Trump Strategy to Pressure School Re-Openings Looks Crazier By the Hour

Reports like this one, explicating the difficulties school districts across the United States face in seeking to start up safely in the fall, further emphasize the despicableness of the president’s pressure campaign for them to re-open.  Schools are scrambling to prepare for the return of students, but they’re hamstrung by a lack of clear guidance on how to keep students safe, and perhaps more importantly, by a lack of funds to implement necessary measures to protect the health of students and teachers.  Potential action by Congress is hazy; while Democrats have plans for amount ranging from $58 billion to $75 billion to help schools, “those efforts lack significant Republican support,” according to the The New York Times.

The challenges seem daunting; for instance, if the expert recommendation is that students should be spaced six feet apart, “many schools could accommodate half of their students or fewer at any given time.”  Then there’s the question of how to protect the nation’s teachers, 25% of whom are 50 or older.

If Donald Trump and the Republicans were serious about re-opening America’s schools, they would start by acknowledging the need for far more resources and dependable guidance.  Because they are not serious, but only desperate, they offer neither, beyond severe injunctions to open or make themselves vulnerable to federal retaliation. To Trump and his allies, schools and teachers are recalcitrant bodies to be bossed around and abused, not full participants in the discussion about how to best serve America’s children.  To protect their fantasies of a revived economy and a nation on the upswing, they deny the material reality and dedication of America’s schools and educators.  On top of their disregard for the health of the children and teachers being commanded to return to class no matter what, this latest brainstorm by the Trump White House is looking ever more like political suicide.

American Psychos

No question can remain that Donald Trump is the primary author of the United States’ catastrophic handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  His policy of indifference and denial has hobbled the federal response from the start, and today we’ve witnessed what may be the most astounding and callous example yet of his unfitness to lead the country through this crisis.  The president has decided that his re-election depends on getting children in school so that their parents can work and pump up the economy, so today he declared his intention to force American schools to re-open in the fall, and to use the cudgel of withheld federal funds to punish any that don’t.  Alongside this, he has criticized the re-opening guidelines of the Centers of Disease Control regarding schools, almost immediately causing CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield to aver that his “recommendations should not be used as an excuse for not returning children to classrooms.”  This of course raises the question of why the CDC even had guidelines to begin with, if they are not meant to get in the way of sending children back to school.  More importantly, it raises the question of whether the CDC is openly manipulating its health advice to soothe and support an out-of-control president panicked by his declining poll numbers.

There have been many events that I thought Trump could not survive, and was proven wrong many times, but what has been true is that his parade of horrors has accumulated to the point that Americans are turning firmly against him, with the pandemic and his openly white supremacist attitude to the George Floyd/social justice protests as the final two likely knockout blows.  But this idea of requiring that all children — and teachers — return to school, regardless of the state of the epidemic, regardless of the protection that can be afforded them, is tantamount to asking Americans to sacrifice their kids for the sake of the president’s election. 

In a tweet earlier today, writing about this “kids are junior warriors for the economy” gambit, Jamelle Bouie wrote that forcing schools to re-open prematurely is of a piece with Trump and the broader GOP’s push to re-open businesses, their wish to cut off further unemployment benefits, and their lack of response to the mounting eviction crisis: the intent is “to use the pandemic to force work, discipline labor, and maintain capital’s share of national income.”  What is increasingly remarkable, and abhorrent, is their willingness to move forward with this sadistic and self-serving approach as the pandemic appears to be spinning out of control in many parts of the U.S., in no small part due to the Republican Party’s premature relaxation of social distancing and other preventative measures.  The class war and racist aspects could not be more apparent; as white-collar employees work from the safety of home offices, disproportionately-minority essential workers are forced to choose between reporting for work or losing their jobs, learning that despite the seeming paradox, “essential” and “expendable” can refer to the same employee.

Whereas a few months ago this approach merely seemed murderous on the basis of logic, now it has been proved to be clearly murderous on the basis of implacable evidence.  It’s not just the escalating case count and tragic rise in the number of deaths that have happened over the last few weeks.  We’re also seeing our testing system getting clogged up and slowed down by the huge recent increase in cases, health professionals warning of PPE shortages, and states like Texas indicating that their ICU’s are nearing capacity.  Things are getting worse, and mass suffering is on the way.  Yet, instead of forming a real plan to deal with our crisis, Trump and the GOP give us a fake plan for pretending that none of this is a big deal, that we should all treat it as normal.

Of course everyone wants kids to go back to school.  Of course everyone wants to avoid long-term damage to their education and their socialization.  But as folks like Josh Marshall and others have been hammering on, the way you get kids back to school is by containing the virus, not by simply mandating that children must go back to classes no matter what.  The lack of seriousness about fighting the virus shows the GOP’s basic lack of care about actually making schools safe.  And really, when did we ever before hear of Donald Trump showing the slightest concern for education until today?  Only when it became a tool in his deranged plan to create the appearance of normalcy did it catch his attention.  

It doesn’t matter if, in the coming days, the president tries to backtrack on his authoritarian pronouncements about forcing schools to re-open.  This is clearly his intent, and we can be sure that even if the administration makes a tactical retreat from trumpeting a plan sure to increase America’s loathing of this insane president, his loyal servants at the White House and allied GOP governors will continue to push the company line.

The Democrats need to crucify these motherfuckers for this one.  Trump failed, and now our children are supposed to pay the price?  Not in our America.

All Unquiet on the Western Front

We are all awash with shocking and enraging news, but this New York Times report about the infiltration of Germany’s special forces and army by right-wing extremists is deeply chilling and alarming.  The narrative at times reads like a paranoid thriller, or the sketch of an an alternative universe where modern day Nazis plot a comeback in Germany, yet the nightmarish reality appears undeniable; after years of downplaying the threat and the existence of extremist networks,

The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and the police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly [. . .]

Most concerning to the authorities is that the extremists appear to be concentrated in the military unit that is supposed to be the most elite and dedicated to the German state, the special forces, known by their German acronym, the KSK.

Just this last week, the German government disbanded one of its four special forces units, after determining that it was too compromised by right-wing members to continue in existence.

The situation only gets more dizzying, as it turns out that “German authorities are concerned that the problem may be far larger and that other security institutions have been infiltrated as well.”  Such concerns seem grounded in reality, as “Over the past 13 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a politician, attacked a synagogue and shot dead nine immigrants and German descendants of immigrants.” There are even worries that the military’s own counter-intelligence apparatus has been compromised.

Many right-wing soldiers are apparently planning for “Day X,” a time in the not-distant future when Germany’s current order will supposedly collapse.  They appear driven by anti-Muslim paranoia, with the recent waves of Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees viewed as an assault on the country and seeded with terrorists.  The links to neo-Nazi organizations, and the way some KSK commandos engaged in Nazi salutes and sang SS songs, are grotesque, but more insidious for me is the overall anti-democratic and fascistic spirit of this sinister movement.  After perpetrating the most unforgivable and haunting horrors in all of human history, for Germany to be wrestling with another right-wing movement dedicated to violence, demonization of ethnic minorities, and notions of national purity feels less like déjà vu and more like the beginnings of a waking nightmare.  The Times report suggests that the German government downplayed signs of a right-wing movement for many years, which raises troubling questions about that country’s willingness to face the demons and descendants of its own past.

It is also more than unsettling that there would be a growing number of Germans who look back at Nazism and the horrors of World War II, and find any form of inspiration rather than the ultimate cautionary tale.

Other threads of the story seem worth pursuing.  There are suggestions that some of the right-wing soldiers were influenced by their deployments to Afghanistan, perhaps feeding their anti-Muslim sentiments, raising a scenario in which the jihadists of September 11 may be indirectly responsible for the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany.  There’s also the intriguing data point that half the suspected extremists in the KSK are from eastern Germany; it seems possible that the east, only part of Germany since 1990, has less of a democratic tradition that might otherwise dent the appeal of right-wing appeals.

We may be necessarily absorbed in our own existential fights right now, but the rise of heavily-armed, fascistic extremist networks in Germany, much less those that have infiltrated the armed forces, should very much be of concern to Americans.  We did not lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers crushing Nazi Germany so that Nazism’s descendants could threaten the Germany democracy that we helped build, and defended through the Cold War.  We may not have needed yet another reason to defeat Trump and destroy Trumpism, but we’ve got it: in this time of threat, democracy-loving Germans need a United States that fights right-wing extremism, not a president who cheers it on.

Profiles in Confederacy-Neutral Cowardice

As President Donald Trump makes clear his intention to run for re-election as America’s second Confederate president, and as the social justice protests following the killing of George Floyd have renewed efforts to eliminate monuments to the Confederacy, Republican senators find themselves in a hard place indeed as a movement grows to re-name military bases that honor rebel generals.  It seems that GOP senators kind of, sort of might be on board — except that they fear angering Donald Trump, who recently tweeted his outright opposition to this cause in the face of a proposal by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Warren’s amendment to a defense police bill “would require the Pentagon to strip the names of Confederate generals from all military assets — such as bases, aircrafts or ships — within three years,” and “also calls for a commission that would review how the Confederacy is being honored through military property and develop a plan to remove those names.”

Don’t get me wrong — there was in fact some outright opposition among GOP senators to strip the Confederacy of its grotesque military honors.  Such an attack on the Confederacy was unpalatable to North Carolina Senator Thom “Because spelling it ‘Tom’ makes too much damned sense” Tillis and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who both objected to Warren’s amendment.  But even senior GOP senators who seem to see which way the national wind is blowing couched their positions in language that almost seemed like a deliberate parody of senatorial bombast.  While Mitch McConnell slyly indicated he would not object to the final outcome of the renaming debate (way to be on the right side of history, Mitch!), North Dakota Senator John Thune went full senatorspeak, declaring,  “I’m not wedded to the idea that those names of those military installations are eternal.  I think that you reevaluate, given the timing and circumstances and where we are in the country, who we want to revere with, you know, by naming military installations or other national monuments. And so I think you have to periodically take a look at that. And in this case, it’s perhaps time to do it.”  “Perhaps,” “revere,” “timing and circumstances,” “eternal,” “wedded”: reading this word salad, I’m not sure if Senator Thune wants to divorce the Confederacy or marry it.

Since President Trump tweeted his opposition to renaming bases named after Confederate traitors, other Republican senators have also gone full hem-and-haw in their desperation to avoid taking a stand on whether the Confederacy was actually an enemy of the American people (news flash: it was).  Texas Senator John Cornyn averred that a discussion and a commission’s recommendations would be informative.   Georgia Senator David Perdue likewise embraced the idea of not taking a stand, preferring like Cornyn to kick the decision over to a commission.  

Compared to Cornyn and Perdue, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst sounded like a radical abolitionist, boldly asserting, “I guess my personal opinion is just, you know, I’m okay — if they change, I’m okay.  I don’t want people to get hung up on a name. I guess my thought is because everybody talks about, ‘Oh, the history behind these bases’ — the history behind those bases is still there.”  Not to be outdone by Ernst’s firm stand against the honoring of Confederate generals, Maine’s Senator Susan Collins not only indicated she supports “reviewing” the names of bases, but observed that “our country has had many extraordinary military leaders, heroes, and Medal of Honor recipients since the Civil War who could be honored.”  So true — America is a land of heroes who did not commit treason!  So many heroes that there’s no point in outright condemning and repudiating those who committed treason — I mean, the heroic American post-Civil War situation just speaks for itself, right?

I am cautiously optimistic that the GOP has badly misjudged this moment, when more Americans than ever seem open to undoing the misbegotten honors bestowed on treasonous generals and a traitorous cause.  Republican senators may think that appeals to obfuscatory processes will preserve the support of that minority of voters who still believe the Confederacy worth praising, while appearing open-minded to the rest, but the lack of leadership is glaring.  This is not a close call.  Having military bases named after those who engaged in treason and insurrection against the United States is an affront to the American military, a slap in the face of African-Americans, and an unspeakable endorsement of a traitorous movement.

Treason for Me But Not for Thee?

Ever since excerpts of John Bolton’s Trump administration memoir began appearing in the press, there’s been a thread of commentary pointing out that we now have even more evidence showing that the president committed treason against the United States — if treason is understood to be a betrayal of the national interest in favor of personal gain.  Among others, John Stoehr at The Editorial Board has elaborated on this charge against the president in light of the Bolton revelations, tying Trump’s behavior to a theory about the GOP’s broader decision over the past several years to switch from loyalty to a United States that we all live in, to a smaller, fictional United States basically encompassing its white citizenry.  I don’t think Stoehr’s theory is wrong.

I am, though, intrigued by the rhetorical question that Stoehr ends with — why don’t more people actually just call Trump’s treason what it is?  Stoehr’s discussion of where the GOP’s real loyalty lies lends itself to a decent explanation for why Republicans won’t ever call him out for treason; so long as the president is acting in a way that advances his re-election interests, even at the expense of American interests, he can’t commit treason because he’s actually showing his loyalty to a higher power — no, not to God, but to the white nation within a nation that is the Republican Party’s home country.  

The more vexing question is why Democrats and the left have been reluctant to call out the president for his betrayal of the nation in the harshest possible terms, by labeling him a traitor to the country.  The first explanation that occurs to me is a fairly tautological one: they’ve chose not to do so because they didn’t see much political gain in doing so.  But why would they think this?  It has something to do with perceptions of “treason” being an accusation that’s extreme, overblown, bombastic — not just because it’s emotionally overboard, but because it gets at notions of the nation and citizenship in which a person can be considered as no longer a legitimate part of the political community.  In a benign sense, this goes against the liberal grain, and could even be said to hint of fascism, akin to President Trump calling the media “the enemy of the people” — a use of emotion and rhetoric to cast certain people as beyond the true community of patriots.  

I would speculate that this reflexive reluctance to use the term “treason” is also tied to the left being far more used to being on the receiving end of such accusations; from socialist labor organizers to Vietnam War protestors, “treason” and “traitor” have been terms that the right has used to try to delegitimize the left at various times.  This may have made the left collectively reluctant to use something that was obviously a slur and a fiction in the past.  On top of this, some may perceive “treason” to have been drained of meaning and power by the right’s long abuse of the term.

I actually think these are all very strong reasons to be cautious about using the terms “traitor” and “treason.”  However, this caution becomes debilitating when it actively prevents us from accurately describing reality.  If any president ever deserved to be called a traitor, and labeled as someone who has committed treason, it is Donald Trump.  As his impeachment made clear, he subverted American national security by undermining Ukraine’s defense against Russia in the interests of his re-election campaign, by making vital aid to the former contingent on that country manufacturing dirt about his then-likely opponent in the 2020 election, Joe Biden. Prior to that, he encouraged Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on his behalf, then acted repeatedly to excuse Russia’s actions and block U.S. efforts to hold that country accountable.

I really don’t know if overcoming the taboo against calling Donald Trump a traitor would actually do much damage to the president or help the Democrats; but it does feel increasingly peculiar to shy away from language that might hammer home the full horror and betrayal of his actions.  It’s also frustrating in light of his claims to be a nationalist and a patriot; his treason blows up those claims, and reveals that what he’s actually claiming to be is a white nationalist, and a patriot only for the cause of Trump.  I keep thinking that there’s got to be a way to make this case better without falling into the outsider/insider slur of right-wing politics. I also can’t help noticing how the concepts of treason and being a traitor have become central elements in the renewed push to remove monuments to the Confederacy and rid our public spaces of the Confederate flag. In that effort, treason has ended up as something of a trump card, an accurate and damning description of what rebel soldiers engaged in and why they should never be celebrated in this country.

Mass Delusion Grips GOP Governors Who Thought Coronavirus Would Magically Disappear, Part II

Yesterday I noted the mass delusion that has taken hold of Republican governors across the United States, who appear to have fallen for he magical thinking modeled by Donald Trump that the coronavirus would go away on its own, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.  But as this Washington Post report makes clear, in Arizona the refusal to believe in science was paralleled by remarkable incompetence and topped off by an effort to suppress the science as well.  Shockingly and depressingly,

Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even more than the confirmed number of cases in hard-hit Brazil [. . .]

 This week, Arizona reported not just a record single-day increase in new cases — with Tuesday’s tally reaching 3,591 — but also record use of inpatient beds and ventilators for suspected and confirmed cases. Public health experts warn that hospitals could be stretched so thin they may have to begin triaging patients by mid-July.

Arizona’s state of crisis is directly attributable to a series of incompetent decisions by Republican Governor Doug Ducey and other officials.  The Post reports that until last week, local governments could not require mask-wearing, and public experts and others argue that “state leaders did not take the necessary precautions or model safe behavior [. . .] even in the face of compelling evidence and repeated pleas from authoritative voices.”  The Post also notes that, “[W]hen forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.”

The notion encouraged by the state that the crisis is over and normalcy has returned is perhaps the single most damning failure of Arizona’s pandemic response.  This means that Arizonans continue to behave in ways that endanger themselves and others, which in turn escalates the risk to all.  Such misinformation also undermines public willingness to resume restrictions on activity that can help stop the spread of the virus. 

The Post report also suggests the frightening extent to which Doucey and his team not only ignored scientific evidence, but sought to manipulate it to bolster their case for a premature relaxation of restrictions.  “The state ended its partnership with the university modeling team whose projections plainly showed a rising caseload in Arizona,” though reversed itself after that decision provoked objections.  State health officials also switched up the testing count methodology in a way that could make it look like the rate of positive results was lower than it actually was. 

Arizona is yet another example of how a Republican governor’s decisions were aligned with the message broadcast by Donald Trump that the U.S. is past the worst of the pandemic, with Doucey speeding up the lifting of restrictions on some businesses the day before Trump visited the state in early May.

President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has been an epic disaster, a mixture of incompetence, psychopathy, and self-delusion.  But in Arizona, Florida, Texas, and other Republican-governed states, GOP governors have reflected and amplified the president’s failures in their own particular ways, giving substance at the state level to the president’s broad strategy of pretending the virus is no big thing.  They have refused to make mask-wearing obligatory, they have opened businesses while caseloads were rising, they have sown confusion about whether growing numbers of cases were merely due to higher testing rates, and they have failed to implement adequate contact and tracing programs.  Really, it is sometimes hard to imagine how things could possibly have been worse had America’s most vicious enemies had been put in charge of the coronavirus response.  GOP governors have been the president’s partners in mass death all along the way; the coronavirus disaster is a Republican disaster.  There is no path to saving ourselves, and our fellow Americans, let alone our teetering economy, that does not run through total repudiation and electoral destruction of this failed party, at both the state and federal levels.

Mass Delusion Grips GOP Governors Who Thought Coronavirus Would Magically Disappear

It has been hard to miss the news over the last several days that many states around the country have had record-breaking numbers of new coronavirus cases, leading some major hot spots like Texas and Florida to freeze further relaxation of social distancing measures.  Reports abound of overwhelmed testing facilities and ICUs nearing capacity; the United States is now staring into the abyss of escalating mass illness and death. And just the other day, the head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said that more than 10 times as many Americans have been infected with the virus as have been reported, meaning there have been not 2.3 million but a staggering 23 million cases around the nation.  As this New York Times analysis observes, many states that opened before meeting basic benchmarks are now seeing hard evidence that they indeed opened up too early, with deadly effects on public health and body blows to the economy.

A Washington Post report out this weekend is blunt and correct in its assessment that President Donald Trump is at the center of this historic American failure, reminding us of how he “has repeatedly downplayed the virus, sidelined experts and misled Americans about its dangers and potential cures,” and “now finds his presidency wracked by an inability to shepherd the country through its worst public health calamity in a century.”

But state-level decisions echoing the president’s demands that the country prioritize opening the economy above all else, in some cases even as their case counts were going up, have given broader substance to the president’s incompetent leadership.  Such decisions looked reckless at the time, and now reality is bearing out all prior criticism of the moves, and more.  In some states led by Republican governors, such choices weren’t just based on unethical and illogical decisions to prioritize business interests over public health, even when it should have been obvious that business would suffer so long as people were afraid to go out and about in the world.  They were also following the lead of our coronavirus-denier-in-chief, who even as late as last week was continuing to assert that the the coronavirus is going away and will soon disappear.

Their coronavirus response demonstrates that the president and his loyal governors share two broad traits: a belief in business interests over public health, and a belief that the coronavirus will really go away on its own.  The belief in business is fundamental to their politics — in the case of the president, because of how he sees economic health as the route to re-election, and in the case of governors, because of an ideological commitment to economic interests above human interests.  The belief in the coronavirus going away on its own is something else, a variety of magical thinking that, among other things, contrasts starkly with the hard-headed talk of getting Americans back to work and making the economy great again.  I understand how the president has this belief — he’s a sick and damaged man unable to separate objective reality from his own rampant needs, desires, and delusions.  But there’s not such a clear excuse for governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

What I keep coming back to is this: the explosion of coronavirus cases across the United States is an entirely predictable event.  We had already seen around the world, and in fact around the United States, that covid-19 is a highly contagious disease that will spread exponentially once it gains a foothold in an area.  And yet, multiple governors — mostly Republican — acted as if this reality were somehow behind us and no longer operative.  For so many to act similarly, in contravention of a known reality, is not just an incidence of magical thinking, but a display of political mass delusion on a scale with little parallel in our history.  For our purposes, the particular explanation for this delusion doesn’t matter; what matters is that it is a catastrophe for many millions of Americans, and a display of political incompetence that’s at a minimum disqualifying, and at a maximum a display of criminal negligence in performing their duties as elected officials.  Just as I recently wrote that no Trump supporter deserves to die because of the president’s incompetence and malignity, no one in a Republican-governed state deserves to die because their governor has succumbed to delusion and rejected basic scientific evidence and medical advice.  In the same way that we wouldn’t want as governor someone who didn’t believe in gravity, we also don’t want governors who don’t believe in the basics of epidemiology.

Police Assaults on Portland Journalists Are an Attack Against All Portlanders

“What I did not expect was the cop to keep chasing me—we had now traversed about 15 feet, he was chasing me—and to start doing sword type stabs at my head and neck. When he finally landed one it hit me directly between my shoulders where your neck meets your back. As everyone who has ever had a neck injury or almost had one knows, every cell in my body tensed up involuntarily as that sort of injury can end you. Though egregious, this was not the issue. The issue was as soon as I involuntarily spun around and said "Hey my nec—" the officer shot me directly in the face with not the handheld can of mace, but the crowd control mace that looks like a fire extinguisher and is meant for, well, a crowd. He was so close—one inch from my eyes—and the burst was so intense that for the first second I thought he had taken out the big canister and punched me with it.”

To read his description of police violence against him, you might instinctively assume Donovan Farley was a hardened criminal under arrest for a serious offense, and had been fighting the officers attempting to take him into custody.  Rather, Farley is a freelance reporter who one June 6 was filming Portland officers as they arrested a protestor at one of the city’s demonstrations against police violence.  Concerned that the arrestee was having trouble breathing, Farley had also begun to yell at the officers to get off him.  That was when the police attack on Farley began.  The tear gassing he received left him temporarily blinded; he was only able to make it out of the downtown Portland when a protestor came to his rescue.  His full account can be read here.

What happened to Farley is chilling and infuriating, but still more so is the fact that police assaults on reporters during the Portland protests have been a repeat occurrence, some of which are noted in this Willamette Week article and this editorial at the Portland Tribune.  Their quantity and persistence suggest, at a minimum, that some Portland police personnel have deliberately chosen to disregard their obligation to respect and defend journalists’ freedom to report on the news of the city.  But as the Portland Tribune editorial noted above suggests, there’s also a possibility that these assaults represent “an organized attempt by rank-and-file Portland police to intimidate accredited journalists.”  

Clearly, an investigation is required to determine whether these offenses against the press constitute an organized effort, or are instances of spontaneous lawbreaking.  If it’s an organized effort, this would be a grotesque and sinister abuse of power by a public institution; but even if arising spontaneously, the offense against not just journalists, but even more importantly against the citizenry of Portland and beyond, is immense and unforgivable.  By their actions, the police are effectively seeking to blind the public, not as painfully but just as effectively as spraying us with one of those crowd-strength tear gas dispensers used against Donovan Farley.  By preventing reporters from doing their job, whether through direct physical harm or a broader goal of intimidation, they are preventing us from knowing what is happening in our city.  It is extremely important to recognize that the journalists out in the streets are not just representatives of the press but representatives of all of us, the public’s eyes and ears in the world.  When police attack journalists, it is always also an attack on the public — not just a display of contempt, but a concrete effort to prevent us from knowing what it is our right to know.

In acting against journalists in ways that echo the president’s insane rhetoric about the free press being “the enemy of the people,” the Portland police officers involved and complicit in these incidents effectively constitute a Trumpist militia in the midst of our city.  Whether responding to the president’s incitement to violence against journalists, or simply trying to protect their own perceived privileges, this is pure lawlessness by officers of the law.  What we’ve seen happening in Portland has been repeated across the country, with hundreds of reports of journalists experiencing assaults or arrests while doing their constitutionally-protected work covering the recent wave of social justice protests.  Just last week, several news organizations requested that U.S. governors investigate upwards of 60 specific cases of assault against photojournalists around the country.  

In Portland last week, after complaints by the Oregonian’s editor about assaults on two of that paper’s journalists, as well as a letter from the Oregon chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Police Chief Chuck Lovell issued a joint statement that indicated, “Members of the media, not just in Portland but around the country, should not be targeted, hurt or arrested while reporting on the demonstrations."  According to the Willamette Week, they also “vowed to thoroughly investigate all reported incidents of assault by police officers against journalists and said they are reviewing the Portland Police Bureau's tactics ‘to make sure we have the best systems in place that serve our first responders and protects the constitutional rights of our journalists.’”

It’s good that after weeks of such abuses, the mayor and the police chief have been moved to speak out (to be fair, the police chief has not held his position for that entire time) — but pledging investigations of these abuses is hardly adequate.  Journalists and Portlanders in general need assurance from the mayor that any police officer deliberately engaging in such abuses is fired from the police force.  When you assault our free press, there should be no second chances.  This is not some mere technical violation, but an authoritarian tactic that’s a direct attack on our democracy and our free society.

It’s encouraging to see state officials start paying attention; after Wheeler and Lovell released their statement, House Speaker Tina Kotek tweeted that, “The physical intimidation of journalists by Portland police officers is a threat to the First Amendment and a free press.  It’s appalling and must stop.”  But like Mayor Wheeler, our state senator and representatives are responsible for doing much more than condemning.  We are clearly in need of state legislation ensuring that police officers who assault members of the media face penalties commensurate with their authoritarian actions.  

It’s also worth remarking on the sheer cowardice of deliberate law enforcement assaults on the press.  Journalists are at these social justice demonstrations to observe and report.  They are not taking part in the demonstrations, are not carrying signs insulting the police, are not part of the minority of demonstrators engaged in violence towards the police.  They are neutral parties there to tell the story of what is happening, acting in a professional capacity.  Striking a reporter with a baton, or shooting a photographer with a rubber bullet, are despicable attacks on neutral parties acting in the public interest.  Such attacks should be considered taboo in the same as when police assault doctors or other medical professionals.

When law enforcement views journalists not as neutral parties but as enemies needing to be targeted and injured, then we are not just talking about an assault on the free press, we are talking about an assault on a free society.  It’s crucial that news outlets like the Oregonian, the Associated Press, Reuters, and others are calling out the police and political leaders in defense of their reporters — but the defense of a free press is the responsibility of all of us, whether it’s through demanding laws protecting journalists or requiring that police be held accountable for their actions.  A free press defends our democracy; but our democracy in turn must defend our free press.

Not-So-Great Coronavirus News in Oregon

So it looks like Oregon’s luck may be beginning to turn in the fight to keep safe from the coronavirus.  Our infection rates are still lower than most states, but as populous Multnomah County and the surrounding region continue to re-open, the state has seen record highs of positive tests over the past two weeks.  According to the Oregonian, “Up until two weeks ago, Oregon had never had a day on which more than 100 cases of COVID-19 were reported. Since then, it’s had 12 such days, and two of them surpassed 200 cases.”

Also a little nerve-wracking is that the state is having trouble determining the source of infections; the Oregonian reports that, “Public health officials are struggling to discern how Oregonians are being exposed to the virus. According to the latest data, for the week June 8-14, contact tracers were unable to identify the source of infection for 36% of new cases statewide. In the Portland area — encompassing Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties — it was even worse: 48%.”

I don't want to be a backseat driver to the decisions of Oregon health officials, but it seems that there's not a lot of margin for error for getting the public health approach to the coronavirus right in Oregon.  Their task is obviously even tougher in light of the clusterf*ck of a federal response, but to me, it feels like both deep caution and an aggressive response are the order of the day.

I also read this weekend that Germany, which has been viewed as having done a good job among European countries in containing the virus, saw its infection rate increase to the point that it is again growing among the population.  Such news should be a reminder that this is an extremely communicable and nasty disease that can readily flare up even after periods of apparent success combating it. 

Say Its Name

“With ‘kung flu,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘our heritage,’ Trump leans on racial grievance as he reaches for a campaign reset” 

So reads the headline of a Washington Post analysis of the president’s self-defeating rally in Tulsa yesterday. While it’s great that the Post has zeroed in on the truckloads of racism Donald Trump wove into his speech, the idea communicated in the headline that the president “leans on racial grievance” is baffling and misleading.  The president did far more than “lean”; when the president slurs Asians, attacks African-Americans, implies that Mexicans are sex criminals, and describes taking down monuments to the Confederacy as attacking “our” heritage, he is actively asserting a white supremacist and white nationalist vision of America, all the more so when he is not just a candidate but the actual president of the United States of America.  And when the Post notes that Trump intends to “build on the darker themes of a previous campaign notable for its attacks on Hispanic immigrants and Muslims,” “darker themes” only obscures what these actual themes are: overt white nationalism and white supremacism. Presenting this president’s statements as unrelated fragments rather than as parts of a coherent world view that can be named does a disservice to the newspaper’s readers.

No Trump Supporter Deserves to Die for the Sake of His Re-election Campaign

Donald Trump’s decision to hold an indoor mass rally in Tulsa today, amidst a growing covid epidemic in Oklahoma, reveals that we are in the slash-and-burn, horror show stage of the Trump presidency.  Many thousands may contract the virus; many hundreds may die, whether directly from being at the rally, or through transmitting the disease to other people afterwards.  The lack of a requirement that participants wear masks and the absence of social distancing make clear that this rally is also intended to be a tribute to the self-serving president’s lie that the pandemic is behind us.  He is willing to sacrifice the lives of his supporters for political gain.  This is a moral abomination, the modern-day equivalent of a bloody sacrifice to the gods.

I have seen some comments on Twitter and elsewhere from opponents of Trump attacking the Trump fans who have decided to attend this rally.  There has been a sometime overt assertion that these supporters deserve whatever illness or death befalls them.  I can’t overstate how sick and misguided this line of thinking is.

There is no conceivable meaning of a democracy worth defending that countenances violence or death upon fellow citizens as part of the political process.  Rejection of this bedrock premise is in fact one of the key reasons why Trump and his Republican political allies must be driven from office.  It doesn’t matter if we disagree with Trump fans, or if we think they’re racist, or misogynist, or even white supremacists — they simply don’t deserve to die for the sin of supporting the president or for their immoral beliefs.  The idea that political opponents deserve physical harm is not democratic politics, it’s authoritarian politics.  It’s fascist politics.  It is not our politics.

Confusion about this point only serves to obscure Trump’s and Republican elected officials’ culpability for the crimes and misrule of this administration.  The president obviously wants us fighting amongst ourselves, wants his supporters to think of Democrats as treasonous race traitors and ungrateful minorities who want to burn and loot and rape and pillage American cities and towns.  To take his bait, to let our anger get the better of us and mirror this undemocratic and hateful attitude, to say that our fellow Americans deserve to die for their politics, is a victory for Trumpism and a defeat for liberal values.

The overriding story of the Tulsa rally is that, for reasons tied to his personal pathology and dwindling political prospects, Donald Trump is engaging in behavior sure to sicken and kill Americans.  No opponent of Trump should see this as anything but an unacceptable assault on our fellow citizens, no matter their political beliefs.

Trump's Betrayal of His Own Supporters Requires Deeper Consideration

The biggest coronavirus news in Oregon this week is of a large outbreak in Union County, in the eastern part of the state, where 236 members of Lighthouse Pentecostal Church have tested positive.  According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, the state epidemiologist suspects that the transmission was potentially at a service or other church event.  Apart from an atypical Trumpian thought that these folks have really screwed up Oregon’s numbers — though infections have been increasing, we’re still among the least hard-hit states — I also felt a flash of schadenfreude that this had happened in rural Oregon, where resistance to Governor Kate Brown’s coronavirus restrictions has been far stronger than in Portland and other urban areas.

This may be an understandable, human reaction, but it’s certainly also shameful.  I don’t know how these churchgoers acquired the virus; no matter what, none of them deserve to have it.  More importantly, we are all at a point where we need to redouble not only our efforts to remind friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens about the urgency of basic social distancing steps like, well, social distancing, but also to insist on where responsibility for this health crisis truly lies: a president who has failed us every step of the way.

I strongly urge everyone to read this Amanda Marcotte piece on this very point.  She reviews the inexcusably incompetent choices that got us here, so that we now face an “untenable choice between indefinite lockdown and the coronavirus spreading unchecked.”  The lockdown, she says, “was never supposed to be the solution.  It was an emergency measure, meant to buy time to come up with a real solution,” which the federal government has failed to do.  As Marcotte notes, the president’s incompetence continues to the present; just this week, he floated the idea (not for the first time) that the number of coronavirus cases would plummet if we just stopped testing.

In light of the failure to develop a plan in the time we all bought via mass adherence to lockdowns, Marcotte advocates for a strategy of harm reduction, such as was used in the AIDS crisis.  Arguing that people can’t be expected to put off basic pleasures forever, she advocates for measures like outdoor socializing and the widespread wearing of masks; since we can’t keep doing the strict measures guaranteed to stop the virus, we can at least do what we can (absent a government plan) to protect our health, our sanity, and our livelihoods.

But just as Marcotte urges a spirit of tolerance and understanding toward our own basic needs while placing the blame for this situation on the proper parties, we should all start thinking more about the way Trump and the Republican Party have, in the matter of the coronavirus, utterly betrayed not just the country at large, but their own voters and constituents.  If so many people insist on ignoring the most basic social distancing guidelines, refuse to wear masks, even deny the danger of the virus, they do so in part because some of the most powerful people in our nation, from the president on down, have urged them to ignore scientific reality, social obligation, and common sense.  In combination with influential right-wing media outlet like Fox News, the effort to downplay the threat of the coronavirus — for, let’s face it, the sake of the president’s re-election effort and the ability of his big corporate donors to keep making a buck — has constituted the most sustained and deadly domestic disinformation campaign of our lifetimes. 

This betrayal opens up another moral perspective for how we might think of political conflict and alignments in the U.S.  Without wishing away their agency or personal responsibility, it’s useful to bear in mind how many Americans have been failed by those in whom they placed their trust, as it opens a door to engaging with our own responsibility towards those we might otherwise consider as unreachable and unpersuadable political opponents.  While we may never be able to find common ground with some citizens, this doesn’t excuse us from responsibility for their welfare — even in circumstances where they’re engaging in behavior that threatens not only their own health, but the well-being of their larger community as well.  I’m not talking about pity or condescension, but something closer to a regard for their lives and dignity that I think most of us are out of touch with as a part of everyday politics.  It is of a piece with the principle that all Americans deserve health care, education, housing, and employment, only with a more liberationist spin.

The coronavirus, with its mortal threat to us all, makes this particular perspective combining compassion and liberation easier to grasp and engage with.  Under Trump, many millions of Americans have entered into a very dark place, full of delusion and rage and racism; while it is hardly our job to save their souls, I guess I’m arguing that it is still our job to save their lives, as much as possible.  No American deserves to die because their president failed them, even when they voted for that president; the degree to which any of us hesitate to agree with this idea is a sign of both the corruption of our politics, and of our bad need for a redemptive spirit.  While Donald Trump and the Republican Party require annihilation at the polls for the good of our collective future, no analogous casting out or punishment is due to or deserved by anyone who voted for them.

Cutting Through the Chaos Talk

Mother Jones’ David Corn nails what Donald Trump’s re-election strategy is likely to be: a full-on assertion that the United States is beset by chaos, and that the president is the only one strong enough to prevent the total destruction of America.  As Corn describes it, “Trump and his campaign want voters to believe their homes are about to be overrun by mobs associated with the ongoing protests against police violence and social inequities.”  Corn correctly notes that this is actually pretty much the president’s strategy from 2016, an assertion of a country beset by foreign invaders and internal enemies that only strongman rule by Trump can redeem.

But Trump’s decision to use the current social justice tsunami as a foil for his re-election effort means that he is not so much putting law and order at the center of his campaign as white nationalism and white supremacism — only without the efforts at plausible deniability that he and his campaign deployed back in 2016.  When the president deliberately ignores that the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful and aimed at defending the rights of minority Americans, and instead asserts that they are about mysterious leftist forces violently trying to take over America, he is relentlessly promoting a vision of white nationalism; under the guise of supporting repressive visions of law and order against civil rights protestors, he is in fact asserting a vision of white supremacy.

Moreover, the massive protests and burgeoning social movement that have followed the killing of George Floyd have by now become interwoven with the president’s own attempts to deny their legitimacy and mischaracterize them as wholly violent and destructive.  In this way, Trump has ensured that this justice movement is seen by most Americans as intimately connected to his own malignant role as president.  In other words, the racist messaging of Trump’s 2016 campaign has now been replaced, by dint of the fact of Trump being president, by the reality of Trump’s actual racist response as chief executive to an actual justice movement.

The difference is between abstract promises of white nationalism, and white nationalism concretely enacted at the highest levels of government.  The most visible manifestation of Trump’s white nationalist (and authoritarian) rule has been in the president’s clear aim to violently suppress the protests in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere; the connection between this white nationalist approach and his re-election effort was made seamless when he released a campaign video of his walk through Lafayette Square after it had been violently cleared of peaceful protestors.

It’s true that the Trump campaign, at a superficial level, is seeking to hide its overt racism by trumpeting lies about antifa and anarchists being an existential, riotous threat to the United States, and the true movers and shakers behind the protests.  Yet it would be hopelessly naïve to think that Trump’s decision to make war on a movement that’s so clearly about racial justice isn’t in fact all about his own opposition to racial justice, not to some abstract and exaggerated chaos in the streets as he claims.  The veneer of deniability has all but come off in the last few days, as the president has stepped in to stop the US Army from re-naming facilities named for Confederate generals, while also decrying the destruction and decommissioning of Reconstruction-era monuments to the Confederacy.  To top it off, we then learned that he planned to resume his campaign rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of one of the worst racial pogroms in U.S. history, on June 19, the day of the Juneteenth holiday recognizing the freeing of American slaves.  According to a million persuasive Twitter takes, it defies belief that this white nationalist president, advised by white nationalists like Steven Miller, isn’t aware of the dire symbolism of such a locale and such timing (the Tulsa rally has now been pushed back a day in the face of massive criticism).

I don’t doubt that Trump’s decision to fully rip off the mask and pretty much crown himself King of the Racists won’t thrill and delight some minority of the voting population, but this seems like a reckless political decision given the widespread public support for the George Floyd protests and the need for racial justice that they represent.  The president seems blind to the definite role he’s played in bringing this moment about, and to the fact that still more overt racism on his part might well catalyze further rejection of him among previous supporters, while stiffening the resolve of his enemies.  It almost feels as if he’s just given in and let his freak flag fly — only in this case, his freak flag is a tattered Confederate battle standard raised by a man in a KKK hood.

Trump’s full-on white supremacist re-election strategy is all the more self-destructive in light of how his efforts to militarize the response to the protests have largely failed.  In particular, it appears that the military leadership has overwhelmingly recoiled from the president’s attempts to enlist it in his race war, which means that his overt racism is no longer so easily wrapped up or diffused by patriotic-militaristic-fascistic appeals.  This is why his simultaneous recent defense of the Confederacy strikes me as such a self-inflicted wound; having symbolically lost his claim to wave the American flag as the army brass edges away from him, Donald Trump seems to be reaching for another flag discredited in the eyes of all but a relatively few Americans.  As the Lincoln Project folks are saying, Donald Trump is the second Confederate president — a taunt that feels more like a credible accusation by the day.

Method and Madness in the Slurring of a Septuagenarian

By now, millions of Americans have watched the video in which Buffalo police officers shove 75-year old protestor Martin Gugino, causing him to fall and crack his head on the sidewalk, where he then lay prone and bleeding as multiple cops marched by him without offering assistance.  The city suspended the two officers directly involved in the incident, spurring 57 others to resign their positions from the city’s Emergency Response Team.  This past Saturday, prosecutors charged the pair who pushed Gugino over with felony assault charges. Gugino remains hospitalized.

According to the New York Times, Gugino is a long-time activist on issues including “military drones, climate change, nuclear weapons and police brutality,” and is described by friends as “mild-mannered.” However, today President Donald Trump tweeted unfounded speculation that Gugino might actually be a member of antifa who staged the whole bloody and grotesque episode.  His tweet has provoked widespread derision and mockery, as so many of his tweets deserve, but the particular outlandishness of this one deserves a closer look (even as we bear in mind the possibility that this lopsided encounter in Buffalo simply caught the president’s attention through a random misfiring of synapses in the mausoleum of pudding and vomit that constitutes his brain).  The video is such a clear demonstration of police brutality, and against a white person, no less, that its unmistakable lesson is that no one of any station is safe from the police; this, surely, is not a welcome message for our authoritarian president.  For him, the police can never be wrong, which means that muddying the waters around Gugino’s affiliation and actions is necessary to preserve the unholy fiction of immaculate policing.

But just as it’s hard to look away from the bare cruelty depicted in the video, I also can’t look away from the self-defeating and revealing stupidity of Trump’s comments.  The president, and indeed much of the right-wing propaganda apparatus, has spent years demonizing antifa, building up this loose agglomeration of antifascist activists into a modern-day domestic equivalent of al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Black Panthers rolled into one.  And as I wrote yesterday, this propaganda has been effective, providing fertile ground for rumors of marauding antifa banditos to burn through small towns across the land.  But now the president has turned this fearsome narrative on its head: antifa are actually fragile septuagenarians who the police can knock over as easy as one-two-three.  What horrors will this Senior Brigade unleash on an unsuspecting America next? Compulsory bingo?  Might they seek to infuse our water supply with high levels of fiber?

Donald Trump may have stepped on his own anti-antifascist (or, to simplify the verbiage, fascist) propaganda due to personal stupidity, but I think it reveals once again the basic method behind the madness.  He and his ilk want Americans to be scared of everything, so that they turn to his strongman rule out of fear.  I mean, if Donald Trump could make us afraid of literally all our fellow Americans, that would indeed be a net win for him.  But trying to pin a terror rap on a 75-year old peaceful protestor show the desperation and hollowness at these attempts to scare and divide us.  At this point, Trump can’t even decide who we should be frightened of; he just knows that he wants us to be scared!

I also can’t help speculate that there might be some relation between Trump’s demonization of Gugino and recent polls showing senior Americans turning against his re-election in a pretty significant way.  To Trump’s reptilian brain, it probably feels pretty good to see the police drawing blood from a member of a demographic that appears to be in the process of stabbing him in the back. 

Paranoid Vigilantes Shadow Small Town Racial Justice Protests

As reports like this one from the Washington Post are documenting, the United States is currently undergoing a mix of widespread and sustained protests unmatched for half a century.  Particularly heartening for those of us hoping for a true sea change in attitudes toward civil rights is how marches and demonstrations are hardly confined to large urban centers; hundreds of events have now taken place in all 50 states, including small towns in solidly conservative states and regions.  Not only are these evidence of a shift in the present moment, they may also presage increased future support of civil rights and police reform efforts; as the Post notes, “the closer someone lives to a protest, the more likely it is to change their vote.  Protests influence not just election turnout, but also what types of issues rise to the top of party platforms, and who gets elected to state, local and federal offices.”

This phenomenon of small-town participation has been happening here in Oregon, with demonstrations in support of justice for George Floyd taking place not just in Portland but locales like Monmouth, Medford, and Pendleton.  But these peaceful protests have been sometimes shadowed by a less progressive counterpoint.  Even as small-town Oregonians rallied against systemic racism, others were being driven to paranoia and fear via what appear to be coordinated efforts via Facebook to foment civil strife and right-wing violence.  And so in communities like Klamath Falls and Grants Pass, armed vigilantes turned out to fight off phantom buses rumored to be filled with antifa members aiming to kill, loot, and plunder these small towns; as one Facebook commentator put it, antifa were “going to burn everything and to kill white people, basically.”

Klamath Falls in southern Oregon saw the most fraught outcome of this fear-mongering; according to reporting from NBC News, as a diverse group of some 200 protestors rallied downtown, another group of hundreds formed a sinister response to their protest:  

They leaned in front of local businesses The Daily Bagel and Rick's Smoke Shop wearing military fatigues and bulletproof vests, with blue bands tied around their arms. Most everyone seemed to be carrying something: flags, baseball bats, hammers and axes. But mostly, they carried guns.

They said they came with shotguns, rifles and pistols to protect their downtown businesses from outsiders. They had heard that antifa, paid by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, were being bused in from neighboring cities, hellbent on razing their idyllic town.

A police presence between the two groups continued for the four hours the George Floyd protestors were present; but it is easy to imagine events having gone another way, with a group of unarmed protestors confronted by heavily armed vigilantes amped up on paranoia and adrenaline.  And as NBC points, this basic scenario, of small town residents driven by wild rumor to prepare for violence, was repeated in many other locales around the U.S.  In Forks, Washington, for instance, such paranoia led locals to harass and threaten a multi-racial family visiting from Spokane, after their bus was mistaken for one of the mythic antifa assault vehicles; in a scene out of a community theater, cinema verite re-enactment of Deliverance, the family was followed by cars containing armed individuals, and was later trapped at a campsite after some of their antagonists apparently cut down trees to prevent their exit (friendlier locals ended up clearing their path).

The juxtaposition between peaceful protests in favor of justice, and violently-minded posses spurred to do battle against imaginary enemies, is uncomfortably stark.  While we should keep the nationwide groundswell of support for racial justice in the forefront of public discussion, it’s not helpful to sweep under the rug this parallel right-wing, racist, and anti-Semitic response (some rumors held George Soros to be funding the antifa buses); in important ways, the under-the-radar nature of the rumors and Facebook messaging made it invisible to much of the media, and so to the mass public consciousness and light of reason that might have quickly exposed the falsity and absurdity of the claims.  At the same time, it’s invaluable to realize that great numbers of Americans are so susceptible to being worked up into an armed frenzy, even if to an objective observer their fears are nonsensical.  This realization can’t be separated from the way that Donald Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have essentially been party to a dangerous incitement of hate, as both men have grossly exaggerated the extent of violence among protestors over the last week, while also stating without evidence that much of it is being caused by antifa and anarchists.  

What’s also notable are the multiple examples of these small-town folk resorting to vigilante-type preparations for violence, rather than relying on their local police forces to keep them safe.  Again, this speaks to a definite paranoia mixed with an eagerness to take up arms against phantom enemies.  While such instincts are pitiable, they are also highly dangerous.  As observers like Jared Yates Sexton have being arguing, such readiness to engage in militia-style violence against left-wing enemies represents a frightening fascistic strain in American society.  We must hope that enough of these citizens witness actual peaceful demonstrations by their neighbors, so that reality might pierce their mass hallucination of persecution and vengeance.