Chris Hedges's Blog, page 328

The U.S.-Venezuela Aid Convoy Story Is Clearly Bogus, but No One Wants to Say It

No one actually thinks the same Donald Trump who kicked off his run for the White House by calling Mexicans rapists, and subsequently, as president, left Puerto Rico for dead after Hurricane Maria, cares at all about the Venezuelan poor. No one actually thinks the murderers row of Cold Warriors—led by two of the most extreme right-wingers in American politics, Venezuela envoy Elliott Abrams and national security adviser John Bolton—cares at all about the starving people in Venezuela or their plight. No one reading this, whether they be right, left, center, libertarian or communist, actually buys the prevailing narrative that the U.S. is sending “aid” to Venezuela as a humanitarian gesture.

So why is everyone pretending otherwise?

There are a number of reasons why these superficial narratives take hold, but I’d like to speculate on two of them.

First, the crisis in Venezuela is very real and very daunting. Without litigating who’s responsible for what, whether U.S.-led sanctions and economic sabotage are more to blame or the economic policies of Nicolás Maduro, one simple fact is true: The status quo is untenable. Perhaps, then, the instinct to “do something” is understandable. But as with previous crises, both organic and contrived, what that “something” is remains unclear. Liberals—as they did in the build-up to the invasions of Iraq and Libya—are easily pressured into this “do something” posture.

The way these things work, however, is that this vague moral directive often involves a combination of CIA and U.S. military intervention. During the Syrian conflict, for example, it meant U.S.- and NATO-led bombings of Syrian forces and a tacit declaration of war under the guise of “no-fly zones.” What’s never considered is a reduction or cessation of U.S. involvement, be it CIA weapons running, wide-scale bombing campaigns, or the imposition of sanctions—all of which prolong a given conflict or simply make it more violent.

Because a core tenet of American liberalism is to avoid assigning blame—at worst, its adherents believe, the U.S. is run by a bunch of bumbling do-gooders—what the American empire is actually doing to fuel a conflict cannot be debated, much less censured. And so the notion that we could simply cease our crippling sanctions, which even the pro-opposition Economist acknowledges are designed to “starve” the Venezuelan people, is simply not an option.

The current “something” in Venezuela we’re all compelled to “do” is ensure the arrival of a humanitarian aid convoy. The fact that the bulk of the international aid community has either distanced itself from this PR stunt or outright opposes it has been widely ignored by the mainstream media. One exception is NPR, which recently reported this inconvenient truth:

The U.S. effort to distribute tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans is more than just a humanitarian mission. The operation is also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela — which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it. Humanitarian operations are supposed to be neutral.

That’s why the International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations agencies and other relief organizations have refused to collaborate with the U.S. and its allies in the Venezuelan opposition who are trying to force President Nicolás Maduro from power.

“Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any other objectives,” Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, told a press briefing last week in New York. “The needs of the people should lead in terms of when and how humanitarian assistance is used.”

In fact, no neutral observer of international aid thinks Bolton and Abrams’ convoy is anything but a mechanism to foment civil war and regime change. We know this because high-level administration officials and their allies on the right keep telling us that’s the case. As the New York Post recently proclaimed, “U.S. delivers aid to town bordering Venezuela to undermine President Nicolas Maduro.”

Donald Trump delivered a long and rambling speech in Miami last week and didn’t once mention human rights, instead railing against the evils of socialism. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe reflects in his new book that Trump has openly fantasized about overthrowing Maduro, something he has discussed in White House meetings. “That’s the country we should be going to war with,” Trump said, according to McCabe. “They have all that oil, and they’re right on our back door.”

Determined to maintain U.S. hegemony and control over the world’s largest-known oil reserves, the Trump officials plotting this latest coup aren’t even bothering to take its humanitarian pretext seriously. Why, then, are purportedly centrist and liberal media outlets?

A second matter to consider is how our government has weaponized the public’s sense of morality. Since the Spanish-American War, the U.S. has used humanitarian concerns as a shield against criticism or skepticism, and it has more or less worked every time. It’s why “aid” organizations like Air America used food transports to ship guns to anti-Communists in Indochina in the 1960s and ’70s. (Weapons were code-named “hard rice.”) And it’s why Elliott Abrams—the current quarterback of this latest affair in Venezuela—used humanitarian aid shipments to smuggle weapons to the Nicaragua’s Contras in the ’80s. Ultimately, these shipments allow for massive military buildups, without anyone in the media or Congress asking too many questions. After all, what kind of monster is opposed to helping starving people?

It’s impossible to know if the current shipments to Venezuela are being used to transport weapons, although Venezuelan authorities say they have intercepted American arms shipments. But given the history of the U.S. (to say nothing of Abrams’), and the fact that the Trump administration is openly calling for Maduro’s ouster while amassing forces along the Colombian border, it’s not exactly a long shot. Still, our political press dismisses the possibility as tin-foil hat stuff, at least in part because mocking wacky Latin American “conspiracy theories” is a mark of one’s seriousness in foreign policy circles.

Unlike a lot of U.S. regime change activities, reports indicate that this latest stunt was exceptionally rushed and slapdash. The Wall Street Journal paints a picture of a U.S. operation its architects believed would work in a day or two:

“The people who devised it in Caracas and sold it here [in Washington], sold it with the promise that if Guaidó made a move and [South American countries] and the U.S. came in behind, the military would flip and Maduro would go,” said a former senior U.S. official. “They thought it was a 24-hour operation.”

Because the large-scale military defections expected never took place (as they almost never do), the U.S. has had to resort to its Plan B for promoting conflict and galvanizing the Venezuelan opposition: On Sat., Feb. 23, President of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó will carry out a “humanitarian avalanche” at the Venezuelan border with Colombia and Brazil that, when one reads the fine print, sounds a lot like a U.S.-led invasion. Billionaire Richard Branson is reportedly organizing a “humanitarian aid” concert the night before. But we know this is a fig leaf, and we know this because those running this operation say so again and again. Bolton himself has speculated that Maduro could end up in a “beach area like Guantanamo.”

Despite all the evidence before them, MSNBC, CNN and countless other networks and publications across the ideological spectrum refuse to frame this humanitarian gambit as an act of hostility. Instead, knowing what they know and who they are covering, they have largely portrayed Trump, Bolton and Abrams as champions of the Venezuelan people.

It goes without saying that hundreds of thousands are suffering in Venezuela, and the instinct to alleviate that suffering is a healthy one. But a craven marketing stunt by far-right Cold Warriors—without any buy-in from actual aid organizations—cannot be taken at face value.

Just as the U.S. military has made calls to high-ranking Venezuelan officials, I am writing directly to the editors, television producers and reporters of our most prominent news outlets. I’m asking you to defect and come to the side of the patently obvious. Unlike the Pentagon, I can’t bribe you or promise you amnesty, but I can appeal to your basic sense of integrity and intellectual honesty: At best, you are helping provide cover for a campaign designed to starve the Venezuelan people; at worst, you are enabling a military conflict that will drag on for years.

One does not need to hold any normative opinions about the fate of Venezuela to be able to identify a naked PR campaign when they see one. Journalists with blue checkmarks on Twitter must say so before this gets any further out of hand.

White Nationalist’s Plot to Commit Mass Murder Revealed

Just as a new report was released showing the continued rise of hate groups in the United States, federal authorities say they have thwarted a plan by a white nationalist “domestic terrorist” to begin widespread, violent attacks on President Donald Trump’s perceived political opponents with the aim of establishing “a white homeland.”

U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Paul Hasson was arrested late last week, the Washington Post reported Wednesday, after investigators accused him of stockpiling weapons to carry out his plans. Hasson had compiled a long list of targets including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as well as other politicians and journalists.

In court documents, the U.S. government wrote, “The defendant intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.”

According to court documents, his targets included a list of visible Democrats and media figures that Trump has clashed with. The guy was a white nationalist, but also seems to view Trump as on his team. https://t.co/EIA1I0sQ8C pic.twitter.com/fYtPns6DRr

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) February 21, 2019

Hasson’s arrest was reported a day after the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) unveiled research showing that for the fourth year in a row, the number of hate groups operating in the U.S. has grown. The group pointed to Trump’s racist rhetoric and policies as well as his history of openly applauding violence against the press and his critics, as a key reason behind the growing prevalence of organized hate.

“The number of hate groups operating across America rose to a record high—1,020—in 2018 as President Trump continued to fan the flames of white resentment over immigration and the country’s changing demographics,” the SPLC reported.

Based on recent internet searches federal investigators uncovered, Hasson appeared to be planning an attack against Trump’s detractors. In January he searched for the phrase, “civil war if trump impeached” and “what if trump illegally impeached.”

“This president is not simply a polarizing figure but a radicalizing one,” Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, said of the group’s findings. “Rather than trying to tamp down hate, as presidents of both parties have done, President Trump elevates it—with both his rhetoric and his policies. In doing so, he’s given people across America the go-ahead to act on their worst instincts.”

In January investigators found Hasson had also conducted internet searches for a number of phrases indicating he planned to get access to his targets, including “best place in dc to see congress people” and “where in dc to congress live.” [sic]

Around the time of Hasson’s arrest, the Washington Free Beacon published an article detailing Ocasio-Cortez’s home in Washington, D.C. The congresswoman responded to reports of Hasson’s apparent plans to target her and others by calling on media outlets to end their “reckless” reporting of personal details as well as amplifying of “unvetted conspiracy theories” that run rampant among right-wing hate groups.

“This isn’t a game,” declared Ocasio-Cortez.

Journalists are sharing stories about where I live the same day it’s shared that myself + others were targeted by a mass shooter.

All this paired w/ amplifying unvetted conspiracy theories. It’s reckless, irresponsible & puts people directly in danger.

This isn’t a game. https://t.co/gcJWcKinxI

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 21, 2019

“Trump has given voice to the rage and paranoia of white supremacists, and now there is a very real danger that as extremists lose the hope they saw in his presidency, some will lash out against the people he has demonized and blamed for America’s problems,” Beirich said.

“Hate has frayed the social fabric of our country,” said SPLC president Richard Cohen in a statement.

Ending the growth of hate organizations “will take leadership—political leadership—that inspires our country to live up to its highest values,” he added.

The Triumphant Homecoming of Angela Davis

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter From Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963. King was arrested there for his role in organizing nonviolent protests against segregation, which were being led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. “Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States,” King also wrote in that famous letter. Civil-rights campaigners were so frequently targeted with bombs by the Ku Klux Klan that the city was often called “Bombingham.” Five months after King’s letter, one of those bombs went off at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls. Today, across the street from that church sits the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), which for more than a quarter century has educated and inspired millions of visitors.

Last October, the BCRI announced it would bestow its 2018 Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award on Angela Y. Davis, the legendary civil-rights activist, prison abolition advocate and scholar. Angela Davis is a Birmingham native, and grew up amidst segregation. Her neighborhood suffered so many Klan bombings that it was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill.” The daughter of civil-rights activists, she went on to become a prominent member of the Communist Party USA and a leader in the Black Panther Party. As a result, like so many activists in that era (MLK included), she was targeted by the FBI. She was charged as a conspirator in the shooting death of a judge. She faced three death sentences in a trial that became an international cause celebre. She was ultimately acquitted of all the charges.

The BCRI’s decision to honor Angela Davis made perfect sense. She has gained renown for her tireless work on behalf of prisoners and to abolish the U.S. prison-industrial complex. Integral to her life’s work, she has long expressed unflinching support for the rights of Palestinian people. In a recently published collection of essays and speeches titled “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement,” she writes, reflecting on the life of Nelson Mandela and the successful campaign to eliminate South African apartheid, “We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid.”

Two months after the BCRI board members announced that she had been granted the Shuttlesworth award, they received a letter from the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center asking them to reconsider the award in part because of Davis’ “outspoken support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.” The BCRI board, in a 9-2 vote, rescinded the award. It canceled the award gala that had been scheduled for Feb. 16.

The response in Birmingham was swift and angry. Birmingham’s school board and city council both voted unanimously to show their support for Davis. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin publicly condemned the decision. A group formed to plan an event to honor Davis on the night of the original gala.

Within days, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute board reversed its decision and asked Angela Davis to accept the award.

Last Friday night, “Angela Solidarity Shabbats” were held in dozens of cities, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. Jesse Schaffer hosted the celebration in Birmingham.

“My Judaism is directly rooted in social justice,” he told us at the Shabbat. “For me, Angela Davis is a direct expression of those values, and she has always understood that our historic struggles are linked, whether it’s Palestinians, it’s black folks in the South, Jewish folks – really, any struggle for justice – that they’re all linked and that we’re stronger together.”

On Saturday night, more than 3,000 people poured into Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium for an evening organized by the Birmingham Committee for Truth and Reconciliation. At the event, Davis reflected on how meaningful the Shabbats were to her:

“‘Angela, sister, you are welcome in this Shabbat’ comes from a slogan that was used on many posters all over the country when I was underground fleeing the FBI. People put up these posters on their doors: ‘Angela, sister, you are welcome in this house.'”

The city’s first elected African-American mayor, Richard Arrington, Jr., wrapped up the evening, saying, “I am especially proud that in this moment of challenge we ran not in different directions, not venting the anger and the frustration we felt; instead, we ran to one another, linked arms, embraced one another and lifted up a daughter who is celebrated in the world community for her stand on human rights.”

Angela Davis says whether or not she returns to accept the Shuttlesworth Award will have to be a community decision. She offered as her final words Saturday night: “Let us use this moment to generate the strength and the enthusiasm and the vision to move forward to a better future for Birmingham, for the country and for the entire world.”

Oakland Teachers to Start Strike Thursday

OAKLAND, Calif. — Teachers in Oakland, California, plan to raise picket signs Thursday in the country’s latest strike by educators over classroom conditions and pay.

The city’s 3,000 teachers are demanding a 12 percent retroactive raise covering 2017 to 2020 to compensate for what they say are among the lowest salaries for public school teachers in the exorbitantly expensive San Francisco Bay Area.

They also want the district to hire more counselors to support students and more full-time nurses.

The walkout will affect 36,000 students at 86 schools.

The Oakland Educators Association called for the strike Wednesday after rejecting a proposal from the district for a 7 percent raise over four years and a one-time 1.5 percent bonus.

Coast Guard Lieutenant Compiled Hit List of Lawmakers, Feds Say

WASHINGTON—A Coast Guard lieutenant who was arrested last week is a “domestic terrorist” who drafted an email discussing biological attacks and had what appeared to be a hit list that included prominent Democrats and media figures, prosecutors said in court papers.

Christopher Paul Hasson is due to appear Thursday in federal court in Maryland after his arrest on gun and drug offenses, but prosecutors say those charges are the “proverbial tip of the iceberg.”

“The defendant is a domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.

Hasson, who works at the Coast Guard’s headquarters in Washington, has espoused extremist views for years, according to prosecutors. Court papers detail a June 2017 draft email in which Hasson wrote that he was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth,” and pondering how he might be able to acquire anthrax and toxins to create botulism or a deadly influenza.

In the same email, Hasson described an “interesting idea” that included “biological attacks followed by attack on food supply” as well as a bombing and sniper attacks, according to court documents filed by prosecutors.

In September 2017, Hasson sent himself a draft letter that he had written to a neo-Nazi leader and “identified himself as a White Nationalist for over 30 years and advocated for ‘focused violence’ in order to establish a white homeland,” prosecutors wrote.

Hasson routinely read portions of a manifesto written by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik that prosecutors said instructs would-be assailants to collect firearms, food, disguises and survival tools, court papers said. Breivik, a right-wing extremist, is serving a 21-year sentence for killing 77 people in a 2011 bomb-and-shooting rampage.

Hasson also expressed admiration for Russia. “Looking to Russia with hopeful eyes or any land that despises the west’s liberalism,” he wrote in the draft email. Prosecutors say during the past two years he had regularly searched online for pro-Russian as well as neo-Nazi literature.

Prosecutors allege that Hasson visited thousands of websites that sold guns and researched military tactical manuals on improvised munitions.

Federal agents found 15 firearms — including several rifles — and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition inside Hasson’s basement apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland. They also found a container with more than 30 bottles that were labeled as human growth hormone, court papers said.

Prosecutors wrote that Hasson “began the process of targeting specific victims,” including several prominent Democrats in Congress and 2020 presidential candidates. In February 2018, he searched the internet for the “most liberal senators,” as well as searching “do senators have ss (secret service) protection” and “are supreme court justices protected,” according to the court filing.

Hasson’s list of prominent Democrats included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and presidential hopefuls Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

The list — created in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet — also included mentions of John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Joe Scarborough and CNN’s Chris Cuomo and Van Jones, according to the court filing.

Hasson appeared to be a chronic user of the opioid painkiller Tramadol and had purchased a flask filled with four ounces of “synthetic urine” online, prosecutors said. Authorities suspect Hasson had purchased fake urine to use in case he was randomly selected for a drug test.

The chief at the federal defender’s office in Maryland — which is representing Hasson — declined to comment on the allegations. The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hasson’s arrest. No one answered the door Wednesday at the home address for Hasson listed in public records.

Hasson’s arrest on Feb. 15 was first noted by Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

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Associated Press writer Michael Kunzelman in Silver Spring, Maryland, contributed to this report.

Smollett Suspected of Lying About Attack, Police Official Says

CHICAGO—Detectives suspect that “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett filed a false police report when he said he was attacked in downtown Chicago by two men who hurled racist and anti-gay slurs and looped a rope around his neck, a police official said Wednesday.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi also said detectives and two brothers who were earlier deemed suspects in the Jan. 29 beating testified before a grand jury. If indicted for filing a false report, a felony, the actor would face a possible prison sentence of one to three years and could be forced to pay for the cost of the investigation.

Smollett’s attorneys met with prosecutors and police earlier Wednesday. It was unknown what they discussed or whether Smollett attended the meeting. The attorneys did not reply to requests for comment.

The police announcement came after a flurry of activity in recent days that included lengthy interviews of the brothers by authorities, a search of their home and their release after police cleared them.

Investigators have not said what the brothers told detectives or what evidence detectives collected. But it became increasingly clear that serious questions had arisen about Smollett’s account — something police signaled Friday when they announced a “significant shift in the trajectory” of the probe after the brothers were freed.

Smollett, who is black and gay and plays a gay character on the hit Fox television show, said he was attacked as he was walking home from a Subway sandwich shop. He said the masked men beat him, made derogatory comments and yelled “This is MAGA country” — an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” — before fleeing.

Earlier Wednesday, Fox Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television issued a statement saying Smollett “continues to be a consummate professional on set” and that his character is not being written off the show, which follows a black family as they navigate the ups and downs of the record industry.

The statement followed reports that Smollett’s role was being slashed amid the police investigation.

Whispers about Smollett’s potential role in the attack started with reports that he had not fully cooperated with police and word that detectives in a city bristling with surveillance cameras could not find video of the attack.

Investigators did find and release images of two people they said they wanted to question and last week picked up the brothers at O’Hare Airport as they returned from Nigeria. Police questioned the men and searched their apartment.

The brothers, who were identified by their attorney as Abimbola “Abel” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, were held for nearly 48 hours on suspicion of assaulting Smollett before being released.

The next day, police said the men provided information that had “shifted the trajectory of the investigation” and detectives had requested another interview with Smollett.

The Osundairos’ attorney, Gloria Schmidt, has not responded to multiple requests for comment from The Associated Press.

Smollett’s lawyers, Todd Pugh and Victor P. Henderson, have said the actor was angered and “victimized” by reports suggesting that he may have played a role in staging the attack.

“Nothing is further from the truth and anyone claiming otherwise is lying,” Pugh and Henderson said Saturday in a statement.

If Smollett’s account is determined to be a fabrication, legal experts say he could be charged with any number of felonies. The most obvious charge is felony disorderly conduct, which is legalese for filing a false police report.

Such a charge is fairly common. In Boone County, Illinois, for example, a woman is awaiting trial on allegations that she called in a false threat of a gunman in September. The call prompted a police search for a suspect and put several area schools on lockdown.

Former Cook County prosecutor Andrew Weisberg recently represented a client who was charged with the same crime when her account of being robbed by three men at O’Hare Airport came apart. Police found surveillance video that showed the woman and an accomplice walking through the airport without the items they claimed were stolen.

Another possibility is an obstruction-of-justice charge. Both crimes are Class 4 felonies, which in addition to prison time carry the possibility of a fine of $25,000.

Weisberg said judges rarely throw defendants in prison, opting instead to place them on probation, particularly if they have no prior criminal record.

Smollett has a record — one that concerns giving false information to police when he was pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence. According to records, he was also charged with false impersonation and driving without a license. He later pleaded no contest to a reduced charge and took an alcohol education and treatment program.

Another prospective problem is the bill someone might receive after falsely reporting a crime that prompted a massive investigation that lasted nearly a month and included the collection and review of hundreds of hours of surveillance video.

The size of the tab is anyone’s guess, but given how much time the police have invested, the cost could be huge.

For an investigation that took only a single day, Weisberg’s client had to split restitution of $8,400, Weisberg said. In Smollett’s case, “I can imagine that this would be easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Also Wednesday, Chicago’s top prosecutor, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, announced that she had recused herself from the investigation.

Her office explained that Foxx made the decision “out of an abundance of caution” because of conversations she had with one of Smollett’s family members just after the report. When the relative expressed concerns about the case, Foxx “facilitated a connection” between the family member and detectives, according to a statement.

Foxx said the case would be handled to her first assistant, Joseph Magats, a 28-year veteran prosecutor.

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Check out the AP’s complete coverage of the Jussie Smollett case.

The Fed’s Dramatic About-Face

“Quantitative easing” was supposed to be an emergency measure, but the Federal Reserve is now taking a surprising new approach toward the policy. The Fed “eased” shrinkage in the money supply due to the 2008-09 credit crisis by pumping out trillions of dollars in new bank reserves. After the crisis, the presumption was the Fed would “normalize” conditions by sopping up the excess reserves through “quantitative tightening” (QT)—raising interest rates and selling the securities it had bought with new reserves back into the market.

The Fed relentlessly pushed on with quantitative tightening through 2018, despite a severe market correction in the fall. In December, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said QT would be on “autopilot,” meaning the Fed would continue to raise interest rates and sell $50 billion monthly in securities until it hit its target. But the market protested loudly to this move, with the Nasdaq composite index dropping 22 percent from its late-summer high.

Worse, defaults on consumer loans were rising. December 2018 was the first time in two years that all loan types and all major metropolitan statistical areas showed a higher default rate month over month. Consumer debt—including auto, student and credit card debt—is typically bundled and sold as asset-backed securities similar to the risky mortgage-backed securities that brought down the market in 2008 after the Fed had progressively raised interest rates.

Powell evidently got the memo. In January, he abruptly changed course and announced QT would be halted if needed. On Feb. 4, Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said it was considering going much further. “You could imagine executing policy with your interest rate as your primary tool and the balance sheet as a secondary tool, one that you would use more readily,” she said. QE and QT would no longer be emergency measures but would be routine tools for managing the money supply. In an article on Seeking Alpha titled “Quantitative Easing on Demand,” Mark Grant writes:

If the Fed does decide to pursue this strategy it will be a wholesale change in the way the financial system in the United States operates and I think that very few institutions or people appreciate what is taking place or what it will mean to the markets, all of the markets.

The Problem of Debt Deflation

The Fed is realizing that it cannot bring its balance sheet back to “normal.” It must keep pumping new money into the banking system to avoid a recession. This naturally alarms Fed watchers worried about hyperinflation. But QE need not create unwanted inflation if directed properly. The money spigots just need to be aimed at the debtors rather than the creditor banks. In fact, regular injections of new money directly into the economy may be just what the economy needs to escape the boom and bust cycle that has characterized it for two centuries. Grant concludes his article by quoting Abraham Lincoln:

The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.

The quote is apparently apocryphal, but the principle still holds: new money needs to be regularly added to the money supply to avoid an overwhelming debt burden and allow the economy to reach its true productive potential. Regular injections of new money are necessary to avoid something economists fear even more than inflation—the sort of “debt deflation” that took down the economy in the 1930s.

Most money today is created by banks when they make loans. When overextended borrowers pay down old loans without taking out new ones, the money supply “deflates” or shrinks. Demand shrinks with it, and businesses lacking customers close their doors, in the sort of self-feeding death spiral seen in the Great Depression.

As Australian economist Steve Keen observes, today the level of private debt is way too high, and that is why so little lending is occurring. But mainstream economists consider the rate of growth of debt to be irrelevant to macroeconomic policy, because lending is thought to simply redistribute spending power from savers to investors. Conventional economic theory says that banks are merely intermediaries, recirculating existing money rather than creating spending power in their own right. But this is not true, Keen said. Banks actually create new money when they make loans. He cites the Bank of England, which said in its 2014 quarterly report:

[B]anks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’ central bank money to create new loans and deposits …

In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way is through commercial banks making loans. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.

Loans create deposits, and deposits make up the bulk of the money supply. Money today is created by banks as a debt on their balance sheets, and more is always owed back than was created, since the interest claimed by the banks is not created in the original loan. Debt thus grows faster than the money supply. When overextended borrowers quit taking out the new loans needed to repay old loans, the gap widens even further. The result is debt deflation—a debt-induced reduction in the new money needed to stimulate economic activity and growth. Thus comes the need for injections of new money to fill the gap between debt and the money available to repay it.

However, the money created through QE to date has not gone to the consuming public, where it must go to fill this gap. Rather, it has gone to the banks, which have funneled it into the speculative financialized markets. Nomi Prins calls this “dark money”—the trillions of dollars flowing yearly in and around global stock, bond and derivatives markets generated by central banks when they electronically fabricate money by buying bonds and stocks. She writes, “These dark money flows stretch around the world according to a pattern of power, influence and, of course, wealth for select groups.” In a piece for Daily Reckoning, she shows graphically that the rise in dark money is directly correlated with the rise in financial markets.

QE has worked to reverse the debts of the banks and prop up the stock market, but it has not relieved the debts of consumers, businesses or governments; and it is these debts that will trigger the sort of debt deflation that can take the economy down. Keen concludes that “no amount of exhorting banks to ‘Intermediate’ will end the drought in credit growth that is the real cause of The Great Malaise.” The only way to reduce the private debt burden without causing a depression, he says, is a Modern Debt Jubilee or People’s Quantitative Easing.

QE-Funded Debt Relief

In antiquity, as professor Michael Hudson observes, debts were routinely forgiven when a new ruler took the throne. The rulers and their advisers knew that debt at interest grew faster than the money supply, and that debt relief was necessary to avoid economic collapse from an overwhelming debt overhang. Economic growth is arithmetic and can’t keep up with the exponential growth of debt growing at compound interest.

Consumers need that sort of debt relief today, but simply voiding out their debts as was done in antiquity will not work, because the debts are not owed to the government. They are owed to banks and private investors who would have to bear the loss. The alternative suggested by Keen and others is to fill the debt gap with a form of QE dropped not into bank reserve accounts but digitally into the bank accounts of the general public. Debtors could then use the money to pay down their debts and non-debtors would receive a cash injection.

Properly managed, these injections need not create inflation. (See my earlier article here.) Money is created as loans and extinguished when they are paid off, so the money used to pay down debt would be extinguished along with the debt. Cash injections not used to pay down debt would just help fill the gap between real and potential productivity, allowing demand and supply to rise together, keeping prices stable.

A regular injection of money into personal bank accounts has been called a “universal basic income,” but it would be better to call it a “national dividend”—something all citizens are entitled to equally, without regard to economic status or ability to work. It would serve as a safety net for people living paycheck to paycheck, but the larger purpose would be as economic policy to stimulate demand and productivity to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Money might then indeed become a servant of humanity, transformed from a tool of oppression into a means of securing common prosperity. But first the central bank needs to be made a public utility, responsive to the needs of the people and the economy.  In other words, it needs to become a public servant once and for all.

Muslim Group Seeks Congressional Probe on Terror Watchlist

FALLS CHURCH, Va.—A Muslim civil rights group called for a congressional investigation Wednesday after its lawsuit revealed that the U.S. government has shared its terrorist watchlist with more than 1,400 private entities, including hospitals and universities.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said Congress should look into why the FBI has given such wide access to the list, which CAIR believes is riddled with errors. Broad dissemination of the names makes life more difficult for those who are wrongly included, CAIR says. Many on the list are believed to be Muslim.

“This is a wholesale profiling of a religious minority community,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad. “To share private information of citizens and non-citizens with corporations is illegal and outrageous.”

An FBI spokeswoman had no immediate comment Wednesday.

The council filed a class-action lawsuit in 2016 challenging the list’s constitutionality and saying those wrongly placed on it routinely face difficulties in travel, financial transactions and their dealings with law enforcement.

In response to the lawsuit, a federal official recently acknowledged in a court filing that more than 1,400 private entities received access to the list.

For years, the government had insisted that it did not generally share the list with private organizations.

The watchlist, which contains hundreds of thousands of names, is supposed to include only known or suspected terrorists. Critics say it is wildly overbroad and mismanaged. The government’s smaller no-fly list is culled from the watchlist.

A hearing is scheduled in federal court for Friday on CAIR’s request that the government now detail exactly which entities have received access to the names. CAIR also wants to know what private organizations are doing with the watchlist information — whether, for example, it is influencing universities’ admissions decisions or is being used by hospitals to screen would-be visitors.

In depositions and in court hearings, government officials had denied until very recently that the watchlist compiled by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center is shared with private entities. At a hearing in September, government lawyer Dena Roth told U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga that the Terrorist Screening Center “does not work with private partners, and that watchlist status itself … is considered law enforcement sensitive information and is not shared with the public.”

Despite that assurance, the judge ordered the government to be more specific about how it disseminates the watchlist. Trenga said the plaintiffs are entitled to the information to try to prove their case that inclusion on the list causes them to suffer “real world consequences.”

In response to the judge’s order, TSC Deputy Director of Operations Timothy Groh filed a statement earlier this month acknowledging that 1,441 private entities have received permission to access the watchlist.

Groh said those entities must be in some way connected to the criminal justice system. He cited police forces at private universities, hospital security staff and private correctional facilities as examples.

He said private groups are expected to abide by a detailed set of rules designed to ensure the list is used properly. It is not clear what those restrictions are.

The exact number of people on the list is kept secret by the government, but it acknowledged in an earlier lawsuit that it adds hundreds of thousands of names every year. It also emphasized that names are routinely removed.

Faiza Patel, a director at the New York University law school’s Brennan Center for Justice, said the government’s willingness to share the list with private organizations is problematic because the list has so many people who are wrongly included in the database.

“When you tag someone as a terrorist it can have serious consequences for people,” she said.

Insisting on Resistance in an Age of Ignorance

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Truthout. 

Ignorance now rules the U.S. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue. We most recently saw this exemplified in Donald Trump’s disingenuousness 2019 State of the Union address in which he lied about the amount of drugs streaming across the southern border, demonized the immigrant community with racist attacks, misrepresented the facts regarding the degree of violence at the border, and employed an antiwar rhetoric while he has repeatedly threatened war with Iran and Venezuela. Willful ignorance reached a new low when Trump — after two years of malicious tweets aimed at his critics — spoke of the need for political unity.

Willful ignorance often hides behind the rhetoric of humiliation, lies and intimidation. Trump’s reliance upon threats to impose his will took a dangerous turn given his ignorance of the law when he used his speech to undermine the special council’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He did so with his hypocritical comment about how the only things that can stop the “economic miracle” are “foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” to which he added, “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” According to Trump, the Democrats have a choice between reaching legislative deals and pursuing “ridiculous partisan investigations” — clearly the country could not do both.

William Rivers Pitt is right in claiming that in one moment Trump thus tied “the ongoing Robert Mueller investigation inextricably to terrorism, war and political dysfunction.” As Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim point out, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added to this criticism by “accusing Trump of an all-out threat to lawmakers sworn to provide a check and balance on his power.”

Malicious ignorance is a willful refusal to reflect enough to do justice to the complexity of an idea and its potential consequences. This is a kind of ignorance that combines the mindset of tyrants with a notion of unreflective certainty that banishes doubt and views opposing positions as acts of treason that are often deserving of some kind of punitive action. Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of U.S. political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge how the violence of the past seeps into the present, reinforced by a corporate-controlled media and digital culture dominated by fatuous spectacles and consumerist trivia.

In the age of Trump and the rise of illiberal democracies all across the globe, James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing in No Name in the Street the stern warning that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” Trump’s ignorance lights up the Twitter landscape almost every day. He denies climate change along with the dangers that it poses to humanity, shuts down the government because he cannot get the funds for his wall — a grotesque symbol of nativism — and heaps disdain on the heads of his intelligence agencies because they provide proof of the lies and misinformation that shapes his love affair with tyrants. This kind of power-drunk ignorance is comparable to a bomb with a fuse that is about to explode in a crowded shopping center. This dangerous type of ignorance fuses with a reckless use of state power that holds both human life and the planet hostage.

Ignorance in a Culture of Immediacy

It sometimes feels as if the age of big ideas has come to an end, transformed into a scattered set of cultural spheres that reinforce the elevation of ignorance to a national ideal and form of weaponized politics. For example, culture has been turned into a disimagination machine that prioritizes a culture of metrics and the hypnotic seductions of the screen. (It’s no coincidence that Trump is the first president whose main source for understanding the world and generating policies is the television.)

Americans live in a culture of immediacy that has created new forms of social and historical ignorance and erasure. As writer John Gray points out, disparaging the past has become “a mark of intellectual respectability.” He then reinforces the point by quoting literary critic Francis O’Gorman, who argues that in the current age marked by “a revival of intolerance” it has become “easier to affirm elements of a Nazi ideology recast in versions of white supremacy.” What Gray was rightfully suggesting, often missed by many progressive commentators, is that fascism never confined itself to the past and is now winning ideologically on a new kind of battlefield.

Time no longer has a long durée; it has to be instantaneous, pulsating with information that barely adds up to a sustained idea. Time is now connected to short-term investments and quick financial gains, defined by the nonstop and frenetic perpetuation of an impoverished culture of global exchange. Time is no longer connected to long-term investment in community, the development of social well-being, and goals that benefit young people and the common good. Time has become a burden more than a condition for contemplation.

The flow of money now replaces the flow of thoughtfulness, critical dialogue and informed judgment. This is exacerbated in a culture of immediacy in which instant gratification rules and thoughtful contemplation becomes a thing of the past. Long-term investments have given way to short-term investments, and in doing so, have erased any long-term commitments to valued relationships, young people, intimacy, justice and compassion. Barbarism presents itself in acts, experiences and forms of suffering that vanish from the mainstream media as quickly as they appear.

The language of neoliberalism erases any notion of social responsibility, and in doing so, eliminates the belief that alternative worlds can be imagined. Under the Trump administration, the world of the robust imagination, a vibrant civic literacy, and inspiring and vitalizing ideas are turned into ashes. Ignorance, forgetfulness and cruelty now merge into a notion of common sense that sustains the willful ignorance of the rich and powerful. How else to explain Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stating during the shutdown, when thousands of federal workers missed their paychecks, that he did not understand why some of them were visiting food banks or seeking food assistance when they could be taking out loans.

This is a form of ignorance that morphs into a culture of cruelty, one that is all too apparent as part of larger mechanisms of power and violence in the United States. As civic culture disappears, historical memory is broken, and words such as fascism, nativism, genocide, internment, war and violence appear as empty abstractions, only to be trivialized or dismissed in the 24-hour news cycle now driven by Trump’s Twitter convulsions.

Life Under Neoliberal Authoritarianism

In the current historical moment, there is a growing worldwide rejection of liberal democracy. We live in an age in which a distinctive form of authoritarianism has emerged which fuses the toxic austerity policies and ruthless ideologies of neoliberalism with the racist and ultra-nationalist principles and attitudes of a fascist past. What might be called a state-manufactured grammar of violence, white supremacy and ignorance no longer hides in the shadows of power and ideological deception. It is now displayed as a nativist badge of honor by right-wing politicians and pundits such as Steve Bannon.

Not only is authoritarianism and the expanding architecture of violence on the rise in countries such as Poland, Hungary, India and Turkey, it is also on the rise in the United States — a country that has prided itself, however erratically, on its longstanding commitment to democratic rights. Democratic institutions, relations, values, principles and passions are under siege both by the vicious forces of neoliberal capitalism and by the forces of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, which have been given a new life in the resurgent elements of fascism, albeit in updated forms.

What must be remembered is that fascism is not a static ideology rooted in a particular moment in history. The conditions that produce torture chambers, intolerable violence, extermination camps, a politics of disposability and racial cleansing are still with us and cannot be easily dismissed as a relic of the past. As Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Umberto Eco and others have observed, the ghosts or warning signs of totalitarianism are crystalizing in new forms and now herald a possible model for the future.

Racial hatred, war, a contempt of dissent, disdain for education, the dismantling of the welfare state, the celebration of civic illiteracy, and the use of state violence against immigrants, Muslims and people of color have become normalized in many countries including the United States. Moreover, there is also a systemic erosion of civic culture and any sense of shared citizenship, not to mention a full-fledged attack on the ecosystem in the name of pillaging the planet for financial gains.

Under neoliberal capitalism, there are no commanding ethical visions. The public has collapsed into the private, and a culture of self-absorption appears fully attuned with a growing aesthetics of vulgarity that thrives on a celebrity culture of ignorance that wields enormous authority, and merges with a spectacle of violence that disingenuously presents itself under the banner of mass entertainment. As neoliberal societies produce massive levels of inequality in wealth, power and income, they increasingly legitimate themselves through a culture of fear, state violence and hyper-consumerism that empties politics of any meaningful relationship to a broader public.

A morbid inequality now shapes all aspects of life in the United States. Three men — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — have among them as much wealth as the bottom half of U.S. society. In a society of pervasive ignorance, such wealth is viewed as the outcome of the actions and successes of the individual actors. But in a society in which civic literacy and reason rule, such wealth would be considered characteristic of an economy appropriately named casino capitalism. In a society in which 80 percent of U.S. workers live paycheck to paycheck, and 20 percent of all children live below the poverty line, such inequalities in wealth and power constitute forms of domestic terrorism — that is, state-initiated violence or terrorism practiced in one’s own country against one’s own people.

State violence has been intensified around the globe in its suppression of dissent, killing of journalists, scapegoating of minorities and the use of militarized polices forces. In addition, the substance of politics is increasingly undermined in a mood economy in which the language of therapy, self help and self-transformation has exploded under a neoliberal regime that claims that the personal is the only politics there is. The self is now cut off from any sense of common purpose and solidarity, if not social and political responsibility. As the language of community, civic culture and crucial public spheres collapse, people are increasingly atomized and rendered powerless, and more than willing to believe that they have little control over their lives.

As I have analyzed in my book American Nightmare, under the banner of a fascist politics, political extremists such as Donald Trump have taken this sense of anger, anxiety and helplessness, and used it to tell their supporters that they should be angry about Black people, immigrants, Muslims, and a host of other groups that have nothing to do with the economic and existential problems that the majority of the population faces daily.

The Role of Violence in Contemporary Life

What has become increasingly clear in the United States is that an emerging fascist politics produces a new kind of carnage that is marked by escalating poverty and misery among large sections of the public. This carnage is coupled with the relentless violence manifested in an epidemic of social isolation, an opioid crisis, mass shootings, the growing presence of the police in all public spheres, and a culture of fear that strengthens the security state and diminishes the welfare state.

Violence has moved from a tool of terror and punishment to a dangerous political space in the wider culture that signals both the loss of historical memory, and a flight from reason and morality. Violence is now both incremental and explosive, dispersed and immediate, but in both cases it is increasingly normalized as it moves between the symbolic and real life.

This is a violence stretched across multiple landscapes and functions as both an attritional violence that is difficult to see and a spectacularizedviolence all too visible in its catastrophic effects. The deep-seated grammar of violence at work in U.S. society with its slow-motion toxicity is often lost in those forms of violence that are fully exhibited in a televisual digital culture. The visceral and the eye-catching now commands our attention while the slow-burning violence that hides beneath the made-for-TV violence of fiery hot forests, volcanoes, earthquakes and mass shootings remains unnoticed.

We now struggle to perceive structural and systemic violence behind the exhibition of “toxic imagery” that venerates the spectacle and conceals the conditions that degrade human life. Is it any wonder that notions of collective responsibility have been replaced by a collective numbing that collapses the line between a genuine moral crisis and the fog of ethical indifference? As Brad Evans makes clear in Atrocity Exhibition, this is a violence that is as existential as it is visceral. There is nothing abstract about the subject of violence, especially under the leadership of a growing number of authoritarian leaders, with Trump at the front of the line, who enable and legitimate it.

The paramount role of violence in many countries today raises questions about the role of the university, academics and students in a time of tyranny. Equally so, it raises crucial questions about the centrality of education to politics and especially how the wider culture functions pedagogically to produce particular kinds of agents, desires, identifications and modes of agency either in support, or at odds with, democratic values and social relations. The latter opens up new questions regarding how we think about the very terrain of politics.

How might we imagine education as central to politics whose task is, in part, to create a new language for students, one that is crucial to reviving a radical imagination, a notion of social hope and the courage to collective struggle? How might higher education and other cultural institutions address the deep, unchecked nihilism and despair of the current moment? How might higher education be persuaded to not abandon democracy, and take seriously the need to create informed citizens capable of fighting what Walter Benjamin once called the “illumination” of fascism and its swindle of fulfillment? As American studies professor Christopher Newfield argues, “democracy needs a public” and higher education has a crucial role to play in this regard as a democratic public good rather than defining itself through and primarily within the culture of business and the values of the financial elite.

Current discourses about fascism often point to the assumptions that drive its politics in its current and diverse forms. What is not often mentioned is the formative culture that gives it meaning, creates the subjects who identify with its toxic worldview, and shapes the desires it mobilizes as part of a larger set of assumptions about the future and who shall inherit it. If we are to expand these important considerations, it is crucial to address how culture and education are intimately connected with social relations rooted in diverse class, racial, economic and gender formations.

To do so we must connect the domains of meaning and representation with the development and functioning of institutional forms of power, especially what might be called the rise of commanding cultural apparatuses that mark a distinctive form of public pedagogy in the current historical moment. Moreover, we need to rethink how culture is not only marked by different sites of struggle, but also how such struggles take place around and over language, values and social relations within the institutions that organize them, extending from public and higher education to the mainstream media to the expansive world of digital culture.

Insisting That Radical Change Can Happen

In an age when culture works to depoliticize, consumerize and privatize, the spaces available for cultural workers to engage in critical pedagogical work that makes power visible are under siege. Yet, it is precisely such spaces where power can be challenged through the use of radical educational and pedaogogical practices that can be used to translate private issues into broader social considerations. These spaces support the production of persuasive alternative ideas, modes of identification, critical forms of agency and courageous forms of political action.

Under Trump, the assault on free speech and dissent has been widely recognized. Less is said about the broader and more pernicious use of language in the service of violence, and how it carries the potential for producing world views that align with the meanings and discourse of a fascist past. No one who believes in a radical democracy can remain numb and silent in the face of the merging of ignorance and power in a language that dares to celebrate the horrors of the unspeakable.

John Dewey, Václav Havel and others have long warned us that a simplistic faith in the stability of the institutions in which a democracy is grounded will automatically prevent the emergence of authoritarianism. But authoritarian societies are not just the result of bad governance. They emerge from a more fundamental deformation in the culture itself. That is, democracy’s survival depends on a formative culture whose strength lies in a set of habits and dispositions rooted in a civic culture and a civic literacy capable of sustaining it.

The deep-seated habits of cruelty, greed, consumerism, racism and unchecked individualism at the heart of neoliberal fascism are eroding the social fabric that make a democracy possible. Coercion, fear and repression are not the only tools used by authoritarian societies. Matters of value, identity, agency and the habits of solidarity when in crisis are as threatening to a democracy as are the forces of repression. Ignorance is the mortar and building blocks of fascism. Politics follows culture, and this means that an informed public is central to any democracy. Being informed is a habit of democracy that supports a broader understanding of how education and the institutions that sustain it can be protected.

We live in dangerous times and there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in an effort to construct a new political and social imaginary. We must support each other in coming to believe that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs will make radical change happen.

Listen to Tucker Carlson Flip Out After Being Exposed by Dutch Historian

If you’re still unfamiliar with Rutger Bregman, you likely won’t be for long. Last month, the Dutch historian went instantly viral after imploring the world’s financial elite to pay their fair share in taxes during a panel discussion at Davos. “We can’t talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes,” he said at the time. “But come on, we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it, taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”

The screed earned him an invitation to “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” but his segment with the eponymous Fox News host and darling of the alt-right never aired. Now we know why. In new audio released by Now This, Carlson can be heard telling his guest that he has a “tiny brain” and that he should go “fuck himself”—this for pointing out that the television personality is, in Bregman’s words, “a millionaire funded by billionaires.”

“I hope this gets picked up because you’re a moron,” Carlson bleats. “I tried to give you a hearing, but you were too fucking annoying. …”

The interview begins innocently enough. Carlson tips his proverbial cap to Bregman for challenging the audience at Davos, chuckling at the hypocrisy of those who feign concern about climate change and economic inequality while flying private jets and hiding their money in offshore accounts. But the mood quickly changes when Bregman prods the television host about his network’s willingness to scapegoat immigrants and people of color.

“I’m glad you’re finally raising the issue,” he says, “but that’s what’s been happening for the last couple of years.”

“And I’m taking orders from the Murdochs, is that what you’re saying?” Carlson shoots back.

“No, it doesn’t work that directly,” Bregman answers. “But, I mean, you’ve been part of the Cato Institute, right? You’ve been a senior fellow there for years? You’ve been taking their dirty money.”

The conversation would only devolve from there, with Carlson unloading on Bregman and Bregman returning in kind. “[You’re jumping] on the bandwagon of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC,” the historian says in one pointed exchange. “But you’re not part of the solution, Mr. Carlson. You’re part of the problem, actually.”

Listen to the heated exchange below:

Watch Fox News host Tucker Carlson call one of his guests a ‘tiny brain…moron’ during an interview. NowThis has obtained the full segment with historian Rutger Bregman that Fox News is refusing to air. pic.twitter.com/kERYPUaGLY

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 20, 2019