Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 253

Tech executives spar with Senate panel over Russian election meddling

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA (Credit: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Executives from the tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google were once again the primary subjects on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, as the Senate Intelligence Committee sought to further understand their role in Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

“A lot of folks, including many in the media, have tried to reduce this entire conversation down to one premise: Foreign actors conducted a surgically executed covert operation to help elect a United States president,” Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said, the New York Times reported. “I’m here to tell you this story does not simplify that easily.”

Wednesday was the second hearing out of a total of three for executives of the tech giants and “offered a rare view into the Senate committee’s investigation, which has largely played out over the past nine months in secured briefing rooms,” according to the Times.

The three companies admitted that they could have done a better job during the election after being grilled by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

“Are you satisfied with your platform’s response to foreign interference in the 2016 election?” Wyden said, demanding a yes or no, according to the Washington Post.

“We are constantly doing better,” Google general counsel Kent Walker said in an attempt to skirt around a firm answer.

When pressed by Wyden, he added, “We could have done more.” Wyden said he’d take that as a “no.”

“No, we need to do more,” Sean Edgett, Twitter’s acting general counsel said.

Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch agreed, “The same is true.”

In the past, Facebook has changed its story on the role its advertising services played in the election. After the admission that Russia had spent $100,000 on advertisements, the social media titan said the content had reached as many as 126 million users.

“We have a president who remains unwilling to acknowledge the threat that Russia poses to our democracy,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the top Democrat on the panel said, the Times reported. “The fact is that this Russian weapon has already proven its success and cost effectiveness.”

While President Donald Trump has vastly underscored Russia’s ability, or willingness, to meddle in the election, it’s also quite difficult to quantify the impact Russian propaganda directly had on voters.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., suggested the companies devise a way to combat false information, but did not receive a concrete vow to do so from the companies, the Post reported.

“The technical challenges associated with that undertaking are substantial,” Facebook’s Stretch said.

“We will definitely take that idea back to explore how we could implement a process like that,” Edgett said of Twitter.

“We, too, will take it under consideration,” Walker said of Google.

The lack of answers and transparency deeply frustrated senators on the panel.

“I’m disappointed that you’re here and not your CEOs,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said, the Post reported. “Because we’re talking about policies and policies of the companies. . . . If we go through this exercise again, we would appreciate seeing the top people who are actually making the decision.”

The tech giants are at odds with the government over how to combat the issue, and how to properly detect and pinpoint what the specifics of the issue are. It’s been argued that social media websites are akin to a public utility, and therefore, should be treated as such.

 

Trump’s pick for NASA chief gets grilled on climate change

Jim Bridenstine (Credit: AP/Sue Ogrocki)

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead NASA faced a barrage of questions and criticisms from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on Wednesday during his confirmation hearing, most notably from Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

“The NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive,” Nelson, who holds tremendous influence over the space agency said, according to the Washington Post. “More importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.”

Nelson added, “Frankly, congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria.”

Bridenstine has received notable endorsements from Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Richard Shelby, R-Ala. In 2016 Cruz was the top recipient of oil and gas contributions, and reeled in nearly $1.5 million, edging out President Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton, respectively.

But Bridenstine, a naval aviator as well as the former head of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, also received an endorsement from Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, as well as key industry groups such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, the Post reported.

Panel chairman Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., indicated the nomination would be moved to the full Senate as soon as next week and that even though Democrats “were trying to rough up the nominee” he believes “the votes will be there” to confirm Bridenstine, the Post reported.

Bridenstine said he looks “forward to promoting the scientific community’s priorities” if confirmed, the Post reported. He added that he supports efforts “that increase our understanding of the Earth as a system and can enable solutions to the most pressing issues we face on our home planet.”

Newsweek elaborated on the importance of the topic of climate change at the hearing:

Although NASA is most commonly associated with the spaceflight program, the agency’s Earth science program is a huge portion of its work. This program plays a crucial role developing, launching and maintaining the satellites climate scientists rely on to understand what’s happening in the atmosphere and on the ground. So if Bridenstine is confirmed, what he thinks of climate change matters.

“I believe carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, I believe that humans have contributed to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Bridenstine said on climate change, according to a Newsweek report. But Bridenstine also questioned the extent to which humans are responsible for contributing to climate change, a worrisome stance that echoes the words of Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt.

“Human activity absolutely is a contributor to the climate change that we are currently seeing,” Bridenstine said, according to Space News.

When asked if human activity was the primary cause, Bridenstine said, “It’s going to depend on a lot of factors, and we’re still learning more about that every day.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders stumbles trying to spin Trump’s terror hypocrisy

Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried defending her boss Wednesday the only way she knows how — by spinning the already befuddling things he’s said, and lied about, to create an even more confusing mess.

Following the first terror attack in Manhattan since 9/11, President Donald Trump has embarked on a campaign to politicize the tragic death of eight people to push for stricter immigration policy. Trump singled out the Diversity Visa lottery program, which Sayfullo Saipov, Tuesday’s terror suspect, used to become a legal resident in the U.S in 2010.

The terrorist came into our country through what is called the “Diversity Visa Lottery Program,” a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

It was Sanders’ job during Wednesday’s press briefing to make sense of Trump’s political response to the tragedy on the last day of October after refusing to “politicize a tragedy” after a gunman opened fire on a Las Vegas concert on the first day of the month. All the White House press secretary could do, however, was mislead the press about what Trump had said.

Sarah Sanders is currently arguing that the White House isn’t politicizing the attack in NYC. In spite of this tweet. https://t.co/0YEzuEHgSD — Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) November 1, 2017

Sanders insists Trump wasn’t politicizing the tragedy by tweet-attacking Sen. Schumer and sparking political debate on immigration.

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) November 1, 2017

Trump called the justice system ‘a laughingstock’ on camera.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it never happened. pic.twitter.com/7YcGcx015E

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 1, 2017

The White House press secretary then tried to justify Trump’s stance on the Diversity Visa lottery by claiming there was “no vetting system” over the program.

Sanders just said there’s “no vetting system” for the diversity visa lottery, which isn’t true. — Philip Bump (@pbump) November 1, 2017

I know this is redundant: But Sarah Sanders is lying right now when she says Green Card lottery has no vetting. — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 1, 2017

Rationalizing Trump’s tweets and off-the-cuff remarks is likely the hardest job in Washington, but Sanders has taken to completely misrepresenting her boss to protect him from negative press.

Sanders cleans up Trump’s tweets: “The president has not blamed Sen. Schumer & doesn’t feel that the senator is responsible for the attack.” — Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) November 1, 2017

As even Republican Sen. Jeff Flake pointed out, Schumer was actually part of a Gang of Eight that attempted to do away with the visa application in question.

Actually, the Gang of 8, including @SenSchumer, did away with the Diversity Visa Program as part of broader reforms. I know, I was there https://t.co/QQFJzPyRzC

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) November 1, 2017

Sanders also got the basics about the program Trump has proposed to eliminate wrong.

“The fact that we have a lottery system that randomly decides who gets the greatest opportunity in the world … And to give that away randomly, to have no vetting system, to have no way to determine who comes, why they’re here, and if they want to contribute to society is a problem,” she said to defend Trump’s call to end the Diversity Visa lottery.

But as reporters in the room pointed, an immigrant selected through the lottery program is vetted by the State Department. When Sanders wasn’t lying Wednesday about Trump’s erroneous beliefs on immigration, she was refusing to condemn slavery.

WH’s Sanders: “i’m not going to re-litigate Civil War. disgusting and absurd to suggest anyone inside this building would support slavery” — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) November 1, 2017

And continued the White House tradition of whining about the press:

.@PeterAlexander: "What are President Trump's flaws?"

Sanders: "Probably that he has to deal with you guys on a daily basis" pic.twitter.com/1cU0QnqnTb

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 1, 2017

Alex Jones: The Russia investigation is a plot to make Robert Mueller “the first King of America”

Alex Jones on "Infowars" (Credit: YouTube/The Alex Jones Channel)

Right-Wing media hedgehog Alex Jones is at it again. After the latest slew of revelations in the Russia investigation that seems to be closing in on the Trump administration, Jones said in a recent edition of his show that is all conspiracy created to make special investigator Robert Mueller, wait for it, King of America.

Calling Mueller an “arrogant, sickening, evil man” on the Oct. 31 edition of “The Alex Jones Show,” Jones accused him of “delivering uranium on tarmacs” and “getting millions back with Russian companies on the payroll.” Mueller has, as far as anyone knows, no association with the 2010 sale of the Toronto-based uranium milling and mining company Uranium One to a private Russian industrial consortium, a sale that did not involve any nuclear materials leaving the United States and has yet become just one of many conspiracies hung around Hillary Clinton’s neck (she had no direct involvement with the deal).

“And so they’ve got to put this on us” added Jones “because we’re trying to restore the republic, trying to make the country great again, and delivering.”

In the kind of desperate, shrill rant that has become his trademark, Jones compared Mueller to the Roman Praetorian Guard, a military organization which interfered in government and eventually overthrew more than a few emperors. He also called Mueller “Judge Dredd” and a “judge, jury and executioner.”

Speaking of “the sunshine of freedom and Americana becoming popular again” and  “the psychological warfare of the new world order,” Jones claimed that Mueller’s investigation is a last-ditch effort by democrats to seize power give because their “leader” is faltering due to illness. That leader? Republican John McCain.

Jones did not mention, and perhaps does not know, that Mueller was appointed in May and McCain wasn’t diagnosed with brain cancer or starting to cross party lines to sink republican health care bills until July. It is difficult to spy a plot to transfer party leadership between the two here, as if there was a question.

“They’ve put everything they can into Robert Mueller,” snarled Jones about the democrats, “who would be the first king of America.” Mueller’s ascension to monarchy would, in Jones’ words, “mark the end of the republic.”

Jones is absolutely correct here. In its 241 years, the United States has never had a king. However, he seems to gloss over the fact that Mueller’s appointment was mostly bipartisan and that there are checks and balances to the U.S. government so he cannot, in fact, wrest absolute control over it.

Now, Jonesean signature tirades such as this may be funny in their way, but laughing brushes away the problem that some people actually believe him. On Twitter, the video that features his accusations against Mueller was retweeted 474 times and liked 847 times. That’s not nothing.

As well, Jones is currently deep into baiting a civil war that he and others of his ilk allege will begin on Nov. 4 when the left wing and antifa will spark a revolution through mass, violent action. He’s gone so far as to tweet images of an ad for the revolution that he alleges appeared in The New York Times (it did not).

Such baiting, such ravings are exactly why someone walked into a pizzeria with an AR-15 in order to save children he had been told were victims of a sexual slavery ring run by Hillary Clinton. Such false equivalencies, false histories and, yes, fake news are the real danger to the country, not a special counsel who would be king.

Watch! Mueller’s Plot Against America Will Fail – https://t.co/FXGky5Knrf #AlexJonesShow LIVE 11am-3pm CT #TuesdayThoughts #ReformationDay

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) October 31, 2017

10 revelations confirming Trump’s awfulness

Donald Trump speaks while flanked by House Republicans after they passed legislation aimed at repealing and replacing ObamaCare, during an event in the Rose Garden, May 4, 2017. (Credit: Getty/Mark Wilson)

What if Donald Trump became your boss?

No, seriously, imagine that, after years of doing your job, watching higher-ups come and go, the very top office at your place of work suddenly went to Trump. Picture the team of middle managers and supervisors he’d bring with him, a ragtag battalion of liars, ideologues and frauds, all armed with a terrifying agenda. What if they ignored long-standing protocols and actively worked against your department to implement their own destructive vision? What if they rendered your work and position essentially obsolete, reducing you to a title exploited to maintain appearances?

That’s the position four former members of the current presidential administration found themselves in after Trump took office. Many of them had previously worked for both Democrats and Republicans. They had lengthy careers in civil service. They had approached the prospect of serving the Trump administration in good faith, only to realize the task before them was undoable. So they resigned, feeling they had essentially been left with no other choice.

The Huffington Post assembled these “Trump quitters” to discuss their decisions and reflect on what led them to it. In attendance were Mike Cox, the ex-climate change advisrr to the Environmental Protection Agency; Ned Price, former CIA agent and National Security Council spokesperson; Sharon McGowan, the former principal deputy chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division; and Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics.

The resulting conversation was filled with insights into the Trump administration, from its anti-truth stance and its anti-fact outlook to its ineptitude and essential malevolence. Below are 10 revelations on how truly awful this administration is.

1. A leader of Trump’s transition team skipped out on the transition to go play Journey cover songs.

Walter Shaub, who served under three presidents, resigned as head of the Office of Government Ethics in July. He’d already become a celebrity of sorts for his public criticism of the administration, including a post-inauguration tweetstorm that pointedly challenged Trump to divest from his conflicting business holdings. Shaub says he was “fairly optimistic” about working with the Trump transition team—at least until it became obvious how unprepared staffers were. That included Don McGahn, the Trump campaign’s top lawyer and the chief attorney of the transition.

“[W]e read news reports that suggested that [McGahn] might be serving as counsel to the transition, but we couldn’t get a meeting with him for a period of time. And then when we did, it was unbelievably obvious how in over his head he was,” Shaub told the Huffington Post. “At one point he asked me if I was the one who gave security clearances or reviewed the background investigation conducted by the FBI of nominees. And I told him, ‘No, you are.’ And the response was, ‘I am?’”

Shaub also notes that though McGahn was too swamped to learn the details of how the transition should go, he did manage to make time to play some sweet licks on guitar for Scott’s New Band.

“The highlight for me, or the lowlight, rather, was one weekend when nobody could figure out where Don McGahn was,” Shaub told the outlet, “and then we read in the newspaper that he did a gig with his ’80s cover band up in Philly.”

Don McGahn, on guitar, covering “Don’t Stop Believin'” with Scott’s New Band. 

2. The Trump team intentionally created this tire fire. 

There’s no way to underestimate the dual roles of cruelty and incompetence in the Trump administration’s decision-making, but destruction was also a goal. Senior adviser and war fetishist Steve Bannon, who once reportedly described himself as a Leninist set on “destroy[ing] all of today’s establishment,” was pretty open about this. In February, at the conservative circle jerk that is CPAC, Bannon proudly announced that Trump’s cabinet nominees “were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.” That’s why Scott Pruitt was tasked with leading the Environmental Protection Agency, an entity he had previously sued 14 times, and Rick Perry—a non-scientist, execution-happy, former “Dancing With the Stars” contestant—was charged with heading the Department of Energy, which he once forgot he wanted to destroy.

Sharon McGowan, who describes herself as a “5’3” lesbian from Queens,” served as the principal deputy chief in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. She noted that the Trump administration had clearly curated a White House made of people bent on demolishing the institutions in their charge.

“I think it’s that there was a concerted effort to pick the appointees who were the most thumb-in-the-eye choices for the agency they were serving,” McGowan told HuffPo. “That deconstructionist kind of mantra, where you want to send a message of how fundamentally devalued the work and the people are at a certain agency.”

She now leads strategy for Lambda Legal, and recently wrote a piece for the organization titled, “I Left the Government to Sue the Government Because I Believe in the Constitution.”

3. They really had it in for the Environmental Protection Agency.

After three decades at the EPA under presidencies “from Reagan’s until this one,” Mike Cox resigned because he sensed the administration’s goal was “to dismantle the organization and really do damage to it.” (On his way out, he wrote a resignation letter that was so honest in its disgust that to summarize it you only need the words “fuck” and “you.”) His description of the first EPA staff meeting with Pruitt reads almost like a hostile encounter.

“It was very clear that he was talking down to us. We were the EPA. We were the bad guys. We were the problem,” Cox told HuffPo. “There was this fundamental feeling he didn’t get it, or if he did, he was purposely poking a finger in the staff’s eye.”

A series of immediate red flags were raised, including budget hacking and staffing cuts that showed the direction the Trump team was going. Among these was eliminating all climate change-focused efforts.

“Many people thought, How could the head of EPA say climate change is not a part of our mission? We felt the core of what we did, I don’t want to use the word ‘violated,’ but it was being undermined.”

4. Trump’s disrespect for the office he was filling was demoralizing.

Just over a year ago, the 17 agencies within the U.S. intelligence community jointly implicated Russia in cyberespionage attacks on the Clinton campaign and DNC. Not only did Trump dismiss those reports, but just days shy of the inauguration following the emergence of the Steele dossier, the president-elect compared those intelligence agencies to Nazis (a term he refuses to use against actual Nazis).

The whole spectacle left a bad taste in the mouth of career CIA analyst Ned Price, who began to have a crisis of confidence in Trump that started before the election, and continued as he disgraced the office of the presidency.

“It actually began for me during the campaign when I heard candidate Trump repeatedly take on the intelligence community in an aggressive, concerted manner,” Price told HuffPo. “It wasn’t just the fact that he was citing WikiLeaks. It wasn’t just the fact that he was comparing the intelligence community to Nazis. You could sort of dismiss all that as rhetorical flourish. But he would just automatically cast aside the high-confidence analysis of the intelligence community on things like Russia’s meddling in our election, and he would call that fake news, and he would call it a hoax.”

Price continued, “That he didn’t respect the weight of serving as commander in chief really came to the forefront on his first full day in office, when he went out to CIA headquarters in Langley. He stood before the Memorial Wall, the wall marking the CIA officers who had given their lives in the line of duty, and talked about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. He joked about going back into Iraq to steal Iraq’s oil. A mentor of mine is etched into that wall, as are several former colleagues.”

5. The Trump administration has no interest in, and even opposes, both facts and expertise.

Asked to cite a recurring theme in the stories explaining their decisions to resign, former climate change advisor Cox points to an overt indifference to facts.

“[T]hese are people who don’t care for other opinions,” Cox stated. “On many occasions, they would ask to be provided with background on a specific issue and indicate that there would be a follow-up meeting. But those would never happen. Once it got to decision time, Pruitt and his closest staff would just do what they wanted to do, and that was that. And the EPA is a science organization! We’re supposed to value facts! Even during the Bush administration it wasn’t like this.”

Ex-CIA agent Price cites the removal of military and intelligence experts from, and elevation of Bannon to, the National Security Council as a warning sign he needed to get out of Dodge.

“That confirmed in my mind that this was an administration that would look to political advisers and ideologues,” Price recalled. “I decided as an intelligence analyst, I would either be twiddling my thumbs all day, or producing reports that would gather dust.”

6. The Trump administration is attacking representative government itself.

The ideal of “American democracy” has always been a fallacy, but the Trump administration is working hard to blow it up from the inside. Former ethics head Shaub says Trump’s flouting of rules, as well as his admiration for dictators, should alarm us all.

“I see the structures of our representative form of government as the container, and then the policy as just whatever you dump into it. What has concerned me is the assault on the container. When you have a president who retains his financial interest, even if you’re supportive of him, you can’t know what his decisions are based on. And that becomes particularly acute when you see him praising [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan for seizing more power, or inviting the murderous [Rodrigo] Duterte to Washington, when he has property interests in Turkey and the Philippines,” he stated.

7. The Trump administration has assembled a group of corruptocrats.

Ethics waivers allow appointees to skirt conflict of interest rules, and unsurprisingly, Trump has been doling them out at a clip. The Obama White House gave out 17 waivers in eight years; the Trump administration issued that many—some of them in secret—in four months. Shaub describes his astonishment at the flagrant dishonesty so many Trump picks displayed.

“The biggest surprise came after I finally saw the waivers. Many of them were unsigned, undated and either explicitly or implicitly retroactive. Of course, if you need a retroactive waiver, it means you’ve broken a rule. In addition, two of the waivers were given to a group of employees that seemed to include the individual who issued the waiver. He may have just given himself a waiver.”

At a certain point, when you work at a place that’s festering with fraudulence, it becomes pretty hard not to become infected. Shaub saw his role becoming more and more diminished and his office being used as a meaningless signifier.

“At that point I realized these guys were capable of just about anything,” he said. “And they had also started to adapt to my going public with these ethical breaches by simply cutting OGE off. That put me in the position of knowing I would have to certify a number of White House financial disclosure reports without knowing what the appointees did for a living. So I became concerned that I would be window-dressing for corruption.”

8. A culture of paranoia and fear pervades the White House.

The president is known for his mafioso-like demands of loyalty from those around him. With help from DOJ head Jeff Sessions, he has made catching leakers a far bigger priority than fixing the sewage pumping station that is his administration. The result is a culture where fear is rampant, and any association with staffers perceived to have been disloyal—particularly those who have left the fold—can have big consequences.

Price notes that his former colleagues at the CIA don’t share classified information with him, but after years of working together, they would like to remain in contact. But many fear the most innocuous exchanges could result in reprisals.

“The thing that strikes me is the deep sense of paranoia. No one will just text me or call me. They’ll all start a conversation by asking if I’m on Signal, or if I’m on WhatsApp. Choose your encrypted service,” Price said. “What’s funny is that they will ask me that, and then the next day I’ll get a message from them on Signal saying, Hey, how are you, I just wanted to catch up.”

McGowan backed this up, adding, “The feeling is that even to be seen associating with someone who left is scary.”

9. Public pressure can have an effect.

While discussing ethics waivers and conflicts of interest among Trump Cabinet officials, Shaub noted that the Trump team finally handed over information not out of principle, but because of public outcry.

“[W]e won a battle to get our hands on the ethics waivers the White House was issuing [in secret]. They fought us very publicly for a month not to release them, but the public pressure actually worked.”

10. Their disappointment in Trump has affected their thinking about public service.

All of the former Trump civil servants expressed a love for civil service, despite their experiences with this administration. Ex-CIA analyst Price says he “hope[s] to go back into public service when the coast is clear.” And Shaub noted his concern about the “chilling effect” the Trump era might have on young people in terms of steering them away from public service.

“[I]t’s much harder for me to convince people that federal service is where they can go to feel the kind of fulfillment that I did when I was there,” Sharon McGowan admitted. “Knowing that power of the federal government is being used to cause so much harm—to tear families apart, to endorse discrimination—it actually feels insensitive for me to try and sell federal service to someone who is part of one of the communities targeted for abuse. I look forward to the day when that is no longer the case.”

The huge tax heist

You know the plot: The bank robbers set off a bomb down the street from the bank, and while everyone’s distracted they get away with the loot.

In the reality TV show we’re now suffering through, Donald Trump is the bomb.

The robbers are the American oligarchs who bankroll the Republican Party, and who are plotting the biggest heist in American history – a massive tax cut estimated to be up to 5.8 trillion dollars.

Around 80 percent of it will benefit the richest 1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Trump is busily distracting America with his explosive tweets and incendiary tantrums – blasting Republican senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, NFL players who take the knee, Dreamers, refugees, immigrants, transgender people, the media, “rocket man,” Hillary Clinton, Obama, NAFTA, Muslims.

The Trump bomb is hugely damaging – unleashing hate, threatening democratic institutions, isolating America in the world.

But none of this seems to bother Republicans in Congress, except for a handful of Senators who won’t be running again. That’s because congressional Republicans are concentrating their efforts on pulling off the giant heist for their rich patrons.

They want to move quickly so no one notices – passing the tax cut before Christmas, with no hearings and minimal debate.

If the plot succeeds, most Americans will be robbed in three ways.

First, they’ll lose tax deductions they rely on – such as the deduction on earnings they put into tax-deferred savings in 401k plans. Some 55 million Americans now rely on 401(k) plans to save for retirement.

They’ll also lose the deduction for what they pay in state and local taxes. More than half of this deduction now goes to taxpayers with incomes of less than $200,000.

Republicans say the middle class will come out just fine because they’ll get a larger standard deduction. Not true. The average American’s tax bill will rise because the deductions they’ll lose will total more than the higher standard deduction Republicans are proposing.

Second, most Americans will lose government services that will have to be eliminated in order to pay for the giant tax cut – including, very likely, some Medicare and Medicaid.

About $1.5 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts were quietly included in the budget resolution Republicans just passed, in order to get their tax bill through the Senate with just 51 votes. (No one paid much attention because Trump was attacking grieving combat widows.)

Third, most Americans will have to pay higher interest on their car and mortgage loans and other money they borrow, because the huge tax cut will explode the national debt.

That debt is now around $20 trillion, or 70 percent of the total economy. If it goes much higher, it will crowd out borrowing and force interest rates upward.

Putting all this together, the theft would be the largest redistribution from the bottom 90 percent to the richest 1 percent in history.

Republican’s biggest fear is that word of the heist will leak out to the public, and their tax bill will be defeated by a handful of Senate Republican holdouts who feel the public pressure.

That’s exactly what happened with their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP’s big-money patrons pushed for repeal not because they had any principled objection to the Act, but because they didn’t want to fork over $144 billion in taxes on incomes over $1 million to pay for the Act over the next decade.

In the end, Republicans couldn’t get away with it because Americans learned that more than 23 million people would lose their health coverage, and Medicaid would also be on the chopping block.

Trump was willing to distract the public’s attention to give congressional Republicans a shot at repeal, but the moment the public started catching on he blew their cover. After the Congressional Budget Office announced the consequences of the Republican health bill, Trump called it “mean.”

He could do the same with the tax bill. He almost has. When word leaked out last week that Republicans were planning to limit 401(k) deductions, Trump tweeted that it wouldn’t happen (and then backtracked on his tweet).

The moneyed interests who run the GOP depend on the Trump bomb to divert attention from their huge heist. Their challenge is to make sure the bomb doesn’t go off in the wrong direction.

Osama Bin Laden’s America

(Credit: Getty/AP/Salon)

Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for their legal troubles in the Russia investigation (on which he’s unlikely to deliver) – a mere $400,000 to $500,000 – bin Laden managed to launch the American war on terror. He did so with little but a clever game plan, a few fanatical followers, and a remarkably intuitive sense of how this country works.

He had those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, a scattering of supporters elsewhere in the world, and the “training camps” in Afghanistan, but his was a ragged and understaffed movement.  And keep in mind that his sworn enemy was the country that then prided itself on being the last superpower, the final winner of the imperial sweepstakes that had gone on for five centuries until, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded.

The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into? The key would be what might be called apocalyptic humiliation.

Looking back, 16 years later, it’s extraordinary how September 11, 2001, would set the pattern for everything that followed. Each further goading act, from Afghanistan to Libya, San Bernardino to Orlando, Iraq to Niger, each further humiliation would trigger yet more of the same behavior in Washington. After all, so many people and institutions – above all, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security state – came to have a vested interest in Osama bin Laden’s version of our world.

Apocalyptic Humiliation

Grim as the 9/11 attacks were, with nearly 3,000 dead civilians, they would be but the start of bin Laden’s “success,” which has, in truth, never ended. The phrase of that moment – that 9/11 had “changed everything” – proved far more devastatingly accurate than we Americans imagined at the time.  Among other things, it transformed the country in essential ways.

After all, Osama bin Laden managed to involve the United States in 16 years of fruitless wars, most now “generational” conflicts with no end in sight, which would only encourage the creation and spread of terror groups, the disintegration of order across significant parts of the planet, and the displacement of whole populations in staggering numbers.  At the same time, he helped turn twenty-first-century Washington into a war machine of the first order that ate the rest of the government for lunch.  He gave the national security state the means – the excuse, if you will – to rise to a kind of power, prominence, and funding that might otherwise have been inconceivable.  In the process – undoubtedly fulfilling his wildest dreams – he helped speed up the decline of the very country that, since the Cold War ended, had been plugging itself as the greatest ever.

In other words, he may truly be the (malign) genius of our age. He created a terrorist version of call and response that still rules Donald Trump’s Washington in which the rubblized generals of America’s rubblized wars on an increasingly rubblized planet now reign supreme. In other words, The Donald, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster were Osama bin Laden’s grim gift to the rest of us. Thanks to him, literally trillions of taxpayer dollars would go down the tubes in remarkably pointless wars and “reconstruction” scams abroad that now threaten to feed on each other to something like the end of (American) time.

Of course, he had a little luck in the process.  As a start, no one, not even the 9/11 plotters themselves, could have imagined that those towers in Manhattan would collapse before the already omnipresent cameras of the age in a way that would create such classically apocalyptic imagery.  As scholar Paul Boyer once argued, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans never stopped dreaming of a nuclear attack on this country.  Our pop culture was filled with such imagery, such nightmares.  On that September day, many Americans suddenly felt as if something like it had finally happened.  It wasn’t happenstance that, within 24 hours, the area of downtown Manhattan where the shards of those towers lay would be dubbed “Ground Zero,” a term previously reserved for the spot where a nuclear explosion had taken place, or that Tom Brokaw, anchoring NBC’s non-stop news coverage, would claim that it was “like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan.”

The sense of being sneak-attacked on an apocalyptic scale – hence the “new Pearl Harbor” and “Day of Infamy” headlines – proved overwhelming as the scenes of those towers falling in a near mushroom cloud of smoke and ash were endlessly replayed.  Of course, no such apocalyptic attack had occurred.  The weapons at hand weren’t even bombs or missiles, but our own airplanes filled with passengers.  And yes, it was a horror, but not the horror Americans generally took it for.  And yet, 16 years later, it’s still impossible to put 9/11 in any kind of reasonable context or perspective in this country, even after we’ve helped to rubblize major cities across the Middle East – most recently the Syrian city of Raqqa – and so aided in creating landscapes far more apocalyptic looking than 9/11 ever was.

As I wrote long ago, 9/11 “was not a nuclear attack.  It was not apocalyptic.  The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud.  It was not potentially civilization ending.  It did not endanger the existence of our country – or even of New York City.  Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.”

On the other hand, imagine where we’d be if Osama bin Laden had had just a little more luck that day; imagine if the fourth hijacked plane, the one that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, had actually reached its target in Washington and wiped out, say, the Capitol or the White House.

Bin Laden certainly chose his symbols of American power well – financial (the World Trade Center), military (the Pentagon), and political (some target in Washington) – in order to make the government and people of the self-proclaimed most exceptional nation on Earth feel the deepest possible sense of humiliation.

Short of wiping out the White House, bin Laden could hardly have hit a more American nerve or created a stronger sense that the country which felt it had everything was now left with nothing at all.

That it wasn’t true – not faintly – didn’t matter. And add in one more bit of bin Laden good luck. The administration in the White House at that moment had its own overblown dreams of how our world should work.  As they emerged from the shock of those attacks, which sent Vice President Dick Cheney into a Cold-War-era underground nuclear bunker and President George W. Bush onto Air Force One – he was reading a children’s book, My Pet Goat,” to school kids in Florida as the attacks occurred – and in flight away from Washington to Barksdale Air Base in Louisiana, they began to dream of their global moment.  Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the partially destroyed Pentagon, they instantly started thinking about taking out Iraq’s autocratic ruler Saddam Hussein and launching a project to create a Middle East and then a planet over which the United States alone would have dominion forever and ever.

As befitted those Pearl Harbor headlines, on the night of September 11th, the president was already speaking of “the war against terrorism.” Within a day, he had called it “the first war of the twenty-first century” and soon, because al-Qaeda was such a pathetically inadequate target, had added, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.”

It couldn’t have been stranger.  The United States was “at war,” but not with a great power or even one of the regional “rogue states” that had been the focus of American military thinking in the 1990s.  We were at war with a phenomenon – “terrorism” – on a global scale. As Rumsfeld would say only five days after 9/11, the new war on terror would be “a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries, including the United States.” In the phrase of the moment, they were going to “drain the swamp” globally.

Even setting aside that terrorism then had no real armies, no real territory, essentially nothing, this couldn’t have been more wildly out of proportion to what had actually happened or to the outfit that had caused it to happen.  But anyone who suggested as much (or something as simple and unimpressive as a “police action” against bin Laden and crew) was promptly laughed out of the room or abused into silence.  And so a call-and-response pattern that fit bin Laden’s wildest dreams would be established in which, whatever they did, the United States would always respond by militarily upping the ante.

In this way, Washington promptly found itself plunged into a Global War on Terror, or GWOT, that was essentially a figment of its own imagination.  The Bush administration, not Osama bin Laden, then proceeded to turn it into a reality, starting with the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Meanwhile, from the passage of the Patriot Act to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, a newly national-securitized Washington would be built up on a previously unheard of scale.

In other words, we were already entering Osama bin Laden’s America.

The War Lovers

In this way, long before Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson began downsizing the State Department, George W. Bush and his top officials (who, except for Colin Powell, had never been to war) committed themselves to the U.S. military as the option of choice for what had previously been called “foreign policy.”  Fortunately for bin Laden, they would prove to be the ultimate fundamentalists when it came to that military.  They had little doubt that they possessed a force beyond compare with the kind of power and technological resources guaranteed to sweep away everything before it.  That military was, as the president boasted, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” What, then, could possibly stop it from spearheading the establishment of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and elsewhere that would leave the Roman and British empires in the shade?  (As it happened, they had absorbed nothing of the twentieth century history of insurrection, rebellion, and resistance in the former colonial world.  If they had, none of what followed would have surprised them in the least.)

And so the wars would spread, states would begin to crumble, terror movements would multiply, and each little shiver of fear, each set of American deaths, whether by such movements or “lone wolves” in the U.S. and Europe, would call up just one response: more of the same.

Think of this as Osama bin Laden’s dream world, which we would create for him and his fellow jihadists.

I’ve been writing about this at TomDispatch year after year for a decade and a half now and nothing ever changes.  Not really.  It’s all so sadly predictable as, years after bin Laden was consigned to his watery grave, Washington continues to essentially do his bidding in a remarkably brainless fashion.

Think of it as a kind of feedback loop in which the interests of a domestic security and surveillance state, built to monumental proportions on a relatively minor fear (of terrorism), and a military eternally funded to the heavens on a remarkably bipartisan basis for its never-ending war on terror ensure that nothing ever truly changes. In twenty-first-century Washington, failure is the new success and repetition is the rule of the day, week, month, and year.

Take, for example, the recent events in Niger. Consider the pattern of call-and-response there.  Almost no Americans (and it turned out, next to no senators) even knew that the U.S. had something like 900 troops deployed permanently to that West African country and two drone bases there (though it was no secret). Then, on October 4th, the first reports of the deaths of four American soldiers and the wounding of two others in a Green Beret unit on a “routine training mission” in the lawless Niger-Mali border area came out. The ambush, it seemed, had been set by an ISIS affiliate.

It was, in fact, such an obscure and distant event that, for almost two weeks, there was little reaction in Congress or media uproar of any sort.  That ended, however, when President Trump, in response to questions about those dead soldiers, attacked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for not calling the parents of the American fallen (they had) and then got into a dispute with the widow of one of the Niger dead (as well as a Democratic congresswoman) over his condolence call to her. The head of the Joint Chiefs was soon forced to hold a news conference; former four-star Marine General and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose son had died in Afghanistan, felt called upon to go to the mat for his boss, falsely accuse that congresswoman, and essentially claim that the military was now an elite caste in this country. This certainly reflected the new highly militarized sense of power and worth that lay at the heart of bin Laden’s Washington.

It was only then that the event in distant Niger became another terrorist humiliation of the first order.  Senators were suddenly outraged.  Senator John McCain (one of the more warlike members of that body, famous in 2007 for jokingly singing, to the tune of an old Beach Boys song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”) threatened to subpoena the administration for more Niger information.  Meanwhile his friend Senator Lindsey Graham, another war hawk of the first order, issued a classic warning of this era: “We don’t want the next 9/11 to come from Niger!”

And suddenly U.S. Africa Command was highlighting its desire for more money from Congress; the military was moving to arm its Reaper drones in Niger with Hellfire missiles for future counterterrorism operations; and Secretary of Defense Mattis was assuring senators privately that the military would “expand” its “counterterrorism focus” in Africa.  The military began to prepare to deploy Hellfire Missile-armed Reaper drones to Niger.  “The war is morphing,” Graham insisted. “You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you’re going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field.”

Rumors were soon floating around that, as the Washington Post , the administration might “loosen restrictions on the U.S. military’s ability to use lethal force in Niger” (as it already had done in the Trump era in places like Syria and Yemen).  And so it expectably went, as events in Niger proceeded from utter obscurity to the near-apocalyptic, while – despite the strangeness of the Trumpian moment – the responses came in exactly as anyone reviewing the last 16 years might have imagined they would.

All of this will predictably make things in central Africa worse, not better, leading to . . . well, more than a decade and a half after 9/11, you know just as well as I do where it’s leading.  And there are remarkably few brakes on the situation, especially with three generals of our losing wars ruling the roost in Washington and Donald Trump now lashed to the mast of his chief of staff.

Welcome to Osama bin Laden’s America.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, “The End of Victory Culture.” He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is “Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.”

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” as well as John Dower’s “The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,” John Feffer’s dystopian novel “Splinterlands,” Nick Turse’s “Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,” and Tom Engelhardt’s “Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.”

Why the Trump investigation reminds Matthews of Watergate

(Credit: Peter Cooper / Salon)

“Trump doesn’t do well with facts, because he believes he doesn’t have to deal with facts,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews told Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir on “Salon Talks”

Matthews is the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball” and the author of the new book “Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.” He also penned the bestselling biography “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.” Matthews has served many roles in American politics over the past three decades. He has worked as a presidential speechwriter, a political aide, and as a journalist, meaning he has witnessed first-hand the ebb and tide of politics, and the fair amount of controversy from past presidents.

When O’Hehir asked Matthews if he’s seen anything like special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Matthews referenced the Nixon Watergate investigation and the “smoking gun” tape.

“I think this one’s going to come down to evidence,” Matthews said of the Trump campaign investigation.

He went on to say this serves as a problem for Trump, who’s “used to running his shop and controlling it. And now he finds himself responsible for all these surrogates,” Matthews said, “and they’re doing stuff that’s getting him in trouble.”

Nonetheless, Matthews added, “The prosecutor here is out for something big and I think he’s looking at an enterprise, possibly a criminal enterprise, probably a RICO charge, but he’s looking at a whole institution: the Trump campaign.”

Watch the full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’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.

“I called this”: How David Wain mastered fake news with a Manafort joke

David Wain (Credit: Getty/Imeh Akpanudosen)

David Wain’s Monday morning joke evolved from banal beginnings.

“I woke up early to go to the gym,” the comedic actor and director explained to Salon, “and I was watching something on my iPad. Then the little thing comes on that said [Donald Trump’s former campaign manager] Paul Manafort was indicted. And I guess I’m so rarely right in the moment, even paying attention to anything like, so I said, ‘Oh I maybe I should just tweet something since I could comment on this.’”

Wain, a comedian and director, is not a prolific Twitter user. Most of his timeline is composed of retweets and links to news stories. But in this case, for reasons he can’t quite explain, “I literally just sat down on my computer for two seconds and created that fake tweet from a year and a half ago and put it out there. I didn’t even honestly think about what the point was or why or even so it was funny. I just did it.”

I called this a year and half ago. pic.twitter.com/U98IwhwdDn

— David Wain (@davidwain) October 30, 2017

Then he went about his day, not really thinking about it. Until, that is “I looked at my phone an hour later and I was like, ‘Jesus.’” Wain’s tweet quickly caught fire, circulating through social media to the point that it was included in a couple of “Hollywood Weighs In!” social media round-ups. Although Wain quickly went back to Twitter and admitted in the tweet’s timeline of replies that this was a joke, there was simply no way to re-capture that red balloon.

At the time of this writing, it’s been retweeted more than 1,200 times and received 7,200 likes. “I have to say, I was scared in a weird way,” Wain admitted, “because within 20 minutes of me putting that up there was this whole sort of . . . thing.” In this simple and almost reflexive gambit to get a laugh, Wain provided a example of how dangerously gullible the public has become in an age of the casual dispersion of misinformation.

“Now I realize how easy it is for a guy sitting in his bedroom in two minutes to Photoshop something, and then everyone believes it,” he said.

As much as some would like to believe it’s people on the other side of the political divide (whatever that means to you) who are more vulnerable to false information, Wain’s tweet is another crumb of proof that anyone can fall for anything. To be fair, though, in order to get that Wain was joking, you’d have to be familiar with his work. On television, he’s appeared in the Comedy Central series “Another Period” and TV Land’s “Younger,” as well as Netflix’s “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.” He’s directed films such as “Role Models,” “Wanderlust” and the feature film version of “Wet Hot American Summer.”

He’s also directed the upcoming cinematic adaptation of a biography of National Lampoon titled “A Futile and Stupid Gesture.” Coincidence? Yes. Entirely.

Knowing this, one might have had an inkling that Wain could have been peddling a tall tale. Then, Wain argues, there’s good old fashioned common sense: The alleged prediction was (absolutely never) posted before Trump was elected, before most people knew anything about Paul Manafort’s curriculum vitae or his business reputation. Thirdly, a Twitter user may have noticed that when he or she places a computer cursor on the alleged prophecy, it doesn’t click through to anything. At this point, one might have read the timeline of replies.

psychic or good at photoshop? — Marielle Heller (@marielleheller) October 30, 2017

Granted, a number of users got the joke immediately. Fellow comedians, for example.

holy shit. you nailed it.

— Nikki Glaser (@NikkiGlaser) October 30, 2017

Some eagle-eyed social media users also figured it out straightaway.

Thanks for proving that ppl will just accept any random claims without investigation. I actually went back and looked at your timeline. :( — Chris Tullbane (@ctullbane) October 31, 2017

But many others believed him. By the time Monday afternoon rolled around, Wain had friends telling him, “’People in my office don’t believe that it’s fake. They are convinced that you did predict.’ I said it on Twitter, like, two minutes later, that it was a joke, and they still don’t believe it.”

You see, in the way of any good joke, Wain’s social media punchline works on a number of levels. There’s his statement, “I called this a year and half ago,” that nods at the low-grade social media fever trend of seizing proof of one’s analytical superiority — “I called it!” — on the occasions when current events line up with personal theory.

This occurs in a range of arenas, from visualizing where a TV series plot will go to speculations about the winner of the World Series to guessing at the next move of a thoroughly predictable president. If someone like Wain was able to “call” the Manafort news a year and a half ago almost to the day, then maybe they can comfort us by “calling” exactly when we’re getting out of this.

“We are so distraught about Trump and so desperate for some kind of solid confirmation that we are right and that something’s going to change, I guess,” he observed.

Wain also happens to be a professional comedian in an era when comics are increasingly viewed as something akin to benevolent clowns with the power to lead us out of the sewer, as opposed to dragging us to Hell. Some fortune telling ability may be part of that package. Remember that a year ago, multiple headlines crowed about “The Simpsons” predicting Trump’s presidency.

Anthony Atamanuik’s gags on Comedy Central’s “The President Show” tend to be eerily accurate because, as he told Vanity Fair in August, he’s figured a predictive model that enables him to learn how his quarry thinks as opposed to mirroring what he says. Other entertainers who predicted we’d be here include Adam Carolla, cartoonist Garry Trudeau and, as he likes to remind us time and again, Michael Moore. Wain is well-known and has a following, and these days that’s really all you need to style yourself as a plausible truth dispenser.

And here, he’s given us a concise example of what happens when the crumbling of the line between truth and fiction becomes complete. Wain intended to be subtly satirical in the manner of his occasional #minorsignchanges posts on Instagram. Unfortunately, as he found out, ours is a not a time for subtlety.

“I’m just interested in how easy it is to manipulate reality and especially in a way that’s potentially believable,” he said. “And people will believe it. Clearly that’s what’s happened. That’s the genius of the people who invented all those articles about Clinton and stuff on Facebook. It’s just this side of possible, and so everyone eats it up.”

“Honestly,” Wain stressed, “I was making no point. I just was thinking my thought was kind of funny, but I can’t defend it comedically or conceptually.”

That may be so. But he’s raised a few people’s hopes nevertheless.

With your future vision, can you please tell us when he’s out of office? I just can’t wait

— John Carrington (@JCarrington3) October 30, 2017

How “Stranger Things 2″ Cloaks Racial Tension in the Heartland

"Stranger Things" (Credit: Netflix/Jackson Davis)

On Halloween in Hawkins, Indiana, the young heroes of “Stranger Things 2” dress up like the team in “Ghostbusters.” But there’s a problem: Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) show up to school dressed up like Bill Murray’s character Peter Venkman. Mike is upset, insisting that Lucas agreed to be Winston, the only black character in the movie’s team.

Lucas insists he specifically did not want to be Winston, and Will (Noah Schnapp) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) back him up. When Mike asks Lucas what’s wrong with Winston, Lucas has a reasonable explanation. He joined the team super late, he says.  He’s not funny, and he’s not even a scientist.

“If he’s so cool,” Lucas says. “then you be Winston.”

Mike balks. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” Lucas asks, causing Mike’s words to fail him. So Lucas fills in Mike reply for him:“ Be-be-because you’re not black?”

“I didn’t say that!” Mike insists. Lucas retorts, “You thought it.”

“Stranger Things” heavily relies on the notion that people are willing to see what they want to see. This is how a government project that rips a hole in our dimension is able to keep on operating even after Will’s friends, his determined mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) and the town’s police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) stumble upon their secret headquarters and strike a deal to bring Will back from the place they call the Upside Down. The band agrees to keep the whole dirty business a secret. Easy enough; who would believe they’d uncovered a world ruled by a shadow monster who commands man-eating Demigorgons?

But this idea applies to the viewer’s interpretation of the story and its characters motivations as well, which is why the Lucas storyline in these new episodes is, on a very obvious level, incredibly frustrating and exemplifies the danger inherent to its nostalgic appeal.

This is especially true now, when a significant portion of white America refuses to conceive of the idea that systemic racism exists, and a share of resentment toward people of color is born out of the viewpoint that they’re looking for it where it doesn’t exist. Black football players are millionaires; shouldn’t they be grateful to the nation who gave them that opportunity? A black president created a health care plan that is equated with a handout; it should be repealed. But this is about socialism, not blackness. It’s about American values, not racism.

It’s about one slice of the population not saying certain things and the other attempting to make them understand that they don’t have to utter an epithet in order for the message to ring loud and clear.

And this is where Lucas’s “Stranger Things” storyline becomes incredibly irritating.

Let’s make one thing clear: Mike is not a racist, and Lucas knows that. It must be said that Lucas benefits from a more expansive backstory in the sequel season than other characters do. The scenes featuring his sister Erica, a Rudy Huxtable stand-in, are priceless.

“Stranger Things” infers statements about Hawkins and its characters without directly having its characters say anything. The Byers family’s run-down house marks them as part of the town’s poorer residents, just as Lucas lives in a large and very nice house. Lucas and Mike also have the best toys. In battles, he’s the kid who brings the wrist-rocket slingshot.

And Lucas and Mike are great friends, close enough that Lucas can call Mike on his bullshit. That much we can see. Lucas also is a black kid in a mostly white small town, a surrogate for any minority who has lived the experience of being a token person of color in mostly white spaces. Lucas is the kid with an American flag hanging on his bedroom wall. You view his camo headband and undereye black as an homage to “Rambo” or tip of the hat to Parker, Yaphet Kotto’s character in “Alien.”

He’s a skeptic and sensible because he has to be. Those qualities also make him a valued member of his friend group. Black viewers may also recognize them as survival skills.

Where Lucas faces the most danger is from Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), the mullet-sporting new kid with a chip on his shoulder and a heavy metal soundtrack. From the moment Billy rides up in his bitchin’ Camaro and primps in the mirror, we can see he’s going to be trouble. High school girls view him as the kind of trouble they want; bystanders ogle the tight cut of his jeans across his butt.

They choose not to see another side of Billy, the one who verbally abuses his stepsister Max (Sadie Sink) and aggressively challenges Hawkins High’s social king Steve Harrington (Joe Keery). Steve is able to stand up for himself. The much smaller Lucas poses no physical threat to Billy.

Billy targets Lucas nevertheless after he sees him hanging out with Max. First he sees them arguing walking out of school together. Billy glares at Lucas from a distance, then interrogates Max when she gets to his car. Why was he talking to you? he asks. Why are you so upset? Did he cause any trouble.

Max explains that Lucas is just a friend, but that doesn’t end the discussion with Billy. He grabs Max by the arm roughly, scaring her.  “This is serious shit, OK?” he barks. “I’m older than you. And something you learn is that there’s certain type of people in this world that you stay away from. And that kid, Max. That kid is one of them. You stay away from him, you hear me?”

There’s certain type of people in this world that you stay away from. That kid is one of them.

From there Lucas and Max become embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game of avoidance with Billy until the inevitable happens, and Billy discovers them hanging out together. He grabs the much smaller Lucas and slams him against a wall, declaring that he’s going to break him.

A few things are at play in this storyline which allow the viewer to explain away aspects of Billy’s behavior if they choose to do so. One, Billy is clearly an ‘80s stereotype, some afterbirth resulting from an experiment to merge Jim Morrison with Dee Snider.

He’s a metal head looking for something to prove, and Lucas just happens to be a target because Lucas happens to be a love interest for Max. It doesn’t matter what color his skin is, this argument goes; Billy would have picked on any of Max’s potential boyfriends. After all, not once does he utter any specific epithets to describe Lucas or specifically give voice to the societal-bred stereotypical fear some white men harbor with regard to black men. He’s just, you know, a certain type of person.

“Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer also maintain the image of Hawkins as a Spielbergian idyll, a nice town where nothing ever happens, by having racism come to town with Billy. Plus, Billy gets to have a good excuse for his explosive rage. In a later episode his father comes home and punishes him for failing to keep an eye on Max by punching him in the face and calling him a faggot. Targeting a gay kid might not be as simple as honing in on a black kid that literally shows up on his doorstep.

A recent Mic article paints Billy as a Trumpian villain, “a white high schooler who embodies the white rage and disaffection that largely characterized Trump’s rise.” But that only explains part of why he’s so disturbing and why his bullying of Lucas sends an incomplete message.

For Billy and Lucas also personify the deceptive illusion of the “Morning in America” myth Ronald Reagan peddled about the heartland in the 1980s. We like to remember it as the heyday of MTV, marketed with a progressive “We Are the World,” “United Colors of Benetton” picture of society. We can choose to forget that MTV did not feature black artists for a long time until publicly pressured to do so, and that low-income people of color were demonized as welfare queens and made the targets of paramilitary-style policing by law enforcement in major American cities such as Los Angeles.

Viewers can choose, as many declared to do for so many years, to not see color.

The Duffer Brothers are right to refrain from inserting political polemics into their show, of course. “Stranger Things 2” is a supernatural fiction, and they have an obligation to maintain that tone. And while they should be commended for incorporating flaws in the suburban cul-de-sac fantasy that fueled the first season, it would have shown more bravery for them to be more specific about the ordinary evil and danger posed by people like Billy.

In a war council before the climactic final battle in “Stranger Things 2,” a character likens the shadow monster and its minions to the Nazis in World War II.  Its evil spreads with an insidious virulence and is linked to a single force, a hive mind. This informs the group solidifying them as the party allied with lawful good against chaotic evil. The story makes its otherworldly malevolence real enough to name it – they dub it the “Mind Flayer.”

The sinister peril Billy visits on Lucas, resembles one we’re contending with in the real world, and receives no name and is left open to interpretation. True life remains stranger than fiction and infinitely more dangerous than Hawkins, Indiana. But maybe knowing this allows us to breathe a sigh of relief for Lucas. If the Duffers aren’t comfortable specifically addressing the dangers he’d face in the real world, maybe they’ll keep in safe in the town’s romantic snow globe.