Opinion

At times during the last five or so years, some of us have been living in the future. Sometimes just a day or two, but at other times it has felt like a week or perhaps even a month. During rare moments of immense clarity, it's like being in a time warp, a year or two ahead of the rest of the world.

I'm talking about those of us, both with and without prominent public platforms, who have consistently sounded the alarm about Trumpism, American neofascism and the escalating crises to come. We were mostly ignored, and sometimes mocked and derided. The truth, one suspects, was too painful to accept for those Americans who for reasons of self-interest, cowardice, willful ignorance or indifference found it convenient to ignore our warnings.

Last Saturday, a much-anticipated Washington rally organized by a no-name TrumpWorld character was a complete bust, with only 50 attendees showing up to voice their support for Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, who were characterized at the event as "political prisoners."

Yet given that this event fell flat, does that mean that right-wing extremism in the post-Jan, 6 era is still a problem? Researchers who monitor online forums and track in-person far-right gatherings say the answer is simple: Yes.

Last week, Special Counsel John Durham secured an indictment against an obscure cyber-lawyer and Democratic insider named Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI about who his clients were when he relayed a tip about possible digital communication between the Trump Organization and Russia. Durham was appointed by Donald Trump to delve into the origins of the Trump/Russia investigation. Sussmann's indictment appears to be the culmination of that probe, which has already dragged on for more than two years.

A grand jury only hears the prosecution's side of the story. Hence the truism that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. With the five-year statute of limitations running out, Durham sought to indict while the indicting was good. At least now he can say he got a Clinton lawyer. This means a lot to the QAnon base, but it won't mean much to a jury.

If there was ever a time to hit the panic button in the Biden era, Monday was that day.

Monday marked one week before so-called moderates in the House of Representatives attempt to force a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package passed at the center of President Biden's Build Back Better agenda. With his approval ratings stalling due to the double hits of a lackluster response to the delta variant and continued vaccine hesitancy holding down economic recovery, along with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan that included the fatal drone bombing of 10 civilians, mostly children, Biden is now facing threats of sabotage from the very people with whom he made a political bed for decades in D.C.

At times during the last five or so years, some of us have been living in the future. Sometimes just a day or two, but at other times it has felt like a week or perhaps even a month. During rare moments of immense clarity, it's like being in a time warp, a year or two ahead of the rest of the world.

This article first appeared in Salon.

President Joe Biden promised during his first joint address to the United States Congress earlier in the year to tackle systemic racism. America and the world was listening, including Haitians.

Some might have thought that beyond the need of the United States to eradicate the scourge of racism evident in many areas of society within its own borders, a radical plan might be implemented to tackle discrimination regarding the heavily criticized border policies.

After a trio of moderate House Democrats, led by Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif, blocked a provision in President Joe Biden's landmark infrastructure package allowing health officials to negotiate excessively high drug prices with large pharmaceutical giants last week, Arizona's senior Democratic Sen. Krysten Sinema has reportedly joined her centrist collegagues in expressing opposition to the White House's proposed prescription drug pricing reforms.

Throwing a wrench in the Democrats' agenda to make life-saving drugs more affordable for millions of Americans, Politico reports that Sinema has told the White House she does not support a provision of the reconciliation bill currently being debated in the House of Representatives that would allow Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs. While running for office in 2018, however, Sinema expressed clear support for lowering prescription drug prices.

When most people think about "bias" in news coverage, they usually think of some kind of ideological bent, as if the Post, say, is trying to advance some kind of political agenda with its journalism. While this does apply to right-wing outlets, like the Washington Examiner, most of the rest of the press corps isn't ideological as we would normally understand that word.

This doesn't mean there isn't bias, though.

There's been a ton of reporting and analysis on Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's new book, "Peril", most of it focusing on the final days of the Trump administration — which by all accounts were even more of a chaotic mess than we could see from the outside (and we saw plenty). The bizarre antics from the president and his henchmen regarding the election results were unprecedented and continue to this day.

But one of the most chilling quotes from the book that I've seen so far comes from this review of the book by history professor Eric Rauchway in the Washington Post. As we knew, Vice President Mike Pence tried every way he could to come up with a rationale to do Trump's bidding and refuse to ceremonially confirm the electoral count in the joint session of Congress on January 6th. On that morning, before the fateful rally that inspired the insurrection, Pence came to the White House to reluctantly tell his boss that he just didn't have the power to do that under the Constitution:

How much would you be willing to invest for a better future for yourself, for today's youngsters, and beyond?

Would you be willing to invest $3 a day?

I once lived next door to a guy in Memphis who owned more than a hundred firearms, some of which were strewn around his two-bedroom house and even lying on the kitchen counter. I saw them when he asked me to come over one afternoon to help him move his 700-pound gun safe.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Pundits are always atwitter if this mean that Democrats are moving too far left or Republicans are shifting too far right and speculate what this means for the party's fortunes in the next election. (Usually you get some “Washington is broken" laments for good measure.)

While all that's a standard part of political discourse, it does obscure a rising and more sinister trend: An explicit goal of the fascist far-right-wing of the Republican Party — those who stormed the U.S. Capitol to wage a violent coup and their myriad sympathizers who hold elected office — is to make good people quit politics, from members of Congress down to members of school boards.

All of us should be able to agree on this, whether we find abortions abominable or support a woman's right to end her pregnancy:

The enforcement mechanism created by Texas lawmakers is un-American. It farms out enforcement of a state's laws to vigilantes and bounty hunters.