Opinion

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson -- one of former President Donald Trump’s most servile sycophants in the U.S. Senate -- has decided to distance himself from the boss now that he’s facing a tough reelection fight.

Johnson trailed Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes by seven points in a recent Marquette Law School poll on the Senate race. Progressives have rallied around Barnes since he outlasted a tough primary field, terming Johnson an “insurrectionist.”

When George W. Bush announced that the United States had begun military action in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by al-Qaeda, he emphasized that the mission would also focus on providing humanitarian aid to the citizens of Afghanistan. "The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies," he explained. "As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine, and supplies." The hypocrisy of a military strike framed as a humanitarian mission was on full display. For those of us who could immediately see through Bush's hubris and his malignant American exceptionalism, the global war on terror epitomized the toxic nature of America's culture of political hypocrisy.

This article first appeared in Salon.

The problem with politics is that it's a zero-sum game. There is a finite number of voters out there; every vote that you get is a vote the other side doesn't get. That's why the headlines following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago were practically unanimous: "FBI search cements Trump's hold on GOP," screamed the Hill. "Trump's dominance in GOP comes into focus, worrying some in the party," was how the Washington Post put it.

This article first appeared in Salon.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that social media platforms are destroying democracy. They allow people to sort themselves into homogenous tribes, he argues.

Haidt says that they can spread disinformation more quickly. People could be attacked more easily. “It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left and trolls,” he writes.

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. But the dramatic testimony and video footage at the January 6 hearings documented the obsessive campaign by Donald Trump and some of his followers to convince people that Trump had, in fact, won.

They were (and some still are, or say they are) convinced Trump won in the face of overwhelming evidence of Biden’s victory – from state boards of elections, state recounts, the actions of the electoral college, rulings in dozens of appeals and court challenges, the Attorney General, Congressional certification of the election results, the inauguration of President Biden, media reports and, now, finally, the House hearings.

Back in 2019, I saw Liz Cheney as the most dangerous woman in America. I was referring at the time to her grotesque insistence that Democrats supported "infanticide" and the absurd threat to shut down the government unless Congress paid for Trump's stupid wall. And she was more than happy to be a Trumpish attack dog, going after Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with undisguised glee. Cheney wasn't just the daughter of one of the primary architects of the Iraq war debacle, she worked in the State Department and helped with its execution. As a member of GOP House leadership, she was a rising star in GOP politics and a likely presidential candidate who had a good shot at becoming the first woman president as the successor to Donald Trump. I sounded the alarm again in 2021.

A lot has certainly changed since then, hasn't it?

Tuesday night, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming lost the Republican primary by 37 points to Harriet Hageman. Cheney has drawn relentless fire from Donald Trump for being one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. Hageman, on the other hand, ran on a platform of advocating Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election and denouncing efforts to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Late Tuesday, Trump gloated about Cheney's loss, posting that "Cheney should be ashamed of herself" for standing up against Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The very next day, Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, filed a 121-page motion asking a judge to reject a subpoena to testify in a case investigating Trump's efforts to steal the state's electoral votes from President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

On the surface, these two events may seem unrelated. The timing, however, is likely not a coincidence.

Liz Cheney is gone, at least from Congress. Her bid for re-election was thwarted in Wyoming by a Republican candidate whose lips are permanently sewn onto Donald Trump's backside — making her part of an all-too-real human centipede.

But it remains to be seen whether striking down Cheney destroys her, or makes her more powerful than we can imagine.

The Department of Justice is now formally investigating Donald Trump for possibly serious crimes including violating the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice in connection to his unlawful possession of top secret and highly classified materials.

During a court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago resort and home last week, the FBI retrieved 11 sets of classified documents that, according to some reports, may include information about "nuclear weapons." Donald Trump had more than a year to return these documents and did not do so. One of his attorneys apparently misrepresented the facts when informing the Justice Department that all the classified documents in Donald Trump's possession had been returned in June.

What would the American republic look like if, one day, the fascists just disappeared? What could we accomplish if the people most hostile to bargaining were not stabbing democracy in the back?

It would look like the Democratic Party.

In 2012, as Barack Obama ran for reelection, the right-wing website Breitbart set out to examine his time at Harvard Law School. They were looking for a scandal. They found a tape of Obama, then a law student, speaking at a political rally. He praised one of his professors, the controversial African-American scholar Derrick Bell, and hugged him. Bell, it turned out, was a practitioner of something called Critical Race Theory (CRT), an academic field far less controversial then than it is today. Guilt by association had been used against Obama before, most notably in regard to his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008, but this time the attempt fell flat. The media moved on, and CRT ceased to be of public interest for almost ten years.

Under examination by more than thirty states, CRT is now back in the spotlight. Then, as now, it is more controversial than radical. For thirty years, CRT has been a school of thought among a small, informal, group of professors, mostly in law. These writers examine disparate topics, but all view the law through the prism of America’s fractured race relations. A Columbia University law professor, Kimberle Crenshaw, coined the term. For her, CRT was “a way of seeing… the ways that our history has created these [racial] inequalities that now can almost effortlessly be reproduced unless we attend to their existence.” Examining how our history created racial inequalities remains worthwhile, even if it makes some people uncomfortable.

Donald Trump's in the headlines again, and as usual, it's because of sinister and criminal activity. This time, there's the added bonus of suspected espionage, likely around nuclear secrets, because Trump's criminal aesthetic is as understated as his tacky gold-plated New York penthouse. Unsurprisingly, this is causing some in the GOP elite to occasionally slip up, and allow their longing for Trump to just go away to peek out.

"The country I think is so exhausted," Fox News host Laura Ingraham said Monday on a right-wing podcast. "They're exhausted by the battle, the constant battle, that they may believe that, well, maybe it's time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump's policies, who's not Trump."