Siege Mentality

An early Sunday morning tweet by President Trump reminds us that propaganda and disinformation are at the center of federal deployments to Portland.  He refers to “anarchists” and “agitators,” and concludes “These were not merely protesters, these are the real deal!”  The language of extremist elements seizing control of Portland had found more baroque expression in a Department of Homeland Security press release from late last week; “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.”  The statement went on to repeat the phrase “violent anarchists” dozens of times.

Portland is indeed under siege  — though not by “violent anarchists,” but on the ground by lawless federal agents increasingly acting as a secret police force on behalf of the president; and in the media by a presidential disinformation campaign.  We here in Portland have had particularly bad luck to be the test case for such extensive federal deployments, but the disinformation campaign that supports such actions has been nationwide.  President Trump has consistently attempted to describe the social justice protests provoked by the killing of George Floyd as the work of anti-American extremists bent on violence and destruction.  In denying the reality of a mass, peaceful movement for racial equality and an end to police violence, he affirms himself as the de facto head of a white supremacist, anti-democratic minority seeking to block the emergence of a more just and equal America.

The presence of federal agents in Portland, purportedly to protect federal property but clearly pushing their mandate into a mission to terrorize legitimate protestors, is the president’s propaganda campaign and warped racism made flesh.  Committing violent acts against peaceful protestors who march in favor of civil rights and against police abuses, these acts constitute the president’s declaration of war against civil rights and civil society.  And by themselves acting as the instigators of violence, the federal agents work to create the appearance of a reality that will lend credence to the president’s propaganda, most crucially by generating images of chaos on the streets that can be broadcast by the president’s re-election campaign and allied right-wing media.

The cruelty and absurdity of this escalating war on American citizens has been amply documented night after night.  Federal agents tear gas, pepper spray, beat, and arrest non-violent protestors.  Only in the addled fantasy life of our president and his rapidly-eroding base do these demonstrators constitute a crack squad of hardened criminals; one looks in vain for the A-Team of anarchists and antifa against whom only the most highly-trained and brutal forces of Homeland Security might stand a chance.  What will be increasingly clear as time passes should already be clear enough for anyone willing to face the facts: the Trump administration has declared war on its own citizenry in the name of promoting white supremacism and the authoritarian aims of a president who is well on his way to suffering a catastrophic electoral defeat in November.

Battlespace Portland, Part II

Oregon Public Broadcasting is reporting that over the last few days, “federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protestors.” Chillingly, the federal officer are dressed in camouflage, are both armed and armored, and have no insignia to indicate who they work for; they are also reportedly not identifying themselves when arresting their targets.

OPB interviewed two people who underwent this experience.  One of them, Mark Pettibone, described being “tossed” into a van; those detaining him pulled his cap over his eyes and held his hands over his head, apparently so he would not be able to see.  He was brought to a location that he subsequently realized was the federal courthouse, where he declined to answer questions without an attorney present.  He was not informed as to why he had been arrested.  After an hour and a half, he was released without being charged for a crime.

OPB also reports that “officers are also detaining people on Portland streets who aren’t near federal property, nor is it clear that all of the people being arrested have engaged in criminal activity. Demonstrators like O’Shea and Pettibone said they think they were targeted by federal officers for simply wearing black clothing in the area of the demonstration.”

This is an instance where videos of the incidents may be the most effective way of communicating how very sinister and grossly inappropriate these federal actions are.  I have to admit that the first time one came up in my Twitter feed, I was sure it was either a parody of federal law enforcement gone wrong, or a video of Russian actions in Crimea or some other site of paramilitary mayhem.

The Department of Homeland Security has been coordinating the deployment of federal agents in Portland, including elements of a Border Patrol tactical team that has also been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group. Last Saturday, a member of the latter group shot a peaceful protestor in the face with a non-lethal munition, fracturing his skull; the man remains hospitalized. 

As the abductions began being reported more widely, acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf visited Portland on Thursday; a DHS statement released in connection with his trip here strongly reinforces the case being made by many, including Greg Sargent at the Washington Post and local politicos like Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, that the activities of federal agents in Portland have very little to do with any actual need for their presence, and very much to do with President Trump’s desperate re-election effort to create an impression of an America besieged by widespread violence:

The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.  

A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice - to attack it is to attack America. Instead of addressing violent criminals in their communities, local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community.  This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.

The hysterical, exaggerated assertions of mayhem and violence, rather than accurately describing reality, are meant to distort it, as well as to incite fear and anger in the reader.  “Siege,” “violent mob,” “lawless anarchists”: these words and phrases promote a funhouse mirror version of reality, in which Portland has supposedly been brought to its knees by wilding antifa types.  My personal favorite element of this inversion is the reference to those who “desecrate property,” as if all property were sacred ground, like a church or a Trump hotel.

The impression that the DHS release is less a statement of facts than poorly-written propaganda grows as you read the seemingly endless list of offenses cited by Wolf; the phrase “Violent anarchists” kicks off nearly every one of the dozens of incidents, as if repetition alone will make the unsupported label true.  In this, it is a very Trumpian document indeed.  The fact that around half the incidents of alleged violence consist of graffiti on federal buildings projects a sense not of menace, but an effort by Wolf to juke the statistics in favor of crackdown.  And the fetishization of symbols may be most absurd in his statement that, “A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice - to attack it is to attack America,” to which the obvious retort is that if this is so, then shooting and abducting peaceful American protestors is also attacking America, on steroids.  

You can’t overstate how inappropriate it is for the man charged with heading the Department of Homeland Security to talk about small scale demonstrations in Portland as an existential danger to the city requiring both federal mobilization and the language of war.  The DHS was created to help protect the United States against external threats, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 being the catalyst for its very existence.  Yet, we now have the man charged with coordinating America’s domestic security efforts acting as if graffiti, broken glass, and isolated assaults on police and federal agents by American citizens constitute an attack on America itself.  A man unable to distinguish between actual threats to domestic security and non-existent ones has no place holding such a job; the same is doubly the case when he promulgates a false narrative about such threats.  In doing so, he reveals himself not as a public servant protecting Americans’ safety, but as a dangerous ideologue promoting the authoritarian vision and illicit re-election strategy of an unmoored president.  

The absurdity of Wolf’s claims is clear to most anyone who actually lives in Portland.  While Wolf promotes an idea of a city under “siege,” residents are aware that the protests involving federal buildings are limited to a few square blocks of downtown, where those buildings actually are.  The city of Portland spreads across 145 square miles.  Wolf is lying, and we know it. There is also the uncomfortable (for Wolf) fact that crime has actually declined in Portland over the last several weeks.

But the attempts by the Trump administration to gin up a false narrative of a city under attack by anarchist hordes is most vividly contradicted by city and state officials’ vehement assertions that the federal presence is not welcome in the city, and that federal forces are in fact committing and perpetuating violence here.  From Governor Kate Brown and Representative Earl Blumenauer, to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, we are hearing a consistent message that the federal agents should not be in Portland.  And it’s not just elected Democrats saying this.   Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese stated that, “the actions by out-of-state federal agents last weekend failed to display good decision making and sound tactical judgment [. . .] These actions caused a significant setback in our local efforts to end the nightly violence around the Justice Center and in Portland”; meanwhile, according to Mother Jones, Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis noted that the Portland Police Bureau “did not request federal assistance and is not coordinating with the federal officers; Davis is quoted as saying, “I don’t have authority to order federal officers to do things.  It does complicate things for us.”

In the last 24 hours, news of these federal abuses have exploded across the national media (this afternoon, it was a top story at both the New York Times and Washington Post websites).  Even as the president believes he has much to gain by creating an impression of dire conflict so as to arouse his most fervent, Fox News-addicted followers, the majority of Americans will find the activities of federal agents in Portland to be beyond the pale.  Some commentators have already drawn parallels between what we are seeing here and the activities of the Pinochet regime, which “disappeared” thousands of Chileans, and of Russia under Vladimir Putin, which deployed troops without national identification to mount a covert invasion of Ukraine.  Given the white nationalist and authoritarian agenda of the president and his advisors, it would be naïve to think that they aren’t aware of these precedents, and either find inspiration in them or are indifferent to the dark resonance they carry for patriotic Americans.  

But alongside exposure, this violent intervention in the affairs of an American city demands a concrete response that shuts it down and holds the perpetrators to account, from the agents following orders to treat peaceful protestors like hardened criminals, all the way up to the incompetent Chad Wolf and his flailing commander-in-chief; all have broken faith with basic notions of freedom and accountability in the deployment of what amounts to a secret police force acting to terrorize legitimate protestors into submission.  It is reassuring that Democratic officials in Oregon are largely united in identifying these activities as reflecting a presidential effort to energize his base, but they must follow up their outraged words with concrete action to end these illegitimate federal actions ASAP.  As a start, elected Democrats need to call for Chad Wolf’s immediate resignation.  As a defender of police state tactics and as a fantasist of a looming “anarchist” menace, he’s unworthy of his position; as the coordinator of such tactics, what he actually is worthy of is congressional investigation.  Likewise, federal agents who violate the civil rights of American citizens deserve neither the benefit nor the honor of public service, and should be removed from Portland immediately.

Battlespace Portland, Part I

[Editor’s note: I’d been working on this post over the past week, and the overall story it covers has now gained national coverage with reports that federal agents have been driving unmarked vans in downtown Portland and arresting non-violent protestors without identifying themselves or the reason for the arrests. These secret police-type arrests are a huge development, and I’ll be writing about it shortly; in the meantime, I still wanted to post this mildly outdated piece, with the caveat that there’s more to come.]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the multiple incidents of police violence against social justice protests in Portland, including actions directed at journalists covering the demonstrations. Since then, the American Civil Liberty Union has filed a lawsuit against the City of Portland and its police department “on behalf of journalists and legal observers who were targeted and attacked by the police while documenting protests in Portland over the killing of George Floyd,” as described by The Oregonian. 

As if homegrown police violence were not enough for the city, at the beginning of July Portland received deployments of various federal law enforcement officers under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security.  Such personnel include elements of BORTAC, a Border Patrol tactical team that has also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group.  Portland, along with Seattle and Washington, D.C, has been singled out by the Trump administration for such military-grade deployment of federal personnel.  Since their arrival, federal security forces have employed non-lethal munitions and tear gas against mostly peaceful protestors; The Oregonian reports that “Civil liberties advocates and activists have accused federal authorities of overstepping their jurisdiction and excessive use of crowd-control measures, including using tear gas and patrolling beyond the boundaries of federal property.”  The use of tear gas is significant, as “Portland police are prohibited from using tear gas under a recent temporary court order unless they declare a riot.” 

Last Saturday, an officer with the U.S. Marshals’ Special Operations Group shot a peaceful protestor in the face with what is being described as an “impact munition.”  The shot fractured the man’s skull, and he has been hospitalized since the incident.  The shooting provoked a broad outcry from Oregon’s federal officials, as well as Governor Kate Brown, who like other Oregon politicians placed the onus for the incident squarely on the presence of the federal agents; she noted that, “President Trump deploying armed federal officers to Portland only serves to escalate tensions and, as we saw yesterday, will inevitably lead to unnecessary violence and confrontation.”  In a similar vein, Senator Ron Wyden referred to the president acting as if American cities “are enemy strongholds.” 

Some Oregon federal officeholders have sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for responses to a number of crucial questions, such as who is directing the Department of Justice and DHS response in Oregon, what the chain of command is, and what other Oregon cities are sites of federal deployments.  But it’s clear that the issues raised by the shooting of a peaceful Portland protestor are larger than Oregon’s right to be rid of trigger-happy agents far more used to combatting drug runners on the border than citizens exercising their right to free speech on the streets of an American city.  As Greg Sargent writes at The Plum Line blog, the deployment of these forces to Portland and elsewhere is part of President Trump’s ongoing effort of “trying to escalate tensions around the [nationwide] protests, while utterly refusing at every opportunity to de-escalate them.”  Sargent points to the clearing of Lafayette Square of peaceful protestors for a presidential photo-op last month as the template for such a strategy. 

The shooting in Portland is all the more disturbing because of President Trump’s comments on Monday that, “We’ve done a great job in Portland.  Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail.  We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily.  It’s not hard to do.”  It’s nauseating to contemplate that the president took a victory lap a day after a severe injury to a protestor, or that he was specifically celebrating that fact; but as Sargent suggests, the idea that urban riots threaten the national fabric has become part of his re-election campaign.  In this case, much like the demonstration at Lafayette Square, Portland is being used as a larger canvas for the president not only to indulge his instincts for bullying and violence, but to create a fictional portrait of a city so out of control that only the iron fist of Homeland Security, and the president who authorizes such actions, can put it to rights.

Portland City Commissioner Joanne Hardesty made an important link between the president’s actions and Portland’s failure to rein in police violence, noting that if it weren’t for the Portland Police Bureau’s inability to deescalate violent protests previously, there wouldn’t have been such a clear opening for the president to try to make Portland part of a campaign ad.

I realize that these small nighttime protests can seem abstract to many Portlanders. But regardless of the exact mix between overwhelmingly peaceful protestors and a minority with more confrontational attitudes, we should all be worried far more by the police and Homeland Security’s nightly practice of abuses than the acts of a small group of people who engage in vandalism.  The power of the US government is vast, and violence against citizens by members of a department created to protect the United States against external threats is disturbing in the extreme.  The same critique goes for the Portland police, who are becoming acclimated to thinking of Portlanders as an enemy force to be put down, rather than a citizenry that they serve.  It is a purely anti-democratic development for officers of the law and security agents of the federal government to grow comfortable with inflicting pain and terror on their fellow Americans.  This concern is all the greater when we focus on the federal agents deployed with what may be specific orders to view the protestors as the enemy, with their allegiance not to the law but to the president who has ordered them to such questionable ends.

Democracy at War

Reporting from The New York Times about Democratic Party pressure on the Biden campaign to expand the 2020 electoral map helps highlight some of the key potentials and dangers of our political moment.  With polls showing Joe Biden leading Trump in swing states, and suggesting tight contests in long-time GOP strongholds like Texas and Georgia, some Democratic officials are encouraging Biden to make a play for states that Democrats have not won for a generation.

Of course, it’s not just polls, but also the energy of the Democratic base and the possibility of persuading independent voters, that’s spurred this effort to re-think the path to the presidency.  And this, in turn, is inseparable from Donald Trump’s catastrophic, white supremacist, and increasingly authoritarian presidency, which has filled millions of Americans with a sense of existential urgency.

Beyond the simple logic of pressing the party’s political advantage for its own sake, some strategists are pointing specifically to the need to discredit Trump and Trumpist politics as a prime reason for the Democrats to go big in 2020.  The Times piece doesn’t delve into the nature of what these Republican politics are, but naming them shows the degree to which the Democrats’ partisan quest for victory is at this point inseparable from defending the fundamentals of American democracy.  The Trumpist politics they need to discredit are white supremacism and authoritarianism; and they need a national repudiation not only for the sake of the party, which cannot prosper in a world where voter suppression, foreign election interference, and violence against citizens are the order of the day, but for the larger good of American democracy.

From this perspective, the Biden campaign’s reluctance thus far to fully embrace a broadened campaign strikes me as potentially self-defeating.  While there are strong and understandable reasons to play it safe in the name of winning the White House — the upset of 2016, partisan polarization that suggests Trump can rely on a strong base of voters no matter what he does, the need to spend limited financial resources wisely — this risks missing a historic opportunity.  This election is as much a referendum on American democracy as on American support for the Democratic Party’s agenda and opposition to Trumpism — but to the degree the Democrats can strengthen the case that they are now effectively the sole vessel for promoting democracy, they also strengthen the case for why they, as a party, should be trusted with power.

A broad campaign that targets states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio would signal to Americans that the Democratic Party is confident in its claims to power at this crossroads in our history; and this vote of confidence is in turn a vote of confidence in the American people, which can help catalyze the result that not only Democrats, but the nation as a whole, requires — an utter rout of the Republican Party in 2020 and beyond.  This argument for the “go big” approach is only strengthened when you consider the coattails effect of a successful presidential candidate; close Senate races in Georgia, Iowa, and elsewhere could more surely end up as Democratic victories if Biden makes a real play for those states.  

Beyond this, if there is any lesson of political strategy that we have learned over these past four years, it is that the best defense against Donald Trump is a good offense.  Our broken media environment, in combination with the president’s manic capacity to generate fresh outrages on a daily basis, means that he has kept the political initiative far too often during his term of office.  Conversely, the Democrats have been either reluctant or unable to counter his strategy by going on offense against him, and in support of fundamental national values.  When Trump is forced to be reactive, and feels his position weakening, he tends to lash out, to act even more impulsively than normal, to alienate.

The concept that a Trump on defense is a Trump who turns off voters becomes even more important in the face of what appears to be Trump’s massive loss of voter support in the face of his gross incompetence in handling the coronavirus pandemic and the George Floyd social justice protests.  Starkest for me are the findings that seniors now support Biden over Trump, a turn-around of a key GOP demographic that does not bode well for the larger Republican Party in November.  If this is not what collapsing support looks like, then I don’t know what does.  Given the escalating death toll from the coronavirus, and the president’s decision to further amplify his white supremacist rhetoric and policies, it seems the Biden campaign is in danger of misreading the degree to which Trump’s support will somehow rebound.

The Times article notes some Democrats worry about over-confidence in the calls to expand their presidential efforts, but this sounds more like lack of confidence to me.  It’s not just that Democrats should be feeling a righteous, fully-earned fury about removing this corrupt president and party from office.  Politicians and voters should also be thinking more about how November will very much be a faith election.  Not faith in the religious sense, but faith in the democratic sense that is always an unsung but crucial part of our nation and government.  Faith that our neighbors are not monsters who wish to see our country turned into an apartheid state.  Faith that our fellow citizens don’t want their children to grow up in a country where the government thinks everyone should fend for themselves in a pandemic.  Faith that they don’t want political disputes to be settled by vigilante violence and the deployment of armed forces on our streets.

Of course you need to keep making the case for why democracy, racial equality, and free and fair elections are worth defending, as their defense can never again be taken for granted; but you also have to have faith that enough of your fellow citizens will accept these premises.  Our faith has been badly tested by the election of Trump, and by how quickly huge portions of the electorate and political system supported him and have hewed themselves closely to his un-American politics; but our faith should be somewhat restored by the mass resistance that has continued and escalated throughout this rancid presidency.  If you think that what this president and the GOP are doing is crazy and outrageous, have faith that you are not alone, that even previous supporters are seeing through the propaganda to the horrid reality of their misrule.  The Democrats need their presidential campaign to compete as widely as possible to send this overwhelming message: democracy cedes no territory to the proto-fascists, the white supremacists, the defenders of the Confederacy.  Democracy is no longer on defense.  Democracy is at war with its enemies, and will sweep them away through the means of its choosing: the relentless and methodical pursuit of democratic politics, the only form of politics we consider legitimate in this country.  Elections, open debate, the inclusion of all in our decision-making.  Our ideals made material are the weapons that will help stop Trumpism and bury it.  

Is Anyone Buying the Trump Administration's Back-to-School Blather At This Point?

Jennifer Rubin has a solid beatdown of the Trump administration’s desperate plan to force school re-openings in the fall as a way to stimulate the economy and rescue the president’s diminishing re-election prospects.  Apparently, freaky billionaire/Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was on weekend talk shows promoting the idea; things did not go well, and the public was at least able to confirm that there is no actual plan for getting schools ready to re-open beyond a mandate to do so.  Rubin also notes the very important points that a) the president really has no leverage to actually deny funding to schools that aren’t unconstitutional b) such denial of funding would hurt the most vulnerable students and c) this chaotic strategy runs completely against decades of Republican insistence that local communities, not the federal government, should make decisions about schooling.  Rubin also makes the salient point that DeVos herself clearly sees the effort to deny funding to uncooperative public schools as a front in her war to replace public schools with private ones.  In the appearances Rubin cites, it was also illuminating to read of DeVos making the tacit argument that there is a battle going on between those who want kids to be educated and those who don’t, when the real struggle is between those who don’t want their kids and teachers to get sick and spread disease, and those who don’t care as long as it helps the president get re-elected.

Donald Trump’s effort to strong-arm America’s teacher and kids into returning to class, no matter the state of the pandemic or their ability to stay healthy, is an act not only of political insanity but borderline evil.  As I wrote a few days ago, it would be one thing to declare that the nation will spend whatever it takes to return kids to school safely; it’s another thing entirely to say that schools must re-open or actually lose money.  Every day that the administration presses this absurd point is another day that they deliberately feed themselves into a political wood chipper, and broadcast to the world the fundamental indecency and incompetence of Trump and his Republican allies. 

A President Grows Weary of His Faucian Bargain

After months of reports of President Trump’s displeasure with the straight-talking Dr. Anthony Fauci, administration officials have taken the extraordinary and horrific step of engaging in a slur campaign to undermine Fauci’s public standing and professional reputation.  According to this New York Times report, White House officials have distributed a compilation of purportedly erroneous statements by Fauci to various news outlets, “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document.”  As the Times notes, this move comes after weeks of increasing divergence between Fauci’s admission that the country is not doing well with the coronavirus pandemic and the president’s continued deranged insistence that the country is well on its way to recovery.

This is not the most outrageous act perpetrated by this president, but in the face of a pandemic that continues to infect and kill thousands upon thousands of our countrymen, it may be one of the most telling.  Fauci has both substantively and symbolically been a boon to the Trump administration, providing honesty and experience to the effort to contain the coronavirus, while providing a veneer of assurance that the government response must be somewhat competent because of the presence of professionals like himself.  As we are engulfed in disease and economic dislocation from coast to coast, it’s clear that however much expert advice was provided to policymakers, it has been disregarded enough that the United States now stands as the worst-hit country in the world.  In this dire situation, experts like Fauci become the enemy of the Trump administration, as their disregarded guidance stands as a judgment on the political leadership’s catastrophic failure.  The respectability that Fauci brought to the White House effort is now no longer welcome, because it was grounded in his willingness to speak truthfully about the pandemic.  Since such truthfulness now necessarily includes at least a tacit indictment of the administration’s coronavirus response, Fauci must be discredited.

The public will at some point turn to the question of whether the experts advising the national response to the pandemic have done their ethical duty in the face of the president’s determination to undercut the effort on every front.  I think there’s a reasonable question of whether they have given cover to this administration’s failure by providing the appearance that health professionals were being listened to.  While the brunt of the culpability falls on those politicians like Trump and Republican governors who chose not to follow their guidance, the broad reluctance of national health officials to confront the obvious malpractice of the politicians they serve deserves more scrutiny.  Yet even such a harsh critique is light years from an outright effort to discredit Fauci, and by extension, to intimidate other health professionals into toeing the party line, as this anti-Fauci crusade is surely also intended to do.

It's not hard to see the self-defeating and self-destructive aspects of this predictable Trumpian turn.  Denigrating experts like Fauci will help worsen the pandemic, while also clarifying for the public that the president’s sole interest is his own, not the nation’s.  That this is all Trump and his advisors can think to do reveals not only the dire political straits they are in, but the depth of our collective national nightmare.  The Trump administration is choosing to wage a losing battle against reality rather than do its job and protect the national health.  In crucial ways, making Fauci into the enemy is a stone’s throw away from making the American people the enemy in the struggle to staunch this pandemic.  Vulnerable to disease, perversely addicted to truth-telling in matters of life and death, increasingly immune to White House propaganda in the face of undeniable facts about the impact of the coronavirus, the citizenry may yet come to represent in the president’s mind the greatest obstacle to his re-election.  And when that happens, will the president still be persuaded to lift a finger to save us from even greater waves of illness and death?

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.