Chris Hedges's Blog, page 23

The Most Unnerving Moment From the Nevada Democratic Debate

Sen. Bernie Sanders was the lone voice on Wednesday night’s debate stage in Las Vegas endorsing without reservation the idea that the candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination with the most votes by this summer’s convention in Milwaukee should be the party’s standard bearer.

All other five candidates onstage endorsed allowing the “process” to play out, which would mean allowing super-delegates to weigh in from the second ballot on, alongside the regular delegates earned from votes in the primary.

Watch:

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the candidates if the person with the most delegates at the end of the primary season should be the nominee even if they don’t have a majority of the delegates. Only one person on stage had a different answer from the others. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/owrJtetRjh

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 20, 2020

“Out of all the candidates, Bernie is the only one to advocate for the democratic will of the people—he wants your vote to count more than a superdelegate’s,” tweeted progressive group Democratic Socialists of America.

Moderator Chuck Todd asked Sanders and the other candidates—Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg—about the possibility of a brokered convention at the end of a contentious and often bitter two hour debate.

“Theres a very good chance none of you are going to have enough delegates at the Democratic National Convention to clinch this nomination,” said Todd. “If that happens, I want all of your opinions on this, should the person with the most delegates at the end of this proimary season be the nominee even if they are short of a majority?”

All candidates but Sanders, who noted the presence of super-delegates on the second ballot, said no.

As the New York Times explained:

It’s essentially an admission from Mr. Sanders’ rivals that he may finish the primary and caucus calendar with the most pledged delegates, but that they hope to hold him under 50 percent and make their case to delegates in Milwaukee.

“Stunning middle finger to democracy and the democratic base,” said journalist Kyle Kulinski of the other candidates. “Inexcusable and the definition of authoritarian.”

Sanders surrogate Linda Sarsour said on Twitter that her candidate’s answer on the delegates was the only acceptable one in a democratic system.

“Bernie Sanders was the only candidate with the RIGHT ANSWER re: should the person with most delegates going in to the convention get the nomination,” said Sarsour. “YES, let the will of the people prevail.”

America’s War on Dissent Began a Century Ago

This is Part 2 of a two-part essay. Read Part 1 here.

Upon U.S. entry into the war, in 1917 the Wilson administration proposed and a compliant Congress almost immediately passed the Espionage Act, a direct attack on American press freedom. The law criminalized newspaper journalists who dared to oppose the war, question the official narrative, or encourage dissent. Massive fines and stiff prison sentences were dealt out with regularity throughout the war. The postmaster general, Albert Burleson, used the Act with particular vigor, banning socialist and anti-war publications from the mails, which then was the only serious method of media distribution.

The actions of Burleson and the government were manifold and nefarious. Bilingual “watchdogs” (mainly university professors) were assigned to monitor the then-vibrant foreign-language publications for “material which may fall under the Espionage Act.” Burleson went past the foreign press and denied mail access to any publication that even vaguely criticized the war, or dared, as he declared, “to impugn the motives of the government” or even criticize “improperly our Allies.” Thus, even the esteemed liberal journal The Nation was banned in September 1918, simply for criticizing the pro-war labor leader Samuel Gompers. This official trampling of press freedom encouraged local organizations to take mass surveillance and thought policing to ever-more extreme levels. For example, the Iowa Council of Defense urged each member to spy on his fellow citizens and “find out what his neighbor thinks.”

Attorney General Thomas Gregory even boasted of his having crafted an effective mass surveillance state. Indeed, it was so effective that it can now be seen as a precursor — though less technologically advanced — of the digital surveillance state that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden unmasked during the Obama years. In April 1918, Gregory claimed, “Scores of thousands of men are under constant observation throughout the country.” The connections to the present day are manifold, relevant, and discomfiting. It was the nearly century-old Espionage Act, in fact, that Barack Obama used to wage his war on leakers, including Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. Indeed, the liberal darling Obama prosecuted more persons under the Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined.

Still, while Obama indicted leaker after leaker, i.e., journalistic sources, his justice department stopped short of indicting a publi­cation itself, citing the potentially dangerous precedent it would set. The Trump administration has followed in Obama’s footsteps by bringing charges against Ju­lian Assange, who — like him or not — runs a viable publication, WikiLeaks. While WikiLeaks itself has not been indicted, that is certainly still a possibility. While the mainstream U.S. press failed to rally to Assange’s side, it would behoove them to do so. If Assange is jailed or WikiLeaks is shut down, there is nothing to stop Trump or future presidents from indicting officials in the Washington Post or New York Times or the publications themselves for printing clas­sified information gleaned from leakers. By then, using World War I vintage tools, the war on the press will be over, the federal government triumphant once and for all.

American propaganda at home

When the United States declared war, many millions of Americans remained uncertain about the need for intervention and skeptical of the official justifications. After all, Democrats won the presidency in 1916 on the popularity of a specifically anti-war platform. Such sentiments were hardly vanquished in April 1917. That presented Wilson with a serious problem, one that needed to be solved immediately. The most prominent, and infamous, government answer was George Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI). While Wilson and Creel vehemently protested that CPI would not peddle propaganda, that’s exactly what the organization felt compelled to do: to “cultivate — even to manufacture” favorable public support for the war, in the words of historian David M. Kennedy.

What followed bordered on the ridiculous. Countless pamphlets were produced depicting German troops as rabid beasts, often shown as strangely threatening to white American women. The teaching of German was banned in many local school districts, as were history textbooks seen as too pro-German. CPI also collaborated with the hawkish National Board for Historical Service to craft and distribute various “war study courses” to the nation’s schools. Education, too, is a regular victim of the warfare state.

Creel had few compunctions about his work and left behind an instructive legacy of unsubtle statements. He unapologetically described his job as “the fight for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions.” His methods were varied and increasingly nefarious. CPI unleashed 75,000 “Four-Minute Men” on local communities. They were prominent citizens with reliably pro-war viewpoints who whipped up support through millions of brief speeches across the nation. Creel’s agency also distributed 75 million copies of pamphlets explaining the official government case for war. What’s more, the Committee even published pro-war advertisements in popular journals such as the Saturday Evening Post to shamelessly persuade the people. Consumerism, it seemed, had finally dovetailed with government propaganda.

The war on “hyphenated” Americans

“Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” —Woodrow Wilson (1919)

Nativism and xenophobia are as American as apple pie, and are pervasive themes in U.S. history. However, the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment reached a fever pitch in the World War I era. By then, the recent wave of new immigrants — Italians, Poles, Slavs, and Jews — outnumbered the old-stock immigrants composed of Western and Northern Europeans. This inspired fear among native Anglo Americans. Just before the war, Henry Ford’s automotive workers on the assembly line attended a factory school for immigrants in which the first English sentence students learned was “I am a good American.”

By 1916, even the supposedly progressive Wilson framed his campaign partly around the concept of Americanism, as defined by the Anglo elite. So-called hyphenated Americans had no place in a United States, and new loaded terms such as “100 percent Americanism” took hold. Even before the war, Wilson gave voice to xenophobia, directed at once-admired German-Americans, as he stated,  “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws … who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life…. Such creatures … must be crushed out.” Then, during his official war address, he claimed that there were “millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us…. If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with, with a firm hand of repression….” It was.

Scapegoating of German and new immigrants and the vigilantism against them straddled the lines of official and unofficial policy. Quasi-vigilante groups such as the massive American Protective League (APL) even managed to enter into a formal relationship with Gregory’s Justice Department. APL members, who stood 250,000 strong by war’s end, spied on neighbors and co-workers, sniffing out even the vaguest hints of dissent. Owing to his vitual deputization of the APL members, Attorney General Gregory went so far as to boast, “I have today several hundred thousand private citizens … engaged in … assisting the heavily overworked Federal authorities in keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports of disloyal utterances.”

APL members rapidly slid into more nefarious arenas — burglary, illegal wiretapping, slander, citizens’ arrests, opening private mail, and, eventually, even physical violence. For perhaps the first time in U.S. history, whites — mostly Germans, pacifists, and socialists — were lynched wholesale. Some were viciously tarred and feathered, others outright murdered. The perpetrators almost never faced punishment. In one representative case, a German-American who had actually attempted (unsuccessfully) to join the U.S. Navy was humiliated, paraded through the streets, and murdered before a cheering crowd. At their trial, the ringleaders wore red, white, and blue ribbons. Their defense counsel described their act as “patriotic murder.” Within 25 minutes the jury found them all not guilty. The “respectable” Washington Post then commented, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”

Which all links to the relevant present. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign calls to “ban Muslims” coming from certain countries, and to “take out” the families of terrorists; and his characterizations of some Mexican and Central American refugees and migrants as “rapists” no doubt set the conditions for, and incited, a recent wave of domestic terror attacks. True, violence against Muslims — which first manifested in the highly emotive post–9/11 Bush years — and Hispanics (including the recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas), and the recent rise in attacks on Jewish communities do not rise to the level of the First World War. Nonetheless, such actions follow in the mold of the xenophobia, racism, and alarmism the Great War produced.

Déjà vu all over again

The American people live, to a large extent, in the shadow of the world the Great War created. All war, especially war on such a grand scale, inevitably suppresses dissent, curtails liberty, and centralizes power in the federal government. Not only did that occur in World War I, but it did so to such a degree that the relationship of Americans to the federal government was completely transformed. U.S. presidents now unilaterally wage war — at home and abroad — with near total impunity.

It seems that while World War I did end, the post–9/11 “terror wars” may never come to a close. A major reason for that is the century-long centralization of foreign-policy and war-making power in the office of the president. Though Congress actually sanctioned (or rather rubber-stamped) war in April 1917, the Great War nevertheless transferred massive power to the executive branch. Indeed, Wilson’s unilateral military expeditions against Russian communists when he (and later his successor, Warren G. Harding) intervened in the Russian Civil War (1918-20) were a harbinger of things to come, great-grandfather to today’s unsanctioned interventions (and killing) in Libya, West Africa, Syria, and beyond. In retrospect, World War I and its more devilish step-child, the Second World War, proved to be the last two actual declared.

What’s more, the tacit — yet wildly vague and open-ended — congressional “authorizations” for force in Afghanistan (2001) and then Iraq (2002) bear a striking resemblance to the legislative rubber-stamp in April 1917. Wilson had said as much in his war address. It was, he declared, the “[executive branch] upon which the responsibility of conducting war and safeguarding the nation will most

directly fall.” And indeed it would. Today’s executive-as-emperor political culture is partly an outgrowth of Wilson’s precedent.

Political tribalism, no doubt prevalent today, was also common during the First World War. In spite of the cynical announcement of Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodges, a fierce Wilson opponent — “When this country is at war, party lines will disappear…. Both Democrats and Republicans must forget party in the presence of the common danger” — Lodge intended all along to criticize Wilson and the Democrats for their “insufficient vigor” in war prosecution. Much the same has unfolded in the “forever wars.” Bush and the Republicans pressured early Democratic acquiescence, but Dems rebelled and criticized (rightly) Bush’s failing Iraq War from 2006 to 2008. Only later, when one of their own — Barack Obama — was in office, did they suddenly support the war expansion, and it became the Republicans who portrayed the president as weak on terror. The formula flipped again when Trump took office. War, whether in 1917 or 2019, is as politically partisan as any other issue.

When the president filled the power vacuum in World War I, and Congress enabled him, it became clear that the federal courts could not and would not save liberty. Repeatedly, the Supreme Court upheld both the Espionage and Sedition Acts. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, once a darling of Progressives, wrote in Schenck v. United States, “when a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.” With those words Holmes essentially spiked the promise of freedom in future wars. The same is true today, as the Supreme Court has failed to overturn the USA PATRIOT ACT or the much-abused Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), or to shut down Guantanamo Bay and the Obama-escalated drone assassination program.

Modern liberalism, and the Democratic Party — as the Great War demonstrated — won’t save liberty either: in 1917, the vast majority of self-proclaimed Progressives sold out and followed “their man” Wilson into war, just as neo-Progressives sheepishly followed Obama down his path of war expansion. Democrats, Progressives, and too many (small “l”) liberals inflicted perhaps permanent damage on their once-optimistic social philosophy of progress. As such, according to David Kennedy, “the idea of the ‘people’ as good and educable, gave way to the ‘masses,’ brutal and volatile.”

The pro-war Progressive Walter Lippmann sensed this by war’s end, and proposed radical, undemocratic measures. The solution to man’s irrationality was to abandon real democracy and create an “intelligence bureau” to pursue “the common interests that very largely elude public opinion … managed only by a specialized class.” From that era, then, one may date the “substantial nagging fear of the people among modern liberals.”

It may be said, then, that the true casualty of the First World War was not just liberty, but the very “progressive” soul, the perhaps always-misplaced faith in government as a potential force for good. It is this cynical postwar world that Americans inhabit.

Bibliographical note: This piece draws extensively on David M. Kennedy’s book Over Here: The First World War and American Society as well as the author’s own teaching notes as lecturer from his time at West Point. Interested readers should read Kennedy’s work in full for a broader and more in-depth treatment of this massively complex subject.

This article was originally published in the January 2020 edition of Future of Freedom.

Warren and Sanders Eviscerate Bloomberg on Debate Stage

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders took aim at former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg onstage at Wednesday’s Las Vegas Democratic debate, likening the billionaire businessman to President Donald Trump and questioning his ability to turn out voters.

Sanders began by calling out Bloomberg for his stewardship of New York’s stop and frisk policy that targeted young black men.

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“In order to beat Donald Trump we’re going to need the largest voter turnout in the history of the United States,” said Sanders. “Mr. Bloomberg had policies in New York City of stop and frisk, which went after African-American and Latino people in an outrageous way. That is not a way you’re going to grow voter turnout.”

In order to beat Donald Trump we are going to need the largest voter turnout in the history of our country. Mr. Bloomberg’s record of stop-and-frisk is not going to do that. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/GD2CwkGi5b

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 20, 2020

“Bernie swinging at Bloomberg right out of the gates,” tweeted journalist Krystal Ball.

Warren added that Bloomberg’s similarity to Trump made him a flawed candidate.

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against,” said Warren. “A billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced’ lesbians, and, no I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”

Here’s that early Warren haymaker. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse faced lesbians. I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” pic.twitter.com/AS9XVbTthz

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) February 20, 2020

“Elizabeth Warren just ripped out Mike Bloomberg’s guts, showed them to him, and reminded us why she once was a frontrunner: her unrivaled ability to take down arrogant, corrupt rich dudes,” said Young Turks journalist Emma Vigeland.

Debate Night Brawl: Bloomberg, Sanders Attacked by Democratic Rivals

LAS VEGAS — From the opening bell, Democrats savaged New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg and raised pointed questions about Bernie Sanders’ take-no-prisoners politics during a contentious debate Wednesday night that threatened to further muddy the party’s urgent quest to defeat President Donald Trump.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who was once a Republican, was forced to defend his record and past comments related to race, gender and his personal wealth in an occasionally rocky debate stage debut. Sanders, meanwhile, tried to beat back pointed questions about his embrace of democratic socialism and his health following a heart attack last year.

The ninth debate of this cycle featured the most aggressive sustained period of infighting in the Democrats’ yearlong search for a presidential nominee. The tension reflected growing anxiety among candidates and party leaders that the nomination fight could yield a candidate who will struggle to build a winning coalition in November to beat Trump.

The campaign is about to quickly intensify. Nevada votes on Saturday and South Carolina follows on Feb. 29. More than a dozen states host Super Tuesday contests in less than two weeks with about one-third of the delegates needed to win the nomination at stake.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was in a fight for survival and stood out with repeated attacks on Bloomberg. She sought to undermine him with core Democratic voters who are uncomfortable with his vast wealth, his offensive remarks about policing of minorities and demeaning comments about women, including those who worked at his company.

Warren labeled Bloomberg “a billionaire who calls people fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.”

She wasn’t alone.

Sanders lashed out at Bloomberg’s policing policies as New York City mayor that he said targeted “African-American and Latinos in an outrageous way.”

And former Vice President Joe Biden charged that Bloomberg’s “stop-and-frisk” policy ended up “throwing 5 million black men up against the wall.”

Watching from afar, Trump joined the Bloomberg pile on.

“I hear he’s getting pounded tonight, you know he’s in a debate,” Trump said at a rally in Phoenix.

On a night that threatened to tarnish the shine of his carefully constructed TV-ad image, Bloomberg faltered when attacked on issues related to race and gender. But he was firm and unapologetic about his wealth and how he has used it to effect change important to Democrats. He took particular aim at Sanders and his self-description as a democratic socialist.

“I don’t think there’s any chance of the senator beating Donald Trump,” Bloomberg declared before noting Sanders’ rising wealth. “The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses!”

Sanders defended owning multiple houses, noting he has one in Washington, where he works, and two in Vermont, the state he represents in the Senate.

While Bloomberg was the shiny new object Wednesday, the debate also marked a major test for Sanders, who is emerging as the front-runner in the Democrats’ nomination fight, whether his party’s establishment likes it or not. A growing group of donors, elected officials and political operatives fear that Sanders’ uncompromising progressive politics could be a disaster in the general election against Trump, yet they’ve struggled to coalesce behind a single moderate alternative.

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, went after both Bloomberg and Sanders, warning that one threatened to “burn down” the Democratic Party and the other was trying to buy it.

He called them “the two most polarizing figures on this stage,” with little chance of defeating Trump or helping congressional Democrats in contests with Republicans.

Bloomberg and Sanders were prime targets, but the stakes were no less dire for the other four candidates on stage.

Longtime establishment favorite Biden, a two-term vice president, desperately needed to breathe new life into his flailing campaign, which entered the night at the bottom of a moderate muddle behind Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. And after a bad finish last week in New Hampshire, Warren was fighting to resurrect her stalled White House bid.

A Warren campaign aide said on Twitter that her fiery first hour of debate was her best hour of fundraising “to date.”

The other leading progressive in the race, Sanders came under attack from Biden and Bloomberg for his embrace of democratic socialism.

Sanders, as he has repeatedly over the last year, defended the cost of his signature “Medicare for All” healthcare plan, which would eliminate the private insurance industry in favor of a government-backed healthcare system that would cover all Americans.

“When you asked Bernie how much it cost last time he said… ‘We’ll find out,’” Biden quipped. “It costs over $35 trillion, let’s get real.”

And ongoing animosity flared between Buttigieg and Klobuchar when the former Indiana mayor slammed the three-term Minnesota senator for failing to answer questions in a recent interview about Mexican policy and forgetting the name of the Mexican president.

Buttigieg noted that she’s on a committee that oversees trade issues in Mexico and she “was not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country.”

She shot back: “Are you trying to say I’m dumb? Are you mocking me here?”

Later in the night, she lashed out at Buttigieg again: “I wish everyone else was as perfect as you, Pete.”

The debate closed with a question about the possibility that Democrats remain divided deep into the primary season with a final resolution coming during a contested national convention in July.

Asked if the candidate with the most delegates should be the nominee — even if he or she is short of a delegate majority, almost every candidate suggested that the convention process should “work its way out,” as Biden put it.

Sanders, who helped force changes to the nomination process this year and hopes to take a significant delegate lead in the coming weeks, was the only exception.

“The person who has the most votes should become the nominee,” he said.

___

Peoples and Jaffe reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report.

Trump Goes Global With His Absurd Anti-Abortion Agenda

Rolanda Hollis, a state representative from Alabama, has introduced a bill in her state’s legislature that has gotten a lot of attention. After Alabama banned nearly all abortions last year, Hollis introduced a bill that would require all men over the age of 50, or those who have fathered three children — whichever comes first — to undergo a mandatory vasectomy. She made it clear the bill was meant to “send a message that men should not be legislating what women do with their bodies.” Replying to a question on Twitter, she explained, “The Vasectomy bill is to help with the reproductive system. This is to neutralize the abortion ban bill.

The responsibility is not always on the women. It takes 2 to tangle [sic]. This will help prevent pregnancy as well as abortion of unwanted children.” Hollis added the bill would “help men become more accountable as well as women.”

If the idea behind Hollis’ bill sounds absurd, that is precisely the point. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has urged the passage of a 20-week abortion ban in his state, among other things, was shocked at what he describes as the bill’s overreach. He said, without irony, “Yikes. A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything … literally! Alabama Democrat proposes bill mandating all men have vasectomy at age 50 or after third child.” Twitter users jumped on his hypocrisy and called him out. Actress and activist Patricia Arquette replied, “Thought you wanted to stop unwanted pregnancies.” LGBTQ rights activist Ida Skibenes retorted, “Yikes. It’s almost like you’re uncomfortable with someone telling you what to do with your body and deciding when and how to have a kid.”

Republican lawmakers in Alabama made it quite clear that their intention in passing their near-total abortion ban was to challenge the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which asserted women had a constitutional right to an abortion. Rep. Terri Collins acknowledged the abortion ban would be challenged in court and said, “The heart of this bill is to confront a decision that was made by the courts in 1973 that said the baby in a womb is not a person.”

So adamant were lawmakers who supported the abortion ban that they refused to hear an amendment that would have carved out exceptions for pregnancies as a result of rape or incest. This means that in Alabama, for example, a 13-year-old girl who might get pregnant after being raped by an older male family member would be forced to carry a baby to term if the state law stands. If such a scenario does not sound absurd — but mandatory vasectomies for men does — you might just be a misogynist.

Hollis, a black woman lawmaker in a deeply conservative southern state, is fearless. She has challenged Republicans in the legislature, reading out a feminist poem by Katie Heim featuring this first line: “If my vagina was a gun, you would stand for its rights. You would ride on a bus and fight all the fights.” Although she made headlines for her vasectomy bill, she has also introduced bills to protect the health of children such as a ban on smoking in cars while children are present. Her detractors have raised the fact that last fall in Florida, she was arrested and detained for one night on suspicion of domestic violence after an argument with her husband during which she admitted to breaking a glass. In a country where black people, including black women, are criminalized and overpoliced, the legitimacy of her arrest deserves to be questioned. Conservatives who ban abortions, protect guns over human lives and celebrate the racist criminal justice system with their “tough-on-crime” rhetoric see no contradictions in their positions.

The anti-abortionists of America are so dangerous, they have tried to spread their ideology all over the world. A new, first-of-its-kind investigation by OpenDemocracy.net recently found that a U.S.-based organization linked to President Donald Trump has been spreading anti-abortion propaganda in at least 18 countries. Vice President Mike Pence has spoken at events organized by Heartbeat International, a group that runs so-called crisis pregnancy centers in which pregnant women who might be considering an abortion are lured in by staffers, who then tell them whatever it takes, including outright lies, to talk them out of the procedure. Heartbeat, according to the investigation, funds such centers throughout the U.S. and all over the world, including in nations where abortion is legal and often more freely available than here. The centers it runs have made claims that abortions can cause cancer, have high failure rates and can make your partner gay — all of which are obviously false.

While anti-abortionists confer life on a collection of cells inside a woman’s body and defend those cells at all costs, their denial of abortion access risks the lives of real, living human beings. Research shows that in areas where abortion access is restricted, maternal mortality rates begin climbing. Specifically, “a state’s enactment of gestational limits for abortion and the Planned Parenthood clinic closures in a state increased its maternal mortality rates,” as per one study.

The issue of abortion has come to define the American political landscape. President Trump knows he can get away with anything as long as he can reliably win the votes of anti-abortion Americans. They will seemingly forgive all his misconduct, criminal behavior, public bullying and compulsive lying, as long as he backs their agenda. And Trump’s support is not just symbolic. He has relied on the opinion of an ardent anti-abortion activist named Leonard Leo, who functions as his “unofficial judicial adviser” to remake the federal courts with the appointment of hundreds of conservative judges. The president also has picked two Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — who were on Leo’s short-list. Trump’s actions could bear real fruit for the anti-abortion crowd as the Supreme Court hears arguments next month in a case involving an abortion clinic in Louisiana. At stake in that case is the seminal Roe v. Wade decision.

It’s not just Trump. Anti-abortion activists have the powerful Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in their corner as well. McConnell has boasted about successfully blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and overseeing the Senate approval of Trump’s judges and Supreme Court justices. The man who has turned the U.S. Senate into a “legislative graveyard” now plans to bring two bills to the Senate floor: the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, and the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” As their titles strongly suggest, both bills absurdly elevate the rights of a collection of fetal cells over all else.

In spite of the relentless fearmongering, legislative erosion of women’s rights and powerful political allies to do their bidding, the anti-abortionists remain a minority. Nearly two thirds of all Americans still identify as pro-choice. If the right’s brazen attempts to erode abortion access sound deeply absurd, perhaps Alabama Rep. Hollis’ idea for mandatory vasectomies for men ought to be introduced on a federal level and debated in full view of the public.

Subverting Trump’s Culture of Cruelty

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Truthout. 

The ghost of George Orwell has never been far from President Donald Trump’s misleading rhetoric, outright lies, dehumanizing invective and punitive policies. All of the latter were on full display in Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. Trump’s speech moved between the kind of absolutes one expects from demagogues, including comments that ranged from how great America is (overlooking how millions live in poverty and millions have lost health care under Trump) and how the U.S. economy is in an unprecedented boom (when in reality it grew at its slowest pace since 2016). Trump’s speech also included outrageously false claims about the president’s supposed support for people who have preexisting conditions and protection of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, when in reality he has taken steps to weaken or eliminate protections for patients with preexisting conditions, and he has proposed cutting funding for all three social programs.

Authoritarian societies protect the powerful — not the poor or vulnerable — and Trump made that clear in boasting about tax policies that largely benefit the ultra-rich and major corporations. He lied about supporting workers’ rights and “restoring manufacturing rights” even as he continues to implement regulatory roll-backs that endanger both the environment and the health of workers and many other people in the U.S. His claim that he has launched the great American comeback is laced with death-dealing policies that range from criminalizing social problems, demonizing and punishing undocumented immigrants and their children, and laying claim to ultra-nationalist and white supremacist rhetoric that echoes the social and racial cleansing policies of earlier fascist societies. When Trump says in his speech “our families are flourishing,” he leaves out the misery and suffering he has inflicted on the many people who don’t fit into his white Christian notion of the public sphere, as well as on the immigrants and other people of color whom he has deemed disposable.

His claim to be building the world’s most prosperous and inclusive society reeks with bad faith given not only Trump’s overt racism, but also his use of white nationalist Stephen Miller as his trusted adviser and major speechwriter, and his awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, a conservative radio host whose unchecked racism, misogyny and sexism is his calling card. Like most right-wing demagogues, Trump refers to national health care, which most advanced countries have, as “socialist” and absurdly seeks to portray such health programs as designed by Democrats largely to benefit undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s ignorance, which is far from innocent, was on display when he stated that his administration is working to protect the environment by planting new trees. At the same time, he has rolled back numerous environmental standards designed to protect the environment, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, loosened regulations on toxic air pollution, opened public lands for business, and gutted the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, among other policies. In his State of the Union speech, Trump unapologetically aligned himself with the war-mongering militaristic policies that one expects in fascist societies. His most fascistic statements centered around celebrating Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, conflating undocumented immigrants with “criminals,” and describing sanctuary cities as a threat to American security and safety. Meanwhile he bragged about stacking the federal courts with right-wing judges and expressed admiration for the two right-wing Supreme Court justices he has appointed, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Trump’s State of the Union reeked with the mobilizing passions of fascism, including invocations of extreme nationalism and calls for the expansion of military power, as well as outright racism, lawlessness, contempt for dissent and anti-immigrant bigotry. Traditional politics and a media-driven culture no longer provide the language for understanding the totality of the crisis that has produced both Trump and the impeachment process.Amid all this, the Republican-controlled Senate was willing to overlook Trump’s authoritarianism, disdain for democracy and ruthless grab for power and acquit him of the impeachment charges, all the while making it clear that matters of evidence, facts, truth and justice were irrelevant to the Republican senators’ decision. Trump’s State of the Union was more than a highly charged campaign speech — it was also indicative of the state of decline and crisis the United States is experiencing under the grim shadow of authoritarianism.In the current moment, with a possible war with Iran still in the making, the ongoing anti-democratic actions of a deeply authoritarian Trump government, and the refusal of both political parties and the corporate press to address the deeper economic and political crisis facing the United States, it is crucial to analyze the current crisis of governance in a broader context that analyzes fascism as a possible wave of the future. The contemporary elements of tyranny at work in the United States point not only to a crisis of leadership and the rise of demagogues such as Trump on domestic and global stages, but also to the conditions and crisis that produce the discontent of millions of people who are embracing a politics of fear in the face of economic instability and climate insecurity.We live in an age of relentless crisis — an age marked by the collapse of civic culture, ethical values and democratic institutions that serve the public good. Language now operates in the service of violence, and ignorance has become a national ideal. Religious fundamentalism, white supremacy and economic tyranny now inform each other, giving rise to an updated recurrence of fascist politics. This is an age in which apocalyptic prophecies replace thoughtfulness and sustained acts of social responsibility. In this age of crisis, right-wing populist regimes fuel conspiracy theories, normalize lying as a way to degrade public discourse and elevate emotion over reason as a way to legitimate a culture of cruelty. As a result, more and more people feel the need for vengeance and the imposition of brutality and injury upon those portrayed as disposable. The impeachment process speaks not only to Trump’s ongoing criminal behavior and pernicious policies, but also to a mass crisis of civic literacy and the inability of the public to understand how society has broken apart, become crueler, and receded from the language of critique, hope and the social imagination. A culture of withdrawal, privatization and immediacy reinforces an indifference to public life, the suffering of others, and what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.” The space of traditional politics and a media-driven culture no longer provide the language for understanding the totality of the crisis that has produced both Trump and the impeachment process. In the absence of a comprehensive politics capable of defining the related parts and threads that point to a society in crisis, violence — especially as related to the joining of a predatory neoliberalism and a fascist politics of white supremacy — becomes the regulative principle of everyday life.
The refusal of the Republican Party-dominated Senate to remove Trump from office legitimizes his lawlessness and makes clear that Trump is simply a symptom of a long-simmering fascist politics.

Evidence of the distinctive nature of today’s crisis on both a national and global level can be glimpsed in the political and cultural forces that shaped President Trump’s impeachment, the Brexit fiasco, and the rise of authoritarian demagogues in Brazil, Turkey and Hungary, among other countries. This is a general crisis whose roots lie in the rise of global neoliberalism with its embrace of finance capital, massive inequities in wealth and power, the rise of the racial punishing state, systemic state violence, and the creation of an age of precarity and uncertainty. This is a crisis produced, in part, through a full-scale attack on the welfare state, labor and public goods. Under such circumstances, democracy has become thinner, and the social sphere and social contract no longer occupy an important place in Trump’s America.

As Nancy Fraser points out, “these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time” and constitute not only a crisis of politics and economics, which is highly visible, but also a crisis of ideas, which is not so visible. As the global economy has unraveled, the backlash against the so-called political elites and established forms of liberal governance has often produced movements for popular sovereignty that lack the crucial call for equal rights and social justice. The current historical crisis not only refigures the social sphere as a site of commercialism and infantilism, but also redefines matters of individual and social agency through the mediation of images in which self-alienation is reinforced within a culture of immediacy, disappearance and a flight from any sense of social responsibility.

Hard and Soft Disimagination Machines

The crisis of politics is now matched by a mainstream and corporate-controlled digital media and screen culture that heightens ignorance and produces political theater and fractured narratives. At the same time, it authorizes and produces a culture of sensationalism designed to increase ratings and profit at the expense of truth. This culture undermines a complex rendering of the related nature of social problems and suppresses a culture of dissent and informed judgments. We live in an age in which theater and the spectacle of performance empty politics of any moral substance and contribute to the revival of an updated version of fascist politics. Politics is now leaden with bombast: words strung together to shock, numb the mind, and images overwrought with a self-serving sense of riotousness and anger. What is distinct about this historical period, especially under the Trump regime, is what Susan Sontag has called a form of aesthetic fascism with its contempt of “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”

One distinctive element of the current moment is the rise of hard and soft disimagination machines. The hard disimagination machines — such as Fox News, conservative talk radio and Breitbart media — function as overt and unapologetic propaganda machines that trade in nativism, misrepresentations and racism, all wrapped in the cloak of a regressive view of patriotism. As Joel Bleifuss points out, Fox News, in particular, is “blatant in its contempt for the truth,” and engages nightly in the “ritual of burying the truth in ‘memory holes.’” Bleifuss adds, “This, the most-watched cable news network, functions in its fealty to Trump like a real-world Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, where bureaucrats ‘rectify’ the historical record to conform to Big Brother’s decrees.” Trump’s fascist politics and fantasies of racial purity could not succeed without the disimagination machines, pedagogical apparatuses and the practitioners needed to make his “vision not merely real but grotesquely normal.”

There is more at work here than a notion of history that celebrates an archaic and reactionary social order. There are also the seeds of a growing authoritarianism.

The soft disimagination machines or liberal mainstream media, such as “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC, and the established press function largely to cater to Trump’s Twitter universe, celebrity culture and the cut-throat ethos of the market — all while isolating social issues, individualizing social problems and making the workings of power superficially visible. Matters of power, corruption, poverty, state violence, and political corruption are rarely connected to a broader understanding of politics that connects such issues. More specifically, rarely are the threads of oppression, disposability, inequality, greed, and concentration of power associated with a toxic neoliberalism or for that matter connected to a past history of genocide, oppression, and colonization.

Politics as a spectacle saturates the senses with noise, cheap melodrama, lies and buffoonery. This is not to suggest that the spectacle that now shapes politics as pure theater is meant merely to entertain and distract. On the contrary, the current spectacle, most recently evident in the impeachment hearings in Congress, functions largely to separate the past from a politics that in its current form has turned deadly in its attack on the values and institutions crucial to a functioning democracy. In this instance, echoes of a fascist past remain hidden, invisible beneath the histrionic shouting and disinformation campaigns that rail against “fake news,” which is a euphemism for dissent, holding power accountable and an oppositional media. A flair for the overly dramatic eliminates the distinction between fact and fiction, lies and the truth.

Under such circumstances, the spectacle functions as part of a culture of distraction, division and fragmentation, all the while refusing to pose the question of how the United States shares elements of a fascist politics that connects it to a number of other authoritarian countries — such as Brazil, Turkey, Hungary and Poland — which have embraced a form of fascist aesthetics and politics that combines a cruel culture of neoliberal austerity with the discourses of hate, nativism and racism. Political theater in its current form, especially with respect to the impeachment process, embraces elements of a fascist past, and in doing so, creates a form of self-sabotage in which the public largely refuses to “pose the question why Hitler and Nazi Germany continue to exert such a grip on modern life.”

Forgetting History and the Legitimation of White Supremacy

Another lesson to be learned from the absence of history or what it means to even have a history in the discourse surrounding the impeachment hearings is not only how ignorance gets normalized, but also how the absence of critical thought allows us to forget that we are moral subjects capable of changing the world around us. Echoes of a dark past loom over the impeachment process and the crimes of the Trump administration. Not only are lessons not learned, but history is being rewritten in the image of the mystical leader, a culture of lies, and a perpetual motion machine that trades in racism, fear and bigotry.

Trump’s scapegoating and demonization of critics of color reflects an updated strategy for mainstreaming the death-haunted elements of fascism.

The impeachment of Donald Trump is a crisis in need of being fully confronted both historically and in terms of a comprehensive politics that allows us to learn from alarming signs coming from the Trump administration. Such a crisis contains elements of a past that suggest we cannot look away or give in to the current assault on the past as a measure of intellectual respectability.

The refusal of the Republican Party-dominated Senate to remove Trump from office both legitimizes his lawlessness and makes clear that Trump is simply a symptom of a long-simmering fascist politics. This is a politics whose roots run deep in American politics and have produced a Republican Party that Noam Chomsky has argued is “the most dangerous organization in human history.” This is a political party that forgets historical narratives that it considers dangerous. At the same time, it couples its embrace of historical amnesia with a rewriting of history that draws on a mythical past to promote toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white supremacy. There is more at work here than a notion of history that celebrates an archaic and reactionary social order. There are also the seeds of a growing authoritarianism.

History offers a model to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, making it more difficult to assume that fascism is merely a relic of the past. Memories of terror are not only present in the white supremacist parade of hate and bigotry that took place in Charlottesville, but also in the current White House, which is home to white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, who is a high-level adviser to Trump and is viewed by many as the architect of his draconian immigration policies. Recently, over 900 of Miller’s emails were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh. Among the trove of emails, Miller commented on and provided reference to white nationalist websites such as VDARE and celebrated the racist novel, The Camp of the Saints. He “also reportedly espoused conspiracy theories about immigration, backed racist immigration policies introduced by President Calvin Coolidge that were praised by Adolf Hitler, and deployed slang popular in white nationalist circles to reference immigration.” Judd Legum argues that Miller also “obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”

In spite of a barrage of calls from a number of politicians for Miller’s removal from the White House, Trump held firm, reinforcing that widely accepted notion that Trump is a white nationalist entirely comfortable with white supremacist ideology. This is not surprising since Trump brought the language of white nationalism into the White House and mainstream politics. Of course, removing Miller would not change much. Miller is not the main white supremacist in the Trump administration. Nor can his presence hide the fact that white supremacy has been a staple of the Republican Party for decades — evident in the history and contemporary presence of high-profile Republican politicians, such as Senators Strom Thurmond and Jeff Sessions, and Representatives Steve King, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher. Moreover, the long legacy of white supremacy in the United States should not undercut the distinctiveness of Trump’s white supremacist views, which he wears like a badge of honor while escalating and normalizing white supremacist sensibilities, practices and policies unlike any president in modern times. His scapegoating and demonization of politicians, athletes and other critics of color reflects more than a divide-and-rule strategy; it is an updated strategy for mainstreaming the death-haunted elements of fascism.

In a society in which ignorance is viewed as a virtue and civic literacy and education are viewed as a liability, you cannot expect anything but fascism.

In addition, he has consistently waged war on the media and elevated the spurious notion of “fake news” to the level of a common-sense assumption. The latter derogatory term has a strong resemblance to Hitler’s demonization of the “Lügenpresse” — the lying press. Rick Noack states: “The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the ‘ugly Germany’: members of xenophobic, right-wing groups. This Nazi slur has also been used by some of Trump’s followers.”

Trump has legitimated a culture of lying, cruelty and a collapse of social responsibility. In doing so, he has furthered the process of trying to make people superfluous and disposable, all the while producing a fog of ignorance which gives contemporary credence to Hannah Arendt’s claim in The Origins of Totalitarianism that, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists.”

Underneath this moral abyss, politics wages war on the truth and historical memory. This was made clear in the Senate’s refusal to hear witnesses, assess evidence and remove from office a president who has repeatedly abused the power of the office and relentlessly produced a pageant of menace and manufactured drama spectacularized through threats of violence, lies, fear and white rage.

If Nazi Germany offered an image of a politics cleansed of social and moral responsibility, Trump offers us a foretaste of what the total destruction of democracy and the planet looks like. The acquittal of Trump as the end point of the impeachment process provides a glimpse of a right-wing, white supremacist party that has rejected democracy for an authoritarian mode of governance, one that benefits the ultra-rich, the corporate elite, right-wing evangelicals, militarists, ultranationalists and white supremacists.

The Republican Party is now organized like a cult. It has given over to totalistic visions, narratives of decline and a politics of ethnic and racial “purification.”

Civic literacy and civic education are an antidote to Trump’s culture of lying and manipulation.

While the Republican Party is far more extremist than the Democratic Party, it must be remembered that they both participate in, benefit from, and support what Robert Jay Lifton has called a “malignant normality,” which he defines in his book Losing Reality as “the imposition of a norm of destructive or violent behavior, so that such behavior is expected or required of people.”

At one level, this strikes me as a suitable definition of a rabid form of neoliberalism and finance capital that is now reproduced in different forms by both parties. At another level, it applies to the “murderous arrangements” that define the fascist politics practiced by the Trump administration. Lifton is worth quoting at length. He writes:

With Trump and Trumpism … we have experienced a national malignant normality: extensive lying and falsification, systemic corruption, ad hominem attacks on critics, dismissal of intelligence institutions and findings, rejection of climate change truths and of scientists who express them, rebukes of our closest international allies and embrace of dictators, and scornful deligitimation of the party of opposition. This constellation of malignant normality has threatened and at times virtually replaced, American democracy.

Fighting Fascist Politics With Civic Education

Historian David Blight has written that Trump’s “greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance — of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution.” Blight is only partly right in that the greatest threat to our society is a collective ignorance that legitimates forms of organized forgetting, modes of social amnesia and the death of civic literacy. The notion that the past is a burden that must be forgotten is a centerpiece of authoritarian regimes. While some critics eschew the comparison of Trump with the Nazi era, it is crucial to recognize the alarming signs in this administration that echo a fascist politics of the past. As Jonathan Freedland points out, “the signs are there, if only we can bear to look.” Rejecting the Trump-Nazi comparison makes it easier to believe that we have nothing to learn from history and to take comfort in the assumption that it cannot happen once again. No democracy can survive without an informed and educated citizenry.

The pedagogical lesson the impeachment process offered far exceeded its stated limited aims as a form of civic education. It not only ignored the most serious of Trump’s crimes; it also failed to examine a number of political threads that together constitute elements common to a global crisis in democracy. The impeachment process, when viewed as part of a broader crisis of democracy, cannot be analyzed and removed from the connecting ideological, economic and cultural threads that weave through often isolated issues such as white nationalism, the rise of a Republican Party dominated by right-wing extremists, the collapse of the two-party system, and the ascent of a corporate-controlled media that functions as a disimagination machine and as a corrosive system of power.

Trump’s State of the Union was an ode to capitalism on steroids, a future controlled by the 1 percent, and a politics that substitutes a fascist politics for democratic narratives.

Crucial to any politics of resistance is the necessity to analyze Trump’s use of politics as a spectacle and how to address it not in isolation, not just as a form of diversion and political theater, but also as part of a more comprehensive political project in which updated forms of authoritarianism and contemporary versions of fascism are being mobilized and gaining traction both in the United States and across the globe. Federico Mayor Zaragoza, the former director general of UNESCO, once stated, “You cannot expect anything from uneducated citizens except unstable democracy.” In the current historical moment and age of Trump, it might be more appropriate to say that in a society in which ignorance is viewed as a virtue and civic literacy and education are viewed as a liability, you cannot expect anything but fascism.

Trump’s State of the Union address made clear that he lives in a world of lies, spectacles and a complex machinery of manipulation that shreds any viable notion of civic culture and the institutions that are fundamental to a robust democracy.

The deceitful rhetoric and lies that Trump produced in the State of the Union speech need to be countered with the power of a civic literacy. In the struggle against manufactured falsehoods and the ecosystem of hate, civic literacy is a fundamental resource. Living within the truth, as Václav Havel once put it, demands modes of civic education within a variety of sites that use the “power of culture to energize and articulate political issues.” In this instance, civic education demands not only a struggle over ideas but also a struggle over the public institutions and critical spheres that produce, legitimate and sustain such ideas.

Any attempt to defeat Trump must expose the type of lies central to his relentless rallies, tweets, and speeches, while simultaneously building a politics wedded to questioning and holding power accountable. Civic education and a civically minded culture must become central to politics, following the assumption that democracy cannot exist without a democratic formative culture whose task is enacting democratic modes of governing and producing critical thinkers who can call existing institutions and dominant relations of power into question. Under such circumstances, as social critic Cornelius Castoriadis writes, civic literacy provides the cultural workstation in which “the question of justice” becomes central to “the question of politics.”

Civic literacy and civic education are an antidote to Trump’s culture of lying and manipulation and offer the first line of defense against Trump’s disimagination machines, which include the right-wing press and talk shows as well as reactionary protofascist digital media platforms. Depoliticization is a form of domination in which agency is rendered toxic and unreflective, while critical thinking is disparaged, and real hope is either trivialized or degenerates into cynicism.

Trump’s use of apocalyptic and exaggerated rhetoric in his State of the Union address maligned language, the truth, historical memory and the public good. His speech thus served as a reminder that fascism begins with language. What needs to be also remembered is that civic literacy also begins with language, not as a tool of violence, but as a means for developing collective modes of resistance wedded to real structural changes and planning.

Trump’s State of the Union address was simply another example of the descent into the constitutional and political abyss in which lawlessness and cruelty have become normalized and buttressed by grandiose claims that abandon any pretense to truth in the service of power. Shifts in language have now made it difficult to imagine the promise of a robust democracy. Let us not forget that civic literacy doesn’t chip away at reality, the truth or democracy; instead, it offers the building blocks for a civic formative culture in which the fascist world of manufactured drama and its underlying straitjacket of common sense can be challenged by individuals who can speak, write and act from a position of agency and empowerment.

Civic literacy is about the possibility of interpretation as an act of intervention that can bridge private troubles to broader systemic forces. Trump’s State of the Union was an ode to capitalism on steroids, a future controlled by the 1 percent, and a politics that substitutes a fascist politics for democratic narratives and struggles for emancipation and social equality. If Trump and his neoliberal counterrevolution are to be defeated, the first step is to expand and develop the formative cultures, critical institutions, modes of identification and forms of civic literacy capable of challenging the violent rhetoric and affective energies of fascism. Only then can we begin to build a popular movement willing to engage in forms of resistance that can overcome the proto-fascistic and racist neoliberal forces that produced Trump.

 

Passengers Leave Ship Docked Off Japan After Quarantine Ends

YOKOHAMA, Japan — About 500 passengers left the cruise ship Diamond Princess on Wednesday at the end of a much-criticized two-week quarantine aboard the vessel that failed to stop the spread of the new virus among passengers and crew.

The quarantine’s flop was underlined as Japanese authorities announced 79 more cases, bringing the total on the ship to 621. Results were still pending for some other passengers and crew among the original 3,711 people on board.

Japan’s government has been questioned over its decision to keep people on the ship, which some experts have called a perfect virus incubator. The Diamond Princess is the site of the most infections outside of China, where the illness known as COVID-19 emerged late last year.

Many foreign governments say they won’t let passengers from the ship return unless they go through another quarantine period, so it was striking to see passengers disembark, get into taxis and disappear into Yokohama, where the ship is docked.

Japanese soldiers helped escort some passengers, including an elderly man in a wheelchair who wore a mask and held a cane. Some got on buses to be transported to train stations. Some people still in their cabins waved farewell from their balconies to those who had already been processed.

“I’m a bit concerned if I’m OK to get off the ship, but it was getting very difficult physically,” a 77-year-old man from Saitama, near Tokyo, who got off with his wife, told Kyodo News. “For now, we just want to celebrate.”

Health Minister Katsunobu Kato initially said Wednesday that those with negative virus tests had fulfilled the Japanese quarantine requirement and were free to walk out and go home on public transportation. He said passengers were only asked to watch their health carefully for a few days and notify health authorities if they have any symptoms or worries.

But after meeting with experts later in the day, he urged the former passengers to refrain from non-essential outings and try to stay home for about two weeks.

“COVID-19 is not 100% known, and a lot of people got infected on the Diamond Princess. Taking those factors into consideration, we believe taking extra caution will contribute to preventing the risk of future infections,” he said.

Some passengers said on Twitter they received health forms in the morning asking if they had symptoms such as a headache, fever or coughing. Passengers who tested negative and had no symptoms still had to get their body temperature checked before leaving.

Passengers were provided with a certificate stating their negative test results and completion of the quarantine.

Still, Masao Sumida, an 84-year-old passenger from Chiba, near Tokyo, told NHK television he was worried people around him might have doubts. “I know I tested negative, but I’m afraid people may try to stay away from me,” he said.

Mitsuo Kaku, a professor at Tohoku University’s Laboratory of Infectious Disease, said on NHK that the risk of virus transmission by those who tested negative is low, but passengers who get off the ship should “use ample precautions” to protect themselves and people around them for about two more weeks.

About 500 passengers had left the ship by Wednesday evening, and Japanese officials were to spend the next three days disembarking about 2,000 others. The Diamond Princess was quarantined after one passenger who left the ship earlier in Hong Kong was found to have the virus.

Even though Japanese officials insist the number of infected patients is leveling off, cases on the ship continue to mount daily. On Tuesday, 88 people tested positive; a day after 99 others were found to be infected.

Crew members, who couldn’t be confined to their rooms because they were working, are expected to stay on the ship.

The National Institute of Infectious Diseases said in a report Wednesday that the crew had not been fully isolated during the quarantine period. It said the quarantine was effective in reducing transmission among passengers, and that the increase in cases toward the end was mostly among crew or passengers in shared cabins.

“It should be noted that due to the nature of the ship, individual isolation of all those aboard was not possible,” it said.

Some medical experts who assisted with the quarantine have said anti-infection measures were often sloppy on the ship. Four health workers — a quarantine official, a physician, a paramedic who took an infected passenger to a hospital and a health ministry official — became infected.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said a more controlled health watch for the crew was starting immediately because they can be spread out and kept in isolation by using vacated passenger rooms.

The ship’s operator, Princess Cruises, said in a statement Tuesday that people who tested positive recently were still on the ship as they waited for transportation to hospitals.

The United States evacuated more than 300 people over the weekend who are now in quarantine in the U.S. for another 14 days. South Korea earlier Wednesday returned seven people from the cruise ship, placing the six South Koreans and one Japanese family member into quarantine.

Other foreign passengers were to be picked up by chartered flights sent from Canada, Australia, Italy and Hong Kong.

The U.S. government said Americans who remained on board instead of returning on the chartered flights would not be allowed to return for at least two weeks after they come ashore. Other governments picking up passengers have similar policies.

Japanese health officials have defended the 14-day quarantine on the ship as adequate, but some outside experts said the decision to impose a second quarantine was the right call.

“It’s absolutely justified,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia. “The evidence suggests the quarantine was not working very well so you have to presume everybody leaving the ship is potentially infected and therefore you have to go through another two-week quarantine period.”

Dr. Nathalie MacDermott, a clinical lecturer at King’s College London, agreed. “Quarantines start from the point when you’re no longer exposed to the infection,” she said. “We cannot be sure that anyone on board has not been exposed to the infection.”

___

Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo. Associated Press writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

U.N.: Thousands Fleeing Syrian Offensive, Kids Dying in the Cold

UNITED NATIONS — Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing a Russian-backed Syrian offensive are being squeezed into ever smaller areas near Turkey’s border “under horrendous conditions” in freezing temperatures that are killing babies and young children, the U.N. humanitarian chief said Wednesday.

Mark Lowcock told the U.N. Security Council that “the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe” in northwest Idlib province, which is the last major rebel stronghold, has “overwhelmed” efforts to provide aid.

He said nearly 900,000 people have been displaced since Dec. 1 when the government offensive began, more than 500,000 of them children.

“Many are on foot or on the backs of trucks in below-freezing temperatures, in the rain and snow,” Lowcock said. “They are moving into increasingly crowded areas they think will be safer. But in Idlib, nowhere is safe.”

Lowock, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said almost 50,000 people have taken shelter under trees and in open spaces. “I am getting daily reports of babies and other young children dying in the cold,” he added.

U.N. special envoy Geir Pedersen echoed Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ expression of alarm on Tuesday at the rapid deterioration of the humanitarian situation “and the tragic suffering of civilians.”

“Hostilities are now approaching densely populated areas such as Idlib city and Bab al-Hawa border crossing, which has among the highest concentration of displaced civilians in northwest Syria and also serves as a humanitarian lifeline,” he said.

Pedersen warned: “The potential for further mass displacement and even more catastrophic human suffering is apparent, as an increasing number of people are hemmed into an ever-shrinking space.”

He said Russia and Turkey, as sponsors of a cease-fire in Idlib, “can and must play a key role in finding a way to deescalate the situation now,” though meetings between delegations of the two countries in Ankara, Munich and Moscow in recent days and contacts between the two presidents have not produced results.

“To the contrary, public statements from different quarters, Syrian and international, suggest an imminent danger of further escalation,” Pedersen said in a video briefing from Geneva.

The United States, United Kingdom, Germany and others stressed that three-way talks with Syria supporters Russia and Iran and opposition backer Turkey, which led to a de-escalation zone in Idlib, aren’t working.

German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen said that since the so-called Astana formula isn’t working, it’s now time for the U.N. to step in and “it’s time also for the secretary-general also to step up to the plate.”

“We have an immense responsibility that we face here as the United Nations, as the Security Council to stop what is happening,” he said. “We must spare no effort.”

U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft told the council that “the clearest path we see to an immediate end to violence in northwest Syria is for the U.N. to take full charge of a new cease-fire initiative.”

“This should be the secretary-general and U.N. special envoy Pedersen’s most urgent priority,” she said.

Heusgen also urged Russia to stop supporting Syria.

“If you tell the Syrians that there is no longer military support to the Syrian regime, they will have to stop the onslaught on their own population,” he said.

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia responded: “We will not stop supporting the legitimate government of Syria which is conducting a legitimate fight against international terrorism.”

He defended the Astana process as playing “the key role,” saying that “there’s no other mechanism for a political dialogue.”

Nebenzia supported Pedersen’s efforts to get agreement from Syria’s government and opposition on an agenda so a constitutional committee can start discussing a new charter for the country, which is seen by many as a first step toward elections and formation of a new government.

“What needs to stop is protection of fighters, insurgents,” he said.

Britain’s ambassador, Karen Pierce, said Russia and Syria need to stop “indiscriminate and inhumane attacks” in the northwest that are killing and injuring innocent civilians.

During closed consultations after the open meeting, French Ambassador Nicolas De Riviere said he proposed that the Security Council issue a statement on the escalating situation but Russia blocked it.

According to council diplomats, the proposed statement called for a cessation of hostilities in northwestern Syria, but Russia insisted on an additional line that would have allowed the fight against “terrorists” to continue. That was unacceptable to the vast majority of council members, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the consultations were private.

America’s Barbaric Health Care System in One Grisly Statistic

An estimated eight million people in the U.S. have started a crowdfunding campaign to help pay for their own or a member of their household’s healthcare costs, according to a survey released Wednesday.

The poll, which was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, also found that in addition to the millions who have launched crowdfunding efforts for themselves or a member of their household, at least 12 million more Americans have started crowdfunding efforts for someone else.

Fifty million Americans have donated to such fundraising efforts, the survey showed.

“As annual out-of-pocket costs continue to rise, more Americans are struggling to pay their medical bills, and millions are turning to their social networks and crowdfunding sites to fund medical treatments and pay medical bills,” Mollie Hertel, senior research scientist at NORC, said in a statement. “Although about a quarter of Americans report having sponsored or donated to a campaign, this share is likely to increase in the face of rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs.”

We live in a barbaric society at the mercy of billionaires https://t.co/kARJZZbFHj

— StrikeDebt (@StrikeDebt) February 19, 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the survey that “no one should have to beg for money to get the health care they need in the richest country on Earth.”

“Enough is enough,” Sanders wrote. “Medicare for All now.”

The survey found that 60% of Americans believe the government—not charities, family members, or friends—has a “great deal or a lot of responsibility” to provide “help when medical care is unaffordable.”

“I have to presume that most crowdfunding campaigns fail,” tweeted single-payer advocate Tim Faust. “So here’s the future of American healthcare: costs keep going up; they keep being pushed onto patients by insurers; whether you drown in medical debt is a function of luck, popularity, and how much sympathy you can garner.”

As she introduced the House version of the Medicare for All Act of 2019 last February, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) lamented that “GoFundMe is becoming one of the most popular insurance plans in the country.”

“It comes down to a profit-making motive that is baked into a system—a system that puts profits over patients,” said Jayapal.

Democrats Have Found Their Own Autocrat

Since Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination four years ago, mainstream media across the political spectrum have warned us about the rise of “populism.” The standard narrative goes something like this: those on the political extremes — especially the far-right but also the far-left—are rapidly gaining ground and subverting liberal democracy across the globe, ushering in a new age of authoritarianism.

“What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao,” explained former George W. Bush speechwriter turned #Resistance leader David Frum in 2017. “Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.”

When it comes to right-wing nationalists like Trump and others — Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, to name just a few — this critique has largely proved correct. Trump’s authoritarian impulses are undeniable, and he has expressed his fundamental disdain for democratic norms, the free press and the rule of law on an almost daily basis. The former game show host has done extraordinary damage to America’s already deeply flawed institutions, and there’s no telling how much more he would do with another four years in office.

Whatever truth there is to this argument, however, there has always been something deeply disingenuous about veteran neoconservatives and neoliberals positioning themselves as defenders of democracy. Some of the loudest critics of this “new authoritarianism” were devoted supporters of Bush II, who was arguably an even more effective demagogue than Trump. Along with Frum, Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot and Jonathan Chait all supported the Iraq War and an unprecedented expansion of executive power. President Obama, of course, consolidated and strengthened that power by broadening the surveillance state that is now under Trump’s control. None of the aforementioned pundits felt compelled to speak up about these developments before 2017.

It’s not so much Trump’s authoritarianism that centrists object to then but the crude and impudent manner of its implementation. Three years after his election, they still regard him as a kind of aberration. Never has this been clearer than in the mainstream media’s recent embrace of Michael Bloomberg. With former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign in a death spiral, the former mayor of New York City has emerged as an appealing alternative for establishment types who despise Trump but cannot bear the thought of supporting a genuine social democrat like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The irony is that Bloomberg fits perfectly into Frum’s definition of authoritarianism, which he argues is built on “rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.” Not only does the billionaire own a media outlet that bears his name, but as his purchased endorsements make clear, he’s all too willing to subvert our political system for his personal gain. Indeed, he has staked his entire candidacy on his ability to do just that.

Bloomberg is notorious for disregarding rules and norms, infamously strong-arming New York’s City Council to overturn the mayorship’s term limits so that he could run for a third term. “Rules, in the Bloombergian universe, only apply to people with less than ten zeros in their net worth,” observed Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast last month, adding that he is a “far more successful billionaire with the smarts, motivation and elitist mentality not only to propose but actually carry out his own deeply authoritarian vision should he be elected president.”

As mayor of New York City, Bloomberg governed as an authoritarian, from his draconian and racist stop-and-frisk policy to his heavy-handed crackdown on Occupy Wall Street. “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” Bloomberg once bragged. While evicting Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park in 2011, he even made sure to prevent journalists from documenting police brutality, closing airspace in lower Manhattan to block any possible aerial footage.

The former mayor’s disregard for civil liberties and disdain for popular movements is a matter of public record. But whereas Trump’s behavior is almost atavistic, Bloomberg employs what The New Republic’s Alex Pareene calls a “polite authoritarianism.” Comparing the two, Pareene writes that the latter “has explicitly argued that ‘our interpretation of the Constitution’ will have to change to give citizens less privacy and the police more power to search and spy on them. In fact, he does not seem to believe that certain people have innate civil rights that the state must respect.”

That so many talking heads have rallied around somebody like Bloomberg as an alternative to left- and right-wing populism should come as no surprise. A paper from political economist David Adler indicates that contrary to the dominant media narrative, centrists are uniquely hostile to democratic values. “Respondents at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, least committed to its institutions, and most supportive of authoritarianism,” writes Adler, whose findings were based on data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey.

Per his research, less than half of self-identified centrists in the U.S. believe that free elections are “essential to democracy.” Perhaps more troubling, they tend to view basic civil rights as non-essential. While dissatisfaction with democracy is high on both the left and right, Adler is careful to point out that this does not necessarily indicate these groups are ready to abandon it altogether; rather, they want their government to be more democratic than they are at present. There is a difference, he notes, between support for democracy and satisfaction with existing institutions. And while he found “moderate levels of satisfaction” with the current system among centrists, they are the least disposed toward democratic reforms.

What these people fear and abhor, ultimately, is any kind of threat to the status quo and the entrenched power of elites. As Jeet Heer recently argued in The Nation, those on the extremes of the political spectrum are more likely to criticize a state whose violence they frequently bear the brunt of, while centrists who are “safely ensconced in mainstream society and hold positions of high social status, are more likely to take an uncritical view of trampling on democratic norms, since they have the comfort of knowing that the authorities are unlikely to go after reputable figures.”

Bloomberg would govern as a well-mannered neoliberal autocrat, and his assault on American democracy would be more insidious—and perhaps more dangerous—than Trump’s in the long run. He let his mask slip last year when he commented that China’s Xi Jinping is not, in fact, a “dictator,” since he “has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.” The Uighur Muslims currently residing in concentration camps might disagree, but then again Bloomberg never did care much about the civil liberties of Muslims or people of color.

Sanders, the current Democratic front-runner, offers a very different view of Xi. “In China,” he wrote in 2018 article for The Guardian, “an inner circle led by Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while it aggressively promotes a version of authoritarian capitalism abroad.” Unlike Bloomberg and his toadies, Sanders is committed to expanding democracy and understands that the neoliberal status quo of the past several decades has fueled the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world today.

Here lies the crucial difference between those who denounce Trump from their armchairs and leftists who join popular movements fighting for radical change. With Bloomberg now set to challenge Sanders for the Democratic nomination, the divide couldn’t be starker. And for those who truly reject authoritarianism, the choice should be easy.