Five years on from Trump's coup attempt ...

... we should be clear about what is happening. American fascism is on the march, and anyone who balks at saying that clearly, who makes excuses and pretends that Trump and the people he brought in aren’t monsters, is deeply unpatriotic. If we are to have a chance at saving democracy, our first duty must be clarity. No sanewashing, no bothsidesing. Only facing the horrible truth can set us free. -- Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman

That's Krugman's substack reflection on the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump's attempted coup in 2021 and the current Trump regime. I have no beef with this formulation. I do have a beef with fancy pundits who haven't dared or won't see so as to speak so plainly.

But I am interested also in this from the comments on Krugman's post; a reader writes:

American voters voted for this [in 2024]. 77 million of them looked at Donald Trump and decided they wanted someone who was a convicted felon, greedy narcissist, sex pest, insurrectionist, profoundly stupid, massively ignorant, racist imbecile, and dedicated to destroying the United States government. 77 million Americans voted for this.

And now the country is getting what it deserves. 

It's easy to be disgusted by our fellow/sister citizens. 

The reflexive, easy response is to think: No -- that's not what they voted for. They wanted cheaper eggs. Or, to be more respectful, lower costs for higher ed or to buy a house. Less respectfully -- Yes, they wanted the old white guy, even a criminal old white guy, in preference to any accomplished Black/South Asian-origin woman. 

The commenter has a point; the dimwits who casually put Trump in office do perhaps deserve what they are getting. 

Much of it will fall on other people, who didn't vote for him or didn't vote at all. The Trump/Musk tantrum at USAID is estimated to have already killed 600,000 people, mostly children in Africa.

But Trump voters will catch some of it when they can't afford increases in the price of health insurance or when there's nobody answering calls for rescue when flood waters rise. 

But then I reflect: none of us really get what we deserve in life -- for ill of course, but also even more for good. What we think of as our desserts is not how it works. 

We just have to forge on, trying to fix what we can and passing on something at least as good and perhaps something a little better to the humans who come after us. As I usually say to people who ask why I do what I do -- my activism -- "Nothing else to do..."

• • • 

Historian Diana Butler Bass offered a thoughtful reflection on January 6 in 2022 and reposted it today. 

...Some of my earliest memories are political ones — mostly of John F. Kennedy and of the Civil Rights Movement. Between the two, I learned that democracy was a hope-filled possibility and that it wasn’t perfect. Indeed, it wasn’t complete. It was a project. There were people who couldn’t vote because of the color of their skin. There were people who didn’t have certain rights because they weren’t men. There were people who couldn’t publicly proclaim who they loved because others considered them deviant. There were those with no access to democracy because they were poor or marginalized or went unnoticed.

How to fix these things, make the project work?

Democratic shortcomings were addressed by better democracy. In the middle of the twentieth century, people fought to widen democracy’s reach, to establish the dignified participation of everyone in voting, and to guarantee equity under the law. The federal government must stand as a protector of democracy for all citizens, no matter an individual’s political party, class, or creed. Indeed, many Americans shared a sense of democratic responsibility for people across the globe who were seeking a fairer, more just, and humane existence. Democracy was a worthy project, and it was a bright birthright, our political North Star.

... Democracy, the rule of the people, is a political system based on us. The rule of the people can be as inspiring as the greatest human impulses, as fickle as human nature, and as devious and deluded as human beings can be. In this way, “democracy” isn’t an ideology. You can’t put an “ism” on the end of democracy. Indeed, it is a practice of being a person in community, a polity based more on faith in the commons than a systematized doctrine. You can’t really believe in democracy. Instead, democracy asks us to trust that we belong to one another — all of us — and that together we can behave more justly and learn that liberty and happiness are possible.

... The cruel facts of history came home when armed Americans, deceived by an American president, destroyed a proud tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and attempted a coup to overturn the results of an election — all in a corrupted notion of actually saving democracy.

... January 6 was backlash on steroids. Backlash to a Black president. Backlash to marriage equality. Backlash to women’s rights. Backlash to the widening of democracy over most of our lifetimes — a widening that saw democracy reaching to include all sorts of people who had been excluded, a democratic correction of the flaws and misuses and mistakes of democracy past. January 6 wasn’t just about Donald Trump or the Big Lie. It was backlash to four decades of democratic progress that had been, by any historical account, extraordinary. 

... We can neither diminish nor deny January 6 — its memory — and how we remember it — is foundational for whatever happens next. So, don’t give up on the truth. Let’s practice the future of democracy. Starting from today. Starting wherever and however we can start. We’ve got work to do repairing and saving this messy, ironic, and imperfect project of government by all the people and for all the people.

Diana's consciousness of long-expanding democracy is common in my generation, most especially among comfortable-class white women. Look at all those white heads at No Kings. But we're not alone in this; it's the core American myth and it still has some life.

Will we allow second rate, greedy mobsters to kill it?

It's not solely about the oil

As a parenting advice column points out, unconstrained little boys like to blow things up.

Boys love explosions ...  I'm not sure about girls and explosions. I suspect they're less enthusiastic. 

Boys seem to have an inborn, visceral affection for explosions. As they mature, they gain the additional motivation of staging explosions to impress girls. I doubt girls are really impressed by this. But some of them might act impressed because they want to please boys. This only leads to more explosions. I'm guessing that the entire fireworks industry, and possibly war, has been built on this dynamic. ...

We've given the keys to our military to an uninhibited toddler and his enablers. So we get murder on the high seas and in Caracas.

Noah Berlatsky reflects:  

“The speed, the violence”

Trump’s refusal to try to get anyone on board [with his Venezuela adventure] is obviously an expression of contempt towards all people who are not his cronies. But it’s also an indication of Trump’s own fecklessness and confusion. He has not explained himself in part because he is not willing to do the work of understanding his or his country’s own motivations or interests. He’s going on impulse. And his impulses are for blowing things up.

Trump has long been praised by fools and opportunists as a non-interventionist, largely because he has long claimed, falsely, to have opposed the Iraq War. But even in his first term, it was clear he believes that war is a fun and exciting expression of power and masculinity (at least when it is waged against relatively weak foes). In his first 100 days in office, he used an enormous non-nuclear device — the “mother of all bombs” (MOAB) — in Afghanistan, then reacted with the same sort of gushing enthusiasm he showed after the Venezuela attack.

“We have the greatest military in the world, and they have done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and thatʼs what theyʼre doing, and frankly, thatʼs why theyʼve been so successful lately.”

In his second term, Trump has launched a constant series of military interventions. In addition to the murders in Venezuelan waters, he authorized strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer and threatened more intervention this week if Iran killed protestors. He’s also bombed Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

These actions have all been framed — especially by [Trump's Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth — as triumphal expressions of American awesomeness and virility. Addressing military officers in September, Hegseth boasted that “we don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He denounced “politically correct” approaches to war and advocated instead “maximum lethality.”

... In short, Hegseth framed murdering people in defiance of the law as a moral and partisan goal. 

Trump’s praise of “speed and violence” and Hegseth’s nattering about “maximum lethality” are of a piece with [19th century futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's] fascist embrace of war as “the world’s only hygiene” and with Hitler’s assertion that “mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.” Fascists don’t need a reason for this war or that war because they believe that war is a good in itself. Force is exciting and fun; using bombs and guns shows you’re strong. Trump’s a bully; he likes bullying.

... As political science professor Elizabeth Saunders said, “we have the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship” — and the dictator’s personal preference is to watch TV shows in which the US military blows things up at his whim. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, we’re about to find out.

I believe we are about to learn that the time is running out in which US enjoys impunity for the consequences of our toddler behavior.

In fact, Trump's enthusiasm for bolstering his waning potency by beating up our western hemisphere neighbors shows a dim apprehension of that fact even in the wily brain of the bully. He wants to cede the rest of the world to other bullies so he can enjoy a free hand closer to home. Bullying in this arena didn't actually work out very well for another Republican imitation cowboy -- that would be Ronald Reagan in his illegal interventions in Central America -- and it is not likely to work even that well for this petulant incompetent. 

As is usual as a consequence of America's wars, we'll end up providing refuge to many of the best (and some of the worst) humans tossed about by our imperial pretensions. That's something to like about this country, I guess.

They broke it; they own it

Our Trump regime's Venezuelan adventure has produced one of the most revealing paragraphs ever in the New York Times: 

Ms. [Delcy] Rodríguez, 56, arrives at the job of Venezuela’s interim leader with credentials of an economic troubleshooter who orchestrated the country’s shift from corrupt socialism to similarly corrupt laissez-faire capitalism. ...

Since corrupt capitalism is Trump's game, he likes that. And he clearly thinks he's won the chance to steal Venezuela's oil. We'll see how it goes.

Good riddance to Maduro. Pity the Venezuelans. Pity us. When legal restraint is swept away, we will all suffer. And pity any country cursed with "black gold" -- except maybe Canada.

They are stark raving bonkers!

When they get through screwing around with Venezuela, there's this. Katie Miller is Stephen Miller's wife, presumably expressing the hopes and fantasies of the cabal of lunatics in charge of the United States.

Somehow I doubt it.

Against forgetting ...

Jack Smith (what a bland Anglo name!) was the very professional prosecutor called upon to consider and if necessary indict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection on January 6 2020 and then stealing classified documents when he left the White House. Smith did his job. Trump escaped the law only when the American people, in our folly, restored him to the presidency.

Smith told his side of that story to a Congressional committee last month. Republicans kept his sworn testimony behind closed doors and only released a written transcript on New Years Eve, counting on the country being distracted. This has worked -- if we let it.

The diligent journalist Parker Malloy had a better fate in mind for Smith's story: 

I spent the holiday reading through the whole thing. Here’s what they didn’t want you to see.

Here are some of the tidbits she extracted from the 255 page transcript:

Trump is a crook:

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

Trump didn't care who, including and perhaps especially his Vice President, got hurt in order to keep him in office:  

“Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it. He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President. And when the violence was going on, he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it. And then even afterwards he directed co-conspirators to make calls to Members of Congress, people who had were his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.” 

Smith had built his dismissed case from testimony by Republicans:

“And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we had such strong proof is all witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies. We had numerous witnesses who would say, ‘I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for President Trump. I wanted him to win.’ The Speaker of the House in Arizona. The Speaker of the House in Michigan. We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal. Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.” 

Trump's allies had even concluded that people who stood in their way in falsely swinging the vote to Trump in Pennsylvania should be killed.

“And there was a text chain with some of the people who were carrying out this scheme for President Trump basically ended with, ‘These people should be shot,’ because — ‘and that we can’t let this snowball like this; otherwise, we’re going to have to do this in all the other States.’”

Parker Malloy has excerpted the vital parts of Smith's testimony at The Present Age. That testimony is not (ever?) going to be highlighted in the mainstream, but you can read this and great deal more there.

Happy New Year! Around the USofA I go

I'm walking (virtually) a circuitous route that takes me through all the state capitols of the United States. Every day on which I walk for exercise, I record my mileage on the World Walking site. (The blue line shows my progress.) For no particular reason, I chose to walk a ridiculous long route; it's unlikely I'll finish this in my remaining life, but it's fun to see how far I get and collect photos from the site of the obscure roads I'm traveling.

The full route. Click to enlarge.

Starting in Washington State, I've progressed south on the West Coast.

  

Olympia, WA

Through Oregon.

Salem, OR

South along the western slope of the Sierras.

Sacramento, CA

Then north past Lake Tahoe and into the desert.

Carson City, NV

For now, I'm slogging on toward Boise, ID and then Helena, MT. 

 

This year I covered a little over 1000 miles. I won't be surprised if I'm still in Montana or perhaps Wyoming on New Years 2027. Those western distances are long.

Actually, I've done this before. Back when I was a long distance runner, I recorded my virtual progress on The Transamerica Bicycle Trail across the country, bumbling and stumbling 4064 miles between August 4, 2007 and February 11, 2011. That was the short way.

Happy New Year! If the people lead, our leaders will follow.

What's to say? We've made it through one year of our elected autocrat's destruction. Three years more to go and then ... what will we make of it?

The higher tranches of American society -- corporate law firms, academic institutions, most politicians -- rolled over and played dead before the Trump onslaught.

The middle and lower classes didn't roll over. We are more and more gaining confidence that we don't have to succumb to the Mad King and his MAGA hordes. 

They are not who we are. They can hurt us, both as a society and as individuals. Many will be hurt beyond recovery. But this is not who we are and, more and more, we aren't going to take it.

I'll be back here on January 2. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy watching football. 

Don't forget the girls!

Today's admonition comes from the great Kareem Abdul Jabbar. He reports a study by Lisa Hinkelman, Ph.D., a nationally recognized researcher, speaker and author who has spent nearly 20 years researching girls and educating adults.

SUMMARY: My most recent research study, which included more than 17,000 fifth-grade through 12th-grade girls in The Girls’ Index, reveals a troubling trend: 67% of the participants reported that they don’t say what they’re thinking or disagree with others because they want to be liked. Let that sink in for a moment. Two-thirds of girls are silencing themselves to be accepted. ... 

I remember that yearning to be conventionally popular as an adolescent girl. You either gave in to it, successfully or awkwardly, or you were part of the third of girls who said, metaphorically, "screw that!" That was a long time ago, but the pressures remain the same. 

Knowing this makes Kareem sad and a little angry. And he wishes the boys could do better.

MY TAKE: A lot has been written this past year about the challenges faced by boys and young men in America. It’s all true: young males are facing so much insecurity in their lives, let alone about their future. Yes, our culture does convey privileges on males that females don’t get. 

The problem they face at such a young age happens when they realize they are favored in our society, yet it doesn’t feel like it to them. Then they either have to deny they are favored, or they have to justify their privilege as deserved. That manifests itself in anti-DEI rhetoric: claiming superiority through religious or faux-biological posturing. 

Look at the sad role models of manhood that are out there in the news every day: flexing, bullying, openly insulting women, accused and convicted sexual predators doing everything they can to cancel women’s rights, silence their voices, and reduce their power. No wonder our boys struggle to grow up with moral values that reflect the principles in our Constitution.

There is a third option that some men embrace: Acknowledge their preferred status, but fight against it to create an even playing field. That would be my idea of Real Men.

Nothing in this massive study surprises me. And that in itself is sad. Our society is not structured to support women but to punish them. Don’t bother pointing to the statistics about the increasing numbers of women attending college or having corporate jobs or who are in politics. That’s important, sure, but it always comes with a societal gut-punch.

As long as women are judged first on their appearance and “sexiness,” they will always be considered inferior. As long as women continue to get Botox or plastic surgery to appear younger or more voluptuous, they will be treated as inferior because, in part, these things are an admission that appearance in a woman is more important than it is in a man. High heels to appear taller and flex the legs, low-cut tops, false eyelashes, hair extensions and wigs all tell men that women are vain and frivolous. 

Yes, you can say it’s fun to dress up and do things to “enhance” your looks, but you haven’t been paying attention to the cost to your power and dignity this cultural brainwashing brings. There are plenty of excuses to embrace this status quo, especially if you’re young and attractive by society’s narrow standards. It feels like you’re getting more than you’re giving up. But that’s not true. You’ve sold young girls—and your older self—down the river.

Look at the results of the study and ask yourself how we’re still here. During the Women’s Liberation Movement of the sixties, I envisioned a future of women having equal opportunities with men, of the insane beauty standards being something we all laughed at, like girdles or foot-binding. 

But then, I thought the same thing about the Civil Rights Movement. And here we are. It’s not good enough. Not for any girl or woman. We can’t just shrug it off anymore and make excuses. 

Or, as other elders would admonish us: Freedom is a constant struggle.

Truth tellers: from embattled Ukraine

There remain among us people who insist on telling the truth -- the truth of Donald Trump et al.'s depredations and the truth of who some American people aspire to be. 

Consider, for example, Tim Mak. Based in Kiev, Ukraine, and ensuring through The Counteroffensive substack that Ukrainian writers can describe the war as they live it, Mak has carved out his own definition of the job of a war correspondent. 

Tim’s breakout in journalism doesn’t follow a known model. Born in Canada, he moved from academic institutions there to the forefront of American politics and cut his teeth reporting on the Obama administration and key political movements, including the rise of the Tea Party and two elections. But the intensity of the 2016 campaign season forced him into an unexpected detour, where he joined the U.S. Army as a combat medic, a role he believed at the time would strengthen his resilience to enrich his later journalism.  

Mak is an American citizen by choice; he could have just remained a Canadian observer of his big neighbor's follies. But he chose to come inside our bedraggled tent. He's also an observer of wars' horrors by choice; his talents could have won him other berths. But he persists because something about Ukraine's stubborn resistance to Russian imperialism reminds him of what he values. He views Trump's turn to enabling Russian conquests as betrayal of his adopted country as well as of Ukrainians.

... One of the reasons I wanted to become an American is that it meant something more than just citizenship in a country. Americans, even when the country failed to live up to its ideals, at least tried to uphold values of freedom and human rights.

America did not need to made “great again” because it was already good — or at least *tried* to be. America exemplified a place where immigrants could make it, fellow allied democracies were boosted, and bad actors were confronted.

... [Trump's new "National Security strategy] throws away any pretense of American exceptionalism or idealism.

It’s a Neanderthalish view of interacting with the world. We are great because we are powerful. We are powerful because we can kill or coerce, or otherwise manipulate you due to the threat of both. ...

Tim Mak thinks we can do better. Sometimes we have done better; sometimes we still do. 

White Christian Nationalists and an American soldier

Yesterday a young man wonderfully named Godspower Nwawuihe scored two touchdowns for the US Military Academy team in a rout of the University of Connecticut in the Fenway Bowl in Boston. The internet is not very forthcoming about his ancestry, but hints that his parents came from Lagos, Nigeria, before settling in Garland, Texas. 

The day before yesterday, Donald Trump ordered the US military to lob missiles at northwestern Nigeria. CNN reports that people on the ground in the target area were mystified. 

Abuja, Nigeria  — A day after part of a missile fired by the United States hit their village, landing just meters from its only medical facility, the people of Jabo in northwestern Nigeria are in a state of shock and confusion.

... Kagara did not realize it at the time, but what he was witnessing was part of a US strike that President Donald Trump would later refer to as a “Christmas present” for terrorists.

Not long after the impact in Jabo, Trump declared on Thursday that the US had carried out a “powerful and deadly strike” against ISIS militants in the region, who he accused of “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!” 

According to US Africa Command, the operation neutralized multiple ISIS militants. 

But Trump’s explanation has left Kagara and his fellow villagers scratching their heads. 

While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa – which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with Islamic State – villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.  

“In Jabo, we see Christians as our brothers. We don’t have religious conflicts, so we weren’t expecting this,” he said.

When local violence does break out in northwestern Nigeria, it seems often to involve conflicts between herders who are Muslims and settled farmers who are Christian. Such conflicts are thought to have been part of human history all over the world.

Should Mr. Nwawuihe complete his time at West Point and be commissioned as an Army officer, will he be sent to kill Nigerians? 

Mr. Trump seems to treat random strikes in Nigeria as a gift to white US Christians who probably couldn't find Nigeria on a map. These strikes are just one more crime against hard won civilization from our clownish grifter ...

• • •

The contemporary Republican base of white evangelicals is a morass of white Christian nationalism. They think God gave them this country and they have a right to rule us all -- and the world too.

 Historian of religion Jemar Tisby provides a succinct definition of the affliction. 

White Christian nationalism is an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christianity as a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control. 

It is characterized by beliefs such as a conviction that Christians have a mandate to exercise dominion over all segments of society, the notion that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, and the sense that they are under attack by anti-American and anti-Christian forces. ...

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian catalogues the fixations and crimes of the nationalist-deluded. 

... White Christian nationalists generally do not seem interested in good works, helping the most vulnerable, or personal character. This is a movement seeking power, not redemption. Its adherents are motivated to remake America into a white, Christian dominated nation. 

Lacking the votes to bring their goals about through democracy, they are all too willing to suppress voting and rely on other anti-democratic measures. Blowing up people on the high seas, separating children from parents, brutalizing Hispanics, and taking away SNAP benefits are features, not bugs for people lacking empathy who seek racial and religious dominance.

These people are a lot of us. Sociologist Robert P. Jones attempted last March to measure carefully the prevalence of this dangerous fantasy.

... three in ten Americans qualified as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (29%). These percentages have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022. In other words, Christian nationalism supporters, while a sizable minority, are outnumbered by a margin of two to one among the general public.

... A majority of Republicans today qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (20%) or Sympathizers (33%), compared to less than one quarter of independents (6% Adherents and 16% Sympathizers) and less than one fifth of Democrats (5% Adherents and 11% Sympathizers). These views are reinforced by TV media outlets consumed disproportionately by Republicans, such as Fox News or far right TV news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax.

... As the US has become more racially and religiously diverse over the past few decades, our two major political parties have responded in dramatically different ways to these shifts. Today, only 41% of Americans identify as white and Christian. But today’s Republican Party is 70% white and Christian, a stark contrast from the Democratic Party, which is 25% white and Christian.

... We see the connection between Christian nationalism and support for political violence clearly in the data. Nearly four in ten Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and nearly three in ten Sympathizers (28%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 15% of Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters.

If these folks get their way, Mr. Nwawuihe may indeed find himself dispatched to attack people in the land of his ancestors. What a dangerous, ignorant world we are making ...