As I focus on the problems of systemic racism and white privilege this month, ProPublica has a good article describing the problem of systemic racism in the capitol police force and its effects during the Capitol attack on January 6th.
I have excerpted the article below, or you can read the entire article by clicking on the title above.
Allegations of racism against the Capitol Police are nothing new: Over 250 Black cops have sued the department since 2001. Some of those former officers now say it’s no surprise white nationalists were able to storm the building.
When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.
Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”
In case after case, agency lawyers denied wrongdoing. But in an interview, Dine said it was clear he had to address the department’s charged racial climate.
. . . Whether the Capitol Police managed to root out racist officers will be one of many issues raised as Congress investigates the agency’s failure to prevent a mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol while lawmakers inside voted to formalize the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
Already, officials have suspended several police officers for possible complicity with insurrectionists, one of whom was pictured waving a Confederate battle flag as he occupied the building. One cop was captured on tape seeming to take selfies with protesters, while another allegedly wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he directed protesters around the Capitol building. While many officers were filmed fighting off rioters, at least 12 others are under investigation for possibly assisting them.
Two current Black Capitol Police officers told BuzzFeed News that they were angered by leadership failures that they said put them at risk as racist members of the mob stormed the building. . .
. . . Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, a former Capitol Police officer who was the lead plaintiff in the 2001 discrimination lawsuit filed against the department, said she was not surprised that pro-Trump rioters burst into the Capitol last week.
In her 25 years with the Capitol Police, Blackmon-Malloy spent decades trying to raise the alarm about what she saw as endemic racism within the force, even organizing demonstrations where Black officers would return to the Capitol off-duty, protesting outside the building they usually protect.
The 2001 case, which started with more than 250 plaintiffs, remains pending. As recently as 2016, a Black female officer filed a racial discrimination complaint against the department.
“Nothing ever really was resolved. Congress turned a blind eye to racism on the Hill,” Blackmon-Malloy, who retired as a lieutenant in 2007, told ProPublica.
Chrissy Stroup has written an interesting article at Religion Dispatches about
Chrissy Stoop
the competing portraits of Jesus on display in public political debate.
In contrast to “fundamentalism,” she coins the term fandamentalism to describe public attempts to harness Jesus as the religious mascot for whatever political policy position one prefers.
I have excerpted the article below, or you can read the entire piece by click on the title above.
But wait, you say, Jesus would of course disapprove of Trump! Let me respond with a modest proposal, as it were: Jesus does not need you, or anyone, to save him, so perhaps you could hear me out? If you do find yourself becoming angry on Jesus’s behalf as you read this, I would ask you to take a breath and try to consider how your very defensiveness might be belying a subtler, but still problematic, form of Jesus fandamentalism.
As I’ve argued on a number of occasions, Christian supremacism is bakedinto the American public sphere to the extent that it’s very difficult to get many people to see how American cable news and legacy media outlets whitewash the power and breadth of Christian Right extremism. They let “respectable” evangelicals dominate the conversation unchallenged by critical outside researchers, ex-evangelicals and those who are most harmed by white supremacist patriarchy. When the trauma and abuse inherent in fundamentalism and Christian nationalism come to light, too often they are represented as mere “hypocrisy,” while the Christians behind them are dismissed as “fake Christians,” conveniently shielding Christianity from any systemic criticism. . .
. . . admitting that the Jesuses of our headcanons and our church traditions are shaped by our own values, “opens possibilities” for believers to ask “why Jesus appears the way he does in our communities, readings, and theologies,” according to Onishi. “What does it say about us? How does our shaping of Christ reflect our values? How should becoming cognizant of that image and those values transform us? Those are questions I think Christian communities would benefit from asking.”
(This is the first in a series of posts I will make on the controversy surrounding something called “Critical Race Theory” within the Christian church and the continuing problem of racism in America. Stay tuned…)
The Southern Baptist Convention’s condemnation of something called Critical Race Theory has made this particular approach to understanding racist behavior (both individually and collectively) a controversial issue in the evangelical world.
All six presidents of the Southern Baptist seminaries have gone on record
Screengrab from the 2019 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting as Danny Akin speaks while other seminary presidents and leaders watch, including Jeff Iorg, Adam Greenway, Al Mohler, and Jamie Dew.
The heart of this new addition to the SBC declaration of faith says,
In light of current conversations in the Southern Baptist Convention, we stand together on historic Southern Baptist condemnations of racism in any form and we also declare that affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message. (emphasis mine) (For a fuller statement see here).
All six seminary presidents added individual affirmations to the end of the document.
SBC President J.D. Greear speaks on a panel discussion about racial reconciliation during the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention at the BJCC, June 11, 2019 in Birmingham, Ala. RNS photo by Butch Dill
What is, sadly, most telling about the new Southern Baptist position paper is the fact that it was formulated by an exclusive group of white men.
No African-American Southern Baptists were includedin this body; neither were any consulted as the group made its deliberations.
Southern Baptist Convention officials admitted it would have been better if they’d contacted Black leaders of their denomination before issuing a statement decrying critical race theory, which led to the departure of several Black pastors…
. . . In late November, the leaders of the six SBC seminaries — all of them white men — declared critical race theory, a set of ideas about systemic racism, was not compatible with the statement of faith of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
But even worse is the denominational reality these optics reveal: both white privilege and systemic racism are thriving within the Southern Baptist Convention, including its educational institutions.
The SBC is now Exhibit A proving the urgent relevance of the very observations, about white privilege and systemic racism, that Critical Race Theory is most helpful in uncovering and confronting.
Honestly, I cannot help but wonder if these white, male, Southern Baptist decision-makers (I am hesitant to call them “leaders”) have actually condemned Critical Race Theory because it holds up a mirror to reveal their true selves.
Perhaps we should not forget that the SBC was originally formed by Southern slave-owners in order to protect the institution of slavery.
I am sure that many Southern Baptists are ashamed of that particular piece of their story. But this recent action shows that it continues to cast a very long shadow.
However much the SBC may have renounced its slave-owning origins, this recent episode in church politics has highlighted both the importance and the validity of Critical Race Theory’s analysis of both white privilege and systemic racism within American society.
Given the fact that the SBC finds the concepts of white privilege and systemic racism as particularly offensive ideas in Critical Race Theory, it is almost comical (were it not so atrocious) to see how the SBC doctrinal committee has made itself the newest poster child (poster children?) for the important benefits that Critical Race Theory has to offer.
The wealthy Republican is evicting tenants despite the eviction moratorium passed by Congress. Once again, rich property owners do as they wish while others suffer.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., drew ire for voting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, as well as for refusing to wear a mask to keep COVID-19 from spreading when lawmakers locked down during the U.S. Capitol insurrection. His nonchalance about the coronavirus did not end there: Eviction notices have been filed against residents of two rental properties associated with Mullin during the pandemic.
The eviction filings come as coronavirus case counts have steadily increased in Oklahoma and the United States. So far, Oklahoma has seen 3,323 deaths from the coronavirus. In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a national moratorium against evictions as a public health measure to prevent the spread of COVID. . .
. . . Mullin’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The CDC took action to curb evictions by issuing an eviction moratorium, which took effect on September 4. But the moratorium has been criticized as weakly enforced and has allowed evictions to continuedespite the pandemic. The moratorium was set to expire on December 31, before Congress took action and extended the moratorium until January 31. President Joe Biden then extended the moratorium until March 31.
He gives special attention to the Senate confirmation hearing for Biden’s nominee as Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Naturally, it is not the least bit surprising to see the Biden presidency kick -off another business-as-usual Democratic administration. After all, every presidential candidate lies. Remember how Trump promised that Mexico would pay for his border wall?
But Mr. Lawrence reminds us that despite the corporate media’s (excepting Fox) decision to applaud Biden as America’s post-Trump savior (though, we ought not forget how much money president Trump brought to these
Antony Blinken with President Biden
outlets with their wall-to-wall coverage of his every faux pas — and there were many) he is essentially an old-style, moderate Republican at heart, who will continue to shovel coal into the gaping furnaces of neo-liberal economics, corporate control over US politics, and American imperialism around the world.
Welcome to the new Democratic administration.
Here is an excerpt:
It was inevitable that President Joe Biden would betray numerous of his campaign promises — and those that mattered most to wide-eyed voters who put him in office. The speed at which he and his people have revealed their treachery is nonetheless stunning.
No, there will be no comprehensive stimulus plan until at least the spring, if then. No, relief checks are not “going out the door immediately,” and no, they will not be for the $2,000 to which Biden committed his administration. As to Biden’s health care reforms, one can hardly believe one’s eyes and ears.
As Andrew Perez and Julia Rock reported in Jacobin last week, Biden’s plans are literally lifted from a letter health-insurance lobbyists recently sent Capitol Hill legislators. The promised public option is out the window. Health care “secure for all?” These people do have bridges they intend to sell you.
All this within a few days of Biden’s ascendancy. It’s not much different on the foreign policy side, so let’s draw the old lesson. You can have democracy at home or empire abroad, but you can’t have both. We will continue to suffer the latter under Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Those drawn into thinking the Biden regime would conduct America’s affairs abroad decently and humanely and in principled fashion will now discover they have been savagely sucker-punched. Those who understood from the outset that Biden’s people would go nowhere near the essential, determining questions of exceptionalism, universalism, and our consequent dedication to empire will be repelled but not surprised as the policy framework is revealed.
In this case, the moment of truth came even before Biden’s inauguration. His saccharine inauguration speech last Wednesday, with its Hallmark-card calls for unity, was quite secondary to the confirmation hearings the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the previous day. . .
. . . Among Blinken’s many rather sad-to-witness “Yes sirs,” two standout: his finely chiseled endorsement of Pompeo’s reckless assassination a year ago of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered military commander (“Taking him out was the right thing to do”), and his approval of the Trump administration’s decision to send lethal arms to the manically corrupt regime in Kiev (“Senator, I support providing that lethal defensive assistance to Ukraine,” when the Obama administration, from which he comes, did not.)
Late last year, Blinken appeared on “Intelligence Matters,” the podcast run by Michael Morrell, the coup-mongering former deputy director at the Central Intelligence Agency and now — of course — a regular commentator on the televisions news networks. In their exchange, the two took up the question of our “forever wars” and Biden’s well-advertised commitment to ending them. Here is a snippet from Blinken’s remarks:
“As for ending the forever wars, large-scale deployment of large, standing U.S. forces in conflict zones with no clear strategy should and will end under his [Biden’s] watch. But we also need to distinguish between, for example, these endless wars with large-scale, open-ended deployment of U.S. forces with [sic], for example, discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces to support local actors. In ending the endless wars we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brushstroke.”
This is what we are in for these coming years, the hyper-rational irrationality of the middling technocrat. There will be adjustments at the margin, reconsiderations of method. There will be no consideration whatsoever of America’s hegemonic objectives—of the imperial project.
Many politicians, including president Biden, are calling for our nation to unify. Biden says that he won’t be the president of red states or blue states — Trump frequently emphasized that he was president primarily for red states — but for the United States.
The question, however, is how will this happen?
During Mitch McConnell’s reign as senate majority leader, the Republican party has shown about as much interest in unity as a harlot has in chastity.
Historically, Republicans establish unity by ignoring Democratic complaints and proceeding full steam ahead. (The last two Supreme Court appointments were text book examples of this tactic.)
Democrats, on the other hand, are congenitally spineless, establishing unity by rolling over and giving Republicans most of what they want. (In a great many ways, the Obama administration was one long give away to Republican demands.)
Politics is adversarial by definition.
How do rivals ever find unity, especially when one side or the other is not particularly interested in burying the hatchet (except in an opponent’s back)?
Watch and behold the wonders of bipartisanship as Republican commentators glory in heart-warming calls for “unity.”
The video is titled “How Conservative Media is Covering Biden.” Watch it and weep.
The Las Vegas casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, died on January 11, 2021.
Donald Trump with Sheldon Adelson. Adelson reportedly contributed $75 million to Trump’s 2019 reelection campaign.
Adelson (and his Israeli born wife) was a fanatical political Zionist who, sadly, was the living embodiment of the old antisemitic slander that Jews all secretly loved Israel more than their country of residence.
Occasionally, caricatures — even slanderous caricatures — can be true.
Israeli apartheid is not limited to the Occupied Territories.
Apartheid reigns within Israel’s recognized borders as well.
Israel is NOT “the only democracy in the Middle East” because Israel is not a democracy.
As I show in my forthcoming book exposing the many errors of Christian Zionism, Israel is actually an extremely rigid ethnocracy. That is, a hierarchical state where one ethnic group (Jews) exercises the legal privilege of systematically discriminating against everyone else in the state (primarily Palestinians).
This is much more than a story about Adelson’s control over the Republican party. It is an expose in how big money donors, CEOs, and corporations are able to control American politics, including our foreign policy.
Below is an excerpt from Kane’s article, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
WITH THEdeath of 87-year-old billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party has lost its biggest benefactor.
A Palestinian girl sits inside a room of her family’s building which was damaged by Israel’s bombing attack in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, Feb. 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
Adelson’s legacy, however, will live on for generations, not only in his Israeli-born wife Miriam, who is expected to continue giving millions of dollars to the Republican Party, but in the shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Adelson’s top concern. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” Adelson said in 2017.
More than anyone else, Adelson can claim credit for transforming the GOP into a party devoted to bolstering Israel’s military occupation and its expansion of West Bank settlements. And the Israeli
Israeli settlers regularly harass and attack Palestinians. They are typically protected by Israeli soldiers.
right, also bankrolled by Adelson, saw many of its political aspirations realized under Donald Trump’s presidency, a political turn that has fractured the long-standing bipartisan consensus on the Jewish state.
Adelson’s most important political conviction was that the Israeli right must be supported. The 19th-richest American used his $35 billion fortune to ensure that the GOP’s policy goals united with the Israeli right’s. In a 2010 speech, Adelson, a U.S. Army veteran, lamented that “the uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.” He added: “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli-born, Israel is in my heart.”
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” he said in remarks made in 2014 at an Israeli-American Council conference. During that same appearance, Adelson dismissed concerns about whether Israeli democracy can coexist while Israel rules millions of Palestinians who have no voting rights. So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he said. . .
. . . FROM 2008 TO 2016, Adelson opposed President Barack Obama at every turn, backing John McCain and Mitt Romney’s failed attempts at defeating him and bankrolling the groups that fiercely wanted to defeat Obama’s Iran policies. In 2013, Adelson suggested that Obama launch a nuclear strike on Iran. Obama instead pursued his landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which he sealed in 2015.
But Adelson’s crowning achievements were yet to come. During the 2016
Israel’s Apartheid/ Annexation wall. As you see, the wall did not stop suicide bombers from entering Israel.
presidential primary, after all the GOP candidates traipsed to Las Vegas to meet with the casino magnate as part of what’s known as the “Adelson primary,” Adelson appeared to back Sen. Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk thought to be a top contender for winning the nomination. The casino magnate was said to be wary of Trump, who had demurred on whether he backed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital in a speech to the Adelson-backed Republican Jewish Coalition. For his part, Trump, in October 2015, mocked Rubio for being Adelson’s “perfect little puppet.”
. . . Adelson wanted Trump to torpedo diplomacy with Iran; Trump backed out of the Iran deal in May 2018. Adelson believed the U.S. Embassy should move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; Trump did so, also in May 2018. (In September 2020, Adelson bought the U.S ambassador’s beach-view residence in the affluent Israeli city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv for $67 million, ensuring that the next U.S. ambassador won’t have a place to live near the old location of the U.S. Embassy.) Adelson wanted the U.S. to legitimize Israel’s policy of building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; Trump did so in January 2019, reversing long-standing bipartisan U.S. policy that saw settlements as illegitimate obstacles to peace because they make a geographically viable Palestinian state impossible.
Officer Daniel Hodges is the young man who was trapped and crushed between the violent mob and a door post inside the Capitol building on January 6.
You have probably seen the video of his cries for help that has now been widely circulated.
His mouth is bloody. In multiple interviews he has described being beaten with his own baton. He was also tazed in the neck multiple times.
Fewer news sources have published Officer Hodges remarks on one of the most significant details about the pro-Trump mob who came to overturn the results of November’s election:
The insurrectionists were heavily armed.
You can read the entire article here. Below is an excerpt of an interview published by “The Police Tribune” where Hodges describes how the police had been confiscating weapons for hours prior to the capitol assault:
“The zealotry of these people is absolutely unreal,” Officer Hodges told reporters. “There were points where I thought it was possible I could either die or become seriously disfigured.”
He said he didn’t want to draw his service weapon because he said he knew that some of the rioters had guns, too, The Washington Post reported.
“I didn’t want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they had guns— we had been seizing guns all day,” Officer Hodges said. “And the only reason I could think of that they weren’t shooting us was they were waiting for us to shoot first. And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple thousand demonstrators, we would have lost.”
Now-former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned in disgrace the day after the Capitol riot, said that he had requested additional help at the Capitol multiple times ahead of the planned Jan. 6 protest in DC.
History professor Loretta Ross published a provocative article at Counter Punch magazine yesterday addressing the increasingly anti-democratic
Professor Loretta Ross of Smith College
tendencies of the Republican party.
Four years ago I would have labelled her thesis a serious exaggeration.
But over the past four years, since the Republican party’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, I have found myself saying more and more often that Republican politicians do not really believe in democracy.
The entire “stop the steal” movement was nothing but an hysterical eruption of antidemocratic values among white devotees of Donald Trump, the Republican president.
Truth be told, I am not convinced that today’s Democratic party really believes in democracy, either.
We need look no further than the party’s coordinated efforts to rob Bernie Sanders (twice!) of the Democratic presidential nomination to find prima facie evidence of this fact.
Bernie Sanders would certainly have become the Democratic presidential nominee had he not been the target of manifold dirty tricks from the Democratic National Committee.
So much for the absurd accusations of conservative pundits who describe the Democratic party as a bastion of Marxist, socialist, radical Leftist revolutionaries. I don’t know what planet those people live on, but it’s not earth.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a “far left” party/movement in this country.
However, nowadays I must confess that given the Republican party’s behavior over the past 4 years, including its scandalous actions (or inactions) during and after the January 6th attack on Congress, I have come to believe that professor Ross’s words are very, very pertinent to our current situation.
Below is an excerpt of her article entitled “The Nazification of the Republican Party.” Or you can read the entire article here:
. . . Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United
Neo-Nazi insignia at the capitol on January 6
States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental.
The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a
Neo-Nazi flag at the capitol riot
deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth (my emphasis). To paraphrase noted Black educator Vincent Harding, we are citizens of a country that has yet to be realized.
The Republican brand as a legitimate political party will be forever associated
Confederate flag inside Congress
with far-right ideologies, including neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. These so-called “respectable” leaders coddled and stoked a white supremacist insurrection by Trump for the past four years. Their transactional opportunism enabled Confederate flags to be defiantly paraded in the U.S. Capitol, a shame not even achieved during the Civil War. They proved they don’t want to share a pluralistic democracy with other political parties and interests.
If Republicans can’t permanently dominate this country with a demographically shrinking number of angry white people, they proved they are ready to blow it up, figuratively and literally. Now they want us to rush to forgiveness and reconciliation, and ignore that truth and accountability come first in the achievement of healing.
Hitler led an insurrection against the German government in 1923 and was sentenced to five years in jail, served one, and used that leniency to commit the
Trump supporter wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt on capitol steps
Holocaust. Never forget that premature forgiveness before accountability is dangerous. Fascists are violent because of who THEY are, not what WE DO–like the ordinary Germans who underestimated the Nazis and thought they were just another political party on the right. Germans who weren’t Nazis passively went about their normal affairs by denying the realities of their Jewish neighbors, all for the sake of “unity.”
Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement
White nationalist insignia worn among pro-Trump rioters
of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party.
I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years.
The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions. From the White House, to the Congress, to the streets, they declared war on democracy. They are seditionists, co-conspirators, and neo-Nazis hiding in plain sight who chose to use whatever power, platforms, and microphones they had to overturn this system of government. Their apparent goal is an apartheid-like system in which an embattled minority of people rule over millions of people who oppose them. We must send an unmistakable signal that this will not be tolerated when a more competent neo-fascist seeks to gain permanent power in the Congress or White House in the future.
I’m calling them American Nazis, who adapted the playbook of the Third Reich. Trump may be gone but Trumpism is not. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, they prioritized their “whiteness over democracy.” This is highlighted by their
More neo-Nazi flags among rioters
implacable attack on voting rights. Republicans who encouraged this dangerous resurrection of fascism are already trying to erase what happened or describe it as simply a “First Amendment Protest.” These apologists trying to launder their shredded reputations should be denied jobs, media opportunities, publishing contracts, and all other opportunities to spread their contempt for democracy. As philosopher Karl Popper observed in 1945, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
We must defend an open, democratic society against these forces of fascism disguised as a respectable Republican Party that encouraged a white supremacist insurrection that seeks to rule like kings above the law. They see calls for unity and civility as weakness, as all fascists do. They take advantage of an open society to undermine the incremental progress of the 20th century in race, gender, citizenship, national, and international relations. For over a century they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with military power, disrupting other democracies by fomenting wars and low-intensity conflicts around the world that have killed millions of people. They are unable to accept the complexity of a multi-cultural and multi-racial globalized world, so they stew in their resentments, and fight every effort to democratize the privileges and benefits of our world. They are at the natural demise of a political party that sought to hold onto power through a web of lies to their followers to enrich a small cabal of people.
America’s tattered global reputation is at stake in this unending Civil War. Instead of denouncing the traitors in 1865, we allowed them to be rehabilitated and enshrined in monuments across the country. Will our descendants look back and see that we flinched yet again when it was time to hold insurrectionists accountable? If not, we’ll have the shortest Reconstruction in history.
Our commitment to human rights, just laws, social welfare, global peace, and democratic governance is what authoritarians seek to undermine through abuse of the concept of freedom. We should call them all American Nazis and prevent them from hiding behind mealy-mouthed words because they’ve shown us who they are. Now we must believe them.
The transition from George W. Bush’s presidency to the Barak Obama administration strikingly revealed the partisan hypocrisy of Democratic leaders and the supposedly “liberal” establishment in America.
While Obama not only continued but intensified many of the worst features of the Bush administration (like expanding the drone bombing and assassination programs, extensive bombing in Syria, and destroying Libya, to mention only a few examples) Democratic and liberal leaders, journalists, and commentators fell silent.
Folks who screamed bloody murder when Bush had done similar things, suddenly became mute, offering no criticism at all — not even a muffled guffaw — when Obama did the very same things.
The Democratic/liberal establishment is applying the same double standard today now that Joe Biden has replaced Donald Trump. I fully expect that the Biden administration will continue the same imperialistic foreign policies, the same neoliberal economic policies, and increasingly oppressive domestic policies as would any other member of the entrenched DC establishment.
Here are a few examples and a few prescient predictions from a few thoughtful analysts:
Biden’s first statement on foreign policy endorses upstart, opposition figure, Juan Guaido, as the president of Venezuela. (I have written many times about US attempts to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Nicolas Maduro; see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Biden is already in the process of creating new domestic terrorism surveillance laws; see here, here, and here. Listen to this good discussion of Biden’s authoritarian impulses with Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald here.
others suffer.
lecturer for over 30 years. He recently published a piece at Consortium News entitled, “
a democracy.
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” 
the violent mob and a door post inside the Capitol building on January 6.
some of the rioters had guns, too, The Washington Post reported.
