Chris Hedges's Blog, page 425

America’s Wars Are Completely Ignored in the Midterm Elections

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.org.

The United States military is actively fighting in seven Muslim-majority countries; and no one cares. As Americans go to the polls today in a ritual pretense of democracy, they will vote for one of the two major political parties on issues ranging from healthcare to immigration to the basic personality of President Donald Trump. The three mainstream networks – from “liberal” MSNBC to “conservative” Fox News – have reported on little else for the last several months. The whole charade is little more than politics-as-entertainment, like some popular sporting event in which the opposing sides wave the flag for the blue team or the red team.

For weeks now, my television, and yours, has been saturated with political commercials for and against local legislative candidates. Some are attack ads focused on corruption and the supposed left or right-wing extremism of the opposing candidate. Others center on taxes, healthcare, and the ostensible “hordes” of immigrants approaching the U.S. in a troublesome caravan. But none, I repeat, none, say a thing about American foreign policy, the nation’s ongoing wars, or the exploding, record defense budget. You see, in 2018, despite being engrossed in the longest war in US history, the citizenry – both on Main Street and Wall Street – display nothing but apathy on the subject of America’s clearly faltering foreign policy.

The reasons are fairly simple: while the populace reflexively (over) adulates our “heroes” in uniform, it has been programmed to ignore the actual travails of our troopers. So long as there is no conscription of Americans’ sons and daughters, and so long as taxes don’t rise (we simply put our wars on the national credit card), the people are quite content to allow less than 1% of the population fight the nation’s failing wars – with no questions asked. Both mainstream wings of the Republicans and Democrats like it that way. They practice the politics of distraction and go on tacitly supporting one indecisive intervention after another, all the while basking in the embarrassment of riches bestowed upon them by the corporate military industrial complex. Everyone wins, except, that is, the soldiers doing multiple tours of combat duty, and – dare I say – the people of the Greater Middle East, who live in an utterly destabilized nightmare of a region.

Why should we be surprised? The de facto “leaders” of both parties – the Chuck Schumers, Joe Bidens, Hillary Clintons and Mitch McConnells of the world – all voted for the 2002 Iraq War resolution, one of the worst foreign policy adventures in American History. Sure, on domestic issues – taxes, healthcare, immigration – there may be some distinction between Republican and Democratic policies; but on the profound issues of war and peace, there is precious little daylight between the two parties. That, right there, is a formula for perpetual war.

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To find the few brave voices willing to dissent against the foreign policy consensus, one must look to the political margins of the libertarian right (i.e. Rand Paul) and the democratic socialist left (i.e. Bernie Sanders). This is a sad state of affairs on an election day that both Donald Trump and Barack Obama have assured us is the “most consequential” of our lifetimes. You see on this point I actually agree with these two polar political opposites. This is a vital election, only not for the reasons we’re told. This November 6th is profound because it demonstrates, once and for all, the utter vacuousness of American politics.

So where does the U.S. currently stand on foreign policy today? Well, it is actively bombing seven countries, has up to 800 military bases in 80 countries, has combat troops, special forces, drones and/or advisors on the ground in (or in the skies above) Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, Libya and Pakistan, among others. Occasionally, American service-members are still dying across the Middle East – often in treacherous insider attacks, in which they very people we “advise and assist” turn their weapons on our troops.

Furthermore, it is unclear that the US is either “winning” – whatever that means anymore – or accomplishing anything of note in any of these locales. For example, in the longest conflict of the lot, Afghanistan, all the key metrics indicate that the US is losing, both politically and militarily. As for the other ongoing wars in the region, no one – not the generals or the civilian policymakers – seems capable of articulating an exit strategy. Maybe there just isn’t any.

Still, none of that will be on the ballot today, when Americans queue up to vote for their favorite teams. They’ll be casting ballots based on the illusion of differentiation between two highly corporate political entities that are squarely in the pocket of the weapons’ industry and their Wall Street financiers. And, tonight, when the media outlets dazzle their viewers with holograms, charts, and other neat toys depicting the day’s winners and losers – not one station will even utter that naughty word: Afghanistan.

What all this illustrates, in sum, is that the citizenry doesn’t really care about the troops, and neither do their elected leaders. Soldiers are political props and little else – meant to be “thanked,” paraded at sporting events, and then effectively ignored – the new American way.

The republic, or, more accurately, the empire, is in real trouble when – in the midst of its longest conflicts ever – war is not even on the agenda at the polls today. Pity the nation…

Noam Chomsky: Trump and His Enablers Are ‘Criminally Insane’

Of the myriad disturbing reports that Donald Trump’s presidency has generated over the past 22 months, from its woeful recovery efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria to its sadistic child separation policy, few were as viscerally upsetting as The Washington Post’s findings from September of this year. According to a new environmental impact statement, administration officials privately acknowledge that we are on course for a cataclysmic temperature increase of 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. What’s worse, the White House appears entirely resigned to the planet’s fate, even opening up the Arctic for offshore drilling.

For this reason alone, Noam Chomsky considers the president and his Republican enablers to be “criminally insane.”

In a new interview with Scientific American, the celebrated linguist and political theorist opines on a range of topics including classical liberalism, Trump’s presidency and his own vision of a better world. He also further clarifies why he considers the Republican Party to be “the most dangerous organization in human history.”

Here are just a few of his more memorable remarks:

On the failings of Western civilization

In his very important study on the rise and fall of American growth, Robert Gordon observes that there was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770, slow growth for another century, and then a “special century” until 1970, dependent largely on specific inventions.  Since the 1970s the picture is much more mixed: in the US, with actual decline in real wages for non-supervisory workers over 40 years and even increased death rates in recent years.  These are among the features of the neoliberal era that have led to the rise of the kind of “morbid symptoms” that Gramsci warned about from Mussolini’s prison cell, as we see all too clearly in the western world today.  Elsewhere we find different patterns.  Thus Russia suffered severe economic decline and demographic collapse when market reforms were introduced in the ’90s.  China has been different again.  As Amartya Sen has shown, Maoist China saved about 100 million people – not a small number – as compared with democratic capitalist India from independence to 1980, not from “enlightenment” in the usual sense, but from rural health programs and other reforms.  And since then it has undergone spectacular growth and provided the bulk of the reduction in global poverty, in a society that’s not a model of enlightened values.  Nazi Germany experienced very rapid growth in the ‘30s, not a triumph of enlightenment.  There are numerous other complexities that are of major significance, but that disappear in unanalyzed statistical tables.

On the threats posed by the modern GOP

Take its leader, who recently applied to the government of Ireland for a permit to build a huge wall to protect his golf course, appealing to the threat of global warming, while at the same time he withdrew from international efforts to address the grim threat and is using every means at his disposal to accelerate it.  Or take his colleagues, the participants in the 2016 Republican primaries.  Without exception, they either denied that what is happening is happening – though any ignorance is self-induced – or said maybe it is but we shouldn’t do anything about it.  The moral depths were reached by the respected “adult in the room,” Ohio governor John Kasich, who agreed that it is happening but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” Or take a recent publication of Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a detailed study recommending an end to regulations on emissions. It presented a rational argument: extrapolating current trends, by the end of the century we’ll be over the cliff and automotive emissions don’t contribute very much to the catastrophe – the assumption being that everyone is as criminally insane as we are and won’t try to avoid the crisis.  In brief, let’s rob while the planet burns, putting poor Nero in the shadows.

On the legacy of Richard Nixon

Nixon had a mixed record.  In some respects, he was the last liberal president: OSHA and EPA for example.  On the other hand, he committed terrible crimes.  Arguably the worst was the bombing of rural Cambodia, a proposed article of impeachment but voted down though it was incomparably more important than the others.  And the article was much too weak, focusing on the secrecy.  There has been little attention to the orders that Nixon delivered, relayed to the Pentagon by his faithful servant Henry Kissinger: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” It is not easy to find comparable orders for genocide in the archival record.  But all of Nixon’s crimes pale in comparison with the decision to race towards the precipice of environmental catastrophe.

On the efficacy of U.S. media in the age of Trump

It depends on what we think their job is.  They are businesses, so by accepted standards their job is profit.  By other standards, they have a duty to the public to provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” under a concept of “fitness” that is as free as possible from submission to power interests or other distorting factors.  About this there is a great deal to say – I’ve devoted many words to the topic elsewhere, as have many others.  But in today’s strange climate of Trumpian “alternative facts” and “false reality,” it is useful to recognize that with all their flaws, which are many, the mainstream media remain an indispensable source of information about the world.

Read the interview in its entirety at Scientific American.

Caravan Migrants Arrive in Mexico City, Bed Down in Stadium

MEXICO CITY — Thousands of Central American migrants traveling in a caravan arrived in the Mexican capital Monday and began to fill up a sports stadium, still hundreds of miles from their goal of reaching the U.S. a day before midterm elections in which President Donald Trump has made their journey a central campaign issue.

By afternoon 2,000 or more had arrived at the Jesus Martinez stadium, which has a capacity of about three times that, and eagerly began sifting through donations of clothes, gave themselves sponge baths, lunched on chicken and rice under the shade of tents and picked up thin mattresses to hunker down for the night.

Many went to medical tents to get treatment for blistered and aching feet, illness and other maladies. “Since we got here, we have not stopped,” said Tania Escobar, a nurse with Mexico City’s public health department.

Melvin Figueroa, a 32-year-old from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, was traveling with his pregnant wife and two children, 6 and 8. He brought the 6-year-old girl to the tent because her eyes were irritated and “she throws up everything she eats.”

Several thousand more migrants were trudging along the highway between the city of Puebla and the capital, catching a lift from passing vehicles when possible.

Nashieli Ramirez, ombudsman for the city’s human rights commission, said the city was preparing to accommodate as many as 5,000 migrants from the lead caravan and several smaller ones hundreds of miles behind it, for as long as necessary.

“We have the space in terms of humanitarian help,” Ramirez said.

As U.S. election day neared, Trump has seized on the caravan and portrayed it as a major threat, even though such caravans have happened regularly over the years and largely passed unnoticed.

He ordered thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border when the migrants were still hundreds of miles to the south, threatened to detain asylum seekers in tents cities and has insinuated without proof that there are criminals or even terrorists in the group.

In dozens of interviews since the caravan set out from Honduras more than three weeks ago, migrants have said they are fleeing rampant poverty and violence. Many are families traveling with small children. Some say they left because they were threatened by gang members or had lost relatives to gang violence; others say they hope to work, secure a good education for their children and send money to support loved ones back home.

Alba Zoleida Gonzalez, 48, from Valle, Honduras, said she had walked for five hours and hitched a ride on a tractor-trailer with about 150 people. Her calf muscles were aching, but that was a small price to pay for the chance at a life better than the one back home.

“I looked for work, and nothing,” Gonzalez said, adding that her husband had been robbed and had to hand over everything he made selling crabs so his assailants wouldn’t do worse. “And when one does find a little job they kill you for the money,” she said.

Arriving in Mexico City, some migrants stopped at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a major pilgrimage site, to thank the Virgin Mary for watching over them during the journey.

Many had struck out ahead of the larger caravan but intended to regroup in the capital. Oscar Ulloa, 20, an accountant from Honduras, said he arrived by bus from Puebla thanks to handouts from Mexicans. He expected the group would assemble and vote in the coming days on their next moves.

The 178-mile trek (286 kilometers) Monday from the Gulf state of Veracruz to Mexico City was the longest single-day journey for the group of about 4,000 migrants.

But there were obstacles on this latest stretch.

Truck after truck denied the migrants rides as they trudged along the highway into the relatively colder November temperatures of central highland Mexico.

At a toll booth near Fortin, Veracruz, Rafael Leyva, an unemployed cobbler from Honduras, stood with a few hundred others for more than 45 minutes without finding a ride.

“People help more in Chiapas and Oaxaca,” Leyva said, referring to the southern Mexican states the group had already traversed and where pickup trucks frequently stopped to offer rides.

Migrants converged on tractor trailers, forcing the big rigs to stop so they could climb aboard. Such impromptu hitchhiking is precarious with dozens scrambling onto vehicles at a time.

Cesar Rodas, 24, had pushed a friend’s wheelchair for 24 days across three countries. But he couldn’t lift his friend and the chair onto a truck bed crammed with 150 people. Rodas was trying to get Sergio Cazares, a 40-year-old paraplegic from Honduras, to the U.S. for an operation that Cazares hopes will allow him to walk again.

Mexico City is more than 600 miles from the nearest U.S. border crossing at McAllen, Texas, and a previous caravan in the spring opted for a much longer route to Tijuana in the far northwest, across from San Diego. That caravan steadily dwindled to only about 200 people by the time it reached the border.

Many said they remain convinced that traveling together is their best hope for reaching the U.S.

Yuri Juarez, 42, said he thinks there’s a “very low” chance he will get asylum in the United States. But he said he had no way to work back home in Villanueva, Guatemala, where he closed his internet cafe after gang members extorted him, robbed his customers and finally stole his computers.

Mexico faces the unprecedented situation of having at least three migrant caravans stretched over 300 miles (500 kilometers) of highway in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz. The largest group has been followed by about 1,000 who crossed over from Guatemala last week and a second group of about the same size that waded over the Suchiate River on Friday.

Mexico’s Interior Ministry estimated over the weekend that there are more than 5,000 migrants in total currently moving through Mexico. The ministry said 2,793 migrants have applied for refugee status in Mexico in recent weeks and around 500 have asked for assistance to return to their home countries.

The presidents of Guatemala and Honduras, which have been under intense pressure from the Trump administration, called Monday for an investigation to identify the organizers of the caravan.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said that “thousands” of his countrymen have returned to Honduras. Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales went further, calling for an investigation of people who “promote or participate” in the caravan, saying they “should be judged based on international laws.”

Most of the migrants interviewed say they joined the caravan spontaneously to stay safe, and many were already on the road when it caught up to them. Activist groups that have been trying to help organize things appear to have emerged only after it formed and began moving north.

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Associated Press writer Amy Guthrie in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Here’s the Real Reason Why Republicans Fear ‘Medicare for All’

Now we know why the GOP is truly terrified of “Medicare for all”: It will wipe out the Republican Party’s control of the House, Senate, White House, and most state governments. Because it could make it very easy for every citizen over 18 to vote.

Here’s how it works.

In Canada, every citizen has a Canadian government-issued “Health Insurance Card” (you can see Quebec’s card at the link). It’s largely only available to citizens, as all citizens are eligible for the Canadian Medicare system; everybody else has to work out other insurance options (yes, there are insurance companies in Canada). And in most provinces, the card has your photo and works as an ID card as well as a driver’s license or passport.

And the Canadian government also explicitly says right here on Quebec’s elections website that your Medicare card is also your first-choice voter ID card. An American version could work identically, perhaps with a star or hologram or other mark to identify citizens as opposed to Medicare-eligible permanent residents, etc.

As Tarek, a Canadian listener to my radio/TV program, shared with me this week:

“Here in Canada, citizens and permanent residents alike are covered by publicly funded health care that is administrated through the provinces, whereas temporary residents must be covered via other means, namely buying private health insurance.

“Since it is in everyone’s best interest to be have ‘free’ health care coverage, unlike other government issued identifications, such as driver’s license…etc, the vast majority (if not all) Canadians from all socioeconomic backgrounds make sure to obtain their health cards, which can be used as an official photo ID for flying domestically, buying alcohol and more importantly voting!”

Here in the U.S., ever since Jim Crow, racist white “conservatives” have used a variety of means to prevent poor people, people of color, low-income working people, students, and older people from voting. Techniques have varied over the years, starting with poll taxes and so-called “literacy tests,” and now are carefully calibrated by cutting voting sites, reducing early voting, and even disenfranchising North Dakota’s Native American population.

The GOP stepped up their voter suppression game in 1980 when Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and Moral Majority co-founder and Reagan campaigner Paul Weyrich famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

In that, he was following on an old Republican strategy of caging and polling-place intimidation, which earned William Rehnquist his rock-star status in the GOP back in the 1960s.

This is still the GOP game plan, although they’ve turned it into an art form. First, they spent a decade whipping up fear about “voter fraud”—brown people from Mexico voting in our elections, something that happens as often as 5 or 6 times per election cycle nationally (as opposed to over 130 million citizens voting). Then, they use this non-threat to pass voter ID laws that make it hard for people who don’t drive (old age, can’t afford a car, live in a big city and use public transportation, or live on campus) to vote.

For example, in the run-up to 2012, Pennsylvania House Leader, Republican Mike Turzai, declared, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to carry the state of Pennsylvania: Done!”

While it didn’t quite work out that way in 2012, the Pennsylvania GOP came back in 2016, along with 26 other Republican-controlled states, to purge over 16 million people from the voting rolls nationally… helping give Pennsylvania (along with Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin, according to Paul Waldman in the Washington Post) to Donald Trump by razor-thin margins far smaller than the number of voters purged and/or turned away at the polls.

Meanwhile, another estimated 2 million Americans tried to vote but were turned away for lack of the proper ID in 2016.

Republican voter suppression is thriving in the U.S.: The Brennan Center documents a 33 percent increase in voters purged during the 2014-1016 election cycle (16 million), compared with the 2006-2008 cycle (12 million purged), as the GOP has made ID and purges (along with fear mongering about brown-skinned people) their main electoral strategy. In just the past year, as many as an additional 14 million voters have been purged from rolls nationwide, while over the past two decades every Republican-controlled state has introduce rigid ID laws.

But with a national ID system in place that’s universally used because it’s the key to getting your health care and medications, there’s no need for “voter registration” and thus no ability for the GOP to purge voters. Voter registration, after all, is a practice we largely got after the Civil War because Southern white politicians warned of “voter fraud” being committed by recently freed black people, and some Northern states used it to prevent poor whites from voting.

In some places in the United States, voter registration just never caught on: North Dakota never bothered to put such a system into place; you just show up at the polls with ID to prove you’re both a citizen and resident, and vote. And with a national Medicare for all ID, every citizen could easily vote, everywhere.

Republicans have aggressively opposed a national health care program for the United States ever since Harry Truman first proposed it in his November 19, 1945 address to Congress. We’re literally the only developed nation in the world without such a system. But its popularity is well over 50 percent in America right now, and growing rapidly among voters across the political spectrum; this is something that’s politically possible in the very, very near future.

In the past, GOP opposition generally revolved around their belief that everything from water to septic to roads to prisons to health care should be run to make somebody rich, and to hell with “the public good.”

But it’s a virtual certainty that the deep-dive think tanks and “wise elders” of the GOP also know how easy it is to vote in Canada and other developed countries, in very large part because of the national ID card that Canada’s (and most of Europe’s) Medicare for all programs provide at great ease and no cost.

Thus, the Medicare system’s threat to GOP voter suppression systems may be the largest reason they’ve spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars fighting single-payer in the U.S.

In most elections, in most states, and nationally in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats win more votes, but Republicans remain in charge, because of gerrymandering made possible by voter suppression at the state level. Even the Senate is held in some red states purely because of voter suppression, leaning heavily on restrictive voter ID laws.

And, at the state level, in many—perhaps a majority—of the so-called “red states,” Republicans hold control of state legislatures and governors’ offices only because of voter suppression, ranging from voter-roll purges to voter ID laws.

If all U.S. citizens had a free national ID that could also be used to vote, it wouldn’t take long for both Congress and most states to flip back from red to blue like they were during the Carter presidency, before the GOP started their “voter fraud” hysteria and began passing voter suppression laws.

With the GOP out of power at the state level, Democrats (and the few remaining ethical Republicans) could replace gerrymandering with good-government solutions like the non-partisan district-drawing commission put into place by California.

After that, it’s only necessary to clean up the handful of states that won’t let ex-felons vote (they’ll have a Medicare ID card, after all), to produce a clean, efficient, and fraud-free national elections system.

Then America will have joined the rest of the developed world, in having both a national health care system and a functioning democracy.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute .

The U.S. Olympic Committee Moves to Shut Down USA Gymnastics After Nassar Scandal

The U.S. Olympic Committee is moving to revoke USA Gymnastics’ status as the governing body for the sport at the Olympic level, meting out the nuclear option to an organization that has botched its own reorganization in the wake of a sex-abuse scandal involving former team doctor Larry Nassar.

In an open letter to the gymnastics community Monday, USOC CEO Sarah Hirshland said “you deserve better,” and that the challenges facing USA Gymnastics are more than it is capable of overcoming as currently constructed.

The organization, even with a newly constituted board of directors, made repeated mistakes after the revelations Nassar molested Olympians while working as a volunteer.

Those included the botched hiring of a program coordinator and an interim CEO to replace Kerry Perry, who lasted barely nine months on the job after replacing Steve Penny.

“This is a situation where there are no perfect solutions,” Hirshland said.

The announcement comes only days after the U.S. team brought home nine medals from the World Championships in the first major meet on the lead-up to the Tokyo Games in 2020. Five of those were individual medals won by Olympic champion Simone Biles, who is among the athletes who have not hesitated to criticize the organization.

By decertifying USA Gymnastics, the USOC is taking major action against an organization that couldn’t grasp its own rebuilding. But the move also leaves a void that cannot be easily filled. In addition to supporting elite and Olympic athletes, USA Gymnastics serves more than 150,000 athletes in 3,000 clubs around the country. There is no other organization standing by to fill that need.

The federal law that governs the USOC gives the federation final say on which organizations represent each sport at the Olympics, and also establishes a process to decertify the organizations. Hirshland said she has given USA Gymnastics the option of surrendering its recognition voluntarily.

USAG issued a statement saying it was looking at the USOC letter “and is evaluating the best path forward for our athletes, professional members, the organization and staff.”

The statement detailed the challenges the new board has faced since taking over in June.

It is in search of its fourth president and CEO in the last 19 months thanks to a series of resignations, all of them under pressure from the USOC or the gymnastics’ community at large.

Penny — named as a co-defendant in several civil lawsuits filed by former elite gymnasts— stepped down in March 2017. He was arrested last month and charged with destroying or hiding documents related to Nassar’s activities at the Karolyi Ranch, the ex-national training center near Huntsville, Texas, where a number of gymnasts said Nassar abused them.

The organization named Perry as Penny’s replacement but her ineffectual tenure lasted barely nine months. She came under fire from several high-profile gymnasts, Biles included, for failing to offer a clear vision on the way forward and quit in September. Her resignation came shortly after the hiring, then quick removal, of Mary Lee Tracy as elite development coordinator; Tracy had been supportive of Nassar when the allegations first surfaced.

USA Gymnastics brought on former U.S. Representative Mary Bono to serve as interim president and CEO last month. Bono didn’t even make it a week, stepping away after drawing widespread criticism for an Instagram post she made shortly before she was hired that showed her coloring over the Nike logo on her golf cleats in response to the company putting former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick at the forefront of a marketing campaign.

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AP Sports Writer Will Graves contributed to this report.

Trump’s Love Affair With Violence in the Age of Fascist Nihilism

This article was originally published on Truthout. 

Fascism first begins with linguistic violence and then gains momentum as an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate force against entire groups—Black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims and others considered “disposable.” In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains” and “enemies,” describes immigrants as “losers” and “criminals,” and has become a national mouthpiece for jingoistic nationalists and a myriad of extremists who trade in hate and violence. Using a rhetoric of dehumanization as a performance strategy to whip up his base, Trump employs endless rhetorical tropes of hate and demonization that set the tone for real violence.

Trump appears utterly unconcerned by the accusation that his highly charged rhetoric of racial hatred, xenophobia and virulent nationalism both legitimates and fuels acts of violence. He proceeds without concern about the consequences of lending his voice to conspiracy theorists claiming that George Soros is funding the caravan of migrant workers, calling Maxine Waters a “low IQ person,” or referring to former CIA director John Brennan as a “total lowlife” and a “very bad guy.” Meanwhile, this inflammatory invective promotes violence from the 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 Montana congressional representative Greg Gianforte for body slamming a Guardian reporter in 2017 speaks for itself, as does his remark that the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were “very fine people.” No wonder Trump is praised by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, and by the Proud Boys (a vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brownshirts). Needless to say, as Karen Garcia notes, Trump’s “frenzied Nuremberg-style rallies” are a cauldron of race baiting and anti-Semitic demagoguery.

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by

We have heard before this collapse of language into a form of coded militarism and racism—the anti-Semitism couched in critiques of globalization, the call for racial and social cleansing couched in the discourse of borders and walls. The emerging discourse of state terrorism in the US alarmingly resembles that of Europe in the 1930s. Edward Luce rightly reminds us that we have witnessed this in the past. He writes: “Eighty-five years ago on Thursday, Heinrich Himmler opened the Nazi’s first concentrating camp at Dachau. History does not repeat itself. But it is laced with warnings.”

In an age when civic literacy and efforts to hold the powerful accountable for their actions is dismissed as “fake news,” ignorance becomes the breeding ground not just for hate, but for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance a nonnegotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful to weaponize everyday discourse.

Trump’s language is neither harmless, nor merely a form of infantilized theater. It is toxic, steeped in a racist nationalist ardor that stirs up and emboldens extremist elements of his base. It adds fuel to a culture capable of horrific consequences, as we have seen with the recent killing of two Black people in a grocery store near Louisville, Kentucky; the sending of pipe bombs to a number of high-profile Democrats; and the mass murder in a Pittsburgh synagogue. It is also the language of silence, moral irresponsibility and a willingness to look away in the face of violence and human suffering. This is the worldview of fascist politics and a dangerous nihilism—one that reinforces a contempt for human rights in the name of financial expediency and the cynical pursuit of political power.

How can Trump and his lemming-like supporters support the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have become increasingly emboldened in the United States? How can they engage in racist and anti-Semitic attacks repeatedly, and at the same time, overlook how they have become democracy’s gravediggers? How can Trump call for national unity and denounce anti-Semitism when he engages in what his critics have described as unapologetic “demagoguery against racial minorities, foreigners and prominent Jewish political figures“? How can they deny that the symbolic violence they endorse endlessly as a central feature of politics creates a climate that produces hate and legitimates violence? Trump does not merely trade in extremism, he also works hard in his rhetoric and policies to get Americans to fear and hate each other.

How can this supporters gloss over the connection between the recent explosive devices mailed to George Soros and the Republican attack ads that accused Soros of paying for protesters at Trump’s rallies or claimed that he was the head of some global financial cabal and worldwide conspiracy? These are familiar anti-Semitic slurs used by a number of demagogues including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. There is more at work here than referring to Trump’s language as condoning and encouraging extremism and violence. There is also a worldview that comes out of a fascist playbook. Referring to the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Bari Weiss captures the relationship between Trump’s language and the violence and anti-Semitism that is ballooning in the US as one register of rising extremism. She writes:

We are living in an age when anti-Semitism is on the rise here at home. You need only think of last year’s chants of “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, or the president’s constant attacks on “globalists,” “international bankers” and “the corrupt media,” all of which are commonly associated with Jews in the minds of anti-Semites. It isn’t at all surprising that these rhetorical tropes have translated into acts of violence—according to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents rose by 57 percent in 2017 …

We have seen too many instances where Trump’s followers have beaten critics, attacked journalists, and shouted down any form of critique aimed at Trump’s policies—to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals and journalists critical of the administration. A few weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, a number of Trump’s outspoken critics, all of whom have been belittled and verbally attacked by Trump, were sent homemade pipe bombs in the mail. Cesar Sayoc—the man who was charged in connection with the bombings—is a strong Trump fan whose Twitter feed is littered with right-wing conspiracy theories along with an assortment of “apocalyptic, right-wing dystopian fantasies.”

Without a care as to how his own vicious and aggressive rhetoric has legitimated and galvanized acts of violence by an assortment of members of the “alt-right,” neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Trump responded to the pipe bomb threats by claiming it was the fault of the mainstream media, which he labeled as “fake news.” Trump appears clueless and incapable of empathy regarding the suffering of others, all while displaying great hypocrisy. For instance, he claims political opponents should not be compared to historical villains and then proceeds to villainize his political rivals when he speaks to his base. The most obvious instance is when he whips up his base by encouraging chants aimed at Hillary Clinton such as “lock her up” or when he claims at his rallies that the Democrats are funding the caravan from Central America that is making its way to the United States border.

Trump ignored the plea of a number of progressive Jewish leaders not to visit the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh until he was willing to denounce white nationalism. Instead he stated, once again, that if the synagogue had adequate security the mass murder might have been avoided. Understandably, members of the Jewish community were deeply offended by this suggestion that the victims were to blame for their own deaths. Once again, Trump turned his back on the victims of white nationalist hate and gave a nod to people who should be labeled as a threat to democracy by refusing to address the role they play in fomenting a fascist politics and in posing a threat to both human life and democracy.

Trump remains silent about the fringe groups he has incited with his vicious attacks on the press, the judiciary and his political opponents. That is, he refuses to criticize them while shoring up their support by claiming he is a “nationalist” who is fighting a global conspiracy. Violent fantasies are Trump’s trademark, whether expressed in his support for ruthless dictators or in his urging to “knock the crap out of” protesters. We have seen this celebration of violence in the past with its infantile appeal to a hyper-masculinity.

Within a week after the pipe bombs were sent to high-profile critics of Trump, a mass shooting took place at a Pittsburgh synagogue in which 11 people were killed and six were wounded. The charged suspect, Robert Bowers, opened fire on a Saturday morning during baby-naming services. As he entered the Tree of Life synagogue and began gunning people down, Bowers shouted, “All Jews must die.” Trump responded to the tragedy by claiming, “This wicked act of mass murder is pure evil, hard to believe, and frankly, something that is unimaginable.” Surely, there is nothing unimaginable about the rising acts of violence in the United States given the degree to which Trump’s highly charged rhetoric baits people to follow through on his demonizing and poisonous calls to punish his alleged critics and those he describes as “enemies of the American people.” While Trump’s attacks on Muslims, undocumented immigrants and Mexicans are part of the script that launched his presidential campaign and have become a central feature of his racist political appeals, his more recent attacks have broadened the objects of his assault in ways that conjure up echoes of a fascist past. Trump now applies fuel to a conflagration that is in tune with the winds of illiberal democracy spreading around the globe. Max Boot summarizes well this expanding demagogic language of disposability and demonization. He writes:

Trump calls Democrats “evil” and “crazy.” He accuses them of being “treasonous” and “un-American.” He claims they are in league with MS-13 gang members. He says they are trying to open our borders to criminals and to turn America into Venezuela…. He applauds a congressman who assaulted a reporter and calls for his political opponent to be locked up. He singles out minorities such as [Rep. Maxine] Waters for opprobrium, and he promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that hold George Soros responsible for everything from the Central American caravan to protests against Brett M. Kavanaugh. When Trump talks about “globalists,” the far right hears “Jews.” When Trump says there were “fine people” on both sides in Charlottesville, the far right hears official approval…. And Trump continues his incendiary rhetoric even after the tragic consequences have become clear.

When confronted with the rising acts of hate-inspired violence in the United States and the question of whether his incendiary language serves to inflame such violence, Trump responded in his usually crude and ethically irresponsible way by stating he was going to “tone up” his rhetoric rather than tone it down. His moral indifference to threats of violence as well as to acts of real violence was on further display when Trump tweeted that the “bomb stuff” was a distraction that was slowing Republican momentum in the polls. Removed from any sense of moral and political responsibility, Trump refuses to acknowledge that words matter and that they feed the violent fantasies of right-wing extremists.

Some high-profile Republicans dismissed the attempted assassinations as fraudulent or blamed the Democrats. For Trump, as well as his Vichy-Republican allies and many of his followers, facts or morality appear to never get in the way of acknowledging the degree to which Trumpism has normalized violence as a tool to squelch dissent by threatening journalists and others critical of Trump’s fascist politics. The rhetoric of violence, hate and intolerance has morphed into the service of fashioning Trump into the symbolic leader of the fascist effort to criminalize all those individuals and groups considered disposable and outside of the ultra-nationalist notion of the US 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 reduced to 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 pollution, ritualistic acts aimed at purging critical thought and undermining informed judgment. This is the discourse of vicious cruelty and a petri dish for nourishing the virus of a fascist politics. It is also the outgrowth of a form of neoliberal fascism that has been emerging in the United States since the late 1970s. What we are witnessing with the rise of fascism in the United States and in many other countries gives credence to the warning made by Theodor Adorno in his essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past“: “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing that the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”

Trump is the endpoint of a malady that has been growing for decades. What is different about Trump is that he basks in his role, as George Scialabba puts it in Slouching Toward Utopia, as a “famous social parasite.” He is unapologetic about the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him) and by megacorporations. He embodies with unchecked bravado the sorts of sadistic impulses that could condemn generations of children to a future of misery. He loves people who believe that politics is undermined by anyone who has a conscience, and he promotes and thrives in a culture of violence and cruelty. He is not refiguring the character of democracy, he is destroying it, and in doing so, resurrecting all the elements of a fascist politics that many people thought would never re-emerge after the horrors and death inflicted on millions by fascist dictators. As Gil Scott-Heron once noted in the title of his studio album, it is “Winter in America.” Actually, it is worse: It is winter in fascist America.

Inequality and Racism Are This Election’s Crucial Issues

Unprecedented amounts of money have flowed into the 2018 midterm elections, and voters are being bombarded with TV commercials and mailers that use misleading and fear-based language. President Donald Trump and the Republicans, in particular, are sending a strong message to Americans that the economy has never been better, and that the GOP will protect us from all the “other” people looking to take away our rights and earnings: immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists and more.

But if one clears away the confusing barrage of messages, there is one narrative that has the strongest bearing on reality, and that is that most Americans are financially struggling to stay afloat—people of color more so than whites—and corporate elites are laughing all the way to the bank as politicians blame vulnerable communities for the ills facing whites.

Obscuring this reality through his virulently racist messaging, the president has been effective at using the propaganda playbook of authoritarian leaders to rally his resentful base. In the past few weeks, we have seen a confluence of the predictable outcomes of his racist scapegoating. A Republican man and ardent Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc, threatened many of Trump’s favorite targets of vitriol, from former President Barack Obama to Rep. Maxine Waters, using crudely made pipe bombs. A white man named Gregory Bush tried to enter a predominantly black church in Kentucky, and when he couldn’t, he killed two African-Americans at a supermarket, remarking on his way out to another white man that “Whites don’t kill whites.”

And of course, the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history took place last week at the Tree of Life synagogue when a white man, Robert Bowers, whipped into a frenzied confluence between anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish sentiments, gunned down 11 people. Protesters in Pittsburgh rightly laid the blame for the synagogue attack on Trump’s hate-mongering, saying, “Words Matter” and “It’s Your Fault.”

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Blue Wave or Red Wave? No Way to Tell.



by Barbara Koeppel

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in deep trouble because it has continued to obscure its long-term underlying racist messaging while promoting the same policies that Trump has pushed: kickbacks for the wealthy through tax cuts couched in “middle-class relief,” a weakening of public protections through deregulation explained as an economic driver that will somehow create jobs, and nativist attacks on immigrants that claim they are a drain on the economy. Voters love Trump for expressing their base instincts in clear language—instincts that were honed for years through Republican dog-whistling—but now care little for Republican lawmakers, who appear weak and contradictory in comparison with Trump.

A recent New York Times article attempting to explain voter attraction to Democrats in the Rust Belt concluded that “Mr. Trump still has extraordinarily high approval ratings among those who voted for him. The problem for the Republicans is that Mr. Trump made these Rust Belt voters into Trump voters, but he never made them Republicans.” Meanwhile, Republicans are left desperately trying to defend their signature legislation—the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—to voters who have very little practical evidence to show for the riches they were told they would reap.

Within this framework, Democrats could be effectively harnessing public anger at the deadly deeds Trump’s racist messages have unleashed. Or, they could cleverly expose the Republican Party’s hypocrisy in celebrating a tax reform law that is a windfall for the wealthy, disguised as tax relief for ordinary Americans. But as in 2016, Democrats are casting themselves as “not Trump” rather than selling voters on a vision that could offer an alternative to Trump. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) website has a simple message, “Defeat Trump’s Republican House,” instead of something on the order of “Build an Economy for All, End Racism.”

So it has fallen to progressive activists to spell out what is most needed in the nation. Sister Simone Campbell is one of 30 Catholic nuns who toured the nation, from California to Florida and many states between, in a large painted bus bearing the words “Nuns on the Bus.” She told me in an interview that her goal was to “Let the nation know that the tax law is bad for our nation because, rather than caring for the 100 percent of our people, it shifts 83 percent of all the benefits to those at the 1 percent or 0.1 percent.” She critically emphasized that taxes are “how we care for our people,” and that tax revenues are “the money that our nation has to spend on our needs.”

Some of the newer, insurgent Democrats looking to remake their party are offering their own visions for a future that is both anti-racist and economically just. A large number of people of color, and women of color in particular, are running on bold progressive platforms, several of them even identifying as “Democratic Socialists.” Some progressive members of Congress have formed a “Medicare for All” caucus, something that would have been unheard of a few years ago.

Even just a handful of people claiming that socialism could be good for America has Trump and the Republicans on the defensive. Trump published an op-ed under his name slamming Medicare for all, which, he said, “would end Medicare as we know it and take away benefits that seniors have paid for their entire lives,” an utterly ridiculous assertion that is hard to even dignify with a response. The White House recently published a bizarre document, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” produced by the Council of Economic Advisers, that attempts to undermine socialist ideas. “People who know anything about socialism will laugh at this report,” said economist Richard Wolff in an interview last week.

A slew of ballot measures in cities and states around the country are attempting to address inequality by going directly to voters. In California, Los Angeles residents want rent control through Proposition 10 and San Franciscans want a progressive tax on big corporations to fund homeless initiatives through Measure C. In Missouri and Arkansas, voters are hoping to pass modest minimum wage increases. In all those places the billionaire class has poured its wealth into convincing voters that they will be the losers if these measures pass.

Those swimming in riches are using their wealth to try to convince the rest of us that they have our well-being in mind. They want us to blame immigrants, and our brown, black, Muslim or Jewish neighbors. They have poured unprecedented amounts of money into the midterm races, hoping that we will allow their proxies in Congress to decide how we are taxed, how our taxes are spent and who should benefit. What these elites fear most is that we will exercise our democratic rights to sweep away inequality and dismantle racism (and sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and so on). It is precisely that fear that we must exploit to the fullest extent on Nov. 6 and beyond.

Twitter, Visa and Lyft Spend Against San Francisco Homelessness Measure

Voters in San Francisco will decide Tuesday whether to nearly double the city’s spending on services for the homeless, but some of the city’s richest companies are spending to oppose it.

Proposition C proposes that companies making more than $50 million in annual revenue would be taxed 0.5 percent more on average, raising about $300 million a year for about 5,000 affordable housing units, 1,075 new beds in shelters and a budget of about $75 million for mental health services.

Rideshare company Lyft spent $100,000 and Square donated $50,000 against the measure, respectively. Visa spent $225,000 in opposition, while Stripe contributed roughly $420,000. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, donated $125,000 to the campaign against the measure, according to contribution reports from the San Francisco Ethics Commission. His spats on Twitter deriding the measure have been widely covered.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of the city’s largest employer, Salesforce, has largely been the face of the campaign in support of Proposition C by donating more than $2 million of his own money and $5.9 million of the company’s money.

“It would be interesting to see them having to tell a person that they are not being prioritized to come indoors, over the tax benefits that a massive corporation receives,” said Anakh Sul Rama, a community organizer with Community Housing Partnership who works with the Proposition C campaign.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said the city needs to audit the money it currently spends on homelessness first. She wrote in a statement against the proposition that San Francisco’s “homelessness spending has increased dramatically in recent years with no discernible improvement in conditions,” while perhaps contradicting herself by also touting her administration’s recent homelessness initiatives.

“I smell enough. I see enough. Clean it up!” Breed said during a visit to a homeless encampment this summer.

“The Mayor doesn’t support Prop C, and we should listen to her. I support the Mayor, and I’m committed to helping her execute her plan,” Dorsey wrote on Twitter.

Benioff, who debated Dorsey’s tweets, told The Guardian that Breed had recently asked him for $8 million. “She wants me to fund personally a homeless shelter in the city, because she’s out of cash,” he said. “That’s evidence we need more money now.”

In her statement on the measure, Breed expressed concern over “the inevitable flight of headquarter companies — and jobs— from San Francisco to other cities in the Bay Area or other states,” citing the city controller’s economic analysis.

The report, however, was much more optimistic, and found that economic “impacts are small in the context of the city’s job market and economy, equal to a 0.1% difference, on average, over 20 years.”

The city’s report also determined:

Additional positive factors, not quantified in this analysis, include an expected improvement in health outcomes, a reduction in acute service costs, and an attractiveness of the City, because of the likely decline in the homeless population. To the extent that these policy objectives are achieved, the economic impact could be better than we project.

The concern that San Francisco companies would leave the city if taxes become too high echoes arguments in favor of the so-called “Twitter tax break,” an incentive program that began in 2011 intended to keep technology companies in Silicon Valley.

“I am absolutely convinced that Twitter would have moved out of the city. We would have lost not only the jobs that they had, but what they expected to create,” former Mayor Ed Lee, who passed away last year, said in 2013.

By allowing companies to circumvent a 1.5 percent payroll tax, the program, which will expire in May 2019, has encouraged major tech companies to stay in the city and helped contribute to the city’s impossibly high housing costs.

“We have 70 billionaires in [the] San Francisco” Bay Area region, Benioff said. “Not all of them are giving money away. A lot of them are just hoarding it. … This is a critical moment where I think Prop. C kind of illuminates who is willing to be a San Franciscan and actually support our local services.”

Stacey Abrams Battles Shameless Suppression Efforts in Georgia

While her Republican opponent was accused of more “Banana Republic”-style antics on the eve of the mid-term elections, Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Monday responded by keeping a laser focus on what her strategy has largely been from the outset: a massive “Get Out the Vote” effort to overcome GOP suppression efforts.

Local volunteers as well as people from all over the country were out in full force over the weekend, knocking on doors across the state and urging Georgia residents to vote on Tuesday. Dozens of canvassing events are planned for Monday and Tuesday as well.

Canvassing is not just about knocking doors – it’s about giving people a reason to show up on Tuesday.

The more doors you knock, the more calls you make, the more voters show up to vote on Election Day. Help us turn out the voters we need to win: https://t.co/ycUcy0ZVkk #gapol pic.twitter.com/7aRWff9xxE

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) November 4, 2018

#TeamAbrams was out in force today pic.twitter.com/kM2XXX3gsK

— James Hare

The Attacks on Birthright Citizenship Are Just the Beginning

If you think the attacks on birthright citizenship led by our ignoramus-in-chief are just a midterm issue, think again. Beneath the bluster, the attacks are a rallying cry for voter suppression and will in all likelihood accelerate as the 2020 presidential race begins in earnest.

The attacks, moreover, are nothing new. They did not originate with Donald Trump.

Dissatisfaction with the principle that anyone born on American soil is automatically a citizen is as old as the 14th Amendment itself, in which the principle is inscribed. In calling for an end to birthright citizenship during the stretch run to the midterm elections, Trump is both reviving a campaign pledge he had made during his successful run for president and resuscitating the deep nativist currents of our political culture that had subsided—but never died—in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

Trump began his assault on birthright citizenship at an Aug. 19, 2015, town meeting in Derry, N.H., when he told a crowd of ardent supporters that “many of the great scholars say that anchor babies [the derogatory term for the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the U.S.] are not covered” by the 14th Amendment. “We’re going to have to find out” by means of a court challenge, he said. The only difference between then and now is that Trump currently proposes to end birthright citizenship by executive order.

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Ariz. Lawmakers Target Birthright Citizenship

To understand the attacks and the fringe scholarship that undergirds them, it’s necessary to recall the origins of the 14th Amendment, and in particular, the first sentence of the initial section of the amendment—known as the “citizenship clause”—that reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

Like the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, and the 15th, which guaranteed the right to vote, the 14th Amendment was adopted to overturn the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which invalidated the Missouri Compromise and held that African-Americans, whether enslaved or freed, could never be U.S. citizens.

Together, the three amendments effectively returned the U.S. to the English common law practice of jus solis (the “law of the soil’’)—the idea that all those born within the geographic boundaries of a nation are citizens at birth. More than 30 countries today recognize the doctrine, including the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Both sides in the current birthright debate agree the 14th Amendment’s central purpose was to confer citizenship upon newly emancipated slaves. They also agree the amendment’s citizenship clause excludes children born to foreign diplomats and children born to enemy forces engaged in the hostile occupation of U.S. territory. They agree further the citizenship clause, as originally drafted, excluded Native American children because they owed their allegiance to tribal nations that had their own reservations. (Native Americans were finally granted citizenship with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.)

However, when it comes to the offspring of the undocumented, the two sides disagree sharply over the meaning and purpose of the citizenship clause’s language limiting citizenship to people “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. Those who align with Trump maintain the clause pertains only to those who declare unswerving allegiance to America and no other sovereign nation. Those who believe the president is wrong maintain that the disputed language means citizenship is accorded to all persons (except the children of diplomats and occupying enemy forces) born or naturalized in the U.S. who are subject to the authority of American law.

The scholars to whom Trump has referred to bolster his birthright attacks are a distinct minority, but they include some prominent names in conservative legal circles. They include law professors Peter Schuck of Yale and John Eastman of Chapman University, as well as 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, all of whom have been writing on the subject for years. More recently, they have been joined by former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Anton, who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in July, and Andrew McCarthy, a National Review contributing editor, who pleaded his case in an essay last week.

Styling themselves as “originalists” faithful to the intended meaning of the citizenship clause, the outliers base much of their argument on the Senate debate on the clause, which was held on May 30, 1866, and was reported in the , the precursor of today’s Congressional Record. The conclusion the outliers draw from the debate, however, is anything but faithful to the Senate’s 1866 deliberations, taken as a whole.

The citizenship clause was introduced in the Senate by Jacob Howard of Michigan as an add-on to the initial draft of the 14th Amendment. In his introductory remarks, Howard noted the clause would not apply to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers but would “include every other class of person.”

It is true, as the outliers argue, that the Senate in 1866 did not have modern-day undocumented aliens in mind when they debated the clause, as the nation did not pass its first immigration law until the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It is also true some senators expressed dissatisfaction with Howard’s understanding of the clause.

Nonetheless, as 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James C. Ho noted in a 2006 essay titled “Defining ‘American’ ”:

This understanding was universally adopted by other Senators. Howard’s colleagues vigorously debated the wisdom of his amendment—indeed, some opposed it precisely because they opposed extending birthright citizenship to the children of aliens of different races. But no Senator disputed the meaning of the amendment with respect to alien children.”

Ho is a lifelong Republican, who once served as the solicitor general of Texas. He was, ironically, appointed to the 5th Circuit by Trump this past January.

The Supreme Court has endorsed Howard’s reading of the citizenship clause in at least four decisions: United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), dealing with the readmission into the country of a Chinese man whom the government sought to exclude because he had been born in the U.S. to resident alien parents; Plyer v. Doe (1982), concerning the right of undocumented children to attend public schools; INS v. Rios-Pineda (1985), a deportation proceeding; and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), in which the court’s plurality opinion noted that a Guantanamo Bay inmate held as an “enemy combatant” was still a citizen because he was born in Louisiana.

Despite the clear and unambiguous judicial history supporting birthright citizenship, the outliers remain undeterred. In 1991, former House Republican Elton Gallegly introduced a bill that sought to establish that only children born to legal residents could be accorded citizenship. Although the legislation never made it out of committee, The Guardian has reported that similar measures have been introduced in each succeeding session of Congress. As a congressman, Vice President Mike Pence was a sponsor of an anti-birthright law proposed in 2009.

Shamefully, over the years, even some Democrats have hopped on the anti-birthright bandwagon. In 1993, for example, then-Nevada Sen. Harry Reid introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993, which would have nullified the citizenship clause.

“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward to be an illegal immigrant. No sane country would do that, right?” Reid, a Democrat, asked his colleagues during a floor speech on Sept. 20, 1993. “Guess again,” he continued. “If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides—and that’s a lot of services.”

Reid’s bill failed to pass.

Even if all the current executive, congressional and legal attacks on birthright citizenship run aground as they should, given the plain text of the 14th Amendment, the attacks will continue, and for good reason: In the hands of Trump, the attacks are a sound organizing tactic. They “rile up the crazies” in Trump’s base and help secure fealty to his leadership in much the same way as his calls to “open up the nation’s libel laws” and his castigation of the media as “fake news” arouse his supporters.

The actual number of “anchor babies” born in the U.S. is uncertain. According to the Pew Research Center, however, “about 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized-immigrant parents in 2014, or about 7 percent of the 4 million births in the U.S. that year.” In Trump’s universe, they will all grow up to vote Democratic. Hence, the need to suppress their voting rights or dilute their voting power, if not entirely, then piecemeal by lesser means, such as restrictive voter ID laws and political gerrymandering.

And though the odds are long, it’s always possible the Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative justices affiliated with the Federalist Society, could one day disregard past precedent and overturn birthright citizenship altogether for undocumented newborns. Such an about-face would deliver a mother lode of future voter suppression, and from the Trumpian perspective, truly make America “great”—read white—again.