Chris Hedges's Blog, page 653

Why the Gun Lobby Is Terrified of the #NeverAgain Movement

This spring marks 19 years since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. American adults could have—and should have—addressed this problem then, before the 14 students who were recently murdered at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were even born. Where adults have failed repeatedly, and many have simply given up, the youth are now leading the charge.

On March 14, high school students all over the United States will walk out of class to mark the one-month anniversary of the shootings at Stoneman Douglas. Additional days of protest are planned for March 24 and April 20—the latter being the anniversary of the shootings at Columbine.

Following the righteous fury of Stoneman Douglas survivors Emma González, David Hogg, Jaclyn Corwin, Cameron Kasky and others (and building on the networks and expertise of existing organizations such as Everytown for Gun Safety), a nationwide, youth-led movement for gun reform is emerging under the social media hashtag “Never Again.”

There have already been walkouts and other protests at high schools and middle schools in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and elsewhere. The movement is growing.

Whether these protests will lead to real change is not yet clear. Young people have very little formal political power. They do not have the money to rival big donors, and they are a terribly ineffective voting bloc. Many cannot vote, and those who can do not do so in large numbers.

However, teenagers have other strengths, the greatest of which may be a blatant disrespect for the status quo. In this case, they have refused to accept the prevailing wisdom that the National Rifle Association is an invincible bedrock of American political life. They have rejected as foolish older generations’ assurances that there is nothing that can be done to reduce gun violence in this country.

Judging by the reactions of Gateway Pundit, Fox News, and the NRA leadership, the gun lobby is terrified of #NeverAgain, and it should be.

Teenagers have been on the front lines of every major U.S. social movement in the last century. Through protest, high school students have succeeded in changing dress codes, desegregating schools and businesses, ending bans on dancing, and forcing the firing (or rehiring) of teachers, coaches and principals. They have won multiple U.S. Supreme Court cases. They have even toppled governments.

In 1936, students in Alameda, California, walked out of class to demand the re-instatement of their recently fired superintendent, William Paden. The city’s mayor, after initially threatening to declare martial law, caved and brought Paden back. The teens won, and their victory inspired other high schoolers, setting off a minor high school strike wave across the country. The mayor’s administration, meanwhile, collapsed amid a series of scandals.

In 1950, the mayor of New York City was so frightened by a citywide high school student strike that he ordered City Hall to be defended by more than a hundred police officers (25 of them on horseback), as well as FBI agents. The students’ demand was a raise for their teachers, and they eventually won it.

Stoneman Douglas student Emma González has publicly referenced the young people of Des Moines, Iowa, who—by protesting the Vietnam War—established student free speech rights with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision. A walkout by high school students was integral to an even more famous U.S. Supreme Court case as well—Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

But protest alone did not create these victories. Protests only work when they apply pressure on the powerful.

For youth movements, success has generally hinged on young people’s abilities to split the adult coalitions aligned against them. They have had to isolate their opponents by attracting adult allies to their cause: parents against the principal, principals and teachers against the schoolboard, parents and lawyers against legislatures, etc.

In Alameda, the students won in large part because they made common cause with adults who were already angry with Mayor Hans Roebke for their own reasons. This alliance brought positive newspaper coverage for their strike, additional pressure on city hall from recall petitions, and a fundraising dance—for strike supplies—hosted by a local hotel.

More famously, in 1957, nine black high school students desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas by repeatedly putting their own lives in danger, creating a public relations nightmare that prompted President Dwight Eisenhower (and the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army) to intervene on their behalf against the state’s segregationist governor, Orval Faubus.

Just as those students undercut the authority of Gov. Faubus and of Mayor Roebke, #NeverAgain is trying to isolate the NRA. For example, they are using the heightened platform of the moment to pressure companies that either have traditionally offered perks to NRA members (such as Delta Airlines, Hertz and Avis), or that must balance the financial benefits of unrestricted gun sales against the possibility of boycotts of their other products (such as Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Fred Meyer and L.L. Bean).

If these efforts continue, they could undermine one of the NRA’s major public strategies—using mainstream associations to legitimize its fringe positions and normalize its dangerous agenda.

#NeverAgain youth activists have also tried to pressure politicians directly, including the Florida legislature, President Donald Trump, and Sen. Marco Rubio, whose obvious national ambitions may make him especially vulnerable. Thus far, they have had little success. This may have to be a task for adults, who can provide the money and votes that youth cannot. Companies such as Walmart willingly implementing some of the most popular reforms, such as age restrictions and bans on specific weapons, could make legislation more palatable, though they could just as likely end up strengthening the argument that regulation is not necessary.

To win, #NeverAgain will have to continue to ramp up pressure on the NRA and its backers, and gain allies among responsible and knowledgeable gun owners. The movement will have to create division between Republican voters and NRA-backed candidates and, as importantly, between the NRA and other major conservative donors. Activists will ultimately have to force a political realignment that convinces the Democratic Party to take a meaningful stand on the issue.

There is a real danger, however, that the NRA will be able to capture the narrative and capitalize on this crisis, furthering its goal of arming everyone, without restriction—beginning with school teachers.

For now, #NeverAgain is gaining momentum and attracting both support and ire from the nation’s adults. School administrators in Waukesha, Wisconsin; Somerset County, Maine; and Needville, Texas, for example, have issued stern warnings against student protests. On the other side, dozens of U.S. colleges and universities have offered statements of support, promising that punishment for protesting would not negatively impact students’ chances for admission.

The upcoming student days of action, paired with other issues impacting public education, should force the issue into the spotlight even further—compelling Americans of all ages and political stripes to choose a side.

The youth leading this nationwide charge follow in the footsteps of more than a century of teenage rebels, from the Uprising of the 20,000 that challenged sweatshop working conditions in 1909, to the Chicano Blow-Outs of 1968, to the Gay-Straight Alliances of the last few decades.

#NeverAgain activists are also beneficiaries of a protest culture that has been hard-fought and sustained more recently by the Sanctuary/DACA movement, #MeToo and the Women’s March, Standing Rock, the Movement for Black Lives, and K-12 teachers’ strikes in West Virginia and elsewhere. All of these, as it happens, have included the participation of high school students.

How these many movements together make common cause—and identify shared structural and individual opponents—will be of the utmost importance if this is to become an effective mass movement.

That question will depend not just on what the youth do in the next few months, but also on how responsible adults react—on whether they decide to leave the sidelines.

Game on.

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Dawson Barrett is assistant professor of U.S. History at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. He is the author of “Teenage Rebels: Successful High School Activists, from the Little Rock Nine to the Class of Tomorrow” (Microcosm Publishing, 2015) and “The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America” (New York University Press, May 2018).

President’s Economic Adviser Gary Cohn Leaving Over Trade Policy

WASHINGTON—Top economic adviser Gary Cohn is leaving the White House after breaking with President Donald Trump on trade policy, the latest in a string of high-level departures from the West Wing.

Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, has been the leading internal opponent to Trump’s planned tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum, working to orchestrate an eleventh-hour effort in recent days to get Trump to reverse course. But Trump resisted those efforts, and reiterated Tuesday he will be imposing tariffs in the coming days.

Cohn’s departure comes amid a period of unparalleled tumult in the Trump administration, and aides worry that more staffers may soon head for the doors.

The announcement came hours after Trump denied there was chaos in the White House. Trump maintained that his White House has “tremendous energy,” but multiple White House officials said Trump has been urging anxious aides to stay.

“Everyone wants to work in the White House,” Trump said during a joint press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. “They all want a piece of the Oval Office.”

In a statement, Cohn said it was his honor to serve in the administration and “enact pro-growth economic policies to benefit the American people.”

Trump praised Cohn despite the disagreement on trade, issuing a statement saying Cohn has “served his country with great distinction.”

Cohn is a former Goldman Sachs executive who joined the White House after departing the Wall Street firm with a $285 million payout. He played a pivotal role in helping Trump enact a sweeping tax overhaul, coordinating with members of Congress.

Cohn nearly departed the administration last summer after he was upset by the president’s comments about the racial violence in Charlottesville, Va. Cohn, who is Jewish, wrote a letter of resignation but never submitted it.

“Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK,” Cohn told The Financial Times at the time. “I believe this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”

In a tweet earlier Tuesday, Trump sought to portray himself as the architect of the White House staff changes, writing, “I still have some people that I want to change (always seeking perfection).”

Trump acknowledged he is a tough boss to work for, saying he enjoys watching his closest aides fight over policy. “I like conflict,” he said during the press conference.

Cohn was nowhere in sight at the press conference and a seat reserved for him in the East Room was filled by a different aide.

Dating back to the campaign, Trump has frequently and loudly complained about the quality of his staff, eager to fault his aides for any mishaps rather than acknowledge any personal responsibility. But the attacks on his own staff have sharpened in recent weeks, and he has suggested to confidants that he has few people at his side he can count on, according to two people familiar with his thinking but not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.

Coinciding with the heated debate over tariffs, Trump’s communications director Hope Hicks, one of his closest and most devoted aides, announced her resignation last week, leaving a glaring vacancy in the informal cadre of Trump loyalists in the White House.

Turnover after just over a year in office is nothing new, but the Trump administration has churned through staff at a dizzying pace since taking office last January, and allies are worried the situation could descend into a free-fall.

Making matters worse, the list of prospects to replace departing aides grows shorter as the sense of turmoil increases. Vacancies abound throughout the West Wing and the administration at large, from critical roles like staff secretary to more junior positions in the press office.

Multiple aides who are considering departing said they didn’t have a clue who could fill their roles — adding that their desire to remain team players has kept them on the job longer than they had planned. But they warned they were nearing their breaking point.

A number of aides have expressed worry about the legal implications — and steep legal bills — they could face if ensnared in the ongoing Russia probe. The probe has had a chilling effect on an already sluggish White House hiring process, according to officials, and there is wide concern that working for Trump could negatively affect future career prospects.

Meanwhile, the prospects for significant governing achievements in the coming years — like the GOP tax bill passed in December — are growing fleeting, as Republicans face a daunting electoral environment this fall.

In a riff Saturday at the Gridiron Dinner, an annual white-tie affair, Trump engaged in a rare bout of self-deprecating humor, comparing the Oval Office job to his past career as the host of the reality-television show “The Apprentice.”

“In one job I had to manage a cutthroat cast of characters, desperate for TV time, totally unprepared for their roles and their jobs and each week afraid of having their asses fired — and the other job I was the host of a smash television hit.”

___

Lemire reported from New York. AP writers Darlene Superville, Jill Colvin, and Ken Thomas contributed.

A Neighbor Named Adolf

View Liesl Bradner’s accompanying photo essay on Nazis in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

Every kid has a childhood story of a creepy old neighbor next door. Just imagine that that neighbor is Adolf Hitler.

This was a reality for Edgar Feuchtwanger, who was 5 years old when he first laid eyes on the future führer. The now 93-year-old chronicles his 10 years of living across the street from a man who would become the modern definition of evil in his new memoir, “Hitler, My Neighbor: Memories of a Jewish Childhood, 1929-1939.”

Told from the viewpoint of a young Jewish-German boy, Feuchtwanger offers a unique and singular perspective. Feuchtwanger, who lived two doors down from Hitler for a decade, documents the years leading up to World War II and the repercussions it had on him and his family.

In 1929, with his popularity on the rise, Hitler took up residence at Prinzregentenplatz 16, a luxurious, nine-room, private flat in Munich visible from young Edgar’s window. One day, while walking down the sidewalk with his German nanny, Rosie, Edgar saw Hitler being shuttled into his Mercedes. Feuchtwanger writes about being close enough to see “a cut from shaving, his nose and ear hairs and his steel blue eyes.”

An only child growing up in a political and literary family, Feuchtwanger learned about current events by eavesdropping on his parents’ and their friends’ conversations. His uncle was prominent novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger. His father, Ludwig, was a lawyer and writer who worked with such authors as Thomas Mann. Yet despite Ludwig’s intelligence and the sturmabteilung (brownshirts) roaming the streets, he wasn’t worried, believing that “no one wants a dictatorship.”

Uncle Lion’s book, “Jew Süss,” was the only title selling better than Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” at the time, making Edgar and his relatives a target. Soon after Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, life drastically changed for young Edgar. His nanny was forced to leave the Jewish household when the Nuremberg race laws went into effect. His father lost his publishing job, and school assignments consisted of drawing perfect swastikas and propagandized history lessons of Germany. The father of his friend Beate was forced to walk the streets of Munich holding a placard that read: “I’m a Jew and I’ll never criticize the police again.”

In the aftermath of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Edgar’s father was arrested and imprisoned at Dachau but managed to escape and make his way to England, where he was reunited with his family.

Feuchtwanger’s thoughts before the recent rise of neo-Nazism in America: “Encourage vigilance: You can’t be too careful about prejudice and anti-Semitism. It’s always lurking.”

Around the same time Edgar was watching his neighbor’s radical rise to dictatorship, across the Atlantic, groups of Nazi agents and German sympathizers were plotting to take over Los Angeles, ridding the town of Jews.

With the rise of white supremacy, blatant racism and neo-Nazi marches resurfacing in towns across the country, it’s not hard to imagine Nazi stormtroopers goose-stepping down the suburban streets of Los Angeles.

“Hitler, My Neighbor”
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That’s just what happened in the 1930s. The German American Bund, the American arm of the Nazi party, staged rallies and meetings filled with swastikas displayed next to red, white and blue American flags.

The majority of Americans paid little or no attention to the German meetings and flyers that peppered the city. They were more concerned with surviving the Great Depression than with fighting Nazism. The lack of interest also could be attributed to the fact that the 1930s were the most anti-Semitic period in the U.S., rife with racism against Jews, Catholics and African-Americans. This would explain how Camp Sutter, a Nazi summer training camp at Los Angeles County’s Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park—in a portion of the park known as Hindenburg Park at the time—was able to recruit children in broad daylight, and why locals didn’t seem to resist when 6,000 German-Americans celebrated the start of the war by raising a swastika statue in the same park. Their long-term plans: to seize control of the government and launch armed revolts and uprisings against Jews.

Two recent books divulge this little-known period of escalating Nazism in the years leading up to World War II. “Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America,” by University of Southern California history professor Steven Ross (see Truthdig’s review here), and “Hollywood Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles,” by Laura Rosenzweig (New York University Press), uncover the incredible true story of Jewish spy rings formed to thwart the Nazis’ nefarious plans. Both books prominently feature unassuming Jewish attorney-turned-spymaster Leon Lewis and his clandestine efforts to expose the Nazi movement and American-born fascist groups in Los Angeles.

A World War I veteran and former director of the Anti-Defamation League, Lewis recruited a small but shrewd network of spies composed of World War I veterans and their spouses. Disgruntled and feeling betrayed by the U.S. government’s cuts in disability payments, veterans made perfect undercover agents but also were vulnerable to Nazi recruiters. Lewis used this fact as a perfect foil for his informants to infiltrate Nazi hangouts.

The 44-year-old Lewis became an advocate for veterans rights while working for the War Risk Bureau. After the war, he monitored the foreign press, tracing the rise of anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe.

With the FBI focused on the communist threat and local police on the Ku Klux Klan, Lewis, along with his team of spies, took it upon himself to root out un-American groups and collect proof of Nazis in L.A. before letting the FBI take over.

Los Angeles was an important target for the Nazis in the early 1930s because it was home to Hollywood, “the world’s greatest propaganda machine,” according to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Hitler considered Hollywood the most dangerous town in America due to the reign of Jewish moguls over the motion picture industry. “The cinematic image has far greater possibilities for propaganda than the written word,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.”

Rosenzweig began writing “Hollywood Spies” as her dissertation 10 years ago. She discloses the undercover surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles funded by the most powerful figures in the film industry. Believing the authorities would not trust findings coming directly from them, these uber-wealthy moguls filtered money through the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee. Not only did they secretly finance Lewis’ spy ring, they also paid private investigators to infiltrate Nazi and fascist organizations in the area, such as the Silver Shirts, American Warriors, American Nationalist Party and the KKK.

Nefarious plots were planned. They included sabotaging local military installations, gunning down Jews in Boyle Heights and, most disturbing, hanging 20 prominent movie stars and executives, such as Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny and Sam Goldwyn. Nazis infiltrated Jewish studios as extras to disrupt films considered anti-German. Due to the resolve of Lewis and Hollywood backers, none of their plans came to fruition. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the government took action and rounded up the Nazis and fascist organizations, marking an end to Lewis’ surveillance.

Were it not for Lewis and his spies, Los Angeles might have become a very different town.

On Spies

At a recent lecture at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, author Steven Ross sat down with Ben Macintyre, best-selling author of fantastic true tales of World War II British espionage. Like Ross’ discovery of Lewis’ spy ring, many of Macintyre’s incredible stories weren’t disclosed until decades after World War II. Main characters were either inconspicuous civilians or misfits and criminals who somehow found their calling as double agents.

As Macintyre chatted about how he learned of these people’s secret missions, he brought up the topic of historical documents. In the past, we had scribbled notes on torn paper, diaries and tactile documents to uncover and peruse. But with everything now digitized and the originals sometimes destroyed, how will personal secrets and shady deeds be exposed?

Lewis destroyed some of his documents, fearing the Nazis were getting close. Luckily, the majority of papers documenting the activities of Nazis and fascists in Los Angeles and the existence of a Jewish spy ring were discovered 80 years later. The documents now are archived at the Delmar T. Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge.

Arctic Finishes Warmest Winter on Record

WASHINGTON—Winter at the top of the world wimped out this year.

The Arctic just finished its warmest winter on record. And sea ice hit record lows for this time of year, with plenty of open water where ocean water normally freezes into thick sheets of ice, new U.S. weather data show.

Scientists say what’s happening is unprecedented, part of a global warming-driven vicious cycle that likely plays a role in strong, icy storms in Europe and the U.S. Northeast.

“It’s just crazy, crazy stuff,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who has been studying the Arctic since 1982. “These heat waves, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

It’s been so unusually warm that the land weather station closest to the North Pole — at the tip of Greenland — spent more than 60 hours above freezing in February. Before this year, scientists had seen the temperature there rise above freezing in February only twice before, and only ever so briefly. Last month’s record-hot temperatures at Cape Morris Jesup have been more like those in May, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.

But it’s more than that one place. Across the Arctic Circle in Barrow, Alaska, February was 18 degrees (10 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal and the entire winter averaged 14 degrees (7.8 degrees Celsius) above normal. Of nearly three dozen different Arctic weather stations, 15 of them were at least 10 degrees (5.6 degrees Celsius) above normal for the winter, according to data from climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Meteorologists consider December, January and February to be winter, and Arctic weather stations averaged 8.8 degrees (4.9 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal for the season that just ended. The air above the Chukchi and Bering seas near Alaska averaged about 20 degrees (11 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal for February, the data center reported.

“The extended warmth really has kind of staggered all of us,” Mottram said.

In February, Arctic sea ice covered 5.4 million square miles (13.9 million square kilometers), about 62,000 square miles (160,000 square kilometers) smaller than last year’s record low, the ice data center said Tuesday. The difference is an area about the size of the state of Georgia. Sea ice coverage in February also was 521,000 square miles (1.4 million square kilometers) below the 30-year normal — an area nearly twice the size of Texas.

Sea ice is frozen ocean water that — in contrast to icebergs and glaciers — forms, grows and melts on the ocean. It is still growing, but “whatever we grow now is going to be thin stuff” that easily melts in the summer, Serreze said.

Near Greenland, warm air moved north up over a section of the Atlantic that usually has sea ice, Mottram said. Something similar was happening in the Pacific with open water on the normally iced up Bering Sea, said data center senior scientist Walt Meier. To be happening on opposite sides of the Arctic at the same time is unusual, Meier said.

While some natural weather fronts were involved, “climate change is the overriding thing,” Meier said. “When you have warmer temperatures you are going to melt more ice and it’s going to grow more slowly.”

In the winter, sea ice “acts as a lid to keep the warmth of the water at bay” but when there is less sea ice, more heat goes into the air, Brettschneider said. “You end up with a vicious cycle of warm air preventing sea ice formation and lack of sea ice allowing warmth to escape into the air.”

One scientific theory is that this is changing weather further south and plays a role with extreme events, especially in winter.

The theory is still debated but gaining acceptance. It suggests that reduced sea ice, especially in the winter, reduces the difference in atmospheric pressure between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, weakening the jet stream. The jet stream is the usually fast-moving west-east current of air that affects daily weather and moves storm fronts along. A weaker jet stream often means strange weather, leaving storms stuck in place for days on end, said one of the theory’s leading proponents, Rutgers University’s Jennifer Francis. She points to recent U.S. nor’easters and freak snowstorms in Europe.

“This is what we’ve been talking about; it couldn’t be more classic,” Francis said. “If you look at the whole picture, the whole jet stream around the northern hemisphere, it’s had these very large excursions north and south and that’s led to all of the wacky weather.”

“The underlying disease that’s causing this is getting worse,” Francis said, referring to heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas. “These are just the symptoms.”

___

This article is part of an Associated Press series produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

What Trump Is Breaking May Take a Long Time to Repair

As the saying goes, you don’t miss the water until the well runs dry: This deeply aberrant presidency threatens to cost the nation much more than even some of Donald Trump’s harshest critics may realize.

From 1988-1992, I was The Washington Post’s correspondent in Buenos Aires, covering all of South America. It was a time when countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Chile—emerging from years of authoritarian rule—were struggling to re-establish democratic norms, and I learned one important lesson: It’s easy to lose the habits and values of democracy, but incredibly hard to get them back.

Perhaps most difficult of all is to recover lost faith in the rule of law. That is why Trump’s very public desire to use the legal system as a weapon against his political opponents is so damaging. “Lock her up” is more than a call to imprison Hillary Clinton. It is, potentially, a tragic epitaph for the consensus view of our legal system as a disinterested finder of fact and dispenser of justice.

In the countries I covered, military rulers had imprisoned, exiled and assassinated their internal foes. It was understandable that democratically elected governments would struggle—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to find ways to hold the murderous generals and admirals accountable. Decades later, however, the pattern still persists.

Democratically elected presidents such as Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil have been hit with serious criminal charges since leaving office. Alberto Fujimori of Peru was extradited from Chile, tried and imprisoned for years before the current president pardoned him on humanitarian grounds. In the United States, we do not seek to jail our out-of-power leaders. Trump, with his repeated calls for the Justice Department to go after Clinton, is determined to establish the custom.

Those former leaders were charged not just with political offenses but also with corruption—another bad habit that Trump is trying to instill.

In most of the South American countries I covered, transparency was a joke. Public officials were assumed to be in the pocket of some special interest—rewarded not just with campaign donations but with secret offshore bank accounts and the occasional suitcase full of cash. I reported on a coup in Paraguay that was led by a general—a lifelong public servant—who, even before seizing the presidency, had built himself a mansion that looked like a replica of the Petit Trianon palace at Versailles.

Trump and his family have refused to divest themselves of their businesses or even draw more than a flimsy veil between their official actions and the impact those actions have on their personal finances. Does the administration’s policy toward Panama really have nothing to do with a bitter dispute over the Trump-branded hotel in Panama City? Does the administration’s tough new attitude toward Qatar really have nothing to do with that nation’s refusal to invest in Jared Kushner’s debt-laden real estate company?

It’s not the potential answers to those questions that are so corrosive; it’s the questions themselves. As in many countries whose governance we scoff at, Americans must now wonder whether policy is being tailored for our leaders’ personal gain.

When the rule of law and financial probity can no longer be assumed, the vacuum is filled with conspiracy theories. The president himself is a conspiratorialist par excellence; he was, after all, the chief purveyor of the birther nonsense. Since neither his words nor those of his press office can be believed, it is natural—but incredibly damaging—to assume that the real story is being hidden from us, for reasons that must be nefarious.

During my years in Buenos Aires, every once in a while some renegade military officer would make a pathetic attempt to stage a new coup; once, when I called home at the end of a long reporting trip, my wife matter-of-factly advised that from the airport I take the long way to our house because a would-be generalissimo was blocking the shortcut with a bunch of tanks, making traffic simply a mess.

I came to cherish the long American tradition of civilian control of the military. Now we are forced to rely on three generals—Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser H.R. McMaster—to keep an ignorant and impetuous president from rashly triggering Armageddon.

Despite his recent joke about making himself president-for-life, Trump won’t be around forever. But the damage he is doing will remain—and it may take years of hard work to repair.

Get Me Out of Wakanda!

This article first ran on Black Agenda Report on Feb. 22.

#EnemyPropaganda

I finally got around to seeing the “Black Panther” movie Tuesday. I’ve been black nearly seven decades. My blackness does not require affirmation from the Disney/Marvel Comics Universe, where Tony Stark is a greedy Pentagon contractor, where Captain America is a genetically modified organism, where the Wakandan king and the wannabe king both work with/for the CIA, and where Daredevil’s pals (season 1 episode 4) note that investigative reporting on “teachers union scandals” is as personally perilous as crossing the Mafia.

For those of us aiming to build a better world, this movie is nothing short of enemy propaganda.

#GetMeTheHellOutaWakanda

In the “Black Panther” movie, all the Wakandan players are royalty, their counselors, their advisers or their rivals. All the strikingly beautiful and capable Wakandan women take orders from men. The only unambiguous good guy is the Frodo-looking CIA agent. The homicidal Killmonger character is calculated to sully the very notion of black rebellion against unjust authority, while Pan Africanism and humanism are defecated upon from multiple angles. Cinematic bar fights, car chases and battle scenes are a dime a dozen, and worst of all, Wakanda isn’t even rendered in any visually inspiring way.

#TheThirstIsReal

The movie disrespects its audience and is a standing insult to science fiction and afro-futurism. As Dr. Jared Ball points out, we can’t just go make and market another movie to compete with this one. Disney/Marvel Studios put tens of millions into the promotion of this thing alone, and for now, millions of people are buying their message. That’s called cultural hegemony.

Those who would drink from this nasty water for “affirmation” and “black joy” must be deeply, desperately thirsty. And evidently, thirst confuses before it kills.

The only good thing I got from this movie was the motivation to look for and find some real, respectful, challenging and innovative science fiction and afro-futurism, preferably written by some black women to wash the rancid taste of Marvel’s superhero-industrial complex from the inside of my head.

#EmailISDarkSocialMedia

I wasn’t going to record this commentary for Black Agenda Radio. Originally it was a Facebook post, but it generated such a response that it deserved a life outside of corporate social media.

Because Black Agenda Report is equally critical of Republicans and Democrats, because as black leftists we consistently oppose capital, patriarchy, empire, the black political class and the bipartisan war machine we are the only black-oriented media outfit alleged by The Washington Post and Prop Or Not to be under the evil influence of the Russians. Google and other corporate social media have targeted Black Agenda Report in order to restrict your access to our content. If I, Glen Ford or Margaret Kimberley or Ajamu Baraka or Black Agenda Report was temporarily or permanently banned from Facebook, all our posts and their comments would disappear. Facebook claims all posts as its private property. And even if they don’t ban us, it can be extremely difficult to find a Facebook post or a tweet more than a day or two old.

So I’m posting this at BlackAgendaReport.Com and at Black Agenda Radio Commentaries on SoundCloud where you can easily find it from now on. Please follow and share our stuff from those places on all your favorite social media. And please visit BlackAgendaReport.Com to subscribe to our direct and free weekly email of each week’s new content. Email is called dark social media because Google, Facebook, Twitter cannot track or block it.

Special thanks to Dr. Johanna Fernandez for the title #GetMeOutaWakanda.

Bruce A. Dixon is the managing editor of Black Agenda Report.

Religion, Politics and the End of the World

For readers who weren’t able to attend the 2007 Truthdig debate between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges, sit back, relax and enjoy the fireworks.

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Trump and the Christian Fascists

By Chris Hedges

The Christian right, which for decades has been laying the foundation for a fascism disguised as religious, is swiftly filling the president’s ideological vacuum. (Above, Trump with the Rev. Pat Robertson.)

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