Chris Hedges's Blog, page 40

The Impeachment of Trump Isn’t Nearly Enough

This article originally appeared on Salon.

The impeachment of Donald Trump appears to be a crisis without a history, at least a history that illuminates, not just comparisons with other presidential impeachments, but a history that provides historical lessons regarding its relationship to a previous age of tyranny that ushered in horrors associated with a fascist politics in the 1930s.  In the age of Trump, history is now used to divert and elude the most serious questions to be raised about the impeachment crisis. The legacy of earlier presidential impeachments, which include Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, provide a comparative historical context for analysis and criticism. And while Trump’s impeachment is often defined as a more serious constitutional crisis given his attempt to use the power of the presidency to advance his personal political agenda, it is a crisis that willfully ignores the conditions that gave rise to Trump’s presidency along with its recurring pattern of authoritarian behavior, policies, and practices.  One result is that the impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage treats Trump’s crimes as the endpoint of an abuse of power and an illegal act, rather than as a political action that is symptomatic of a long legacy of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism.

What is often ignored in the mainstream media is that Trump’s impeachment battle is part of the wider historical and global struggle taking place over democracy and can be seen, as Larry Diamond points out, in Trump’s attack on “the independence of the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the police.” Trump’s crimes far exceed what is stated in the impeachment documents and include not only endless lies, threats and flirtation with extralegal violence but also his attack on the press as the “enemy of the people.” In addition, there is his use of Twitter to spew out verbal grenades that explode in an array of racial hatred and panics aimed at his critics and those groups who do not fit into his white nationalist view of citizenship and who should inhabit the public sphere.  As the bully-in chief, he weaponizes language into a tool of hatred and in doing so transforms politics into a spectacularized theater of bigotry, humiliations, and violence. Ralph Nader argues that Trump’s most distinguishing impeachable offenses reside in his “abuses of the public trust” which range from his “obsessive pathological lying and falsifications” (over 15,000 since January 21, 2017) to his “endless racism and bigotry in words and deeds,” his support for voter suppression, and his “incitement of violence on more than one occasion.”

According to Nader, not only has Trump shredded and violated the Constitution, undermined its critical separation of power, and “illegally ordered his staff or ex-staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas to testify and provide documents, he has also ignored Congress’ right to declare war by inciting an unlawful crisis with Iran. There is a lesson to be learned here regarding how history is reproduced in the present. Trump’s killing of a high-ranking Iranian general “based on thin evidence with an eye towards domestic politics” mimics, if not recalls,  an older period in history when Hitler, following the crisis produced by the Reichstag fire, seized upon the ensuing fear, terror, and war fever to further consolidate his power. For Trump, pushing the United States to the edge of war through a military strike not only draws attention away from the impeachment process and his ongoing crimes and misdeeds, but suggests, as Elizabeth Warren points out, that he will do “whatever he can to advance the interests of Donald Trump.” Trump’s haphazard decision to threaten a war with Iran also puts Americans at risk of terrorist attacks and undermines previous efforts to roll back Iran’s nuclear program.  Moreover, Trump’s war fever is also a self-serving fascistic affirmation of his toxic hyper-masculinity and his admiration for military power and authoritarian displays generally associated with demagogues who use such displays as a tool to produce respect among their followers.

The politics of invisibility and the language of violence

Undoubtedly there have been serious political debates regarding the impeachment of Trump, but they have not gone far enough. The debates have focused mostly on issues such as the inadequacy of the Democrats’ efforts to impeach, arguments regarding whether the impeachment charges go far enough, and the more favorable view that the impeachment process, however limited, is necessary to stop Trump from using the resources of the government to influence other governments to interfere in American elections for his own personal and political gains.

There are also more extreme views largely coming from Trump and his supporters. Some have argued that the impeachment process is pure theater — a staged theatrical hoax; Others such as Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have claimed that the process is rigged, and is an attempt on the part of the Democrats to win favor in the 2020 elections. Trump himself has angrily dismissed the impeachment process as corrupt, and claimed, among other things, that he is the victim of a socialist plot. It gets worse as Trump continues to produce a well-worn pattern of threats against his critics. He and his allies frequently respond to congressional Democrats involved in the hearing by weaponizing language, turning it into a vehicle of threats and intimidation. For instance, he has stated that House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff “should be arrested for treason.” In addition, Trump suggested that Schiff should “be violently punished” in a manner of justice displayed by dictatorships such as Guatemala. Jean Spanbauer, a Trump supporter, mused on line that “Shifty Shiff (sp) needs to be hung.” There is more at work here than the indiscriminate insult or infantile mocking. Language in this instance operates in the interest of violence, functioning so as to divert and punish. According to Victor Klemperer, an expert on Nazi Germany, this type of language has a precedent in the Third Reich in which it operated “as part of a linguistic malignant disease designed to spread the poison of mass seduction [and] destroy the intellect which defies it.”As Ishaan Tharoor observes, “the use of such volatile and dehumanizing language in the current moment is not innocent and often leads to violence. He writes:

There are immediate consequences to such demagoguery, not least in the form of far-right terrorist attacks and violence carried out by people inflamed by this sort of rhetoric. But there’s also a long-term toll, one that’s more imperceptible, yet no less corrosive, to the body politic. It’s the kind of erosion on display in places such as Hungary, Poland and Turkey, where majoritarian, nationalist politicians have steadily undermined democratic institutions and the liberal norms they’re supposed to uphold.

Political theater in the age of relentless lies

Within the current crop of competing discourses analyzing the impeachment, the Democrats present themselves as the “last line of defense between constitutional democracy and tyranny” while Republicans repeat conspiracy theories and accuse the Democrats of producing a show trial whose purpose is the ultimate reversal of Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency. The Republicans have been particularly egregious and have used the hearings to badger witnesses, and showcase their “emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling,” all the while making outlandish claims that turn the hearings into a “propaganda circus.”  In some cases, more insightful commentary has been produced, such as comments from legendary journalist Bill Moyers, who views the impeachment hearings as a potential site for a lesson in civic education. For Moyers, the value of the impeachment proceedings lie in that making visible “things you would never know otherwise.” Bringing the concept of civic education to understanding the impeachment process is crucial, but what people learn from such events is limited by what is actually revealed both within and outside of the hearings.  In this case, Trump’s impeachment process in the House was reduced to a political spectacle and served to undermine reason and informed judgment while promoting a steady stream of the performative diversions produced through a regimen of ignorance, self-serving lies and the triumph of illusion.

Unfortunately, the mainstream 24/7 news cycle, with its relentless torrid of dramatic sound bites, did its best to turn the House impeachment hearings into political theater by largely focusing on the political risks Democrats faced by conducting the hearings. In addition, they mostly adhered to the empty tactic of providing balance while avoiding any attempt to tell the truth about a present that has collapsed into a disdain for human rights, enacts cruelty as an act of patriotism, justifies oppression in the name of national security, views undocumented immigrants as disposable, allows elections to be bought by the highest bidder, demonizes and threatens critics and regards the truth as a liability.

Beyond the two-party system

What is missing from mainstream and conservative discussions regarding Trump’s impeachment is that both Democrats and Republicans share an unwillingness to address a range of social and political issues that brought Trump to power. These include illegal wars, state sanctioned torture, the creation of black sites, economic policies that promote massive inequality and mass incarceration, an attack on public goods, and racist policies that undermine the very democracy. Both parties in different ways claim they are protecting the Constitution, whether in the service of defending Trump or attempting to remove him from office. As Andrew Bacevich argues, it must be remembered that it was the “Democratic members of the Senate and House [who] over the past decade and more [gave] presidents a free hand to wage war however they saw fit [and]cannot be described as anything but cowardly. It was after all, President Obama who pioneered the role of assassin-in-chief to which Trump has now laid claim.” Both parties have aided and abetted in different degrees elements associated with a totalitarian state — these include political corruption, unwarranted state surveillance, support for a bloated military machine, the rise of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite, increased support for policies that promote the concentration of the media in few hands and a willingness to corroborate with a government that is controlled by narrow financial interests. All of these issues are largely absent from the questions and issues raised around the impeachment process and the conditions that made it necessary. Democracy may be in crisis, but there is little or no indication from the media, ruling elite or established politicians that the impeachment crisis is more than a free-standing event and should be analyzed within a more comprehensive politics that flushes out the mobilizing passions of a fascist politics that has led to the Trump presidency and its reign of corruption, lawlessness and abuse of power.

What must be rejected is the notion that the impeachment process signals a crisis rooted in a power struggle between the two established political parties, one of whom is at the forefront of the resistance to the growing authoritarianism accelerated by the Trump regime. While there are significant political and ideological differences between both parties, especially given the fact that the Republican Party has been taken over by ideological extremists, these differences neither criticize nor condemn the ideological and economic foundations of a toxic neoliberal capitalism that has become increasingly more dangerous at home and abroad. For instance, both parties share in defending existing power structures and the most basic rudiments of the corporate and surveillance state.

Vichy Republicans without apology

While the Republican and Democratic Party share a fundamental commitment to the ideology and institutional structures of neoliberal capitalism, the Republican Party is far more extreme in its critique of the American press, judiciary, dissent and labor unions, and its support for reversing environmental protection laws. Moreover, as Paul Krugman has argued, the Republican Party under Trump has become “a party of sycophants” that turns a blind eye to Trump’s use of his office for personal gain; and who with their cult like following compare their leader to Jesus Christ.

Ken Burns, the acclaimed filmmaker, columnist George Will and Krugman, among others, have labeled Trump’s loyal party followers “Vichy Republicans,” referring to the war-era collaborationist Vichy government of France — run by cowardly French sympathizers and appeasers who gave their faithful loyalty to their Nazi occupiers. In similar fashion, Trump’s Republican Party has bought into the script of ultra-nationalism, turned a blind eye to Trump’s racism, unchecked fantasies of power and his sanctioning of state violence at home and abroad.

This is a party that has chosen to look away in the face of Trump’s lies, crimes and repeated acts of corruption. Not only have they refused to take an impartial look at the impeachment inquiry, they have pledged to support Trump at all costs and have done everything possible to muddle the public discourse by floating conspiracy theories, calling the proceedings a hoax,  and attacking the character of witnesses. This is a party that has been more than willing to engage in a Faustian bargain with incipient authoritarianism.

If the Republican Party once stood for basic principles such as small government, family values, fiscal soundness and national security, that is no longer true. Instead its most paranoid and racist elements now control the party. The Republican Party’s move to the right intensified in the 1990s under the influence of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, and later with the rise of Sarah Palin and the defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012.

Today, the Republican Party almost unilaterally has become a party of white supremacists, blood-and-soil nationalists and political corruption who activate white panic, voter suppression, and define citizenship in racial terms. Moreover, they support through either fear or blind loyalty Trump’s ideological policies, race baiting and dangerous foreign policy strategies, regardless of the excesses and ongoing assault on the country’s democratic institutions. This includes race baiting, a racist campaign strategy, caging children, savage attacks on undocumented immigrants, devaluing critics by calling them treasonous, slashing of social provisions such as food stamps, serial lying, and a reckless assassination made on impulse that brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war.

Theodor W. Adorno argued in “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” that “the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.” This is particularly evident in the debilitating pronouncements of William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, regarding his defense of unchecked executive authority, which he believes should be unburdened by any sense of political and moral accountability. Tamsin Shaw is right in suggesting that Barr bears a close resemblance to Carl Schmitt, “the notorious … ‘crown jurist’ of the Third Reich.” Barr places the president above the law, defined as a kind of unitary sovereign. In addition, he appears to relish in his role as a craven defender of Trump, all the while justifying a notion of blind executive authority in the face of Trump’s endless lies, racist policies and lawlessness that echo the dark era of the 1920s and ’30s.

Barr’s attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general, and his threat to remove police protection from black communities who are not loyal to Trump, are at odds with any viable notion of defending the truth and “the most basic tenets of equality and justice.” Moreover, Barr provides legal and ideological cover for Trump’s dangerous lackeys, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham. McConnell publicly denounces the impeachment process and as an unabashed defender of Trump states that he will work hand in hand with the Trump administration on the impeachment process. In addition, Graham has stated that he has already made up his mind about Trump committing a criminal conspiracy, which he dismisses,  and will do everything he can to make impeachment “die quickly” in the Senate.

Acquiescence to Trump has become a defining feature of the Republican Party in spite of his celebration of demagogues such as Kim Jong-un, whom he called a “real leader” and overtly fascist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Paul Krugman goes so far as to claim that modern conservatives live inside a cult and are “turning into government by the worst and dumbest.” At the same time, he makes it clear that there is more than a massive degree of stupidity at work in the Trump administration, there are also the dark clouds of authoritarianism which extend far beyond the political career of Donald Trump. Krugman writes: “For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you. The fact is that the G.O.P., as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power.” The impeachment hearings further reinforce an image of a party that in the face of egregious crimes by the president either remain mute or overtly support him in a show of ideological certainty or what Robert Jay Lifton calls an act of “absolute purification” and a cult-like totalizing vision that reproduces a politics of “malignant normality.”

Goldman Sachs Democrats

Neither political party offers a substantive challenge to the military-industrial complex, or views capitalism as the enemy of democracy if not the planet itself. In different ways, both parties have hollowed out democratic institutions and cozied up to dictators. In addition, neither party historically used the impeachment process to indict George W. Bush for launching an illegal war in Iraq, or for that matter George H.W. Bush for illegally kidnapping, jailing, and torturing what he indiscriminately labeled as “enemy combatants.” Nor was Obama charged with a war crime when he “gave the executive branch of the government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son?” There is more at work here than acts of bad faith, there is also a thread of moral hypocrisy and a flight from social responsibility on the part of both parties.

One indication of a collusion between both parties is obvious in the fact that as the Democrats were railing against Trump’s abuse of power, they approved the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, which are deeply reactionary laws that attack individual privacy and civil liberties, while criminalizing protest in the interest of national security. Moreover, they have given Trump $1.4 billion for his wall, and supported a $738 billion bloated military budget.

In the current moment, with a possible war with Iran still in the making, the ongoing anti-democratic actions of a deeply authoritarian Trump government, and the refusal of both political parties and the established press to address the deeper economic and political crisis facing the United States, it is crucial to analyze the current crisis of governance in a broader context that analyzes fascism as a possible wave of the future. The contemporary elements of tyranny at work in the United States point to not only a crisis of leadership and the rise of demagogues such as Trump on the domestic and global stages, but also the conditions and crisis that produce “the discontent of millions of people, facing economic instability, climate insecurity, mass migrations, technological change, cultural shifts around gender and race—people who in turn seem all too willing to embrace the politics of fear and blame.”

The age of crisis and apocalyptic prophecies

We live in an age of relentless crisis — an age marked by the collapse of civic culture, ethical values and democratic institutions that serve the public good. Language now operates in the service of violence and ignorance has become a national ideal. Religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, and economic tyranny now inform each other giving rise to an updated recurrence of fascist politics. This is an age in which apocalyptic prophecies replace thoughtfulness and sustained acts of social responsibility. In this age of crisis, right-wing populist regimes fuel conspiracy theories, normalize lying as a way to degrade public discourse, elevate emotion over reason as a way to legitimate a culture of cruelty, and society experiences its own pleasure through the need for vengeance and the imposition of brutality and injury upon those minorities considered disposable.

The impeachment process speaks not only to Trump’s ongoing criminal behavior and pernicious policies, it also points to a mass crisis of civic literacy and the inability of the public to understand how society has broken apart, become more cruel and receded from the language of critique, hope and the social imagination. A culture of withdrawal, privatization and immediacy reinforces an indifference to public life, the suffering of others and what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.”

The space of traditional politics and a media driven culture are marked by an ongoing culture of diversion and disappearance and no longer provide the language for understanding the totality of the crisis that has produced both Trump and the impeachment process. In the absence of a comprehensive politics capable of defining the related parts and threads that point to a society in crisis, violence, especially as related to the joining of a predatory neoliberalism and a fascist politics of white supremacy, becomes the regulative principle of everyday life.

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

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

Hard and soft “disimagination machines”

The crisis of politics is now matched by a mainstream and corporate controlled digital media and screen culture that produces political theater, heightens ignorance, fractured narratives and racial hysteria. At the same time, it authorizes and produces a culture of sensationalism designed to increase ratings and profits at the expense of truth, undermine a complex rendering of the related nature of social problems and suppress a culture of dissent and informed judgments.

We live in an age in which theater and the spectacle of performance empty politics of any moral substance and contribute to the revival of an updated version of fascist politics. Politics is now leaden with bombast, words strung together to shock, numb the mind, and images overwrought with self-serving sense of riotousness and anger. What is distinct about this historical period, especially under the Trump regime, is what Susan Sontag has called a form of aesthetic fascism with its contempt of “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”

One distinctive element of the current moment is the rise of hard and soft disimagination machines. The hard disimagination machines, such as Fox News, conservative talk radio and Breitbart News, function as overt and unapologetic propaganda machines that trade in nativism, misrepresentation and racist hysteria, all wrapped in the cloak of a regressive view of patriotism. As Joel Bleifuss points out, Fox News in particular, is “blatant in its contempt for the truth, and engages nightly in the “ritual of burying the truth in ‘memory holes’ and spinning a new version of reality [that keeps] the spirit of 1984… alive and well…. This, the most-watched cable news network, functions in its fealty to Trump like a real-world Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, where bureaucrats “rectify” the historical record to conform to Big Brother’s decrees.”

Trump’s fascist politics and fantasies of racial purity could not succeed without the disimagination machines, pedagogical apparatuses and the practitioners needed to make his “vision not just real by grotesquely normal.” What Trump makes clear is that the weaponization of language into a discourse of racism and hate is deeply indebted to a politics of forgetting and is a crucial tool in the battle to undermine historical consciousness and memory itself.

The soft disimagination machines or liberal mainstream media such as “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and the established press function largely to cater to Trump’s Twitter universe, celebrity culture, and the cutthroat ethos of the market, all the while isolating social issues, individualizing social problems, and making the workings of power superficially visible. Politics as a spectacle saturates the senses with noise, cheap melodrama, lies and buffoonery. This is not to suggest that the spectacle that now shapes politics as pure theater is meant merely to entertain and distract. On the contrary, the current spectacle, most recently evident in the impeachment hearings in the Congress, function largely to separate the past from a politics that in its current form has turned deadly in its attack on the values and institutions crucial to a functioning democracy. In this instance, echoes of a fascist past remain hidden, invisible beneath the histrionic shouting and disinformation campaigns that rail against “fake news,” which is a euphemism for dissent, holding power accountable and an oppositional media. A flair for the overly dramatic eliminates the distinction between fact and fiction, lies and the truth.

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

Forgetting history and the legitimation of white supremacy

Another lesson to be learned from the absence of history, or what it means to even have a history in the discourse surrounding the impeachment hearings, is not only how ignorance gets normalized but also how the absence of critical thought allows us to forget that we are moral subjects capable of changing the world around us. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a crisis in need of being fully confronted both historically and in terms of a comprehensive politics that allows us to learn from alarming signs coming from the Trump administration. Such a crisis contains elements of a past that suggest we cannot look away or give in to the current assault on the past as a measure of intellectual respectability.

History offers a model to learn something from earlier turns towards authoritarianism making it more difficult to assume that fascism is merely a relic of the past. Memories of terror are not only present in the white supremacist parade of hate and bigotry that took place in Charlottesville in which violence was enacted in the name of “blood and soil” but also in the current white house which is home to white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, who is a high-level adviser to Trump and is viewed by many as the architect of his draconian immigration policies.

Recently, more than 900 of Miller’s emails were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh. Among the trove of emails, Miller commented on and provided reference to white nationalist websites such as VDARE and celebrated the racist novel, “The Camp of the Saints.” He “also reportedly espoused conspiracy theories about immigration, backed racist immigration policies introduced by President Calvin Coolidge that were praised by Adolf Hitler, and deployed slang popular in white nationalist circles to reference immigration.” Judd Legum argues that Miller also “obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”

In spite of a barrage of calls from a number of politicians calling for Miller’s removal from the White House, Trump held firm, reinforcing the widely accepted notion that Trump is a white nationalist entirely comfortable with white supremacist ideology. This is not surprising, since Trump brought the language of white nationalism into the White House and mainstream politics. Of course, removing Miller would not change much. Miller is not the main white supremacist in the Trump administration. Nor can his presence hide the fact that white supremacy has been a staple of the Republican Party for decades, evident in the history of and contemporary presence of high-profile Republican politicians such as Strom Thurmond, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher.

Moreover, the long legacy of white supremacy in the United States should not undercut the distinctiveness of Donald Trump’s white supremacist views, which he wears like a badge of honor while escalating and normalizing white supremacist sensibilities, practices and policies unlike any president in modern times. His scapegoating of minorities and demonization of politicians, athletes and other critics of color reflects more than a divide-and-rule strategy, it is an updated strategy for mainstreaming the death-haunted elements of fascism.

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

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

Conclusion

The historian David Blight has written that Trump’s “greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance — of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution.” Blight is only partly right, in that the greatest threat to our society is a collective ignorance that legitimates forms of organized forgetting, modes of social amnesia, and the death of civic literacy.

Under the Trump regime, historical amnesia is used as a weapon of (mis)education, politics, and power.  The notion that the past is a burden that must be forgotten is a centerpiece of authoritarian regimes, one that allows public memory to wither and the threads of fascism to become normalized. While some critics eschew the comparison of Trump with the Nazi era, it is crucial to recognize the alarming signs in this administration that echo a fascist politics of the past. As Jonathan Freedland points out, “the signs are there, if only we can bear to look.” Rejecting the Trump-Nazi comparison makes it easier to believe that we have nothing to learn from history and to take comfort in the assumption that it cannot happen once again. No democracy can survive without an informed and educated citizenry.

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

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

U.N. Agency Declares Global Emergency Over Virus From China

GENEVA — The World Health Organization declared the outbreak sparked by a new virus in China that has spread to more than a dozen countries as a global emergency Thursday after the number of cases spiked more than tenfold in a week.

The U.N. health agency defines an international emergency as an “extraordinary event” that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response.

China first informed WHO about cases of the new virus in late December. To date, China has reported more than 7,800 cases including 170 deaths. Eighteen other countries have since reported cases, as scientists race to understand how exactly the virus is spreading and how severe it is.

Experts say there is significant evidence the virus is spreading among people in China and have noted with concern instances in other countries — including the United States, France, Japan, Germany, Canada, South Korea and Vietnam — where there have also been isolated cases of human-to-human transmission.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted the worrisome spread of the virus between people outside China.

“The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China but because of what is happening in other countries,” he said. “Our greatest concern is the potential for this virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems which are ill-prepared to deal with it.”

“This declaration is not a vote of non-confidence in China,” he said. “On the contrary, WHO continues to have the confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak.”

A declaration of a global emergency typically brings greater money and resources, but may also prompt nervous governments to restrict travel and trade to affected countries. The announcement also imposes more disease reporting requirements on countries.

In the wake of numerous airlines canceling flights to China and businesses including Starbucks and McDonald’s temporarily closing hundreds of shops, Tedros said WHO was not recommending limiting travel or trade to China.

“There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” he said. He added that Chinese President Xi Jinping had committed to help stop the spread of the virus beyond its borders.

“During my discussion with the president and other officials, they’re willing to support countries with weaker health systems with whatever is possible,” Tedros said.

On Thursday, France confirmed that a doctor who was in contact with a patient with the new virus later became infected himself. The doctor is now being treated in an isolated room at a Paris hospital. Outbreak specialists worry that the spread of new viruses from patients to health workers can signal the virus is becoming adapted to human transmission.

China raised the death toll to 170 on Thursday and more countries reported infections, including some spread locally, as foreign evacuees from China’s worst-hit region returned home to medical tests and even isolation.

Russia announced it was closing its 2,600-mile border with China, joining Mongolia and North Korea in barring crossings to guard against a new viral outbreak. It had been de facto closed because of the Lunar New Year holiday, but Russian authorities said the closure would be extended until March 1.

Meanwhile, the United States and South Korea confirmed their first cases of person-to-person spread of the virus. The man in the U.S. is married to a 60-year-old Chicago woman who got sick from the virus after she returned from a trip to Wuhan, the Chinese city that is the epicenter of the outbreak.

The case in South Korea was a 56-year-old man who had contact with a patient who was diagnosed with the new virus earlier.

Although scientists expect to see limited transmission of the virus between people with close contact, like within families, the instances of spread to people who may have had less exposure to the virus in Japan and Germany is worrying.

In Japan, a man in his 60s caught the virus after working as a bus driver for two tour groups from Wuhan. In Germany, a man in his 30s was sickened after a Chinese colleague from Shanghai, whose parents had recently visited from Wuhan, came to his office for a business meeting. Four other workers at the same factory later became infected. The woman had shown no symptoms of the virus until her flight back to China.

“That’s the kind of transmission chain that we don’t want to see,” said Marion Koopmans, an infectious diseases specialist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and a member of WHO’s emergency committee.

Koopmans said more information was needed about how the virus was spread in these instances and whether it meant the virus was more infectious than previously thought or if there was something unusual in those circumstances.

Mark Harris, a professor of virology at Leeds University, said it appears that the spread of the virus among people is probably easier than initially presumed.

“If transmission between humans was difficult, then the numbers would have plateaued,” he said. Harris said the limited amount of virus spread beyond China suggested the outbreak could still be contained, but that if people are spreading the disease before they show symptoms — as some Chinese politicians and researchers have suggested — that could compromise control efforts.

The new virus has now infected more people in China than were sickened there during the 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a cousin of the new virus. Both are from the coronavirus family, which also includes those that can cause the common cold.

The latest figures for mainland China show an increase of 38 deaths and 1,737 cases for a total of 7,736 confirmed cases. Of the new deaths, 37 were in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, and one was in the southwestern province of Sichuan. Outside China, there are 82 infections in 18 countries, according to WHO.

China extended its Lunar New Year holiday to Sunday to try to keep people home, but the wave of returning travelers could potentially cause the virus to spread further.

China has been largely praised for a swift and effective response to the outbreak, although questions have been raised about the police suppression of what were early on considered mere rumors — a reflection of the one-party Communist state’s determination to maintain a monopoly on information in spite of smart phones and social media.

That stands in stark contrast to the initial response to SARS, when medical reports were hidden as state secrets. The delayed response was blamed for allowing the disease to spread worldwide, killing around 800 people.

Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of Britain’s Wellcome Trust, welcomed WHO’s emergency declaration.

“This virus has spread at unprecedented scale and speed, with cases passing between people in multiple countries across the world,” he said in a statement. “It is also a stark reminder of how vulnerable we are to epidemics of infectious diseases known and unknown.”

___

Cheng reported from London. Associated Press writers Ken Moritsugu in Beijing, Elaine Ganley in Paris, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.

Trump Takes Axe to Medicaid

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.

The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a plan allowing states to convert federal Medicaid funding into block grants, a longstanding conservative goal that critics warn could have deadly consequences for millions of vulnerable people who rely on the healthcare program as a major source of income.

Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), announced the so-called “Healthy Adult Opportunity” initiative in a statement claiming the policy will “improve health outcomes and care” for low-income people.

Progressive advocacy groups warned the plan could do precisely the opposite by giving states a green light to cut Medicaid spending and divert federal funding to other state programs, potentially leaving millions without essential healthcare coverage.

“People, poor disabled people in particular, are going to die,” tweeted Alice Wong, director of the Disability Visibility Project. “Not an exaggeration.”

Urging the public to look beyond the plan’s benign label, Public Citizen healthcare policy advocate Eagan Kemp said President Donald Trump’s “nefarious program is just a Medicaid block grant by another name, and the only opportunity it will provide is to miss out on needed care or go broke trying to get it.”

“Trump’s plan will ensure that many working families who are currently covered by Medicaid will face cuts to their services, wait lists for needed care, and the risk of medical debt and bankruptcy from trying to pay for illness,” Kemp said in a statement. “These further attempts to cut health care are just more evidence that Americans need Medicare for All now to protect their access to care once and for all.”

Today, Trump released his plan to ruthlessly cut Medicaid.

Let's be clear: Americans will die. https://t.co/iEik7mJBEV

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) January 30, 2020

The proposal, which is likely to face legal challenges, invites states to apply for a waiver to receive a lump-sum payment from the federal government for Medicaid instead of open-ended matching funds. Right-wing supporters of block-granting Medicaid claim it would give states more “flexibility,” but critics warn the move could limit states’ ability to increase healthcare spending in response to public need.

“Any state taking this offer is engaging in fiscal malpractice,” Eliot Fishman, senior director of health policy with advocacy group Families USA, said in a statement. “Furthermore, the administration is acting lawlessly. None of the statute regarding Medicaid match rates can be waived administratively.”

“We are better than this, and we—the American people—must hold the Trump administration and Republican members of Congress accountable,” said Fishman.

Congressional Democrats joined healthcare advocacy groups in condemning the plan.

“Trump wants to destroy Medicaid while claiming to save it,” tweeted Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.). “This fiendish scheme is an Orwellian fable conjured up by the most shameless pack of liars to ever occupy our government. Never forget Republicans’ goal is to steal healthcare from as many Americans as they can.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, said in a statement that “even after people across the country spoke out and pressed Congress to reject President Trump’s plan to gut Medicaid with his Trumpcare bill, he’s still charging forward with harmful policies that will hurt the many families who rely on Medicaid.”

 

Does a New York Times Endorsement Matter at All?

The New York Times’ recent endorsement (1/19/20) of both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to have stirred up as much anger as when Time (12/25/06) selected “you” as its person of the year in 2006. CNN (1/20/20) mocked the Times’ “utterly confusing” decision as inconsequential. Others claimed it “reeked of ignorant pomposity” (the Federalist, 1/22/20) or that it “fails us all” (Nation, 1/21/20). Meanwhile, the Atlantic’s David Frum (Twitter, 1/20/20) said the board should “Quit mumbling and worrying about upsetting readers and forthrightly SAY, ‘Anybody but Bernie [Sanders].’”

After condemning Trump for his “white nativism,” the Times’ editorial board directly compared him to Sanders—“we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another”—while also dismissing the other nationwide frontrunner, Joe Biden, as being too old. Perhaps unfortunately, given her discredited claims of Native American identity, it called Warren a “gifted storyteller,” and praised her for watering down her Medicare for All plan. It described Klobuchar, for her part, as “the very definition of Midwestern charisma,” and confusingly asserted that she represents “the best chance to enact many progressive plans”—most of which corporate media have commended her for opposing (FAIR.org, 7/17/19).

However, for those who support any of the other Democratic candidates, there is good news; the Times has a distinctly poor record of picking winning candidates, often making tragically comical predictions and assertions in its endorsements.

In 2016, for instance, it confidently told its readers (1/31/16), “John Kasich is the only plausible choice for Republicans” in the primaries, brushing off Donald Trump’s bid and dismissing his proposals to deport Mexican or bar Muslim immigrants, or increase tariffs on Chinese goods, as “applause lines” that he “invents…as he goes along.”

Eight months later, the editorial board (9/25/16) endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election, even though she might “appear, on the surface, not to offer change from an establishment that seems indifferent and a political system that seems broken.” Calling her a “determined leader intent on creating opportunity for struggling Americans” and making the US a “force for good in an often brutal world,” the paper said she would “need to find common ground with a destabilized Republican Party,” praising her “unusual capacity to reach across the aisle.” It offered no advice on how she might reach those Democratic voters who saw her as part of an indifferent establishment, whose failure to turn out cost her an Electoral College victory.

The Times (1/25/08) also “strongly endorsed” the “inspiring” Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008, calling her a “both uniting and leading” figure who was highly skilled at “winning over skeptical voters and then delivered on her promises.” How did that turn out?

In 2000, the editorial board picked losers in both the primaries and the general, endorsing John McCain for the Republican nomination (3/5/00) and Al Gore for president (10/29/00). It chose Gore despite suggesting that George W. Bush would be “the most moderate Republican nominee in a generation,” and praised him for his commitment to fair play during the campaign, an ironic statement given the Republicans’ shenanigans in Florida just one week later.

One could argue that the Times’ presidential pick was not a loser, since Gore did not actually lose the election. But in the midst of the judicial process that would award the presidency to Bush by fiat, the editorial board made the highly perishable observation that “American courts have been vindicated as a place of shelter and protection for fairness and democratic values.” And after the Supreme Court halted the recount, the Times was quick to reassure: “Our national history bears the comforting lesson that the American people’s confidence in the rule of law and the stability of their institutions will not be damaged in the long run.”

By the 2004 election, the New York Times editorial board (10/17/04) had realized that Bush was no moderate, but had “turned government over to the radical  right.” It therefore “enthusiastically” supported losing candidate John Kerry, although it criticized his campaign for being more about opposition to Bush than support for Kerry—before issuing an endorsement that attacked the incumbent while largely failing to make a positive case for its chosen candidate.

The Times has historically favored Democrats over Republicans, even during periods of GOP dominance. It endorsed Walter Mondale in 1984 (10/28/84) and Michael Dukakis in 1988 (10/30/88), praising their “pragmatic” centrist agendas, before later deciding that the reason they lost was that they were too left-wing (FAIR.org, 8/21/19).

The New York Times is often described as the paper of record, perhaps the most influential newspaper in the world. However, its ability to persuade the wider public of the qualities of certain candidates running for office may be overstated. Its decision to back two candidates—one of whom has lost nearly half her support since October, and another whose polling average has never risen above 4%—will likely not be a kiss of death to others running. If history is any judge, the New York Times endorsement is a mixed blessing, at best.

Alan Dershowitz Is Insulting Everybody’s Intelligence

This article originally appeared on Truthout.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard emeritus law professor who is serving as a hired gun for Team Trump, is arguing that even if John Bolton testifies that Trump admitted the quid pro quo with Ukraine to him, the Senate could not remove the president from office. Dershowitz has gone so far as to say that even if Trump told Bolton he was withholding the congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine until it helped him with an investigation of the Bidens, that is still not impeachable conduct.

Contrary to the overwhelming weight of scholarly legal thought, Dershowitz has claimed that “high crimes and misdemeanors” is limited to offenses prohibited by statute. He told senators that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, for which Trump was impeached, are not grounds for impeachment.

Dershowitz used to take the opposite position. During the Clinton impeachment, Dershowitz said no technical crime was required for impeachment, and abuse of trust could be an impeachable offense. “I didn’t research it” before, he admitted, but now thinks that “criminal type-acts” are necessary.

Posing a “hypothetical case” before the Senate on January 27, Dershowitz asked senators to assume a Democratic president told Israel he would withhold congressionally authorized foreign aid or an Oval Office meeting unless it stopped building settlements. That would not be an abuse of power, Dershowitz stated, even though he himself “might disapprove of such a quid quo pro demand on policy grounds.” What Dershowitz’s hypothetical president should really do is ask Congress to reverse the aid authorization because Israel’s settlement building violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which is part of U.S. law.

Abuse of Power Is Not Trump’s Only Impeachable Offense

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a political decision to limit the impeachment of Trump to the Ukraine scandal, and the House of Representatives accordingly impeached him for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. But there are many other possible grounds for impeaching Trump, including the obstruction of justice documented in the Mueller report, violation of the Emoluments Clause, the war crime of assassinating Qassem Soleimani, and the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Given Dershowitz’s loyal defense of Trump in various arenas, it is no surprise that he disagrees with political historian Allan Lichtman on the question of whether Trump’s climate change policy is a crime against humanity and an impeachable offense. (I have also laid out the legal case for why Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement constituted a crime against humanity.)

It was the danger that a president would abuse his power that most concerned the framers. Thus, they provided for impeachment in the Constitution.

“High crimes and misdemeanors” include, but aren’t limited to, conduct that the criminal law punishes. Impeachable offenses are political, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65. They “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

Trump violated the public’s trust that he would act in their interests and protect the climate from future disaster. He also violated the trust the people placed in him to conduct foreign policy to further the interests of national security and not the interests of Trump’s re-election.

A President Doesn’t Need to Break Criminal Law to Be Impeached

Impeachable offenses are not confined to acts prohibited by criminal law. “Unlike a criminal case,” the 1974 House Judiciary Committee report for the Nixon impeachment says, “the cause for the removal of a President may be based on his entire course of conduct in office. In particular situations, it may be a course of conduct more than individual acts that has a tendency to subvert constitutional government.”

“The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts on the subject, but it staggers on like a vengeful zombie,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe argued in The Washington Post. “In fact, there is no evidence that the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ was understood in the 1780s to mean indictable crimes.”

Tribe wrote that Dershowitz’s “suggestion that, even if some noncriminal offenses might be impeachable, ‘abuse of power’ is not among them is particularly strange.” He added: “No serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it. The suggestion turns the impeachment power on its head.” Indeed, it was the danger that a president would abuse his power that most concerned the framers. Thus, they provided for impeachment in the Constitution.

“I really thought Dershowitz disgraced himself,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) told CNN’s Dana Bash. Dershowitz “said essentially even if a President commands the power of state to corrupt a future election, by seeking the intervention of a foreign power, that that’s not something that impeachment would be appropriate for,” Merkley added. “It’s exactly the type of foreign interference that the founders talked about.”

“What Dershowitz did yesterday was stand up and be a guy with Harvard attached to his name and spout complete nonsense that’s totally unsupported by any scholarship, anywhere.”

All four constitutional scholars called to testify in the House impeachment inquiry, including Trump’s own expert, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, agreed that impeachment does not require a crime and that abuse of power is an impeachable offense.

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman testified, “The framers provided for impeachment of the president because they feared that a president might abuse power of the office to gain personal advantage; to corrupt the electoral process and keep himself in office; or to subvert our national security.”

Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, testified that “drawing a foreign government into our election process is an especially serious abuse of power because it undermines democracy itself.”

Offenses supporting impeachment “are not neatly delineated but depend on context and gravity,” University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt testified. He stressed the political nature of impeachable crimes.

“There needs to be clear and unequivocal proof of a quid pro quo,” Turley said, but “the current record does not establish a quid pro quo.” Perhaps Bolton’s testimony would convince Turley.

Frank O. Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri and author of the book High Crimes and Misdemeanors, said Dershowitz is bucking the weight of legal thought. “In making this argument, Alan is essentially alone, and I mean alone,” Bowman said. “What Dershowitz did yesterday was stand up and be a guy with Harvard attached to his name and spout complete nonsense that’s totally unsupported by any scholarship, anywhere.”

Dershowitz’s unfounded theory should not provide political cover for GOP senators who oppose hearing witness testimony, a staple in all prior impeachment trials and indeed, in any fair trial. They fear that Bolton will nail Trump to the wall. And that’s the last thing the “Vichy Republicans” want.

Could This Be the End of American Exceptionalism?

More Americans are dissatisfied with democracy than at any point since records began in 1995, according to a new study published Wednesday, and the number of citizens with a positive view of the U.S. system of government dipped for the first time below 50%.

To observers like journalist Rania Khalek, the reason for such a shift in global attitudes was clear.

“Our systems aren’t actually democratic,” said Khalek. “We live in a miserable oligarchy, no wonder people are unhappy.”

“Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years”

That’s bc our systems aren’t actually democratic. We live in a miserable oligarchy, no wonder people are unhappy https://t.co/gb06pA1qen

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 29, 2020

A majority of people around the world—57.5%—are dissatisfied with democracy, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy study (pdf) found.

“If confidence in democracy has been slipping, it is because democratic institutions have been seen failing to address some of the major crises of our era, from economic crashes to the threat of global warming,” said study lead author Dr Roberto Foa.

According to the study, Americans’ dissatisfaction with democracy has been on the rise since the financial crisis of 2008:

The U.S. has seen a “dramatic and unexpected” decline in satisfaction, according to researchers. In 1995, more than three-quarters of US citizens were satisfied with American democracy, a figure that plateaued for the next decade. The first big knock came with the 2008 financial crisis, and deterioration has continued year-on-year ever since. Now, less than half of US citizens are content with their democracy.

“Such levels of democratic dissatisfaction would not be unusual elsewhere,” said Foa. “But for the United States it may mark an end of exceptionalism, and a profound shift in America’s view of itself.”

More broadly, Foa said, the dissatisfaction should be seen in the context of rational actors replying in a logical fashion to the questions posed by researchers. If the systems fail, they don’t deserve the people’s faith.

“Our findings suggest that citizens are rational in their view of political institutions,” said Foa, “and update their assessment in response to what they observe.”

The Latest Threat to Trans Rights Hurts American Kids

PARK CITY, Utah — The latest anti-transgender state law in the country, South Dakota’s House Bill 1057, sailed through the state’s House of Representatives by a 2-1 margin on Wednesday. The law criminalizes medical procedures intended to address gender dysphoria for people under the age of 16.

“Gender dysphoria,” according to the American Medical Association, is an “incongruence between anatomic sex and gender identity,” when a person identified as a male or a female at birth is transgender, feeling that they belong somewhere else along the male-female spectrum. The AMA estimates that 0.6% of the population is transgender, and that this “has been recognized and documented in human populations worldwide since antiquity.” Failure to support transgender people, especially youth, can lead to a cascade of problems, from physical and mental health problems, self-harm and being victimized by intense discrimination and violent crime, including murder. Nevertheless, the Republican majority in the House, ignoring opposition from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, approved the bill. If it passes the Senate and gets signed into law by the governor, transgender youth in South Dakota will suffer.

“It is hugely disappointing that HB 1057 overwhelmingly passed the South Dakota House,” Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project, told us shortly after the vote. “This measure would criminalize lifesaving care for trans youth and is a dangerous and misguided proposal that will cause serious harm and likely deaths across the state.”

Quincy Parke, a transgender youth from South Dakota, addressed the House earlier in the week, saying: “Let me be clear: As someone who researched my own treatment options and someone who this bill would directly affect, what you’re doing is not preventing harm. You are actively denying medical treatment to children who have such strong feelings of disconnect from their bodies that over half of them are or have been suicidal at some point in their lives.”

Earlier in the month, HB 1057’s sponsor, Republican House member Fred Deutsch from Florence, South Dakota, appeared on the radio program of evangelical Christian activist Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. “I’ve had family members killed in Auschwitz. I’ve seen the pictures of the bizarre medical experiments,” Deutsch said. “I don’t want that to happen to our kids.” Perkins, who has referred to being transgender as a “perversion,” didn’t think it perverse to compare Nazi experiments to medical treatments fully endorsed by the AMA.

“Just last week, a study came out documenting that the provision of this very care reduces suicidality in transgender young people,” Strangio said before the vote, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Now we have lawmakers disregarding science, disregarding the urgent needs of the trans community, and saying, ‘We do not care that you might die. We are going to make your health care, and indeed your life, a crime.'”

The struggles faced by those in the transgender community, as well as their contributions to our society, were a focus at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Yance Ford, the first openly trans director to be nominated for an Oscar, and Strangio are both subjects of a remarkable new documentary, “Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.” The film received a rousing standing ovation at its premiere here, with its deep dive into Hollywood’s long, complex and evolving depiction of trans lives.

Reacting to Deutsch, Ford said on Democracy Now!, “I was appalled to listen to a legislator who was claiming, under the pretext of protecting vulnerable children, to have the right to insert himself and his beliefs into lifesaving medical treatment that is provided by professionals — doctors, actual people with actual medical training, science behind them — to provide children in South Dakota with gender-affirming treatment that children and their parents seek out.” He went on: “It never ceases to amaze me how determined people are to erase trans people, even when they’re children. I remember when I was 16, 15, 14, being fully aware of what I was dealing with. If I had had those choices, if my parents had had those choices when I was that age, I would have had a different childhood.”

If the South Dakota Senate passes the anti-trans bill passes, pressure will mount on Republican Gov. Kristi Noem to veto it, to avoid a costly court challenge and the potential of a financially devastating boycott of her state.

“The fact that ‘Disclosure’ is premiering while HB 1057 is being debated is, for me, a reason to feel hope even in these despairing moments,” Strangio tweeted on Monday. “We will keep claiming our right to tell our own stories and control our own bodies.”

Document Offers Tantalizing Preview of a Sanders Administration

While former Vice President Joe Biden still leads the Democratic field nationally, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has pulled ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and Politico reports that he’s now receiving the kinds of political attacks typically associated with “front-runner status.” It’s a label the Vermont senator appears willing to embrace, as a new internal document reveals his campaign is already preparing dozens of executive orders if he’s elected president.

According to Jeff Stein and Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post, Sanders is considering a raft of bold, palliative measures that include “unilaterally allowing the United States to import prescription drugs from Canada; directing the Justice Department to legalize marijuana; and declaring climate change a national emergency while banning the exportation of crude oil. Other options cited in the document include canceling federal contracts for firms paying less than $15 an hour and reversing federal rules blocking U.S. funding to organizations that provide abortion counseling.”

The 2020 hopeful has already pledged to repeal President Donald Trump’s “racist” immigration policy on his first day in office. Per the Post, this could include immediately halting construction of the border wall, removing the current administration’s limit on refugees and reinstating the Obama-era legal status of Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

“The unilateral actions considered by Sanders’ campaign are likely to be fiercely opposed by conservatives and even moderate liberals, and Sanders could face criticism for moving to take more power away from the legislative branch amid ever-expanding executive authority,” Stein and Sullivan note. “Many Democrats and some Republicans have criticized Trump for the numerous executive orders he signed in the early part of his presidency.”

Unlike Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sanders has expressed reticence about nuking the filibuster for ambitious legislation like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, signaling his preference for budget reconciliation — a means by which select spending bills are passed with a simple 50-vote majority in the Senate. The sweep of the orders currently under consideration suggests he’s willing to exercise the raw power of the executive office as well.

Read more at The Washington Post.

What Happens If Iowa and Nevada’s 2020 Caucuses Are Disrupted?

In 2012, the Iowa Republican Party named Mitt Romney (now Utah’s senator) as the winner of its presidential caucuses. But 16 days later, long after Romney rode a wave of momentum into New Hampshire, the Iowa GOP said that then-Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had actually won after votes that weren’t turned in on caucus night were counted.

In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Independent-turned-Democrat Bernie Sanders virtually tied in the delegates they had won to the next stage of Iowa’s process. At 2:30 A.M. the next day, the Iowa Democratic Party said that Clinton had won 699.57 state delegate equivalents, while Sanders won 695.49 delegates. Her spokesman declared victory and she got the headlines.

With 2020’s Iowa caucuses days away on February 3 and a tight Democratic field, the question if some version of history will repeat itself is not conjectural. But today’s scenarios mostly concern a disruption of the caucus process in Iowa in cyberspace: from either sabotaging the voting technology or disinformation about the reported outcome. The same threats would also face Nevada, 2020’s third contest and also a state party-run presidential caucus.

National media like National Public Radio and the Associated Press have worried that Iowa’s use of a smartphone app by 1,600-plus precinct chairs to report local results is a cybersecurity risk. The Washington Post has worried about disinformation because the Iowa Democratic Party will release two potentially conflicting figures—raw vote counts and delegates awarded. (Nevada is also using a precinct-reporting app and will release these same figures.)

The response to these threats has been predictable. Officials at the Iowa Democratic Party, the Nevada State Democratic Party, Democratic National Committee and even the federal Department of Homeland Security (whose election security team has worked with both states) all said that many steps have been taken to avert threats that could disrupt the process. The state parties also further said that they have ramped up efforts to combat disinformation.

“Iowa Democrats have worked in partnership with the DNC and national cybersecurity experts to develop systems and safeguards to efficiently and securely report results on caucus night while actively monitoring and combating disinformation,” Troy Price, Iowa Democratic Party chair, said by email. “We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of the democratic process and secure Iowans’ votes very seriously.”

“From the beginning, NV Dems [the Nevada State Democratic Party] has been committed to making our First in the West Caucus the most accessible, expansive and transparent caucus yet,” Shelby Wiltz, Nevada State Democratic Party Caucus director, said by email. “We developed a reporting application [smartphone app] in order to streamline the process and provide our volunteers with additional support to run their caucuses as efficiently as possible.”

However, if something were to go badly wrong with compiling results in Iowa or Nevada—something of a scale that exceeds the random confusion that comes with using any new voting tool—it is unlikely that the two states’ backup systems could quickly verify the results in the wee hours after the caucuses end; certainly not before some candidate claims victory and boards a post-midnight plane to the next state.

That assessment comes from examining publicly available partydocuments about potential caucus recounts. Both states are using similar technology, procedures and press statements. The documents, especially a Nevada 2020 Caucus Recount Manual, suggest that it could be a week or more before the party could examine their paper records to see if they matched the app-filed electronic results. The initial delays come from assembling all the paper records.

“If something fails, then what?” asked David Jefferson, a computer scientist who has analyzed voting systems since the 1990s and a board member of Verified Voting, an advocacy group. “The question is not as easily answered by saying, ‘There are paper backups, so don’t worry.’”

“If there are failures, what is the backup plan?” he continued. “What is the process if there are electronic failures of some kind? What happens if something written down on paper doesn’t match the electronic versions? Then what do they do?”

Party-Run Contests

Presidential caucuses are unlike most elections in America. They are party-run town meetings in more than a thousand local precincts spread across their state. Democrats will only have a few caucuses in 2020, but the two that come early are pivotal. Iowa is 2020’s first contest. Nevada is the third.

Caucus voting is also different. The caucuses will have two rounds of voting, where any candidate who gets less than a viability threshold (usually 15 percent) is disqualified. Voters rank their choices, and if their first choice is not viable, their next viable candidate will get their vote. This process requires the caucus chairs to do some math. After the voting, each caucus divides a preset number of delegates to the winners. The allocations are based not on how many people show up locally, but by geography to balance urban, suburban and rural representation.

All of this complexity is why the Iowa and Nevada state parties wanted to develop an app for precinct chairs to use: first for the caucus math and then to transmit the results of their rounds of voting and delegate allocations. (In Nevada, the caucus chairs will also receive the results of early voting before their caucus begins; Iowa does not have an early voting option.)

Using the app as a calculator is not controversial—although it is likely to lead to some degree of user confusion due to unfamiliarity. That assessment comes from Iowa academics who note that most caucus chairs are over 60 years old and would rather call in their results. But security experts consider receiving and sending data via Wi-Fi or cell phones as risky. Also, because caucuses aren’t government-run elections like primaries, there are few legal penalties for meddling.

There are a few other differences between Iowa and Nevada in the approaches and technology each has chosen. The only time Iowa will expose voting data to online threats is at the end of the night when precinct chairs use the app to file results.

In Nevada, there are more digital systems in use. That state party will link early voting sites to an online voter registration system. (Iowa will print precinct voter lists.) Nevada also will offer four days of early voting, where participants will use party-owned tablets, which is online voting. Nevada also will send the early voting results to each precinct chair’s app, so that all of the early votes and live attendee votes are applied at the local level. In other words, Nevada’s digital system is more complex than Iowa’s system—and perhaps more inclusive.

Both state parties also have backup plans that were approved by the DNC’s technology team and by the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee. The states must have paper record backups of all the voting. Thus, every caucus voter will fill out presidential preference cards. The caucus chairs also will fill out summary sheets that document the precinct’s two rounds of voting and resulting delegate allocations. And, if a precinct chair can’t use an app—for any reason—they can telephone in the results to party headquarters.

In general, coverage of these 2020 plans has focused on the cybersecurity and disinformation threats. Those reports, in turn, have prompted top party officials to take second looks at their mostly undisclosed precautions and publicly seek to project confidence.

“The Rules Committee has been following the news stories and has inquired about the facts,” said James Roosevelt Jr., Rules and Bylaws Committee co-chair. “And while it is not something that comes to us for approval, we have not learned anything that would lead us to intervene.”

But the media coverage hasn’t focused on what would happen next if something significantly interrupted, disrupted or corrupted any part of the caucus process. Nor have statements by top party officials addressed that scenario, as party officials at state and national levels are all making the same points to express confidence in their new procedures and digital tools.

However, if one parses the timelines laid out in state party documents concerning any possible recount, it appears that it could be many days before the final results would be publicly released should some large-scale disruption occur.

Iowa has not released any document explaining how it will handle recounts. But Nevada has, and its process would not look at the voter intent on the individual presidential preference cards, its recount manual said. It also would not look at falsified registrations or bad behavior by participants. Both happened in the past. It would only manually compare the results on the precinct summary sheet to what the caucus chair app reported or the chair called in. Campaigns, which would have to pay for the recount upfront, can send their representatives to observe. But reporters and the public are excluded, the documents said.

Nevada’s recount process starts by giving precinct chairs two days to turn in all of their paper voting records. It envisions finishing 13 days after the state’s February 22 caucus.

Iowa and Nevada Risks Differ

These details suggest different potential snafus in these two high-profile caucus states.

Iowa has fewer cybersecurity risks because their system has fewer online elements. But because the state party will release two sets of numbers—raw vote totals and delegates awarded—there is a prospect of some disinformation if the popular vote winner does not emerge as the winner of the most delegates to the process’s next stage. In other words, the likelihood of disinformation seems more likely than a voting system meltdown, especially if people do not understand the delegate allocations are akin to a state version of the federal Electoral College.

To be sure, Iowa and national party officials are well aware of this scenario.

“Fundamentally, if people want to cast doubts on the results, they can always find ways to say, ‘This is not what democracy looks like,’” said Roosevelt, the Rules Committee co-chair. “In fact, this is what democracy looks like in a diverse country. There are urban areas. There are academic areas. There are rural areas. And different numbers of people will caucus in those areas. But they will be aggregated for a congressional district total. So it is what democracy looks like.”

On the other hand, Nevada’s state party is asking more from its digital tools and from its caucus chairs and volunteers that will run their caucuses. While they, like the Iowa party, have partnered with the same security experts in government (DHS) and academia (Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project) that government officials have been working with to prepare for 2020’s elections, Nevada’s 2020 caucuses will rely on several online-based elements—vote total transmissions, voter registration and online voting for early voters.

For months, the Nevada party’s statements have been upbeat and emphasized their expectations of success. They have released documents with timelines and details if a recount is necessary. But compared to the Iowa Democratic Party, Nevada is placing a bigger bet that their digital tools will deliver.

“Throughout this entire process, protecting the voices of Nevada Democrats has been our number one priority,” said Shelby Wiltz, caucus director. “We continue to work with a team of security experts with varying backgrounds to combat disinformation and to ensure the integrity of our process.”

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

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

Health Experts: Human-to-Human Spread of New Virus Worrying

BEIJING — World health officials expressed “great concern” Wednesday that a dangerous new virus is starting to spread between people outside of China, a troubling development as China and the world frantically work to contain the outbreak. For a second day, the number of infections grew dramatically.

The new virus has now infected more people in China than were sickened there during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak. On Wednesday, the number of cases jumped to 5,974, surpassing the 5,327 people diagnosed with SARS.

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The death toll, which stood at 132 Wednesday, is still less than half the number who died in China from SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. Scientists say there are many questions to be answered about the new virus, including just how easily it spreads and how severe it is.

The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief told reporters on Wednesday that China was taking “extraordinary measures in the face of an extraordinary challenge” posed by the outbreak.

Dr. Michael Ryan spoke at a news conference after returning from a trip to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior government leaders. He said the epidemic remains centered in the city of Wuhan and in Hubei province but that “information is being updated and is changing by the hour.”

Ryan said the few cases of human-to-human spread of the virus outside China — in Japan, Germany, Canada and Vietnam — were of “great concern”and were part of the reason the U.N. health agency’s director-general was reconvening a committee of experts Thursday. It will assess whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.

To date, about 99% of the nearly 6,000 cases are in China. Ryan estimated the death rate of the new virus at 2%, but said the figure was very preliminary. With fluctuating numbers of cases and deaths, scientists are only able to produce a rough estimate of the fatality rate and it’s likely many milder cases of the virus are being missed.

In comparison, the SARS virus killed about 10% of people who caught it.

The new virus is from the coronavirus family, which includes those that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as SARS and MERS.

Ryan noted there were several aspects of the new virus outbreak that are extremely worrying, citing the recent rapid spike in cases in China. He said that while scientists believe the outbreak was sparked by an animal virus, it’s unclear if there are other factors driving the epidemic.

“Without understanding that, it’s very hard to put into context the current transmission dynamics,” he said.

Meanwhile, countries began evacuating their citizens from the Chinese city hardest-hit by the virus. Chartered planes carrying about 200 evacuees each arrived in Japan and the United States as other countries planned similar evacuations from the city of Wuhan, which authorities have shut down to try to contain the virus.

The first cases in the Middle East were confirmed Wednesday, a family of four from Wuhan that was visiting the United Arab Emirates. Airlines around the world announced they were cutting flights to China, and Hong Kong was suspending rail travel to and from the mainland at midnight.

The number of cases in China rose 1,459 from the previous day, a smaller increase than the 1,771 new cases reported Tuesday. Australia, Finland and Singapore were among those reporting new cases, as the number outside China topped 70. The vast majority are people who came from Wuhan.

The U.S. plane arrived in California after a refueling stop in Alaska. All 201 passengers, who included diplomats from the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan, passed health screenings in China and Anchorage, and were to undergo three days of monitoring at a Southern California military base to ensure they show no signs of the illness.

“The whole plane erupted into cheers when the crew welcomed them back to the United States,” Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, told reporters in Anchorage.

Four passengers on the evacuation flight to Japan had coughs and fevers, and two were diagnosed with pneumonia. It wasn’t clear whether they were infected with the new virus, which first appeared in Wuhan in December. Its symptoms, including cough and fever and in severe cases pneumonia, are similar to many other illnesses.

Takeo Aoyama, an employee at Nippon Steel Corp.’s subsidiary in Wuhan, told reporters he was relieved to return home.

“We were feeling increasingly uneasy as the situation developed so rapidly and we were still in the city,” Aoyama said, his voice muffled by a white surgical mask.

Australia, New Zealand and Britain were among the latest countries to announce they are planning evacuations.

British health secretary Matt Hancock tweeted that “anyone who returns from Wuhan will be safely isolated for 14 days, with all necessary medical attention.” The measures are a step up from those during the devastating 2014-16 Ebola outbreak, when returning travelers from West Africa were asked to monitor themselves for symptoms.

Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said the steps are justified to prevent the introduction of the virus and its spread.

“There’s always a balance between the draconian measures of public health and what people might want to do, and obviously it’s regrettable if people who turn out not to have the virus are quarantined unnecessarily,” he said.

The outbreak has affected international sporting events. The International Hockey Federation postponed Pro League games in China, and soccer, basketball and boxing qualifiers for the Tokyo Olympics in February have been moved outside of the country.

In China’s Hubei province, 17 cities including Wuhan have been locked down, trapping more than 50 million people in the most far-reaching disease control measures ever imposed.

WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, commended China’s response. The low number of infections outside China “is due in no small part to the extraordinary steps the government has taken to prevent the export of cases,” he said. “They’re doing that at the expense of their economy and other factors.”

During the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic, China was slammed for hiding that outbreak for months, allowing it to spread unchecked before reporting it to the WHO. Even after inviting international experts to investigate the epidemic, SARS patients were moved from hospitals and driven around in ambulances to conceal the true extent of the virus’ spread.

The source of the new virus and the full extent of its spread are still unknown. However, the World Health Organization said most cases reported to date “have been milder, with around 20% of those infected experiencing severe illness.”

Scientists expect many crucial questions about the virus’ behavior will be answered in the coming weeks as the outbreak evolves and it becomes clearer how people are infected.

Although the Chinese health minister and others have suggested that the virus is spreading before people get symptoms, data to confirm that has not yet been shared widely beyond China.

“It’s still unclear whether that takes place,” said Malik Peiris, chair in virology at the University of Hong Kong.

“The fortunate thing about SARS, if there was anything fortunate, was that transmission did not take place before symptoms,” he said. If it turns out that the new coronavirus can indeed be spread by people who don’t show any symptoms, “a pandemic is a scenario that we have to consider.”

___

Associated Press writers Maria Cheng and Jill Lawless in London; Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska; Amy Taxin in Riverside, California; and Christina Larson in Washington contributed to this report.