Chris Hedges's Blog, page 432

The Cult of Trump

Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them.

Donald Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party into a cult. All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the cult leaders. The cult reflects the leader’s prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas. Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader. Huge segments of the population, betrayed by the established elites, were conditioned for a cult leader. They were desperately looking for someone to rescue them and solve their problems. They found their cult leader in the New York real estate developer and reality television show star. Only when we recognize Trump as a cult leader, and many of those who support him as cult followers, will we understand where we are headed and how we must resist.

It was 40 years ago next month that a messianic preacher named Jim Jones convinced or forced more than 900 of his followers, including roughly 280 children, to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge and address the impending crisis of ecocide and the massive mismanagement of the economy by kleptocrats, his bellicosity, his threats against Iran and China and the withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties, along with his demonization of all who oppose him, ensure our cultural and, if left unchecked, physical extinction. Cult leaders are driven, at their core, by the death instinct, the instinct to annihilate and destroy rather than nurture and create. Trump shares many of the characteristics of Jones as well as other cult leaders including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult; the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who led the Unification Church; Credonia Mwerinde, who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda; Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong; and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

“A cult is a mirror of what is inside the cult leader,” Margaret Thaler Singer wrote in “Cults in Our Midst.” “He has no restraints on him. He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as a child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.”

George Orwell understood that cult leaders manipulate followers primarily through language, not force. This linguistic manipulation is a gradual process. It is rooted in continual mental chaos and verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements that defy reality and fact soon paralyze the opposition. The opposition, with every attempt to counter this absurdism with the rational—such as the decision by Barack Obama to make his birth certificate public or by Sen. Elizabeth Warren to release the results of her DNA test to prove she has Native American ancestry—plays to the cult leader. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously and often denies ever making them, even when they are documented. Lies and truth do not matter. The language of the cult leader is designed exclusively to appeal to the emotional needs of those in the cult.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

The cult leader grooms followers to speak in the language of hate and violence. The cult leader constantly paints a picture of an existential threat, often invented, that puts the cult followers in danger. Trump is doing this by demonizing the caravan of some 4,000 immigrants, most from Honduras, moving through southern Mexico. Caravans of immigrants, are, in fact, nothing new. The beleaguered and impoverished asylum seekers, including many families with children, are 1,000 miles from the Texas border. But Trump, aided by nearly nonstop coverage by Fox News and Christian broadcasting, is using the caravan to terrify his followers, just as he, along with these media outlets, portrayed the protesters who flooded the U.S. capital to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as unruly mobs. Trump claims the Democrats want to open the border to these “criminals” and to “unknown Middle Easterners” who are, he suggests, radical jihadists. Christian broadcasting operations, such as Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, splice pictures of marching jihadists in black uniforms cradling automatic weapons into the video shots of the caravan.

The fear mongering and rhetoric of hate and violence, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia, eventually lead to widespread acts of violence against those the cult leader defines as the enemy. The 13 explosive devices sent last week to Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James Clapper and CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc, an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter who was living out of his van, herald more violence. Trump, tossing gasoline on the flames, used this assault against much of the leadership of the Democratic Party to again attack the press, or, as he calls it, “the enemy of the people.” “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” he tweeted. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its acts, FAST!”

It should come as no surprise that on Saturday another enraged American white male, his fury and despair seemingly stoked by the diatribes and conspiracy theories of the far right, entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and massacred eight men and three women as he shouted anti-Semitic abuse. Shot by police and arrested at the scene was Robert Bowers, who believes that Jewish groups are aiding the caravan of immigrants in southern Mexico. He was armed with a military-style AR-15 assault rifle, plus three handguns. The proliferation of easily accessible high-caliber weapons, coupled with the division of the country into the blessed and the damned by Trump and his fellow cultists, threatens to turn the landscape of the United States into one that resembles Mexico, where at least 145 people in politics, including 48 candidates and pre-candidates, along with party leaders and campaign workers, have been assassinated over the last 12 months, according to Etellekt, a risk analysis firm in Mexico. There have been 627 incidents of violence against politicians, 206 threats and acts of intimidation, 57 firearm assaults and 52 attacks on family members that resulted in 50 fatalities. Trump’s response to the mass shooting at the synagogue was to say places of worship should have armed guards, a call for further proliferation of firearms. Look south if you want a vision of our future.

Domestic terrorism and nihilistic violence are the natural outcomes of the economic, social and political stagnation, the total seizure of power by a corporate cabal and oligarchic elite, and the contamination of civil discourse by cult leaders. The weaponization of language is proliferating, as seen in the vile rhetoric that characterizes many political campaigns for the midterm elections, including the racist robocall sent out against Andrew Gillum, an African-American candidate for the governorship of Florida. “Well, hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I’ll be askin’ you to make me governor of this here state of Florida,” a man speaking in a caricature of a black dialect accompanied by jungle noises said in the robocall. Cults externalize evil. Evil is embodied in the demonized other, whether desperate immigrants, black political candidates and voters, or the Democratic Party. The only way to purge this evil and restore America to greatness is to eradicate these human contaminants.

The cult leader, unlike a traditional politician, makes no effort to reach out to his opponents. The cult leader seeks to widen the divisions. The leader brands those outside the cult as irredeemable. The leader seeks the omnipotence to crush those who do not kneel in adoration. The followers, yearning to be protected and empowered by the cult leader, seek to give the cult leader omnipotence. Democratic norms, an impediment to the leader’s omnipotence, are attacked and abolished. Those in the cult seek to be surrounded by the cult leader’s magical aura. Reality is sacrificed for fantasy. Those who challenge the fantasy are not considered human. They are Satanic.

Meerloo wrote:

The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have received. He is suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any means he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing device for his own conscience, he cannot live. His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal contradictions, or man’s inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological fact that man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error, through the interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit himself to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never become a mature person. … It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow man. He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded.

Behavior that ensures the destruction of a public figure’s career does not affect a cult leader. It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented by The New York Times or The Washington Post. It does not matter that Trump’s personal financial interests, as we see in his relationship with the Saudis, take precedence over the rule of law, diplomatic protocols and national security. It does not matter that he is credibly charged by numerous women with being a sexual predator, a common characteristic of cult leaders. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. The establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its complicity in empowering the ruling oligarchy and the corporate state, might as well be blowing soap bubbles at Trump. Their vitriol, to his followers, only justifies the hatred radiating from the cult.

The cult leader responds to only one emotion—fear. The cult leader, usually a coward, will react when he thinks he is in danger. The cult leader will bargain and compromise when afraid. The cult leader will give the appearance of being flexible and reasonable. But as soon as the cult leader is no longer afraid, the old patterns of behavior return, with a special venom directed at those who were able to momentarily impinge upon his power.

The removal of Trump from power would not remove the yearning of tens of millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking, attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based science and journalism long before Trump did. Cults are a product of social decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode in another financial crisis.

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters the press and Trump’s mainstream critics.

Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like liberation movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals, feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a Democratic Party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression and cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny.

Brazil Elects Far-Right Candidate Jair Bolsonaro to Presidency

SAO PAULO  — Jair Bolsonaro, a brash far-right congressman who has waxed nostalgic for Brazil’s old military dictatorship, won the presidency of Latin America’s largest nation Sunday as voters looked past warnings that the former army captain would erode democracy and embraced a chance for radical change after years of turmoil.

Bolsonaro, who cast himself as a political outsider despite a 27-year career in Congress, became the latest world leader to rise to power by mixing tough, often violent talk with hard-right positions. His victory reflected widespread anger at the political class after years of corruption, an economy that has struggled to recover after a punishing recession and a surge in violence.

“I feel in my heart that things will change,” said Sandra Coccato, a 68-year-old small business owner, after she voted for Bolsonaro in Sao Paulo. “Lots of bad people are leaving, and lots of new, good people are entering. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

In Rio de Janeiro, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters gathered on iconic Copacabana Beach, where fireworks went off. In Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, cars horns could be heard honking and crowds celebrated as the results came in. There were also reports of clashes between his backers and opponents in Sao Paulo.

Speaking to supporters from his home in Rio, Bolsonaro recounted how he was stabbed while campaigning last month and almost died.

“I was never alone. I always felt the presence of God and the force of the Brazilian people,” he said.

Bolsonaro, who ran on promises to clean up Brazil and bring back “traditional values,” said he would respect the constitution and personal liberty.

“That is a promise, not of a party, not the vain word of a man. It’s a promise to God,” he said, standing next to his wife and many cheering supporters.

Addressing supporters in Sao Paulo, his rival, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party, did not concede or even mention Bolsonaro by name. Instead, his speech was a promise to resist.

“We have the responsibility to mount an opposition, putting national interests, the interests of the entire Brazilian people, above everything,” Haddad said. “Brazil has never needed the exercise of citizenship than right now. Don’t be afraid. We are here. We are together!”

Brazil’s top electoral court said Bolsonaro won with just over 55 percent of the vote, compared with just under 45 percent for Haddad.

Bolsonaro went into Sunday the clear front-runner after getting 46 percent of the vote to Haddad’s 29 percent in the first round of voting on Oct. 7, when 13 contenders were on the ballot. Opinion polls in recent weeks had Bolsonaro leading by as much as 18 percentage points, but the race tightened in the last few days. Several Brazilian heavyweights came out against him, arguing that he was a direct risk to the world’s fourth-largest democracy.

His rise was powered by disgust with the political system. In particular, many Brazilians are furious with the Workers’ Party for its role in the graft scheme known as “Carwash.” Haddad struggled to build momentum with his promises of a return to the boom times by investing in health and education and reducing poverty.

Along the way, Bolsonaro’s candidacy also raised serious concerns that he would roll back civil rights and weaken institutions in what remains a young democracy. He frequently disparaged women, gays and blacks, and said he would name military men to his Cabinet.

In a highly unusual moment, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Jose Dias Toffoli, read out part of the Constitution to reporters after he voted.

“The future president must respect institutions, must respect democracy, the rule of law, the judiciary branch, the national Congress and the legislative branch,” Toffoli said in remarks many took to be a rebuke of Bolsonaro and his more extreme positions.

As late as Sunday morning, Haddad was still holding out hope that he could win after receiving several key endorsements late Saturday.

Among them was a popular former Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa, who tweeted support for Haddad, saying Bolsonaro’s candidacy scared him. Likewise, former Attorney General Rodrigo Janot, one of the biggest crusaders against corruption in the Workers’ Party in recent years, also endorsed Haddad.

One of the most important endorsements, particularly for young people, came from YouTube personality Felipe Neto, whose channel has nearly 27 million followers.

Neto said he was troubled by Bolsonaro’s comments a week ago that “red” leftists would be run out of Brazil.

“In 16 years of the (Workers’ Party), I have been robbed, but never threatened,” Neto said on Twitter.

The past few years in Brazil have been exceptionally turbulent. In 2016, then-President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party was impeached and removed from office on charges that many on the left felt were politically motivated. The economy suffered a two-year recession and is only beginning to emerge, with growth stagnant and unemployment high.

Scores of politicians and executives have been jailed in the Carwash corruption investigation, which uncovered a multi-billion-dollar scheme to trade public contracts and official favors for bribes and kickbacks.

That instability unleashed sharp anger against the political class but also revealed deep divisions in Brazilian society, and this campaign was the most polarized in decades. There were numerous reports of politically motivated violence, especially directed at gay people.

Many observers predicted that a newcomer would emerge to harness the anti-establishment anger. Instead, support coalesced around Bolsonaro, who at the margins in Congress painted himself as just the strong man Brazil needed to dismantle a failing system.

Bolsonaro’s campaign first gained traction with his promises to go after violent crime in a country that leads the world in homicides and where many Brazilians live in daily fear of muggings or burglaries. But his vows to loosen gun laws and give police a freer hand to use force have also raised concerns that his presidency could lead to a bloody crackdown and an erosion of civil rights.

The campaign gained momentum by winning over much of the business community with promises of enacting market-friendly reforms that would reduce the size of the Brazilian state, including cutting ministries and privatizing state companies.

“I hope that with these elections we’re not signing a blank check again, and that we don’t close our eyes to everything that has happened,” said Jose Nobrega, a 53-year-old waiter in Mare, one of Rio’s most violent neighborhoods.

___

DiLorenzo and Savarese reported from Sao Paulo. Prengaman reported from Rio de Janeiro. Associated Press writers Marcelo Silva de Sousa and Beatrice Christofaro contributed from Rio.

Associated Press Blames Shooting Victims, Synagogue’s Open Doors

After President Trump blamed the congregation at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were shot and killed by an anti-Semitic gunman on Saturday, for not having armed guards, The Associated Press followed suit. In a tweet, the AP insinuated that the victims were somehow responsible for the attack by leaving the sanctuary doors unlocked, critics said.

Some social media users said that the tweet, which said that the shooter, Robert Gregory Bowers, “exploited doors that were unlocked,” unfairly blamed the victims.

Why even include the doors in this headline? What’s wrong with your editors to allow this? What kind of victim blaming nonesense is this?

— spunky girl sidekick, MLIS. (@mrsgeedeck) October 28, 2018

ah yes, it was unlocked doors that did murder, not a person with a mass killing device and an ideology of hate

— 17 Spooky Years Of Forever War (@AthertonKD) October 28, 2018

“exploited doors that were unlocked”

As a child, the “the doors of the church are open” meant safety and community. As a teen/adult, it meant forgiveness and the responsibility to protect, love, and care for others.

I guess this is what terrorism does. Exploit unlocked doors. https://t.co/fL4A2wOUps

— Dr. G is in Research Mode (@AmeliaNGibson) October 28, 2018

The article the AP tweet was referencing also included a mention of unlocked doors, which was later removed. The article originally read: “During the week, anyone who wanted to get inside Tree of Life synagogue had to ring the doorbell and be granted entry by staff because the front door was kept locked. Not so on Saturday—the Jewish Sabbath—when the building was open for worship.” This carried the implication that perhaps the congregation members could have saved themselves.

Trump said Saturday: “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better. If they had some kind of protection within the temple it could have been a much better situation. They didn’t. … This is a case where if they had an armed guard inside they may have been able to stop him immediately, maybe there would have been nobody killed, except for him maybe.”

Trump is victim blaming Jewish victims of the Pittsburgh massacre. Nauseating. https://t.co/ulRcgdKUdK

— Owen Jones

New York Times’ Trauma Tourism in Philadelphia

When The New York Times Magazine (10/10/18) looked at Kensington, a neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia, it didn’t see a diverse and resilient community that has tirelessly fought against adversity. Instead, it saw an opportunity to take readers on a sensational 6,000-word tour of trauma, complete with cringe-worthy language and compassionless photographs.

Reporter Jennifer Percy began the piece by painting a dismal and menacing backdrop:

The streetlights were broken or dim, and the alleyways were dark. Most of the blocks were lined with two-story rowhouses, abandoned factories and vacant lots. Kensington Avenue, the neighborhood’s main drag, was a congested mess of Chinese takeouts, pawn shops, check-cashing joints and Irish pubs.

Percy’s sour description of Kensington could fit almost any city: How many urban neighborhoods have brightly lit alleys? She tells you how to feel about a mix of businesses catering to working-class customers, associated with diverse ethnicities: It’s a “congested mess.”

This framing continued throughout the feature. At one point, Percy described the Kensington underpass as “dark, like the opening to a rat hole,” as if all underpasses aren’t dark. Even people who do something as simple as getting off the train in Kensington are reduced to “buyers”—“The train doors opened, and buyers spilled onto the walkway”—because Percy can’t imagine why anyone would go to Kensington other than to buy drugs.

The piece failed to differentiate between trash and the belongings of homeless individuals: “Trash was everywhere—office chairs, a pleather loveseat, plastic crates, trash bags stuffed with clothes.” Defining these belongings as nothing more than trash allows readers to be indifferent to Percy’s description of the city clearing out homeless encampments, seizing and throwing away people’s tents, clothes and supplies.

The Times doesn’t shy away from othering and stigmatizing people who do use drugs. (Percy wrote artlessly of one individual, “His eyes looked as if someone had scooped them out and filled them with mud.”) The piece reserved the word “residents” for those who lawfully live in Kensington’s houses and apartments. Anyone else, regardless of how long they have lived in Kensington, was just another homeless “addict.”

A recent revision of the AP Style Guide urged reporters to use “person-first language” when covering the drug issue, replacing the noun “addict” with “phrasing like he was addicted, people with heroin addiction or he used drugs” (Undark, 6/6/17).  But in the Times piece, in every possible instance, such individuals were described as “addicts” or “users.”

Alex Shirreffs, a Philadelphia resident who has witnessed the effects of stigmatizing language through her work, reached out to the Times about their language use. In a tweet, she said she

asked them to consider style guide changes that would favor person-first language to describe addiction, but they seem to be sticking with the stigmatizing status quo because of…laziness?

Philip B. Corbett, the Times’ associate managing editor for standards, responded:

We do recognize the sensitivity of this topic and understand the arguments about words like “addict” and “alcoholic.” At the same time, as with many issues of language and terminology, we try to weigh the pros and cons of terminology favored by experts against the widely used and accepted layperson’s language. At this point, “addict” remains widely used among ordinary readers, and even some people who have addictions continue to use the term. On the other hand, I think that for now at least, “a person with a heroin addiction” and similar phrases would strike many readers as unfamiliar and strained.

It’s unclear why the Times thinks readers would be puzzled by a phrase like “a person with a heroin addiction,” and that dehumanizing language is the only way to convey to their audience that a person uses drugs. Researchers who have looked at the impact of such language on attitudes towards people who use drugs—based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, as it happens—have urged people, especially those in the media, to “stop using ‘addict’ and ‘alcoholic’ when talking about people with substance-use disorders” (WHYY, 8/13/18). The research shows that these words generated both implicit and explicit bias against people who use drugs, while first person language helped eliminate bias. The Times’ choice to ignore this research actively hurts the Kensington community, as well as anyone who has an addiction.

Percy glossed over connections between drug use and sex work in Kensington, reducing an extremely complicated issue to trauma-porn.

People cycled in and out of Kensington’s recovery houses, treatment centers and shelters. After years of this, women often ended up as prostitutes. They offered oral sex for $25 so they could buy a few bags. They had been raped, tied up and held up. They had nowhere to go to shower. They feared telling the cops about the abuse because they had already been busted on drug or prostitution charges. They slept curled with their purses between their knees and their chests.

This short description is dehumanizing and gives no autonomy to sex workers as people, adding to stigma. How many women did Percy interview before determining that all of them offered the same services for the same price? Could she have crafted a description that was any more victimizing? Did she not think about the potential ramifications of this statement on Kensington’s street-based sex workers? Street-based sex work already comes with risks. Publishing detailed and intimate information about their services, and particularly about how they don’t report abuse, could attract predatory individuals.

Percy mentions that women who are abused while engaging in sex work are afraid to go to the police, but doesn’t explore this issue any further. Sex worker advocate groups and researchers have repeatedly said that criminalization forces workers into dangerous situations, and leads to a strained or even abusive relationship between law enforcement and sex workers. Multiple harm-reduction groups exist in Kensington specifically for sex workers, including SOL Collective, Project SAFE, and the Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance, but Percy didn’t think to include their work in the conversation.

Percy mentions that women who are abused while engaging in sex work are afraid to go to the police, but doesn’t explore this issue any further. Sex worker advocate groups and researchers have repeatedly said that criminalization forces workers into dangerous situations, and leads to a strained or even abusive relationship between law enforcement and sex workers. Multiple harm-reduction groups exist in Kensington specifically for sex workers, including SOL Collective, Project SAFE, and the Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance, but Percy didn’t think to include their work in the conversation.

Brooke Feldman, a community activist who was interviewed for and quoted in the Times article, said she was surprised and upset after reading the piece. She said her interview with Percy included a productive conversation about not sensationalizing the situation in Kensington, but that the final product ultimately did just that.

Feldman described the distrust that exists between advocates and journalists: “I have long been apprehensive about talking to media when it comes to stories about mental health and substance abuse,” she said. Philadelphia journalists had been working hard to report in ways that humanize and build relationships with communities. “There had been intentional efforts to foster relationships,” she said. Feldman felt that the Times piece deeply hurts these efforts.

Feldman was also disappointed that the many practical solutions being built by Kensington’s grassroots organizations were absent. “For those a part of the solution, [the article] did a disservice,” she said. After reading this piece, one would be forgiven for assuming that Philadelphia city officials have taken the lead in providing resources for Kensington’s struggling populations. Government officials are described as being the people on the ground trying to get people into treatment or provide access to services. Percy completely ignored the many non-governmental organizations that have been doing this work every day for years, well before the city declared Kensington a disaster area.

Prevention Point was mentioned once, and was described simply as a “nonprofit on Kensington Avenue that exchanged dirty needles for clean ones.” Prevention Point has also helped get hundreds of people into treatment in the past year, runs a homeless shelter, provides case management and help with legal services, teaches individuals and organizations how to administer Narcan and gives those who use drugs a safe place to exist. It has been instrumental in helping to guide the city’s efforts and making sure that people stay alive long enough to get treatment. The Times’ framing propped up the city’s official narrative, while ignoring the hard work of advocates and residents.

Feldman is concerned that the Times piece will only add to the stigma that much of corporate media has already generated. “Sensational stories cause harm and add to stigma, which is the number one barrier to people opening up and being willing to receive services,” she said. For those most impacted, dehumanizing reporting is deadly.

This massive reporting effort ultimately serves no one but the Times itself. It certainly doesn’t highlight any of the positive responses or harm reduction efforts happening in Kensington every day. All of the good that happens in Kensington was overlooked. The picture of Kensington that the Times has manufactured is bleak and hopeless, existing only to entertain readers to the detriment of struggling individuals.

Wait Stretches to Two Years for Citizenship Applicants

LOS ANGELES—More than 700,000 immigrants are waiting on applications to become U.S. citizens, a process that once typically took about six months but has stretched to more than two years in some places under the administration of President Donald Trump.

The long wait times have prompted some immigrant advocates to ask whether the delays are aimed at keeping anti-Trump voters from casting ballots in elections.

“People are motivated to participate, and they’re being frustrated from being able to participate in the elections they’re excited about,” said Manuel Pastor, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.

The number of immigrants aspiring to become U.S. citizens surged during 2016, jumping 27 percent from a year earlier as Trump made cracking down on immigration a central theme of his presidential campaign. At first, the federal government kept up with the applications, but then the wait grew.

Backlogs are nothing new in the U.S. immigration system. It often takes years to receive asylum or to be deported. But naturalization — the final step to become an American citizen, obtain a U.S. passport and receive voting rights — had not been subject to such delays in recent years.

Now the average wait time for officials to decide on applications is more than 10 months. It takes up to 22 months in Atlanta and as long as 26 months in parts of Texas, according to official estimates.

Trump tweeted on Thursday that Central American migrants headed north in a U.S.-bound caravan should return home and can apply for American citizenship if they wish. “Go back to your Country and if you want, apply for citizenship like millions of others are doing!” he posted as thousands continued their trek through Mexico.

But immigrants generally must be legal permanent residents of the United States to apply for citizenship and getting a green card can take years — if a person even qualifies for one.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the longer waits to naturalize are because of the surge in applications, not slower processing. The agency decided 850,000 cases in 2017, up 8 percent from a year before.

Despite “a record and unprecedented” spike in applications, the agency is operating more efficiently and effectively and “outperforming itself,” spokesman Michael Bars said in a statement.

To become an American citizen, immigrants must hold green cards for at least three years, demonstrate good moral character and pass English and civics tests.

Citizenship applications typically rise before an increase in filing fees and during presidential election years as immigrants get excited about the prospect of voting and advocacy groups conduct widespread outreach to try to get more eligible voters to the polls.

Enrique Robles, 32, said he applied to naturalize as soon as he was eligible after living in the U.S. most of his life. When he didn’t hear about the status of his application, Robles, who is originally from Mexico, started to worry.

More than a year later, he said, he was called to an interview where an immigration officer questioned whether he should have been issued a green card in the first place, a concern he was able to quickly dispel by explaining that his father had legitimately sponsored him.

“With this administration, it feels like more they are looking for possibilities to kick people out,” said Robles, who took his citizenship oath in September.

Keeping potential citizens from voting could have an effect, but it could also drive their relatives and friends to the polls in greater numbers.

“The naturalization delays have a huge cost in stopping some people” from voting, but they “have a huge impact in motivating others,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of New American Economy, a bipartisan group in support of immigration.

Competitive districts that have a large number of foreign-born residents are likely to be among those where naturalization delays could matter most. Those include districts in California’s Orange County and in Texas and New Jersey, Robbins said.

At a recent naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles, some new citizens said the process seemed long to them, while others said it flew by in a matter of months. Key for many was being able to travel with an American passport and being able to vote.

Sameeha Alkamalee Jabbar, 38, who is from Sri Lanka, said the process took 10 months and at times she worried about the backlog. She wants to vote next month because “every vote counts” — and especially because her husband is seeking re-election to a school board seat in Orange County.

“This is home now,” she said, wearing a stars-and-stripes hijab. “I love the United States of America.”

Immigrant advocates recently filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles demanding records from the Trump administration on the delays. They questioned whether wait times were longer in electoral battleground states and said that could suggest voter suppression.

Juliana Cabrales, Mid-Atlantic director of civic engagement at the NALEO Educational Fund, which supports Latino participation in politics, said the group is focused on driving voter turnout in the midterm elections but will quickly pivot to encouraging immigrants to apply for citizenship if they want to vote for president in 2020.

“Right now, we’re finding ourselves in this space, in places like Miami and New York, where processing times are 21 months,” she said. “If you want to vote in 2020 you have to apply (to naturalize) now.”

Mail-Bomb Suspect Played DJ as FBI Closed In

WASHINGTON—In the hours before his arrest, as federal authorities zeroed in and secretly accumulated evidence, Cesar Sayoc was in his element: spinning classic and Top 40 hits in a nightclub where he’d found work as a DJ.

As he entertained patrons from a dimly lit booth overlooking a stage at the Ultra Gentlemen’s Club, where Halloween decorations hung in anticipation of a costume party, he could not have known that investigators that very evening were capitalizing on his own mistakes to build a case against him.

He almost certainly had no idea that lab technicians had linked DNA on two pipe bomb packages he was accused of sending to prominent Democrats to a sample previously collected by Florida state authorities. Or that a fingerprint match had turned up on a separate mailing that authorities say he sent.

And he was probably unaware that investigators scouring his social media accounts had found the same spelling mistakes on his online posts — “Hilary” Clinton, Debbie Wasserman “Shultz” — as on the mailings he’d soon be charged with sending.

In the end, prosecutors who charged Sayoc with five federal crimes Friday say the fervent supporter of President Donald Trump unwittingly left behind a wealth of clues, affording them a critical break in a coast-to-coast investigation into pipe bomb mailings that spread fear of election-season violence. The bubble-wrapped manila envelopes, addressed to Democrats such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and intercepted from Delaware to California, held vital forensic evidence that investigators say they leveraged to arrest Sayoc four days after the investigation started.

“Criminals make mistakes so the more opportunities that law enforcement has to detect them, the greater chance they’re going to be able to act on that, and that appears to be what happened here,” said former Justice Department prosecutor Aloke Chakravarty, who prosecuted the Boston Marathon bombing case.

But It wasn’t always clear that such a break would come, at least not on Monday when the first package arrived: a pipe bomb delivered via mail to an estate in Bedford, New York, belonging to billionaire liberal activist George Soros. That same day, Sayoc, still under the radar of law enforcement, retweeted a post saying, “The world is waking up to the horrors of George Soros.”

Additional packages followed, delivered the next day for Clinton and Obama and after that to the cable network CNN, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democratic targets of conservative ire.

Each additional delivery created more unease. But together they also provided more leads for the FBI, which mined each pipe bomb for clues at a laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.

As the packages rolled in, technicians hit a breakthrough: a fingerprint and DNA left on a package sent to Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat and one of the intended pipe bomb recipients, and DNA on a piece of pipe bomb intended for Obama. The FBI said it had identified no other possible matches on the evidence it had examined.

Besides that, the FBI said, his social media posts that traffic in online conspiracy theories, parody accounts and name-calling include some of the same misspellings as were noticed on the 13 packages he was charged with sending.

The clues, authorities say, led them to a 56-year-old man with a long criminal history who’d previously filed for bankruptcy and appeared to be living in his van, showering on the beach or at a local fitness center.

As the FBI worked around the clock, and as Americans were busy debating the hard-edged political climate and whether Trump had fanned the flames with his rhetoric, it was business as usual for Sayoc as he took to Twitter to denigrate targets like Soros. That was not uncommon for the amateur body builder and former stripper whose social media accounts are peppered with memes supporting Trump and posts vilifying Democrats.

On Thursday from noon to 9 p.m. as law enforcement grew ever closer, descending on a postal sorting facility in Opa-locka, Florida, Sayoc was working as a disc jockey at a West Palm Beach nightclub where he’d found work in the last two months. There, he spun his music from inside a small dimly lit booth overlooking a stage with performers dancing below. Autographed photos of scantily clad and nude adult entertainers were plastered across the walls like wallpaper.

“I didn’t know this guy was mad crazy like this,” said Stacy Saccal, the club’s manager. “Never once did he speak politics. This is a bar. We don’t talk politics or religion in a bar, you know?”

But Scott Meigs, another DJ at the club, had a different experience.

He said Sayoc had been talking about politics to everybody at the club for the last two weeks, preaching the need to elect Republicans during the November elections. “I just figured he was passionate about the upcoming elections.”

The next morning, he was taken into custody near an auto parts store in Plantation, Florida, north of Miami. Across the street, Thomas Fiori, a former federal law enforcement officer, said he saw about 50 armed officers swarm a man standing outside a white van with windows plastered with stickers supporting Trump and criticizing media outlets including CNN.

They ordered him to the ground, Fiori said, and he did not resist.

“He had that look of, ‘I’m done, I surrender,'” Fiori said.

___

Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman, Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin, Michael Biesecker, Stephen Braun and Chad Day in Washington; Ellis Rua, Terry Spencer, Kelli Kennedy and Curt Anderson in Florida; Jim Mustian, Deepti Hajela, Tom Hays and Michael R. Sisak in New York; and Raphael Satter in Paris contributed to this report.

Police: Synagogue Gunman Said He Wanted All Jews to Die

PITTSBURGH—The suspect in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue expressed hatred of Jews during the rampage and told officers afterward that Jews were committing genocide and that he wanted them all to die, according to charging documents made public Sunday.

Robert Gregory Bowers killed eight men and three women inside the Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday during worship services before a tactical police team tracked him down and shot him, authorities said in state and federal affidavits, which contained some unreported details on the shooting and the police response.

“I just want to kill Jews,” Bowers told an officer, according to one of the documents.

Officials released the names of all 11 victims during a news conference Sunday, all of them middle-aged or elderly. The victims included a pair of brothers and a husband and wife. The oldest was 97.

Mayor Bill Peduto called it the “darkest day of Pittsburgh’s history.”

Calls began coming in to 911 from the synagogue just before 10 a.m. Saturday. Bowers, 46, shot one of the first two officers to respond in the hand, and the other was wounded by “shrapnel and broken glass,” according to court documents.

A tactical team found Bowers on the third floor, where he shot two officers multiple times, an affidavit said.

One of the wounded officers was treated and released, and a second was expected to be released Sunday. The other two officers were expected to stay in the hospital, and one of them, a 40-year-old man, remained in critical condition Sunday.

Two other people in the synagogue were wounded by Bowers. A 61-year-old woman was listed in stable condition, and a 70-year-old man was in critical condition, according to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Bowers, who was armed with an AR-15 rifle and three handguns and used all four weapons in the attack, told an officer while he was being treated for his injuries “that he wanted all Jews to die and also that they (Jews) were committing genocide to his people,” a Pittsburgh police affidavit said.

Bowers was charged with 11 state counts of criminal homicide, six counts of aggravated assault and 13 counts of ethnic intimidation in what the leader of the Anti-Defamation League called the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.

Bowers was also charged in a 29-count federal criminal complaint that included counts of obstructing the free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death — a federal hate crime — and using a firearm to commit murder. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the charges “could lead to the death penalty.”

Bowers, who underwent surgery and remained hospitalized, is scheduled for a court appearance Monday. It wasn’t clear whether he had an attorney to speak on his behalf.

His neighbor, Chris Hall, said he never heard or saw anything to indicate that Bowers harbored anti-Semitic views or posed a threat. Bowers kept to himself, he said.

“The most terrifying thing is just how normal he seemed,” Hall said. “I wish I knew what was going on inside his head. Maybe something could have been done. I don’t know.”

The victims included Melvin Wax, a retired accountant in his late 80s who was always one of the first to arrive at synagogue and among the last to leave.

“He and I used to, at the end of services, try to tell a joke or two to each other,” said Myron Snider, a fellow member of New Light Congregation, which rented space in the basement of Tree of Life. “Most of the time they were clean jokes. Most of the time. I won’t say all the time. But most of the time.”

The nation’s latest mass shooting drew condemnation and expressions of sympathy from politicians and religious leaders of all stripes. With the midterm election just over a week away, it also reignited a longstanding and bitter debate over guns.

Pope Francis led prayers for Pittsburgh on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square.

“In reality, all of us are wounded by this inhuman act of violence,” he said. He prayed for God “to help us to extinguish the flames of hatred that develop in our societies, reinforcing the sense of humanity, respect for life and civil and moral values.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman quoted Merkel on Twitter as offering her condolences and saying that “all of us must confront anti-Semitism with determination — everywhere.”

Trump on Saturday said the outcome might have been different if the synagogue “had some kind of protection” from an armed guard, while Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, up for re-election, noted that once again “dangerous weapons are putting our citizens in harm’s way.”

Calling the shooting an “evil anti-Semitic attack,” Trump ordered flags at federal buildings throughout the U.S. to be flown at half-staff in respect for the victims. He said he planned to travel to Pittsburgh but offered no details.

In the city, thousands gathered for a vigil Saturday night. Some blamed the slaughter on the nation’s political climate.

“When you spew hate speech, people act on it. Very simple. And this is the result. A lot of people dead. Senselessly,” said Stephen Cohen, co-president of New Light Congregation, which rents space at Tree of Life.

Little was known about Bowers, who had no apparent criminal record but who is believed to have expressed virulently anti-Semitic views on social media. Authorities said it appears he acted alone.

The Jewish community is “an important part of the cultural and social identity of Pittsburgh, and so this was an attack upon our neighbors and upon our friends,” Scott Brady, the chief federal prosecutor in western Pennsylvania, said.

The gunman targeted a building that housed three separate congregations, all of which were conducting Sabbath services when the attack began just before 10 a.m. in the tree-lined residential neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, about 10 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh and the hub of the city’s Jewish community.

During the week, anyone who wanted to get inside Tree of Life synagogue had to ring the doorbell and be granted entry by staff because the front door was kept locked. Not so on Saturday — the Jewish Sabbath — when the building was open for worship.

Michael Eisenberg, the immediate past president of the Tree of Life, said synagogue officials had not gotten any threats that he knew of before the shooting. But security was a concern, he said, and the synagogue had started working to improve it.

___

Lauer reported from Philadelphia, and Breed reported from Raleigh, North Carolina. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists Mark Gillispie, Robert Bumsted and Gene Puskar in Pittsburgh; Eric Tucker, Michael Biesecker and Michael Balsamo in Washington; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Michael Kunzelman in Silver Spring, Maryland; and Michael Rubinkam in northeastern Pennsylvania.

American History for Truthdiggers: Wealth, Squalor in the Progressive Era

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 20th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 20 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19.

* * *

The Gilded Age. The American Industrial Revolution. The Progressive Era. Call it what you will, but one salient (Dickensian) fact about this period endures: It was the best of times, it was worst of times—depending on one’s point of view. Industrialization brought immense wealth for some and crippling poverty for others. Mass production might result in savings for the consumer, but working wages remained low. The boom-and-bust cycle of laissez-faire capitalism was in full swing, resulting in national banking panics and, from 1893 to 1897, the worst financial depression up to that point in the country’s history.

The key story of this era revolves around various attempts—by rural farmers and urban workers, by women and blacks, Republicans and Democrats, Populists, Progressives and even socialists—to mitigate the excesses of industrialized American capitalism. It would not prove to be an easy task, and, one could cogently argue, it is a task Americans still grapple with. The two-party system nearly fell apart in this period because neither major political brand seemed to have a viable answer to the key question of day: how to maintain peace and the basic standard of living during a time of massive industrial growth and rising economic inequality. It is a question familiar to supporters of Donald Trump and supporters of Bernie Sanders.

Were the corporate leaders of the Gilded Age corrupt “robber barons” or “rags-to-riches” heroes? Was factory work a long-term good, driving down prices and growing the American economy, or was it soul-sucking wage slavery? Maybe both. What’s certain is that the nature of labor changed forever. Systems of efficiency like “Taylorism” and the assembly line specialized labor and brought much monotony to the workplace. Early American factory life was a nightmare, not unlike contemporary conditions in much of the developing world. The tyranny of the clock (a relatively new addition to the factory floor) dominated life as the average laborer worked six days a week, 10 hours a day. By 1900, there were 1.7 million children toiling in the labor force.

Worse still, in the late 19th century neither political party supported unions or any sort of modern social welfare system or safety net. The results were barbaric. Unorganized workers lacked health care, safety regulations and unemployment insurance. From 1880 to 1900, there were 35,000 deaths on the job, annually—the equivalent of a Korean War every year for two decades. Beyond the fatalities, an average of 536,000 men and women were injured at work in each of those years.

The coldhearted ideology of the day—in both major political parties and among the wealthy—tended to blame poverty on the workers themselves. Except among a tiny (but growing) core of socialists, few Americans who were not directly affected by the plight of workers demonstrated any enthusiasm for federal intervention or poverty mitigation. Indeed, the Democratic President Grover Cleveland—a fiscal conservative—declared in 1893, “While the people patriotically and cheerfully support their Government, its functions do not include the support of the people.” The Republicans were often even less sympathetic.

Most politicians simply reflected the prevailing mores. American elites (and many hoodwinked workers and farmers) clung tightly to belief in the American Dream—that with enough hard work and grit anyone, by pulling on one’s own bootstraps, could become rich. The empirical statistics, even then, debunked this ideology as little more than anecdotal, but it endured and endures. An academic of that era, William Sumner, summarized this viewpoint: “Let every man be sober, industrious, prudent, and wise and poverty will be abolished in a few generations.” Nor did many popular preachers, such as Henry Ward Beecher, show much sympathy for the plight of the poor, with Beecher famously announcing that “[n]o man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin.”

Nonetheless, when the economy finally collapsed in 1893—due in large part to the corruption and excesses of various corporate monopolies—setting off the worst depression in U.S. history to that point, views on charity, social welfare and the supposed character defects of the poor began to change. Perhaps the federal and local governments did have a role in citizens’ welfare. Of this much, many were sure: Something had to change.

Populism and Agrarian Revolt: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate and Populist firebrand.

After 1877, when the Republican Party abandoned Southern blacks along with any remnants of its old abolitionist sentiment, the GOP became increasingly identified as the party of “business,” of corporations and the capitalist class. The Democrats, now largely a regional (Southern) party, also proved initially conservative on economic issues and stuck with pure free-market capitalism. Neither party, it seemed, appealed to the best interests of small rural farmers or urban wage workers. One result of industrialization was the accumulation of massive wealth in the hands of the very few (mostly Northern and Eastern corporatists). In 1890, the richest 1 percent of the population owned 51 percent of the national wealth, while the poorest 44 percent owned less than 2 percent of the wealth. The result of this imbalance was instability, strikes, work stoppages, federal intervention and, often, bloodshed. Unions formed, shattered and rose again. Still, at a national level, it was the rural farmers who first revolted.

Farmers felt themselves the perennial victims of a rigged system. They lived by the whims of market prices, of supply and demand. They hated the national tariff—which “protected” urban manufacturing but caused rising costs in the consumer goods necessary to live on the prairie. Furthermore, the post-Civic War move away from paper currency (or “greenbacks”) to hard specie, meaning gold, devastated all but the wealthiest farmers. Seeing themselves as the ideal Americans of the Jeffersonian vision—the salt of the earth who tilled the land—they demanded that silver (which was more plentiful) as well as gold be used to back their paper currency. Small farmers simply didn’t have much in the way of gold reserves, and the “hard money” policies of the Republicans and urban elites devalued what little cash they had.

Disgusted with two-party politics, and feeling abandoned by both mainstream Republicans and Democrats, a new organization, the People’s Party, formed and met with early electoral successes in their Western and (sometimes) Southern heartlands. The Populists, as they were called, entered American politics and, in one guise or another, have been with us ever since. Theirs was the policy and ideology of “us” versus “them,” rich versus poor, West versus East, rural versus urban and—lamentably—white versus black. The Populists for the most part distrusted the state; then again, they did support federal intervention when it suited them.

Riding a tidal wave of rural and agricultural support, by 1896 William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska managed a veritable takeover of the Democratic Party, fusing it with the Populists, and ran for president. Bryan was one the great orators in American history. His speeches summoned the tone of evangelical church rallies. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Bryan mesmerized the crowd as he placed an imaginary crown of thorns on his head and pronounced, “We will answer their [the Republicans] demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.” Then, stretching out his arms as if on a cross, he hollered, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan, however popular and however enthralling on a podium, would go on to lose in 1896 (and then twice more). He was defeated by the Republican William McKinley, who ran on a platform of nationalism and status quo “prosperity” and who labeled Bryan a radical tainted by his party’s association with the old Confederate South.

And there was something else: money in politics. McKinley and his corporate Republicans raised $7 million (the equivalent of $3 billion today), the Democrats just $300,000. Bryan ran an energetic campaign, riding the rails and giving 600 speeches in 27 states; McKinley rarely left his home and rested on his financial advantages. In the end, money won. McKinley would be president. Lest we become too sentimental and consider Bryan’s and the Populists’ failed campaign as some sort of moral victory, it is necessary to illuminate the “dark side” of Populism.

Many Populists demonstrated strong strains of nativism and racism. They railed against “Jew” bankers, “Slavic” immigrants up north and, in the South,  the “Negro menace.” This was not mere rhetoric. As Populism rose in the West and South, blacks were being utterly disenfranchised. Southern states—now back in the hands of many former Confederate leaders—struck almost every eligible black voter from the rolls. Between 1898 and 1910, the number of black registered voters in Louisiana dropped from 130,000 to 730! Populism, in other words, may have been the party of the “people,” but it was most certainly only thus for white people. Consider the contrast. The very year Bryan ran his crusading campaign (1896), the Supreme Court would hold that segregation was legal when it ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Few Populists made an effort to craft an interracial alliance of poor people, and thus it was ultimately American blacks who were left to writhe on Bryan’s proverbial cross of gold.

The Progressive Moment: Social Freedom or Social Control

The Panic and Depression of 1893 was so severe—and the government so unprepared and unwilling to intervene—that millions of families were brought to the brink of starvation, and the “ranks of a tramp army” (of unemployed men) swelled. Though the Populists never managed to convince or co-opt Northern factory workers to join their crusade, many of the sentiments and proposed policies of the People’s Party began to infuse a new movement of (mostly middle class) “Progressives,” as they styled themselves. Progressives weren’t exactly radical in the traditional sense—though their wealthy opponents depicted them as such—and they belonged to both major political parties. What they most had in common was an abiding criticism of the excesses of American “boom-bust” capitalism, and a sense that regulation of markets and the intervention of government could mitigate the worst aspects of this and future depressions.

Throughout their heyday, 1896-1920 or so, Progressives called for, and often achieved, many of the government programs and policies that exist to this day. They pushed for antitrust and anti-monopoly regulations, the eight-hour workday, an end to child labor and unemployment, and workers’ compensation insurance, to name but a few. One problem for the Progressives was their inability to forge lasting alliances with rural Populists, whom they saw as backward country bumpkins. Nor did the rural poor trust the machinations of these urban (seemingly arrogant) reformist Progressives. The two groups had such divergent cultural values and traditions—as well as different views on immigration and government intervention—that a true union of urban/rural workers and reformists never manifested itself.

Historians long have argued about the ultimate nature of the Progressive movement. Some view the Progressives as genuine reformers with the best interest and freedoms of the working classes at their root. Others sense an overriding aura of social control in the Progressive agenda. Though the remarkable achievements of the Progressives should never be ignored, their paternalist and controlling side bears some analysis. As true believers in the government’s ability to reform, regulate and solve the nation’s economic and social problems, Progressives sometimes displaced the social justice rhetoric of the Populists “with slogans of efficiency.” Indeed, Progressives seemed to “know what was best” for poor farmers and urban immigrants alike—sobriety and moderation. This explains why so many Progressives were also in favor of temperance. Their motto was “trust us,” meaning the experts, your social and educational betters.

While Populism pitted the “people” against the state, Progressives believed in the utility of using (through new theories of social science) the state to intervene in the economy and reform society. Indeed, the paternalistic impulses of some Progressives were such that they saw the masses—urban or rural—as a threat to democracy, a populace itself in need of regulation. Therein lies part of the “dark side” of the Progressive movement. Sure, Progressives made great, if gradualist, progress on improving working conditions, government regulation and the right of (white) women to vote. This ought to be rightfully celebrated. Still, many Progressives, both academics and policymakers, believed in the social Darwinist notion of human beings’ “survival of the fittest.” In that vein, a powerful wing of the Progressives backed eugenics programs of forced sterilization laws. Those deemed physically or mentally unfit were to be sterilized for the good of the American “whole.” Beginning in 1907, two-thirds of U.S. states would eventually pass forced-sterilization laws. Indeed, even the Supreme Court ruled, in Buck v. Bell (1927), that compulsory sterilization was fully legal and constitutional. In a disturbing irony, Adolf Hitler and other Nazis would later cite America as a positive example and model of their early racial purity programs.

Progressives had a deep blind spot related to race in general and African-Americans in particular. The inconvenient fact is that the “Progressive Era” coincided with the Jim Crow era and the height of racial terrorism in the South. When Progressives talked about easing inequality they meant white inequality. The same went for most Populists. Indeed, as The New York Times reported on the 1924 Democratic National Convention: “An effort to incorporate in the Democratic Platform a plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan … was lost early this morning by a single vote. … There [was oratory against the proposal] by William Jennings Bryan, who spoke with his old-time fire and enthusiasm.”

“Progressive” Democrats couldn’t even agree to condemn the Klan! Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The Progressives and Populists had one thing in common: They wanted to win national elections. As a result, they showed a willingness to play the race card and ignore the Southern regime of terror that was then at its height.

As most Progressives and Populists remained silent, lynching reached its zenith in this era, and neither party took national action. It didn’t take very much for a black man to be lynched in the “Progressive Era” South. In 1889, Keith Bowen was killed for simply entering a room where three white women were sitting. In 1904, a white mob lynched a black man for knocking on a white woman’s door. In 1912, Thomas Miles was killed for writing a note to a white woman, inviting her for a cold drink. Multiply this by a thousand and one gets a sense of the scale of lynching in this period. And what did a self-described “Progressive” president, Theodore Roosevelt, have to say about all of this? The New York-bred Brahmin lowered himself to the baseness of a Southern apologist. He stated that “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” How’s that for victim blaming?

The Wild Election of 1912: Who Was the Real Progressive?      

Nevertheless, by 1912 the old notion of a governmental hands-off policy in economics and society was out of style. In that presidential election, three men ran on a platform of “Progressivism”—Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson and the old stalwart Theodore Roosevelt, who had formed his own third-party, the Progressive (or “Bull Moose”) Party. In this election, the three main candidates all sought to “out-progressive” the others. In truth, though, the men were, in their policies and platforms, remarkably similar. And they admitted it! Wilson, the Democrat, stated, “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is.” Roosevelt, ever more succinct and blunt, declared that “Wilson is merely a less virile me.”

So who was most traditionally Progressive? It’s a tough question. Roosevelt was most associated with Progressivism, in theory. He touted his achievements as a “trust-buster,” believed that big government could balance big business, and had a strong environmental record (including an expanded program of national parks). Still, he was socially conservative, feared “anarchy” and supported overt imperialism. His racism, and that of his followers, was also a problem—some called the Roosevelt wing of the Republican Party the “Lily-whites.” Taft, though portrayed by his opponents as a “business” Republican, actually busted twice the number of trusts as Teddy, mandated an eight-hour workday for federal employees and pushed for a progressive income tax. Wilson—born to a slaveholding family in Virginia in 1856—had racist instincts but supported some trust-busting and believed the Constitution to be a “living document” that must change with the times.

In the end, Roosevelt (though the most successful third-party candidate in history) split the Republican vote and propelled Wilson into the White House. Wilson followed through on many of his campaign promises, and the 63rd Congress, during his first term as president, was one of the more productive in U.S. history. Under Wilson’s watch, Congress lowered the tariff, abolished child labor and passed a new antitrust act, the eight-hour workday and federal aid to farmers. Wilson’s first term seemed a Progressive dream. But the man also had Southern roots and was a product of his era and its hateful culture. The favorite movie of the Progressive Wilson was “The Birth of a Nation,” which depicted the KKK as heroic. Furthermore, he excluded black soldiers from the 50th-anniversary observance of the Battle of Gettysburg and ushered in segregation of federal buildings and the federal civil service. On the issue of race, under Wilson, “Progressive America” had took a step backward.

Why No Socialism in America?: Urban, Rural and Racial Division

The hopes and fears of the period are captured in “The Strike,” an 1886 painting by Roger Koehler. In it, a crowd of workers approaches the home of a well-dressed factory owner. Amid the tension, a man picks up a stone.

It is a question asked time and again by historians on both sides of the Atlantic: Why did a significant socialist movement not rise in the United States as it did in Europe? Indeed, one could argue that this is one of the rare things that actually is “exceptional” about America. Indeed, while many liberal Progressives in the U.S. admired the social programs long flourishing in industrialized Europe, they never managed to implement most of these policies in Washington. One reason they had so much trouble was the power of the courts in America. Through the peculiar U.S. system of lifetime appointments of judges, the justices—especially on the Supreme Court—were a generation behind contemporary policymakers and tended to strike down social welfare provisions as unconstitutional. It would take decades to modernize the court. European countries rarely had such problems with experimentation and improvisation.

Thus, the United States fell way behind Europe on social welfare (and remains so today). One dream of American Progressives was universal health insurance, which they proposed back in 1912. More than a century later, the U.S. holds the distinction of being perhaps the last major industrialized country not to have such a program. Germany had shown the way in 1883, and the United Kingdom passed the National Insurance Act in 1911.

This is not to say that American socialists did not exist. In fact, 1912 was probably the high tide of socialist sentiment in this country. Many socialists, including their party leader, Eugene Debs, a former union man, believed that neither of the two major parties had an answer to the ills and excesses of capitalism. As one union member summed it up, “People got mighty sick of voting for Republicans and Democrats when it was a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ proposition.” Though it is rarely remembered or spoken of now, in 1911 card-carrying Socialists were elected mayors of 18 cities, and more than 300 held office in 30 states. In the 1912 presidential election, Debs received a remarkable 1 million votes, the most ever for a far-left socialist candidate. Clearly, some proportion of voters agreed with Debs that “[t]he Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system.”

Still, though Debs’ accomplishments were real, it must be said that no serious socialist or social democratic movement ever gathered much steam on this side of the Atlantic. The reasons were as numerous as they were lamentable. The working class in the United States was utterly divided against itself—something the owners of this country exploited and perpetuated. Rural Populists wanted lower tariffs, cultural homogeneity, an end to new immigration, and a return to “traditional values.” They were never able to make common cause with the urban (often immigrant) working class, despite their obvious common interests. Just as today, the American working and middle classes were waging a culture war over race, citizenship, immigration and social “values.”

But the main factor was race, specifically the “Negro question.” Both urban white immigrants and rural white farmers defined progress and reform along the narrowest of racial contours. They believed in white Progressivism and white Populism. In the interest of not alienating their parties’ Southern wings and winning elections and because of their downright bigotry, they left African-Americans to suffer economic peonage and physical torment. Progressives and Populists of the period failed to recognize one salient truth: Some cannot be free so long as all are not free. When it came to fulfilling the idealistic dreams of populism and progressivism, race, as in so many American matters, would prove to be the nation’s Achilles’ heel. It would take two generations to even begin to right that wrong.

* * *

To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

• Jackson Lears, “Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920” (2009).

• Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018).

• Richard White, “The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896” (2017).

Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

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.

11 Dead in Pittsburgh Synagogue Attack

Truthdig update: Robert Bowers “was charged late Saturday with 29 federal counts, including weapons offenses and hate crimes,” and President Trump has ordered flags at federal buildings across the nation flown at half-staff in respect for the victims of Saturday’s shooting in Pittsburgh, The Associated Press reported. According to a CNN article, the Anti-Defamation League said in a written statement that the massacre is believed to be the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history.

PITTSBURGH—A gunman who’s believed to have spewed anti-Semitic slurs and rhetoric on social media barged into a baby-naming ceremony at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday and opened fire, killing 11 people in one of the deadliest attacks on Jews in U.S. history.

The 20-minute attack at Tree of Life Congregation in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood left at least six others wounded, including four police officers who dashed to the scene, authorities said.

The suspect, Robert Bowers, traded gunfire with police and was shot several times. Bowers, who was in fair condition at a hospital, was expected to face federal hate-crime charges.

“Please know that justice in this case will be swift and it will be severe,” Scott Brady, the chief federal prosecutor in western Pennsylvania, said at a late-afternoon news conference, characterizing the slaughter as a “terrible and unspeakable act of hate.”

The shooting came amid a rash of high-profile attacks in an increasingly divided country, including the series of pipe bombs mailed over the past week to prominent Democrats and former officials.

The shooting also immediately reignited the longstanding national debate about guns: President Donald Trump said the outcome might have been different if the synagogue “had some kind of protection” from an armed guard, while Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf noted that once again “dangerous weapons are putting our citizens in harm’s way.”

Bob Jones, head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, said that worshippers “were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith,” though he cautioned the shooter’s full motive was not yet known.

The social media site Gab.com said the alleged shooter had a profile on its website, which is popular with far-right extremists. The company said the account was verified after the shooting and matched the name of the gunman.

A man with the same name posted on Gab before the shooting that “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

HIAS is a nonprofit group that helps refugees around the world find safety and freedom. The organization says it is guided by Jewish values and history.

Bowers also recently posted a photo of a collection of three semi-automatic handguns he titled “my glock family,” a reference to the firearms manufacturer. He also posted photos of bullet holes in person-sized targets at a firing range, touting the “amazing trigger” on a handgun he was offering for sale.

The attack took place during a baby-naming ceremony, according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. During a Jewish baby naming ceremony, the baby is given his or her Hebrew name. The name could be a name that sounds like the baby’s secular name or has significance in his or her family’s history.

Officials later said that no children were hurt.

“It is a very horrific crime scene. It’s one of the worst that I’ve seen and I’ve been on some plane crashes,” said a visibly moved Wendell Hissrich, the Pittsburgh public safety director.

The synagogue is located in the tree-lined residential neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, about 10 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh and the hub of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, said the group believes it is the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history.

“Our hearts break for the families of those killed and injured at the Tree of Life Synagogue, and for the entire Jewish community of Pittsburgh,” Greenblatt said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “heartbroken and appalled” by the attack.

“The entire people of Israel grieve with the families of the dead,” Netanyahu said. “We stand together with the Jewish community of Pittsburgh. We stand together with the American people in the face of this horrendous anti-Semitic brutality. And we all pray for the speedy recovery of the wounded.”

World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder called the shooting “an attack not just on the Jewish community, but on America as a whole.”

Trump called the shooting a “wicked act of mass murder” that “is pure evil, hard to believe and frankly something that is unimaginable.”

Trump has at times been accused by critics of failing to adequately condemn hate, such as when he blamed “both sides” for the violence at a Charlottesville white supremacist rally.

On Saturday, he said that anti-Semitism “must be confronted anywhere and everywhere it appears.”

The synagogue is a fortress-like concrete building, its facade punctuated by rows of swirling, modernistic stained-glass windows illustrating the story of creation, the acceptance of God’s law, the “life cycle” and “how human-beings should care for the earth and one another,” according to its website. Among its treasures is a “Holocaust Torah,” rescued from Czechoslovakia.

Its sanctuary can hold up to 1,250 people.

Michael Eisenberg, the immediate past president of the Tree of Life Synagogue, lives about a block from the building.

He was getting ready for services when he received a phone call from a member who works with Pittsburgh’s Emergency Services, saying he had been notified through scanner and other communications that there was an active shooter at their synagogue.

“I ran out of the house without changing and I saw the street blocked with police cars. It was a surreal scene. And someone yelled, ‘Get out of here.’ I realized it was a police officer along the side of the house. … I am sure I know all of the people, all of the fatalities. I am just waiting to see,” Eisenberg said.

He said officials at the synagogue had not gotten any threats that he knew of prior to the shooting. The synagogue maintenance employees had recently checked all of the emergency exits and doors to make sure they were cleared and working.

“I spoke to a maintenance person who was in the building and heard the shots. He was able to escape through one of the side exit doors we had made sure was functioning,” Eisenberg said.

Eisenberg said the larger main synagogue, Tree of Life, had let two other smaller congregations use space at the synagogue on Saturdays, and that all three were meeting at the time.

Jeff Finkelstein of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said local synagogues have done “lots of training on things like active shooters, and we’ve looked at hardening facilities as much as possible.”

“This should not be happening, period,” he told reporters at the scene. “This should not be happening in a synagogue.”

Just three days before the shooting, Rabbi Jeffrey Myers posted a column on the congregation’s website, noting that people make time to attend funerals, but not for life’s happy occasions.

“There is a story told in the Talmud of a wedding procession and a funeral procession heading along parallel roads, with the roads intersecting,” Myers wrote on Wednesday. “The question asked is: when they meet at the fork, which procession goes first, funeral or wedding? The correct answer is wedding, as the joy of the couple takes precedence. In fact, the funeral procession is to move out of sight so that their joy is not lessened.”

Myers ended his column with words that now seem all too prescient.

“We value joy so much in Judaism that upon taking our leave from a funeral or a shiva house, the customary statement one makes (in Yiddish) is ‘nor oyf simches’ – only for s’machot,” Myers wrote. “While death is inevitable and a part of life, we still take our leave with the best possible blessing, to meet at joyous events. And so I say to you: nor oyf simches!”

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Michael Balsamo in Washington, Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia, Gene Puskar in Pittsburgh and Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

 

Rockets Fall on Israel, Warplanes Strike in Gaza

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli aircraft struck dozens of militant sites across the Gaza Strip early Saturday as militants fired some 30 rockets into Israel, in the heaviest exchange of fire between the bitter enemies in several weeks.

The fighting followed a bloody day of border protests, in which Israeli forces shot and killed four Palestinians protesting along the perimeter fence dividing Hamas-ruled Gaza and Israel. The sudden burst of fighting and bloodshed complicated the mission of Egyptian mediators, who have intensified shuttle diplomacy to achieve calm and prevent a full-blown conflict between the militant Hamas group and Israel.

The Israeli military said it had struck some 80 sites across Gaza by early Saturday morning, including a security headquarters building. Air raid sirens sounded throughout the night in southern Israel, with militants firing some 30 rockets, the military said.

It said about 10 rockets were intercepted by its Iron Dome rocket defense system, two landed prematurely in Gaza and the rest fell in open areas. Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, convened an emergency meeting of top security officials, the army added, without elaborating.

There was no word on injuries as a result of the rockets and airstrikes.

Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group, implicitly claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. It issued a statement saying that it normally exercises restraint, but it “can no longer stand idle before the continued killing of innocents and bloodshed by the Israeli occupation.”

It was not immediately clear whether Islamic Jihad, which sometimes acts independently of Hamas, had coordinated the rocket fire with Hamas. But Israel holds Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in 2007, responsible for all fire emanating from the territory.

The sides have fought three wars over the past decade, and Israel and Egypt have maintained a stifling blockade on the territory to weaken Hamas. The Hamas-led weekly protests along the Israeli border have been aimed in large part at breaking the blockade, which has devastated the Gaza economy.

On Friday, thousands of Palestinians gathered at five locations along the boundary, burning tires and throwing rocks, grenades and firebombs at Israeli troops who responded with tear gas and occasional live fire.

The Israeli army said some suspects briefly crossed the fence.

Three of the dead were reported in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Witnesses said that dozens of protesters approached the fence there.

In northern Gaza, a 27-year-old man died after being shot in the head, the ministry said. It added that 170 other protesters sustained various injuries.

Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, had previously scaled down the protests as Egypt stepped up its efforts to secure calm.

On Wednesday, Egyptian intelligence officials met representatives of Palestinian factions in Gaza. Loay Qarouti of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command said the mediators asked them “to protect the lives of protesters and minimize losses among them.”

Egypt wants to restore calm in order to pursue the broader goal of Palestinian reconciliation between Hamas and the West Bank-based administration of President Mahmoud Abbas. The internationally recognized Abbas lost control of Gaza in the 2007 takeover.

But Hamas maintains it wants a full lifting of a crippling blockade Israel and Egypt imposed on Gaza to isolate the Islamic movement.

The blockade has made it increasingly difficult for Hamas to govern. Widespread desperation among Gaza’s 2 million residents — who get only a few hours of electricity a day and undrinkable tap water, in addition to suffering from soaring joblessness and limited freedom of travel — fuels their participation in the Hamas-orchestrated protests.

Since the marches began six months ago, at least 160 Palestinians present or taking part in the protests have been killed. A Gaza militant fatally shot an Israeli soldier in July.

Israel accuses Hamas of using the large protests as cover to stage border infiltrations and attacks. It says it is defending its border and accuses Hamas of exploiting young protesters and encouraging them to risk their lives in order to increase pressure to ease the blockade.

Israel has come under heavy international criticism for what many see as excessive use of force and the large number of unarmed people who have been shot.

In the West Bank, a 33-year-old Palestinian man was killed and nine others wounded by live rounds, one in critical conditions, as the Israeli forces confronted stone throwers in a village near Ramallah city, doctors said.