Opinion

The entire edifice of Donald Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election — that it was stolen from him through illegal votes cast by Democrats — now seems to rest on the unprepossessing business-suit-clad shoulders of one man: Jeffrey Clark, a former official in the Trump Department of Justice. He has informed the HouseSelect Committee on the Jan. 6 uprising that he is willing to be interviewed by investigators and if called upon, to testify with one condition. He intends to invoke his right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

This article first appeared in Salon.

If it seems like it was just yesterday that U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled the President of the United States and in fact every Democrat in the country “communists,” it was, which is why it might seem strangely hypocritical that the Republican from Georgia minutes ago was labeling herself the “most attacked” freshman member of Congress in all of U.S. history.

“Joe Biden is a communist,” Greene declared strongly Thursday evening. “And that’s who the Democrats are – they’re communists.”

If Roe goes down, there will be more at stake than access to abortion. In the absence of federal protections, state governments would be free to regulate trans rights, “sodomy” and even condoms. “Once you pull on the loose thread of Roe,” Editorial Board contributor Anthony Michael Kreis said on Thursday, “the rest of the stitches holding the right to privacy and sexual liberty together are easier to unravel.”

The threat to individual rights doesn’t end there. All civil liberties are in danger. Roe’s death would signal a high court prepared to restore the power of states to discriminate against their residents, wrote historian Heather Cox Richardson. “Make no mistake,” she said this week, “it is not just reproductive rights that are under siege. If the Supreme Court returns power to the states to legislate as they wish, any right currently protected by the federal government is at risk.”

Some analyses of Trumpism and Republican populism have claimed to detect a strain of anti-corporate sentiment. It is true that today’s right-wingers are willing to criticize big tech companies for supposedly treating them unfairly, but most of the time the GOP continues to serve the interests of big business.

That was clear during an important hearing just held by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law. Subcommittee chair David Cicilline (D-R.I.), vice-chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), other Democratic members and the witnesses all raised serious questions about the current regulatory system, focusing on issues such as disclosure and social equity.

Most days, it’s hard to fully comprehend our current dystopian nightmare.

We now accept that 777,000 Americans are dead in the COVID pandemic and the death toll continues to climb day after day, even when we’ve had life-saving vaccines widely available for eight months.

Michael Flynn is always in the news for the worst reasons.

Today, it’s because of the former Trump advisor’s feud with Lin Wood and the leaking of text messages and audio recording during which he calls QAnon “total nonsense” as well as a CIA psy-op. Last time, he was calling for a single religion in the United States. Time before that, QAnon members accused him of being a Satanist for a sermon at a church drawing from a former New Age apocalyptic leader.

When the Department of Defense released its annual report on Chinese military strength in early November, one claim generated headlines around the world. By 2030, it suggested, China would probably have 1,000 nuclear warheads — three times more than at present and enough to pose a substantial threat to the United States. As a Washington Post headline put it, typically enough: “China accelerates nuclear weapons expansion, seeks 1,000 warheads or more, Pentagon says.”

The media, however, largely ignored a far more significant claim in that same report: that China would be ready to conduct “intelligentized” warfare by 2027, enabling the Chinese to effectively resist any U.S. military response should it decide to invade the island of Taiwan, which they view as a renegade province. To the newsmakers of this moment, that might have seemed like far less of a headline-grabber than those future warheads, but the implications couldn’t be more consequential. Let me, then, offer you a basic translation of that finding: as the Pentagon sees things, be prepared for World War III to break out any time after January 1, 2027.

I hope it’s clear by now Roe is doomed, though I don’t mean it will be overturned. That would be too obvious. I mean the Supreme Court’s six conservatives will instead find ways to sabotage it without striking it down. That way the anti-abortionists will get what they want. That way “moderate” Republicans will be able to say Roe is still the law of the land. (I presume this is a preferred outcome for Susan Collins.)

That’s where we’re headed. That doesn’t mean, however, the fighting will end. Far from it. The Christian Science Monitor’s Henry Gass reported Tuesday on how conflict over reproduction will continue post-Roe. Some states will amend their constitutions prohibiting abortion. Some states will do the same protecting it. (My state of Connecticut enshrined Roe in statute years ago.) The site of conflict had been national for over a half-century. Future sites will be local.

Each week brings us further confirmation that Donald Trump and members of his regime staged a coup attempt. It appears abundantly clear that they will face few if any consequences. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice give no impression that they are prepared to prosecute Trump personally, or any of the other major organizers of the Jan. 6 insurrection — and what little they are doing is moving very slowly.

Without significant intervention, the world's so-called "leading democracy" will go quietly to sleep.

Despite all the legalese about "stare decisis" and "reliance interests," the abortion rights hearing held at the Supreme Court Wednesday morning came down to one question: Can women's rights simply be disappeared, with the ease of shaking an Etch-A-Sketch?

Unfortunately, 6 out of 9 members of the Court seemed to strongly believe that yes, it's time to hit the reset button on that whole "treating women like full human beings" experiment after nearly 50 years, since Roe vs. Wade, of women having full human rights.Through the two hours of questioning in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health, one word came to mind to describe the stance of the conservative judges: Contempt.

In a speech last month at Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. monument, President Joe Biden described the January 6 insurrection as being about “white supremacy.” Later on, MSNBC did a segment on Thanksgiving in which guest commentator, Gyassi Ross, discussed its realities. Ross, who is Indigenous, sees it as the beginning of theft, genocide and “white supremacy.” After Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, Colin Kaepernick tweeted, “white supremacy cannot be reformed.”

It seemed like the term had come out of nowhere. I decided to check Google Trends. From 2004 to about 2016, there were relatively few searches for the word “white supremacy.” Then in 2016, there was an increase in the frequency of searches, with several sharp spikes. Two of those spikes were in August 2017 and June 2020. What happened?

The last few weeks we have seen the media work itself into something of a frenzy in an attempt to force a "reckoning" on the matter of the Steele Dossier, the opposition research document prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele about then-candidate Donald Trump. I'm sure I don't need to go into detail about that chapter in the Trump era. You'd have to have been in a coma not to have heard more about it than you ever cared to. Suffice to say that it was the source of the rumor about the infamous "pee tape" which offered many a late night comedian an uproarious punchline.

It's hard to know exactly what precipitated this sudden desire to have the media don a hair shirt over their coverage of the dossier, but it seems to stem from a recent ABC interview with Steele and the recent indictments of a handful of people by Special Prosecutor John Durham for lying to the FBI about it. Durham's inquiry into what Trump called "the oranges of the investigation" has been going on for years now with very little to show for it and according to those who have followed the cases closely, like journalist Marcy Wheeler, there is every reason to believe that the probe will end up being a dud.