Chris Hedges's Blog, page 413

Donald Trump’s Fascist Politics and the Language of Disappearance

In an age when speed overcomes thought, a culture of immediacy blots out any vestige of historical memory and markets replace social categories, language loses its critical moorings and becomes what Chris Hedges has called “a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.”

No longer a vehicle for critique, doubt or possibility, language in the age of Donald Trump upholds the cultural and political workstations of ignorance and paves the way for a formative culture ripe with the death-saturated practices and protocols of fascist politics. As a species of neoliberal fascism eradicates social bonds and democratic communal relations, vulgarity parades as political wisdom and moral cowardice becomes a mark of pride. In a neoliberal age that has a high threshold of disappearance, the sins of a Vichy-inspired history have returned and are deeply rooted in a Republican Party that is as criminogenic as it is morally irresponsible and politically corrupt.

Of course the threads of a fascist politics weave through both political parties, which have sold their souls to the financial elite, though the Democrats do their work under the cover of self-righteousness and constitutional liberties while the Republicans bask in their embrace of corruption and a craven silence in the face of Trumpism. Vast apparatuses of pedagogical regulation endlessly work to produce a kind of Orwellian magic realism in which fiction and reality collapse into each other and the label of “fake news” provides a camouflage for serial liars.

The bad-faith vocabulary of individual responsibility, self-reliance, and choice eliminates the notions of soul crushing constraints and broader systemic forces, and in so doing produces armies of individuals stuck in the debilitating grip of social atomization, low self-esteem and the anxieties produced in landscapes of battered schools, rusting towns and meaningless work, if available. The destruction of collective structures capable of resisting the discourse of fascist politics go hand in hand with a culture awash in civic illiteracy and a culture of cruelty. Persistent denigration now leads to unbridled racism, the resurgence of white nationalism and an indifference to rampant criminality at the highest levels of government.

Robert Jay Lifton’s description of an earlier historical moment as a “death-saturated age in which matters of violence, survival, and trauma inescapably bear down on daily experience” has returned in a new form with a vengeance under the Trump regime. Yet such an age has been met by those in power with a silence that reeks with the scourge of complicity and the moral blindness of a kind of willful ignorance.

Where is the collective rage among the Republican Party over Trump’s endless rhetorical tropes of hate and demonization that both wound and undermine the foundations for a civil society? What can be said about an administration and its followers that refuse to respond to the accusation that Trump’s highly charged rhetoric both legitimates and fuels acts of violence? Why does the American public not erupt in outrage when the Trump administration makes the anti-Semitic claim that George Soros is funding the caravan of migrant workers, and engages in outright racist slurs by calling Maxine Waters a “low IQ person” and demeaning the intelligence of basketball great LeBron James and CNN anchor Don Lemon? What kind of signals does this type of rhetoric send to numerous fascist groups that support him?

Trump thrives on promoting social divisions and often references violence as a means of addressing them. His praise of Greg Gianforte, then a Montana congressional candidate (and now a congressman) for body-slamming a Guardian reporter in 2017 registers as a mark of pride. Oblivious to the horrors of the past, Trump once called the Nazi protesters in Charlottesville “very fine people.” Unsurprisingly, David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan, praised Trump for the remark. This is the politics of fascism wrapped in the discourse of indifference and disappearance.

The language of compassion, community and vulnerability is erased from government media sites, as is any reference to climate change. References to compassion, the grammar of ethics, justice and democracy wither as the institutions that enable and promote them are defunded, corporatized or privatized. The language of egoism, self-interest, hyper-masculinity and a vapid individualism erase any reference to social bonds, public commitments, the public good and the commons. Even worse, under the blitz of a rhetoric of bigotry, hatred and dehumanization, the ability to translate private issues into lager systemic and public concerns is diminished. The language of fascism is now reinforced by a culture of immediacy, stupidity, ignorance and civic illiteracy, and as such promotes a culture in which the only obligation of citizenship is consumption and the only emotion worth investing in is unbridled anger largely directed at Blacks, undocumented immigrants, Muslims, and the oppositional media.

In the age of Trump, self-reflection is a liability. Reason and informed judgment are increasingly viewed as archaic and outdated. Trump both embodies and models an age in which power and ignorance reinforce each other. One recent example brings this point home in spades. Following  the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Trump was criticized for his ongoing rhetoric of bigotry, dehumanization and violence. He responded with his usual felonious flight from any sense of moral and political responsibility by stating that he was going to “tone up” his rhetoric rather than tone it down. He lies endlessly, shreds standards for discerning the truth, and produces falsehoods daily in order to divert the media from addressing serious topics ranging from health care to attacks on Social Security and the Mueller investigation.

Peter Baker and Linda Qiu of the New York Times reinforce this charge by pointing to the litany of lies Trump produced while campaigning for the midterm elections. They write:

As he barnstorms the country trying to help Republican allies, President Trump has offered voters this fall a litany of misleading statements and falsehoods that exaggerate even legitimate accomplishments and distort opponents’ views beyond the typical bounds of political spin. In the past couple of weeks alone, the president has spoken of riots that have not happened, claimed deals that have not been reached, cited jobs that have not been created and spun dark conspiracies that have no apparent basis in reality. He has pulled figures seemingly out of thin air, rewritten history and contradicted his own past comments.

The endless lying is about more than diversion or a perpetual motion machine of absurdist theater. It is also about creating a mediascape where morality disappears and a criminogenic culture of thuggery, corruption, white supremacy and violence flourishes — and democracy dies. History seems to be repeating itself in a script in which language collapses into an ecosystem of falsehoods, militarism and racism.

Jason Stanley, in his book, “How Fascism Works,” argues that the 10 pillars of a fascist politics are alive and well in the United States. The pillars he points to are the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety and appeals to the heartland. History offers us a reliable narrative of the horrific consequences of a society in which the elements of a fascist politics are at work and points to how, closer to the current historical moment, anti-Semitism is couched in the language of globalization and the call for racial and social cleansing is echoed in the discourse of borders and walls. What historical memory reveals in this case is an emergence of a form of fascist politics that alarmingly resembles the 1930s.

In an age when civic literacy and holding the powerful accountable for their action are dismissed as “fake news,” ignorance becomes a breeding ground not just for hate but also for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance a non-negotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful to poison everyday discourse.

State-sanctioned ignorance is more than fodder for late-night comedy shows. It also provides the psychological conditions for individuals and groups to associate the discourse of “pollution” and disposability with what Richard A. Etlin calls “a biologically racialist worldview, which divides the human race according to the dichotomy of the pure and impure, the life-enhancing and the life-polluting.” This is a language mobilized by the energies of the ethically dead, and resonates strongly with the anti-Semitism that was at the center of the genocidal policies of the Third Reich.

The endpoint of the language of disappearance can also be seen in the warehousing of minorities of class and color into the school-to-prison pipeline, a carceral system that represents a bloated and punitive  21st-century apparatus of apartheid, and a regime of law and order in which young black men are indiscriminately subjected by the police to racial harassment and extreme violence. The language and logic of disappearance is also evident in attempts to both punish and make invisible the voices of the poor, homeless and sick who lack basic economic rights such as health care, housing, a living-wage job and quality education. As the language of violence saturates American society, the underlying causes resulting in the killing of journalists both at home and abroad disappear in the spectacle of lies and tweet-bombs that emerge from the White House daily. Trump, obsessed with weaponizing Twitter, is Archie Bunker in drag, who outdoes his comedy routine by, as Matthew Miles Goodrich observes, “railing against fake news, in a moment where Khashoggi was dismembered for being a dissident member of the press.”

The Trump administration has now joined ranks in enabling the vile discourses of racism and anti-Semitism, which have returned to an unusual and dangerous extent in Hungary, Poland and a number of other countries now moving towards fascism. These discourses have come back to life, occupying centers of power, while surfacing among alt-right and other neo-Nazi groups in the United States. It is difficult to ignore, but apparently among politicians easy to forget, that Trump’s racist remarks set the tone for his presidential campaign and have been the driving force during his presidency. Under the Trump administration, people who should be considered a threat to democracy are now at the center of power and embraced by Trump. Moreover, as Trump increasingly appeals more and more to his base, his discourse becomes more extreme and his condoning and fomenting of violence more intensified.

The threads of a general political and ideological crisis run deep in American history. With each tweet and policy decision, Trump pushes the United States closer to a full-fledged fascist state. His words sting, but his policies can kill people. Trump’s endless racist taunts, dehumanizing expressions of misogyny, relentless attacks on all provisions of the social state and ongoing contempt for the rule of law serve to normalize a creeping fascist politics. Moreover, his criminogenic disdain for any viable sense of civic and moral responsibility gives new meaning to an ethos of a selfishness and a culture of cruelty, if not terror, that has run amok in the United States.

An aura of corruption, lies, mendacity and violence defines this administration. The erosion of public values and the rule of law are now accompanied by a worldview that wreaks havoc on everything it touches. The walking dead now inhabit the White House and they have a ravenous appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe. Preoccupied with apocalyptic delusions, they view the current age as one of privileged disposability — a period in which racial and social cleansing informs their model of politics and governance. This is the politics of invented danger, rooted in a discourse that chomps on the flesh of the body politic, whose power is in part haunted by a paranoia over the possibility or threat posed by repressed ideals of the promise and possibility of a radical democracy.

Some high-profile Republicans have dismissed the charge of fascism against the current administration as fraudulent or claim that the real threat to national sovereignty comes from anyone who is not white or for that matter even Democrats. For Trump as well as his spineless Republican allies and many of his unquestioning followers, facts or morality appear never to get in the way of acknowledging the degree to which Trumpism has normalized violence as a tool to squelch dissent or threaten journalists and others critical of Trump’s fascist politics.

Many in Trump’s fan base suffer from more than a bad-faith act of adoration for the strongman; they also represent a corrosive element of fandom marked by what appears to be a gleeful allegiance to the structures of white supremacy.The rhetoric of violence, hate and intolerance has morphed into the service of fashioning Trump as the undisputed strongman at the center of a stupefied cult, and as a symbol for criminalizing those individuals and groups considered disposable and outside the ultra-nationalist notion of America as a white public sphere.

Under Trump, violence defines the political sphere, if not politics itself, and has become a mythic force in which all meaning, desire, relations and actions are framed with a friend/enemy divide. This is the worldview of the demagogue, and points alarmingly to a resurgence of a fascist ideology updated for the 21st century. Trump’s rhetoric of hate resembles the Nazi obsession with the discourse of elimination, ritualistic acts aimed at purging critical thought and undermining informed judgment. This is the discourse of barbarians, and a petri dish for nourishing the virus of a fascist politics.

Of course, Trump is not simply some eccentric clown who happened to be elected by a body of angry and desperate sleepwalking voters. He is symptomatic of a savage form of neoliberalism that over the past 40 years has promoted a war against the welfare state, the most vulnerable and those deemed excess while punishing everyone else with austerity policies that also made the financial elite richer and major corporations more powerful. Extreme wealth and inequality has found its savior and unabashed apostle in Donald Trump — a populist for the rich. Trump is distinctive in that he merges the worst of casino capitalism with an unapologetic reverence for white supremacy and bigotry. Government welfare for the rich and misery for everyone else, mixed with relentless racism that has dispensed with the old dog-whistle variety for the bullhorn variety of Bull Connor, archenemy of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Trump delights in smearing those individuals and groups he considers disposable. He has brazenly attacked journalists even in the face of a growing number of assaults on them — over 1,000 killed in the last decade across the globe. He has endlessly defended Saudi Arabia’s role in torturing and killing Jamal Khashoggi, unabashedly suggesting that the profits from trading in weapons of death are more important than defending civil and human rights.

Trump delights in producing and suggesting cruel policies that might have seemed unimaginable a decade ago. For instance, he now threatens to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship, believing his nativist impulses can overturn the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. His racism appears unbounded, given his endless attacks on immigrants, Muslims and blacks. When asked about his history of racism, he dismisses it, stating that the term is applied by Democrats to Republicans who occupy positions of power. He wages war on the planet through his support for the fossil fuel industry and his ongoing deregulation of corporate practices that pollute the environment.

The debris of violent shootings, racism, religious intolerance, the fog of celebrity culture and the destruction of civic culture has cast an apocalyptic shadow over the future of both democracy and the United States. Trump represents a ghost of the past, and we should be terrified of the way it emboldens and resonates with what is happening both in the United States and in other countries such as Brazil, Poland, Turkey and Hungary.

Trump’s love affair with some of the world’s most heinous dictators and his hatred of democracy echoes a period in history when the unimaginable became possible, when genocide was the endpoint of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and nationalist rhetoric ended in the horrors of the death camp. The world is at war once again: It is a war against democracy, and Donald Trump is leading the battle. Trump is our demagogue-in-residence, and the discourse of fascist politics and illiberal democracy no longer resides outside the United States. The menacing abyss of fascism is now at our doorstep.

Michael Bloomberg to Give $1.8B to Johns Hopkins University

BALTIMORE — Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Sunday he’s donating $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to boost financial aid for low- and middle-income students.

The Baltimore university said the contribution — the largest ever to any education institution in the U.S. — will allow Johns Hopkins to eliminate student loans in financial aid packages starting next fall. The university will instead offer scholarships that don’t have to be repaid.

University President Ronald Daniels said Bloomberg’s contribution will also let the institution permanently commit to “need-blind admissions,” or the principle of admitting the highest-achieving students, regardless of their ability to pay for their education.

“Hopkins has received a gift that is unprecedented and transformative,” he said in a statement, noting the prestigious school was founded in 1876 by a $7 million gift from Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins that was, similarly, the largest gift of its kind at the time.

By way of comparison, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Gates Millennium Scholars program in 1999 with a $1 billion commitment over 20 years. The Chronicle of Higher Education listed it as the largest private donation to a higher-education institution in the U.S. earlier this month.

Bloomberg said he expects the money will allow Hopkins to offer more generous scholarships and ease the debt burden for graduates.

“America is at its best when we reward people based on the quality of their work, not the size of their pocketbook,” he said in a statement. “Denying students entry to a college based on their ability to pay undermines equal opportunity.”

The 76-year-old founder of the global finances services and media company, Bloomberg L.P., is among the world’s richest people. He graduated from Hopkins in 1964, served as New York mayor from 2002 to 2013 and has for years weighed running for president — including in 2020.

Tijuana Protesters Chant ‘Out!’ at Migrants Camped in City

TIJUANA, Mexico — Hundreds of Tijuana residents congregated around a monument in an affluent section of the city south of California on Sunday to protest the thousands of Central American migrants who have arrived via caravan in hopes of a new life in the U.S.

Tensions have built as nearly 3,000 migrants from the caravan poured into Tijuana in recent days after more than a month on the road, and with many more months ahead of them while they seek asylum. The federal government estimates the number of migrants could soon swell to 10,000.

U.S. border inspectors are processing only about 100 asylum claims a day at Tijuana’s main crossing to San Diego. Asylum seekers register their names in a tattered notebook managed by migrants themselves that had more than 3,000 names even before the caravan arrived.

On Sunday, displeased Tijuana residents waved Mexican flags, sang the Mexican national anthem and chanted “Out! Out!” in front of a statue of the Aztec ruler Cuauhtemoc, 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) from the U.S. border. They accused the migrants of being messy, ungrateful and a danger to Tijuana. They also complained about how the caravan forced its way into Mexico, calling it an “invasion.” And they voiced worries that their taxes might be spent to care for the group.

“We don’t want them in Tijuana,” protesters shouted.

Juana Rodriguez, a housewife, said the government needs to conduct background checks on the migrants to make sure they don’t have criminal records.

A woman who gave her name as Paloma lambasted the migrants, who she said came to Mexico in search of handouts. “Let their government take care of them,” she told video reporters covering the protest.

A block away, fewer than a dozen Tijuana residents stood with signs of support for the migrants. Keila Samarron, a 38-year-old teacher, said the protesters don’t represent her way of thinking as she held a sign saying: Childhood has no borders.

Most of the migrants who have reached Tijuana via caravan in recent days set out more than a month ago from Honduras, a country of 9 million people. Dozens of migrants in the caravan who have been interviewed by Associated Press reporters have said they left their country after death threats.

But the journey has been hard, and many have turned around.

Alden Rivera, the Honduran ambassador in Mexico, told the AP on Saturday that 1,800 Hondurans have returned to their country since the caravan first set out on Oct. 13, and that he hopes more will make that decision. “We want them to return to Honduras,” said Rivera.

Honduras has a murder rate of 43 per 100,000 residents, similar to U.S. cities like New Orleans and Detroit. In addition to violence, migrants in the caravan have mentioned poor economic prospects as a motivator for their departures. Per capita income hovers around $120 a month in Honduras, where the World Bank says two out of three people live in poverty.

The migrants’ expected long stay in Tijuana has raised concerns about the ability of the border city of more than 1.6 million people to handle the influx.

While many in Tijuana are sympathetic to the migrants’ plight and trying to assist, some locals have shouted insults, hurled rocks and even thrown punches at them. The cold reception contrasts sharply with the warmth that accompanied the migrants in southern Mexico, where residents of small towns greeted them with hot food, campsites and even live music.

Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum has called the migrants’ arrival an “avalanche” that the city is ill-prepared to handle, calculating that they will be in Tijuana for at least six months as they wait to file asylum claims. Gastelum has appealed to the federal government for more assistance to cope with the influx.

Mexico’s Interior Ministry said Saturday that the federal government was flying in food and blankets for the migrants in Tijuana.

Tijuana officials converted a municipal gymnasium and recreational complex into a shelter to keep migrants out of public spaces. The city’s privately run shelters have a maximum capacity of 700. The municipal complex can hold up to 3,000.

At the municipal shelter, Josue Caseres, 24, expressed dismay at the protests against the caravan. “We are fleeing violence,” said the entertainer from Santa Barbara, Honduras. “How can they think we are going to come here to be violent?”

Some from the caravan have diverted to other border cities, such as Mexicali, a few hours to the east of Tijuana.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who sought to make the caravan a campaign issue in the midterm elections, used Twitter on Sunday to voice support for the mayor of Tijuana and try to discourage the migrants from seeking entry to the U.S.

Trump wrote that like Tijuana, “the U.S. is ill-prepared for this invasion, and will not stand for it. They are causing crime and big problems in Mexico. Go home!”

He followed that tweet by writing: “Catch and Release is an obsolete term. It is now Catch and Detain. Illegal Immigrants trying to come into the U.S.A., often proudly flying the flag of their nation as they ask for U.S. Asylum, will be detained or turned away.”

___

Guthrie reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writer Julie Watson contributed to this story from Tijuana.

Bill Nelson Concedes to Rick Scott as Florida Senate Recount Ends

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida political icon who first arrived on Capitol Hill in the decades when Democrats dominated this presidential battleground state, conceded his bitterly close re-election bid to Republican Rick Scott on Sunday, ceding a razor-thin race to the outgoing governor after a bruising recount.

Nelson gave up his quest after days of acrimony and tense recounting leading to a midday Sunday deadline for Florida’s counties to turn in their official results. Florida will not officially certify the final totals until Tuesday, but the totals showed Nelson trailing Scott by slightly more than 10,000 votes.

“It has been a rewarding journey as well as a very humbling experience,” Nelson said in a videotaped statement. “I was not victorious in this race but I still wish to strongly re-affirm the cause for which we fought: A public office is a public trust.”

The close of nearly two weeks of high political drama in the presidential swing state likely spelled the end of the political career of the 76-year-old Nelson. First elected to Congress 40 years ago, Nelson had been a Democratic survivor in an era when Republicans swept to power in Florida in the ’90s. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000 and was making his fourth attempt at re-election.

Nelson, a Florida native with a distinct twang, was defeated by Scott, a multimillionaire businessman and relative newcomer to the state who had been urged to run by President Donald Trump. A Scott victory will help Republicans boost their majority in the U.S. Senate.

This marked the third time Scott, who did not jump into politics until eight years ago, has barely edged a Democratic opponent.

Scott ran a harsh campaign against Nelson, calling him ineffective and out-of-touch. Amid the recount, Scott suggested that some county election officials were allowing fraud to occur.

“Now the campaign truly is behind us, and that’s where we need to leave it,” Scott said in a statement soon after official results were posted. “We must do what Americans have always done: come together for the good of our state and our country. My focus will not be on looking backward, but on doing exactly what I ran on: making Washington work.”

Trump congratulated Scott on Twitter: “From day one Rick Scott never wavered. He was a great Governor and will be even a greater Senator in representing the People of Florida. Congratulations to Rick on having waged such a courageous and successful campaign!”

Nelson was seen as a moderate who rarely made waves or earned much national exposure as he focused on Florida-specific issues. One of his more notable moments came when he flew on Space Shuttle Columbia while serving in Congress.

His only other election loss was in 1990 when he lost a Democratic primary for governor to eventual winner Lawton Chiles.

Mac Stipanovich, a Republican strategist who once called Nelson an “empty suit,” said he wasn’t sure if Nelson would have a legacy like other well-known Florida Democrats such as Chiles and former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. He called Nelson “something of a cipher” and said it was “remarkable how little space he occupies after such a long period of public service.”

But Stipanovich also said Nelson doesn’t fit in today’s highly polarized political environment.

“I believe Bill Nelson is a first rate human being and is a moderate in an age where there is no moderation,” said Stipanovich. “There’s much to regret about people like him leaving the public arena. We’re not better for all of this anger and polarization and Nelson is the antithesis of it.”

After it became clear the Senate race would head to a legally required recount, Nelson and Democrats filed several lawsuits that challenged everything from Scott’s authority over the state’s election division to deadlines for mail-in ballots.

The Nelson campaign managed to secure only one win in court. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker gave voters until 5 p.m. on Saturday to fix their ballots if they haven’t been counted because of mismatched signatures. Nearly 5,700 ballots were rejected because signatures on ballot envelopes did not match signatures on file with election officials.

The tense and bumpy recount followed an equally negative campaign. While the two candidates disagreed on key issues, they focused primarily on character and competence. Scott repeatedly bashed Nelson through TV ads paid for by more than $60 million of his own money, while Nelson branded Scott as a Trump follower who had used the governor’s office to pad his wealth.

It was seen as one of the marquee races of the midterm elections. But it was soon overshadowed by the governor’s race: a vitriolic competition between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum that became a proxy battle between Trump and his Democratic opponents.

Scott and Nelson disagreed on issues ranging from gun control to environmental policy to health care. Nelson was a strong supporter of the federal health care overhaul pushed into law by President Barack Obama, while Scott had called for the law’s repeal and replacement.

Nelson and his allies ran ads that questioned Scott’s ethics, pointing to his ouster as chief executive of health care giant Columbia/HCA amid a federal fraud investigation. Although Scott was never charged with any wrongdoing, the health care conglomerate paid a then-record $1.7 billion fine for Medicare fraud.

Support Grows for a ‘Green New Deal’ to Address Climate Issues

As the debate within the new House Democratic caucus continues to grow over the demand to create a New Green Deal select committee, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) came out on Saturday to say that not only should Nancy Pelosi create such a committee, she should appoint newly-elected New York freshman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be its chairperson.

“Pelosi should not only create this committee, but also appoint ⁦@Ocasio2018⁩ as Chair,” Khanna tweeted. “That is the boldness voters want. We need to shake up Congress & give the millennial generation a chance to lead. They have the most at stake re climate change.”

Theres so much thats important here — you have California congressman @RoKhanna using his platform to pressure the highest-ranking California lawmaker in Congress to put @Ocasio2018 in a position of real power. This is what solidarity & a political movement look like in practice. https://t.co/I0m3y2H5Ui

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 17, 2018

While the energy behind the demand has come from grassroots youth activists, led by groups that include the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez generated numerous headlines—and nearly a week of Capitol Hill chatter—after she joined protesters staging a sit-in at Pelosi’s office on Tuesday.

Since then, as many have noted, the arguments for and against making a bold climate plan a top priority of Democrats have put a spotlight on the tensions between the more centrist establishment figures in the party—as well as those who have taken the most from the fossil fuel industry over the years—and the ascendent progressive wing that is calling for much more aggressive policies and visionary solutions.

The veteran Democrats named as wary about a Green New Deal in this article have accepted nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests https://t.co/BBlMdFgpUd

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 16, 2018

Describing her engagement with the Pelosi sit-in and the activists who staged it as “good trouble,” Ocasio-Cortez said there’s a reason that Democrats, not the climate-denying GOP, are targeted on this issue at this point.

“I got a lot of heat when I joined these amazing activists on Tuesday,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Saturday. “‘Go protest Republicans,’ we were told. ‘You’re being disruptive and unhelpful,’ we were admonished. But the thing about protesting Republicans is that none of them listen to their constituents. We learned that w/ the Kavanaugh fight and so many before that. Democrats, on the other hand, do listen. So when everyday people show up in numbers and ask for change with commitment and consistency, we can get somewhere. And we are.”

Now we’ve gone from 6 Congressmembers to *7* who’ve signed into the #GreenNewDeal Select Committee resolution!

Thank you,@repblumenauer.

I am proud that our party walks the walk in listening to advocates and everyday people to make real, legislative change. https://t.co/q2FBgEJbto

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 17, 2018

According to the Huffington Post:

The Green New Deal committee, meant to include six Republicans, would be charged with drafting a 10-year federal infrastructure and jobs plan to neutralize the United States’ output of greenhouse gas emissions, adopt 100 percent renewable electricity and reduce widening income inequality. The resolution would likely seek to bar lawmakers who have accepted donations from fossil fuel companies from serving.

Maloney, Serrano and Khanna joined incoming House members Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) to support the proposal. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) did not return a request for comment, but told protesters on Friday he supported the Green New Deal.

Since Tuesday, the number of Democratic House members supporting the creation of the committee has continued to grow:

WOW.

Thank you to the 9 members of Congress and the dozens of organizations now supporting our #GreenNewDeal resolution with @Ocasio2018 & @justicedems!

Join our call tomorrow at 2pm ET to get plugged in to this growing movement: https://t.co/FiqvAVSjuN. pic.twitter.com/zSJ1utdsRY

— Sunrise Movement

Trump on Khashoggi Death Tape: ‘No Reason for Me to Hear It’

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump said there is no reason for him to listen to a recording of the “very violent, very vicious” killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which has put him in a diplomatic bind: how to admonish Riyadh for the slaying yet maintain strong ties with a close ally.

Trump, in an interview that aired Sunday, made clear that the audio recording, supplied by the Turkish government, would not affect his response to the Oct. 2 killing of Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post who had been critical of the Saudi royal family.

“It’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape. I’ve been fully briefed on it, there’s no reason for me to hear it,” Trump said in the interview with “Fox News Sunday.” ”I know everything that went on in the tape without having to hear it.”

On Saturday, Trump said his administration will “be having a very full report over the next two days, probably Monday or Tuesday.” He said the report will include “who did it.” It was unclear if the report would be made public.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that the crown prince ordered the killing in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, according to a U.S. official familiar with the assessment. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Others familiar with the case caution that while it’s likely the crown prince was involved in the death, there continue to be questions about what role he played.

Trump noted to “Fox News Sunday” that the crown prince has repeatedly denied being involved in the killing inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

“Will anybody really know?” Trump asked. “At the same time, we do have an ally, and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.”

A Republican member of the Senate intelligence committee said that so far, there is no “smoking gun” linking the crown prince to the killing. Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, who has received a confidential intelligence briefing on the matter, told ABC that “it’s hard to imagine” that the crown prince didn’t know about the killing, but he said, “I don’t know that we absolutely know that yet.”

He said that Congress will await the Trump administration’s report in the next two days and that the U.S. will need to be clear about the ramifications of sanctions, given Saudi Arabia’s strategic role in the Middle East.

For his part, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the crown prince has been a “wrecking ball” in the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

“I hate to say that because I had a lot of hope for him being the reformer that Saudi Arabia needs, but that ship has sailed as far as Lindsey Graham’s concerned,” the South Carolina Republican told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I have no intention of working with him ever again,” said Graham, who is in line to be the next chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Intelligence officials have been providing information to Trump for weeks about the death, and he was briefed again by phone Saturday by CIA Director Gina Haspel and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as he flew to California. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders provided no details of his call but said the president has confidence in the CIA.

“The United States government is determined to hold all those responsible for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi accountable,” the State Department said in a statement. “Recent reports indicating that the U.S. government has made a final conclusion are inaccurate. There remain numerous unanswered questions with respect to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi.”

The statement added: “The U.S. government has taken decisive measures against the individuals responsible, including visa and sanctions actions. We will continue to explore additional measures to hold those accountable who planned, led and were connected to the murder. And, we will do that while maintaining the important strategic relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia.”

Before his call on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that when it came to the crown prince, “as of this moment we were told that he did not play a role. We’re going to have to find out what they have to say.” That echoed remarks by national security adviser John Bolton, who said earlier this week that people who have listened to an audio recording of the killing do not think it implicates the crown prince.

Trump has called the killing a botched operation that was carried out very poorly and has said “the cover-up was one of the worst cover-ups in the history of cover-ups.”

But he has resisted calls to cut off arms sales to the kingdom and has been reluctant to antagonize the Saudi rulers. Trump considers the Saudis vital allies in his Mideast agenda.

But members of Congress are pushing Trump for a tougher response to the killing. The administration this past week penalized 17 Saudi officials for their alleged role in the killing, but American lawmakers have called on the administration to curtail arms sales to Saudi Arabia or take other harsher punitive measures.

Turkish and Saudi authorities say Khashoggi, a Saudi who lived in the United States, was killed inside the consulate by a team from the kingdom after he went there to get marriage documents.

The Dangerous Rush to Judgment Against Julian Assange

After years of speculation, we now know that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been accused by the Justice Department of committing crimes against the United States. We know this because an assistant U.S. attorney named Kellen S. Dwyer screwed up and inadvertently disclosed in a motion filed on Aug. 22 in an unrelated case that Assange has been secretly charged in an accusation that has been placed under seal.

The unrelated case is pending in the Eastern District of Virginia against Seitu Sulayman Kokayi, 29, who, according to The Washington Post, is linked to international terrorism and whose father in-law has been convicted of committing terrorist acts.

What we don’t know about the prosecution of Assange is virtually everything else.

For starters, we don’t know whether the charging document lodged against Assange is an indictment or simply a complaint. The difference is important because indictments are handed down by a grand jury, while complaints are generated by the Justice Department on its own initiative and are usually preliminary and superseded by subsequent indictments. If the charging document is an indictment, it would imply the department is ready to roll, and that a trial will commence as soon as Assange is arrested and extradited. (The Supreme Court has held that federal criminal trials cannot start in the defendant’s absence.)

More important, we don’t know the nature of Assange’s alleged offenses, when they allegedly were committed, or when the charges against him were filed.

Has he been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing classified material? Has he been accused of hacking in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in connection with the publication of emails taken from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential election campaign, or for receiving and publishing intelligence documents related to the CIA last year? Does he stand accused as a principal (primary actor), or is he viewed as an aider and abettor or a co-conspirator, either of Chelsea Manning, who leaked national-defense material to WikiLeaks in 2010, or the 12 Russian military officers who were indicted this July by special counsel Robert Mueller for stealing the Democratic National Committee’s emails?

We also don’t know whether Mueller’s office is responsible for going after Assange, or whether former Attorney General Jeff Sessions can claim the credit. In an April 2017 press conference, Sessions announced that arresting Assange was “now a priority.” The same month, Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA and current secretary of state, remarked in a speech delivered to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank: “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is—a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

It’s possible that Pompeo is right, and that Assange is in fact a Russian agent and not a legitimate publisher entitled to First Amendment protections. But possibilities are not proof. Speculation is not evidence.

It’s vital to remember in this respect something we are taught in high school civics: Even the lowliest of defendants in our criminal justice system is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Whether you love Assange and see him as a source of transparency in an age of government secrecy or regard him as a pro-Trump threat to democracy, he is entitled to that presumption. Anything less represents a dangerous rush to judgment that undermines the rule of law.

Writing in The Intercept last week, Glenn Greenwald decried the intensifying support for Assange’s extradition, not only on the right, but also among liberal Democrats who feel stung by Trump’s election and incensed by the help he may have received from Russian intelligence in scoring his improbable victory at the polls.

Trump, who professed his “love” for WikiLeaks during the campaign, is now on board with targeting Assange. Ever the opportunist, the president could easily flip back to the position he advocated in 2010 in an interview with Fox News, when he declared that Assange should receive the death penalty if brought to the U.S.

It’s important not to get swept up in the anti-Assange mania afoot today, not only because the mania undercuts the presumption of innocence, but because of the significant dangers posed to the First Amendment. As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted in a 34-page analysis published in 2017:

“While courts have held that the Espionage Act and other relevant statutes allow for convictions for leaks to the press, the government has never prosecuted a traditional news organization for its receipt [and publication] of classified or other protected information.”

In the trial of Assange, the government no doubt will contend that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate news organization. It is unlikely, however, the Trump Justice Department will be able to draw a principled line between publishers that merit First Amendment protection and those who do not.

The Obama administration declined to indict Assange because of what was described as the “New York Times problem”—that if Assange were charged, The New York Times, the Post and The Guardian, among others, would also have to be prosecuted for publishing classified material.

To get around the “New York Times problem,”  the Trump DOJ will have two basic options:

First, it could elect to blow through the problem, arguing that just because the Espionage Act has never been applied to a publisher in the past, there’s a first time for everything. Indeed, as the CRS’ 2017 analysis notes, the text of the act actually prohibits both the illegal acquisition and the subsequent dissemination of classified material.

Nor would the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Pentagon Papers case preclude the prosecution of Assange. The ruling in the Pentagon Papers case held only that the government could not enjoin The Times from publishing the material disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg. It did not hold that The Times could not be prosecuted post-publication. Although the Nixon administration decided as a matter of policy not to do so, the court did not resolve whether it could have charged The Times. The issue still has not been put to rest.

Should the Trump administration succeed in obliterating the “New York Times problem,” no publication would be safe from the administration’s vengeance and overreach. Small independent news organizations—think, Truthdig, The Intercept, The Nation and others on the left—would be especially vulnerable.

Second, in lieu of a blunderbuss assault on the “New York Times problem,” the Justice Department might argue that even if WikiLeaks is considered a publisher, the First Amendment should not apply to foreign news outlets.

Surprisingly, there is scant case law on the subject. What little there is, however, suggests that even if foreign publishers may not be seen as beneficiaries of the First Amendment, the amendment safeguards the rights of Americans to read material of their own choosing.

As a little-known and long-deceased federal district court judge, Stanley Weigel, held in 1964 in an obscenity case:

“Even if it be conceded, arguendo, that the ‘foreign press’ is not a direct beneficiary of the Amendment … the Amendment does protect the public of this country. … The First Amendment surely was designed to protect the rights of readers and distributors of publications no less than those of writers or printers. Indeed, the essence of the First Amendment right to freedom of the press is not so much the right to print as it is the right to read.”

I am not a fan of Assange. Like many, I fear that he has gone over to the dark side in the global battle against regressive nationalism. But I am not willing to sacrifice or bend the First Amendment—not even a little—in an effort to silence him or rush him to some kind of American justice.

The Only Catch in the Nonstop Coverage of Donald J. Trump

Face it: it’s been an abusive time, to use a word he likes to wield. In his telling, of course, it’s he or his people who are always the abused ones and they — the “fake news media” — are the abusers. But let’s be honest. You’ve been abused, too, and so have I. All of us have and by that same fake news media.

It isn’t complicated, really. Thanks to them, to those cable news talking heads who never stop yammering about him, to the reporters who clamor over his every word or twitch, he’s always there, 24/7. I know that it’s still called covering the news, but it’s a phrase that no longer faintly fits the situation. Yes, a near majority of Americans voted for him as president, but no one voted to make him a living (and living-room) icon, a never-ending presence not just in our world, but in all our private worlds, too.

Never, not ever, has a single human being been so inescapable. You can’t turn on the TV news, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, wander on social media, or do much of anything else without almost instantly bumping into or tripping over… him, attacking them, praising himself, telling you how wonderful or terrible he feels and how much he loves or loathes… well, whatever happens to be ever so briefly on his mind that very moment.

And if that isn’t really almost too obvious to write down, then what is? Still, just briefly, let’s try to take in the obvious. Let me put it this way: never, not since Adam or certainly Nebuchadnezzar, not to speak of Eve or Cleopatra, has anyone in history been so unrelentingly focused upon or mercilessly covered — so, in a sense, fawned upon (and, of course, “abused”). In the past, I’ve labeled what we’re living through “the white Ford Bronco presidency” because, for the last nearly three years, the media has covered him as if he were indeed O.J. Simpson in that car fleeing the police over his wife’s murder, as if, that is, there were nothing else on Earth worth gluing our eyeballs to, and not as in O.J.’s case for a relatively few hours, but for what already seems like an eternity.

In a way, this is the simplest piece I’ve ever written, because whoever you are, wherever you live in this country (or possibly on the planet), whatever you think of him, positive or negative, you already know all of this. You’ve already discussed it with your friends. You’ve certainly wondered what would happen if the mainstream media suddenly stopped attending to Donald Trump — and oh yes, I hadn’t mentioned his name until now, because why bother? You never had a doubt, did you?

My guess on the effect of such a withdrawal of coverage: he’d shrivel up and die. Your guess may be different, but it doesn’t matter because we’re clearly never going to find out. Even the recent presidential decision to take away CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass — doctored video of his behavior and all — after a distinctly abusive press conference (“I’ll tell you what: CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN”), was only the cause for yet another deluge of coverage. None of Acosta’s media compatriots, not even at CNN, decided, for instance, to protest by refusing to cover another White House event until he got that pass back (though CNN is suing the Trump administration). None of them evidently even seriously considered closing the door, shutting the gate, turning their backs on you-know-who. That clearly is the twenty-first-century media version of thinking about the unthinkable.

Honestly, who doesn’t talk about all this in the face of a presidency that’s in your face, all our faces, in a way that no other president, emperor, king, autocrat, dictator, movie star, celebrity, or [feel free to fill in whatever I haven’t thought of here] has ever before been. His every phrase, tweet, complaint, bit of praise, parenthetical comment, angry snit, insult, or even policy decision is reported, discussed, gnawed on, considered, reconsidered, yakked about nonstop, hour after hour after endless hour, reshown in clip after repetitive clip. This is, in short, a unique historical experience of ours and ours alone. How could we not talk about it all the time?

The Media Critic-in-Chief

Oh wait! Oddly enough, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s one place where it’s barely talked about at all, where silence largely reigns, and to my mind that couldn’t be stranger.

Here’s the only catch in the non-stop coverage of Donald J. Trump (2015 to 2018 and beyond): that same mainstream media that can’t get enough of him, that eats up and gnaws on his every odd phrase, gesture, act, or passing thought, is essentially silent on only one thing: the coverage itself. The most obvious subject in the world — not him, but the thing that keeps him going, that keeps the whole ship of state more or less afloat at this point — the unprecedented focus on him just doesn’t seem to be a subject fit for significant coverage, even though it’s a commonplace in our conversations out here in what still passes for the real world. We may regularly roll our eyes, but the mainstream media programmatically never does. Not in public anyway. And as was true from the beginning of the Trump era, from the New York Times and Politico to the Atlantic magazine, media outfits have hired yet more people to cover… well, Donald Trump (and not just from Washington either) and ploughed right on.

But do they cover themselves? Hardly. Media critics inside those mainstream companies have become an ever rarer species. The New York Times, for instance, let go of its “public editor” in May 2017 and left it to perhaps random tweeters to handle how the paper was covering anything. And that’s been typical. Or put another way: there’s really only one media critic left in the mainstream world — and you know just who he is! (A typical tweeted comment of his: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”) And sometimes that criticism couldn’t be more personal. (“Loser,” he recently called White House reporter April Ryan. “What a stupid question that is,” he said to CNN’s Abby Phillip. “What a stupid question. But I watch you a lot, you ask a lot of stupid questions.”) I’m referring, of course, to America’s media-critic-in-chief now in residence in Washington, D.C., when, of course, he isn’t out in the provinces getting a little love from his adoring “base” in those endless rallies for the midterm elections and, of course, the ones for the 2020 campaign, which began long ago.

And naturally enough, the “fake news” reporters can’t cover those rallies enough or discuss them and what he says at them more often. But again, there’s one catch, one lacuna, in all this. They almost never cover Donald J. Trump’s rally of rallies in that same analytical and dissecting fashion. I’m thinking, of course, of the rallies that truly keep him going — and by that I mean his endless set of interactions with… yep, the media. After all, without being eternally in their glowing spotlight, without that endless coverage of everything him, what would he be?

In a sense, those hordes of reporters crowding into his world are his most adoring fans (even if many of them may loathe him personally). They may not literally bathe him in love (as his fans in those stadiums do), but they certainly bathe him in what he loves most, what clearly keeps him up and running: attention.  And from each of those media “rallies” of his, however small, however impromptu, however angry or insulting, no matter the nature of the words exchanged, he clearly comes away feeling clean as a new-born babe (though they perhaps feel dirty as… well, who knows what).

It may not be a love affair, but it certainly is an affair to remember. And despite the fact that his official news conferences may be rare, he manages to meet the press (to use a thoroughly outmoded phrase) constantly and in ways too numerous to mention. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that he’s taken more questions from reporters — even if he’s regularly mangled and shredded them — than all our recent presidents (except that other classic narcissist, Bill Clinton).

The Donald’s Earned Media World

Being the canny self-promoter that he is, Donald Trump knows the value of those exchanges, no matter their nature. He knows that the specifics of what the media may write or say about him matter remarkably little, as long as they cover him in this totalistic fashion, as long as they never stop bathing him in his own ultimate form of glory. They are, as he would be the first to tell you, his “earned media.” In fact, just the other day at his post-election news conference, he had this little exchange with a reporter:

“Q: Mr. President, first off, I personally think it’s very good to have you here because a free press and this type of engagement —

“The President: I do, too. Actually? I do, too.

“Q: Yes. It’s vital to democracy.

“The President: It’s called ‘earned media.’ It’s worth billions. Go ahead.”

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is no fool. He knows that he’s got not just a knack but the knack for accruing “earned media” — that is, unpaid for publicity and advertising. Estimates were that he got a staggering $5.6 billion of it during his 2015-2016 election campaign and, exactly as he implied in that knowing aside, it’s never ended. And yes, it is “vital” to him, if not to “democracy.” Think of him, in fact, as President Earned Media.

Since we are talking about a mutual affair, however, the opposite is also true: Donald Trump is the media’s version of… at the risk of being completely repetitious, earned media. No one’s put it better than former CBS head Leslie Moonves — recently taken down by the #MeToo moment — during the 2016 election campaign. “It may not be good for America,” he said, “but it’s damn good for CBS.” He added, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this [is] going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” And, as we all know, Donald did.

Keep in mind that the media had been thrown into chaos and confusion by the growth of the online world of the Internet, as many news businesses faltered and staff cuts were widespread. How convenient, then, to stumble upon such genuine human clickbait, someone on whom you could focus your attention so relatively cheaply and profitably. So much for covering the world, a distinctly expensive proposition! Talk about bargain basement candidacies and presidencies!

From the moment he descended that escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015, Donald Trump became the media equivalent of a freebie — someone viewers and readers just couldn’t help watching, hearing about, reading about. It was like stumbling on a gold mine in the desert. As it turned out, Americans were indeed ready to have the talking heads of CNN (now the president’s eternal punching bag), MSNBC, and Fox News yammer on hour after hour, day after day, about him and only him. It was, in its own way, a genuine miracle for news companies that had found themselves up against the wall and it couldn’t have been more real, or — as, at some level, Donald Trump himself grasped — more fake.

Put it all together and you can understand how a major Trump rally — oops, I mean that post-election news conference of his — actually worked. But first let me take a moment, in truly Trumpian fashion, to thank myself on your behalf. Like you, I watched clips of that news conference. Then I did all of you a favor and actually read the whole 17,000-plus words of it, one hour and 26 minutes worth of his and their words, so you wouldn’t have to.

And believe me, it was quite a performance as the president called on/ignored reporters desperate to get his attention, insulted them, spoke with them, spoke against them, spoke over them (“We are a hot country. This is a hot White House…”), spoke around them, described them (“I come in here as a nice person wanting to answer questions and I have people jumping out of their — their seats, screaming questions at me…”), wandered away from them, wandered away from himself, ignored or didn’t answer their questions, was incoherent for significant stretches of time, or couldn’t even hold onto a thought. And by the way, the reporters there more than matched him (“One, I was tempted to ask you why you like Oprah so much, but I think I’ll go on to the question that…”), blow for blowhard (“Based off of that, how would you say, over the last two years, God plays — what kind of a factor He plays in the day-to-day execution of the Office of the Presidency?…”).

Read the whole thing and you’d have to be struck — even by the less-than-soaring standards of past presidential news conferences — by how little (with a bow to Gertrude Stein) there there actually was there. The president’s incoherence was remarkably well matched by the dreariness of the generally expectable, largely thought-free questions he was asked on a limited set of topics.

As always, though, there were those Trumpian moments that aren’t likely to leave your head soon thereafter. There was, for instance, the exchange in which the president called on PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, a relatively rare black reporter in that room. She began her question this way, “On the campaign trail, you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying…”

At that point, the president promptly interrupted to respond: “I don’t know why you’d say that. That’s such a racist question.” (Something he’d then repeat twice more.) The pure chutzpah of that response should have taken anyone’s breath away, but it was also a reminder of the strange sense of freedom Trump feels to say anything in the presence of the media, including mocking or insulting three black female reporters at that news conference.

And this can only happen again and again and again. It’s hard not to feel that we are all now eternally watching two sets of addicts who simply can’t exist without or get enough of each other.

Toward the end of that news conference, one of the reporters began a question (also focused on white nationalism) this way: “Thank you, sir. And I think we’d all love to have more of these, if you’re willing…”

It tells us so much about our twenty-first-century Trumpian world that anyone in that press corps would wish for more of the same. I have a feeling that somewhere in all of this someone, maybe Bob Mueller, should indict all of them for fraud. In the meantime, the rest of us remain in a world wallpapered with Donald Trump, a world in which the fake news media, which is his truest “base,” just can’t get enough of him.

Death Toll Rises to 76 in California Fire With Winds Ahead

CHICO, Calif. — Northern California crews battling the country’s deadliest wildfire in a century were bracing for strong winds Sunday that could erode gains they have made in containing the fearsome blaze, which has killed at least 76 and leveled a town.

Even as hundreds of searchers sift through the rubble in the town of Paradise looking for the dead, nearly 1,300 people remain unaccounted for more than a week after the fire sparked in Butte County, Sheriff Kory Honea announced Saturday night. Authorities stressed that the long roster does not mean they believe all those people are missing.

Honea pleaded with fire evacuees Saturday to review the list of those reported as unreachable by family and friends and call if they are safe. Deputies have located hundreds of people to date, but the overall number keeps growing because they are adding more names, including those from the disaster’s chaotic early hours, Honea said.

“It’s really very important for you to take a look at the list and call us if you’re on the list,” he said.

The remains of five more people were found Saturday, including four in the decimated town of Paradise and one in nearby Concow, bringing the number of dead to 76.

Among the dead was Lolene Rios, 56, whose son Jed tearfully told KXTV in Sacramento that his mother “had endless amount of love for me.”

President Donald Trump toured the area Saturday, joined by California’s outgoing and incoming governors, both Democrats who have traded sharp barbs with the Republican administration. He also visited Southern California, where firefighters were making progress on a wildfire that tore through communities west of Los Angeles from Thousand Oaks to Malibu, killing three people.

The president pledged the full support of the federal government. Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom thanked him for coming out.

“We’ve never seen anything like this in California, we’ve never seen anything like this yet. It’s like total devastation,” Trump said as he stood amid the ruins of Paradise.

Rain was forecast for midweek, which could help firefighters but also complicate the search for remains. The National Weather Service warned that on Sunday, the area could get 20 mph sustained winds and 40 mph gusts, which could make it hard for crews to continue making progress against the blaze.

Northern California’s Camp Fire has destroyed nearly 10,000 homes and torched 233 square miles (603 square kilometers). It is 55 percent contained.

The fire zone in Northern California is to some extent Trump country, and that enthusiasm was on display as dozens of people cheered and waved flags as his motorcade went by.

Kevin Cory, a wildfire evacuee who lost his home in Paradise, praised Trump for coming to a state that is often at odds with the White House.

“I think that California’s been really horrible to him and the fights. I mean they’re suing him,” he said. “It’s back and forth between the state and the feds. It’s not right.”

But for the most part, survivors, some who had barely escaped and no longer had homes, were too busy packing up what little they had left or seeking help to pay much attention to the president’s visit.

Michelle Mack Couch, 49, waited in line to get into a Federal Emergency Management Agency center in the city of Chico. She needed a walker for her elderly mother and tags for her car.

“Let’s hope he gets us some help,” said Couch, who voted for Trump and whose rental home burned down last week. As far as taking time out to watch the president, she said wryly, “We don’t have a TV anymore.”

Honea expressed hope that Trump’s visit would help with recovery, saying the tour by the Republican president and California’s Democratic leaders “signals a spirit of cooperation here that ultimately benefit this community and get us on a path toward recovery.”

In Southern California, Trump also met briefly at an airport hangar with families and first responders touched by the shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks more than a week ago.

Trump called the shooting at a country music bar, which left 12 dead, “a horrible, horrible event.”

___

Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire in Paradise, California, and Janie Har and Daisy P. Nguyen in San Francisco contributed to this report.

How Media Coverage of Trans Issues Set the Stage for Formalized Discrimination

Time magazine (5/29/14) declared a “transgender tipping point” in 2014, but corporate media continue to treat trans identity as a matter of controversy.

The New York Times (10/21/18) received access to a memo from the Trump administration calling for the Department of Health and Human Services to adopt a definition of sex founded on “a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The memo called for a definition that assumed a male/female sex binary, determined by the sex assigned to a person at birth based on genital appearance. Four days after this decision, the Department of Justice argued that it is legal to discriminate against transgender people in issues of employment.

Many in the media have been quick to denounce the Trump administration in the wake of these actions—without, however, assessing the ways that media coverage of trans issues have set the stage for this formalized discrimination. Ever since the so-called “trans tipping point”—how Time magazine (5/29/14) characterized the spate of attention given to “Orange Is the New Black’s” Laverne Cox—news media have been fascinated with transgender issues, often using the controversial nature of transgender rights to attract readership. Media outlets have featured many pieces over the last few years that do not simply sensationalize transgender lives, but attempt to frame them as up for debate.

This framing is not new for news media. Writing for the “culture wars” section of The Cut (2/7/16), Jesse Singal previously wrote on the firing of sexologist Kenneth Zucker, who is most famous for arguing against accepting the gender identification of transgender youth. Singal framed Zucker’s firing, from the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic in Toronto, as the result of transgender activists who were opposed to the questions Zucker is asking. This was depicted as an important debate being been shut down—“allowing a vital scientific question…to be decided by activists.”

Jesse Singal (The Cut, 2/7/16) treated gender identity as a debate club topic.

The underlying assumption of this piece was that transgender lives are up for debate in the first place, and that scientific authorities ought to be a vocal voice in this debate. For Singal, the fact that these authorities deny transgender individuals’ self-identification was less important than the necessity of debate. What was striking about Singal’s piece was the way that it framed transgender individuals as a controversy that needs to be resolved, not by transgender individuals themselves, but through emphasizing the voices of those who study and often speak over transgender individuals. Implicit in Singal’s call for debate is the paternalistic assumption that Zucker is more capable of understanding transgender issues than transgender individuals are.

Singal’s piece was particularly pertinent for understanding the Trump administration’s actions, given that the administration specifically appealed to an “objective” and scientific definition of sex. This appeal mirrors Singal’s own framing of self-identification and science as at odds, and justifies scientists and experts speaking over transgender individuals.

By “twisted social norms,”  the Washington Post headline (1/17/17) means the “left’s ultimate aim…to abolish gender distinctions entirely.”

The opinion sections of online news sites have also facilitated the idea that human rights are a “controversy” if the humans are transgender. For example, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post (1/17/17), Thomas Wheatley argues that while allowing transgender people to use their own genders’ bathroom facilities will not hurt women, the left “trivializes the debate as a patently obvious matter of civil rights.” Wheatley maintains that this debate is important because the “broader trend toward gender nullification — and its dissolution of prudent, time-tested boundaries of conduct”—will “directly endanger women,” because “traditional gender roles still serve as a deterrent to predatory behavior” (as if “predatory behavior” can’t be an expression of “traditional gender roles”).

By providing a platform to Wheatley, the Post allowed an abstract debate about hypothetical social norms to take precedence over protecting the right of transgender individuals to safely exist in public. While Singal’s piece framed scientific debate as more important than transgender rights, Wheatley promoted debates about social values as more important: “I do not want to vilify Mother’s Day as transphobic or chide basic chivalry as wrongful discrimination,” he declared.

Wheatley attempted to use a both-sides framing by brushing aside the most odious arguments against transgender rights, but ultimately only did so to make his later rejection and insistence on debate look more reasonable. This clearly demonstrates the extent to which Wheatley sees transgender lives as an abstract rhetorical talking point for a broader debate—about how “a wholly inclusive construction of gender…strips gender of all concrete meaning”—rather than as real human lives with their well-being at stake.

For transgender individuals, the stakes are high; questions of bathroom access deal with the ability to exist in public at all. An actual and fair analysis of the issue would take these concerns seriously and emphasize the effects that these issues have on transgender lives.

Acknowledging that trans people know their own gender “has produced a surprisingly broad backlash, from secular feminists as well as evangelical conservatives.” (New York Times, 10/15/16)

Likewise, a New York Times article by Judith Shulevitz (10/15/16), headlined “Is It Time to Desegregate the Sexes?,” argued that Obama era definitions of sex (the same definitions the federal government is scrapping) have been broadened too far in an attempt to protect transgender students. The article maintained that anti-transgender sentiment cannot be described as “mere intolerance,” because some anti-transgender activists are non-religious, presenting anti-transgender radical feminists as a more rational voice in opposition to transgender rights.

The article also framed the debate about transgender rights as an issue of “clashing values”: “Religious pluralism requires accommodation of the demure as well as the less inhibited.” While the piece makes several defenses of trans rights, the idea that we need to debate the federal definitions of sex set the stage for the Trump administration to change those definitions. In fact, the administration is responding to the same concerns that Shulevits says we must fairly consider. While the Times (10/21/18) now bemoans the administration’s proposal that transgender people be “defined out of existence,” its opinion section previously provided a platform for advocating these very definitional changes.

Following the release of the memo, media reporting has continued to use the framework of debatability to talk about the administration’s actions. An Economist piece (10/27/18) titled “Who Decides Your Gender?” condemns the memo, but goes on to suggest that allowing self-identification could harm efforts to “keep women and children safe.” It argues that “deciding how to balance competing rights and how to weigh risks will demand careful debate.” The idea that transgender people’s right to self-identify and exist in public spaces is up for debate is itself central to the justifications the Trump administration has provided for their actions.

Outlets like the New York Times and Economist simultaneously condemn the administration’s assault on transgender rights while propping up the framework that has been used to justify them. If media are truly interested in weighing risks, they ought to begin by understanding the intense forms of marginalization and discrimination that transgender individuals face. Unless we start with these ugly realities, any call for debate will simply function to render transgender lives abstract and potentially disposable.