Chris Hedges's Blog, page 606

Why the DNC Is Fighting WikiLeaks and Not Wall Street

Exactly 200 days before the crucial midterm election that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress, the Democratic National Committee filed a 66-page lawsuit that surely cost lots of money and energy to assemble.

Does the lawsuit target purveyors of racist barriers to voting that block and deflect so many people of color from casting their ballots?

No.

Well, perhaps this ballyhooed lawsuit aims to ensure the rights of people who don’t mainly speak English to get full access to voting information?

Unfortunately, no.

Maybe it’s a legal action to challenge the ridiculously sparse voting booths provided in college precincts?

Not that either.

Announced with a flourish by DNC Chair Tom Perez, the civil lawsuit—which reads like a partisan polemic wrapped in legalisms—sues the Russian government, the Trump campaign and operatives, as well as WikiLeaks and its founding editor, Julian Assange.

It’s hard to imagine that many voters in swing districts—who’ll determine whether the GOP runs the House through the end of 2020—will be swayed by the Russia-related accusations contained in the lawsuit. People are far more concerned about economic insecurity for themselves and their families, underscored by such matters as the skyrocketing costs of health care and college education.

To emphasize that “this is a patriotic—not partisan—move,” Perez’s announcement of the lawsuit on April 20 quoted one politician, Republican Sen. John McCain, reaching for the hyperbolic sky: “When you attack a country, it’s an act of war. And so we have to make sure that there is a price to pay, so that we can perhaps persuade the Russians to stop these kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy.”

Setting aside the dangerous rhetoric about “an act of war,” it’s an odd quotation to choose. For Russia, there’s no “price to pay” from a civil lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. As the DNC well knows, any judgment against such entities as the Russian Federation and the general staff of its armed forces would be unenforceable.

The DNC’s lawsuit amounts to doubling down on its fixation of blaming Russia for the Democratic Party’s monumental 2016 loss, at a time when it’s essential to remedy the failed approaches that were major causes of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the first place. Instead of confronting its fealty to Wall Street or overall failure to side with working-class voters against economic elites, the Democratic National Committee is ramping up the party leadership’s 18-month fixation on Russia Russia Russia.

After a humongous political investment in depicting Vladimir Putin as a pivotal Trump patron and a mortal threat to American democracy, strategists atop the Democratic Party don’t want to let up on seeking a big return from that investment. Protecting the investment will continue to mean opposing the “threat” of détente between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, while giving the party a political stake in thwarting any warming of the current ominously frigid relations between Moscow and Washington.

In truth, the party’s Russia fixation leaves significantly less messaging space for economic and social issues that the vast majority of Americans care about far more. Similarly, the Russia obsession at MSNBC (which routinely seems like “MSDNC”) has left scant airtime for addressing, or even noting, the economic concerns of so many Americans. (For instance, see the data in FAIR’s study, “Russia or Corporate Tax Cuts: Which Would Comcast Rather MSNBC Cover?”)

But even some of the congressional Democrats who’ve been prominent “Russiagate” enthusiasts have recognized that the lawsuit is off track. When Wolf Blitzer on CNN asked a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jackie Speier, whether she believes that Perez and his DNC team “are making a big mistake by filing this lawsuit,” the California congresswoman’s reply was blunt: “Well, I’m not supportive of it. Whether it’s a mistake or not we’ll soon find out.” Speier called the lawsuit “ill-conceived.”

The most unprincipled part of the lawsuit has to do with its targeting of Assange and WikiLeaks. That aspect of the suit shows that the DNC is being run by people whose attitude toward a free press—ironically enough—has marked similarities to Donald Trump’s.

Early in his presidency, Trump proclaimed that news media are “the enemy of the American people.” Of course, he didn’t mean all media, just the outlets providing information and analysis he doesn’t like.

What Perez and the DNC crew are now promoting via the lawsuit is also harmful, though more camouflaged. The lawsuit’s key arguments against WikiLeaks are contrary to the First Amendment, and they could be made against major U.S. newspapers. Unauthorized disclosures are common, with news outlets routinely reporting on information obtained from leaks, hacks and various forms of theft.

Just as the government’s criminal prosecutions for leaks are extremely selective, the DNC position is that a media outlet that’s despised by a powerful party could be sued for potentially huge sums.

But—unless it’s functionally shredded—the First Amendment doesn’t only protect media outlets that powerful interests believe are behaving acceptably. That’s why the Nixon administration was unable to prevent The New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Now, the DNC lawsuit’s perverse “logic” for suing WikiLeaks could just as easily be applied by any deep-pocketed group that wants to strike back at a publisher for revealing “stolen” information that harmed the aggrieved party.

In view of the national Democratic Party’s deference to corporate power, we might see why the DNC is taking the current approach. It would be a much steeper uphill challenge to actually champion the interests of most Americans—which would require taking on Wall Street, a key patron of both major political parties.

Nor would it be easy for the Democratic Party to advocate for U.S.-Russia détente that could reduce the risks of nuclear conflagration. Such advocacy would enrage the kingpins of the military-industrial cartel complex as well as most of the corporate-owned and corporate-advertised news media.

How much easier it is to make some political hay by targeting Russia with a civil lawsuit. How much more convenient it is to show utter contempt for the First Amendment by suing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

A loud and clear message from the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle is that hoping for working-class votes while refusing to do battle against corporate exploiters of the working class is a political dead end. “The mainstream Democratic storyline of victims without victimizers lacks both plausibility and passion,” says an independent report, “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” Six months after the release of that report (which I co-authored), the DNC still is unwilling to polarize with elite corporate interests, while remaining extra eager to portray Russia and WikiLeaks as liable for the 2016 disaster.

So, unfortunately, this assessment in the “Autopsy” remains all too relevant: “The idea that the Democrats can somehow convince Wall Street to work on behalf of Main Street through mild chiding, rather than acting as Main Street’s champion against the wealthy, no longer resonates. We live in a time of unrest and justified cynicism towards those in power; Democrats will not win if they continue to bring a wonk knife to a populist gunfight. Nor can Democratic leaders and operatives be seen as real allies of the working class if they’re afraid to alienate big funders or to harm future job or consulting prospects.”

Willingness to challenge Wall Street would certainly alienate some of the Democratic Party’s big donors. And such moves would likely curb the future earning power of high-ranking party officials, who can now look forward to upward spikes in incomes from consultant deals and cushy positions at well-heeled firms. With eyes on the prizes from corporate largesse, DNC officials don’t see downsides to whacking at WikiLeaks and undermining press freedom in the process.

Trump Issues New Warning to Iran on Nuclear Deal

WASHINGTON—Weighing withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, President Donald Trump declared on Tuesday that if the Iranians “restart their nuclear program, they will have bigger problems than they’ve ever had before.”

Trump issued his warning alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in the Oval Office, where the two allies were to discuss the multinational nuclear accord, the war in Syria and other issues during a day of meetings at the White House.

“You can mark it down, if they restart their nuclear program, they will have bigger problems than they’ve ever had before,” Trump repeated.

One of Macron’s main objectives during his three-day visit to Washington is to persuade Trump to stay in the deal. Trump remains publicly undecided but reminded his French counterpart of what he sees as flaws in the agreement, which he called a “terrible deal” that fails to address ballistic missiles or Iran’s activities in Yemen or Syria.

Macron told reporters that he and Trump would look at the Iran deal “in a wider regional context,” taking into account the situation in Syria. “We have a common objective, we want to make sure there’s no escalation and no nuclear proliferation in the region. We now need to find the right path forward,” Macron said.

Domestic concerns were also near the surface for Trump. He refused to answer a reporter’s question as to whether he is considering a pardon for his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, whose office was raided by the FBI. Trump called it “a stupid question.” Cohen has not been charged in the case.

The meetings followed a pomp-filled welcome ceremony on the South Lawn. Trump said before an audience of U.S. soldiers and members of his Cabinet that the relationship he forged with Macron at the start of his presidency was a testament to the “enduring friendship that binds our two nations.” He thanked the French leader for his “steadfast partnership” in the recent missile strike in response to the chemical attack in Syria.

Macron told Trump that together the U.S. and France would defeat terrorism, curtail weapons of mass destruction in North Korea and Iran and act together on behalf of the planet, a reference to Macron’s work to revive a U.S. role in the Paris climate accord.

“History is calling us. It is urging our people to find the fortitude that has guided us in the most difficult of times,” Macron said. “France and with it, Europe, and the United States have an appointment with history.”

The social highlight of Macron’s visit, the first state visit of the Trump presidency, comes Tuesday night with a lavish state dinner at the White House. About 150 guests are expected to dine on rack of lamb and nectarine tart and enjoy an after-dinner performance by the Washington National Opera. On Monday night, the leaders took a helicopter tour of Washington landmarks and had dinner at the Potomac River home of George Washington in Mount Vernon, Virginia.

Tuesday’s meetings follow the collaboration by the U.S., France and Britain in missile strikes in Syria earlier this month to respond to the alleged chemical weapons attack. The U.S. has 2,000 troops in Syria assisting local Arab and Kurdish fighters against Islamic State, though Trump has resisted a deeper U.S. involvement and is eager to withdraw completely from Syria.

Macron was also expected to lobby Trump to maintain the Iran nuclear deal and reconsider his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.

Macron’s pomp-filled three-day visit to Washington underscores the importance that both sides attach to the relationship: Macron, who calls Trump often, has emerged as something of a “Trump whisperer” at a time when the American president’s relationships with other European leaders are more strained. Trump, who attaches great importance to the optics of pageantry and ceremony, chose to honor Macron with the first state visit of his administration as he woos the French president.

For all their camaraderie, Macron and Trump disagree on some fundamental issues, including the multinational nuclear deal, which is aimed at restricting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Trump, skeptical of the pact’s effectiveness, has been eager to pull out as a May 12 deadline nears. Macron says he is not satisfied with the situation in Iran and thinks the agreement is imperfect, but he has argued for the U.S. sticking with the deal on the grounds that there is not yet a “Plan B.”

Trump ended his first year in office without receiving a foreign leader on a state visit, the first president in nearly 100 years to fail to do so. He was Macron’s guest last July at the annual Bastille Day military parade in the center of Paris. Macron and his wife also took Trump and first lady Melania Trump on a tour of Napoleon’s tomb and whisked them up in the Eiffel Tower for dinner overlooking the City of Light.

Macron was welcomed back to the White House on Tuesday with a traditional arrival ceremony featuring nearly 500 members of the U.S. military and a booming 21-gun salute. He was also attending a State Department lunch hosted by Vice President Mike Pence.

The state dinner honoring Macron will be served in the State Dining Room, which will feature more than 2,500 stems of white sweet pea flowers and nearly 1,000 stems of white lilac. Separately, more than 1,200 branches of cherry blossoms will adorn the majestic Cross Hall.

The first lady opted for a cream-and-gold color scheme, and will use a mix of china services from the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

State dinner tickets are highly sought after by Washington’s political and business elite. A few of those expected to attend: Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund and a former top French government official; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mike Pompeo, Trump’s choice to be the next secretary of state.

In a break with tradition, Trump has invited no congressional Democrats or journalists, said a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the arrangements publicly. But some Democrats did make the cut, including Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose office confirmed his attendance.

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire contributed.

Syria Controversy: Who Supports Assad in the Civil War?

Editor’s note: Reports of a chemical attack in Syria have generated conflicting claims about what happened and who was responsible. The April 7 event is still under investigation. On April 19, Truthdig columnist Sonali Kolhatzar wrote a column titled “Why Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria?” Truthdig contributor Max Blumenthal questioned her analysis. Below is Kolhatkar’s response. You can read Blumenthal’s take here.

Max Blumenthal asserted that I made a “sweeping characterization” in my column about fake news in the Syrian civil war. But I was careful to say that the propensity to back Bashar Assad, the dictator of Syria, is seen only in “some sectors of the left,” which is accurate. Judging by the many emails I received from progressives grateful for my column, I am happy to confirm that only some on the left take this pro-Assad position. Others, like me, are disturbed by the pro-Assad trend.

I admit my one mistake was to miss the fact that The Guardian reporters, whose article I cited, were not in Douma. Their bylines clearly noted that they were reporting from Istanbul and Beirut. I take full responsibility for that oversight and asked Truthdig editors to publish a correction, which they did.

Whether The Guardian’s reporters are “notorious sympathizers” of Assad’s opposition is not relevant. Robert Fisk, whose flawed reporting I cited, might well be an ardent supporter of Assad, which I also did not mention. The merit of the reporting is what is at stake, rather than the reporters’ sympathies. In fact, The Guardian reporters based their writing on interviews with the head of an aid organization operating inside Syria who has been in contact with medics fleeing Douma. The Guardian also spoke to medics who wished to remain anonymous, and I have no reason to doubt the paper’s reportage. Most critically, they interviewed a survivor of the attack who spoke on the record.

Regarding a report by The Associated Press, its reporter corroborated that a chemical attack had occurred and reported noticing a “strange smell.” The witness who accused the rebel group of carrying out the attack mentioned an intact gas cylinder, which is likely the same one The Guardian cited in its interviews with survivors and medics—a cylinder, “of the type used by the Syrian military.”

Indeed, on-the-ground reports were contradictory, but how did multiple reporters corroborate a chemical attack with medics, survivors and witnesses, while Fisk only managed to meet people who claimed no chemical attack had taken place?

That is the point I was making. Pro-Assad sympathizers have used Fisk’s report to demolish any and all claims of government responsibility for the attack, as have those who claim no attack occurred at all. In fact, Fisk’s report does not even mention the gas cylinder, which both The Guardian and AP cite, because no chemicals existed whatsoever in Fisk’s version of the story.

The main point of my column is intact: There are a lot of questionable reports about Syria, which some members of the American left are desperate to validate to maintain the lie that Syria’s brutal dictator is neither brutal nor a dictator. My conclusion is that defending Assad need not be a precondition to opposing U.S. militarism in Syria.

We need to get beyond the battle over Assad’s crimes to unite against U.S. militarism, but unfortunately, pro-Assad sentiment undermines the left’s credibility on this issue.

Syria Controversy: Don’t Believe the Official Narrative

Editor’s note: Reports of a chemical attack in Syria have generated controversy and conflicting claims about what happened and who was responsible. The April 7 event is still under investigation. On Thursday, Truthdig columnist Sonali Kolhatkar wrote a column titled “Why Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria?” Truthdig contributor Max Blumenthal questions her analysis. Below is his response. You can read Kolhatkar’s take here.

This month, the United States, the United Kingdom and France launched airstrikes in Syria in flagrant violation of international law and entirely on the basis of images that had appeared on social media.

To date, no concrete evidence of a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government in Douma has been produced to support the Trump administration’s justification for the allies’ bombing in response. The only sources of what State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert described as “our own intelligence” on chemical warfare allegations were the White Helmets and the Syrian American Medical Society.

The U.S. government has funded both groups, and they operate exclusively alongside Salafi-jihadi militants, including the local affiliate of al-Qaida and Islamic State. Both groups also are avowedly dedicated to stimulating support for a Western-led war of regime change against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Neither, therefore, can be considered credible sources of intelligence.

In 2007, journalist James Bamford recalled how Americans had been subjected to “a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq—the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.” The dirty war on Syria represents an extension of that strategy, with the mainstream media operating hand in glove with insurgent-allied influence operations like the White Helmets to cultivate public support for another war of regime change.

As Adam Johnson demonstrated at the media monitoring outfit FAIR, not one editorial page of any major American newspaper opposed Donald Trump’s strike on Syria. And in the attack’s wake, the Western commentariat criticized Trump not for his illegal bombing campaign but for what was seen as the insufficient violence he displayed.

Having exposed itself once again as an eager channel for an outrageous series of pro-war deceptions, the Western media has forfeited the trust of the public and earned the extreme skepticism, if not the angry wrath, of those it claims to serve. As citizens turn in unprecedented numbers to alternative media sources, their governments have falsely labeled these sources as “Russian bots” and waged a campaign to suppress RT, perhaps the only international English-language network willing to provide a platform to critical voices on the recent events in Syria. When British Adm. Alan West questioned the official narrative on alleged Syrian chemical attacks during a recent Sky News interview, his host essentially admonished him against thinking critically in public because “we’re in an information war with Russia on so many fronts.”

In this repressive atmosphere, as space for challenging pro-war narratives closes off like never before, Sonali Kolhatkar—the host of a leading public affairs radio program that has provided me and many other progressive journalists and activists with a friendly platform—attempted an unusual intervention. Instead of weighing in to defend alternative anti-war media, Kolhatkar lectured “some on the left” for their refusal to trust mainstream coverage of the incident in Douma. Posing as an opponent of bombing Syria, Kolhatkar assailed those who questioned the core rationale for the bombing, accusing them of having fallen for “fake news.”

Echoing The Intercept and Al-Jazeera pundit Mehdi Hasan, who recently ranted at an elusive mass of left-wing “Assadists,” Kolhatkar even accused anti-imperialist elements of secretly “desir[ing] glorification of leaders and strongmen.” In doing so, she not only assailed the process of intensive truth seeking that citizens should be encouraged to undertake in public debates over war, she gaslighted the truth seekers, casting them as authoritarian lunatics in need of reprogramming.

Kolhatkar took special aim at veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, who was able to enter Douma and produce testimony by a Syrian doctor that undercut insurgent claims of a chemical attack. To counter Fisk’s on-the-ground reporting, Kolhatkar cited an array of articles from The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, The Associated Press and The New York Times that mostly relied on correspondents outside Syria. Exhibiting a reflexive faith in the credibility of these established outlets, she neglected to examine their record of heinously biased coverage of Syria or the partisan sources they relied on in reporting on Douma.

Citing a Guardian report, Kolhatkar wrongly claimed that the article was written by “journalists on the ground.” The piece was actually datelined from Beirut and Istanbul and contained no on-the-ground reporting. (Kolhatkar’s false reference to “journalists on the ground” was removed with an acknowledgment at the end of the column after I alerted Truthdig editors to the error.) The article’s authors, Kareem Shaheen and Martin Chulov, relied on only one named “Syrian” source: Ghanem Tayara, a doctor based not in Syria but in Birmingham, England. Tayara, who has been agitating within the U.K. for a Western-led military intervention for several years, also was the main source asserting that his colleagues had been coerced into giving testimony that supported the government’s line.

Strangely, Kolhatkar scoffed at the notion that The Guardian could have been part of “some grand conspiracy” to stimulate support for regime change in Syria. She thus ignored the paper’s editorializing for military intervention in Syria, as well as the background of its Middle East correspondent: As I previously reported, Shaheen has promoted material spun out by The Syria Campaign, the PR firm representing the White Helmets, and has favorably quoted the spokesman for Ahrar al-Sham, a Turkish-backed Salafi militia implicated in an array of atrocities. Shaheen was, in fact, the first Western reporter allowed into insurgent-controlled Khan Sheikoun by Ahrar al-Sham after allegations of a chemical attack there in April 2017. Demonstrating his pro-opposition bent, he once tweeted a photo of a neighborhood that had been destroyed by al-Qaida and falsely described it as an exhibit of Assad’s brutality.

Turning to an Al-Jazeera report to undermine Fisk’s coverage from Douma, Kolhatkar openly wondered why any rational person might distrust this Qatari-backed news group’s coverage of Syria. She thus ignored the role of Al-Jazeera’s governmental parent as a top financial sponsor of both the White Helmets and Syria’s al-Qaida affiliate, the Nusra Front. Al-Jazeera has been so dedicated to regime change in Syria that it partnered with Google and Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2012 to encourage the defection of Syrian army officers to the CIA-backed armed opposition.

The network’s Arabic arm, meanwhile, has featured calls for the genocide of Syrian minority groups by one of its most popular hosts, Faisal Qasim. While promoting the White Helmets, Al-Jazeera’s viral site, AJ+, even appeared to justify the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey by a sympathizer of al-Qaida.

Al-Jazeera also has given its “personality of the week” award to one of al-Qaida’s most prominent media figures in Syria, Bilal Abdul Kareem.

While Al-Jazeera might play a valuable role in providing Westerners with a regular stream of information and opinions on the Middle East, it is about as far from an impartial source on Syria as a network can be. To cast it as an objective source, as Kolhatkar did, would probably qualify under the definition of what she called “fake news.”

Next, in her bid to discredit Fisk, Kolhatkar cited an Associated Press article by Bassem Mroue filed from Douma. However, she strangely omitted the following section, which undermined her case for accusing the Syrian government of carrying out a chemical attack by air:

Nuseir, 25, said he ran from the shelter to a nearby clinic and fainted. After he was revived, he returned to the shelter and found his wife and daughters dead, with foam coming from their mouths.

He and two other residents accused the rebel Army of Islam of carrying out the attack. [Emphasis added.] As they spoke, government troops were not far away but out of earshot. Nuseir said a gas cylinder was found leaking the poison gas, adding that he didn’t think it was dropped from the air because it still looked intact.

The most compelling reasons to doubt that the Syrian government carried out a chemical attack in Douma lay not only in witness testimony but in a basic consideration of motivation and timing. The Syrian army had completely defeated the Jaysh al-Islam insurgents in eastern Ghouta and was on the precipice of destroying them in Douma when the chemical attack was alleged to have happened. From a military standpoint, the Syrian government had no need to deploy chemical weapons, as it had already achieved victory through conventional means. From a political perspective, a chemical attack was suicidal—guaranteed to trip the “red line” imposed by Western governments and immediately trigger military intervention.

The insurgents, however, had every reason to allege that a chemical attack had taken place, as stimulating Western intervention has been their only hope for achieving the objective of regime change.

Kolhatkar attempted to turn this obvious logic on its head, wondering without any apparent sign of irony, “Why would rebels frame Assad only to leave their stronghold right afterward?”

Perhaps the Syrian government was stupid enough to use chemical weapons when it had every motive not to do so. And maybe it was so stupid that it has used them over and over again, flagrantly daring the West to intervene. Someday, Western governments might be able to produce enough evidence to demonstrate that this was the case. But so far, they have been unable to do so. What’s more, they have failed to convince their citizens that another war of regime change against a formerly stable post-colonial Arab state was necessary.

Despite being subjected to a tidal wave of deceptions and a campaign of pro-war perception management of unprecedented scale, the Western public has managed to maintain an attitude of healthy distrust toward its media establishment. The everyday skeptics deserve our congratulations, not condescending lectures and elitist contempt.

George H.W. Bush Hospitalized With Blood Infection

HOUSTON — Former President George H.W. Bush has been hospitalized in Houston with an infection, just after attending the funeral of his wife, Barbara, a spokesman said Monday.

Jim McGrath said on Twitter that the 93-year-old Bush is “responding to treatments and appears to be recovering.” He was admitted Sunday morning to Houston Methodist Hospital after an infection spread to his blood, McGrath said.

Barbara Bush was laid to rest Saturday in a ceremony attended by her husband and former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and their wives, along with current first lady Melania Trump. She was 92, and she and her husband had been married 73 years — the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history.

The elder Bush uses a wheelchair and an electric scooter for mobility after developing a former of Parkinson’s disease, and he has needed hospital treatment several times in recent years for respiratory problems.

He attended the funeral wearing a pair of knitted socks decorated in blue, red and yellow books — a tribute to his late wife’s work promoting literacy.

On Friday, during the public viewing of Barbara Bush’s casket, George H.W. Bush offered his hand to many of the around 2,500 people who walked through the church to pay their respects.

A year ago this month, Bush spent two weeks in the hospital for treatment of pneumonia and chronic bronchitis, a constant irritation of the lining of tubes that carry air to one’s lungs. Bush’s doctors said chronic bronchitis is a condition more prevalent with age and can aggravate the symptoms of pneumonia.

Bush was hospitalized for 16 days in January 2017 for pneumonia. During that hospital stay, which included time in intensive care, doctors inserted a breathing tube and connected him to a ventilator.

He also was hospitalized in 2015 in Maine after falling at home and breaking a bone in his neck, and in December 2014 for about a week for shortness of breath. He spent Christmas 2012 in intensive care for a bronchitis-related cough and other issues.

George Herbert Walker Bush served as president from 1989 to 1993. Born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, Bush also served as a congressman, CIA director and Ronald Reagan’s vice president.

Somewhere, Ronald Reagan Is Weeping

Political opponents cannot be expected to lavish boundless affection on those they battle day after day.

But in a well-ordered democratic system, those who fight on behalf of competing parties, interests and ideas can usually find some room for mutual esteem and even occasionally try to profit intellectually from each other. It’s when politics becomes unhinged that we squander the gift of social learning through reasoned argument.

The last several days underscore why not only political progressives but genuine moderates are at wit’s end with the Republican Party and what passes for contemporary American conservatism.

If conservatism in the United States has claimed to stand for anything, it is the idea that government authority should be limited. Conservatives regularly argue (especially when Democrats are in the White House) that the executive’s clout should be checked and that legitimate law enforcement authorities deserve our respect, particularly when they are investigating abuses of power.

The behavior of House Republicans in demanding James Comey’s memos about his conversations with President Trump, which were subsequently leaked to the media, shows a GOP that has abandoned all principle. It is willing to do whatever it takes to protect a president who has no regard for the truth, the law or established norms.

Any doubts that Republicanism and conservatism have given themselves over to one man, his whims and his survival were dispelled by the GOP’s use of the congressional oversight process to undermine a legitimate probe into a hostile power’s interference in our elections.

As it happens, the actual memos are embarrassing to Trump and support Comey’s veracity. And if the Republicans’ obstructionist triumvirate of Reps. Devin Nunes of California, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina had hoped to prove that Comey leaked classified information, the memos reveal exactly the opposite.

It should be stunning that the chairs of the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight Committees are more interested in doing Trump’s bidding than in figuring out how Vladimir Putin may have helped to elect our current president. It’s possible to imagine that, somewhere, Ronald Reagan is weeping.

This episode speaks to a larger question: that the corruption of American conservatism is the primary cause of our inability to have constructive debates that move us to resolve issues rather than ignore them.

The ongoing frustration of many of us who really did respect conservatism once upon a time is not just about the movement’s capitulation to Trump. It is also triggered by the supposedly substantive side of the news: The only thing Republicans in Congress know how to do now that their corporate tax cut has proved to be unpopular is—to propose more tax cuts. There is an emptiness where problem-solving conservatism used to be.

In the period when democracy planted deep roots in Western Europe and was thriving in the United States, conservative parties were led by figures such as Dwight Eisenhower in the United States, Harold Macmillan in Britain, Konrad Adenauer in Germany, and Charles de Gaulle in France.

All of them understood from the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and a destructive world war that moderation is conservatism’s best impulse and that market economies require a social dimension. Capitalism could not work absent an active government that fostered a degree of economic equality and security.

Applying the insights of this more responsible version of conservatism to our time would lead us to seek the best approaches to the very discontents that helped put Trump in the White House in the first place—for example, growing inequality. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found that income inequality has been increasing since 1970. And between 2000 and 2015, incomes actually went down for the bottom 60 percent of earners. There are many causes for division and resentment in our country, and this is surely one of them.

Liberal democracy also faces challenges in Europe, where a 2017 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study found that “social cohesion” is threatened by the rise of economic inequality over nearly four decades.

We need a politics where the democratic left and right compete over who can most effectively and efficiently excise this social cancer from our body politic. Such a debate could be both instructive and productive.

Alas, except for a small, honorable cadre of writers and think-tankers, the American right has taken itself out of the game. Our politics will remain broken as long as conservatism confines its energies to cutting taxes and defending a reckless president at all costs.

9 Dead, 16 Injured in Toronto Van Attack

TORONTO—A rented van jumped onto a crowded Toronto sidewalk Monday, killing nine people and injuring 16 before the driver fled and was quickly arrested in a confrontation with police, Canadian authorities said.

Witnesses said the driver was moving fast and appeared to be acting deliberately, but police said they did not yet know the cause or any possible motive. The name of the suspect was not released.

Toronto Police Services Deputy Chief Peter Yuen released no details about the investigation as he announced the number of casualties.

Yuen said police were still interviewing witnesses and examining surveillance video of the incident as part of what he called a “complex” investigation.

“I can assure the public all our available resources have been brought in to investigate this tragic situation,” he said.

The incident occurred as Cabinet ministers from the major industrial countries were gathered in Canada to discuss a range of international issues in the run-up to the G7 meeting near Quebec City in June.

Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale said that it was too soon to say whether the crash was a case of international terrorism and that the government had not raised its terrorism alert.

A senior national government official later said that authorities had not turned over the investigation to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sign that investigators believed it unlikely terrorism was the motive. The official agreed to reveal that information only if not quoted by name.

The driver was heading south on busy Yonge Street around 1:30 p.m. and the streets were crowded with people enjoying an unseasonably warm day when the van jumped onto the sidewalk.

Ali Shaker, who was driving near the van at the time, told Canadian broadcast outlet CP24 that the driver appeared to be moving deliberately through the crowd at more than 30 mph.

“He just went on the sidewalk,” a distraught Shaker said. “He just started hitting everybody, man. He hit every single person on the sidewalk. Anybody in his way he would hit.”

Witness Peter Kang told CTV News that the driver did not seem to make any effort to stop.

“If it was an accident he would have stopped,” Kang said. “But the person just went through the sidewalk. He could have stopped.”

Video broadcast on several Canadian outlets showed police arresting the driver, dressed in dark clothes, after officers surrounded him and his rental Ryder van several blocks from where the incident occurred in the North York neighborhood of northern Toronto. He appeared to make some sort of gesture at the police with an object in his hand just before they ordered him to lie down on the ground and took him away.

Witness Phil Zullo told Canadian Press that he saw police arresting the suspect and people “strewn all over the road” where the incident occurred.

“I must have seen about five, six people being resuscitated by bystanders and by ambulance drivers,” Zullo said. “It was awful. Brutal.”

Police shut down the Yonge and Finch intersection following the incident and Toronto’s transit agency said it had suspended service on the subway line running through the area.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his sympathies for those involved. “Our hearts go out to everyone affected,” Trudeau said in Ottawa. “We are going to have more to learn and more to say in the coming hours.”

___

Associated Press writers Ben Fox in Miami and Rob Gillies in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, contributed to this report.

Unconditional Love for Israel, Silence for Palestine

This article was first published on Antiwar.com on April 17.

For a writer, any criticism of Israeli military action is a veritable “third-rail” in American politics. Touch that nerve and you’re open to charges of anti-Semitism or worse.

Still, recent events in Gaza demand that some of us, at least, shed light on the plight of Palestinians.

Let us begin with a thought experiment: imagine dozens of unarmed, protesting Caucasian Christians or Jews—say, Israelis or Europeans—were shot dead by heavily armed brown folks, like, say Palestinian Muslims. What would we call this? That’s easy: terrorism. How would the media cover such an event? Simple: extensively and emotionally, probably for many days. The smiling faces of the victims would be splashed across the screens of television networks from Fox News to MSNBC.

Heck, for proof just look to the recent past: terror attacks in France and Belgium, for instance. Certainly, even decades back, Americans demonstrated more empathy for white, Christian victims. When, in 1972, British paratroopers fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Northern Ireland, killing thirteen, the episode was christened Bloody Sunday. I come from a city (New York) where sympathy for the catholic Irish was so robust that certain bars overtly collected money in tip jars for “terrorists” in the IRA well into the 1990s.

Well, something remarkably similar has occurred over the last two weeks, as thousands of Palestinians—protesting the deplorable conditions for the 1.8 million human beings besieged in Gaza – were subjected to Israeli Army gunfire that has left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. To date, not a single Israeli has been killed. This is typical of the recurrent violent episodes in Gaza. Scores or hundreds of Palestinians die—often including many women and children—whilst a few, if any, Israelis are killed or wounded. Still, mainstream U.S. media covers each incident as though there is parity of blame, responsibility, and suffering. It’s a very old and very persistent farce.

Language is a weapon in the semantic combat of the war for Palestine. In the American media, Israeli gunfire is a “response” to Palestinian “actions.” It is never a “massacre,” never a war crime. The very soil on which these events occur are dubbed “territories,” not a Palestinian homeland promised by successive UN Resolutions, not as a space illegally occupied by Israeli’s military as part of what is, in truth, a far right-wing settler colonial project.

Silence is also a weapon, and it’s wielded skillfully by corporate media personalities (or celebrities) running the gamut from Sean Hannity to Rachel Maddow. No doubt, the Gaza story-that-isn’t will be drowned out by the prospective for escalation of America’s already ill-advised war in Syria. But, see, it’s not just that. Last night I sat on my couch reading a marvelous, compassionate, fair article on the Gaza crisis from former CIA veteran Paul Pillar. I quoted a passage from his powerful text, then, as a demonstration for my wife, clicked on the television. CNN and MSNBC were focused on Stormy Daniels, Russia gate, and raids on Trump’s lawyer’s property. FOX, appropriately, had Alan Dershowitz—the wildly pro-Israeli hawk—on as a guest, and even he wasn’t talking about Gaza.

Americans, by and large, don’t care about the Palestinians. They’re busy scrounging a living and struggling to get by in an era of wage stagnation. They’ve only so much empathy to go around. Besides, even if they wanted to know about the violence, even if they might be sympathetic to the plight of Gazans, our corporate media ensures their ignorance. The ongoing massacre in Gaza is, when critically analyzing our media space, the dog that doesn’t bark.

We have neither the time, nor the collective energy to recount the scope of the problem, the full history of Israel/Palestine. For those interested, I’d suggest you start with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s “The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories.” For our purposes, let us instead examine just one stated grievance of the Gazan protesters. They seek recognition of their right to return. To where, you ask? To the homes and lands their parents and grandparents fled or were forced from in the face of Israeli Army offensives in 1948-49. Some families even keep the actual keys to their old homes, heirlooms of an injustice imposed. And here’s where matters get complicated.

The Palestinians are never likely to actually return to those homes. Many no longer exist. Most are occupied by Israeli families for whom the story of ’48 is a distant memory of a crime they, to be fair, didn’t commit. It’s unrealistic—even if that’s deeply unfair—to assume hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (most of whom are rather young) will someday dislodge all those Israeli citizens and recreate a village life that no longer exists. We have to get real.

The protests, though, are authentic, honorable, and explicable. And yes, I’m even including the angry youths tossing stones and rolling burning tires. I may not approve of the methods, but as Martin Luther King Jr. once said of America’s urban unrest, “I think we have to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

The people of Gaza, 1.8 million of them, are blockaded in one of the most densely-populated strips of land on this planet. They are denied the civil rights of Israelis or citizenship in their own national state. They live in a sort of socio-political limbo, with spotty electricity, poor sanitation, soaring unemployment, and gripping poverty. Gaza has regularly been referred to—at least among the few analysts who care to study this forgotten spot of earth—as one, large “open air prison.”

For what crime are these Palestinians being incarcerated? For being Muslim, of course, for not being Jewish, for not simply fading away. They cannot, we are told, receive any relief so long as they support “terrorists.” By this, the Israelis mean that Palestinians are to be punished for voting the wrong way, and choosing Hamas in what international monitors admit was a free and fair election. Democracy is a tricky thing, after all. Hamas, to be fair, has moderated from its earliest, extreme-Islamist, manifestations. It has offered truces with the Israeli government. And Hamas, ironically, gains support the more that Palestinians are kept under an Israeli thumb. This is, like so much American policy in the Mid-East, counterproductive to the point of absurdity.

So what can be done, how can tensions be cooled, and some sort of fairness ensured? It’s hard to know, actually. There are no easy answers and malign actors exist on both sides. Some Palestinians are terrorists; most, however, are not. Still, I’d suggest the Israeli state—and the international community—must at least recognize the earlier injustice inflicted on the Gazan refugees; perhaps accept their symbolic right of return, and offer tangible reparations, as well as a genuine path to independent statehood along with the West Bank.

It’s not so unheard of, by the way. Reparations is a dirty word in U.S. discourse, conjuring as it does images of supposedly unworthy, whining African-American “complainers.” Leaving that problematic framing aside, other countries have successfully granted reparations for marginalized communities. Australia has officially apologized and paid monetary reparations to what remains of their displaced—and nearly destroyed—aboriginal population. Canada, too, apologized to its aboriginal people (which it refers to as First Nations), and has paid lump sums to thousands of natives. Israel, like the United States, is a proud, rich nation and loathe to admit error or pay out damages. Still, there is strength—and prudence—in contrition.

With this I’ll close, for now. Before the accusations of this author’s anti-Semitism and naivety commence, listen closely to what I am saying: this seventy year conflict is complex and ever-changing. There is plenty of blame to go around. Israel has a right to exist as a state and its citizens ought to expect a reasonable degree of security.

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We Are All Ahed Tamimi



by Eric Ortiz















Zero Hour in Palestine



by Chris Hedges

What Israel may not demand is some fantasy of absolute security from any and all threats (which no country, not even the U.S., can ever achieve), the continued right to flout international law, and to maintain hegemony from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. And that is because the inverse of my assertion of basic Israeli rights is equally true: Palestinians have a right to exist as a state, to demand full civil and political entitlements, and a reasonable degree of security.

So, where, exactly, does the United States fit in to all this? It’s simple, really. For it is the U.S. which has shielded Israel from decades of critical United Nations resolutions. It is the U.S. which has armed and financed the Israeli military. It is the U.S. whose media provides silent cover for Israeli crimes; and, it is the U.S. which must act as an honest broker if peace is to be achieved.

In truth, after seventy years of failure, and the long track record of one-sided support America has shown toward Israel, I’m no longer optimistic about the prospects for a two-state solution. That said, as a lowly soldier who spent countless hours receiving ear-fulls of criticism of U.S.-Palestine policy from distant Afghans and Iraqis, I am certain of one thing: America’s unjust favoritism of Israel places U.S. servicemen at risk in the Middle East.

Israel has a choice. It purportedly desires to be three things: Jewish, democratic, and expansive—encompassing all territory from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. It can be any two, but not all three. If it is to be expansive and democratic, then it must absorb millions of Palestinians—at which point it ceases to be Jewish. If it continues to deny statehood or full civil rights to the Palestinians, but remains expansive—it is no longer democratic. The best path seems obvious: a less expansive Israel that allows a genuine Palestinian nation-state its own sovereignty. Only, so long as the right-wing Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is paramount, that solution is off the table.

And so, America too, has a choice. It can be a fair arbiter, truly the “beacon of democracy” it boisterously bills itself. Or, it can continue to favor Israel and ignore the plight of Palestinians.

If the U.S. ever hopes to win back friends on the Arab Street, demonstrate consistency in its application of international law, or just live up to its own purported values, well, then, the empathy gap must close. Palestinians are as human as Israelis, who are as human as Americans.

It is time to act accordingly.

Poll Shows Support for Boosting Teachers’ Pay

WASHINGTON—Americans overwhelmingly believe teachers don’t make enough money, and half say they’d support paying higher taxes to give educators a raise.

The findings of the new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research come amid recent teacher strikes and other protests over low pay, tough classroom conditions and the amount of money allocated to public schools in several Republican-led states.

Tens of thousands of Arizona teachers voted last week to strike after rejecting an offer of a 20-percent raise, because it didn’t include a vow from state lawmakers not to further cut taxes before providing more money for the state’s schools.

“To educate children and barely get a living is obnoxious,” said Elaine Penman, a company manager in Tucson, Arizona, who added she and others went outside to cheer on protesting teachers who were marching by.

She’s among the 50 percent of Americas who say they’d pay a higher tax bill if it meant more money for teachers.

“I’m a parent and I benefit directly from what teachers do,” said Penman, who has two children in traditional public schools and one in a charter school.

In 2016-2017, the average salary for a public school teacher was $58,950, down slightly from the previous year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Overall, 78 percent of Americans said that’s not enough. Just 15 percent think teachers are paid the right amount, while 6 percent think they’re paid too much. In a 2010 AP-Stanford poll, 57 percent of Americans said they thought teachers are paid too little.

Americans in states with the lowest average teacher salaries — less than $50,000 a year — were slightly more likely to think teachers were paid too little and that the national average should be an important factor in determining salaries.

The AP-NORC poll found that parents and those without children are about equally likely to think teachers are paid too little. It’s a sentiment that crosses party lines, too. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats, 78 percent of independents and 66 percent of Republicans think teacher salaries are too low.

Slightly more than half of Americans — 52 percent — also approve of teachers leaving the classroom to strike in their search for higher pay, while 25 percent disapprove. Among those who say they’ve heard about the recent teacher protests, 80 percent say they approve of such tactics.

The recent run of teacher protests began in March in West Virginia, where teachers won a raise after going on strike. The strategy soon spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado and Arizona, where educators joined together online and have held increasingly frequent protests during the past six weeks.

The poll found that 51 percent of Americans have been paying at least some attention to the protests. People living in states with the lowest teacher salaries were more likely to have heard about the protests than those in states with the highest teacher pay.

Americans believe state and local governments share responsibility with teachers and their unions for the disruptions caused by the strikes. Vernita Grimes, 68, of the District of Columbia, said teachers aren’t making enough money for the work they do and she supports them having the right to strike, “even though I know kids are losing valuable teaching time.”

But Caitlyn Scott, 27, of Kent, Ohio, said teachers are earning “about what they should,” and she opposes strikes by teachers.

“I think they kind of committed to being there for the entire school year,” she said.

Half of Americans would be willing to shoulder the cost of paying teachers more and providing more money to schools via higher taxes, with only 26 percent opposed. But while 69 percent of Democrats say yes to higher taxes for schools, only 38 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of independents say the same.

People living in urban areas are more likely than those in rural areas to support such a tax increase, 57 percent to 40 percent.

Stephen White, a high school teacher in Marysville, California, said raising taxes is “probably the only way” to pay for teacher raises. “Look at states that cut taxes and some districts had to go to four-day school weeks.”

That had happened in Oklahoma, where teachers staged a nine-day walkout earlier this month to protest the level of classroom funding.

White said he used to be anti-union when he worked in the private sector, but changed his position when he became a teacher. He said salaries don’t take into account all that teachers do, especially outside the normal school day.

“The private sector makes double what we do,” he said. He acknowledged that strikes are disruptive. “We don’t like that, but sometimes drastic times call for drastic measures.”

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,140 adults was conducted April 11-16 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.

Students as Teachers: Facing the World Adults Are Wrecking

During the first week of May 1963, more than 800 African-American students walked out of their classrooms and into the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, to call for an end to segregation. Despite frequent arrests and having dogs and high-pressure firehoses turned on them, they kept marching. Their determination and ceaseless bravery — later called the Children’s Crusade — was captured in photographs and newspaper articles across the country. Through acts of peaceful and defiant civil disobedience, these students accomplished what their parents had failed to do: sway public opinion in support of the civil rights movement.

Fast forward to March 24, 2018. Naomi Wadler, a fifth grader, is standing at a podium in front of hundreds of thousands of protesters at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. Young as she was, Wadler, who organized a walkout at her elementary school to honor the 17 victims of the Parkland massacre, delivered a searing and heartfelt speech about the countless gun-related deaths of African-American women in America. Her steely resolve and the power of her message brought me to tears. I wondered: Is this what it will take? Will a new generation of fearless student-leaders be the agents of change that America so desperately needs?

As a teacher, it took me a while to begin to see just what my students truly had in them. During my first two years of high school teaching, I’m not sure I loved or even liked my teenage students. If someone asked me about my job, I knew the right things to say — working with teenagers was challenging yet inspiring — but I didn’t believe the lip service I was paying the profession. Much of my initial experience in the classroom was emotionally draining, engaged as I was in power struggles with those students, trying to assert my influence and control over them.

It seemed so clear to me then. I was their teacher; they were my students. So I set out to establish a dynamic of one-way respect. I would provide information; they would listen and absorb it. This top-down approach was the model I’d observed and experienced my entire life. Adults talk, kids listen. So it couldn’t have been more unsettling to me when certain of those students — by sheer force of spirit, will, or intelligence — objected. They caused friction in my classroom and so I saw them as impediments to my work. When they protested by arguing with me or “talking back,” I bristled and dug my heels in deeper. I resented them. They posed a continual threat to my ego and my position as the unassailable owner of the classroom stage.

Still, I knew something was wrong. In the quiet hours of the early morning I’d often wake up and feel a discomfort I can’t describe. I’d run through exchanges from the previous day that left me wondering if I was doing more harm than good in that classroom. Yes, I continued to assert my right to the ownership of knowledge, but was I actually teaching anyone anything? I was — I could feel it — actively disregarding the emotional and intellectual capacities of my students, unwilling to see them as informed, competent, and worthy of being heard. I was, I realized, becoming the very kind of person I hated when I was in high school: the adult who demanded respect but gave none in return.

The best decision I ever made in a classroom was to start listening to my students.

As I slowly shifted the power structure in that room, my thinking about the way we look at youth and how we treat adolescents began to change, too. We ask teenagers to act like adults, but when they do, the response is often surprise followed by derision.

So it came as no real shock to me that, as soon as the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, started to talk back to the “adults in the room” — the pundits, commentators, politicians, the National Rifle Association, members of other special interest groups, and even the president — they were met, at least in certain quarters, with remarkable disdain. The collective cry from their opponents went something like this: there is no way a bunch of snot-nosed, lazy, know-nothing teenagers have the right to challenge the status quo. After all, what do they know, even if they did survive a massacre? Why would watching their friends and teachers die in the classrooms and hallways of their school give them any special knowledge or the right to speak out?

This nose-scrunching, finger-waving contempt for all things adolescent is a time-honored tradition. There’s even a name for it: ephebiphobia, or fear of youth. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato was quoted as saying: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”

And in some ways, Plato was right: the old should be fearful of the young. You see, the teenagers who marched after Parkland don’t necessarily hate the world; they just hate the particular world we’ve built for them. They’ve watched as the rules of the status quo have been laid out for them, a status quo that seems to become grimmer, more restrictive, and more ludicrous by the week. Fight for an end to police violence against unarmed black civilians and you’re a terrorist. Kneel during the National Anthem and you’re un-American. Walk out of your school to force people to confront gun violence and you’re not grateful for your education. In short, whatever the problems in our world and theirs, there is no correct way to protest them and no way to be heard. Not surprisingly, then, they’ve proceeded in the only way they know how: by forging new paths and ignoring what they’ve been told is immutable and impossible.

A World of Digital Natives

In doing so, those students have a distinct advantage over their elders. Adolescents understand the optics of the future in a way that most of the rest of us don’t. They’ve spent countless hours making YouTube and Snapchat videos and vlogging about their lives. They’re digital natives with the astonishing confidence to navigate the gauntlet of talking heads, corporate news media sites, politicians, commentators, tweeting presidents, and anonymous trolls. They not only do it with remarkable conviction, but it seems to come naturally to them.

They’ve been raised not only to believe in themselves, but also to have faith that there’s an audience online for those beliefs. No wonder Rush Limbaugh has taken to calling David Hogg, one of the most prominent of the Parkland student protesters, “Camera Hogg.” No wonder many on the right have accused students like him of being “paid actors.” Of course, Hogg isn’t acting; he’s simply a kid who has made practice perfect.

According to a 2017 American Time Use Study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American teenagers spend around 4.5 hours per day online, though that number may actually be low. In 2015, Common Sense Media conducted a study that found “American teenagers (13- to 18-year-olds) average about nine hours (8:56) of entertainment media use, excluding time spent at school or for homework.” Two divergent paths emerge when considering such statistics. Follow one and the research supports the conclusion that excessive screen time has deleterious effects on the mental health and wellbeing of teenagers. Follow the other and you find those same teenagers so finely attuned and well adapted to the landscape of social media that they’ve become virtual masters of the craft.

Seventeen-year-old student activist David Hogg displayed exactly this mastery when he responded recently to Laura Ingraham of Fox News. She had attempted to publicly humiliate him by tweeting condescendingly about how he had been rejected by four California colleges. Hogg proved himself so much savvier than his famous foe when, instead of responding to Ingraham’s mudslinging, he promptly tweeted for a boycott of her show’s advertisers. More than a dozen of them quickly jumped ship, which was devastating for her. When she issued an anemic mea culpa, he responded on CNN by saying, “The apology… was kind of expected, especially after so many of her advertisers dropped out.” In his measured appraisal of the situation lay a striking grasp of the established order. “I’m glad to see corporate America standing with me and the other students of Parkland and everybody else,” he said, “because when we work together we can accomplish anything.”

That exchange, a real-time adults vs. kids tweet war, had me riveted. The immediacy and efficacy of Hogg’s actions seemed to shatter the well-established dynamics between old and young. Hogg not only showcased his understanding of the way things work in America as so much craftier than Ingraham’s — always go for the money — but also utilized the most powerful tool at his disposal: a single well-aimed tweet meant to upend a seemingly bulletproof target. In doing so, he demonstrated that young people are now capable of speaking far more resonantly than their parents or grandparents could possibly have imagined. The question, of course, remains: Will the rest of us listen to them?

Asking the Big Questions at a Young Age

When focused through collective grief, anger, and urgency, the energy and passion that defines youth can be a powerful stimulus for change. The inherent ridiculousness of the argument against youth-led movements — that students have no platform on which to stand — pointedly overlooks the role of youth as catalysts for social transformation. From the Children’s Crusade of the civil rights moment to the student protests of the Vietnam War, adolescents (and sometimes even children) have regularly been on the front lines of the fight for social change.

The argument against listening to children is often made by those who forget what it’s like to be young. The daily lives of adolescents are, after all, deeply involved in thinking, assessing, analyzing, and evaluating. Nine months out of the year, whether they like it or not, they are actively engaged in education. By the time they graduate from high school — assuming they’ve attended for an average of 6.5 hours per day, 172 days per year — 18-year-olds in Oregon where I teach have spent somewhere around 14,690 hours in the classroom. It should come as no surprise then that, after so many years of being taught how to give speeches, make arguments in papers, support claims with evidence, and study the past, many teenagers are remarkably articulate and well-positioned to grasp the nature of the world they are about to enter. Whether they fully know it or not, they’re regularly being forced to ask the “big” questions about a distinctly messy world and beginning to form their own life philosophies.

Yes, just as I felt in my first two years as a teacher, teenagers can be maddeningly self-absorbed. But (as must be increasingly obvious, post-Parkland) those on the threshold of adulthood can also be astute observers of the world around them — sometimes strikingly more so than the adults who are supposed to provide them with so much wisdom. They’re deeply passionate about the things they love and rightfully skeptical of the world they will inherit.

Asking them to accept the depressing realities of the society we’re bequeathing to them without expecting them to respond, let alone protest, is tantamount to teaching without listening. My students know that the loan debt for their college-age equivalents already stands at $1.3 trillion and is only likely to get worse. It’s a subject that comes up in class all the time. So most of them already grasp their fate in our world as it is. They ask me how they’re supposed to pay for college without incurring lifelong, crippling debt, and I can’t give them a reasonable answer. But of course they don’t really expect me to.

They’ve been told that the richest 20% of Americans hold 84% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 40% of Americans have less than 1%. They can see those vast wealth disparities for themselves in their lives, in their classrooms. They know that this country is over-weaponized and that neither “hunting” nor the “Second Amendment” can account for it. They’ve grappled with the terrifying reality that they could be gunned down in their own school, at the movies, at a concert, or even outside their homes. When we practice active-shooter drills in the classroom, all those fears are only confirmed. They see that adults can’t protect them and draw the necessary conclusions. So when they disrespect institutions, rules, beliefs, and traditions that look like relics from a past that has wantonly jeopardized their future, and when they disrespect the adults who seem to uphold those traditions, shouldn’t we take notice and listen?

Here’s one thing that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Teachers, exposed daily to these very teens, have been among the first to collectively follow them out of the classrooms and into the streets. The teacher strikes and walkouts in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia indicate that support for grassroots movements is building and that adults are, in their own ways, beginning to stand with and support the young.

Those teachers, often in the streets without the support and assistance of their unions (when they even have them), have opted instead to harness the energy and momentum behind the current youth-led activism and the tools available to them on social media to make their demands heard. Noah Karvelis, a new teacher in Arizona, caught the essence of the present situation when he described his colleagues as being, “primed for activism by their anger over the election of President Trump, his appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, and even their own students’ participation in anti-gun protests after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.”

Ultimately, the teachers are demanding changes that will benefit not just them but their students. Still, their detractors have opted to respond to their strikes and walkouts by shaming the teachers and reducing their calls for funding and support to so many petty complaints. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin even compared striking teachers in her state to a teenager who “wants a better car.” In doing so, she highlighted one thing: the greatest insult you can hurl at teachers these days is to compare them to their students.

Teenagers can indeed be infuriating. They can be rude, naïve, and short sighted, but so can adults. Dismissing adolescents for the fact of their youth and denying them the right to be heard just makes the rest of us look ever more like the enemy. All I can say in response is that this teacher is standing firmly with her students and the hundreds of thousands of others who are collectively demanding a voice.