I am getting a little sick of all the liberal salutes and fond farewells to Joe Biden, painting him as a fundamentally decent man and a compassionate father.

The Democratic Party rewarded Biden’s long Senate career of racism, militarism, and bipartisan fuckery by greasing his way to an undeserved presidency. Americans will remember Biden as the man who lied so much about both his health and the health of the economy that they chose a fascist to replace him. The rest of the world will remember Joe Biden as a mass murderer, war criminal, and an accomplice in genocide.

This is Joe Biden’s legacy:

“Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten…”

For the last year Palestinians have been living in an extra-hellish hellscape, harried from place to place by Israeli military and systematic bombing that has killed between 45,000 to nearly 200,000 people, depending on which figures you trust.

Early on, the American political establishment and an empire-friendly media settled on the dishonest narrative that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” after which the US threw tens of billions of dollars at Israel, arming and funding it to the teeth with brutal weapons that alarmed even politicians who voted for the transfers.

Anyone who opposed either Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians or the US breaking its own laws to fund human rights abuses became a dissident — to use a word we once reserved primarily for the Soviet Union. We turned on our own dissidents as a host of new legislation appeared, criminalizing protest of what has now been rightly judged to be a genocide.

Dissidents in putative “Western democracies” suffered arrest, censorship, loss of income, public humiliation, charges of “antisemitism,” doxxing, and show trials. These occurred under “liberal” governments as well as authoritarian ones. In the US, McCarthyite hearings were conducted to purge college presidents and shut down student groups. Current legislation proposes to shut down non-profits and human rights groups that oppose Israeli genocide.

Bipartisan consensus gives the middle finger to international law and international bodies like the UN and the ICC. The Imperial State has unabashedly shown us its long, bloody fangs. And, amazingly, they look just like those in dozens of repressive regimes across the globe. Gaza has offered Americans a dismal peek into the realities of every one of their national institutions. For anyone paying attention.

All of this is to be expected. Imperialism and Capitalism are ultimately incompatible with democracy, so guess which one takes the hit? The Capitalist gods have created a government in their own image. On January 20th it will be: out with Democratic Party billionaire donors (who prefer to quietly wield their influence) and in with triumphal Republican billionaires who will screw up your life as much as the Democratic billionaires, but will troll you as they do it.

Corrupt, malevolent regimes never fail to produce dissidents — just as unbearable repression produces resistance movements, including some you may not like. No one can be a disinterested spectator forever. Sooner or later someone comes to take your house, your orchards, your land, your life, your job, or your voice. Eventually you have no choice but to take a side.

“Beit Lahiya is gone, Beit Hanoun is gone. Operations are underway in Jabalya, essentially clearing the area of Arabs.”

If there was ever any question of what the war in Gaza was really about, we now have confirmation from former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, acknowledging — in the Jerusalem Post of all places — that Israel’s disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance was a fantastic opportunity for Zionists to start a new round of annexation and ethnic cleansing. Just as in Israel’s first round of ethnic cleansing in 1948, “Nakba 2.0” was accomplished through terror, slaughter, and the forced transfer of civilians. But this is what Zionism is, even the “friendly” version Joe Biden espouses: I win, you disappear.

Both American political parties signed on to support and commit war crimes and human rights abuses, bringing dissidents into the streets all over the globe. The blunt and clumsy instrument used to defend Israel is “antisemitism.” We are asked to swallow a crude and nonsensical explanation — that “antisemitism” has spontaneously spiked by orders of magnitude for no good reason. The fact is: people don’t hate Jews any more or less than they did a year ago. But there is considerably more reason to hate the Israeli state. And incidentally, that includes a lot of Israelis too. But criticism of Zionism is not antisemitism, as much as Democrats are now willing to create laws to criminalize the former as the latter.

It’s a long relay effort involving both parties. Democrats may have (again) brought us to this point but Republicans are about to (again) take the baton and run with it. But it wasn’t just the Democratic Party that left us in such a tough spot; it was the party’s liberals who placed all their eggs in the “lesser-evil” basket, hoping they could save a few domestic rights at the cost of sacrificing, quite literally, the lives of others out of sight thousands of miles away. They ended up saving neither.

As long as pesky dissidents were only the allegedly “antisemitic” Left or a bunch of disobedient college students, Liberals were content to throw them under the bus too. Enough Democratic politicians broke ranks to vote for repressive laws, condemn dissidents, or conduct McCarthyite hearings with MAGA Republican colleagues, that we can fairly say that both parties have brought America to ruin.

If you’ve ever read Martin Niemöller’s quote beginning with “First they came for the Communists,” you know that by the time the fascists came for pacifist Lutherans like Niemöller, there was no one left to defend them because all their predecessors were dead. Niemöller’s point was the importance of both moral integrity and solidarity.

Moral integrity and Solidarity: a little something to think about as Trump takes power and the Democrats conduct one more political post-mortem.

I have spent the last three quarters of a century in and out of the United States and lived though tumultuous chapters of our national history that have often been measured in wars of choice and countless instances of undermining other people’s democracies. Now things have come full circle; it is our own democracy that we’ve decided to torch.

If authoritarianism — or let’s just call it by its proper name, fascism — seems like a new choice, Americans have always had a rather low opinion of actual democracy. This is why we purge voter rolls and disenfranchise ex-felons. This is why we give cops carte blanche to murder civilians without consequence. This is why the majority of our national treasure is spent on destruction instead of lifting up the people who pay the freight. This is why the building blocks of our democracy, like the electoral college and the Senate, were designed to be inherently undemocratic. This is why we have a Supreme Court that gives lie to what you learned in social studies — that it is held in check by two other branches of government. Clearly it no longer is.

Americans could care less about democracy. We worship at the altar of raw power and we sneer at equality, justice, civic virtue and social cohesiveness. We are not all in this together. It’s every man for himself, and that’s just the way the capitalists like it.

There is so much in Trump’s win that boggles the mind, from his obvious dementia — if not outright insanity — to his incessant lying, the multiple felonies, the sleaze and corruption, and the fascist toadies and evangelicals who have sidled up to him. But the greatest insanity is the expectation that a corrupt billionaire and a coterie of other corrupt billionaires will somehow make things right for the common man — instead of simply lining their own pockets. What moron would believe such nonsense?

It turns out that the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are not morons. While they may not have been voting in their own long-term self-interest, and many no doubt disapproved of Trump’s countless moral, intellectual, and mental failings, they were not voting for a man but for a Führer who will dictate and decree the kind of country they have always wanted — dominant Christian and White-controlled. If there are any doubts about this, Trump’s cabinet appointments make it abundantly clear.

Emergent fascism is scary enough, but what was equally shocking about this election was how fluidly the Democratic Party moved from years of denying that its incumbent president was cognitively impaired to fielding a new one — all without the inconvenience of a primary. How easily the party machine raised billions from mega donors while continuing to gaslight voters about the benefits (it turns out, mainly to Wall Street) of Bidenomics. How easily, barely raising any alarms, the Democratic Party moved significantly to the right on immigration, war, military spending, foreign policy, and even social issues. How coldly the party provided “ironclad” and excessive support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. And refused to change course, even with a new candidate.

Democrats of every stripe behaved badly in this election, from Blue Dog Democrats to Democratic Socialists. From Congressman Bill Keating, who cheer-led the Gaza war while profiting from his Boeing investments — to good old Bernie Sanders and [former?] Democratic Socialist spitfire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who both shepherded progressives, herding them into line to stick with an administration that was illegally funding the genocide of Palestinians even as they both supported performative legislation to stop it.

The Democratic Party is finished. Or it should be. Like a trojan virus in an operating system, unless thoroughly rooted out, the Democratic leadership will continue to advance the neoliberal policies and losing strategies that have had it on the ropes for decades and are its hallmark. Like a trojan or root virus, the most reliable solution is to start all over again, installing a new OS on the bare metal.

The Left has always argued for a new party of working people. Now liberal Democrats are slowly discovering they need one too.

For some time the title of this blog has been Civilization and its Discontents, the English title of a monograph published by Sigmund Freud in 1930, shortly before Nazism finally took power. In times like that — remarkably similar to times like this — people naturally question why they live in societies, particularly those breaking down, and what their relationship to those societies should be.

The German title of the monograph is Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, where Unbehagen conveys uneasiness instead of simply discontent. In 1930 the world was changing — not in a good way — and there was a sense of dark, imminent social and political changes, much like birds know a storm is brewing.

As with much of Freud’s other work, Unbehagen dealt with id, ego, sex, religion and morality. Freud pointed out that societies offer their own pleasures while demanding of their members normative behavior (prohibiting even victimless, non-criminal behavior) that denies primal instincts that could undermine the presuppositions of social institutions. Today’s MAGA fundamentalists, with their insistence on hetero-normative sex and a hypocritical moral code from which their own leaders are always excused, have nothing on Weimar prudery or any of the world societies Freud examined.

Freud identifies “three sources from which our suffering comes: (1) the superior power of nature, (2) the feebleness of our own bodies and (3) the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society.” There is not much to be done about the first two, but the third (family, state, and society) is the subject of his monograph.

For Freud, religion was just one of a number of palliatives to reduce human suffering — something “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” If societies stifled human desire, religion was even more pernicious:

“Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.”

Besides religion, other mechanisms of “displacements of libido” (sublimation, for example) distract humans suffering from deprivation and want. The ego, Freud says, can elevate human consciousness to spheres of imagination (art, science) or fantasy (religion, psychosis, narcissism) — but according to Freud’s “pleasure principle” a person’s underlying primal needs must always be met directly. Those needs — and the aforementioned tensions between individual, family, society, and the state — form the basis of our unease or discontent:

“[…] what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. […] How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange altitude of hostility to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned by certain specific historical events. […] There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. […] But […] this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier. […] What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”

If you have long suspected that the Massachusetts legislature purposely tanks most progressive pieces of legislation, you’d be half right.

Half right because the Massachusetts legislature actually tanks 99.8% of all legislation filed.

According to ACT ON MASS, the Massachusetts legislature has not been in session since July 31st and is officially the least effective legislature in the country. But don’t blame it all on your local legislators, who rank #3 among the most prolific filers of new legislation:

Blame it instead on the House and Senate leadership who kill legislation by consigning it to “study” or “committee.” As a result of this – as well as our habit of electing Republican governors – Massachusetts is dead last in the percentage of legislation actually enacted:

And we can thank House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka for this.

As a consequence of the legislature being prevented from doing its job, ballot initiatives seem to pop up like mushrooms amidst all the dead wood on Beacon Hill. Massachusetts voters can expect as many as 34 ballot questions before them in the next two election cycles. Many of these will be sponsored (or challenged) by lobbyists, worded deceptively, or funded to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars. All because the legislature can’t, or won’t, do it’s damned job.

In 2021 Massachusetts ranked 47th in government transparency according to the Open States project of the Sunlight Foundation. It takes great effort to discover how your representative voted – that is, if they ever get to vote on legislation that is more often than not tanked in the House or Senate.

Once again, we can thank House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka for this.

In 2018 an environmental lobbyist perfectly summed up the reality in the State House when a young reporter asked him when a bottle bill would come up for a vote:

“Probably never,” I shot back.

“But isn’t the majority of the committee in favor of it? Won’t they call for a vote?” he queried.

That moment, I broke an unspoken but absolutely firm rule among lobbyists: never criticize the State House political system. “Let me be clear,” I asserted. “Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.”

It is encouraging that State Auditor Donna DiZoglio is fighting to audit both houses. Unlike forensic audits which search out criminal activity, the State Auditor’s reports are friendly performance audits that suggest ways to make the organizations studied more efficient and more transparent.

And hopefully more democratic.

If you think Democratic Senators are going to save us from creeping authoritarianism, you haven’t been paying attention to the legislation that some of them are filing — often with the co-sponsorship of far-right Republicans.

These include: Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s Kids Online Safety Act; Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s Stop CSAM Act; South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act (co-sponsored by Blumenthal and Durbin); Kansas Senator Roger Marshall’s Cooper-Davis Act (co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Dick Durbin, and Amy Klobuchar); and Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s RESTRICT Act. You can find them all described here.

I had no sooner posted an article about the deluge of Democratic-sponsored legislation when they did it again. This time it’s the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, filed by Hawaii Democratic Senator Brian Schatz (and Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton).

Adding to the imposition of firewalls, censorship, the neutering of encryption, and extensive surveillance of user content in the preceding bills, this one requires social media platforms to verify the ages of users and bans children under 13 from using social media — completely! Children over 13 can only use social media with parental permission. To enable access to the internet, Schatz’s bill creates a digital ID program to be run by the Department of Commerce which will then be used for tracking citizens and legal residents.

It would be a disaster if even one of these bills were enacted into law. They must all be stopped.

Please write Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey urging them to reject these bills.

Dear Senator ___, I urge you to reject: Senator Blumenthal's Kids Online Safety Act; Senator Durbin's Stop CSAM Act; Senator Graham's EARN IT Act (co-sponsored by Senators Blumenthal and Durbin); Senator Marshall's Cooper-Davis Act (co-sponsored by Senators Shaheen, Durbin, and Klobuchar); Senator Warner's RESTRICT Act; and Senator Schatz's Kids on Social Media Act. Most of this legislation disingenuously promises to protect children from online predators. Even if we accept these claims at face value, they are to be accomplished by dangerous if not unconstitutional means: policing the internet, imposing firewalls and censorship, effectively snooping on users, and weakening or breaking online encryption. One bill creates a national ID program to track users and significantly limits use of the internet by children. What's next? Books? It is no surprise that Republicans are involved in attempts to censor and surveil American citizens, but it is unconscionable that so many Democrats have joined with them. Shut this legislation down now. Sincerely, [your name and town here]

PLEASE take action against a suite of repressive legislation intended to police the internet, ban encryption, allow the banning of online platforms, and impose firewalls and dragnet surveillance on American internet users.

When a politician comes to you with legislation claiming to “protect children” it’s wise to be cautious and read the legislation.

Republicans have perfected such appeals in hundreds of bills claiming to “protect” children from history, social studies, vaccinations, and sex education — just as an earlier generation “protected” children by imposing segregation and fighting busing and fluoride. If Republicans really cared about children, they’d pass comprehensive gun control legislation, support universal childcare, and put safety belts in school buses. But they don’t.

So it’s disheartening when Democrats join Republicans in trying to destroy online privacy by policing the internet.

Connecticut Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal has had the internet in his sights since at last 2007 when he called it “a playground for predators.” Last year Blumenthal filed his Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) legislation and it immediately triggered some well-deserved outrage from almost 100 civil rights organizations. You can read their objections here to a bill that would have made online platforms impose Chinese-style “Great Firewall” controls on what children can access online and would have mandated a “duty of care” to implement various types of surveillance and data collection to “protect” children from “bad actors.”

Still smarting from the criticism, Blumenthal went back to the drawing board and this year, together with far right Tennessee Senator Marcia Blackburn and equal numbers of center-right Democrats and right-wing Republicans, filed S.1409, An Act to Protect the Safety of Children on the Internet (KOSA 2023). Unfortunately, this one is just as awful as the last.

KOSA’s Republican co-sponsors include: Marsha Blackburn; Katie Britt; Shelley Capito; Bill Cassidy; John Cornyn; Mike Crapo; Steve Daines; Joni Ernst; Lindsey Graham; Chuck Grassley; Cindy Hyde-Smith; James Lankford; Cynthia Lummis; Roger Marshall; Markwayne Mullin; Lisa Murkowski; James Risch; Marco Rubio; Rick Scott; Dan Sullivan; Roger Wicker; and Todd Young.

It’s doubtful that the members of this right-wing crew are as interested in protecting children as they are in policing the internet.

Their Democrat fellow-travelers include: Tammy Baldwin; Richard Blumenthal; Ben Cardin; Thomas Carper; Bob Casey; Chris Coons; Dick Durbin; Maggie Hassan; John Hickenlooper; Tim Kaine; Mark Kelly; Amy Klobuchar; Ben Lujan; Joe Manchin; Robert Menendez; Chris Murphy; Gary Peters; Brian Schatz; Jeanne Shaheen; Mark Warner; Peter Welch; and Sheldon Whitehouse.

KOSA comes at a time when states like Idaho have banned TikTok and others are imposing laws to limit teen access to the internet. Of course, the most glaring problems with the internet — hoaxes, disinformation, and threats from the far right — are not easily addressed because censorship violates the First Amendment.

But if you “protect” the children through surveillance and censorship, then all the same surveillance and censorship infrastructure can be used on grownups. In order to impose selective censorship on just children, you’ll need some method of age verification. And here’s where the trip down the slippery slope begins. Everyone — not just children — will have to verify their age by providing personal information typically not required for online services. Adults won’t really be able to opt-out either; otherwise every 11 year-old would simply claim s/he’s an adult.

According to the ACLU, EFF, and 90 other civil rights organizations, “age verification may require users to provide platforms with personally identifiable information such as date of birth and government-issued identification documents, which can threaten users’ privacy, including through the risk of data breaches, and chill their willingness to access sensitive information online because they cannot do so anonymously. […] Rather than age-gating privacy settings and safety tools to apply only to minors, Congress should focus on ensuring that all users, regardless of age, benefit from strong privacy protections by passing comprehensive privacy legislation.”

Neither Republicans nor Democrats have done much to guarantee citizens online privacy to the degree that the EU has, but center-right Democrats and far-right Republicans sure love to invent ways to “protect children” which inevitably destroy privacy and curtail civil liberties.

Melissa Gira Grant writes in the New Republic that “KOSA […] has been billed as a new way to protect kids from a more pervasive and more dangerous internet. But in reality, KOSA hands powerful tools to the far right to further wage its war on kids, whether it’s censoring education on racism or demonizing queer and trans youth. Meanwhile, Democrats who support KOSA appear to either not have noticed or not minded.”

KOSA requires online platforms to “take reasonable measures” to “prevent and mitigate” harms to minors such as “anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors,” and monitor “patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors” and “physical violence, online bullying, and harassment of the minor.” State attorneys general are tasked to “prevent and mitigate” and to prosecute platforms for failures to protect children. Describing harms ambiguously much like anti-CRT legislation, state AGs can prosecute platforms if children are “threatened or adversely affected by the engagement of any person in a practice that violates this Act.”

Still from “Das Leben der Anderen” – Stasi surveillance in East Germany

Even if well-intentioned, which it is not, the burden of surveillance that this legislation imposes on internet platforms and the vast sweep of monitoring hundreds of millions of users is something right out of East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Stasi).

As Floridians are well aware, their governor and legislature regard teaching Advanced Placement Black History as harmful, so that could end up being censored. KOSA is a gift to the far-right, to white supremacists, and to homophobes since it will effectively legitimize anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ and racist provisions like Florida’s nationally.

Consequently, 90 civil liberties groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warning that “online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people. […] At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes arebeing banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of ‘grooming,’ KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”

In addition to the mandated censorship and surveillance, internet platforms would be required to file annual public reports itemizing risks to children and listing their prevention and mitigation efforts:

• an assessment of the extent to which the platform is likely to be accessed by minors
• a description of the commercial interests of the covered platform in use by minors
• an accounting of the number of individuals using the covered platform reasonably believed to be minors
• an assessment of the reasonably foreseeable risk of harms to minors posed by the covered platform
• an assessment of how recommendation systems and targeted advertising systems can contribute to harms to minors
• a description of whether and how the covered platform uses system design features that increase, sustain, or extend use of a product or service by a minor
• a description of whether, how, and for what purpose the platform collects or processes categories of personal data that may cause reasonably foreseeable risk of harms to minors
• an evaluation of the efficacy of safeguards for minors
• an evaluation of any other relevant matters of public concern over risk of harms to minors

The specificity of these burdensome reporting and data collection requirements is remarkable, given these same legislators’ lack of interest in accountability for police officers, Pentagon contractors, or oil and gas companies.

Enigma machine: it’s encryption was eventually broken

KOSA, and worse

KOSA is only one of several malignant pieces of legislation intended to police the internet. Several others do so at the cost of effectively banning encryption.

• The STOP CSAM ACT from Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin requires online platforms to snoop on their users to detect child pornography. While this makes it easier to prosecute Dark Web operators, the legislation also depends on disabling data encryption to permit snooping by law enforcement and the user’s own platform. Effectively banning encryption is such a radical step that it explains why STOP CSAM was quietly sneaked into the [annual] National Defense Authorization Act, which is often passed without much scrutiny by both political parties. In addition to breaking encryption, and like KOSA, STOP CSAM would also mandate a take-down mechanism that can be used by far-right politicians to remove any kind of content considered harmful to children, including resources for LGBTQ+ teens or African-American curriculum.
• The EARN IT ACT from South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham is ostensibly to “protect” children from child pornography. But once again, it does more to advance dragnet surveillance than its stated purpose. This bill permits the scanning of your online family photos, messages, and emails. And of course in order to do that your provider has to disable your encryption.
• The Cooper-Davis Act, an amendment to the Controlled Substances Act from Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall, is intended to monitor the online use and sale of controlled substances, particularly fentanyl. This legislation requires your internet provider to monitor your communications and proactively report suspected drug use or drug sales to law enforcement. No warrants are necessary! Aside from violating the Fourth Amendment, the bill also relies on disabling encryption to enable the snooping.
• The RESTRICT ACT, sponsored by Democratic Senator Mark Warner, claims to target data collection by foreign governments. It was specifically intended to ban TikTok but it also penalizes users for employing Virtual Private Networks (VPN) or side-loading (unconventional installation) of apps to circumvent censorship.

Take action against all of them!

Donald Trump did tremendous damage to the Supreme Court by appointing two Christian Nationalist zealots during his single term. Trump, a sexual predator in his own right, appointed accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh to join accused sexual predator Clarence Thomas in a court already swimming with misogyny.

In a nation where only 23% of all citizens regard themselves as Catholic, 7 of 9 — 78% — of current Supreme Court justices are Catholic (Kagan is Jewish, Jackson is Protestant). Several of the Catholic justices reject the liberal Catholicism that came out of the Second Vatican Council, a papal nod to modernity, equality, and justice. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointment, actually belongs to a Catholic cult replete with handmaids (not precisely what you think). There is not a single gay justice on the Court, although at least 7.2% of all Americans are gay. This is a court that knows little and cares even less about the diverse lives of ordinary Americans.

The Court’s recent, explosive rulings both snub their nose at stare decisis and dishonestly select cases based on fraudulent standing before the court. Where once it took a panel of legal experts to discern the legal principles behind a decision, now it only requires asking the question: what would Donald Trump want?

Worse, the Court is now encroaching upon the functions of the other branches of government. In her dissent to the Court’s ruling on student debt cancellation, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the result here is that the court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness”.

“Congress authorised the forgiveness plan… the [education secretary] put it in place; and the president would have been accountable for its success or failure,” she wrote. “But this court today decides that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits of the plan (so says the court) that assistance is too ‘significant'”.

Most dishonestly, the Court violated a basic legal principle of standing (as it also did in the website case) by conjuring up an aggrieved party with no standing to actually bring its complaint before the Court. The Court claimed the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a student loan servicer that conducts day-to-day operations on federal student loans, would lose revenue as a consequence of debt cancellation. The only problem is that MOHELA did not bring the suit and said in its own financial documents that it didn’t plan to make any payments in the future.

Furthermore, an analysis from the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective shows that MOHELA stood to gain revenue if debt cancellation had gone forward. In selecting this case and faking the plaintiff, the Court was not settling a dispute; it was going out of its way to preempt both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

For the past year following the Dobbs decision, the Court has drawn intense criticism, with critics eager to revisit the lies and ethical violations of its black-robed sexual predators, as well as those who took cash and gratuities from billionaires and then ruled on cases affecting these sugar daddies.

But the last straw has been the Court’s outrageous violations of judicial precedent and dishonesty in picking and choosing cases as well as manufacturing aggrieved parties. We have finally reached the point where many are calling for impeachment, reforms and court expansion.

The Constitution’s Article III, Section 1 says that federal judges can hold their offices “during good behavior.” With a corrupt Supreme Court, it’s sobering to consider that the Supreme Court itself may have the last word in deciding if conspiring with your wife on an insurrection, letting billionaires buy your decisions, or violating basic legal principles that would disbar lesser judges constitutes grounds for impeachment. One hopes it is entirely in Congress’s hands.

Reforms can be accomplished by the Court itself, others only by Congress, and others (term limits or court diversity) only by Constitutional amendment. The reform group Fix the Court does not advocate the expansion of the Court but does advocate: term limits, tighter ethics and disclosure rules, public access to court proceedings, divestiture of individual stocks by justices, more rigorous recusal rules, comprehensive financial disclosures, and public disclosures of the many media appearances most of us didn’t even know that justices make.

Expanding the court, however, does not require altering the Constitution. It could theoretically be done today. This is a position that an increasing number of legislators, including both Massachusetts senators, advocate. The group Demand Justice advocates for court expansion. Democrats have already filed legislation to expand the court, though it is unclear why they think it would survive a Constitutional sniff test. Expansion is something the President can do with Senate approval. The only problem is: the current president refuses to expand the court.

But adding justices is hardly a new idea. Donald Trump’s next favorite president (after himself, of course) was Andrew Jackson, who added two justices to the Court in 1836. In 1937 the very threat of expanding the Court to 15 justices by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was enough to return several obstructionist justices to less ideologically-motivated positions.

Which is not to say the court does not also need major reform. There is nothing sacred about nine justices or lifetime presidential appointments. The way justices are appointed in other Western nations puts our poorly-defined scheme to shame.

The Supreme Court of Canada is appointed by the Governor in Council and consists of nine justices. The number started out as six, was bumped up to seven, and ultimately became nine. On the surface Canada’s looks like ours, but Canada’s Supreme Court Act requires that three judges come from Ontario, three from Quebec, two from the Western provinces or Northern Canada and one from the Atlantic provinces. And judges must also retire before their 75th birthdays.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has twelve justices (shown above) and they must have already served on the bench for 15 years, or two on a “federal” bench. The UK convenes a selection commission chosen from judiciaries in Britain, Scotland, Northern Island and Wales, and it strives for at least regional balance. After selection, a justice is formally appointed by the Queen. Even with 12 justices that number can still be increased. Justices must retire at 70 or 75, depending on when they joined the bench.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, or BVerfG), has sixteen justices divided a couple of ways into two senates and three chambers. Judges are elected by both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, each of which selects eight justices. A Justice must have previously held a position on the bench and be at least 40 years of age. Justices serve for 12 years or until the age of 68, whichever comes first.

The French Court of Cassation is the highest appeal court in France and has an elaborate system of chambers and sitting and administrative judges, but 15 justices head up the court. These 15 judges serve a 9 year term and 3 each are appointed by the President of the Republic and Senate and National Assembly presidents. To become a judge a lawyer must be admitted to the Supreme Court Bar after passing an exam from the National School of the Magistracy. Typically, candidates are already judges in lower courts.

Our Supreme Court selection process is a mess. Not only is it highly politicized, but it lacks regional and demographic representation, professionalism, and justices typically serve well past normal retirement. More importantly, the selection process is simply undemocratic. And timidity, inertia, and a vague Constitution seem to prevent Congress from using its powers to rein in abuses by the Judicial branch.

We need a serious re-do of the selection process as well as term limits for the Supreme Court. And there are many places to look for good ideas, starting with those of our closest allies. Add Supreme Court reform to a long list of Constitutional changes necessary to update American democracy rather than overturn it — now that we’ve seen how fragile ours really is.

But in the interim, let’s expand the Supreme Court.

In June 2022 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that women no longer have a Constitutional right to abortion. While previously the personal privacy of women had been balanced by the State’s interest in the life of a viable fetus, a woman is now little more than a uterus without rights for the majority-Catholic court. Once Dobbs was decided, an emboldened Republican Party quickly announced it had other reproductive and civil rights in its crosshairs.

While the Democratic Party in general is now pushing to strengthen reproductive rights in Blue states, and claims it wants to make abortion a winning 2024 campaign issue, President Joe Biden told a group of wealthy donors recently that, while he supported the Roe v Wade compromise, “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion…” This lack of urgency (or real commitment for that matter) coming from an 80 year-old male citing his religious reservations is guaranteed to take the air out of the Democratic Party’s support for the bodily autonomy of women.

Yesterday the majority white Supreme Court dismantled Affirmative Action programs and upheld the rights of Christians to refuse to work on Sundays. Today it handed down rulings barring student debt forgiveness and upholding the right of Christians to discriminate against gay people.

We seem to be well on our our way to the Christian theocracy the GOP has in mind for us.

Most Democrats recognize that we are right on the edge of irrevocably losing whatever shreds of democracy the Court’s Christian Nationalists have not already torched. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer expressed outrage when the Dobbs decision was announced and lashed out with, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” Despite the tough guy impression, Schumer has done little to provide meaningful oversight of the Court and has resisted calls to expand it.

Other Democratic Senators led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey are calling for enlarging the number of Justices. In 2021 a group of progressive New York legislators called for enlarging it as well, appealing for Democrats to give up the ridiculous pretense that the Court is even-handed. “The Republican Party […] uses aggressive tactics to stack the courts with right-wing ideologues, cultivated in their own parallel legal ecosystem. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has fought to preserve the myth of our apolitical judiciary,” stated an appeal organized by State Assembly member elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani of the 36th district (NY).

Regardless, President Biden remains firmly opposed to court expansion.

You might recall that Biden embraced the role of “healer in chief” when he won the Presidency. In retrospect, part of the healing was to reassure Republicans he wasn’t going to tinker with the Supreme Court. Biden created a 36-member commission to look at the Court and its final report infuriatingly cautioned that enlarging the court would call the Court’s legitimacy into question.

The scope of the SCOTUS Sugar Daddy problem might have been unknown at the time but the corruption and conflicts of interest of several of its justices (and one insurrectionist spouse) were well-known. Last year Democrats sponsored toothless performative legislation to impose term limits on Supreme Court Justices, but the Constitution is the only mechanism that can actually change a justice’s term of office.

Critics questioned the centrist composition of Biden’s commission, its objectivity, and an Atlantic article wrote it off with: “Biden wished to avoid weighing in on this politically explosive proposal. The commission was his attempt to avoid having to do so.”

Yesterday the President doubled down on his do-nothing strategy, telling an MSNBC reporter that, while the court “may do too much harm […] I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we are going to politicize it maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy.” Once again, the 80 year-old President seemed to dismiss the severity of the problem. And Biden’s given reason for refusing to expand the Court only made a mockery of how politicized it is already.

To find similar upheavals in legal systems elsewhere you need only travel to Central Asia, where Iran suffered similar rapid-fire decrees by religious courts as the Shah’s dictatorship became a religious dictatorship. Remember conservative Americans whining about “shariah law” and “Islamofascism” in the Muslim world? These same Americans are now all-too eager for a religious dictatorship here.

The Supreme Court’s rulings have enabled a dictatorship of sorts for a shrinking, desperate demographic — white Christians. They and their party have become oppressors of a long list of victims which include: women of childbearing age, LGBTQ+ individuals, migrants, people of color, Muslims, public school teachers, librarians, secular Americans, liberal Jews, academics, union workers, environmental scientists, civil rights activists, civil libertarians, police reformers, war resisters, historians, sociologists, child psychologists, reproductive rights physicians, and anyone even barely to the left of the John Birch Society.

With today’s ruling barring college debt forgiveness, the Supreme Court now adds young people to its hit list – young people who indebted themselves in order to play the American meritocracy game. The Court’s ruling should have been a surprise to no one. As savings and loan, stock market, auto industry, insurance industry, bank, and pandemic bailouts for corporations have repeatedly demonstrated, human capital is never of equal importance. When actual living, breathing humans experience real crises in their lives, we discover all too quickly that, in America, you are on your own.

The issues America faces require political leadership people can believe in. And secular America needs a fighter rather than a healer.

Given Biden’s poor polling, his age, his gaffes, his reckless foreign policy, his apparent lack of interest in tackling controversial problems, a dangerous primary opponent (RFK Jr.), a wildcard from the Left (Cornell West), and a stealth MAGA candidate who will probably run under the No Labels label, the Democratic Party is going to have a serious problem in 2024 if they stick with Biden.

It’s time for the DNC grownups to begin thinking of an alternative to Biden in 2024. If the Democratic nominee won’t fight the GOP like he really means it, a secular and diverse America is going to lose even more than we have already.

As I feared, a misguided Democrat has suggested that Biden pardon Trump when and if he beats Trump at the polls (again). This misguided individual and a self-described Democrat is Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at Duquesne University, who explicitly mentions Gerald Ford’s famous precedent of pardoning Nixon..

Ledewitz argues that democracy is dying from the downward spiral of violations of norms and laws. He even agrees with former Attorney General William Barr that prosecuting Trump is absolutely justified.

But — so argues the law professor — to hell with the rule of law.

Ledewitz argues that, despite every legal justification and the fact that ignoring crimes like Trump’s has brought us to this point, Democrats ought to pardon Trump — not for justice but out of a political calculus intended to mollify MAGA zealots.

For a little historical context, I don’t recall the Justice Department ever hesitating to prosecute Klan members in Mississippi because some substantial portion of the electorate there didn’t want it to happen. But conflict avoidance is at the heart of Ledewitz’s argument. And this is a despicable case for a law professor to be making.

Ledewitz employs such ridiculous and simplistic logic that he embarrasses himself. Although it’s hard to imagine that he never saw an innocent defendant accept a favorable plea deal (in a legal system where more than 90% of all defendants take pleas), Ledewitz’s argument is based on a simplistic logic: Biden will offer Trump a pardon and Trump will turn it down if he’s not actually guilty. But — so Ledewitz reasons — Trump is guilty, ergo accepting Biden’s pardon will be an admission of his crimes. Voila! Case closed. Perry Mason does it again!

But it’s not as if Trump doesn’t wolf down legal maneuvers along with his cheeseburgers every day. Or that he would never take anything given to him freely (by some accounts he was prepared to sell pardons). Or as if Trump’s supporters are actually moved by ethics, logic, facts, or respect for the rule of (secular) law. Despite all the damning proof of crimes provided, Trump survived two impeachments precisely because his many enablers just don’t care about facts, the rule of law. Or Perry Mason logic.

Let the rest of us — those who actually believe in justice — agree that if Donald Trump broke the law then he must suffer the same consequences as any other citizen. If especially a law professor is prepared to reject this basic premise of justice, then let’s just open the doors to all the jails and let out all the criminals.

Either we believe in the rule of law, or we don’t. I hope someone is still teaching that at Duquesne Law School.

As Donald Trump fights the numerous criminal charges he earned while running the Presidency into the ground, I am reminded of Trump’s second impeachment trial in which he was exonerated by an all white jury – well, actually, Republican Senators. Same principle, though. Men who believe they are above the law.

The House’s Articles of Impeachment had already been watered-down and consisted only of Trump’s most recent attempts to extort Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 presidential election. Those charges did not include anything from the Mueller report, Trump’s numerous emoluments clause violations, lying about illegal payments to porn stars or mistresses, or any of the many obstructions of justice to come. Prosecution by the Senate should have been a slam dunk but we all know what happened.

If all that winking and looking away at crime, and the kid-glove treatment, was not bad enough, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fast-tracked the Senate trial down to two weeks — three times shorter than Nixon’s. For sake of comparison, in 2016, when South Korea impeached president Park Geun-hye for corruption and influence-peddling, prosecutors charged her with 13 counts remarkably similar to Trump’s, and her trial in South Korea’s Constitutional Court lasted 10 weeks. Gun-hye’s refusal to appear before the court was never an impediment to her conviction.

But with Trump, well, kid gloves.

The travesty of justice Americans witnessed in the Senate that year was reminiscent of special treatment numerous white criminals have received in other sham trials:

• In 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury after one hour of deliberation.
• In 1963, after Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi, two all-white juries acquitted his killers in separate trials.
• In 1998, when 13 white supremacists were charged with attempting to murder a federal judge and FBI agent, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
• In 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin by a jury with only one juror of color.
• In 2016, a group of armed sovereign citizens who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were acquitted by an all-white jury — while on the same day unarmed Native Americans protesting a pipeline on their own land were maced and beaten by police.
• It’s not even possible to list the thousands of times that white police officers have murdered unarmed black men and been acquitted or simply not charged.

Yesterday, after only a brief pause from its election denial propaganda, FOX News was back at it, calling Biden a “wannabe dictator” and portraying the real wannabe dictator, Trump, as the victim of – well – prosecution for crimes anybody else would be prosecuted for. To hear just about every Republican tell it, not one of the standard rules of justice applies to a white supremacist criminal like Trump. Apparently only [non-white] “banana republics” prosecute their corrupt politicians.

But let’s not forget the many other get-out-of-jail cards available for white men. Stand Your Ground laws, statutes encouraging vigilantism, and the doctrine of Qualified immunity — a magic wand to wave away police murders. Add to this the increasing abuse of presidential and gubernatorial pardons for MAGA criminals and insurrectionists. Criminals who believe they’re above the law.

For the moment it’s not looking so good for Trump in 2024. If Biden does win this election, I am troubled by the nagging concern that Biden – in pursuing some sort of misguided national unity objective – might end up pardoning Trump’s federal crimes, just as Gerald Ford wiped the slate clean for Richard Nixon. This would be a huge mistake.

Rubbing the average citizen’s nose in impunity for serious criminality will do nothing to alter the perception that American justice is a cruel joke. If the most corrupt man in America is not subject to the same laws as the rest of us, we might as well open the prison doors and let all the criminals walk free.

Americans have a strange view of presidential accountability

On August 8th, after a dozen FBI agents showed up unannounced at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of ex-president Donald Trump, MAGAworld began calling for civil war. “Tomorrow is war,” tweeted Steven Crowder, a Trump supporter with 5 million YouTube and 2 million Twitter followers. Another MAGA Tweet invoked civil war directly: “The Feds are currently RAIDING Mar-A-Lago. This could very well be the equivalent of the FIRST SHOT fired upon Fort Sumter. I believe they want a civil war. What other outcome can this bullsh!t lead to?”

For many Americans — including a lot of Democrats — it is unimaginable that even a corrupt, criminal American president like Trump could ever serve a day in jail. For starters, it has never happened. But there is also the matter of presidential pardons which seem to have kept Richard Nixon out of jail. Or maybe we simply regard presidents as untouchable monarchs. While Trump was campaigning in Iowa in 2016 he joked, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He wasn’t wrong.

In general White America views the punishment of criminal presidents and prime ministers as something that only happens in unstable, undemocratic — meaning non-European — parts of the world. After the FBI’s raid on his father’s compound, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics” — a view shared by Ron DeSantis. Even former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang went out of his way to attack the investigation of the corrupt ex-president.

But America has never had any qualms about holding former leaders of other nations to account. When deposed Lybian president Muammar Qaddafi was captured, mutilated, and murdered, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, “We came, we saw, he died.” When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was tried by a US-approved regime and executed, President Bush wrote, “Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.” But when it comes to corrupt American presidents, no such rules of law ever seem to apply.

In fact, the rules by which one foreign despot is a friend and another an enemy seem to boil down to anti-communism and global alliances — and not the rule of law. Joe Biden’s fist bump with Saudi murderer/dictator Muhammad bin Salman while doubling down on sanctions on Cuba’s rulers are a good contrast. America continues to praise Brazilian and Indian democracies as the “largest democracies in the world” (other than our own) — despite their authoritarian character and because of their overt anti-communism.

Indira Gandhi was a corrupt prime minister whose family was Indian royalty and was spared any jail time. The “scourge of communists” and Naxalites, Gandhi issued a series of dictatorial decrees, imposed censorship, suspension of civil liberties, and arrested political opponents (including current PM Modi), which eventually led to her assassination by her own security detail. In fact, long before Modi, Indira Gandhi’s rule marked the beginning of the end of Indian democracy — precisely because she was never held to account.

Upon coming to power, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, a Republican darling, vowed to purge Brazil of political opponents. “These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland. It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.” Bolsonaro, of course, is the product of the U.S. looking the other way at Brazil’s far right (and anti-communist) military, which never really went away.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the GOP’s new idol and another virulent anti-communist, grabbed power this year by declaring a state of emergency and now rules by decree. Judging by his prominence at two recent CPAC conferences, Orban’s Fidesz party is the new model for American democracy.

So while we love anti-communist despots and refuse to prosecute our own criminal leaders, other western-oriented nations have somehow managed to hold their leaders to account.

Norway actually executed its Nazi collaborationist Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling for high treason. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon was convicted of fraud and misuse of funds. The French President Fillon served under, Nicolas Sarkozy, was likewise jailed for corruption, influence peddling, and bribery of a federal magistrate. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went to jail on corruption charges. Former Israeli President Moshe Katsav served time in prison on rape charges. And Israel’s best-known PM Benjamin Netanyahu is now facing prison on multiple charges of corruption and bribery.

Canada’s Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, Lise Thibault, served time in prison for misuse of public funds. The Premier of Western Australia Ray O’Connor was sent to prison on charges of fraud. Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond was arrested on sexual harassment charges. Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates was sent to prison for corruption, tax evasion, and money laundering. Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov was recently arrested on multiple corruption charges. British Virgin Islands PM Alturo Fahie was arrested on drug smuggling charges. South Korean Finance Minister Choi Kyoung-hwan served time in prison for an influence-peddling scheme that also took down the South Korean president Park Geun-hye. Puerto Rican Governor Wanda Vazquez was charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and wire fraud by the DOJ.

Given the hesitancy to prosecute a popular leader with a large following, Americans may end up following Italy’s lead. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and corruption charges and sentenced to four years in prison, which due to his age he never actually served. Berlusconi was also barred from public office, a ban which only applied to Italy and did not affect his ability to serve as a member of European Parliament. It was a resolution that probably made no one happy.

But if Democrats really want to preserve democracy, Trump must be prosecuted. What the nature of that punishment consists of can vary, but if we simply close the books on Trump’s multiple crimes, then we should also empty the jails and prisons because then the rule of law will have absolutely no meaning.

• John Barrasso (WY) – (202) 224-6441 – contact

• Marsha Blackburn (TN) – (202) 224-3344 – contact

• Roy Blunt (MO) – (202) 224-5721 – contact

• John Boozman (AR) – (202) 224-4843 – contact

• Mike Braun (IN) – (202) 224-4814 – contact

• Shelley Moore Capito (WV) – (202) 224-6472 – contact

• John Cornyn (TX) – (202) 224-2934 – contact

• Tom Cotton (AR) – (202) 224-2353 – contact

• Kevin Cramer (ND) – (202) 224-2043 – contact

• Mike Crapo (ID) – (202) 224-6142 – contact

• Ted Cruz (TX) – (202) 224-5922 – contact

• Steve Daines (MT) – (202) 224-2651 – contact

• Joni Ernst (IA) – (202) 224-3254 – contact

• Deb Fischer (NE) – (202) 224-6551 – contact

• Lindsey Graham (SC) – (202) 224-5972 – contact

• Chuck Grassley (IA) – (202) 224-3744 – contact

• Bill Hagerty (TN) – (202) 224-4944 – contact

• Josh Hawley (MO) – (202) 224-6154 – contact

• John Hoeven (ND) – (202) 224-2551 – contact

• Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS) – (202) 224-5054 – contact

• James M. Inhofe (OK) – (202) 224-4721 – contact

• Ron Johnson (WI) – (202) 224-5323 – contact

• John Kennedy (LA) – (202) 224-4623 – contact

• James Lankford (OK) – (202) 224-5754 – contact

• Mike Lee (UT) – (202) 224-5444 – contact

• Cynthia M. Lummis (WY) – (202) 224-3424 – contact

• Roger Marshall (KS) – (202) 224-4774 – contact

• Mitch McConnell (KY) – (202) 224-2541 – contact

• Jerry Moran (KS) – (202) 224-6521 – contact

• Rand Paul (KY) – (202) 224-4343 – contact

• Rob Portman (OH) – (202) 224-3353 – contact

• James E. Risch (ID) – (202) 224-2752 – contact

• Mike Rounds (SD) – (202) 224-5842 – contact

• Marco Rubio (FL) – (202) 224-3041 – contact

• Rick Scott (FL) – (202) 224-5274 – contact

• Tim Scott (SC) – (202) 224-6121 – contact

• Richard C. Shelby (AL) – (202) 224-5744 – contact

• Dan Sullivan (AK) – (202) 224-3004 – contact

• John Thune (SD) – (202) 224-2321 – contact

• Thom Tillis (NC) – (202) 224-6342 – contact

• Tommy Tuberville (AL) – (202) 224-4124 – contact

• Roger F. Wicker (MS) – (202) 224-6253 – contact

• Todd Young (IN) – (202) 224-5623 – contact

As the United States continues to slide into fascism, I have been rereading Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” concerning the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of a war criminal who expressed himself in cliches, was an ambitious braggart, an egregious liar, an ignorant sociopath, someone attracted to and utterly at the service of men of power. We have many of these creatures living among us today. It could happen here. It is happening here.

In Arendt’s discussion of how ordinary Germans made themselves accomplices in something so monstrous as the Holocaust, she touches on the coup attempt that almost ended Hitler’s regime. Arendt quotes from German novelist Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, who himself died in a concentration camp on the eve of the collapse of the Third Reich. In his “Diary of a Man in Despair” Reck-Malleczewen writes of those who participated in the dictatorship who could have stopped Hitler early on — but only thought of it too late to save their nation.

I swear, he was talking to the Republican Senators of 2020:

“A little late, gentlemen, you who made this archdestroyer of [the nation] and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who […] without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal […] Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the house that went broke, in order to establish a political alibi for themselves — the same men who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power.”

This week Donald Trump tweeted that his administration was “looking into” the “banning” of conservatives on “liberal” social media. With a conservative stranglehold on talk radio and powerful news outlets like FOX and Sinclair effectively functioning as mouthpieces for Trump’s policies, on the face of it Trump’s charges seem ridiculous. But Trump’s criticism hit an unexpected nerve with friends of free speech. Censorship in social media may not exclusively target conservatives, but it’s a very real thing.

A while ago I taught a citizenship class. If you read though the one hundred official U.S. citizenship questions, only one amendment — the First — gets any love. Not one question mentions any of the other amendments to the Constitution — and for good reason. It would be tough to explain school prayer, bowing to Evangelicals on abortion and adoption, stop and frisk, illegal wiretapping, blanket surveillance, cruel prison punishments including death by mystery cocktail, violations of habeus corpus, excessive bail, the lack of speedy trials, voter suppression, systemic racism, Constitution-free borders, limited “free speech zones,” and prosecutorial practices that effectively deny an accused person the right to a jury trial.

And what would be the point? Many of my students came from places where American “democracy” has propped up dictators and taught genocide and torture to their militaries. Or maybe these prospective Americans just looked around and noticed that, around here, civil liberties don’t really apply to immigrants or people of color.

Nevertheless, the citizenship questions give star billing to the First Amendment, which “guarantees” freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and the right to petition the government. The First Amendment is clearly the beating heart of American democracy — for the writers of the citizenship test — and it’s almost an article of their faith that it grants us rights found nowhere else on earth.

But in truth the First Amendment is a completely toothless piece of text that does little to stop abuses arising from telling people what you think.

Read the fine print. The Constitution promises that the government won’t go after you for your views or interests — although it certainly has and does. Donald Trump, for example, tried to go after 1.3 million people who may have clicked on a website dedicated to disrupting his low-attendance inauguration. But besides attacking the First Amendment, the president’s sweeping demand for ISP data was also a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Reporters sans Frontieres ranks the United States 43rd in press freedom, a sign it’s pretty much on life support. And when Trump began targeting the Black Lives Matter movement, it was only the most recent example of a government that has always done expressly what the First Amendment forbids.

Now while the First Amendment theoretically keeps the government from silencing you, there’s absolutely nothing to stop an employer, a social or political organization, a business, or a school from censoring, expelling or punishing you. Adjunct professor Lisa Durden found this out when she was fired for defending Black Lives Matter on FOX News — not because the popular teacher had done anything wrong at her community college. White supremacist Richard Spencer lost his gym membership because of his views — not because of any specific behavior at the gym. Juli Briskman was canned by her employer for a third party photo showing her giving Donald Trump the middle finger as his motorcade sped past her while she was bicycling. The excuse given by Akima, a federal contractor — Briskman “violated” the company’s social media policy.

Americans regard China’s Great Firewall — which censors what Chinese citizens can view online — as a significant feature of authoritarian rule in that country. Yet the only difference between Chinese and American censorship is that here in the United States it’s been outsourced to corporations and employers — and, increasingly, internet service companies.

Twitter censored Politwoops, a group exposing backtracking and lying by politicians who delete or alter their ill-considered Twitter posts. Facebook censors content for both China and for the United States. When activist Mary Canty Merrill penned an open letter, “Dear White People,” she was censored by Facebook. Conservative Google employee James Damore wrote an internal memo criticizing his company’s diversity programs and was immediately terminated.

Some think the Internet is open and free. But remember — the Internet began its life as a defense industry (DARPA) project, and U.S., European, Chinese, Saudi, and other laws actually compel service providers to monitor and censor content while also delivering personal data (either lawfully or under secret programs like PRISM) to spy agencies. The U.S. government even forces ISPs to lie about it after the fact.

The internet, also as a consequence of the many lunatics who post on it, has become a gratuitously censored place. Social networks go out of their way to sanitize “offensive” or “upsetting” content. Google, Facebook, and Twitter — for all the hate speech they manage to monetize — feel obliged to protect us from beheadings, nursing mothers, the aftermath of terror attacks, radical manifestos, and “harmful” or “dangerous” hyperbole from both right and left. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are both sitting in jail now because they posted proof of U.S. war crimes, including a video of the 2007 murder of two Reuters reporters by the U.S. military.

A dangerous consequence of overt censorship is self-censorship. With enough positive or negative reinforcement people simply stop telling you what they really think. Or, if they persist, someone will censor them for simple lack of “civility.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election I observed this phenomenon as Bernie and Hillary people duked it out. One moderator of an Indivisible group decided to shut down debate by insisting on acceptable views, acceptable discussion, acceptable tone, and acceptable news sources.

In the preface to one edition of Animal Farm, George Orwell noted that popular opinion is often a greater threat to freedom of thought and expression than authoritarian government, and that anyone who chafes against prevailing orthodoxy often “finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness” by his own friends.

… the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

And Orwell hadn’t even heard of Facebook.

We’ve entered a dangerous era in the United States. Many of our nominal constitutional protections have been officially suspended for a generation, the USA now runs a vast network of concentration camps for asylum seekers, whose simple arrival at “our” borders has been criminalized. The president uses racist invective without shame and calls himself a nationalist. The liberal-ish press sees itself primarily as a purveyor of entertainment and strives for “balance” while their right-wing colleagues practice sycophancy and promote the most extreme propaganda.

Why is Western “democracy” so vulnerable to fascism and nationalism? Why does fascism come back with a vengeance every three or four generations? It is a mistake to ascribe this to unique economic and historical conditions that produce monsters like Trump, Duterte, MBS, Orban, and Bolsonaro. And although expressions of xenophobia and white supremacy include Capitalism and colonialism, Marx can’t adequately explain it.

There is something dark and perverse in human nature. The fascists we ought to fear the most are not always the demagogues who show up on election years — sometimes they live right next door.

In 1929 Freud saw something frightening approaching as he wrote Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which has been translated as Civilization and its Discontents. It’s one of Freud’s best and most pessimistic essays. Whatever you may think of psychoanalysis, mommy issues or cigars, Freud offers insight into the clash — not of civilizations — but between “civilization” and the individual. His work, alongside that of anarchists like Emma Goldman, tries to explain why “democracies” never manage to rise above human frailty. More often, in fact, they enshrine our worst human impulses in law and hand over power to hyper-aggressive miscreants and monsters.

This week’s ongoing deterioration of Western democracy includes Australia’s new surveillance legislation which neuters encryption standards so that security services can read citizens’ encrypted communications. This joins New Zealand’s digital strip-search legislation, which fines people $5,000 if they won’t allow their phones and laptops to be searched without a warrant.

China is rolling out its “social credit” system, which makes the Stasi’s files look benign in comparison. And the Philippine president has called for the murder of Catholic clergy critical of him. Domestically, a FWD.us and Cornell University study released this week revealed the extent of America’s police state — one half of all Americans have a family member currently or once incarcerated. And as I write this the American president still continues to defend a Saudi prince who US spy agencies say was complicit in a horrific assassination.

For all the fascist preoccupation with refugees, we have little to fear from people crossing our borders. As always, the real danger lies within.

As we rapidly slide into authoritarianism led by a racist vulgarian, the press has oddly become fixated on not the danger to our democracy but on civility and balance. To hear some tell it, we have too much democracy. No, we hear a lot lately, the threat to America is bad manners.

The mainstream media considers it “uncivil” to lob hardballs at a politician or shout “non-responsive!” at his evasive answers. Instead, it steers a safe, middle course, avoiding “controversial” phrases and judgments. The “split-screen” showing both sides of an issue is a fixture of the media, whether in the Op-Ed section of a newspaper or on your favorite cable news show.

Civility is why “nationalist” is the style guide’s choice for Richard Spencer — instead of the more accurate “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi.” If a Congressman uses the N-word it will be reported as a “racially-charged remark” and not as a “racist” epithet. When reporting climate change there must be “balance” to the 99% of scientists who regard it as fact. Civility means fairness and fairness requires false balance. So readers are obliged to hear from petrochemical lobbyists to provide indispensable new insights into a nonexistent “debate.”

Recently the press began worrying that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied a cheeseburger at a Virginia restaurant. The liberal press fretted — is this the end of civility? The Washington Post warned in its best Mom voice, “Let the Trump team eat in peace.” Al Jazeera worried that liberal vexation at a mendacious fundamentalist White House spokeswoman reflected “growing concern about political tribalism” in the United States.

When U.S. Representative Maxine Waters suggested challenging Trump administration figures in public, Politico headed for the bomb shelter: “Waters scares Democrats with call for all-out war on Trump.” House minority leader Nancy Pelosi rebuked Waters, calling for “unity” — even though a recent CNN poll showed that 42 percent of Americans want Trump to be impeached — including a very unified 77 percent of Democrats.

The liberal reticence to vigorously challenge Trump seems based on fears of ridiculous things Trumpistas might say. In a piece entitled “The Left Loses its Cool,” Politico quoted Florida’s GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi: “When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,” she said. “The next people are going to come with guns. That’s what’s going to happen.” For Trump supporters having an unpleasant lunch is worse than ICE throwing children into cages or dying because somebody took your healthcare away. Nonsense like this often goes unchallenged.

While the president was busy signing, un-signing, and re-signing executive orders on family separations, the press seemed far less intererested in discovering why sitting U.S. Senators were denied entry to DHS detention facilities. When immigration attorney David Leopold appeared on CNN and pointed the finger for the White House’s inhuman family separation policies at “white nationalist, Stephen Miller,” host Kate Bolduan cut him off: “I don’t know if you want to go as far as to — I mean, let’s not — I just did an entire segment about civility here. I don’t know if you want to call Stephen Miller a white nationalist.”

Thus “civility” ended what could have shed some light on the issue of family separations. Leopold was on the right track: to really understand White House immigration policies you first have to understand its White Supremacists. Yet while the mainstream media pulls its punches, censors guests, and cuts off lines of inquiry, FOX and Sinclair, right-wing radio and conservative papers throughout the country dispense with such niceties and play hardball.

“When they go low, we go high,” Michelle Obama told Democrats shortly before the 2016 election. This was a sweet sentiment. But during that same campaign Donald Trump mocked a disabled journalist and called Mexicans rapists and criminals. This became the new standard of civility. Last March Trump tweeted that Maxine Waters was a “very low IQ individual.” The Tweet was reported but Waters largely had to defend herself in the press.

The stakes have never been higher. We ought to worry less about civility and more about democracy. If we really want to salvage what’s left of it we need to take the gloves off and aggressively confront injustice and untruth.

That goes for both liberals and for a very timid and diminished Fourth Estate.

Yesterday the Boston Globe published a piece by Martha Bayles, “Will the media be crushed?” Bayles makes her thesis crystal clear:

“Put bluntly, it’s not enough to assert that a free press is the lifeblood of liberal democracy. We must also recognize that liberal democracy is the lifeblood of a free press. And if liberal democracy stops working, no one should expect the press alone to fix it.”

And what’s the point of a free press if there is no democracy?

Our free press has handed American democracy a lifeline more than once. Watergate comes to mind. The Guardian’s and Intercept’s articles on NSA spying on Americans put unconstitutional spying on notice. The Wikileaks State Department cable dump shed light on a hypocritical and destructive foreign policy. The public got to see what sort of mischief its elected officials were up to – and lying about. The Fourth Estate has often been a fourth pillar of democracy, albeit an unappreciated volunteer.

Bayles cites a Freedom House report – that our free press is declining in pace with declining democracy. Freedom House specifically identifies Trump’s autocratic methods as a threat to watch. But it’s not just Trump himself. For mainstream Republicans authoritarianism is now acceptable – and, like plastic forks pretending to be silverware, perfect for everyday use.

In Arizona, Republicans have proposed HB 2404, which restricts the right of citizens to put referenda on the ballot. In North Dakota, HB 1203 makes it legal to run over and kill pipeline protestors. In Minnesota, Republicans want to make protesting police killings a serious crime. Republicans in Washington state want to make protesting a Class C felony. In Michigan, Republicans proposed a bill that would prohibit unionists from picketing. Republicans in Iowa also introduced new legislation to increase penalties for protesting. The Intercept goes into greater detail on these cases.

Betraying a contempt for the Judiciary, Republicans in Florida introduced HJR 121, which permits legislators to overrule any judicial ruling they don’t like – effectively abolishing the Judiciary. In Washington, a similar Republican bill has been filed. Similar confusion with the function of the Judiciary seems to have been at work in Alabama, New Jersey, and Kansas. Louisiana Republicans have enacted a “Blue Lives Matter” law that makes “resisting arrest” – a vague and often unprovable charge already abused by police – a felonious hate crime. The law is now in effect.

And it’s only been a month since the inauguration.

The DNC has a long road ahead. For many Democrats regaining Congressional seats and rebuilding a decimated party are going to seem like the main – if not the only – objective. If we are really lucky, regaining seats by doing a better job of reaching out to working class voters will be the reason.

Democrats also have a huge todo list. They must rewind and unroll all these assaults on democracy at the state level, dismantle a heavily militarized American police state, reinstate the Constitutional holiness of warrants and probable cause, provide oversight of a surveillance machine that can easily suck up all our text messages and emails. Democrats must reform our foreign policy, end shady dealings with autocrats (Putin isn’t the only one), get rid of FISA courts – and finally (and symbolically) retire the Patriot Act.

Otherwise – what’s the point of winning if there is no democracy?

On January 30th, as soon as a US-born NASA engineer set foot back on US soil, agents from Homeland Security placed him in a holding cell and demanded that he give up the PIN to his cellphone.

Sidd Bikkannavar, an employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, was stopped and questioned about his South Asian heritage, although he was born in the United States and his personal information was already known to officials from his Global Entry application.

Bikkanavar was shown a “Blue Paper,” which stated that he was obliged to give up the PIN number to his phone – although, according to Hassan Shibly, executive director of CAIR in Florida, American citizens are under no such obligation.

Thus Bikkannavar was denied his rights as an American citizen because he was racially profiled.

On the other hand, perhaps none of us has all the rights we think we do.

The NASA engineer’s experience is a sobering reminder that – since the Patriot Act was signed – there are no Fourth Amendment protections within a one-hundred mile deep coastal and border zone. If you live within 100 miles of Canada, Mexico, or the ocean, you live in what the ACLU calls a Constitution free zone.

WIRED recently offered travelers some suggestions for keeping prying eyes out of your personal data. In a nutshell – don’t re-enter the country with much to show authorities if you don’t want to have to change all your passwords after your Constitutional rights have been violated. If you’re a non-citizen, it’s trickier.

Most Americans, if they were in Bikkannavar’s position, would give up their rights in a heartbeat if it meant not being delayed. Most Americans, if in the engineer’s shoes, would give up their rights in a second if it meant not being inconvenienced by the confiscation of an expensive gadget.

But this is a calculation no one should have to make.

The Fourth Amendment unambiguously requires warrants and probable cause to protect citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. What happened to Bikkannavar was not simply unreasonable – it was a violation of his Constitutional rights:

Amendment IV – The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The “Constitution Free Zone” is only 100 miles deep but it affects approxmiate 200 million Americans:

The Electoral College, like it or not, is how presidents are elected. It may be an anachronism, it may be an exception to the way all other elections work in the United States, and it may be an exception to the way political leaders are chosen in any other democracy, but it’s what the U.S. Constitution requires. And it’s not likely to change without a Constitutional convention – even though most Americans hate it. Two-thirds of us, in fact. Or 70%, depending on whom you ask.

Anyone who has driven across this vast country knows that dense urban areas – where the majority of Americans actually live – are quite different, demographically and politically, from more sparsely-settled regions. Clinton won in what some are calling urban archipelagos, and she won the popular vote by an almost three million vote plurality – the second time in sixteen years the Electoral College has subverted direct democracy.

Supporters of the Electoral College usually blame it on James Madison. But Madison thought the people at large were more qualified to choose an Executive. Detractors of the system point out that the Electoral College was a compromise with slave states – several with more slaves than owners – concerned they would always have fewer popular votes than other state at a time when slaves were property, not people, and definitely not voters.

But the fact is – today’s American population is overwhelmingly urban. Almost 80% in 2000, and 81% in 2010 live in urban areas. And as we become even more urban, the Electoral College will increasingly subvert democratic selection of a president. The Electoral College’s “winner takes all” mechanism leads to voter disenfranchisement. The system also gives a mathematical advantage to rural (white) America, which in turn creates institutional disenfranchisement of minority voters. The Electoral College is based on the odd principle that states – not the people themselves – are vested with the right to choose a president. And, increasingly, it’s a small number of states, with disproportionate focus on rural white America, that decide the presidency.

Some say the system is a stabilizing force for democracy – but if this is so then why was it not proposed for all elections? Once vocal critics of the institution, Republicans since 2000 have become converts to the Electoral College and often say that voters are a mob from which democracy needs to be protected – although we certainly weren’t spared from demagoguery this time around. Libertarians are more skeptical – your vote doesn’t count anyway, so why worry? In fact, one suggests, let’s just formalize this lunacy by abolishing the popular vote.

Meanwhile, Liberals have been trying to come up with ways to tweak a broken system. The National Popular Vote bill is one such workaround that creates a compact between states that holds all accountable to awarding the vote to the winner of the popular vote. But Republicans have been hostile to the idea since it dawned on them the system was rigged in their favor. Here in New England, Massachusetts joined the compact in 2010, followed by Vermont in 2011, with Rhode Island following suit in 2013. Maine, our beautiful but occasionally mad neighbor, ratified the compact in the Senate but defeated it in the state House two years later. Check to see the status in your state.

But this doesn’t really fix the underlying problem. The U.S. Constitution still has one more major birth defect affecting elections – one that must be corrected. Although change seems more unlikely than ever, it’s the only way to make presidential votes count. And patience may be required. The 27th Amendment didn’t immediately make it into the Bill of Rights, and it took 202 years to ratify.

With pressure, it works. Over the years Constitutional amendments have fixed a number of election problems. The 12th Amendment was the nation’s first fix to the Electoral College; it completely replaced rules which used a type of ranked voting. The 15th Amendment gave former slaves the vote. The 17th Amendment replaced the appointment of Senators with the popular vote. The 19th Amendment gave women the vote. The 23rd Amendment added the District of Columbia to the Electoral College. The 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes. The 26th Amendment gave younger adults the right to vote. With all these changes, an elite slaveholder version of “democracy” was slowly transformed into one that includes nearly all of us.

And with one more refinement, a vote for president could be something that truly counts.

Following his inauguration – or, as Trump refers to it, the Day of National Patriotic Devotion – this week has been the unmitigated disaster many people predicted. Besides the Dear Leader’s autocratic decrees, lying to the White House press corps, his swamp-soaked cabinet picks, and his plans to seal the borders to our own Hermit Kingdom, now even some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s mental stability. It’s like something out of a Grade B disaster movie.

Only it’s real.

So If you feel you have to do something — start making calls to your elected officials. A new website called “The 65” (thesixtyfive.org) helps anyone overwhelmed by choice. The “65” refers to the sixty-five million of us who didn’t vote for this mess.

TheSixtyFive.org has a call script for each issue, and it helps you find the phone numbers for elected officials. The 65’s list of issues focuses on fighting the administration’s new iniatives and the Weekly Call to Action highlights one that’s especially time-critical. This week it’s stopping Betsy DeVos’s cabinet appointment.

If you receive email or Facebook requests to sign petitions, make a call instead. You can find your elected officials at the USA.gov website, and if you live in Massachusetts you’ll find your state senators and representatives at malegislature.gov. To spare yourself a bit of typing, you can download contacts in vCard format for all Federal and Massachusetts legislators (most email clients and Gmail use vCard). That way you’ll always have them on speed dial.

And pay attention to protecting your 10th Amendment (state) rights. If you live in Massachusetts, the Fundamental Freedoms Act and the Electronic Privacy Act both need sponsors to keep us safe(r) from the Trump administration. Call your Massachusetts legislator and do your best to mumble something like this:

Hi, my name is [NAME], and I live in [CITY]. I’m calling to ask my legislator to co-sponsor two important bills that are priority issues for me: the Fundamental Freedoms Act (HD1156/SD992), and the Electronic Privacy Act (HD2870/SD1175). Would [OFFICIAL] be willing to be a co-sponsor on either of these bills?

I just called my representatives and one called back in person, which I very much appreciate. I’m sure in a few weeks my mumbling will be greatly improved.

I opened today’s Standard Times to see – not in the opinion section but in the news – a piece entitled “Attack on Free Speech.” The article refers to the killing of a filmmaker and the attempted murder of another at what the AP called a “free speech” event. The Associated Press boldly jumped from journalism to propaganda when it neglected to inform readers of details of this supposed “free speech” event.

The victim, 55 year-old filmmaker Finn Norgaard, like most attendees, was probably there just to see what it was all about. Norgaard was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an inexcusable murder that could have happened to any curious person who went to see what all the fuss over insulting cartoons was about.

The “free speech” event was organized by Helle Merete Brix, the author of numerous books and articles critical of Islam and Muslims. Sort of a Danish Pamela Geller, Brix has made a career of being a professional Islamophobe. In one of her books, “I krigens hus” (“In the house of war”) she maintains that Islam has colonized the West – despite historical proof of the opposite. Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad identifies Brix as one of Denmark’s most rabid Islamophobes and notes her influence on mass-murderer Anders Breivik.

Niels Ivar Larsen was a widely-quoted witness to the attack. Larsen is a well-known writer and translator who has called for forcing mixed sexes at mosques and mandating female imams. There is no evidence Larsen has similarly called for a female pope or demanded that Orthodox Jews tear down their mechitzas or ordain female rabbis. It’s fair to say, like Larsen, the audience was largely fixated on expelling Muslims from Europe – not a group of people like, say, James Risen. Risen’s predicament really is about free speech.

The intended victim, Lars Vilks, is a Swedish conceptual artist who, in a dispute with Sweden over two large sculptures, declared the area around them to be a micro-nation he named Ladonia. Between 2007 and 2010 “Sovereign Citizen” Vilks became notorious for creating films of Muhammad, first depicted as a dog, then visualized in a gay bar, employing other devices designed for one purpose only – to insult and marginalize Muslims.

It was at the appropriately-named Krudttønden (Danish for “powder keg”) cultural center in Copenhagen that Brix and Vilks staged their provocation. I use this word because, if words are to have any meaning at all, it is dishonest to claim it had anything to do with “free speech” or an exchange of ideas. They literally wanted to light a match in a powder keg. And they succeeded at the cost of a human life.

What happens if you insult Pope Francis’ mother? The pontiff has already told you. He’ll punch you out. While it is reasonable to lay blame for violence at the feet of a perpetrator, provocations designed to produce violence make provocateurs part of the crime. “Incitement to riot,” for example.

So were these racists, xenophobes, and sovereign citizens really pursuing “free speech” – or were they poking not only Muslims but the rest of civil society in the eye?

If exhibiting hate toward minorities is how a society exercises “free speech” (while actual free speech is limited for “security reasons”) Western democracy is built on an extremely shaky foundation.

This was published in the Standard Times on February 19, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150219/opinion/150219344

Jay Ambrose’s editorial (“Colleges need more conservatives,” December 12, 2014) begins, incensed at a “pledge of allegiance” to a right-wing Christian state used by a Colorado college professor in his “American Civilization” class to get students talking about – well – American civilization.

See? he says: Colleges are filled with Democrats, liberals, Marxists, and moral relativists rejecting “Western values” – and we need more diversity to “offset such influences.”

Odd. I didn’t think Conservative liked Affirmative Action or meddling with the “free market” of ideas.

Ambrose is unhappy that most professors are Democrats. That may well be. But they’re also PhD’s for the most part – independent thinkers who don’t hate science or get most of their information from scripture and lobbyists.

It’s probably the “independent thinker” part that has Ambrose so riled.

His essay is filled with bizarre claims, figures, and logic. He objects to a Marxist professor on the grounds that millions were supposedly killed “in Marx’s name” – forget that Marx, who predicted socialism replacing advanced capitalism in modern Europe, had been dead for about 40 years when revolutionaries in feudal societies in Asia seized on some of his ideas.

But Ambrose, a bible-thumping Tea Partying Kentuckian, characterizes the new far-right Conservatism as “a sense of the world that appreciates the best of the past.”

Maybe that was true in Eisenhower’s day. But since when are fracking, filling the environment with CO2, giving corporations human rights and taking them away from people, endless welfare programs for defense contractors, preservation of advantage for the white male super-rich, attacks on immigrants, misogyny, and classism – “the best of the past?”

Assuming liberal universities do adopt “Affirmative Action for the Koch Brothers” plans and invite more conservative visiting professors, where’s the reciprocity in Christian madrassas like Bob Jones University or Liberty University?

More insidious than propagandizing college students, the New Conservatives want to reach even younger minds. Many high schools run ROTC programs and, as part of No Child Left Behind laws, are obliged to host military recruiters. These are schools that still can’t manage to completely steer clear of religion, are constantly reacting to conservative attacks on books, sex education, evolution, and on teachers who try to challenge their students to think.

What Ambrose really wants is right-wing political orthodoxy to be dispensed to the young through preferred hiring of people like him. When education starts bending to creationism, climate change denial, and militarism, we might as well all take the “pledge” that irked Ambrose so much.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 17, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20141217/opinion/141219568

The patriotic-sounding “USA Freedom Act” currently working its way through Congress is intended to blunt some of the nation’s anger at the warrantless surveillance of American citizens disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake characterizes the Act as “faux reform” and he knows a thing or two about the subject. As a crypto-linguist during the Cold War he studied how the East German Stasi spied on an entire nation and he found the NSA’s techniques chillingly similar.

Of all the Amendments to our Constitution, the Fourth is possibly the most important to individual liberties: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” “Effects” and “persons” still have the same meanings today as in 1792 when they were added to the Constitution, and the meaning is quite clear, yet the Fourth Amendment has never been violated as savagely as it is today.

After decades of warnings of a “creeping Security State” by Drake, Senator Frank Church, and others, we have finally arrived at the Police State. Unchecked surveillance of every citizen; police powers and technology increasing daily; police agencies and officers operating with relative impunity. Evidence obtained through warrantless surveillance is passed along to prosecutors. Defense attorneys are wiretapped. Gag orders prevent the accused from discussing details of their cases with lawyers or spouses. Kidnapping, torture, extortion and murder by faceless agencies and the executive branch go unpunished. Trade agreements are negotiated in secret, keeping even legislators in the dark. FISA courts rubber-stamp the illegal surveillance that normal courts would deny. The CIA spies on the Senate, and the Supreme Court’s mission seems to be making life great for corporations while rolling back the social gains of the last century.

In this “democracy” the very wealthy go largely unpunished while the very poor are hounded by arbitrary searches in communities with increasingly militarized police. Twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners are caged in our country. Thirteen states have passed laws making secret the mystery cocktails they inject into those condemned to death. Children are charged as adults and held in solitary confinement. Drones, cameras, bag checks, Shotspotters, cell tower dumps, cellphone “stingers,” license plate readers, fingerprint readers, retina scans, DNA registries, face recognition, kill switches on phones and cars, lie detectors, drug tests, stop and frisk, tasers, SWAT teams dispatched for minor crimes – this now characterizes law enforcement’s relationship to the public.

In 2010 Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin counted some 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 corporations feeding at the homeland security trough in over 10,000 locations across the United States. DHS and Fusion programs grant police departments the latest military and surveillance gadgets. Ignoring Eisenhower’s warnings, the military-industrial complex has become a dangerous, bi-partisan revolving-door to corporate riches for every director of the DHS and countless program directors. This half-trillion dollar industry (apart from the Defense budget) includes many specialized lobbying groups such as the Secure Identity and Biometrics Association, which advocates for a biometric-based national identity card. Over five million Americans have security clearances and serve a Police State that the Stasi would have envied. And almost all of this is being deployed, not against terrorists, but against us, the American public.

In this year’s mid-term elections 33 Senate seats and 435 Congressional seats are up for grabs. To date only a handful of politicians have questioned the wholesale assault on democracy underway since 9/11. Virtually all, Republican and Democrat, just want the issue to go away because, hey, who wants to take on lobbyists from powerful industries?

It will take more than fake, patriotically-themed reform laws to do it. The “Patriot” Act must be repealed, not amended; the FISA courts dismantled, not tweaked; and spy agencies must be neutered and brought under meaningful Congressional control.

We need to bring democracy back.

This was published in the Standard Times on May 22, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140522/opinion/405220357

This morning’s paper brought us Steve DiMarzo, Jr.’s piece (“Liberals throttling right-wing views”) – in which he argues that liberals prevent climate change deniers from expressing their own opinion in the “debate.”

Sadly, climate change deniers – and science deniers, in general – keep pretending there actually is a debate, and that their views have equal scientific weight. But, to illustrate how ridiculous this is, geochemist James Lawrence Powell recently reviewed every scientific study published in peer-reviewed journals in 2013, finding a total of 10,885. Of these, only two challenged man-made global warming. Some “debate.” And DiMarzo fails to demonstrate that science deniers have truly lost their First Amendment rights rather than simply being embarrassed by real science.

One suspects that, for the Right-wing, science plays a subservient role in culture wars, in continuing to justify tax breaks for oil and coal companies, and in keeping corporations from paying for remediation or carbon credits.

Corporate interests, people like the Koch brothers, have plenty of money, media, and opportunity to present their views to the public. And, now thanks to the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling that corporations are now people, we can barely hear the voice of the average citizen for the roar of corporate lobbyists and their propaganda.

True censorship, on the other hand, is fairly easy to find. Just this week a notable Republican seeking the blessing (and a handout) from casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson had to backtrack on calling the West Bank “occupied territory” – which of course it has been for several generations. Unfortunately unprincipled groveling and denying reality is not just a Republican trait, but it seems to have been perfected by the GOP.

No, if you really want freedom of speech in this country, you have to buy it. Not for the average citizen. Both the print and electronic media continue to be consolidated, almost exclusively in the hands of corporate interests – guaranteeing that you’ll never hear all sides of an argument.

What? In the USA? Internet companies are forbidden from revealing the scope of federal spying on civilians. PBS cancelled the broadcast of a documentary on the Koch brothers (turns out they were corporate sponsors). There are now several liberal journalists (not right-wingers, Mr. DiMarzo) who are currently living abroad because of harassment resulting from their investigations of government wrongdoing. Cities are prevented from disclosing – to their own taxpayers! – the purchase of “Stingray cell tower simulators” – surveillance devices an increasing number of police departments use to capture citizens’ “metadata” without warrants.

Freedom of speech and assembly? Peaceful demonstrations are frequently broken up with heavily militarized police, whose implements of war are funded by federal Fusion centers. Progressive organizations are disrupted by police informers. Citizens on the Mexican border are subjected to warrantless searches – hundreds of miles from Mexico – as are minorities with warrantless “stop-and-frisk” searches. When the Fourth Amendment is violated so routinely, it has a chilling affect on the ability of citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights. That’s censorship too.

Sorry, Mr. DiMarzo. We should be worried about climate change. But we should worry even more about the scope of the police state erected since 9/11. The NSA (part of the military) collects civilian data based on four different authorities – not the Constitution – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 (modified in 2004 and 2008), Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. These orders have superseded the Constitution – a document that is supposed to guarantee many more civil liberties than just the right to carry assault weapons or deny science.

So, if we’re going to talk Censorship – by all means, let’s do. But let’s not pretend that science denial is free speech under attack. All it is – is willful ignorance and corporate propaganda being rebutted by real science. There is plenty of REAL censorship we should all be alarmed by.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 8, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140408/opinion/404080301

When the American war of choice in Iraq began, and the French opposed it, Congressional Republicans gave the french fry a new name. What a love-hate relationship we have with the French. One day it’s Freedom Fries, the next it’s nous sommes tous Charlie Hebdo. But long before Charlie Hebdo, the press in general had proven to be a disappointing pack of cowards. Today’s paeons to murdered satirists seem to reflect some guilt by mainstream journalists for never, truly, doing their jobs.

One expects it of the war mongers, but even the liberal press now preaches that an attack on a satire magazine is an attack on journalism and secular liberalism. Everyone seems angry that, as a consequence of the terror attacks, people living in Western “democracies” – getting weaker by the minute as Americans shed the Bill of Rights and Europeans move to the Right – are forced to feel the same fear as victims of our drones, torture, and extraordinary rendition.

The Parisian terrorists may have been monsters, but they were monsters who correctly recognized Charlie Hebdo as part of a greater – in this case cultural – war by the West on the Muslim world. It seems our historical insecurities about Mohammedan hordes storming the gates of Vienna just won’t go away. Gratuitous insults to Islam are nothing new, and are part and parcel of an ongoing war on many fronts. It is no coincidence that insult to Islam was also part of a system of abuse at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and implicit in illegal FBI and NYPD harassment of Muslim communities domestically.

As Juan Cole, a Middle East scholar, notes: “Having American troops occupy [Iraq] for 8 years, humiliate its citizens, shoot people at checkpoints, and torture people in military prisons was a very bad idea. Some people treated that way become touchy, and feel put down, and won’t take slights to their culture and civilization any longer. Maybe the staff at Charlie Hebdo would be alive if George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney hadn’t modeled for the Kouashi brothers how you take what you want and rub out people who get in your way.”

Indeed, besides Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, former Abu Ghraib prisoner and now the head of ISIS, Abu Ghraib is the gift to terrorism that just keeps on giving. Sharif Kouashi, one of the Paris killers, was radicalized in 2003 by the invasion of Iraq and specifically by the U.S. torture facility. Long before Charlie Hebdo began running insulting cartoons, Kouashi began the all-too familiar transformation from native-born, dissolute, disaffected man into seething religious fanatic, and then into a terrorist.

One need only look as far as Charlie Hebdo itself to discover that selective insult – not “journalistic courage” – was the point of its satire. In 2009 Maurice Sinet wrote a column for the magazine which some regarded as anti-Semitic. He was fired tout de suite by Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Philippe Val. Here in the United States the press routinely launders almost all criticism of the Jewish state, accepting charges it is anti-Semitic or a “blood libel.” It is impossible to have a full, public discussion about the Israeli occupation in this country, thanks to the self-censoring press. There is also a journalistic double standard if a Judeo-Christian religion has to take it on the chin.

Likewise, we will never have a completely open discussion in the press of poverty, racism, climate change, militarism, religion, or our native oligarchs. Ultimately, journalists draw a paycheck from businesses owned by rich white guys with friends in powerful places. No need to offend them. Fact and analysis are simply replaced by platitudes. Let us agree that this is just the way it is in a “market economy” – but, please, let’s not hype the journalistic courage possible in such a system.

We have never seen the photos of the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib or held to account the monsters in our own midst – the torturers, invaders by false pretense, assassins, those who have subverted our democracy. With some exceptions, the press just isn’t interested in it. From the moment journalists became “embedded” with the military in the first Gulf War, self-censorship began. In the last two wars reporters couldn’t or wouldn’t run pictures of flag-draped caskets. ISIS videos are sanitized. Journalists and editors routinely agree to embargos, gag orders, or censors. Fear of the domestic security apparatus, including the Justice Department, makes journalists think twice before telling certain stories or penning certain sentences. Government attacks on real journalists like James Risen are increasing so quickly one would think we live in Russia or Mexico. Why has this provoked no soul-searching?

It is not unfair to accuse journalists, as a profession, of failing to do their jobs, of holding their tongues, of playing along, of failing to speak truth to power, of choosing their themes timidly, of holding back, and pulling their shots. As the NSA affair demonstrates, journalists – even the brave ones at the Guardian in Britain – had to be grabbed by their collars and noses firmly rubbed in the facts for the story to be reported aggressively.

The slaughter of twelve people of any kind is horrific and society rarely knows how to react, other than to mouth platitudes or come up with odd symbolic gestures. Let France bury the martyred satirists – for that’s what victims of culture wars are, martyrs – in the national Panthéon, as has been suggested. For that matter, we could set aside a grave for Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher, in Arlington National Cemetery.

But journalistic freedom is more than defending tastelessness and mouthing fancy French paroles. If courage means anything to journalists, I suggest we say instead:

“I am James Risen.”

As I read this morning’s editorials it seemed odd for part-time journalist Lauren Daley to be advocating for press censorship in the case of Rolling Stone’s cover photo of Dzokar Tsarnaev. But that’s apparently where American journalism is headed.

Given the magazine’s overall style, one could argue that putting anyone on a Rolling Stone cover tends to glamorize them. There was similar whining in 1970 when Rolling Stone’s cover featured Charles Manson – something TIME Magazine did as well, along with placing the Columbine killers on their cover.

And speaking of TIME Magazine, many of its “Man of the Year” issues have been fairly controversial. In both 2000 and 2004 the “Man of the Year” was George W. Bush; in 2007 Vladimir Putin; in 2008 Barack Obama; in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg. Rather than Man of the Year, “Rogue’s Gallery” would be more like it. But perhaps the lesson here is that the public wants to read about fascinating people, not necessarily morally upright ones.

Daley spent more than a few column inches portraying the cover as a desperate attempt by the magazine to be cool, relevant, “with it,” etc. She practically ran out of adjectives after starting with “vile.” She applauded CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Kmart, and Tedeschi’s taking the magazine off their shelves. I suppose as long as the government doesn’t do it it’s not censorship in her mind.

So let’s extend Ms. Daley’s censorship to all forms of media, not just magazines. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (the film version won 4 Academy awards) would never have passed the “Daley Test” because it put a human a face on the cold-blooded killers of the Clutter family. There are literally thousands of books, films, and television series that feature what we can kindly term “anti-heroes” – people like Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Dirty Harry.

But putting a human face on the monsters among us, and trying to understand how they come about, is precisely the point of the Rolling Stone article – should Ms. Daley have actually bothered to read it. Especially here in Massachusetts, many wonder how a sweet, popular, curly-headed kid – yes, the one in the picture – could have become a mad bomber. Was it simply by reading Islamist propaganda? Was it just his brother’s influence? The answers, as always, are more complex. But apparently Ms. Daley isn’t even a wee bit curious.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 19, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20130719/opinion/307190349

It is surprising that more high-school dropout CIA/NSA contractors making $200K a year haven’t come forward like Edward Snowden – but perhaps the money and the Hawaiian paradise are intended to salve itchy consciences. Though elected officials and, shamefully, the press routinely call whistle-blowers “self-styled” or “narcissistic,” and their motives, stability, and loyalties questioned – rarely are the ethical issues surrounding the disclosures taken at face value. 

It is instructive to recall a time when the United States actually admired whistle-blowers. I found this account, which was all the more interesting to me because it takes place literally in our own backyard. It might be worth re-telling the story for readers of your paper:

http://fairwhistleblower.ca/content/whistle-blowers-1777

Highlights:

“In the winter of 1777, months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American warship Warren was anchored outside of Providence, R.I. On board, 10 revolutionary sailors and marines met in secret — not to plot against the king’s armies, but to discuss their concerns about the commander of the Continental Navy, Commodore Esek Hopkins. They knew the risks: Hopkins came from a powerful family; his brother was a former governor of Rhode Island and a signer of the declaration.

“Hopkins had participated in the torture of captured British sailors; he ‘treated prisoners in the most inhuman and barbarous manner,’ his subordinates wrote in a petition.”

“One whistle-blower, a Marine captain named John Grannis, was selected to present the petition to the Continental Congress, which voted on March 26, 1777, to suspend Hopkins from his post.”

Fortunately, many in the fragile, new nation realized that “misconduct” and cover-ups could easily undermine a budding democracy. The first whistle-blower protections were passed almost immediately following attempts to quash an investigation. Here it is, in language that holds up even today:

“Resolved, That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these stats, which may come to their knowledge.”

Two years ago “national security” hampered Congressman Ron Wyden’s ability to debate a government program called PRISM in Congress, this week identified as the domestic spy program that puts electronic “back doors” in sites like Facebook, GMail, and DropBox for government “monitoring.” This week, following a whistleblower’s disclosures, politicians scrambled to offer apologies to their constituents for keeping them in the dark, or lying, just as the new security state had kept them in the dark.

In 2010 Dana Priest and William Arkin from the Washington Post produced a series of articles called “Top Secret America” (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/) which detailed the scope of the security state built after the “Patriot” Act. 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies now run “national security” programs. A million people hold security clearances.

And this vast apparatus is just getting bigger. Next September, a $2 billion NSA data center, the largest in the world, opens in Bluffdale, Utah to begin collecting data. The million square foot facility is expected to use 5% of the state’s energy – to spy on you and me.

In 1990, after East Germany ceased to exist, former citizens discovered that their government had been spying on a third of them. Well, American spymasters beat that. Last year NSA whistleblower William Binney revealed that his former employer was collecting information on, and communications from, virtually every American citizen, including phone conversations and emails. This week Edward Snowdon, a whistleblower from Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, disclosed details of the PRISM program and the extent of domestic spying.

Americans rightly distrust spy agencies. From the FBI’s inception in 1908, it has spied on – not just criminals – but socialists, anti-war, animal, and human rights activists, conservationists, community organizers, American Indians, Jews, Muslims, farm workers, Martin Luther King, and most of the civil rights movement. In the 1970’s we learned the extent of domestic spying via COINTELPRO and similar programs.

In consequence laws regulating domestic surveillance were passed under presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton. Yes, Reagan.

The CIA and NSA were created in 1942 and 1949, respectively. The National Security Act of 1947 specifically barred intelligence agencies from operating domestically – all the more remarkable because the US was still at war.

In the past Americans never willingly surrendered their privacy rights. But then came the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of – and, recently, a Supreme Court that has neutered the Constitution. An attack no more shocking than Pearl Harbor somehow convinced some Americans to trade the Bill of Rights for a spurious guarantee of “safety.”

Since passage of the “Patriot Act,” we now have “Fusion centers” which “coordinate” police departments and spy agencies without much accountability, often exceeding their mandates. The NYPD, for example, in conjunction with the CIA, has a Tel Aviv office. Through “Fusion” programs police departments receive funds to buy drones, tanks, military weaponry, and surveillance gear. In Boston we have seen spy gear used against Occupy Wall Street protesters and other citizen groups. License plate readers routinely track your whereabouts. We have unexplained flights over Quincy.

Last December Julia Angwin reported in the Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Holder, without debate or consent of Congress, had expanded the National Counterterrorism Center’s ability to store data on citizens, even those not suspected of a crime. A former White House staffer called this expansion of “Total Information Awareness,” which had already been attempted and rejected during the Bush administration, “breathtaking in scope.”

The rationale for this loss of rights is “safety.” But compare the 3,000 people who died in 2001 with the more than a quarter of a million people killed with guns since 9/11. The Second Amendment seems to be the only left one standing.

Big Brother? Detentions without trial? Extraordinary renditions? Assassinations? Offshore gulags? Corporate Personhood? This is not the same country I was born in.

If this is how you want to live, friends, then you deserve the loss of every right you’ve surrendered. But if you lament the loss of what we once had, then make this your top political priority –

Repeal the Patriot Act. Fire the Attorney General. And prosecute the people who have been lying to us.

What nation permits the secret police to spy on its regular citizens with little oversight, cultivates informants, infiltrates cultural and political organizations, and turns neighbor against neighbor?

If you immediately thought of East Germany and the Stasi — go to the back of the class! This is happening in your own country.

The New York Times reports today that the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide will be modified to make unconstitutional fishing expeditions easier for the FBI. The relaxed rules permit investigations:

• without any evidence of wrongdoing or criminal activity
• without recording their reasons for doing so
• administering lie-detector tests more easily
• permitting more aggressive dumpster-diving
• relaxing use of repeated surveillance squads
• making it easier to infiltrate activist organizations
• reducing restrictions on use of informants
• permitting informants to permit in religious services

What with the new fears of terrorists, illegal immigrants, and nationalized health care, it is easy to forget that we have actually been a nation of frightened cattle for a very long time. This could have been my 4th grade class:

There is a scene in the film A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessep, must answer for a soldier’s hazing death. He explodes, “You can’t handle the truth!” before his classic monolog, explaining how lesser men will never understand the darker side of what it takes to create an effective military.

This scene absolutely nails the American relationship to authoritarian power, but it applies equally toward foreign policy and our rapidly expanding security apparatus. Guantanamo, the end of habeas corpus, imaginary WMDs to justify war, lying at the UN, airport scanners, and now the Wikileaks revelations all illustrate the same principle with painful clarity. We just want mommy to make it better. We don’t care how she does it. Maybe Colonel Jessep had it right: we can’t handle the truth.

Pundits have had their fun with the Wikileaks disclosures. If you’re on the left, they are a confirmation of everything we have learned about our endless wars and the hopeless prospects for “democracy building.” If you’re on the right, they justify a third American war in a decade in Iran. The Wikileaks documents portray compulsive data-gatherers sitting in their offices trying to fit what they have learned into neat little boxes reflecting American interests. Or of dispatches from diplomats who only hear what they want to hear. Or — as former ambassador Charles Freeman notes — who are often told only what they want to hear by their foreign contacts.

Why do we accept military and foreign policy conducted in an antiseptic environment, free of “trivial” moral concerns or inconvenient transparency? We may not usually get it, but we have an expectation of transparency in our elections, economics, health care, tax laws, banking, and other domains. Why should disclosures of foreign policy missteps by both the Bush and Obama administrations be so violently attacked?

Yes, violently. Canadian Conservative Party advisor Tom Flanagan called for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s assassination, as did Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin. National Review Author Jonah Goldberg asked why Assange hasn’t been garroted yet. Daniel Ellsberg, no stranger to leaks himself, believes Assange is in physical danger. Senator Joe Lieberman pressured Amazon.com to stop hosting Wikileaks in the United States, and domains throughout the world have been under constant denial of service attacks.

Wikileaks have provided many opportunities for political posturing. For example, Senator Charles Schumer, who wants the US to release Jonathan Pollard, a spy in federal prison for revealing military secrets to a foreign country, now wants new laws to prosecute Assange (an Australian) for publishing military statistics and embarrassing diplomatic cables.

The mainstream press can’t quite believe its good luck at the endless stream of stories Wikileaks has generated. In general it has shown more interest in what is “newsworthy” than what is valuable to an informed public, depending on “embedded” reporters, softball questions, remaining addicted to talking heads instead of reporting real news. The Rolling Stone’s interview with Stanley McChrystal was a striking exception, and it occurred only after the public really started questioning the war. The truth is: it has taken a dramatic flood of documents from Wikileaks to really get the mainstream media to focus on what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, rather than focusing, much of their attention is on the salacious details of Assange’s whereabouts, his safety, or the raciest snippets from the cables. But, like any business, the media only give us what we really want.

Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by political dissidents. Within a year it had already published over a million documents. As long as those documents related to China, Somalia, Peru, Iran, Ivory Coast, Kenya, or non-Western states, Wikileaks garnered approval from human rights groups, Western governments and the mainstream media.

But last April Wikileaks posted a video of the wanton killing of a number of Iraqi civilians in July 2007, including two Reuters photographers, by American Apache helicopters. In July Wikileaks released 92,000 documents from Afghanistan. Last October Wikileaks released 392,000 documents from Iraq which provided a glimpse into the war between 2004 and 2009. Both collections of documents painted a picture of the failed use of force in nations we simply do not understand. Then this month the first of a quarter million diplomatic cables began to be released. And they haven’t been flattering either.

China, Somalia, and Burma don’t have anything on us. Murder, torture, terror, repression, duplicity, lying, and all the things that Colonel Jessep hinted at do not apply to just our enemies. We can do them as well as anybody.

Transparency. We have a right to know. And I believe we can handle the truth.

When Americans go to the polls on November 2nd, we will drag along considerable anger into the voting booths — anger at incumbents, anger at the economy, anger at the decline of American power, and anger at a growing sense that the country has run off the rails. As angry as we are, we will lash out at everyone and do anything but look in the mirror at the quite unflattering image before us. For, in reality, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the mess we are in.

True, incumbents from both parties voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and now Pakistan — wars which have accounted for $1.1 trillion of our $1.3 trillion deficit. But it was the average citizen who wanted to lash out at someone — anyone — after 9/11. It was we voters who put in motion wars signed off by politicians from both parties who replaced their own consciences and judgment with polls and focus groups. Besides, haven’t all our wars been slam-dunks?

It was we ourselves who gutted state governments, schools, libraries, and added to our own insecurity by choosing to slash taxes and support services. This winter if we break a strut in an icy pothole we can only blame ourselves for neglecting infrastructure. If grandma has to start eating pet food or choosing which medication to take because retirement benefits have not kept up with inflation for two years — we can blame ourselves for insisting on fiscal restraint for everything except wars, spying, and police services. Some of us want to smash the gods of government by dismantling the EPA and the Department of Education because we have lost our faith. The new watered-down health care bill is an abomination at the altar of Free Market Capitalism.

Angry people are seldom rational people. Americans are not unique in grasping at easy answers, quick solutions, the quarterly return, the unstudied decision, and even at straws. The lure of the Tea Party has both Democrats and Republicans scrambling to share some of their radical rhetoric. It may feel good to scream for the death of government, but if we throw the baby out with the bathwater, at the end of the day one out of ten of us will still be sitting, unemployed, in a recently foreclosed house, without any rational plan by a government to get us out of this mess — and still waiting for the Free Market to help out.

Whoever survives the next election is going to be there with agendas set — not by some cabal of “special interests” — but ultimately by us, the voters. If we see a rise in demagoguery, an increase of hate directed against gays, Latinos, Muslims, Blacks, Mormons, liberals, or some “other,” we need only look in the mirror to see the cause. We ourselves have permitted a new generation of Gordon Gekkos to wreck the economy by rewarding corporations for sending jobs offshore or literally gambling with our money. Some want to expel all foreigners and abolish the 14th Amendment. Hate won’t bring the jobs back from China but tough talk apparently sells at the polls. But talk is cheap.

If all this rage produces a series of poor choices, don’t expect the politicians to save us from ourselves. We citizens may have no interest in forcing election reform, but we sure like to whine about craven politicians whose votes reflect our own views — those of us who bother to vote or to express them. Don’t expect the news media to inform us of anything other than what’s “newsworthy.” We can’t understand economic analysis or international news — we don’t even know where some of these countries are — and besides, we have short attention spans; half of us think we need another war with Iran. We’d much prefer Talking Angry Heads, conspiracy theories, and Reality TV. And even though it’s stealing trillions of dollars from our future, we don’t really want to see stories about Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan on the 11:00 news. We want to know about warehouse fires and dog bites. And so that’s what we get.

And in the end we get the democracy we deserve. If we are well-informed and work at understanding the roles of government and business and can appreciate the function and limits of both, our elected representatives will formulate sensible economic, environmental, educational, and foreign policies. But if all we are capable of expressing is anger and rejection, the search for easy answers will only lead us deeper into the swamp.