Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 245

“Mad Men” creator accused of sexual harassment

Matthew Weiner (Credit: AP/Richard Shotwell)

Matthew Weiner, the creator of acclaimed television series “Mad Men,” was accused of sexual harassing Kater Gordon, a former writer on the same show and a coworker, multiple sources reported late Thursday.

In an interview with The Information, Gordon spoke of being in the room with Weiner when he told her that “she owed it to him to let him see her naked.” Weiner denies the allegations; in a statement, his representatives said, “he does not remember saying this comment nor does it reflect a comment he would say to any colleague.”

Weiner fired Gordon from “Mad Men” in 2009.  At the time, Gawker ran a speculative article hemming over Weiner’s reasons for firing Gordon, noting that she had risen from the ranks of personal assistant to a staff writer with an Emmy Award to her name. Earlier in 2009, the two had appeared together onstage at the Emmys to accept Gordon’s award. Gawker wondered at the time if Weiner had harassed Gordon, but ultimately dismissed the possibility. “If something inappropriate took place, why would he fire her? Probability: unlikely,” Gawker wrote.

Weiner joins an ever-growing list of high-profile men in the entertainment industry who have been outed as harassers and abusers in the past few weeks, revelations that have shocked the public and brought to light the patriarchal and toxic culture of Hollywood, which often shunned those who publicly name of their abusers.

Weiner had been in the news recently for an upcoming novel. As recently as three days ago, the New York Times printed a feature-length story about his transition to novelist.

Meanwhile, Kater Gordon admitted she had struggled to find work in Hollywood in the wake of her firing. “I had the Emmy, but instead of being able to use that as a launch pad for the rest of my career, it became an anchor because I felt I had to answer to speculative stories in the press,” Gordon told The Information.

Twitter suspends verification process after uproar over Charlottesville organizer’s verified status

(Credit: Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

Jason Kessler, the organizer of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, was bestowed with “verified” status on his Twitter profile on Tuesday, giving an imprimatur of authority to the far-right organizer. After a minor uproar, the entire verification program was suspended only two days later, in another major mishap for the social media website.

“Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance. We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it. We have paused all general verifications while we work and will report back soon,” the company tweeted after widespread outrage that Kessler’s platform was further legitimized.

 

Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance. We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it. We have paused all general verifications while we work and will report back soon

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 9, 2017

 

Kessler has tweeted that the woman killed at the Charlottesville White Supremacists protest “was a fat, disgusting Communist” and that her death “was payback time.” @jack, is this what you want on your platform?https://t.co/egyZCi8GAv — Anthony De Rosa

A defense of Roy Moore: Alabama Republicans have the worst response to sexual assault allegations

Roy Moore (Credit: AP/Brynn Anderson)

After Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of initiating sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his 30s in 1979, supporters of the Christian fundamentalist candidate, along with the most prominent platforms of the so-called alt-right, have attempted to defend his innocence and downplay the serious allegations he is facing.

In an effort to scoop the damming reporting, which was published by The Washington Post on Thursday, Breitbart News published a story that not only attempted to defend Moore’s alleged actions but also framed the Post’s story as a political hit-job.

“The alleged incidents, all of which Moore strongly denies, allegedly took place between 1977 and 1982,” Breitbart wrote. “Breitbart News obtained details of the forthcoming Post story from the newspaper’s letter detailing the allegations sent to Moore’s campaign for comment.”

In a statement to Breitbart, Moore said, “These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign.”

“This garbage is the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation,” Moore’s campaign said separately.

A Breitbart editor then argued on MSNBC that, “There’s only one relationship alleged that was problematic.”

Breitbart Editor: “There’s only one relationship alleged that was problematic.” pic.twitter.com/ZK8EV0Y3vn

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 9, 2017

An Alabama state auditor, Republican Jim Zeigler, bluntly told reporters he doesn’t see anything wrong with Moore’s accused behavior.

“There is nothing to see here,” Zeigler told The Washington Examiner. “The allegations are that a man in his early 30s dated teenage girls. Even the Washington Post report says that he never had sexual intercourse with any of the girls and never attempted sexual intercourse.”

Ziegler then cited the Bible in an attempt to justify Moore’s alleged actions, “Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist.” Ziegler added, “Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

By that logic, Moore may soon give birth to the second coming of the son of God.

Alabama Marion County GOP chair David Hall also downplayed the allegations.

“It was 40 years ago,” Hall told Daniel Dale, a reporter for the Toronto Star. “I really don’t see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She’s not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.” He added, “The other women that they’re using to corroborate: number one, one was 19, one was 17, one was 16. There’s nothing wrong with a 30-year-old single male asking a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old, or a 16-year-old out on a date.”

Other Alabama Republicans were quick to question the veracity of Moore’s accusers. 

“They got some pictures? That’ll do,” Alabama State Rep. Ed Henry, Donald Trump’s Alabama campaign co-chairman, told TPM. “You can’t sit on something like this for thirty-something years with a man as in the spotlight as Roy Moore and all of a sudden three weeks before a senatorial primary all of a sudden these three or four women are going to talk about something in 1979? I call bull. It’s as fabricated as the day is long.”

Alabama Bibb County Republican chairman Jerry Pow told the Star’s Dale that he’d vote for Moore even if he had committed a sex crime against a teenage girl.

“I would vote for Judge Moore because I wouldn’t want to vote for Doug [Jones],” Pow said, referring to Moore’s election opponent. “I’m not saying I support what he did.”  

Me: “The story said she said he tried to get her to touch his genitals.” Hall: “Well, she said he may have TRIED to. But we’re talking something that somebody SAID happened, 40 years ago. It wouldn’t affect whether or not I’d vote for him.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 9, 2017

After a long pause, Alabama Bibb County Republican chairman Jerry Pow tells me he’d vote for Roy Moore even if Moore did commit a sex crime against a girl. “I would vote for Judge Moore because I wouldn’t want to vote for Doug,” he says. “I’m not saying I support what he did.” — Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 9, 2017

But despite Moore’s past, and his future plans for office, several GOP members of the U.S. Senate made it quite clear that they don’t want Moore to attempt to join them, after Thursday’s allegations broke.

“The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., wrote on Twitter.  

The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) November 9, 2017

However, other Republicans were quick to point out that Moore should only step aside if it turned out that the allegations were true.

“If these allegations are true, he must step aside,” McConnell said in a statement, according to CNN.

“If there is any truth at all to these horrific allegations, Roy Moore should immediately step aside as a Senate candidate,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, tweeted.

If there is any truth at all to these horrific allegations, Roy Moore should immediately step aside as a Senate candidate. — Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) November 9, 2017

Moore, who has a long and controversial past, had received support from former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who is on a quest to unseat the establishment Republicans in Congress who he views as a roadblock for Trump’s agenda.

Moore defeated the Mitch McConnell and Trump-backed candidate, Luther Strange, in the Alabama GOP Senate primary in September. Trump immediately distanced himself from Strange following his defeat.

If only Republicans had acted the same way when more than a dozen women accused Trump of sexual harassment. The White House has taken the position that all of the women who have accused the president of previous wrongdoing are liars.

“Mitch McConnell should know better to make a statement like he made unless he gets all the answers,” Perry Hooper Jr., Trump’s other Alabama co-chairman, told TPM. We’re right in the political zone right now, the election’s December 12th. This is the same campaign issue the left ran against Donald Trump on, they’re doing the same thing against Roy Moore.”

Infowars peddled stories from a Russian propaganda outlet for years

Alex Jones (Credit: Getty/Oli Scarff)

For years, Alex Jones’s alt-right website Infowars relied on news articles from Russian state-sponsored media outlet RT to provide it with content BuzzFeed News reported in an article published Wednesday.

Republishing content from other outlets with permission is a common practice among media properties. However, a spokesperson for RT claimed to Buzzfeed that Infowars never obtained permission to do so.

Using a social-sharing tracking website called BuzzSumo,  Buzzfeed’s survey found that Infowars republished over 1,000 stories from RT since 2014. The news articles touched on subjects relating to U.S. politics, terrorism and immigration.

Anna Belkina, the communications director for RT, did not tell BuzzFeed whether her employer would pursue legal action against InfoWars.

“We take under consideration any use of our content without authorisation, and proceed with any action we deem appropriate. We do this on a case-by-case basis, dependent on the resources we have available at the time,” she said.

RT republished stories from American and British media companies as well, CNN, the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post included. Yet, the amount of apparently unauthorized reuses of content from those outlets is dwarfed by the amount sourced from the Russian news provider.

National security experts have asserted that RT is a propaganda arm of the Russian government. A report by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence argued that RT played an influential role in the 2016 presidential election, sowing distrust in Hillary Clinton while portraying Donald Trump as a martyr.

“State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President- elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton,” the report said.

The report cited articles, such as “Trump Will Not be Permitted to Win,” which tried to preemptively delegitimize the results of the election when it appeared Clinton was the likely winner.

In September, RT announced that the Justice Department asked the media outlet to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It has refused to do so repeatedly.

“The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the DNI report concluded.

Jones’ reliance on RT to provide his audience with content while perhaps surprising, is hard to view as shocking. The conspiracy theorist was an early supporter of Trump and often makes claims that frame the U.S. government as a force for evil.

Overall, BuzzFeed’s report Wednesday is just the latest strong suggestion that were was a pattern of coordinated efforts between Trump supporters and the Russian government during the presidential campaign.

RT’s own audience is relatively small, which led Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, to downplay the influence it might have had on the election. “The main instrument of Russia propaganda, the RT channel, has a small audience — the U.S. intelligence agencies grossly inflated its importance.” he wrote.

If, as it appears, RT’s content surfaced on Infowars repeatedly, however, then its reach may have been considerably larger, and perhaps more consequential, than originally thought.

Congress’s romance with cowardice

An US soldier waits in front of a tank type 'M1A2 SEP' (Credit: Getty/Christof Stache)

On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said,

“Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. . . This chamber reeks of blood. . . It does not take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.”

More than six years had passed since Congress all but rubber-stamped President Lyndon Johnson’s notoriously vague Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which provided what little legal framework there was for U.S. military escalation in Vietnam.  Doubts remained as to the veracity of the supposed North Vietnamese naval attacks on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf that had officially triggered the resolution, or whether the Navy even had cause to venture so close to a sovereign nation’s coastline.  No matter. Congress gave the president what he wanted: essentially a blank check to bomb, batter, and occupy South Vietnam.  From there it was but a few short steps to nine more years of war, illegal secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, ground invasions of both those countries, and eventually 58,000 American and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Leaving aside the rest of this country’s sad chapter in Indochina, let’s just focus for a moment on the role of Congress in that era’s war making.  In retrospect, Vietnam emerges as just one more chapter in 70 years of ineptitude and apathy on the part of the Senate and House of Representatives when it comes to their constitutionally granted war powers.  Time and again in those years, the legislative branch shirked its historic — and legal — responsibility under the Constitution to declare (or refuse to declare) war.

And yet, never in those seven decades has the duty of Congress to assert itself in matters of war and peace been quite so vital as it is today, with American troops engaged — and still , even if now in small numbers — in one undeclared war after another in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and now Niger . . . and who even knows where else.

Fast forward 53 years from the Tonkin Gulf crisis to Senator Rand Paul’s desperate attempt this September to force something as simple as a congressional discussion of the legal basis for America’s forever wars, which garnered just 36 votes.  It was scuttled by a bipartisan coalition of war hawks.  And who even noticed — other than obsessive viewers of C-SPAN who were treated to Paul’s four-hour-long cri de coeur denouncing Congress’s agreement to “unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, anyplace upon the globe”?

The Kentucky senator sought something that should have seemed modest indeed: to end the reliance of one administration after another on the long-outdated post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) for all of America’s multifaceted and widespread conflicts.  He wanted to compel Congress to debate and legally sanction (or not) any future military operations anywhere on Earth.  While that may sound reasonable enough, more than 60 senators, Democratic and Republican alike, stymied the effort.  In the process, they sanctioned (yet again) their abdication of any role in America’s perpetual state of war — other than, of course, funding it munificently.

In June 1970, with 50,000 U.S. troops already dead in Southeast Asia, Congress finally worked up the nerve to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a bipartisan effort spearheaded by Senator Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican. As it happens, there are no Bob Doles in today’s Senate. As a result, you hardly have to be a cynic or a Punxsutawney groundhog to predict six more weeks of winter — that is, endless war.

It’s a remarkably old story actually.  Ever since V-J Day in August 1945, Congress has repeatedly ducked its explicit constitutional duties when it comes to war, handing over the keys to the eternal use of the U.S. military to an increasingly imperial presidency.  An often deadlocked, ever less popular Congress has cowered in the shadows for decades as Americans died in undeclared wars.  Judging by the lack of public outrage, perhaps this is how the citizenry, too, prefers it.  After all, they themselves are unlikely to serve.  There’s no draft or need to sacrifice anything in or for America’s wars.  The public’s only task is to stand for increasingly militarized pregame sports rituals and to “thank” any soldier they run into.

Nonetheless, with the quixotic thought that this is not the way things have to be, here’s a brief recounting of Congress’s 70-year romance with cowardice.

The Korean War

The last time Congress actually declared war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor, and there were Nazis to defeat.  Five years after the end of World War II, however, in response to a North Korean invasion of the South meant to reunify the Korean peninsula, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, decided to intervene militarily without consulting Congress.  He undoubtedly had no idea of the precedent he was setting.  In the 67 intervening years, upwards of 100,000 American troops would die in this country’s undeclared wars and it was Truman who started us down this road.

In June 1950, having “conferred” with his secretaries of state and defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he announced an intervention in Korea to halt the invasion from the North.  No war declaration was necessary, the administration claimed, because the U.S. was acting under the “aegis” of a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution — a 9-0 vote because the Soviets were, at the time, boycotting that body.  When asked by reporters whether full-scale combat in Korea didn’t actually constitute a war, the president carefully avoided the term.  The conflict, he claimed, only “constituted a police action under the U.N.” Fearing that the Soviets might respond by escalating the conflict and that atomic reprisals weren’t out of the question, Truman clearly considered it prudent to hedge on his terminology, which would set a perilous precedent for the future.

As American casualties mounted and the fighting intensified, it became increasingly difficult to maintain such semantic charades.  In three years of grueling combat, more than 35,000 American troops perished.  At the congressional level, it made no difference.  Congress remained essentially passive in the face of Truman’s fait accompli.  There would be no war declaration and no extended debate on the legality of the president’s decision to send combat troops to Korea.

Indeed, most congressmen rallied to Truman’s defense in a time of. . . well, police action.  There was, however, one lone voice in the wilderness, one very public congressional dissent.  If Truman could commit hundreds of thousands of troops to Korea without a congressional declaration, Republican Senator Robert Taft proclaimed, “he could go to war in Malaya or Indonesia or Iran or South America.”  As a memory, Taft’s public rebuke to presidential war-making powers is now lost to all but a few historians, but how right he was. (And were the Trump administration ever to go to war with Iran, to pick one of Taft’s places, count on the fact that it would still be without a congressional declaration of war.)

Vietnam and the War Powers Act

From the start, Congress rubber-stamped President Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which passed unanimously in the House and with only two dissenting Senate votes.  Despite many later debates and resolutions on Capitol Hill, and certain strikingly critical figures like Democratic Senator William Fulbright, most members of Congress supported the president’s war powers to the end.  Even at the height of congressional anti-war sentiment in 1970, only one in three members of the House voted for actual end-the-war resolutions.

According to a specially commissioned House Democratic Study Group, “Up to the spring of 1973, Congress gave every president everything he requested regarding Indochina policies and funding.”  Despite enduring myths that Congress “ended the war,” as late as 1970 the McGovern-Hatfield amendment to the Senate’s military procurement bill, which called for a U.S. withdrawal from Cambodia within 30 days, failed by a vote of 55-39.

Despite some critical voices (of a sort almost completely absent on the subject of American war in the twenty-first century), the legislative branch as a collective body discovered far too late that American military forces in Vietnam could never achieve their goals, that South Vietnam remained peripheral to any imaginable U.S. security interests, and that the civil war there was never ours to win or lose.  It was a Vietnamese, not an American, story.  Unfortunately, by the time Congress collectively gathered the nerve to ask the truly tough questions, the war was on its fifth president and most of its victims — Vietnamese and American — were already dead.

In the summer of 1970, Congress did finally repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, while also restricting U.S. cross-border operations into Laos and Cambodia.  Then, in 1973, over President Richard Nixon’s veto, it even passed the War Powers Act.  In the future, that bill stated, only a congressional declaration of war, a national defense emergency, or “statutory authorization” by Congress could legally sanction the deployment of the armed forces to any conflict.  Without such sanction, section 4(a)(1) of the bill stipulated that presidential military deployments would be subject to a 60-day limit.  That, it was then believed, would forever check the war-making powers of the imperial presidency, which in turn would prevent “future Vietnams.”

In reality, the War Powers Act proved to be largely toothless legislation.  It was never truly accepted by the presidents who followed Nixon, nor did Congress generally have the guts to invoke it in any meaningful manner.  Over the last 40 years, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have insisted in one way or another that the War Powers Act was essentially unconstitutional.  Rather than fight it out in the courts, however, most administrations simply ignored that law and deployed troops where they wanted anyway or made nice and sort of, kind of, mentioned impending military interventions to Congress.

Lots of “non-wars” like the invasions of Grenada and Panama or the 1992-1993 intervention in Somalia fell into the first category.  In each case, presidents either cited a U.N. resolution as explanation for their actions (and powers) or simply acted without the express permission of Congress.  Those three “minor” interventions cost the U.S. 19, 40, and 43 troop deaths, respectively.

In other cases, presidents notified Congress of their actions, but without explicitly citing section 4(a)(1) of the War Powers Act or its 60-day limit.  In other words, presidents politely informed Congress of their intention to deploy troops and little more.  Much of this hinged on an ongoing battle over just what constitutes “war.”  In 1983, for example, President Ronald Reagan announced that he planned to send a contingent of U.S. troops to Lebanon, but claimed the agreement with the host nation “ruled out any combat responsibilities.”  Tell that to the 241 Marines killed in a later embassy bombing.  When combat did, in fact, break out in Beirut, congressional leaders compromised with Reagan and agreed to an 18-month authorization.

Nor was the judiciary much help.  In 1999, for instance, during a sustained U.S. air campaign against Serbia in the midst of the Kosovo crisis in the former Yugoslavia, a few legislators sued President Bill Clinton in federal court charging that he had violated the War Powers Act by keeping combat soldiers in the field past 60 days.  Clinton simply yawned and pronouncedthat act itself “constitutionally defective.”  The federal district court in Washington agreed and quickly ruled in the president’s favor.

In the single exception that proved the rule, the system more or less workedduring the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf crisis that led to the first of our Iraq wars. A bipartisan array of congressional leaders insisted that President George H.W. Bush present an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) well before invading Kuwait or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  For several months, across two congressional sessions, the House and Senate held dozens of hearings, engaged in prolonged floor debate, and eventually passed that AUMF by a historically narrow margin.

Even then, President Bush included a signing statement haughtily declaringthat his “request for congressional support did not… constitute any change in the long-standing position of the executive branch on . . . the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.”  Snarky statements aside, sadly, this was Congress’s finest hour in the last 70 years of near-constant global military deployments and conflicts — and it, of course, led to the country’s never-ending Iraq Wars, the third of which is still ongoing.

Approving enduring and Iraqi “freedom”

The system failed, disastrously, in the wake of 9/11.  Just three days after the horrific attacks, as smoke still billowed from New York’s twin towers, the Senate approved an astoundingly expansive AUMF.  The president could use“necessary and appropriate force” against anyone he determined had “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.  Caught up in the passion of the moment, America’s representatives hardly bothered to determine precisely who was responsible for the recent slaughter or debate the best course of action moving forward.

Three days left paltry room for serious consideration in what was clearly a time for groupthink and patriotic unity, not solemn deliberation.  The ensuing vote resembled those in elections in Third-World autocracies: 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House.  Only one courageous person, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, took to the floor that day and spoke out.  Her words were as prescient as they are haunting: “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. . . As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”  Lee was simply ignored.  In this way, Congress’s sin of omission set the stage for decades of global war.  Today, across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and beyond, American troops, drones, and bombers still operate under the original post-9/11 AUMF framework.

The next time around, in 2002-2003, Congress proceeded to sleepwalk into the invasion of Iraq.  Leave aside the intelligence failures and false pretenses under which that invasion was launched and just consider the role of Congress.  It was a sad tale of inaction that culminated, just prior to the ignoble 2002 vote on an AUMF against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in a speechthat will undoubtedly prove a classic marker for the decline of congressional powers.  Before a nearly empty chamber, the eminent Democratic Senator Robert Byrd said:

“To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. . . As this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war. Yet, this chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.

“We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events.”

The evidence backed up his claims.  Late on the night of October 11th, after only five days of “debate” — similar deliberations in 1990-1991 had spanned four months — the Senate passed a so-called war resolution (essentially a statement backing a presidential decision, not a congressional war declaration) and the invasion of Iraq proceeded as planned.

Toward forever war

With all that gloomy history behind us, with Congress now endlessly talking about revisiting the 2001 congressional authorization to take on al-Qaeda (but not, of course, the many Islamic terror groups that the U.S. military has gone after since that moment) and little revisiting likely to occur, is there any recourse for those not in favor of presidential wars to the end of time?  It goes without saying that there is no antiwar political party in the United States, nor — Rand Paul aside — are there even eminent antiwar congressional voices like Taft, Fulbright, McGovern, or Byrd.  The Republicans are war hawks and that spirit has proven remarkably bipartisan.  From Hillary Clinton, a notorioushawk who supported or argued for military interventions of every sort while she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state, to former vice president and possible future presidential candidate Joe Biden and present Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Democrats are now also a party of presidential war making. All of the above voted, for instance, for the Iraq War Resolution.

So who exactly can antiwar activists or foreign policy skeptics of any sort rally to? If more than 70 years of recent history is any indication, Congress simply can’t be counted on when it comes time to stand, be heard, and vote on American wars.  You already know that for the representatives who regularly rush to pass record Defense spending bills — as the Senate recently did by a vote of 89-9 for more money than even President Trump requested — perpetual war is an acceptable way of life.

Unless something drastically changes: the sudden growth, for example, of a grassroots antiwar movement or a major Supreme Court decision (fat chance!) limiting presidential power, Americans are likely to be living with eternal war into the distant future.

It’s already an old story, but think of it as well as the American way.

Maria will fundamentally change US policy toward Puerto Rico

(Credit: Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

In the last 90 years, three catastrophic hurricanes have struck Puerto Rico.

San Felipe II in 1928 and San Ciprían in 1932 triggered political and economic changes in America’s largest colony that endured for generations. However, Puerto Rico remains an unincorporated territorial possession of the United States, subject to the plenary powers of Congress. The Puerto Rican government exercises only those powers that the Congress allows. In other words, it is still a colony.

As a political economist who has studied Puerto Rican political and economic change, I believe Hurricane Maria could be another watershed moment that redefines U.S. treatment of Puerto Rico.

The neglected island

In 1928, things were not well in Puerto Rico.

Three decades of U.S. colonial rule had transformed Puerto Rico into a vast sugar plantation controlled by absentee corporations and a prized military base for protecting the Panama Canal. A classic study of Puerto Rico noted that “thousands are undernourished, or actually starving, while the products of the Island bring more than $100 million a year. Disease is present everywhere.”

Luis Muñoz Marín, arguably one of Puerto Rico’s most famous political figures, wrote that Puerto Rico had been converted into a “land of beggars and millionaires … It is Uncle Sam’s second largest sweat-shop.”

Puerto Ricans wanted to reform the colonial system that was responsible for these woes. In April 1928, Félix Córdoba Dávila, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in Washington at the time, complained that Puerto Ricans “are not asking for charity, but for rights.”

Then came Hurricane San Felipe II, a Category 5 hurricane.

The War Department reported that on Sept. 13, 1928, Puerto Rico “was struck by the most devastating hurricane in its history, and the results of years of private and public enterprise were obliterated in a few hours.”

San Felipe II killed 312 people. It left a half a million Puerto Ricans homeless and destitute, almost one-third of the island’s population. Property damage, estimated at US$85 million — about $1.57 billion in 2017 dollars — was unprecedented. According to the Red Cross, no sector of the economy was “left in a worse plight” than the coffee farms. Plantations lost almost their entire crop, and Puerto Rico never regained its prominence as a coffee exporter.

President Calvin Coolidge’s call for Americans to contribute to the American Red Cross generated $3.1 million in donations. The War Department dispersed more than $500,000 worth of supplies and reassigned Army officers, including medical staff, to Puerto Rico. Congress established the Puerto Rican Hurricane Relief Commission in 1928 with $8,150,000 to provide loans for rehabilitating coffee plantations, reconstruction and jobs. U.S. authorities reported that Puerto Ricans were “undismayed and undiscouraged,” and as “bending every effort to create from the ruins a greater Puerto Rico.”

At the same time, San Felipe II led to increased opposition to U.S. colonial rule. The Nationalists and the Union Party emerged as vocal critics of U.S. colonial policy. Many Puerto Ricans portrayed the federal government’s response to San Felipe II as charity that failed to alter the regime of colonial rule and absentee capital — the root of Puerto Rico’s misery.

Four years later, in September 1932, San Ciprían, a Category 4 hurricane, struck Puerto Rico.

It left 225 dead and caused $35 million damage (about $644 million in 2017). The Red Cross director reported: “The acute and intense hurricane surpasses anything he has seen in his career.” San Ciprían intensified the misery that afflicted Puerto Rico. The majority of Puerto Ricans lived a precarious existence. They lacked reserves to survive the ravages of any hurricane for long.

The Army, private relief organizations, Red Cross, colonial administration and federal government took action to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. In August 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration and charged it with providing “relief for the destitute unemployed of the island.” The agency’s director acknowledged the desperate need for aid, but noted that it should be temporary. Puerto Ricans, he wrote, “were an industrious people with a real desire to work and distinct aversion to charity and relief.”

The creation of the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration was an important change in U.S. colonial policy. The scale and severity of Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis was beyond the capacity of the charity-focused, volunteer approach of the Red Cross and other organizations. A federal agency had stepped in.

Although the agency saved lives, it was not well-funded. Governor of Puerto Rico Blanton Winship complained in 1935 that “Puerto Rico continues to receive only a small portion of the funds to which the island is rightfully entitled.” These relief efforts did little to mitigate political discontent.

Calls for independence escalated. Puerto Ricans denounced the corrupt colonial administration that opposed the federal agency, blocked land reform and was solidly in the pocket of the absentee corporations. Labor strikes broke out throughout the island, and often turned violent. The colony was on the verge of collapse.

The two hurricanes were a wake-up call for federal authorities to the failures of colonialism. San Felipe II and San Ciprían set in motion a process of reform that culminated in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952. The government of Puerto Rico was unofficially given autonomy to manage domestic affairs, including the economy.

Maria and the future of Puerto Rico

The magnitude of human loss that Hurricane Maria has inflicted is still unknown. As of this writing, the official number of Puerto Ricans killed by Maria stands at 51, but journalists have been investigating the accuracy of these figures. Moody’s Analytics estimated property damage at $55 billion, and projected a $40 billion loss in economic output.

But the physical devastation, upheaval and trauma inflicted on daily life in Puerto Rico add up to much more. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz went so far as to say that if not resolved, the situation could lead to “something close to a genocide.”

The Donald Trump administration’s response to the crisis reveals that Puerto Ricans are racialized as subordinate, despite their U.S. citizenship. Trump’s racially charged statements resurrected long dormant, degrading characterizations of Puerto Ricans as lacking the capacity and will to fend for themselves.

Maria has also exposed the crisis within Puerto Rico’s divided politics. The Statehood and Commonwealth parties have campaigned for decades on resolving Puerto Rico’s political status. Yet, both parties share responsibility for the island’s escalating debt, and neither has been able to stop Puerto Rico’s economic decline. The entrenched poverty, crisis in political leadership and the federal government’s continued treatment of Puerto Rico as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” have an uncanny resemblance to the situation in 1932.

A major difference, however, is that Puerto Rico does not figure as prominently in U.S. national security as it did before the collapse of the Soviet Union and demise of Cuba as a regional threat. This partially explains the federal government’s seemingly untroubled response to the unfolding crisis in Puerto Rico.

Another critical difference is that the Puerto Rican diaspora has emerged as a powerful, if unexpected, economic and political force. They have come to the aid of their island, and are actively lobbying against some of the most restrictive colonial policies — the Jones Act, PROMESA board and inequity in federal programs.

Puerto Ricans living across the U.S. are putting pressure on their local officials and the federal government for more assistance, and have organized a nationwide campaign to raise funding and collect donations for Puerto Rico. As a recent editorial in Puerto Rico’s leading newspaper put it, “the diaspora is key to the reconstruction of the country.” It may also be key in moving the federal government to finally resolve Puerto Rico’s political status.

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected to state that Carmen Yulín Cruz is mayor of San Juan.

Pedro Caban, Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York

How closing public schools undermines democracy

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Chicago shuttered some 50 schools in 2013. Since then, voter turnout and support for Democrats in the affected neighborhoods has plunged. What’s the connection? In the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast, AlterNet education editor Jennifer Berkshire talks to political scientist Sally Nuamah about the political fallout from the closures, and why shuttering schools ends up undermining democracy.

Jennifer Berkshire: There’s been a lot of attention paid to how students who attended the schools Chicago closed down in 2013 are faring now. But you’ve been measuring a different kind of impact: what’s happened to those communities in terms of voter turnout and democratic participation. What are you finding?

Sally Nuamah: We’re basically finding that support among the African American community for the Democratic Party, specifically in areas where closures occurred, decreased in a really substantial way. You actually see lower levels of participation, higher levels of negative attitudes toward people who are in the same parties in which most of these people identify, which is the Democratic Party.

Beyond that, you see these communities are further losing population. There’s less will, or less faith, in the traditional public school system across this population, because they are afraid they’re going to be betrayed again, they’re going to have to move schools again, and that’s a very volatile situation. Then there is the economic piece, and the fact that the number of African American teachers in Chicago has declined by 40%.

Berkshire: You describe people in the Chicago neighborhood where you grew up talking about the potential closing of a school in ‘life and death’ terms.  What did they mean?

Nuamah: It was very clear, just from talking to people, that they feared the larger consequences of what the closure of the school means, what it symbolizes, and the direct resources it takes from a community. People would constantly refer to the fact that if this community’s institutions close down, it would affect their ability to have healthcare, it would affect their ability to have employment. It would affect their ability to live in a neighborhood that is safe, because right now, the closed-down structure is acting as an eyesore.

I would hear people specifically say that people would think that they failed. Their kids would think that they failed, because the institutions that their kids attended were being closed down and they couldn’t protect it.  So, [school closings] have to do not just with social and economic issues but also in terms of what people are modeling, what their teaching to their younger people. What they’re able to protect for the next generation to come, they were leaving assets that were passed down to them from prior generations, especially because schools have always been at the center of civil rights and the fight for equality.

Berkshire: Whenever you see a big battle over closing schools, like the one in Chicago back in 2013, inevitably you’ll hear questions about why people fight so hard to save a failing school. But as you found out in your research, that question misses something fundamental about how residents in these neighborhoods see public schools and the role that they play.

Nuamah: What you find is that when communities are opposed to school closures, it’s not that they want to go to bad schools — they’re rational human beings. It has more to do with the larger historical, social, and community-based roles that schools have played. In African American communities in particular, public schools had long history of being the first public institutions in which African Americans got access. That led to mayoral positions, and other kinds of political positions thereafter.  But not just that: schools historically have been a main social mechanism for the black middle class.  A lot of people end up in black middle class status after the industrialization, through jobs in the education sector.

All those acts I mentioned actually aren’t related directly to student achievement, but play an important social, economic, and political role in these communities, especially after industrialization.  That is in part why a school and education policy has always had a central role and narrative around Civil Rights, and the social mobility of minority, especially black, populations.

Berkshire: As a regular chronicler of school reform efforts and the backlash against them, I’m struck again and again by the fact that the people ‘fixing’ the schools have a much more narrow understanding of what schools do — and what people want from schools — than those on the receiving end of the fix. This seems like a classic example of that.

Nuamah: When you replace public schools with new schools that don’t account for these larger social, economic, and political roles schools have always played in these communities, it actually undermines why these people think that these institutions are important, and why they’re something that we are still fighting for.

This is an edited transcript. Listen to the entire interview. Learn more about Sally Nuamah’s research on the political fallout from school closures at SallyNuamah.com.

Jennifer Berkshire is the education editor at AlterNet and the co-host of a biweekly podcast on education in the time of Trump.

Trump won’t stop lying about Russia

(Credit: Getty/Justin Sullivan)

In a very real sense, being a liar has defined Donald Trump. It’s who he is. He’s been lying his entire life. Now he is trying to save his presidency with a blizzard of lies that exploit the disconnect between what happened during the election last year, when we learned about it, and how. It’s a strategy meant to confound and confuse not only with the sheer number of lies, but how they’ve been rolled out. The Trump strategy has been first to lie outright that his campaign had nothing to do with Russians whatsoever. When meetings with Russians were revealed, they explained them away with new lies, that the meetings were routine and didn’t mean anything. When the Russian contacts turned out to be real and substantive, they lied that the contacts didn’t amount to “collusion.” When collusion between the campaign and the Russians couldn’t be explained away, they created a wholly new line of lies, that it was Hillary who colluded with Russians through the so-called “uranium sale,” by financing the Steele dossier, which had sources . . . who were Russians.

Telling lie after lie after lie got Trump the presidency, but now panic has set in at the White House. Many of the people who have stood by while he lied, or lied for him, are being put under oath, and when you raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth, telling lies can get you arrested. Lying can put you in jail. Deciding whether or not to tell the truth when you’re under oath is why people in the Trump White House are hiring $1,000 an hour Washington, D.C. lawyers. It’s no fun at all. If you have any questions about this, ask former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who lied to the FBI, was arrested, charged, pled guilty, and is now cooperating with the investigation into Russian connections with the Trump campaign led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  

Let’s have a look at what we have learned in a single week. We already knew that the three top figures in the Trump campaign met with three Russians at Trump Tower in June, 2016. Last week the Papadopoulos plea deal revealed that the Trump campaign knew that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and “thousands” of her emails, in April of last year. Then we learned that Carter Page was put under oath by the House Intelligence Committee and admitted that he received permission to make his July 2016 trip to Russia from then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and notified Hope Hicks, now the White House communications director, and Jeff Sessions, now Attorney General, of his trip.

Page also revealed that he had met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and reported back by email to senior members of the Trump campaign while he was in Moscow about “insights” he had gained during his meetings with high officials in the Russian government. Page also told the House Intelligence Committee that he had been informed that his fellow campaign adviser, Papadopoulos, had met in London and Rome with a “professor” with connections to ranking officials in the Russian government.

But for months and months we didn’t know these meetings had taken place, and that in all, nine men from the Trump campaign had met with Russians during the campaign and transition. We didn’t know in March and April of 2016 when Papadopoulos was running around London meeting with Russians. We didn’t know in June 2016 when Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner sat down in Trump Tower with a passel of Russians, including an attorney carrying a document from the Russian Prosecutor General. We didn’t know when Trump, Sessions, Manafort and others met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention last year. We didn’t know when Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner met with Kislyak and Russian banker Sergey Gorkov at Trump Tower in December 2016. And we didn’t know when Flynn called Kislyak on December 29 and told him not to worry about sanctions against Russia that had just been imposed by the Obama administration because they would take care of them after the inauguration.

This is the first time in history that the biggest scandal about a political campaign involves not illegal donations or scurrilous campaign ads or dirty tricks but contacts between the campaign and a foreign country hostile to the United States. We were buried by Trump’s blizzard of lies. They lied over and over and over again about the number of times they had met with Russians.

In July, 2016, at the time of the Republican National Convention, George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week,” asked Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, “Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” “No, there are not,” answered Manafort, who had been copied on Papadopoulos’ emails about his meetings with the “professor” in London about the Russian government having “dirt” on Clinton and “thousands” of her emails, and who had attended the June Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer close to the Putin regime. “That’s absurd. And you know, there’s no basis to it.”

On the same day, Donald Trump Jr., who chaired the Trump Tower meeting with Russians, went on CNN and told Jake Tapper that Clinton campaign allegations about Russians helping the Trump campaign were “disgusting” and “phony.” Donald Trump Jr. went on to say, “That exactly goes to show you what the DNC and what the Clinton camp will do. They will lie and do anything to win.”

In September, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Kellyanne Conway if campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page had been in contact with Russians. Conway, who was co-chair of the campaign while Page was still one of its advisers, answered: “If he’s doing that, he’s certainly not doing it with the permission or knowledge of the campaign, the activities that you described. He is certainly not authorized to do that.” (Page had reported to numerous campaign officials about his Moscow trip.)

During an October appearance at a rally in Florida, Trump out of the blue stated: “I have nothing to do with Russia, folks. OK? I’ll give you a written statement.”

In November, after Trump had won the election, Hope Hicks, who was at that time the campaign spokesman and who had been informed by Carter Page of his Moscow meeting with the Russian Deputy Prime Minister in Moscow, denied to the Associated Press that there had been any contact between the Trump campaign and Russians. “It never happened,” she said. “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”

In December, Kellyanne Conway, who was working in the transition office in Trump Tower where Flynn, Kushner, and Kislyak had been meeting, was asked by John Dickerson of CBS News if there had been any contact between the Trump campaign and Russians. “Absolutely not,” Conway said. “And I discussed that with the President-elect just last night. Those conversations never happened.”

At his Senate confirmation hearings to become Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who had been informed of the trip Carter Page made to Russia by Page himself, answered a question about Russia contacts this way: “Let me state this clearly, colleagues. I have never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States. Further, I have no knowledge of any such conversations by anyone connected to the Trump campaign.”

At a White House press conference on February 16, three days after Flynn had been fired for lying about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, and only weeks after Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner had met with Kislyak in his own transition office, Trump was asked if anyone in his campaign had been in contact with any Russians. “You can talk all you want about Russia, which was all, you know, fake news, a fabricated deal, to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats and the press plays right into it. In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this — that they know nothing about it; they weren’t in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call. It’s all fake news. It’s all fake news.”

Asked by another reporter whether anyone on his campaign had contacts with Russians, Trump said: “No. Nobody that I know of. Nobody.”

The reporter persisted: “Can you just say yes or no?”

“Russia is a ruse,” Trump answered. “I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.”

Four days later, then deputy White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Russia contacts with the Trump campaign “a non-story because to the best of our knowledge, no contacts took place, so it’s hard to make a comment on something that never happened.”

On March 17 Donald Trump Jr. denied that he met with Russians during the campaign on campaign business. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” Trump Jr. said. “But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”

In May, during his interview in the White House with Lester Holt on NBC, Trump said “there is no collusion between me and my campaign and the Russians.”

In July, just days before the Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials including Donald Trump Jr. and Russians would be revealed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “I would certainly say Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election.”

On October 30, at her regular White House press briefing, asked about the Papadopoulos guilty plea, Sarah Huckabee Sanders pulled a White House Triple-Salchow with a double reverse twist, and landed the whole Russia collusion thing on . . . you guessed it . . . crooked Hillary: “It doesn’t have anything to do with the activities of the campaign. It has to do with his failure to tell the truth. That doesn’t have anything to do with the campaign or the campaign’s activities. There’s clear evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding with Russian intelligence to spread disinformation and smear the President to influence the election,” Sanders said.

She’s Trump’s spokesperson. She lies. It’s who she is. But she’s just the latest in a long string of liars for Trump, and she’d better watch out, or she’ll be following her predecessor Sean Spicer into a Capitol Hill hearing room or a grand jury in a drab building somewhere, and if you want to know what happens when they put you under oath and start asking you questions about Russians, you can ask George Papadopoulos. He knows.

Lawrence O’Donnell: Democratic wins were “too perfect”

Lawrence O'Donnell (Credit: Salon/Peter Cooper)

Democrats won a number of local elections on Tuesday in legislative and gubernatorial races across the country that many are looking at as a rebuke to President Trump and Republicans. More importantly, the results have ushered in a number of historic firsts for transgender, female and black candidates.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell sat down with me on “Salon Talks” Wednesday and called the victories “a bunch of beautiful movies,” as he reflected on Tuesday’s results, and in particular, Danica Roem of Virgina’s win.

Roem became the first openly transgender woman elected to a state legislature, beating the Republican incumbent Bob Marshall. Marshall is notorious for pushing anti-LGBTQ policies, and has even referred to himself as “chief homophobe.” In 2016, he pushed for a measure to bar transgender students from using school restrooms that align with their gender identity.

“That is the movie pitch that if Hollywood had heard it yesterday they would have went, oh you know it’s a little…I mean it’s just a little too perfect,” O’Donnell said.

Only a few names from the on the long list of milestones hit last night including a win by Sheila Oliver, who will be the first black female Leiutenant Governor in New Jersey, and the election of Jenny Durkan as Seattle’s first lesbian mayor.

Watch the video above to hear O’Donnell relate the candidates that ran and won in Tuesday’s races to the politics of the late 1960s, a point he expands on in his new book, “Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics.”

To hear more on O’Donnell’s take on how the cultural and political dynamics of today parallel the 1960’s, watch our full interview on Facebook.

Tune into SalonTV’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

“The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” A Year Into Trumpland

Zhubin Parang (Credit: Sean Gallagher)

Predicting how the world will look at the end of the day is dicey in the era of Donald Trump, but a betting person might feel safe to wager that Wednesday night’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” will open on an upbeat note.

Progressives are celebrating significant wins at the local and state level around the country, including Virginia. The headlines are dominated by declarations of how these victories give liberals a reason for hope.

A year ago, the election day telecast of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central felt very different to viewers as well as the people who make it. In a February interview with Salon executive producer Steve Bodow described the feeling as “hallucinatory.” But to hear the show’s head writer Zhubin Parang describe the days, week and months that followed, our experience has morphed into something more akin to being on speed.

“The way we have thought about it recently is that we have had to think of Trump as being a fire hydrant that has busted open on the street,” Parang told Salon in a recent phone conversation. “Initially that was a huge thing and everybody in the street was freaking out and like, ‘Oh my god this fire hydrant is blasting water everywhere.’ But it feels the fire hydrant has been going off two, three years now.”

Year 1 of Trumpland has coincided with the second year of Parang’s tenure leading “The Daily Show” writers room. In that time the series found a way to balance hard-hitting satire with a sense of playfulness. As a Persian man raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, Parang feels the impact of executive orders and bans more than many, and certainly in a way most comedy writers — a fraternity dominated by white men of European descent — would not.

“It’s especially bad because the way [Trump] talks about Iran and Iranians. As someone who has family over there, he’s talking about my aunts and my grandparents and cousins being these supposed terrorists and sponsors of evil,” Parang said. “And it’s especially frustrating because the things he says about Iran are actually true about Saudi Arabia. They’re violently repressive, they’re cruel to women . . . but because they invite him over to sword dance and touch an orb, I guess that’s okay.”

At the same time, Parang says he’s careful to separate his personal feelings from writing the show’s material. “We’re not looking just to make lengthy rants about why Trump’s foreign policy should seek rapprochement with Iran. I’m trying to articulate Trevor’s voice about particular issues, and so to the extent that I have personal feelings about something, I can’t really just express them in anger and frustration, I have to turn that into comedy.”

He added, “I’m very lucky that Trevor also has a very internationalist perspective of the world. Because we share a lot of the same opinions on the inherent goodness of people, and their failure in their leadership to come to peace, instead of this view that Trump has that there are certain people that are just evil and have to be addressed with through force and there can’t be any negotiation.”

As grueling as the past year has felt to the average bystander bracing herself from the impact of the Petulant Pumpkin’s next hyperbolic tweet, it’s also been an extraordinary time for Parang to be the head writer for a version of “The Daily Show.”

The series boasts a more diverse group of correspondents than it had in previous years, and their blend of perspectives has led to hilarious and cathartic field pieces, including Ronny Chieng’s takedown of Fox’s Jesse Watters’ racist street report from New York’s Chinatown, Hasan Minhaj’s honest distillation of the experience of being a Muslim in today’s America, and scathing insights into the struggles African Americans face from Roy Wood Jr. and newcomer Dulce Sloan.

During that time Noah also has come into his own largely due to his familiarity with men like Trump. “Trevor has a unique perspective on him because Trevor has seen Donald Trumps before,” Parang said, citing a segment in which Noah pointed out the many similarities Trump shares with African dictators.

“Because Trevor has grown up around countries that have flamboyant showman dictators, who constantly use divisiveness and elite hostility to keep power and be corrupt in power, Trevor is used to living in that world.” Parang explained. “And that didn’t quite make sense during the Obama era when the president was the embodiment of American multiculturalism and intelligence.”

When Trump assumed office, Parang added, “it felt like the United States was suddenly regressing to the global mean in the maturity of its democracy. And to have Trevor there to not be constantly shocked was a huge comfort to me, because it felt like, ‘okay, this will be okay.’ I’ve got this guy every day sitting on the couch with me who can tell me that South Africa went through the exact same thing.”

Not long after Noah took over in 2015 critics and a number of viewers seemed all too ready to write him off.  Now, the channels press department keeps having to recycle releases headlines boasting of the series recording its most-watched month ever. The latest is dated August 31, when the show became the #1 nightly talk show among millennials, surging past “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” among Adults 18-34. Two weeks later, Comedy Central extended Noah’s contract through 2022.

Mind you, he still has a way to go to win back Jon Stewart loyalists who may have migrated to series helmed by “Daily” alumni — namely Noah’s nightly competitor Stephen Colbert on CBS’s the late show, or weekly series such as “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” or “Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver.” Even so, Noah’s rep for skewering Trump has not gone unnoticed.

Parang doesn’t view Bee, Oliver and Colbert as competitors, however. “We love all our sister shows and we’re very glad that they’re there, Parang said. “The challenges we have as a daily show require a different format than their challenges as a weekly show. And there’s a blessing and curse for both of us. On our side,  it is unfortunate that we generally don’t have the time to sit down and think through larger pieces. We still do them when we can, but by and large we’re not able to do that as often as the weekly shows do.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “we are able to react to a much more wider range of issues, and we are able to be the first ones there to give our comments on the news, to be able to make fun of something. And I think that’s something that the weekly shows don’t get to do. By the time it comes around to Wednesday or Sunday, the conversations already moved on so fast. The cycle is so fast the conversation’s already moved on.”

Asked about his hopes for the next 365 days, Parang laughed before taking a deep breath.

“I’m not one of those people who’s okay with bad things happening to the United States if it means that the comedy is good,” he said. “So when I think about where the country is headed, I would rather trade in an easier joke for a government that is responsive to its citizens needs and is active in caring for them.”

Until that time comes he and Noah, and “The Daily Show” writers and correspondents, intend to  continue their mandate be what Parang referred to as “good catharsis.”

We’re going to need all the help we can get to make it through Year 2.