Chris Hedges's Blog, page 529

More Fear Than Proof of Russian Midterm Meddling—So Far

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—The sponsors of the Russian “troll factory” that meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign have launched a new American website ahead of the U.S. midterm election in November. A Russian oligarch has links to Maryland’s election services. Russian bots and trolls are deploying increasingly sophisticated, targeted tools. And a new indictment suggests the Kremlin itself was behind previous hacking efforts in support of Donald Trump.

As the U.S. leader prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, many Americans are wondering: Is the Kremlin trying yet again to derail a U.S. election?

While U.S. intelligence officials call it a top concern, they haven’t uncovered a clear, coordinated Russian plot to mess with the campaign. At least so far.

It could be that Russian disruptors are waiting until the primaries are over in September and the races become more straightforward — or it could be they are waiting until the U.S. presidential vote in 2020, which matters more for U.S. foreign policy.

In the meantime, an array of bots, trolls and sites like USAReally appear to be testing the waters.

USAReally was launched in May by the Federal News Agency, part of an empire allegedly run by Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin that includes the Internet Research Agency — the “troll factory” whose members were indicted by U.S. special investigator Robert Mueller this year.

USAReally’s Moscow offices are in the same building as the Federal News Agency. The original troll factory was also initially based with Federal News Agency offices in St. Petersburg, in a drab three-story building where a huge “For Rent/Sale” sign now hangs. The site believed to house the troll factory’s current offices is a more modern, seven-story complex with reflective blue windows in a different but similarly industrial neighborhood of St. Petersburg. Associated Press reporters were not allowed inside, and troll factory employees declined to be interviewed.

The USAReally site appears oddly amateurish and obviously Russian, with grammatical flubs and links to Russian social networks.

It says it’s aimed at providing Americans “objective and independent” information, and chief editor Alexander Malkevich says it’s not about influencing the midterm election. Yet his Moscow office is adorned with a confederate flag, Trump pictures and souvenirs and a talking pen that parrots famous Trump quotations.

“Disrupt elections? You will do all that without us,” he told The Associated Press. He said Americans themselves have created their own divisions, whether over gun rights, immigrants or LGBT rights — all topics his site has posted articles about.

Most online manipulation ahead of the midterm election is coming from U.S. sources, experts say. They worry that focusing on Russian spy-mongering may distract authorities from more dangerous homegrown threats.

There is Russian activity, to be sure. But it appears aimed less at swaying the U.S. Congress one way or another and more at proving to fellow Russians that democracy is unsafe — and thereby legitimizing Putin’s autocratic rule at home.

While security services are on high alert, “the intelligence community has yet to see evidence of a robust campaign aimed at tampering with election infrastructure along the lines of 2016,” Christopher Krebs, the undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, told a Congressional hearing Wednesday.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about.

National Intelligence Director Dan Coats said Friday that warning lights about overall cyber-threats to the U.S. are “blinking red” — much like “blinking red” signals warned before 9/11 that a terror attack was imminent.

Coats said that while the U.S. is not seeing the kind of Russian electoral interference that occurred in 2016, digital attempts to undermine America are not coming only from Russia. They’re occurring daily, he said, and are “much bigger than just elections.”

Intelligence officials still spot individuals affiliated with the Internet Research Agency creating new social media accounts that are masqueraded as belonging to Americans, according to Coats. The Internet Research Agency uses the fake accounts to drive attention to divisive issues in the U.S., he said.

USAReally plays a similar role.

“USAReally is unlikely to create big momentum in its own right,” in part thanks to stepped-up actions by Twitter and Facebook to detect and shut down automated accounts, said Aric Toler of the Bellingcat investigative group.

However, Toler said the site could build momentum by creating divisive content that then gets passed to other provocative news aggregators in the U.S. such as InfoWars or Gateway Pundit.

He believes that a key role for sites like USAReally is to please the Kremlin and to prove that Prigozhin’s empire is still active in the U.S. news sphere.

Prigozhin, sometimes dubbed “Putin’s chef” because of his restaurant businesses, has not commented publicly on USAReally. Prigozhin and 12 other Russians are personally charged with participating in a broad conspiracy to sow discord in the U.S. political system from 2014 through 2017.

Editor Malkevich confirms his site’s funding comes from the Federal News Agency. But he says he has nothing to do with the indicted trolls, who once operated under the same roof.

“I absolutely don’t understand this spy mania,” he said. He says the site has a few thousand followers, and that his 30 journalists and editors check facts and don’t use bots.

The big question is what Trump plans to do about this.

Trump is under heavy pressure to tell Putin to stay out of U.S. elections when they meet, and he said Friday that he would. But many state lawmakers and members of Congress say it’s taken far too long, and that Trump’s refusal to condemn Russia’s interference in the 2016 election complicates efforts to combat future attacks.

Adding to the pressure on Trump is a new indictment issued Friday accusing 12 Russian military intelligence officials of extensive hacking in 2016 that was specifically aimed at discrediting Trump’s rival, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

After the top U.S. intelligence agencies found a Putin-ordered influence campaign in which Russian hackers targeted at least 21 states ahead of the 2016 election, several state election directors fear further attempts to hack into voting systems could weaken the public’s confidence in elections.

Maryland officials announced Friday that a vendor providing key election services is owned by a company whose chief investor is well-connected Russian businessman Vladimir Potanin. The FBI told state officials no criminal activity has been detected since vendor ByteGrid was purchased in 2015 by AltPoint Capital Partners.

Experts note that governments have been using technology to influence foreign powers for millennia, and caution against assuming the Russians are always at fault.

“Just because it’s a troll doesn’t mean it’s a Russian troll,” said Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council. “The really big challenge for the midterms … is differentiating what the Russians are doing, and what the Americans are doing to each other.”

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Davlashyan and Charlton reported from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Kate de Pury in Moscow, Geoff Mulvihill in Philadelphia and Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Indictment of 12 Russians: Under the Shiny Wrapping, a Political Act

With great fanfare, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday released a 29-page indictment, a byproduct of the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Ostensibly, this indictment cemented the government’s case against the Russians and punched a hole in the arguments of those, like President Trump, who have been labeling Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.” This, of course, is precisely what Rosenstein and Mueller hoped to achieve through their carefully timed, and even more carefully scripted, indictment.

The indictment was made public at a time when the FBI is under increasing scrutiny for the appearance of strong anti-Trump bias on the part of some of its senior agents. This purported bias in turn generated rational concerns on the part of the president’s supporters that it possibly influenced decisions related to investigations being conducted by the FBI into allegations of collusion between persons affiliated with the campaign of then-Republican candidate Trump and the Russian government. The goal of this alleged collusion was to interfere in the American electoral processes and confer Trump an advantage against his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

It also comes on the heels of a concerted effort on the part of the president and his political supporters to denigrate the investigation of Mueller and, by extension, the judgment and character of Rosenstein, who, since the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Russian investigation, has been giving Mueller his marching orders. Indeed, several conservative members of the House of Representatives are mulling the impeachment of Rosenstein, claiming he is refusing to cooperate with Congress by denying them access to documents related to the investigation that certain members of Congress, at least, deem relevant to their constitutionally mandated oversight function.

While the impeachment of Rosenstein is highly unlikely and the likelihood of the FBI being found guilty of its investigations being corrupted by individual bias is equally slim, in the world of politics, perception creates its own reality and the Mueller investigation had been taking a public beating for some time. By releasing an indictment predicated upon the operating assertion that 12 named Russian military intelligence officers orchestrated a series of cyberattacks that resulted in information being stolen from computer servers belonging to the Democratic Party, and then facilitated the release of this information in a manner designed to do damage to the candidacy of Clinton, Rosenstein sought to silence once and for all the voices that have attacked him, along with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Mueller investigation, as a participant in a partisan plot against the president.

There is one major problem with the indictment, however: It doesn’t prove that which it asserts. True, it provides a compelling narrative that reads like a spy novel, and there is no doubt in my mind that many of the technical details related to the timing and functioning of the malware described within are accurate. But the leap of logic that takes the reader from the inner workings of the servers of the Democratic Party to the offices of Russian intelligence officers in Moscow is not backed up by anything that demonstrates how these connections were made.

That’s the point of an indictment, however—it doesn’t exist to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather to provide only enough information to demonstrate probable cause. No one would, or could, be convicted at trial from the information contained in the indictment alone. For that to happen, the government would have to produce the specific evidence linking the hacks to the named Russians, and provide details on how this evidence was collected, and by whom. In short, the government would have to be willing to reveal some of the most sensitive sources and methods of intelligence collection by the U.S. intelligence community and expose, and therefore ruin, the careers of those who collected this information. This is something the government has never been willing to do, and there is much doubt that if, for some odd reason, the Russians agreed to send one or more of these named intelligence officers to the United States to answer the indictment, this indictment would ever go to trial. It simply couldn’t survive the discovery to which any competent defense would subject the government’s assertions.

Robert Mueller knew this when he drafted the indictment, and Rob Rosenstein knew this when he presented it to the public. The assertions set forth in the indictment, while cloaked in the trappings of American justice, have nothing to do with actual justice or the rule of law; they cannot, and will never, be proved in a court of law. However, by releasing them in a manner that suggests that the government is willing to proceed to trial, a perception is created that implies that they can withstand the scrutiny necessary to prevail at trial.

And as we know, perception is its own reality.

Despite Rosenstein’s assertions to the contrary, the decision to release the indictment of the 12 named Russian military intelligence officers was an act of partisan warfare designed to tip the scale of public opinion against the supporters of President Trump, and in favor of those who oppose him politically, Democrat and Republican alike. Based upon the media coverage since Rosenstein’s press conference, it appears that in this he has been wildly successful.

But is the indictment factually correct? The biggest clue that Mueller and Rosenstein have crafted a criminal espionage narrative from whole cloth comes from none other than the very intelligence agency whose work would preclude Rosenstein’s indictment from ever going to trial: the National Security Agency. In June 2017 the online investigative journal The Intercept referenced a highly classified document from the NSA titled “Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities.” It’s a highly technical document, derived from collection sources and methods the NSA has classified at the Top Secret/SI (i.e., Special Intelligence) level. This document was meant for internal consumption, not public release. As such, the drafters could be honest about what they knew and what they didn’t know—unlike those in the Mueller investigation who drafted the aforementioned indictment.

A cursory comparison of the leaked NSA document and the indictment presented by Rosenstein suggests that the events described in Count 11 of the indictment pertaining to an effort to penetrate state and county election offices responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. presidential election are precisely the events captured in the NSA document. While the indictment links the identity of a named Russian intelligence officer, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, to specific actions detailed therein, the NSA document is much more circumspect. In a diagram supporting the text report, the NSA document specifically states that the organizational ties between the unnamed operators involved in the actions described and an organizational entity, Unit 74455, affiliated with Russian military intelligence is a product of the judgment of an analyst and not fact.

If we take this piece of information to its logical conclusion, then the Mueller indictment has taken detailed data related to hacking operations directed against various American political entities and shoehorned it into what amounts to little more than the organizational chart of a military intelligence unit assessed—but not known—to have overseen the operations described. This is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller’s team suggests exists to support its indictment of the 12 named Russian intelligence officers.

If this is indeed the case, then the indictment, as presented, is a politically motivated fraud. Mueller doesn’t know the identities of those involved in the hacking operations he describes—because the intelligence analysts who put the case together don’t know those names. If this case were to go to trial, the indictment would be dismissed in the preliminary hearing phase for insufficient evidence, even if the government were willing to lay out the totality of its case—which, because of classification reasons, it would never do.

But the purpose of the indictment wasn’t to bring to justice the perpetrators of a crime against the American people; it was to manipulate public opinion.

And therein lies the rub.

The timing of the release of the Mueller indictment unleashed a storm of political backlash directed at President Trump, and specifically at his scheduled July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. This summit was never popular with the president’s political opponents, given the current state of affairs between Russia and the U.S., dominated as they are by events in Syria and Ukraine, perceived Russian threats against the northern flank of NATO, allegations of election meddling in the U.S. and Europe, and Russia’s nuclear arsenal. On that last point, critics claim Russia’s arsenal is irresponsibly expanding, operated in violation of existing arms control agreements, and is being used to underpin foreign policy objectives through the use of nuclear blackmail.

President Trump has publicly stated that it is his fervent desire that relations with Russia can be improved and that he views the Helsinki summit as an appropriate venue for initiating a process that could facilitate such an outcome. It is the president’s sole prerogative to formulate and implement foreign and national security policy on behalf of the American people. While his political critics are free to criticize this policy, they cannot undermine it without running afoul of sedition laws.

Rosenstein, by the timing and content of the indictment he publicly released Friday, committed an act that undermined the president of the United States’ ability to conduct critical affairs of state—in this case, a summit with a foreign leader the outcome of which could impact global nuclear nonproliferation policy. The hue and cry among the president’s political foes for him to cancel the summit with Putin—or, failing that, to use the summit to confront the Russian leader with the indictment—is a direct result of Rosenstein’s decision to release the Mueller indictment when he did and how he did. Through its content, the indictment was designed to shape public opinion against Russia.

This indictment, by any other name, is a political act, and should be treated as such by the American people and the media.

 

Cease-Fire Holds After Day of Intense Israel-Hamas Fighting

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military lifted its restrictions along the Gaza border Sunday, indicating it had accepted an Egypt-mediated cease-fire that ended a 24-hour round of fighting with Hamas militants that had threatened to devolve into all-out war.

The military had shut down a popular beach and placed limitations on large gatherings as residents kept mostly close to home on Saturday amid dozens of rockets that were fired from Gaza. But after several hours of calm it said residents could resume their daily routines.

On Saturday, the military carried out its largest wave of airstrikes in Gaza since the 2014 war, hitting several Hamas military compounds and flattening a number of its training camps. Two Palestinian teenagers were killed in an airstrike in Gaza City, while four Israelis were wounded from a rocket that landed on a residential home.

The military said several mortar shells were fired even after Hamas announced the cease-fire as sirens warning of incoming projectiles wailed in Israel overnight again. The military struck the mortar launcher early Sunday but the calm held, with neither side appearing eager to resume hostilities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would not accept a cease-fire unless it included an end to all militant hostilities, including incendiary kites and balloons from Gaza that have devastated nearby Israeli farmlands and nature reserves.

“The Israeli military has delivered its most punishing blow against Hamas since the 2014 war. I hope they got the message. If not, they will get it later on,” he said at the weekly cabinet meeting.

After several balloons drifted into Israel Sunday, the military said it targeted the Hamas squad that had launched them from the northern Gaza Strip.

Hamas police also announced an explosion Sunday at a house in Gaza City that killed a father and son, aged 35 and 13. The explosion appeared to be an accidental blast related to militant stock piles of explosives. Hamas said it would investigate.

Israel said it unleashed Saturday’s barrage in response to weeks of violence along Gaza’s border — including a grenade attack Friday that wounded an officer — as well as sustained Hamas rocket attacks and a campaign of incendiary devices floating over the border.

Hamas responded with more than 200 projectiles toward Israel communities, evoking memories of the three wars the sides have waged over the past decade. Israel said its Iron Dome defense system shot down more than 20 projectiles.

On Sunday evening the military announced that following a “situation assessment” it had reinforced Iron Dome batteries in central Israel and in the south of the country. It added that a small number of reserve army soldiers were called up.

Israel also destroyed several Hamas attack tunnels, as well as factories involved in the production of the incendiary kites and balloons, and a Hamas battalion headquarters in northern Gaza.

“We have no intention of tolerating rockets, kites, drones or anything,” said Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. “I hope that Hamas will draw conclusions and if not, they will have to pay a heavy price.”

Two teenagers were killed and several others were wounded when Israel struck an unfinished five-story building near a Hamas security compound and a public park in Gaza City, reducing the structure to rubble. The military said Hamas was using it as a training facility and had dug a tunnel underneath as part of its underground network.

The rare strike in the heart of Gaza City blew out windows at a nearby mosque, an art gallery, government offices, a tech start-up company and dozens of houses, leaving light fixtures and wiring dangling. The Al-Azhar university said its classrooms and the dentistry college lab were also damaged.

Speaking to thousands attending the two teenagers’ funeral, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh vowed to continue Gaza protests and to take revenge for the teens. He also met with the U.N. Mideast envoy, Nickolay Mladenov, who urged both sides to maintain calm

“Yesterday we were on the brink of war, and it has taken the concerted efforts of everyone to make sure that we step back from confrontation,” Mladenov said in Gaza. “Everybody needs to take a step back.”

The strike that killed the teenagers unleashed a Hamas’ launch toward the Israeli border town of Sderot, where a rocket hit the Buchris family home.

“We were sitting in the living room and all of a sudden, the aquarium exploded and there was smoke everywhere and glass flew everywhere,” said Aharon Buchris, who was wounded along with his wife and two teenage daughters, as he awaited surgery in hospital.

Israel has been warning Hamas that while it has no interest in exacerbating hostilities, it will not tolerate Gaza militants’ continued efforts to breach the border and its campaign of incendiary attacks on Israeli border communities.

Hamas-led border protests are aimed in part at drawing attention to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. Over 130 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since protests began on March 30.

With Israel focused on efforts to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent military foothold in neighboring Syria, it has been wary of escalating violence in Gaza. Netanyahu has also come under pressure from southern Israeli communities under rocket fire from Gaza.

Hamas, meanwhile, has been trying to break out of its isolation and spotlight the hardships of the impoverished strip without invoking the full wrath of Israel.

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Associated Press writer Fares Akram in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

California Democratic Party Snubs Feinstein, Endorses Rival

OAKLAND, Calif. — The California Democratic Party snubbed U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Saturday by handing its official endorsement and a badly needed boost to state Sen. Kevin de Leon, her longshot Democratic challenger.

In backing de Leon, a majority of the party’s 360-member executive board ignored Feinstein’s calls to stay neutral in the race. Her allies had warned an endorsement would create an intraparty squabble that could detract from important down-ballot races.

De Leon has long been courting party activists and appealed to those seeking a fresh face and a more progressive senator to fight against President Donald Trump.

“Today’s vote is a clear-eyed rejection of politics as usual in Washington, D.C.,” de Leon said in a statement after the vote. “We have presented Californians with the first real alternative to the worn-out Washington playbook in a quarter-century.”

A total of 217 delegates voted for de Leon, of Los Angeles, while 22 cast ballots for Feinstein and 94 voted for no endorsement.

Party members and activists are typically more liberal than the wider California electorate that has sent Feinstein to Washington five times. Feinstein has turned skepticism from some party activists into an asset in her past campaigns.

The endorsement of de Leon means the state party will spend money promoting his candidacy this fall.

Still, Feinstein outpaces him in name recognition and cash and has a loyal following across California. She won the June 5 primary with 44 percent of the vote compared to de Leon’s 12 percent.

While it’s an embarrassment for California’s senior senator to lose her party’s official nod, it may do little to change the trajectory of the race.

“We are confident that a large majority of California Democrats will vote to reelect Sen. Feinstein in November,” Jeff Millman, her campaign manager, said Saturday night.

California runs a top-two primary system that sends the two highest primary vote-getters to the general election regardless of party. The system allowed de Leon to take the No. 2 spot by squeaking past a slew of unknown Republicans in the primary.

Six U.S. House candidates for seats considered top Democratic targets joined Feinstein’s call for neutrality in a letter to members before the vote on Saturday.

“A divisive party endorsement for U.S. Senate would hurt all down-ballot candidates and our ability to turn out Democrats we desperately need to vote in November,” it said.

De Leon led the state Senate until earlier this year. He is the author of California’s sanctuary state law that was the target of a Trump administration lawsuit. A judge dismissed the case.

Feinstein was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, when she became the first woman to serve the state in that chamber. She is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she’ll take center stage this summer during the U.S. Supreme Court nomination fight.

The California Democratic Party has snubbed U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein by giving its endorsement to her rival, state Sen. Kevin de Leon.

He won the party nod Saturday after a vote of the party’s roughly 360-member executive board made up of local officials and party activists.

It’s an embarrassment for Feinstein, who had urged members to stay neutral in the race. The endorsement means the party will spend money promoting de Leon’s campaign, which has struggled to raise cash.

Still, Feinstein holds the upper hand. She took 44 percent of the vote in the June 5 primary compared to de Leon’s 12 percent in a field of more than 30 candidates.

Feinstein’s allies had warned an endorsement in the race would create an intraparty squabble that could detract from important down-ballot races.

California sends the two highest vote-getters to the general election regardless of party.

Trump’s War on Black Athletes

Snatching immigrant babies may have scored some points for President Trump with his base, but it was never going to light up the scoreboard like tackling black jocks. That one really played to the grandstands. The complicated combination of adoration and resentment so many white males feel for those rich, accomplished über-men is a significant but rarely discussed aspect of fandom, especially in relation to football, that magna cum macho of American sports.

Last September, when the commander-in-chief of toxic masculinity dubbed any football player who didn’t stand during the playing of the national anthem a “son of a bitch,” the war on black men took a spectacular pop-cultural surge. And unlike white cops who shoot unarmed black men, President Trump didn’t even have to claim that he had been afraid.

He should have been, though. After all, he might have sparked a slaves’ revolt that, in the end, could do him in. The opportunity to crack the whip on the fantasy plantation called pro football was, however, just too irresistible for him. Whether it will trigger a long-awaited, long-deferred Jock Spring is the big question of the coming season to which there’s a critical corollary: Will such sustained activism be supported by the white players of the National Football League as well? That hasn’t happened yet and it could change things in major ways.

“For white players it’s about the fear of losing their jobs,” David Meggyesy, a white former NFL linebacker, who in the 1960s set a standard for radical outspokenness, told me recently. “But too many white fans share Trump’s tribalism that includes seeing white players as the brains and black players as the bodies, not too smart, who should just shut up and play.”

Trump, once a pro football owner himself, clearly understands a white male mindset in which black football players exist only to provide on-field thrills, never to be humanized, much less allowed to protest inequality and racism. Meanwhile, the players, most of whom know that they are easily replaceable, often lacking guaranteed contracts, exist at the sufferance of their white billionaire team owners, a number of whom were early Trump donors.

Silent Seasons

Looking back, it’s little wonder that, for almost half a century, black athletes had been a politically silent segment of the black entertainment industry. The reigning superstars — O.J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods — collaborated with owners, television, and corporate America in their successful pursuit of record-breaking wealth, while refusing to take stands against racism. Simpson and Woods even denied their own blackness. O.J. once explained to me that he wasn’t black or white, he was O.J., while Tiger, with a Thai mother and an African-American father, claimed to be “Cablinasian.” They set the standard and its reward system: as long as the players continued to remain apolitical, owners and fans were basically willing to tolerate bad behavior, ostentation, and a sullen refusal to be grateful.

But by 2016, with Trump soon to be elected, O.J. in jail, Tiger in decline, and Jordan now the principal owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, the resistance, led by Colin Kaepernick on that now-famous knee, began to grow. President Trump would be directly dissed when, in April 2017, many New England Patriots declined invitations to the White House after winning the 2017 Super Bowl. That September, after the president disinvited Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry to the White House for comments he made suggesting that he might not attend a championship ceremony there, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron James chipped in. He addressed Trump in a tweet as “U Bum” and wrote that “going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” In June 2018, Trump had to cancel a Super Bowl party after most of the Super-Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles team indicated they wouldn’t be attending. And in that same month, LeBron and Curry once again said that, whichever of their teams won the NBA championship, neither would be stopping by with the league trophy and a jersey with Trump’s name on the back.

That could be part of the reason why, a week before that title tournament began, the president issued a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, who in 1908 was the first African-American to become world heavyweight boxing champion. Both Presidents Bush and Obama had declined to pardon him when asked.

In 1913, Johnson had been convicted of transporting a white woman over a state line “for immoral purposes” in violation of the Mann Act. He fled the country but eventually returned to serve prison time. The son of former slaves, Johnson, who died in 1946, became a symbol of black athletic activism for flaunting his money, his bling, and his white paramours.

Sports fans were so outraged by his success and his attitude that the call went out for a “Great White Hope” who would beat him in the ring.Novelist Jack London even begged a retired white champ, Jim Jeffries, to “emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile off Johnson’s face.” In 1910, in the “fight of the century,” Jeffries was soundly beaten and race riots subsequently broke out across the country with hundreds injured and 20 people killed. Back when a boxing champion was the beau ideal of masculinity, it was simply unacceptable to have a black Mr. Man.

Ghosts in the House

Sixty years later, when boxing legend Muhammad Ali returned to the ring (after he had been stripped of his championship title for refusing to be drafted into the Army in a protest against the Vietnam War), he said he had drawn strength from Johnson standing up to his persecutors. Visiting with Ali in those days, I remember him watching old films of Johnson on a bed sheet hung in the living room of his training camp quarters. He kept pointing at Johnson and yelling, “He’s the ghost in the house, the ghost in the house!”

Between Johnson and Ali, what I once termed SportsWorld produced plenty of ghosts — star athletes who were punished for exhibiting a free man’s outspokenness in the confines of what filmmaker Ken Burns, in his documentary on Johnson, called “unforgiveable blackness.” Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson, now a saint for breaking baseball’s color barrier, was subjected to pressures that probably led to his fatal heart attack at 53; Ali lost the prime of his boxing career and never made Jordan-style money; sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos were thrown off the Olympic team and marginalized for raising their fists in protest against racism at the 1968 Mexico City games. NBA basketball stars Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul Jabbar were treated coldly for their starchy sense of independence and baseball All-Star centerfielder Curt Flood’s career went into the tank after he unsuccessfully challenged baseball’s former restrictive reserve clause that kept players tethered to the teams holding their contracts.

Each of those lives also represented a grim lesson learned by the generations of black athletes who followed them. You can be forgiven for violence (especially against women) and even greed (if it isn’t at the expense of club owners), but you can’t challenge the establishment. As Harry Edwards, the sociologist who advised Smith and Carlos before their Olympic demonstration, once told me, white fans prefer the “grinners” when choosing their favorite black athletes, the ones who allow them to feel good about their fandom.

Not coincidentally, it was Edwards, in his role as an official guidance counselor for the San Francisco 49ers, who advised Colin Kaepernick in his brilliant and apparently career-ending refusal to stand for the anthem.

Again, the empire struck back, as it had 48 years earlier against Smith and Carlos. Without either official acknowledgment or explanation, club owners have simply denied Kaepernick, a skilled quarterback in his prime, a chance to work. In that group decision, the arrogance of the National Football League seemed modeled on the Olympic Committee’s. The severity of the response was also an updated affirmation that, in SportsWorld, star athletes are never to repudiate the values of the establishment, that independence will be quashed.

The Heritage

Sportswriter Howard Bryant, author of “The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism,” traces the recent rise of black activism to a post-9/11 transformation of sports events into celebrations of the military and the police even as African Americans were victimized in America. In an interview with Dave Zirin, Bryant said:

“And now we have black players being turned against their own country by the White House and by the people who own the teams, and it is deliberate. It’s deliberate and it’s designed to demonize not only the black athlete, but the black concern over police brutality: to turn fighting police brutality into being un-American. It has essentially turned the American flag into a symbol of whiteness and turned the players who are protesting police brutality into symbols of anti-Americanism, which could not be further from the truth.”

Zirin himself co-authored “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable” with star Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman Michael Bennett, who decided last year not to stand for the anthem “to honor the founding principles of this country.” That was soon after the alt-right, neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that the president did anything but condemn. In response, Bennett wrote: “I can’t hide behind the glamour and glitz of football and fame. The reality is that I’m a Black man in America and I am going to be a Black man in America long after I’m out of this league.”

While no one can doubt the physical courage that NFL players are paid to display in game after game at the risk of disability and early death, moral courage is another matter. Once you get beyond figures like Kaepernick, his 49ers teammate Eric Reid (who has also been shunned by the NFL), Bennett, Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, and — a true rarity in these years — his white teammate defensive end Chris Long, things thin out relatively quickly.

Those pro football players who want to protest without necessarily meeting Kaepernick’s end will be challenged further in the coming season by new league rules. In a clear concession to Trump and the preponderance of owners who backed him, the NFL decided several months ago that players must stand for the national anthem or be subject to fines. Alternatively, they may remain out of sight in the locker room until the anthem is over, which, of course, is just another way of shutting them up (or down).

For a variety of reasons, despite the president’s focus on them, National Football League players are not in the same progressive league as their basketball equivalents, although the NFL and the NBA are both about 70% black. Basketball superstars like LeBron, Curry, and Carmelo Anthony, as well as white coaches Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr have spoken out strongly against Trump and racial inequality. Oscar Robertson, now 79, an all-time NBA star and activist, has, for instance, wondered out loud just where the white allies of the protesting black football players might be.

“They don’t fully understand the issues yet,” said Meggysey, now 76, in a phone interview. He became an official of the NFL players union long after his football days ended and now he concludes, “For all the talk of color-blind team brotherhood and shared goals, the racialism that black players live with every day is simply not shared by whites. It would be great if a Tom Brady, an Aaron Rodgers had the balls to step forward. Thank God for Colin. Every so often a hero comes forward. Ali, Smith and Carlos, Billie Jean King. You can only hope their message is delivered.”

Then he laughed and added, “You know, this new rule about staying in the locker-room during the anthem, it doesn’t say for how long or when you have to come out. If they could just all get together and delay the TV broadcast of the game for ten or fifteen minutes, cost millions in commercials, who knows. Maybe that’s something the owners and Trump would understand.”

They would also understand that a wider resistance among young men who posture as warriors but too often act like the serfs of the owners, coaches, and even doctors who use them as avatars of their own macho dreams of power could make common cause with those in the grandstands. Sports fans, seeing activist athletes finally standing up as the multi-colored brotherhood they are supposed to be, might figure out which side they are really on.

Clean Energy Is Vital but Still Not Enough

The journey to a world of clean energy without fossil fuels – essential if humankind is to contain global warming to no more than 1.5°C by 2100 – won’t be easy.

One new study outlines the problems for people who want to provide the cement for tomorrow’s cities, the steel for new structures, and the long-distance transport of heavy goods.

Freight shipping and air travel alone account for 6% of all carbon dioxide emissions that fuel global warming, and cement and steel industries release up to 1.7 bn tons of the greenhouse gas a year.

Electric cars may be on the road in increasing numbers, but trucks may have to carry heavy goods for 1,000 miles. For some deliveries, there is still no substitute for liquid fuel.

A second new study confirms that humans already have the knowhow to capture carbon dioxide as it is produced and combine it with hydrogen from water to make high quality liquid fuel. The technologies are still at the laboratory stage and the challenge is to get them to large-scale production at ever lower costs.

Both studies address the big picture. Researchers have repeatedly shown that – on paper – renewable sources could provide all the world’s electricity. But that wouldn’t stop all carbon emissions.

US scientists report in the journal Science that they looked at the “tough nuts” yet to be cracked; air travel, long-distance freight traffic by truck or ship, and the making of steel and cement.

They also looked at the range of new possibilities that have begun to emerge from the ingenuity on offer in the world’s laboratories – including even renewable airline fuel – but they want to see more creative thinking and greater steps towards sustainable building.

Shaping the future

“Taken together, these tough-nut sources account for a substantial fraction of global emissions. To effectively address them, we will need to develop new processes and systems. This will require both development of new technologies and co-ordination and integration across industries,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution.

And his co-author Steve Davis of the University of California Irvine said: “For better or for worse, the long-lived infrastructure built today will shape the future. We’re making good progress on things like the cost of solar panels and electric vehicles, but we need to start tackling the more difficult sectors as well.”

A second US team writes in Nature Climate Change to introduce what could be a new buzzword: electro-geochemistry. There is an argument – and wide-scale investment to back it – that biofuels, based on ethanol converted from crops or plantations, or just burned in power stations, could deliver reliable energy.

There is a second argument, yet to be tested at scale, that the carbon dioxide from biofuel exhausts could be captured and buried, to keep it from entering the atmosphere.

New fuel possibility

There is another way, argues Greg Rau, from the University of California Santa Cruz, and colleagues. Electrolysis of saline water could generate hydrogen and oxygen. Reactions between easy-to-obtain minerals could yield a solution that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turns it into a carbonate that could stay in the seas and reduce ocean acidification.

Hydrogen is already a vehicle fuel. From the materials in hand, chemists could make other fuels. And at the end of the process, there could be less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The dream of negative emissions becomes more plausible.

And, the researchers reason, these electro-geochemical methods could, on average, deliver 50 times more energy generation and carbon removal than the uncertain and land-consuming approach involving biofuels and carbon capture. But such approaches are still in their infancy.

“It’s early days in negative emissions technology, and we need to keep an open mind about what options might emerge,” Dr Rau said. “We also need policies that will foster the emergence of these technologies.”

Turtle Researcher’s Award Rescinded Over Racy Student Photos

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A scientists’ group has rescinded an award to a turtle researcher who included pictures of scantily clad female students doing field research in his speech at a New York conference.

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports longtime Brazilian turtle researcher Dick Vogt showed the racy slides Thursday during the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Rochester. Some slides were so risque that conference organizers added blue boxes to cover parts of the women’s bodies.

Conference attendees complained on Twitter that the slides were sexist and exploitative. The uproar prompted the Herpetologists’ League to rescind Vogt’s award for distinguished herpetologist on Friday.

The directors of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists tweeted that they “regretted” Vogt’s presentation.

The newspaper says Vogt has declined to comment.

American History for Truthdiggers: Birth of an ‘Era of Revolutions’

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

Below is the 13th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 13 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12.

* * *

It was a time of great change. And, as always, a picture—or in this case a painting—is worth a thousand words. In the portrait above, Patrick Lyon of Philadelphia is depicted as a blacksmith hard at work at the forge. He wears an apron and a shirt that shows his muscular forearms. This portrait was commissioned by Lyon himself, and it depicts a man proud of his labor, toil and strength. Here was a working man—blue-collar chic!

This is stranger than it may appear to modern eyes. After all, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, men who could afford to commission such paintings usually preferred to be portrayed in formal dress, adorned in powdered wig and leggings and surrounded by the expensive objects that implied an aristocratic status. Something had changed.

Lyon may appear to be the quintessential workingman in this painting, but he was also something else—one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia. He was a leading businessman, an inventor and, yes, long before, a blacksmith. Pat Lyon possessed more than the requisite means to commission the ubiquitous aristocratic portrait, yet instead chose to be represented as a simple—yet proud—blacksmith. In contrast to his aristocratic peers and forebears, Lyon explicitly told the artist, John Neagle (1796-1865), that he did “not wish to be represented as what I am not—a gentleman.”

There was something profound afoot in American society in the three decades following the War of 1812, a veritable revolution of revolutions—massive changes in economics, politics and society. Neagle’s portrait of Pat Lyon in many respects depicts them all. The United States was becoming more commercialized, more egalitarian (at least for white males) and, to a certain extent, populist. The Federalists, seen as the party of aristocracy, had faded from the political scene, and new factions of the Republican Party would lead America through this time of turmoil.

Technology, infrastructure, government investment and communications: These would all permanently change. Quality of life for most Americans increased, but others, as always, were left behind—victims of a society moving too far too fast. This and the next two volumes of this series should be seen as interacting parts of the same holistic volume, about an era of revolution. 

Lessons of War: Madison, Republicans and the Hypocrisy of ‘New Nationalism’

The War of 1812 was at best a draw, at worst an embarrassing debacle. It demonstrated the unpreparedness of American arms, government and infrastructure for conflict with a major world power. The United States, despite major efforts, couldn’t even conquer Canada and was lucky to maintain its own territorial integrity.

Nonetheless, James Madison (in the presidency from 1809 to 1817) and most Americans, especially Republicans, decided to publicly rebrand the war as a decisive victory, a Second War of Independence. What we know as nationalism—a term not in use until the 1830s—exploded in the aftermath of this indecisive war. If America could defeat mighty Great Britain, again, what couldn’t it do? The entire continent seemed ripe for the taking, and, in due time, for the improving. In time Spanish Florida would be illegally invaded by Gen. Andrew Jackson and eventually would be sold to the U.S. by a Spain that did not have much choice in the matter. The Pacific Northwest would be divided and shared between Britain and the U.S., making America a two-ocean power and cutting the Spanish and Russians out of the deal. All, it seemed, was part and parcel of America’s unmistakable destiny.

Yet the men who had stood atop the federal government throughout the war privately knew better. They were aware of the debacle that had ensued and how near disaster had been. The war had been fought on a shoestring and, generally, under the republican ideology of limited government. The Republicans, from Thomas Jefferson to Madison, had espoused a minimalist approach to federal power, but that would change.

Soon the only party that had any real power—the Republican Party—began to fragment into opposing factions and eventually would become nearly unrecognizable. Suddenly Madison and the “new nationalists” began calling for internal improvements (canals and roads), military preparedness (this time the Army would not be completely demobilized), a protective tariff to benefit manufacturers, and even a re-chartering of the National Bank. Every one of these demands had recently been anathema to the doctrinaire Republicans, including the father of the party, Jefferson. What’s amazing is how quickly most—including the sage of Monticello—embraced the changes and accepted the increase in federal power and jurisdiction.

Wars change societies; they always have and surely always will. Things are gained—efficiency, technological innovations and federal power—but things are also lost, such as civil liberties, ideological purity and, in the case of America, modesty. 

A Society Forever Changed: The Transportation and Commercial Revolutions  

“We are under the most imperious obligations to counteract every tendency of disunion. … Let us, then, bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals. Let us conquer space.” —Congressman John C. Calhoun of South Carolina

It is ironic how many modern conservatives tend to blame government action for all problems and extol the virtue of private entrepreneurship and innovation. How rarely are those two sections of society so discrete and separate. The transportation and commercial revolutions that unfolded in 19th-century America did forever alter (usually for the better) life in these United States. Commodity costs dropped, travel became affordable, information proliferated and living standards rose. This—under the 16 years of Madison and Monroe’s administrations—was possible only through the combination of Republican governmental investment and prioritization of private innovation. The once laissez-faire Republicans ever so quickly pivoted from small government to the funding and application of technological inventions in cooperation with the private sector.

This was a team effort, and it forever altered life in America. Nearly everyone was affected by the proliferation of steamboats, canals, roads and technological advances. Everyone, even Native Americans, became more tied to the commercial economy. Fewer farmers were needed, and other occupations and professions opened up. There were now both more wage laborers and commercial entrepreneurs. This meant that property ownership—once the signal indicator of wealth and status—became less influential in economic and political life. It wasn’t long before most states eliminated property qualifications for voting.

A prime example of innovation, government investment and societal change unfolded in New York. In the 1820s, after years of work, the Erie Canal was completed. Running 363 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, the 40-foot-wide canal connected the farms of the Great Lakes and Midwest with the trading port of New York City. Almost overnight the population of that city, and of western New York state, exploded. New York became, forever, the singular commercial hub of the United States. Local farmers and merchants were now plugged into a nationwide and international economy. As the historian Daniel Walker Howe noted, “New York had redrawn the economic map of the United States and placed itself at the center.”

The commercial and transportation revolutions set off a communications revolution that sped up time and the flow of information. Mail traveled exponentially more quickly and so did newspapers, the primary items of mail in those days. The number and diversity of papers expanded, bringing politics and international affairs into the daily lives of more and more Americans. But there was, undoubtedly, a dark side to this information propagation. Most newspapers in this era were little more than organs of particular political parties or factions, rather than objective news sources. These papers relied, oftentimes, on wealthy benefactors or government printing contracts from the party in power. The next time someone complains about the unprecedented partisanship and corporate influence on today’s media space, remind them of this era of the Market Revolution, the period of intense economic and communication revolutions in the years following 1815.

Winners and Losers: The Uneven Effects of the Market Revolution  

“And if we look to the condition of individuals what a proud spectacle does it exhibit! On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?”—President James Madison

The crazy part is Madison probably meant it. As the chief executive waxed eloquently on the triumphs of technology and his own administration in the above quote, he seemed truly and honestly unaware of how obtuse a statement this was in the second decade of the 19th century. This was, however, a time when few would respond to the president by pointing out the hypocrisy of holding some 1.5 million blacks in chains, keeping several million women trapped in the paternalistic home, and having stolen the lands of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans.

Such was the spirit of the times that a “republican” such as President Madison would scoff at such critiques—after all, those folks didn’t count in his visions of democratic utopia. And so, left behind in this great rising market tide were natives, blacks, many women and some impoverished white workers.

Native Americans, once again, can be seen as some of the great losers in the Market Revolution era. More roads, more canals and quicker transportation meant, simply, more white settlers expropriating their tribal lands even faster. The technology and transportation were not for them.

In some cases, even natives living beyond the borders of the United States were affected by American triumphalism. The “hero” of the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson, had during the conflict seized lands from the Creek Indians, even those who had fought on his side. This opened Alabama and Mississippi for immediate settlement. Only this wasn’t enough. In 1818, President James Monroe sent him on a punitive expedition (with unclear orders) into Spanish Florida, to punish natives and allied runaway slaves who had exploited the international border to raid American settlements. The weakened Spanish Empire was powerless to stop him.

Jackson’s main opponent was a breakaway sect of Creeks who had moved south and intermixed with runaway slaves and marooned blacks to form the famous Seminole tribe. Jackson burned settlements, chased the warriors south, seized some Spanish forts (without a fight) and then refused to leave! He even arrested and executed two British traders as “spies” in contravention of international law and caused a diplomatic scandal. Eventually, of course, the Spanish ceded the Floridas to the U.S., and, of course, native power was forever broken in the old Southwest (the present states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana).

Blacks, slaves, fed the new market economy; they rarely benefitted from it. Contrary to popular conception, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin (short for “engine”) did not lessen the burden of slave pickers but instead increased their expected yield and workload. Now that the seeds could be separated from raw cotton more quickly, the cotton demand exploded. Furthermore, the temperate climate and limitless land in what was then considered the southwest (stolen from the Creek and other native tribes) made the United States the top producer of cotton in the world by 1820. It was cotton that made America, and the South, “king.” It fed the textile plants of England and Massachusetts alike, and the demand seemed insatiable.

Slaves were expected to work harder, rest less often and produce more. Worse still, the massive migration southward and westward (one of the most significant in American history) of farmers and planters from Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas to Alabama and Mississippi also meant the concurrent shift of slaves. With Virginia tobacco less profitable, Chesapeake planters had less need for their slaves. Thus, over the proceeding decades—and up until the Civil War—men from the Upper South sold slaves, broke up their families and fed the “Alabama fever,” as it was known. The black experience, of forced migration and family separation, cannot be detached from the triumphs of the Market Revolution.

* * *

“I went in among the young girls [at the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts] … not one expressed herself as tired of her employment, or oppressed with work … all looked healthy … and I could not help observing that they kept the prettiest inside. … Here were thousands … enjoying all the blessings of freedom, with the prospect before them of future comfort and respectability.”—Col. and Congressman Davy Crockett, on visiting the Lowell Mills textile plants

Crockett, the veritable “King of the Wild Frontier,” was right about one thing. In Lowell, Mass., and other urban (usually Northern) settings, women were, increasingly, leaving the home and entering the workspace. What is interesting, and instructive, is the language this frontiersman used to describe these toiling women. They were, he said, free! This seems an odd way for a man of the wilderness, of the vast hardy Western frontier, to describe the life of dirty, cramped factory workers held (see below) to a rigorous dictatorship of the clock.

A timetable and life schedule for the workers of the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts. A line at the top declares that the timetable is “arranged to make the working time throughout the year average 11 hours per day.”

In the era of market and transportation revolutions, there was indeed now more economic opportunity, but there also grew a greater disparity between rich and poor (sound familiar?). For all the talk in this era of “self-made men,” most white males still toiled as small farmers or wage laborers. Only a tiny fraction accumulated immense wealth.

Some small farmers, often those who found themselves unluckily located away from the roads and canals, saw their business dwindle as the revolutions of commerce, transportation and economics literally passed them by. Many a part of New England and upstate New York became littered with ghost towns and abandoned farms. Many merchants and artisans went bankrupt, unable to deal with the competition of goods shipped in from afar.

There was also, some felt, a loss of independence, community and fulfillment produced by the market shift. Jefferson’s utopian dream of small, independent farmers from the Atlantic to the Pacific simply hadn’t panned out (as Jefferson woefully acknowledged late in his life). This, as we will see in a later volume of this series, led to an explosion of religious, social and temperance revivals—attempts to reconnect a world on the move with the cherished values of the “old way.” This, too, seems a natural outgrowth of all such economic and political revolutions in American history.

   * * *

It was a strange time; one of speed and change; of winners and losers; of growth and of pain. It was the time of Pat Lyon—the rich man who had himself painted as a blacksmith—and of dislocated slaves pushed ever harder in the cotton fields. This was the era of a rising tide of wealth but also of child labor and the crowded women at the Lowell Mills.

What’s certain is that the economic, political and societal revolutions of 1815-1845 (which will be covered in the next two volumes) cannot be studied in isolation. This was an era of revolutions that interacted to forever change antebellum American society. Some prospered as others withered, but all were affected in kind.

   * * *

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

• James West Davidson, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle and Michael B. Stoff, “Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past,” Chapter 10: “The Opening of America, 1815-1850” (2011).

• Daniel Walker Howe, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” (2007).

• Gordon Wood, “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815” (2009).

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

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

Israel Exchanges Intense Fire With Hamas Militants in Gaza

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military carried out its largest daytime airstrike campaign in Gaza since the 2014 war Saturday as Hamas militants fired dozens of rockets into Israel throughout the day, threatening to trigger an all-out war after weeks of growing tensions along the volatile border.

Two Palestinian teenagers were killed in an airstrike in Gaza City, while three Israelis were wounded from a rocket that landed on a residential home.

Israel said it was focused on hitting militant targets and was warning Gaza civilians to keep their distance from certain sites. But even before the report of casualties the intense tit-for-tat airstrikes and rocket barrages still marked a significant flare-up after a long period of a generally low-level, simmering conflict.

“The Israeli army delivered its most painful strike against Hamas since the 2014 war and we will increase the strength of our attacks as much as necessary,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the latest Israeli sortie, the third of the day, struck some 40 Hamas targets including tunnels, logistical centers and a Hamas battalion headquarters. He said the escalation was the result of the sustained Hamas rocket attacks, its fomenting of violence along the border and its campaign of launching incendiary kites and balloons that have devastated Israeli farmlands and nature reserves.

“Our message to Hamas is that we can and will enhance the intensity of our effort if needed,” he said. “What Hamas is doing is pushing them ever closer to the edge of the abyss … Hamas will have to understand that there is a price to be paid.”

Later, witnesses reported that Israeli warplanes dropped four bombs on an unfinished building near a Hamas police and security compound in Gaza City, reducing the old structure to rubble. The four-story building is adjacent to a public park. Gaza’s Health ministry said two teenagers were killed in the strike and ten others injured.

It marked the first casualties of the day. Striking in the heart of Gaza City is typically only seen during full-blown conflicts like the 2014 war and could signal that a further escalation may be in store.

The Israeli military had no immediate reaction to that strike but said it had targeted a separate high-rise building in the northern Gaza Strip that was used as a Hamas urban warfare training facility. It said a tunnel was dug under the building.

Shortly after, Israeli medical officials said three Israelis were wounded from a rocket that landed on a house in southern Israel. It said paramedics in the southern city of Sderot were treating a 52-year-old man with a chest wound, a 17-year-old girl with a face wound and a 20-year-old woman with injuries to her limbs.

Sirens wailed overnight and throughout most of the day Saturday in southern Israel as waves of rockets and mortars were launched from Gaza amid the airstrikes. The military said it identified about 60 launches of rockets and mortars from Gaza toward Israeli territory, of which about 10 were intercepted by the Iron Dome aerial defense system. As a precaution, the military shut down a popular beach in southern Israel and placed limitations on gatherings of large crowds. Israeli police says four of the projectiles caused damage.

Israel has been warning Hamas in recent weeks that while it has no interest in engaging in the kind of conflict that led to the sides fighting three wars over the past decade, it will not tolerate Gaza militants’ continued efforts to breach the border and its campaign to devastate Israeli border communities with incendiary attacks.

With Israel focused on rising tension along its northern border in its efforts to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent military foothold in post-civil war Syria, it has been wary of escalating hostilities in Gaza. But Netanyahu has also come under pressure to act from southern Israeli communities, who have once again found themselves under rocket fire from Gaza in addition to contending with the daily field fires.

“We are ready to operate simultaneously in different theaters,” Conricus said, referring to the dual threats from Syria and Gaza. “It will be challenging to fight on more than one border but it is something we can do and are prepared to do.”

Israel’s military chief visited the border area for briefings and the Security Cabinet, Israel’s top decision-making body, is expected to convene Sunday to discuss further actions.

On Friday, thousands of Palestinians gathered near the Gaza border for their near-weekly protest. A 15-year-old Palestinian who tried to climb over the fence into Israel was shot dead. Later the military said an Israeli officer was moderately wounded by a grenade thrown at him.

Gaza’s health ministry said Saturday that a 20-year-old struck by gunfire Friday during the protests in the southern Gaza Strip had also died of his wounds.

The Islamic militant group Hamas that rules Gaza has led border protests aimed in part at drawing attention to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. The demonstrations have been fueled in large part by pervasive despair caused by the blockade, which has caused widespread economic hardship.

Over 130, mostly unarmed, Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since protests began on March 30.

Israel says it is defending its sovereign border and accuses Hamas of using the protests as cover for attempts to breach the border fence and attack civilians and soldiers. Most recently, it has been struggling to cope with the widespread fires caused by the incendiary kites and balloons floating over the border.

In a statement, the military said Hamas’ activities “violate Israeli sovereignty, endanger Israeli civilians and sabotage Israel’s humanitarian efforts that aim to help Gazan civilians.”

In a relatively rare admission, Hamas said it fired the rockets to deter Israel from further action. Most of the recent rockets from Gaza have been fired by smaller factions but Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said it was an “immediate response” that was meant to “deliver the message.”

The military said its jets targeted two Hamas tunnels as well as other military compounds, including those involved in the production of the kites and balloons. It said the Hamas battalion headquarters in northern Gaza was completely destroyed and footage it released showed a series of large explosions that left a gaping hole in the ground.

From Ali to LeBron James: Howard Bryant on Revolt of the Black Athlete (Audio and Transcript)

In the latest “Scheer Intelligence,” sports journalist Howard Bryant, author of “The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism,” joins Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer to examine the intersection of sports, race and politics. They discuss the lineage of black athletes protesting in the United States, the tension between activism and extreme wealth, black physicality as both an asset and a vulnerability, and the conflation of the military, government and police into one authoritative entity.

Politics and sports weren’t always so closely intertwined. Sports arenas were typically safe from political exaltations, and watching a game was a form of escapism. Things changed after 9/11, when patriotism surreptitiously crept onto the field and into the arena as a result of covert marketing campaigns. Bryant explained that 9/11 provided “… an opportunity for the Department of Defense, or the military, to sell war essentially at the ballpark.”

However, one group of athletes has been politicized from the moment they joined professional sports in the United States: black athletes. Their mere presence on the field was, and still is, a political act. Some of the first celebrity black athletes–Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, for example–built a heritage of racial activism that continued through the 1960s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, this heritage declined. O.J. Simpson famously stated, “I’m not black. I’m O.J.” Tiger Woods identified not as a black athlete but as “Cablinasian,” a blend of Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian.

Now, in a post-Ferguson world, athletes like Lebron James, Colin Kaepernick and Carmelo Anthony have reclaimed the heritage through their boots-on-the-ground activism.

So what does it take to be part of this black athletic heritage? Bryant explained, “You have to literally be arm in arm and take a risk and recognize that this is something that is required of you, is being asked of you. It’s not something that your shoe company can protect you from with a commercial. You have to do it yourself.”

Listen to Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer interview Howard Bryant or read the transcript of their conversation, below.

—Posted by Samantha Shadrow

Here are a few prominent quotes from the transcript, which appears in full below.

The Heritage

32:45: “People have asked me this question, ‘What does it take to be part of this heritage? Is a player who gets involved in criminal justice reform, like the Philadelphia Eagles have done, does that put them in this pantheon?’ And to me the answer is no, to me the answer is you have to, you have to be in the street. You have to literally be arm in arm and take a risk and recognize that this is something that is required of you, is being asked of you. It’s not something that your shoe company can protect you from with a commercial. You have to do it yourself.”

Capitalism and Protest

4:40: “Is it possible, if you’re LeBron James, to be connected with this corporate world at the highest levels and also still be a protester? It’s a very delicate balance, it’s a very difficult balance, and I think that’s going to inform where we go going forward. I think that that’s gonna be the question for these super-rich athletes.”

5:10: “… I think that that next battle is going to be incorporating player power into management. As we know, the players don’t choose the commissioners. The players, especially in the National Football League, they don’t have guaranteed contracts. Their safety is very much at risk. They don’t have the power that goes with the glamour and the money as much as we would think that it does.”

15:19: On military veterans: “They don’t wanna be commodified. They don’t wanna be used by billionaires to sell products and camouflage jerseys and alternate jerseys and all of the different things that come with the selling of sports.”

Black Bodies and Black Minds

7:55: “What’s been interesting to me, especially when you talk about that [mind and body] dichotomy, is the capitalism of it and the commerce of it. It’s very difficult when you look at the LeBron Jameses and some of these other athletes who make money off their anger in a way. You see them dunk and snarl and show that physicality and profit off of that physicality. There’s a lot of currency in that sort of black athleticism. But at the same time that is happening, at the same time we’re selling that sort of black masculinity, it’s also being used as justification for shooting black men.”

18:50: “You do have this amputation that takes place where advocating for your own people or something that is important to you or a part of your identity has suddenly become a negative in a sport where your blackness and your physicality is being profited from.”

28:30: “If the player is going to conclude, at this late date, that without sports they would be dead or in jail then we have failed. We have failed miserably. And you sit and you listen to these players talk about this, that without their jump shot or without their 40-yard dash time, they would be dead or in jail. And I just begin to ask the question, how people who went to the University of Kentucky or North Carolina or UCLA or USC, how you could be a byproduct of these schools and conclude that your margin is that thin. What does that say about where we are today, that it has been a failure and that this athletic story that was once so heroic maybe isn’t that heroic if the players are uneducated. …”

Exceptionalism

7:20: “The argument I make in the book is that the black athlete, because of his role and her role integrating the community, the society in general, before the military, before schools, before neighborhoods, is that the black athlete is the most important, most influential and most visible black employee this country’s ever produced. They’re the ones who made it, and because they’re the ones who made it we have this expectation of them. We want them to speak for us because of that great disparity, because of how much the young look up to them because they’re the ones who have the influence. ”

Patriotism

10:20: “I think the issue for me had been how 9/11 has completely changed how we package, market, sell sport to the public. And that provided, as you said, an opportunity for marketers, an opportunity for the Department of Defense, or the military, to sell, to sell war essentially at the ballpark. To recruit soldiers at the ballpark, potential soldiers and to do all of these things surreptitiously under the guise of an organic supporting of the troops when actually these are business transactions taking place.”

12:16: “These concepts actually matter, these themes actually matter. And to the point where sports is now one of the most politicized if not the most politicized place of entertainment in America.”

14:40: “… It’s not just the Red Sox and Yankees battling out on the scoreboard. You’re also fighting, in some level, for, to use the old Iraq War phrase, the hearts and minds of the people. And you’re using sports as that place where we’re going to try and question people’s patriotism or solidify the patriotism of our citizens when at the same time, what’s also happening, is you’re also getting pushback because of the disappointment on the part of veterans.”

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the transcript below. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, an arrogant-sounding title, but the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Howard “Howie” Bryant. Many people know him through ESPN; he’s been a well-known sports journalist writing for the Washington Post, the Oakland Tribune, the Bergen Record. He is involved with the Weekend Edition on National Public Radio. And the reason I’m excited about doing this interview is I read what I think is one of the best books I’ve ever read about the role of sports in America. It’s called “The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism.” And it’s a grand sweep, from the days when I was a kid and I was rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series against the Boston Red Sox, and no Negro could play. And the next year Jackie Robinson came in, and my hero Enos Slaughter spiked Jackie Robinson going around first base, and the Cardinals turned out to be one of the most racist teams. And this book takes us from those days through a period in which black athletes could rise to their potential, become actually quite prosperous and wealthy. And there was something called the black heritage that was manifested. And then we went through a rough period of the OJs and the Michael Jordans, where there was a deliberate avoidance of controversy and any concern for your own people. And now, in the post-Ferguson, post-9/11 era, there’s a whole new revitalized consciousness. Is that a good summary of what the book is, basically, the trajectory of the book?

Howard Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the only part that I would add to that is simply the collision of this heritage coming from, or stemming from the deaths of Michael Brown and the problems in Ferguson, colliding with this uber patriotism and nationalism that we see at the ballpark post-9/11.

RS: You talk about the fans, mostly white; and you talk about the athletes who are, can be very highly paid, way beyond what they were in the past, as the workers. And then you have the owners. And as someone who sits up there in Row 15 at the Lakers games [laughs], you know, and what used to be a $35 ticket now is a $50 ticket, I greet the news this morning as we’re doing this recording, LeBron James is coming to the Lakers, and I think that’s great, great for the home team. But, you know, it’s hard to think of him as a worker, exploited worker; he’s being paid $154 million for a four-year contract. And you know, reading your book, though, LeBron James comes out as a really major figure in your story. He picks up after Jackie Robinson, or going way back to Paul Robeson, who’s a great singer and a great athlete, all-American, at Rutgers football and so forth, but then a victim of McCarthyism. Then you have Jackie Robinson, and you describe him really as a complex but basically very heroic, progressive figure. And then you take us up through the O.J. Simpson, and you know, days where you wanted to run away from all that. And then, as you say, in the post-Ferguson period, you have black athletes speaking up and taking the knee and what have you. And the hero, the modern hero in your book—and correct me if I’m wrong—is really LeBron James. Can you be a heroic, progressive figure and be making $154 million on a four-year contract?

HB: Well, exactly, and I think that’s the question. I think the other question in that is, too, is do you join this heritage? Do you join the pantheon of Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali and John Carlos and Tommy Smith, simply by wearing a T-shirt, when you have your corporate backers doing commercials, such as Nike, wearing T-shirts that say “equality” when you’re really battling the type of capitalism that puts these guys at risk in the first place? Is it possible if you’re LeBron James to be connected with this corporate world at the highest levels, and also still be a protester? It’s a very delicate balance, it’s a very difficult balance, and I think that’s going to inform where we go, going forward. I think that that’s going to be the question for these super rich athletes. You saw Carmelo Anthony, after Freddy Gray’s death in Baltimore, walking arm-in-arm with the people. The question, when you see that, also is, OK, well, where is the next front in this battle? And I think that when you look at what LeBron James has done and where he’s been, I think that that next battle is going to be incorporating player power into management. As we know, the players don’t choose the commissioners; the players, and especially in the National Football League, they don’t have guaranteed contracts. Their safety is very much at risk. They don’t have the power that goes with the glamour and the money as much as we would think that it does. So I think that that next step is going to be, what do the players do with this newfound wealth? What do they do with this power? And also, how do they balance being the super rich and then also being expected to maintain fidelity to the streets and to the workers, to the people?

RS: You know, your book raises so many contradictions about the role of sports, and indeed the role of celebrity, in American culture. Because I mean, the fact of the matter is, we basically have two images of black life. We have an imprisoned population, and incredible disproportionate jailing of black people, association with violence, and you know, unemployment and what have you. And then we have the celebrity blacks, whether it’s Oprah, whether it’s Michael Jordan or what have you. And your book deals with the limits of that celebrity. On the one hand, it’s a false message of how you can succeed; I mean, you have to be particularly good to succeed in that world, and there’s many people left behind. And also, generally, it’s at the cost of denying who you are. In the case of Carmelo Anthony, he went back to Baltimore; that’s his home neighborhood, and he felt this connection. But most people want to break that connection.

HB: Yeah, there’s no question. And I think one of the issues in the book for me, when I was conceptualizing it, was this entire notion of black body over black brain. And this question of, what do we do with all of this money, and what do we do with all of this celebrity with these black athletes? If they’re still uneducated, if they go to college and come out with no education, the argument that I make in the book is that the black athlete, because of his role and her role in integrating the community, the society in general—before the military, before schools, before neighborhoods—is that the black athlete is the most important, most influential, and most visible black employee this country’s ever produced. They’re the ones who made it, and because they’re the ones who made it, we have this expectation of them. We want them to speak for us because of that great disparity, because of how much the young look up to them, because they are the ones who have the influence. What’s been interesting to me, especially when you talk about that dichotomy, is the capitalism of it and the commerce of it. It’s very difficult when you look at the LeBron Jameses and some of these other athletes who make money off their anger in a way. You see them dunk and snarl and show that physicality and profit off of that physicality; there’s a lot of currency in that sort of black athleticism. But at the same time that is happening, at the same time we’re selling that sort of black masculinity, it’s also being used as justification for shooting young black men. “Oh, I feared for my life,” that seems to be the, that is the excuse or the justification du jour as to why police officers pull the trigger. So at the same time this massive sort of physicality is being glorified in sports, it’s also the reason, one of the reasons why you find these players out there protesting as well.

RS: Patriotism is a profit-making center—

HB: No, that’s right, yeah.

RS: —for these leagues. And as is other good causes, whether it’s wearing pink, you know, for breast cancer or what have you. These are paid activities that are profit, but they also send a message—no, authority is good, the cops are good, military intervention is good, patriotism is good, we should all rally around the flag. And then we should discuss the most recent taking the knee, objecting to that. But it goes back to the Olympics of ’68, right, when you had two track stars having a clenched fist in the air. So give us some sense of why it persists, why there is rebellion, why there is an issue.

HB: Well, I don’t think that you can have this conversation in 2018 without talking about 9/11. To me, the demarcating line in all of this is 9/11. When you look at what you’re seeing in sports today, when you watch a sporting event and you see the flags and the flyovers and the policing and the national anthem, and every, every other shot has an American flag somewhere, the players have American flags stitched to their jerseys. If you watch the NBA finals, there’s the NBA logo of Jerry West on one side of the backboard, on the left side; and on the right side, there’s an American flag. I think that all of this is, these are all byproducts of 9/11. And I think that the issue for me had been how 9/11 has completely changed how we package, market, sell sports to the public. And that provided, as you said, an opportunity for marketers, an opportunity for the Department of Defense, for the military, to sell—to sell war, essentially, at the ballpark. To recruit soldiers at the ballpark, potential soldiers. And to do all of these things surreptitiously, under the guise of an organic supporting of the troops, when actually these are business transactions taking place. One of the responses to this book so far has been “I didn’t know that,” when you go into the sections, that the flags the size of the 50-yard line and the surprise homecomings and the “God Bless America” at the ballpark—all of those things are being paid for by the Department of Defense. People don’t know these things. And I think that was the one stunning revelation for me. As I’ve said before, on the one hand whenever you do a project it’s gratifying that somebody would tell you that you gave them information they didn’t know. And then on the other hand, there’s a part of me that says, well, this has been going on for almost 20 years; how come we don’t know this? Why don’t we know these things? Shouldn’t we know these things? The fact that the Milwaukee Brewers charged the Wisconsin National Guard $49,000 to sing “God Bless America”—these are not organic displays of support of the military. This is a business opportunity. And I think as that collides with this heritage, what you find, especially with a contested and a very contentious election in 2016, now you have a president who’s involved who is taking protest and using it to challenge one’s citizenship, and one’s fitness to be an American, and one’s patriotism. All of these things are taking place in an arena where you’re supposed to go to get away from your problems. Sports was supposed to be the place where, OK, you were a Lakers fan, I’m a Celtics fan, and we’re going to battle it out for three hours, but at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. These concepts actually matter; these themes matter. And to the point where sports is now one of the most politicized, if not the most politicized, place of entertainment in America.

RS: Yeah, you know, you have really startling examples of that in your book. But I mean, one that people don’t even notice, you fly a B-2 bomber over a game, a stealth bomber, and it would degrade the very quality of the plane that made it stealthy. And so they would have to spend an enormous amount of money in a very short period of time to compensate for having flown over the game. And yet, our military budget paid for that.

HB: That’s right.

RS: And there’s a great deal of expenditure. So it becomes, you know, if you want the analogy, in any totalitarian society, the celebration of war. And you know, it was our first president, general turned president, George Washington, who in his farewell address warned the American people to beware the impostures of pretended patriotism.

HB: No question.

RS: And you have in your book the example of Pat Tillman, for instance. Somebody who was a, you know, Arizona Cardinals professional, walks away from, you know, a couple of million bucks in his contract. And with his brother Kevin, who was playing for, you know, the farm team of, I guess, St. Louis. And they joined the Rangers, and then his death, which was by friendly fire, is turned by the military into an occasion for whipping up war feeling. And that’s the context in which, then, some football players take a knee. Why? Because they say: your propaganda is basically concealing a lie about our country.

HB: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that had surprised me, Robert, about this the most, was when I brought this up to some people and we talked about these displays, and we talked about, well, this is a deception—this whole thing has been a deception in so many different ways. One of the responses that I got, and I put it in the book, is well, was well: maybe it is a deception, but because it’s for the troops, it’s a harmless deception. And I was thinking to myself, what is a harmless deception? And if this is an organic display, and if these are displays that should be respected, then why are we lying? Why would you have to conceal something that you would be proud of? And so there’s no question that where we are today, that there’s a battleground that’s not just the Red Sox and Yankees battling it out on the scoreboard. You’re also fighting on some level for, to use the old Iraq War phrase, the “hearts and minds of the people.” And you’re using sports as that place where we’re going to try and question people’s patriotism or solidify the patriotism of our citizens, when at the same time what’s also happening is you’re also getting pushback because of the disappointment in the fact, on the part of veterans. That was one of my favorite parts of the book, was actually talking to veterans themselves and asking them, how do you feel about this? This is why Chapter 7 is titled “Props.” They don’t want to be commodified. They don’t want to be used by billionaires to sell products and camouflage jerseys and alternate jerseys, and all of the different things that come with the selling of sports. But that’s what it’s become.

RS: [omission for station break] I want to get back to your point about patriotism, because that’s always been the gloss over things. You’re right, at one point sports was supposed to be a place where you could escape, go have a beer, get a hot dog, and so forth. But there’s always been this sort of macho thing, and our team, USA, USA. And yet sports were actually, throughout their history in this country, a disguise, a coverup of a harsh reality. I mean, you go in your book to the fact that there were the Negro leagues, and that sports were segregated, and the, you know, I mentioned that World Series in ‘46, the Cardinals were the southernmost team, and they were racist, and they let out a black cat from their dugout, and they mocked Jackie Robinson, and so forth. You know, then we had a different kind of black athlete who becomes—he’s not black. You know, Michael Jordan; O.J. Simpson is somebody you deal with quite a bit in your book. And they are—Tiger Woods. They are sanitized. What was the word that Tiger Woods uses to describe his identity?

HB: Cablinasian. That he was some composite of Asian, Caucasian and clack.

RS: Yeah. And that’s sort of the ideal. Or Michael Jordan; you don’t say anything offensive, you may give some money to charity on the side. And that is what makes LeBron James refreshing in your book. That he lets people know that there’s a there there. That he can feel anger. And–

HB: Well, absolutely. And not just anger, but advocacy. That you don’t have to be mad about it, but he is the first athlete—which is why I believe he’s so significant—who since the mid-70s, since Muhammad Ali, who really has attached his black identity to his public persona. He doesn’t run from it, he’s not afraid of it, he’s not ashamed of it, he’s not—he’s not trying to be “greenwashed” is a term that I use, which is to have money amputate your identity. He doesn’t do that, he takes his identity with him. And that provides a great deal of cover and pride for fellow athletes, and also for the kids looking up to him; that you don’t have to run from this part of you. You do have this amputation that takes place, where advocating for your own people, or something that is important to you, or a part of your identity, has suddenly become a negative in a sport where your blackness and your physicality is being profited from. Why is this such a bad thing? And it’s not just the players. It’s also baked into our language, when you have these conversations about race, and people will say to you–well, to me as an African American–oh, when I look at you, I don’t see color. Well, why not? Or are we moving toward a colorblind society? Well, why must it be colorblind? And obviously, there’s nuance within those words. But those are the words that we use, and each one of those words is essentially saying, “I don’t want you to be who you are. I can’t handle who you are.” At least, the country hasn’t been able to handle you being you; we need to find some other way to negotiate you. The players bought into this completely. I remember, there’s one anecdote I think in Chapter 5 or 6, they all sort of roll in together now, where Chris Webber was telling me about how when he was a rookie, the black veterans in the NBA told him not to have a black agent because of the message that it sent to white owners, that you were being militant. And he was like, well, I wasn’t being militant, I just want to give people jobs who I think deserve them, who may not have access to this industry, and are qualified to have access to this industry. So it just shows you how deep the racial elements go. And that is in a league that’s 80 percent black. So what could it possibly be like in baseball or in other parts of our country?

RS: What I think is particularly gutsy about this book, and getting into stuff that people don’t want to talk about, is examining this phenomenon of patriotism. And law and order, and the cops, and so forth; the display of authority. And you give these people their due. You talk about their bravery, you talk about, you know, the real damage to people in war, and the risks that firemen take and policemen take; you know, 9/11 and what have you. But you get at a kind of propaganda element here, which is don’t question authority. Don’t challenge it. That to my mind—and the last third of the book is really strong on that, what has happened to our culture. And the interesting thing is, going back to the figure of Muhammad Ali, you know, I remember—because I’m old enough to remember intimately—this guy was vilified.

HB: Yeah, he was hated. Very much so.

RS: You know, we should talk a little bit about that, because he actually was an incredibly courageous figure. And he turned out to be a, you know, a very smart, perceptive figure. But I remember at the time, they just wanted to vilify, destroy this guy.

HB: Yeah. Well, one of the areas that I think is really important when we talk about this sort of byproduct of 9/11 has been this notion of authority, and of patriotism, and the conflation of police and the military. One of the interesting responses I got from a column where I talked about, I think it was in 2014 or 2015 I had written a column about Memorial Day, and how I didn’t like the fact that the networks were showing images of the police on Memorial Day. And they were conflating all of these different images of authority, which is a byproduct of 9/11. Because let’s not forget, as much as we talk about the military, you had so many of those police officers and Port Authority run into those buildings, and it cost them their lives. And Fire, of course. And I received a letter from someone who said, how dare you criticize the police on Memorial Day. That’s a day where we honor the fallen. And I sent him a message back saying, dear sir, thank you for your good letter, but the police have nothing to do with Memorial Day. And that’s how far we’ve gone in terms of even understanding what these days are, because these symbols and these institutions have been conflated. One of the areas that had concerned me the most, in terms of authority, was after 9/11, the outpouring of T-shirts that said “NYPD” on them. And “FBI” and “CIA.” And these weren’t hipster, you know, punk kids being ironic, like they used to in the seventies, wearing the CCCP, USSR jerseys. These are people who are supporting the CIA and the FBI and the DEA. If you walk around New York or D.C., you see these being sold as souvenirs. And on the one hand you might look at that and say, well, it’s kind of harmless, or maybe it’s just respect for what happened on 9/11—these citizens are also your juries. So if you walk around treating the police like your favorite ball club, why would you convict an officer? They’re the good guys. They’re supposed to be the good guys. It makes it even more difficult to look at these authoritarian symbols and view any sort of wrongdoing.

RS: You know, this whole idea that somehow the sacrifice is always worth it, that they did the right thing–no. No. The government screwed up. First he went to Iraq, and he didn’t believe in that war, and it was a phony war, and it was a lie, and then he said–

HB: That’s right, Robert. And that goes to what you were saying about Ali, and I didn’t mean to lose track of that part of your question. Was, that’s the reason—to me, there are two reasons why we talk about Ali. And one of the hard things about Muhammad that is so difficult is that we criticized and vilified Colin Kaepernick for taking his knee in September of 2016–Muhammad Ali had just passed away less than two months before. Just before that, we were celebrating this man for his courage. And we made that disconnect. And part of the reason we made the disconnect that Ali could be a hero and Colin Kaepernick was a villain, was because Ali was harmless. One, he was dead; two, he hadn’t spoken, because of the Parkinson’s; he hadn’t been a dangerous figure to public life in 30 years. He had been rehabilitated. He had won his championship back, too, which is one of the reasons that separates him from this heritage of Smith and Carlos and Robinson and the rest of them, because a lot of those guys had been destroyed. And Ali was the one who got his title back; he actually won. And then the third part of that was that he was also, when you look at this country that was so tired coming out of the 1960s, and weary finishing with Watergate in Vietnam, that he was vindicated; he was right. And so why wouldn’t you celebrate him being right? And that’s one of the questions that people have said to me: are we going to do the same thing to Colin Kaepernick 15, 20 years from now? And I say, maybe, maybe not; but why can’t we do it now?

RS: Let’s take it back finally to Ferguson. Because that, for you in your book, “The Heritage,” is really a decisive moment. And I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me what you’re saying is, you can be a famous black athlete making enormous amounts of money, but you can also be stopped by a cop. And you have, you have—

HB: Well, that’s right. Well, and Ferguson is important, because Ferguson was what activated the player. When you go back and look at this lineage, and you say OK—you go Smith, Carlos, 1968, they raised the black fist. And then all of a sudden you start to see this heritage begin to disappear as players began to make more money and people were tired going into the 1970s. And then you don’t see anything else for years—O.J., Michael, Tiger run the show; you know, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley—none of these great players really got involved. And then all of a sudden they’re back. Ferguson is the moment. Obviously, Trayvon Martin two years earlier activated LeBron James and Dwyane Wade with the Miami Heat. But Ferguson, beginning in Ferguson, then Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland—and all of a sudden you had this tidal wave of shootings that were taking place, very high-profile and captured on video. That to me is the moment where the heritage was revived. And in a lot of ways, when you talk to the players, that was where they began to essentially repudiate the Michael Jordan attitude that ballplayers weren’t supposed to get involved, or that they shouldn’t get involved, or that because he didn’t get involved they shouldn’t either. Ferguson is that moment. So that is really, when I thought about conceptualizing this book, two things hit me that made me really think about it. One, 9/11, what was happening in 9/11, and two, the black athlete waking up after Ferguson.

RS: Let’s talk about O.J. Simpson. I happen to teach at the University of Southern California, where I wonder, what education did he get there? What was it, this role model? And in your book you spend quite a bit of time on that. And it was a role model, first of all, that for a young kid in the ghetto, if you get the right sneakers and you buy the product, you’re going to be O.J. And that’s a lie; you’re not. And you better, you know, find another way, and the schools better be improved, and jobs better be there. So that’s the first thing. And secondly, that you’re going to not pay a price for your previous history. And that the society is really going to welcome you, where in fact, in the case of O.J., there also was a lot of excitement that he fell from the pedestal.

HB: Well, absolutely right. And I think the point that I was trying to make there was, one, obviously, the player began making more money. And the players began to distance themselves from the general public. When Hank Aaron was playing, and Willie Mays and those guys were playing, their kids went to public schools. Jackie Robinson’s kid went to public school. That’s not the case when you’re making $25 million a year, it’s all very different. But the other thing that struck me was this entire notion of integration, and it’s one of the conversations that we talk about a little bit in Chapter 9. If the player is going to conclude at this late date that without sports they would be dead or in jail, then we have failed. We have failed miserably. And you sit and you listen to these players talk about this, that without their jump shot or without their 40-yard dash time they would be dead or in jail. And I just begin to ask the question, how people who went to the University of Kentucky or North Carolina or UCLA or USC, how you could be a byproduct of these schools and conclude that your margin is that thin. What does that say about where we are today? That it has been a failure, and that this athletic story that was once so heroic, maybe isn’t that heroic if the players are uneducated. And you’re starting to see this sort of–I don’t want to call it a surrender, but you’re seeing an alternate solution, which is now paying the players. It’s almost a surrender, in a way, or an acknowledgment that we are simply going to use you for your body; that the black brain is not going to overcome the value of the black body in this culture, so we might as well just give you the money too, in college.

RS: Your book gives a really wonderful sense of an ignored history. And I want to just get to two figures: Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson. Paul Robeson, for many people who don’t know, first of all did get, have a great education at Rutgers. He had a real sense of the world, he traveled very widely in the world. He also was a very, you know, a great singer; he understood classical music and everything, he understood different cultures around the world. And he rejected a kind of an American-centric, white American-centric view of the world at a time when the American military was segregated. You know, it wasn’t just in the Deep South, and he experienced segregation. Jackie Robinson was another product of a good education at UCLA. And in your book, you describe how Jackie Robinson was used to try to destroy Paul Robeson. And then you develop a very complex view of Jackie Robinson, that he then later regrets that he was used, and he gets—he’s embittered by how he was used. And you provide, you know, I know there’s the movie and all that, but you provide actually a more sympathetic view of Jackie Robinson, and a more respectful view, I think, than I’ve seen in a long time.

HB: Well, there’s no question that McCarthyism destroyed Paul Robeson, not just in his time but also in the later retellings of who he was. If you view Paul Robeson only through the lens of the Cold War, you’ll never get the true Paul Robeson. And that has been the lens through which he’s been viewed. And in terms of Jackie, I give Jackie his credit for his growth; Jackie Robinson made a lot of mistakes. Jackie Robinson made a lot of missteps. But Jackie Robinson always stayed on the front lines in terms of being committed to what he thought was required for the liberation of his people, to push us forward. He was used by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949, when he was asked to denounce Paul Robeson. But during that testimony, he also recognized that he used that platform for something that didn’t get discussed that day in the newspapers, but is in the testimony. And that’s what I refer to as the beginning of this heritage, where he talks about just because a communist says police brutality is a problem doesn’t mean it’s not true. And lynchings, and poor education, and mistreatment by the culture. When he talks about these things, that’s the responsibility; that’s where the responsibility was born, in my opinion. Where Jackie was not going to be quiet. And after that he criticized the New York Yankees for not [being] integrated, and he went to the Deep South and took a young Curt Flood with him down to Alabama and Mississippi on tours during the Civil Rights Movement, to show just what was taking place in some of those, the violence with the voting rights campaigns and everything. And so what you have here is someone who remained committed. People have asked me this question: what does it take to be part of this heritage? Is a player who gets involved in criminal justice reform, like the Philadelphia Eagles have done—does that put them in this pantheon? And to me, the answer is no. To me, the answer is you have to, you have to be in the street. You have to literally be arm-in-arm and take risk and recognize that this is something that is required of you, is being asked of you. It’s not something that your shoe company can protect you from with a commercial. You have to do it yourself.

RS: The book is called “The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism.” The author is Howard “Howie” Bryant. So thanks again for coming. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Rebecca Mooney. Our engineers here at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And we had a good assist from New England Public Radio at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.