Never again is now. .. Justice takes sides.

Jemar Tisby, an historian of the justice struggle in Black America, reports from a pilgrimage to Manzanar National Historic Site with the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary. The Seminary is an evangelical Christian institution which aims to work broadly to encourage awareness of global human diversity. That is, these are ordinary Americans, not Bible-thumping Republican Christian Nationalists.

Tisby's little film (12 minutes) is a fine introduction to the last occasion on which an American government disappeared citizens using the Alien Enemies Act.

On getting with the program

A Florida teacher wishes to be in compliance with the new law restricting what can be taught -- or mentioned -- in the classroom.

 

This was floating around on Twitter. It seemed worth sharing.

• • •

But let's get serious here for a minute. Republicans are bound and determined to inflame a sex panic so as to run on it in the midterms. 

In the charged debate over what and how children should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity, some mainstream Republicans are tagging those who defend such lessons as “groomers,” claiming that proponents of such teaching want children primed for sexual abuse. The argument draws on previous tactics adopted by the right to oppose the erosion of traditional gender roles at moments of societal transition, experts say. They point out that, while groomer rhetoric seems designed to appeal to fringe partisans, it is part of a conservative effort to foster a moral panic that will help limit how and what educators teach — by restricting history lessons, banning books, and curbing discussions of systemic racism and LGBTQ issues. Hannah Natanson and Moriah Balingit

We've been here before.When uppity (or hungry) women insisted on going to work outside the home in the 1980s and 90s, leaving their kids in day care, the usual suspects ginned up a day care sex panic, charging a few unfortunate operators with Satanic ritual abuse. Ambitious DAs descended on schools and ginned up prosecutions. But there was nothing there but manipulated parental hyper-anxiety. It was all nonsense -- nearly all the accused were eventually set free when temperatures cooled.

This time, the targets of fear are LGBTQ people. And anyone who might teach truthful history about race. The antidote to irrational fears is 1) education and 2) to get over it.

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to provoking commentary. Some annotated by me. 

To-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Theodore Johnson, director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, writing at The Bulwark: "... what will it mean if the progressive wing of the Court made up of three women—one black, one Hispanic, and one Jewish—is consistently on the losing side, their constitutional interpretation on issues of civil rights and criminal justice routinely defeated?" My heart goes out to these sisters ... Can you imagine having to work with those pricks (one honorary)?

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie: "for Americans who want a more equal society, the Supreme Court has been, is and will continue to be an adversary, not an ally. Understanding that fact is the first step toward doing something about it." 

• • •

Polish politician and member of the European Parliament Radosław Sikorski observes: "Populism has roots in many things, including frivolity. Electorates were voting for outlandish politicians in the UK, in the United States and elsewhere, out of a sense that nothing can go wrong, and therefore we can have these weird individuals. And now we know that things can go very badly wrong, and we need steadier hands." Over and over we have to learn this -- the politics of frivolity is a luxury item suitable only for an unserious society.

G. Elliot Morris, data nerd for The Economist: "Congressional election outcomes serve as very limited barometers of the public’s preferences for policy and presidents. ... If Democrats lose 30 or 40 seats in November, it is very hard to claim that x, y, or z is the thing that costs them electorally. That’s because lots of things matter marginally but most of the swing is already baked in. Though they have some control over how many seats they will lose in November, barring a war or political realignment by November, the Democrats lost Congress when they won the White House." I think of this well-founded observation when I read screeds about how Democrats should adopt this message or that one -- or throw this part of our coalition under the bus or that one ... We will need to work our darndest to hold as many Congressional seats as possible knowing the odds are against us, while winning some winnable Senate races and governor contests.

Nsé Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project: “We need to remember that disinformation and fear that drives the other side, particularly around issues like critical race theory, do not equally drive Black voters ... We have to stop being reactive to talking points that motivate other audiences while ignoring the issues that actually matter to Black voters.” These Georgia folks have proved they know how to focus where their work can do the most good.

Stacey Abrams, running for Georgia governor, is very clear on what will get her elected: "You should not vote for me as a person. You should vote for me as a proxy, as a representative for who you are and what you want your community to be. The minute a politician becomes the product itself, we find ourselves in a lot of trouble. We’ve had recent examples of people buying the commodity versus the conduit." Abrams is the living antithesis of our frivolous politicians.

• • •

Philip Bump in the Washington Post: "Putin’s defenders in his fight against democracy are those who are disparaging America’s diversity, over and over again." Republicans are finding the present moment confusing. Putin invaded a democratic Ukraine, politics became more serious, and massaging racial and gender resentment ceased to provide an adequate compass. Some might find new bearings; many will remain unserious panderers to unserious crackpots.

Feminist stalwart Jessica Valenti: "To the politicians pushing anti-choice laws, women dying isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job. They believe that if we were real mothers and real women, we’d give up anything for pregnancy: Our education, our finances, our safety, our health and even our lives." Woman hatred is real.

Paul Butler: "Students who think their education should be free of racist slurs from professors are not illiberal snowflakes who don’t understand academic values. They simply want to learn in an environment where their teachers don’t judge them by their race or gender." He's calling bull___ on fear of "cancel culture." 

Hamid Hayat served 14 years in federal prison for a crime he didn't commit because there was no crime. "His country once looked at him and imagined a terrorist. Americans feared his anger, and for that, he lost nearly everything. So if he does feel anger now, he isn’t free to show it. He still worries what co-workers and neighbors will think when they learn about his story. He still feels the need to show that he has a good heart, a good mind. He is still afraid of America’s fear." Because it was convenient for the people running the country, we let ourselves be run off our rails by exaggerated fears of Muslims. We should remember this, if we don't want to compound the folly and our crimes of cowardice.

Ariel Dorfman explores the urge of the powerful to censor: "... Winnie the Pooh was banned in China because apparently the portly, lovable bear was being used by dissidents to mock President Xi Jinping." 

For a last word here: the Reverend Dr Ellen Clark-King, Dean of King’s College London: "TL:DR  God is not male so broaden your pronouns."

Shards from Putin's war on both Ukraine and hope

The horror of this moment has literally rendered me a little dumbstruck. As a friend remarked on Thursday, my heart is heavy. In more time, I'll share my own thoughts. Today, thoughts of others, with a little commentary in italics.

Max Seddon is the Financial Times bureau chief in Moscow. He tweeted:"It’s remarkable how [Ukrainian President] Zelensky has finally grown into the role. When the US warned if Russia’s plans to invade, he was slammed by Ukrainians for not taking it seriously. But when the war became inevitable, Zelensky started playing the president on TV again – he’s a natural."

This short BBC clip conveys Zelensky's performance of heroism in his beleaguered role. 

Russian journalist Yana Pashaeva: "The main feelings of liberal Russians are concerns for Ukrainians—many of whom are our relatives and friends—shame for Putin, and helplessness." The shame and helplessness -- this is something citizens of the United States know when we have watched and protested our country big footing small countries.

Amie Ferris-Rotman, who reported from Russia for a decade tweets "Over 170 Russian journalists, including from Kremlin-run RT and TASS, have signed an open letter calling for an end to war with Ukraine." That's risk taking, as are peace demonstrations resulting in over 1000 arrests in Moscow.

Marc Santora, reporting for the New York Times from Lviv, Ukraine: "The civilian resistance in Ukraine received instructions on Saturday night from the military on how to help stop the Russian advance. They were told to destroy a road if they saw tanks passing along it, because fuel trucks were sure to follow; to burn a forest if they spotted Russian vehicles there; and to shoot out tires on military vehicles if they had rifles and could shoot from a distance. Above all, the defense ministry advised people to keep themselves safe but make life for Russian soldiers as difficult as possible." You have to assume Russia's army can crush these Ukrainians -- and that even amidst the adrenaline rush of war and patriotic feeling, they know it.

That cosmopolitan student of democracy, Yascha Mounk, concludes: "... the world’s dictators are taking off their masks. Autocratic leaders from Myanmar to Nicaragua no longer feel constrained by the need to maintain some semblance of democratic legitimacy or appease the State Department. And those dictators, like Vladimir Putin, who also have significant military might at their disposal are now trying to remake the world order in their image." The struggle for the possibility of humane civilization is indeed on the line. Of course it always was, but we are forced to notice.

Click to enlarge.

"A solid plurality of U.S. voters say they’re willing to face higher prices at home in order to sanction Moscow for invading Ukraine — and fewer than 1 in 10 oppose any sanctions"  according to pollsters Morning Consult. Let's hope we can unite enough to persist. That is our struggle.

Climate activist Bill McKibben knows how we ought to respond to Putin's war: "If you care about freedom, shut up about high gas prices. And put a solar panel on your roof." He's right! Putin's base state is a gas station with nukes -- if we, and especially Europe can replace fossil fuels, this is over. You can't eat nukes.

For many years, Joe Cirincione worked for international nuclear disarmament through the Ploughshares Fund. He speaks our appropriate fear in this moment.

Foreign policy maven David Rothkopf has worked for the last word here: "But usually big global conflicts have grey areas in which the irresolute or weak can hide, sometimes grey areas that make knowing who if anyone to support difficult. That's not the case here. Either you are for or against Putin's evil, for or against freedom & democracy." Yes.

Damn lies and statistics

Washington Post politics and data writer Philip Bump has done a terrific job of showing how politicians exaggerate crime statistics when goosing anxiety suits their purposes. In a newsletter that came with my Wapo subscription (sorry, no direct link available), he writes:

[New York Mayor Eric Adams] was presenting his administration's anticipated budget and, as part of that, made the case that the city needed to make investments necessary to combat rising crime.

So Bump shows Adams' chart:

Click to enlarge

Now that looks scary!

But note how relatively small the increments in the left axis are, running from 92,000 to 104,000 offenses.

Bump offers another way to visualize the same data that he thinks is more realistic -- or at least far less alarmist.

Click to enlarge

When the left axis starts from zero -- wouldn't we love zero felony offenses? -- rising to 120,000, the increase looks much less dire, only 7.5 percent over previous year.

Being aware of what's really going on in charts about increasing felonies is going to be politically important in the coming year. Republicans are bound and determined to scream "RISING CRIME" whether statistics support that conclusion, or do not, or show something more nuanced.

Wariness about inflammatory howls claiming rising crime are going to be especially important in San Francisco where much of the moneyed establishment and supporters of the police union are out to recall our elected District Attorney, Chesa Boudin. Beware.

A season of chaos

During the Trump administration, frequently I felt all that was left to say was "the cruelty is the point." (H/t Adam Server.) As I look at the current Trump/Bannon interval, I fear what needs to be said is "the chaos is the point."

A lot of people, mostly white men, feel massively aggrieved by a seemingly endless pandemic, an economic system in which they sit in a precarious place (if any place), and broad expansion of who matters in this pseudo-democracy (something more like all of us, not just them). So we get both 1/6 and the truckers fouling up Ottawa.

Timothy Snyder is perceptive in The Winter Sieges of North American Capitols.

... the deepest similarity was that the cause of the protestors made no sense.  The Americans who stormed the Capitol last January purported to believe that Trump had won an election that he lost.  There was no evidence of this; what is more, there was no logic: if the Democrats really stole elections, surely they would have arranged comfortable majorities for themselves in the House of Representatives and the Senate.   

The Canadian trucker protest plumbs similar depths of unreason. The ostensible pretext for the "Freedom Caravan," the use of trucks from around the country to disable Ottawa, was the need for Canadian truckers to be vaccinated before they enter the United States.  But this is not something over which anyone in Ottawa actually has control.  ... But this senselessness, it seems, is part of the point.  Making demands that cannot be met makes it hard to bring the chaos to an end.

Snyder blames the internet -- but media which enable communication of feelings more than thought are just a tool. 

Neither of these events attract majority approval. Though most Republicans believe Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election, 62 percent of us still believe the insurrection was an effort to overturn a valid vote, not the Republican National Committee's "legitimate political discourse." Most Canadians are NOT on team trucker according to The Grid: 

The protests are not organized by Canadian trucking unions, the largest of which has come out against the protests. They also do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers: More than 80 percent of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost 90 percent of truckers, according to Canada’s minister of transport.

A hack of the GoSendMe "Christian" fund raising site which is supporting the Canadian trucker protest revealed that the largest part of the cash support is coming across the blockaded border -- from MAGAs in the United States.

I blame political leaders who see personal advantage in fomenting chaos. Trump himself of course -- what other power has he got? But the hangers-on are leaping into the fray.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis -- the aspiring GOPer presidential hopeful who wants election police to preside over voting -- is all in with the Ottawa protesters. He thinks he's got a winning pitch with this sticker:

Rand Paul has charged out front on weaponizing the pain, as has been his family's business for a couple of generations.

"I’m all for it," said [Senator Rand] Paul, a vocal critic of masking and vaccine mandates. "Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates. ... I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities."

I'm feeling for the residents of Ottawa -- a quiet, almost staid, small city. Here's one reaction from some native Ottawans:

The Unitarian writer John Pavlovitz catches what those of us struggling for some minimal sanity are up against:

The fatigue of decent humans is the plan of bad people: inundate us with a million tiny crises, assail us with countless daily culture war battles, and batter us with endless legislative assaults—until we are gradually crushed beneath the weight of it all.

Yes, there are bad people manipulating painful feelings. And if we want to live in a more sane polity, we can but keep on keeping on.

On forced teaching of tripe

The American right fears truthful education. And unscrupulous politicians know how to scare and outrage anxious parents about what their kids might be encountering in the schools.

The point is that the smear campaign against critical race theory is almost certainly the start of an attempt to subject education in general to rule by the right-wing thought police, which will have dire effects far beyond the specific topic of racism. Paul Krugman 

... Critics say the focus on white guilt precludes any candid discussion of American history. "This isn't even a ban on Critical Race Theory, this is a ban on Black history," Florida State Senator Shevrin Jones (D) said. "They are talking about not wanting White people to feel uncomfortable? Let's talk about being uncomfortable. My ancestors were uncomfortable when they were stripped away from their children." via Judd Legum 

The banning of books about race or LGBTQ issues does not just affect those communities, said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association. It also withholds the opportunity for all students to learn “an honest and accurate truth of our history...Censoring the full history of America impacts all of us as a country,” Anderson said.

The country has been here before. Fundamentalist Christians made themselves a laughing stock in the early 20th Century by blocking teaching of evolution in Tennessee. (Yes, they still would if they could ...)

Senator Joe McCarthy went looking for Communists under beds and school room desks in the 1950s.  The great editorial cartoonist Herblock saw that episode like this:

Click to enlarge.

We do not remember these censorship eras proudly.

PEN America (a free speech watchdog) has outlined some of the goobledegook that is turning up in contemporary right wing gag laws being offered in state legislatures. The report concludes:

It is unclear how this ends. Nevertheless, just three weeks into 2022, some facts are already coming into focus. This year’s crop of educational gag orders will be even more censorious than 2021’s. They will target more institutions, regulate a wider array of speech, and impose harsher penalties. If current trends continue, they will also suffer from numerous internal defects and inconsistencies, the product of both a rushed drafting process and ideological zealotry. Their impact on the educational process may be severe.

H/t Laura Malone Elliott for the cartoon.

Demagogic power

In Jesus and the Disinherited, the theologian Howard Thurman writes of humanity's encounter with the God-Man from the perspective of people who "stand with their backs against the wall." Their encounter is very different from the stance of comfortable middle class churches. This special book influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his struggle against the domination systems of the United States. Thurman is brutally uncompromising in calling out the lies, the hypocrisy, the justified hatreds, the survival stratagems that those on the downside of power employ which get in the way of realizing their own humanity.

I'm not going to try to discuss Thurman's thoughts in any depth here (or probably ever), but in reading his book, I encountered a chilling passage I cannot resist sharing:

Several years ago I was talking with a young German woman who had escaped from the Nazis, first to Holland, then France, England, and finally to America. She described for me the powerful magnet that Hitler was to German youth. The youth had lost their sense of belonging. They did not count; there was no center of hope for their marginal egos. According to my friend, Hitler told them: "No one loves you -- I love you; no one will give you work -- I will give you work; no one wants you -- I want you." And when they saw the sunlight in his eyes, they dropped their tools and followed him. He stabilized the ego of the German youth and put it within their power to overcome their sense of inferiority. It is true that in the hands of a man like Hitler, power is exploited and turned to ends that make for havoc and misery; but this should not cause us to ignore the basic soundness of the theory on which he operated.

Does Thurman's account of Hitler's power remind you of anyone in U.S. public life? Here's a reminder:

“Go home. We love you, you’re very special.” ... “I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. ..."

Yes, that's Donald Trump tweeting from the White House to the mob he incited to attack the Capitol and the Congress on January 6, 2021.

The power in recognition -- in the claim to love -- is a neutral thing; the question is, what or who does that power -- that charism -- serve?

A taxonomy of hatred

I realized while reading Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez that I have a perhaps unconventional slant on this book. The book is a meticulously researched and compassionately constructed taxonomy of the individuals and social movements which throughout my lifetime have tried to exclude me from the human family. I feel these people.

Du Mez contends:

Today, what it means to be a ‘conservative evangelical’ is as much about culture as it is about theology. This is readily apparent in the heroes they celebrate”

That would be the actor/imitation cowboy/phony warrior John Wayne, on through Oliver North of Iran-Contra notoriety, James Dobson the professional homophobe, Jerry Falwell the rightwing conservative organizer, Pat Robertson the outspoken fascist -- and probably more significant to most ordinary white evangelical Christians, a rogues gallery of charlatans making a buck on what they call "ministries" but which look from the outside like cons hidden under a light religious gloss. And all this leading to grievance and hatred of the other ...

From the start, Evangelical masculinity has been both personal and political. In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself. 

... Despite Evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, Evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it. 

... White evangelicalism has such an expansive reach in large part because of the culture it has created, the culture that it sells. Over the past half century or so, evangelicals have produced and consumed a vast quantity of religious products: Christian books and magazines, CCM (‘Christian contemporary music’), Christian radio and television, feature films, ministry conferences, blogs, T-shirts, and home décor. Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture.

Oddly enough, the cast of shady characters Du Mez chronicles are probably more familiar to people who have lived intimately the political struggles for women's and LGBTQ liberation than to most Americans: the gay press, when such thrived, published voluminous research on these people. Some awareness was essential to defense against them.

This book's success is fascinating. The publisher, the Liveright division of W.W. Norton, had no great expectations for it. But DuMez's history took off: it soon sold 100,000 copies a month and when it came out in paperback leaped to No. 4 among nonfiction paperbacks.

Who are all these book buyers? This professor of history at Calvin University was offering something to millions of evangelicals who were jolted by sex scandals in their denominations and the climate of division promoted by the contemporary GOP. If many evangelicals seem impervious to well-researched critiques of white masculine hate masquerading as faith, millions of others -- many of them women -- are not. Du Mez writes forcefully yet compassionately from within their culture.

Obviously, this isn't a book for the likes of me. But I'm not sorry I picked it up. She's done a solid, painful, necessary piece of work.

The Patriot Act is 20 years old

On October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, into law. (That's the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism [USA PATRIOT] Act of 2001" if you want to get formal about it.)

(Ashleigh Nushawg/Flickr)

According to the ACLU:

Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.

In those fraught days after 9/11, American Muslims saw the new law as a gun aimed straight at their community. They weren't wrong; hostile surveillance and harassment have been a constant in American Muslim life over the last two decades. The law too often has been understood as a license for various law enforcement agencies to participate in putting these vulnerable Americans on notice that they are different and perhaps dangerous.

CAIR (the Council on American–Islamic Relations) has served as a leading umbrella civil rights organization for many embattled Muslim communities for the last two decades, as well as participated in broader human rights coalitions. For the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Patriot Act, the group polled American Muslims about whether they still felt under siege:

• 63% of American Muslims say they believe American media coverage of Muslims has not become more accurate since 9/11

• 69% said they experienced one or more incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination since 9/11

• 34% said anti-Muslim rhetoric after 9/11 had an impact on their mental health

nevertheless

• 63% say their mosques have engaged in more interfaith dialogue since 9/11

• 95% say they always or sometimes speak up in response to anti-Muslim remarks

• 181 American Muslims ran for office in 2020

More here.

CAIR concludes:

Overturning these unconstitutional policies, such as the disastrous watchlist system, is within reach if we work together, inshallah.

A meditation for Good Friday: empire grinds through lives

Andrew Stroehlein is the European media director at Human Rights Watch. His work is to spread the stories of brave men and women who stand up against injustice and repression in the states in which they live, thereby risking their lives and freedom. Most of them end up jailed, sometimes tortured, sometimes dead. In a recent article at Persuasion, he offers a catalogue of some less famous heroes:

• Ilham Tohti. China has many living heroes. Among them is Tohti, an ethnic Uyghur economist and critic of the government. In the face of the authorities’ abuses and discrimination against the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region, Tohti has been a voice of reason and decency. ...

• Ahmed Mansoor. A prominent human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, Mansoor was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 on charges entirely related to his statements on fundamental rights. Yes: a decade in prison for nothing more than telling the truth. ...

• Sônia Guajajara. The Brazilian activist has become a powerful force in the cause of indigenous and environmental rights, strongly opposing the government of the populist Jair Bolsonaro for its disastrous policies, which have contributed to rapid destruction of the Amazon. ...

• Bobi Wine. The Ugandan musician and opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine, had the audacity to challenge the five-term president, Yoweri Museveni, for the country’s top post—even though Museveni holds all the levers of state violence and his henchmen aren’t afraid to use them. ...

•Anna Politkovskaya. She refused to stop reporting on abuses by Russian forces in the Second Chechen War and was poisoned on a plane in 2004 ... She survived the poisoning but was shot dead outside her apartment in 2006.

• Alexei Navalny This opposition politician returned to Russia in January despite having been poisoned there. Many asked, “Why?” He knew he would be arrested and was soon sentenced to more than two years in prison.

Stroehlein asks in some bewilderment, how do these women and men find the courage to walk into danger, to choose to put themselves under the power of forces who may well kill them? Some excerpts from what he has learned:

It’s the simplicity of their message that makes these dissidents effective. ...  what’s true of all of them is this: They can’t see it any other way. ... a dissident sees the irrational as a calling. And if what’s “rational” means social consensus, then these paths do look “irrational.” But for the dissidents, it’s the authorities who are irrational. 

... The fact is that most dissidents don’t end up persuading their societies to change. Many dissidents face an awful fate that they could see coming. It’s not that they don’t care about their own life; it’s that they want to make their one life matter. 

... We see dissidents’ bravery and vision as inspiring, but also incomprehensible. We struggle to understand what makes them choose such a dangerous path. 

But that’s just it: We see it as a brave choice. They don’t see any choice at all.

My emphasis. Against lies occupying places of power, there is only truth. For some few, that knowledge is inescapable. That may be a kind of insanity. But where would we be without some humans carrying that terrible burden? The rest of us do our best.

The fear will linger ...

What happens to the psyches of members of legislative bodies who have experienced incursions by armed right-wing thugs screaming for their overthrow? Plenty, it seems.

Michigan statehouse in April. Photo by Jeff KowalskyAFP

Matt Shuham of Talking Points Memo interviewed members of the Michigan and Idaho legislatures who have endured gun-toting anti-coronavirus restriction protesters invading their space. 

“Now I’m like, ‘Well gosh, does it really make sense to get up and make a big speech about why I’m making this vote, or is that just going to land 50 armed guys terrorizing my family outside my House?’” said state Rep. Ilana Rubel, a Democrat and minority leader in the Idaho House of Representatives.

... State Rep. Donna Lasinski (D), minority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives, recalled sitting mere feet from the swinging doors that separated the House “and the men who were screaming and armed right outside our chamber” in April. 

She said the rage on display in Washington, D.C. last week recalled what she’d seen at her own workplace — “when you hear someone scream, and you hear the change in their voice that has moved them to a point where you feel like there’s no return, where you feel like violence is imminent.”

From the point of view of the thugs, intimidation is the point. And unless this kind of terrorism can be curbed, very few people are going to be willing to sign on to contest and hold elected office. And that means the terrorists win.

Watching this has reminded me that our Constitutional structure of government was not designed to be operated by professional politicians whose career path consisted of winning and holding elective office. The founding generation expected Congresscritters and their state analogues to be short-termers, white gentlemen taking a break from their plantations (South) or perhaps their law practices (North). 

Though political parties formed within a decade and professionalization rapidly followed (all that patronage for office holders to distribute!), it's worth remembering that eighty years after the founding, our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, had been merely a one-term Congressman who had retreated after a loss to a country law practice. He enjoyed continued prominence only thanks to the accident that the national party structure was reformulating itself to generate a new, anti-slavery, free labor party (the early Republicans). His equivalent of Twitter was a national lecture tour reinforcing the drive toward free-soil expansion of the nation to the west. And, having won the Presidency in 1860, he had to slink into Washington under threat of assassination in Baltimore before even taking office. In Lincoln, we lucked into a politician who believe in something beyond a career and paid the price.

People whose ambitions are simply to hold a cushy job and perhaps graduate to a lucrative lobbying career aren't going play in the political arena if it is perceived as more dangerous than prestigious. We have to make elective office safe enough to attract people who want to engage in public service without fear. Ideologues will come to the fore when temperatures remain as hot as they are today. 

Biden wasn't my guy by a long shot. But nothing is served by so breaking the structures of government that only ambitious monsters and monomaniacal zealots will take part. Let's hope he can calm the roiling seas.

Angela Davis: we have to do the work as if change were possible

With the Trump DC shitshow behind us, protesters killed by a vigilante in Wisconsin, and a violent clash between right wing thugs and activists leading to a death in Portland streets, I have encountered a pervasive hesitation and foreboding among friends in several of our ubiquitous zoom meetings. Certainly these are scary times. And it would be wonderful if we could all just crawl under our beds and the threat would go away. But it won't. The next 65 days til the election and most probably the three months after will be anxious times. That simply is where we find ourselves.

In such times, it seems worthwhile to listen to the reflections of someone who has been through a lifetime of struggle with this country's demons. The filmmaker Ava Duvernay (Selma, 13th, When They See Us) interviewed lifelong justice warrior Angela Davis for Vanity Fair. Her thoughts:

Duvernay: ... How does it feel for a woman born into segregation to see this moment? What lessons have you gleaned about struggle?

That’s a really big question. Perhaps I can answer it by saying that we have to have a kind of optimism. One way or another I’ve been involved in movements from the time I was very, very young, and I can remember that my mother never failed to emphasize that as bad as things were in our segregated world, change was possible. That the world would change. I learned how to live under those circumstances while also inhabiting an imagined world, recognizing that one day things would be different. I’m really fortunate that my mother was an activist who had experience in movements against racism, the movement to defend, for example, the Scottsboro Nine.

I’ve always recognized my own role as an activist as helping to create conditions of possibility for change. And that means to expand and deepen public consciousness of the nature of racism, of heteropatriarchy, pollution of the planet, and their relationship to global capitalism. This is the work that I’ve always done, and I’ve always known that it would make a difference. Not my work as an individual, but my work with communities who have struggled. I believe that this is how the world changes. It always changes as a result of the pressure that masses of people, ordinary people, exert on the existing state of affairs. I feel very fortunate that I am still alive today to witness this.

And I’m so glad that someone like John Lewis was able to experience this and see this before he passed away, because oftentimes we don’t get to actually witness the fruits of our labor. They may materialize, but it may be 50 years later, it may be 100 years later. But I’ve always emphasized that we have to do the work as if change were possible and as if this change were to happen sooner rather than later. It may not; we may not get to witness it. But if we don’t do the work, no one will ever witness it.

My emphasis.

75 year ago, we dropped the Bomb

The Imperial War Museums (there are multiple locations) in Britain seem remarkable institutions. As a younger friend exclaimed after a visit, "that could be a peace museum!" In a way unlike how such an institution might act in the U.S. of A., their culture treats wars soberly, as terrible, anti-human, eruptions, not occasions for bluster and chest beating.

For the occasion of today's anniversary, IWM asks:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were experiments in a new kind of warfare, whose full implications were not entirely understood at the time. The bombing of these cities in August 1945 brought an end to the Second World War, but at a terrible cost to the Japanese civilian population, and signalling the dawn of the nuclear age. What had led to the fateful decision to deploy these new weapons of mass destruction?

As a confirmed peacenik, I recoil from the atrocity that my country perpetrated to end the war of my parents' time. The scene in the video in which Churchill, Truman, and Stalin appear to be yucking it up appalls. War breeds more war; Hiroshima and Nagasaki only make macabre sense in the context of years of brutalizing, coarsening combat. As well, the Pacific war between Japan and "the West" -- Britain and the United States -- was a race war. Both sides routinely denied the shared humanity of the other.

I also know, I have no business judging. Future generations, if there are any, will condemn mine for our profligate addiction to fossil fuels.

At the annual ceremony at the peace memorial site at Hiroshima this year, journalists report the crowd was diminished. Many survivors have died; some of those who remain alive stayed away for fear of the coronavirus.

"Despite the health risks, a relatively small number of survivors attended this year. They believed that 'they’ve come this far' and 'can’t quit,' Mr. Sakuma said, adding that 'sending this message from Hiroshima is extremely important.' ...

... The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, who was not able to travel to the event because of the virus and delivered remarks by video, issued a stern warning about the dangers the world faced as international arms-control regimes began to break down.

"'Today a world without nuclear weapons seems to be slipping further from our grasp,' he said, adding that 'division, distrust and lack of dialogue threaten to return the world to unrestrained nuclear strategic competition.'"

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we no longer have the excuse of not knowing.

Here we go again, inflating enemies

If this NY Times headline gives you the shivers, it just proves you were a conscious human in the run up in 2002-3 to the Iraq war. Our "leaders" are at it again, ginning up enemies for fun and profit -- then to try to grab the oil; now to try to save Trump's sorry ass from the whupping that voters aggrieved about dead grandmothers and lost paychecks are going to give him in November.

And as in 2003, too many Democrats are suckers for making China the designated enemy of the day. Come on Joe Biden -- you fell for non-existent weapons of mass destruction last time. This time, can you just recognize that natural disasters happen, that animal bugs sometimes jump to humans?

Sure, China did a lousy job controlling the epidemic at first -- but neither Europe nor the USA has anything to brag about. China is often a bad actor in the world, oppressing its Muslim minority and repressing its ethnic citizens. But picking a dumb fight will only make bad worse -- there and here. And again, we've got nothing to crow about as Trump dumps international agreements on nukes and climate that he obviously neither read nor understood.

This image seems to fit Trump's apparent decision to declare the COVID-19 emergency over:

A plague of fear

So that coward and nincompoop in the White House is trying to blame China for a virus -- and this follows:
Also this:

Gun stores are reporting a sharp rise in the number of Asian people purchasing firearms to protect themselves from racist attacks amid the coronavirus outbreak.

David Liu, the owner of Arcadia Firearm & Safety in San Gabriel Valley, has claimed that he has seen around 10 times more customers walk through his door in recent weeks.

"It was crazy," Liu told Newsweek. "One example is on March 3 and 4, I had 50 plus people come in here to take their firearms safety test and everyone one of them bought a gun. That's quite unusual for my small shop.

"They're all coming in because the media is telling them that Asians are being targeted, Chinese are being targeted."

We get a choice: fear or solidarity. Let's help each other choose better.

Choosing hope

The Christian faith is not sensible. After all, we claim to live in hope that death has no further dominion, that life wins -- errant nonsense in a material sense. And, once we reach a certain maturity, we all learn in our creaky bones that our individual life won't win. We see that for too many around us, life didn't win. And there was nothing "fair" about it.

On Ash Wednesday we are reminded that we come from dust and to dust we will return. (Perhaps stardust?)

Daniel Schultz, a feisty UCC minister, who has been kicking around the progressive blogosphere as long as I have, seems to be currently happily ensconced at Religion Dispatches where he makes himself the scourge of white evangelicals who wallow in terror of cultural erasure. He reminds that we've been enjoined in our old books to "fear not."

Christianity teaches ... that there are worse things than dying (chief among them the hardening of one’s heart), and that life can only be properly lived by surrendering it compassionately to others. That’s what it means for Christians to belong to Jesus. It isn’t remotely radical to say that we believe that Christ gave up his life for God and for the community of people who followed him; Christians give up their lives for Christ, and for one another. (In theory, anyway. Practice is another thing.)

As we contemplate our mortality through the ashes, let's try to at least pretend that we are not afraid and can aim our brief lives more toward hope than fear.

The "stop the world, I want to get off" crowd

Since November 2016 when the Trump election was enabled by votes from 81 percent of white evangelical Christians, I've noodled away at understanding what drives these people. The simple explanation -- these are terrified white people grasping at the Making America White Again straw despite its repugnance -- is both irrefutable and yet feels incomplete. John Fea helped me appreciate how terrified these people are in a culture they can't seem to grasp, much less control and constrain. Fear overrides both sense and common decency.

Major media are taking another run at understanding white evangelical Christians. Washington Post writer Elizabeth Bruenig braved the wilds of north Texas from which she sprang last spring during Holy Week, reporting sensitively on the folks she'd left behind. Amid her compassion, there were hints of something chilling. She quotes "Lydia Bean, 38, a researcher who taught at Baylor University":

“Basically, it’s like a fortress mentality, where it’s like — the best we can do is lock up the gates and just pour boiling oil over the gates at the libs,” ...“I really think one of the things that’s changed since I did my fieldwork at the very end of the Bush administration is a rejection of politics in general as a means to advance the common good, even in a conservative vein.” In that case, politics “becomes a bloodsport, where you’re punishing and striking back at people you don’t like” without much hope of changing anything. For that kind of “hopeless cynicism” regarding politics — walls up, temporary provisions, with just enough strength and zeal left to periodically foil one’s enemies — Trump is an ideal leader.

That is, terror at imagined loss can morph into nihilism. A few can become the El Paso terrorist. Far more simply cheer on Trump from within imagined fortress walls that ratify their purity:

By voting for Trump — even over more identifiably Christian candidates — evangelicals seem to have found a way to outsource their fears and instead reserve a strictly spiritual space for themselves inside politics without placing evangelical politicians themselves in power. In that sense, they can be both active political agents and a semi-cloistered religious minority, both of the world and removed from it, advancing their values while retreating to their own societies.

Conservative white evangelical internet troll Ben Howe explained his own kind less sympathetically to Emma Green:

...Trump’s appeal is not judges. It’s not policies. It’s that he’s a shit-talker and a fighter and tells it like it is. That’s what they like. They love the meanest parts of him.

Okay, I get it. White evangelicals are just scared witless by losing racial and cultural hegemony; they are using Trump to defend their bunker....But I'm left with the question: how did white evangelical Christianity become the bastion of ignorance that this strain among us serves as today? If you are accustomed to using your wits to comprehend your surroundings, you are a lot less likely to be scared witless. And it wasn't always this way. It was some pretty rock-ribbed white Protestants who founded the country's early intellectual and scientific institutions -- Harvard, Princeton, even the first public schools.

And for all that, by the early 20th century, too many (most?) white evangelicals experienced basic science, especially in the form of evolutionary theory, as incompatible with their most cherished beliefs. Catholic and Protestant Christians made peace with science; evangelicals did not. It's awfully hard to live at peace with modernity -- with a civilization that can put a human on the moon, blow up the planet, and is creating climate chaos -- without living in a world informed by science.

A Pew Social Trends survey concludes that the same divide that gave us the blind partisanship which led to Trump also is leaching into attitudes toward education. By and large we think we need it -- but we are becoming dubious:

Americans see value in higher education – whether they graduated from college or not. ... Even so, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction – even suspicion – among the public about the role colleges play in society ...

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days. About four-in-ten (38%) say they are having a negative impact – up from 26% in 2012.

And that divide has a partisan cast:

Healing for this country must include helping people -- especially white evangelical Christians -- both think and feel that knowledge of the world is a good; can we do that?

To be afraid is appropriate, not crazy

Friends online, seeking to contextualize the El Paso massacre, pointed to this PBS documentary. (I snagged it from Netflix, but it is readily available in many outlets.)

It's a good, thorough, narrative of the sequence of events -- the ATF storming of Ruby Ridge, the incineration of the Waco Branch Davidians -- that formed the 1990s catalogue of government offenses that right wingers used to justify organizing in violent militias and, eventually, the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma's federal building. That domestic terrorist act killed 168 people, of whom about 100 were low level government employees and many of the others children in a daycare center. The film asks an all too contemporary question.

How could somebody get to that state in their life where they would be so angry and upset they would do something like this?

Joe Hersley, FBI agent

The perpetrator, Tim McVeigh, wanted to start the "next American revolution." A disgruntled failed soldier who loved guns, he drifted into neo-Nazi circles and became convinced that "the only way government is going to get the message is with a body count ..."

In the film, that indefatigable researcher of the right-wing, Leonard Zeskind, answers what we are now asking about El Paso suspect Patrick Crusius: was McVeigh some kind of sick sociopath, or did he come out of an identifiable right wing milieu?

There was no massive conspiracy, that much is true, but the idea that Timothy McVeigh was a lone killer, that is wrong headed. because it absolves the movement from which it all sprang. Timothy McVeigh was not on his own, he was the creation fo the white supremacist movement. He carried the Turner Diaries around and read it to people. He lived at the gun shows. He met neo-Nazis ... and the idea that there was no connection between the white supremacist movement and the events in Oklahoma City is patently false. There was a strong connection ...

And now we have a president who vibes with white nationalists ...

Justice foully delayed -- but not denied forever

This case always stunk to high heaven. But Hamid Hayat had to serve 13 years in prison because the federal government and too many of his California neighbors were scared stupid after the 9/11 attacks.

A father and son, immigrant Pakistani agricultural workers from Lodi, visited their old country in 2003-2005. The federal government, desperate to find secret Muslim terrorists in our midst, accused both men on their return of having received military training. I described the case this way in May, 2006 and nothing that has come out since shows U.S. law enforcement as other than ignorant and racist.

Hayat "confessed" under FBI interrogation, after much prompting, saying that he had been to a terrorist camp in Pakistan. This "evidence" might seem more convincing if his father had not also "confessed" under interrogation that his son had attended a terrorist camp -- at a completely different location where "the training, including firearms practice, took place in an enormous, deep basement where trainees masked like 'Ninja turtles' practiced pole-vaults and executions with scimitars."

Unfortunately for Hamid Hayat, his jury never heard this version as his father was tried separately under a completely different theory about the location of the putative camp. The father's jury was unable to agree on a verdict.

Okay -- I wasn't there at this trial, I didn't hear it all -- but this case sure sounds like a prosecution for the thought crime of stupidly fantasizing about being an Islamic warrior. Dumb, yes -- but criminal? Not in my book. The evidence that this guy did anything but harbor silly ideas seems awfully thin.

With better attorneys and in different times, Hayat's defenders have never given up.

And now a federal judge has thrown the case she once presided over out of court. The government could appeal, but their "evidence" has been effectively rebutted by witnesses in Pakistan who saw both father and son every day of their visit.

Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also applauded the decision.

“After all these years, we never lost hope that Hamid’s wrongful conviction would be overturned,” Elkarra said. “At the time of Hamid’s case, the prosecution took advantage of anti-Muslim, post-9/11 bias to convict an innocent man. And this much-needed good news comes at a time when Islamophobia and bigotry as a whole is on the rise.”