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Austria to See Early Election After Scandal

VIENNA — The Latest on Austrian politics (all times local):

10:40 p.m.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has called for an early election after his vice chancellor resigned over a covertly shot video that showed him apparently promising government contracts to a prospective Russian investor.

Kurz said he would ask President Alexander Van der Bellen to set a date for a new election “as soon as possible.”

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Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party which is in Kurz’s ruling coalition, had resigned earlier Saturday, a day after the video was published.

The video hit a nerve amid broader concerns about ties between Russia and right-wing populist parties critical of the European Union.

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9:05 p.m.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says frustration with his far-right coalition partners’ behavior was behind his decision to call for a new election.

Kurz said Saturday that he and his right-wing People’s Party “had to endure much” from the anti-immigration Freedom Party, the junior member of his governing coalition. Kurz called for the early poll after his vice chancellor, Freedom Party chief Heinz-Christian Strache, resigned. Two German publications had released video showing Strache apparently promising government contracts to a purported Russian investor at a villa on Ibiza.

Kurz cited his partners’ “closeness to radical right-wing groups” as well as “the rat poem” written by a Freedom Party city official in a party newspaper that compared migrants to rats. The official resigned amid public disgust and criticism from Kurz.

Kurz said in his statement calling for new elections that “enough is enough.”

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8:05 p.m.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has called for an early election after the resignation of his vice chancellor spelled an end to his governing coalition.

Vice chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache resigned Saturday after two German publications showed video of him apparently offering government contracts to a purported Russian investor.

Kurz said he could not reach an agreement with the leadership of Strache’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party on carrying forward the coalition with his center-right People’s Party.

He also said a possible coalition with the Social Democrats would not permit the Austrian government to carry out its policies of limiting debt and taxes.

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7 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken out against “right-wing populism” following a scandal involving Austria’s vice chancellor apparently offering government contracts to an allegedly wealthy Russian woman.

Speaking Saturday with Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic in Zagreb, Merkel said the EU had to “stand up decisively” to populists and accused right-wing parties of “corruptibility.”

Merkel spoke ahead of the elections to the European Parliament that are being held Thursday through Sunday. Nationalist and populist movements critical of the 28-country European Union are contesting the election against mainstream center-right and center-left parties that want more European cooperation and integration.

Austrian vice chancellor Heinz-Chritian Strache resigned Saturday after two German publications published video of him apparently promising a Russian investor government contracts in return for her purchasing a newspaper and supporting his anti-immigrant Freedom Party.

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2:35 p.m.

Austria is waiting for a statement from Chancellor Sebastian Kurz about the future of the country’s government after his vice chancellor and coalition partner Heinz-Christian Strache resigned in a covert video scandal.

Strache quit Saturday after two German newspapers published footage of him apparently offering lucrative government contracts to a potential Russian benefactor.

The resignation raises the question of whether Kurz and his center-right People’s Party will take a replacement in the cabinet from Strache’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party and continue their coalition. Alternatively, Kurz could call a new election.

Kurz was expected to speake after 3 p.m. (1300 GMT) the APA news agency reported.

Meanwhile, several thousand government opponents demonstrated on Vienna’s Ballhausplatz in front of the chancellor’s office.

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12:45 p.m.

Austrian vice chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache says he is resigning after two German newspapers published footage of him apparently offering lucrative government contracts to a potential Russian benefactor.

Strache said Saturday in a statement before assembled journalists that he was illegally set up in a “political assassination,” but added his behavior in the video was “stupid and a mistake.”

The scandal has led to speculation about the future of the governing coalition between Strache’s anti-immigration Freedom Party and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s center-right People’s Party.

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11:50 a.m.

Austria’s vice chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache is expected to make a statement about his political future after two German newspapers published footage of him apparently offering lucrative government contracts to a potential Russian benefactor.

The dpa news agency reported Saturday Strache was expected to address the issue at a news conference at noon local time (1000 GMT) Saturday.

The scandal has led to speculation about the future of the governing coalition between Strache’s anti-immigration Freedom Party and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s center-right People’s Party. Neither Strache nor Kurz have commented publicly.

The daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly Der Spiegel on Friday published extracts of covert video purportedly showing Strache offering government contracts to an unnamed Russian woman if she were to buy an Austrian newspaper and support his party.

American History for Truthdiggers: Nixon’s Dark Legacy

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

Below is the 31st installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, who retired recently as a major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 31 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

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

He was corrupt. He was petty, angry and resentful. He was also one of the most astute politicians in the annals of the American presidency. Time after time he overcame obstacles and defeats to rise again. His genius, ultimately, was this: He envisioned a new coalition and knew how to channel white resentment over the civil rights and antiwar movements into political triumph. This was his gift, and his legacy. Americans today inhabit the partisan universe that Richard Milhous Nixon crafted. Republican leaders to this very day speak Nixon’s language and employ Nixon’s tactics of fear and anger to win massive white majorities in election upon election. Indeed, though Nixon eventually resigned in disgrace before he could be impeached, the last half-century has been rather kind to the Republican Party. Only three Democrats have been elected president in that period, and Republicans have reigned over the White House for a majority of the post-Nixon era.

For all that, Nixon remains an enigma. Though he crafted a lasting conservative majority among American voters, he also supported popular environmental and social welfare causes. He secretly bombed Laos and Cambodia and orchestrated a right-wing coup in Chile but also reached out to the Soviets and Chinese in a bold attempt to lessen Cold War tensions and achieve detente. A product of conflict, Nixon operated in the gray areas of life. Though the antiwar activists, establishment liberals and African-Americans generally hated him, Nixon won two presidential elections, cruising to victory for a second term. He was popular, far more so than many would like to admit. Although the 1960s began as a time of prosperity and hope, they produced a president who operated from and exploited anxiety and fear, and in doing so found millions of supporters. Nixon was representative of the dark side of American politics, and no one tapped into the darkness as deftly as he did. The key to his success was his ability to rally what he called the “silent majority” of frustrated Northern whites (most of whom traditionally were Democrats) and angry Southern whites (in what came to be known as his “Southern strategy”). It was cynical, and it worked.

White Backlash: Nixon’s Southern Strategy

Southern racists didn’t disappear in the wake of the civil rights movement; they simply rebranded as Republicans and expressed their intentions in less overtly racial language. Nixon, ever the consummate politician, knew this and set out to form a new American Republican majority, both for the campaign year of 1968 and for the future. The seeds of a new conservative ascendency had been in place for quite some time. In 1948, some Southern Democrats bolted the party and ran then-Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president as a “Dixiecrat,” on a ticket dubbed the States’ Rights Democratic Party. In 1964, many in the Deep South supported the Republican Barry Goldwater—this in a region so Democratic for so long that it was known in the party as the “solid South”—in his presidential bid against the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson. And, though it may be apocryphal, Johnson, a Texan, was reported to have said that his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would “lose the South [for Democrats] for a generation.” Yet it was Nixon who effectively discerned these symptoms of Democratic weakness and crafted a conservative electoral coalition that has remained in place ever since.

During the 1968 presidential campaign, a young number-crunching political strategist, Kevin Phillips, explained a new Southern strategy to Nixon. The bottom line was that Nixon needed to win over Southern Democrats to the Republican side and to essentially give up any attempt to win the black vote. As a result, the Republicans would abandon civil rights indefinitely. Phillips told Nixon that the election would be won on “the law and order / Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome.” In other words, Nixon was being successfully urged to run on “law and order” in response to the massive urban riots that had so spooked Northern whites, and to say the same things that Southern Democrats had long been mouthing about race (although in less overtly racist language).

Nixon was from California and knew he didn’t have to speak as coarsely as Strom Thurmond. Instead, he used coded, but equally apocalyptic, language to win over fearful whites. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said in his 1968 acceptance speech at the GOP convention. Still, he declared, in the tumult there was the quiet “voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators … they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.” What he meant, below the biblical eschatological imagery, was that he would be the candidate for a “silent majority” of whites—folks furious about inner-city riots, crime, hippies and a civil rights movement that most felt had gone too far, too fast.

In taking particular aim at the rioters, Nixon ignored official government reports that blamed the disorder on racism and entrenched poverty and he tied the maelstrom to a defiance of law and order. The year before his first term started, Nixon said the riots were “the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America. Far from being a great society, ours is becoming a lawless society.” The jab against Johnson’s Great Society, which in considerable part sought to help poor black populations in urban centers, was not lost on his enthusiastic listeners. Nixon had flipped the script, changed the paradigm. The real victims, the real minority, consisted not of blacks and other historically oppressed groups but working-class, white males! In a national address in 1969, Nixon plainly and forcefully unveiled his most famous phrase—“silent majority.” “… I would be untrue to my oath of office,” he declared, “if I allowed the policy of this Nation to be dictated by the minority who [oppose the Vietnam War] … and who try to impose [their views] on the Nation by mounting demonstrations in the street. … And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” Protest, in short, was no longer patriotic. Not in Nixon’s America.

Behind the national discourse and Nixon’s successful alignment of political sentiment was a staggering degree of cynicism. The president and company knew exactly what they were doing, exactly how they were manipulating white voters. Nixon adviser John Dean would later state that he “was cranking out that bullshit on Nixon’s crime policy before he was elected. And it was bullshit, too. We knew it.” More damning were the reflective comments of another key Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

It was vital, according to the Nixon team, to demonize black activists, especially advocates of black power. The chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, explained, “The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.“ Consider it racism-lite.

Still, it worked. The parties were sorted, once and for all, by race. In 1960, about 60 percent of blue-collar workers voted Democrat; in 1968, roughly 30 percent did. As for African-Americans, in 1960 more than 30 percent voted Republican; in 1972, just 10 percent did. Of course there were still far more whites than blacks in the United States, and Nixon played the numbers effectively. Haldeman saw the racial polarization and understood the numbers game sufficiently to advise Nixon: “must learn to understand the silent majority … don’t go for Jews and Blacks.” And a memo to Nixon from a member of his administration urged that he indirectly use this message in campaigning: “Today, racial minorities are saying that you can’t make it in America. What they mean is that they refuse to start at the bottom of the ladder the way you [the average middle-class American] did. They want to surpass you. … They want it handed to them.”

Turning this strategy into electoral sound bites required that Nixon make his point without mentioning race. He spoke directly to white resentment, but took it only so far. Many Nixonian Republicans ditched the Confederate battle flag and removed the N-word from their public vocabulary. Nixon would substitute crime, drugs and welfare for more overt racist tropes popular in the South.

Nixon’s pick for vice president, Spiro Agnew of Maryland, used coarser language and served as the attack dog of the 1968 campaign and the administration. He once had damned the “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of black leader.” Furthermore, throughout the campaign, Agnew used racial slurs such as “Polacks” and “fat Jap.”

There was more than just coded language and white resentment behind Nixon’s victories. Indeed, the Republicans spent twice as much as Democrats on radio and TV advertisement, demonstrating, even then, the power of money in politics. In 1968, Nixon won his first term by beating, barely, the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. With former Gov. George Wallace of Alabama running an outwardly racist third-party campaign, 57 percent of American voters opted either for Wallace or Nixon. Only 42.7 percent went for the candidate of the once-ascendant Democrats. Indeed, Humphrey received a shockingly low 35 percent of the white vote in 1968, and Republicans would win a majority of whites in nearly every presidential election in the proceeding 50 years.

To win over whites, especially in the South, President Nixon had to placate the more overt racists in the country. He had his attorney general, John Mitchell, slow the pace of school desegregation, he refused to terminate federal funding for segregated schools, and he tapped a Southerner for the Supreme Court (his nomination of Clement Haynsworth of South Carolina was blocked in the Senate). Nixon would also rail against court-ordered desegregation measures such as forced-busing programs. It all worked like a charm. The “solid South” became the Republican South, and in 1972 Nixon would win a second term in a landslide. He was a vicious political infighter, as reflected by his characterization of his campaign battles and his administration’s tactics: “getting down to the nut cutting.” And indeed he would.

The Last Liberal or the First Conservative?

Nixon, especially when compared with later Republican presidents, was in many ways a moderate conservative. He was pragmatic, caring more about victory than ideology. He recognized the popularity of certain liberal government programs and went along with them. At least for a while. All this has led many historians to debate whether Nixon was the first conservative of a new era or the last liberal of a bygone, FDR-initiated era. There is some evidence on both sides of the scale, but, ultimately, Nixon was no liberal.

On the liberal side, Nixon would propose a guaranteed minimum income, the Family Assistance Plan, for all Americans as a substitute for welfare programs. No Republican after Nixon would dare to countenance such massive social spending. Then again, he knew it wouldn’t pass and used the plan as little more than a tactical move to protect his left flank, even advising Haldeman to “make a big play for the plan, but make sure it’s killed by Democrats.” And it was. Conservative Republicans loathed the proposed government spending, but the liberals felt the Nixon proposal was not generous enough. The measure was stillborn, just as Nixon had hoped.

Nixon would sign a fair amount of liberal legislation from 1969 to 1972, but it must be remembered that most of this was pragmatic, a nod to a still Democrat-dominated Congress. Nonetheless, some of Nixon’s achievements seem strange for a Republican president. In his first term, he extended the Voting Rights Act, funded the “war on cancer,” increased spending for the national endowments for the arts and humanities, and signed the Title IX measure, banning sex discrimination in all higher education that received federal funds. In his first term, federal spending per person in poverty rose by 50 percent and total government outlays for social protections more than doubled. His labor secretary, George Shultz, even established the “Philadelphia Plan,” which called for affirmative action hiring programs for construction union members employed on government contracts. At one point, Nixon called for a comprehensive national health insurance plan. Though he personally cared very little about the environment, he knew that most Americans did. Thus, he created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and sanctioned the first official “Earth Day.” Other environmental protections included the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

Some of these measures so frustrated conservatives that Patrick Buchanan, one of the more ideological members of his team, warned Nixon that some within the party felt that conservatives were “the niggers of the Nixon administration.” On race, the Nixon administration was far from liberal, intervening to curtail desegregation measures in Southern school districts and successfully nominating two conservatives to replace liberal icons on the Supreme Court. The appointments of those judges would set the stage for the later dismantling of civil rights legislation. On busing, Nixon opposed court orders and, as previously mentioned, instructed his Department of Justice to slow the pace of integration. As he told Ehrlichman, “I want you personally to jump” on the DOJ “and tell them to knock off this crap. I hold them … accountable to keep their left-wingers in step with my express policy” of doing the minimum integration required by law. In 1972, Nixon called for a moratorium on busing measures and made his opposition to the court orders a touchstone of his re-election campaign that year.

Ultimately, Nixon’s occasional leftward moves were purely tactical. He hoped, eventually, to shift government in a more traditional conservative direction. He was only waiting for his moment. Nixon funneled much government spending to local control—so-called devolution—which allowed conservative areas to maintain covert racialized policies in spending. Nixon also railed against supposedly undeserving welfare recipients and reframed John F. Kennedy’s call to serve the country by urging Americans, in his second inaugural address, to ask “not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself?” It was the perfect mantra for a population that writer Tom Wolfe and others called the “Me Generation,” one that represented a shift from public service to private profit that would only strengthen with time. After his overwhelming electoral victory in 1972, Nixon began to move rightward. He proposed a budget that slashed government programs and called for the end to urban renewal projects, hospital construction grants and the Rural Electrification Administration. He cut spending on milk for schoolchildren, mental health facilities and education for students from poor families.

Nixon’s ultimate goal was to work the governmental system and then bring the liberal welfare state crashing down in due time. He sought to reorient American politics away from social spending and racially affirmative policies and toward more conservative government orthodoxy. He wouldn’t see his dream realized while he was president—mainly because he was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal—but his successors would achieve most of his goals. In that sense, he was, indeed, the “first” conservative, the vanguard of a new Republican ascendancy.

Unexpected Detente: Nixon and the World

Nixon’s practicality can best be seen in foreign policy, always his first love. Here Nixon was as savvy an actor as ever. What he had planned was a massive realignment of global affairs, an opening to a relationship with China and the Soviet Union, and some progress in lessening Cold War tensions. In his plans, Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and eventual secretary of state, was a key player. Kissinger and other “realists” believed that pure national interests, not human rights or even political ideology, should drive U.S. behavior in foreign policy. This posture was framed as the “Nixon Doctrine,” the belief that the U.S. should first consider its own strategic interests and shape commitments accordingly. Gone would be the more moralistic instincts in foreign policy. The team of Nixon and Kissinger would personify the power of the “imperial presidency”—the centralization of foreign-policy power in the executive branch. Nixon would conduct most foreign affairs in secret, using back-channel communications and evading official channels in the State Department. He had, after all, little use for “elitist” experts.

Nixon’s first bold move was to reach an agreement with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to lessen tensions over Cuba. The U.S. would promise not to invade and the Soviets would cease building a submarine base and refrain from supplying Fidel Castro with offensive missiles. The problem was that this deal, like much else in his foreign policy, was reached in secret and thus had no legal standing. Nevertheless, it was a sign of limited rapprochement with the Soviets. Nixon also understood, correctly, that international communism was far from monolithic, and that the Soviets and the Chinese were increasing hostile toward each other. As such, Nixon famously decided to “go to China,” meet Mao Zedong and open a relationship between the two countries. Probably only Nixon could have pulled this off. A Democratic president would have been eviscerated from the right and condemned as soft on communism. Nixon, the longtime Cold Warrior, however, faced little opposition to his China policy. As he frankly told Chairman Mao, “Those on the right can do what those on the left only talk about.” Mao nodded and replied, “I like rightists!”

Months later in 1972, Nixon would head to Moscow and put the final touches on the first stage of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). The treaty was largely symbolic and did not meaningfully reduce the stocks of nuclear weapons, but it was a start and another step in the direction of detente. Nonetheless, despite his limited successes, Nixon did little to change the long-term arc of Cold War tensions. After Nixon, less adept politicians, especially hawks in his own party, would dismantle detente and revitalize the arms race and tensions with Moscow.

One could argue, moreover, that Nixon and Kissinger were veritable war criminals. They secretly dropped a staggering number of bombs on Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War, killing tens of thousands and destabilizing both societies. Congress was not informed. Nixon also prolonged the war unnecessarily and increased the bombing of Hanoi. As a result, huge numbers needlessly died on all sides. Furthermore, the U.S. president and Kissinger supported a military coup in Chile to keep an elected socialist president from holding office. The resulting U.S.-backed government would torture its own people and “disappear”—secretly kill—tens of thousands of dissidents. The coup occurred on what many Latin Americans refer to as the “other 9/11”—Sept. 11, 1973. Finally, in Central Asia, Nixon supported Pakistan—in order to please its ally, China—in its brutal suppression of its Bengali separatists. Though the experts at the State Department warned him of what might happen, Nixon—true to form—conducted his policies in secret and backed Islamabad. It’s estimated that Pakistan, with America’s blessing, killed perhaps a million Bengalis in the ultimately unsuccessful war.

What, then, is the historian to make of Nixon’s foreign policy? Perhaps little except this: It was his and his alone. Nixon personally, along with Kissinger, did as he pleased. Sometimes, given Nixon’s astute understanding of foreign affairs, that meant dividing the two main communist global powers, China and Russia. Nixon’s foreign policy would also open up bilateral negotiations between the U.S. and the two other countries, contributing to a limited detente. It could also, however, be a brutal realpolitik—secretly bombing civilians, backing coups and suppressing foreign separatists. But nowhere was Nixon’s obsession with secrecy and victory at all costs more on display than at home, in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.

The World of Watergate

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” —Richard Nixon in a 1977 interview

It began, one supposes, with the break-in and attempted wiretapping of the Democratic Party’s offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. But that wasn’t the half of it. Nixon may not have personally ordered the break-in or even known it was about to happen; the crime was in the cover-up, as it often is. Besides, the real story was this: From start to finish, the Nixon administration was one of the most corrupt, sneaky, vindictive and win-at-all-costs presidencies in history. Illegality was the hallmark of Nixon and his team. What would ultimately bring Nixon down was the existence of secret tape recordings of every conversation in the Oval Office, tapes that exposed the secrecy and corruption with which Nixon operated with his famously insular staff. The tapes revealed Nixon’s pettiness and bigotry. In one rather banal example, Nixon and Haldeman had the following conversation in 1971 about the TV host Dick Cavett:

Haldeman: We’ve got a running war going on with Cavett.

Nixon: Is he just a left-winger? Is that the problem?

Haldeman: Yeah.

Nixon: Is he Jewish?

Haldeman: I don’t know. He doesn’t look it.

The tapes revealed many such ugly conversations, but mainly depicted a man who was always at war with his enemies and saw himself as the perpetual embattled victim. Public enemy No. 1 was the Democrats. So it was that members of the Committee to Re-elect the President (aptly known by the acronym CREEP) would conduct a break-in at the Watergate Office Building. The problem was the burglars were caught and arrested. From there unfolded a cover-up of drastic proportions that would ultimately end the Nixon presidency.

Nevertheless, the Nixon team’s level of subterfuge, secrecy and illegality always transcended Watergate. For example, what Attorney General John Mitchell referred to as a program of “White House horrors” was expansive and prevalent both before and after the break-in. In 1971, when Nixon was told by Haldeman that the Brookings Institution think tank might have classified files on Vietnam that might embarrass the previous administration (of Democrat Lyndon Johnson) and the Democrats more broadly, Nixon ordered a break-in and theft, as documented later in the so-called Watergate tapes. “Goddamnit, get in there and get those files,” he ordered, “Blow the safe and get it!” In another incident, when Rand analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, Nixon had his underlings break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to find embarrassing files that could be used to blackmail him. The list goes on. Nixon discussed infiltrating antiwar groups with undercover agents and selling ambassadorships. CREEP would also harass and embarrass Nixon rivals by organizing fake rallies in the opponents’ names and thereby generating mountains of unpaid bills—an example of what CREEP member Donald Segretti called “ratfucking.” In addition, Nixon tried to plant a spy in the Secret Service detail of George McGovern, his 1972 Democratic opponent for the presidency, and ordered surveillance on Ted Kennedy to unearth dirt on the Massachusetts senator.

Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, was indicted in Maryland for receiving bribes in return for political favors, and he resigned in October 1973, replaced by Gerald Ford. The corruption went further still. Attorney General Mitchell controlled a secret fund of over $150,000 to be used against the Democratic Party, specifically for forging letters, stealing campaign files and leaking fake news. Nixon also promised to offer executive clemency if the Watergate burglars were imprisoned, and Ehrlichman was ordered to pay them $450,000 in hush money. Nixon and Kissinger had the FBI tap telephones in order to gather intelligence on political enemies, placing illegal wiretaps on 13 government officials and at least four journalists. And this litany of malfeasance is far from comprehensive.

Just six days after the Watergate break-in went public, Nixon, in a conversation captured by his office taping system, discussed damage control and the cover-up with Haldeman. In 1973 and ’74, the entire edifice of corruption and cover-up came crashing down. Nixon was forced to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate affair, Archibald Cox. However, when Cox turned up the heat and began investigating Nixon and calling on him to turn over the Oval Office tapes, the president ordered the attorney general to fire him. When Elliot Richardson refused to do so, Nixon fired him; when Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, also refused, Nixon fired him. The dismissals went down in U.S. history as the “Saturday night massacre.” Eventually the third in line, Robert Bork—whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan would fail in the Senate years later—agreed to fire Cox. Still, Nixon’s efforts to block the release of the tapes failed. Both a congressional investigatory committee and the Supreme Court demanded the tapes be turned over. What these tapes revealed ruined Nixon.

The president’s advisers believed that Congress had the votes to impeach, convict and remove him, so Nixon resigned. Despite all the illegality, he would never stand trial or serve a day in prison. His successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, upon becoming president immediately pardoned Nixon and left in place all the structures, institutions and power bases that had allowed his perfidy to flourish. As such, nothing happened to stop future corruption in the Oval Office. Ford announced that “[o]ur Constitutional system worked,” but it was unclear that it had. Nixon almost surely would not have been caught if it wasn’t for the tapes and his blatant abuses. The Watergate committees narrowly focused their investigation on the break-in and cover-up, not paying attention to the broader corruption of Nixon’s administration or the imperial presidency that remained in place.

* * *

President Richard M. Nixon was a complicated man, a truly singular figure. He was defined by mistrust, opportunism and secrecy. Both at home and abroad he played the part of a master tactician, placing politics above principles at every turn. Although his backers found much to praise in his actions, more often than not he subverted democracy both at home and in other countries. Before Nixon and Watergate, most Americans trusted their federal government. That ended with Nixon’s resignation. As the extent of Nixon’s crimes and abuse gradually came to light, many Americans lost faith in the entire system. They blamed both sides—Democrat and Republican—ironically, and took to seeing all politicians as crooks. Thus, though Nixon never achieved the conservative dream of destroying Franklin Roosevelt’s social welfare state while president, he did unintentionally usher in the requisite rightward shift in American politics.

As the people lost faith in the ability of the federal government to do good, to improve life and accomplish great things, they ended up endorsing more conservative ideologies. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, largely because of the Watergate scandal would be elected president slightly more than two years after Nixon’s resignation, but the humble Georgian would serve just a single, embattled term. Republicans, in fact, in the 28 years after Carter’s 1980 defeat, would own the presidency for all but eight years. This reorientation toward the right was, perhaps, the defining legacy of Nixon. He crafted a world of shadows, a more sinister view of government and the gradual empowerment of the executive branch that has by now seemingly resulted in a breakdown of the Founders’ hopes for separation of powers. There could have been no Reagan, or George W. Bush, without the example and accomplishments of a Nixon. There also couldn’t have been a Donald Trump, and that is something worth reflecting upon. Tricky Dick lost the battle—Watergate—but he may ultimately have won the war for America’s soul.

* * *

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

• Gary Gerstle, “American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century” (2001).

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

• James T. Patterson, “Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974” (1996).

• Bruce Schulman, “The Seventies” (2001).

• Howard Zinn, “The Twentieth Century” (1980).

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

Abortion Debates Prompt Rape Testimony From Female Lawmakers

COLUMBUS, Ohio — For more than two decades, Nancy Mace did not speak publicly about her rape. In April, when she finally broke her silence, she chose the most public of forums — before her colleagues in South Carolina’s legislature.

A bill was being debated that would ban all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected; Mace, a Republican lawmaker, wanted to add an exception for rape and incest. When some of her colleagues in the House dismissed her amendment — some women invent rapes to justify seeking an abortion, they claimed — she could not restrain herself.

“For some of us who have been raped, it can take 25 years to get up the courage and talk about being a victim of rape,” Mace said, gripping the lectern so hard she thought she might pull it up from the floor. “My mother and my best friend in high school were the only two people who knew.”

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As one Republican legislature after another has pressed ahead with restrictive abortion bills in recent months, they have been confronted with raw and emotional testimony about the consequences of such laws. Female lawmakers and other women have stepped forward to tell searing, personal stories — in some cases speaking about attacks for the first time to anyone but a loved one or their closest friend.

Mace is against abortion in most cases and supported the fetal heartbeat bill as long as it contained the exception for rape and incest. She said her decision to reveal an attack that has haunted her for so long was intended to help male lawmakers understand the experience of those victims.

“It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you are on, there are so many of us who share this trauma and this experience,” Mace said in an interview. “Rape and incest are not partisan issues.”

Personal horror stories have done little to slow passage of bills in Georgia, where a lawmaker told about having an abortion after being raped, or Alabama, where the governor this week signed a law that bans all abortions unless they are necessary to save the life of the mother.

In Ohio, a fetal heartbeat bill passed even after three lawmakers spoke out on the floor about their rapes — among them State Rep. Lisa Sobecki, who argued for a rape exemption by recounting her own assault and subsequent abortion.

It was gut-wrenching, the Navy veteran said, but her decision to speak out was validated the next day when she was approached in the grocery store by a man in his 70s, whose wife of 41 years had read of her account that morning in the local newspaper. The story prompted his wife to tell him for the first time that she also had been raped.

“It’s not just our stories,” Sobecki said. “It’s giving voice to the voiceless, those that haven’t felt for a very long time that they could tell their stories and be heard.”

Four years ago, when a previous fetal heartbeat bill was being debated, state Sen. Teresa Fedor, then a state representative, surprised colleagues with her story of being raped while in the military and having an abortion. She felt compelled to share the story again this year when the issue resurfaced.

“It’s not something you like to focus on,” the Toledo Democrat said. “And it didn’t seem to have an impact in stopping the effort, so that’s the sad part.”

The governor signed the bill, without exceptions for rape or incest.

Ohio state Rep. Erica Crawley, a Democrat representing Columbus, said she didn’t intend to share the story of her sexual assault when floor debate on the heartbeat bill began. But she said she was motivated by a Republican colleague who alleged that witnesses at committee hearings on the bill had exaggerated or fabricated their stories.

“I wanted them to know that I’m someone you have respect for, and this has happened to me,” she said.

Crawley felt she had no choice but to speak out: “Because if I stay silent, I feel like I’m complicit.”

Kelly Dittmar, an expert on women and politics at Rutgers University, said she would not be surprised if even more female lawmakers begin to speak out about their rapes and abortions. More women feel empowered by the #MeToo movement, she said, and the record number of women who won seats in state legislatures last year gives them a greater voice.

“For some women who have healed enough in their own personal battles with this type of abuse, they might be comfortable speaking about this publicly because they see a higher purpose for it,” she said.

One such woman is Gretchen Whitmer. In 2013, she was minority leader in the Michigan state Senate when she spoke against a Republican-backed effort to require separate health insurance to cover abortion.

Seven minutes into her floor speech, a visibly upset Whitmer put down her notes and told her colleagues that she had been raped more than 20 years earlier and that the memory of the attack continued to haunt her. She thanked God that she had not become pregnant by her attacker.

In an interview this week, the Democrat said her decision to share her story was the right one. After her testimony, her office received thousands of emails from people thanking her.

“That was the thing that bolstered me the most and convinced me that I had to continue speaking out and running for office and taking action,” she said. “There are a lot of victims and survivors out there who care, who need to be heard, who need to be represented and who need the law to reflect what we want and need to see in our country.”

Earlier this week, Michigan’s Republican-led Legislature passed two bills to restrict abortions and sent them to the governor.

That governor is now Whitmer. She said she will veto both of them.

___

Cassidy reported from Atlanta.

No Longer in the Dark: 300 Navajo Nation Homes Get Electricity

KAIBETO, Ariz. — Miranda Haskie sits amid the glow of candles at her kitchen table as the sun sinks into a deep blue horizon silhouetting juniper trees and a nearby mesa.

Her husband, Jimmie Long, Jr., fishes for the wick to light a kerosene lamp as the couple and their 13-year-old son prepare to spend a final night without electricity.

They’re waiting for morning, when utility workers who recently installed four electric poles outside their double-wide house trailer will connect it to the power grid, meaning they will no longer be among the tens of thousands of people without power on the Navajo Nation, the country’s largest American Indian reservation.

Haskie and Long are getting their electricity this month thanks to a project to connect 300 homes with the help of volunteer utility crews from across the U.S.

The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority typically connects from 400 to 450 homes a year, chipping away at the 15,000 scattered, rural homes without power on the 27,000-square-mile (43,000-square-kilometer) reservation that lies in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

At that rate, it will take the tribal utility about 35 more years to get electricity to the 60,000 of the reservation’s 180,000 residents who don’t have it.

The couple’s home at the end of rutted dirt roads outside the small town of Kaibeto was about a quarter-mile (0.4 kilometers) from the closest power line. Life disconnected from the grid in the high desert town dotted with canyons and mesas was simple and joyful but also inconvenient, they said.

“It’s not that bad. Growing up, you get used to it, being raised like that,” Long said.

The family’s weekday routine included showering, cooking and charging cellphones, battery packs and flashlights at Haskie’s mother’s house 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away, down dirt roads that turn treacherous in stormy weather.

Navajos without electricity also pack food or medication in coolers with ice or leave it outside in the wintertime. Children use dome lights in cars or kerosene lamps to do their homework at night. Some tribal members have small solar systems that deliver intermittent power.

No electricity typically means no running water and a lack of overall economic development. Creating the infrastructure to reach the far-flung homes on the reservation is extremely costly.

Hooking up a single home can cost up to $40,000 on the reservation where the annual, per-capita income is around $10,700 and half the workforce is unemployed, said Walter Haase, general manager of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.

For the recent power hookup project, called LightUpNavajo, the utility raised funds from an online campaign, collected donations from employees, businesses and communities, and used revenue from solar farms on the reservation to cover the utility’s $3 million cost. Money that isn’t raised will be borrowed and the repayment passed on to customers via their rates, Haase said. The project started in March and ends this month.

The volunteer crews spent days on the reservation, learning about Navajo culture, the language and the landscape before setting out to job sites often hours away from their hotel rooms. Tribal utility crews had already performed much of the prep work, removing trees or stumps so the volunteers could focus on installing power poles and miles of electric line to connect homes.

A four-man crew from Piqua, Ohio, weathered rain, dust storms and sandy terrain that threatened to bury their equipment as they traveled through the western part of the reservation in Arizona earlier this month. They heard from families who have waited months, years and a lifetime to get power. Navajos showed their appreciation to the crews with feasts of fry bread, steaks and steamed corn.

“It’s kind of crazy to think about the different things you take for granted on a daily basis,” said Ken Wagner, a journeyman lineman for Piqua Power System. At an appreciation dinner, his crew received gifts of posters with traditional Navajo sayings, turquoise jewelry, shirts and mugs.

Among those getting electricity hookups were Vernon Smith and his wife, Bertha. They live in Salt Lake City but are preparing their home in Tuba City on the reservation for a move back. They became set on getting electricity when a kerosene lamp tipped over while she was napping and she feared the house would burn down.

The wait for electricity took three years, but Vernon Smith called that “a miracle.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said in an interview, his face lighting up as recalled seeing the whirling blades of a ceiling fan in his reservation home for the first time. “I didn’t think I was going to get electricity that fast.”

Haskie said she could live without electricity but that it’s also exciting getting it.

“I can walk in, turn the light on without my son turning on the generator,” she said.

She’s crafted a wish list that includes a blender, a coffee maker, a juice maker, a stand-up mixer and an espresso machine. Eventually, she’ll subscribe to cable TV.

The couple’s son, Jayden, said he managed fine without power — using portable chargers for his cellphone. Some days, he fired up a gas generator that was hooked up to the home’s electric panel to watch TV or turn on the light in his bedroom.

But the generator’s 5-gallon (19-liter) tank lasted less than a day and the cost of fuel meant it was used sparingly and mostly on the weekends.

He’s looked forward to taking eggs, bacon, steak, pork chops and hamburgers out of a refrigerator to cook whenever he wants.

As of Thursday, the LightUpNavajo project hooked up 208 homes. Crews from 26 utilities in 12 states traveled to the reservation to help, installing 1,500 power line poles and more than 35 miles (56 kilometers) of electric lines.

The project was designed with a $125,000 grant from the American Public Power Association. Mark Hyland, an association senior vice president, said the group and the tribal utility will consider repeating it on the Navajo Nation, or using it as a model for other reservations or rural areas.

On the morning that Haskie’s and Long’s home got power, journeyman lineman Justin Foutz with the Piqua utility slipped on a pair of gloves and grabbed an extendable, yellow tool to close a switch atop the utility pole and send power to the home.

“Coming in hot,” he said.

A few minutes later, electrician Delbert Graham knocked on the trailer’s door.

“Hey, you’re energized,” he said. “Go ahead and turn on your main breaker.”

Using a flashlight inside the darkened house, Long flipped on the breaker, turned on the home’s porch light and opened the door with a smile.

Then the crew loaded up their utility trucks and headed toward the small community of Coppermine, about an hour’s drive down the next dirt road, to connect more homes.

Australia’s Ruling Coalition Elected to Surprise Third Term

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s ruling conservative coalition won a surprise victory in the country’s general election on Saturday, defying opinion polls that had tipped the center-left opposition party to oust it from power and promising an end to the revolving door of national leaders.

Opposition Labor Party leader Bill Shorten conceded defeat late in the evening as Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party-led coalition came close to a majority in the 151-seat House of Representatives, where parties need a majority to form a government. Vote counting was to continue on Sunday.

“It is obvious that Labor will not be able to form the next government and so, in the national interest, a short while ago, I called Scott Morrison to congratulate him,” Shorten told distraught Labor supporters.

The tight race raised the prospect of the coalition forming a minority government. The conservatives became a rare minority government after they dumped Malcolm Turnbull for Morrison in an internal power struggle last August. The government then lost two seats and its single-seat majority as part of the blood-letting that followed.

Pre-election opinion polls had suggested that the coalition would lose its bid for a third three-year term, and that Morrison would have had one of the shortest tenures as prime minister in the 118-year history of the Australian federation.

There was so much public confidence of a Labor victory that Australian online bookmaker Sportsbet paid out 1.3 million Australian dollars ($900,000) to bettors who backed Labor two days before the election. Sportsbet said 70% of wagers had been placed on Labor at odds of $1.16.

A rival betting agency said he had accepted a record AU$1 million wager on Labor.

Shorten, who campaigned heavily on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, said Saturday morning that he was confident Labor would win, but Morrison would not be drawn on a prediction.

Morrison is the conservatives’ third prime minister since they were first elected in 2013.

Tony Abbott, who became the first of the three conservative prime ministers in the 2013 election, conceded defeat Saturday in the Sydney seat he has held since 1994.

Polling suggests climate change was a major issue in the seat for voters, who elected an independent candidate, Zali Steggall. As prime minister in 2014, Abbott repealed a carbon tax introduced by a Labor government. Abbott was replaced by Turnbull the next year because of poor opinion polling, but he remained a government lawmaker.

Senior Labor lawmaker Chris Bowen said his party may have suffered from what he conceded was an unusual strategy of pushing a detailed policy agenda through the election campaign.

Morrison began the day Saturday by campaigning in the island state of Tasmania, where the Liberals appeared to have gained two Labor-held seats. He then flew 900 kilometers (560 miles) home to Sydney to vote and to campaign in Sydney seats.

Shorten campaigned hard on more ambitious targets to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The government has committed Australia to reduce its emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030. Labor has promised a 45% reduction in the same time frame.

Shorten, a 52-year-old former labor union leader, has also promised a range of reforms, including the government paying all of a patients’ costs for cancer treatment and a reduction of tax breaks for landlords.

Morrison, a 51-year-old former tourism marketer, said he had closed Labor’s lead in opinion polls during the five-week campaign and predicted a close result.

Morrison promises lower taxes and better economic management than Labor.

Both major parties promised that whoever wins the election will remain prime minister until he next faces the voters’ judgment. The parties have changed their rules to make the process of lawmakers replacing a prime minister more difficult.

During Labor’s last six years in office, the party replaced Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with his deputy Julia Gillard, then dumped her for Rudd.

___

Associated Press writer Trevor Marshallsea in Sydney contributed to this report.

U.S. Warns Airliners Flying in Persian Gulf Amid Iran Tensions

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — U.S. diplomats warned Saturday that commercial airliners flying over the wider Persian Gulf faced a risk of being “misidentified” amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran.

The warning relayed by U.S. diplomatic posts from the Federal Aviation Administration underlined the risks the current tensions pose to a region crucial to global air travel. It came as Lloyd’s of London warned of increasing risks to maritime shipping in the region.

Meanwhile, oil giant ExxonMobil began evacuating staff from Basra, Iraq, where the U.S. Consulate has been closed for months following a rocket attack America blamed on Shiite militias backed by Iran, local authorities said. The island nation of Bahrain also ordered its citizens out of Iraq and Iran over regional tensions.

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Concerns about a possible conflict have flared since the White House ordered warships and bombers to the region to counter an alleged, unexplained threat from Iran that has seen America order nonessential diplomatic staff out of Iraq.

President Donald Trump since has sought to soften his tone. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also stressed Saturday that Iran is “not seeking war,” comments seemingly contradicted by the head of the Revolutionary Guard, who declared an ongoing “intelligence war” between the nations.

Regional tensions remain high. Authorities allege that a sabotage operation targeted four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, and Iran-aligned rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for a drone attack on a crucial Saudi oil pipeline.

Saudi Arabia directly blamed Iran for the drone assault, and a local newspaper linked to the Al Saud royal family called on Thursday for America to launch “surgical strikes” on Tehran.

This all takes root in Trump’s decision last year to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and world powers and impose wide-reaching sanctions. Iran just announced it would begin backing away from terms of the deal, setting a 60-day deadline for Europe to come up with new terms or it would begin enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels. Tehran long has insisted it does not seek nuclear weapons, though the West fears its program could allow it to build atomic bombs.

The order relayed Saturday by U.S. diplomats in Kuwait and the UAE came from an FAA Notice to Airmen published late Thursday in the U.S. It said that all commercial aircraft flying over the waters of Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman needed to be aware of “heightened military activities and increased political tension.”

This presents “an increasing inadvertent risk to U.S. civil aviation operations due to the potential for miscalculation or misidentification,” the warning said. It also said aircraft could experience interference with its navigation instruments and communications jamming “with little to no warning.”

The Persian Gulf has become a major gateway for East-West travel in the aviation industry. Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, home to Emirates, is the world’s busiest for international travel, while long-haul carriers Etihad and Qatar Airways also operate in the region.

Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways all said they were aware of the notice and their operations were unaffected. Oman Air did not respond to a request for comment Saturday about the warning.

The warning appeared rooted in what happened 30 years ago after Operation Praying Mantis, a daylong naval battle in the Persian Gulf between American forces and Iran during the country’s long 1980s war with Iraq. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes chased Iranian speedboats that allegedly opened fire on a helicopter into Iranian territorial waters, then mistook an Iran Air heading to Dubai for an Iranian F-14. The Vincennes fired two missiles at the airplane, killing all aboard the flight.

Speaking in China, where he finished a tour of Asian nations who rely on Mideast oil, Zarif told the state-run IRNA news agency that war is not what Iran wants.

“In fact, as the supreme leader said, there will be no war since we are not seeking war and nobody in the region is suffering from a hallucination to think that he is able to confront Iran,” Zarif said.

Zarif added that while Trump has said that he too is not seeking war, “some that have sat around him” are pushing for such a conflict. That appeared to be a dig at national security adviser John Bolton, who for years has promoted the idea of overthrowing Iran’s government.

Separately, the head of the Revolutionary Guard reportedly said the U.S. and Iran already were in a “full-fledged intelligence war.” The semi-official Fars news agency also quoted Gen. Hossein Salami using 9/11 as a metaphor for America’s political system, describing it “like the World Trade Building that collapses with a sudden hit.”

Meanwhile, Lloyd’s Market Association Joint War Committee added the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the United Arab Emirates on Friday to its list of areas posing higher risk to insurers. It also expanded its list to include the Saudi coast as a risk area.

The USS Abraham Lincoln and its carrier strike group have yet to reach the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a third of all oil traded at sea passes. A Revolutionary Guard deputy has warned that any armed conflict would affect the global energy market. Iran long has threatened to be able to shut off the strait.

Benchmark Brent crude now stands around $72 a barrel.

In Iraq, Exxon Mobil has begun evacuating staff from Basra amid the tensions with Iran, two Iraqi officials told The Associated Press. Exxon Mobil works in Basra at its West Qurna I oil field, which had been shut off for years from Western oil firms over sanctions levied on Iraq during dictator Saddam Hussein’s time in power.

The U.S. Consulate in Basra has been closed since September after American officials blamed Iran-aligned Shiite militias for a rocket attack on the post, which is inside Basra’s airport compound. Basra as a whole has been shaken by violent protests in recent months over entrenched corruption and poor public services, which earlier saw Iran’s Consulate there overrun and set ablaze.

Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, said it declined to discuss “operational staffing.”

Iraq is OPEC’s second-largest Arab producer, pumping some 4.5 million barrels of crude oil a day.

___

Associated Press writers Qassem Abdul-Zahra and Bassem Mroue in Baghdad and Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

Catalysts of Destruction

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“The Grimoire of Kensington Market”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“The Grimoire of Kensington Market”
A book by Lauren B. Davis

Hans Christian Andersen is the Danish writer best remembered for children’s stories like “The Little Mermaid” and “Thumbelina,” but the only thing childlike about “The Snow Queen” is that the main characters are children. Beyond that, it is a disturbingly dark tale and it’s questionable that a “grown-up” version is even necessary. It starts when a demon manufactures a mirror that “had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever.” The mirror breaks into a million pieces and is blown across the world by the wind and whoever gets but a small sliver in their eye, or more disastrously their heart, falls under its wicked spell. In Andersen’s tale, a young boy named Kay gets a shard in his eye and the roses he used to admire with his little friend Gerda now look hideous. Under its spell, Kay is entranced and the Snow Queen whisks him away to her kingdom. Gerda goes on a mission to rescue him.

Lauren B. Davis hews closely to Andersen’s story in “The Grimoire of Kensington Market,” her modern, adult retelling of “The Snow Queen.” To start, Davis homes in on the dark corners of the original and substitutes the curse of the broken pieces of mirror with the addiction to a magical drug called elysium, which inhaled through a pipe brings the user into an instant state of blind, blissful euphoria. And like the shards of glass in the original story, elysium “demanded a price for the beautiful visions. It burrowed into your darkest crannies—your memories, your heart—and found the things you feared, the things of which you were ashamed, and dragged them out into the world, first in dreams, and then in hallucinations.” Those under its addictive spell are called Pipers, and they are instantly recognizable by the silver swirls that appear on their skin.

Just as in Andersen’s tale, a girl is rescuing a boy. In Davis’ adaptation, the girl is a young woman named Maggie, a recovering elysium addict herself. She looks after The Grimoire, the magical bookstore of the title, where books magically appear as a new story is told somewhere in the world and where the same books can disappear, if a story is forgotten. Maggie had stumbled through its doors years ago when she hit rock bottom and the bookstore and its owner, Mr. Mustby, had been her salvation. One day Maggie receives a cryptic message from her brother Kyle, who is still suffering from his addiction to elysium. A drug dealer has apparently taken Kyle deep into her lair in a place called The Forest, and now Maggie must travel into the lion’s den to save him, before he succumbs to elysium permanently.

The Kensington Market Davis refers to in her gritty fable is not a market at all, but a diverse, artsy neighborhood in downtown Toronto, the kind of place where bike shops, vintage clothing stores and tattoo parlors can be found side by side. But another Kensington market crept to my mind as I read about how elysium ravages and consumes those unfortunate enough to fall under its spell. I thought of the neighborhood in Philadelphia called Kensington, referred to in a New York Times article last year as the Walmart of heroin:

the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast (where) missing-person posters hung from storefront windows. The dealers were all out in the open, calling out brand names, even handing out free samples. Many people smoked crack or meth or injected heroin. They stuck needles in their arms, necks and the skin between toes. They were limp and nodding off. Some people lay on the ground looking dead. … Near a bridge over the gulch, an encampment of dozens of homeless addicts had grown up. There were mattresses piled beneath the bridge, along with tables where users cut, snorted and cooked drugs together. A Hispanic addict known as the Doctor worked behind a folding table in a shack called “the hospital.” He charged a couple of dollars to shoot up those who couldn’t do it themselves. People sometimes pushed the bodies of users who had overdosed and died into the bushes instead of calling the police. Residents complained about the smell.

It’s a place where one could witness an addict try desperately to inject another in the neck, but keep missing the vein because he “kept going unconscious with the needle in his hand.” It’s a scene so deplete of recognizable humanity that it almost begs to be allegorized, otherwise we risk ignoring it. This is where the strength of “The Grimoire” lies, because The Forest in Davis’ tale doesn’t sound too far off:

The sickly sweet stench from garbage piles created a barricade of odour. … City workers didn’t bother to collect the rubbish here. The buildings were derelict, the windows long broken … rubbish bins, an old mattress, a busted television. Rats probably, or cats … a makeshift hovel barred the path, part tent, part tin, several timbers, planks and boards … it was a sort of parody on the village square. The buildings were chained and battered architectural ghosts. Three fires burned in the square and around each stood figures warming their hands. … Pipers got to a point where the visions leaked into the real world. No road but madness or death then. They forgot to eat. Even if they wandered out of the Forest and to hospital, it was no good. They forgot to breathe, eventually. 

The thread between the shards of glass in Andersen’s original, the elysium in “The Grimoire” and the opiates in the real world make literal and emotional sense. They are catalysts of destruction, with the ability to alter one’s reality in one inhale, to make the detestable acceptable and to make one leave all that they know in pursuit of fleeting moments of euphoria. At the same time however, a fairy tale tends to make black-and-white what is in reality various shades of gray, and “The Grimoire” doesn’t escape the trap completely. For example, every fairy tale must have its villain, and in “The Grimoire,” the Snow Queen is transmuted into a smooth-talking drug dealer named Srebrenka: “Bobbed, glistening silver hair with kiss-curls on her unlined forehead and cheeks. Kohl-rimmed blue eyes. Alabaster skin. Eggplant-coloured lips. A perfectly tailored man’s suit.” She is one of many characters that Davis details with a production designer’s precision, so it is unfortunate that she is so clearly the villain. She’s too convenient a scapegoat for the blight of elysium and by extension simplifies the drug addiction in our world.

Still, that’s not to say that “The Grimoire” is devoid of subtlety drawn from the real world; a powerful emotional through line in Davis’ book is Maggie’s complicated relationship with her brother Kyle. We learn that she had abandoned him once before and her last interaction with him was fraught. She was free of elysium at that point and her tough love had morphed into something else:

If it hadn’t been for Mr. Mustby, I’d have died out there and nobody gave a flying fart, did they? Did you? And now I should save poor little Kyle? Well, I know you, Kyle, because I know what I was like when I was on the pipe and don’t tell me you’re not using again, because you might not be using now but sure as hell you’re going to be before the week’s out and you know it, so don’t give me that hurt little boy look or I’ll slap you. You stole from Alvin and you’d steal everything I have if I was stupid enough to let you live with me. Goddamn it! You want the pipe so bad I can smell it on you.

Having a loved one in the throes of addiction is a difficult experience with no clear answers. How do you ease their pain without enabling them? How do you get them help without alienating them? As Kyle ran off, Maggie remembers him as a child “in his striped flannel pajamas, curled up under her arm, falling asleep as she read to him from his favourite book of magical tales; the powdery, slightly animal scent of him; his weight in her arms, his thick eyelashes … and her chest felt bound by tightening ropes.” It is this mixture of love and guilt that makes the decision for Maggie. Despite the strong hold elysium may still have on her, she takes the risk to leave The Grimoire and her boyfriend Alvin, and venture into the shadowy world of The Forest to find her missing brother.

The emotional stakes for Maggie are all too real, but Davis doesn’t dwell in that mood for too long: She knows an adventure awaits. Her mission takes on the standard quest-like qualities of a standard fantasy epic from the get-go. Before leaving, she visits Mr. Trundale, the owner of the shop next to The Grimoire, a magical apothecary called Wort & Willow. As a sort of adopted uncle, Mr. Trundale tries his best to dissuade Maggie from going into The Forest, knowing she may fall under elysium’s spell again and never return. But when he sees her determination, he provides her with some secret weapons that include “a pomegranate seed, although not the usual sort of seed. It grants wisdom and learning to whoever eats it. Second, the tooth of a bear, which is useful for those who have lost things, and finally, a sprig of mistletoe for warmth. If you need them, you’ll know what to do when the time comes.” The gamer in me couldn’t wait for these items to find their intended purpose, but having them laid out so plainly also took away much of the fun. The pair of crows that accompany Maggie also so clearly tell us she’s on the right path, that even in the most terrifying moments, we know Maggie is headed the right way.

Although these elements reduce much of the suspense, there is still plenty to enjoy in “The Grimoire.” In addition to Srebrenka the drug dealer, Maggie meets some delicious, otherworldly characters, some derived from Andersen’s original. We meet The Trickster early in her journey, “a man of enormous girth, a bloated toad, his head blending into his shoulders as though he’d eaten his own neck. … His eyes were glittering slits and his belly hung so far between his monstrous wool-clad thighs they were forced wide apart.” Later, we encounter Miss Tilden, the owner of a fantastical luxury hotel, “a woman with translucently pale skin. Her eyes were the colour of the walls—now blue, now green, and shot through with gold—shifting and changing as she moved her head. Her hair was as pale as her skin, pale as the petals of the bed on which she lay. … Her full mouth was the colour of roses, as was the blush on her cheeks. … There was a kind of sheen around her, as though she was viewed through gauze. Her gown, fashioned from an opalescent material, flowed with subtle varieties of pink, yellow, green and blue.” On the other end of the spectrum, Maggie finds respite at a humble tavern called The Fish and the Fiddle, run by Aunt Ravna, a woman with a “smiling face as wrinkled as a dried apricot. She wore a long burgundy skirt and a quilted jacket of the same fabric. A red scarf tied under her chin secured a red hat. The jacket, hat and scarf were all embroidered with yellow flowers and green vines.”

Davis’ mastery of vivid details extends to her scene setting, where she paints a Lewis Carroll-J.K. Rowling-esque world that immediately floods the senses and transports the reader. For starters, the Grimoire was a bookshop that “smelled of old paper, glue and was, with slight undertones of mildew and mice. It was full of books, as one might expect, but not just full of books in the general way of bookshops. Rather, it was full of books so that walking from the door to the corner where Maggie sat behind her desk was like navigating a maze. There were books on the shelves, books on the tables, books precariously balanced on the top of the forgotten teacups on the aforementioned tables, books on the windowsills, books on the chairs, books piled on the floor shoulder high, if you were tall, over your head, if you were short.”

The Tilden Hotel’s luxurious hotel lobby was a

vast space of pink marble and gold. The floors were inlaid with jade and lapis lazuli flowers. Corinthian columns rose to a vaulted ceiling festooned with gilt garlands, cherubim and seraphim. From the centre of the ceiling dozens of candles burned in a chandelier composed of life-sized naked figures. At each corner of the lobby, harpists played in perfect unison. Enormous vases, taller than Maggie, stood along the walls, filled with equally enormous palm fronds, birds of paradise, ostrich feathers and strange fleshy flowers she couldn’t identify. The room smelled of jasmine and sandalwood and musk.

The hotel is straight out of a Wes Anderson movie, complete with cheerful bellboys. Perhaps it’s in the name, but one can almost see Tilda Swinton playing the hotel’s decadent owner.

The hotel is quite a contrast to Aunt Ravna’s cozy tavern, which contains “a room in which a cheery fire blazed on a stone hearth, filling the air with the scent of pine and cedar. Four well-used, overstuffed chairs crowded around the fireplace. Scattered about the room were chairs and tables, and a bar with three stools filled the far end. Emerald, amber, garnet and crystal bottles of various shapes and sizes glittered from shelves. Deep casement windows let in the early morning light, but when Maggie looked, she could make out nothing but cloudy grey shapes … as though the tavern wasn’t in the cramped, if gay, little town, but perched on the edge of some great could-hung mountain.” By the time Aunt Ravna serves Maggie hot cider with a cinnamon stick, you can feel yourself sinking into one of those overstuffed chairs yourself.

Davis makes it easy and pleasurable to get lost in the worlds she creates. However, as Maggie traverses from one well-described setting to another, the stakes wilt as her journey takes her further and further from reality. It’s unfair to judge a book based on what it could have been, but I think Davis misses an opportunity to depart even further from Andersen’s tale during Maggie’s rescue mission. The thread Davis weaves between the magical shards of glass in the original fairy tale and the addictive elysium in her own mirrors the tragedy of addiction so painfully that I wished Maggie’s journey took her to places that held the same depth and gravitas. What if Maggie met the fairy tale equivalent of the city mayor trying to clean up the neighborhood by sweeping the degenerates away? Or fantastical doppelgangers of the embittered emergency medical services workers who have grown accustomed to injecting Narcan to overdosing people, sometimes to the same person multiple times a day? What would the revolving doors of drug rehab centers and jails look like in Davis’ world?

Instead, we are taken to a world of flying caribous that ride the aurora borealis and talking tulips. Despite the occasional dream that visits Maggie, where Kyle perhaps too explicitly asks for her help and drops clues the size of dump trucks, we are not reminded enough of what’s at stake. Even the parallel between elysium and heroin ultimately lacks (ahem) substance: Elysium is magical and therefore the solution must be magical. But opiates are real, and no matter how hard we wish it, magic cannot offer any solution to the current opioid crisis on our hands (which is the real national emergency by the way). We can’t harness magic, but how can we harness our political will? We don’t have magical seeds, but how do we find lasting solutions? We don’t have just one villain, so how do we find the courage to battle all the slippery villains in the real world?

The best fantasy tales transport us to surreal worlds while reflecting fundamental truths in our own. Beyond a mirror though, these stories can serve as a magnifying glass, a prism even, intensifying and clarifying what we feel and know to be true. The hope is that by seeing the faults in a parallel world, we see more clearly the cracks in ours. No matter how painful it is to read about Philadelphia’s Kensington, I wish more sobering reality had infused Davis’ transportive Kensington. “The Grimoire” reads as a fairy tale of the slightly grown-up variety, but in the end, fails to deepen into a larger allegory for the opiate epidemic.

But this criticism should be taken with a grain of salt: It may just be that this reader has finally grown too old for fairy tales.

‘Game of Thrones,’ an American Parable

Even if you’re one of the few television viewers not watching “Game of Thrones,” you’re probably at least dimly aware of Dany and her dragons. From the merch to the memes to the rising number of babies , Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) is undoubtedly the most talked-about character on the show, her journey from meek and abused teen bride to conquering queen endearing her to the show’s most devoted fans. In an op-ed for New York Magazine last month, Massachussetts Sen. and 2020 Democratic hopeful Elizabeth Warren called her “my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.”

But as was revealed Sunday, Daenerys was never really anyone’s hero. During the penultimate episode of the series’ final season, fans were shocked when Daenerys commanded her dragon to slaughter the people of King’s Landing, home of her rival, Queen Cersei Lannister, torching men, women and children as they ran for cover—this after the Lannister army and its allies had declared their surrender. It was an act of brutality that turned the fantasy universe of “Game of Thrones” into one of pure horror.

Dany devotees were apoplectic. They argued that such actions were completely out of character, that their proud and noble queen would never harm innocent civilians. More than 400,000 have signed a change.org petition demanding that HBO remake the final season with “competent writers.” As blogger Candace Aiston wrote, “I’m so [expletive] mad right now. Game of Thrones has been a waste of my life.”

But was this really a break in character? Or did Daenerys fans, including Warren, just have her wrong from the start?

While “Game of Thrones” is a wide-ranging soap opera whose creators, quality and tone change almost from episode to episode, one consistent theme throughout its eight-year run has been its intense skepticism regarding power. From the lore surrounding Dany’s father, the “Mad King,” to the lecherous Robert Baratheon to the incestuous Cersei to the ruthless Stannis and lecherous Walder Frey, nearly every feudal ruler in “Game of Thrones” is portrayed as despicable in one way or another. The various plots they participate in to gain or keep power usually result in the deaths of their friends, their families and themselves, along with untold scores of serfs who fight and die in their wars.

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Where Is the Democratic Alternative to Forever War?



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

Daenerys was never an exception to the rule. Television viewers may have embraced her as a feminist hero, comparing her to such real-life politicians as Warren and Hillary Clinton, but throughout the series she was as vengeful, vindictive and cruel as any lord. Here are just a few of the victims of Daenerys’ royal wrath:

A woman sexually assaulted by the Dothraki army, whom Daenerys burns alive for a witch
The entire leadership of said Dothraki, a band of ethnic nomads that the white Daenerys massacres before commanding its military
Randall and Dickon Tarly, whom she sacrificed to one of her dragons for failing to recognize her as their rightful queen
Varys, who rightfully feared she might level King’s Landing in an impending siege

These are far from the only people Daenerys gleefully tortured to death throughout the show, so her actions in the most recent episode should have come as no surprise.

Politically, Daenerys’ storyline is a parable about the folly of humanitarian intervention. Up until this point, she had justified her actions, at least in part, as a righteous effort to free the people of King’s Landing from Queen Cersei’s tyrannical rule. But Daenerys began her quest long before Cersei ascended to the throne. If she had crossed the Narrow Sea with her armies and her dragons and found Westeros to be justly ruled, would she have simply turned back and decided the throne was no longer her birthright? It seems unlikely.

As King of the North, Jon Snow has been the closest thing this show has had to a democratically elected leader. Snow is an almost comically forthright do-gooder, willing to sacrifice anything and everything to help his people. And still Daenerys forced him to give up his crown before she would agree to help him fight off the existential threat of the White Walkers and their zombie-like army. It was not the cruelty of other rulers that incited Daenerys to violence but her own will to power.

So why were so many “Game of Thrones” fans, dedicated to the study of the show, the books and its lore, so stunned by Daenerys’ genocidal turn? The most likely answer is that they have been conditioned to be.

In the real world, we see rulers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as noble, kind and just while they rain down death and destruction on the poor of foreign countries. Is it any wonder that we can excuse a torture here or a slaughter there if a character is compelling enough?

The numerous comparisons of Daenerys to Clinton, made by fans of both, were never more accurate than when Dany obliterated scores of civilians to better subjugate them. Whether we think of King’s Landing as Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya, one thing is clear—we should learn to be just as horrified when our charismatic leaders rain down fire of their own.

Europe’s Far-Right Parties Target Youth Vote

BOKRIJK, Belgium — They are strikingly young, but emphatic that they should not be considered newcomers. Rather, they are claiming the mantle of Old Europe at its most traditional.

Several of this year’s far-right candidates in Europe are well under the age of 30 — just like some of their most ardent supporters. In Belgium, the telegenic Dries Van Langenhove, who is among the top picks on the list for the far-right party Vlaams Belang, is 26. In France, the head of the far-right National Rally slate for the upcoming European Parliament elections is 23 and has been a card-carrying party member since the age of 16. In Denmark, the lead candidate from the Danish People’s Party is a 29-year-old who is already a veteran campaigner. And in Spain, the chief spokesman for the Vox party is 27 and was elected to parliament last month.

These candidates are part of a growing attempt by Europe’s far-right parties to gear their anti-migration, euroskeptic message to the young, with everything from beer nights for adults and bouncy castles for kids to an outsized presence on social media, the Associated Press has found. Young European voters are responding with a rightward shift sometimes faster and farther than their elders — as illustrated by voting results or party rolls from Italy, France, Spain and Austria.

The trend could have major implications for this month’s elections, which decide the makeup of the European Parliament as well as some national governments, as in Belgium.

“The far right has made a very explicit effort to pander to younger audiences. They’ve essentially rebranded themselves,” said Julia Ebner, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a left-leaning think tank. “Far-right political parties have been most active in engaging with social media users.”

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White Nationalism’s Most Powerful Accelerant



by Dan O'Sullivan

The far right has also succeeded at picking up on existing grievances and fears among young people and at using their language and cultural reference points, she said.

It’s a significant change from where the far right found itself in Europe’s postwar era: identified with the Nazis and a Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews, marginalized by governments and eclipsed by a unifying Europe.

Opponents say today’s far-right candidates have given new window-dressing to old racist beliefs and an implicit call for violence, pushing a pro-Christian, anti-Islam ideology that Belgium’s security services describe as “extreme right in a white collar.” Only now they’re appealing to a demographic with no memories of where extremist beliefs once led the continent: to a world war that left almost all of Europe in rubble.

Every country defines and measures its young voters slightly differently. But the trend is unmistakable.

Across Europe, the right has gained ground with the electorate in general, but its strength among young voters, who traditionally lean left, has come as a surprise, according to poll estimates. In Italy, 17% of voters aged 18 to 34 voted for the League party in 2018, compared to just 5% in 2013. In Austria, 30% of the youngest voters chose the Freedom Party in 2017, up from 22% in 2013, making it the most popular party among those ages 16 to 29. And in Germany, the AfD’s gains were notable while support from the youngest voters for the Green Party barely changed. France’s vote showed similar trends.

Belgium’s Van Langenhove has 31,000 Instagram followers and a strong presence on social media. Until recently isolated as racist by the rest of the political spectrum, the Flemish independence party Vlaams Belang whose slate he leads in Flemish Brabant has a handful of seats in the parliament and a plan to more than double that.

Van Langenhove is also the leader of Schild en Vrienden, a Flemish nationalist movement known for anti-immigration stunts and named in Belgium’s annual report last year on extremist groups that are national security concerns. The report did not accuse the group of violence but noted the movement “deserves our attention.”

On a recent spring holiday in a historic park, Van Langenhove’s larger-than-life photo was plastered across the Vlaams Belang campaign vans. They were parked alongside the cars of thousands of party supporters and their children, who split their time between anti-immigration speeches inside and an outside festival that included face-painting, bouncy castles and a stand for the book “The Kidnapping of Europe.”

Louis Beernaert, 27, has been coming to Vlaams Belang meetings with his father and sister since he was a child. Now his sister’s husband and their toddler have joined also. They were all in favor of the party’s new faces, which include its 32-year-old president, Tom Van Grieken.

“It needed to get younger,” Beernaert said. “Their ideas are the same, but they say them in a less radical way.”

Van Langenhove, who holds his torso like a boxer, posed for selfies and chatted with party leaders sometimes decades his senior without a flicker of deference.

He avoids direct discussion of race in favor of what he calls identity. But he routinely posts on social media about “replacement,” a term used by white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe for the idea that European populations are being culturally and ethnically replaced by minorities. “Our People First” is the Vlaams Belang slogan.

Even though migration to Europe has slowed to a trickle, the continent is still grappling with the after-effects of the hundreds of thousands who arrived in the past few years alone. Belgium’s foreign-born population went from just under 12% to nearly 17% between 2006 and 2017, not including people who slipped in illegally. In France, asylum requests last year topped out at 123,625 — an increase of 23% from 2017, when they had already risen 17%.

In repeated surveys of young Europeans, including one released this month by the TUI Foundation, migration and asylum are described as Europe’s most pressing issue. The environment comes in a distant second.

Vlaams Belang’s decision to name Van Langenhove came after the Belgian network VRT linked him to racist and sexist messages in closed chat rooms. He dismissed the show as a “smear,” but it prompted protests at the Ghent campus where he was studying law and got him banned briefly. Later, he was suspended from Facebook for content that violated the social network’s terms of service. He is now more circumspect online and in front of the camera.

“Everything is on the table right now, it’s an all-in game. And that’s why more young people are taking the risk of associating themselves with right wing nationalist groups and organizations,” he told the AP. “Young people are right in the middle of the problems. Older people, they move to the countryside, they move to areas where there’s not a lot of foreigners. But young people have to move to the cities for their jobs, for their education.”

Jobs are a sore point, with youth unemployment at around 15% in Belgium, just above the European Union average, and 20% in France. Vlaams Belang is hoping its message of economic protectionism will help the party, which has forged links in France with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party as well as the loose far-right alliance that includes Italy’s League, Austria’s Freedom Party, Britain’s UKIP, the German far-right AfD and the Danish People’s Party.

Opponents, exemplified by centrist French President Emmanuel Macron, say the nationalists offer nothing in return for all they reject.

In an open letter to Europe in March, Macron called nationalism “the trap that threatens the whole of Europe: the anger-mongers, backed by fake news, promise anything and everything.”

That month, young far-right leaders from all those parties and more gathered in Rome, where a 23-year-old raised by a single mother in a suburban Paris housing project was one of the stars. Jordan Bardella’s brief speech to a young audience hit many of the same notes as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s from decades ago.

“Another challenge of our generation will be immigration. Confronted with the demographic bomb that is Africa, it is the survival of our peoples, our civilizations, our Christian roots that is at stake today,” the National Rally candidate tweeted on March 29.

Marine Le Pen re-branded her father’s National Front party as the National Rally after losing the French presidency to Macron in 2017. Despite the loss, she made important inroads among young French voters, easily outstripping all the traditional parties in polling among the young as well as the far-left candidate. She clearly took something away from the experience. The head of her party list this year is Bardella, who joined the National Front at age 16 and swiftly rose to lead its youth movement and that of its successor.

Graphic shows percentages of Italian youth voting for the far right. (Peter Hamlin / AP graphic)

Bardella is nearly as explicit as Van Langenhove about the young leading the way against waves of alleged mass migration and rules from the EU in Brussels.

While Van Langenhove used a medieval Flemish castle in an elaborate stunt against pro-migrant activists, Bardella uses Old France as his backdrop — casks of Cognac, golden fields, even the classic French comic book characters Asterix and Obelix. He is growing increasingly confident about campaigning on his own, especially with recent stumbles by Macron’s party.

“The generation that is committed to nationalist political movements today is the generation that tomorrow will be called upon to lead Europe,” Bardella told the AP.

That is exactly what Pawel Zerka fears. A researcher with the left-leaning European Council on Foreign Relations, he said the mainstream parties have barely made an effort to appeal to younger voters, seeing them as a lost cause because so few actually turn out to vote.

“So many young voters across Europe don’t believe the future will be better than today and they believe the past was better than today,” he said, citing repeated surveys. “The current European Union or the (mainstream) parties don’t offer a credible or attractive vision for the future for the young.”

So the far right is stepping in. In Denmark, Peter Kofod, 29, has risen steadily since his first election in 2014 to city council. The following year, he became chairman of the youth wing of the anti-immigrant, populist Danish People’s Party, which drew votes from a fifth of young voters.

Graphic shows percentages of German youth voting for the far right. (Peter Hamlin / AP graphic)

In Spain, Vox’s gains have come at the expense of traditional conservatives, who were slow to counter the upstart far-right party’s rise among the young. Its events include popular “Pints for Spain” evenings at bars, nightclubs and cafes, where no one over 25 is allowed in.

Under Manuel Mariscal, the 27-year-old Vox spokesman and a newly elected lawmaker, the party’s main Instagram channel has more than 300,000 followers, more than half of them younger than 34. A lot of its outreach happens on WhatsApp, where Vox’s Madrid youth operation has nearly 1,750 active members.

“A young kid who is highly motivated is capable of convincing many others. He talks to friends, he debates constantly with others, with family, that enthusiasm is contagious,” said Luis Felipe Ulecia, the 24-year-old vice secretary for youth. A bracelet with the Spanish flag around his left wrist, he spoke to AP at a working-class bar in Madrid about the party’s efforts to recruit the young.

“We are not looking for high-and-mighty young leaders … they need to be street-smart. They need to know about Spain’s countryside. And they need to have been to the polígonos,” he said, in reference to factory hubs outside the cities.

He later led a small outing of well-dressed young supporters in unfriendly territory in Barcelona, handing out pamphlets and at one point carefully confronting leftist activists.

Graphic shows percentages of Austrian youth voting for the far right. (Peter Hamlin / AP graphic)

Although the party has a small footprint in Spain — elections in April made it the No. 5 political party in the parliament’s lower house — it’s already influencing political debates on migration and the country’s territorial unity. Still, Vox’s vote total was far lower than its social media following would indicate.

This shows a possible ceiling for the ability of far-right groups to translate likes into votes, according to Manuel Mostaza Barrios, an analyst at the Madrid-based Atrevia consulting group.

As he put it: “The candidates most followed on social media aren’t necessarily those that get the most votes.”

___

Aritz Parra contributed from Madrid, along with Elaine Ganley in Paris, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, David Rising and Frank Jordans in Berlin, and Raf Casert in Brussels.

Thom Hartmann: The GOP Is Hellbent on Locking Up Women

During Mike Pence’s first year as governor of Indiana, his state put a young woman in prison for having a miscarriage, alleging that she’d taken an abortion-causing drug. Purvi Patel didn’t have a trace of such a drug in her system, but Pence’s state sentenced her to 20 years in prison anyway. Just a few years earlier, Indiana had also held Bei Bei Shuai for 435 days in the brutal maximum security Marion County prison, facing 45 years to life for trying to kill herself and, in the process, causing the death of her 33-week fetus.

Utah charged 28-year-old Melissa Ann Rowland with murder because she refused a C-section, preferring vaginal birth for her twins, and one of them died. Sixteen-year-old Rennie Gibbs was charged by the state of Mississippi with “depraved heart murder” when her baby was born dead because his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck: her crime was that she had cocaine in her bloodstream, according to prosecutors. Angela Carder was ordered to have a C-section to deliver her baby before she died of cancer; both she and the baby died from the procedure.

These cases have exploded in recent years, as the GOP and the nation’s law enforcement system have embraced the American “Christian” version of fundamentalist Islamic law which dictates that women are the property of men and their principal purpose for existence is reproduction.

According to Duke University’s Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, there were 413 documented—and probably thousands of lesser-known—cases of women being prosecuted for having miscarriages or attempting abortions between the time Roe v. Wade became the law of the land and 2005.

Between 2005 and 2014, the Guttmacher Institute documented another 380 cases.

Georgia just passed a law, signed by Republican Brian Kemp (the man who ran his own election against Stacey Abrams), which puts any woman in that state who has a miscarriage at risk of 30 years in prison or even the death penalty. Other states are in line, and in those states, like Georgia, with the death penalty, many are proposing legislation to put women who have abortions to death.

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Trump's Abortion Lies Are Going to Get Somebody Killed



by Sonali Kolhatkar

And we know what happens when abortion is totally banned. Romania, with a population slightly smaller than Florida, banned abortion (although, unlike Alabama, they allowed a provision for rape, incest, and congenital abnormalities) in 1966.

While wealthy Romanian women were still able to get abortions by traveling to other nearby nations, that option was not available to poor women. At least 10,000 women died of botched illegal abortions (that’s the official number; the real number is probably 10 times that) before Nicolae Ceaușescu was deposed and the law was repealed.

Few families were spared; maternal death was higher than any other country in Europe by a factor of ten and poverty exploded.

When the country was opened to the world, over 170,000 children were found languishing in brutal orphanages, ignored, emaciated and handcuffed to cribs. Nobody knows how many died in the decades before that.

When Nicolae Ceaușescu was deposed in 1989, his own soldiers gleefully machine-gunned him and his wife to death. The same penalty Georgia would inflict on its women who get abortions.

Given that one out of four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, laws like Georgia’s and Alabama’s may well require a substantial addition to our police systems.

Who is going to monitor all those pregnancies, and examine the women and the remains of their miscarriages to make sure there wasn’t a drug or self-inflicted injury involved?

Who is going to make sure that women who are pregnant are immediately brought to the attention of the authorities if they’re reluctant to do so themselves?

When Governor Mike Pence proudly signed Indiana’s abortion restrictions in 2016, women across the state noted that it required that miscarried fetuses (along with aborted fetuses) be “interred [buried in a cemetery] or cremated,” no matter whether the pregnancy was six or sixteen weeks along when the miscarriage happened.

It led to a movement across the state called “Periods for Pence,” in which women tweeted or called the governor’s office to tell him when their periods had started and ended, so the state wouldn’t mistake a normal menstrual period for a miscarriage.

The press treated it as funny at the time; nobody’s laughing now.

The Republicans could borrow the name from Saudi Arabia for their police who scour the streets looking for badly behaving women; the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” would hire a few million upright “Christian” men who would each take responsibility for monitoring the menstrual cycles of 50 or 100 women.

Like in Saudi Arabia, it would be a real job-creator, boosting the economy while ensuring public morality.

Thanks to the internet, each woman who’s the ward of a particular commissioner could use modern technology to keep it all simple; like the Saudi Absher app that women use in that country to obtain a man’s permission to leave the house or date, American women could simply swipe “period started” and “period finished normally” when those events happen.

This way, the commissioners could limit the unpleasant work of physically checking women’s uteruses or showing up with a pregnancy test to only once a year (more frequently for “high-risk” women, less frequently for “low-risk” ones).

No doubt Facebook could help out with a handy algorithm based on women’s online activity.

My wife Louise and I have had three children and one miscarriage, which was an emotionally gutting experience. It pains me to even write this article, and particularly to present the idea above.

But if the GOP keeps going down this road, this very well may be where we end up.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.