So, on a whim I decided to Google a few of the top 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
The results were… interesting. Depressing.
And extraordinarily inconsistent.
Now, Google “personalizes” its search results, so your mileage may vary, but it seems to me maybe people should be seeing the same information across the board, if we want “free and fair” elections.
It’s bad enough that Facebook has allowed micro-targeting of users to push ads from President Donald Trump’s campaign. Popular.info founder Judd Legum has done extensive research on this. “Facebook admits it ran hundreds of Trump campaign ads that violate Facebook rules,” he reported back in April. That was after his reporting found the Trump campaign had “produced hundreds of ads targeting women in practically every city in Texas.”
But back to Google.
In a search for Elizabeth Warren, I noticed a box on the first page of the search results. It was depressing.
Are these really the questions Americans are asking about the two-term Senator from Massachusetts?
What about her policies? Are Americans really more curious who Warren’s husband is than what she plans to do about health care costs or gun violence?
Are Americans not Googling the California Democratic Senator? Doubtful. Why is she being treated differently in the Google search results, at least for me?
So I tried Bernie Sanders.
Again, similar, depressing results.
I moved on to Beto O’Rourke:
Seriously?
Finally, Pete Buttigig.
Just like Kamala Harris, no “People also ask” box.
Why?
Again, perhaps these results are just specific to Google’s results for me, but maybe not.
And regardless, why isn’t the format the same for all candidates?
Is this the best we can do?
No.
If you’re actually interested in learning about the 2020 presidential candidates, here are some better resources, most of which as a journalist I use regularly.
OnTheIssues – one of the absolute best and most comprehensive for political candidates’ longterm history.
Ballotpedia – a great resource for learning about state and federal races, they do a good job of keeping up with daily developments in the presidential campaigns too.
Want to get into the polling data? RealClearPolitics, which leans right in its reporting, does an excellent job of laying out the polling numbers.
FactCheck.org, which says it’s “a nonpartisan, nonprofit ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.”
Of course, hopefully you visit NCRM daily (at least!). use the search box at the top of our page to find what we’ve reported on various candidates. Feel free to sign up for our daily newsletter. And stay involved. Ask questions. Get multiple answers. Make informed decisions.
I understand why it’s hard for normal people to believe that white evangelical Christians are sadists. Normal people have never been, as I was a long time ago, on the inside of that shadowy religious world. But the sooner they understand this, the sooner normal people will see that white evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump isn’t rooted in hypocrisy, contradiction or merely straying from the straight and narrow. The reason they support a fascist president is simple: They’re sadists.
The word “sadist” is off-putting. I get that. But if you’re thinking of sex, you’re thinking in the wrong way. If you’re thinking of “pleasure,” as in sexual pleasure, you’re thinking the wrong way. The pleasure white evangelical Christians derive from the suffering of human beings deemed less human than they are is not about sex. It’s about the pain, humiliation or even violence out-groups deserve by dint of being out-groups. Gay men, for instance, deserve their punishment because they are gay. Punishment for being gay is “divine justice.” From such “justice” comes pleasure—which is sadism.
I didn’t come up with the term. Richard Rorty did. I’m only pushing it as far to the fore as I can, because I don’t think normal people understand what they are facing, and if they don’t understand, they will keep treating sadists as if they have a legitimate place in a liberal democracy. Cruelty isthe point, as Adam Serwer powerfully and famously put it in The Atlantic. But normal people must understand the animating force behind that cruelty. Sadists are sadistic not because they are cruel. It’s much simpler than that. They are cruel because being cruel to people deserving cruelty feels good.
Rorty was expansive in his use of “sadism.” In Achieving Our Country, one of his final books, he characterized slavery, Southern apartheid, racism, misogyny and other ancient hatreds as “socially accepted sadism.” In this, he included not only efforts to harm people—humiliating, cheating, raping and murdering them—but also efforts to rationalize the harm. (For instance: not only is it OK to cheat women out of equal pay for equal work because they are women; women actually want to be cheated.) Though renowned as a philosopher and literary critic, Rorty was a life-long liberal. His goals were many, but key was making “socially accepted sadism” less socially acceptable.
He didn’t live to see the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage. (He died in 2007.) But I believe that he’d have seen that ruling as a capstone to a long 20th-century political war to make anti-gay sadism less socially acceptable. Indeed, the United States seems to have surpassed that standard. Within a decade, trans rights have become widely recognized as legitimate and just. Moreover, anti-gay sadism are now a social taboo mighty enough to alienate the world’s richest and most powerful corporations.
You’ll notice I said “anti-gay sadism,” not “homophobia” or the fear of homosexuals and homosexuality. This is what normal people are in the habit of thinking. For instance: homophobes are homophobic because they don’t understand. Because they don’t understand, they’re afraid. Being afraid drives them to act homophobic. This seems reasonable, and while it may be true in many cases, it’s false in some. I have come to believe attributing fear to sadism gives the sadists far too much credit.
Think about it. To ease a person’s fear of homosexuals and homosexuality, you have to persuade that person that gay people are human beings. They are not demons. They are not monsters. They are people. They are the flesh-and-blood sons and daughters of mothers and fathers—just like you. Gay people have no more control over how they were born than you do. Treat them as you wish to be treated, and you’ll see there’s nothing to fear. Most Americans, I think, have gone through that process. Most, though they may not know it, have manifested the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
You’d think white evangelical Christians would have gone through the same process given their profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But they can’t. They can’t because they won’t. And they won’t because, to them, being homosexuality an abomination. You cannot expect a person to reason his way out of fear when doing so would bring him, in his view, to the edge of a Lake of Fire. You cannot expect him to recognize your political legitimacy when he looks at you and doesn’t see a human being with endowed and inalienable rights. Instead, he sees an unholy perversion.
Normal people can’t know any of this, because they have never been on the inside of the shadowy world of white evangelical Christianity. (That is, to me, what makes them more or less “normal.”) Even if normal people had some inkling, it never feels right to presume the worst in people. But trust me when I say white evangelical Christians are presuming the worst in normal people—in you. Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? No? You are therefore not one among God’s Chosen.
This is their moral compass, which is not a moral compass at all, and as such, Trump-voting white evangelical Christians do not have the ability to reason their way out of fear. And because they don’t, they will choose sadism. Why? Sadism feels good.
In a recent report, scientists warn of a precipitous drop in the world’s insect population. We need to pay close attention, as over time, this could be just as catastrophic to humans as it is to insects. Special attention must be paid to the principal drivers of this insect decline, because while climate change is adding to the problem, food production is a much larger contributor.
The report, released by researchers at the Universities of Sydney and Queensland and the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, concluded that 40 percent of insect species are now threatened with extinction, and the world’s insect biomass is declining at 2.5 percent a year. In 50 years, the current biomass of insects could be cut in half. Such a sharp decline could trigger a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”
We have, it appears, a lot to learn to avert the looming insect apocalypse. Here are five critical lessons.
1. Small things tend to get overlooked.
While the volume of scientific research on the threat of species extinction is growing rapidly, most of the focus has been on the declining population of fish and large mammals. Compared to larger species, insect species and their populations get very little attention. In making their report, the authors conducted a comprehensive review and found 73 historical studies of insect decline. That’s a tiny fraction of the reports written about the population loss of larger species. Yet arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans) account for about half of the world’s animal biomass—17 times more than humans.
2. Small things matter.
When it comes to endangered species, large mammals get all the headlines, but insects are essential to the underlying web of life on which larger creatures depend. About 60 percent of bird species rely upon insects as a primary food source, and birds consume up to 500 million tons of insects every year. Moreover, it is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of wild plants depend upon insects for pollination. And while some insects feed off domesticated crops, other insects help to keep pest populations under control. A 2006 study estimated that insects in the U.S. provided “ecosystem services” worth $57 billion a year. These include pest control, crop pollination, and serving as a vital food source for fish and small wildlife.
3. Environmental degradation is accelerating.
Climate change, pollution and the ongoing destruction of forests, wetlands, reefs and other vital habitats are taking an ever-increasing toll on nature. And it’s not just insects; environmental degradation is accelerating and rapidly diminishing non-human populations, including birds, fish and large undomesticated mammals. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that wildlife populations, on average, have declined 60 percentsince 1970. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies 26,000 species as threatened with extinction, and leading scientists publicly warn that a “sixth mass extinction” has commenced.
4. It’s not just our greenhouse gas emissions …
No one should underestimate the impact that rising greenhouse gas emissions are having on the web of life, but the authors of the insect report indicate that the three largest drivers of insect depopulation are, in order of importance: 1) habitat loss attributable to agriculture and urbanization; 2) pollution, mainly caused by pesticides and fertilizers and; 3) the introduction of invasive species. Climate change, which many believe is the largest driver of ecological ruin, ranked only fourth as a driver of insect decline.
5. … It’s us.
The principal drivers of insect extinction have a common denominator. Simply put, the insect decline, in one form or another (including climate change), is attributable to humans. Our growing numbers and our appetites are driving insects to extinction. There is no letup in sight. World population, presently 7.6 billion, is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by mid-century, and the world’s middle class is expected to rise at an even faster rate. Our demand for food, and particularly our appetite for meat products, is leaving less room for other creatures, including insects.
Humans already use a land mass about the size of South America to produce crops for consumption and an area nearly the size of Africa to feed our livestock. Add in the pesticides and fertilizers that we depend upon to boost crop yields, and it’s no wonder that insect populations are suffering mightily.
The authors of the report on insect loss warned that, “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” Curbing our reliance on pesticides and fertilizers could reduce the loss of insects, but it’s our ever-growing need for higher crop yields that has given rise to their use in the first place. Given enough time and capital investments, the farmers of the world might be able to adopt sustainable farming practices without reducing crop yields, but we may not have the luxury of time.
To avoid insect apocalypse, we need to reduce the size of our agricultural footprint. That should begin by preventing runaway population growth and the unsustainable food demand that would go with it. We should increase our support for family planning programs that help to prevent unplanned pregnancies at home and abroad. At present, nearly 40 percent of the pregnancies in the world are unintended. We should also commit to reducing our meat consumption, particularly beef. Meat-based diets require the use of far more land and water and result in much bigger environmental impacts—from greenhouse gas emissions to land degradation—than plant-based diets do.
If insects head toward precipitous decline and extinction, humans can’t be far behind. We need to advance our thinking about insects, their importance and what can be done to save them.
###
Robert Walker is the president of the Population Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit educating the public about the environmental implications of population growth, and advocating for reproductive health and rights.
This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
There is something pretty basic—and important—about this division we’re seeing among Democratic candidates about healthcare that, surprisingly, is too often missing from the discussion—prices of providing health.
As the presidential candidates sink into details about their various versions of how to provide insurance coverage, it is assumed that a huge federal bureaucracy can negotiate acceptably lower prices. Indeed, the discussion of Medicare for All with or without private insurers versus incrementally expanding Obamacare versus other forms of extending the human right to healthcare is all about the price of insurance and deductibles rather than the cost of actual care. The cost of prescription drugs is the exception: That issue has indeed drawn public attention.
Whoever pays, through tax or private insurance, even a cursory look at the rest of the world shows that Americans are overpaying for similar health treatments.
By contrast, Trump is trying to get rid of federal support for healthcare, and the best of Republican ideas is to shove the problem to the states with insufficient public funds. Strangely, the fault line among Democrats centers on how wide to see the federal acceptance of responsibility for all health-related costs.
But it’s only half the problem. Whoever pays, through tax or private insurance, even a cursory look at the rest of the world shows that Americans are overpaying for similar health treatments.
But as with prescription drugs, there is no necessary link between providing the access, the insurance, and lowering the price. We have plenty of access to public drugs, but there is ample evidence that Big Pharma still charges Americans way more than other countries. Bernie Sanders’s recent election stunt to take 15 insulin patients across the border to Canadian pharmacies to find insulin at one-tenth the U.S. price was instructive.
Now extend that to hospital systems, doctors’ fees, medical equipment and the rest, and you can see the point.
In any business, there are always two parts of selling–availability of the product or service on the one hand, and price on the other. Insuring your house against burglary has no influence over the cost of replacing whatever was taken; why aren’t we arguing about one price to cover anything that is stolen in the country? Because it makes no sense. Indeed, there are discussions now underway about moving people flooded out rather than paying for replacement housing only to see the cycle start again with the next rains.
Congress Has to Get On Board
Before we take the entire debate as seriously as each of the candidates does, we should remember that the president doesn’t get to set new systems that cover one-sixth of the U.S. economy by fiat. If we really want to vote for a candidate who can make healthcare alternatives happen, we should vote for the person who can also get a House and Senate membership elected and who has extraordinary powers of persuasion.
In fact, we ought to be voting for such a person in any case. The same skills are needed for foreign policy, military policy, budget and infrastructure and moral leadership.
We need to be having a public conversation about something akin to price controls for medically related services and products just as we are having a conversation about access and insurance. It is not only insurance companies who set the hospital prices for surgical treatments or the cost of visiting a doctor or the price of insulin through negotiation in our health marketplace. It is the pharmaceutical companies, the medical service providers and the equipment manufacturers who also want to set their prices.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a New York Times op-ed column that touched on these ideas, though there have been oodles of others. The candidates, he said, “are having the wrong debate. Instead, they should be competing to find the best ways to tackle affordability—an issue they can all agree on and President Trump has done nothing about.”
Emanuel argued that the best way to lower costs is not through a political battle over Medicare for All, but to change policies governing actual cost. He believes that coordinating eligibility standards among all government benefit programs, for example, automatically can boost the numbers of people covered by government health insurance.
Four Targets for Cutting Costs
He suggests four targets to reduce actual cost:
The government should set maximum costs for prescription drugs, linking drug prices to their health benefits in reducing mortality, and international prices. Big Pharma hates this.
Hospital costs should be capped as well, understanding that hospital prices have risen much faster than Medicare and Medicare reimbursements. He argues that the main culprit behind price escalation springs from increasing numbers of for-profit mergers of hospital systems, which create local monopolies.
A policy targeting wasteful insurance billing practices and paperwork by adopting uniform standardized electronic formats for all insurers. Surprisingly studies show that European countries are saving tens of millions this way.
Pushing on switching from fee-for-service payment to “value-based” alternatives by incentivizing doctors, insurers and hospitals to skip unneeded testing, for example by basing payments on outcomes rather than fee-for-service. Doctors I know don’t want any controls over their income.
I don’t know that these specific approaches work. Each is backed by various academic studies over the years that project cost savings. I’m sure there are studies with the opposite conclusions.
What I do know is that if we truly believe that we need to cover the health needs of millions more people, we need to be working on the costs being covered as well as this intractable conversation about the how-tos of insurance.
The man who used an ethnic slur against CNN anchor Chris Cuomo epitomizes everything contemptible about the worst of President Donald Trump's supporters. He was racist, smug, dishonest and — when the going got tough — cowardly.
Spoiler alert: This essay will end by explaining why Trump, those trolls and everyone who defends them are, to use Cuomo's colorful language, "punk-ass bitches." But first, a review of what happened.
— (@)
During the exchange in question, an unidentified man referred to Cuomo as "Fredo," a possible or plausible slur against Italian-Americans (admittedly, opinions differ) that implies weakness, stupidity and Mafia connections. The epithet was inspired by the Francis Ford Coppola films "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part Two" in which John Cazale's character, Fredo Corleone, repeatedly bungled important mob business and was widely viewed with ridicule and shame by his family.
It is not an innocuous term. Referring to a person of Italian descent as Fredo, unless that person is actually named Fredo, is the equivalent of referring to a Jewish person such as myself as Shylock, the money-grubbing anti-Semitic stereotype from William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." It is done for bigoted reasons, plain and simple.
The person who said this to Cuomo clearly knew that that was the case. Throughout the exchange with Cuomo, he held to a tone of passive-aggressive arrogance; like all right-wing trolls, he derived pleasure from the knowledge that he was "owning the libs" (whether or not that's an accurate characterization of Chris Cuomo).
Even without the guy's vocal intonation as a dead giveaway, however, there were also the repeated lies. He acknowledged recognizing Cuomo from CNN and disliking his coverage ("You're a much more reasonable guy in person than you seem to be on television"), then claimed that he thought Fredo was his actual name. At one point he insisted that he thought Fredo was Cuomo's brother, even though it would make no sense for him to refer to Chris Cuomo by his brother's supposed name. After Cuomo threatened to get physical — while, to be clear never actually assaulting the guy — the troll got nervous and said, "Hey man, hey, listen, we don't want any problems, bro." Yet in case you mistakenly believe he felt any regret over what he'd said, either the man or one of his friends shouted to Cuomo, "Look at all these cameras. You're in for it. You're in for it."
Then the dudebros uploaded the video, convinced that they had "won" because they insulted a prominent media figure based on his ethnicity and he got upset about it.
These were bullying tactics. These men trolling Cuomo decided to use a borderline ethnic slur against him — and whether the chief troll is partly of Italian heritage, as he claims, is irrelevant — recorded him as he responded with justifiable outrage, wimped out when Cuomo challenged them to stand by their bigoted language, became afraid when threatened with actual consequences, and then lashed out with one final verbal kick to let the so-called liberal know they believed they had established their dominance
To be clear, again: If Cuomo actually had physically assaulted the trolls, he would have been wrong. That wouldn't have made them retroactively right, of course, but physical violence is never justified as a response to insults or despicable language.
Anyway, Cuomo never touched the guys. They trolled him, and the president of the United States, shamefully but unsurprisingly, is egging them on.
Trump clearly exulted in the fact that someone in the media he dislikes was demeaned. The most generous interpretation of that tweet is that he doesn't care or didn't notice that the incident involved an ethnic insult; a more likely interpretation is that Trump is himself a bigot, and finds attacking Cuomo based on his ethnicity to be fair game.
Does Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who now serves as the president's lawyer, think it was okay for Cuomo to be called Fredo? Does Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state? Does Dan Scavino, Trump's director of social media?
This question must be expanded beyond the Italian-Americans who work for Trump who are of Italian descent. I am Jewish, felt disgusted at the Jews in Trump's inner circle — including Stephen Miller, Trump's senior policy adviser; Steve Mnuchin, his treasury secretary; and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law — for their silence when the president defended the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. I don't understand how the women who work for or support Trump justify his assault on reproductive rights or his rampant misogyny. I'm baffled that African Americans (albeit few in number) can work for him or support him when he calls for abusive police tactics, refers to largely black nations as "shithole countries" and encourages his followers to chant "Send her back" at a congresswoman born in Somalia.
As we ought to understand by now, when Trump and his supporters use this kind of language, it isn't harmless. The goal is to demean people who disagree with the president as less than fully American, and then sadistically celebrate when those people get upset by it. Such trolls are the lowest forms of life in our political ecosystem: Unable to prevail in the field of logic and ideas, they resort to abject cruelty, and rarely if ever have the courage to admit what they're doing because they know they're wrong.
The First Amendment protects everybody's right to air their political opinions without facing legal consequences, but that doesn't mean that everybody deserves a platform, or that the rest of us have to listen. Any reasonably developed cerebrum recognizes that what such people have to say isn't worth listening to. These kinds of trolls should be dismissed from all political conversations not because their ideology is wrong (though it is), but because they aren't saying or do anything substantive. They are bullies kicking sand in the eyes of other children on the playground because they think it's fun — and because they know they can't hack it in a fair, civilized game.
They don't deserve violence, but they do deserve to be referred to as "punk-ass bitches," because that's exactly what they are. I don't care whether or not you like Chris Cuomo, or agree with his opinions. But anyone who defends these idiots' behavior, or who criticizes Cuomo for his response, is also a punk-ass bitch. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Mr. President.
Whenever American civil society has been under great stress, if not indeed falling apart, self-appointed champions of conventional wisdom and traditional values have ginned up public paroxysms of alarm and rage at internal enemies who politicians, propagandists, and pundits leap to blame for the crisis.
In the 1690s, it was witches — hysterical women and girls whom Puritans said had been taken by Satan. In the 1840s, it was Catholic immigrants, whom Republicans in the 1884 presidential campaign said were besotted with “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” In every decade before and since then, it has been black people, often represented as dangerous, feral beasts. In the 1920s, it was anarchists, Reds and pushy Hebrews. In the 1950s, it was American Communist spies for Stalin, the Satan of that time. In the 1960s, it was hippies, riotous blacks and traitorous opponents of the Vietnam War. Since 9/11, it has been Muslim terrorists and, in 2003, it was Saddam Hussein’s (imaginary) weapons of mass destruction and American critics of the Iraq war. In 2015, it was coddled, petulant college students, campus counselors, who, we’ve been told, are out to silence and punish anyone whose exercise of freedoms of inquiry and expression frightens or angers them. Now, it’s the white supremacist terror network.
The targeted groups usually contain real dangers which are always blown way out of proportion, the crusaders against them usually compounding the civic crises they claim to be preventing. What they usually end up proving is that many Americans will do almost anything but challenge the far-more subtle, pervasive and decisive enemy that’s riding our routine submission to and complicity with the most decisive cause of our civic implosion. It’s as if we’d rather stampede away from facing the harsh truth and fall into obdurate, enveloping silence about it.
Today’s very real emergency of gruesome, accelerating, nationally humiliating massacres of Americans in our workplaces, markets, schools and other public places is driving many to target a white supremacist terror network that is dangerous and terrifying — but is more a carrier than a cause of the crisis. For every white supremacist who’s opened fire in 250 recent mass shootings, other white shooters have targeted mainly other whites — school children in Connecticut, concertgoers in Las Vegas, church congregants in Texas and beyond.
Similarly, for every mentally ill shooter like Jared Loughner, the paranoid schizophrenic who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people in 2011, most other mass shooters are no more “insane” than President Trump, who, while a candidate in 2016, boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Carrier and casualty though Trump certainly is of the scourges of white supremacy, gun madness, drug abuse, impulsive self-interest, and — as we see at any of his rallies — a deranging variant of political correctness, all these plagues antedated him and helped elevate him to the White House. He is only returning the favor by accelerating what was already torrential in our civic implosion.
But what about the torrents of racist and sexist violence and degradation that Trump and the white supremacists are riding — the undercurrents beneath “current events,” sluiced into the republic’s wellsprings from its very beginnings and lately prompting the true and urgent claims of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo? Haven’t Americans now broken a lot of racial and sexual glass ceilings in the republic’s house, electing a black president who understood us better than most of us understood ourselves, and elevating women as governors, legislators, business executives and curators of a better national conversation?
But most glass-ceiling breakers haven’t managed, or even really tried, to reconfigure the foundations and walls that supported those ceilings. More often, they’ve only compounded what’s destroying us. They’ve imparted an aura of legitimacy to what is really driving Americans toward enmity, violence, terror, addiction, and marketed escapism — the aforementioned undercurrent that most of us will do anything but name and challenge because it, too, was sluiced into the republic’s wellsprings and into our lives.
This real “villain” — which is not so much malevolent as just mindless — is the turbo-marketed, intimately intrusive, seductive swamping of reasoned speech and honest conversation by engines of shareholder-driven marketing, casino-like financing, and legislation and jurisprudence that equate freedom of speech with the freedom to spend money.
"Democracy dies in darkness," reads the motto of the Washington Post. But democracy dies also in a profit-mad glare of images and cries that are turning the free-for-all of deregulated commercial "speech" into a free-for-none, bypassing our brains and hearts on their way for our lower viscera and our wallets, 24/7, in our homes and heads, short-circuiting our capacity to think or converse.
The tsunami of hollow, seemingly harmless commercial speech that’s distracting us from our dispossession and atomization as citizens and workers profits the corporate overlords by coming on to us not as citizens who could enlarge our self-interest by contributing to the public good but as narrowly self-protective investors and consumers whose transaction is neither more nor less than a market exchange.
Unregulated commercial speech reduces thoughtful citizens to impulse buyers. It hollows out the public deliberation that should license and regulate the very engines that grope us, goose us or intimidate us. It leaves a democratic vacuum into which hate speech and worse have swept via the mouths and trigger-fingers of loners — including the CEO misogynists who sit atop many of the engines driving our derangement.
Social media is only the most powerful and intrusive carrier of this plague. We would be as short-sighted to blame fake news and civic decay on social media as we would be to blame road rage on the internal combustion engine. Computers and cars do accelerate derangement on our information and transportation highways, but they don't caused it; pre-digital newspapers and radio fomented gratuitous 20th-century wars and witch hunts.
What’s bringing out the worst in readers and viewers isn’t the technology; it’s the licensed, routinized greed that degrades but dazzles so many of us. I’ve been warning about the Americanization of this disease at length — in “How Hollow Speech Enables Hostile Speech” for The Los Angeles Review of Books and, more briefly, in a Salon essay last year. Now we need to find and support leaders who will do the hard, imaginative political work of naming, challenging and perhaps undoing this juggernaut, rather than relying on moralistic crusades against its symptoms that never touch the disease.
Two former Trump aides — both of whom have been convicted of crimes — will speak at a right-wing conference organized by a QAnon conspiracy theorist to raise money for mounting legal bills stemming from the Mueller probe.
Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, are scheduled to speak at the “Digital Soldiers Conference” in Atlanta in September, Mother Jones reported. Both men pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
The conference, which features a logo that is an American flag with stars rearranged to form a “Q”, is billed as an event for “patriotic social media warriors” to prepare for the upcoming “digital civil war” against “censorship and suppression.”
The event website offers tickets ranging from $49 to $2,500 for an “Ultra VIP” pass. The site says that the “majority of proceeds” will go to Flynn’s legal defense fund. Though he pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe, Flynn continues to await his sentencing and recently hired a new lawyer who has spread anti-Mueller conspiracy theories on Fox News.
The event is organized by Rich Granville, the CEO of Yippy Inc. Granville’s Twitter feed is almost entirely filled with references to QAnon, an unhinged conspiracy theory that claims a secret government insider who goes by “Q” is dropping clues about a secret Trump operation to fight the “deep state” by sending prominent Democrats to face secret military tribunals and executions at Guantánamo Bay.
Granville acknowledged that he is a QAnon believer to Mother Jones but denied that his logo, a flag that clearly has a large Q on it, is a reference to the conspiracy theory favored by especially unhinged far-right partisans. He bizarrely claimed instead that the stars refer to “Flynn’s prior status as a three-star general,” the publication reported.
“It does look like Q, but there is no reference to QAnon anywhere on that site,” Granville insisted.
He told the outlet that he believes the secret Trump plot espoused by QAnon followers is no theory.
“Do I think it’s good for America? Absolutely,” he said. “Do I think it’s a conspiracy theory? I doubt that.”
“I am with anybody who is with the United States of America, any digital soldier, any patriot, any average American who is doing their part to support the president of the United States,” Granville added.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials in December 2017. He also admitted to lying in Foreign Agent Registration Act documents about having lobbied for the Turkish government while serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign. Mueller’s office recommended a lenient sentence for Flynn, citing his “substantial cooperation.” QAnon believers have speculated that Flynn is actually working with Mueller to bring down the deep state and expose the alleged Democratic pedophile ring, Mother Jones reported.
Trump has not spoken publicly about QAnon but has retweeted QAnon conspiracy theorists, invited them to the White House and included rally-goers carrying QAnon signs in a recent campaign video. At a rally earlier this month, a speaker at one of his rallies recited a QAnon slogan minutes before Trump took the stage.
The FBI’s field office in Phoenix issued an intelligence bulletin in May warning that QAnon poses a domestic terror threat.
The memo described QAnon as a conspiracy theory positing that the anonymous “Q” has posted “classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.”
“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the memo said, warning that the threat will likely increase during the 2020 campaign.
Earlier this year a QAnon believer named Anthony Comello killed a man believed to be a crime boss because he believed the man was a “member of the deep state,” his attorneys said.
“Mr. Comello’s support for ‘QAnon’ went beyond mere participation in a radical political organization. It evolved into a delusional obsession,” the attorney said. “Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself, and that he had the president’s full support.”
As someone who specializes in international business, I know how rapidly ideas and ideologies can be transported globally. International business scholars are increasingly concerned with the possibility that economic nationalism will lead to deglobalization, reversing decades of economic growth.
And so it’s important to look back at how Adolf Hitler rose to power. Understanding 1930 to 1933 helps us better understand 1939 to 1945. And in an era of rising political extremism around the world, this period of history holds lessons important for the present.
Hitler’s ascent involves conservative politicians sharing power with an extremist party and being outmanoeuvred. It features a university courageously resisting ministerial interference, but quickly falling in line when the new regime had cemented its power.
Hitler had his mind firmly set on attaining political power in Germany. But he faced a problem: He did not have German citizenship — in fact, he was a state-less immigrant living in Germany.
Hitler was born in Austria, moved to Munich in 1913 and revoked his Austrian citizenship in 1925 to avoid being extradited back to his native country. The normal path to German citizenship was cumbersome and uncertain — and Hitler had a major criminal record, after all, due to his involvement in what’s known as the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
The issue became urgent when Hitler wanted to run in the 1932 German presidential election. At the time, his party, the NSDAP (Nazi party) shared power in only one of the German states, the small northern free state of Braunschweig (known as Brunswick in English). Hitler therefore asked his party members in Braunschweig to get him citizenship.
Hitler is seen at a Nazi party rally in Braunschweig in February 1931.
German Federal Archive
Politics in the state of Braunschweig was more polarized than national politics. The state included a substantive urban working class, traditional small businesses and large rural districts. Nationally, German politics of the 1920s was characterized by a succession of multi-party governments bringing together social democrats (SPD) with parties of the centre and centre right.
In Braunschweig, the SPD governed as a majority from 1927 to 1930 under Prime Minister Heinrich Jasper. The centrist and centre-right parties and representatives of small businesses in the state formed an alliance. They viewed the SPD as their main opponent in the 1930 state election, and resented, among other things, the appointment of SPD members to positions in state administration, schools and the university.
Coalition with Nazis
When the SPD lost its majority in the election while the Nazis rose to third place, the alliance parties formed a coalition with Hitler’s party. This coalition government gave the Nazi party the position of speaker of Parliament and minister of the interior.
The Nazis used these positions to effectively promote their interests, and despite various crises, the coalition held on until 1933. Dietrich Klagges, the minister of the interior from 1931, used his position to harass political opposition, undermine democratic processes, intervene in internal matters of the university, and — critically — to give Hitler his German citizenship.
Election results in Braunschweig and Germany, 1918-1933.
When the university did not comply with their racially charged demands, university leaders themselves became the focus of Nazi attacks.
University president Otto Schmitz went over Klagges’s head to communicate directly with Prime Minister Werner Küchenthal. Küchenthal refused to sign the appointment document.The conflict escalated in March 1932 when Klagges, the minister of the interior, prepared to appoint Hitler as a professor at the university. The school strongly opposed the idea, not only because Klagges was interfering in university autonomy, but also because Hitler lacked the academic qualifications.
Klagges found another route, namely to appoint Hitler to a governmental position with the Braunschweig representation in Berlin, which would automatically entail German citizenship. Coalition partners reluctantly agreed on the assurance that Hitler would actually work in that role (which he never did).
But at the university, the relationship with the minister continued to deteriorate. In May, Schmitz was suspended and investigated for an unrelated supposed scandal. But the new president, Gustav Gassner, also squared off against the Nazi student group, objecting to their use of Memorial Day to celebrate one of their leaders killed in a street fight and that they carried party banners with the swastika symbol at university events. Klagges overruled him.
After the national power grab of the Nazi party in January 1933, Braunschweig, sooner than elsewhere, experienced dismissals, arrests of political opponents, street violence and book burning. Among many social democrats and communists, former prime minister Jasper and city major Ernst Böhme were arrested; Böhme was was tortured until he signed his resignation. Gassner first hid and then fled the state, resigned while in Bonn and was arrested upon his return to Braunschweig.
On May 1, 1933, Klagges announced on the steps of the university that Nazi party member Paul Horrmann was its new president. By then, democracy and university autonomy were dead.
Why didn’t other politicians intervene?
Klagges’s excesses could have been stopped by politicians in the non-Nazi parties of the coalition in Braunschweig. Why didn’t they act? This question has been discussed extensively by local historians — and by the protagonists themselves after 1945. At least three factors came together.
First, the divide between the centre-right (the alliance parties in the coalition) and the centre-left (the SPD, or social democrats) was deeper in Braunschweig than elsewhere in Germany, probably due to the experience of an SPD-only government from 1927 to 1930. And the centrist and centre-right parties’ rejection of the Versailles treaty was an important part of their ideology, a view they shared with the Nazi party.
Second, the street violence and verbal intimidations by Nazi groups, including paramilitaries, created an atmosphere of fear. Even before the national power grab, individuals who had spoken out against the Nazis were anxious about their personal safety.
Third, some key decision-makers appear to have been rewarded with lucrative promotions: For example, Küchenthal became head of the state bank, a position he kept until 1945.
In their own statements after 1945, centrist and centre-right politicians argued that they tried to contain the Nazis by integrating them into government, which they expected would eventually undermine their voter support. That was a costly miscalculation.
What this means for us today: A personal view
My interest in this history is very personal. Not only is Braunschweig my hometown, but my grandfather was a junior professor at the Technical University of Braunschweig, working closely with Gustav Gassner, the president who stood up to the Nazis but was imprisoned and went into exile in Turkey.
Recognizing the importance of learning from history, and family memories in particular, I believe this history holds important lessons on the rise of Nazism in Germany — and thus also on how similar excesses can be prevented in the future.
Once a fascist group obtains political power, it is very hard to displace.
For voters, be informed and engaged. And steer clear from political groups that are not committed to democratic processes or have racially motivated agendas.
For politicians, sharing power with extremists in your own party, or in other parties, is dangerous. Politicians of the centre-left and centre-right may see each other as historical opponents, but they should be allied in fighting extremists on either side.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s legacy was established long ago, well before he became #MoscowMitch.
McConnell delivered Donald Trump the first major victory of his presidency months before Trump even took office. With his decision to block Merrick Garland — Barack Obama’s pick to succeed Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court — for almost a year after Scalia's death, McConnell reshaped the future of the nation’s highest court. If Garland had been granted a fair hearings and eventually confirmed to the bench, liberals would have held a voting majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in decades. McConnell has called his unprecedented decision to block Garland, made within hours of Scalia's passing, the “most consequential” of his political career.
“I saved the Supreme Court for a generation by blocking President Obama’s nominees and led the way for Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh,” McConnell recently bragged.
Even beyond than his refusal to fill a Supreme Court vacancy during the final year of Obama’s presidency, the majority leader’s biggest impact on the federal judiciary was his stonewalling of Obama’s lower bench appointments.
By the time Trump got to the White House, there were 103 judicial vacancies in the federal courts. Since his inauguration, Republicans led by McConnell have pushed through an astonishing 144 judicial appointments, including 99 district court judges and 43 appellate court judges. Trump has now appointed nearly one of every four federal circuit court judges and 15 percent of all district court judges. In 2019 alone, the Senate has confirmed 13 of Trump’s nominees for the circuit court and 46 district court picks.
This is in large part thanks to significant rule changes ushered in by McConnell, such as diminishing debate time over district-level federal judges from 30 hours to two hours. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first two years of the Trump administration, barred home-state senators from using their traditional "blue slip courtesy" to block judicial nominees. To no one's surprise, Trump stooge Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who now chairs the committee, has continued this policy.
As a result, Trump has now surpassed Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Barack Obama in getting federal judges confirmed by the August recess of his third year in office, according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, recently bragged that the Senate majority leader has “taken on this role as the principal enabler of the Trump agenda.” The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who for decades has worked to get conservative judges on the federal bench — and was instrumental in the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — described McConnell is “the most consequential majority leader, certainly, in modern history.”
With the notable exception of the Supreme Court, most federal judges have consistently rejected Trump’s unconstitutional policies especially but not exclusively on immigration. Now McConnell is trying to change the courts. The Kentuckian clearly understands which way the political winds are blowing: He's working overtime to fast-track a conservative judiciary that will protect moneyed interests and prevent any leftward legislative progress, even with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Senate.
Beyond their numbers, the records of McConnell’s right-wing judges is equally as horrifying.
This multi-generational shift in the federal judiciary has resulted in the least diverse bench in modern history, with not a single black, Latino or LGBT appointee. More than two-thirds of those confirmed are white men, with a median age is 47.5 years. Federal judges serve for life, ensuring that Trump’s legacy will be imprinted on the federal judiciary for the next three to four decades.
Several have exhibited open hostility to immigrant rights, reproductive freedom, voting rights and LGBTQ equality. Among the new circuit court judges is Steven Grasz, who defended a “partial-birth” abortion ban in front of the Supreme Court and was confirmed despite receiving a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association over concerns he would be “unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge.” Another is Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed despite calling Roe v. Wade an “erroneous decision” and reportedly belonging to a private religious group where women are literally described as “handmaids.” John Bush, who once compared abortion to slavery on an anonymous blog, is also now a circuit court judge.
If Trump and McConnell are re-elected next year — the latter faces a potentially tough battle in the Bluegrass State — they will likely be able to appoint and confirm more than half of all sitting federal judges by 2024.
McConnell has blatantly been willing to let a hostile nation meddle in our elections, but he's so much more than #MoscowMitch. He has remade the federal judiciary to his own design, with the help of a corrupt and ignorant president. That will seal his legacy as the Senate’s master manipulator.
What has become of conservatism under President Donald Trump?
The exact nature of the ideology and the movement has always been up for debate, but at a trivial level, conservatism has always just been whatever influential groups of self-identified conservatives say it is. And despite frequent calls from some corners to decry Trump as not a "true" conservative, the evidence that he has subsumed not only the Republican Party but the ideological movement underpinning it is growing by the day.
And in a new feud between ex-Republican Max Boot and the magazine National Review, observers can glimpse in real-time the merging of the conservative old order and the Trumpist present. It's "the Trumpification of conservatism," as Boot put it.
Boot set the current flare-up in motion with a recent column in the Washington Post about white fragility called: "Get a grip, white people. We’re not the victims."
To be frank, the piece would not have been particularly noteworthy on its own. It's a rather mundane point that writers of color have long emphasized, and that is accepted as conventional wisdom by anyone to the left of Jennifer Rubin. Its thesis was simple: Despite polling that shows a majority of white people believe otherwise, discrimination against people of color in the United States is a much bigger problem than discrimination against white people.
But this rather terrestrial — though important — point set off one National Review writer. John Hirschauer denounced the piece and Boot as fanning "the flames of racial hatred."
It was absurd and overblown.
Perhaps most representative of the piece's tone, Hirschauer wrote of Boot: "Based on your skin color, says the white pundit, you’re either a victim or a villain." Boot said no such thing. His point was simply that, when it comes to racial discrimination, the majority of whites are wrong to think that they are primarily the victims. This does not entail, of course, that they are the villains.
To give Hirshauer a charitable reading, he may be objecting to some of Boot's overly sweeping claims. Hirschauer refers to these as "totalizing racial language." These are some of the key phrases of Boot's that Hirschauer seems to object to:
What it reveals is the sense of outrage that white people feel when they fear they are losing their privileged position to people of color.
...
White people can be pretty clueless. (I know, I’m one myself.) Get a grip, folks. We’re not the victims here. Thinking that we are is not just wrong. It’s dangerous.
You might say these claims are literally wrong, since surely not all white people feel a sense of outrage when they lose their privileged positions, and surely some white people are the victims in some scenarios.
But the second paragraph quoted here is the conclusion of Boot's piece, meant to be pithy. The first sentence is referring to an incident of white backlash against opposition to racism in South African. Picking on these sentences for perhaps not being literally true shows exactly the kind of oversensitivity on Hirshauer's part that Boot is warning about.
That's not the worst of it. Hirschauer claimed:
Boot sets up a Faustian choice for “white” readers: Side with the white supremacists and their detestable program, or sell your political soul to Max Boot and become one of the self-loathing whites so paralyzed by intersectional deference that they can hardly advance an argument without first reciting that neutered prelude: “As a straight, white, cisgender man with privilege, I . . .”
Again, there's no indication in Boot's piece that he hates whites. The idea of the "self-loathing white" is, in fact, a white supremacist trope. Boot responded:
In 2016, a group of white supremacists led by Richard Spencer got into a scuffle in the District after one of them accused an anti-racism protester of being a “self-hating white person.” These bigots routinely label any white person who offends their racist sensibilities a “race traitor.” I have gotten used to this kind of invective from white supremacists online. I did not expect to get it from a magazine that has defined mainstream conservatism for more than 60 years.
Hirschauer has tried to defend his argument. In a new piece, he denied spouting white supremacist talking points and condemned the ideology as "a sin." He continued:
My point in the self-loathing comment: If Boot is really condemning all white people — and his piece often leaves out any qualifier and talks directly to the unmodified mass of “white people” — then he, as he admits, is part of this all-encompassing category he finds worthy of such rank condemnation (as are Bernie Sanders, Rob Reiner, Howard Dean, etc.).
But once more, Hirschauer is misrepresenting Boot's piece. Boot never once condemned "all white people," and it's hyperbolic overreaction to believe that he did. Hirschauer even deceptively provides a partial quote of Boot's claim referring fear of losing privilege to people of color, falsely asserting that the claim was categorical. It wasn't. Hirschauer also said: "In the world of Max Boot’s creation, there is only Max Boot’s policy preferences on the one hand, and white nationalism on the other." But this too is false; Boot's arguments haven't been about policy at all, they're about the attitudes white people have toward people of color. And it's this discussion that seems to have set Hirschauer off.
All of this wouldn't matter that much, of course, except for what it reveals about American conservatism. Boot noted that Hirschauer's article was defended by Rich Lowry, National Review's editor.
Boot said it was "alarming" and "telling" that the article was published by the outlet at all. And he pointed out that the magazine has in recent years often defended Trump from accurate accusations of racism and promoted the president's views on immigration.
"This is, sadly, a return to the roots of a magazine that defended Jim Crow in the 1950s (and even the early 1960s) and South Africa’s apartheid regime until its dissolution in 1994," Boot wrote. "I take no pleasure in writing these words. I am heartbroken to see that it is not just the Republican Party that has become Trumpified but much of the American right — including a magazine I once revered."
Boot doesn't really square the fact that he "once revered" the magazine with its obviously racist past. And it's also accurate to argue, as many have, that American conservatism itself has inextricably linked to racism and white supremacy. But movements ebb and flow, and there was legitimate resistance to Trump — at points — within the conservative movement and indeed in National Review, in part because of his outright bigotry.
That resistance has almost entirely faded. That National Review is now unabashedly employing white supremacist tropes to attack an ex-Republicans denunciation of racism is just more evidence of that.
Stocks spiked Tuesday on news that President Donald Trump has backed down from a major threat in his trade war with China.
The administration had planned on slapping a 10 percent tariff — that is, an import tax — on $300 billion of Chinese goods starting on Sept. 1, 2019.
But now, the administration has backed down, as explained in a United States Trade Representative press release:
Certain products are being removed from the tariff list based on health, safety, national security and other factors and will not face additional tariffs of 10 percent.
Further, as part of USTR’s public comment and hearing process, it was determined that the tariff should be delayed to December 15 for certain articles. Products in this group include, for example, cell phones, laptop computers, video game consoles, certain toys, computer monitors, and certain items of footwear and clothing.
Why would all this awesome stuff be exempt from the tariff until Dec. 15? The administration didn’t say, but many observers pointed out the obvious: The new date would significantly limit the effect of the tariffs on the costs of consumer goods during the Christmas shopping season.
Some tariffs will still go into effect on Sept. 1, mostly on agricultural goods.
But the apparent reason for delaying the consumer product tariffs, of course, undercuts frequent lie about his tariffs, that China pays for them and not the U.S. Trump has often suggested that tariffs are not just a good negotiating tactic, but good in themselves — that they boost the U.S. economy. It also undercuts Trump’s headstrong strategy that he can announce an aggressive round of tariffs and then start to roll them back within less than two weeks. He’s floundering without a clear objective.
As Trump ramped up his trade war at the beginning of the month, the stock market tanked. The president — who is obsessed with cable news, which often features a stock ticker in the bottom corner — has shown that he is sensitive to the market’s perturbations in the past. It’s possible these moves spooked him, prompting him to pull back on some tariffs and triggering the rally on Tuesday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 370 points by the end of the day.
Economist Paul Krugman noted that the market’s reactions to the posturing in the trade war seem to exaggerate the severity of the effects of the tariffs themselves.
“The best going explanation of the tariffs/market link was that markets took tariff announcements as indications of broader decision process; to be blunt, how crazy Trump is. Hard-line announcements suggested more radicalism to come, softer announcements more rationality,” Krugman explained on Twitter. “But this was obviously a defensive move to avoid price hikes before Christmas, not a change in Trump’s world view or improvement in his decision-making. So why respond so strongly?”
The best guess, it seems to me, is that the move indicated that Trump is well-aware of the potential impacts his policies will have on consumers. And that, in turn, will have an effect on his decision-making. Any president would want to avoid being the cause of consumer’s pocketbook anxiety as they head into the Christmas season without a very good reason for the policy.
And Trump doesn’t have a very good reason for his aggressive tariffs. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias notes, Trump’s claims about what he actually wants from China vary and don’t really form a coherent demand. Mostly, it just seems that Trump wants to be seen as tough on China without having a thought-out strategy.
In recent months and weeks, especially with Fed Chair Jerome Powell raising rates in response to, in part, the negative effects of Trump’s trade war, fears have grown that the president may actually be leading the country to choppy economic waters with his international feuds. It did not appear to many that the fight would end peaceably and with only minor changes to the status quo, as Trump’s kerfuffle over NAFTA did.
But by showing he’s sensitive to the impacts of tariffs on the holiday season, Trump is sending the pretty clear message that he’s not likely to let his pugnacious instincts completely override pragmatic political strategy. That gives investors reasons to breathe a sigh of relief.
It has another effect, though, too, and one Trump probably won’t be happy about. It tells China that the president is cognizant of where the pain points in the U.S. economy are. And that means, despite his bloviating, he has less leverage over the authoritarian regime than he would like people to believe.
The National Rifle Association faced the most serious crisis of its modern existence. Dissidents within the NRA directly challenged Executive Director Wayne LaPierre’s leadership. Not only had the nation’s oldest gun group’s net worth declined by more than $60 million, exacerbated by stagnant membership numbers, but LaPierre stood accused of wasteful spending, as had the NRA’s public relations firm, Ackerman-McQueen. One former NRA insider accused both of “financial bloodsucking.” Worse, the NRA suffered political reversals at the polls, and their reputation was further tarnished in the aftermath of a devastating massacre, and the organization’s maladroit public comments. The crisis came to a head over a celebrity brought in to improve the organization’s image and save LaPierre’s job.
This crisis moment for the NRA came not last year, but over twenty years ago. LaPierre weathered that storm, including political losses in the 1992 elections and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, thanks in part to LaPierre’s installment of actor Charlton Heston to beat back the insurgents and improve the NRA’s tarnished image. The ploy worked, and the NRA went on to help elect gun-friendly president George W. Bush, paving the way for the enactment of its top policy priorities.
As the NRA’s comeback 20 years ago suggests, only a fool would count the NRA out now as a key force in the gun issue. Early in the twentieth century, the fledgling organization nearly disappeared, rescued mostly thanks to government-lent support to buttress its shooting and training activities. Among the NRA’s rescuers was hunting enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt.
But their current woes—financial, political, legal—overshadow past crises.
The story begins, ironically, with their jackpot political bet on Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Pouring $31 million into his campaign—triple what it spent on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign—and over $50 million in all into the 2016 elections, the NRA sat on top of the political world at the start of 2017. Yet in a shocking series of cascading crises, it all rapidly unraveled.
Media investigations reported disturbing and possibly illegal connections, perhaps including money laundering, between the NRA and Russian officials tied to the 2016 election. The NRA embarked on a series of cost-cutting measures, culminating in an angry and litigious split with the NRA’s long-time ad firm, Ackerman McQueen, which had received decades of lavish annual fees—$40 million in 2017 alone. Then the NRA pulled the plug on its expensive and little viewed online media outlet, NRATV.
Validating the NRA’s money woes, it was outspent in the 2018 midterm elections, for the first time ever, by gun safety groups, and a bevy of candidates around the country ran and won on a gun safety agenda. These reversals were spearheaded by a reinvigorated gun safety movement led by students from Parkland High School in Florida, the scene of the worst high school shooting in many years.
And then came the NRA’s annual spring convention. Usually a picture of gun rights unity and pride, this year’s event was a public relations debacle. The NRA’s president, Oliver North, issued a letter to the NRA’s board accusing LaPierre of profligate and improper personal spending, including $275,000 on clothing from a Beverly Hills boutique, travel to several posh resorts, and a charge of sexual harassment. North insisted that LaPierre step down, calling the situation an “existential crisis.” LaPierre fired back, accusing North of extortion and having an improper relationship with Ackerman-McQueen (which also represented North and paid him $1 million a year; ironically, LaPierre and his wife both had long ties to the ad firm). LaPierre prevailed, and North learned that he was out while the convention was still underway.
Yet that didn’t stop the bad news revelations: since 2010, the NRA had drawn over $200 million in cash from its non-profit NRA Foundation to keep the doors open. As of the end of 2017, NRA available assets were in the negative, to the tune of $31.8 million. In the last ten years, while its revenues grew only .7% per year, its expenses grew on average 6.4% per year. Recent annual deficits ran to $40 million. Some board members loudly condemned LaPierre’s profligate ways, including former congressman Allen West and former NRA president Marion Hammer.
On the legal front, a New York state agency ruled that the NRA’s “Carry Guard” insurance program, designed and marketed by Ackerman-McQueen to generate revenue by providing policies to cover self-defense shootings, violated state insurance rules. Critics dubbed it “murder insurance” because it could provide coverage for a criminal act. The NRA sued; the expensive litigation continues. The state’s Attorney General launched an investigation into the NRA’s tax status (the NRA is chartered in NY). NRA officials have already been served with subpoenas. Congressional investigations are following similar leads, including possible campaign finance law violations involving Russia.
In the latest turn, the NRA’s chief political strategist and second-in-command, Chris Cox, was suddenly forced out by LaPierre. Cox was accused of conspiring with North, a claim Cox denied. The sudden ouster was an even greater shock than North’s since he was with the organization for 24 years, and was viewed as LaPierre’s successor. Several wealthy donors to the NRA announced that they would stop all contributions until LaPierre was dismissed.
Each of these revelations is a body blow. Cumulatively, they could spell the end of the NRA as it has operated in modern times. Here are at least four likely developments:
--the NRA will survive, but not in its current incarnation. No stopgap cash infusion can cure its money problems and profligate spending habits.
--the NRA will ultimately need new leadership. No Charlton Heston can repair the damage.
--the NRA will not be a major factor in the 2020 elections. It will continue to speak out on gun issues, but it does not have and will not acquire the kind of cash needed to be a real player in time. NRA loyalists will continue to back Trump, but they would do so anyway.
--Despite other obstacles, gun safety groups will have an open field to advance their cause. On the other hand, the NRA’s political muscle lies less with money than with its loyal and devoted grassroots base, which remains intact. State gun rights groups will work to mobilize that base in the months to come to fill the void created by the NRA’s manifold problems.
The NRA has survived existential threats from within and without, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine gun politics today without the bulldog NRA chewing its way through the political landscape. Yet it is equally difficult to imagine how it can regain its bygone political mojo.
Robert J. Spitzer is a Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at SUNY Cortland and the author of fifteen books, including five on gun policy. His most recent books include “Guns across America” (Oxford University Press, 2015) and “The Politics of Gun Control” (Routledge, 7th ed., 2018).
That we cannot take gun control seriously, that we can’t talk about abortion or race or tax cuts forthrightly and honestly spells big trouble for dealing with the kind of food and water shortages being laid out in a new report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The report, which includes the work of 107 experts from 52 countries, is a devastatingly serious outline of what is coming. It’s not some worst-case scenario to be dismissed with a White House back of the hand, it’s not some sci-fi movie. Its conclusions reflect the science of what is already underway to turn large portions of Earth un-plantable and probably un-livable.
As if to underscore the point, The New York Times coincidentally published an analysis of water shortages growing out of control, with 17 nations showing substantial problems in having freshwater supplies for its cities. Some were arid to start with, but others like parts of Brazil and Mexico are busily pumping out groundwater, previously sacrosanct water sources, to meet population needs. Projected out, The Times report says a quarter of the globe faces important water shortages.
I’m mostly worried that we lack the ability to have an intelligent debate about our current-day issues, and it is hard to imagine how we can take such a me-first America to a table to discuss what happens to the entire globe.
Without trying to scare people, the UN climate group says a half-billion people already live in places turning into desert,and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, accordingtothe report, which was released in summary form. Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Plus heating the planet will widen uninhabitable areas.
I’m mostly worried that we lack the ability to have an intelligent debate about our current-day issues, and it is hard to imagine how we can take such a me-first America to a table to discuss what happens to the entire globe.
Already, more than 10%of the world’s population remains undernourished.
Climate Refugees
For the United States and Europe, which are undergoing fairly awful arguments about current-day immigration from those fleeing wars, gang violence and horrible economies, you can begin to worry about how we will expand this view to include vast numbers of climate refugees.
The idea that this climate report hit as Americans try to sort out public mass shootings inspired by hate for The Other, for immigrants and non-whites, the prospects for intelligent, empathetic consideration of what to do about climate migration simply boggles the mind. Start with the fact that we have a president in Donald Trump who is a Climate Change denier, sprinkle in a healthy dose of inherent racism, his insistence on rewarding greed over the welfare and well-being of all, and you can see the stew we are cooking.
The report details how climate change is threatening food and water supplies for humans, turning arable land to desert, degrading soil and increasing the threat of droughts and other disasters. As have previous studies, it puts most of the blame on fossil fuel-burning power plants and automobiles but adds that agriculture and forestry account for 23% of total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite global statements to take aggressive action to keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius – minus the United States, of course, since Trump withdrew our participation – the report again underscores the needs to make fundamental changes in what we eat globally, how we farm, what we plant, and cutting emissions, all while feeding growing populations.
News reports talk about the panel’s call for “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade to avoid devastating effects from rising seas, more intense storms and other impacts of climate change. They also say that we need to plant large swaths of land currently used to produce food to growing trees that store carbon and to use crops designated for energy use.
Trashing Green New Deal Proposals
It’s important to note that as we read these things, our politicians are routinely trashing the aspirations of Green New Deal programs as radical, leftist and somehow unpatriotic.
But rather than addressing themselves to the aspirations as just that, too many are just turning away to worry about tax cuts and other economic incentives to assure short-term successes for American corporations.
It was interesting to see that a quarter of the problem traces to flatulence by livestock, nitrous oxide emissions from the earth and artificial fertilizers. At the same time, there have been years of deforestation efforts in the Amazon, Indonesia and even in the U.S. West, harming the ability of forests to retain carbon dioxide.
We are often asked what we can do as individuals. Apparently changing our diet to less meat and more vegetable would be helpful. On a global scale, that could have real effect. The other day, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and Fox commentator Sean Hannity went at it over a mayoral proposed “Meatless Monday” for school students, with Hannity ridiculing the idea and the mayor. This does not speak well for intelligent conversation about future diets.
Of course, all of the changes that get listed in such reports inevitably have direct effects on national economies – and jobs. Clearly, that is awful, which is why the Green New Deal projects all try to link with job retraining and changes in government support for individuals, along the lines of Democratic candidate Andrew Yang’s proposal for $1,000 a month for each adult in the country.
The Washington Post said that left unchecked, climate change could imperil food security in parts of the world, putting further strain on a food system that’s already stressed, citing the report. Crop yields could shrink. Foods such as wheat could become less nutritious. Damage from thawing permafrost could endanger infrastructure. Water scarcity could become an urgent problem in dry areas.
In our culture of excess, we need to ask ourselves some important questions.
