Chris Hedges's Blog, page 479

Colin Kaepernick Receives Powerful Letter of Support From Black Police Union

The blowback was as unhinged as it was utterly predictable. Earlier this week, Nike announced it would be partnering with Colin Kaepernick for a new ad campaign, despite the fact that the former 49ers quarterback has been out of the league since 2016. Within 24 hours, President Trump condemned the move as a “terrible message” to the country and the nation’s angriest young white men were setting fire to their own property in protest.

Police unions, among the president’s more fervid supporters, proved no exception. The National Fraternal Order of Police has called the ad an “insult” to law enforcement, while the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) went so far as to call for a boycott of Nike. But one such union has resisted this jingoistic hysteria and thinly veiled racism—the National Black Police Association, which published a powerful letter in support of Kaepernick Thursday.

“The African American community makes a sacrifice each time a life is unjustly lost at the hands of the very people who should protect them,” writes Sonia Y.W. Pruitt, the union’s national chairwoman and a police lieutenant in Maryland. “A sacrifice is made each time the criminal justice system treats people of color as less than. A sacrifice is made each time a letter is sent asking officers to boycott a corporation, without asking those very African American officers who are most affected, what their opinion is.”

As The Washington Post’s Eli Rosenberg reports, the letter also takes aim at NAPO, specifically its “unwillingness to address the topic of race head-on.”

“As black officers we live in two worlds,” the letter continues. “On the one hand we’re police officers, and then on the other hand we’re members of the African American community so we’re well versed in both. Which is why we can understand why Mr. Kaepernick took a knee.”

Kaepernick first demonstrated during the national anthem in 2016, not in protest of Trump’s candidacy but of systemic racism in the criminal justice system. It was a decision he ultimately took after careful consultation with Nate Boyer, a fellow football player and a former Green Beret in the U.S. Army.

“Ultimately it’s to bring awareness and make people realize what’s really going on in this country,” Kaepernick told reporters at the time. “There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust, people aren’t being held accountable for, [and] that needs to change. … This country stands for freedom, liberty and justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now.”

In an especially ghoulish turn of events, critics on the right have taken to invoking Pat Tillman in their latest attacks on Kaepernick, suggesting the ad is a dishonor to his memory. (Tillman was an NFL player and U.S. soldier whose death in Afghanistan spawned a government coverup and multiple investigations.) His biographer, Jon Krakauer, would beg to differ.

“Pat would have found Kaepernick an extremely admirable person for what he believed in,” he recently told The Washington Post. “I have no doubt if he was in the NFL today, he would be the first to kneel. So there is irony about what is going on.”

Read the National Black Police Association’s letter in its entirety here, watch Nike’s latest ad here, and read Kevin Tillman’s moving tribute to his brother here.

Film and TV Star Burt Reynolds Dead at 82

Burt Reynolds, the handsome film and television star known for his acclaimed performances in “Deliverance” and “Boogie Nights” and for an active off-screen life which included relationships with Loni Anderson, Sally Field and Dinah Shore, has died at age 82.

His death was confirmed Thursday by his agent Todd Eisner, who did not immediately have further details.

Reynolds inspired a wide range of responses over his long, erratic career: critical acclaim and critical scorn, commercial success and box office bombs. Reynolds made scores of movies, ranging from lightweight fare such as the hits “The Cannonball Run” and “Smokey and the Bandit” to more serious films like “The Longest Yard” and “The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.”

He was nominated for an Oscar for “Boogie Nights,” the Paul Thomas Anderson film about the pornography industry; won an Emmy for the TV series “Evening Shade,” and received high praise for his starring role in “Deliverance.”

But he also was a frequent nominee for the Razzie, the tongue-in-cheek award for Hollywood’s worst performance, and his personal life provided ongoing drama, particularly after an acrimonious divorce from Anderson in 1995. He had a troubled marriage to Judy Carne, a romance with Shore and a relationship with Field damaged by his acknowledged jealousy of her success.

Through it all he presented a genial persona, often the first to make fun of his own conflicted image.

“My career is not like a regular chart, mine looks like a heart attack,” he told The Associated Press in 2001. “I’ve done over 100 films, and I’m the only actor who has been canned by all three networks. I epitomize longevity.”

Reynolds was candid about his flops, his regrets and about his many famous friends. He would call posing nude for Cosmopolitan one of his biggest mistakes because it undermined the respect he had gained for “Deliverance.” He revered Spencer Tracy as an early mentor and came to know Johnny Carson, Clint Eastwood, Frank Sinatra and many others.

Dems Release Kavanaugh Documents That GOP Didn’t Want Public to See

Moving closer to the kind of full-scale revolt progressives have been urgently demanding from Democrats throughout Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Thursday defied Senate rules by unilaterally releasing documents that had been deemed “committee confidential” and hidden from the public.

“As I’ve been saying from the beginning, this process has been a sham,” Booker said in a statement after releasing documents related to Kavanaugh’s views on racial profiling. “The fact that tens of thousands of documents revealing a Supreme Court nominee’s views on key issues were deemed committee confidential and not available to the public reflects the absurdity of this process.”

“The public has a right to access documents about a Supreme Court nominee’s views on issues that are profoundly important, such as race and the law,” Booker added. “This process has demonstrated an unprecedented level of secrecy and opaqueness that undermines the Senate’s constitutional duty to advice and consent.”

After Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) warned Booker during Thursday’s confirmation hearing that he could be removed from the Senate for releasing the Kavanaugh documents, Booker responded: “Bring it.”

.@CoryBooker to @JohnCornyn after he threatens that Booker could be removed from Senate for releasing Kavanaugh emails: “Bring it. Bring it.” pic.twitter.com/d6fnkM5vgJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 6, 2018

At around the same time Booker released the racial profiling documents—a move that comes on the final day of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings—Hirono joined her colleague in disregarding Senate rules by uploading screenshots of documents Republicans “don’t want you to see—because they show that Judge Kavanaugh wrongly believes that Native Hawaiian programs are constitutionally questionable.”

“I defy anyone reading this to be able to conclude that it should be deemed confidential in any way, shape, or form,” Hirono added.

These are the docs Rs don’t want you to see—because they show that Judge Kavanaugh wrongly believes that Native Hawaiian programs are Constitutionally questionable. I defy anyone reading this to be able to conclude that it should be deemed confidential in any way, shape, or form. pic.twitter.com/yj31vDNGia

— Senator Mazie Hirono (@maziehirono) September 6, 2018

Effectively proving Hirono and Booker’s point that these documents were marked “committee confidential” and withheld from the public without any justification, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) formally released the same documents shortly after the two Democrats published them online.

But the documents made public on Thursday represent a minuscule fraction of the total number of the estimated 141,000 pages Grassley has designated as “committee confidential,” despite Democrats’ objection that Grassley does not have the sole authority to make such a designation. Additionally, as Common Dreams reported on Saturday, President Donald Trump has asserted “executive privilege” to withhold 100,000 pages of Kavanaugh’s record from the public.

“Republicans know how extreme Brett Kavanaugh’s record is, so they’re making up rules to hide it from the public. The American people deserve to know a SCOTUS nominee’s views on issues like race and abortion,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted on Thursday. “I stand with Cory Booker and Mazie Hirono.”

Republicans know how extreme Brett Kavanaugh’s record is, so they’re making up rules to hide it from the public. The American people deserve to know a SCOTUS nominee’s views on issues like race and abortion. I stand with @CoryBooker and @MazieHirono. https://t.co/rKXLsv8qew

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 6, 2018

The two Democratic senators’ decision to bypass Senate rules to make several so-called “confidential” Kavanaugh documents available to the public comes as progressive groups continue to pressure Democrats to use every procedural tool at their disposal to block the lifetime nomination of a judge that poses a dire threat to women, workers, and the planet.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, a coalition of progressive organizations argued that Grassley does not have the power to hide Kavanaugh documents from the public and urged Senate Democrats to “immediately read them into the Senate record.” The day before, Democrats had been urged by those opposed to both Kavanaugh as a jurist and the Republican-controlled confirmation process to “just get up and walk out” of the hearing.

And while progressives applauded Hirono and Booker for releasing the Kavanaugh documents, they argued that Democrats must go much further to block the judge’s nomination.

“If Booker and the other Democratic senators are serious here, they should all start sequentially releasing all prejudicial and incriminating documents against Kavanaugh now during the course of the hearings when they will be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause [of the Constitution],” said Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. “This would include documents relating to torture and war crimes.”

In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Thursday, political analyst and essayist Thomas Neuburger argued that Democrats have the power to block Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court “if they want to.”

“First, if Republicans don’t agree to table the nomination until 2019, every Democratic senator but one will boycott the Senate chamber for the rest of the year,” Neuburger wrote, outlining one possible procedural strategy Democrats could deploy. “Then the one remaining Democrat, a rotating position, will rise to deny unanimous consent on every matter the Senate tries to take up, including each quorum call. This means all 50 Republicans (with the passing of John McCain) must be in or near the chamber on any day Republicans wish to do business.”

“Even if Democrats execute this perfectly though, and Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will nonetheless prove that the ‘constitutional revolution’ his confirmation guarantees—which even Republican voters will come to hate—is entirely of Republican doing,” Neuburger concluded. “That will pay Democrats dividends down the road, in the same way that being complicit could cost them dearly.”

Big Rigs Abandoned as Truckers Flee Fire in California

SHASTA-TRINITY NATIONAL FOREST, Calif.—Truckers abandoned big-rigs and motorists screamed in fear as they came dangerously close to an explosive wildfire that shut down about 45 miles of a major California interstate near the Oregon border that authorities were desperately trying to reopen.

In a video, a passenger in a vehicle screams: “Oh my God, I want to go!” as nearby trees burst into flames.

“I can’t breathe,” the woman says, sobbing. “Please, guys, come put it out.”

The fire erupted Wednesday afternoon in a rural area and devoured timber and brush on both sides of Interstate 5 as it nearly tripled in size overnight, officials said Thursday.

It was raging just weeks after a blaze in the Redding area killed eight people and burned some 1,100 homes in a frightening start to the fire season.

California’s insurance commissioner said Thursday that victims of that fire and one in the Mendocino area — the two largest blazes in the state so far this year — have filed more than 10,000 claims so far totaling $845 million.

The two fires “devastated entire communities and tragically cost many people their lives, and were among the most destructive fires in our state’s history,” Commissioner David Jones said in a statement.

The two fires destroyed or damaged a combined 8,800 homes and 329 businesses, he said, warning that scientists are predicting more destructive wildfires later this year.

The blaze Thursday along Interstate 5 has blackened 23 square miles (60 square kilometers), prompting mandatory evacuations. It was moving rapidly but was still far from any large towns.

Officials from a number of agencies were meeting Thursday to determine if they can reopen the highway, a key route for commercial trucks, California Highway Patrol Officer Jason Morton said.

The highway runs north from the Mexico border through California, Oregon and Washington state to the border with Canada.

The scattered homes and cabins in and around Shasta-Trinity National Forest were under evacuation orders, from the community of Lakehead north to the Siskiyou County line, said Chris Losi, a spokesman for the forest.

“It isn’t a lot of people,” he said.

The blaze was human-caused, officials said, without indicating whether it was arson or an accident.

About 17 big-rigs were abandoned along the interstate and at least four caught fire, Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Foster of the California Highway Patrol’s Mount Shasta office told the Los Angeles Times. At least two trucks were partially melted.

U.S. Forest Service workers helped the driver of one flaming truck to safety. Truckers, firefighters and others aided more drivers.

“There’s vehicles scattered all over,” Brandon Vaccaro of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection told the Redding Record Searchlight. “Whatever occurred here was probably pretty ugly for a while.”

About 45 miles (72 kilometers) of I-5 were closed in both directions, Losi said. The blaze also delayed Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train service between Sacramento and Oregon.

The city of Dunsmuir, with about 1,500 residents, was about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the flames. Residents were urged to be prepared to leave if the fire threatened.

___

Elias reported from San Francisco.

Trump Administration Plans to Detain Immigrant Minors Indefinitely

NBC reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a new regulation that will allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrant minors and their parents indefinitely, flouting 20 years of precedent that mandates a limit of 20 days.

The rule goes into effect in 60 days, NBC explains, and allows ICE to keep migrant parents with their children as their asylum cases wind through the court system. An unnamed official who spoke to NBC explained that “the purpose of the rulemaking is to terminate the 1997 Flores settlement agreement that said children could not be held in detention longer than 20 days.”

As The Washington Post reports, Homeland Security officials believe that the current “limits on detaining families have effectively sent a message to would-be migrants that any parent who brings a child can expect to be quickly released from custody after entering the country illegally.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the decision, saying in a statement, “Today, legal loopholes significantly hinder the Department’s ability to appropriately detain and promptly remove family units that have no legal basis to remain in the country.”

In order to detain migrant minors and their families indefinitely, ICE needs to expand its facilities to provide more room. The three current “family residential centers” have just 3,500 beds combined and “those facilities are almost always full,” the Post explains, adding that “limitations on child detention under the Flores settlement have been a disincentive to build more. The settlement also mandates that children can only be held in licensed facilities, and the government has struggled to find states willing to do so.”

The Trump administration told NBC that the new rule is legal because the facilities are being evaluated by third parties. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar claims the rule will “satisfy the basic purpose” of the Flores agreement because the children will be kept safe. “Under this proposed rule, HHS would implement the Flores Settlement Agreement and our duties under the law to protect the safety and dignity of unaccompanied alien children in our custody,” he said.

NBC News did not name the third-party evaluators or explain how authorities plan to keep children safe.

The Post observes, “While the new rule does not require congressional approval, it’s likely to trigger new legal challenges and could revive still-simmering anger over the Trump administration’s separation of 2,600 migrant children from their parents under a border crackdown this spring.” NBC says that the case could go to an appellate court, or possibly to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, 500 migrant children remain in federal custody without their parents.

U.K. Charges 2 Alleged Russian Spies in Nerve Agent Attack

LONDON — Britain deepened its diplomatic feud with Moscow on Wednesday, charging two men it says are Russian military intelligence officers with the nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a double agent who betrayed the service by spying for the West.

But U.K. authorities acknowledged there was little chance Russia would hand over the suspects, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, to face justice in Britain.

Prime Minister Theresa May said the use of a chemical weapon in the city of Salisbury, which left a British woman dead and four people, including Skripal and his daughter, seriously ill, was carried out by officers of the GRU intelligence service and almost certainly approved “at a senior level of the Russian state.”

“This was not a rogue operation,” she told lawmakers after police released photos of the suspects as they traveled through London and Salisbury before flying back to Moscow from Heathrow Airport on the evening of March 4, hours after the Skripals were poisoned.

Moscow strongly denies involvement in the attack, and Russian officials said they did not recognize the suspects.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the names and images of Petrov and Boshirov “say nothing to us.”

British prosecutors said the two were being charged in absentia with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and use of the nerve agent Novichok.

Sue Hemming of the Crown Prosecution Service said the U.K. wouldn’t ask Moscow to hand the men over because Russian law forbids extradition of its citizens. Britain has obtained domestic and European arrest warrants for the suspects, meaning they can be detained if they leave Russia for another European country.

Neil Basu, Britain’s top police counterterrorism officer, conceded it was “very, very unlikely” police would be in a position to arrest them any time soon.

But, he said, “we will never give up.”

Sergei Skripal, 67, is a former colonel in the GRU who was convicted in 2006 of spying for Britain and imprisoned. He was freed in a 2010 spy swap and settled in the U.K.

Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of London, on March 4. They spent weeks hospitalized in critical condition and are now recovering in a secret location for their own protection. A police officer, Nick Bailey, was also hospitalized.

British authorities and the international chemical weapons watchdog say the victims were exposed to Novichok, a type of military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The poisoning ignited a diplomatic confrontation in which hundreds of envoys were expelled by both Russia and Western nations.

Six months after the chemical weapons attack rocked the quiet cathedral city, police released new details about what Basu called “one of the most complex investigations” the force had ever seen.

Police say Petrov and Boshirov, both about 40, flew from Moscow to London on Russian passports two days before the Skripals were poisoned. Basu said the passports were genuine but the names were probably aliases, and appealed to the public to help identify the men.

Police revealed that traces of Novichok were found at a hotel in London’s east end where the men spent two nights.

Police didn’t test the budget City Stay Hotel for Novichok until two months after the attack, but Basu said the tiny quantity of nerve agent found there did not pose a risk to other guests.

Police believe the nerve agent was smuggled to Britain in a counterfeit Nina Ricci perfume bottle and sprayed on the front door of Sergei Skripal’s house.

More than three months later, the bottle was found by a local man, 48-year-old Charlie Rowley. He was hospitalized and his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after being exposed to the contents.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed Tuesday that Rowley and Sturgess were also exposed to Novichok.

Police are still trying to determine where the bottle was between the Skripal poisoning in March and its discovery by Rowley on June 27. As a result, Basu said, police weren’t yet ready to lay charges in the second poisoning, though the two Russians are the prime suspects.

The case, with its chilling cloak-and-dagger details, echoes the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent who died after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at a London hotel. Britain spent years trying in vain to prosecute the prime suspects, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun.

A British inquiry concluded that Litvinenko had been killed at the behest of the Russian state, probably with the knowledge of President Vladimir Putin.

Russian defense and security analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said authorization to attack the Skripals had also likely come “from the very top.”

“This is a message to the Russian intelligence community and spy community that you do not sell out Putin to the West or there are going to be serious consequences,” he said.

Western officials say Russia’s intelligence services have grown increasingly aggressive in their overseas activities. Members of the GRU have been indicted in the U.S. for hacking the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

May said Britain and its allies would “step up our collective efforts” against the agency, though she did not name any specific measures.

“There can be no place in any civilized international order for the kind of barbaric activity which we saw in Salisbury in March,” she said.

“The Russian state needs to explain what happened in Salisbury,” May added. “All we’ve had is obfuscation and lies.”

___

Associated Press writers Kate de Pury and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed.

Dubai Jet Quarantined in New York Due to Sick Passengers

NEW YORK—A large commercial jet from Dubai caused a scare on Wednesday after a pilot radioed that it would be landing at New York’s Kennedy Airport carrying several passengers and crew members who fell ill with flu-like symptoms.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immediately quarantined the double-decker Emirates aircraft holding 520 passengers so it could evaluate about 100 of them. Some had complained about coughs, headaches, sore throats and fevers.

Officials said 10 people—three passengers and seven crew members—ended up hospitalized in what Emirates called a “precaution.” The rest were cleared to continue their travels while the CDC sought to determine what caused the sickness.

“Given the symptoms that we are seeing in the patients and given the history that they present, it looks like this is probably influenza,” Acting New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said. “But again, until we have our final results late tonight we won’t be able to give a final determination on what the underlying cause is of this illness.”

On social media, passengers including 1990s rapper Vanilla Ice, posted photos and videos of a large-scale emergency response when the aircraft touched down around 9 a.m. at JFK. Video from news helicopters showed the jet stranded on the tarmac for several minutes before passengers began to emerge so they could board buses to get to the terminal.

Vanilla Ice, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, posted a video on Facebook of an emergency response to an initial report that dozens of people could be sick. On Twitter, he described looking out the window to see several ambulances, firetrucks and police vehicles converge on the plane.

He also wrote that the sick people were seated on the “bottom floor” of the jumbo jet, “so I’m happy I’m up top.”

Another traveler in the business class section of the aircraft, Raghida Dergham, also said in an interview that sick passengers were in a “lower level” economy section of the plane.

“I feel great. I feel fine,” Dergham said. “Nobody was alarmed. … It was handled very well.”

But other passengers said they suspected that some passengers were sick before they got on the plane and blamed the airline for not doing more to protect the health of others.

“Why did they allow them on the flight? … I sat with them for 13 hours. If it’s a virus, we’re all getting sick,” said Srinivasa Rao.

Passenger Erin Sykes posted a video of officers in masks and gloves taking the temperature of passengers on the tarmac.

In an interview, Sykes said she saw a few passengers being taken off the plane first for medical attention, but she added that “many, many” others were showing signs of illness.

“Very intense coughing. Violently sick. Going into the bathroom a lot,” she said when asked to describe the scene.

She added: “These people should know not to travel in a confined space with other healthy people.”

Said another flier, Zeph Shamba, said he saw at least one man on the 14-hour flight coughing and vomiting.

“People were worried because we don’t know what it is. And we get down there and guys with masks on their noses and stuff like that,” Shamba said. “It’s like the plane from hell.”

___

Associated Press Writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai contributed to this story.

Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base

How, liberals and progressives ask with shocked amazement, can President Trump’s supporters continue to back him? They persist even as one piece of evidence after another emerges of his epic and pathological gaslighting, his shameless immorality, his abject criminality, his wild stupidity and his corruption. Then there’s his chilling authoritarianism, his tendency toward fascism, his ugly sexism, his textbook malignant narcissism and his nasty racism.

These flummoxed observers aren’t wrong about Donald “Don’t Believe What You See and Hear” Trump’s terrible, duplicitous and unabashedly Orwellian nature, but their incredulity is naive.

Yes, the evidence is clear as day—to people who pay serious attention to evidence. Nine of every 10 Americans—and certainly a larger share of Republicans and Trump backers—believe in the existence of God. Ask most Americans what exactly one is supposed to believe in when it comes to “God,” and they will say little or nothing in the way of empirical proof. It’s never quite clear what the concept and word mean. It’s about faith, not evidence.

Evidence is easily devalued in a faith-based nation in which magical thinking (a critical component of authoritarianism and hardly limited to religious and metaphysical matters) is rife.

“Cognitive dissonance,” a mental pattern first identified by the psychologist Leon Festinger, doesn’t help. People confronted with evidence that contradicts their convictions don’t typically correct their beliefs, Festinger found. Instead, they more commonly double down on their mistaken idea rather than face the mental and egoic pain associated with admitting erroneous thinking. The more they have invested in and even lost from false beliefs, the more they will respond to contrary evidence by actually intensifying their attachment to those untrue notions. (This may help explain how Trump often seems to gain support after talking heads, reporters and politicos call him out for saying or tweeting something particularly absurd.)

Right-wing media worsens the problem. A potent network of counterfactual white Republican news and opinion outlets regularly amplify and reinforce fact-trumping feelings and cognitively dissonant reactions. Watch Fox News and listen to noxiously racist, nationalist and neo-McCarthyite talk-radio hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Nothing is clear as day across the soulless landscape of radically conservative media, where 2+2=5; war is peace; love is hate; corporate Democrats are Marxists; antifa is a giant mass movement created by the Democratic Party; black football players who take knees during the national anthem are traitors; the billionaire rentier Donald Trump is a friend of the working man; anthropogenic global warming is a “hoax”; and “God” wants us to burn every last fossil fuel on earth. As Trump’s wacky post-modernist lawyer Rudolph Giuliani put it recently, “truth isn’t truth.”

Feelings trump facts all the time in the U.S. This is true on both sides of the major-party aisle. Talking in 2007 and 2008 to highly educated campus-town liberal Democrats, including plenty of doctorate holders and religious skeptics, I consistently found that facts were of little use in trying to dent their deeply entrenched and utterly false view that Barack Obama was a people’s champion of peace, democracy and social justice. To paraphrase the Beatles, they had “a feeling [about Obama]–a feeling deep inside, oh yeah.”

The so-called mainstream liberal media is itself no great champion of truth. It perversely purveyed George W. Bush’s Orwellian nonsense about Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction.” As I was first writing this paragraph (last Friday), moreover, Trump’s cable-news bêtes noires CNN and MSNBC were immersed in a seemingly endless and totally absurd memorialization of the war criminal, lifelong imperial war hawk and corporate neoliberal John McCain as a Christ-like embodiment of transcendent human decency.

There’s also the selective and partisan use and interpretation of evidence. Trumpsters know some facts very well. Tell them their president lies, cheats and commits crimes, and some of them will remind you that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have done the same. They’re right about that (Obama’s apparent observance of his marriage vows notwithstanding), even if they often get their facts wrong on how and why those corporate Democrats (absurdly seen as Left by Republicans) transgressed. And it’s never clear how the readily documentable fact that Democrats do nasty things makes Trump’s epic awfulness any less awful.

Trump’s backers also cite undeniable facts of economic expansion, the stock market explosion and a falling official unemployment rate during Trump’s anti-presidency. But Trump boosters leave out and often deny the fact that the expansion started under Obama. They ignore the considerable downsides of the Obama-Trump “boom”: over-stagnant wages, savage economic and related racial inequality, environmental destruction, massive public and private debt, the over-concentration of stock ownership and profits in the hands of a small minority, and the reckless overvaluation of stocks and other financial assets—harbingers of a coming crash encouraged by Trump’s heedless deregulation of finance.

Trump backers seem to think the U.S. capitalist economy is micromanaged in the Oval Office, as if Trump—who can’t even read a basic balance sheet—is personally responsible for the business cycle he’s been fortunate to ride. That’s a pretty stupid thing to believe.

Speaking of stupidity, what about Trump’s real or alleged idiocy? The “mentally deranged dotard” (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s colorful description of Trump last summer) would probably outscore George W. Bush (more on that dolt below) but come in below the Clintons and Obama on standard intelligence measures. Whatever his brainpower, however, Trump is an inexhaustible font of fatuous and inane political assertion. Take, as one example, his frequent go-to: climate change denial. Then there’s his claim that thousands of Muslims danced on the roofs of apartment complexes watching the World Trade Center towers collapse on 9/11, as well as the ridiculous assertion the U.S. is being flooded by immigrant rapists and murderers.

These would also make the list: the preposterous charge Trump was denied a popular victory over Hillary Clinton by immigrant voter fraud; the ludicrous allegation Google has “rigged” its search engine against him, and the wild-eyed contention that a small leftist anti-fascist group (antifa) will drown the nation in violence if Democrats take over Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. Finally, there’s Trump’s openly and insanely false claim that NBC doctored (“fudged”) an interview he did with Lester Holt in May of 2017—an interview in which he clearly tells Holt that he fired FBI Director James Comey because Comey was investigating the president’s connections to Russia. Every day seems to bring a new ludicrous and patently false tweet or comment from “President Dunce Cap.”

Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for much of the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book titled “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” The book was filled with depressing statistics like the following:

● A majority of Americans didn’t know which party was in control of Congress.

● A majority couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

● A majority didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government.

● A majority of Americans told pollsters in 2003 they believed George W. Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had attacked America on 9/11.

George W. “Is Our Kids Learning?” Bush, Number 43, was an abject moron who thought “God” wanted him to invade Iraq. The depressing fact that a majority of Americans believed Dubya’s bold-faced lie about Saddam Hussein’s culpability in the 2001 jetliner attacks on U.S. soil was striking evidence for Shenkman’s assertion that “ignorance of basic facts” reflects a “level of inattentiveness that is unhealthy in a society that purports to be free and democratic.”

The problem didn’t go away just because the electorate responded to the Iraq fiasco and the meltdown of the economy by putting enough of its longstanding racism aside to place a former editor of the Harvard Law Review—an epitome of the professional class’ education-based meritocratic worldview who happened to be black—in the White House for eight years. The silver-tongued and deeply conservative Ivy League creation and arch-neoliberal imperialist Obama did facts and truth no favors by pretending to be something he wasn’t—a progressive friend of social justice, democracy and peace—while he dutifully helped preserve Wall Street’s control of the nation’s domestic and foreign policies. (Orwell noted that form of pretense, too.)

Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon in early 2016, Shenkman recognized the underlying U.S.-American disease of mass stupidity (though in truth the real problem he was discussing was ignorance) was alive and well in Obama’s final year:

[M]illions of [U.S.] people take sheer nonsense seriously. Their ignorance is making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald ‘I love the poorly educated’ Trump. Election 2016 is turning into a civics teacher’s case study from hell. … From the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower … Trump has been offering simplistic solutions. … Each proposal has been eviscerated in the media based on the critiques of experts who have pointed out that his proposed solutions barely withstand cursory analysis. … But his voters haven’t cared. Nor have they worried when the media have caught him in one lie after another. Politifact has called him out for lying more than any of the other candidates, but to little effect. … It appears he can get away with saying anything.

The rest, as they say, is history. With no small help from the horrific and uninspiring candidacy of the ultimate establishment politico Hillary Clinton (Yale Law, one notch above Harvard Law), the Orwellian falsehood machine and lower-brain atavist Trump swept the Electoral College. The president has continued his relentless war on reality with a remarkably durable approval rate in the low to mid-40s, largely undented even by his former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen’s recent identification of Trump as a co-conspirator in the illegal payment of funds for the purpose of silencing two women with whom Trump had had extramarital affairs.

What about Trump’s authoritarianism? It is evident in his cold disregard for the rule of law and the power of Congress and his Cabinet, as well as his recurrent habit of praising strongman leaders around the world.

Most liberals and progressives I know are stunned that Trump’s clear despotism and taste for tyranny do not bother his base. But there’s no basis for their astonishment about this. Leaving aside the fact Trump is more showman than strongman, nobody who pays serious attention to the relevant survey data should think that the president’s authoritarian inclinations would be a problem for his supporters.

In December 2015, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams surveyed 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Employing standard statistical survey analysis, McMillan found education, income, gender and age had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. “Only two of the variables I looked at,” MacWilliams reported in January of 2016, “were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.” Trump, MacWilliams found, was the only candidate in either party with statistically significant support from authoritarians. “Those who say a Trump presidency ‘can’t happen here,’ ” MacWilliams wrote in Politico, “should check their conventional wisdom at the door. … Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity.”

A year and a half later, a poll conducted by political scientists Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56 percent of Republicans support postponing the 2020 presidential election if Trump and congressional Republicans advocate this to “make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote.”

This brings us to Trump’s racism, evident from numerous statements of his before and during his presidency. Is it a problem for Trump backers?

Know any other good jokes? Trump’s disproportionately Caucasian base is fused by an embattled white racial identity. This Trumpian “make America white again” heart- and mind-set holds that whites are becoming a minority targeted by discrimination and “politically correct” liberal and leftists have been turning the nation’s politics and policies against white values, culture, needs, rights and prerogatives. This curious “reverse discrimination” victim whiteness (devoid of evidence for its claims) informs the Trump base’s understanding of the meaning of the word “corruption” in ways the liberal writer Peter Beinart recently captured in the Atlantic. For Trump’s base, Beinart writes, the idea of corruption isn’t so much about politics and the law as it is about racial and gender purity:

Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. … Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies [of race and gender], their behavior makes more sense. … Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that [Hillary] Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.

Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anti-corrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera [the “illegal immigrant” accused of murdering the young white woman Mollie Tibbetts in rural Iowa two weeks ago]—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution. [Emphasis added.]

But, of course, it’s not about racism, nativism, sexism or authoritarianism when it comes to understanding Trump’s base. White racial and gender identity and authoritarianism have long merged with and cross-fertilized each other. Last May, political scientists Steven V. Miller and Nicholas T. Davis released a working paper titled “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy.” Their study found a strong correlation between white Americans’ racial intolerance and support for authoritarian rule. “When racially intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people of color,” NBC News reported, citing the Miller and Davis paper, “they abandon their commitment to democracy.”

The Trump base’s bigotry and its leanings toward authoritarianism are not separate problems. They are inseparably linked. When Trump calls Mexicans murderers and rapists, when he rails about the need for building a wall, when he denounces the media as “fake news,” when he disses judges and the rule of law and juries, and when he praises authoritarian leaders, he is appealing to the same voters.

The most sophisticated and statistically astute analysis of the 2016 Trump electorate produced so far has been crafted by political sociologists David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley. In an article published in Critical Sociology last March, Smith and Hanley found the white Trump base was differentiated from white non-Trump voters not by class or other “demographic” factors (including income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of education) but by eight key attitudes and values: identification as “conservative”; support for “domineering leaders”; Christian fundamentalism; prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against blacks; prejudice against Muslims; prejudice against women, and a sense of pessimism about the economy.

Strong Trump supporters scored particularly high on support for domineering leaders, fundamentalism, opposition to immigrants and economic pessimism. They were particularly prone to support authoritarian leaders who promised to respond punitively to minorities perceived as “line-cutters”—“undeserving” others who were allegedly getting ahead of traditional white Americans in the procurement of jobs and government benefits—and to the supposed liberal “rotten apples” who were purportedly allowing these “line-cutters” to advance ahead of traditional white American males.

Support for politically authoritarian leaders and a sense of intolerance regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences are two sides of the same Trumpian coin. The basic desire animating Trump’s base was “the defiant wish for a domineering and impolitic leader” linked to “the wish for a reversal of what his base perceives as an inverted moral and racial order.”

Is Trump’s narcissism a problem for his backers? Not really. As psychologist Elizabeth Mika noted last year in an essay titled “Who Goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism”:

The tyrant’s narcissism is the main attractor to his followers, who project their hopes and dreams. The more grandiose his own sense of self and his promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and the stronger their support. … Through the process of identification, the tyrant’s followers absorb his omnipotence and glory and imagine themselves winners in the game of life. This identification heals the followers’ narcissistic wounds, but also tends to shut down their reason and conscience.

If that sounds anything like “creeping fascism,” that’s because it is. As political scientist Anthony DiMaggio recently observed:

There are too many red flags in public sentiment to ignore the threat of creeping fascism. Ominously, one of the strongest statistical predictors of support for Trump is the desire for a strong leader who will ‘crush evil’ and ‘get rid of the rotten apples’ who ‘disturb the status quo.’ Half of Republicans say they trust Donald Trump as a more reliable source of information than the news media—more reliable even than conservative media outlets. Nearly half of Republicans think media outlets should be ‘shut down’ if they are ‘broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate,’ raising ominous possibilities regarding precisely who will act on such allegations. … The cult of Trump is not an abstract phenomenon, but one that has real implications. … The danger of fascist creep is also seen in the support from most Republican Americans for shutting down the 2020 election, so long as Trump declares it necessary to combat fictitious voter fraud. Conservatives’ acceptance of this conspiracy theory continues, unfortunately, despite the president’s own ‘voter fraud commission’ being disbanded after failing to find any evidence of it.

Is Trump’s “creeping fascism” a problem for his backers? Leaving aside the interesting debate among liberal and left commentators about whether Trump is a real or creeping fascist, it is unlikely that more than a small number of Americans could provide even the remotest outlines of a working definition of what classic European fascism was or what fascism more broadly defined is in the world today. It’s hard for people to reject something they know little or nothing about regarding its existence and nature (even as they are thinking and acting in accord with some of the phenomenon’s key characteristics).

As the dangerously declining superpower that is the United States moves at an accelerating pace, under Trump, into a period that deserves to be called at least pre-fascism, it is an even better time than usual to heed George Santyana’s warning: “Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”

Trump Official Decries President’s ‘Amorality’ in Op-Ed

A senior administration official is sounding an alarm about President Donald Trump’s “amorality” and “impetuous” leadership style in an unsigned opinion piece published in The New York Times.

The newspaper describes the author of the unsigned column only as “a senior official in the Trump administration.” The White House is not immediately responding to a request for comment.

The writer says Trump aides are aware of the president’s faults and “we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”

The writer alleges “there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment” because of the “instability” witnessed in the president.

The writer adds: “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”

Read the full op-ed at The New York Times.

Kavanaugh Stonewalls on Presidential Subpoenas

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly stressed the importance of judicial independence on the second day of his confirmation hearing Wednesday as he faced questioning from senators, including Democrats who fear he would be President Donald Trump’s man on the high court. But he declined to address whether Trump could be subpoenaed or could pardon himself.

Pressed by Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican, on whether he would be independent from the president who nominated him, Kavanaugh responded, “No one is above the law.”

But asked later by the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, whether a president can be required to respond to a subpoena, Kavanaugh said, “I can’t give you an answer on that hypothetical question.” The Supreme Court has never answered that question, and it is among the most important at Kavanaugh’s hearing since Trump could face a subpoena in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Kavanaugh also refused to say whether he thinks a president can pardon himself — or provide a pardon in exchange for a bribe or pardon someone on the understanding that the person wouldn’t testify against the president.

“I’m not going to answer hypothetical questions of that sort,” Kavanaugh said, responding to questions from Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Day two of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings began much as the first with protesters often interrupting proceedings. Some two dozen protesters were escorted from the hearing room after shouting objections to Kavanaugh’s nomination. One shouted that the questions senators were asking about executive power were not “hypothetical” and should be answered.

Despite interruptions, senators plunged into their initial opportunity to publicly question Kavanaugh in what was expected to be a marathon day of examination.

The hearing has strong political overtones ahead of the November election, but Democrats lack the votes to block Kavanaugh’s confirmation. They fear Kavanaugh will push the court to the right on abortion, guns and other issues, and that he will side with Trump in cases stemming from Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Addressing some of those concerns, Kavanaugh said that “the first thing that makes a good judge is independence, not being swayed by political or public pressure.” He cited historic court cases including Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated schools and U.S. v. Nixon that compelled the president to turn over the Watergate tapes — a ruling that Kavanaugh had previously questioned.

“That takes some backbone,” he said of the justices who decided those cases.

Asked about court precedents, the importance of previously settled cases including the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that ensures access to abortion, Kavanaugh said, “Respect for precedent is important. … Precedent is rooted right in the Constitution itself.”

Kavanaugh noted that Roe was reaffirmed in a 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He likened it to another controversial, landmark Supreme Court decision, the Miranda ruling about the rights of criminal suspects. Kavanaugh said the court specifically reaffirmed both decisions in later cases that made them “precedent on precedent.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, praised Kavanaugh for hiring female lawyers as his clerks as a judge on the District of Columbia court of appeals, and then posed questions about whether Kavanaugh was aware of sexual harassment allegations against retired circuit court Judge Alex Kozinski in California. Kavanaugh had clerked for Kozinski in the early 1990s and considered the judge a friend and mentor.

Kavanaugh said he had known nothing about the allegations until they were disclosed last year. “It was a gut punch for me,” he said, and he was “shocked, disappointed, angry.”

Asked about an email list Kozinski allegedly used to send offensive material, Kavanaugh said: “I don’t remember anything like that.”

Trump nominated Kavanaugh, 53, to fill the seat of retired Justice Anthony Kennedy. The change could make the court more conservative on a range of issues.

Republicans hope to confirm Kavanaugh in time for the first day of the new Supreme Court term, Oct. 1.

In stressing his independence, Kavanaugh pushed back against suggestions that after his time on independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s team investigating Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he no longer believes a sitting president should be investigated. He said his views did shift after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but his ideas about revisiting the special counsel law were merely suggestions.

“They were some ideas for Congress to consider. They were not my constitutional views,” he told the panel.

Pressed by Feinstein on his comment several years ago that U.S. v. Nixon might have been wrongly decided, he said his quote — shown on a poster above the senator — was “not in context” and “I have repeatedly called U.S. v. Nixon one of the four greatest moments in court history.”

The judge’s work in the George W. Bush White House also has figured in the hearing, particularly as Democratic senators have fought for access to his documents from his three years as staff secretary that could shed light on his views about policies from that era, including the detention and interrogation of terror suspects. Republicans have declined to seek those papers, and instead have gathered documents from his work as White House counsel to Bush. Many are being held as confidential within the committee.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois asked Kavanaugh if he would seek a delay in his hearing so the paper trail could be vetted.

But Kavanaugh declined to engage, saying. “I do not believe that’s consistent” with the way prior nominations have been handled. He also declined to give an opinion on the Republicans’ action on the documents, responding, “It is not for me to say.”

Kavanaugh stood by his 2006 testimony when nominated for the appellate court when he said he was not involved in some Bush-era policies, particularly a bill-signing statement on the treatment of terror suspects that would have passed his desk as staff secretary.

Kavanaugh responded to Durbin, as he did to similar questioning from Leahy about Bush-era surveillance policy, that his earlier testimony was “100 percent accurate.”

Democrats, including several senators poised for 2020 presidential bids, tried to block the proceedings on Tuesday in a dispute over the records. Republicans in turn accused the Democrats of turning the hearing into a circus.

Trump jumped into the fray Tuesday, saying on Twitter that Democrats were “looking to inflict pain and embarrassment” on Kavanaugh.

The president’s comment followed the statements of Democratic senators who warned that Trump was, in the words of Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, “selecting a justice on the Supreme Court who potentially will cast a decisive vote in his own case.”

The most likely outcome of this week’s hearings is a vote along party lines to send Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate. Majority Republicans can confirm Kavanaugh without any Democratic votes, though they’ll have little margin for error.

One of several red-state Democrats watched as potentially voting for Kavanaugh, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, joined the hearing in the audience for a while. He is up for re-election this fall. Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine also stopped in for part of the session.

Republicans will hold a slim 51-49 majority in the Senate once Jon Kyl, the former Arizona senator, is sworn in to fill the seat held by the late Sen. John McCain.

Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who both favor abortion access, are the only two Republicans even remotely open to voting against Kavanaugh, though neither has said she would do so. Abortion rights supporters are trying to appeal to those senators.

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Associated Press writers Jessica Gresko and Ken Thomas contributed.