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The Political Education of Hunter S. Thompson

“Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism”

A book by Timothy Denevi

Four decades have passed since Hunter S. Thompson became a cultural icon. His books continue to sell well, and a steady stream of articles, films and other materials have sustained his celebrity. Perhaps no one has done more than Jann Wenner, his publisher at Rolling Stone, to feature Thompson and repackage his work. But aside from Juan Thompson’s memoir, which details his rocky relationship with his father, few first-rate books have appeared since William McKeen’s biography, “Outlaw Journalist,” was published in 2008.

That same year, actor Johnny Depp purchased Thompson’s archive. About 800 boxes of material were placed in storage, where they remain to this day. We don’t know when scholars will have access to those materials, but we have some idea of their riches. Thompson’s literary executor, historian Douglas Brinkley, tapped them to produce two volumes of correspondence well before Thompson’s suicide in 2005. (A planned third volume never materialized.) According to Brinkley, those works include a fraction of the 20,000 letters Thompson wrote before 1997. The archive is likely a low priority for Depp, whose finances are in disarray. For Thompson’s critical fortunes, however, the current situation is an absurd defeat. Fanboys will continue to feast on his legend, but new research efforts must face the problem of the sequestered archive.

Into this breach has stepped Timothy Denevi, an assistant professor in the MFA program at George Mason University. His new book, “Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism,” draws heavily on the extant sources and occasionally supplements them. His interview with Bay Area physician Bob Geiger, for example, illuminates Thompson’s long-standing use of Dexedrine. Thompson sampled many drugs, but Denevi maintains that Dexedrine and alcohol were his staples, at least until his cocaine habit marked the end of his most productive period. Even on the road trip that inspired “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which details the drug cornucopia stashed in the narrator’s trunk, Thompson’s actual supply consisted only of marijuana and Dexedrine—as well as Benzedrine for his traveling companion, attorney and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. Although Denevi emphasizes Acosta’s influence on Thompson’s political outlook, Thompson dedicated his book to Geiger “for reasons which need not be explained here.”

“Freak Kingdom” focuses on Thompson’s political journalism in the years between the Kennedy assassination and Nixon resignation. It’s an astute way to frame his peak period. Although Thompson continued to harbor hopes for his fiction, the Kennedy assassination pushed him toward journalism and prompted his signature phrase; in a letter written that day, he mentions “the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.” The events he witnessed during this interval—especially the 1964 Republican and 1968 Democratic national conventions—informed his other key book, “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” Along the way, Denevi also considers Thompson’s work on the death of Los Angeles journalist Ruben Salazar; the Freak Party campaigns in Colorado; the origins of “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” the first example of gonzo journalism; and the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, who inspired some of Thompson’s most trenchant work.

Readers will be disappointed if they expect a searching evaluation of Thompson’s political journalism. Instead, the chief concern is his political education, which Denevi re-creates by featuring episodes from Thompson’s personal and professional life. He makes that purpose clear at the outset:

In these pages I’ve tried to dramatize his political evolution in the manner a novel might—while also citing every detail and quote along the way—with the hope of expressing, for you, the effort he put out as a writer and thinker to combat institutional injustice.

Shrewdly combining details from various sources, Denevi offers a series of fully realized scenes whose vitality exceeds any single collection of facts.

How reliable are these scenes? Denevi complicates that question by comparing his use of sources to a translator’s. “Some meanings come across perfectly,” he writes in his bibliographical note. “Others demand the intercession of the translator to expand upon and render a more explicitly subjective judgment. Facts are never singular, even if Truth may very well be.” This passage is unlikely to satisfy hard-shell empiricists, who stubbornly prefer to know where the facts end and the subjective judgments begin. Moreover, Denevi’s reference to Truth, with its telltale initial capitalization, signals a turn toward metaphysics. Even for sympathetic readers, the note may raise more questions than it answers.

The question of reliability is more than an exercise in academic fussiness. In fact, it goes to one of Thompson’s central concerns: the best way to render the world truthfully. He never accepted the distinction between veracious journalism and fanciful fiction. To the contrary, he always thought fiction was a superior vehicle for expressing truths that mattered. “Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can’t reach,” Thompson claimed in a 1965 letter to editor Angus Cameron. “Facts are lies when they’re added up.” He also described gonzo journalism as “a style of ‘reporting’ based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.” A McGovern strategist endorsed this point when he described Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 presidential race as the least factual and most accurate account of the campaign.

Thompson defended his novelistic outlook and occasionally went on the offensive. In his obituary for Richard Nixon, for example, he claimed that mainstream journalism’s slavish devotion to objectivity empowered his long-standing adversary.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism—which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Though not an explicitly political work, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” also drew its power from that warped subjectivity. By channeling his experience though a fictional first-person narrator, Thompson told Tom Wolfe, he hoped to prevent the “grey little cocksuckers who run things” from “drawing that line between Journalism and Fiction.” Even Thompson’s editor at Random House had to ask whether “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was fiction or nonfiction.

“Freak Kingdom” not only endorses Thompson’s method but also adopts it. Certainly the use of novelistic techniques chimes well with the New Journalism that shaped him. If fiction is a bridge to the truth, this project declares, let the construction begin. Although Denevi does not say so, “Freak Kingdom” also responds creatively to the effective embargo on the archival material. It doesn’t replace more traditional forms of literary study, nor does it offer a compelling political analysis; although the subtitle mentions American fascism, for example, that topic receives no serious treatment. Nevertheless, the book meets the standard Denevi set for it. By dramatizing the key decade in Thompson’s life, “Freak Kingdom” brings his weird journey into clear and vivid focus.

The U.S. Military’s Empire of Secrecy

“Democracy dies in darkness.” That’s an old saying that The Washington Post recycled as its motto at the dawn of the Trump era. Truth is, the journalists at the Post don’t know the half of it; nor do they bother to report on the genuine secrecy and increasing lack of transparency in the Department of Defense. Nothing against the Post—neither do any of the other mainstream media outlets.

But it’s true: Right under most Americans’ noses, the military has become more opaque over the last several years. Now, few outlets cover foreign policy with any particular gusto—after all, there’s so much to say about Stormy Daniels or the Brett Kavanaugh drama. But this trend should concern all citizens.

Thing is, what the U.S. military is up to on any given day is done in your name. If civilians are killed, locals alienated or civil liberties restricted, then the global populace, including concerned U.S. citizens, aren’t going to fix blame solely on the armed forces … they’re going to blame you! If for no other reason than this, citizens of an—ostensible—democracy ought to be paying attention. The military is a fierce, potentially brutal instrument, and anyone who cares about liberty ought to watch it closely.

Only that’s getting harder and harder to do in today’s political climate. On one issue after another the U.S. military has recently intensified its secrecy, has classified previously open information and has suppressed any remaining sense of transparency. Don’t just take my word for it: This week a relatively mainstream congressional Democrat, Adam Smith—a ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee—wrote at length on this very topic.

Make no mistake, these trends are long-standing and gradual. So, what follows is not some vacuous liberal attack on President Trump, who remains, for legal purposes, and so long as I remain in uniform, my commander in chief. Still, the time is long past when someone needs to scream from the proverbial mountaintop about America’s expanding empire of secrecy.

Though there are plenty of examples to review, there’s something else to keep in mind: The military isn’t some monolithic monster. It’s far more discreet than that, and so are these trends, so watch closely. Evidence abounds. Soon after the inauguration, the military—which had long recognized and planned for the existential threat of climate change—received guidance to all but purge the term from its reports. It was to be replaced with more nebulous (and inaccurate) phrases, such as “extreme weather.”

Then there’s the minor matter of the war in Afghanistan and its progress—after, you know, 17-plus years. One of the key benchmarks or metrics for progress has been the success or failure of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). Well, for years the DOD released annual casualty figures for the ANSF, and the trends were alarming. Afghan Security Force casualties are frankly unsustainable—the Taliban are killing more than the government can recruit. The death rates are staggering, numbering 5,500 fatalities in 2015, 6,700 in 2016, and an estimate of “about 10,000” in 2017. The reason we’re not sure about the exact count last year is because that data—admittedly at the request of the Afghan government—has been newly classified. This seems absurd. How can the legislature or the public determine the viability or prognosis of America’s longest war without such key statistics? The short answer is, it can’t. And so, the war drags on. …

What’s more, the military’s historically uneasy relationship with the press has also further chilled. As Rep. Smith reported, and complained about, the DOD had issued edicts to curtail or discourage officers from providing candid assessments on readiness challenges, the control of nuclear weapons and other key appraisals. Only after a prolonged public outcry were these once-common press interactions partially reinstated. Nevertheless, this all points to an alarming trend of apparent furtiveness.

There are other examples to add into the disturbing mix. The Navy has stopped publicly posting accident reports. Also, at a time of exploding, record defense budgets, once routine public reports on the cost, schedule and performance of expensive weapons systems have, since 2017, been labeled as “For Official Use Only”—which keeps the data from the public through an ever-expanding regime of “over-classification.” Without such public releases, the populace and their elected representatives cannot effectively scrutinize what President (and five-star General) Eisenhower aptly labeled the “dangerous” military-industrial complex. Is that the point? Let’s hope not.

Then there is the internal censorship within the military’s computer networks. Recently, credible, left-leaning websites such as Tom Dispatch and The Intercept have reportedly been blocked on many government computers. The reason provided in the firewall warning message is the existence of “hate and racism” on the two sites. Now, many readers, and even more American citizens, may not like the content of these publications—which is fine—but anyone who has even briefly read anything on these sites can vouch for one salient truth: There is absolutely nothing hateful or racist at Tom Dispatch or The Intercept. These publications are professionally edited and reviewed, and, indeed, are unique in that they focus on long-form analytical essays.

It appears that the only crime of these sites is that they are, indeed, left-leaning. Need proof? Well, guess which genuinely racist, conspiracy-theory-peddling websites are not blocked? You guessed it: Breitbart and InfoWars. Heck, even Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to ban Alex Jones’ InfoWars from their social media sites. So, there’s only one major conclusion to draw: Genuinely shocking and offensive right-leaning publications are just fine; meanwhile, even credible, respected left-leaning sites are apparently a threat. This sort of rank partisanship is disturbing from a purportedly apolitical organization like the DOD.

Now, there are no doubt times when tactical necessity requires secrecy in military operations. I’ve lived at the sharp end of that spear, and do not discount its occasional inexorability. That said, much of the move away from transparency has little to do with combat, so to speak, and more to do with politics. We, the citizenry, trust our military with immense responsibility, but as a supposed democracy, that same military ought to be accountable to Congress and to the public. These days, that seems ever more like a distant fantasy.

This all matters. America has a choice. It can be an empire—or it can be a genuine republic. It may not be both.

—

Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer and a regular contributor to Truthdig. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Copyright 2018 Danny Sjursen

How Marriott’s Credit Union Swindles Its Low-Wage Workers

As approximately 8,000 Marriott workers nationwide enter their second month on strike, protesting poor labor practices, some employees are speaking out about how the Marriott Employees’ Federal Credit Union exploits their hardship.

“The money gets into my account, and they take it out when I overdraft,” Amos Troyah, a dishwasher at a Philadelphia Marriott, told The New York Times. “They are robbing me.”

In 12 months, Troyah made $30,000 and paid $2,000 in fees to the credit union.

Last week, Marriott employees filed a class action lawsuit in Philadelphia over charges on loans that were previously undisclosed at the credit union, which is officially independent, though its leadership is made up of Marriott executives.

Workers pay a $35 fee to apply for a loan of up to $500 for six months. Often, the borrowers do not realize that these loans have an annual interest rate of 40 to 50 percent. The lawsuit states that Marriott’s human resources departments markets these loans to workers who are unaware of costs, which include a $10 weekly deduction straight from their Marriott paycheck.

“While the mini-loan may appear to be a free-standing financial product, it is part-and-parcel of the unequal bargaining relationship between the Marriott and its employees. By providing employees with quick cash when needed and indebting them to their employer, the mini-loan allows the Marriott to retain its workforce while subjecting workers to unfair and unpredictable scheduling practices,” the lawsuit argues.

The credit union also charges $35 for an overdraft and fees of around $6 and $10 when an account goes below a specified balance or a person carries out too many transactions. Fees make up an unusually high amount of the credit union’s $188 million assets, at 1.7 percent. According to a federal regulatory agency, fees on loans at the Marriott credit union are unusually high: $11 for every $100.

These fees can add hardship for workers who are already in tough financial situations. “As the largest employer in hospitality, they’re in a position where they could really step forward and try to do right by their employees,” said Lisa Correa, a worker at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. “They continue to find ways to downsize the workforce, adding to our workload, and they’re doing whatever they can to not pay medical.”

According to The Nation, the credit union exploits people of color, who are less likely than the rest of the population to have savings, due to unequal access to wealth. If a person then takes out a predatory loan, he or she is likely to become even more reliant on lenders. The Nation also points out that this practice has roots in the racism of the post-Civil War South:

The combination of predatory lending and predatory-employment practices has a historical precedent in the sharecropping system that kept formerly enslaved black families in the South trapped in a cycle of debt. Since most sharecroppers did not have a steady cash flow, they used their prospective crops as collateral to finance loans from the country store, a merchant who faced little competition and could therefore set interest rates as high as 50 or 60 percent. White store merchants and landlords built their own wealth on a system that left predominantly black sharecroppers in perpetual debt.

On its website, Marriott’s credit union states: “Unlike most banks, credit unions focus on individuals, not larger businesses. They are able to offer better value than banks by putting the credit union’s profits back into providing service to members, not by providing capital gains to shareholders.”

But those capital gains certainly have not reached Marriott’s low-income workers.

Trump’s War on the Fed

October was a brutal month for the stock market. After the Federal Reserve’s eighth interest rate hike, on Sept. 26, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 2,000 points, and the NASDAQ had its worst month in nearly 10 years. After the Dow lost more than 800 points on Oct. 10 and the S&P 500 suffered its first weeklong losing streak since Trump’s election, the president said, “I think the Fed is making a mistake. They are so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy.” In a later interview on Fox News, he called the Fed’s rate hikes “loco.” And in a Wall Street Journal interview published on Oct. 24, Trump said he thought the biggest risk to the economy was the Federal Reserve, because “interest rates are being raised too quickly.” He also criticized the Fed and its chairman in July and August.

Trump’s criticisms are worrisome to some commentators, who fear he is attempting to manipulate the Fed and its chairman for political gain. Ever since the 1970s, the Fed has declared its independence from government, and presidents are supposed to avoid influencing its decisions. But other Fed watchers think politicians should be allowed to criticize the market manipulations of an apparently out-of-control central bank.

Why the Frontal Attack?

Even if the president’s challenges are a needed check on the Fed, some question whether he is going about it in the right way. Challenging the central bank in public forces it to stick to its guns, because it must maintain its credibility with the markets by showing that its decisions are based on sound economic principles rather than on political influence. If the president really wants the Fed to back off on interest rates, it has been argued, he should do it with a nod and a nudge, not a frontal attack on the Fed’s sanity.

True, but perhaps the president’s goal is not to subtly affect Fed behavior so much as to make it patently obvious who is to blame when the next Great Recession hits. And recession is fairly certain to hit, because higher interest rates almost always trigger recessions. The Fed’s current policy of “quantitative tightening”—tightening or contracting the money supply—is the very definition of recession, a term Wikipedia defines as “a business cycle contraction which results in a general slowdown in economic activity.”

This “business cycle” is not something inevitable, like the weather. It is triggered by the central bank. When the Fed drops interest rates, banks flood the market with “easy money,” allowing speculators to snatch up homes and other assets. When the central bank then raises interest rates, it contracts the amount of money available to spend and to pay down debt. Borrowers go into default and foreclosed homes go on the market at fire-sale prices, again to be snatched up by the monied class.

But it is a game of Monopoly that cannot go on forever. According to Elga Bartsch, chief European economist at Morgan Stanley, one more financial cataclysm could be all that it takes for central bank independence to end. “Having been overburdened for a long time, many central banks might just be one more economic downturn or financial crisis away from a full-on political backlash,” she wrote in a note to clients in 2017. “Such a political backlash could call into question one of the long-standing tenets of modern monetary policy making—central bank independence.”

And that may be the president’s endgame. When higher rates trigger another recession, Trump can point an accusing finger at the central bank, absolving his own policies of liability and underscoring the need for a major overhaul of the Fed.

End the Fed?

Trump has not overtly joined the End the Fed campaign, but he has had the ear of several advocates of that approach. One is John Allison, whom the president evidently considered for both Fed chairman and treasury secretary. Allison has proposed ending the Fed altogether and returning to the gold standard, and Trump suggested on the campaign trail that he approved of a gold-backed currency.

But a gold standard is the ultimate in tight money—keeping money in limited supply tied to gold—and today Trump seems to want to return to the low-interest policies of former Fed Chair Janet Yellen. Jerome Powell, Trump’s replacement pick, has been called “Yellen without Yellen,” a dovish alternative in acceptable Republican dress. That’s what the president evidently thought he was getting, but in his Oct. 24 Wall Street Journal interview, Trump said of Powell, “[H]e was supposed to be a low-interest-rate guy. It’s turned out that he’s not.” The president complained:

[E]very time we do something great, he raises the interest rates. … That means we pay more on debt and we slow down the economy, both bad things. … I mean, we had a case where he raised interest rates right before we have a bond offering. So you have a bond offering and you have somebody raising interest rates, so you end up paying more on the bonds. … To me it doesn’t make sense.

Trump acknowledged the independence of the Fed and its chairman but said, “I’m allowed to say what I think. … I think he’s making a mistake.”

Presidential Impropriety or a Needed Debate?

In a November 2016 article in Politico titled “Donald Trump Isn’t Crazy to Attack the Fed,” Danny Vinik agreed with that contention. Trump, who is not a stickler for consistency, was then criticizing Yellen for keeping interest rates too low. Vinik said that while he disagreed with Trump’s interpretation of events, he agreed that the president should be allowed to talk about Fed policy. Vinik observed:

The Federal Reserve is, by definition, not independent. Unlike the Supreme Court, the central bank is a creation of Congress and is accountable to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. It can be changed—or abolished—by Congress as well. And to pretend it’s not—to treat the Fed as an entity totally removed from American politics—also leaves us powerless to talk about the ways it might be improved. …

The long tradition of deference to the Fed’s policy independence can even pose a risk: It creates an environment in which any critique of the Fed is seen as out of line, including the idea of reforming how it works.

Vinik quoted Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth economist and 20-year veteran of the Fed, who published a set of recommended central bank reforms in conjunction with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign in 2016. One goal was to make the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets Fed policy, more representative of the American public. The FOMC is composed of the president of the New York Fed, four other Federal Reserve bank presidents and the Federal Reserve Board, which currently has only four members (three positions are vacant). That means the FOMC is majority-controlled by heads of Federal Reserve banks, all of whom must have “tested banker experience.” As Vinik quoted Levin:

The Federal Reserve is a crucial public agency, so there are lots of important questions—including the selection of its leaders, the determination of their priorities, and the specific strategy that they’re following—that should all be open to public discourse.

Vinik also cited Ady Barkan, the head of the Fed Up campaign, who agreed that questioning Fed policy is appropriate, even for the president. Barkan said the Fed’s independence comes from its structure: Its leaders are appointed, not elected, for long terms, which inherently insulates them from political pressure. But the Fed must still be accountable to the public, and one way policymakers fulfill that responsibility is through public comments. Monetary policy decisions, said Barkan, are therefore appropriate topics for political debate.

Reassessing Fed Independence

According to Timothy Canova, professor of law and public finance at Nova Southeastern University, the Fed is not a neutral arbiter. It might be independent of oversight by politicians, but Fed “independence” has really come to mean a central bank that has been captured by very large banking interests. This has not always been the case. During the period coming out of the Great Depression, the Fed as a practical matter was not independent, but took its marching orders from the White House and the Treasury; and that period, says Canova, was the most successful in American economic history.

The Fed’s justification for raising interest rates despite admittedly low inflation is that we are nearing “full employment,” which will drive up prices because labor costs will go up. But wages have not gone up. Why? Because in a globalized world, the availability of cheap labor abroad keeps American wages low, even if most people are working (which is questionable today, despite official statistics).

Higher interest rates do not serve consumers, homebuyers, businesses or governments. They serve the banks that dominate the policy-setting FOMC. The president’s critiques of the Fed, however controversial, have opened the door to a much-needed discourse on whether the fate of the economy should be in the hands of unelected bureaucrats marching to the drums of Wall Street.

Postscript: The stock market has turned positive as of this writing (Thursday), but the rebound has been led by the FANG stocks—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. As noted in my article of Sept. 13, these are the stocks that central banks are now purchasing in large quantities. The FANG stocks jumped in unison on Wednesday, although only one (Facebook) had positive news to report, suggesting possible market manipulation for political purposes.

They Are Coming for the Jews

Back in October, which feels like another geologic era, when the continents took different shapes and the animals were strange, New Yorker writer Adam Davidson observed that whether or not Donald Trump knew that his ritualistic invocation of George Soros as the moneybags puppet-master of the global left was anti-Semitic, “Either way, the President is a mouthpiece for vile anti-Semitism.” (At the time, Trump had insinuated that Soros was paying for protests against Brett Kavanaugh.)

Within a matter of minutes, New York Times writer Nick Confessore had replied: “I don’t think attacking things as Soros-funded is de facto anti-Semitic.”

Adam Davidson is Jewish. Nick Confessore is not.

Less than a month later, a man who believes that Soros is the leader of a secret cabal intent on destroying the white race murdered 11 Jews in a synagogue. Two days later, Trump said again, in an interview, that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Soros were funding a so-called migrant caravan.

The administration of the United States is racist and anti-Semitic. People of color and Jews keep saying so, and reporters and pundits keep telling us not necessarily.

Even when they sidle up to it, they hedge. “Employing barely coded anti-Semitism, [the political right] have built a warped portrayal of him as the mastermind of a ‘globalist’ movement,” The New York Times wrote in a long article on Soros on Wednesday. It isn’t “barely coded.” It’s anti-Semitic.

Jews are now relearning what people of color have been yelling from the rooftops for decades. I am not a great fan of the term “gaslighting,” which has insinuated its way into popular discourse in a way I find annoyingly inexact, little more than a broad synonym for simple lying. Nevertheless, it’s a hard word not to reach for when you feel like you’re constantly being told you are crazy. “Coded anti-Semitism” is, I suppose, a new version of “racial language” or “racially charged.”

Even when it is plainly so, the obscene conventions of mainstream journalism require journalists to say possibly not. The GOP just released a virulently racist ad that features a cackling Latino murderer, riots and implied stampedes of migrants overrunning border fences. The Washington Post still felt obliged to tell us, “A number of people pushed back against characterizing the ad as ‘racist.’ ” Who were these numerous people? We meet only two. Both operate random Twitter accounts, one with fewer than 100 followers, the other which recently retweeted a racist Facebook meme featuring a fake image purporting to be Hillary Clinton in blackface.

Even in covering the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, the paper reached for the splintered framework of division and debate. “A mass shooting in Pittsburgh and a Trump visit expose a divided America,” declared a Post headline for a story about a father and daughter—he’s a conservative! She’s a liberal! Like a lazy sitcom!—debating whether Trump should visit the city and whether he bears any responsibility for the attack. It ends with a warm surprise: Dad voted for Hillary Clinton, he says, out of love and respect for his daughter.

They seem like perfectly nice, ordinary people. They are not Jewish. The question of whether the man who incited this pogrom should or should not come to offer his ersatz respects is not theirs to answer or debate.

Even where Jews do appear, there is assiduous attention paid to the fact that a minority of American Jews—about 25 percent—support President Trump in some fashion, largely because of his loud public support for Israel. We are also treated to appearances by Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, and Naftali Bennett, an Israeli government minister whose party does not believe that Reform and Conservative Jews are really Jewish. And of course we are reminded, again and again, that the president’s son-in-law is a Jew, which, it is implied, somehow inoculates him against anti-Semitism.

After his hasty, uncelebrated trip to Pittsburgh, the president’s first public comment was to tweet an insult at the people who protested his ill-conceived appearance. Many of those protesters were Jews.

I happen to believe that Nazi analogies have cutting polemical uses and that objections to them on grounds of politeness and hyperbole are usually made in bad faith. That’s because Nazism is—diminishingly, I fear—still coded as the most evil of evils, and the comparisons are rhetorically effective.

The drawback of the centrality of the Third Reich in our popular conception of anti-Semitism, however, is that its immense shadow obscures a much longer history of violence against Jews. We think of the vast, mechanized slaughter of the last years of World War II and the Final Solution, of the gas chambers and crematoria, and this, in a way, gives license to deny that hatred of, and violence against, Jews at a lesser scale is anti-Semitic.

But persecution of our people is not all the Spanish Inquisition and the Shoah. Far more frequently, and for over a thousand years, it consisted of people—not always soldiers; frequently peasants themselves—attacking a village. Burning a synagogue. Even the earlier days of the Nazi regime and the Second World War featured a great deal of popular violence against Jews, much of it, as contemporary observers of anti-Jewish riots in Germany note, by seemingly ordinary and decent people.

I am going to confess something about which I am deeply ashamed. I did not always believe people of color. Oh, I believed that there were racists, and I believed in systemic racism, and I thought of myself as a good ally and man of the left, but there were times when I privately thought: Your concerns are a little exaggerated; your sensitivities to particular cues of language too finely attuned. There were times when I thought: You need to grow a thicker skin.

How thick must skin be to stop a bullet?

Learning to listen was shaming, embarrassing and terrifying. It meant renegotiating what I had long believed to be the near boundlessness of my own intellect and empathy. It was humbling to let myself hear, for the first time, how little I knew. It meant confronting my own place in systems of oppression and control and, more than anything, violence, from which I had benefited—telling myself the whole time that the benefit was inadvertent—my whole life. It meant believing what I was told and allowing that my own skepticisms were themselves the product of a deeply internalized racism that it will be a life’s work to unlearn.

Now, of course, they are coming for Jews, for my people, coming for us again, after we let ourselves be lulled into a comfortable whiteness because they let us join the country club and go to the Ivy League. They are coming to kill us at the incitement of the elected executive of the government of the United States. And even after the deadliest assault on Jews in American history, I am not convinced that anyone is really listening.

Trump Administration Reimposes Iran Sanctions Lifted in Nuclear Deal

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration on Friday announced the reimposition of all U.S. sanctions on Iran that had been lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal, ramping up economic pressure on the Islamic Republic as President Donald Trump completed the unraveling of what had been one of his predecessor’s signature foreign policy achievements.

The sanctions, which will take effect on Monday, cover Iran’s shipping, financial and energy sectors and are the second batch the administration has reimposed since Trump withdrew from the landmark accord in May. The rollback ends U.S. participation in the nuclear deal, which now hangs in the balance as Iran no longer enjoys any relief from sanctions imposed by the world’s largest economy.

Shortly after the announcement, Trump tweeted a movie poster-like image of himself walking out of what appears to be fog with the phrase “Sanctions are Coming, November 5.”

With limited exceptions, the sanctions will hit countries that do not stop importing Iranian oil and foreign firms that do business with blacklisted Iranian entities, including its central bank, a number of private financial institutions, and state-run port and shipping firms, as well as hundreds of individual Iranian officials.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the sanctions are “aimed at fundamentally altering the behavior of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He has issued a list of 12 demands that Iran must meet if it wants the sanctions lifted. Those include ending support for terrorism and military engagement in Syria and a complete halt to its nuclear and ballistic missile development.

“Our ultimate aim is to compel Iran to permanently abandon its well-documented outlaw activities and behave as a normal country,” Pompeo told reporters in a conference call with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “Maximum pressure means maximum pressure.”

Pompeo said eight nations will receive temporary waivers allowing them to continue to import Iranian petroleum products for a limited period as they move to end such imports entirely. He said those countries, which other officials said would include U.S. allies such as Turkey, Italy, India, Japan and South Korea, had made efforts to eliminate their imports but could not complete the task by Monday.

The waivers, expected to be announced Monday, will be valid for six months, during which time the importing country can buy Iranian oil but must deposit Iran’s revenue in an escrow account. Iran can spend the money but only on a narrow range of humanitarian items. Pompeo said two of the eight countries would wind down imports to zero within weeks.

Mnuchin said 700 more Iranian companies and people would be added to the sanctions rolls. Those, he said, would include more than 300 that had not been included under previous sanctions.

“We are sending a very clear message with our maximum pressure campaign: that the U.S. intends to aggressively enforce our sanctions,” he said.

Iran hawks in Congress and elsewhere were likely to be disappointed in the sanctions as they had been pushing for no oil import waivers as well as the complete disconnection of Iran from the main international financial messaging network known as SWIFT.

One group that has been highly critical of the deal welcomed the new sanctions but said there should be no exceptions.

“We encourage the Trump administration to fulfill the promise of a maximum pressure campaign — no exceptions — until Iran permanently and verifiably changes its behavior,” United Against a Nuclear Iran said in a statement. “Oil and gas firms, including those from friendly countries like India, South Korea and Japan, should not be granted sanctions waivers. Similarly, financial entities — including SWIFT — must sever ties with Iranian banks and financial institutions.”

Mnuchin defended the decision to allow some Iranian banks to remain connected to SWIFT, saying that the Belgium-based firm had been warned that it will face penalties if sanctioned institutions are permitted to use it. And, he said that U.S. regulators would be watching closely Iranian transactions that use SWIFT to ensure any that run afoul of U.S. sanctions would be punished.

Pompeo, meanwhile, defended the oil waivers, saying U.S. efforts to cut Iran’s petroleum revenue had already been successful. He noted that since May, when the U.S. began to press countries to stop buying Iranian oil, Iran’s exports had dropped by more than 1 million barrels per day.

Pompeo and Mnuchin both said the sanctions will have exceptions for humanitarian purchases.

The 2015 nuclear deal, one of former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements, gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program, which many believed it was using to develop atomic weapons. Trump repeatedly denounced the agreement as the “worst ever” negotiated by the United States and vowed to withdraw from it during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump and other critics of the deal said it gave Iran too much in return for too little, allowed Iran to gradually resume nuclear activity that could eventually be used for weapons development and did not address any of the country’s other problematic activities.

Obama-era officials as well as the other parties to the deal — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union — have vehemently defended it. The Europeans have mounted a drive to save the agreement from the U.S. withdrawal, fearing that the new sanctions will drive Iran to pull out and resume all of its nuclear work.

Lee Camp: ‘We’re in a New Age of McCarthyism’

Arguably the greatest comedian of his generation, Lenny Bruce appeared on network television just six times. Six times over a career that spanned the better part of two decades. On multiple occasions, he was cited for obscenity—a series of arrests that culminated in his 1964 conviction. (He was posthumously pardoned.) Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood home two years later, a syringe and a burned bottle cap beside him.

Lee Camp knows something about being deemed beyond the pale. In June 2017, he found himself the subject of a bizarre profile in The New York Times that suggested, in so many words, that he was a stooge of Vladimir Putin. “We’re in a new age of McCarthyism,” Camp tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer. “I grew up with people telling me, ‘What a dark time in America’s past! Let’s never go back to such a barbaric way of thinking’ … of guilt by association and letting our cognitive abilities just go by the wayside.”

For the past four years, Camp has hosted “Redacted Tonight” on Russia Today—a comedy show that explores the all-too-familiar ills of American empire: unchecked militarism, Wall Street greed and, perhaps most importantly, the propaganda of our political press. During that time, he has developed a cultlike following among leftists desperately searching for an alternative to corporate media. “I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for 20 years,” Camp says. “It became increasingly political after the Iraq invasion in 2002; you know, that’s when I kind of had [an] awakening as to what was really going on in our world.”

Camp is not the only iconoclast at RT America. The network has featured such prominent independent thinkers as Jesse Ventura, Phil Donahue and the late Ed Schultz—an ex-governor and two former MSNBC hosts, respectively. In November 2017, amid a steady diet of “Russiagate” stories in the national media, the network was forced to comply with the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA)—a bill designed to target lobbyists. “[The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)] is the definition of what they’re talking about,” Camp notes. “It is Israel’s lobbying arm in the U.S. And it has never been forced to register as a foreign agent.”

In the latest episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” the comedian explores the legacies of Richard Pryor and George Carlin, as well as Lenny Bruce, big tech’s capacity to strangle independent media and the freedom of working for a network like RT America. “I’d just given up the idea of ever being on television, because the things I talk about are not generally allowed on corporate media,” he says. “RT America [lets me talk] about infinite war and Wall Street exploitation … and I’ve never been told to say anything or told not to say anything.”

Listen to his interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, someone who’s described as an American comic, but actually I think of as more, dare I say it, a pretty deep thinker about politics. And that’s Lee Camp. But the fact is, the most scurrilous, deceitful, creepy article I’ve ever read in a mainstream newspaper was a hit job on Lee Camp in The New York Times about a year ago. And I couldn’t believe it. I mean, you go through this thing, the guy, because he dares to have a show on RT–and you know, and they couldn’t get anything on Lee Camp, other than that he’s funny; they did admit that he’s very funny. You’ve been a comedian for decades. And so, what’s this all about? You’ve been red-baited, you’re–

Lee Camp: Yeah.

RS: And, you know, what’s going on? It’s kind of a weird, weird atmosphere.

LC: Yeah, that New York Times piece was truly incredible. And yeah, it ended with saying there were Russians outside my show, my standup show in New York. But the guy failed to mention, this so-called journalist failed to mention that there–unrelated, completely unrelated, didn’t even know he was going to be there, there was a Russian, a well-known Russian rapper performing after me at the same venue, like an hour after me. So the people he saw, the Russians he saw in line were Russian-Americans waiting to see this rapper. And apparently, The New York Times couldn’t even dig deep enough to look up at the name in lights that was performing after me. But anyway, yeah, we’re in, you know–and I didn’t live through it, but we’re in a new age of McCarthyism. And you know, I grew up with people telling me, oh man, what a dark time in America’s past! Let’s never go back to such a barbaric way of thinking and guilt by association and being so afraid, and you know, just letting our cognitive abilities just go by the wayside to just point people and say, you know, you’re Russian, you sympathize with the Russians because you want peace, or you stand for something that I don’t necessarily agree with. And we’re all back, it seems like so much, so many Americans are just back there, you know, led by corporate media to just push this ridiculous red-baiting and neo-McCarthyism. And it’s a disgusting time in that sense. And of course I’ve been doing the same stuff for the past 20 years; I’ve been a stand-up comic, talking about these issues; I had a YouTube show before I was at RT; and I’ve been doing my same stuff, talking about the same issues, for 20 years. And only in the past two have people decided, ooh, scary, scary Russian.

RS: The really depressing thing here is the McCarthyites now are my friends. They are people who should know better. And the thing that seems to be driving this McCarthyism–the Russians did it, the Russians did it–is that Hillary Clinton lost the election. I mean, there was a lot of problems with Trump, but the idea that he’s a stooge of Putin–if there was a foreign government that interfered in our election, it was Israel. Why doesn’t anybody dare say it?

LC: I know.

RS: It was Israel! Netanyahu went, spoke to the U.S. Congress, violated all tradition, attacked a sitting president for his deal with Iran, OK–which was, by the way, Obama’s great achievement in foreign policy, and he should be applauded for it.

LC: Yeah.

RS: So you got Israel in an unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia, and you know, backing the Sunnis against the Shiites, and Iran is the great enemy. And what happens with this election is Trump goes over to that position. It’s not only that they influenced the election, but then Trump moves the embassy, you know, to Jerusalem; he embraces Saudi Arabia; and he makes Iran the great enemy. So if you want to talk about influence on this president, it clearly has come from that direction. On the other hand, here’s Putin–if he backed Trump in the way–and I think the documentation is quite light. The main things Putin is supposed to have done is allow us to read or hear what Hillary Clinton said to Goldman Sachs, which Bernie Sanders said we had a right to have, and we didn’t know what she had said. And the other is that the Democratic National Committee was in the business of undermining Bernie Sanders. Those are the two main leaks that came out; maybe we’ll learn more. But the irony is that Trump has done nothing–not only done nothing, he’s tried to savage the Russian economy. He’s increased sanctions, he’s been tough as could be. So you have this really disconnect here, that is alarming, and it’s fed by the same thing that drives MSNBC and others; it’s opportunism, careerism.

LC: I mean, you’re absolutely right. And they made this decision, from what I understand, you know, the internal Clinton people made this decision basically a week after the election. That, you know–because remember, for that first week, they were blaming Comey and the FBI for sinking her chances of winning, because he reopened the investigation or whatnot. And then they realized, well, going against the FBI as the reason we lost this election is not going to be good for us and the democrats. So then, a week later, they shifted to, you know, this–oh, it’s all Russia, Russia did it, and we need to just go after Russia. And Comey became the great hero all of a sudden, of the democrats, which was a stunning–you know, you got to take Dramamine to deal with the amount of spinning they’re doing here. But yeah, it–and Israel was definitely, and continues to definitely be such a p=owerful influence on this government. And you know, the hilarious thing is that RT was the first media outlet, RT America, to be forced to sign up as foreign agents or whatever. I mean, I didn’t personally have to do it, but the company did. And of course, the foreign agent bill, which was initially law, which was initially put in, was designed to–you know, for lobbyists, foreign lobbyists to register as foreign agents, not press agencies. And AIPAC is the definition of what they’re talking about; it is Israel’s lobbying arm in the U.S. And it has never been forced to register as a foreign agent, and it was asked to back in the sixties, and just never did. And so the actual definition of a foreign agent is not registered, but now they’re, you know, forcing this on press agencies; they’re now going after China’s television network, I believe, also had to register. So I guess they’ll just, you know, when are they going to come after BBC and CBC, when are those going to register as foreign agents?

RS: So let me ask you about comedy. Because it’s interesting how taste can be, or matters of taste, can be used to dismiss people. You know, and I want to bring up Lenny Bruce, because I do think he was one of the great, great thinkers as well as comics. And they were able to totally marginalize and destroy this guy, destroy–you’re not funny, you’re beyond the pale. And I get the, a little bit of the feeling that people are doing that with you. You know, that you’re a threat because you actually do have a following, and you are funny. So let me ask you about careerism. Tell me a little bit about yourself, where you came from, how you became a comic, and why you’re not more obviously selling out.

LC: Well, I don’t know that I have the answer to all those questions. But I was born to a military doctor father here at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., the famous military hospital. And then grew up, most of my younger years, in Richmond, Virginia; went to University of Virginia. I started writing comedy when I was about 12, thought I was going to be a comedy writer because I’d never been on a stage, I had no interest in acting or anything. And then when I got to college, started performing onstage and became obsessed with standup comedy. And immediately after school, went to New York to be a standup comic. And you know, I think like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been doing this for, I’ve been doing standup comedy for 20 years. It became increasingly political after the Iraq invasion in 2002; you know, that’s when I kind of had, continued to have my awakening as to what was really going on in our world. Started reading people like Chomsky and Hedges and yourself, and started to really understand the truth behind the corporate media, that maybe they don’t really want to touch on so much. And I just kind of felt that that is what I wanted to be talking about onstage, even if it made my path a little more difficult, even if it meant that, you know, if you’re playing to a roomful of tourists in New York City, a certain percentage of them are going to be a little turned off. I got pretty good at kind of putting these political ideas in there while still entertaining the entire crowd, even if they were right-wing or something. And that’s, I think, the great gift of comedy, is that people will sit and listen to ideas that they might disagree with, despite finding them a bit appalling or upsetting or uncomfortable or what have you. Whereas if you just lecture somebody and they disagree, they’ll often walk out in the first five minutes. And you know, I think that’s what’s exciting about comedy. But you know, people ask me which came first, the comedy or the activism; and it was definitely the comedy. I just wanted to be a comedian, I wanted to be Seinfeld when I was, you know, 15 or 16. And then the activism and the politics came later. And now I just find I–you know, there are great comedians out there that aren’t saying anything important; there’s absurdist comedians, people like Mitch Hedberg and Steven Wright, that are brilliant. But–or were brilliant. But for me, what I find interesting is really dealing with these deep, dark subjects, and yet inserting the comedy to make them go down a little easier. Because even those who agree can burn out so quickly if we don’t have a bit of a release, a bit of a spoonful of honey to go with the medicine. So yeah, I’ve just been going down that path. And you know, I’d given up–to talk about careerism, I’d given up on the idea of ever being on TV, really. I mean, I’d had little–I’d basically had one interview on each network, because once they saw what I said and realized, oh, that’s not acceptable for our airwaves–I’d been on CNN once, I’d been on MSNBC once, I’d been on [Laughs] all these networks one time. Fox News, you know, had me escorted out of the building. So I basically had appeared on each of these things, they realized I was not acceptable for corporate America; Comedy Central I was on once. And so I’d just given up the idea of ever being on television, because the things I talk about are not generally allowed on your corporate media. And then RT America basically was like, do whatever–do what it is you’re doing. You know, do whatever you want. And I’ve found such freedom there, that I can talk about these issues, talk about infinite war and Wall Street exploitation, and I’m not–I’ve never been told to say anything or told not to say anything. So it is this crazy situation, where I’ve gotten very lucky that I’m doing something that I feel is important, and yet can still be seen by people.

RS: Yeah, it’s interesting about our relation to media, mass media. The great thinker Leonard Cohen had a song, “There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets through.” And my own feeling, you know, you mentioned a few people–Chris Hedges; well, Chris Hedges wrote for, as you have pointed out, for The New York Times for a long time. He did great work, he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer; he did great work reporting from the Mideast. I think Chris Hedges is the best journalist that we’ve produced in our modern period; Sy Hersh is another great one, worked sometimes for The New York Times, but he also wrote, when I was editing Ramparts magazine–

LC: And how–I actually want to ask you this–how outrageous is it that someone like Sy Hersh has to publish amazing journalism in German magazines? Because they won’t publish it here!

RS: Yeah, but I’m going to tell you, as an older guy, it’s always been that way. There’s always been these contradictions. And you know what, I’m going to take a quick break. I’ve been talking to Lee Camp, a terrific comic–I say “comic” sort of demeans this, although he’ll take exception–I think he’s a big thinker, and it comes out in his comedy, it’s informed by it. But we’ll be right back. [omission for station break] We’re right back with Lee Camp, who’s got a comedy special that we’re going to talk about, coming on Election Day, so you can’t forget it–Election Day. And I want to talk to you about a basic issue about, how do you survive as a writer, as a comic, as a thinker, as an artist. And you know, you’ve had your difficulties, your connection with RT, of course you have connections with lots of things. And what I, the reason I wanted to have you on this interview, I am really ticked off with people who say that going on RT disqualifies you. Why doesn’t it disqualify you if you work for The New York Times and they shamelessly, as you have pointed out in the case of Chris Hedges, they not only shamelessly supported the Iraq War and the lies about it, but they fired Chris Hedges for daring to give a commencement speech criticizing the war, which he had witnessed, on the ground, in person. And yet he was forced out.

LC: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you can go down the list of people that have been forced out of these networks for being against war, or not standing the corporate line. You know, Phil Donahue pushed out at MSNBC; Jessie Ventura had a giant contract with MSNBC that, once they found out he was against the Iraq War, they paid him a lot of money to get out of the contract, never airing his show; Ed Schultz kind of pushed out because he supported Bernie Sanders. So it is a very fine line of what you’re allowed to say on those corporate airwaves.

RS: Well, you know, my own view is that you are providing a good model of how to survive. Because if you don’t survive and get the word out and get to talk to people, then what are you doing? You’re just [Laughs] you know, proving to your god or something that you’re virtuous. Even that won’t cut it if, you know, the god is discerning; he’ll say, wait a minute, that was a cop-out [Laughter], you just went to some monastery and shut up, that doesn’t do it. So you know, the fact of the matter is, you’re out there with your big mouth and your comedy and your big ideas and everything else. And so what’s happening now? I mean, can you make a living?

LC: [Laughs] Well, yeah. No, I’m doing fine, because I have this TV show, “Redacted Tonight,” at RT America. But other than that, you know, the touring is pretty, is OK; but you know, that’s, you just kind of break even with the live touring. I’m luckily in the situation where I’m excited that I can put out this comedy special on my own without any corporate backers, and I don’t have to deal with that side of things. So I’ve kind of gotten lucky that that is a, you know, now a point of pride, that this thing’s only at LeeCampComedySpecial.com. But you know, I appreciate that, and you know, you brought up other comedians that have walked this line–most of the ones that were allowed to get famous, they got famous doing things that were not overtly political, or at least not too much. You know, if you look at the early stuff of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, they were not very political in the early days. And once they had that fame, they started talking about more important issues. And then of course, you know, George Carlin was taken all the way to the Supreme Court with the NPR case, right, and Lenny Bruce was basically driven to his death; they made it impossible for him to perform and make money, because anywhere he performed at, he’d get arrested for speech violations or obscenity violations. You know, Carlin said some very important things, and that’s why his legend continues to live on, and I think it’ll just continue to grow. And it’s because he already had that audience, he’d developed a large audience without saying things that threatened corporate America or the, you know, the gatekeepers. And then once he was threatening, it was too late; he was, he had such a massive platform, and was adored by so many people that it was too late. And some of his stuff in the nineties and early thousands is really important thought, for a comedian, at least, on the fact that we’re bombing endlessly, and that we perpetrate war so often, and those type of things that you don’t hear a lot from your entertainment. You know, I’m sure there’s plenty of kind of no-name comedians out there, and if they’re talking about this stuff, it’s not easy to break in.

RS: Well you know the whole thing is, we’re trying to scratch–to find a little hole in the dike or something, that we can slip something through. Because the fact is, you know, the freedom of press that was guaranteed in our Constitution was a press that pretty much any white male [Laughs] farmer could own. You know, it was the penny–any printer could put out a penny press; that’s what Tom Paine did, he seduced the wife of a printer, and we got, you know, some of these great pamphlets.

LC: Well, and that’s why the information revolution is so threatening to the powers that be, is because it is, everybody does have a voice. And I think you’re seeing that kind of being shut down now, with these, just like week, you know, Anti Media and Free Thought Project all banned, 800 pages banned from Facebook, and their accounts of their editors on Twitter simultaneously suspended. So clearly, Facebook and Twitter discussed that these pages needed to be shut down. And to me, that’s very frightening; that’s, to see that level of conspiring between these large social media platforms to shut out alternative or independent journalism outlets.

RS: So the reality is, OK, these people, the business model is broken for journalism. And the people on the internet who are making the enormous amount of money and becoming trillion-dollar companies are, in the main, robbing your privacy. But it’s not against the Constitution, because the government is involved. And governments all over the world do it. So then, the real issue here is, what are the motives of these companies? And now you have an incredible, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post–very interesting. I happen to edit a publication that was on a list of publications that The Washington Post–and I know Marty Baron; I worked with him at the LA Times, he knows it’s all nonsense. Most of the people who edit Truthdig worked at the LA Times, a few worked at The New York Times and the Hearst Corporation. And yet, you know, boom–there was some mysterious group, PropOrNot, or something, and they said oh, these people are all bad actors.

LC: Oh, yeah. How ridiculous.

RS: Very similar to what’s happening with Facebook now, and everything. And what they could do–oh, The Washington Post ran that story, you know. Well–

LC: Incredible, yeah.

RS: And you know, they can put you out of business; you know, that’s totally irresponsible. And so–

LC: Well, it actually turns out the pages that were blacked out on Facebook were almost all connected to that PropOrNot.

RS: I want to cut to the chase here about what one should do. Because I’m trying to look for role models, what people can do. And the fact is, we do have space in this society. And people have to use it. And as I say, the freedom of the press that the Founders had in mind was one that pretty much anybody could start, who as I say, was a white male–yes, we all know the limitations, severe limitations–but with very small capitalization. Now that’s not the case. That’s not the case, and it hasn’t been for a long time. And so the people playing in that field have a different, dare I say it, class interest, and a different view of the society. And so I want to end, really, getting to your dilemma right now, the dilemma of Lee Camp. You know, there aren’t too many people doing what you’re doing. Most of them sell out. Most of what we teach in these schools and everything now is, how do you get on the bandwagon? How do you get some crumbs off the table? And so I want to end, really, with this idea of, you know, how do you survive in this society and be a good citizen?

LC: Well, you know, it’s just–I mean, now I’m at the point that I’m, you know, able to make money doing this, and you know, I’ll make money with this comedy special, and I make a little bit of money from my touring, and obviously I make money from the TV show. So it’s not, you know, I don’t want to act like I’m poor or anything. But when I wasn’t making money, you know, right before I got “Redacted Tonight,” and I’d spent probably three, four years with very little income. And what kept me going, and what kept me talking about these issues and not kind of becoming a different style of comedian, was just kind of an inner obligation. I didn’t, I didn’t–I’m incapable, whatever it is in me, I’m incapable of just turning the other way and ignoring the path, ignoring the fact that we–you know, for example, we have eleven years until we’re past the point of no return on climate change. I, to me, I can’t just go onstage in front of a group of people every night and act like that doesn’t exist. Or that we aren’t dropping, you know, somewhere between 50 and 100 bombs a day in our names. And it’s like those type of things just, they don’t go away, and I think they would haunt me if I was ignoring them. And so you know, there may be temptations to do some other style of comedy, or to avoid the things that make people uncomfortable, but I’ve just never been able to really shut that off in my mind. And you know, I’ve–ever since I was little, you know, I wasn’t an activist, but I’ve always been very angry at being lied to or being misled. I, manipulation just makes me furious. And so [Laughs] I think that’s part of what has kept the fire of my anger going, and you know, kept me angry on this latest standup special, is I just hate to see so many people manipulated and then exploited through that manipulation. And I just want to do my part to continue to talk about these things, to continue to get these issues out there. And like I said earlier, to do it in a way that luckily, you know, with throwing a little comedy in there, people can not burn out, and continue to care about these things, hopefully. And obviously, for the information that I then funnel through comedy, I look to the great thinkers and the great journalists that are putting kind of the pure, the pure dope out there; they’re putting the pure facts out there, and then I take that and funnel it through my comedy. And so I hope that that’s what people get from this new comedy special. And you know, I understand I’ve been tremendously lucky to even have a career talking about these things. And it is that–like, I don’t understand people that, you know, get rich or have huge success and don’t–and then turn against those who are being most exploited in our society. It should be the opposite. If you end up getting money or getting success, you should want to help all those that didn’t have that luck, that didn’t have that thing, that didn’t have that door open. And so I have no intent or understanding, even, of people that turn their back on the lowest in our society. And you know, I just want to keep fighting for more equality and a world that can live sustainably and peacefully. And I don’t know how to put it other than that.

RS: The price is not just to individuals. But if we’re afraid, and we can’t bring up certain subjects; if we can’t discuss, you know–I mean, for instance, one that I brought up on the show, which I’m sure I’ll get a lot of angry response to: that it was Israel and Saudi Arabia that successfully meddled in our election. You know, and Israel and Saudi Arabia seem to get along quite nicely, and you got the richest Arab country bombing the hell out of the poorest, in Yemen, and this horrible–

LC: Yemen is awful.

RS: Yeah. And then you know, and the picking on–you know, yes, I’m not for any theocracy, and certainly not for the Ayatollahs of Iran; but I mean, my goodness, it wasn’t Iranian hijackers that were on those planes. And yet you know, we bought that view of the Mideast, and the Palestinians are getting screwed–I don’t know, I’ve stopped watching Rachel Maddow, but does she ever talk about, you know, human rights and the Palestinians?

LC: Well, I can tell you, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found out that in an entire year, ending in this past July, they did zero stories on Yemen, and they did 455 on Stormy Daniels on their main, on their main shows. So, clearly, Rachel Maddow’s not talking about Yemen. [Laughs]

RS: OK, but so let me just end on a point–because you, I noticed in these articles about you and RT and so forth, they say you don’t talk about Putin, and you don’t talk about Russia, and so forth. Which your answer is, that’s not what I’m here, basically, to do; I’m here to talk about American corporations, and so forth.

LC: Well, it’s also not true. I’ve covered Russiagate extensively; I’ve just covered it not in the way they want me to, I’ve covered it the way Chris Hedges and Ray McGovern see it, you know.

RS: The whole problem is intimidation. And that’s the real enemy of journalism, is when you’re intimidated, either by career or fear of a totalitarian state, or you know, the desire to be loved. And I would argue–and I felt this during, watching Jon Stewart, who I have my own issues with. But nonetheless, I felt Jon Stewart, for a period there, did better journalism than the mainstream media. And you can actually get on a stage, as you’re going to do for Election Day–where do people go? LeeCampComedySpecial, it’s all one thing, dot com?

LC: LeeCampComedySpecial.com, and I’m a terrible salesman, but if they use the promo code UncleSam, one word, they’ll get 25 percent off.

RS: Uncle Sam! Twenty-five–and it’s Election Day. So it’s a good thing to do Election Day. And we’ve had a terrific interview with Lee Camp. If you want to hear more from him, check out LeeCampComedySpecial.com on Election Day. Our producers for this show of Scheer Intelligence have been Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Engineering here at KCRW is provided by Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And we’ve had an assist from NPR in Washington.

Veterans Call on Troops to Refuse Deployment to Southern Border

Urging active-duty soldiers to be guided by a higher “moral or ethical standard” than the one demonstrated by their commander-in-chief, two war resisters who previously served as U.S. Army Rangers called on members of the military to refuse President Donald Trump’s orders to report to the U.S.-Mexico border.

In an open letter published by Common Dreams Thursday, Rory Fanning and Spenser Rapone asked soldiers to examine the context in which about 4,000 migrants are currently traveling to the U.S.—and ask themselves whether 15,000 armed soldiers should be confronting families who are expected to arrive at the border at the end of November after weeks of traveling to escape poverty, violence, and unrest.

“These extremely poor and vulnerable people are desperate for peace. Who among us would walk a thousand miles with only the clothes on our back without great cause?” wrote Fanning and Rapone. “The odds are good that your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. lived similar experiences to these migrants. Your family members came to the U.S. to seek a better life—some fled violence. Consider this as you are asked to confront these unarmed men, women and children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.”

Rapone and Fanning are far from alone in their objection to Trump’s plans to send up to 15,000 soldiers to the border to provide so-called “defense” against the migrants who are hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.

A number of veterans and former government officials have also slammed the president’s proposal, noting that the military has already been “strained by 17 years of war” while 5,200 soldiers—the same number of troops still stationed in Iraq—are already at the border.

“Service members who have repeatedly spent long periods of time away from home don’t need this. And the U.S. doesn’t need its military to ‘defend’ against a group of unarmed migrants, including many women and kids,” wrote David Lapan, a former Marine who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump.

“This is a craven political stunt by President Trump ahead of the U.S. midterms, and a cynical capitulation by a secretary of defense who has prided himself on improving the readiness, focus, and lethality of the U.S. armed forces,” Kelly Magsamen, a National Security Council official who worked in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, wrote in Defense One.

Plans to deploy troops to the border are part of Trump’s response to a “caravan” of migrants who have been traveling since October 12, beginning in Honduras and gathering more members as they head towards northern Mexico in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States.

The president’s attempts to portray the migrants as dangerous as Americans vote in the midterm elections have been rejected by progressives and journalists.

“The very fact that Trump has had to lie about the caravan’s makeup — claiming it is infiltrated by criminals and terrorists — neatly illustrates that it does not present the emergency he and Republicans have hyped into existence” – ⁦@ThePlumLineGS⁩ https://t.co/L61Ps5OWaD

— Tim O’Brien (@TimOBrien) October 26, 2018

Press coverage too often accepts Trump’s line on the caravan, despite its hyperbole and falsehoods.

Reality check: it’s 1,000 miles away; it’s down to 4,000 people from 7,000; it’s seeking asylum at ports of entry—not charging the border.

— Justin Miller (@justinjm1) October 29, 2018

Fanning and Rapone also urged soldiers to reflect on the fact that U.S. actions and policies have contributed to Central Americans’ desperation to leave their home countries in recent months.

“Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator,” wrote the veterans, referring to the 2009 coup which ousted Manuel Zelaya. Following the coup, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported an election that legitimized the new government, which has overseen widespread corruption while cracking down on dissent in the country.

While wreaking havoc in numerous countries, the U.S. has maintained its status as a stable democracy and one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, where people from around the world understandably hope to be able to benefit from its vast resources after seeking asylum.

Fanning and Rapone urged soldiers to disavow the president’s racist attempts to portray migrants as dangerous in order to galvanize his base ahead of the elections, and work together to show Trump that they will not participate in criminalizing and endangering the lives of asylum-seekers.

“By every moral or ethical standard it is your duty to refuse orders to ‘defend’ the U.S. from these migrants,” wrote the veterans. “History will look kindly upon you if you do. There are tens of thousands of us who will support your decision to lay your weapons down. You are better than your Commander-in-chief. Our only advice is to resist in groups. Organize with your fellow soldiers. Do not go this alone. It is much harder to punish the many than the few.”

Blue Wave or Red Wave? No Way to Tell.

Based on a 1,500-mile interviewing trek that I took outside the Beltway for 12 days two weeks ago—to Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Rock Island, Ill., Toledo and Akron, Ohio, and several points in between—one thing seems certain: Don’t hold your breath on election eve for crossovers.

On a single issue, Democrat and Republican voters are on the same page: Their favorite—Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford—was the victim of the other side’s malice. From there, the universe splits.

Democratic Voters

Democratic voters are intensely anti-Trump and anti-Republican Party and are beating the bushes for voters on Nov. 6. In fact, some candidates have already won, such as two young Democratic Socialist women in Pittsburgh—Summer Lee, a lawyer, and Sara Innamorato, a community activist—who ran for the state Legislature in the Democratic primary, beat the party’s establishment candidate and are unopposed in November.

Like Democrats everywhere, those I interviewed are furious about the president and Republicans demonizing immigrants, separating parents from children, trying to destroy Obamacare, passing tax cuts for corporations and the rich, protecting assault weapons, slashing environmental regulations, ripping up the Iran accord and denying climate change. And most were angry that Bernie Sanders was not the party’s candidate in 2016.

Moving west from Pittsburgh, there’s Chuck Jones, a former United Steelworkers local president in Indianapolis who is running for town trustee in Wayne Township (population 147,000), a position in which he would oversee five fire departments and “poor” relief. Jones became a celebrity when Donald Trump visited the Carrier furnace factory in Indianapolis and claimed he would save more than 1,100 jobs the company was shipping off to Mexico.

“Trump lied his ass off. It was a dog and pony show,” Jones told me during our interview. When the president boasted about his deal, Jones published an opinion piece in The Washington Post revealing the real number, which was several hundred jobs lower. Trump immediately tweeted that Jones was “worthless,” which, he says, sparked an electric response.

“The union hall was packed. People from all over the world thanked me for standing up to him, and sent me flowers, candy and thousands of letters,” he said.

At present, Jones’ supporters are crisscrossing the county, campaigning. And he thinks he’ll beat incumbent Andy Harris—although it will be close.

Also in the Democrat camp are a retired psychiatric nurse from Cleveland (who wants to remain anonymous) and Baldemar Velásquez, head of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Toledo, Ohio.

“Because of my political buttons, T-shirt and bumper stickers, people are in my face. I want to have conversations with them, but I never get anywhere,” says the retired nurse. She confronts people who think it wasn’t fair to force Southern cities to remove Confederate statues, as well as those who insist that all publications lie—she tries to tell them that the major newspapers double-check the facts. She knows two women, she says, who only read blogs and believe that mass killings around the country are “government set-ups [designed] to take their guns away.”

“One woman is a music teacher, which I thought might make her more rational. But I was wrong,” she adds.

Velásquez is clear about politicians and the poor (such as the farmworkers in his union). He says they support Ohio congresswoman Marcy Kaptur because she has supported them as far back as the 1990s, when she criticized Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement. They also support Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is trying to hold onto his seat in a race against Gov. John Kasich.

“Poor and working people support Brown, whom they see as a blue-collar hero, a populist without being right-wing,” Velásquez says. He thinks 60 percent of workers in the Toledo area, whether Mexican or white, will vote Democrat.

Velásquez adds that Republicans gerrymandered the district, which forced the two Democratic representatives, Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, to run against each other in 2012. The new district is so weirdly shaped, he says, that some call it “the snake along the lake.”

Lots of auto workers in Toledo vote Republican, he says, as do many in the building trades. “They have a false consciousness and think their jobs are secure. But they’re not.”

Interestingly, Velásquez notes, “Some people like strong men. Even some Latinos are attracted to Trump, since, as with many other people, they like their leader to be a tough guy and don’t care about his policies. I knew a longtime FLOC member who wanted to vote for George Wallace back in 1968. Why? They think these men ‘tell it like it is and don’t fool people.’ There’s a Mexican [saying] for this—‘A man doesn’t let any hair grow on his tongue.’ ”

The FLOC head says that some workers who voted for Trump would have voted for Sanders if he had been the Democrats’ nominee. But when the party undercut him, they got fed up with its business-as-usual behavior and went for Trump in protest.

What did they think of the Kavanaugh hearings? Velásquez says farmworkers and the working poor have different conversations about what’s important. “We talk about racism, police misconduct, neglected inner cities and the theft of our wages—when employers don’t pay what’s owed for the hours we work. The Kavanaugh debate was a luxury we don’t have. What matters is where you get your next job and where you’ll live.”

Farmworkers haven’t had a labor law since 1935, which means they’re not free to organize, he says. “In all those years, no Democrat has talked about reforming labor laws to protect workers, so we can defend ourselves.

“Thus, the only time many poor people vote is when they think someone champions for them. The last one was JFK in 1960. Jesse Jackson did, but he didn’t get elected.”

Democrats need to address issues that will attract both Mexicans and the poor,  Velásquez says, adding that “although successful Mexican businessmen will vote Republican, most Latinos would vote Democrat.”

Trump has also spurred many Democrats inside the beltway. In Washington, D.C., for example, men and women who hadn’t been activists before, such as professors, government workers and other professionals, worked for over a year and campaigned door-to-door in some northern Virginia races last November in which first-time candidates (mostly women) won. They also traveled to southwestern Pennsylvania in March to campaign for Conor Lamb, the Democrat who won the congressional special election in a Trump stronghold. Now they’re campaigning and raising money for northern Virginia Democrats running for Congress in flippable districts.

Many of them, often in their 60s and 70s, joined the Indivisible Network, a group that formed after Trump’s election. At a meeting last week, one woman explained why: “I could have just sat around and whined. But I had to do something.”

Republican Voters

Those I interviewed—steelworkers, factory workers, truck drivers and small businesspeople—are just as partisan as Democrats. Interestingly, some have a disconnect on some issues: For example, they think universal health care and education-for-all could be good—one retired steelworker had two friends who died because they couldn’t afford the care they needed—but they still think these are socialist schemes, and typically reject them.

Doug Jackson, a Mississippi truck driver and trainer of new drivers (he was also once a welder and mechanic), reflects another disconnect—on immigration. “A friend and I were talking about the immigrants headed to the border right now, and he said we ought to keep them out. I used to think that too, but I told him ‘to put yourself in the position of being a father where there are death squads. … You’d do whatever you could to get your family to a safe place.’ I also told him that immigrants do the jobs no Americans want. They pick up trash, pluck chickens or pick vegetables. When I finished talking to him, he was thinking about it differently.”

Still, Jackson has harsh words for those he thinks are “lazy” and “don’t want to work”—labels often linked to the poor who receive benefits. “I’ve worked since I was 17 and dropped out of school to support my parents,” he told me. “If somebody wants something, they have to work for it.”

Does he see a connection between Trump’s diatribes and Cesar Sayoc, the avid Trump follower who was charged with sending pipe bombs to Democrats and their supporters last week? Or the shooting of two black men in Kentucky one day earlier (which neither he nor most of the public have learned about) and the 11 killings at the Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday? Jones thinks for a few seconds and says, “Possibly. If someone is that mentally disturbed to begin with, in-your-face rhetoric might set someone off.” But, he added, “I’m not certain.”

Nearly all the Republicans I interviewed, however, are elated about the economy. Over and over they say they’ll vote Republican on Nov. 6 because “the economy is booming, everyone has a job and Trump made it happen.” Their older kids are also enrolled in or have graduated from college—the first in their families—although they’re often working two jobs to pay off their loans.

Even a young black woman, a part-time Dollar General cashier in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood, says, “Jobs are what matters.”

“Me and some of my friends might even vote for Trump if he runs again,” she told me. Although she earns $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage) and has no paid vacation, sick leave or company-paid health insurance—and will only get a 50-cent-an-hour raise next year—she still says, “I have a job.”

Many factory workers in Indianapolis also take this line. That the number of jobs Trump promised he’d save at the Carrier furnace-producing plant only turned out to be 800, or that the nearby Rexnord Corp. ball-bearings plant shut down in 2017, sending 300 jobs to Monterrey, Mexico, doesn’t enter the narrative. Nor does the fact that some Rexnord workers found new jobs, but often at less pay and with far fewer benefits.

They don’t like Trump’s behavior—not the men at the Flying J truck stop on Interstate 70 in Indiana, not the convenience-store owner in Rankin (a run-down neighborhood outside Pittsburgh, whose steel mill sits shuttered), not the men and women at a bar near an Indianapolis factory, and not the retired realtor who lives in a wealthy Akron, Ohio, suburb. But it doesn’t turn them off. “He doesn’t say things nicely, but he tells the truth—not like typical politicians talk, who always b.s. us.” And they don’t read the fact checks or hear them on Fox News. So rudeness—“Yes, he’s crude,” one woman told me—is mistaken for honesty.

According to Richard Walker, an emeritus professor of economic geography at the University of California, Berkeley, “Since unions have been so compromised and once-tight communities are dispersed, there’s no worker education, and no worker or community solidarity.” He says these were crucial “because they helped people understand what was going on.”

Thus, many workers I interviewed don’t blame the companies for closing their plants and dispatching their $25-an-hour jobs to Mexico, where workers earn $3. Instead, they blame the politicians or the union president “who didn’t save our jobs.”

Others see no point in voting. Not the Cinnabar concession worker at the Flying J, who earns $8.50 an hour and is pleased she’ll get a 50-cent raise next year. “I haven’t ever voted,” she says. Nor does the Pakistani-born, U.S. citizen, refrigerator technician in Virginia who says, “All politicians make promises and are crooks.”

Walker says the fact that the economy is booming is normal for the end of a long upswing. He explains that the recovery from the deep 2010 recession, which peaked in 2015, got a push from the Republican 2017 tax cut. While most of the gains went to corporations, it did put some money into the economy and a little more in ordinary people’s pockets. In turn, they spent more, which spurred demand and job growth.

This also gave states and cities more taxes, so they have spent more, say, on hiring teachers or fixing roads. “All this had a multiplier effect,” Walker says.

The stimulus, however, didn’t trigger a massive investment boom in factories or equipment. As recently reported in Financial Times, the tax cut had “little impact on investment.” According to the piece, a National Association for Business Economics survey of the third quarter in 2018 found “members reporting rising sales and improved profit margins, but that the Republican tax reform ‘has not broadly impacted hiring and investment plans.’ ”

“The surge reached its peak, isn’t sustainable and looks like it’s running out of steam,” Walker says. He points to the S&P stock market index that’s down 10 percent from last year and global stocks that are down 20 percent. “These drops wiped out the gains of the past year. Historically, economies peak before they go down,” he notes.

As more evidence of trouble, “Credit card debt in the U.S. has reached a seven-year high,” he says. “This means people don’t have enough income to cover their needs” and therefore turn to plastic. The economist says the old line is still true—that “people think the economy looks good because it’s been down for so long.” They think this way although real wages haven’t increased since 1979.

Velásquez agrees. “I haven’t seen an explosion of new jobs around here. ProMedica, a health care management corporation based in Toledo, consolidated its services in the downtown area, which created construction jobs. Some people believed Trump caused this, but he didn’t.”

Still, many working- and middle-class Republican voters think life is better than it was a few years ago, which will guide them on Election Day.

On Tuesday, FiveThirtyEight, the online journal that estimates election results, says Democrats have an 85 percent chance of winning the House and a 15 percent chance of winning the Senate, though a loss of one seat is more likely. That would mean a Senate with 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats.

Despite polls heralding blue or red waves, based on my heartland and other interviews, it’s a tremendous toss-up.

Blue Wave or Red Wave? No Way to Tell

Based on a 1,500-mile interviewing trek that I took outside the Beltway for 12 days two weeks ago—to Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Rock Island, Ill., Toledo and Akron, Ohio, and several points in between—one thing seems certain: Don’t hold your breath on election eve for crossovers.

On a single issue, Democrat and Republican voters are on the same page: Their favorite—Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford—was the victim of the other side’s malice. From there, the universe splits.

Democratic Voters

Democratic voters are intensely anti-Trump and anti-Republican Party and are beating the bushes for voters on Nov. 6. In fact, some candidates have already won, such as two young Democratic Socialist women in Pittsburgh—Summer Lee, a lawyer, and Sara Innamorato, a community activist—who ran for the state Legislature in the Democratic primary, beat the party’s establishment candidate and are unopposed in November.

Like Democrats everywhere, those I interviewed are furious about the president and Republicans demonizing immigrants, separating parents from children, trying to destroy Obamacare, passing tax cuts for corporations and the rich, protecting assault weapons, slashing environmental regulations, ripping up the Iran accord and denying climate change. And most were angry that Bernie Sanders was not the party’s candidate in 2016.

Moving west from Pittsburgh, there’s Chuck Jones, a former United Steelworkers local president in Indianapolis who is running for town trustee in Wayne Township (population 147,000), a position in which he would oversee five fire departments and “poor” relief. Jones became a celebrity when Donald Trump visited the Carrier furnace factory in Indianapolis and claimed he would save more than 1,100 jobs the company was shipping off to Mexico.

“Trump lied his ass off. It was a dog and pony show,” Jones told me during our interview. When the president boasted about his deal, Jones published an opinion piece in The Washington Post revealing the real number, which was several hundred jobs lower. Trump immediately tweeted that Jones was “worthless,” which, he says, sparked an electric response.

“The union hall was packed. People from all over the world thanked me for standing up to him, and sent me flowers, candy and thousands of letters,” he said.

At present, Jones’ supporters are crisscrossing the county, campaigning. And he thinks he’ll beat incumbent Andy Harris—although it will be close.

Also in the Democrat camp are a retired psychiatric nurse from Cleveland (who wants to remain anonymous) and Baldemar Velásquez, head of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Toledo, Ohio.

“Because of my political buttons, T-shirt and bumper stickers, people are in my face. I want to have conversations with them, but I never get anywhere,” says the retired nurse. She confronts people who think it wasn’t fair to force Southern cities to remove Confederate statues, as well as those who insist that all publications lie—she tries to tell them that the major newspapers double-check the facts. She knows two women, she says, who only read blogs and believe that mass killings around the country are “government set-ups [designed] to take their guns away.”

“One woman is a music teacher, which I thought might make her more rational. But I was wrong,” she adds.

Velásquez is clear about politicians and the poor (such as the farmworkers in his union). He says they support Ohio congresswoman Marcy Kaptur because she has supported them as far back as the 1990s, when she criticized Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement. They also support Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is trying to hold onto his seat in a race against Gov. John Kasich.

“Poor and working people support Brown, whom they see as a blue-collar hero, a populist without being right-wing,” Velásquez says. He thinks 60 percent of workers in the Toledo area, whether Mexican or white, will vote Democrat.

Velásquez adds that Republicans gerrymandered the district, which forced the two Democratic representatives, Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, to run against each other in 2012. The new district is so weirdly shaped, he says, that some call it “the snake along the lake.”

Lots of auto workers in Toledo vote Republican, he says, as do many in the building trades. “They have a false consciousness and think their jobs are secure. But they’re not.”

Interestingly, Velásquez notes, “Some people like strong men. Even some Latinos are attracted to Trump, since, as with many other people, they like their leader to be a tough guy and don’t care about his policies. I knew a longtime FLOC member who wanted to vote for George Wallace back in 1968. Why? They think these men ‘tell it like it is and don’t fool people.’ There’s a Mexican [saying] for this—‘A man doesn’t let any hair grow on his tongue.’ ”

The FLOC head says that some workers who voted for Trump would have voted for Sanders if he had been the Democrats’ nominee. But when the party undercut him, they got fed up with its business-as-usual behavior and went for Trump in protest.

What did they think of the Kavanaugh hearings? Velásquez says farmworkers and the working poor have different conversations about what’s important. “We talk about racism, police misconduct, neglected inner cities and the theft of our wages—when employers don’t pay what’s owed for the hours we work. The Kavanaugh debate was a luxury we don’t have. What matters is where you get your next job and where you’ll live.”

Farmworkers haven’t had a labor law since 1935, which means they’re not free to organize, he says. “In all those years, no Democrat has talked about reforming labor laws to protect workers, so we can defend ourselves.

“Thus, the only time many poor people vote is when they think someone champions for them. The last one was JFK in 1960. Jesse Jackson did, but he didn’t get elected.”

Democrats need to address issues that will attract both Mexicans and the poor,  Velásquez says, adding that “although successful Mexican businessmen will vote Republican, most Latinos would vote Democrat.”

Trump has also spurred many Democrats inside the beltway. In Washington, D.C., for example, men and women who hadn’t been activists before, such as professors, government workers and other professionals, worked for over a year and campaigned door-to-door in some northern Virginia races last November in which first-time candidates (mostly women) won. They also traveled to southwestern Pennsylvania in March to campaign for Conor Lamb, the Democrat who won the congressional special election in a Trump stronghold. Now they’re campaigning and raising money for northern Virginia Democrats running for Congress in flippable districts.

Many of them, often in their 60s and 70s, joined the Indivisible Network, a group that formed after Trump’s election. At a meeting last week, one woman explained why: “I could have just sat around and whined. But I had to do something.”

Republican Voters

Those I interviewed—steelworkers, factory workers, truck drivers and small businesspeople—are just as partisan as Democrats. Interestingly, some have a disconnect on some issues: For example, they think universal health care and education-for-all could be good—one retired steelworker had two friends who died because they couldn’t afford the care they needed—but they still think these are socialist schemes, and typically reject them.

Doug Jackson, a Mississippi truck driver and trainer of new drivers (he was also once a welder and mechanic), reflects another disconnect—on immigration. “A friend and I were talking about the immigrants headed to the border right now, and he said we ought to keep them out. I used to think that too, but I told him ‘to put yourself in the position of being a father where there are death squads. … You’d do whatever you could to get your family to a safe place.’ I also told him that immigrants do the jobs no Americans want. They pick up trash, pluck chickens or pick vegetables. When I finished talking to him, he was thinking about it differently.”

Still, Jackson has harsh words for those he thinks are “lazy” and “don’t want to work”—labels often linked to the poor who receive benefits. “I’ve worked since I was 17 and dropped out of school to support my parents,” he told me. “If somebody wants something, they have to work for it.”

Does he see a connection between Trump’s diatribes and Cesar Sayoc, the avid Trump follower who was charged with sending pipe bombs to Democrats and their supporters last week? Jones thinks for a few seconds and says, “Possibly. If someone is that mentally disturbed to begin with, in-your-face rhetoric might set someone off.” But, he added, “I’m not certain.”

Nearly all the Republicans I interviewed, however, are elated about the economy. Over and over they say they’ll vote Republican on Nov. 6 because “the economy is booming, everyone has a job and Trump made it happen.” Their older kids are also enrolled in or have graduated from college—the first in their families—although they’re often working two jobs to pay off their loans.

Even a young black woman, a part-time Dollar General cashier in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood, says, “Jobs are what matters.”

“Me and some of my friends might even vote for Trump if he runs again,” she told me. Although she earns $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage) and has no paid vacation, sick leave or company-paid health insurance—and will only get a 50-cent-an-hour raise next year—she still says, “I have a job.”

Many factory workers in Indianapolis also take this line. That the number of jobs Trump promised he’d save at the Carrier furnace-producing plant only turned out to be 800, or that the nearby Rexnord Corp. ball-bearings plant shut down in 2017, sending 300 jobs to Monterrey, Mexico, doesn’t enter the narrative. Nor does the fact that some Rexnord workers found new jobs, but often at less pay and with far fewer benefits.

They don’t like Trump’s behavior—not the men at the Flying J truck stop on Interstate 70 in Indiana, not the convenience-store owner in Rankin (a run-down neighborhood outside Pittsburgh, whose steel mill sits shuttered), not the men and women at a bar near an Indianapolis factory, and not the retired realtor who lives in a wealthy Akron, Ohio, suburb. But it doesn’t turn them off. “He doesn’t say things nicely, but he tells the truth—not like typical politicians talk, who always b.s. us.” And they don’t read the fact checks or hear them on Fox News. So rudeness—“Yes, he’s crude,” one woman told me—is mistaken for honesty.

According to Richard Walker, an emeritus professor of economic geography at the University of California, Berkeley, “Since unions have been so compromised and once-tight communities are dispersed, there’s no worker education, and no worker or community solidarity.” He says these were crucial “because they helped people understand what was going on.”

Thus, many workers I interviewed don’t blame the companies for closing their plants and dispatching their $25-an-hour jobs to Mexico, where workers earn $3. Instead, they blame the politicians or the union president “who didn’t save our jobs.”

Others see no point in voting. Not the Cinnabar concession worker at the Flying J, who earns $8.50 an hour and is pleased she’ll get a 50-cent raise next year. “I haven’t ever voted,” she says. Nor does the Pakistani-born, U.S. citizen, refrigerator technician in Virginia who says, “All politicians make promises and are crooks.”

Walker says the fact that the economy is booming is normal for the end of a long upswing. He explains that the recovery from the deep 2010 recession, which peaked in 2015, got a push from the Republican 2017 tax cut. While most of the gains went to corporations, it did put some money into the economy and a little more in ordinary people’s pockets. In turn, they spent more, which spurred demand and job growth.

This also gave states and cities more taxes, so they have spent more, say, on hiring teachers or fixing roads. “All this had a multiplier effect,” Walker says.

The stimulus, however, didn’t trigger a massive investment boom in factories or equipment. As recently reported in Financial Times, the tax cut had “little impact on investment.” According to the piece, a National Association for Business Economics survey of the third quarter in 2018 found “members reporting rising sales and improved profit margins, but that the Republican tax reform ‘has not broadly impacted hiring and investment plans.’ ”

“The surge reached its peak, isn’t sustainable and looks like it’s running out of steam,” Walker says. He points to the S&P stock market index that’s down 10 percent from last year and global stocks that are down 20 percent. “These drops wiped out the gains of the past year. Historically, economies peak before they go down,” he notes.

As more evidence of trouble, “Credit card debt in the U.S. has reached a seven-year high,” he says. “This means people don’t have enough income to cover their needs” and therefore turn to plastic. The economist says the old line is still true—that “people think the economy looks good because it’s been down for so long.” They think this way although real wages haven’t increased since 1979.

Velásquez agrees. “I haven’t seen an explosion of new jobs around here. ProMedica, a health care management corporation based in Toledo, consolidated its services in the downtown area, which created construction jobs. Some people believed Trump caused this, but he didn’t.”

Still, many working- and middle-class Republican voters think life is better than it was a few years ago, which will guide them on Election Day.

On Tuesday, FiveThirtyEight, the online journal that estimates election results, says Democrats have an 85 percent chance of winning the House and a 15 percent chance of winning the Senate, though a loss of one seat is more likely. That would mean a Senate with 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats.

Despite polls heralding blue or red waves, based on my heartland and other interviews, it’s a tremendous toss-up.