Chris Hedges's Blog, page 410

Roberts, Trump Spar in Extraordinary Scrap Over Judges

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts clashed in an extraordinary public dispute over the independence of America’s judiciary, with Roberts bluntly rebuking the president for denouncing a judge who rejected his migrant asylum policy as an “Obama judge.”

There’s no such thing, Roberts declared Wednesday in a strongly worded statement contradicting Trump and defending judicial independence. Never silent for long, Trump defended his own comment, tweeting defiantly, “Sorry Justice Roberts.”

The pre-Thanksgiving dustup was the first time that Roberts, the Republican-appointed leader of the federal judiciary, has offered even a hint of criticism of Trump, who has several times blasted federal judges who have ruled against him.

Before now, it has been highly unusual for a president to single out judges for personal criticism. And a chief justice’s challenge to a president’s comments is downright unprecedented in modern times.

It seemed a fight that Trump would relish but one that Roberts has taken pains to avoid. But with Roberts’ court feeling the heat over the president’s appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Roberts and several of his colleagues have gone out of their way to rebut perceptions of the court as a political institution divided between five conservative Republicans and four liberal Democrats.

Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have themselves spurred charges that the courts are becoming more politicized. As the justice widely seen as closest to the court’s middle, Roberts could determine the outcome of high-profile cases that split the court.

The new drama began with remarks Trump made Tuesday in which went after a judge who ruled against his migrant asylum order. The president claimed, not for the first time, that the federal appeals court based in San Francisco was biased against him.

Roberts had refused to comment on Trump’s earlier attacks on judges, including the chief justice himself. But on Wednesday, after a query by The Associated Press, he spoke up for the independence of the federal judiciary and rejected the notion that judges are loyal to the presidents who appoint them.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them,” Roberts said.

On the day before Thanksgiving, he concluded, “The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump hit back from his resort home in Florida, questioning the independence of federal judges appointed by his predecessor and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. He especially criticized judges on California’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country,” the president tweeted.

If the 9th Circuit judges are independent, he said, “why are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. … these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!”

Trump has never been reticent about criticizing the judiciary. Last year, the president scorned the “so-called judge” who made the first federal ruling against his travel ban. During the presidential campaign, he criticized Roberts himself for the chief justice’s decisive vote in 2012 to preserve President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Trump also referred to an Indiana-born judge of Mexican descent, who was presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University, as a Mexican who would be unable to rule fairly because of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The president’s remarks on Tuesday came when a reporter asked for his reaction to a ruling by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco that put the administration’s asylum policy on hold. Under that new policy, Trump declared no one could apply for asylum except at an official border entry point. That tends to back migrants up for weeks if not months. A number of migrants remain in Tijuana after traveling in a caravan to reach the U.S.

Trump complained that his opponents file lawsuits in courts that are part of California’s liberal-leaning 9th Circuit. It’s not unusual for those challenging a president’s policies to sue in courts they consider likely to back their claims. Conservative groups tended to bring challenges to Obama-era policies in Texas, part of the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

“Every case that gets filed in the 9th Circuit, we get beaten. And then we end up having to go to the Supreme Court, like the travel ban, and we won,” Trump said.

The president went on to say about the asylum ruling: “This was an Obama judge. And I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to happen like this anymore. ”

The initial travel ban ruling in 2017 was issued by U.S. District Judge James Robart, an appointee of President George W. Bush in Washington state. Roberts, too, was appointed by Bush.

It was unclear what Trump meant when he said things would change. The 9th Circuit is by far the largest of the federal appellate courts, covering Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Some Republicans in 9th Circuit states have proposed splitting the circuit in two, but legislation has not advanced.

The court has long had a majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents, with the current breakdown at 16-7. But Trump has the opportunity to narrow that edge significantly because there are six vacancies, and he already has nominated candidates for five of them.

Trump Thanks Saudis After Defying Calls to Punish Prince

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump publicly thanked Saudi Arabia for plunging oil prices just a day after he was harshly criticized for deciding not to further punish the kingdom for the killing of U.S.-based columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump, who made clear in an exclamation-filled statement on Tuesday that he feels that the benefits of good relations with the kingdom outweigh the possibility its crown prince ordered the killing, tweeted on Wednesday that it’s “Great!” that oil prices are falling.

“Thank you to Saudi Arabia, but let’s go lower!” he wrote from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he’s spending Thanksgiving.

The international crude benchmark has fallen under $65 per barrel from a four-year high of more than $86 in early October as the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Russia have stepped up output. However, OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries, could announce production cuts at its Dec. 6 meeting in Vienna, nudging prices upward.

The president on Tuesday condemned the brutal slaying of Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post who had criticized the royal family. Trump described the brutal slaying of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul as a “horrible crime … that our country does not condone.” But he rejected calls by many in Congress, including members of his own party, for a tougher response, and he dismissed reports from U.S. intelligence agencies that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must have at least known about such an audacious and intricate plot.

President Donald Trump defended his decision not to punish Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or cut arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. insisting it would be “foolish” to cut ties. (Nov. 20)

“It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event,” the president said. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

The statement captured Trump’s view of the world and foreign policy, grounded in economic necessity. It began with the words “America First!” followed by “The world is a very dangerous place!”

The U.S. earlier sanctioned 17 Saudi officials suspected of being responsible for or complicit in the Oct. 2 killing, but members of Congress have called for harsher actions, including canceling arms sales.

Trump said “foolishly canceling these contracts” worth billions of dollars would only benefit Russia and China, which would be next in line to supply the weapons. Critics, including high-ranking officials in other countries, denounced Trump’s statement, saying he ignored human rights and granted Saudi Arabia a pass for economic reasons.

Asked by a reporter if he was saying that human rights are too expensive to fight for, Trump responded, “No, I’m not saying that at all.” But he preferred to focus on Iran rather than any actions by Saudi Arabia. The U.S. needs a “counterbalance” to Iran, “and Israel needs help, too,” he said. “If we abandon Saudi Arabia, it would be a terrible mistake.”

Trump was roundly criticized by Democrats, but some Republicans weighed in against him, too.

Sen. Rand Paul. R-Ky., said the Trump administration has “blinders on” in comparing Iran and Saudi Arabia and said Trump showed weakness in not standing up to Saudi Arabia.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted: “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is close to Trump, also disagreed with the president’s decision, saying America must not lose its “moral voice” on the international stage.

“It is not in our national security interests to look the other way when it comes to the brutal murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi,” Graham said.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, mocked Trump’s announcement, tweeting that Trump “bizarrely devotes the FIRST paragraph of his shameful statement on Saudi atrocities to accuse IRAN of every sort of malfeasance he can think of.”

Zarif went on to joke that “perhaps we’re also responsible for the California fires, because we didn’t help rake the forests— just like the Finns do?” He appeared to be referring to recent remarks in which Trump suggested raking the forest floor prevented fires in Finland and would have helped to prevent California’s devastating wildfires.

Mevlut Cavusoglu, the foreign minister of Turkey, where the killing occurred, said Khashoggi’s death should not be covered up for the sake of maintaining trade ties with Saudi Arabia.

“It concerns a murder,” Cavusoglu said. “It is not possible to say, ‘Our trade will increase. Let’s cover this up. Let’s ignore it.’”

Saudi prosecutors have said a 15-man team sent to Istanbul killed Khashoggi with tranquilizers and then dismembered his body, which has not been found. Those findings came after Saudi authorities spent weeks denying Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate.

Trump said King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed “vigorously deny” any knowledge of the planning or execution of the killing. He also said the CIA has not made a conclusive determination about whether the crown prince ordered it.

A U.S. official familiar with the case told The Associated Press last week that intelligence officials had concluded that the crown prince, the kingdom’s de facto leader, did order the killing. Others familiar with the case, however, have cautioned that while it’s likely the crown prince had a role, there continue to be questions about the degree.

“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi,” Trump said. “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran.”

Trump said he knew some members of Congress would disagree with his decision. He said he would listen to their ideas, but only if they were focused on U.S. national security.

Late last week, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation that calls for the suspension of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, for sanctions on people who block humanitarian access in Yemen or support the Houthi rebels and for mandatory sanctions on those responsible for Khashoggi’s death.

Democrats harshly criticized Trump’s decision Tuesday and called on Congress to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia and end support for Saudi Arabia’s war against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen, which is facing a humanitarian crisis.

“Standing with Saudi Arabia is not ‘America First!’” said Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, where Khashoggi lived. “President Trump has sided with a murderous regime over patriotic American intelligence officials.”

Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said Khashoggi was killed by agents of the Saudi government in a “premeditated murder, plain and simple,” and she said she would introduce legislation requiring intelligence agencies to release an unclassified public assessment.

Trump Wanted to Prosecute Comey and Clinton: Report

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump told his counsel’s office last spring that he wanted to prosecute political adversaries Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey, an idea that prompted White House lawyers to prepare a memo warning of consequences ranging up to possible impeachment, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Then-counsel Don McGahn told the president he had no authority to order such a prosecution, and he had White House lawyers prepare the memo arguing against such a move, The Associated Press confirmed with a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss the situation. McGahn said that Trump could request such a probe but that even asking could lead to accusations of abuse of power, the newspaper said.

Presidents typically go out of their way to avoid any appearance of exerting influence over Justice Department investigations.

Trump has continued to privately discuss the matter of prosecuting his longtime adversaries, including talk of a new special counsel to investigate both Clinton and Comey, the newspaper said, citing two people who had spoken to Trump about the matter.

Trump has repeatedly and publicly called on the Justice Department to investigate Clinton, and he has tweeted his dismay over what he saw as former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ reluctance to go after Clinton. Trump’s former lawyer, John Dowd, urged Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in a memo last year to investigate Comey and his handling of the Clinton email investigation.

Sessions last year said he was directing senior federal prosecutors to look into matters raised by House Republicans related to the Clinton Foundation and a uranium mine transaction benefiting the foundation that was approved when Clinton was secretary of state. The FBI has been investigating that matter. Sessions, in March, told lawmakers that he was not prepared to appoint a special counsel to investigate the FBI and potential political bias there.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. McGahn’s lawyer, William Burck, also did not respond to a request for comment.

Daniel Ellsberg: The Cold War Was Based on a Lie

What follows is a conversation between “The Doomsday Machine” author and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

PAUL JAY: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself. I’m Paul Jay. We’re continuing our discussion with Daniel Ellsberg.

Daniel, in 1959, 1960, there is a race because we understand, we the population understood, that there was a missile gap. We were told. That the Russians had something between 40 and 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles which they could either first strike or second strike the United States. There had to be a great race to create more and more ICBMs here. The possibility, the discussions inside the military, the strategic planning is all based on a potential, really, first strike, because most people believe this number of, the numbers of ICBMs that Russia, the Soviet Union had that was such a threat. And you made a rather alarming discovery.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, first of all, the estimate of 40 to 60- which was pretty much in 1962 at the time of the missile crisis based on a lot of satellite photography- was much lower than was estimated earlier, from ‘58, ‘59, ‘60. The Air Force had a higher estimate. Even the CIA official estimate in 1961 was well over 100. I think was like 120. The State Department estimated like 160. The Air Force was much higher than that. And in August of 1961, the then-commander of Strategic Air Command, I was told, when I was at Omaha at the base there- that was Thomas Power- believed that there were then 1000 Soviet ICBMs. This was the time when the estimate was much lower, as I say; between 120 and 160. But 1000 is what he believed.

Now, if you look back and say, how could I have been working on plans of this nature? It wasn’t to carry out a nuclear war. I thought that would be catastrophic in any case. I was shocked when I learned that the Joint Chiefs understood how catastrophic it would be; hundreds of millions. But I did believe that it would be catastrophic, and that the way to deter a Soviet surprise attack was by presenting them with the assured capability of destroying a large part of their society. For deterrence. That nothing else would do. That was because my colleagues and I accepted, and certainly the intelligence communities, perceived and projected the image of Stalin’s Russia and then his successors as Hitler with nuclear weapons, and that they would bend no effort- they would bend every effort to achieve the ability to destroy us, or at least to blackmail us into submission. And since they had achieved ICBMs launching faster than we had- that was almost the one point on which we didn’t lead the arms race- it was assumed that they would move ahead quickly, build a lot of ICBMs so they would have this capability against our bomber bases before we had ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles.

It was taken for granted by my colleagues that we were greatly outnumbered; the so-called missile gap. And Eisenhower actually didn’t accept that, but he was regarded as a doddering old man who was playing golf all the time, and simply not with it. We really looked down on him, because the Air Force thought that was almost the [treasonable] estimate which was also being made by the Army and Navy on the same basis of data.

PAUL JAY: What was their estimate?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Little data. And theirs was ‘a few.’ Well,  that’s pretty different from 160, or let alone 1000. So my Air Force colleagues thought the Army and Navy were lowballing the estimate so as to keep a ceiling on the Air Force budget for missiles in their favor. [Were] literally being treasonous. That was a word I did hear. I haven’t heard it much until recently, now.

PAUL JAY: That the Army and Navy were being treasonous?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The Army and Navy were doing this. Now, in late- just after the estimate of 1000 in August, in September we finally got full coverage of the ICBM possible sites in Russia with our satellites, which were a very secret program, which my colleagues at Rand were not privy to at Top Secret level. It was higher than Top Secret. There were only a handful of people at Rand who had-

PAUL JAY: And why were you? Why did you have access?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I didn’t. I was in the Pentagon. I didn’t have a clearance. But people made a security lapse, in a way. I was there, and saw a new estimate. And was told in a security breach, in a way, which was almost unprecedented. I never- not before or after people told me something that I didn’t have the clearance for. And I couldn’t share it with Rand, because we would all have lost our access had I spread this around. But the news was this: that what the Soviets had at that time was four ICBMs.

PAUL JAY: Four.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Not 40, not 160, not 1000, but 4.

Now, that remained, by the way, relatively unknown to the public very late in the game. Even Richard Rhodes’ excellent book, his second book on the nuclear program, on the H-bomb, many years later was still saying that what they had then was not what had been predicted, but only 40. But that’s ten times more than they actually had. They had essentially nothing. They had not sought a first strike force at all, which they could have had with their original missiles, inefficient and large and clumsy as they were. They could have had a first strike [crosstalk].

PAUL JAY: So how does that fit with the narrative? The Russians are coming, the Soviet threat. They’re going to take over the world.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: It should have led to a whole reconsideration of the framework here, because it wasn’t just that they couldn’t afford to. they clearly hadn’t felt that was high priority to have that capability. The notion that they were aching to take over Western Europe at the earliest possibility, or to destroy the U.S. as their main rival, was clearly something wrong with it. And it was actually wrong.

But as Ray Garthoff, a high intelligence person, leader and ambassador, wrote, he was rapporteur for a group that was saying, what’s the significance of the new estimates for an interagency group, intelligence group that was doing that? And he reported much later in a little Brookings Institution book that the premise of their study was do we have enough? Are our forces adequate in face of the new estimates? He said the answer was yes, they’re adequate. We were planning for 1000 Minuteman or more. The Air Force wanted 10,000 Minuteman missiles; solid fuel Minutemen missiles. To argue for 10,000, or even 1000, was not so easy when the Russians had 4. But they were adequate. It was not- it was not too few. As Garthoff points out, no one asked the question, could there be too many? Do we need this many? And could we reconsider our whole approach of whether it’s possible to negotiate a missile test ban, or testing an ICBM, an H-bomb test ban?

It was taken for granted that these Hitlers with nuclear weapons would not negotiate seriously any more than Hitler would have, and Hitler would not. The Soviets would have, by almost everything we know now. Would have been happy. What this indicated was they had built the weapons even without an agreement that limited arms. So if we were willing to limit ours, which we weren’t, could they have been kept down to a very low number? I think very likely so. We now know that Khrushchev, in this respect, was like Gorbachev. He wanted to cut down spending on the military all together, and nuclear weapons in general. And yes, he almost certainly would have done that. we didn’t think of even- actually, they proposed things like that- but didn’t take that seriously at all. We needed the missiles. We wanted the missiles, in part for political economic reasons in 1961.

As the man who examined me for my Ph.D. orals, economics professor Arthur [Smittys], was a consultant on economic matters to President Kennedy. And he was telling him, at a time when the recession threatened, the Minuteman program is something you can turn up. Or go down, if you wanted to cool off the economy. It’s a Keynesian lever, here. And McNamara at the same time was saying, I really can’t justify more than, say, 400 missiles, because that will pretty well annihilate the Soviet Union. But if I go for less than 1000 we will be impeached. And you can impeach not only presidents, but SecDefs. And they couldn’t, for political reasons, they thought, turn off that production line, get it down. And so we went for 1000. Actually, he was going- he had 1000 in mind. He didn’t admit that to the Air Force. The Air Force wanted a minimum of 1600. He was getting down to 1400. But he always had in mind that at the end a nice round 1000 was what he was aiming at. But the others would have been in full revolt to Congress had he said that at the time.

PAUL JAY: In his book Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg writes:

“I’ve gone into all this to emphasize that the credibility of this new estimate—fantastic, inherently incredible to anyone who had been relying on Air Force estimates or even CIA estimates (anything but Army and Navy estimates)—depended on knowledge of a kind of information that most people in the national security field, inside and outside the government, had no inkling existed. From the internal leaks—“unauthorized disclosures”—to me within the bureaucracy, I did believe it, even though it totally contradicted the fundamental basis for my concerns and work for the past several years.

It wasn’t just a matter of numbers, though that alone invalidated virtually all the classified analyses and studies I’d read and participated in for years. Since it seemed clear that the Soviets could have produced and deployed many, many more missiles in the three years since their first ICBM test, it put in question—it virtually demolished—the fundamental premise that the Soviets were pursuing a program of world conquest like Hitler’s.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Already Making Democrats and Republicans Nervous

The 116th United States Congress is not yet in session and already there’s been no shortage of headlines about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the incoming House Democrat who sent a shock through her party’s establishment with her primary win in New York’s 14th Congressional District. Even before she won the November midterm election and became the youngest representative ever to head to Congress, both Republicans and Democrats tried desperately to make sense of her popularity—and began throwing punches.

From criticizing her clothing and savings account to trying to cut down her activism, it seems media and politicians alike can’t stop talking about her. Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman both scrutinized Ocasio-Cortez’s actions, with Lieberman warning in the run-up to the midterms that the would-be House member “hurts the party, congress and even America.”

In her own party, the incoming New York representative is already facing censure from her fellow Democrats, both for her push to establish a “Green New Deal” committee to tackle climate change as well as her support for the #OurTime campaign, which is seeking out primary candidates to challenge conservative Democrats in the next elections. An article in The Atlantic highlights how some Democrats on the Hill are reacting to her intrepid challenges:

The discussion surrounding the select committee [on the “Green New Deal”] is just a small squabble, one that is hardly acrimonious and involves an issue that most Democrats seem dedicated to. And the focus on the few more outspoken progressive freshmen, like Ocasio-Cortez, is disproportionate to the amount of power they’ll actually have in the House.

But the debate has nevertheless provided a preview of what will likely become a familiar dynamic in the early months of the 116th Congress: Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive colleagues will demand bold reforms; other Democratic lawmakers will praise their zeal, but encourage them to rein it in a little. It’s an important dynamic to understand: The Democrats don’t have a huge majority, so just a few votes could make or break party unity on legislation. … the new progressives’ criticism of their own party—and their push for reforms—is sure to continue in the coming months, as House Democrats begin prioritizing issues and introducing new legislation. But as their ambitions grow, so, too, may some Democrats’ fears that the newcomers’ zealousness is a liability.

“We do have the majority, but it’s a slim majority,” said one Democratic House staffer. “So [if] you have a couple people who oppose something, you’re gonna have trouble.”

The suggestion that maintaining control is worth sacrificing progressive policies such as “Medicare for all,” abolishing ICE, free college tuition and other goals Ocasio-Cortez promised to fight for is one many on the left have heard before. It seems that in Donald Trump’s America, however, this lesser-of-two-evils approach isn’t as convincing as it once was. As for the barrage of criticism, the following Quartz piece points out that it might actually work in Ocasio Cortez’s favor:

… Ocasio-Cortez “is in a position that is normally dominated by white, male members of society…Critics feel threatened by what she represents, and so they choose to focus on her clothes to show that she’s not who she says she is—and by extension, that she doesn’t belong.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s power is that she does belong, precisely because she is such an untraditional officeholder (not wealthy, white, and male). American college students and alumni collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in student-loan debt. The skyrocketing cost of rent in every major American city, including DC, and the lack of affordable housing options just compound their financial imprisonment.

The squeeze is even tighter for women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, non-Christian Americans, and people of color who see a rise of sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and nationalism as a frightening feature of public discourse in America. And as the #MeToo movement proves, barriers to entry and power remain formidable for women, especially women of color, in every major industry.

Ocasio-Cortez, like so many millennial Americans, has experienced these problems. Yet she refuses to indulge in a victim narrative. She defines herself as a survivor and as a change-maker. As she wrote on Twitter in response to Scarry, “Dark hates light—that’s why you tune it out.”

Swipes from both sides of the aisle aren’t anything Ocasio-Cortez can’t take, anyway, and if her recent social media activity is anything to go by, the freshman Congress member can give as good as she gets. Speaking of social media, the democratic socialist has been quick to turn her online presence into an effective tool for both contesting critics’ claims as well as informing her constituents and the rest of the American public about everything from her struggles on the Hill to her everyday life as a newly elected representative. Perhaps unlike many other politicians, she’s also recognized that in the age of Trump tweets, social media is a political battleground that should not be underestimated.

It was precisely on Twitter that the New York Democrat recently threw her support behind another bold idea that would go a long way toward promoting democracy: getting rid of Columbus Day, a holiday steeped in anti-indigenous sentiment, and giving Americans Election Day off to exercise their voting rights.

The opprobrium is unlikely to decrease once she takes her seat on Jan. 3, but if it’s any indication of how uneasy she’s making politicians eager to maintain the broken status quo, Ocasio-Cortez is already doing exactly what she was elected to do.

Families Could Be Held Indefinitely in Unlicensed Detention Centers

Migrant families could be held indefinitely in unlicensed detention centers under a new federal plan that also would end critical court protections for immigrant children, according to new court records.

Under the so-called Flores agreement, created in 1997, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement “shall release a minor from its custody without unnecessary delay” to a parent, relative, legal guardian or adult designated by a parent.

But new Trump administration regulations would dismantle the landmark Flores agreement and allow authorities to release children only to a parent or legal guardian – even if those adult guardians are detained.

The new restrictions would maintain “family unity,” according to the government. But immigration lawyers argue that some children could be held in detention with their parents indefinitely while their immigration case is pending.

Lawyers also raise concerns about licensing requirements. Under Flores, children must be placed in state-licensed shelters that require certain standards such as specific staff-to-child ratios and reporting suspected child abuse.

In another significant change, the new Trump regulations would allow children who arrived with parents to be detained in unlicensed family detention centers. The Department of Homeland Security would hire an auditor to “ensure compliance with the family residential standards established by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement),” the rules read.

Put another way, the government would be licensing itself.

“It’s absurd,” said Neha Desai, immigration director for the National Center for Youth Law and one of the lawyers in the Flores case.

“If these regulations were to go into effect in this country, it would be a dramatic step backward in providing the most fundamental of rights and protections for some of the most vulnerable children in this country,” Desai said.

The new regulations would affect the nearly 13,000 children currently in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates more than 100 shelters in 17 states.

“What they’re trying to do with the rules is expand their power to detain families and children for longer in worse conditions,” said Ai-jen Poo, one of the leaders of the Families Belong Together coalition.

The Flores standards, she added, put “a check on the administration.”

The Flores agreement forced the government to comply with a set of national standards on the detention, care and release of immigrant children. The settlement was a result of a class-action lawsuit filed in 1985 by immigrant advocacy groups over the treatment of unaccompanied minors.

In September, the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services moved to replace the agreement with the new regulations. Lawyers representing the children filed an injunction Nov. 2, arguing that the new rules violate the terms of the Flores agreement.

The Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment because the case is pending. In a response filed last week, government lawyers argue that the injunction is “premature” because the regulations aren’t finalized. Officials still have to review more than 95,000 comments submitted by the public since the rules were posted in the Federal Register on Sept. 7.

The new rules also would strip children of the right to see an immigration judge if they’re considered a flight risk or a danger to themselves or others. Instead, a minor could request a hearing before an official from the Department of Health and Human Services, “hardly a neutral and detached decisionmaker,” lawyers say in court filings.

That arrangement may mean more children end up in psychiatric facilities or jails such as the Yolo County Juvenile Detention Facility in California, where minors have reported being pepper-sprayed by guards.

“I cannot shower because the water is so hot that it is making my hair fall out,” a 17-year-old held at Yolo told lawyers, according to the court filings. “The food here tastes bad, the only thing that I eat is fruit because the rest does not have any flavor. I have lost weight since being in Yolo because I can’t eat the food.”

Leah Chavla, policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said the proposed regulations are concerning because the government has violated the Flores agreement before. Over the summer, for instance, Shiloh Treatment Center near Houston came under scrutiny for injecting immigrant children in its care with powerful psychiatric drugs without proper consent. A federal judge ordered the government in July to stop the practice, though attorneys allege it’s still continuing.

“They’re saying, ‘Trust me, trust us, we’re going to self-regulate,’ ” Chavla said. “It’s just expecting everybody to place blind trust on them, and I don’t think that’s warranted.”

A hearing on the regulations is scheduled for Nov. 30 in front of U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in the Central District of California.

The Threat of White Supremacists Is Even Bigger Than You Realize

This story was co-published by ProPublica and Frontline PBS.

It was a grisly scene inside Apartment 3722 at the Hamptons, a gated community in Tampa, Florida.

One body lay face up on the floor, wedged between a wall and an air mattress. A handgun was stuffed in a holster on the dead man’s waist. The other body, clad in a black T-shirt and shorts, was slumped back on a futon, a shattered and bloody iPhone on his lap. A police investigator would later write that the two men had been “shot multiple times at close range with an assault rifle.”

There were some obvious clues that this was no ordinary double homicide. Tacked to the wall near the bodies was a large black-and-white flag bearing the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Adolf Hitler’s elite paramilitary unit. On a nearby shelf was a black Stahlhelm, the distinctive helmet worn by Nazi soldiers during World War II. There were multiple copies of “Mein Kampf” and a prominent place was reserved for “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel of race war in America that has inspired generations of terrorists, among them Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. A framed picture of McVeigh sat on a dresser.

On that night in May 2017, the police quickly took two suspects into custody and developed a rough outline of what had happened. One of the suspects, Devon Arthurs, 18, said the victims were his roommates, and members of a neo-Nazi group called the Atomwaffen Division. Arthurs said that he’d decided to leave the group, and that he’d killed the men to keep them from carrying out what he said were their plans for violence.

The second suspect detained by police, Brandon Russell, also lived in the apartment. Russell told the authorities he’d just returned home from a weekend of training with the Florida Army National Guard. And then Russell revealed something that should have set off alarms among federal investigators assigned to track the growing threat from armed, violent right-wing extremists. He said, and the police quickly confirmed, that the single-car garage attached to the apartment was full of explosives.

Explosives experts from the Tampa Police Department and the local FBI field office soon found components of a crude pipe bomb as well as radioactive materials. The search turned up ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, the mixture used by McVeigh to destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. There were sacks of explosive precursors, including potassium chloride, red iron oxide and potassium nitrate. There were homemade fuses fashioned from brass 5.56 mm rifle cartridges. In a closet, they found two Geiger counters.

And there was a cooler with the name Brandon scrawled on the lid in black marker. Inside, the investigators discovered HMTD — hexamethylene triperoxide diamine — a potent, highly volatile peroxide-based explosive. It has become a favored tool of terrorists both here and abroad, who cook it up in small batches using recipes circulating on the internet and in improvised weapons manuals.

At Tampa police headquarters, investigators put Arthurs and Russell in separate interrogation rooms. They wanted to know about the killings, about the neo-Nazi group and about the explosives.

Arthurs said the apartment had served as a nerve center for Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist organization of 60 to 70 people that has spoken openly of its hopes of igniting race war in the United States. If the authorities could access the group’s encrypted online chats, Arthurs said, “it’d be easy to track down each member.” The interrogation was videotaped, and a recording was obtained by ProPublica and Frontline.

“The things that they’re planning were horrible. They’re planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people, they’re planning to kill civilian life,” Arthurs said.  A detective asked if Atomwaffen had drawn up a list of specific targets. “Power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues, things like that,” Arthurs replied.

“I’m telling you stuff that the FBI should be hearing,” Arthurs said, adding that he thought lives could be saved.

To this day, it is unclear if the FBI talked with Arthurs or what steps it took to shut down Atomwaffen. The FBI declined repeated requests to discuss the case. But this much is clear: Within months of Arthurs’ warnings, Atomwaffen members or associates had killed three more people.

It is frequently argued that the white men who murder in the name of racial purity are lone wolves, radicalized by the echo chamber of the alt-right internet. No one can reasonably expect authorities to stop a seemingly law-abiding citizen like Dylann Roof, the young man who killed nine black church members in South Carolina.

But the Atomwaffen case seems a fair test of the country’s intelligence abilities. And a close look at it suggests that much more could have been done to investigate an organization one of its founding members, Arthurs, was begging the authorities to shut down and offering his help to do so.

Some experts and former officials see the case as part of a larger pattern, evidence that federal agencies are understaffed and out of position in confronting the threat of white supremacist terrorism even as the FBI’s latest report shows a spike in hate crimes for the third straight year.

That concern intensified after the massacre of 11 Jewish worshipers last month at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. John Cohen and George Selim, former senior officials in the Department of Homeland Security, criticized what they say has been the disinvestment in programs and efforts meant to help protect against the threat of far-right attacks. Task forces have been disbanded, they said, and recent efforts to reconstitute what they termed an “intelligence infrastructure” for domestic terrorism have lagged.

The government’s own data underlines the threat. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report said “far-right extremism” was responsible for 62 of the 85 lethal extremist incidents in the U.S. from the day after 9/11 through 2016, while Islamist extremist violence was responsible for 23 of the incidents. The report said far-right extremism had killed 106 people over those years.

Contacted by ProPublica and Frontline, Cohen, now a professor at Rutgers University, said he stood by his public critique.

“We know what the problem is, but every time there’s another one of these attacks all we hear is, ‘Oh, this is shocking, this is horrible, our prayers are with the people, who would have imagined this ever would have happened?’” Cohen said. “No, it’s very imaginable because it’s happening on a regular basis in this country. We’re just not doing enough to stop it.”

The authorities dispatched to the Tampa apartment seemed unprepared to deal with this particular brand of terrorism. The police detectives and FBI agent who interviewed Arthurs and Russell appear to have given little credence to the evidence discovered in the apartment, or to Arthurs’ allegations that the group was plotting terrorist attacks and mass murders.

While Arthurs was taken to the county jail on homicide charges, police and FBI agents released Russell, who claimed that he used the explosives to power model rockets. An officer even drove Russell back to the murder scene so he could retrieve his car.

What happened next could well have been a disaster. Within hours, Russell acquired an AR-15-style assault rifle and a bolt-action hunting rifle. He loaded homemade body armor and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into his car, and set off for the Florida Keys with another Atomwaffen member. He was eventually arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Monroe County. They were shocked by the weapons and ammunition they found in the car. There was no luggage. No food. Russell didn’t seem prepared for an extended trip, they said.

“When we found all the weapons, we were convinced that we had just stopped a mass shooting,” recalled Deanna Torres, one of the deputies who captured Russell, who would eventually plead guilty to federal explosives charges.

Five former law enforcement agents spoke to ProPublica and Frontline about the handling of Arthurs and Russell. Most said they were baffled by the decision to release Russell.

Tampa police and local prosecutors would not discuss the case.

Atomwaffen didn’t disband in the aftermath of the Tampa arrests. The group continued to recruit new members, staging “hate camps” in at least two states that included weapons training. And the group’s violence went unhindered.

In December 2017, a 17-year-old Atomwaffen follower was arrested on suspicion of murdering the parents of his ex-girlfriend after they ended their daughter’s relationship with the neo-Nazi. A month later, Samuel Woodward was charged with killing a gay Jewish college student in California. Woodward, ProPublica reported in the following days, had participated in weapons training with Atomwaffen members in Texas in the months after the Tampa slayings. Woodward’s fellow Atomwaffen members cheered online when he was arrested, calling him a “one man gay jew wrecking crew.”

In response to questions about DHS’s readiness to combat white supremacist violence, DHS Press Secretary Tyler Houlton issued a statement:

“The Department of Homeland Security is committed to combating all forms of violent extremism, especially movements that espouse racial supremacy or bigotry. DHS takes all threats to the homeland, both foreign and domestic, very seriously and to suggest otherwise is an affront to the men and women of DHS that work tirelessly every day to ensure the safety of the American people. We will continue to work hand-in-hand with our federal, state and local partners to carry out our mission of keeping our country safe.”

Brandon Russell met Devon Arthurs online, on a site called Tinychat that provides video chat services, Arthurs said. Both young men lived in Florida — Brandon in Tampa, Devon in Longwood, a suburb north of Orlando. Wearing headsets, the two would sit at their computers and talk deep into the night.

Eventually, their conversations moved over to Iron March, a now-defunct neo-Nazi forum with the tagline “race war now!” On Iron March, Russell posted photos of himself posing with a Mossberg shotgun while wearing a white T-shirt bearing the words “Natural Born Killers” and an image of a Nazi eagle. Online, he celebrated school shooters like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (Columbine High School) and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech); mass murderer Anders Breivik (a self-proclaimed National Socialist who killed 77 people in Norway); and Hitler.

In addition to his fascination with fascism and acts of violence, Russell had one more obsession: nuclear weapons. He posted instructions online for building improvised nuclear reactors — it’s not clear how realistic these plans were — and studied nuclear physics as an undergraduate at the University of South Florida.

When Russell launched Atomwaffen in 2015, Arthurs was one of the first recruits to the group. Arthurs began gravitating toward Nazi beliefs at 13 or 14, according to his father, Alan Arthurs, who said he’s still mystified by his son’s interest in Nazism. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t know why,” he told Frontline and ProPublica.

In the spring of 2017, Devon Arthurs and Russell moved into the Tampa apartment. Arthurs had dropped out of high school and had no job. But Alan Arthurs believes his son and Russell were making lengthy road trips to sell illegal firearms in states far from Florida.

In time, Russell and Arthurs were joined in the Tampa apartment by Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22, two Atomwaffen members from Massachusetts.

Oneschuk and Himmelman were the dead men police discovered in the apartment on the night of May 19, 2017.

Alan Arthurs said his son called him after the shooting and confessed to killing the pair. Over the ensuing hours, Arthurs told a shifting series of stories about his motives. He told his father he’d killed them to head off Atomwaffen’s terrorist plans. He said something similar to investigators. But he also offered an even stranger version: that he’d converted to Islam and supported ISIS, and that he’d killed the two men because they mocked his newfound religion. A judge has since ruled Arthurs mentally incompetent to stand trial.

In his interrogation shortly after his arrest, Arthurs said he was aware of his mental health problems and wished he’d been hospitalized long before. He said that people might not think he looked like a terrorist, but that he had been engaged in dark and dangerous conduct.

And then, in quite composed fashion, he sketched out in great detail both the terrorist ambitions of Atomwaffen and the tactics law enforcement might use to infiltrate the group and bring it down. He warned the Tampa detective leading the questioning, Kenneth Nightlinger, against underestimating the group. Repeatedly, he tried to push back against what he seemed to regard as the detective’s skepticism.

Arthurs said Atomwaffen drew inspiration from The Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group active during the 1980s. Led by Robert Mathews, the organization believed the U.S. had been taken over by a shadow government of powerful Jews. The Order bombed a synagogue and in 1984 assassinated Alan Berg, a prominent Jewish radio host who lived in Denver.

Russell and Atomwaffen “venerate” The Order, Arthurs said in his interview with detectives. “These people, they have no human empathy like we do.”

“These people … they know exactly how to build, they knew exactly how to build bombs that could’ve destroyed this entire building,” Arthurs said.

Nightlinger often pressed for more information.

“Do you know about specific plans that these two individuals had?” the detective asked, referring to Oneschuk and Himmelman.

Arthurs said the men were planning on blowing up power lines near a major highway. They were going to use the HMTD to do it.

The detective pressed further.

“Did Brandon ever specifically talk about doing anything similar to that? To any government buildings?”

“Oh, absolutely. All the time,” Arthurs answered.

“Any specific ones?”

“Government offices, federal buildings,” Arthurs said.

The detective at one point tried to assure Arthurs that he and others would act on his information.

“This is absolutely serious stuff,” said Nightlinger, encouraging Arthurs to pass on “any information” that could be used to combat “these misguided individuals.”

Arthurs apologized for seeming flustered.

“I’m not trying to sound like a schizo cause I know that I’m trampling over words and stuff,” he said.

“No, no, you’re in control, man,” Nightlinger said. “You’re good, keep going.”

And Arthurs did.

Arthurs told the detective that Russell acquired guns and trained him and the other roommates in how to handle them. He said while Russell had joined the Florida Army National Guard, he’d used the American flag as a doormat to the apartment. He warned that if Russell was given the chance, he’d easily be able to reacquire the explosives that had been confiscated from the garage.

And repeatedly Arthurs offered to help law enforcement round up Atomwaffen members and dismantle the organization. He’d open up his computer. And he thought it would be easy to penetrate the computers of the others.

“You think having your computer, an FBI agent as you requested, sit down and go over this stuff, you think then you would open some eyes?” Nightlinger asked.

“Yeah, I definitely do,” Arthurs said. “I think that it would open some eyes to a much bigger thing than what happened today, and I think that I could definitely, basically save a lot of lives overall.”

At one point, the detective seemed persuaded. Nightlinger suggested he would pass the word to the appropriate agents in the FBI.

“I mean they’re actually going to be actually be made aware of this and they’re going to do their homework,” he said. “Just to make sure you’re not talking out your ass about something here in order to maybe gain some favorable treatment.”

The FBI would not answer questions about its handling of the Tampa case, saying that the investigation remains open. Agents have questioned former Atomwaffen members in at least two states, according to individuals with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

In a statement, the FBI said: “The FBI is not permitted to discuss any facet of the Brandon Russell investigation. The decision not to discuss this investigation was made in accordance with Department of Justice Guidelines and FBI Rules and Regulations.”

ProPublica and Frontline reviewed the crime scene photos and police reports from the Tampa apartment with Kerry Myers, a former FBI bomb tech who investigated the Oklahoma City bombing.

“They were making bombs,” Myers said. “This is a bomb maker’s workshop.”

Myers added that the materials were enough “to blow up a car, blow up an airplane, blow up a bus. We have the same basic explosive kit here that the Boston Marathon bombers had.”

Alan Arthurs, who had watched his son’s involvement in Nazism develop over the years and seems to have been the first person Devon called after the killings, told ProPublica and Frontline he has never been interviewed by FBI agents. The local Tampa detectives didn’t question Alan Arthurs until June 5, 2017, more than two weeks after the crimes, according to Police Department records.

At the Tampa apartment, investigators recovered one of Russell’s notebooks, which contained a hand-drawn map of a quarry located between Orlando and Tampa. The map included GPS coordinates for the quarry and a description of its operations. Such facilities often use high-powered explosives to blast through rock. McVeigh stole blasting caps from a mining operation before the Oklahoma City attack.

The quarry in Florida, a sand mine, is owned by E.R. Jahna Industries. Reached for comment, company executive Adell Jahna said that he had never heard of Atomwaffen and that the company had never been contacted by local law enforcement or the FBI in connection with the case.

During his interrogation, Devon Arthurs had not only warned of Atomwaffen’s violent ambitions, but said repeatedly that the organization had attracted U.S. military personnel as members and was aiming to recruit more.

Arthurs said Russell, the group’s founder, had signed up for the Florida Army National Guard in part to get the kind of combat training he might put to use for Atomwaffen. Russell had been drilling in Pinellas Park with the 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team on the day of the murders. In his own interview with Tampa police, Russell said he expected his unit to be deployed in 2018 and was considering the Army as a career.

“He joined specifically for the knowledge and the training, and he wants to use that training against the government,” Arthurs said of Russell during his police interrogation. “These people join the military specially to get training. To get access to equipment.” The ultimate goal, Arthurs continued, was to become more equipped to kill people.

Defense Department directives and the regulations of each military branch bar service members from engaging in white supremacist activity. Service members can face criminal charges and expulsion from the military for violating these policies.

After Russell’s arrest, the Florida Guard mounted an investigation into his activities while in uniform. Three weeks after Russell was jailed, the Guard wrapped up its inquiry. In a report, the Guard listed some of the troubling things it had found:

Russell had a tattoo of the Atomwaffen logo on his right shoulder. The investigator on the case noted that the U.S. military did not maintain a database of tattoos that might have been used to screen for troubling affiliations.
Two of Russell’s superiors had warned him about his conduct after he repeatedly “vocalized his hatred for homosexuality and ‘faggots.’”
Russell had “seemed very anxious to receive body armor, and keep his military issued gear.”

But the investigation concluded that Russell had not sought to recruit other soldiers for Atomwaffen, and that he “did not present consistent characteristics that would have led a reasonable person to suspect Russell held such radical beliefs.” Investigators determined there had been no negligence in allowing Russell into the Guard or in his continued presence in its ranks.

The two-page summary of the investigation, obtained by ProPublica and Frontline, contains no references to Arthurs’ statements to authorities about other possible Atomwaffen members in the military. Nor does it contain any evidence that the Guard had alerted officials in other military branches to the potential presence of Atomwaffen in their ranks.

The Florida Army National Guard did not respond to repeated requests for an interview regarding Russell.

This year, ProPublica and Frontline identified seven Atomwaffen members with military experience, including Russell.

The Pentagon did not respond to detailed requests from ProPublica and Frontline to discuss Atomwaffen and its possible recruitment of current or former military members.

In a statement, a Pentagon spokeswoman, Maj. Carla Gleason of the Air Force, said: “The DoD uses a multi-level approach to learn as much as possible about potential new soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines so we can assess whether they should be extended the privilege to serve in the military. While we can’t guarantee that every person who enters the service will be free from holding extremist thoughts, various screening tools provide us the best opportunity to identify those who do not share our values.”

Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, has studied the historic links between the white power movement and the U.S. armed forces. White power groups, she said, have long drawn from the ranks of the military. And former soldiers have become leaders of white supremacist groups over the decades.

Aryan Nations chief Richard Butler did a stint in the Army. KKK Grand Dragon Louis Beam served in Vietnam, as did White Patriot Party leader Frazier Glenn Miller. In 2014, after decades of involvement with white extremist groups, Miller murdered three people outside of a pair of Jewish institutions in Overland Park, Kansas. He was eventually sentenced to death and is awaiting execution.

Belew is careful to say that the members of the military who wind up affiliated with white supremacist groups constitute “a tiny, not even statistically significant percentage” of total service members. But those few, she said, have often played “an enormously important role” in organizing such groups and carrying out their bloodiest actions.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Belew said, white power groups increasingly modeled themselves on the U.S. military and began to focus on recruiting “both veterans and active-duty troops in order to run boot camps” and “create paramilitary training facilities.” As the movement grew more extreme, she said, it sought out people who could build improvised explosives or accurately fire a submachine gun.

Atomwaffen has certainly embraced that tactic. Current and former soldiers have participated in what the group calls “hate camps,” secret weapons training conducted in a number of states around the country over the last two years.

Those who have studied the relationship between military service and white supremacist ideology say soldiers can become deeply disillusioned when fighting controversial wars with little in the way of clear victories. They may return angry and damaged, animated by a degree of nihilism.

One Atomwaffen member who saw combat in Afghanistan discussed his emotional demons in the group’s private online chats. The man wrote that he had “nightmares about seeing people i know blown up” and felt guilt about inadvertently killing women and children.

ProPublica and Frontline interviewed a former Atomwaffen member who had served overseas in the Army. He would only speak if his identity was not revealed and asked us to call him Jeremiah.

“There were a lot of people that were disenchanted with the mission. I’d say about half of the guys in my unit,” Jeremiah said. “I think a lot of guys, they’re lost and they want hope. They’re looking for answers.”

Somehow he found those answers on Iron March, the now-defunct online neo-Nazi hangout that Russell used to launch Atomwaffen. According to Jeremiah, Atomwaffen “definitely wanted to appeal to veterans.” Within the organization, “people looked up to the military guys,” he said.

He said he encountered other racial extremists during his time in the Army: “There’s a good amount of them. They keep quiet for the most part about it, especially when they’re in because they can get in a lot of trouble.”

But it’s unclear how seriously the military is taking the matter. The former member said he’s never been contacted by military investigators.

ProPublica and Frontline interviewed more than 20 officials with direct knowledge of the military’s handling of felony-level criminal investigations. Most said racial extremists were a low priority for military police and detectives with elite military law enforcement units like the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which polices the Navy and Marine Corps. Military investigators are more focused on street gangs operating within the armed forces, sexual assault and illegal drugs, the officials said.

Roughly a year after Russell’s arrest in Tampa, an Army investigator told ProPublica and Frontline that the Army’s CID unit had not opened an investigation into Russell and his neo-Nazi organization. Several military officials said Army CID had no jurisdiction in Russell’s case because he was a member of the Florida Guard and not an active-duty soldier.

ProPublica and Frontline published their initial reporting on the nexus between Atomwaffen and the military in May. Since then, the Marine Corps has taken action against Atomwaffen member Vasillios Pistolis, a lance corporal on active duty. Pistolis, who had allegedly participated in assaults during the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist rally in 2017, was court-martialed and ousted from the corps. In interviews, Pistolis admitted having been a member of Atomwaffen but denied being in Charlottesville.

In response to that earlier reporting, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., in May wrote a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis requesting details on the Pentagon’s efforts to rid the ranks of white supremacists.

Replying to Ellison, the Defense Department said that it had received “27 reports of extremist activity (domestic) by Service members over the past five years.” Military investigators, the letter continued, had investigated 25 of these reports; ultimately, 18 service members from across the military had been disciplined or forced out of the armed forces.

Gleason, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said she couldn’t provide information on individual cases but stated, “Our standards are clear; participation in extremist activities has never been tolerated and is punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” She added that commanders are “encouraged to be preventive and pro-active, and they are doing that.”

We took the Pentagon’s letter to Ellison to retired Maj. Gen. John Altenburg, who served as the Army’s deputy judge advocate general, the second-highest-ranking JAG officer in the Army. Altenburg said he was persuaded that the military is taking proper action against offenders in its ranks.

“I’m pleased to see that they’re doing all this,” Altenburg said of the 18 cases of discipline handed down by the Pentagon. “This looks very thorough to me and looks like they’re on top of it.”

He noted that the Pentagon letter did not distinguish between white supremacists and other types of political extremists.

At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Heidi Beirich was skeptical of the Defense Department’s figures, calling them “laughable.”

“Hate groups are telling their people to join the military, and this was something that’s been documented, both in FBI reports and in DHS reports,” said Beirich, who heads the center’s Intelligence Project. “There’s not only going to be 27 of them, in a military force of, I don’t know, one and a half to two million people in the United States, who are under arms.”

Last year, nearly 25 percent of active-duty service members surveyed by the Military Times said they’d encountered white nationalists within the ranks. The publication polled more than 1,000 service members.

Beirich questioned the Pentagon’s willingness to root out white supremacists. “We keep sending stuff to the military, examples of people, saying: ‘You should look at this guy. He looks like he might be in violation,’” she said. “Most of the time we never even hear anything back from them.”

Climate Change Poses a Terrifying New Normal, Study Finds

While one-at-a-time disasters fueled by a rapidly warming planet have become commonplace in recent years—with the ongoing and deadly wildfires in California just one example—new research shows that by century’s end the frightening new normal could be cities and states facing multiple extreme climate events all at once.

Researchers at the University of Hawaii found that without keeping the warming of the planet below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, major cities like New York, Sydney, and Rio de Janeiro could soon face up to five catastrophic weather events in a single year—including wildfires, hurricanes, storm surges, and droughts.

The phenomenon has already taken place, the report notes, with Florida experiencing more than 100 wildfires, drought, and the severely destructive Hurricane Michael in the past year—but with most news reports and climate researchers focusing on one disastrous weather event at a time, the current reality has been obscured.

“A focus on one or few hazards may mask the impacts of other hazards, resulting in incomplete assessments of the consequences of climate change on humanity,” lead author Camilo Mora told the Agence France Presse.

The report only bolsters the argument of those forced to issue urgent action demands in the wake of whatever climate-related disaster has most recently struck. In the U.S. right now, that means the unprecedented wildfires that have ravaged California in recent weeks.

“The costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action on climate change,” Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, told the AFP. “We can still reduce future damage and suffering if we act quickly and dramatically to reduce carbon emissions.”

At least 80 people have been killed in the fires, with nearly 1,000 unaccounted for as of Tueasday morning, according to NBC.

“An untold number of people lost their lives due to the Camp Fire wildfire in California, many are missing and communities have been destroyed. Last week, the air quality in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay were the worst on the planet,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, in a statement.

“The increasing risks make it clear that this nation must deepen its commitment to stemming climate change now. We cannot accept the tragic loss of life and displacement from these wildfires as the new normal,” she continued. “We must honor the victims now by fighting for a better and safer tomorrow for their families and communities.”

One far-reaching solution was the subject of direct actions in lawmakers’ offices across the country on Tuesday, as the youth-led climate action group Sunrise Movement demanded that Democrats back the Green New Deal—a bold set of proposals modeled on the Depression-era New Deal and aimed at investing in carbon-free energy infrastructure and the millions of jobs it would create.

Real climate leadership means a #GreenNewDeal that can actually secure a livable future for all of us against the climate emergency.@RepRaulGrijalva @RepJayapal@repmarkpocan, will progressives step up with young people for the bold action we need? https://t.co/vl6ImX9xR1 pic.twitter.com/1NS9v6qWP8

— Sunrise Movement DC (@SunriseMvmtDC) November 20, 2018

Even the youngest among us are scared about climate change. That’s why we’re here asking @RepDianaDeGette to support the #greennewdeal pic.twitter.com/AoOKTyHcwf

— Anna McDevitt (@AnnaMcDevitt1) November 20, 2018

“It’s these kinds of social movement actions that we know can change the zeitgeist,” May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, told The Real News last week. “And we can’t always be talking about what we don’t want. That is why the Green New Deal is so essential, because it’s about the future we need to build…and that is, I think, a way of really capturing that we can do better.”

As California Fires Worsen, Environmentalists Demand a Green New Deal

With @dharnanoor and @mayboeve of @350.#CampFire #climate https://t.co/hlnzURpYOt

— The Real News (@TheRealNews) November 16, 2018

Proactive measures to combat the climate crisis will have far-reaching effects on the quality of life enjoyed by people all over the world, said Jonathan Patz, one of the authors of the University of Hawaii’s study—not just the effect of avoiding destructive wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.

“Our health depends on multiple factors, from clean air and water, to safe food and shelter,” Patz told the AFP. “If we only consider the most direct threats from climate change—heatwaves or severe storms, for example—we inevitably will be blindsided by even larger threats that, in combination, can have even broader societal impacts.”

Can the Los Angeles Times’ Revival Endure?

Part two of a two-part series. To read part one, exploring the decline of the Los Angeles Times and the veteran journalists leading its revival, click here. 

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” the famous press critic and journalist A.J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker in 1960.

Liebling penned those words in an age when press barons controlled powerful newspapers and filled them with propaganda that reflected their overwhelmingly conservative viewpoints.

Newspapers have lost much of their authority, and “press baron” has become an antiquated phrase. But in our brave new digital world, the power of media moguls has grown exponentially. That’s why a figure like Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong carries such outsize influence in America today.

I spent several days interviewing Los Angeles Times editors and reporters at their headquarters to better assess the publication’s new owner. He is a billionaire physician, scientist and entrepreneur with a lifelong admiration for newspapers. He was inspired as a boy in segregated South Africa by Donald Woods, the courageous anti-apartheid editor of the Daily Dispatch who was placed under house arrest and had to flee the country after exposing the police killing of Steve Biko, a leading civil rights activist.

“What forged me, a South African in apartheid, was a newspaper,” Soon-Shiong told Jessica Yellin of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism in an interview at the Pacific Council on International Policy. “Donald Woods was one of the editors going against the government. He was under house arrest, and [this was] what inspired me as a student. [I was] somebody who grew up with no vote, no ability to own property, not sure whether I am white, black, Asian. The only thing that informed me was this newspaper.”

Norman Pearlstine, whom Soon-Shiong appointed editor in chief at The Times, said, “He is an unusual owner. He said, ‘I grew up under apartheid non-white. It was through looking at newspapers that I realized there was a world where apartheid was not the governing principle. That’s why I got the hell out of there, and as successful as I am today, I still feel like the outsider I was growing up.”

He could have had me fooled. Just this month, Soon-Shiong revealed he would be a major backer of an Olympics-style sports competition to be held in the city that is home to his new newspaper plant, El Segundo. He presides over an array of corporations and nonprofits, some of which deal with the very government agencies his paper covers. Rising from obscurity as a UCLA physician-research scientist, he now moves freely among the highest echelons of Los Angeles civic life. Soon-Shiong joins a growing class of billionaire newspaper owners that includes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. (The former has helped revitalize The Washington Post, while the latter has turned the Las Vegas Review-Journal into a right-wing rag.)

Soon-Shiong, whose formal title is owner and executive chairman, will forge his own path. As I spoke to him over the phone, I found him to be an interesting man—one who likes an intellectual challenge and seems to enjoy challenging others. “You can never replace human capital, feet-on-the-ground,” Soon-Shiong told me. “That is not going to be what we will be.”

“Artificial intelligence is augmented intelligence,” he said, daring my conventional journalist’s mind to envision something new. Let’s say I was writing a story on bottled water, for instance. “You press a button, you have all this stuff about water,” he said. “It augments the intelligence of the reporter.”

Stories today are riddled with hyperlinks, and when all else fails, there’s always Google search. But Soon-Shiong’s button would be faster, permitting a reporter to quickly enhance a story with a single click. The reader, too, can be thrust into something as pleasant as a Fiji aquifer or as dangerous as runaway brush fires. Push a button on the Times website and you are there.

“Imagine that you could download an app similar to the L.A. Times app, and press a button to see an on-call doctor at any time,” he told the 2018 Select LA Investment Summit. “Imagine you had the ability to interact with anybody, anywhere or have access to livestreaming of any event. That’s what we’re going to try to release for you. I think this is an opportunity to truly change how we present media.”

Soon-Shiong hopes these innovations will solve the Times’ most pressing problems—declining print circulation, slow growth on the web and difficulty attracting young readers. Technology, he told me, can offer an answer. “You can take technology and see what is important to the readers, you can use technology to find out what readers want,” he said.

Take video games and esports, a form of online competition among collegiate and professional gamers. He believes the L.A. Times can use these kinds of media to reach younger readers who have been largely neglected, both by broadsheets and the newspaper industry at large.

His NantWorks holding company invested in Daybreak Game Co., one of several firms in the rapidly growing esports market. These investments have surprised traditionalists who wonder if the paper’s coverage of esports might pose a conflict of interest. But this kind of gaming is likely here to stay. Goldman Sachs has said esports has “one of the fastest-growing fan bases in pro sports,” and on a collegiate level, USC now fields an esports team that competes in the League of Legends.

“Esports requires a technical structure,” said Soon-Shiong, who plans to build one out in the Times building and at a new facility next door. Each will house the technology needed for video game competition, as well as arena seating for fans to watch. Among them, he hopes, will be the young people who now rely on social media for their news, much of it fake. Soon-Shiong aims to intersperse these competitions with “truthful news that will engage the readers.”

The plan is remarkably straightforward: Seduce the young with games, and also give them factual news. “Their viewership … is tens of millions or sometimes a hundred million,” he told Elex Michaelson of Fox 11. “It’s crazy we don’t go there to engage.”

This isn’t the kind of idea you typically hear at media conferences. But as Soon-Shiong told USC’s Yellin, he thinks of himself “as a physician, a biologist and a scientist. I have this almost insatiable curiosity and ability to integrate very complex ideas that hopefully can transform into impact for humanity. That drives me every day. … So fortunately, or unfortunately, that is my curse. I run a lot of thought experiments in my head that I quickly translate. The L.A. Times is one of them, actually.”

Soon-Shiong made his fortune with ideas. Not only did he invent and develop the revolutionary anti-cancer drug Abraxane, according to the website of the government’s Health Information Technology Advisory Committee, but he also discovered a way to administer the medication more easily and effectively. Abraxane has since received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, lung cancer and advanced pancreatic cancer, prompting Soon-Shiong to sell two of his companies for $4.6 billion and $4.3 billion respectively.

Soon-Shiong controls several companies and nonprofit organizations as well, each engaged in a number of diverse activities. One of the companies is NantEnergy, which has created an energy storage system—more specifically, batteries that run on zinc and oxygen. They are both rechargeable and provide energy much more cheaply and efficiently than the common lithium battery. As many as 110 villages in Africa and Asia are currently being powered by NantEnergy’s innovation.

Not all of Soon-Shiong’s ventures have been successful. Verity Health System, a nonprofit operator of six California hospitals, has filed for bankruptcy protection and is currently seeking a buyer for some or all of the facilities. The company has said that its hospitals, which generally serve the poor, will remain open.

“After years of investment to assist in improving cash flow and operations, Verity’s losses continue to amount to approximately $175 million annually,” Rich Adcock, chief executive of Verity Health, told the Los Angeles Times. “The losses mounted despite the $300-million cash infusion from Dr. Soon-Shiong and his NantWorks entities.”

A story by Rebecca Robbins at the national health website Stat revealed that NantHealth gave $12 million to the University of Utah, which then sent $10 million back to the firm to pay for genetic sequencing. A separate story in Politico has raised questions about the relationship between Soon-Shiong’s companies and the nonprofits he heads.

“Nobody should be a target just because they want to help our country.  Cancer affects all Americans,” Soon-Shiong fired back on Twitter. In a separate tweet, he attacked Stat and Politico for their reporting on his meetings with President-elect Donald Trump. (At the time, he was lobbying for a position in the administration.) “Politico/Stat attacks anyone who meets POTUS to serve the U.S.,” he wrote. “Important to give back. That’s why I am doing what I do.” A separate tweet read: “Media attacks anyone who meets @POTUS to serve the U.S. I grew up in a place with no freedom. Important to give back.”

The Times’ staff will have to figure out this complicated man and try to implement his vision, however it evolves.

Pearlstine and Deputy Managing Editor Sewell Chan recently sent messages to staff announcing a reorganization designed to bring order to a process that remains a work in progress. Chan has been tasked with gathering, editing and presenting the news in a way that will compete with the fast-moving, easy-to-follow websites of The New York Times and The Washington Post. “My first priority is to rebuild our team and restore momentum that was lost during a period of turmoil,” he told me.

A digital operation called “The Hub” features news and copy desks alongside design, data and graphic experts, all of them operating at top speed and updating the site continuously over the course of the day. This faster, more centralized effort is a key component of what it takes to help the Times adapt to the speed of the new era, according to new management.

As assistant managing editor for digital, Len De Groot oversees digital platforms and audience engagement. He also helps decide where to position stories and visual presentations on the website.

At a 7:30 a.m. meeting, editors decide which stories to feature. De Groot said they also decide “how stories should be told,” with a mix of text, pictures, charts, videos and whatever else that will keep their readers engaged. The story lineup is changed hour by hour as events unfold.

What fascinated me was the way that De Groot and his colleagues measure audience engagement by tracking how many people are reading a story in real time. That tracking is done through a firm called Chartbeat, which assigns each story a numerical ranking. “It tells us how many people are on a given story,” said De Groot. “I monitor Chartbeat all day. If a story is dropping down in the rankings, a new headline might boost it up.”

I wondered if the process might cheapen the news.

“Why?” he asked. “Why is making a story more accessible cheapening it?” Writing headlines, he said, is a longtime journalistic skill. “I really don’t think there is any cheapening of journalism at all,” he continued.

I talked to a number of reporters and editors. They said they felt no pressure to cheapen their work, but they have to produce considerably more, and faster.

“Now it is important to update constantly,” said political reporter Michael Finnegan. “There’s a first version. The second will be better. The third will be better.”

What about the pressure to produce?

“It depends,” he said. “On a good story, the adrenaline gets going. … I want to post as fast as possible without making a mistake.”

“I have to be involved in a way that I wasn’t,” Finnegan continued, addressing the need for reporters to write their own headlines. “I had to learn a skill that I didn’t have. [And on] breaking news stories, I choose the photo. That is something I did not do before.” Still, he said, his job remains “good reporting, good writing. It is still the point to bring something to the table that others can’t.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Bettina Boxall said she’s still writing stories about the wildfires and other environmental issues, simplifying the complex, and, in her words, “doing what I have done for years.” At the height of the recent California fires, she and Paige St. John produced a model of explanatory journalism, “California’s Most Destructive Wildfire Should Not Have Come as a Surprise.”

National correspondent Matt Pearce is a new-school journalist with old-school sensibilities. Not only does he know how to assemble a story, but he can do so at internet speed. Pearce is a throwback to the days when print newspapers rolled out multiple editions during the day and evening, replete with new stories and fresh leads. Half of his pieces are assigned by editors, and half he pitches himself. His goal, along with that of his colleagues, is to capture readers from competing sites.

As word of the Los Angeles Times’ revival spreads, job applications have increased, exceeding availability. “We have many hundreds of applicants for the foreign and national jobs that are opening,” said Foreign Editor Mitchell Landsberg, whose job includes reviewing said applications.

Why, I wondered, are people interested in working for an industry that’s so unstable?

“They use the word ‘fun,’ ” said Steve Padilla, who runs the Metpro program for hiring and training a diverse crew of journalists. “They wrote for the school paper, they want to right wrongs, comfort the afflicted. That hasn’t gone out of style.”

Pearlstine displayed a similar fearlessness when he eschewed a legal career to become a journalist several decades ago. Today, he is tasked with hiring talented writers for the paper’s depleted staff and molding them into an editorial team. But he also has to win over readers and advertisers alike.

“I think we make a mistake in thinking we are going to go up head-to-head on their turf with publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post,” he said. “They have a different sensibility, reflective of the audiences they have served for a very long time.”

“There are certain pockets … we obviously need to serve,” he continued. “Some of them are immigrant populations, you can imagine a site serving Filipino-Americans, or Korean-Americans. And then there are certain core issues I think are absolutely critical to anybody who is living here. Some of those are quite obvious, like immigration, homelessness, traffic.”

The naming of Victoria Kim to be the correspondent in Seoul, her native city, is one of the signs the new team sees the talent and potential of existing staff as well as new hires. She has been part of the metro staff, covering courts and the Korean-American community.

Pearlstine said the second thing to do to win people over “is identify those places where the title ‘the Los Angeles Times’ gives you license to address a larger subscription-based audience that has specific interests.”

Sports, food and entertainment would all fall under that banner. But most important, the Los Angeles Times must be a leader in the struggle for independent journalism, now under assault with a bona fide authoritarian in the White House.

To do so, the Times must rise from the ashes of the paper’s gross mismanagement. Hopefully, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, inspired by the courageous South African editor Donald Woods, will have the commitment to see its ascent.

We’re Headed Toward Perpetual Conflict and Cataclysmic War

American militarism has gone off the rails — and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Back in 2008, when I was still a captain newly returned from Iraq and studying at Fort Knox, Kentucky, our training scenarios generally focused on urban combat and what were called security and stabilization missions. We’d plan to assault some notional city center, destroy the enemy fighters there, and then transition to pacification and “humanitarian” operations.

Of course, no one then asked about the dubious efficacy of “regime change” and “nation building,” the two activities in which our country had been so regularly engaged. That would have been frowned upon. Still, however bloody and wasteful those wars were, they now look like relics from a remarkably simpler time. The U.S. Army knew its mission then (even if it couldn’t accomplish it) and could predict what each of us young officers was about to take another crack at: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fast forward eight years — during which this author fruitlessly toiled away in Afghanistan and taught at West Point — and the U.S. military ground presence has significantly decreased in the Greater Middle East, even if its wars there remain “infinite.” The U.S. was still bombing, raiding, and “advising” away in several of those old haunts as I entered the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Nonetheless, when I first became involved in the primary staff officer training course for mid-level careerists there in 2016, it soon became apparent to me that something was indeed changing.

Our training scenarios were no longer limited to counterinsurgency operations. Now, we were planning for possible deployments to — and high-intensity conventional warfare in — the Caucasus, the Baltic Sea region, and the South China Sea (think: Russia and China). We were also planning for conflicts against an Iranian-style “rogue” regime (think: well, Iran). The missions became all about projecting U.S. Army divisions into distant regions to fight major wars to “liberate” territories and bolster allies.

One thing soon became clear to me in my new digs: much had changed. The U.S. military had, in fact, gone global in a big way. Frustrated by its inability to close the deal on any of the indecisive counterterror wars of this century, Washington had decided it was time to prepare for “real” war with a host of imagined enemies. This process had, in fact, been developing right under our noses for quite a while. You remember in 2013 when President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began talking about a “pivot” to Asia — an obvious attempt to contain China. Obama also sanctioned Moscow and further militarized Europe in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Crimea. President Trump, whose “instincts,” on the campaign trail, were to pull out of America’s Middle Eastern quagmires, turned out to be ready to escalate tensions with China, Russia, Iran, and even (for a while) North Korea.

With Pentagon budgets reaching record levels — some $717 billion for 2019 — Washington has stayed the course, while beginning to plan for more expansive future conflicts across the globe. Today, not a single square inch of this ever-warming planet of ours escapes the reach of U.S. militarization.

Think of these developments as establishing a potential formula for perpetual conflict that just might lead the United States into a truly cataclysmic war it neither needs nor can meaningfully win. With that in mind, here’s a little tour of Planet Earth as the U.S. military now imagines it.

Our Old Stomping Grounds: Forever War in the Middle East and Africa

Never apt to quit, even after 17 years of failure, Washington’s bipartisan military machine still churns along in the Greater Middle East. Some 14,500 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan (along with much U.S. air power) though that war is failing by just about any measurable metric you care to choose — and Americans are still dying there, even if in diminished numbers.

In Syria, U.S. forces remain trapped between hostile powers, one mistake away from a possible outbreak of hostilities with Russia, Iran, Syrian President Assad, or even NATO ally Turkey. While American troops (and air power) in Iraq helped destroy ISIS’s physical “caliphate,” they remain entangled there in a low-level guerrilla struggle in a country seemingly incapable of forming a stable political consensus. In other words, as yet there’s no end in sight for that now 15-year-old war. Add in the drone strikes, conventional air attacks, and special forces raids that Washington regularly unleashes in Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan, and it’s clear that the U.S. military’s hands remain more than full in the region.

If anything, the tensions — and potential for escalation — in the Greater Middle East and North Africa are only worsening. President Trump ditched President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and, despite the recent drama over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has gleefully backed the Saudi royals in their arms race and cold war with Iran. While the other major players in that nuclear pact remained on board, President Trump has appointed unreformed Iranophobe neocons like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to key foreign policy positions and his administration still threatens regime change in Tehran.

In Africa, despite talk about downsizing the U.S. presence there, the military advisory mission has only increased its various commitments, backing questionably legitimate governments against local opposition forces and destabilizing further an already unstable continent. You might think that waging war for two decades on two continents would at least keep the Pentagon busy and temper Washington’s desire for further confrontations. As it happens, the opposite is proving to be the case.

Poking the Bear: Encircling Russia and Kicking Off a New Cold War

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is increasingly autocratic and has shown a propensity for localized aggression in its sphere of influence. Still, it would be better not to exaggerate the threat. Russia did annex the Crimea, but the people of that province were Russians and desired such a reunification. It intervened in a Ukrainian civil war, but Washington was also complicit in the coup that kicked off that drama. Besides, all of this unfolded in Russia’s neighborhood as the U.S. military increasingly deploys its forces up to the very borders of the Russian Federation. Imagine the hysteria in Washington if Russia were deploying troops and advisers in Mexico or the Caribbean.

To put all of this in perspective, Washington and its military machine actually prefer facing off against Russia. It’s a fight the armed forces still remain comfortable with. After all, that’s what its top commanders were trained for during the tail end of an almost half-century-long Cold War. Counterinsurgency is frustrating and indecisive. The prospect of preparing for “real war” against the good old Russians with tanks, planes, and artillery — now, that’s what the military was built for!

And despite all the over-hyped talk about Donald Trump’s complicity with Russia, under him, the Obama-era military escalation in Europe has only expanded. Back when I was toiling hopelessly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army was actually removing combat brigades from Germany and stationing them back on U.S. soil (when, of course, they weren’t off fighting somewhere in the Greater Middle East). Then, in the late Obama years, the military began returning those forces to Europe and stationing them in the Baltic, Poland, Romania, and other countries increasingly near to Russia. That’s never ended and, this year, the U.S. Air Force has delivered its largest shipment of ordnance to Europe since the Cold War.

Make no mistake: war with Russia would be an unnecessary disaster — and it could go nuclear. Is Latvia really worth that risk?

From a Russian perspective, of course, it’s Washington and its expansion of the (by definition) anti-Russian NATO alliance into Eastern Europe that constitutes the real aggression in the region — and Putin may have a point there. What’s more, an honest assessment of the situation suggests that Russia, a country whose economy is about the size of Spain’s, has neither the will nor the capacity to invade Central Europe. Even in the bad old days of the Cold War, as we now know from Soviet archives, European conquest was never on Moscow’s agenda. It still isn’t.

Nonetheless, the U.S. military goes on preparing for what Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller, addressing some of his forces in Norway, claimed was a “big fight” to come. If it isn’t careful, Washington just might get the war it seems to want and the one that no one in Europe or the rest of this planet needs.

Challenging the Dragon: The Futile Quest for Hegemony in Asia

The United States Navy has long treated the world’s oceans as if they were American lakes. Washington extends no such courtesy to other great powers or nation-states. Only now, the U.S. Navy finally faces some challenges abroad — especially in the Western Pacific. A rising China, with a swiftly growing economy and carrying grievances from a long history of European imperial domination, has had the audacity to assert itself in the South China Sea. In response, Washington has reacted with panic and bellicosity.

Never mind that the South China Sea is Beijing’s Caribbean (a place where Washington long felt it had the right to do anything it wanted militarily). Heck, the South China Sea has China in its name! The U.S. military now claims — with just enough truth to convince the uninformed — that China’s growing navy is out for Pacific, if not global, dominance. Sure, at the moment China has onlytwoaircraft carriers, one an old rehab (though it is building more) compared to the U.S. Navy’s 11 full-sized and nine smaller carriers. And yes, China hasn’t actually attacked any of its neighbors yet. Still, the American people are told that their military must prepare for possible future war with the most populous nation on the planet.

In that spirit, it has been forward deploying yet more ships, Marines, and troops to the Pacific Rim surrounding China. Thousands of Marines are now stationed in Northern Australia; U.S. warships cruise the South Pacific; and Washington has sent mixed signals regarding its military commitments to Taiwan. Even the Indian Ocean has recently come to be seen as a possible future battleground with China, as the U.S. Navy increases its regional patrols there and Washington negotiates stronger military ties with China’s rising neighbor, India. In a symbolic gesture, the military recently renamed its former Pacific Command (PACOM) the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM).

Unsurprisingly, China’s military high command has escalated accordingly. They’ve advised their South China Sea Command to prepare for war, made their own set of provocative gestures in the South China Sea, and also threatened to invade Taiwan should the Trump administration change America’s longstanding “One China” policy.

From the Chinese point of view, all of this couldn’t be more logical, given that President Trump has also unleashed a “trade war” on Beijing’s markets and intensified his anti-China rhetoric. And all of this is, in turn, consistent with the Pentagon’s increasing militarization of the entire globe.

No Land Too Distant

Would that it were only Africa, Asia, and Europe that Washington had chosen to militarize. But as Dr. Seuss might have said: that is not all, oh no, that is not all. In fact, more or less every square inch of our spinning planet not already occupied by a rival state has been deemed a militarized space to be contested. The U.S. has long been unique in the way it divided the entire surface of the globe into geographical (combatant) commands presided over by generals and admirals who functionally serve as regional Roman-style proconsuls.

And the Trump years are only accentuating this phenomenon. Take Latin America, which might normally be considered a non-threatening space for the U.S., though it is already under the gaze of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Recently, however, having already threatened to “invade” Venezuela, President Trump spent the election campaign rousing his base on the claim that a desperate caravan of Central American refugees — hailing from countries the U.S. had a significant responsibility for destabilizing in the first place — was a literal “invasion” and so yet another military problem. As such, he ordered more than 5,000 troops (more than currently serve in Syria or Iraq) to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Though he is not the first to try to do so, he has also sought to militarize space and so create a possible fifth branch of the U.S. military, tentatively known as the Space Force. It makes sense. War has long been three dimensional, so why not bring U.S. militarism into the stratosphere, even as the U.S. Army is evidently training and preparing for a new cold war (no pun intended) with that ever-ready adversary, Russia, around the Arctic Circle.

If the world as we know it is going to end, it will either be thanks to the long-term threat of climate change or an absurd nuclear war. In both cases, Washington has been upping the ante and doubling down. On climate change, of course, the Trump administration seems intent on loading the atmosphere with ever more greenhouse gases. When it comes to nukes, rather than admit that they are unusable and seek to further downsize the bloated U.S. and Russian arsenals, that administration, like Obama’s, has committed itself to the investment of what could, in the end, be at least $1.6 trillion over three decades for the full-scale “modernization” of that arsenal. Any faintly rational set of actors would long ago have accepted that nuclear war is unwinnable and a formula for mass human extinction. As it happens, though, we’re not dealing with rational actors but with a defense establishment that considers it a prudent move to withdraw from the Cold War era Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia.

And that ends our tour of the U.S. military’s version of Planet Earth.

It is often said that, in an Orwellian sense, every nation needs an enemy to unite and discipline its population. Still, the U.S. must stand alone in history as the only country to militarize the whole globe (with space thrown in) in preparation for taking on just about anyone. Now, that’s exceptional.