Chris Hedges's Blog, page 404

We Need to Triple Cuts to Stand a Chance Against Climate Change

The world is not yet living up to its undertaking to tackle global warming, and it will have to make tripled climate cuts − at least − if it is to do so, a report says.

The emissions gap − the difference between the global emissions of greenhouse gases scientists expect in 2030 and the level they need to be at to honour the world’s promises to cut them − is the largest ever.

The 2018 Emissions Gap Report is published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). While it is still possible to keep global warming below 2°C, its authors say, the world’s current pace of action to cut emissions must triple for that to happen.

In 2015 almost 200 governments adopted the target of keeping global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to try for a lower level, 1.5°C. Their decision is set out in the Paris Agreement.

Inadequate targets

But the Gap Report spells out in detail a criticism scientists have been making since soon after the Agreement was reached, saying the current pace of countries’ plans for reducing emissions − which they decide for themselves − is not enough to meet the Paris targets.

As well as allowing signatories the freedom to cut emissions as savagely or as modestly as they wish, the Agreement is also condemned by those who believe its targets are themselves so unrealistic that they fail to measure up to the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.

The combination of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly inadequate action to slow them means that the emissions gap is bigger than it has ever been.

Meeting the 2°C target will require climate action efforts to triple, the Gap Report says. But to meet the 1.5°C limit, which many governments and scientists are urging, needs nations not just to triple their efforts, but to increase them five-fold.

“The science is clear … governments need to move faster and with greater urgency. We’re feeding this fire while the means to extinguish it are within reach”

Current action to limit emissions suggests that global warming will reach about 3°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, and will continue to rise after that. If the gap is not closed by 2030, the report’s authors say, it is highly unlikely that the 2°C target can be reached.

In 2017 global emissions rose again, after a three-year decrease, as countries’ efforts to combat climate change fell short of what was necessary for global emissions to peak. That year global emissions reached reached 53.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e), the highest levels yet recorded. Just 57 countries, representing 60% of global emissions, were on track to peak emissions by 2030.

(A gigatonne is a thousand million tonnes. “GtCO2e” is an abbreviation for “gigatonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide” − emissions of various GHGs put on a common footing to express them in terms of the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming effect.)

The Gap Report has been released just before this year’s UN global climate summit, the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the Polish city of Katowice.

Critical decade ahead

Two of the contributors are researchers from IIASA, based in Laxenburg, Austria: Joeri Rogelj and Daniel Huppmann.

“This year’s report shows with renewed urgency that emissions reductions in the next decade are critical, and that there are readily available options to achieve this”, said Dr Rogelj.

He is a lead author of the chapter that updated the assessment of the emissions gap, which found that little or no progress had been made in the past year on new policies or more ambitious pledges.

New, more conservative assumptions about the potential contribution of negative emissions technologies (geoengineering) in the future mean that even bigger emissions cuts will be needed.

Dr Huppmann led the year-long effort to compile a large database of emissions scenarios through the IIASA Scenario Explorer. The 2018 Emissions Gap Report draws from this database, first published in Nature Climate Change.

Closing the gap

The report outlines a roadmap which could still meet the Paris Agreement targets and close the emissions gap by 2030. It includes possible contributions by government fiscal policy, the pace of innovation, and a review of climate action by groups other than governments.

If they make commitments to the strongest climate action globally, the authors say, emissions could be cut by 19 GtCO2e, enough to close the 2°C gap.

Governments could subsidise low-emission alternatives and impose higher taxes on fossil fuels. If a carbon price of US$70 a tonne were adopted, emissions could be cut by 40% in some countries.

Removing fossil fuel subsidies would cut global emissions by 10% by 2030, compared with a situation where no climate policies were imposed.

“If the IPCC report represented a global fire alarm, this report is the arson investigation,” said UN Environment’s deputy executive director, Joyce Msuya. “The science is clear; for all the ambitious climate action we’ve seen, governments need to move faster and with greater urgency. We’re feeding this fire while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”

Chuck Schumer Ignites Calls for Ouster as Senate Minority Leader

With the brutal consequences of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda on full display after U.S. Border Patrol fired tear gas at asylum seekers in Mexico, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sparked fury from progressives and immigrant rights groups on Tuesday by telling reporters that he is perfectly willing to cede ground to the president’s xenophobic policies and offer up $1.6 billion for “border security” funding in upcoming budget talks.

“We are for strong border security,” Schumer declared when asked about Trump’s request for $5 billion in border wall funding.

When asked if he would be willing to go higher than $1.6 billion, Schumer dodged the question, saying he doesn’t want to negotiate through the media.

While Schumer’s office clarified that the $1.6 billion in funding he supports would not be for Trump’s racist border wall but rather for non-concrete “fencing” and other ill-defined “border security” initiatives, critics expressed dismay that the top Senate Democrat is offering any funding for the president’s anti-immigrant agenda, particularly after the GOP was repudiated in the midterm elections.

“Did every mainstream Democrat suddenly decide it’s time to offer a ‘kinder, gentler’ anti-immigration message? And do they think that ‘fences’ are more humane than walls?” asked Richard Eskow, senior advisor for health and economic justice at Social Security Works and host of “The Zero Hour.”

“They must, since so many voted for border fencing in 2006,” Eskow continued. “No fences. No walls. Support all asylum seekers.”

Make no mistake: this is political cowardice. We don’t need a dime for a wall, a fence, a ping-pong net partition, none of it.

We need Democratic leadership who are going to have a goddamn backbone and reject this racist ideology. https://t.co/yH6Gw3vLWP

— Charlotte Clymer

Trump Administration Quietly Resumes ‘Zero Tolerance’ by Another Name

The Trump administration has quietly resumed separating immigrant families at the border, in some cases using vague or unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing or minor violations against the parents, including charges of illegally re-entering the country, as justification.

Over the last three months, lawyers at Catholic Charities, which provides legal services to immigrant children in government custody in New York, have discovered at least 16 new separation cases. They say they have come across such instances by chance and via their own sleuthing after children were put into temporary foster care and shelters with little or no indication that they arrived at the border with their parents.

ProPublica stumbled upon one more case late last month after receiving a call from a distraught Salvadoran father who had been detained in South Texas, and whose 4-year-old son, Brayan, had literally been yanked from his grasp by a Customs and Border Protection agent after they crossed the border and asked for asylum. Julio, the father, asked to be identified only by his first name because he was fleeing gang violence and worried about the safety of relatives back home.

“I failed him,” said Julio, 27, sobbing uncontrollably. “Everything I had done to be a good father was destroyed in an instant.”

ProPublica tracked down Brayan, who has reddish-blond hair and an endearing lisp, at a temporary foster care agency in New York City, and reached out to the lawyer who represents him. Until that phone call, the lawyer, Jodi Ziesemer, a supervising attorney at Catholic Charities, had no idea that Brayan had been separated from his father. The chaos, she said, felt disturbingly like zero tolerance all over again.

“It’s so disheartening,” Ziesemer said. “This was supposed to be a policy that ended.”

Officially it has. On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order retreating from his so-called zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy, which called on authorities to criminally prosecute adults caught illegally crossing the border and separate them from any children they brought with them. A week later, a federal judge, Dana M. Sabraw, issued an injunction against the separations and ordered the government to put the thousands of affected families back together.

Sabraw, however, exempted cases in which the safety of the child was at risk, and crucially, imposed no standards or oversight over those decisions. As a result, attorneys say, immigration officials — taking their cues from an administration that has made it clear it still believes family separations are an effective deterrent — are using whatever justification they can find, with or without substantiation, to deem immigrant parents unfit or unsafe.

“If the authorities have even the most specious evidence that a parent was a gang member, or had some kind of blemish on their record,” said Neha Desai, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, “anything they can come up with to say that the separation is for the health and welfare of the child, then they’ll separate them.”

In an email, a senior CBP official acknowledged that immigrant families are still being separated, but said the separations had “nothing to do with zero tolerance.” The official added that “this administration continues to comply with the law and separates adults and children when required for the safety and security of the child.” The official declined to say how many children have been taken from their parents for what was said to be their own protection.

CBP officials explained that Brayan was such a case. One official said that the agency had conducted a routine background check on Julio, and that it “confirmed his gang affiliation with MS-13.” Spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer declined to provide the evidence the agency had to support the allegation, saying only that it was “law enforcement sensitive.” Nor would she say why CBP believed Julio was a danger to his child. But Sabraw’s order, she said, “did not prevent these separations, in fact it explicitly allows DHS to continue with this prior practice.”

CBP has also not shared any evidence supporting its assertion of Julio’s gang ties with his lawyer, Georgia Evangelista, who said she wonders whether it exists.

(On Tuesday, a government lawyer repeated the allegation to an immigration judge in South Texas but said he could not provide documentation to the court because it was “confidential,” according to Evangelista. She said the immigration judge did not press for release of the evidence but freed her client on an $8,000 bond. Evangelista was frustrated by the outcome, saying, “How can we fight these charges when we don’t know what they are.”)

According to Evangelista, Julio arrived at the border in mid-September, carrying a letter prepared by a Salvadoran lawyer that explained that he had fled El Salvador with his son because he had been attacked and threatened by gangs there for years. At Evangelista’s request, the Salvadoran lawyer and Julio’s former employer sent sworn statements vouching for Julio’s character, and stating that he was never involved in criminal activity.

“I’m furious about this. They aren’t playing by the rules,” Evangelista said, referring to U.S. immigration authorities. “They’re treating him like a criminal so they can justify taking away his son. Where’s the proof? It’s his word against theirs. It sickens me.”

Susan Watson, a civil rights and family lawyer, said this kind of action could not be done without a judge’s review in custody cases that do not involve immigration issues. “Constitutionally, before a parent is separated from a child, you are entitled to due process,” she said. “Some decision in a dark corner by the Border Patrol doesn’t meet that standard.”

In New York, Ziesemer says the new separations identified by her organization involve children between the ages of 2 and 17, including Brayan. All of them arrived in New York City without any records indicating they had been separated from their parents at the border and why. A few weeks ago, the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit over the first round of family separations, sent a letter to the Justice Department raising concerns about the new cases, specifically about the grounds for the separations and why the ACLU hadn’t been notified about them.

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who led the organization’s lawsuit against family separations in the spring, said, “If the government is still secretly separating children, and is doing so based on flimsy excuses, that would be patently unconstitutional and we will be back in court.”

Lawyers at the ACLU and Catholic Charities said that the DOJ responded that it wasn’t obligated to report the new separations to the ACLU because they hadn’t been done as a part of the zero-tolerance policy. The DOJ said that in 14 of the 17 cases flagged in the ACLU’s letter, the children were removed from their parents’ custody because authorities suspected the parents had some kind of criminal background that made them unfit — even dangerous. But the agency would not specify what crimes the parents were suspected of committing and what evidence authorities had to support these allegations.

The ACLU and other groups representing immigrant children said the DOJ’s secrecy is highly troubling on several counts. They worry that the Department of Homeland Security has allowed authorities without formal training in custody issues — primarily Border Patrol agents — to make decisions using standards that could violate the spirit of the court order and that would never hold up in non-immigration cases. Ziesemer has talked to relatives and social workers and says she suspects that at least eight of the cases involve parents whose crime is illegally re-entering the country. Illegal re-entry is a felony, although previous administrations did not typically separate families in such cases. Ziesemer said the allegations the government has advanced to justify separations in eight other cases were either vague or unsubstantiated. The final case she identified involved a parent who was hospitalized.

“The government’s position is that because these are not zero-tolerance cases, they don’t have to tell us, or anyone, about them,” Ziesemer said. “Our position is that when children are separated from their parents, there needs to be some oversight.”

Brayan’s case is a vivid example of how government officials are interpreting the court order to allow separations of families.

I found out about him by accident. Early last month, after the government reported that of the more than 2,600 immigrant children separated under the zero-tolerance policy, only one child under the age of 5 remained in their care. I decided to try to find that child, thinking the case might make a compelling bookend to a story I’d written this year about a girl named Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, whose cries were recorded inside a Border Patrol detention facility in June. The recording ignited a storm of outrage that tipped the political scales against the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

An attorney on the border, Thelma O. Garcia, said she represented a 6-year-old Salvadoran boy named Wilder Hilario Maldonado Cabrera, who was in a temporary foster home in San Antonio. Wilder had been separated from his father in June, Garcia said, and hadn’t been reunited because the father had a 10-year-old warrant for a DUI charge in Florida.

The father, Hilario Maldonado, called me from the South Texas detention facility in Pearsall and said he’d tried to keep in touch with Wilder by phone, but his social worker didn’t always pick up. When they did connect, he said, Wilder, pudgy, precocious and missing his two front teeth, scolded him for not coming to take him home.

I told Maldonado that it appeared he would be one of the last parents to go through such a separation because the government had agreed to stop them.

Maldonado, 39, said that wasn’t true. The separations are still happening, he said, and he knew of one.

A few minutes later, I got a call from Julio, who was at the same detention facility. He sounded desperate, crying and pleading for answers. He said he’d turned himself and Brayan into the authorities as soon as they’d crossed the border, asked for asylum and told immigration agents that his mother, who lives in Austin, Texas, was willing to help him get on his feet. Seven days later, a Border Patrol agent took Brayan, dressed in a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, away, screaming.

Julio said all he knew was that his son was somewhere in New York. As soon as we hung up, I called Ziesemer at Catholic Charities, which has a government contract to provide legal services to the unaccompanied minors in the city. I asked whether she’d heard of Brayan.

“We do know this kid,” Ziesemer quickly responded, “but were not aware he was separated from his father.”

Ziesemer was audibly shaken. “Until you called, all I had was his name on a spreadsheet,” she said.

Ziesemer immediately arranged to have Brayan, who had been placed in a temporary foster home, brought to her office. Her experience told her not to expect much from their first interaction, partly because Brayan was likely to be afraid, and partly because he was only 4. So she tried putting Brayan at ease by opening a box of crayons and a Spider-Man coloring book.

He warmed up to her quickly, putting down his crayons to show her his Spider-Man moves and squiggling lines on a piece of paper when she asked whether he knew how to write his name. But, as Ziesemer expected, he was too young to make sense of what had happened to him on the border, much less explain it to an adult he’d just met. And his lisp made it hard for Ziesemer to understand the few things he could tell her.

After the meeting, she sounded both exasperated about having to grill a tiny child and terrified that there might be other children like him buried in her spreadsheets.

“We, and the caseworkers and the consulates, do what we can to fill in the gaps and figure out where these kids came from,” she said. “But that means days and weeks go by with a child not knowing where his parents are and vice versa. And it doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way.”

After Ziesemer’s meeting with Brayan, I traveled to Pearsall to meet Julio. He said he’d fled the country with Brayan because street gangs had threatened to kill him after finding out that he reported one of their members to the police. His wife and stepson stayed behind because there wasn’t enough money to pay for everyone to come. I spoke to his wife, who told me she was hiding out at her parents’ house because she didn’t want to be home if gang members came looking for her husband.

In photos his relatives sent, Julio looked sort of like a cop, stocky with a crew cut. But after a month in detention, he looked pale and deflated. He wore navy blue detention garb and his dark brown hair was wet, though neatly combed. He didn’t have any tattoos, which are common among Central American gang members.

Through tears, Julio told me he’d replayed the days since his arrival at the border in his mind, trying to make sense of why authorities took away his son. Julio and Brayan had been taken to the “ice box,” a notorious air-conditioned cellblock that is the first stop for most immigrants intercepted at the border. Brayan developed a high fever and had to be taken to the hospital for treatment. A Border Patrol agent who drove Julio and his son scolded Julio for bringing a small boy on such a harrowing trip. Could that be the reason they took his son away? Was it because the agents had looked at the color of Brayan’s hair and didn’t believe he was the boy’s father?

Julio wonders whether he had been fooled into signing a document at the hospital — they were all in English — surrendering his rights to his child. Was it because he’d once been arrested for a robbery in El Salvador, but exonerated two days later when authorities realized they had the wrong person? Why would they consider him a danger to his child?

It wasn’t until I told him that Julio learned his child had been taken from him because Border Patrol agents suspected he was a gang member. The news hit him hard, and it was confounding because at the same time the CBP had deemed him a gang member, another agency within DHS had found that his asylum petition, in which Julio claims he was a victim of gang violence, was persuasive enough to be heard by an immigration judge.

In early October, Julio had met with an asylum officer for what’s known as a credible fear interview. According to the report of that interview, which Julio provided to ProPublica, the asylum officer not only asked him why he fled El Salvador, but whether he had a criminal record. Among the questions were: Have you ever committed a crime in any country? Have you ever harmed someone for any reason? Even if you did not want to, have you ever helped someone else harm people? Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime? Have you ever been a member of a gang?

Julio answered no to all of them. The asylum officer who conducted the interview deemed Julio’s account credible, and, even more significantly, indicated that she had been provided no derogatory information or criminal records that would automatically bar Julio from winning asylum.

The discrepancy reflects differences in the legal standards for asylum and family separation. While the asylum officer’s decision is subject to review by a judge, the Border Patrol’s decision to take away Julio’s child was not.

“I don’t know what information, if any, they really have on Julio,” his attorney, Evangelista, said. “They have total discretion when it comes to separating him from his child. They can do what they want. And they don’t have to explain why.”

Julio said his own father had abandoned him when he was about Brayan’s age. Then his mother left for the United States when he was 7. He said he vowed never to do the same thing to Brayan, which is why he didn’t leave the boy behind in El Salvador. He wonders now whether that was a mistake. In every phone call with Brayan, Julio says, he feels his son slowly slipping away.

“He tells me: ‘You’re not my Papa anymore. I have a new Papa,’” Julio said of his son, adding: “He doesn’t even call me Papa. He calls me Papi. I never taught him that word.”

Back in New York, Ziesemer said she worries family separations may be beginning all over again.

Sitting with Brayan in her office, she said, brought back the faces of the 400 or so separated kids who had shuffled through over the summer. As Catholic Charities’ point person during the crisis, she said she came to know every single one of those kids by name. One 9-year-old girl went into a full panic attack when she was asked to step into a room without her sister because she thought Ziesemer was going to take her sister away like officials had taken her mother. “At one point, we had to have a meeting with the entire office to explain why the conference room was full of all these wailing kids,” she said.

Catholic Charities, the ACLU and several other large immigrant advocacy groups took the lead in putting the families together again; working the phones to find parents who were still in immigration detention and dispatching colleagues to Central America to track down parents who had already been deported. In addition to the “huge, heavy lift” of reunification, Ziesemer said, there was a crush of calls and emails from Congress, consulates and the media — all seeking information about the separations.

Ziesemer said she and her team worked around the clock for months, and though there are still several dozen kids awaiting reunification, she thought things were winding down. That’s when she began seeing new cases, like Brayan’s, which had some of the same hallmarks of the old ones.

Ziesemer didn’t know much about Brayan, except the little bit of information she’d gotten from him during their meeting. So I shared with her some of the things I’d learned about him from his family: that he could eat four hard-boiled eggs in one sitting; that he loved Lightning McQueen, a character from the Pixar movie “Cars”; and that he had a dog, Lucky, whom he insisted on seeing during every WhatsApp video call with his mother. His grandmother in Austin had fixed up a bedroom for him, filled with Mickey Mouse dolls, remote-control cars and winter coats. I told Ziesemer how distraught Brayan’s father was that his son called him “Papi.”

“A couple of weeks is a long time for a kid his age,” she said about Brayan. “They start losing attachments to people, even their parents.”

America Has Desegregated in Name Only

It’s a little-acknowledged reality that housing markets distribute more than mere dwellings. That’s because people’s place in the social order is intimately related to their geographic location generally, and where they live specifically.

Housing quality functions both as a reflection and driver of inequality. Beyond that, however, better homes come with better neighborhoods that afford other opportunity-expanding advantages: good, well-funded schools; high-quality and readily available health care; agreeable recreational facilities and parks; full-service grocery stores with healthy foods; excellent retail outlets; nice sit-down restaurants; well-kept roads and other infrastructure; safe distance from pollutants, major transport and cargo routes; proximity to pleasing natural vistas and settings; a vibrant civic and institutional life; abundant professional services; enjoyable public facilities, events and more. The least pleasant, spacious, healthy and expensive homes are commonly found in places where these and many other interrelated social premiums are scarce.

One’s chances of moving up in the social order are enhanced when one can move over in the spatial order—­over to communities that offer more opportunity for social advancement. That’s the underlying truth of the classic theme song from “The Jeffersons,” a TV show that followed the travails of a middle-class black family that leaves the ghetto for a more affluent neighborhood of Manhattan. “Well we’re movin’ on up,” the lyric went, “To the East Side.” (Of course, gaining spatial entry to the privileged Upper East Side required the Jeffersons to first move up the economic ladder in order to afford access to the spatial and residential premiums of predominantly wealthy white living.)

When it comes to raising a child, a modest home in an opportunity-rich community might be preferable to a higher-end home in an opportunity-poor community. (My working-class mother-in-law’s decision to keep her family in a small house across from the Illinois Central Railroad in an affluent middle-class suburb meant that each of her children attended a first-rate high school—a welcome byproduct of the neighborhood’s hefty property taxes. This education, in turn, prepared them for higher education and a professional career.)

In the United States, as in other nations, the meaning of place—both spatial and social hierarchical—is highly racialized. The nation’s racial disparities, which are so vast that the median black household earns 8 cents for every dollar that the corresponding white household earns, are intimately related to a persistent de facto apartheid that keeps most African-American children living in predominantly poor and segregated communities, and attending equally poor and segregated schools. The country’s sickest and most destitute neighborhoods tend to have the highest concentration of black, Latino and Native American residents.

The nation’s tenacious racial separatism both reflects and reinforces this disparity, reminding us that separate remains unequal in a society where social and political resources are distributed unevenly.

The black middle class is not immune. It remains highly segregated and lives in much greater proximity to poverty, crime, police harassment and disease than does the white middle class.

Extreme black-white segregation spans entire metropolitan areas—which include numerous “inner-ring” suburbs like Harvey and Dixmoor, immediately south of Chicago, and Inkster, Mich., outside Detroit)—and the nation itself. Black Americans are spatially concentrated in cities and large metropolitan areas. They are remarkably scarce in the nation’s hinterland, excepting a handful of rural black communities that date back to Reconstruction.

The Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North from 1916 through the 1960s was to disproportionately urban localities. This reflected both the location of the industrial workplaces that drew migrants from the racially hyper-oppressive South (Chicago’s packinghouses and steel mills; Detroit’s auto plants; Akron, Ohio’s tire factories; and so on), and the often-brutal hostility white small town and rural communities north of the Mason-Dixon Line showed to blacks in their midst. “Sundown Towns,” where blacks were unwelcome and found themselves in danger if seen “after sundown” (or before, often enough), were common across border states and the Upper Midwest during this era.

The nation’s enduring apartheid also has chilling implications for the nation’s increasingly polarized politics. It’s hard for citizens to form bonds of empathy and solidarity across racial lines when they experience so much of American life separately and unequally—even when they live in close proximity. (I am writing this essay in a condominium development on Rosa Parks Boulevard in Nashville, Tennessee’s Germantown neighborhood. The development inhabits a former cotton, flour and burlap bag mill that once employed hundreds of black and white workers, providing both groups with livable wages and a shared workplace. The plant closed decades ago. It was then purchased by a developer and refurbished with hundreds of fetching lofts housed almost exclusively with white professionals. Just across the street, which takes its name from civil rights hero Rosa Parks, the blocks are completely black and poor. The two neighborhoods might as well be distant planets.)

Thanks in large part to this racial separatism, the black experience—working and middle class—is largely invisible to most of white America. Without direct contact, whites get much, if not most, of their highly distorted sense of black reality through the filter of corporate media. Here, two images predominate.

On the one hand, there’s a parade of successful and affluent black sports, media and entertainment personalities (including anchors on most metropolitan television news teams), along with the occasional black political star like Colin Powell, Eric Holder, Patrick Duvall or Barack Obama. This helps feed the wildly false but widely held white belief, especially strong among the nation’s predominantly white Republican voters, that blacks are “getting ahead of whites” and that whites are the true victims of racial discrimination.

On the other, there are the news networks’ nightly footage of criminals and gang members and frequent portrayal of blacks as slothful, violence-prone offenders—especially in neofascistic law-and-order shows like “Blue Bloods,” “Cops,” and their ilk. Beyond helping drive white support for the nation’s giant, historically unmatched system of mass incarceration, this “urban nightmare” media feeds conservatives’ belief that any kind of black advancement is undeserved and unjustly enabled by leftists, who have rigged the American Dream against virtuous and hard-working white Americans.

At the same time, blacks’ ubiquity across our national media leads whites to radically overestimate the nation’s African-American population. (Whites believe nearly a third of the country is black, when in fact it’s closer to 12 percent.) This only fuels fears that whites are becoming, or have indeed already become, an overwhelmed and embattled minority in the U.S. That the Obamas occupied the White House for eight years has only encouraged this paranoia.

All this feeds the reactionary and racist, even creeping-fascist, politics of the Republican Party. So perhaps does the disproportionately black composition of the nation’s incarcerated population, which is detained in mostly rural and regions of the country (“upstate” in New York and Michigan, “downstate” in Illinois). Many rural, small-town whites’ main experience with black Americans is rooted in conflict—or perhaps in a fraught interaction with a cog in one of America’s largest growth industries in the neoliberal era (alongside casinos, opiate distribution and hog farms): the prison-industrial complex. That is hardly an environment conducive to fostering interracial empathy and solidarity. Exacerbating matters, rural prison towns’ vested interest in mass incarceration turns their populations and elected representatives into cheerleaders for “law and order” policies that saddle large numbers of black men with prison histories and felony records.

The more urban, liberal swaths of the country are no less guilty of this myopia. While I am a longstanding critic of the Democratic Party, I have been increasingly disturbed by the extent to which my keyboard comrades have been willing to hold their tongues about the creeping fascism of the modern GOP while railing against the neoliberal politics of its opposition.

Part of the explanation for this curious, damn-near TrumpenLeft tendency is spatial. The left, such as it is, tends to be concentrated in bright blue zones where the corporate and financial establishment have married fealty to big capital with a multicultural brand of representational identity politics. Republicans are numerically scarce and politically marginal in most of metropolitan America. When you fight the corporate and financial powers-that-be in urban America (as does any left worth its name), you go against outwardly liberal, multiracial, cross-ethnic and Democratic Party-affiliated “growth machines” rather than nativist and racist white Republicans like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

That is no small part of why so many urban leftists today can sound so much like Trump apologists online, reflexively dismissing criticism of his presidency with the rejoinder that Obama-Clinton-Pelosi Democrats are terrible, too. It’s the dismal neoliberal Dems they see (and hate) up close. It’s harder to understand and acknowledge how dangerous the right truly is when their exposure to Trumpists is limited—if not nonexistent.

Some of my leftist companions might benefit from a few years of residence in the rural South, the Upper Midwest or the Great Plains. Living under a white-nationalist Republican Party, as I have on and off since 2009, can be instructive. You’ve got to experience the current Republican Party and its reactionary base up close to believe just how dodgy, deadly and toxic the nation’s conservative party has become.

If urban leftists underestimate the dangers of the right, then more conventional liberals’ spatial and social distance from the hinterland tends to distort their conception of small-town America. In truth, it offers potential allies in the struggle for a more decent, democratic and sustainable world.

At the same time, it is important not to lose sight of the ways in which our institutions inflate the political power of white conservatives. How does a right-wing Republican majority in the U.S. Senate get to pass a militantly partisan hack like Brett Kavanaugh through to the highest court in the land when majority U.S. public opinion stands well to the left of the GOP and Kavanaugh on countless policy issues? This is due in no small part to a Constitution that assigns two senators per state, regardless of its size.

Red Wyoming, which has a population of 573,720 Americans, holds U.S. senatorial parity with blue California, home to more than 39 million. The former has one U.S. senator for every 287,000 residents, while the latter has one U.S. senator for every 19.5 million residents. Just one of New York City’s eight boroughs, Brooklyn, has 2.6 million people. If Brooklyn were a state, and it were apportioned the same ratio of populace to elected official as Wyoming, it would have nine U.S. senators—likely all of them Democrats.

This apportionment system means that the Republican Senate majority answers to a disproportionately white, rural and reactionary section of the electorate. Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” Daniel Lazare noted last year, it is mathematically possible now to “cobble together a Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote.”

Another geographically related farce of “democracy” that lives on in the U.S. is an Electoral College system that “triples the clout of the eight smallest states and doubles that of the next six” (Lazare). This ludicrously undemocratic method of electing U.S. presidents has ensured the victory of two popular vote losers in the past five election cycles (2000 and 2016). Equally absurd is the ubiquitous political-geographic gerrymandering that tilts state legislatures and the House of Representatives far to the right of the populace by inflating the representation of predominantly white rural and ex-urban regions.

But progressives must not write off the nation’s rural and exurban spaces as hopelessly, completely and inherently regressive. Doing so is particularly self-destructive in a system that badly exaggerates the political power of the nation’s most right-wing regions, even if the abolition of gerrymandering is long overdue.

More than half a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the call for racial and socioeconomic desegregation in the United States remains as urgent as ever, no matter how many black and brown faces appear on our movie, television and computer screens.

The Military Atrocities We Ignore While We Ring In the Holidays

The memories can be fond, some of them anyway. Patrolling in the morning with a platoon full of mates – brothers, really – and then returning to base to share decent turkey dinners flown in for our enjoyment. We wore dirty uniforms, gorged ourselves on turkey and sides, and washed it all down with plentiful doses of nonalcoholic beer and energy drinks. Another year, sticking around the chow hall after the holiday meal to watch cricket matches with the vaguely Pakistani contractors who prepared and served our food, desperately trying to learn the rules of the odd sport.

For all the hardships of three holidays spent in Iraq and Afghanistan (2006, 2007, and 2011), the army never failed to get us a Thanksgiving Dinner of sorts. There was a certain sadness, of course, about being away from family and friends – but it was surprisingly easy to face the day and manage a smile in front of the troops. Our humor was dark – dark as hell – but, in times since, I’ve rarely laughed so hard. In a way, Thanksgivings at war weren’t all that bad.

Other memories are rather more morbid. Like when a few military policemen on my Forward Operating Base – cheekily nicknamed “Mortaritaville” on T-shirts sold in the post shop – were wounded by mortar fire while walking to Thanksgiving Dinner. Truth is, American casualties were so common in the Baghdad of 2006-07 that they really only registered as numbers – monthly statistics we used to measure violence in the city. Just another day engulfed in the fire of civil war.

I can’t remember all of the details. Memories can be hazy, and, strangely – manufactured in a way. Still, this Thanksgiving weekend, I found myself thinking back on those three holidays abroad; taking stock of what it was my units had (or had not) accomplished and of my own mental evolution.

On November 23, 2006, a U.S. Army National Guard sergeant was killed by small arms fire in Baghdad and another National Guard corporal was killed by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) in Afghanistan. I was a 23-year-old scout platoon leader then. My unit had only been in country about a month. No one had been killed or seriously injured. The little combat we had seen was but a cat-and-mouse game of short firefights. I’m embarrassed to admit it all seemed rather exciting; in fact, I secretly longed for more action and more war stories. And for my sins I’d get them.

We ate as a platoon in the decent-sized chow hall on Camp Rustamiyah in southeast Baghdad. As for the war, well, it was at one of many low points. Iraq, and Baghdad in particular, was engulfed in a sectarian civil war that’s never truly ended. It may never. Oh, and on that Thanksgiving Day, at least 32 Iraqis were killed. Barely anyone cared about them.

On November 22, 2007, a US Army staff sergeant was killed in an improvised explosive device (IED) blast in Iraq. My unit was still in Baghdad that year for our second straight Thanksgiving – we’d had our tour extended by three months to help execute President George W. Bush’s troop “surge.” I was now the executive officer (XO) of my cavalry troop, acting as the logistics and supply point-man and serving as troop second-in-command. By then, there was nothing glamorous left in that shit-hole of a war. Three of my platoon’s soldiers were dead; one was paralyzed; a few more wounded. There were so many new faces – replacement soldiers – that it was hard to keep up.

I ate with friends, other young officers, in that same camp chow hall. It was a darker day. Anger and frustration – rather than the excitement of the year before – pervaded our conversations on that Thanksgiving. Sure, violence was down – so said General David Petraeus and his statistical charts – but even then we could sense that this was but a temporary pause. Several hundred American troops had died in the intervening year and it was hard to see the point of it all. Oh, and on that Thanksgiving Day, at least 22 Iraqis were killed. No one noticed – violence was “down” after all.

On November 24, 2011, miraculously, no American troops died in either major theater of war. Still, during that month, seven soldiers died in Iraq and 31 lost their lives in Afghanistan. By then the wars had swapped places. The US military now surged in Afghanistan and that was the main theater. I was now the commander of a cavalry troop and ate turkey with my officers and men on a small combat outpost (COP) in the Pashmul district of Kandahar province. Our troop had already lost three dead, several limbs, and suffered more than two dozen wounded. For all that, we barely held more ground than we personally stood on. The Taliban all but had us locked up in our our tiny forts and they attacked us that Thanksgiving – just as they did on nearly every day of our almost complete 2011-12 tour of duty.

I ate with my lieutenants and troopers in a large, dirty green tent – but at least the turkey was there, and hot. By then I’d all but given up on the wars of American interventionism. If I was excited in ’06, and angry in ’07, I was, to be honest, absurdly apathetic by ’11. All that matter to this 28-year-old captain was minimizing casualties and getting the boys home safely to Kansas. We, the American people, were told by then that the war in Iraq was over, a victory – still 11 Iraqis were killed in internecine fighting. It was nearly impossible to find any statistical data on Afghan deaths, but they invariably outweighed those in Iraq.

This past Thanksgiving, the US military remained at war – now actively engaged in at least seven Muslim-majority countries. There’s no end in sight. Every time we, the people, were told that victory was “just around the corner,” our hopes were foiled. Afghanistan is in worse shape than ever before, Iraq’s fragile political structure remains highly unstable and low-level guerrilla warfare continues unabated. The entire Middle East, rather than blooming as a new garden of liberal democracy (the dream of George W. Bush) remains awash in violence, famine, and record refugee flows. It is now beyond farcical to imagine any sort of American “victory” in the region.

And this author, well, he spent this Thanksgiving, without his family and on a shoe-string of mental health – a marriage on the rocks, worsening PTSD, and in the grips of depression. There were times, this holiday, that I earnestly wished I was back in Baghdad or Kandahar – laughing along with comrades as we lost a war that shouldn’t have been fought. The mind plays tricks, you know? Still, other veterans had it worse. Data indicates about 22 vets kill themselves per day – and the stats don’t break for the holidays. Others struggled to keep warm under bridges or in various shelters. Meanwhile, jets flew over packed NFL stadiums adorned with field-sized American flags, and mainstream media outlets treated viewers to cheerful video notes home from deployed troops. Hardly anyone asked what we’re still doing there.

By the way, another US Army Ranger was killed over this holiday weekend. Oh, and on this Thanksgiving, so did at least 26 Afghans – in case anyone is still counting.

World Faces ‘Impossible’ Task at Post-Paris Climate Talks

KATOWICE, Poland — Three years after sealing a landmark global climate deal in Paris, world leaders are gathering again to agree on the fine print.

The euphoria of 2015 has given way to sober realization that getting an agreement among almost 200 countries, each with their own political and economic demands, will be challenging — as evidenced by President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris accord, citing his “America First” mantra.

“Looking from the outside perspective, it’s an impossible task,” Poland’s deputy environment minister, Michal Kurtyka, said of the talks he will preside over in Katowice from Dec. 2-14.

Top of the agenda will be finalizing the so-called Paris rulebook, which determines how countries have to count their greenhouse gas emissions, transparently report them to the rest of the world and reveal what they are doing to reduce them.

Seasoned negotiators are calling the meeting, which is expected to draw 25,000 participants, “Paris 2.0” because of the high stakes at play in Katowice.

Forest fires from California to Greece, droughts in Germany and Australia, tropical cyclones Mangkhut in the Pacific and Michael in the Atlantic — scientists say this year’s extreme weather offers a glimpse of disasters to come if global warming continues unabated.

A recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change warned that time is running out if the world wants to achieve the most ambitious target in the Paris agreement — keeping global warming at 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). The planet has already warmed by about 1 degree since pre-industrial times and it’s on course for another 2-3 degrees of warming by the end of the century unless drastic action is taken.

The conference will have “quite significant consequences for humanity and for the way in which we take care of our planet,” Kurtyka told the Associated Press ahead of the talks.

Experts agree that the Paris goals can only be met by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.

But the Paris agreement let countries set their own emissions targets. Some are on track, others aren’t. Overall, the world is heading the wrong way.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization said globally averaged concentrations of carbon dioxide reached a new record in 2017, while the level of other heat-trapping gases such methane and nitrous oxide also rose.

2018 is expected to see another 2 percent increase in human-made emissions, as construction of coal-fired power plants in Asia and Africa continue while carbon-absorbing forests are felled faster than they can regrow.

“Everyone recognized that the national plans, when you add everything up, will take us way beyond 3, potentially 4 degrees Celsius warming,” said Johan Rockstrom, the incoming director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“We know that we’re moving in the wrong direction,” said Rockstrom. “We need to bend the global carbon emissions no later than 2020 — in two years’ time — to stand a chance to stay under 2 degrees Celsius.”

Convincing countries to set new, tougher targets for emissions reduction by 2020 is a key challenge in Katowice.

Doing so will entail a transformation of all sectors of their economies, including a complete end to burning fossil fuel.

Poor nations want rich countries to pledge the biggest cuts, on the grounds that they’re responsible for most of the carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Rich countries say they’re willing to lead the way, but only if poor nations play their part as well.

“Obviously not all countries are at the same stage of development,” said Lidia Wojtal, an associate with Berlin-based consultancy Climatekos and a former Polish climate negotiator. “So we need to also take that into account and differentiate between the responsibilities. And that’s a huge task.”

Among those likely to be pressing hardest for ambitious measures will be small island nations, which are already facing serious challenges from climate change.

The U.S., meanwhile, is far from being the driving force it was during the Paris talks under President Barack Obama. Brazil and Australia, previously staunch backers of the accord, appear to be following in Trump’s footsteps.

Some observers fear nationalist thinking on climate could scupper all hope of meaningful progress in Katowice. Others are more optimistic.

“We will soon see a large enough minority of significant economies moving decisively in the right direction,” said Rockstrom. “That can have spillover effects which can be positive.”

Poland could end up playing a crucial role in bringing opposing sides together. The country has already presided over three previous rounds of climate talks, and its heavy reliance on carbon-intensive coal for energy is forcing Warsaw to mull some tough measures in the years ahead.

The 24th Conference of the Parties, or COP24 as it’s known, is being held on the site of a Katowice mine that was closed in 1999, after 176 years of coal production. Five out of the city’s seven collieries have been closed since the 1990s, as Poland phased out communist-era subsidies and moved to a market economy.

Still, in another part of the city, some 1,500 miners continue to extract thousands of tons of coal daily.

Poland intends to send a signal that their future, and by extension that of millions of others whose jobs are at risk from decarbonization, isn’t being forgotten. During the first week of talks, leaders are expected to sign a Polish-backed declaration calling for a ‘just transition’ that will “create quality jobs in regions affected by transition to a low-carbon economy.”

Then, negotiators will get down to the gritty task of trimming a 300-page draft into a workable and meaningful agreement that governments can sign off on at the end of the second week.

“(I) hope that parties will be able to reach a compromise and that we will be able to say that Katowice contributed positively to this global effort,” Kurtyka said.

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Frank Jordans reported from Berlin.

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Follow Frank Jordans on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

Mississippi GOP Sen. Hyde-Smith Wins Racially Charged Runoff

JACKSON, Miss. — Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a divisive Mississippi runoff Tuesday, surviving a video-recorded remark decried as racist and defeating a former federal official who hoped to become the state’s first African-American senator since Reconstruction.

The runoff was rocked by the video, in which Hyde-Smith said of a supporter, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” A separate video showed her talking about “liberal folks” and making it “just a little more difficult” for them to vote.

The comments by Hyde-Smith, who is white, made Mississippi’s history of racist lynchings a theme of the runoff and spurred many black voters to return to the polls Tuesday.

In the aftermath of the video, Republicans worried they could face a repeat of last year’s special election in Alabama, in which a flawed Republican candidate handed Democrats a reliable GOP Senate seat in the Deep South. The GOP pumped resources into Mississippi, and President Donald Trump made a strong effort on behalf of Hyde-Smith, holding last-minute rallies in Mississippi on Monday.

Her supporters said the furor over her comments was overblown. They also stuck by her as a photo was circulated of her wearing a replica Confederate military hat during a 2014 visit to Beauvoir, the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

“So many things are taken out of context,” said Elizabeth Gallinghouse, 84, from Diamondhead, Mississippi. “The fact that she toured Jefferson Davis’s house. You or I could have done the same thing. They said, ‘Put this cap on. Hold this gun.’ It was a fun time. She wasn’t trying to send any messages.”

The contest caps a campaign season that exposed persistent racial divisions in America — and the willingness of some political candidates to exploit them to win elections. With Hyde-Smith’s victory, Republicans control 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats. The GOP lost control of the House, where Democrats will assume the majority in January.

In the final weeks of the runoff, Hyde-Smith’s campaign said the remark about making voting difficult was a joke. She said the “public hanging” comment was “an exaggerated expression of regard” for a fellow cattle rancher. During a televised debate nine days after the video was publicized, she apologized to “anyone that was offended by my comments,” but also said the remark was used as a “weapon” against her.

Democratic opponent Mike Espy, 64, a former U.S. agriculture secretary, replied: “I don’t know what’s in your heart, but I know what came out of your mouth.”

Addressing his supporters Tuesday night, Espy said: “While this is not the result we were hoping for, I am proud of the historic campaign we ran and grateful for the support we received across Mississippi. We built the largest grassroots organization our state has seen in a generation.”

The “public hanging” comment also resonated with his supporters. “That really offended me,” said Charles Connley, 60, a black voter from Picayune.

Some corporate donors, including Walmart, requested refunds on their campaign contributions to Hyde-Smith after the videos surfaced.

Hyde-Smith was in her second term as Mississippi agriculture commissioner when Republican Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her to temporarily succeed GOP Sen. Thad Cochran. The longtime lawmaker retired in April amid health concerns.

The win makes Hyde-Smith, 59, the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi.

Hyde-Smith and Espy emerged from a field of four candidates Nov. 6 to advance to Tuesday’s runoff. Her win allows her to complete the final two years of Cochran’s six-year term.

Shortly after the win Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “Congratulations to Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith on your big WIN in the Great State of Mississippi. We are all very proud of you!”

____

Associated Press writers Jeff Amy and Janet McConnaughey contributed to this report.

Anti-Semitism Rises in Europe as Memories of the Holocaust Decline: CNN Report

The killing of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue Oct. 27 was a chilling reminder for American Jews that anti-Semitism is not just a relic of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but a real, even fatal aspect of American life that was merely hidden from view. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 57 percent increase in U.S. anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, compared with 2016. And the Pittsburgh massacre wasn’t the only anti-Semitic incident the week of the attack: A bomb was hand-delivered to the home of billionaire philanthropist George Soros (a frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories) that Monday. What’s more, as a new report from CNN reveals, anti-Semitism is also on the rise in Europe.

CNN’s poll of 7,092 people from seven countries showed that almost a quarter of respondents believe that “Jews have too much influence in business and finance.” And “Nearly one in four said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars across the world.”

“One in five,” CNN continued, believe “[Jews] have too much influence in the media and the same number believe they have too much influence in politics.”

At the same time that anti-Semitic beliefs have risen, awareness of the Holocaust has decreased. According to CNN, “A third of Europeans in the poll said they knew just a little or nothing at all about the Holocaust, the mass murder of some six million Jews in lands controlled by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s.”

This trend, CNN writes, was particularly apparent among young people in France: “One out of five people there between the ages of 18 and 34 said they’d never heard of [the Holocaust].” By comparison, across the other European countries surveyed, “Half of respondents said they know ‘a fair amount’ about the Holocaust, while only one out of five people said they know ‘a great deal.’ ”

Those who have heard of it, including two-thirds of those surveyed, CNN says, believe that future generations should be taught about the atrocities that occurred. This sentiment, however, is weakened a little by the third of respondents who believe Jews use the Holocaust to advance their own interests. Also striking is that while few people overall admitted having a personally unfavorable opinion of Jews (one in 10 across the seven countries surveyed), CNN reports that “[t]he figure rises to 15% in Poland and 19%—about one in five—in Hungary.”

These findings come just weeks after French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe revealed, in a speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht attack on Jews throughout Germany, that a 69 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents occurred over the last year. “We are a very far cry from ridding ourselves of anti-Semitism,” he said, according to a BBC report.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, also speaking on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, expressed alarm, saying, as the BBC reported, “We have sadly almost become accustomed to the fact that every synagogue, Jewish school, kindergarten, restaurant and cemetery needs to be either guarded by police or given special protection.”

Merkel, who is stepping down as chancellor at the end of her term in 2021, believes that the rise of far-right parties across Europe, along with countries’ inability to deal with an influx of immigrants, is Europe’s “Achilles’ heel.” She added, speaking of the refugee crisis, “This challenge seems to me to be a bigger question for the cohesion of the EU than the euro-zone crisis was.”

Merkel was emphatic in saying this behavior is unacceptable: “There is no excuse or justification for hunting people down, the use of violence and Nazi propaganda, or showing hostility for people who appear to be [foreign], or who own a Jewish restaurant or for attacking police.”

Read the full CNN report here.

Trump’s Fascist Efforts to Demolish Democracy

This article was initially published on The Conversation. 

Fascist politics is once again on the rise in the United States, Europe and Latin America.

As an echo from the past, its principles and attitudes are re-emerging in a populist rhetoric that embraces extreme forms of nationalism, the cult of the leader, systemic racism, a culture of fear, a hatred of dissent and an utter disdain for the truth.

Driven by a hatred of “the other” and infused with narratives of decline and victimization, fascist politics trade in an incendiary rhetoric of fear, demonization and violence.

It creates divisions by targeting groups it defines as criminal, less than human, and then expands its hate-mongering to other groups as part of an attempt to deepen and expand a culture of terror, insecurity and disposablilty.

It attempts to build power through aggressive attacks on the media, critics and the judiciary.

Resentment based on real economic and existential insecurities become fodder for cult-like figures to misdirect anger, feed collective hate and foster a climate of shared fears and social divisions.

Fascist politics is inseparable from the culture of violence, which it uses as its primary tool of communication and weapon of choice.

Trump’s attack on the ‘others’

One recent example can be found in U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing escalation of attacks on migrants. He has referred to the caravan of refugees from Central America as an invading criminal force against whom he is mobilizing as many as 15,000 troops, more than currently serve in Afghanistan.

According to Trump, the caravan of migrants had “violently overrun” Mexico and were on the verge of invading the United States.

Prior to the midterm elections, he called immigrants “predatory” and “the worst scum of the world.” After the midterms, he ramped up the violence by authorizing “U.S. troops guarding the border against migrant caravans to use deadly force if necessary.”

Trump’s language does more than promote a decline in civility, it also advocates state terrorism while functioning as a savage nod to the most extremist elements of his base of support.

For instance, he has threatened to order U.S. soldiers to shoot migrants and refugees from Central America if they throw rocks at them. In addition, he has pledged to use an executive order to rewrite the U.S. constitution and annul birthright citizenship.

Trump’s rhetoric and policies point to a terrifying new horizon for the political arena and its modes of governance. It shows that domestic terrorism is alive and well.

It’s evident in Trump’s refusal to condemn Saudi Arabia for the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump has made clear that human rights and even murder can be overlooked if dictators have money to spare in order to purchase U.S. military hardware. In the fascist playbook, commercial deals take precedent over human rights, justice, and liberty.

“It’s a mean & nasty world out there, the Middle East in particular. This is a long and historic commitment, & one that is absolutely vital to America’s national security.” @SecPompeo I agree 100%. In addition, many Billions of Dollars of purchases made in U.S., big Jobs & Oil!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2018

Trump has unleashed what Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno once called an “authoritarian irrationality,” the dark and menacing underside of a racist and totalitarian psychology and politics.

Trump may not be Adolf Hitler, but there are disturbing similarities in his language and reactionary policies.

Recognition and resistance

It’s precisely these historical lessons that should be examined carefully so that the plague of fascism can be both recognized in its current form and resisted so that it will never happen again.

The entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin of history. The architects of fascist politics are with us once again, stoking dystopian fantasies in the decaying communities and landscapes produced by 40 years of a savage capitalism.

Angry loners, displaced workers and bitter nativists looking for a place to park their misdirected anger are vulnerable to cult leaders. They’ve found one in Trump.

Campaigning for the midterm elections, Trump reached for the fascist playbook and calculatedly promoted racism, hatred and ignorance in a cynical move that should send alarms ringing across the globe.

Amid an outbreak of violence that included the killings of two African-Americans in a grocery store in Kentucky, a campaign of mail bombs sent to high-profile Democrats and critical celebrities, allegedly by one of his fervent supporters, and the mass murder of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, Trump refused to acknowledge that his toxic rhetoric has fanned the flames of racism and anti-Semitism.

#BREAKING: CNN reports new mail bomb found in California, addressed to Dem. donor Tom Steyer.
Arrest made in South Florida. Suspect is Cesar Sayoc, has criminal history and ties to NY.
Latest: https://t.co/D6MsNhXnwk

— CBS4 Miami (@CBSMiami) October 26, 2018

Instead, he blamed the media for the violence and labelled them “the true enemy of freedom.”

He also called Democrats the “party of crime” determined “to unleash violent predators and ruthless killers” onto American streets.

In addition, he has ratcheted up his demonization of immigrants by branding them not only as rapists, drug dealers and criminals but also as Mideast terrorists.

He’s also publicly and proudly stated that he’s a nationalist (code for a noxious strain of beliefs espoused by racists and white nationalists), emboldening right-wing extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, the American equivalent of the Nazi Brownshirts.

‘Weaponizes language’

Incapable of both empathy and self-reflection, Trump uses language in the service of lies, vilification and violence.

His inflammatory rhetoric does more than legitimize and accelerate acts of violence; it weaponizes language as a tool of political opportunism without regard for the suffering and misery it inflicts on individuals and entire groups considered disposable.

He thrives in creating social divisions and merges ignorance and power to fuel conspiracy theories, eliminate the line between fact and fiction and give credence to the expanding media village of the extreme right.

Trump attempts to criminalize political opposition, maligns immigrants and others as losers and revels in his role as a national mouthpiece for white nationalists, nativists and myriad extremist groups.

He’s unconcerned about the power of words to inflame, humiliate, and embolden some of his followers to violence. Instead, he displays a sadistic desire to relegate his critics and those he views as not white enough or ethnically abhorrent to zones of terminal exclusion.

‘Abolish democracy’

His call to “Make America Great Again” reveals his nostalgia for a white Christian past. Allan Nairn, the award-winning investigative journalist, gets it right in arguing that Trump and the Republican Party want “to abolish democracy…because that’s the only way they can perpetuate their power” and create a form of “domestic fascism.”

What’s so duplicitous and dangerous about Trump is that he hides behind the institutions of representative democracy, which he attempts to destroy by stealth and through an accumulation of assaults rather than through an outright suppression of civil liberties and political rights, though that may be on the horizon.

Part of Trump’s demolition of democracy is his tactic of turning his almost daily assaults into a form of political theatre. It’s evident in his ongoing rallies that overflow with menace, not unlike the fascist Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s.

As the master of the spectacle, Trump normalizes through sheer repetition his ongoing attempts to fuel hatred, racial divisions and the destruction of social bonds, all of which is necessary for fascist politics to flourish.

In the Trump era, the line between deadly violence and the rhetoric of a fascist politics is dangerously thin. And as historical memory fades and civic literacy is disparaged, the rise of barbarism and brutality are on the rise.

Using language to resist

That’s why critically addressing Trump’s language is a crucial act of political resistance.

Trump’s hateful rhetoric also proves that education is central to politics, because it’s through language and diverse forms of communication that power materializes to shape consciousness, desire, identity and values.

It’s crucial therefore in the age of Trump to use the language of resistance, one that’s rooted in compassion for others, expands the reach of justice and encourages us to confront the forces of tyranny.

Language is the precondition for education, and education is central to politics itself. We need a new language that both inspires and energizes people to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

The current crisis of politics is not simply about the rise of fascist politics, it is also about the crisis of language, memory, and agency. Now is the time for individuals and social movements to give new meaning to the recognition that without an informed citizenry, democracy cannot survive and individual and collective resistance will disappear.

The One Mistake Democrats Cannot Afford to Repeat

When Democrats take control of the House in early January, they’ll have two kinds of leadership—one from the top of the party’s power pyramid, the other from its base. With formal control, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer can brandish huge carrots and sticks to keep Democratic lawmakers in line. With grassroots support, a growing number of those lawmakers can—and should—strategically step out of line to fight for progressive agendas.

Pelosi and Hoyer have been running the Democratic machinery in the House of Representatives since 2003, and they’re experts at combining liberal rhetoric with corporate flackery. Pelosi is frequently an obstacle to advancing progressive proposals. Hoyer is significantly worse as he avidly serves such “constituents” as giant banks, Pentagon contractors and other Wall Street titans. The duo has often functioned as top-drawer power tools in the hands of powerful corporate-military interests.

Pelosi is a longtime wizard at generating and funneling hundreds of millions of election-cycle dollars, and as speaker she’ll wield enormous power over committee assignments. But she must keep Democratic House members minimally satisfied—and along the way that should mean yielding more power to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Buoyed by wins in the midterm elections, the caucus includes two-fifths of all Democrats in the House.

That’s where the other kind of leadership comes in—if a hefty number of self-identified progressives in Congress go to the mat to vigorously represent progressive constituencies. For that to happen, a dubious aspect of the Progressive Caucus past must not repeat itself.

“When historic votes come to the House floor, party functionaries are able to whip the Progressive Caucus into compliance,” I wrote six years ago. A grim pattern set in during the Obama presidency, “with many Progressive Caucus members making fine statements of vigorous resolve—only to succumb on the House floor under intense pressure from the Obama administration.”

Backing down had tragic consequences for the nation’s health care system. In September 2009, Progressive Caucus leaders sent a letter to President Obama pledging not to vote for any health care bill “without a robust public option.” They wrote: “Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Medicare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable.” Six months later, every member of the Progressive Caucus abandoned the demand and voted for a health care bill with no public option at all.

In recent years, the leadership of the Progressive Caucus has become more impressive. The current mix of leaders and new members—which includes veteran lawmaker Raul Grijalva, more recent House arrivals like Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna, and notable incoming progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley—seems to augur well.

There are encouraging signs that Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders are using new leverage to gain more power for progressives. After meeting with Pelosi on Nov. 15, co-chair Pocan and first vice-chair Jayapal released a statement saying “We are pleased that Leader Pelosi shares our commitment to ensuring that CPC members are represented proportionally on the key exclusive committees—including Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Appropriations, Financial Services and Intelligence.”

Progressive leaders can gain persuasive influence largely because they’re advocating for proposals that—as polling verifies—have wide support from the U.S. public, such as a $15-an-hour minimum wage (59 percent), Medicare for All (70 percent), progressive criminal justice reform (65 percent) and higher taxes on the wealthy (76 percent). Behind such political agenda items is an activist base eager to achieve many programs that have been obstructed by most top-ranking Democrats in Congress.

Clearly, much of the Democratic Party’s momentum is now coming from the left. And many of the positions that the timeworn Democratic leadership has staked out are now being overrun—outmatched by the cumulative power of dynamic social movements that have generated electoral clout. Medicare for All is a case in point, with numerous likely Democratic presidential candidates climbing on board.

Ultimately, the most profound progressive leadership for Congress isn’t in Congress at all. It’s in communities and movements across the country—nurturing diverse progressive strengths in many aspects of social change, including at election time.

No matter how intense the top-down pressure gets from Speaker Pelosi, we should insist from the bottom up that members of Congress stand their ground for progressive principles. And—no matter how fervently they embrace the “progressive” label—if members of Congress aren’t willing to fight for those principles, then the grassroots should mobilize: to create an outcry, to lobby and to consider launching primary challenges. No elected officials should be immune from scrutiny and accountability.