Chris Hedges's Blog, page 451

As Registration Deadline Approaches, Texas Voters Jump Hurdles

A close U.S. Senate race in Texas between Democrat Beto O’Rourke and Republican Ted Cruz could be swayed by whether people are actually able to cast their votes.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rolando Pablos rejected 2,400 registrations, and those voters will have to register properly before Tuesday. Those affected, along with others across the country, registered on Vote.org by sending their voter information to the organization, which then sent completed forms to county voter registrars.

“That’s not allowed in Texas,” Texas secretary of state spokesperson Sam Taylor said. “You can’t affix a picture of a signature to an application. That opens up a wide range of possible fraud and abuse.”

In Travis County, though, where Austin is located, voter registrar Bruce Elfant said the state law made the online registrations legitimate, according to the office’s legal counsel.

Vote.org founder Debra Cleaver wrote,“Vote.org exists solely to increase turnout. The Texas secretary of state does not appear to share this goal.  He is actively choosing to reject thousands of lawfully submitted forms only days before the deadline, in a state with several highly competitive elections,”

The Brennan Center for Justice is keeping tabs on a number of states, including Texas, in regard to restrictive voting policies like gerrymandering, illegal voter purges and rigid voter ID laws.

“The outcomes are going to depend not only on the candidates and the voters’ choices, but also on whether our voting system is doing its job. It’s got to allow eligible Americans to cast their votes, and it must protect the accuracy and fairness of the results,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center.

“Texas voters continue to face obstacle after obstacle just to participate in the democratic process. Millions of eligible voters remain shut-out of the democratic process, a disparate number of whom are young, poor, and people of color,” according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Those living in Texas are not allowed to vote if they are on probation or parole, but organizers within the state are joining a national movement to push for voting rights for the formerly incarcerated.  “This is an entirely new voting bloc,” said a Texas community organizer, Steve Huerta. “It’s a political game-changer for struggling communities.”

One formerly incarcerated woman, Crystal Mason, is facing up to five years in prison for voting in the 2016 presidential election. Mason was previously convicted of tax fraud and spent five years in prison. She was living in Fort Worth on supervised release and did not realize she was not allowed to vote.

“Black people in Fort Worth hear about her case and they understand that they are not welcome in the voting booth,” her lawyer said.

“There are no downsides to online voter registration—unless, of course, your goal is to suppress voter turnout,” Vote.org’s Cleaver wrote. “We hope that this isn’t the case, and look forward to Texas joining the 38 other states that have taken steps to secure and modernize their voter registration solutions.”

Teenager Among 3 Palestinians Killed in Gaza Protest

Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israeli forces have shot dead three Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, as thousands of people protested along the fence dividing the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The ministry said the boy was struck in the chest, a 24-year-old man was shot in the back and another man, 28, succumbed to his wounds at the hospital Friday.

It added that 126 protesters were wounded by live fire.

Responding to calls by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, thousands of Palestinians thronged five areas along the fence, burning tires, throwing rocks and chanting slogans against a stifling Israeli-Egyptian blockade on the territory.

The Israeli military said about 20,000 protesters participated. They threw explosive devices and grenades toward the troops which used tear gas and live fire to, it added.

Funding Platform to Unseat Susan Collins in 2020 Crashes From Traffic Surge

A crowd-sourced fund to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine in 2020 crashed Friday afternoon after traffic spiked and donations surged as she was delivering a speech on the Senate floor explaining why she would join nearly all of her GOP colleagues in voting “yes” on controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

On the campaign funding platform Crowdpac, father and activist Ady Barkan joined forces with advocacy groups Maine People’s Alliance and Mainers for Accountable Leadership to raise pledges for Collins’ not-yet identified Democratic opponent if she supported President Donald Trump’s high court pick. As of at 3:40pm ET Friday, it had raised $2,020,366 in pledges, an increase from the $1,804,551 it had amassed by Wednesday. A week ago, the total was $1,605,182.

While the site crashed, Barkan announced on Twitter that another portal existed to fund Collins’ 2020 opponent:

While Crowdpac is down (from overwhelming traffic), you can donate here to @SenatorCollins’ 2020 opponent.https://t.co/WsijVuCSc9

— Ady Barkan

‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ Aims Straight for Trumpism’s Dark, Neoliberal Heart

At a time when the neoliberal Resistance has embraced the CIA and FBI as heroic organizations supposedly defending our putative democracy from the “Cheeto Mussolini,” Michael Moore’s new documentary comes as a breath of fresh air.

“Fahrenheit 11/9” is anything but a superficial tale of a brainless and ineffectual orange marionette catering to the whims of a dastardly Russian bogeyman—that is to say, how MSNBC would have us see Donald Trump. On the contrary, this film is precisely what is needed: an enlightening and entertaining cinematic diagnosis of the rapid decay of the United States of America in the age of Trumpism, delivered from an uncompromising left-wing perspective, one that is willing to tear down liberal idols when necessary.

I would highly recommend the documentary, especially for those who live outside the U.S. and want to get a crash course on the trials and tribulations that have rocked this country in recent years. That list ranges from the poisoning of the majority black residents of Flint, Mich.; to the paroxysm of mass shootings; to the Big Pharma-induced opioid epidemic; to the hyper-militarized police state and its drive for perpetual war; to the barbarous terrorizing of immigrants. (In one of the film’s most striking moments, the last surviving Nuremberg trials prosecutor, 99-year-old Ben Ferencz, tells Moore forthrightly that Trump’s policy of separating young immigrant children from their families is a crime against humanity.)

The movie also highlights the actual, real resistance to this systemic crisis—from wildcat teacher strikes spreading across the South, to a new wave of openly socialist people organizing the grassroots and running for office, to the resistance of indigenous peoples at Standing Rock.

“Fahrenheit 11/9” correctly—and terrifyingly—details the very serious threat that Trump and Trumpism pose to all of us. Crucially, it goes much deeper.

The documentary explores precisely who and what is responsible for giving birth to the monstrous far-right Donald Trump regime—and over a period of decades, not just a year or two.

While it is clear that Moore is a Democratic partisan, he is far from a party hack. His film rightly characterizes the Democrats as neoliberal centrists who lose because they are always willing to compromise and never willing to fight.

The documentary is extremely critical of Barack Obama for his objectively right-wing policies (Obama’s shameful betrayal of Flint looms large), and Moore correctly identifies the Wall Street-funded ex-president as a facilitator of the Trumpification of America.

Likewise, Moore even more explicitly condemns the Clintons as the figures who paved the gilded path to Trumpism. The movie chronicles Bill Clinton’s wholehearted embrace of neoliberalism, from his cultivation of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex to his wanton gutting of welfare. It also looks at how Hillary Clinton utterly failed to even pretend to represent the working class, and how, instead of campaigning in key Rust Belt states, she spent her time filling her campaign coffers at opulent dinners hosted by corporate oligarchs.

While Moore did eventually campaign for Clinton after initially endorsing Bernie Sanders in the primary, his film documents how the Democratic Party rigged the primary against the insurgent social-democratic presidential candidate, climaxing in the Democratic National Committee’s outright theft of states from Sanders at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

“Fahrenheit 11/9” also astutely identifies how the corporate media pilloried Sanders, and really anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan, while preaching centrist piffle and extolling the virtues of the all-knowing Free Market. The film singles out the U.S. newspaper of record, The New York Times, as the Voice of Conventional Wisdom that just so happens to support every corporate bailout and “sell” every war while relentlessly demonizing Sanders and the broader left.

And then there is the corporate media’s profligate promotion of Trump. Disgraced CBS CEO Les Moonves really summed it all up when he proclaimed that Trump’s far-right campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. … The money’s rolling in, and this is fun!”

One cannot help but roar in simultaneous anger-laughter at Moore’s montage of top cable news networks broadcasting an empty MAGA-emblazoned pulpit, trying desperately to fill an hour of dead time as they waited obediently for the racist billionaire to arrive late to a campaign rally.

Even more piercingly, the documentary investigates the intentional contamination of the water in Flint, whose mostly black residents were forced to poison themselves with lead while government workers were told to cook the books. This decision, made to maximize corporate profits, was ordered by venture capitalist plutocrat-cum-Michigan-governor/dictator Rick Snyder, and the documentary uses this horrid crime as a synecdoche for the political crisis engulfing the U.S. as a whole. To Moore, Snyder was a Trumpian presage, and the fact that his crimes essentially got Obama’s stamp of approval only further demonstrates how widely the blame goes around.

Impressively, “Fahrenheit 11/9” also manages to largely ignore the farcical charade of Russiagate, which, since Trump’s election on Nov. 9, 2016 (hence the title of the film) has become a mouth-foaming liberal obsession. The two-hour movie mentions the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin only twice, in passing, and even then as just a minor factor in Trumpism.

The documentary is not without its weaknesses. It loses direction in the final quarter, and it appears that Moore was not quite sure how to end it (a daunting decision, given the stakes). In this last 30 minutes, the film descends a bit into the hyperbolic as well. True, the U.S. could well be a lone Reichstag fire away from becoming the Fourth Reich; or Trump could be more of a Berlusconi-style (or, frankly, even Churchill-esque) figure than a Hitlerian one. Only time will tell.

Moreover, international politics—that is to say, the politics of the 95 percent of the planet outside of the United States—fades into the background (as is so customary in social-democratic-oriented works), and foreign leaders as disparate as Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are reduced to an amorphous blob of oriental despotism.

The tone is sometimes confusing, alternating between hopeful optimism and abject despair. Moore is rather Pollyannaish in his view of the U.S.: He argues that this is a “leftist country” by correctly pointing to many of the progressive policies that are supported by the vast majority of Americans (i.e., single-payer health care, stronger social services, a decrease in military spending and so forth). It is indisputably true that these social-democratic programs are overwhelmingly backed by the working class. Still, it is quite a stretch to portray support for policies that are commonplace, and taken for granted even by hegemonic conservative political parties throughout most of the industrialized world, as a sign that the U.S. is a “leftist country”—although the intent of Moore’s argument is clear, even if the language is not useful, and the point is well-taken.

I also found it questionable for Moore to include numerous interview clips with the historian Timothy Snyder discussing contemporary parallels with the history of classical fascism, given that scholars like Snyder himself bear significant responsibility for popularizing the fascist-apologist myth of “Double Genocide,” effectively whitewashing the unique crimes of Nazism in order to portray the Soviet Union (which did the vast majority of the work in defeating Nazism) and Communism as a whole as somehow morally equivalent to fascism. But as with so many avowed Cold Warriors, Snyder has transformed himself into a Resistance-style liberal darling in the age of Trumpism.

The documentary’s faults are balanced by its sense of humor. Like Moore’s other works, the film has its share of comic relief—a refreshing trait a good many Serious Leftists could learn from. From blasting the Pagliacci aria “Vesti la giubba” as a different kind of tragic clown wins the 2016 presidential election, to overdubbing Trump’s voice on footage of Hitler from “Triumph of the Will,” Moore’s characteristic irony is disarming, even when he is grappling with the macabre. There is likewise a surprising clip of fascistic demagogue Steve Bannon, the erstwhile Trump chief strategist and chief of “alt-right” bible Breitbart, applauding Moore for his virtuosic filmmaking.

Its politics aside, “Fahrenheit 11/9” is indeed just that: simply top-notch, enjoyable filmmaking.

Michael Moore is known popularly as a bleeding-heart liberal, and critics have long accused him of preaching to the choir. It is likely that most of the people who watch this film will be not the Bannons of the world, but rather those who are already somewhere vaguely on the left side of the spectrum.

But in the case of “Fahrenheit 11/9,” this is not a bad thing. In fact, it is precisely those neoliberal Democrats who believe that Putin personally hacked into Trump’s brain and that any criticism of Hillary Clinton was a Russian/FBI/Bernie bro plot who need to see this film. The documentary should encourage deep introspection and self-criticism from liberal centrists who have spent decades externalizing their problems and blaming the GOP and the GOP alone for a long-term, bipartisan right-wing lurch that they themselves gladly facilitated.

“Fahrenheit 11/9” is far from propaganda for the Democratic Party. Sure, Moore has undeniably thrown in his lot with the Democrats, but he is by no means an uncritical yes-man.

The film is an even-handed and entertaining dive into the sinister bowels of American politics at a time of unprecedented crisis, confusion and imperial decline. It will make you angry; it will horrify you; it might even bring you to tears. And most importantly, it will inspire you to act, to try to stop the cancerous growth of neofascism before it is too late.

A Cloud of Depression Over the ‘Half Widows’ of Kashmir

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

Farzana lives in a four-room house just outside Anantnag, a town about 40 miles south of Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar. The corner room, lined with beautiful red carpets, was where her husband, Iqbal, read books. “He read pretty much anything he could lay his hands on,” Farzana said.

Iqbal, a cloth merchant, was captured by the Indian army in 2009. The army claims he was an armed militant who was waging a battle against the Indian state. His relatives say that he wasn’t a militant and that he was working in his shop when he was taken away.

The family doesn’t know whether Iqbal is dead or alive.

For seven years, Farzana cleaned and decorated her husband’s room every day, in case he returned. “When she stopped cleaning the room was when we realized she had lost hope of seeing her husband again,” said Muneeza, Farzana’s mother in law.

From the time she stopped keeping up the room, Farzana has often been wakened by nightmares. Her family says she cries without apparent reason and has unpredictable rages. Like many Kashmiri women, she has been diagnosed with chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Kashmir Valley has been at the center of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan since 1947, and currently the two countries control parts of the region. The area has suffered from extreme violence for the past three decades as Kashmiri militants have fought against Indian rule. Uncertainty governs life in the valley, which is surrounded by three nuclear powers—India, Pakistan and China.

The violence has left women like 37-year-old Farzana as “half widows,” a term commonly used for those whose husbands have been missing for years. “Who would have thought death would be uncertain?” Farzana said.

Over the years, Farzana made several trips on crowded buses to the army headquarters in Srinagar. When she was lucky, she could go past the security guard at the gate. But even then, no one responded to her and she returned without any information.

Farzana still makes trips on the rickety bus to Srinagar. But now it’s to visit the Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, one of only two psychiatric facilities available to about 7 million Kashmiris. Other centers exist, but they offer only basic counseling services.

Mental Illness and Conflict

Farzana is among nearly a million Kashmiri women who suffer serious mental conditions. They include “half widows” and actual widows. Many of the latter are in their 20s and 30s, and an alarming number of them say they have suicidal tendencies.

About 1.8 million adults in the Kashmir Valley have “significant symptoms of mental distress,” according to a 2015 report by Doctors Without Borders. The report says about 50 percent of Kashmiri women suffer from depression, about 36 percent of them have an anxiety disorder and 22 percent suffer from PTSD.

This is believed to be the first time mental illness among Kashmiri women has been quantified by an international agency. In the past, Doctors Without Borders had conducted such research only in war zones such as Iraq and Syria.

The past 30 years have been an especially tense phase of the long conflict. The current armed militancy goes back to 1989, when Kashmiris became enraged about rigged elections, and anti-India sentiments grew irrevocable.

Many militants today want Kashmir to secede from India, and some want the valley, which has a Muslim majority, to become part of predominately Muslim Pakistan. To counter militant organizations—both homegrown ones and those funded by Pakistan—India began sending large numbers of army troops to the valley in 1990. Today, more than 700,000 Indian troops are stationed in Kashmir.

To counter militant organizations, India has increased its militarization of Kashmir. (Kashmir Global / flickr)

During peak violence phases, women in the valley report widespread rapes, torture, beatings and maiming, mostly by the army but sometimes by the rebel forces as well. A United Nations report estimated that Indian security forces killed up to 145 civilians and rebels killed about 20 civilians between July 2016 and April 2018. The report said India used “excessive force,” and a U.N. commissioner called for a human rights investigation.

“With physical violence being so prevalent, very few people have the time to focus on [dealing with] mental illnesses,” said Srinagar-based psychiatrist Mushtaq Margoob. “Today, it has reached the level of a crisis.”

Interestingly, regions of the valley with increased violence have relatively fewer psychiatric disorders, according to figures in the Doctors Without Borders report. Professor Shazana Andrabi offers two possible reasons for this. Either people report mental illness less often in the high-violence areas, or having an outlet for their anger and frustration has reduced their propensity to mental illness. “After all, people pick up arms against the state to express their extreme dissatisfaction,” said Andrabi, who specializes in international relations at Islamic University of Science and Technology in Srinagar. “When such expression is thwarted, it leads to mental illnesses.”

Additional Burden

Kashmiri women are often required to take on the roles of men lost to violence, and that burden—in addition to their grief—takes a toll on the women’s mental health. “When our men go out to fight, we have to ensure there is enough bread for everyone to eat. That is our contribution to the rebellion,” said Hafiza, 25, who lives in a six-bedroom mansion in a small village in the Pulwama district of southern Kashmir. Three of Hafiza’s brothers joined rebel groups in the past decade, and her youngest brother was killed in 2016.

Hafiza manages the family household and saffron business. After her brother died, she was diagnosed with mild depression. Her mother said Hafiza was functional and managed to handle her day-to-day activities efficiently. However, her condition worsened. She lost her appetite and spent hours in silence. She also became extremely irritable.

Today, Hafiza takes an antidepressant that helps her function each day. For example, her job requires her to interact with saffron buyers in India and abroad, and she says she’s now able to deal with them without losing her temper.

Getting Help

Women who need help for mental health issues face at least two formidable obstacles in Kashmir: social stigma and the lack of resources.

The social stigma was apparent during a visit to Hafiza’s home. Her 60-year-old mother was reluctant to show Hafiza’s antidepressant pills, but with persuasion, she flashed the bottle before locking it in a cupboard. Hafiza’s relatives are unaware of her illness—if they find out, her mother fears Hafiza won’t be able to make a suitable marriage.

“Whenever [my relatives] come, they talk to me about getting married,” Hafiza said. “That puts more pressure on me, and I get even more depressed.” Earlier she had said, “I don’t want to get married at all. If I do, I will be burdened with running another household.”

The patients in a long line at the Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience also reflect the fear of stigma. They try not to look at each other’s faces, or they cover their faces with traditional clothing. “I suspect misplaced shame associated with mental illness worsens patients’ conditions,” professor Andrabi said.

Women who overcome that stigma and seek treatment find a dearth of mental health facilities in the area. In 2015, two counseling centers opened in Srinagar, but their services are limited and can’t keep up with growing demand. Also, people from rural areas have to rely on infrequent government buses to reach the capital to access counseling and psychiatric services. The result is insufficient care for serious mental illnesses and disorders.

Transgenerational Trauma

Violence affects the Kashmiri population in large numbers. In July 2016, clashes between the Indian army and civilians resulted in more than 100 deaths. Several hundred civilians were blinded that month after being hit by the army’s “nonlethal” metal pellets. As recently as August of this year, protests against Indian rule turned violent when a crowd threw stones at security forces, which responded with tear gas and gunshots.

Children in Kashmir suffer from ongoing violence and from “transgenerational trauma.” (Kashmir Global / flickr)

Kashmiri children not only bear the impact of these incidents, but they also suffer from the effect of past violence on their parents. This generation of Kashmiris who have never known a normal childhood especially run the risk of absorbing the mental damage inflicted on their mothers. For instance, Farzana’s sons—aged 10 and 13—look on as their mother loses her temper more often and more virulently. She has long periods of silence that are broken by sudden bursts of verbal abuse.

The boys also have had to come to terms with the fact they might never see their father again.

“Generation after generation has been at the receiving end of violence,” psychiatrist Margoob said. “Living in constant uncertainty for many decades creates a transgenerational transmission of trauma that is tough for people who do not live here to understand.”

Some names in this article were changed and some first names used to protect privacy.

Reporting for the article was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Reporting Grants for Women’s Stories.

Restoring Ulysses S. Grant to His Rightful Stature

“ Grant”

A book by Ron Chernow

Reviewed by Allen Barra

Is Hiram Ulysses Grant—his name at birth—the greatest American? It’s a legitimate question, one given impetus by Ron Chernow’s huge new landmark biography, now out in paperback.

To begin with what should be obvious: Grant is the greatest general in American history. The scale of his achievements measured against adversity casts even commanders such as John “Blackjack” Pershing, George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur and even Grant’s charismatic opponent, Robert E. Lee, in his shadow.

Whether Grant or Lee was the better military commander is something historians have never stopped debating (J.F.C. Fuller’s famous 1933 volume, “Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Leadership,” began to push opinion in favor of Grant among military scholars). In any event, Grant won the Civil War, and in winning he both saved the Union—no other general could have—and helped create the United States as we know it.

As a writer, he gave us one of the masterpieces of American historical prose, “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,” which Edmund Wilson thought the finest book written by an American president. (This judgment, of course, was made before the works of Donald J. Trump. Insert emoji of choice.) Mark Twain, who published the “Memoirs,” regarded Grant’s prose to be superior even to Lincoln’s.

The military was in Grant’s blood; his great-grandfather fought in the French and Indian War, and his grandfather was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. The gene must have skipped a generation with Grant’s father, Jesse, a tanner by profession who was something of a rogue—a sly and opportunistic fellow who later in life tried on more than one occasion to cash in on his son’s fame. Hannah, his mother, was a strong, pious, taciturn woman; she did right by his education and upbringing but showed him little affection. “I never saw my mother cry,” Grant once said.

By Grant’s birth in 1822, his parents were settled in Ohio. He was named Hiram after Hannah’s father; the middle name was drawn out of a hat at a family party. Ulysses stuck. We know him as Ulysses S. (for Simpson) because of a clerical error when he enrolled at West Point. He liked the sound of the initials “U.S.” and so did, eventually, the press and the public.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Grant” at Google Books.

All the stories you’ve ever read about Grant’s failures before the military turn out to not only be true but understated. The first 38 years of his life were so uneventful that biographers have been frustrated by the lack of interesting anecdotes. It’s hard to imagine anyone who had such an impact on American history waiting so late in life to make an impression.

Grant served with distinction in the war with Mexico, a conflict that he considered immoral and unnecessary. Chernow maintains that he was scarcely alone in this belief; many prominent Americans, among them Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sen. Charles Sumner, John Quincy Adams and even Abraham Lincoln—were also against that war. Lincoln, Chernow writes, “denounced President Polk’s war in thunderous terms: ‘He is deeply conscious of being in the wrong … he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.’ ”

For his part, “Grant insisted that the Civil War was ‘largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.’ ” The Mexican war, Chernow writes, was “a huge bonanza for the United States. … The U.S. gained Texas with the crucial Rio Grande boundary as well as New Mexico and California … Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and part of Colorado.”

The struggle over these territories between the pro-slavery and the free political factions led to the death of hundreds of thousands in the Civil War and propelled Ulysses S. Grant into history.

An obscure officer in 1861 when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Grant shot through the ranks of the U.S. Army with astonishing speed, as genuine a testament as exists in American history to the country’s ability to promote and reward competence. Grant’s campaigns in the western theater of the war, along and down the Mississippi River, presaged modern warfare, and while the eastern papers paid more attention to the Army of the Potomac’s massive failures against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Grant’s incredible campaign in the swamps and scrub around Vicksburg shut the Mississippi off to the Confederacy and may have been the war’s most important military action.

He invented the concept of an army living off the land, which enabled him to cut loose from fragile supply lines; Sherman’s application of this strategy in his march through Georgia and South Carolina shortened the war by months and perhaps a year. Grant righted the Union position in Tennessee and then, defying a hostile press, finally defeated Lee in Virginia the only way it could have been done—by sheer tenacity.

Despite the reputation he had made during the war as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, his magnanimity toward Lee and the Confederates was worthy of Lincoln’s sentiments—“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

It’s impossible to read the first 500 or so pages of “Grant” without empathizing with its subject, and thus it’s difficult to read the rest without a growing sense of trepidation as Grant is drawn into post-Civil War politics. You almost wish the book would end before he was elected president in 1868.

His two terms are remembered today primarily for financial scandals and for the ineffectualness of the federal government to prevent the Klan from suppressing the political gains of blacks. Some of his administration’s problems were due to Grant’s lack of tact: “On Reconstruction issues,” Chernow writes, “Grant operated from deep knowledge and long experience, but when it came to the niceties of diplomacy, he was an amateur at sea. …”

But many of his administration’s failures were beyond Grant’s control, created by the decay of ethics that came with the economic postwar boom that caused Mark Twain to label it “The Gilded Age.” The wave of corruption would swamp even Grant himself when his savings were wiped out in a Ponzi scheme run by his son’s business partner, Ferdinand Ward.

The racial situation was hopeless. Grant could make no headway helping blacks in the South without incurring resistance from Northern conservatives who accused him of stifling states’ rights. At any rate, most Northern states were no more interested in advancing black Americans than were Southerners. One honestly wonders whether Lincoln would have had any more success with these issues had he lived, and if Grant bore the brunt of a maelstrom of ills that no one could have foreseen or solved.

As Chernow points out, though, Grant’s accomplishments as president were not insignificant: “As the first president to govern after the Fifteenth Amendment, he guaranteed the exercise of brand-new black voting rights and opposed the spate of domestic terrorism it engendered. He had been a good steward of the nation’s finances, having slashed taxes, trimmed debt, and watched the trade balance turn from deficit to surplus. He had shown that government could make good on its pledge to repay war debt and restore American credit.”

Grant initiated the modern national parks system, and if he did not succeed in establishing a policy of fairness to Native Americans, he at least made a genuine effort. Before he left office, “Grant received a delegation of Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, who said, ‘On the eve of your retirement from office, we desire to express our appreciation of the course you have pursued towards our people while president of the United States—At all times just and humane you have not failed to manifest an earnest wish for their advancement in the arts and pursuits of civilized life, a conscientious regard for their rights and the full purpose to enforce in their behalf, the obligations of the United States.’ ”

While president, Grant appointed his friend and staff officer Eli S. Parker, a full-blooded Seneca Iroquois, as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ultimately, Chernow thinks, “He got the big issue right during his presidency, even if he bungled many of the small ones.”

Almost certainly Grant was our greatest ex-president. After leaving the White House, he felt, said a friend, “like a boy getting out of school.” Shortly after, he and wife, Julia, embarked on a two-year tour of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The Japanese showed unconditional reverence for Grant: “How you crushed a rebellion, and afterwards ruled a nation in peace and righteousness, is known over the whole world.” The emperor called him “the unassuming bourgeois Civil War hero and president.”

Mark Twain, perhaps Grant’s most fervent admirer, praised him for winning a terrible battle with alcohol: “He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk.”

But nothing in Grant’s amazing life revealed his courage so much as his furious battle to complete his memoirs in order to provide for his family after a diagnosis of throat cancer. He had no illusions about beating the cancer. “My chances, I think, of pulling through this are one in a hundred,” he said about six months before his death. Queen Victoria and British Prime Minister William Gladstone sent telegrams of encouragement.

Matthew Arnold, who should have known better, sniffed that in his “Memoirs,” Grant wrote “an English without charm and high breeding,” though in a more charitable moment he found them full of “sterling good-sense,” and Grant’s prose “saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected terms of expression.” (Qualities, one thinks, that should atone for a lack of high breeding.)

Twain found them to be “a great, unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece.” The “Memoirs” can lay claim to being the best-selling book of the 19th century and earned Julia Grant the amazing amount of $450,000 in royalties—around $15 million in today’s currency.

It isn’t clear why Grant’s reputation isn’t greater today. Perhaps it’s the lingering impression left by his bouts with alcohol, perhaps the failure to lift black rights along with those of whites during Reconstruction. Walt Whitman saw him more clearly than we do: “Out of all the hubbub of the war, Lincoln and Grant emerge as the towering figures. … I think this is the greatest lesson of our national existence so far.”

Though it’s not likely to inspire a Broadway musical, Chernow’s accomplishment with “Grant” is perhaps even more monumental than his 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton. For one thing, the material is far more voluminous: the Mexican War and the expansion of the U.S., the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Grant’s two presidential terms. At around 1,000 pages of text, “Grant” never seems padded or unfocused. For another, Chernow is righting an important historical wrong and restoring to Grant the stature that was accorded to him by his contemporaries. Can anyone claim better character references than Lincoln, Twain and Whitman?

If Grant’s image doesn’t belong on Mount Rushmore with Lincoln, it should at least be acknowledged that if not for him, Lincoln’s might not be there at all.

America Is on the Road to Becoming a Fascist State

In a compelling essay for The New York Review of Books this month, Christopher R. Browning, a leading historian of the Holocaust and Nazism, outlines the frightening parallels between the United States and the Weimar Republic. “No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends,” he writes, “the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics.”

Jason Stanley would agree. A professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of “How Fascism Works,” he contends that failures of democratic governance have forged a society eerily reminiscent of pre-war Germany—one in which there’s a growing appetite for the kind of ultranationalism espoused by Donald Trump. Indeed, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has openly praised the Immigration Act of 1924, which not only created quotas and bans on certain immigrant communities but served as a model of sorts for Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

“The idea in fascism is to destroy economic politics,” Stanley tells Robert Scheer in the latest episode of “Scheer Intelligence.” “The corporatists side with politicians who use fascist tactics because they are trying to divert people’s attention from the real forces that cause the genuine anxiety they feel.”

This anxiety is not exclusively or even primarily economic. As Stanley is careful to point out, people of color have suffered far greater hardship, and yet they are increasingly drawn to progressive populism. Instead, he posits, Trump and his ilk are channeling a noxious strain of patriotism that creates a nostalgia for a past that never existed. “When you see the dominant group made to feel like they’re the victims in the face of all the facts,” Stanley notes, “that’s when you know that fascist politics is taking grip.”

The episode also plumbs the phenomenon of fake news, both how it’s constructed and deployed. Stanley argues that many of our most cherished beliefs are based on mythologies, with the notion that we’re spreading democracy to the rest of the world perhaps the deadliest of all.

“America has never been great,” he concludes. “But the idea of America can be great. It’s a future thing, our greatness, not a past thing. The past is something we’re trying to overcome, and we’re trying to realize our greatness with certain ideals.”

Listen to the full interview below:

Robert Scheer: Hi, I’m Robert Scheer, and this is another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Jason Stanley, who has written a book called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, published by Random House. And you teach at Yale, right? And you’ve written a number of interesting book about propaganda, and this fits in. The basic hook here is Trump, and people being frightened about the echoes of fascism, not only in this country but throughout the world. And your book attempts to examine the architecture of fascism, its origins and so forth.

Jason Stanley: Though I would say that though the hook is Trump I agree with President Obama that Trump is a symptom and not a cause.

RS: The interesting thing about your book is you really talk about society in disarray. There’s an emotional feeling behind this, that what happens when societies fall apart, and when authoritarian figures hold up a notion of law and order, and the proper nationalism. And basically what we’re talking about is mythology, and that’s the Trump connection; they develop a mythology about the past, and about when Germany was great; now we have when America was great. And they use that as a springboard for basically developing an us-them philosophy.  Is that not the basic architecture?

JS: That’s the basic architecture. In How Fascism Works, however, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to sort of draw attention to the fact that there are familiar aspects of fascist politics that have always been here, and to which our country has always been vulnerable. One thing about coming from my Holocaust background–my parents are both survivors, were refugees; they weren’t in camps, but they were refugees–they were always attendant to these details. And even more so because my mother was a court stenographer in Manhattan district court, in criminal court, so she could see some of these features up front. And she would often note the similarities between what was happening with racism in the United States, and what faced Jewish people in Poland, which she experienced as a young child. She would note, you know, they’re targeting black Americans here. James Baldwin has a classic piece called “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” And in it he says, You think—addressing Jewish-Americans like myself—You think that you’re closer to us because of our shared history of oppression. But our shared history of oppression makes us dislike you more, because we know you’re glad not to be us. We know you understand what we face, and you’re glad not to be us.

Our history of racism makes us especially vulnerable to certain elemental features of fascist politics. For example, fake news. I mean, fake news has always been directed against black Americans, from what Angela Davis calls “the myth of the black rapist,” the mad conspiracy theory underlying the horrors of lynching, that there was some epidemic of rape of white women by black men, to superpredator theory in the mid-1990s, which was promulgated at a time when violent crime was rapidly dropping, yet these theorists such as John DiIulio were saying that violent crime was going to rise because young black Americans were superpredators. So when you have this history of fake news, when you have political parties trafficking in coded racist messages, then you have an especially ripe background. People say oh, well, we’re not Germany; well, in some respects, we’re even better set up for this kind of politics. So when structures break down; when you have an Iraq War and a financial crisis; when, you know, you can legitimately blame the quote unquote elite for failures of democratic governance and to adhering to proper norms, when you have those failures and you have our past that in fact deeply influenced Nazi Germany, then you have real worry.

RS: Let’s begin with that, we are not Germany. Because we are. We are actually the society that is closest to what Germany was, and people forget that.  But the fact is, they were the people most like us, and people like Henry Ford, as you point out in your book, and others, had great admiration for Germany. It was the best educated, most scientific, highest level of music, big economy, and then it all started to fall apart. And the people that were most like us became the most evil barbarians in modern history. And it was very confusing to Americans, and you capture that in your book, that ambiguity about it.

JS: That’s right, because we have these two traditions. On the one hand, we do have a glorious tradition of liberal democracy that I cherish and venerate, and that is used—the Civil Rights Movement used it, black intellectual leaders all the way back at least to Frederick Douglass, but even David Walker and Martin Delaney would appeal to our tradition of liberty and equality, to point out hypocrisies in American life. And Frederick Douglass used that, for example, in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” his speech, to say look, you venerate liberty? Well, you know—so we have these ideals, but we also have a long history of incredible hypocrisy among these ideals. And we have a long history of, in addition to anti-black racism and the genocide of Native Americans, both of which deeply affected Hitler, the anti-immigrant laws and sentiment. Mein Kampf—My Struggle, Hitler’s main book—is about a call to create a national state, to tear down the state and replace it by a national state based around national ethnic identity, and not democratic norms, not citizenry that is multiethnic, but around the nation. And his model there is the United States. As he writes, “I know that this is unwelcome to hear, but anything crazier and less thought-out than our present laws of state citizenship is hardly possible to conceive.”

So he rails against Germany’s immigration laws. Very familiar vocabulary to us. “But there is at least one state in which feeble attempts to conceive a better arrangement are apparent. I of course do not mean our German republic, but rather the United States of America, where they are trying, partially at any rate, to include common sense in their councils. They refuse to allow immigration of elements which are bad from the health point of view, and absolutely forbid naturalization of certain defined races, and thus are making a modest start in the direction of something not unlike the conception of the national state.” So there, Hitler is praising the United States, and in particular the 1924 Immigration Act, which Jeff Sessions praised in October 2015, called for a return to; he praises it as a basis, he praises the United States anti-immigration act of 1924, and the United States, as a model for what he wants to create in Germany. Now, I think Hitler was wrong about our country; I think that subsequent history of our country showed that he was wrong. But we need to bear that in mind, that there are enough elements in our country that Hitler did take it, in Mein Kampf, as something of a model.

RS: Well, in your book, you make it pretty clear that we have–I mean, let’s not gloss over these similarities. You quote liberally from our tradition, in which the other was persecuted viciously. It wasn’t Donald Trump who is reminding–oh, we have to be great by excluding people, which is basically Hitler’s message, trying to find some mythic, pure German. We did that with the Chinese Exclusion Act; we rounded up the Japanese; before all that, we had killed the Native Americans. And I want to bring up, you know, we can talk all we want about our liberal tradition, but the thing that comes through in reading your book–and I highly recommend it; I’m talking to Jason Stanley, and it’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them–“them” of immigrant-bashing, or incarceration of black people, which you have a whole chapter on. I mean, I was amazed at a statistic I haven’t seen, but then I did the math, and you’re absolutely right: black people, male and female, represent 13 percent of the American population; they’re well over 50 percent of the imprisoned population that is now two and a half million people. But they represent, as you mention in your book, nine percent of imprisoned population of the entire world.

JS: If their representation in the world prison population reflected their world population, then the nation of black America should be the third largest nation on earth, behind China and India.

RS: I want to pick on one word in particular, patriotism. And in your architecture of fascism, patriotism, the pure German, make Germany great again–those exact words weren’t used in your book, but I mean, the fact of the matter is, Hitler’s message–and he was as odd a figure as Trump. Trump with his orange hair; well, there was Hitler with his funny little moustache, obviously was an unattractive, cartoonish figure, very much like Trump. But yet he invoked some idea of the perfect Aryan, blonde German, and a mythical history, and he’s doing this in a Germany that’s falling apart. The echo that I found there was this patriotism. You even mention people taking the knee at football games and so forth as a way of legitimately objecting to a kind of false patriotism. And patriotism was really the key to the whole fascist message, wasn’t it?

JS: I would say it’s ultranationalism. So a certain form of patriotism. Because my American patriotism takes the form of veneration of liberty and equality, which are two values which are abstract. And they’re not connected to a particular mountain range, they’re not connected to a particular past; they’re abstract, they’re liberal democracy. My venerate–you know, I’m patriotic about that.

RS: What does that mean? I mean, it goes back to the French, it goes back to the Greeks? I mean, we didn’t invent it. You raise a big challenge in this book. Where does the ultimate madness come from? And if you’re going to talk about Trump as a fascistic figure, he didn’t invent himself; he’s a product–yes, his father was from Germany, and so forth. But the fact of the matter is, Trump is a familiar figure in American life.

JS: That’s right. And I don’t want to deny the toxicity that certain forms of patriotism can take. It’s just that, as our own history teaches–for example, the Civil Rights Movement, which did not take place in Vermont; it took place in Alabama in the early 1960s, a terrifying place to hold it. That happened here, and those were Americans who did it. And so I want to honor their legacy and what they did to struggle for advances that, although sometimes it’s hard to see those advances in the face of mass incarceration and the various forms of anti-black racism and oppression of all of us that occurred after the Civil Rights Movement.

But we have things in our past that are worth celebrating, and they’re worth celebrating because they’re connected to certain virtuous ideals. On the other hand, when patriotism takes the form that we’re seeing it now–a nostalgia for a white past, a white Christian past–what fascism does, when fascist politics–what you do is you create a sense of aggrieved, intense victimization by the dominant group. Whenever you see the dominant group feeling, yearning for a past that never was, where they got the appreciation they deserved, and feeling that this was yanked away from them–that’s what fascism tries to do. It creates this mythic past so that the dominant group feels like they’re the world’s greatest victims. When you see white Christians in the United States saying they’re the most discriminated group, then you know that fascist politics has taken hold, that fascist politics is working the way it does.

That’s what Hitler did in Germany. He constantly railed against–Germans were the greatest victims of world history. He had Versailles to use, of course, but he blamed Versailles, bizarrely, on Jews. And he said, the Germans are the greatest victims. So when you see the dominant group being made to feel like they’re victims, that they’re terrible victims, in the face of all the facts, that’s when you know that fascist politics is taking grip. That’s what the function of this sort of bizarre, fake view of the past is supposed to be. It’s supposed to create this model, like, we once were victorious, we once ruled, and then foreigners, and foreigners came, and liberals made us share our power with foreign forces. Liberalism and cultural Marxism destroyed our supremacy and destroyed this wonderful past where we ruled and our cultural traditions were the ones that dominated. And then it militarizes the feeling of nostalgia. All the anxiety and loss that people feel in their lives, say from the loss of their healthcare, the loss of their pensions, the loss of their stability, then gets rerouted into a sense that the real enemy is liberalism, which led to the loss of this mythic past.

RS: Yeah, I get that. But I want to push back a little bit on patriotism. Because it’s this glorification of your nation’s history. And so when Trump said he wanted to make America great, Hillary Clinton one-upped him and said, we’ve always been great. So saying we’ve always been great means we were great when we enslaved people, we were great when we committed genocide against Native Americans, we were great when we treated the Chinese population as near slaves, and no fundamental human rights, and we were great when we rounded up innocent Japanese and put them in concentration camps. And I could go down the list; we were great when we had slavery and we were great when we had segregation. It’s an absurd notion, and you know, it was George Washington in his farewell address who warned us about the impostures of pretended patriotism.

This patriotic appeal is a menace. And the fact is, even reasonable people are afraid to say that. You know, we look at Hitler and we say, oh, they had issues; they got a bad deal after World War I, they could say we have foreign enemies, they had serious economic problems, right, of the kind that we have been experiencing. And patriotism becomes blaming the other, becomes scapegoating the other. And it’s interesting; in Germany, by the way, Hitler didn’t scapegoat BMW and Mercedes and the big German financiers and so forth. He scapegoated unions, he scapegoated people resisting, he scapegoated the Jews and handicapped people and homosexuals. He didn’t go after the big-shots. And in this country, that’s what Trump does. You know, blaming everybody except Wall Street for our problems.

JS: Right. Because the idea in fascism is to destroy economic politics. Because you want people to connect along racial lines, along ethnic lines. So that’s why you go after trade unions. You don’t mention the sort of actual economic forces, because you want to create a fictitious bond, both between you and your followers and between the followers along non-economic lines. Fascist movements always work in tandem with corporatists, and we’re seeing that here now with the connections between, for example, the Koch brothers and attendant interests, and the nationalist wing of the Republicans.

The nationalist wing of the Republicans is delivering the corporatist wing everything they’re ever desired; they’ve delivered them right-to-work laws in the Janus decision; they’re delivering them an endless string of federalist-society-approved judges. And this, history tells us, is always what happens; that the corporatists side with politicians who use fascist tactics because they’re trying to divert people’s attention from the real forces that cause the genuine anxiety they feel.

RS: Yes, and what happened in Germany is that the reasonable, responsible, even the best of people, many of them went over to Hitler.

JS: Absolutely. Because what you do in fascist politics is you paint the ordinary Democratic Party, the ordinary center-left party, as communists. And you create terror about that. Goebbels writes, in one essay or speech: The less Bolshevism threatens, the less Marxism threatens, the less the ordinary citizen cares about us. So what Goebbels is saying, and he says it at greater length in this piece called “The Radicalization of Socialism,” where he says what you want to do is you want to paint the center-left party as Marxists and as socialists, and that will drive–he says, you know: The middle class sees in Marxism not so much the subverter of national will, but mainly the thief of its property, the uncomfortable disturber of peace and quiet.

So in fascist politics, you paint the center-left as socialists, as communists, and then you say they’re coming for your property. And then you send all the property owners into your arms, because you create this false fear and panic by painting the ordinary center-left party as socialists. And then you promise the corporatists, you say, we’re against labor unions, we’re going to break their power. We’re against any mass movement that challenges our power.

And then, of course, as Arendt warned us, there’s the temptations of one-party rule. Arendt talks about “party over parties.” She says, it’s a great danger when politicians start to feel loyalty for their political party rather than multi-party democracy. And we are already in a phase of party over parties, we’re already facing the threat of one-party states. A minority of Americans voted for this president, a minority of Americans voted for the Senate, and it looks like we’re going to have not just a right-wing Supreme Court, but a hard-right Supreme Court for generations to come.

RS: On that depressing note, it’s time for a break, and we’ll be back in a moment with Scheer Intelligence and our guest Jason Stanley, the author of the provocative, but–and unfortunately, highly relevant book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House. [omission for station break] So let’s talk a little bit about how fascism works, not just in Nazi Germany, but how it may be working here. And clearly, Trump is a very frightening figure, and your book makes that clear; the rhetoric, the style, it’s all an echo of the us-them, scapegoat immigrants, scapegoat minorities, scapegoat labor unions, scapegoat anybody gets in the way. But I must say, I want to push back a little bit. I think you’re a little too kind on the people you call liberal democrats. And I just want to give you two quotes from your book. You say, “A liberal democrat does not pick makers against takers.” That’s a reference to Ryan and others, right?

JS: Yes. And Romney.

RS: “A generous social welfare state unites a community in mutual bonds of care.” That’s what liberals believe, in your view, OK. But it was all–

JS: Liberals ought to believe.

RS: Well, OK, thank you.

JS: [Laughs]

RS: Because reading your book, I thought wait a second! It was Bill Clinton who said he would end welfare as we know it, and he did.

JS: What philosophers call liberal democracy, not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, Bill Clinton–you are absolutely right. Bill Clinton engaged in the most heinous and problematic racially coded messages. He took over the republican strategy, the republican Southern strategy, with his 1992 campaign to end welfare as we know it, thereby race-baiting with that vocabulary. So, yeah, I mean liberal democracy in the philosophical sense. What happened in the United States is both political parties–and I hold both political parties to blame–kept racism alive with these coded messages. And when you do that, you open yourself up to a politician who’s going to come and decode the messages. And by decoding the messages, by being explicitly racist, that politician is going to seem like a breath of fresh air. They’re going to seem non-hypocritical. They’re going to be welcomed–finally, someone telling it like it is, rather than ending welfare as we know it.

RS: Well, but Clinton did end the federal anti-poverty program, the main one. Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Thirty percent were mothers, and 70 percent were their children, and he ended it, and he turned it over to the tender mercies of the state. And when he was running Arkansas, that was not a great place to be poor, and certainly not to be black and poor. But the reason I’m pushing on that is, and it goes to a statement you made earlier, that President Obama made, that Trump is a symptom. And he’s building on a lot of hysteria, often about non-problems; we didn’t have an immigration problem, we had more people going back, you know, on the southern border than were coming over, because of the recession and so forth. It’s all largely, as was the Jewish problem in Germany, an invented–

JS: Absolutely, yeah, I was about to say, they’re all invented, yeah, they’re invented.

RS: Yeah, they’re all invented, and your book is very clear on that. But let’s be clear, also, that the democrats helped invent it. And I want to get back to this–I found your book quite powerful in talking about how we’ve treated the other in this country. Because people think, well, we’re not Germany–oh, come on, we have a horrible record of treating the others.

JS: Horrible.

RS: But yet your figures in that one chapter you have on black people was startling to me, both–first of all, economically; you have a figure that for every hundred dollars of accumulated wealth that whites have, blacks have only five dollars. You talk about the Great Recession–I mean, after all, one reason why Trump is viable to voters is that they’re hurting economically. White workers are hurting economically; the white middle-class is being eroded. But the black and brown college graduates, Federal Reserve study of St. Louis said they lost 60, 70 percent of their wealth, accumulated family wealth, college graduates who are black and brown. And then when you get to the prison population, which I referred to before–you have a statistic in your book, you say if you’re a black male–if you’re a white male, you have a one in 17 chance ending up in the prison system. But if you’re a black male, you have a one in three chance.

JS: And our prison system is mind-boggling. Just a note on the whole white economic anxiety, it’s worth mentioning that although the Great Recession absolutely hammered black and brown populations, much more so than white populations, they didn’t turn to fascism. So the whole economic anxiety argument, that that’s behind Trump, is a little dubious. Because, you know, it’s not like black Americans moved en masse to a strong-man authoritarian to embrace after, despite their greater economic anxiety.

RS: No, but they did move to people who have a more progressive, populist message, as opposed to Hillary Clinton celebrate–talk about fake news and everything. Hillary Clinton, in those speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs and other bankers, she has not one sentence mentioning the crimes of these people, the damage they did to black, brown, and white people. But the fact is, in her speeches she said, I need you–we need you to come down to Washington and fix this problem. These are the people who created the problem.

JS: The financial crisis opened up our democratic system, which is flawed in the best of its moments, to charges of corruption. And I’m shocked by what was allowed to happen to us unpunished. Not that I’m for strict punishment, but that all this titanic wealth was given back to the very people who created the jobs–I’m furious about it. And what that did is it opened us up to a figure like Trump. Because what fascist politics does is it represents the system as corrupt, and when you represent the system as corrupt, then you can run against the system even if you are incredibly corrupt. Because you can, for example, say: Look, the fact that I’m corrupt makes me a good champion of the people, because I know how this corrupt system works. That’s why when Trump says “I didn’t pay any taxes, that means I’m smart.”

So there’s some good research out of MIT, a paper called “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue,” that shows that when people can be brought to believe that a system is corrupt, then they’ll think that the person who is lying when playing the game that they think is corrupt, is the more authentic person. So what our leaders, including Hillary Clinton, did is they opened up the system to legitimate charges of corruption and then allowed somebody to come and say: That whole system is corrupt, I’ll be a strong-man, I’ll come in and bash it and tear it down, and I’ll run it from now on.

RS: I want to get into this fake news. Because you’re an expert on propaganda. By your definition, and you have an actually brilliant analysis of propaganda, usually based on evoking a foreign enemy that’s attacking the virtues of a mythically beautiful German society going back thousands of years, et cetera, et cetera. And you have an idea of shared reality. Shared reality–that’s the basis of enlightened, rational society. And you defend mainstream media in that regard, that Trump attacks–we know, we accept certain logic, certain facts–well, we accepted an idea of the Cold War, that there was an international communist conspiracy with a timetable for the takeover of the world. And there was never an international communist movement. And this was a reality known to what David Halberstam called “the best and the brightest.” And they acted as if, you know, they told the Americans quite the opposite.

JS: I couldn’t agree more that our history, especially the military-industrial complex–the whole concept of empire is based on fake news. All of colonization is based on fake news. I mean, really? You know, we’re invading other people and killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in order to free them? You don’t kill people by freeing them. The whole idea that we have the right to invade other countries, because we’re better, is based on mythology and based on–I mean, colonization doesn’t work unless you have this myth of being better. So whenever you find the massive military incursions justify, that clearly do terrible harm to other countries, you have done under the banner of, oh, we’re spreading democracy or spreading civilization or spreading Christianity, you’re going to have myth, you’re going to have fake news.

But I also want to emphasize in my work that, no, America has never been great. But the idea of America can be great. It’s a future thing, our greatness, not a past thing. The past is something we’re trying to overcome, and we’re trying to realize our greatness with certain ideals. But of course, our past is replete with fake news; we are an empire, we’re a military empire. Whenever you find a military empire, it’s going to justify its invasions on the basis of fake news. Think of the European invasion of the United States that resulted in the genocide of our native population. That was based on complete fakery, that the Native American population was somehow uncivilized, and the barbarian savages who were slaughtering them were civilized. When you have mass violence, it’s going to be based–because humans need this in order to justify mass violence–it’s going to be based on these deep myths and fake news. And so since we’re an empire, we have this long history of fake news.

And a particularly dangerous moment is when the empire starts to lose its status; when it starts to lose its status, then the myths are no longer so comforting, and a fascist leader can come and say, look how we used to be great, we used to be happy with our myths. So, that’s how the structure works. The structure wouldn’t work if you didn’t have an empire that was based on fake news. We had this past. And sometimes Trump shows his hand; so he said, you know, we’re not so great; look at the Iraq War. So he was very explicit about that. What you have happening with some of these figures is they want to say, well, let’s go back and not fake it; let’s just say we’ll invade people and take their oil, let’s not pretend. And so that’s seen as more authentic. Like any military empire, we’ve had a titanic amount of fake news. And what I’m hoping is that people can now recognize how dangerous that is. Because the danger is that then someone can come and say, the mainstream media? Really? Look at the Iraq War, look at all the lying we’ve done in the past. So insofar as elites care about even the simulacrum of democracy that we’ve had in the United States, even the sort of vague shadow of democracy that we’ve had in the United States, even keeping up the pretenses–they shouldn’t lie anymore.

RS: That summary was a very good point on which to end this. That’s it for “Scheer Intelligence,” and I want to thank my guest Jason Stanley. The book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House. The producers for “Scheer Intelligence” are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And we want to thank Yale University Studios for bringing Jason Stanley to us. See you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

Jury Convicts Laquan McDonald’s Killer of Second-Degree Murder

A jury on Friday convicted white Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder in the 2014 shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Van Dyke was charged with first degree-murder in the October 2014 killing, a charge that requires a finding that the shooting was unnecessary and unreasonable. The judge told jurors the second-degree charge was also available, requiring them to find Van Dyke believed his life was in danger but that the belief was unreasonable.

Jurors also convicted him of aggravated battery, but acquitted him of official misconduct. It’s the first time in half a century that a Chicago police officer has been convicted of murder for an on-duty death.

McDonald was carrying a knife when Van Dyke fired 16 shots into the 17-year-old as he walked away from police.

Second-degree murder usually carries a sentence of less than 20 years.

By far the most serious charge Van Dyke, 40, faced was first-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

But, in a move not uncommon at Illinois murder trials, Judge Vincent Gaughan told jurors before they began deliberating that they could consider the charge of second-degree murder. Second-degree murder typically carries a sentence of less than 20 years, especially for someone with no criminal history. Probation isn’t an option for a first-degree murder conviction, but it is with second-degree murder.

First-degree murder requires a finding that the accused knew the killing wasn’t justified but did it anyway. For a second-degree murder conviction, the jury must agree that the accused truly believed the killing was justified but that the belief wasn’t reasonable.

Van Dyke was the first Chicago police officer to be charged with murder for an on-duty shooting in more than 50 years. That case, which also involved an officer shooting someone with a knife, ended in conviction in 1970.

The verdict is the latest chapter in a story that has made headlines since a judge ordered the release of squad car video of the shooting in November 2015. The case also put the city at the center of the national conversation about police misconduct and excessive force.

The 12-person jury included just one African-American member, although blacks make up one-third of Chicago’s population. The jury also had seven whites, three Hispanics and one Asian-American.

Officers had McDonald largely surrounded on a city street and were waiting for someone to arrive with a stun gun to use on the teenager when Van Dyke arrived, according to testimony and video. The video, played repeatedly at trial, shows Van Dyke opening firing. McDonald spins, then crumples to the ground. Van Dyke continues to shoot when the 17-year-old is lying in the street. At times, smoke can be coming from his body, and one officer who was there that night testified that the smoke was actually gunfire hitting the teen.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys argued over what the video actually proved.

Prosecutor Jody Gleason noted during closing arguments that Van Dyke told detectives that McDonald raised the knife, that Van Dyke backpedaled, and that McDonald tried to get up off the ground after being shot.

“None of that happened,” she said. “You’ve seen it on video. He made it up.”

But Van Dyke and his attorneys maintained that the video didn’t tell the whole story.

His attorneys had portrayed Van Dyke as being “scared’ by the young man who he knew had already punctured a tire of a squad car with the knife. Van Dyke testified that the teen was advancing on him, ignoring his shouted orders to drop the knife. Van Dyke conceded that did actually step toward McDonald and not away from the teen, as Van Dyke had initially claimed. But the officer maintained the rest of his account, saying: “The video doesn’t show my perspective.”

Van Dyke had been on the force for 13 years when the shooting happened. According to a database that includes reports from 2002 to 2008 and 2011 until 2015, he was the subject of at least 20 citizen complaints — eight of which alleged excessive force. Though he was never disciplined, a jury did once award $350,000 to a man who filed an excessive force lawsuit against him. Van Dyke testified that McDonald was the first person he ever shot.

To boost their contention that McDonald was dangerous, defense attorneys built a case against the teenager, who had been a ward of the state for most of his life and wound up in juvenile detention after an arrest for marijuana possession in January 2014. Among those testifying were several current or former employees at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center who said they had violent run-ins with McDonald. They also pointed to an autopsy that showed McDonald had the hallucinogenic drug PCP in his system.

Prosecutors stressed that Van Dyke was the only officer to ever fire a shot at McDonald.

They called multiple officers who were there that night as they sought to chip away at the “blue wall of silence” long associated with the city’s police force and other law enforcement agencies across the country. Three officers, including Van Dyke’s partner that night, Joseph Walsh, have been charged with trying conspiring to cover up and lie about what happened to protect Van Dyke. They have all pleaded not guilty.

Even before the trial, the case had already had an impact on law enforcement in Chicago. The city’s police superintendent and the county’s top prosecutor both lost their jobs — one fired by the mayor and the other ousted by voters. It also led to a U.S. Justice Department investigation that found a “pervasive cover-up culture” and prompted plans for far-reaching police reforms.

A week before jury selection, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he would not seek a third term, although his office insisted the case had nothing to do with his decision. He had faced criticism that he fought the release of the video until after his re-election in April 2015

Ahead of the verdict, the city had prepared for the possibility of the kind of massive protests that followed the release of the video in November 2015, with an extra 4,000 officers being put on the streets.

The issue of race permeated the case, though it was rarely raised at trial. One of the only instances was during opening statements, when special prosecutor Joseph McMahon told the jurors that Van Dyke didn’t know anything about McDonald’s past when he encountered him that night.

“What we do know, what he (Van Dyke) did see, was a black boy walking down the street… having audacity to ignore the police,” McMahon said.

Van Dyke’s lead attorney Dan Herbert countered: “Race had absolutely nothing to do with this.”

How Saudi Money Keeps Washington at War in Yemen

It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan resolution to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of American-made bombs to Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for them, despite mounting evidence that the U.S.-backed, supplied, and fueled air campaign in Yemen was targeting civilians, the Saudi government turned out to have just the weapon needed to keep those bombs and other kinds of aid coming their way: an army of lobbyists.

That year, their forces in Washington included members of more than two dozen lobbying and public relations firms. Key among them was Marc Lampkin, managing partner of the Washington office of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck (BHFS), a company that would be paid nearly half a million dollars by the Saudi government in 2017. Records from the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) show that Lampkin contacted Senate offices more than 20 times about that resolution, speaking, for instance, with the legislative director for Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) on May 16, 2017. Perhaps coincidentally, Lampkin reported making a $2,000 contribution to the senator’s political action committee that very day. On June 13th, along with a majority of his fellow senators, Scott voted to allow the Saudis to get their bombs. A year later, the type of bomb authorized in that sale has reportedly been used in air strikes that have killed civilians in Yemen.

Little wonder that, for this and his other lobbying work, Lampkin earned a spot on the “Top Lobbyists 2017: Hired Guns” list compiled by the Washington publication the Hill.

Lampkin’s story was anything but exceptional when it comes to lobbyists working on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was, in fact, very much the norm. The Saudi government has hired lobbyists in profusion and they, in turn, have effectively helped convince members of Congress and the president to ignore blatant human rights violations and civilian casualties in Yemen. According to a forthcoming report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative program, which I direct, at the Center for International Policy, registered foreign agents working on behalf of interests in Saudi Arabia contacted Congressional representatives, the White House, the media, and figures at influential think tanks more than 2,500 times in 2017 alone. In the process, they also managed to contribute nearly $400,000 to the political coffers of senators and House members as they urged them to support the Saudis. Some of those contributions, like Lampkin’s, were given on the same day the requests were made to support those arms sales.

The role of Marc Lampkin is just a tiny sub-plot in the expansive and ongoing story of Saudi money in Washington. Think of it as a striking tale of pay-to-play politics that will undoubtedly be revving up again in the coming weeks as the Saudi lobby works to block new Congressional efforts to end U.S. involvement in the disastrous war in Yemen.

A Lobby to Contend With

The roots of that lobby’s rise to prominence in Washington lie in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As you may remember, with 15 of those 19 suicidal hijackers being citizens of Saudi Arabia, it was hardly surprising that American public opinion had soured on the Kingdom. In response, the worried Saudi royals spent around $100 million over the next decade to improve such public perceptions and retain their influence in the U.S. capital. That lobbying facelift proved a success until, in 2015, relations soured with the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear deal. Once Donald Trump won the presidency, however, the Saudis saw an unparalleled opportunity and launched the equivalent of a full-court press, an aggressive campaign to woo the newly elected president and the Republican-led Congress, which, of course, cost real money.

As a result, the growth of Saudi lobbying operations would prove extraordinary. In 2016, according to FARA records, they reported spending just under $10 million on lobbying firms; in 2017, that number had nearly tripled to $27.3 million. And that’s just a baseline figure for a far larger operation to buy influence in Washington, since it doesn’t include considerable sums given to elite universities or think tanks like the Arab Gulf States Institute, the Middle East Institute, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (to mention just a few of them).

This meteoric rise in spending allowed the Saudis to dramatically increase the number of lobbyists representing their interests on both sides of the aisle. Before President Trump even took office, the Saudi government signed a deal with the McKeon Group, a lobbying firm headed by Howard “Buck” McKeon, the recently retired Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. His firm also represents Lockheed Martin, one of the top providers of military equipment to the Kingdom. On the Democratic side, the Saudis inked a $140,000-per-month deal with the Podesta Group, headed by Tony Podesta, whose brother John, a long-time Democratic Party operative, was the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Tony Podesta later dissolved his firm and has allegedly been investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for serving as an unregistered foreign agent.

And keep in mind that all this new firepower was added to an already formidable arsenal of lobbying outfits and influential power brokers, including former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who, according to Lee Fang of the Intercept, was “deeply involved in the [Trump] White House hiring process,” and former Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the pro-Republican Super PAC American Action Network. All told, during 2017, Saudi Arabia inked 45 different contracts with FARA-registered firms and more than 100 individuals registered as Saudi foreign agents in the U.S. They proved to be extremely busy. Such activity reveals a clear pattern: Saudi foreign agents are working tirelessly to shape perceptions of that country, its royals, its policies, and especially its grim war in Yemen, while simultaneously working to keep U.S. weapons and military support flowing into the Kingdom.

While the term “foreign agent” is often used as a synonym for lobbyist, part of the work performed by the Kingdom’s paid representatives here resembles public relations activity far more than straightforward lobbying. For example, in 2017, Saudi foreign agents reported contacting media outlets more than 500 times, including significant outreach to national ones like the New York Times, theWashington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and PBS, which has aired multiple documentaries about the Kingdom. Also included, however, were smaller papers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and more specialized outlets, even ESPN, in hopes of encouraging positive stories.

The Kingdom’s image in the U.S. clearly concerned those agents. Still, the lion’s share of their activity was focused on security issues of importance to that country’s royals. For example, Saudi agents contacted officials at the State Department, which oversees most commercial arms transfers and sales, nearly 100 times in 2017, according to FARA filings. Above all, however, their focus was on Congress, especially members with seniority on key committees. As a result, at some point between late 2016 and the end of 2017, Saudi lobbyists contacted more than 200 of them, including every single Senator.

The ones most often dealt with were, not surprisingly, those with the greatest leverage over U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia. For example, the office of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who sits on both the appropriations and armed services committees, was the most contacted, while that of Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) was the top Democratic one. (He sits on the appropriations and foreign relations committees.)

Following the Money from Saudi Arabia to Campaign Coffers

Just as there’s a clear pattern when it comes to contacting congressional representatives who might help their Saudi clients, so there’s a clear pattern to the lobbying money flowing to those same members of Congress.

The FARA documents that record all foreign-agent political activity also list campaign contributions reported by those agents. Just as we did for political activities, the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative program conducted an analysis of all campaign contributions reported in those 2017 filings by firms that represented Saudi interests. And here’s what we found: more than a third of the members of Congress contacted by such a firm also received a campaign contribution from a foreign agent at that firm. In total, according to their 2017 FARA filings, foreign agents at firms representing Saudi clients made $390,496 in campaign contributions to congressional figures they, or another agent at their firm, contacted on behalf of their Saudi clients.

This flow of money is best exemplified by the 11 separate occasions we uncovered in which a firm reported contacting a congressional representative on behalf of Saudi clients on the same day someone at the same firm made a campaign contribution to the same senator or House member. In other words, there are 10 other cases just like Marc Lampkin’s, involving foreign agents at Squire Patton Boggs, DLA Piper, and Hogan Lovells. For instance, Hogan Lovells reported meeting with Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia on April 26, 2017, and that day an agent at the firm made a $2,700 contribution to “Bob Corker for Senate 2018.” (Corker would later decide not to seek reelection.)

While some might argue that contributions like these look a lot like bribery, they turn out to be perfectly legal. No law bars such an act, and while it’s true that foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions to political campaigns, there’s a simple work-around for that, one the Saudis obviously made use of big time. Any foreign power hoping to line the pockets of American politicians just has to hire a local lobbyist to do it for them.

As Jimmy Williams, a former lobbyist, wrote: “Today, most lobbyists are engaged in a system of bribery, but it’s the legal kind.”

The Saudi Lobby Today

Fast forward to late 2018 and that very same lobby is now fighting vigorously to defeat a House measure that would end U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen. They’re flooding congressional offices with their requests, in effect asking Congress to ignore the more than 10,000 civilians who have died in Yemen, the U.S. bombs that have been the cause of many of those deaths, and a civil war that has led to a resurgence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. They’ll probably mention Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent “certification” that the Saudis are now supposedly taking the necessary steps to prevent more civilian casualties there.

What they’re not likely to mention is that his decision was reportedly driven by the head of the legislative affairs team at the State Department who just happens to be a former foreign agent with BGR Government Affairs, one of 35 FARA registrants working for Saudi Arabia at this moment. Such lobbyists and publicists are using the deep pockets of the Saudi royals to spread their propaganda, highlighting the charitable work that government is doing in Yemen. What they fail to emphasize, of course, are the Saudi blockade of the country and the American-backed, armed, and fueled air strikes that are killing civilians at weddings, funerals, school bus trips, and other civilian events. All of this is, in addition, helping to create a grotesque famine, a potential disaster of the most extreme sort and the very reason such humanitarian assistance is needed.

In the end, even if the facts aren’t on their side, the dollars are. Since September 2001, that reality has proven remarkably convincing in Washington, as copious dollars flowed from Saudi Arabia to U.S. military contractors (who are making billions selling weapons to that country), to lobbying firms, and via those firms directly into Congressional coffers.

Is this really how U.S. foreign policy should be determined?

Trump Floats Conspiracy Theory About Kavanaugh Protesters

President Donald Trump lashed out Friday at female protesters who have confronted senators over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, labeling them “rude elevator screamers” and “paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad.”

Trump’s tweet Friday came before a crucial Senate vote on Kavanaugh, who stands accused of a high school-era sexual assault. Amid a national reckoning around gender roles and sexual consent, protesters have flooded the capitol in recent days, with many women angrily addressing senators, some identifying themselves as sexual assault victims.

The president struck a more upbeat note after the Senate pushed Kavanaugh past a key procedural hurdle, saying on Twitter that he was “very proud.”

As the Kavanaugh nomination has dragged out, protests — and direct lobbying — have grown.

An emotional exchange last week between Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and two women quickly went viral and appeared to contribute to Flake’s demand that a vote be delayed by a week for an FBI background investigation. On Thursday several women approached Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah near capitol elevators to ask why he was backing Kavanaugh. Hatch told them to “grow up.” West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin was also confronted. “How do you know how I’m going to vote?” the senator responded to criticism from a protester.

All three voted Thursday to push the nomination through.

Taking on the protesters directly, Trump said in Friday’s tweet: “Don’t fall for it!”

After initially saying that Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, should be heard and speaking cautiously, Trump has grown increasingly frustrated. Placing himself firmly against the #MeToo moment, he has warned that this process could lead to false accusations against men and mocked Ford’s emotional testimony.

Trump has vigorously defended Kavanaugh, who denies the allegations against him. At a rally Thursday night, Trump mocked former Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, for quickly vacating his seat in January in response to a string of sexual misconduct allegations and amid tremendous pressure from Democrats. Trump marveled at the speed, saying “boy, did he fold up like a wet rag.”

Other Republicans have echoed Trump’s frustration. On “Fox and Friends” Friday, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said the protests were “a reflection of the incivility of American society generally.” He added: “I think it’s also evidence that people will go to any lengths when they are encouraged by people on Capitol Hill”

Some of the women protesting are members of or paid staffers for activist groups. Ana Maria Archila, one of the two women who confronted Flake, is co-executive director of the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy Action. She said Friday that if Trump “wants to say I have a job where I advocate for justice, he is right.”

To Trump’s criticism, Archila said: “This is what he does, he’s a bully. But you know what? I am standing next to thousands and thousands and thousands of women who are feeling incredibly powerful in this moment and I am not afraid.”