Last month, in what Jeffrey Toobin called “the worst speech given by an Attorney General of the United States in modern history,” Attorney General William Barr offered a lecture at Notre Dame Law School in which he denounced secularism as a “social pathology” that destroys the “moral order.” After blaming secularists for a host of contemporary problems — including depression, drug overdosing, and violence — Barr explained that without belief in a “transcendent Supreme Being” and adherence to “God’s eternal law,” the “possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.” Unless we follow “God’s instruction manual,” he sermonized, there will be “real-world consequences for man and society” — consequences that are not pretty, but quite grim. For without religion, there can be no “moral culture” and society will inevitably fall prey to humanity’s “capacity for great evil.”
Such hackneyed assertions are not new. Pious people of power have been scapegoating the non-religious for centuries, characterizing non-believers as threats to the nation, and declaring that without religion, there can be no moral social order. And like those before him who have made such claims — from Newt Gingrich to the prophet Muhammed — William Barr is wrong.
When lots of people in a given society stop being religious of their own accord, such organic secularization does not result in the evaporation of morality in society, nor national decay. For instance, the most secular countries in the world today fare much better on nearly every measure of peace, prosperity, and societal well-being — including infant mortality, life expectancy, educational attainment, economic prosperity, freedom, levels of corruption, and so forth — than the most religious countries. In fact, those countries with the highest murder rates — such as Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil — are extremely religious, while those countries with the lowest murder rates — such as Iceland, Canada, Slovenia, Norway, and the Netherlands — are among the most secular nations in the world. Heck, Singapore and the Czech Republic are among the least religious nations on earth, while Brazil and the Philippines are among the most God-worshipping, yet the latter’s murder rates are over ten times higher than the former’s, and the crime rate of never-been-Christian, strongly secular Japan is 80 times lower than El Salvador’s, a Catholic nation neck-deep in worship of Barr’s “Supreme Transcendent Being.”
Similar correlations hold within our own country: on almost every measure of societal well-being — from poverty rates to STD rates to DUIs — the most secular states tend to fare the best, while the most religious tend to fare the worst. For example, among the states with the highest gun violence and murder rates, many are among the most religious — e.g., Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arkansas — while among those with the lowest gun violence and murder rates, many are among the least religious states, such as New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.
Of course, such correlations don’t prove that secularism causes these more positive outcomes experienced by less religious societies. But they do knock the knees out of Barr’s thesis that secularism is a destructive force. For if secularism resulted in moral deterioration, then highly secular societies would be decaying bastions of crime and misery, while the strongly religious would be shining beacons of liberty and harmony. But we find just the opposite reality: the nations with the best overall quality of life are among the most secular countries in the world. And while numerous factors account for the differing degrees of societal well-being — factors that have nothing to do with religion or secularism — that’s exactly the point. Societies thrive or fail because of their social policies, laws, economic opportunities, civil institutions, and government regulations — not because of their faith in God, or lack thereof.
Historical analysis is also relevant. The so-called “rise of the nones” has occurred over the last five decades, with both God-belief declining and the percentage Americans claiming no religious affiliation skyrocketing, from less than 5% up to 26% today. And yet, over the course of those same decades, America’s poverty rate has precipitously declined, and the national violent crime rate has gone down by 51%! Clearly, secularism isn’t the hindrance to moral social progress Barr would have us believe.
At the individual level, while religiously-active people do volunteer and donate more money to charity than their secular peers — at least in the US, if not elsewhere — secular people are notably moral in other ways; they are, on average, less racist, less ethnocentric, less homophobic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and less likely to hit their children than their religious peers; they are also more likely to support women’s equality, reproductive rights, sane gun control, death with dignity, animal welfare and efforts to fight climate change. Finally, atheists are significantly under-represented in prison.
But how can secular people be moral if they don’t believe in God? Easy. Contrary to Barr’s perspective, morality did not start with the Bible. Human communities began constructing ethical codes of conduct long before the world’s major religions arrived on the scene. And that’s because morality first developed during our long evolutionary past, when cooperation, honesty, and altruism increased group survival. Concomitantly, our brains long ago developed neurological pathways and peptides that enhanced our ability to be empathetic and compassionate — the two fundamental cornerstones of a moral orientation. We’ve also learned how to treat others through socialization and enculturation. And our innate ability to think, reflect, and reason has consistently led most of us to the basic, universal ethical principle that we ought to treat people the way we ourselves would like to be treated.
Although religion preaches many moral precepts, it by no means holds a monopoly on them. Ethical life abounds well beyond the confines of church, Bible, and belief in gods. Those who actively scapegoat the secular as pathologically immoral are purposefully spreading fear, and division — and in so doing, violate the very moral orientation they claim to champion.
Several Republican senators have taken a “vow of silence” on the impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives.
Maine Senator Susan Collins has described her position this way: “I am very likely to be a juror so to make a predetermined decision on whether to convict a president of the United States does not fulfill one’s constitutional responsibilities.”
From a purely political standpoint, the senators’ choice is beneficial for both parties. The senators cannot find it easy to speak approvingly of the president’s opportunistic conduct with foreign countries, so silence is probably the most graceful position for the Republican Party.
The silence is also helpful from the Democratic Party’s perspective. Democrats would no doubt prefer that the senators just abandon Trump immediately, but that seems unlikely to happen. The silence at least preserves the possibility that they will convict Trump if and when the time comes.
That said, there is nothing requiring the senators to remain silent on the issues. No written law or rule instructs senators to take that approach. The Senate’s Rules on Impeachment Trials do not address pretrial conduct at all.
The senators’ choice seems to stem instead from a decision to treat the impeachment proceeding much like a judicial trial. As a professor of Constitutional law, I find that analogy quite apt.
Constitution lays it out
Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives is granted the exclusive power to impeach – or bring charges against – officers of the United States, including the president.
Once articles of impeachment (charges) are passed by the House, they are brought to the Senate for trial. Members of the House are named “managers” of the impeachment and are responsible for bringing forth evidence to support the charges.
Chief Justice John Roberts would preside over an impeachment trial of the president.
When the president is the impeached party, the chief justice of the United States must preside over the trial. Both the chief justice and all of the members of the Senate take a special oath, swearing that “in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment,” they “will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”
The president cannot be convicted and removed from office unless two-thirds of the senators vote for that outcome.
Legal or political?
This process is readily comparable to criminal proceedings in the courts.
In both, the charging function and the trying function are distinct and are carried out by different institutions. The House arrives at the specific charges, votes to proceed (much like a grand jury), and then presents to the Senate the evidence in favor of conviction (much like a prosecutor). The Senate simply listens to the evidence and votes, just as a jury would in a criminal proceeding.
In James Madison’s draft of the Constitution, he conferred the power to impeach the president on the House of Representatives, just as the Constitution reads now, but Madison had the Supreme Court, rather than the Senate, conducting the trial.
Ultimately Madison’s position was defeated not because a judicial proceeding was a bad idea, but because his framing colleagues worried that relying on the Supreme Court raised several particular concerns.
Gouverneur Morris thought the justices might unduly favor the president, given that he would have appointed them. Alexander Hamilton thought the court was just too small a group for such a momentous decision, and also might be called into play later if the president were criminally prosecuted after his removal.
Respecting the process
Because impeachment gives rise to a proceeding akin to a criminal trial, the senators’ silence may not be required, but is appropriate.
In federal and state trials all over the country, courts routinely instruct jurors to refrain from drawing a conclusion – and refrain even from speaking with other jurors – until all the evidence is in. The “pattern” instructions the courts rely on usually include an instruction like this: “Do not discuss this case among yourselves until I have instructed you on the law and you
have gone to the jury room to make your decision at the end of the trial. Otherwise, without realizing it, you may start forming opinions before the trial is over.”
Rules governing federal and most state trials note the importance of keeping personal views private until all the evidence is in, and all the arguments are made.
Rule 2.10 of the Model Code of Judicial Conduct, which has been adopted by the vast majority of states, directs judges not to commit publicly to stances on issues that may end up before them.
The idea is that when people publicly state a position, it is much harder for them to consider impartially evidence suggesting that their public position was wrong. Put simply, face-saving must not become more important than making an impartial decision.
There is some public cost to the senators’ choice to remain silent. To the extent that the senators decline to address the emerging impeachment issues, their constituents are unable to evaluate their oversight of the president.
That period of ambiguity, however, is brief. It will end the moment that each senator rises in the chamber and casts a vote to acquit or to convict.
So Republican senators are not legally required to remain silent in the face of becoming jurors, but their doing so in service to impartiality makes sense given the gravity of the proceeding.
Democrat Raymond Thornton of Arkansas voted to impeach President Richard Nixon in 1974. In an interview with a historian the year after the impeachment, Thornton explained his approach to the momentous responsibility he had faced.
“I wanted to get it right,” he said.
“I considered that this was most likely the most important task I would ever have in government and that my whole effort should be given to the study of it and to try to come up with an answer that was fair and right and which I could live with for the rest of my life.”
Has anyone else noticed that we already had a presidential election during which all you heard was “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and now here we are three years later in the middle of another one, and all you hear is “Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine!”? It’s easy to forget the good old days when you would read long take-outs by political whizzes like Jack Germond about the genius of some Republican state committeeman in deep Indiana who was going to turn out the south 32 counties for Nixon in a tightly contested primary. Who even knows what a Republican committeeman is these days, when you’re more likely to read that some hack Ukrainian prosecutor holds the keys to Trump’s re-election.
It’s 2016 all over again, folks. The only thing that’s changed is the name of the corrupt foreign country that Trump is tapping to influence his re-election to the presidency. Even some of the players are the same. Remember Paul Manafort, the late, lamented former Trump campaign chairman who fancied ostrich skin jackets and $12,000 suits? Well, old Paul is currently sporting prison polyester, waist chains and handcuffs, and he’s ba-a-a-a-a-a-ack!
Manafort’s name surfaced last month in reports that Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has been talking to the jailed former Trump campaign manager through his attorneys, seeking confirmation of a free-floating right-wing conspiracy theory that it wasn’t the Russians who meddled on behalf of Trump in the 2016 election, but the Ukrainians who butted in on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Yep, you read that right. From his cell in prison, no less, Manafort has been pushing a narrative about the 2016 election that discredits the rationale behind the entire investigation by Robert Mueller into Russian election meddling.
Even the name of Konstantin Kilimnik is back in the news. Remember him? He was Manafort’s Ukrainian-born former partner who famously joined him in a New York cigar bar where Manafort passed him polling data from the Trump campaign for the hotly-contested states of Michigan and Wisconsin, among others. And why would Trump’s campaign manager give Trump campaign polling data that was ordinarily kept secret to a Russian national? Could it have had anything to do with the timing of the release of Russian-hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in the closing days of the campaign? Kilimnik, who the FBI says has ties to Russian intelligence services, has also been pushing the theory that it wasn’t Russians who hacked the Democrats’ emails, it was Ukrainians.
The fact is, there is so much new stuff about Trump trying to get a foreign country to help in his re-election that we are liable to forget the outrages against our democracy that we’ve already endured. So let’s stop right now and remind ourselves that it was the Mueller investigation that produced 25 indictments of Russian citizens for hacking Democratic Party emails and for running a social media campaign intended to influence the 2016 presidential election. And it was also Mueller and his prosecutors who indicted and convicted Trump’s former campaign manager, — that would be Manafort —for tax and financial fraud crimes that landed him in prison for seven and a half years.
Let’s also remember where Manafort carried out the crimes that landed him in prison: Ukraine. According to the Washington Post, as part of a plea deal, “Manafort acknowledged that he made more than $60 million in Ukraine, laundering more than $30 million of it through foreign companies and bank accounts to hide it from the IRS and cheating the government out of $15 million in taxes. He also agreed that he had lobbied in the United States on behalf of Ukrainian officials without registering and that he conspired to tamper with witnesses in his case.”
And where do we find ourselves today? Right back in Ukraine. This time it’s Manafort’s former boss, Donald Trump himself, who has been personally managing the campaign to get the Ukrainian government to help his re-election efforts. In fact, it was this week that we learned from George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state in charge of Ukraine, how Trump wanted Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden and the 2016 election. Kent told House impeachment investigators that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to a microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton,” according to the Washington Post.
Even the minor characters are similar. In 2016, we had low-lifes like Kilimnik and “Professor” Joseph Mifsud running around on the fringes of Russia’s efforts to penetrate the Trump campaign and influence the presidential election. For 2020, we’ve got a couple of real jewels by the names of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both born in the former Soviet Union, and you guessed it! Both are currently under indictment on federal campaign finance charges. In 2016, the connections to Trump were made through Manafort and campaign advisers like George Papadopoulos. This time, it’s Giuliani who is Trump’s cut-out to these foreign-born scam artists. And what was Giuliani using Parnas and Furman for? According to The New York Times, beginning in January of this year, “Mr. Giuliani had enlisted Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman to collect information and make connections in Ukraine that could be used to damage Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential contender, and to undermine the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
Even the way they have been moving funny money around was reminiscent of 2016. Back then, Manafort had pulled in millions from his work for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, which he laundered through shell companies and bank accounts in Cyprus. This year, Parnas and his buddies used a company called Fraud Guarantee, that apparently had no employees and no customers, to funnel money to Giuliani through a complicated deal with a Long Island lawyer and a shell company in Belize.
Parnas and Fruman were tapped out, having recently made the illegal $325,000 contribution to America First Action, a super PAC supporting Donald Trump, for which they are now under indictment. But they wanted a connection to Giuliani they could use back in Ukraine to drum up business deals, and apparently the way you get connected to Giuliani is to give him money. So they got a Long Island lawyer named Charles Gucciardo, who was a Trump supporter and large-money donor, to invest in their company, and then used the good offices of Fraud Guarantee to funnel $500,000 to Giuliani.
Parnas and Furman have appeared in numerous photographs with President Trump, including photos taken during a private dinner in the White House attended by Giuliani and Vice President Mike Pence. Trump, of course, has claimed that he doesn’t know either Parnas or Fruman and has “never met them.”
It’s déjà vu all over again, isn’t it? In 2016, the Trump campaign was linked to Russia. This time, it’s Ukraine. In 2016, it was Manafort. This time, it’s Giuliani. Both of them linked to shady characters from Russia and Ukraine, both of them on the take for money that has been passed through shell companies and offshore banks. These guys can’t touch anything without turning it into a crooked scheme. And the biggest and most crooked scheme of all is Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election.
Donald Trump Jr. compared the sacrifices of fallen troops to those his family made to get to the White House in his new book “Triggered.”
Don Jr., the son of a man who allegedly escaped the Vietnam War draft by obtaining a bogus doctor’s note claiming he had bone spurs in his foot, recalled the day before his father’s inauguration when President-elect Donald Trump brought his family to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in a passage highlighted bythe Washington Post.
“I rarely get emotional, if ever. I guess you'd call me hyper-rational, stoic,” Don Jr. wrote. “Yet, as we drove past the rows of white grave markers, in the gravity of the moment, I had a deep sense of the importance of the presidency and a love of our country.”
Standing there surrounded by the graves of more than 400,000 troops and their families, Don Jr. wrote, he could not help but think of his own families “sacrifices.”
“In that moment, I also thought of all the attacks we’d already suffered as a family and about all the sacrifices we’d have to make to help my father succeed — voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were ‘profiting off the office,’” he wrote.
"Frankly, it was a big sacrifice, costing us millions and millions of dollars annually . . . Of course, we didn't get any credit whatsoever from the mainstream media, which now does not surprise me at all,” he added.
Don Jr. did not mention that his father broke with decades of precedent by retaining ownership of his company and continuing to profit from international business ventures. Don Jr.’s sense of victimhood was also an ironic twist in a book — that is effectively cashes in on his newfound relevance — in which he writes that a “victimhood complex has taken root in the American left.” His father later plugged the book on Twitter, benefiting his son even further by reaching the president’s 66 million followers.
Much of the book finds the son of the most powerful man in the world complaining that his family is the victim of unfair attacks.
In one passage, Don Jr. refutes critics who have called his father “racist” by pointing out that Trump allowed him and Eric to play with Michael Jackson as children and let him go on vacation with former NFL star Herschel Walker.
Considering "all the things my father has been called, particularly a 'racist,' it sure sounds odd that he’d let his son vacation with a black man or hang out with Michael Jackson, doesn’t it?" he wrote. “If he’s a racist, he’s sure not very good at it.”
Don Jr. even compared former special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation, which was ordered by Trump-appointed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after extensive evidence of the campaign’s contacts with Russians during the 2016 election, to the FBI’s smear campaign against civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr.
"Even now there are forces deep inside our government trying to bury evidence of wrongdoing against my father,” he wrote. “If those people have a hand in writing the history of the Russia hoax — and believe me, they will try — they will say that the Mueller investigation was based on real evidence and that Donald Trump and his administration really did commit obstruction of justice.”
“If you don't think something like that could ever happen, consider this: it's happened before — to, of all people, Martin Luther King Jr,” Don Jr. wrote. "J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI kept a file on Dr. King for years. After living through the past three years, can you honestly say that anything has really changed? Or is it more of the same?"
Don Jr.’s comments comparing his family’s “sacrifices” to those of fallen soldiers did not sit well with Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who is an Iraq War veteran.
"Eight men I served with are buried in Section 60 of Arlington. I visit them monthly," he tweeted. "Even if Donald JR. lived a 1,000 years he will never even get close to being as good and honorable as they were. Sacrifice is only a word to the Trumps."
Hours after Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney claimed “absolute immunity” from cooperating with the House impeachment probe into President Donald Trump, Democrats leading the inquiry released sworn testimony from two key witnesses who placed the chief of staff at the center of President Donald Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.
Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviser, told House impeachment investigators last month about a July 10 meeting in which U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland “blurted out” Mulvaney’s role in arranging a White House visit for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Mulvaney personally ordered the hold on Ukraine aid. His refusal to come forward and tell Congress why he did that is utterly damning.”
—Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.)
“Well, we have an agreement with the chief of staff for a meeting if these investigations in the energy sector start,” Sondland said, according to Hill. Sondland was apparently referring to Burisma, a natural gas company that used to employ Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son.
Then-national security adviser John Bolton “immediately stiffened and ended the meeting” after Sondland’s remarks, Hill told House Committees.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official who listened to Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky, corroborated Hill’s account of the White House meeting, which was attended by Ukrainian officials and Trump advisers.
“Sondland relatively quickly went into outlining how the—you know, these investigations need to—on the deliverable for these investigations in order to secure this meeting [between Trump and Zelensky],” Vindman said. “I heard him say that this had been coordinated with White House Chief of Staff Mr. Mick Mulvaney.”
Erin Banco, national security reporter for The Daily Beast, reported that Hill and Vindman’s testimonies “mark the most direct link between the scandal now imperiling the presidency and the president’s chief of staff.”
The depositions were made public just hours after Mulvaney refused to comply with a subpoena to testify as part of House Democrats’ impeachment probe.
The acting chief of staff reportedly informed House committees “one minute before” his deposition was scheduled to begin that he would not show up and asserted “absolute immunity.”
Legal analysts on Friday swiftly called into question the legal basis for Mulvaney’s “absolute immunity claim”:
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Mulvaney, who previously ran the Office of Management and Budget, became a focus of House Democrats’ investigation after the Washington Postreported in September that he put a hold on $400 million of appropriated Ukraine aid on instructions from Trump. During a press briefing last month, Mulvaney admitted the aid was withheld to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations on behalf of Trump.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) tweeted Friday that it is “hard to imagine something more suspicious and damaging than the White House’s own chief of staff afraid to tell the truth under oath.”
“Mulvaney personally ordered the hold on Ukraine aid,” said Beyer. “His refusal to come forward and tell Congress why he did that is utterly damning.”
Virtually all political analysis shares a common premise that voters are divided into various ideological camps, and that while they might be coaxed to support a politician from a different spot on the spectrum they will naturally gravitate to candidates who share their label. Every day, you will find opinion columns and news reports that assume, for example, that Joe Biden’s supporters would search for another moderate Democrat if he fades, or that warn that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would struggle to win the votes of mainstream liberals in Wisconsin, or otherwise begin with similar “political lane”-based premises.
But in the cumulative exit polls for the 2016 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton among voters who wanted the next president to be more liberal than Obama, just as you would expect, but he also won over Democratic voters who wanted a more conservative president than Obama. Clinton won handily by dominating among those who told pollsters that they thought Obama was about where they wanted the next president to be ideologically.
Currently, and very much contrary to the conventional wisdom, progressives Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are tied as the most frequently cited second choice by those who prefer the more moderate Joe Biden, according to Morning Consult’s polling. Warren supporters are only slightly more likely to name Sanders as their second choice (28 percent) than to pick Biden (24 percent), and the same is true of Sanders voters–32 percent say Warren is their number 2, and 28 percent pick Biden. The top second choice among those backing Pete Buttigieg, who is often described as competing in Biden’s “moderate” lane, is Warren.
The reality is that most voters aren’t nearly as ideological as the people who write about politics (and political junkies on Twitter) believe. There is some evidence that the electorate has become more ideological with our rising polarization, but even as more identify as “very liberal” or “very conservative,” when you drill down a bit, most people still aren’t consistently so in their actual beliefs.
One shouldn’t overstate the case. It’s not that ideological affinity plays no role whatsoever in voters’ candidate selection, or that voters who place a great deal of emphasis on ideology don’t exist. Rather, perceived ideological alignment is only one among a mishmash of factors, often irrational, that go into voters’ choice of candidates. The media tend to report as if it’s the primary factor, but it’s probably pretty low on the list after personal affinity–the one you’d want to have a proverbial beer with–cues from your in-group (or in-groups), the view that a primary candidate can win in the general election, etc.
When we get to a general election, the storyline tends to shift to independents, who are often portrayed as moderate “swing-voters” that might be scared away from a party that moves too far toward the left or right. Such voters do exist–they’re not entirely mythical creatures like leprechauns–but not in significant numbers. Most independents are “closet partisans” who vote consistently for the same party (when they vote at all), and studies suggest that, on average, their politics don’t differ significantly from those of partisans.
There’s a correlate when the media cover various policy proposals. Many pundits and reporters assume that various proposals will appeal to or alienate this or that group of voters. This is based on what political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels call “the folk theory” of democracy. The idea is that people identify with a party or a candidate because they perceive that doing so will advance their own rational interests.
But in their book, Democracy for Realists, the scholars make a pretty strong case that voters tend to work backwards, first developing an attachment to a candidate (or party), and then working backwards to support the policies for which the candidate advocates. They wrote in The Washington Post in 2016 that “decades of social-scientific evidence show that voting behavior is primarily a product of inherited partisan loyalties, social identities and symbolic attachments. Over time, engaged citizens may construct policy preferences and ideologies that rationalize their choices, but those issues are seldom fundamental.”(As someone who writes frequently about healthcare policy, it’s quite clear that most of the people yelling at me on Twitter aren’t well versed in the subject but nonetheless have strong beliefs that correlate perfectly with whether or not my writing supports their favorite candidate’s position.) There are exceptions–Achen and Bartels point to single-issue voters who care deeply about issues like guns or abortion–but for the most part, affinity for a candidate comes first.
There’s an important caveat here. It’s very likely that lazy political analysis can create a feedback loop that effectively makes ideology more important to voters than it would otherwise be. A broad body of research has shown that most people don’t follow politics very closely and aren’t well-versed in policy details, so they tend to look for cues among their social affinity groups and other influencers. The political press influences perceptions and the constant drumbeat of reporting and analysis about how a given candidate may or may not align with this or that group likely creates a self-fulfilling prophesy by telling voters who is and who isn’t in their “lane,” or which candidates are “one of them.”
There is evidence that a candidate perceived as being outside the mainstream will face a small penalty with voters for that perception–much smaller than most pundits would tell you, but a penalty nonetheless. Most political journalists have a fairly strong bias toward centrism, and it’s quite likely that hearing over and over again that a given candidate’s policies are too far to the left or right to attract broad support can bring that penalty down on a campaign even if voters wouldn’t otherwise feel that those policies are problematic.
With some exceptions, the political press in this country is abysmal at analyzing politics consistent with empirical research into how it all works. Political journalists not only have a tendency to prize moderation, but most remain deeply wedded to the “folk theory” of democracy, and that results in coverage that skews public opinion in all sorts of ways that are ultimately deleterious to healthy democratic debates.
There are many things that being a billionaire can buy you: Mansions, yachts, famous works of art, servants, secure spots at Ivy League schools for your kids, board seats on prestigious foundations. But perhaps the most important thing that being a billionaire buys you is the opportunity to live in a world where everyone around you is kissing your ass. People will fawn over you like you're the smartest person in the world, especially if they want some of your money. Politicians, activists and especially fundraisers eagerly agree with every word that falls out of your mouth like it's the truest pearl of wisdom. Even the most self-aware among us, if we were living such a life, would start to think our farts smelled like roses and that any criticism, no matter how mild, was a serious oppression no human being should endure.
That's my theory, anyway, about the very long and public tantrum we're getting from our billionaire class in the face of a Democratic primary where two of the top candidates are daring to suggest that perhaps billionaires are not, in fact, a billion times greater than everyone else and should be taxed at rates that reflect the fact that they are not untouchable gods who have deigned to walk among us (or at least look at us through limousine windows).On Thursday, billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg declared his intention to run in the Democratic primary. He's made noises about this before, mostly in an effort to scare the more progressive candidates into toning down their rhetoric, so it's worth retaining a healthy skepticism until he actually makes it official. But it also speaks to the outsized ego that being too rich to have anyone telling you no can develop that Bloomberg would think he can just stroll into a race that everyone else has been running for nearly a year now and take first prize.
But mostly, Bloomberg's behavior is part of a larger pattern of billionaires getting fussy in public over the Democratic primary, a fussiness which has been intensifying as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has been campaigning heavily on taxing the wealthy and restricting money's influence on politics, appears to be gaining momentum going into the actual voting portion of the primary season, which starts with February's Iowa caucus.
Billionaire whining is reaching stratospheric pitches, as evidenced by hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman nearly bursting into tears on live television at how mean Warren supposedly is.
"We need a unifier in that position because the country is being torn apart," Cooperman said, getting choked up over the tragedy of a candidate who sometimes suggests that extremely wealthy people might owe something to the country that has done so much for them.
The problem, of course, is that the number of people who are in Cooperman's wealth bracket is tiny. Warren estimates that Cooperman is the top 0.0002% of Americans, wealth-wise. It would be more divisive, population-wise, to start singling out people whose hobby is collecting belly button lint, though there's no reason for it as that hobby is mostly harmless while hoarding massive amounts of wealth is not.
All this follows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg grabbing headlines last month, when audio was released of him going on a major victim trip in the face of Warren's candidacy, saying, "if someone's going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight."
Zuckerberg was complaining about Warren's proposal to break up the tech companies with anti-trust actions, something she probably wouldn't even need Congress to do if she were president. But it contributed to this larger narrative of billionaires panicking in the face of Warren's rise, because she is perceived as somehow a threat to their massive wealth and power.
Because of all this, it's probably no surprise that Bill Gates — who has gotten an atypical amount of attention lately due to his regrettable relationship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein — got flamed far and wide for making an unfunny joke about Warren's proposed wealth tax this week.
"If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine," Gates, who is worth $108 billion, said at a conference. "But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over."
To be quite clear, Gates was joking when he said this. Gates is one of the few billionaires who is pretty liberal and believes in raising taxes on the rich like himself. And he seemed to be talking about Warren — or any Democrat, really — when he said, "I hope the more professional candidate is an electable candidate."
Still, the comments created a real opportunity for progressives to highlight yet again how much money these billionaires actually have. Warren's campaign responded put up a "Calculator for the Billionaires" that estimates Gates would pay a little over $6 billion in taxes, which is nothing compared to his massive wealth.
Gates may have meant well, but the fact that he was even being asked about Warren and the wealth tax highlighted the larger problem, which is that the feelings and desires of billionaires are centered in our politics in a way that is not justified by their actual importance or numbers. And the very idea that this might start being slightly less true than it used to be is causing a whole bunch of super-rich people to flip out. It would explain why Bloomberg is running and why Cooperman is crying on TV.
The focus that the whiny billionaires have on Warren is noteworthy because she is hardly the only candidate in the race who wants to raise taxes on the ultra-rich. Sanders is neck-in-neck with Warren in many polls and has the same willingness to tell the ultra-rich they need to pay higher taxes, but he doesn't seem to be attracting the same levels of negativity.
Part of that is no doubt the perception that Warren has the wind at her back and can really win this thing. But I suspect gender plays a big role, too. However hurt men with fragile egos are by male criticism, the words of women tend to cut more deeply. Women are still expected to be flatterers and soothers, and so a woman who bucks that role to offer robust criticism gets a lot more notice — and anger — from delicate men.
This matters, because this isn't about money — not really. As Paul Krugman pointed out earlier this week in the New York Times, the Wall Street class attacked Barack Obama, who handled them gently despite the fact that many of them played a direct role in destroying the economy in 2008. Instead, he argues, this is because billionaires "seem to be snowflakes, emotionally unable to handle criticism".
Which, again, makes sense. Money buys clothes and houses, but mostly it buys you an audience of ass-kissers wherever you go. Criticism then must truly feel like a shock to the system.
The pity party for the rich got particularly out of hand when former Vice President Joe Biden, who is leading in the polls and is still Warren's main competition, accused Warren of "elitism" for running on a platform of much more aggressive taxation than the one he proposes.
It's a perplexing message, as it seems frankly anti-elite to restructure the tax code to redistribute more money away from the rich and towards working people. But it makes sense in the context of Biden's campaign strategy, which has been focused mainly on raising money from rich donors. Biden clearly feels his target audience of millionaires and billionaires wants to hear how they're the ones being oppressed by "elites".
For her part, Warren is clearly delighted by the negative attention from billionaires, sending out a fundraising email mocking billionaires for "literally shedding tears" at the idea they may "no longer have a government that caters to their every need."
Her glee makes sense. Raising taxes on the rich is extremely popular, not just with Democrats and independents, but even with Republican voters. Maybe there was a time when most Americans, as per that (apocryphal?) John Steinbeck quote, thought of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but that time seems to have passed.
More importantly, Americans really don't like how the rich in this country feel entitled to buy up our democracy. And that's what this fight is really about: Billionaires who cannot believe that anyone could win who doesn't kiss their rings first. But the outsized impact of money on American politics is what is ruining this country, and the public — especially Democratic voters — know it. Which Bloomberg is certain to discover if he's foolish enough to make good on his threat to run this time.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about President Trump's defense strategy in the Ukraine scandal, noting that he's basically running the same play that he ran during the Mueller investigation. He finds a few catchphrases to use on Twitter and during interviews and just repeats them over and over again. It's a crude salesman's trick and not one you'd expect to be effective in dealing with a legal and political scandal, but Trump thinks he was able to survive the Russia probe by yelling "No collusion, no obstruction!" and denigrating the press and the investigators.
He will almost certainly go with his gut instinct again and there's probably nothing anyone can do about it. But that doesn't mean there isn't a very lively debate among Republicans about the right course of action.
Trump's allies have complained for weeks about his stubborn refusal to have an impeachment "war room," as Bill Clinton did back in 1998. The fact is that it wouldn't do much good. Its efficacy under Clinton depended on message discipline and a president who could at least pretend that the process wasn't interfering with his ability to do the job. Obviously Trump would be unable to do either of those things. But he has brought in a couple of spokespeople to deal with impeachment questions, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Treasury Department spokesman Tony Sayegh. (Bondi is uniquely qualified for this gig, since she herself was credibly accused of a quid pro quo with Trump during the 2016 campaign.)
The Trump supporter who seems most at sea with all this is Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, perhaps the president's most loyal minion. Graham started out denying the whole thing outright, just as Trump did. On Sept. 25, he told reporters:
It turned out that absolutely did exist. Yet Graham still seemed to think that was all there was to it. On Oct. 20, he told Axios on HBO:
— (@)
More than half a dozen witnesses have now testified that the quid pro quo was discussed constantly and caused a full-blown uproar among the Foreign Service professionals. Graham remained the good soldier, parroting Trump's language but not sounding terribly convincing. On Oct. 25, he said: "He's telling me that the phone call was perfect. I'm saying the phone call was OK with me."
On Tuesday of this week, Graham finally threw up his hands, saying, "I've written the whole process off. I think this is a bunch of BS," telling reporters he won't even read any of the transcripts — the same ones he had previously clamored for Democrats to release. But by Wednesday, he was taking yet another tack:
— (@)
This has become known as the "moron defense," which holds that the president is too dumb to commit all the crimes it appears he has committed. So far, Graham's the only one I've heard articulate that defense in this case and I would guess that's because it's bound to make Trump livid. You may have noticed that he sees himself as a "very stable genius" and he'd probably rather be impeached than hear Republicans say that he was too stupid to have committed a crime. Which really is stupid, but there we are.
The other defense that's apparently being discussed among the senators who will supposedly be the jurors in an impeachment trial is the one that says, "Yeah, he did it, but it doesn't rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor." Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told the Washington Post that Trump had no corrupt intent when he did what did. Kennedy said, “To me, it all turns on intent, motive. ... Did the president have a culpable state of mind? … Based on the evidence that I see, that I’ve been allowed to see, the president does not have a culpable state of mind.”
According to the testimony of former State Department official George Kent, the White House insisted that the president of Ukraine go on CNN and use three particular words: investigation, Biden and Clinton. What could possibly be the corrupt intent in that?
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is pushing the idea that Trump's defense team in a Senate trial should call Joe and Hunter Biden to testify in public. So far, other Republican senators haven't seemed too keen on that idea, but seeing as they're all afraid to cross Trump it's possible that if he decides he wants this, they will follow his orders. He seems to like the idea:
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Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that there is a brewing battle between White House counsel Pat Cipollone and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, with each demanding to be in charge of impeachment strategy. Mulvaney should probably be careful what he wishes for: Along with EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, he's on a House GOP list of possible scapegoats to take the fall for Trump's corrupt bargain with Ukraine.
Richard Nixon tried that by throwing his two most trusted aides, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, over the side. They did it gladly. They'd been with him for years and were his loyal Praetorian guards. Somehow, I doubt that these three amigos feel that way about Trump. Sondland and Mulvaney hardly know him, and it's hard to imagine Giuliani falling on his sword and winding up in federal prison, as Haldeman and Ehrlichman did. Anyway, we all know what happened to Nixon, don't we?
Finally, we have the working White House impeachment war room that will almost certainly handle Trump's defense on an official basis. Its two arms would be Fox News and the Twitter feed of Donald Trump Jr. The New York Times did a deep dive into the swift-boat campaign against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the impeachment inquiry last week. Trump Jr and Fox News host Pete Hegseth played a big part in spreading an easily rebutted smear that bubbled up through the right-wing fever swamp. Don Jr. has also tweeted out the name of the purported CIA whistleblower, whom Trump and his henchmen have been trashing nonstop. Whatever happens going forward, we can be sure that Trump family Twitter feeds will play a big part in defending the president throughout the impeachment process.
Lindsey Graham says Trump's Ukraine policy was incoherent. It wasn't. He knew what he wanted. But the strategy to defend the president in this impeachment proceeding is certainly incoherent at this point. He will probably survive a trial in the Senate, but none of his defenders are going to come out looking any better than he does. The central fact they can't accept is that his behavior was indefensible.
In the hours after the slaughter in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3, a final toll emerged: 22 dead, most of them Latinos, some Mexican nationals. A portrait of the gunman accused of killing them soon took shape: a 21-year-old from a suburb of Dallas who had been radicalized as a white supremacist online and who saw immigrants as a threat to the future of white America.
While much of the country reacted with a weary sense of sorrow and outrage, word of the mass killing was processed differently by members of Patriot Front, one of the more prominent white supremacist groups in the U.S.
In secret chat forums, some Patriot Front members embraced the spirit of the anti-immigrant manifesto left behind by the accused gunman. Others floated false conspiracy theories: the CIA was behind the murders; the accused killer was actually Jewish. Still other members cautioned that the group had its own “loose cannons” to worry about. It would be a bad look if the next mass murderer was one of their own.
But there was little, if any, regret over the loss of life.
“It shouldn’t be hard to believe that the group facing the harshest oppression from our ruling elite are producing shooters,” one Patriot Front member wrote. “White men are being slowly destroyed in a way calculated to produce resentment and a sense of helplessness. Of course, some of them decide to lash out.”
Several Patriot Front members alerted others to the need to be careful, for the killings in El Paso would likely make the group a target of the FBI.
“Watch your backs out there,” one wrote.
Patriot Front was formed in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. While many on America’s far-right cheered the rally, its violence struck others as a public-relations debacle for the white nationalist brand that was sure to attract greater oversight by law enforcement.
Patriot Front aspired to help chart a new way forward: spread propaganda espousing its version of a nascent American fascism; quietly recruit new members worried about a nation overrun by immigrants and a world controlled by Jews; avoid talking about guns or violence online, but engage in a mix of vandalism and intimidation to foster anxiety; wear masks in public and communicate secretly.
“The organization is not about its members,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, once wrote to its members in the secret chats. “It is about its goals. Each person behind the mask is just another awoken member of the nation, who could be anyone who’s had enough.”
ProPublica spent several months examining the makeup and operations of Patriot Front, which records suggest numbers about 300 members.
While the group is careful not to talk about guns online, two members in the last year have been arrested with arsenals of illegally owned high-powered rifles and other weapons. While many of the group’s propaganda “actions” are legal exercises of free speech, its members have been arrested in Boston and Denver in recent months for acts of vandalism. In Boston, three members engaged in a nighttime propaganda effort last winter were arrested on suspicion of weapons possession and assaulting a police officer. What the group touts as political protests have felt to those targeted like acts of menace, as was the case in San Antonio, Texas, last year when Patriot Front members filmed themselves trashing an encampment of immigration activists.
One person whose establishment was targeted by Patriot Front in recent months spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing the group’s return.
“Ordinarily would you call the police if somebody put a big sticker on your door? No,” the person said. “However, once you find out what this is all about, and who is involved, and what they are promoting? Then, yeah, now we are in hate speech space.”
To the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front is a white hate group and a genuine criminal threat. To some of the more avowedly violent neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., Patriot Front is a laughable collection of clowns and cowards, content to chat online and put up stickers while a race war awaits.
But for law enforcement, gauging how serious a threat Patriot Front might pose is difficult. Patriot Front shares qualities both with groups engaged in real domestic terrorism and with fringe political groups.
Asked about the group, the FBI issued a statement that reflected these complexities and the limitations they place on police agencies.
“When it comes to domestic terrorism, our investigations focus solely on the criminal activity of individuals — regardless of group membership — that appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce the civilian population or influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion. We would encourage you to keep in mind that membership in groups which espouse domestic extremist ideology is not illegal in and of itself — no matter how offensive their views might be to the majority of society.”
Rousseau, a Boy Scout and high school journalist before he founded Patriot Front, has much the same profile as the accused gunman in El Paso, Patrick Crusius: both grew up in middle-class suburbs of Dallas — Crusius in Allen, Rousseau 35 miles away in Grapevine; both were seen as unremarkable teenagers before being inculcated in their racist ideology online; both talk of a desire to reclaim America for “true” or “pure” patriots; both regard immigrants as a poisonous and present danger.
In the days after the rampage in El Paso, Rousseau told his members in the secret chats that such acts of wholesale violence were not for him. While fascist causes like Patriot Front’s could survive the blowback from such killings, he said, real success for the group would come from spreading its ideology and increasing its numbers. Of the alleged El Paso shooter, Rousseau wrote in a chat, “He’d have made more progress toward his goals by swallowing the first round in his magazine instead.”
In the months of chats obtained by ProPublica, Rousseau is by turns amateur philosopher and historian, as well as the group’s sole spokesman and its online policeman. He warns members that they will be kicked out if they don’t stay busy — pasting up flyers and conducting banner drops, joining street actions and posting regularly in the chat forums. He has put together a security guide to help Patriot Front members stay anonymous. He waxes admiringly about certain far-right groups in Europe, and he sees them as a model for how to become more serious political players in the years ahead. He has the secret chats routinely deleted, and he tells members to avoid ever writing or saying anything that might later be of interest to a prosecutor.
“It should be known,” he wrote to members recently, “that political dissidents are subject to unjust scrutiny.”
Pete Simi, a professor at Chapman University in California and an expert on white supremacists in the U.S., said Rousseau’s stewardship of Patriot Front is deeply familiar.
“It is very common for the leadership of these groups to disqualify violence, while doing things that are encouraging violence,” Simi said. “It is part of their strategy to avoid liability, while simultaneously promoting hate. When they say they are not violent, this is a lie. They are promoting violence by their goals.”
“Thomas’ Biggest Fear Is Someone Doing Something Crazy”
To gain an understanding of Patriot Front — its origins and ambitions, both the careful talk and the criminal behavior of its members — ProPublica examined hundreds of online postings, interviewed a person who infiltrated the group, obtained police records, reviewed its leader’s public statements online and in a variety of far-right podcasts, collected video material recorded both by the group and members of the public, and traveled to the homes of its founder and two of the members who had recently been arrested.
The person who infiltrated Patriot Front in recent years — posting in the group’s chats and accompanying it in its propaganda actions — sketched out a portrait of its members, which appear to be exclusively male:
They come from seven or eight regional “networks,” and the vast majority of them are recruited online; the typical member is around 25 years old and can be from blue-collar backgrounds or be working as “white-collar tech geeks”; many of them are gamers; few have wives or girlfriends; they can look like “the nerdy boys that sit next to you in high school,” but they clearly sympathize with “right-wing terrorism.”
The person who infiltrated Patriot Front said he applied for membership on the group’s website — the one with the mission statement written by Rousseau. American democracy was dead. The government had been taken over by Jews and other “elites.” Land claimed by descendants of the country’s original white settlers had been surrendered to immigrants of color. The dream was of a white ethnostate, in which all that was good and true and pioneering about the America of long ago could be restored.
The person who gained entrance to the group said Rousseau was one of three Patriot Front members who interviewed him on the telephone when he applied. He was asked to explain his political evolution, to say which political figures he hated and admired most, to state the circumstances in which the use of violence would be OK and to articulate the greatest threat to America. He was told Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” would be required reading.
The chats reviewed by ProPublica show Rousseau spends lots of time online pressing members to take part in targeting streets, parks and colleges with the group’s propaganda. He and others delight in seeing their actions reflected in the SPLC’s nationwide map recording acts of hate and in the media. Last spring, the group tried to stage protests in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s offices in multiple cities, including New York.
“One minute of action is better than 10,000 books on ideology,” Rousseau told his members.
Rousseau, still a teen when he founded Patriot Front, makes clear in the secret chats reviewed by ProPublica that he is in charge, though he’s happy to go without a formal title.
“The title commander gives me bad flashbacks,” he wrote in a chat once. “If I absolutely had to have a title, it would probably be general director. But my name works just fine for now.”
The chats show some members regard Rousseau as a disciplined and effective spokesman for the group, and they appear to heed his repeated scoldings about preserving their anonymity.
“The enemy cannot attack you if they do not know who you are,” Rousseau wrote.
Using the pseudonym Samuel, a member from New York expanded on the idea in response.
“I would say the biggest accomplishment of masking up is obfuscating our total numbers,” he wrote. “We can make them feel as if there are thousands of us when it’s only a few hundred, and we could be anyone and no one. Next time they are at the CVS and see a white kid with a neat haircut, it could be us. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.”
Examples of Patriot Front flyers and stickers. Patriot Front’s messaging features symbols like flags, bald eagles, and red, white and blue motifs, in an effort to hide its white supremacist views. (Via Facebook)
Rousseau, when he isn’t criticizing members who violate the ban on talking about guns or violence, can often be found policing the group’s ideological thinking. Nazism, however popular among members, can’t now be the goal, Rousseau said.
“This is not Germany, this is not the 1930s,” he chastised. “Get a grip on the fact that we’re activists, not re-enactors trying to scratch some self-indulgent itch for a political fantasy.”
Rousseau conducts his online leadership from the home he shares with his divorced father in Grapevine, a largely white, solidly middle-class city between Dallas and Fort Worth. ProPublica went to see Rousseau there this summer, and we found the shades drawn in every window and a rusting boat filled with fallen leaves on the property.
Rousseau came to the door, but he closed it quickly and would not talk. The following day, the red sports car in the driveway had been reparked, making it hard to see the lone license plate on its rear end.
Interviews with people in and around Grapevine — those who went to school with Rousseau, those who participated in the Boy Scouts with him, a man who dated his mother — produced a unanimous sense of surprise that he’d started an organization committed to an all-white America.
He’d mixed easily with the diverse array of students at his high school, and while he was against gay marriage, he was regarded more as a nice, conservative boy than a threat. He wore his hair long, in braids or a bun, and was obsessed with working out and the state of his physique.
At the student newspaper, he wasn’t regarded as an impressive writer, but he won a national award for editorial cartooning. Classmates saw him as a lazy student and a bit of a loner, but he had a knack for argument and a stubborn streak about never being wrong. The school had its share of racial incidents, but he was never involved and wasn’t seen as condoning them.
When Donald Trump was elected president, some senior boys at the school made a show of chanting, “Build a wall.” Rousseau, for his part, was certainly an ardent Trump supporter — he wore a Make America Great Again hat and carried a Trump lunchbox. But his enthusiasm wasn’t seen as menacing.
“He seemed Republican, but he didn’t seem crazy, said one fellow student.
To someone who was with him in Boy Scouts, Rousseau seemed serious about the organization, and he was elected patrol leader. At the same time, Rousseau could be difficult with adults, developing what the person called an “authoritarian defiance.”
“I’m saddened,” the person said of Rousseau’s embrace of white supremacy.
Simi, the professor at Chapman University, said enough research exists on modern-day white supremacists to develop a profile: young men, isolated and angry in some way despite their relatively privileged upbringing in middle class or affluent circumstances, and vulnerable to invitations to join up with others with similar grievances.
In years past, Simi said, groups like Patriot Front used to recruit potential new members by waiting outside schools for the last children to leave, the loners wandering off long after the final bell. Now such groups don’t have to work so hard to find targets. They have the internet, Simi said.
“It is a central aspect of these groups to take the frustration and anger and combine it with the special feeling and insights of being part of a group,” he said.
Rousseau, then just 18, was in Charlottesville in 2017, marching in the “Unite the Right” rally as a member of Vanguard America. The Anti-Defamation League calls Vanguard America a neo-Nazi group formed in 2016 that, like Patriot Front after it, was chiefly engaged in spreading propaganda. James Fields, the white supremacist convicted of murdering a young protester at the Charlottesville event, was photographed there carrying a Vanguard America shield, though he was not a member of the group.
Vanguard America splintered after the debacle in Virginia. Some wanted to abandon efforts to disguise their Nazi leanings and simply be brazen in their public look and violent aims. Rousseau took a different tack, and he started Patriot Front as an ostensibly more strategic, savvy, careful alternative. It would embrace more homegrown symbols — the flag, the bald eagle and patriotic language. Such shifts might attract a wider membership.
“I did go to Charlottesville. Some bad activism there,” Rousseau wrote in one of the secret chats. “I’ve done my part to learn from my mistakes.”
While Rousseau publicly and in the chats reviewed by ProPublica disavows violence, some Patriot Front members have shown support for a white supremacist group that embraces it: the Rise Above Movement. Eight RAM members have been arrested on charges related to violence in Charlottesville and in California.
“Gotta love RAM,” a Tennessee member said in the chats. “I hope they see us as 100 percent allies.”
In the chat logs, a Patriot Front member from Texas provides a list of addresses for 11 people in prison or under house arrest, referring to them as “POWs.” The list includes four members of RAM, numerous men arrested for violence in Charlottesville including Fields, and an imprisoned white supremacist in California. The Texan urged Patriot Front members to write to the prisoners and provided links to send some prisoners money directly. He also listed a donation link for a fund tied to Augustus Sol Invictus, a lawyer known for defending white supremacists.
Later in the chats, a member from New York shared a link to a white supremacist online fundraiser, saying proceeds would be given to a legal fund for RAM. He then chimed in that nearly $2,000 had been donated. “When they crack down we double down and become stronger,” he said. “Hail Victory!”
Observers of white hate groups credit Rousseau as a talented in-fighter, and they portray his breakaway from Vanguard America as a shrewd coup.
According to the person who infiltrated Patriot Front, Rousseau worries greatly about his members making the worst strategic mistake: carrying out an act of terrible violence. It would end his group, he has said.
“Thomas’ biggest fear is someone doing something crazy,” said the person who infiltrated Patriot Front.
“We Are Regular People”
Jakub Zak was in bed in the Chicago suburb of Vernon Hills when police, accompanied by his father, shook him awake. The police had been told that Zak, 19, was a member of Patriot Front, and that he might have a stash of illegal guns.
“He appeared nervous and tried to cover a few items on his bed as he put on his blue jeans,” police records say.
The police, though, had a clear view of what couldn’t be hidden: a gun safe meant for rifles, as well as magazines of ammunition on the bedroom floor.
Zak asked his father to make the police leave. His father would not.
“I advised Jakub that we would like for him to be cooperative, and explained to him cooperation goes a long way,” one detective wrote in a formal report, dated April 2018. “I explained to him the decision is for him to make, and he should think what is best for him.”
Zak spoke with his father and then offered the code for the safe. If there were guns in the house, the police wrote, Zak’s father wanted them out.
The police found a loaded 9 mm pistol and then, in a second safe, four more guns, including three high-powered semiautomatic rifles. The police records show Zak’s only concern was whether he could get his case for carrying the guns back after their confiscation.
It is unclear when or how Zak joined Patriot Front. The initial tip sent to law enforcement identified him as a member, one who often posted in the secret chats under the pseudonym “Hussar.” Postings under that name — portions of which were first published by Unicorn Riot, the activist group — suggest Zak was a frequent participant in the group’s propaganda efforts in the streets.
Online, Zak posted a mix of Patriot Front slogans and images — “America: Revolution is tradition”; “Deport them all.” But there was also much more explicitly violent material: a young black man lying prone on the street and about to be stomped; a Glock pistol.
Zak, who had no prior criminal record, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun possession charge and was sentenced to probation. Whether local police referred his case, and his affiliation with Patriot Front, to any other law enforcement agency is unclear.
But the basic facts of Zak’s case amount to one of the hard-to-identify, hard-to-quantify, hard-to-assess threats in the U.S. today: an enthusiastically racist young man exposed to a steady diet of like-minded white supremacists, who doesn’t find it terribly hard to get his hands on dangerous weapons. Crusius, the accused El Paso killer, had no prior record; he lived with his grandparents; his mother is reported to have anonymously called law enforcement, worried once her son had bought a gun, even if it was legal; the parents of a classmate of Crusius’ told a local news organization in Dallas that their son had been encouraged by Crusius to join him in a white supremacist group.
In a brief interview at their home in Vernon Hills, Zak’s parents would not let him be interviewed.
“There is nothing to talk about,” his mother said, claiming he was not a member of any white hate group. “He is going through rough times, and he is in a better place now. I don’t want to start anything. He is getting his life together and planning [for] the future.”
“We are regular people,” his father added.
Concerns about how effectively federal authorities have been in thwarting the threat of white supremacists extends back years, covering both Democratic and Republican administrations. In recent months, though, there has been a series of arrests suggesting that federal and local authorities are being more aggressive.
In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security took care to restate the balance law enforcement has to strike.
“The Department must take care, while addressing the scourge of violence, to avoid stigmatizing populations, infringing on constitutional rights, or attempting to police what Americans should think,” the report said.
Last February, a Patriot Front member, Joffre Cross, was arrested on gun charges in Houston. At a probable cause hearing, authorities said they got on to Cross through phone records belonging to a white supremacist in Texas who was convicted on assault charges this year.
Cross, 33, fits what experts see as another familiar profile for potentially violent white supremacists: a former Army soldier whose association with white supremacists dates back to his active-duty days. Disaffected former soldiers are a prime recruiting target for white hate groups, prized for their gun and bomb training and their possible access to weapons. Cross, while on active duty, was convicted on drug charges and imprisoned for five years. As part of the investigation, the authorities developed information that he was eager to secure weapons for white supremacist groups.
Cross, who has pleaded not guilty, was charged with felony weapons possession after police found guns and body armor in his home.
“If you don’t know me,” Cross once posted on Instagram, “consider this your trigger warning.” Cross and his attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Cross is a regular participant on the Russian social media platform VK, whose terms of service about extremist content are not strictly enforced. His posts are rife with Nazi videos, Holocaust denial material and white supremacists beating protesters.
One post reads: “Help more bees; plant more trees; save the seas; shoot refugees.”
In the Patriot Front chats, Cross continued to post even after his arrest.
“We have to build a foundation that can weather any storm, anything they throw at us,” he wrote last April. “We just have to keep pushing.”
“In the Aggregate They Are Disturbing”
It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2019 when 20 or so masked members of Patriot Front made their way onto a corner of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. They set off flares and smoke devices, delivered a short speech using a megaphone and fled. The police report said it lasted all of three minutes.
Blakely Lord, a high school English teacher, managed to capture the incident on video. In brief, she called the episode “profoundly disturbing.”
“I chose to film because you feel helpless,” Lord said. “I’m a dumpy middle-aged English teacher. I’m not going to get out my sword and face them down.”
She added, “I do think it’s a narrative people need to be thinking about: these little incidents may seem unimportant, but in the aggregate they are disturbing.”
Such disturbances — masked flash mobs, defacing property, distributing propaganda — are the day-to-day work of Patriot Front. Screaming outside an anarchist book fair in Texas. Plastering stickers across multiple store fronts on a busy block in Denver. Parading with flares at night in apublic park in Boston. Posting an “America First” sticker at a gay pride center in Vermont. All in the last year.
Members give one another tips about where to place posters and stickers legally, and they urge one another to wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. But in practice, Patriot Front members frequently target storefronts or places of worship, which is vandalism. Additionally, many colleges and universities, another favorite target for postering, prohibit flyers from nonstudent groups. White supremacists see campuses as a strategic location for flyering: a place to recruit potential members while attracting press coverage to amplify their propaganda.
In Columbus, Georgia, three months ago, two Patriot Front members posted flyers on and around a local synagogue, Temple Israel. “Reclaim America,” read one. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of victory,” read another. And the address of Patriot Front’s website was printed at the bottom of the flyers. The temple’s leadership became aware of Patriot Front’s history and said it was clear the synagogue and its members were targeted because of their faith.
“To me, the sinister aspect is this particular group disguises themselves as patriots, Tiffany Broda, the temple’s president, told the Ledger-Enquirer last July. “Yet they are a hate group, a nationally recognized hate group. And though we don’t want to give them publicity, we think that it’s important to bring this out of the shadows.”
“Jews have been a part of Columbus almost since the founding of our city, which is almost 200 years ago,” Rabbi Beth Schwartz added. “We will remain vigilant as a congregation, vigilant as a Jewish community. We don’t hide our heads in fear.”
Patriot Front members make clear in their chats that such actions — almost always recorded by one of the masked members — have multiple aims: to frighten, to provide material for their own propaganda efforts on social media, and to recruit. The drive to recruit might help explain why college campuses are Patriot Front’s most common targets.
Late last month, Patriot Front launched what it claimed were coordinated actions to distribute flyers and stickers and posters at more than 100 campuses across the country. The group posted on Twitter what it said was evidence of success at 90 schools.
Michael Loadenthal, a visiting professor of sociology at Miami University in Ohio, said Patriot Front had recently been targeting the school.
“Fascists having a public presence is organizing; this is recruitment,” Loadenthal said, adding that the simple idea that “white supremacists are individually radicalized people in their basement at home is wrong.”
“They are a network,” he said. “No particular node is dangerous until they are.”
Simi, the professor in California, said Patriot Front had hit the campus of Chapman University three times in a single month recently. The school, he said, had set up a permanent conference dealing with the nation’s southern border, and Patriot Front had singled out posted materials related to the conference to be defaced or covered up.
“People on the campus get intimidated,” Simi said.
He said the school had to add security cameras and police protection.
“This is part of their strategy,” Simi said of Patriot Front. “These are things they want to happen.”
Thalia Beaty and Lucas Waldron contributed to this report.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas openly called for President Donald Trump to send military forces across the U.S. border into Mexico to address cartel violence in the region while he was speaking to Fox News on Wednesday.
Cotton was addressing the recent horrific killing of at least nine Americans, including six children, in what has been described by media reports as a “highway ambush.”
The slaughter rightly raised alarms, but Cotton’s reaction constituted a staggeringly overblown and perilous response.
“This is the deprave massacre of three women and six children,” he said. “Cartel violence in Mexico has reached an all-time high over the last year, murders have surged under President López Obrador’s policy of ‘hugs not bullets.’ I mean, that may be nice for a children’s fairy tale, but in the real world when the bad guys and cartels have .50 Caliber Machine Guns, the only answer is more bullets and bigger bullets. And if Mexico can’t protect American citizens in Mexico, then we may have to take matters into our own hands.”
He continued: “Look, our special operations forces were able to take down al-Baghdadi in Syria a couple of weeks ago. They did it to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan eight years ago. I have every confidence that if the president directed them to do so, they could impose a world of hurt on these cartels a few dozen miles away from the American border.”
What this constitutes — sending military units in an attack on Mexican soil as we “take matters into our own hand” — is an invasion of a sovereign country and a friendly U.S. neighbor. And while the attack that inspired Cotton’s attack was indeed devastating, it must be remembered that the United States has little high ground to stand on in this regard. Thousands are murder by gun violence every year in the United States, including in massacres that are frequently larger than the Mexican attack Cotton is referring to. When these attacks are carried out by Americans on American soil, Cotton and the rest of the GOP shrug their shoulders and say that nothing can be done to stop gun violence in the U.S. But apparently if they happen just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, it gives Trump a license to invade the country, in Cotton’s view.
I guarantee you’ve never seen a political ad like the video Jeff Sessions posted on Thursday as he launched his bid to reclaim his old Alabama seat in the U.S. Senate.
The announcement of his campaign had been expected after multiple reports found that he was looking to run despite consternation from his fellow Republicans. Sessions had been the senator from deep-red Alabama before he joined President Donald Trump’s Cabinet as attorney general. So in some ways, he’s a natural fit to take on Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who won a fluke special election by running against the catastrophic candidate Roy Moore in 2017. Moore faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with young women and girls in that campaign.
But Sessions was unceremoniously ousted by Trump right after the 2018 midterm elections, and the president had long made his anger at Sessions widely known. He fumed at the attorney general for recusing himself from the Russiainvestigation, even though ethics rules obligated Sessions not to participate in a probe of the Trump campaign after serving as the president’s surrogate ahead of the election. Trump’s firing of Sessions — a clear attempt to wrest control over the investigation — has been an under-discussed instance of potential obstruction of justice or impeachable offense by the president.
All this baggage brings us to Sessions’ surreal campaign video. Knowing he is bound to face criticism from Trump, and knowing that he needs the support of Trump’s base to win 2020, Sessions’s ad pushes a bizarre argument that, despite the fact that the president clearly doesn’t like him, Republican voters should.
He sidestepped the fact that he was fired by Trump in humiliating fashion, saying: “When I left President Trump’s Cabinet, did I write a tell-all book? No. Did I go on CNN and attack the president? Nope! Have I said a cross word about our president? Not one time. And I’ll tell you why: First, that would be dishonorable. I was there to serve his agenda, not mine. Second, the president’s doing a great job for America and Alabama. And he has my strong support.”
The video cannot be fully explained in words, though, because Sessions’ facial expressions and tone add a ridiculous and absurdist element that defies description.
But beyond the aesthetics, the message is just a staggeringly blunt and humiliating one. Sessions knows Alabama voters will know who he is, and he knows they know Trump doesn’t like him. His pitch is: Vote for me anyway, because I won’t let the president’s ferocious personal contempt for me stand in the way of pledging my undying support for him.
Sessions will prostrate himself at the altar of Trump, no matter the cost to his dignity. It’s yet to be seen if that turns out to be a winning campaign message.
A new book by the anonymous Trump administration official who wrote the famous New York Times op-ed detailing a “resistance” to the president with the government is set to be released soon, and the Washington Post has obtained an early copy. It published an article describing the controversial book, which the White House called a “work of fiction.”
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the book or its author. There’s little reason to doubt that the opinion editors at the Times genuinely published the writing of an actual administration official, but without a more rigorous reporting operation behind the book, we shouldn’t be confident its contents aren’t exaggerated or even perhaps fabricated at times.
The official defended their decision to stay anonymous — though not persuasively — and suggested they might eventually come forward, the Post reported:
“I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the author writes. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should center. Some will call this ‘cowardice.’ My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”
More interestingly, the author admitted that the central thesis of the original Times column was mistaken:
“I was wrong about the ‘quiet resistance’ inside the Trump administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is.”
This passage, however, undermines the argument for staying anonymous. It would make sense to say that, while the truth about Trump should be made public, a high-ranking official who is concerned about the president’s conduct would be best to stay anonymous and therefore retain a position to mitigate the damage coming from the White House. But if Trump can’t be mitigated, why stay anonymous? Cowardice, indeed, seems like the most natural explanation.
The book also suggests that other officials in the administration are disturbed by Trump. For example, it recounted:
Senior Trump administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a “midnight self-massacre” to sound a public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government, according to a new book by an unnamed author.
And:
The book contains a handful of startling assertions that are not backed up with evidence, such as a claim that if a majority of the Cabinet were prepared to remove Trump from office under the 25th Amendment, Vice President Pence would have been supportive.
But these claims warrant the most skepticism. (Pence has denied the specific allegation.) A single person can always misunderstand a situation or make faulty inferences about others’ intentions, so relying on this account to draw conclusions about other officials is dicey business.
Some of the book, however, rings true. It said that the president is suspicious of coups, doesn’t like staffers taking notes, and once yelled at an aide who was writing something down during a meeting. This is reminiscent of a section of the Mueller Report in which Trump questioned White House Counsel Don McGahn’s taking of notes. The book also said that officials sometimes wake up “in a full-blown panic” to discover Trump has tweeted something explosive that they need to clean up — this is something we have all seen many times. It also says Trump has a habit of being condescending and misogynistic toward women who work for him, which is hardly surprising and gives a devastating account of his mental health that is consistent with his public appearances:
“All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.”
But this just raises the question: If the most reliable parts of the book are the things we can already assume are true, what’s the point?
With the impeachment inquiry leveling up this month as public hearings begin, and with an election that might actually be the end of Donald Trump now less than a year away, the campaign to let Trump's Republican allies — even the most villainous offenders — move on and pretend this never happened is already underway.
Sadly, the clearest articulation of the let-bygones-be-bygones mentality has come from a Democrat — unsurprisingly, former Vice President Joe Biden.Biden, who is still, somehow, the frontrunner in Democratic primary polling, spoke at a chi-chi fundraiser on Wednesday, and dropped this pearl of wisdom: "With Donald Trump out of the way, you’re going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany."
The people Biden is talking about, let us remember, are not only fully capable adults, but people who believe they are qualified and deserving national leaders. They're not a bunch of adolescents who are just going through a temporary goth-libertarian phase or whatever. But there's no doubt that many Republicans are taking stock of the current political situation, in which Trump is daily cementing his historical legacy as the most embarrassing president ever elected, and plotting how to escape any and all reputational accountability for their role in our current national nightmare.
On Wednesday evening, the Washington Post published a story claiming that Attorney General Bill Barr, who has been the luckiest of Trump spittles since his appointment as Trump's main clean-up guy in February, declined to offer the same level of cover-up services on Trump's current Ukraine scandal that he previously provided on the Russia scandal:
President Trump wanted Attorney General William P. Barr to hold a news conference declaring that the commander in chief had broken no laws during a phone call in which he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political rival, though Barr ultimately declined to do so, people familiar with the matter said.
It's not surprising that Trump wanted Barr to stage a spectacle in which he lies to the American people to cover up for Trump's crimes. After all, Barr did exactly that in the ancient past of, oh, last April, when he embarked on a spin campaign to distort the findings of Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's relationship with a criminal Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election. First though an alleged summary and then through a press conference — both before the release of Mueller's actual report — Barr went hard on the claims that there was nothing of great importance in the document. This turned out to be flat-out false, as Mueller found both extensive efforts at collusion and obstruction of justice and documented them in considerable detail in the novel-length report.
But now there are "people familiar with the matter" who want to make sure the press understands that Barr is suddenly none too keen on helping Trump cover up criminal conspiracies involving foreign governments.
Why "people familiar with the matter" would want to get the word out is not mysterious. "People familiar with the matter" can clearly see that the overwhelming evidence against Trump, coupled with Trump's increasingly frantic behavior, means this situation may be unsalvageable. It's time for "people familiar with the matter" to start looking into life after Trump, and getting in on pretending that all this never happened so that folks like potential President Joe Biden can forgive and forget.
The story about Barr turning his nose up at this particular criminal cover-up spread rapidly, often aided by left-leaning publications. Which is all understandable, since we all enjoy watching rats flying off a sinking ship and Trump flinging the word "fake" around in his usual pathetic response. But it's also unsettling, because Barr — sorry, "people familiar with the matter" — is only doing this because he wants a piece of that sweet post-Trump bygones action that Biden is proposing.
If our political class had any love for this country, they would not let Barr get away with this. The man is a lifelong opponent of democracy who hitched his wagon to Trump because he correctly assessed that Trump shared his love of authoritarian rule. If he abandons Trump, it will only because Trump no longer serves this goal, not because Barr suddenly had an "epiphany".
A similar situation is going on with the anonymously written upcoming book "A Warning," purportedly by the same "senior administration official" who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last year. The book isn't out yet, but the tidbits being released appear geared towards the goal of making sure that many of the people who enabled and protected the Trump presidency can escape any kind of public accountability after he flames out.
The first bit of the book to be leaked suggests that "Anonymous" is casting a wide net of desired redemption. As reported by Yashar Ali of the Huffington Post, "highly placed White House officials did a back-of-the-envelope tally of which Cabinet members" would be willing to invoke their constitutional right to remove Trump and replace him with Vice President Mike Pence.
Pence himself is cast in a redemptive light in this telling, with the claim that "high-level White House aides were certain that Vice President Mike Pence would support the use of the 25th Amendment to have President Donald Trump removed from office because of mental incapacity."
All of this should be taken with a many-carat grain of salt, as this supposed plot to remove Trump never actually happened and Pence continues to be an eager proponent of whatever nonsensical lies the White House tells on any given day to defend Trump's corruption. Moreover, Pence may be neck-deep in this Ukraine scandal himself, casting serious doubts about the veep's eagerness or ability to stay outside the Trumpian blast zone.
And, of course, we now also have Jeff Sessions, having disgraced his already disgraceful career by being Trump's attorney general for a time, eyeballing a return to his Senate seat, where he can pretend none of this ever happened.
Sadly, we will see more of these attempts at rehabbing various high-level Republicans as Trump's apparent implosion continues. The more likely it is that Trump is sent packing to Mar-a-Lago — or better yet, to federal prison — the more Republicans are going to pretend they barely knew the guy.
Unfortunately, as Biden's comments show, too many people are ready and eager to help Republicans out in their quest to recover their reputations, post-Trump. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted on Twitter, "there will be a lot of 'respectable' voices urging us to 'look forward not back.'"
Just as happened after the debacle of the George W. Bush administration, the rehab process will probably work. Soon enough, we'll be seeing Pence, or possibly even Trump himself, hanging out with Ellen DeGeneres or some other liberal celebrity. A lot of powerful people have a lot of interest in making sure that those who aided and abetted this criminal presidency get away scot-free.
That doesn't mean that the rest of us should give in so easily. Refusing, every step of the way, to pretend that everything is cool and normal now and it's just like Trump never happened is critical. The more we refuse to play along with this charade, the more likely it is there will be real consequences for the people who did this to us. More important still, there will be less chance that they'll try to do it again.
