( Tomdispatch.com ) – I grew up in the least-Jewish Jewish family around in the 1950s. We celebrated Christmas every year in a big-time fashion: tree, decorations, and all. And despite the desires of my dear grandmother, there would be no temple, no Sunday Hebrew school, no religion of any sort. I actually went to a Quaker school and I suspect that the first temple I ever entered was at 13 for a friend’s bar mitzvah. I did have one Israeli buddy for a few years, a neighbor who got a black-and-white TV before we did and so I spent as much time as I could in his apartment until his family went back to the Middle East. Yes, sometime in those early years, I was on the street with my own father when a passing stranger made an antisemitic slur and, being a tough, no-nonsense guy (“Major” Engelhardt as he liked his friends to call him from his years in World War II), my dad went right after him. And yes, one of my first roommates at Yale (which had only removed its Jewish quotas a year or two before I arrived in 1962), someone I grew to like, later told me that his dad, undoubtedly a Yale alumni, had specifically warned him to watch out for any Jew at Yale whose father was in the insurance business. (Consider that a knife through the heart!)

And none of that has ever changed. I married an ex-Catholic, brought my kids up without religion, and though there’s a temple catty-corner to the apartment building I’ve lived in for almost the last half-century, I’ve only been inside it once (for a Pete Seeger concert). And yet, explain it as you will, I take what Benjamin Netanyahu and crew, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, are doing in Gaza in a strangely personal fashion. Yes, I was horrified when Hamas committed its grim crimes on October 7th, but somehow, somewhere deep in my heart, I never thought that the Israelis would respond not just in kind but in a fashion even more horrifying and without end.

I mean, honestly, given the historic suffering of Jews, who the hell kills untold thousands of children in a 25-mile-strip of land; attacks every hospital in sight; instantly cuts off food, fuel, and water to more than two million people; causes massive deaths (a daily toll higher than any other significant twenty-first-century conflict); destroys more than half of that area’s housing; and leaves untold thousands of Gazan civilians starving to death and with untreated illnesses of all sorts — and, after all of that, still isn’t faintly done? Somehow — yes, call it the hidden Jew in me — I take offense at that. And in that context, let me turn to TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte who offers his own very personal look at what being Jewish has meant to him and means to him now in this all-too-hellish world of ours. Tom

Article by Robert Lipsyte:

Eyeless in Gaza: Being Jewish and Being Heartbroken by the War

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives. Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Sandy Koufax all made me proud, while I felt ashamed of Roy Cohn, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.

I never reached such lofty, self-righteous, or even chauvinistic heights or depths, but such figures, positive and negative, offered a comforting structure for my casual, shallow life as a Jew. I rarely observed high holy days. My children were neither bar nor bat mitzvahed. I have lived in a space somewhere between my immigrant grandmother’s anxious response to all current events — “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” — and my father’s snarky yet philosophical “Judaism would be a great religion if you got God out of it.” In my overall indifference to my Jewishness and my unsureness about what it meant to me lay, I thought, a kind of worldliness and emotional integrity. It was enough to attempt to live a decent life, be a sportswriter for the New York Times, write books for adults and children, try my best to do some good works.

Then October 7th arrived. And the response to it.

Middle East Eye Video: Footage from Unrwa shows the vast scale of destruction in Gaza

And soon, I began to wonder what I was so sure that I was unsure about now. With or without God onboard, what kind of Jew must I be right now, as Israelis valiantly defended their homeland and at the same time committed war crimes in my name, while the very words Israeli and Jew were fused in the public conversation?

What could anyone like me do in such circumstances to slow such a horrific drive toward both the destruction of others and self-destruction, while trying to continue the search for some kind of peace? How could we resolve our complicity as bystanders, whether as high-minded Spinoza-style Jews or the lox-and-bagel versions?

I’ve never thought so hard — or helplessly — about anything as I have recently about what it means to be a Jew. How did so many of us, as secular Jews, get to be where we are right now in a country that itself may be coming apart at the seams? How did we become trapped in a mindset that, whether in the Middle East or here, appears to deny a middle ground? I think of Samson in the bible story, blinded and enslaved by the Philistines in Gaza, still managing to pull the temple down around him. Do we still have the strength?

Immigrants and Refugees

Born in 1938, I grew up in New York City’s borough of Queens in an overwhelmingly Jewish community of middle-class strivers, many of whom were the children of late-nineteenth-century Eastern European immigrants. Their dreams were focused on sending their kids to college and moving to the suburbs. In their nightmares were pogroms in Poland (then fading from their collective memory) and the Holocaust, a horror kept fresh by the refugees from Europe who continued to arrive in our neighborhood throughout the late 1940s.

My neighbors hardly received all of the newcomers with open arms. Many of those Holocaust refugees came from Germany and had the stereotypical supercilious attitude of German Jews toward Eastern European ones. The refugees tended to be better educated, more cultivated, and often, despite their state, soon-to-be better off. (Many had relatives already here who would help them financially, house them, and even include them in established businesses.) In the America of that moment, the tattooed numbers on so many of their arms weren’t necessarily viewed with particular sympathy.

And their new neighbors often asked distinctly rude questions: Why hadn’t they resisted the Nazis? Why had they waited so long to leave Europe? It was as if they had decided to be willfully ignorant about how hard it must have been for the refugees to comprehend the way they had been betrayed by their former fellow citizens in Germany and how effective wartime America had been in keeping them out.

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I remember as a boy being confused by the antagonism. Weren’t we all Jews? I had enough problems with the antisemitism of the few gentiles I knew growing up. That included two Catholic cousins I happily played with in summers upstate until, when I was in sixth grade, they told me we could no longer be friends because I had killed Christ. And the slurs hardly ended there. They were usually thoughtless relics of ingrained bigotry, sometimes from the very teachers, editors, and colleagues who would help me most. I found out that, in some fashion, I could let it pass.

My Jewish education didn’t really begin until 1951, after a shotgun bar mitzvah forced by my grandparents. I ended up at a small reform Queens synagogue which was either poor enough or progressive enough to be willing to stage a quickie ceremony for me after only a few months of training in Hebrew. The rabbi, Solomon Landman, insisted that I stay on for confirmation classes. Reluctantly, I agreed and was swept away by his version of Judaism.

The classes were enthralling modern lessons in Jewish pride and accomplishment, highlighting figures ranging from Supreme Court Justices Benjamin Cardozo and Felix Frankfurter to baseball star Hank Greenberg to writers and philosophers like Spinoza to my true hero, Dr. Joseph Goldberger. He was the public health epidemiologist who discovered that pellagra, an often fatal skin disease, was caused by a niacin deficiency. I wanted to start a campaign to rename Vitamin B3, the cure he discovered, Vitamin G.

Ethics and moral decision-making were constant topics for us. We talked about the real meaning of being Jewish, about the importance of accepting responsibility for others, particularly the disadvantaged, about the need for true civil rights and a historical obligation to Black Americans. I was thrilled. The world began to make more sense to me. There was, it seemed, purpose in being a Jew beyond the “people of the book” mantra that always sounded to me like a claim to being a smarter species.

Godless Places

I came to believe that Rabbi Landman had been exiled to that backwater temple because he was so far ahead of his time. If there was a God, He had specifically dispatched the Rabbi to me. I began to look forward ever more eagerly to our weekly meetings. Then, suddenly, he died and my new world closed up. How could God have allowed that to happen? Or had God ever really been there at all?

At 14, I was done with religion. A few years later, Columbia University would prove a fairly godless place, as did the Army. I remember how, one frigid weekend, two other Jewish soldiers and I asked the sergeant in our unit for permission to skip outdoor clean-up duty and celebrate what we described as the holiday of Too Kolt. He consented, but the chaplain’s assistant, a Jew, busted us. Too Kolt was just too cute. It became a good, guilt-free story back on New York’s Upper West Side. My Jewish education, in other words, had become a joke.

That education took another complicated and fascinating turn when I married into a German-Jewish family, the first refugees I came to know well. The Glasers barely made it to America in 1938 with $5,000 in cash, four kids, and a mansion’s worth of furniture which they stuffed into a small house in Buffalo, New York. My father-in-law Willy, the patriarch, had been a factory owner but all his properties turned out to be in communist East Germany, and in that post-World War II, Cold War era there would be no reparations.

Nonetheless, over the years he managed to acquire and operate a thriving downtown photo studio and own apartments in Buffalo’s Black ghetto. He took me along once to collect rents from his “chocolates,” as he called his tenants, people he treated with a patriarchal affection that grated on the son of New York City public school teachers who had worked in Black schools.

After picking up the rents, mostly in cash, we went home for schnapps and reminiscences. Willy had been a corporal in the German Army in World War I — he showed me a depression in his thigh where he had taken a bullet for the Kaiser – and he remained regretful that he had never become an officer, despite his wealth and standing, because he was a Jew. He blamed jealous superiors. (If only the generals knew how he had been discriminated against!)

Believe it or not, he had expected better treatment by Hitler’s government. That man, Willy told me, had some good ideas for Germany. And he had expected Hitler to come to his senses on his urge to destroy Jews, but instead, of course, the Glasers had to flee with my future wife in her mother’s belly.

Willy fit easily enough into my old neighborhood’s stereotype of the German Jew. On paper, he was a white colonial and a slum landlord who found positives in Hitler. Still, I grew fond of him. The world, I realized, was more complicated than I had been led to believe. As it turned out, Willy and I stayed in touch longer than I did with his daughter.

By that time, the early 1960s, we were beginning to truly grasp the horrors of the Holocaust, not to speak of both the idealism and the political conniving that led to the creation of Israel. In some minds now, Zionism and British colonialism are simply lumped together as a pragmatic combination that solved “the Jewish problem,” while letting the Arabs pick up the bill. But that’s indicative of the ideological simple-mindedness that muddies this issue today. In the wake of World War II, the Jews needed a safe place to live, something they had never had, and Israel became a dream of survival.

At the same time, it wasn’t understood in this country that Palestinian Arabs weren’t just Indians to be subdued for the sake of the settlers (as in a John Wayne cowboy movie of the 1950s). Everyone, not just Jews, deserved the promise of “never again.” That still seems to be a hard sell with so many in this country and it doesn’t help that the most vocal advocates for Palestinian equality are often uncompromising young ideologues pitched against billionaire Israel lobbyists and Jews who are for Donald Trump because he’s supposedly on Israel’s side.

As for me, I visited Israel just once, some 20 years ago, reporting on an opera program for the New York Times. Except for airport security, I found everybody I met to be nice. I got greater insight from hearing about the trip my wife Lois Morris took there in 1973 as a travel writer. An Arab waiter followed her from the hotel restaurant and accosted her at the door to her room. A friend of hers appeared. They fought him off and reported him. After she identified the waiter, he was led away and she was told no statement would be necessary. Her word over his was sufficient. He would be in jail for at least six weeks. Almost 60 years ago, she was trapped in our same Israel conundrum — upset by the attack and appalled that the attacker had no rights in that country.

A World of Thugs and Vandals

In 1978, a quarter-century after my rabbi died, I was still raging over my deadbeat God, this time from a room at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. When a staff rabbi walked in to offer religious comfort, I threw him out, asking where this God of his had been while I was getting sick. In a fit of carcinoma bravado, I later wrote about the incident, including a gratuitous shout-out to a street gang, the Jewish Defense League: “If we’re going to have thugs and crazies who vandalize synagogues then we might as well have some who vandalize the vandals.”

Reading that in print was the start of my own experience of waking up. What, I thought, was I saying? Was I taking my cues from the thugs? Are they our teachers? Is that what happens in desperate times?

I was struggling with such thoughts when a letter arrived from Rabbi Alvin Kass, who had been a college classmate of mine, although we didn’t know each other then. Al had led a major conservative synagogue in Brooklyn and was the New York Police Department’s Jewish chaplain. (He’s head chaplain now.) In response to my piece, he gently wrote: “There is more to being Jewish than being categorized as such by a hostile world.”

I accepted his offer to meet and talk. We became friends. Over more than 40 years he’s joined Rabbi Landman as my spiritual advisor, officiating at my wedding, while offering rational possibilities in chaotic times. Of course, given the world we’re in, we’ve been talking far more urgently of late. Yes, Hamas are thugs and vandals, but how is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any different in his behavior?

The truth is we shouldn’t have to choose between them. It’s important to get rid of them both, while, at least in our thinking, separating two power-mad and murderous ruling bodies from their people, most of whom just want peace. How can we use the “ethical monotheism” of Judaism to find common ground and a country for each? We don’t have that answer and don’t even know if it’s possible, but at least we should know what the only true goal is: to end the present horror. And that would be good for the Jews, with or without God.

Copyright 2024 Robert Lipsyte

Via Tomdispatch.com .

<( Tomdispatch.com ) – We live in a world of dangerous, deadly extremes. Record-breaking heat waves, intense drought, stronger hurricanes, unprecedented flash flooding. No corner of the planet will be spared the wrath of human-caused climate change and the earth’s fresh water is already feeling the heat of this new reality. More than half of the world’s lakes and two-thirds of its rivers are drying up, threatening ecosystems, farmland, and drinking water supplies. Such diminishing resources are also likely to lead to conflict and even, potentially, all-out war.

“Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades,” warned a study published in Global Environmental Change in 2018. “Although water issues alone have not been the sole trigger for warfare in the past, tensions over freshwater management and use represent one of the main concerns in political relations between… states and may exacerbate existing tensions, increase regional instability and social unrest.”

The situation is beyond dire. In 2023, it was estimated that upwards of three billion people, or more than 37% of humanity, faced real water shortages, a crisis predicted to dramatically worsen in the decades to come. Consider it ironic then that, as water is disappearing, huge dams — more than 3,000 of them — that require significant river flow to operate are now being built at an unprecedented pace globally. Moreover, 500 dams are being constructed in legally protected areas like national parks and wildlife reserves. There was a justification for this, claimed the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) some years ago. Such projects, it believed, would help battle climate change by curbing carbon dioxide emissions while bringing electricity to those in the greatest of need.

“[Hydropower] remains the largest source of renewable energy in the electricity sector,” the IPCC wrote in 2018. “Evidence suggests that relatively high levels of deployment over the next 20 years are feasible, and hydropower should remain an attractive renewable energy source within the context of global [greenhouse gas] mitigation scenarios.”

The IPCC acknowledged that unceasing droughts impact stream flow and that climate change is unpredictably worsening matters. Yet its climate experts still contended that hydropower could be a crucial part of the world’s energy transition, arguing that an electric dam will produce seemingly endless energy. At the same time, other renewable sources like wind and solar power have their weather- and sunlight-bound limitations.

A Crack in the Dam Logic

Well-intentioned as it may have been, it’s now far clearer that there is a crack in the IPCC’s appraisal. For one thing, recent research suggests that hydro-powered dams can create an alarming amount of climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. Rotting vegetation at the bottom of such reservoirs, especially in warmer climates (as in much of Africa), releases significant amounts of methane, a devastating greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

“Most of this vegetation would have rotted anyway, of course. But, without reservoirs, the decomposition would occur mostly in the atmosphere or in well-oxygenated rivers or lakes,” explains Fred Pearce in the Independent. “The presence of oxygen would ensure the carbon in the plants formed carbon dioxide. But many reservoirs, particularly in the tropics, contain little oxygen. Under those anaerobic conditions, rotting vegetation generates methane instead.”

While CO2 also seriously harms the climate, methane emissions are far worse in the short term.

“We estimate that dams emit around 25% more methane by unit of surface than previously estimated,” says Bridget Deemer of the School of Environment at Washington State University in Vancouver, lead author of a highly-cited study on greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. “Methane stays in the atmosphere for only around a decade, while CO2 stays several centuries, but over the course of 20 years, methane contributes almost three times more to global warming than CO2.”

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And that’s hardly the only problem dams face in the twenty-first century. At the moment, Chinese financing is the most significant global driver of new hydropower construction. China has invested in the creation of at least 330 dams in 74 countries. Each project poses its own set of environmental quandaries. But above all, the heating of the planet — last year was the warmest in human history and January 2024 the hottest January on record — is making many of those investments look increasingly dubious. On this ever-hotter globe of ours, for instance, a drought in Ecuador has all too typically impacted the functionality of the Amaluza Dam on the Paute River, which provides 60% of that country’s electricity. Paute was running at 40% capacity recently as its river flow dwindled. Similarly, in southern Africa, water levels at the Kariba Dam’s reservoir, located between Zambia and Zimbabwe, have fluctuated drastically, impairing its ability to produce consistent energy.

“In recent years, drought intensified by climate change has caused reservoirs on all five continents⁠ to drop below levels needed to maintain hydroelectric production,” writes Jacques Leslie in Yale E360, “and the problem is bound to worsen as climate change deepens.”

Even in the United States, the viability of hydropower is an increasing concern. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, for example, has been impacted by years of drought. Water levels at its reservoir, Lake Mead, continue to plummet, raising fears that its days are numbered. The same is true for the Glen Canyon Dam, which also holds back the Colorado, forming Lake Powell. As the Colorado dries up, Glen Canyon may also lose its ability to produce electricity.

Driven by dwindling water resources, the global hydropower crisis has become a flashpoint in the far reaches of Northern Africa, where the creation of a giant dam could very well lead to a regional war and worse.

A Crisis on the Nile

The lifeblood of northeastern Africa, the Nile River, flows through 11 countries before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. Measured at 6,650 kilometers, the Nile may be the longest river on Earth. For millennia, its meandering waters, which run through lush jungles and dry deserts, have been irrigating farmlands and providing drinking water for millions of people. Nearly 95% of Egypt’s 109 million people live within a few kilometers of the Nile. Arguably the most important natural resource in Africa, it’s now at the epicenter of a geopolitical dispute between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan that’s brought those countries to the brink of military conflict.

A major dam being built along the Blue Nile, the river’s main tributary, is upending the status quo in the region, where Egypt has long been the preeminent nation. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD for short) is to become one of the largest hydroelectric dams ever constructed, stretching more than 1,700 meters and standing 145 meters tall, a monument many will love and others despise.

There’s no question that Ethiopia needs the electricity GERD will produce. Nearly 45% of all Ethiopians lack regular power and GERD promises to produce upwards of 5.15 gigawatts of electricity. To put that in perspective, a single gigawatt would power 876,000 households annually in the United States. Construction on the dam, which began in 2011, was 90% complete by last August when it began producing power. In total, GERD’s cost is expected to eclipse $5 billion, making it the largest infrastructure project Ethiopia has ever undertaken and the largest dam on the African continent.

It will not only bring reliable power to that country but promises a culture shift welcomed by many. “Mothers who’ve given birth in the dark, girls who fetch wood for fire instead of going to school — we’ve waited so many years for this — centuries,” says Filsan Abdi of the Ethiopian Ministry of Women, Children, and Youth. “When we say that Ethiopia will be a beacon of prosperity, it starts here.”

While most Ethiopians may see the dam in a positive light, the downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan (itself embroiled in a devastating civil war) were never consulted, and their officials are indignant. The massive reservoir behind GERD’s gigantic cement wall will hold back 74 billion cubic meters of water. That means Ethiopia will have remarkable control over the flow of the Nile, giving its leaders power over how much access to water both Egyptians and Sudanese will have. The Blue Nile, after all, provides 59% of Egypt’s freshwater supply.

As it happens, fresh water in Egypt has long been growing scarcer and so the country’s leadership has taken the threat of GERD seriously for years. In 2012, for instance, Wikileaks obtained internal emails from the “global intelligence” firm Stratfor revealing that Egypt and Sudan were even then considering directing the Egyptian Special Forces to destroy the dam, still in the early stages of construction. “[We] are discussing military cooperation with Sudan,” a high-level Egyptian source was quoted as saying. While such a direct attack never transpired, Stratfor claimed that Egypt might once again lend support to “proxy militant groups against Ethiopia” (as it had in the 1970s and 1980s) if diplomacy were to hit a dead end.

Unfortunately, the most recent negotiations to calm the hostility around GERD have gone distinctly awry. Last April, the embittered Egyptians responded to the lack of any significant progress by conducting a three-day military drill with Sudan at a naval base in the Red Sea aimed at frightening Ethiopian officials. “All options are on the table,” warned Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. “[All] alternatives remain available and Egypt has its capabilities.”

Seemingly unfazed by such military threats, Ethiopia plans to finish building the dam, claiming it will provide much-needed energy to impoverished Ethiopians and limit the country’s overall carbon footprint. “[GERD] represents a sustainable socio-economic project for Ethiopia: replacing fossil fuels and reducing CO2 emissions,” the Ethiopian embassy in Washington has asserted.

GERD, however, falls squarely into the category of being a major problem dam — and not just because it could lead to a bloody war in a region already in horrific turmoil. Once filled, its massive reservoir will cover a staggering 1,874 square kilometers, making it more than three-quarters the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake (after it started to shrink).

Unfortunately, GERD never underwent a proper environmental impact assessment (EIA) despite being legally required to do so. No EIA was ever carried out because the notoriously corrupt Ethiopian government knew that the results wouldn’t be pleasing and was unwilling to let any roadblocks get in the way of the dam’s construction, something that became more obvious when upwards of 20,000 indigenous Gumuz and Berta natives began to be forced from their homes to make way for the monstrous dam.

Publicly coming out against the dam has proven a risky business. Employees of International Rivers, a nonprofit that advocates for people endangered by dams, have been harassed and received death threats in response to their opposition. Prominent Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu, a critic of the dam and the government’s actions concerning it, was imprisoned for more than four years under draconian anti-terrorism laws.

Electric Water Wars

While GERD has created a dicey conflict, it also has international ramifications. China, which has played such a pivotal role in bankrolling hydropower projects globally in these years, has provided $1.2 billion to help the Ethiopians build transmission lines from the dam to nearby towns. Since it has also heavily invested in Egypt, it’s well-positioned, if any country is, to help navigate the GERD dispute.

Military analysts in the United States argue that China’s involvement with the dam is part of a policy meant to put the U.S. at a distinct disadvantage in the race to exploit Africa’s abundant rare earth minerals from the cobalt caverns of the Congo to the vast lithium deposits in Ethiopia’s hinterlands. China, the world’s “largest debt collector,” has indeed poured money into Africa. As of 2021, it was that continent’s largest creditor, holding 20% of its total debt. The growth of Chinese influence internationally and in Africa — it has large infrastructure projects in 35 African countries — is crucial to understanding the latest version of the globe’s imperial geopolitics.

Most of China’s African ventures are connected to Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a program of this century to fund infrastructure deals across Eurasia and Africa. Its economic ties to Africa began, however, with Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s push in the 1950s and 1960s for an “Afro-Asian” alliance that would challenge Western imperialism.

So many decades later, the idea of such an alliance plays second fiddle to China’s global economic desires, which, like so many past imperial projects in Africa, have significant downsides for those on the receiving end. Developing countries desperately need capital, so they’re willing to accept rigid terms and conditions from China, even if they represent the latest version of the century’s old colonialism and neo-colonialism that focused on controlling the continent’s rich resources. This is certainly true in the case of China’s hydropower investments in places like Ghana’s Bui Dam and the Congo River Dam in the Republic of Congo, where multi-billion-dollar loans are backed by Congo’s crude oil and Ghana’s cocoa crops.

In 2020, the U.S. belatedly inserted itself into the GERD feud, threatening to cut $130 million in aid for Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism efforts. The Ethiopians believed it was related to the dam controversy, as they also did when, in June 2023, the Biden administration directed USAID to halt all food assistance to the country (upwards of $2 billion), claiming it wasn’t reaching Ethiopians, only to reverse course months later.

The dispute over Ethiopia’s enormous dam should be a warning of what the future holds on a hotter, drier planet, where the rivers that feed dams like GERD are drying up while the superpowers continue to jockey for position, hoping to control what remains of the world’s resources. Hydropower won’t help solve the climate crisis, but new dam projects may lead to war over one thing key to our survival — access to fresh, clean water.

Copyright 2024 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – When the Civil War ended in 1865, the 76-year-old Constitution needed an upgrading and those leading the country did indeed dramatically transform it with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Reconstruction Era amendments. The 13th (1865) abolished slavery, while the 15th (1870) gave voting rights to newly freed Black men.

However, it was the 14th Amendment, first drafted in 1866 and ratified in 1868, that would prove the most far-reaching and that today sits all too squarely between Donald Trump and his white nationalist and authoritarian dreams. While much attention has been rightfully focused on its “insurrection” clause (Section 3) and whether, thanks to it, Trump should be allowed to hold office, given his role in the January 6th attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, his actions are also at odds with other key provisions of that amendment.

Trump’s Constitutional Indiscretions

It hardly needs to be said that Donald Trump is no constitutional scholar. At this point, though, there can be little doubt that his instincts are distinctly focused on some version of autocratic rule and white male privilege. No surprise then that, in his adult life, including as president, he’s staked out positions and advocated policies that distinctly conflict with the letter of, and the tone of, the 14th Amendment.

Mind you, he’s brazenly violated other parts of the Constitution as well, including the “emoluments” clause of Article 1, Section 6, and the “appropriations” clause of Article 1, Section 9. The foreign emolument section states that, without congressional assent, neither the president nor other office holders can “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Yet, as the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee documented, “Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million in payments from foreign governments and government-backed entities from 20 countries,” in itself adding up to a set of gifts (or do I mean grifts?) of historic proportions. Moreover, that figure is undoubtedly a significant underestimate of what he actually received. According to reporting by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Trump’s businesses took in more than $160 million from international sources during his presidency.

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He also got away with violating the constitutional authority given only to Congress to appropriate federal spending by stealing funds from the military to try to build his border wall. To be specific, he diverted $2.5 billion from the military’s construction budget to that wall project of his. In June 2020, a federal appeals court found that the administration had acted illegally. By then, however, the money had been spent and Trump’s tenure would soon come to an end.

Preserving the 14th Amendment

Undoubtedly, however, his determination to put the 14th Amendment in the trashcan of history should draw the most concern. The rights that U.S. citizens cherish — from basic civil and human ones to not being ruled by insurrectionists — are most strongly protected by provisions in that amendment. The struggle to constitutionalize equal rights was one of the most important for the Black community after the Civil War. In November 1865, for example, a “54-foot long petition signed by hundreds of men,” organized by the State Convention of Colored People of South Carolina, was submitted to Congress demanding “equal rights before the law,” “an equal voice,” and “the elective franchise.”

The first line of the 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Known as the “birthright citizenship” statement, it has almost universally been interpreted to mean that anyone born within the territory of the United States is automatically a full citizen. More than 30 countries have the principle of “jus soli” (of the soil) allowing citizenship with no qualifications to, or restrictions on, those born there, regardless of the status of their parents. Among the countries with no restrictions are Brazil, Canada, Cuba, El Salvador, Guyana, Mexico, Tanzania, Tuvalu, and the United States.

That statement was included in the 14th Amendment specifically to revoke the Supreme Court’s pre-Civil War 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision — one of the most egregious it ever made — denying citizenship and any rights to Black people in the United States. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously wrote that Black people and their descendants “had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order… they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

In the post-Civil War environment, that ruling clearly had to be corrected and so the 14th Amendment’s congressional authors wrote it in such a way as to include not just newly freed slaves but anyone born in the United States. (The one all-too-ironic and shameful exception was Native Americans who weren’t given legal citizenship until 1924 under the Indian Citizenship Act.)

Donald Trump has long expressed a deep opposition to birthright citizenship. He and much of the far right refer to it derogatorily as “birth tourism” and claim that thousands of women are coming to this country just to have children who would automatically become citizens. There should be no doubt that he and his followers are speaking of immigrants of color from the global South. When elected in 2016, he promptly declared that he would abolish birthright citizenship with an executive order. He was then informed that such an order would never stand up legally and only in January 2020 did he finally propose new rules for the State Department that were meant to stop it from issuing visas to visitors coming to this country supposedly for the purpose of birth tourism. It was notable, by the way, that the nations of Western Europe were excluded from those rules, which in any case were so vague as to be impossible to enforce without breaking laws on privacy. Ultimately, the consensus among scholars is that it would take a constitutional amendment to end what is now a constitutional right.

Yet Trump continues to declare that, should he win the presidency in 2024, one of his priorities will indeed be to abolish birthright citizenship. As he put it last year, “As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.” His contention that he has a “correct” interpretation of the law is distinctly in conflict with the history of past challenges to that amendment. Previous Supreme Courts, whether dominated by liberals or conservatives, have upheld birthright citizenship on numerous occasions, starting with the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case. Trump, of course, is betting that his three appointments to the court and at least two other conservative justices will finally break with such precedents.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment also guarantees “due process” and “equal protection under the laws.” That “due process” clause was specifically meant to stop southern whites who returned to power in the post-Civil War era from passing state laws and enacting other policies that would legally treat newly freed Blacks differently. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, “Black codes” were indeed enacted by pro-slavery whites in southern legislatures. As a result, Congress felt called upon to pass laws, known as the Enforcement Acts, meant to ensure that the 14th and 15th Amendments would be the law of the land and that the rights of Black people would be protected.

In 1896, equal protection for African Americans and other people of color would nonetheless be nearly trampled to death by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. That decision, in fact, would sanction racial segregation thanks to a perverse interpretation of the 14th Amendment under the banner of “separate but equal” (which, of course, actually meant separate and distinctly unequal). Almost 60 years of Jim Crow segregation followed until, in 1955, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling reinterpreted the equal protection clause to ensure that “separate” could never be interpreted to mean “equal.”

Trump, however, has demonstrated strikingly little fealty to the principle of due process for all. From his 1989 call for the death penalty for five young Black and Brown men before they even had a trial to his threatening insistence that Hillary Clinton and others of his political opponents be jailed based purely on personal grievances and vendettas, he’s never faintly respected the constitutional rights of others. He’s called for protesters to be beaten at his rallies and mused that Black Lives Matter activists should be shot in the legs at demonstrations.

When it came to foreign policy and immigration policy, his administration (with his fervent backing) separated children from their parents in a fierce crackdown on undocumented aliens, while he demanded a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.” In addition to the racism and cruelty of such policies, they plainly violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

For the Civil Rights Movement and, more broadly, all movements for social justice and human rights in the United States, the equal protection clause has proven decisive. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were typically passed on the principle of “equal protection.” It was also the basis for ending bans on interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia), providing abortion rights to women nationally (Roe v. Wade), and allowing same-sex marriage in every state (Obergefell v. Hodges).

As demonstrated by their rulings to end Roe, as well as affirmative action in university admissions (with the exception of military academies like West Point), Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices simply don’t believe in equal protection. For a candidate and party that brand themselves as proponents of “law-and-order” above all else, it’s clear that a reactionary version of “order” is significantly more important than fairness or the equal application of the rule of law to every citizen.

Insurrectionists Can’t Hold Office

Of course, as even certain conservative legal scholars have noted, Trump played a key role in launching the January 6th insurrection and, under the third section of the 14th Amendment, should be ineligible to run again for president. As that section reads, someone — an officer of state — who violates his or her oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” and who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” cannot hold office.

Thanks to Trump, millions of Americans now believe that he won an election he distinctly lost. Although he was told by most of his own experts and in dozens of court decisions that he had done so, he didn’t bother to share that information with his followers. Instead, he continued to foster misinformation and deep anger about that election. Without him, that crowd would never have gathered in Washington to “save America” and “stop the steal.” (“Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted to his followers.) Without him, its participants wouldn’t have gone to the Capitol. Without his exhortations that they needed to “fight like hell,” that crowd he was addressing at the Ellipse in Washington on January 6, 2021, might never have become quite so riled up.

Courts in Colorado and Maine have determined that Trump should not be allowed to stay on the ballot because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In about half of the other states, cases have been filed to remove him due to his role in the insurrection (something on which the Supreme Court will seemingly soon rule).

Most telling, when it came to his cavalier disregard for constitutional rule, has been his claim that, since the oath of office he took as president only required him to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, he wasn’t obliged (as Section 3 demands) to “support the Constitution” on January 6th, a distinction only someone as venal as Trump would have made. But as CREW noted in response to the petition from Trump’s lawyers in the Colorado case, “The Constitution itself, historical context, and common sense, all make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause extends to the President and the Presidency.”

Even conservative lawyers J. Michael Luttig, Peter Keisler, Larry Thompson, Stuart Gerson, and Donald Ayer have argued in their amicus brief in the case that “Trump incited the threat and use of violent force as his last opportunity to stop the peaceful transfer of executive power.” They state unequivocally that he “had the intent that the armed mob, at the very least, threaten physical force on January 6, 2021, in response to his speech on the Ellipse.” And to be clear, as legal scholar and civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill argues in her brilliant amicus brief, Trump’s insurrection was targeted, in part, against the votes of African Americans.

No Understanding of, or Desire to Understand, the Constitution

In July 2016, as he was about to secure the Republican nomination for president, Trump had a closed-door meeting with House Republicans. In responding to a question about Article 1 of the Constitution that addresses the responsibilities, powers, and limits of the president, Trump stated: “I’m for Article I, I’m for Article II, I’m for Article XII.”

There are, in fact, only seven Articles in the U.S. Constitution.

From the day Donald Trump took office, he had no intention to “preserve, protect, and defend,” no less “support” the Constitution. Instead, he essentially ran roughshod over much of that document. And the issue was never simply his ignorance of the Constitution (though that should be taken for granted), but his outright hostility to it. That he has not yet been held accountable for that should be considered a disgrace in this era and will undoubtedly be seen as such by generations to come. Today, as in the years after its passage to defend the rights of the newly freed, the enforcement of the 14th Amendment remains as much a political question as a legal one.

In a sense, it couldn’t be simpler. President Donald Trump was an officer of the United States who incited and engaged in insurrection and so should be disqualified from ever again holding the office of the presidency. However, based on skeptical questioning by both liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices at the February 8th hearing on the case, it appears that the court will likely not allow Colorado or any other state to bar Trump from the ballot. If so, the Trump danger will continue — for now.

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking — it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.

Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.

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Under the buzzword “modernization,” the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come. “Modernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046,” the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) pointed out, “while the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028.”

Such bloated sums might prove a good argument against specific weapons systems, but Uncle Sam has incredibly deep pockets for nuclear weaponry and a vast array of other military boondoggles. In fact, compared to the costs of deploying large numbers of troops, nuclear weapons can seem almost frugal. And consider the staggering price of a single aircraft carrier that went into service in 2017, the Gerald R. Ford: $13.3 billion.

Militarism’s overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower made clear in a 1953 speech: 

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

The Nuclear Complex and “Crackpot Realism”

In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are — in the most absolute sense imaginable — markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species. Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.

Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed Sentinel land-based missile system, on the drawing boards to replace the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 400 underground silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Northrop Grumman has already pocketed a $13.3 billion contract to begin moving the project forward. But the costs have been zooming upward so fast as to set off alarm bells in Congress, forcing a reassessment.

“The U.S. Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile program is at risk of blowing past its initial $96 billion cost estimate by so much that the overruns may trigger a review on whether to terminate the project,” Bloomberg News reported in mid-December. Since then, the estimated overruns have only continued to soar. Last month, Northrop Grumman disclosed that the per-missile cost of the program had climbed by “at least 37 percent,” reaching $162 million — and, as Breaking Defense noted, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would need to “certify the program to stave off its cancellation.”

At one level, cancellation would vindicate the approach taken by disarmament-oriented groups a couple of years ago when they tried to stop the creation of the Sentinel by arguing that it would be a “money pit missile.” But at a deeper level, the cost argument — while potentially a winner for blocking the Sentinel — is a loser when it comes to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, which ICBMs uniquely boost as the land-based part of this nation’s nuclear triad.

As Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote in the Nation in 2021, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.” Eliminating ICBMs would be a crucial step when it comes to decreasing those dangers, because “unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.” That’s why ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and why defeating just the Sentinel would be a truly Pyrrhic victory if the purported need for such land-based missiles is reaffirmed in the process.

In theory, blocking the Sentinel by decrying it as too expensive could be a step toward shutting down ICBMs entirely. In practice, unfortunately, the cost argument has routinely led to an insistence that the current Minuteman III ICBMs could simply be upgraded and continue to serve just as well — only reinforcing the assumption that ICBMs are needed in the first place.

The author of the pathbreaking 2022 study “The Real Cost of ICBMs,” Emma Claire Foley, is now a colleague of mine at RootsAction.org, where she coordinates the Defuse Nuclear War coalition’s new campaign to eliminate ICBMs. “News of dramatic cost overruns on the Sentinel program is unsurprising, but I don’t think that in itself should encourage disarmament advocates,” she told me recently. “Cancellation of the Sentinel program does not equal a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, or the risk of nuclear war. It will take an organized mass movement to make good on this opportunity to meaningfully reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.” On the other hand, when it comes to nuclear issues, accommodating to “crackpot realism” is a precondition for being taken seriously by the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.

Such accommodation involves adjusting to a magnitude of systemic insanity almost beyond comprehension. Disarmament advocates are often confronted with a tacit choice between seeming unserious to the nuclear priesthood and its adherents or pushing for fairly minor adjustments in what Daniel Ellsberg, in the title of his final landmark book, dubbed all too accurately The Doomsday Machine.

This country’s anti-nuclear and disarmament groups have scant presence in the mainstream media. And the more forthright they are in directly challenging the government’s nonstop nuclear recklessness — with results that could include billions of deaths from “nuclear winter” — the less media access they’re apt to get. When President Biden reneged on his 2020 campaign pledge to adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, for instance, critical blowback in the media was meager and fleeting. Little news coverage occurred when a small number of members of Congress went out of their way to object.

“Unfortunately,” Markey said in a speech on the Senate floor two years ago, “our American democracy and Russia’s autocracy do share one major thing in common: Both our systems give the United States and Russian presidents the godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it by ordering a nuclear first strike.”

Nuclear Madness and Psychic Numbing

Any nuclear first strike would likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war. And the science is clear that a “nuclear winter” would indeed follow — in Ellsberg’s words, “killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98% or 99% would not.”

Such a steep plunge in planetary temperatures would exceed the worst prognoses for the effects of climate change, even if in the other direction, temperature-wise. But leaders of the climate movement rarely even mention the capacity of nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet’s climate in a different way from global warming. That omission reflects the ongoing triumph of nuclear madness and the “psychic numbing” that accompanies it.

During the more than three-quarters of a century since August 1945, when the U.S. government dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear genie has escaped from the bottle to eight other countries — Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea — all now brandishing their own ultimate weapons of mass destruction. And the biggest nuclear powers have continuously undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Key dynamics have scarcely changed since, in 2006, the Centre for International Governance Innovation published a cogent analysis that concluded: “Europe and North America are busy championing nuclear weapons as the ultimate security trump card and the preeminent emblem of political gravitas, thereby building a political/security context that is increasingly hostile to non-proliferation.”

Like Barack Obama before him, Joe Biden promised some much-needed changes in nuclear policies during his successful quest to win the White House, but once in office — as with Obama’s pledges — those encouraging vows turned out to be so much smoke. The administration’s long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), issued in October 2022, was largely the usual dose of nuclear madness. “Although Joe Biden during his presidential election campaign spoke strongly in favor of adopting no-first-use and sole-purpose policies, the NPR explicitly rejects both for now,” the Federation of American Scientists lamented. “From an arms control and risk reduction perspective, the NPR is a disappointment. Previous efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.”

Stymied by the Biden administration and Congress, many organizations and activists working on nuclear-weapons issues were heartened by the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, promoted from the outset as an epic thriller about “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.” For several months before the film’s release last July, activists prepared to use it as a springboard for wider public discussion of nuclear weapons. The film did indeed make a big splash and sparked more public discussion of nukes in the United States than had occurred in perhaps decades. The movie had notably stunning production values. Unfortunately, its human values were less impressive, especially since people on the receiving end of the scientific brilliance at Los Alamos in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and even downwinders in New Mexico) remained off-screen.

Watching the movie, I thought of my visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory about 60 years after the triumphant Trinity atomic test. During an interview, one of the public relations specialists there explained that the legal entity managing the Los Alamos lab was “a limited liability corporation.” That seemed to sum up our government’s brazen lack of accountability for the nuclearization of our planet.

Six months after Oppenheimer arrived at multiplexes, its political impact appears to be close to zero. The film’s disturbing aspects plowed the ground, but — in the absence of a strong disarmament movement or effective leadership among officials in Washington on nuclear weapons issues — little seeding has taken place.

At the end of January, supporters marked the first anniversary of H. Res. 77, a bill sponsored by Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and cosponsored by 42 other members of the House, “embracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” The nonbinding measure aptly summarizes the world’s nuclear peril and offers valuable recommendations, beginning with a call for the United States to actively pursue and conclude “negotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation” as well as purposeful talks “with China and other nuclear-armed states.”

Specific recommendations in the bill include: “renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the President’s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack; taking the nuclear weapons of the United States off hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons.”

The fact that only 10% of House members have even chosen to sponsor the resolution shows just how far we have to go to begin putting the brakes on a nuclear arms race that threatens to destroy — all too literally — everything.

Copyright 2024 Norman Solomon

Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – Amid ongoing emergencies, including a would-be autocrat on his way to possibly regaining the American presidency and Israel’s war on Gaza (not to mention the flare-ups of global climate change), the U.S. has slipped quietly toward an assault on civil liberties as an answer to plummeting mental health. From coast to coast, state lawmakers of both parties are reaching for coercive treatment and involuntary commitment to address spiraling substance use and overdose crises — an approach that will only escalate despair and multiply otherwise preventable deaths while helping to choke the life out of America.

In December, we wrote about how loneliness has become a public-health crisis, according to the Surgeon General, and the ways in which it drives widespread substance use. We reach for substances to ease feelings of isolation and anguish — and when the two of us say “we,” we mean not just some hypothetical collective but the authors of this article. One of us, Sean, is a doctor living in long-term recovery from a substance-use disorder and the other, Mattea, is a writer who uses drugs.

And we’re anything but unique. Disconnection and loneliness aren’t just the maladies of a relatively few Americans, but the condition of the majority of us. Vast numbers of people are reaching for some tonic or other to manage difficult feelings, whether it’s weed, wine, work, television, or any mood- or mind-altering substance. These days, there’s scarcely a family in this country that’s been unscathed by problematic drug use.

Not surprisingly, under the circumstances, many elected officials feel increasing pressure to do something about this crisis — even as people who use drugs are widely considered to be social outcasts. In 2021, a survey of thousands of U.S.-based web users found that 7 in 10 Americans believed that most people view individuals who use drugs as non-community members. It matters little that the impulse to use such substances is driven by an urge to ease emotional pain or that the extremes of substance use are seen as a disease. As a society, we generally consider people who use drugs as rejects and look down on them. Curiously enough, however, such social stigma is not static. It waxes and wanes with the political currents of the moment.

“Stigma has risen its ugly head in almost every generation’s attempts to manage better these kinds of issues,” says Nancy Campbell, a historian at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose. Campbell reports that she finds herself a target of what she calls “secondary stigma” in which others question why she even bothers to spend her time researching drug use.

Perhaps one reason to study such issues is to ensure that someone is paying attention when lawmakers of virtually every political stripe seek to answer a mental health crisis by forcing people into institutionalized treatment. Notably, such “treatment” can increase the odds of accidental death. Allow us to explain.

“Treatment” Can Be a Death Sentence

Across the country, the involuntary detainment and institutional commitment of people with mental illness — including those with a substance use disorder — is on the rise. Deploying the language of “helping” those in need, policymakers are reaching not for a band-aid but a club, with scant or even contradictory evidence that such an approach will benefit those who are in pain.

“The process can involve being strip-searched, restrained, secluded, having drugs forced on you, losing your credibility,” said UCLA professor of social welfare David Cohen in a 2020 statement about his research on involuntary commitment. He co-authored a study that found its use rose nationwide in the decade before the pandemic hit, even as there was a striking lack of transparency regarding when or how such coercion was used.

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Today, many states are expanding laws that authorize mandatory treatment for people experiencing mental-health crises, including addiction. According to the Action Lab at the Center for Health Policy and Law, 38 states currently authorize involuntary commitment for substance use. None of them require evidence-based treatment in all involuntary commitment settings and 16 of them allow facilities to engage in treatments of their choice without the individual’s consent. Nearly every state that ranked among the highest in overdose rates nationally has an involuntary commitment law in place.

In September, the California legislature passed a bill that grants police, mental healthcare providers, and crisis teams the power to detain people with “severe” substance use disorder. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors subsequently voted to postpone implementation of the law, with Board Chair Lindsey Hogarth noting the risk of civil rights violations as a reason for the delay. In October, Pennsylvania state legislators introduced a bill that would permit the involuntary commitment of people who have been revived following an overdose. While many mental health advocates acknowledge the good intentions of legislators, the potential for harm is incalculable.

New research shows that people who attended abstinence-based treatment programs were at least as likely, if not more likely, to die of a fatal overdose than people who had no treatment at all. By contrast, those who had access to medications like methadone or buprenorphine for opioid-use disorder were less likely to die. Those medications, however, are not considered “abstinence” and so are not uniformly provided in treatment settings. Though there is extensive evidence of the effectiveness of medications for opioid use disorder, abstinence still remains widely regarded as the morally upright and best path, even if it makes you more likely to die. The reason for the elevated risk of mortality following abstinence-based treatment is no mystery: abstinence reduces the body’s tolerance. If a person who has been abstinent resumes use, the ingestion of a typical dose is more likely to overwhelm his or her bodily system and so lead to death.

Disturbingly, both The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal recently ran columns favoring mandatory treatment, with the Journal citing as evidence a 1960s study in which individuals fared well after 18 months of mandated residential treatment that included education and job training — a standard of care that’s virtually nonexistent today. The Atlantic referenced a study of 141 men mandated for treatment in the late 1990s whose outcomes were comparable to individuals who entered treatment voluntarily; the study’s own authors had, however, cautioned against generalizing the findings to other populations due to its limited scope — and since then, the potent opioid fentanyl has entered the drug supply and raised the risk of a fatal overdose following a period of abstinence.

Meanwhile, as policymakers turn to coerced treatment, consider this an irony of the first order: there are far too few treatment options for people who actually want help. “There is no place in this country where there is enough voluntary treatment. So why would you create involuntary commitment, involuntary treatment?” asks Campbell. The reason, she suggests, is the inclination of lawmakers not just to do something about an ongoing deadly crisis, but in no way to appear “soft on drugs.”

Just to put the strange world of drug treatment in context, imagine elected officials wanting to seem tough on constituents who have cancer or heart disease. The idea, of course, is ludicrous. But 7 in 10 Americans think society at large views addiction as “at least somewhat shameful” and people who use drugs as significantly responsible (that is, to blame) for their substance use. No surprise, then, that politicians would find it expedient to punish people who use drugs, even if such punishment only layers on still more shame, with research indicating that shame, in turn, exacerbates the pain and social isolation that drives people to use drugs in the first place. As Dr. Lewis Nelson, who directs programs in emergency medicine and toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, pointed out to USA Today, the science of addiction and recovery is frequently overlooked because it’s inconsistent with ingrained social ideas about substance use.

“I Still Don’t Need Saving”

Punishing people for substance use worsens the pain and isolation that make drugs so appealing. So rather than punishment — and in our world today this will undoubtedly sound crazy — what if we treated people who use drugs as full and complete human beings like everyone else? Like, say, people with high blood pressure? What if we acknowledged that those who use drugs need the very same things that all people need, including love, support, and human connection, as well as stable employment and an affordable place to live?

Research on this, it turns out, suggests that human connection is particularly good medicine for the emotional pain that so often underlies substance use and addiction. Stronger social bonds — namely, having people to confide in and rely on — are associated with a positive recovery from a substance use disorder, while the absence of such social ties elevates the risk of further problematic drug use. Put another way, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that a powerful means of healing widespread mental distress is to connect with one another.

When people in distress have friends, attendant family, and healthcare providers who are genuinely there for them no matter what, their own self-perception improves. In other words, we help one another simply by being nonjudgmentally available.

Jordan Scott is a peer advocate for Recovery Link, which offers free digital peer support to people in Texas and Pennsylvania. She identifies as a person who uses drugs. “I felt like the message got reinforced that there was something wrong with me, that there was something broken with me,” she told us. “Anything that isn’t abstinence, or anything that doesn’t include total abstinence as a goal, is constantly positioned as less than.”

New research published in the journal Addiction draws a contrast between treatment focused exclusively on abstinence and a broader array of wellness strategies, including reducing drug use rather than eliminating it entirely. The study found that reduced use had clinical benefits and that health can distinctly improve even without total abstinence. Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse Nora Volkow, for instance, supports a nuanced approach that includes many possible paths of recovery along with a shift away from the criminalization of drug-taking to a focus on overall health and wellbeing. And the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has identified four dimensions critical to recovery: health, home, purpose, and community.

Most important of all, a person doesn’t necessarily need to be abstinent in order to make gains in all four areas. This makes good sense when you remember that addiction or other problematic substance use is a symptom of underlying pain. Rather than exclusively treating the symptom — the drug use — addressing the underlying loneliness, trauma, or other distress can be a very effective approach. “Family can be a valid pathway to wellness,” Scott pointed out, while adding that her own path went from 12-step meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous to active civic engagement.

For someone else, quality time with his or her kids or even exercising and eating well might be a linchpin for staying mentally healthy. In other words, healing from the pain that underlies substance use disorder can look a lot like healing from any other health challenge.

Yet policymakers continue to call for intensifying the use of coercive treatment. “I think we’re going to see more [involuntary commitment] before we see less of it,” said Campbell, who studies historical patterns in the social response to drug use. There’s nothing new, she noted, in the move to “help” people by institutionalizing them — even if such a move constitutes an erosion of basic civil rights.

“I think most of the time people are genuine in wanting to help,” said Scott, who has been a target of such “help.” The problem, she explained, is the idea that there is a group of people considered “normal” and therefore superior, who think they’re in a position to save other members of society.

“I didn’t need saving. I am a drug user now. I still don’t need saving,” Scott told us. These days she’s focused on being a part of her community through volunteerism while drawing on a support network of people who respect her path.

As for the two of us writing this article, Sean is spending time with his children, staying connected with friends, practicing meditation and yoga, and has for years facilitated a group of physicians in recovery. Mattea has started a new habit of going to the gym with her uncle to ease her loneliness, while also confiding in close friends for support. And all of that truly does make a difference.

Copyright 2024 Sean Fogler and Mattea Kramer

Via Tomdispatch.com

What a world! For eight weeks now, events in Israel and Gaza have been the story of the hour, day, week. And what exactly are we to make of that? 

Let’s start with the obvious: American media coverage of the horrors there has been nonstop since the Hamas slaughter of October 7th. In fact, it’s knocked Russia’s war in Ukraine, the one we were told was so essential to the future of democracy, off front pages (and their media equivalents) everywhere. And the coverage of recent protests has strikingly outpaced those of any other antiwar protests in this century. What the American news media do is, of course, only part of any story, but their recent protest focus contrasts vividly with how they’ve typically covered antiwar and peace actions and so reveals something about how we Americans are thinking about war and peace right now.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, American journalists did report on the outrage over that country’s actions and the outpouring of support for Ukraine, but in the endless months of conflict since then, they’ve paid almost no attention to actions calling for a negotiated settlement there, even as that war goes bloodily on and on. Neither was there much coverage of antiwar protests against Washington’s endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan after February 15, 2003, when (depending on whom you read) six to 15 million people took to the streets of 600 to 800 cities around the world in the largest one-day antiwar protest in history. There, too, even though antiwar veterans and peace groups continued to stage actions, the interest of American news outlets soon evaporated.

Admittedly, Camp Casey, a sprawling encampment of relatives and supporters of soldiers and veterans who wanted to stop the war in Iraq, which sprang up near a vacationing President George W. Bush in August 2005, temporarily caught the attention of a bored press corps idling in the heat. By spring 2008, however, when I was trying to drum up interest in Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, a sizeable gathering of Americans who had fought in those two wars and were publicly testifying about their misguided actions there, I was dismissively told by a New York Times reporter, “If you read the New York Times, you would know that it doesn’t cover rallies.” 

A couple of summers ago, the Boston Globe and other local news outlets showed no interest in talking to anyone boarding buses in that city for the Poor People’s Campaign’s Moral March on Washington, which included antimilitarism in its platform. In contrast, when about 100 locals boarded buses for a pro-Israel rally in Washington this November, the Globe devoted 24 paragraphs to the story. (Granted, the pro-Israel-march buses loaded at Gillette Stadium, home to the Patriots football team, which is always news in these parts.) It’s common to gripe about insufficient reporting on a cause you care about, but for me — and I’ve covered antiwar actions since 2001 — it’s striking that the media, in their gatekeeper and agenda-setting roles, have been so eager to cover protests about Israel’s war in Gaza in ways they seldom did when it came to U.S. antiwar actions earlier in the century.

Does it matter if you throw a protest march and reporters don’t come? Yes, because the very point is to be noticed. The news media are a sphere where competing ideologies and aims play out in the open. So, the way marches and other actions are or aren’t covered helps shape public opinion, affirms or challenges received wisdom, creates a historical record, and — fingers crossed — helps define future political practices.

In this case, with the United States in a powerful position to influence the course of the war on Gaza, continued reporting on antiwar protests could help pressure President Biden to stop embracing (could there have been a worse optic?) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demand a permanent ceasefire instead.

Why This Story Now?

Amid competing narratives, unverifiable information, intense emotions, and everything we still don’t know, it’s important to keep all the often-contradictory realities we do know in mind — and be suitably alarmed.

We know that the United States lavishes at least $3.8 billion yearly in military aid to Israel, along with Get Out of Jail Free cards when it comes to human-rights abuses. Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned in protest over the way our weaponry was killing Gazans, reminded us of just that recently. (The U.S. has also given money to the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, but vastly less of it.)

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We also know that 1,200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered in the October 7th raids by the armed wing of Hamas, the most Jews killed at one time in that country’s history. And we know that about 240 others of all ages were kidnapped in those raids and held hostage.  

We know that nearly 16,000 Palestinian civilians have now been killed in Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza and that about 1.7 million Gazans, three-quarters of the population there, have been forced to flee their homes in search of ever more elusive safety. We know that, of about 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons without charge or trial, 240 were released in exchange for 105 Israeli hostages and that, in the same period, about 244 Palestinians and four Israelis were killed in clashes on the West Bank.

We’ve gotten little information on combatant casualties in Gaza, save occasional announcements from the Israeli military and a rare statement from Hamas, but that’s not unusual. In recent American wars, only independent organizations like icasualties and the Costs of War Project have tried to offer comprehensive reckonings of the damage done.

“Far too many” Palestinians have been killed, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in early November, but how many is the right number when civilian deaths of any sort should be unacceptable? In the face of so much slaughter, destruction, and upheaval, the urge to choose sides, take a stand, make a statement, or man the barricades was compelling. And so it was hardly surprising, after the barbarity of October 7th, that rallies in sympathy with the Israeli hostages, against anti-Semitism, and even calling for revenge sprang up around the world. As many as 290,000 protestors gathered in solidarity with Israel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on November 14th. But as the Israeli assault on Gaza escalated and civilian deaths soared, sympathies began to shift and protests here and elsewhere calling for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Gaza grew rapidly.

Meanwhile, staff and political appointees at the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and at least 40 other government agencies signed letters or memos calling for a ceasefire, as did at least 100 congressional staff members, who staged a walkout. People put up posters of Israeli hostages. Others tore them down. Businesses and institutions issued position papers and those that didn’t were pressured to do so. Even restaurants got into the act.

On university campuses, those sympathizing with various positions sprang into action and began to duke it out. Students for Justice in Palestine was kicked off certain campuses; some student protesters were vilified and doxxed, even losing future job offers; and alumni weighed in, threatening to withhold donations. All of this was heavily covered by news outlets, which thrive on stories about extreme positions staked out early, along with in-your-face actions, heavy-handed responses, the selective suppression of speech, and the influence of money on all of that.

So, obviously one explanation for the coverage is that the protests, marches, demonstrations, rallies, and disputes have been too big, widespread, and persistent to ignore, but it’s not that simple. (It never is, is it?)

We in the United States are, in some sense, close enough to the war in Gaza to make protest a reasonable response — thanks to the military funding provided to Israel, the historical relationship between the two countries, blood ties and friendships between many Americans and Israelis and/or Palestinians, and vivid parallels between the mistreatment of people of color in the U.S. and of Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, and on the West Bank. Yet the U.S. is also nearly 7,000 miles away and none of our own military is (at least as yet) on the ground there. Even with alarming upsurges in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, life in America is, for most of us, still comparatively safe. So is most political action.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve also become increasingly accustomed to such concerted political actions — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, student walkouts for climate change, and picket lines for industrial strikes (often led by young activists). And despite the difficulties and dangers of reporting from Gaza — at least 63 journalists and media workers have been killed in the war so far — an established press corps in Israel and surrounding countries has made both the nightmare of the October 7th attacks and the increasingly horrific war conditions in Gaza all too vivid to Americans.

Inside/Outside the Frame

There’s a journalistic adage that goes: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. A corollary might be: If your mother says you’re perfect, consider the source. Good journalism, in other words, involves constant verification and an instinct for skepticism.

But journalism isn’t stenography and journalists tip their hands all the time. They make choices about what’s news and how to frame it; what to include, emphasize, or omit; who gets quoted and who’s considered a reliable source or expert. It’s clearly their job to inform us as fully, honestly, and fairly as possible so we can make our own moral decisions, including about whether and what to protest.

“The only way to tell this story is to tell it truthfully,” wrote David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, as he began his multifaceted report on a trip to Israel shortly after October 7th, “and to know that you will fail.” You can watch journalists trying to get it right — the protests, the war, the horrors, the consequences — to do justice to the story and the people at its heart. And yet they fail for many reasons. (How could they not?)

Sometimes, it’s the pressure of social media and the 24/7 news cycle, which promotes a rush to publish before necessary information is in. Sometimes, it’s because the topic is complex and requires a backstory and context most Americans (even journalists) don’t already know. Worse yet, it’s hard to fit such complexity into short paragraphs, concise lead sentences, and even more concise headlines, which are often all the news that its consumers have the time to take in.

Sometimes it’s that word-packages — displaced, surgical strikes, humanitarian crisis — become so routine we essentially stop noticing. The camera, too, can be an aid or a weapon, and even grammar comes into play, as in the difference between Israeli civilians were killed (by stated or implied actors), while Palestinians civilians died, as if by some unknown force or their folly in being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’ve been hung up lately on the word horrors and its variations: horrible, horrific, horrifying. Examples of their use in such media coverage are legion. The writer in me wants to come up with a fresh word that would really allow us to absorb and truly consider the — yes! — horrors of what’s now happening in Gaza. Then I recall these two lines from Pablo Neruda’s searing poem about the Spanish civil war:

“and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.”

This war, like all war, is indeed horrible.

Sometimes the coverage problem is what’s pejoratively called bothsideism or, more generously, balance. But assuming there are only two sides to every story misses the reality that most stories have many sides. The protesters in recent demonstrations, for instance, embraced a remarkable range of demands, intentions, and sympathies, but reporting was so much easier if positions were clear-cut and uniform. So, coverage has tended toward a Manichaean view of the hostilities and those demonstrating about them: pro or con, allies or enemies, Zionist or anti-Semite, good for America and Joe Biden or a blow to democracy everywhere and the Democratic Party in particular. Such a way of reporting, however, closes down so many other possibilities.

This is particularly apparent when political demonstrations against atrocities like those committed in Israel on October 7th and in Gaza (and the West Bank) thereafter are seen mainly as a spectacle in which reporters count the numbers, repeat the slogans, and focus on a random few who supposedly represent the whole. Individual stories may humanize an issue and draw eyes to an article. Such reporting, however, can also play into a particularly American version of dissent in which the individual resister becomes the story, not the resistance movement. Such a skew can make political protests seem more like a series of individual temper tantrums, at best tolerable outlets for sometimes justified anger, and not much more.

What doesn’t make it inside such a news-media framework is revealing. In this country, as an issue, peace itself has been ceded to the left, which effectively means banished. But imagine, for a moment, what a different world we might be in if our news platforms were to set up peace beats alongside their war beats. What if the opinions of peace workers were as routinely sought out as retired generals and politicians in the pockets of arms manufacturers? What if it was considered a crucial part of the news to explore the complexities of, possible conditions for, and likelihood of peace, rather than presenting it as just the absence of war or a zero-sum game? What if our reporting explored moral issues along with economic and political ones and maybe even figured out how to make peace seem as exciting and newsworthy as war?

I’m not so naïve as to think that a shift in the business of news coverage here in America would end years of animosity and violence in the Middle East. Still, over time it could reorient our thinking about militarism and, given this embattled and battered planet of ours, that doesn’t seem — to me, as least — like such a bad idea.

Copyright 2023 Nan Levinson

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”

Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.

Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.

Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.

The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.

In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

 Trump Threatens

It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as the New York Times reported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.

Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.

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Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps” — think: prisons — that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told the New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

And rest assured about one thing: the next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons. 

Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House — a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges — success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.  

When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me — they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.

The Fascist Aims of America First

While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.

Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between three and eight million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto. 

While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States. 

In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist — that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe — and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading anti-Semite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.

Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.

The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.

America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:

“When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.”

Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call — perhaps a bridge too far even for them — but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)

Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at — yes! — Mar-a-Lago.

The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak republican is more dangerous than a democrat.” Ward is under investigation in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there. 

Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.

The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. 

Violence as Politics

Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As the Wall Street Journal noted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.

The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Copyright 2023 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com