing them to voluntarily (and often enthusiastically) align with the interests of global capital at their own expense. It is a battle to shift what Italian militant intellectual Antonio Gramsci would call common sense and to infiltrate the dominant worldview with the interests of capital. Writing from a fascist prison in Italy while World War I raged on, Gramsci tried to understand why working people were engaging in an ideology that was against their best interest. Part of the answer is a battle over ideology. It is this battle that the United States has been unable to win in Venezuela. In the words of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Director Vijay Prashad, “[t]his Revolution [has] crafted new hopes for millions of people, and they will fight tooth and nail to defend not this or that reform but the great horizon of freedom that has opened before them.”

Immense human suffering has been manufactured to lay the ground for U.S. intervention. Though U.S. sanctions have caused 40,000 deaths in one year alone (from 2017 to 2018), U.S. and corporate media have put the blame on the Venezuelan government for the casualties. In this sense, the ideological component of the hybrid war against Venezuela follows a long historical trend in which imperial forces “economically suffocate the population of non-aligned countries. Having made them gasp for air, the imperialists blame the governments for—effectively—choking themselves.”

In its latest dossier, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research details the forms that the hybrid war in Venezuela has taken. Using a concept elaborated by political analyst Andrew Korybko, the dossier discusses the aim of the war to achieve “full spectrum dominance”; to dominate every aspect of society including not only “ideological frameworks but also the full range of human emotions—how to understand desire and beauty, values and aesthetics—as well as all the dimensions of human survival—organisation of the market and production.” It is a war, then, to dominate one’s entire conception of reality. It is a war that seeks to so thoroughly squeeze the people of Venezuela that they are forced to adopt the solutions presented by imperialism. The iron grip will loosen, the U.S. promises, so long as they are willing to sacrifice their sovereignty and submit to the interests and the direction of the United States.

The United States is keenly aware of the legacy left by colonialism, a legacy that it continues to exploit. Forced for centuries to develop its economy around the export of a single primary commodity—oil, in the case of Venezuela—the country is heavily reliant on the import of basic consumer goods, such as food and medicine. This strategy to exploit the weaknesses and limits of target governments is squarely in the center of the strategy of hybrid warfare.

Though the Bolivarian government has taken measures to increase the national production of food, they have remained insufficient, providing a weakness for the U.S. to exploit in its plan to “make the situation more critical,” in the words of former chief of the U.S. Southern Command Kurt Tidd. In his Plan to Overthrow the Venezuelan Dictatorship: “Masterstroke,” Tidd details a number of strategies to this end including inducing inflation, obstructing imports, discouraging investors, and creating general instability. The U.S.’s decision to pour salt in the wounds of colonialism—if unchecked—will continue to result in more deaths. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Food imports have dropped sharply along with overall imports; in 2018 they were estimated at just $2.46 billion, as compared with $11.2 billion in 2013. They can be expected to plummet further in 2019, along with imports generally, contributing to malnutrition and stunting in children.”

This weakness has also left the country particularly vulnerable to the economic blockades and sanctions imposed by the United States, which have induced capital flight, inflation, and blocked access to credit and purchasers for its oil. In other words, the U.S. “withdrew the basic tools that the government could have used to solve the crisis, and aggravated the suffering of the Venezuelan people.” The devastating results of this offensive provide the perfect opportunity for the United States’ trojan horse of humanitarian aid—as it has done in Haiti—and lay the ground for a regime change at all costs.

What is at stake in Venezuela today expands far beyond the nation’s borders. The country lies at the crux of a geopolitical war waged by global capital, with the United States at its head, to destroy the threat of a people-centered agenda once and for all. The U.S. was unable to do this in Vietnam. It has been unable to do this in Cuba. And, so far, it has been unable to do this in Venezuela, though it has not stopped trying. Not only was Venezuela able to reduce hunger and inequality and improve the lives of the many since Chávez’s election, but it has also been able to offer key support to other nations who bear the weight of the heavy fist of the U.S. empire, from Cuba to Haiti. If the U.S. succeeds in destroying the Bolivarian government, it will be a blow to people across the world.

For the U.S., the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela must be destroyed. Maduro must be delegitimized. The people of Venezuela must be made to suffer. But, for the majority of the world’s people, we would do well to remember the words of Che Guevara reflecting on Vietnam: “How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe … with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the peoples of the world!” Venezuela is today’s Vietnam.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Trump Has Alaska’s Wildlife in His Crosshairs

A video featuring a father and son slaughtering a mother black bear and then her two screaming newborn cubs in their den has ricocheted around the world, drawing obvious comparisons to the killing of Cecil, the African lion, by a Minnesota dentist several years ago.

Sadly, the shocking brutality the two men displayed for the world to see could soon be sanctioned by this administration. The Department of the Interior proposes to make legal these and other venal trophy-hunting practices on more federal public lands in Alaska. In 2017, Congress and the president overturned a 2016 rule governing 76 million acres of National Wildlife Refuge System lands, and effectively prohibited the trophy hunting of hibernating black bears.

This administration has shown a penchant for supplicating itself to trophy hunters and trappers. At a time when most Americans regard trophy hunting with revulsion, the Trump administration plans to overturn two federal rules prohibiting the most deplorable trophy hunting and trapping practices ever carried out on federal lands in Alaska.

Related Articles











Trump's Environmental Rollbacks Are Already Taking a Steep Toll



by

In 2015, the National Park Service forbade such execrable trophy-hunting methods as the slaughter of hibernating black bear mothers and their cubs in their dens (with the aid of artificial light), using smelly bait to attract and kill unsuspecting grizzly bears, slaughtering entire wolf and coyote families at den sites and shooting defenseless swimming caribou.

Also at risk is a 2016 rule concerning the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge that prohibited the hunting of brown bears over bait and the discharge of weapons within one-quarter mile of heavily used recreational areas, including campgrounds, trailheads and rivers. This rule also prohibited trophy hunting and trapping in high-use public zones in the Kenai refuge.

Another element of the mess at issue is that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game works under the auspices of Intensive Management, a paradigm that privileges hunting interests over wildlife conservation. Intensive Management permits the wholesale slaughter of wolves and bears in the mistaken belief that killing lots of these native carnivores will increase game herds for humans. That approach has utterly failed, however, most importantly because the Arctic’s fragile ecosystems cannot support unlimited numbers of herbivores. The result is a management strategy that has decimated Alaska’s native carnivore communities and encouraged an increase in the animal species most likely to cause harm to the landscape and environment.

When will it all end? Trophy hunters and trappers have killed wolves in Denali National Park and Preserve and along its boundaries in such numbers that tourists have all but lost their chance to witness wolves, including the famous and storied East Fork (Toklat) Pack, studied and admired since the 1930s.

The same is true for grizzly bears. Because of Intensive Management, Alaska’s great bears are now in great jeopardy. The state’s sanction of extreme hunting practices threatens to shrink native carnivore populations, to the dismay of biologists who study these majestic animals and to the great loss of all Americans who care about them. Such trophy hunting and predator-control practices should not be allowed on federal lands anywhere, and especially not in our national preserves and refuges in Alaska.

As of the previous census, wildlife-watching is a $2 billion-a-year industry in Alaska that contributes far more to local economies than trophy hunting and trapping ever could. Alaska’s wildlife-watching tourism outperforms the funds generated in the state from all hunting activities (and the extreme methods at issue here account for only a tiny fraction of that amount).

Wolves, black bears and grizzly bears represent an extraordinary lure for tourists, and they will continue to compel the interest of all Americans for decades. If their populations are hindered on these public lands, local economies could falter. But more importantly, we will all suffer the loss that their death and disappearance from our wild spaces entails.

Our national parks, preserves and wildlife refuges were founded “to conserve species and habitats in their natural diversity … for the benefit of present and future generations.” Overturning these rules and catering to trophy hunters moves us backward. That’s the wrong direction, and we shouldn’t let it happen. 

Sign a petition urging Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt to oppose the rule that would overturn the 2015 National Park Service rule currently protecting iconic wildlife from trophy hunters and trappers on federal U.S. lands.