These problems are not separate or apart from Age of Trump.

In the most obvious example, more than 1 million people have died in America from the COVID pandemic – hundreds died just this week. The nation has not properly grieved such a massive loss. Part of that inability to properly grieve is a function of how the Trump regime and its agents have faced no serious criminal (or even civil) punishments for their role in what was a de facto act of democide.

Ultimately, however, Trumpism and other forms of fake populism are symptoms, not the cause of a deep societal rot that spans American society. When social deviance and other anti-social and anti-human behaviors are normalized entire cultures become pathological. This is one of the main lessons from the Age of Trump and in other countries where democracy and civil society have succumbed to authoritarianism, fascism, and other illiberal forces.

What would a healthy American society even look like? What would it require for America to confront its deep traumas and then find closure and healing?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Dr. Seth D. Norrholm, a translational neuroscientist, psychologist, and one of the world's leading experts on PTSD and fear. He is currently a scientific director at the Neuroscience Center for Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma (NeuroCAST) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Wayne State University School of Medicine. Dr. Norrholm explores how America has been traumatized and is in the midst of a type of collective PTSD that the country's leaders as well as everyday Americans are afraid to confront. The fact that Americans are overprescribed mood-altering drugs and are addicted to social media and other technology contributes to this denial and disengagement with reality. Of note: Americans are 4.4 percent of the world's population but consume more than 80 percent of the opioids.

"What we have now are elected officials who aim to do real, significant harm to those they view as the enemy."

Ultimately, Dr. Norrholm is deeply concerned that today's Republican Party (and by implication the larger "conservative" movement and white right) has become a vessel for pathological behavior where "personality disordered" individuals like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, and others are elevated and given great power on a national and international stage.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling given the state of this country and world?

It's day to day, it's minute by minute depending on what is going on in my personal life and of course politics and current events too. I'm often accused of being too negative or spending too much time dwelling on the terrible or gut-wrenching news that comes at us in droves. But I'm actually an optimist and I believe that, on the whole, people are good and have good intentions. For many, it would seem easy to give up. The one true thing that keeps me from giving up is my optimism.

I tell many people, across areas of my life, "If you don't believe that you can overcome something, then you're probably not going to do it."

But the truth is that there have been so many moments these last few years in America and other parts of the world where everything feels so hopeless and pointless. Sometimes in life when you feel like there's no point, and the world is just caving in on you, THAT is when you have to fight the hardest. I often think of the analogy of these hard times being like leaving a bar and knowing that there is going to be a fight. You know it is not going to work out well. But you must have that mindset of, "Well, yeah, this is gonna be bad. I'm going to the hospital and at least one of them is going to the dentist, if not the hospital with me."

My father taught me something similar. He would say they may beat me up or kill me, but they will know that they were in a fight for sure. They are going to remember me.

That's the type of grit and resilience and perseverance you have to have in life, whether it's dealing with the challenges we are facing as a society or our struggles and adversities on a personal level. You CAN be the effector of change.

People who read my work or listen to my podcasts will often reach out to me and say things like, "Why are you so negative? Why are you so dark?" I am just trying to prepare the public for the reality of this American nightmare. I have been warning them for seven or so years and few want to listen. You must be prepared to confront evil. We are in a great moral crisis, one that we are not going to survive by denying reality and pretending it's just going to magically disappear. That is not defeatism or "negativity". It is the truth.

Sometimes when you are explaining a problem, people want to interpret it as you are excusing the problem. This is especially true when you are discussing the specific problems and challenges that are afflicting white men in American society right now.

The fact is, you cannot solve a problem that you do not understand. That is the rule and framework that I use across my life in all areas.

As a mental health professional, I have the ability to observe and analyze how the world impacts our individual and collective emotions and the larger world. When people have a framework for understanding all these changes and challenges in the world that are impacting them then there can be a calming effect. The worst type of stressor for us as human beings is unpredictable stress. This is due to our lack of a sense of control or disorientation. When you are disoriented, you need to first understand what is happening in order to orient yourself. From there we can find solutions.

Isn't it better to deal with reality as it is instead of living in some type of fantasyland?

Trump's presidency, and these two years afterward, have impacted people in different ways. There is the COVID pandemic, of course, and more than 1 million dead Americans and tens of millions affected in some way, psychologically, practically, or otherwise. Those people lucky enough to have been able to work from home the whole time, or come from a more secure economic background, or have other social capital and resources experienced the pandemic very differently from someone who works in the service industry and is poor or working class. If you're living in a gated community, your perception and experience of the world likely haven't necessarily changed a whole lot from before Trump to after Trump. In fact, in 2017, it may have even got better with a tax break. If you are someone with money it is much easier for you to stick your head in the sand when things get too stressful and to ignore the realities that are hurting other people.

Clinically speaking, I support the following advice about how to get through these last few years with everything that has been happening:

"It is this lack of accountability coupled with the removal of the "conscience" of the GOP that has ushered in an era where it is not just lying that has been accepted but pathological lying and personality-disordered individuals who would be unfit for many jobs in the American workforce."

You do not have to spend eight or 10 hours a day watching cable TV or listening to political podcasts or whatever it may be. If doing that is causing you distress, then don't do it. If it's negatively impacting your relationships, if it's creating a traumatic or extreme stress reaction, hurting your life and spirituality, if you're having anxiety, if you're depressed, then don't do it. You can still be an informed citizen by not constantly monitoring the news and current events. If you need to disengage for your own health and well-being then do it.

There is so much denial and a type of amnesia about America's many problems and character flaws -- this is especially true among white Americans. Why are they at all surprised by the Age of Trump, the COVID disaster, police thuggery and brutality against Black and brown people, gays and lesbians and trans people? As I and others have often said, "white privilege is one hell of a drug".

As human beings, we often struggle to step outside of our own subjective experiences. Empathy is literally the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. If our entire life has been more or less comfortable, and if we have not dealt with adversity until middle age for example, then we handle adversity very poorly. Yes, there are some people who have gone their whole lives without major traumatic or other adverse experiences. Such people usually handle adversity very poorly. Why? They have never had to face it. Conversely, if you're somebody who dealt with childhood trauma, over time those experiences -- or even one traumatic moment -- may break you. But here is one of the "advantages" of having experienced trauma earlier in life: you can draw on those lessons and coping experiences as an adult. You are in a sense "inoculated" and can have confidence and life skills others may not.

On a national level, many, if not most Americans, believe in the myth of "American Exceptionalism" that fascism, authoritarianism, and other great disasters that happen in other countries somehow cannot happen here. That is the arrogance and narcissism of American Exceptionalism. But it almost happened here as we saw on January 6, 2021, with Trump's coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol. It continues to be on display by sitting members of Congress.

What happens on a cognitive level when a person is forced to confront reality and that their denial will not save them?

People don't want to accept bad news. Or to think about who is responsible or culpable. So we just wish it away and hope that it doesn't happen. Many Americans have reached that point. I've written in the past about how the effect of chronic stress and chronic fear rewires the brain. That dynamic causes us to have a more intense reaction that, in turn, creates a fear response that lasts longer. In essence, we are in a state of hypervigilance that is akin to what someone who suffers from PTSD might experience.

The mainstream news media continues to follow the rule of "if it bleeds it leads." Tucker Carlson, for example, is an expert at using (false) fear and terror to drive his ratings. He is always telling his audience that some "THEY" are "COMING AFTER YOU!" If a person hears that type of message over and over again it will change how their brain reacts to stress. There is an entire right-wing media machine dedicated to creating fear and terror and chaos on a massive level — and it spreads like a virus.

What is the clinical definition of trauma? What does it mean for a society to be traumatized?

Trauma is something adverse or tragic that happens to you that creates a deep emotional or psychological injury. American society is basically being caught in a trauma feedback loop. The media is exacerbating the trauma. People who have unresolved trauma in their lives are having those feelings amplified by how extremely dysfunctional and hyper-polarized American politics have become these last few years. Many Americans are ultimately trapped in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of trauma. Politics has unfortunately become a medium or theater of war where people unload all their trauma (or unresolved conflicts or perceived grievances) onto the people that they disagree with about politics or perhaps even hate. They should be in therapy or support groups instead.

We have famously been described as a "Prozac Nation." What do we know about this empirically?

In 2021, there were 337 million prescriptions written for antidepressants -- we're a country of 330 million people. And obviously, that's not a one-for-one ratio, because some people may be getting multiple prescriptions filled throughout the year. The US has 5% of the world's population, but we consume 50% of the world's pharmaceuticals. We are a society that is overprescribed in terms of medication. Historically, human beings have relied on physical activity through our fight-or-flight instincts to mitigate and to deal with stress and fear. We encountered something that was stressful or fearful, we either fought like hell, or we ran like hell. Our bodies evolved to rely on those responses. However, because of technology, and especially automation, we've gotten to a point where we're living highly sedentary lifestyles. It's no coincidence that as obesity rates have climbed to about 70%, and as Type II Diabetes rates have climbed, we're seeing exponential rates of depression and anxiety.

Don't get me wrong, pharmacology absolutely has a place in mental health. But outside of a severe, debilitating, or incapacitating mental illness, there should be a progression of force, so to speak, going from the least invasive to most invasive, with pharmacology being at best, the fifth line of defense in dealing with mental health for most people struggling with depressive, anxious, or fearful signs and symptoms. The progress should be diet, it should be exercise, it should be sleep, and then it should be therapy. Only after you exhaust those options, do you then start to be open to a medication regimen.

Unfortunately, American society is typified by a get-rich-quick, path of least resistance, lottery ticket mentality. A person goes to the primary care doctor and tells them they are depressed and the doctor immediately gives them a prescription. From a mental health standpoint, we're not taking the steps that we can do to try to maintain our mental health or to address it once it starts to regress a little bit. And then once it does regress, we're to quit to look for the easy way out to try to address it.

You have written extensively about the meaning of masculinity in the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism. What is the state of masculinity right now in America?

Fascists, authoritarians, and fake populists incite fear. In turn, that creates a moral authority and a justification to do anything required to defeat "evil" or "immoral enemies". Once you create that as a backdrop, now you can excuse Trump's or other right-wing leaders' immorality or pathologies. One of the things that happens with authoritarians is that they want to create the perception of — or even actual — chaos and disorder. That scares people so that they will be willing to vote in or perhaps even install a strong man to restore order.

If you value your safety, if you value your family's safety, if you value your way of life, then this is the tradeoff that we have to make in order to preserve that. What's worse is that some of those with the most evil intent will (mis)align themselves with Christianity and the Bible to shore up a defense of their cause.

American society is one of spectacle and distraction. There are dream merchants in advertising, politics, technology, and across American life who are dedicated to selling fantasies and manipulating the public. How has that impacted the collective mental health of the American people and their ability to deal with personal and collective problems?

Let's be clear here. There have always been lies and deception in American politics and government. It has occurred often in a "wink and nod" fashion where a political candidate says something to get elected but then acts differently once in office. But there was a long-standing, underlying assumption. That assumption being the politician might act in a way that I disagreed with and that might have had consequences for me or not (e.g., higher taxes, higher prices, longer processing times) but ultimately believed in democracy and didn't want to actually hurt me/us. What we have now are elected officials who have torched that underlying understanding and aim to do real, significant, often malicious harm to those they now view as the enemy.

One inflection point in recent history that we can point to is the death of John McCain. That was one of the true points where Republican decency and its moral compass were shattered. So the spectacle has become more real and the collective anxiety felt in America is due to REAL threats (to Social Security, to alternative lifestyles, to women's rights, to civil rights, to school safety, and to protection from being shot in public).

George Santos and Donald Trump are more than fabulists. They appear to be pathological liars and malignant narcissists. But the more important fact is that such behavior is embraced by American society on so many levels. In fact, I would argue that they are able to get away with such behavior and profit from it encouraging that pathology and legitimizing it among the public at large. It is not a coincidence that both Santos and Trump are Republicans.

Related to my point above, the destruction of the moral compass and avarice and cowardice in the Republican party has ushered in a new wave of candidates and politicians. What were once damning qualities or behaviors are now either swept aside or embraced.

"The amplification and distortion of the public self has pushed many people further away from self-reflection."

George Santos likely has a disordered personality characterized by pathological lying and lack of respect for others. He was just sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives. There was a time when Howard Dean's candidacy for President was derailed because he once yelled too loud into a microphone at a campaign event. Jim Jordan covered up a university sexual assault scandal. Marjorie Taylor Greene cheered the 1/6 Insurrection. 147 Republicans voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. None were sanctioned, punished, or removed.

It is this lack of accountability coupled with the removal of the "conscience" of the GOP that has ushered in an era where it is not just lying that has been accepted but pathological lying and personality-disordered individuals who would be unfit for many jobs in the American workforce.

Does the average American want to be honest with themselves? What would that look like in practice? Moreover, what about a type of critical self-reflection and personal inventory on an individual and societal level? That would require that we look at the ugliness in the mirror. To do such a thing is terrifying for a culture and a people who are addicted to social media, the stupidity of the human zoo that is TikTok, obsessed with being "micro celebrities" on Twitter or Instagram, and the like.

This is a great point. Psychologists have long known that we tend to have a public self and a private self. Before the age of social media, the coverage, influence, and impact of the public self was relatively limited. You could write an op-ed to the local newspaper, call into a radio show, or contact your member of Congress through a snail mail letter. Social media has pushed the public self beyond what was once envisioned. Tweets, Instas, Snaps, and Facebook posts can be "blown up" and go viral within seconds and minutes.

People who were once "on the fringe" have a louder voice and farther reach. Force multipliers like Fox News and other media outlets amplify messages that (1) never got very far and (2) were pretty easily dismissed. So, to answer your question, the amplification and distortion of the public self has pushed many people further away from self-reflection.

Those experience machines are a way of filling up one's deep personal emptiness with dopamine hits from being "seen" and "acknowledged" by their so-called friends online. What of meaningful interpersonal human relationships? Loneliness and social atomization are a public health problem and a precondition and fuel for fascism and other anti-human politics.

Technological advances, 24/7 at-the-fingertips access, and social media have greatly increased the size of the echo chambers within which the far right and extremists reside (and you could argue the far left as well). Through confirmation bias, an attentive audience, and a broad platform, people have a greater sense of seeing and being seen – even if it is in a fantasy world where elections are rigged, viruses are hoaxes, and immigrant invasion threatens our lives and property.

You are absolutely right that we know as neuroscientists that "likes", "follows", "retweets", and other social media affirmations and validations increase dopamine like a rewarding drug, food, or sexual experience might. This fuels and reinforces the extreme behaviors and bolsters allegiance to false gods, golden calves, and their message.

If you were going to diagnose America collectively as a patient, what would your conclusion be?

The underlying problem in American society and politics right now is fear – both misplaced and well-placed. Even when otherwise good people are afraid -- for their kids, families, or self-preservation -- they will go to extreme lengths to protect themselves or to protect their families. Fear is a very effective political strategy. Remember also, it is not very hard for in-group/out-group, rivalry dynamics to take place with groups of people. Social psychology experiments have shown that simply identifying one group as "A" and another as "B," it doesn't take long for dislike, animosity, and eventually cruelty to leak out.

In addition, many people will compromise their values in order to support, defend, or even be a member of a tribe that is engaging in immoral or egregious or unethical actions. We will essentially defend the tribe that will defend us. This dynamic is almost a kind of authoritarian arms race. As a society, we are suffering from a Collective Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Depression as well. Anger is often a byproduct of depression. Men tend to express their emotions externally with violence. Women tend to internalize their fear and anger. Fear is underlying all of this. When people are scared, they get depressed; when people are scared they have anxiety; when people are scared they get pissed off. When they get pissed off, they often want to act.

What does it mean to be healthy in such an unhealthy society?

It's difficult to be healthy if you don't have healthy relationships. If you're having issues with the people you love, it really doesn't matter how well things are going at work, and how much money you're making, it's really difficult to feel healthy. There are a lot of good people in the world -- and there are lots of bad people in the world too. Is hope a dangerous thing? In the end, it is all about how you use that hope. Action is what matters.

Repetition is one of the most essential principles in marketing. It is how a brand creates a relationship with consumers. If the marketing campaign is successful, the consumer will link the brand with certain emotions, images, and ideas. In the most effective marketing campaigns, the consumer embraces a given brand as exemplifying those qualities to the exclusion of the competing brands.

At Forbes, Robin Lewis uses the example of Apple to demonstrate how this model functions:

Simply stated, a brand or store has a neurological connection with its customers if those customers approach the store visit as they would a visit to the home of a good friend. The trip requires almost no perceivable effort because they know it is going to be a fun and enjoyable experience.
The consumer mind-connecting process created by Jobs for Apple is instructional for all consumer-facing businesses because of its holistic approach.
Once connected, Apple and its cult of addicts are impervious to competitors. Steve Jobs was almost obsessed with building this deep connection with consumers. His ability to translate science, technology and innovation into artistically designed, consumer-friendly products is now legendary. The unique Apple Stores served as the final link in the connection.

Republicans are masters of marketing using endless repetition.

They have successfully captured their public and created for them an entire alternate reality — a closed episteme — consisting of not just the party but a right-wing hate media echo chamber. Republicans can have all of their questions answered by this alternate reality.

Republicans have used their marketing machine to brand themselves as the party of "freedom", "liberty" and "individual rights." This is objectively not true. Today's Republican Party and "conservative" movement are fascists and authoritarians who in total hate real democracy and freedom. Their ultimate goal is to take away the civil and human rights and freedoms of those people they deem to be the enemy and therefore not "real Americans."

Their Orwellian newspeak version of "freedom, liberty and individual rights" just means that people are free as long as they do what Republicans want. For example, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is engaging in a fascist project consisting of thought crime laws, banning books and authors who are deemed "dangerous," and using his own personal Gestapo to intimidate and harass his political enemies.

DeSantis and his agents are also, quite literally, declaring the personhood of queer, gay, lesbian, transgendered and nonbinary people to be illegal. Part of this attack on their humanity and literal existence involves encouraging vigilantism and other violence. DeSantis is also taking away the reproductive rights and freedoms of women and girls.

.New research highlights the central role that authoritarian ideas – especially misogyny and hostile sexism – play in today's Republican Party and the behavior of its voters. While self-identified Democrats and the public as a whole have increasingly embraced the idea of gender equality as a norm, Republicans have become more regressive and misogynistic, according to a study by the communications and polling firm PerryUnDem. PerryUnDem's research also shows that hostile sexism and the core belief that women are inferior to men (meaning support for "traditional gender roles") is highly correlated with opposing women's reproductive rights. A belief that women do not have the intellectual or moral wisdom required to make decisions about their own bodies (i.e. they need to be guided by men) is also highly correlated with opposing women's reproductive rights and freedoms.

In addition, Republicans are also much more likely than Democrats to believe that women who choose to have abortions are irresponsible. Republicans in the study also believe that feminism has done more harm than good for the country.

PerryUnDem's report summarizes these findings:

Are sexist beliefs related to views toward abortion? Yes. There are very strong correlations between sexist beliefs and views toward abortion.
2. How pervasive are false stereotypes of women who have abortions? Upwards of 60% of the public hold stereotypical views.
3. What variables in our survey best predict wanting abortion legal or illegal? False stereotypes of women and women who have abortions.
The group identified as "hostile Anti-Egalitarians" -- a group that includes almost 50 percent of Republican men -- are most likely to hold such misogynistic views.

PerryUndem's report elaborates:

This segment – 18% of all survey respondents – is the least progressive on gender and holds the most hostile sexist views. This cohort almost universally (95%) agrees feminism has done more harm than good. Large majorities agree women are too easily offended (91%) and 80% agree that white men are the most attacked group in the country right now. Three quarters (75%) say they're more comfortable with women having traditional roles in society. Just 12% say a husband should definitely be prosecuted in the case of marital rape. This group skews white (76%), older (72% are 45+), men (57%), married (59%), Republican (58%), and religious (38% attend religious services once a week or more). Forty-four percent of Republican men are Antiegalitarians.

In a previous essay here at Salon, Amanda Marcotte explained how hostile sexism and misogyny fit into the Republican Party's strategy:

Republicans know that there's no substantive voting constituency for their economic policies. Tapping into this anger over women's economic and social gains allows the party to reach voters who would not be motivated by spending cuts to Social Security or tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. So while most Americans may reject the misogyny that underpins abortion bans, the anti-choice message is tapping a larger group of voters than Republicans could otherwise access. If they give up sexism now, they risk losing their core voters without necessarily getting new ones to replace them. Misogyny has been central to the Republican brand for too long, it turns out, for them to risk changing course now…
"The research tells us that anti-abortion attitudes" are about more than "babies or when life begins," Tresa Undem, the co-founder of PerryUndem, told Salon. Instead, "views are about one's fundamental beliefs toward women." When it comes to Republicans, "they hold the most hostile sexist views."
In other words, to keep the GOP base motivated to donate, volunteer, and vote in elections, the Republican party needs to appeal to sexist attitudes. The most effective way to win over misogynist voters is to attack reproductive rights.

And new research by UC Berkeley political scientist Cecilia Hyunjung Mo complements PerryUndem's findings. In conversation with Edward Lempinen of the Berkeley News, Mo elaborates on what she describes as "modern sexism" and anxieties related to hierarchy and loss of status:

Today, we're seeing the advancement of women and several minority groups. We're increasingly talking about issues of inequality. But if you're thinking, "I'm not on top anymore and I should be on top," then you might start feeling aggrieved by these changes.

Mo highlights how modern sexism impacts men's voting and other political behavior:

Additionally, in current work I'm doing in the U.S., my collaborators and I see preliminary evidence that modern sexism and some other dimensions of sexism seem to be a lot more predictive of voting now than they were in the past.
These constituencies seem to be arguing, "Gender discrimination doesn't exist anymore. We need to stop caring about advancing women. Women are getting too much. Men are being left behind. And we don't like government agencies and taxpayer dollars being invested in trying to remedy some form of discrimination that we don't think exists anymore."

Donald Trump, Mo explains, skillfully uses white male rage as a tool to radicalize his followers into attacking and undermining pluralistic democracy. "Having the president of the United States champion their causes emboldened the aggrieved white male, and as their grievances were being amplified, they were made to feel that something could actually be done to address their concerns."

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The mainstream American news media, especially its professional centrists with their "bothsidesism" and horserace coverage obsessions, have consistently failed to properly adapt to the Age of Trump, ascendant neofascism, and the larger democracy crisis. One of their greatest failures is a near-religious cult-like devotion to a belief in "normal politics" where the institutions and democracy are strong because of so-called shared values. The mainstream news media refuses to accept the foundational central role that emotions and identity play in politics. What America's news media and mainstream political class need to understand and accept is that modern conservatism is a type of motivated social cognition where sexism, racism, misogyny, social dominance behavior, authoritarianism and other factors play a central role in political decision-making. To deny these facts is to willfully refuse to understand the true nature of America's democracy crisis.

Once again, if a person tells you who they are believe them.

Being a Republican or conservative today is a statement of one's core identity and personhood where fascism, authoritarianism, violence, and a need to dominate and control others deemed as being outside of one's tribe is central to the group identity and brand. Today's Republican fascists have been screaming at the top of their lungs about who they really are and too many members of America's news media and political class have convinced themselves that they are somehow not serious. That denial will be written in capital letters as the epitaph for America's democracy and civil society.

In a recent essay at Raw Story, Thom Hartmann summarized the danger to American democracy and society embodied by DeSantis:

Historians and political observers have been predicting that America would get our very own Mussolini ever since the days of Barry Goldwater. And there's been no shortage of candidates: bribe-taking Nixon; Central American fascist-loving Reagan; Gitmo torturing and war-lying Bush; and, of course, Trump.
But with Ron DeSantis, we may finally be facing an all-American politician who has Mussolini's guile, ruthlessness, and willingness to see people die to advance his political career, all while being smart and educated enough to avoid the easily satirized buffoonishness of Trump.

DeSantis and other Republican fascists have proclaimed Florida to be a bastion of "freedom" and "liberty." In reality, Florida is now a laboratory for fascism. As part of his authoritarian project, DeSantis is enforcing thought crime laws that forbid the teaching of AP African-American studies in high school and other courses and programs across Florida's school system (including at the college and university level) that examine questions of power, race and systemic inequality. DeSantis and his agents recently declared that the AP African-American studies course was inappropriate and will not be taught in Florida's schools because it has "no educational value" and is "indoctrinating" (white) young people. DeSantis and his regime's thought crime attacks on African-American studies are Orwell's "1984" meets "Birth of a Nation."

Racism and white supremacy are a choice.

The purpose of DeSantis' thought crime laws is to intimidate and terrorize all teachers, educators, librarians, and others who are committed to education, critical thinking, and the truth in Florida (and beyond). In DeSantis' Florida — and soon to be across "red state" America if he and the other fascist Republicans get their way — there will be censors who review books and other material for thought crimes and other "dangerous" ideas that are contrary to the interests of conservatives. These censors and party officials and their designated agents will also rewrite history – and reality itself – to fit the demands of the regime. The public will no longer be able to discern truth from lies and fantasies from facts and fiction. The subversion and destruction of reality, facts, and the truth are a precondition for, and one of the primary ways that fascist and other authoritarian regimes obtain and keep power.

DeSantis' goal is to make America into a new Jim Crow Christofascist plutocracy. Donald Trump and Trumpism were just intermediate stops on that evil journey.

This is the power of censorship: people quickly learn to police their own behavior and that of their family, friends, neighbors, and yes, strangers. The public's intellectual, creative, ethical, and moral lives quickly become impoverished. The result is the ideal fascist authoritarian subject: a compliant person who does not resist.

Here is a partial list of the dozens of scholars, authors, and other public thinkers whose work has now been declared "illegal" and a "thought crime" by DeSantis and his agents and subsequently marked for removal from the AP African-American Studies course:

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Angela Davis

Bell Hooks

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Nell Irvin Painter

Manning Marable

Cathy Cohen

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

James Cone

Nikki Giovanni

Barbara Fields

These are not just names on a banned books list. These are real human beings who are committed to helping the public and their students be engaged and responsible members of a larger community and to develop critical thinking skills that they can use to challenge and interrogate Power with the goal of making a better, more just, and truly democratic society.

DeSantis and his regime's thought crime attacks on African-American studies are Orwell's "1984" meets "Birth of a Nation."

I personally have interviewed, been in dialogue with, enjoyed the company of, had meals with, or otherwise interacted with a good many of these "banned" authors and scholars. I and many others have greatly benefitted from their scholarship, wisdom, time, and concern.

Why are DeSantis and his agents (in Florida and across the country) targeting African-American studies and other such programs?

There are many reasons.

The Black Freedom Struggle is one of the most successful pro-democracy resistance movements in American (and world) history. DeSantis and the other Republican-fascists and their forces do not want these lessons to be known, learned, or otherwise disseminated. DeSantis is working to create a type of "regime of knowledge" where Black, brown and other marginalized people's triumphs and experiences are outright erased and/or grossly distorted as a way of literally removing their personhood and existence. History has repeatedly shown that "thought crimes," banned books and other forms of intellectual violence are precursors to and do the work of interpersonal and intergroup violence on a large scale by the State, and those empowered to act in its name, against those deemed to be "the enemy."

In all, Power intersects with and is an extension of knowledge production. And knowledge is not "neutral." Philosopher Michel Foucault explained as much. "There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations." Foucault also explained that "Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it."

DeSantis attended Yale for his undergraduate degree. In all likelihood, he encountered the work of Foucault during his studies there. Now DeSantis is putting Foucault's powerful insights to work in ways contrary to their original intent.

In a recent interview at The New Yorker, contributing writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor spoke with historian Robin D.G. Kelley about DeSantis' thought crimes regime and the targeting of African-American studies. Both Professor Taylor's and Professor Kelley's work was purged from the Advanced Placement African-American studies course. Kelley's comments merit being quoted at length:

There's two levels. One is that it's about Ron DeSantis possibly running for President. I think that's the most important thing, because, no matter what we think about DeSantis and his policies, we know he went to Yale University, and majored in history and political science with a 3.7 G.P.A., which means that he was at one of the premier institutions for history. That's why I get frustrated when people say he needs to take a class. He took the class. He knows better. He knows that the culture wars actually win votes. He's trying to get the Trump constituency.
So I think this is about Ron DeSantis wanting to run for President. But I also think that the focus on Florida occludes a bigger story. As you know, this goes back to the Trump years—well before Trump, but let's just talk about the Trump years—the attack on the 1619 Project, Chris Rufo's strategy of turning critical race theory into an epithet by denying it any meaning whatsoever. And creating a buzzword. That's actually a strategy that has nothing to do with the field of African American studies; it has everything to do with vilifying a field—attacking the whole concept of racial justice and equity. So, to me, if DeSantis never banned the class, we would still be in this situation. And although it is true that a number of states did accept the pilot program for the A.P. class, some of those same states have passed, or are about to pass, laws that are banning or limiting what they're calling critical race theory. So there is a general assault on knowledge, but specifically knowledge that interrogates issues of race, sex, gender, and even class.
It's an ongoing struggle to roll back anything that's perceived as diminishing white power. They want to convince white working people—the same white working people who have very little access to good health care and housing, whose lives are actually really precarious, as they move from union jobs to part-time, concierge labor to make ends meet—that somehow, if they can get control of the narrative inside classrooms, their lives would be better. Racism actually damages all of our prospects and futures.
I don't think it's an accident that the people who are targeted are you, Angela Davis, myself, bell hooks. To say that we're not radical would be a lie. What does radical actually mean? What it means, what Black studies is about, is trying to understand how the system works and recognizing that the way the system works now benefits a few at the expense of the many. It's easy to allow someone to come in, in the name of Black studies, and say, "We're going to talk about ancient Africa, and the great achievements of the Kush of ancient Egypt." That's not a threat—not as much as the idea of critical race theory saying that, no matter what policies and procedures and legislation are implemented, the structure of racism, embedded in a capitalist system, embedded in a system of patriarchy, continues to create wealth for some and make the rest of our lives precarious. Precarious in terms of money, precarious in terms of police violence, precarious in terms of environmental catastrophe, precarious in many, many ways. And I think people could agree with me that that's why we do this scholarship: because we're trying to figure out a way to make a better future. You know, that's the whole point. And if that's subversive, then say it, but it's definitely not indoctrination, because indoctrination is a state that bans books.....
[T]he subject of African American studies, even before it was called that, has been not just the condition of Black people but the condition of the country. And not just narrating that oppression and understanding it, and not just trying to think about ways to move beyond it—to transcend it, to come up with strategies to try to live—but also understanding what's wrong with this country, with the system.
We're not just interrogating our lives, we're interrogating knowledge production itself.

Dangerous thinking is a good thing and those with power want to socialize us into learned helplessness so that we will not see (and achieve) the radical possibilities of a true social democracy.

Years ago, when I was in high school and then college, I was lucky enough to have very generous teachers who took me on trips to conferences and other events at leading universities and institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In fact, I was very lucky to have attended several conferences where Yosef Ben-Jochannan ("Dr. Ben"), who was one of the founders of African Studies, was the featured speaker. Those years that saw the Million Man March(es), debates about the merits of multiculturalism, diversity and "affirmative action" at America's colleges and universities, boiling ethnic, racial and class tensions in Los Angeles and New York's Crown Heights and Howard Beach neighborhoods (among others), the golden age of Hip Hop Music and Culture, and so many other political and cultural formations and events. It would be an understatement to say that those years were quite an exhilarating time to be a young black politically engaged person in America.

In so many ways, I am very much a product of that time period.

I learned that I have no taste for racial chauvinism; such beliefs are the mind killer. I also came to the conclusion that American and Western society is profoundly sick with white supremacy and racism. Those forces will likely bring the ultimate destruction of American society and its so-called democracy.

A more humane and good society are possible if we want it badly enough on both sides of the color line. Racism and white supremacy are a choice. America is structured around such forces and too many white Americans and others are deeply invested in such an arrangement of things -- even if it causes them great harm. DeSantis and the larger white right are using thought crimes and other tools of censorship and intimidation as weapons to limit how we conceptualize freedom, democracy, justice, and the boundaries of the possible. DeSantis and those of his ilk wouldn't be trying to ban books and authors (and by implication whole groups of people) if they were not deeply afraid of them – and the possibilities of achieving a more democratic and free and humane society.

The antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory, for example, has been linked to many incidents of lethal violence, most notably the Jan. 6 coup attempt at the Capitol orchestrated by Donald Trump.

The white supremacist great replacement theory is an absurd and fantastical lie that there is a plot by Democrats and other so-called multiculturalists working in the name of diversity to eliminate white people and replace them with Black and brown people in the United States and Europe. It has been propagated by the likes of Fox News' Tucker Carlson, the network's biggest star. And it has been directly linked to hate crimes like the May 2022 massacre of 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo by an avowed white supremacist.

And while extreme beliefs have grown increasingly common among Republicans, new research by the United States Secret Service sounds the alarm about the link between such widespread conspiracy theories and the country's plague of mass shootings.

A full 26% of the attackers studied from 2016 to 2020 were motivated by conspiracy theories or a "hate-focused belief system." A Christmas Day 2020 bomber, the Secret Service determined, was motivated by a conspiracy theory. "The day before Memorial Day was chosen by one attacker because, according to a conspiracy theory at the time, this was the day before society would collapse," the report explains.

The Secret Service report specifically points to the role played by misogyny and other forms of hatred against women in mass shootings:

Gender-based biases and extreme misogyny continue to pose a threat to women. As stated earlier, though not all who possess misogynistic views are violent, viewpoints that describe women as the enemy or call for violence against women remain a cause for concern. At least 35 attackers (19%) displayed misogynistic behaviors prior to their attacks, including calling women derogatory names, engaging in sexual harassment, and threatening sexual violence. …
As described in prior NTAC publications, including Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism (2022), those who subscribe to extreme misogynistic belief systems often communicate about, promote, and consume these views across various online communities. In some instances, some of these community members go beyond simply advocating on behalf of men, expressing extreme ideologies involving the sexual objectification of women and calls for violence against women.

The report also highlights loneliness and other forms of anti-social behavior among mass shooters, with approximately one-third of them fitting that profile.

The increase in mass shootings and other forms of anti-social behavior in the Age of Trump is a symptom of deep cultural problems in the United States.

A new op-ed in the New York Times by Jillian Peterson and James Densley echoes the Secret Service's findings. "We Profiled the 'Signs of Crisis' in 50 Years of Mass Shootings. This Is What We Found" focuses on the role of what social scientists and other experts describe as "the deaths of despair." Often used to explain increasing mortality rates among predominantly middle-aged white men caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse, Peterson and Densley say the term "also helps explain the accelerating frequency of mass shootings in this country."

The Republican Party's willing surrender to neofascism is a type of permission for violent and pathological behavior across American society.

White Americans as a group are much more vulnerable to the "depths of despair" than are Black and brown Americans because white privilege and other unearned advantages have left many white people unable to confront the challenges and disappointments of life. (Black and brown people are instead barraged by racial battle fatigue.)

In their op-ed, Peterson and Densley offer this warning and advice about mass shootings and an American society that is literally gun crazy:

Mass shooters are not the victims. But in order to prevent future tragedies we must treat the underlying pathologies that feed the shooters' despair.
Mass shootings must no longer be written off as "inexplicable" episodes of "unthinkable" violence.
Our communities and governments need to find ways to reduce social isolation more broadly and improve access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment.
These steps must be taken not in place of but in addition to passing widely supported gun safety laws like background checks, longer waiting periods, safer gun storage requirements and red flag laws.
Instead, we have allowed mass shootings to become normalized in American culture, and ask our children to participate in active shooter drills and pass through metal detectors on their way to class.
We say "never again" and yet less than 48 hours elapsed between the shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, Calif. "Again" keeps happening because mass shooters are not monsters who appear out of thin air.
Mass shooters live among us. They are us. They are for the most part the men and boys we know. And they can be stopped before they pull the trigger.

The increase in mass shootings and other forms of anti-social behavior in the Age of Trump is a symptom of deep cultural problems in the United States. As Richard Slotkin, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Carol Anderson, and other experts have examined in great detail, America's gun sickness is centuries old. The other causes are more immediate, like the rise of Trumpism, neofascism, and an illiberal and larger anti-democracy political project that views violence as a legitimate and necessary means of obtaining and keeping political and social power.

The gun is the ultimate conversation stopper.

The Republican Party knows that the public as a whole rejects its policies. As a response to that reality, political violence is viewed as a "reasonable" and "necessary" tactic and strategy for imposing their will on others in what they believe is an existential battle for "the future of the country." In that way, the Republican Party's willing surrender to neofascism is a type of permission for violent and pathological behavior across American society. Ultimately, the Age of Trump represents the normalization of deviance and a permission function for the worst of human behavior.

Donald Trump may, and hopefully will soon, disappear from American life but what he and his movement have encouraged and given permission for will remain for a very long time to come.

America is very sick; the rot is down in the bones. Unfortunately, America's leaders and most everyday people do not want to do the necessary and hard work to get better. Even worse, many of them are not able to discern the difference between healthy and unhealthy behavior. Sick societies produce sick leaders and America is no exception.

On Jan. 8 "Diamond," whose real name is Lynette Hardaway, passed away. It was initially speculated that she died of COVID. It has now been publicly revealed that the cause of death was a heart condition caused by high blood pressure. Diamond rose to public prominence as one half of the duo known as "Diamond & Silk." These Donald Trump obsessives performed as "black conservatives" and were routinely featured at Trump's rallies, on Fox News, Newsmax, and across the right-wing propaganda disinformation media echo chamber.

"Black conservative" is a specific type of character and performance in post-civil rights America (although the archetype long predates it). In the white right-wing imagination, these are black people who fulfill a fantasy role in a type of new-age race minstrel performance where they denigrate and insult the intelligence, dignity, and political agency of other black people for the pleasures of white "conservatives" and white America. These black conservatives claim that other black people are lazy, have "bad culture", "can't think for themselves", are trapped on a "Democratic Party plantation." If they "knew better," black conservatives argue, more black people would actually be "conservatives." Black conservatives also elevate themselves as exemplars of "hard work" and as "proof" that America is a meritocracy where anything is possible — "if you just stop worrying" about racism.

In what is perhaps their most important role, black conservatives are professional "best black friends." They serve as mercenaries, human racism deflection shields who are deployed to tell white people some of the most grossly racist and vile things about other black people. For example, on the Friday edition of his Fox "News" program, Tucker Carlson's black conservative guest played the above role perfectly as he suggested that the savage killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police was somehow caused by "black culture," specifically single black mothers:

They don't want us focused on reality. Hey, if they want us to devote an hour of coverage to this and weekend coverage to this and they want to take us to a good place, I would examine the racial element of this. Because there is a racial element. And this is a story about young Black men and their inability to treat each other in a humane way.
Everybody involved in this, on the street level, was either 24 to 32 years old. Everybody, it was a group of young Black men, five on one. It looked like gang violence to me. It looked like what young Black men do when they're supervised by a single Black woman, and that's what they got going on in the Memphis Police Department.
They've elected -- or put some Black woman in charge of the police force, and we're getting the same kind of chaos and disunity and violence that we see in a lot of these cities that are run by single mothers.
If we want to discuss the breakdown of family that leads to disrespect for authority, that causes you to resist the police and run from the police and not comply with the police, because you resist authority at all times, because there was no male authority in your home, let's have that discussion.
But that's not where they want to take us. They want to take us down the path of saying, "You know what? This is Tucker Carlson's fault. This is some random white -- this is Donald Trump's fault." It's not. It's the breakdown of family and the buying into all these left-wing things that have nothing to do with promoting family.

Carlson looked on with approval as his black conservative guest channeled white supremacist and other anti-black talking points that made Nichols somehow responsible for his own killing by the Memphis police.

In total, today's black conservatives function as a type of human projection and embodiment of white racist fantasies about the difference between "the good blacks" (compliant, submissive, and enabling of white racism and white supremacy) and "the bad blacks" (assertive, not submissive, resisting white racism and white supremacy, possessing human agency, not committed to making white people comfortable).

To be fair, there is a long and rich history of authentic black conservatism from within the black community that is based on a sense of linked fate and a deep love and concern for black people's humanity, survival, and success. Moreover, this authentic black conservatism is not subservient to the white gaze or otherwise doing the work of white racism and white supremacy. Today's professional black conservatives, however, are not part of that tradition or community of black political life and struggle. Today's professional black conservative seeks and usually receives lucrative rewards from the right-wing machine.

Throughout the Age of Trump, "Diamond" and "Silk" played their role in that universe very well. Diamond's funeral was held last Saturday in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Donald Trump was the featured guest at Diamond's homegoing ceremony, which was attended by several hundred MAGA faithful and others. Of course, Diamond's funeral and celebration of life also featured nonsense conspiracy theories, right-wing paranoia and fearmongering, general MAGA madness and other foolishness. The Daily Mail described this spectacle as:

Following the impassioned call to action on the vaccine, Silk paid homage to the former U.S. president remembering the close relationship the three shared going as far as to say that he 'treated us just like the other children - Eric, Don Jr, Tiffany.'
But as Trump paid tribute to Diamond, describing her as one of the world's 'brightest stars' he admits he 'didn't know Silk at all' despite meeting her countless times.
'The world has lost one of its brightest stars but I see that we have another star who was equal to but she stepped up and she is different,' Trump said.
'I'm serious I thought I knew them both, I didn't, I knew Diamond, but I didn't know Silk at all I just learned about Silk, you're fantastic, you're going to carry on beyond, beyond anybody's wildest imaginations.'
Pictures of the three together have resurfaced, showing Trump with the duo at the White House on several occasions and on the campaign trail with Trump.
As the funeral service proceeded, it slowly began to descend into madness, turning from a funeral service to what appeared to be a MAGA rally….
But as Trump paid tribute to Diamond, describing her as one of the world's 'brightest stars' he admits he 'didn't know Silk at all' despite meeting her countless times.
'The world has lost one of its brightest stars but I see that we have another star who was equal to but she stepped up and she is different,' Trump said.
'I'm serious I thought I knew them both, I didn't, I knew Diamond, but I didn't know Silk at all I just learned about Silk, you're fantastic, you're going to carry on beyond, beyond anybody's wildest imaginations.'
Pictures of the three together have resurfaced, showing Trump with the duo at the White House on several occasions and on the campaign trail with Trump.
As the funeral service proceeded, it slowly began to descend into madness, turning from a funeral service to what appeared to be a MAGA rally.

Throughout the funeral, Trump appeared to be visibly bored, disinterested, uncomfortable, and clearly did not want to be there. Most of the reporting and commentary about Diamond's funeral focused on Trump's disgusting narcissism, where even during such a solemn event he could not suppress his own ego to show appropriate empathy and sympathy for another person whom he claimed to care about.

Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes called this out on MSNBC. "Just beyond bizarre, beyond rude, beyond anything that anyone would see in normal, polite, let me say decent society," Sykes said of Trump. "This is a guy that a lot of people want to be the next president of the United States again, and so on brand for him, too….Look, this is what happens when you have a narcissistic sociopath give a homily at a funeral. It won't go well."

Trump's behavior at Diamond's funeral is, at this point, to be expected. The bigger and more important story is what "Diamond & Silk" represent. Today's Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement uses black and brown bodies, women, gays and lesbians and members of other marginalized groups as human weapons in their war on multiracial pluralist democracy and a more humane and inclusive society.

In the case of "black conservatives", these forces are using them as a way of appropriating the moral authority and symbolic power and legacy of the civil rights movement and the larger Black Freedom Struggle to do the work of white supremacy, racial authoritarianism, and other anti-democratic projects.

At the Washington Post, Hannah Allam and Razzan Nakhlawi provide additional context in their article, "Black, Brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role":

People of color are playing increasingly visible roles across the spectrum of far-right activism. Today, non-White activists speak for groups of radicalized MAGA supporters, parts of the "Patriot" movement, and, in rare cases, neo-Nazi factions. Although a few have concealed their identities, many others proudly acknowledge their backgrounds and offer themselves as counterpoints to charges of pervasive racism in right-wing movements.
The "multiracial far right," as it's sometimes called, adds another layer to an already fraught debate over how to address violent extremism, the top domestic terrorism threat. Understanding the makeup and motivations of far-right groups is crucial to the Biden administration's pledge to overhaul the federal response to domestic threats in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.
People of color are a tiny fraction of that world, but analysts say they play an outsized role in challenging perceptions. The common refrain that white supremacy is a main driver of the far right is complicated when Black or Brown figures speak publicly for Stop the Steal, the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and other factions that are under scrutiny. The trend is forcing new ways to think about, and talk about, the far right's appeal.
"It's like a multiracial kind of fascism in that it absolutely imagines a nation that has to defend itself from marauding outsiders and invest in militarism. But it's not in the language of 'purity' that we often associate it with," said Daniel Martinez HoSang, a Yale University associate professor and co-author of the 2019 book "Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity."…
"Part of their standing on the White right is that they're constantly willing to attack other people of color and say anti-Black things in ways that kind of ingratiate them to White conservatives," said Martinez HoSang, the professor. "Whereas there's another group of conservatives of color that refuses to do that, sees it as racist and wants to build a conservatism that isn't predicated on those racist assumptions."

Also at the Washington Post, Cristina Beltran highlights the role of "multiracial whiteness" in how some nonwhite people are attempting to access the privileges that come from being allied with a white supremacist political and social project:

The Trump administration's anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has made it easy to classify the president's loyalists as a homogenous mob of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI's posters showing people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African American….
Rooted in America's ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.
Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition. For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one's racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism. In the politics of multiracial whiteness, anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories.
Multiracial whiteness offers citizens of every background the freedom to call Muslims terrorists, demand that undocumented immigrants be rounded up and deported, deride BLM as a movement of thugs and criminals, and accuse Democrats of being blood-drinking pedophiles.
Here, the politics of exclusion, violence and demonization are available to all. If you want to speak Spanish and celebrate a quinceañera in your family, go ahead. If you want to be a Proud Boy, be a Proud Boy. Trump doesn't care. As long as you love him, he'll love you.
America's racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites. Thinking in terms of multiracial whiteness helps us recognize that much of today's political rift is a division between those who are drawn to and remain invested in a politics of whiteness and those who seek something better.

Donald Trump's behavior at Diamond's funeral should be a warning and a lesson for black conservatives about how their white fans and sponsors really see and value them.

Social scientists and other researchers have repeatedly shown that white Republicans, conservatives, and right-leaning independents possess higher levels of antipathy, general animus, and outright hostility and racism towards black and brown people as compared to white Democrats, liberals, and progressives. This dynamic is especially extreme for Trump supporters and other members of that white identity politics tribe.

Black conservatives have chosen to play a very lucrative role in the modern right-wing media machine. In the end, however, they are utterly disposable and easily replaceable because they are viewed as a type: cogs and pawns in a white racist fantasy projection, not real human beings.

Still, the larger concern — and real danger — is how today's Republican fascists are using such figures and members of other marginalized communities to legitimize their campaign to end real pluralistic democracy.

"Diamond & Silk" were professional clowns. Hershel Walker is a buffoon. The various other black and brown conservatives who are summoned up by the right to play their onerous roles are contemptible and, yes, perhaps even "entertaining" in their own horrible way. Likewise, it is easy to laugh at and mock Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene , R-Ga., for her "stupidity" and belief in patently wrong and dunderheaded conspiracy theories. She is now one of the most powerful people in the United States Congress.

It is the larger movement, and not the personalities, who should be the focus of the news media. and its analysts and pundits as they explain to the public the realities of the American and global democracy crisis. That type of work is time-consuming, exhausting, difficult and does not generate the clicks, likes, shares, ad revenue, and profits that drive the business that is the American news media – which is why as an institution it has largely avoided doing that necessary type of pro-democracy reporting and journalism throughout the Age of Trump and beyond.

Over the last few decades in America, partisanship has become a type of personal identity. A political party is more than an organization or the letter next to a candidate's name on a ballot. This is about much more than "political polarization" or "hyper-partisanship" or the other sterile technical language which experts routinely use in academia, the news media, and the larger political class. In today's America, party identification reflects fundamental debates and divides over what it means to be a citizen, a member of a political community and a human being.

Two concepts are particularly useful for understanding this broken politics and the larger democracy crisis:

Asymmetrical polarization describes how one party has become much more extreme than another party. As a practical matter, this means there is much less space for reasonable compromise or true consensus in some middle ground that accurately represents the desires of both parties and/or their voters.

Negative partisanship is a dynamic where party identification is not so much about the political policies that a given person supports but more about viewing your political rivals and others you disagree with as enemies with whom compromise is not possible.

In a 2021 conversation at the New York Times with Ezra Klein, political scientist Lilliana Mason explained how negative partisanship identity, race and polarization impact contemporary United States politics:

I think that the Democratic Party has been gradually, partly in response to the Republican Party's attraction of attracting people who are high in racial animosity, the Democratic Party has had to react against that. So we end up with Obama, then Trump, and then Biden, for the first time ever, in his inaugural address, actually saying the words "white supremacy." So the parties have been making it more clear where they stand along this line.
And unfortunately, that means that we have in the Republican Party — and again, it's really this MAGA faction, right, these people that really disliked marginalized groups even before Trump came along. They've always been in the American electorate. They were Democrats during the Civil War and Jim Crow, et cetera, and now they've moved into the Republican Party.
But the problem with that is that we end up with an entire political party that is really trying to speak to these animosities and that sense of hatred of marginalized groups, which means that it has become an anti-democracy party, right? It is not in their interest to fully represent every single American. It's not in their interest to have a multiracial democracy. In fact, they're campaigning against that.

With its slavish commitment to "normal politics" the country's mainstream news media, its professional centrists, the Church of the Savvy, and the larger commentariat have, for the most part, not adapted to America in the Age of Trump.

As Mason highlights, negative partisanship and polarization and other indicators of America's broken politics and larger democracy crisis are amplified by white supremacy and white identity politics. In all, today's Republican Party, so-called conservatives and the larger right-wing neofascist movement reject democracy if it means that white people like them will not have uncontested control over American society. Mason continues:

So on average, Americans have left of center issue positions. Most people are to the left of center on their preferences for economic policy and legislation. Even when you put issues like abortion and gun control and immigration into the equation, right, we're still a left of center country on policy preferences. The problem is that there are a lot of people who identify as conservative and hold liberal, leftist policy preferences, but that conservative or Republican identity is so strong that they will vote to make sure that their group is winning regardless of what the policies they're actually voting for are.
And then at the same time, one of the main points of "Uncivil Agreement" was that we have this social sorting, right, where effectively the Republican Party has become increasingly white, Christian, rural, male — or at least pro- sort of patriarchy — and the Democratic Party is not as monolithic as that. They're just sort of the party that's trying to push for a more egalitarian, multiracial democracy. And so the Republican Party is kind of forced into this — I mean, ironically, right — identity-based politics where they are really trying to make sure that the white Christian male is at the top of the American social hierarchy. That's what they're fighting for.

Negative partisanship and these sustained high levels of polarization are relatively new developments in American politics, where voting and partisanship are made salient and meaningful in a person's day-to-day life as opposed to during an election or campaign. Of course, "politics" has been an existential question of literal life and death, slavery and freedom, and civil and human rights for Black and Brown people and other marginalized groups across American history.

With its slavish commitment to "normal politics" the country's mainstream news media, its professional centrists, the Church of the Savvy, and the larger commentariat have, for the most part, not adapted to America in the Age of Trump where politics and party are now a type of deeply held personal identity – one that many neofascists and others on the right-wing are willing to engage in violence and other anti-democratic behavior to "protect." (In practice, "protecting" means using violence and other means, illegal, quasilegal, and otherwise to impose their will on others.) As a function of their obsolescent habits and norms, the American mainstream news media, especially the D.C. Beltway reporting class, continues to focus on political personalities and "the horserace." Such an approach amplifies the differences between political candidates and other leaders instead of focusing on what they have in common as members of the same party, which in the case of today's Republican Party means a neofascist organization that has more in common with a cult or fundamentalist religion than a traditional political organization in a Western democracy.

Here is the story that the mainstream news media and commentariat should be focusing on: The Republican Party does not support democracy and is escalating its efforts to end it here in America.

This dynamic is already present in the very early and premature coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign where the mainstream news media and commentariat are developing a narrative where Trump will face off against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for control of the Republican Party. In this obvious story, Trump, the former president, coup plotter, reality TV star and "unconventional" public figure will be challenged by the younger, more educated, "acceptable" and "polished" "leader" who is seeking to spread his power and influence beyond Florida. The other potential Republican presidential candidates are just stand-ins and extras in the political drama.

In reality, Trump and DeSantis are more alike than they are different in terms of the dangers and threats to America's multiracial democracy and society that they embody.

Both DeSantis and Trump are guilty of democide and willful cruelty and indifference in terms of their response to the Covid pandemic. Both DeSantis and Trump do not support free speech and/or free thought and have tried to censor their "political enemies," including the news media. Both DeSantis and Trump support the Big Lie and other attempts to usurp multiracial democracy through voter suppression and other tactics including violence and intimidation. They are both plutocrats who want to give the corporatocracy and monied classes even more control over American society. They support white Christian nationalism and eroding the separation of church and state. Neither support women's reproductive rights and freedoms. And through their policies and behavior, both Desantis and Trump have shown themselves to be white supremacists and racial authoritarians.

Here is the story that the mainstream news media and commentariat should be focusing on: The Republican Party does not support democracy and is escalating its efforts to end it here in America.

Such truth-telling requires a discussion of power, systems, institutions, culture, history, and how Trumpism and American neofascism are symptoms of a deep problem in America and not the disease itself. So almost by definition, the mainstream American news media avoids a sustained discussion of such topics because it would require being self-critical and speaking too much truth to power.

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There is another reality that the American mainstream news media and political class do not want to publicly admit: Today's Republican Party and the "conservative" movement are anti-democratic and anti-freedom because that is what their voters and other supporters want.

To wit. Donald Trump won more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Likewise, more people voted for the Republicans than the Democrats in the 2022 midterms.

It is true that there are differences between Trump and DeSantis and the various factions of the Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement. But in the end, these forces are largely united in their desire to destroy America's multiracial democracy and replace it with a new apartheid Christofascist plutocracy. Whichever candidate ends up surviving the Republican Party's battle royal pit fight to become the 2024 presidential nominee, the mainstream news media and commentariat will earnestly play the roles of referee, color commentator and stenographer when they should instead be alerting police and prosecutors about the crimes against democracy and human decency being committed right in front of them.

The media must make it clear: Be it DeSantis or Trump or some other Republican who wins the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, U.S. democracy and the American people will suffer all the same.

America is becoming an idiocracy — assuming it isn't fully one already.

On a widely viewed cable TV network there is a new show called "Power Slap: Road to the Title," and the title is a perfect description of the show. In this "sport" two adults slap one another as hard as they can until one of them is knocked out, cannot continue, or the "judges" stop the "competition." The "slap-fighters" are not allowed to put up their hands to defend themselves or flinch. The participants in this human zoo have been knocked head over heels (literally) and appear to have suffered severe concussions as well as bloody and swollen faces that could result in permanent disfigurement. The crowd in the studio cheers as the competitors slap each other into oblivion.

It is all one more example of how American society is "amusing itself to death" as a culture that is infantile and broken — both socially and politically. Today's America is extremely anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-rational, unreflective, impulsive, narcissistic and juvenile. Such a dynamic breeds fascism, authoritarianism, fake populism, white supremacy, misogyny, violence, and a larger culture of cruelty and debasement that does not value or elevate human dignity and human respect.

What can be done to lessen the power and appeal of conspiracy theories in American politics and society?

The Age of Trump and American neofascism are an extension of these cultural pathologies and failings. In a previous essay here at Salon I summarized this rot:

More than half of all Americans cannot read at a sixth-grade level. High quality primary and secondary public education, as well as the college and university system — which should create citizens who are capable of critical thinking and acting as responsible members of a democratic community — have been systematically targeted for destruction by the Republican Party and "conservative" movement….
To some significant degree, the internet, social media and its algorithms, our ubiquitous smart phones and digital technology, and a larger media culture designed to drive what is euphemistically described as "engagement," damages people's ability to think deeply and critically about complex matters.
While overuse of social media and digital technology can be harmful across all demographic cohorts, research suggests it has a particularly negative impact on the brain and emotional development of younger people. Psychologists and other researchers have demonstrated that many Americans are increasingly unable to concentrate or engage in deep focused thinking for more than a few minutes.

America no longer has a shared sense of reality, truth and facts. This, too, is one of the preconditions necessary for the rise of neofascism and the other illiberal and antidemocratic forces that were further empowered and mainstreamed by the Age of Trump and that continue to grow in power and influence.

When members of a society, be it the elites or everyday people, cannot agree upon basic facts and reality that makes communication and collective problem solving very difficult if not impossible.

One of the most dangerous manifestations of this problem in American society and across the West and elsewhere is how conspiracies and conspiracism now dominate today's Republican Party and larger right-wing and "conservative" movement. And the differences between the two concepts are critically important.

A "conspiracy" refers to two or more actors working, usually in private, to advance their own interests over those of the public or some other group. Conspiracies do in fact exist. Trump's and the Republican fascists' coup attempt on Jan. 6 is one of the most prominent recent examples.The way that rich and monied classes exert outsized control over American society where they literally rig the system to their advantage and against the interests of the American people and their well-being is another such example.

"Conspiracism," on the other hand, is a theory of knowledge and the world where one's understanding of events is understood through the framework of the conspiracy theory. In that way, "conspiracism" is a meta-conspiracy theory.

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Contrary to what many would like to believe, education and "intelligence" do not inoculate a person against conspiracism and conspiracy theories. Instead, education and "intelligence" serve to shape the types of conspiracies that a given person is attracted to, how they justify them, and the cognitive shortcuts and decision-making rules that are applied to give a conspiracy theory structure and coherence. In total, conspiracism is a type of lifestyle and identity that is largely impenetrable to facts and reason, where any factual intervention or refutation of the conspiracy theory is taken to be further proof that the conspiracy is in fact real.

In his new essay in The Atlantic, "Asymmetrical Conspiracism Is Hurting Democracy," political scientist Brian Klaas explains how the Republican Party is sick with conspiracism and is using it to undermine democracy:

Other countries, including the U.K., have polarization. America has irrational polarization, in which one political party has fallen under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. Polarization plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral. The battle for American democracy will be a battle over reality.
Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or "deep state" cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump's MAGA base. Trump's disciples have developed an encyclopedic knowledge of a dizzying cast of characters, along with a series of code words for alleged cover-ups. They rattle off their accepted wisdom about conspiracies that most people have never heard of, such as "Italygate," the absurd notion that the U.S. embassy in Rome, in conjunction with the Vatican, used satellites to rig the 2020 presidential election….
What's really troubling about this political moment in America, though, is not merely the spread of conspiratorial thinking in the general population. It's also that the delusions have infected the mainstream political leadership. The crackpots have come to Congress.

"In the past decade," Klaas continues, "conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature....

A conspiracy nation cannot be a real democracy.

Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the "fantasy-industrial complex," in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset. They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil. "

What can be done to lessen the power and appeal of conspiracy theories in American politics and society? Here is a short list to start:

01. Deplatform hate

Malign actors such as Donald Trump, the Republican fascists, and the propagandists across the right-wing media hate echo chamber who circulate conspiracy theories and disinformation need to be publicly confronted and denied a platform by the mainstream news media.

02. Build community

America's epidemic of loneliness, social alienation, and broken community ties and bonds needs to be addressed as a type of public health crisis. America also needs to expand low cost and free access to mental health care services. America's extreme levels of social inequality and a growing rift where the country's elites feel little connection to or responsibility to the public and the commons needs to be remedied.

03. Educate

America's public education system needs to be improved and expanded. Critical media literacy needs to be taught across all educational and age levels.

In a new essay at the Conversation "How to talk to someone about conspiracy theories in five simple steps", social psychologists Daniel Jolley, Karen Douglas, and Mathew Marques offer these suggestions:

1. Be open-minded
An open-minded approach starts with asking questions and listening. It builds understanding with the person. Listen carefully, and avoid defending your own beliefs….
2. Be receptive
Work on what psychologists call conversational receptiveness to foster empathy which can bridge the gap between the beliefs you each hold....
3. Critical thinking
Affirm the value of critical thinking.
If the person you're talking to already perceives themselves as a critical thinker, redirect this skill towards a deeper examination of the conspiracy theory itself.
For example:
We probably both agree that asking questions is important. But it is key we evaluate all pieces of evidence. We need to weigh up the information and make sure we check the evidence that we agree with as well as the things we don't like or make us feel uncomfortable.
4. Conspiracy theories aren't the norm
Highlight how conspiracy theories are not as commonplace as people might think.
Readdressing social norms can help address people's need to protect a group they identify with….
5. Think about what can be controlled
Encourage them to be forward-focused and inspire them to put their energy into areas of their life where they experience more control….

Ultimately, the problem is not that individuals choose to believe in conspiracy theories. Instead, the real problems are the cultural and political forces that have elevated conspiracism and conspiracy theories into normal and acceptable ways of thinking about complex societal problems.

As Hannah Arendt warned decades ago, "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

A conspiracy nation cannot be a real democracy. The Republican fascists and their agents know this to be true, which is why they have so embraced conspiracism and conspiracy theories as one of their main weapons in a battle to win the hearts and minds of the American people.

salon.com

Biden's documents: Democrats, media fall into GOP trap one more time

Some years ago, my mother went shopping at a department store in the local mall. After she had left the store and was walking around the mall, she noticed that people were pointing and laughing at her. What had she done to become an object of scorn and mockery? Did she have toilet paper on her shoe? Was her hair unkempt, or her clothing disarranged? Did she have something on her face?

Finally a young man came up to my mother and told her that a long robe from the department store had gotten stuck to her jacket. She was unknowingly dragging it behind her, like a queen or a bride with an enormous train.

My mother was horribly afraid that police or security guards would arrest her as a thief. It was not an irrational fear. Like many Black boys and girls, while growing up I was lectured on the importance of getting a receipt after making any purchase, and also told to have cash in my pocket anytime I left the house, in order to prove that I could buy whatever I wanted to. As a man from the Black working class who has mostly operated in majority-white spaces throughout my life, that advice has served me well. In order to survive, Black people in America must carry their receipts, both literal and metaphorical.

My mother used a payphone to call the store's security office and "confess" to her accidental shoplifting. Almost unbelievably, the security guard who picked up the phone told her not to bother bringing the robe back — it was being marked down for the end-of-season sale and, more to the point, his shift was nearly over. My mother accepted this strange gift reluctantly. Some 25 years later, I still have that robe: I think of it as a magical security blanket, and wear it often.

While watching the newly-hatched fake scandal about the classified documents that Joe Biden apparently took with him after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, I keep thinking about my mother and that robe.

As ABC News summarizes the case, Biden's lawyers have found various classified documents during their own searches of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and his private office in Washington. Attorney General Merrick Garland has felt compelled "to appoint a special counsel to review Biden's handling of classified materials."

As others have observed, up to and including right-wing operatives on Fox News, Joe Biden (or perhaps member of his staff and aides) almost certainly took these documents by accident, in a case of accidental shoplifting categorically similar to the one involving my mother and the robe. There is no direct or fair comparison between Biden's documents case and the top secret or classified documents that Donald Trump took from the White House, and his repeated and blatant attempts to defy the law.

Biden and his representatives are fully cooperating with the Department of Justice, and have immediately returned classified documents as they are discovered — not two years later, after repeatedly lying about them. The documents in Biden's possession, by all accounts, do not include nuclear secrets, intelligence sources and methods, and other information that might legitimately compromise national security.

Republicans and their propagandists, of course, do not care about the truth. This "scandal" has become a prop in their political theater, and part of a larger effort to undermine the Biden administration through impeachments, bogus investigations and show trials.

Predictably, the mainstream news media is helping to amplify this fake scandal. It is almost inexorably compelled toward stories of scandal and controversy, especially around presidents and other leading political figures. Those stories are driven by personality, gossip and conflict, feature a supposed mystery or "unanswered questions" and follow a familiar script. Even more important, mainstream media has also been systematically bullied by the right wing into overcorrecting for supposed "liberal bias." That leads to false equivalencies, in which the gross misdeeds and actual law-breaking of Republicans are routinely downplayed and any unethical or questionable behavior by Democrats, no matter how minor or inconsequential, is amplified.

Indeed, the Trump regime and today's Republican Party are so spectacularly corrupt and criminal that the mainstream media still struggles with how to report on their misdeeds accurately. As Salon columnist Brian Karem wrote recently:

There are some — especially among my brethren in the press — who refuse to look beyond the surface similarities of the [Trump and Biden] cases in a brazen and crude attempt to be "even-handed." Then there are those who refuse to look at either case objectively because they feel either Biden or Trump are above reproach. There are also those who are incapable of discerning the differences and those who benefit from refusing to recognize them. The press is filled with the same face paint, rubber noses and oversized shoes as the GOP.
All these viewpoints are based upon perception and appearance, not reality. There are those who believe it is horrible that Biden is being investigated by the DOJ. For them, it makes him look guilty, and they argue about why the DOJ picked up the Biden case so quickly when it took so long to investigate Trump, "and he's the real criminal here." Then there are those who have the mental acuity of a moth circling a light bulb, believing it's circling the sun (I speak of reprobates like Jim Jordan), so convoluted in their thinking that they believe a DOJ investigation, should it exonerate Biden, will have been conducted merely to give the president cover. Appearance versus reality.

Democrats, meanwhile, continue to be experts at self-sabotage. Rather than defending Biden and highlighting his great accomplishments across a range of issues — from the economy to the COVID pandemic, student loan reform, infrastructure and the war in Ukraine — some leading Democrats are choosing to advance the narrative about the classified documents, undermining their own president.

Of course Republicans don't care about the truth. The Biden "scandal" is just a prop in their political theater, and part of a larger effort to undermine not just the Biden administration, but democracy in general.

Republicans and "conservatives," for all the evil they have done over the last few decades, do have some important lessons to teach Democrats and the "left." Most prominent is the importance of message discipline and rallying around their leaders. In this existential battle for American democracy and the country's future, Democrats would be wise to finally learn those lessons and resist the perpetual temptation to convene a circular firing squad.

At this point, Biden's documents "scandal" has been amplified to such a degree that it is clearly beginning to impact public opinion. Andrew Romano reports that a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds that nearly two-thirds of adults surveyed (64%) favor a congressional investigation of the documents found at Biden's home and office. That includes a majority of Democrats, only 27% of whom oppose such an investigation:

This broad bipartisan consensus represents unwelcome news to the White House, which has struggled over the last two weeks to manage a steady drip of revelations about additional documents discovered in various locations — revelations that echo the ongoing clash between former President Donald Trump and federal authorities over the "highly classified" materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.

If this pseudo-scandal grows into a conflagration that burns down Joe Biden's presidency, Democrats and the mainstream media will only have themselves to blame. The winners, as usual, will be the Republican fascists and their endless campaign to end American democracy. The losers will be the American people.

Some years ago, my mother went shopping at a department store in the local mall. After she had left the store and was walking around the mall, she noticed that people were pointing and laughing at her. What had she done to become an object of scorn and mockery? Did she have toilet paper on her shoe? Was her hair unkempt, or her clothing disarranged? Did she have something on her face?

This article first appeared in Salon.

Finally a young man came up to my mother and told her that a long robe from the department store had gotten stuck to her jacket. She was unknowingly dragging it behind her, like a queen or a bride with an enormous train.

My mother was horribly afraid that police or security guards would arrest her as a thief. It was not an irrational fear. Like many Black boys and girls, while growing up I was lectured on the importance of getting a receipt after making any purchase, and also told to have cash in my pocket anytime I left the house, in order to prove that I could buy whatever I wanted to. As a man from the Black working class who has mostly operated in majority-white spaces throughout my life, that advice has served me well. In order to survive, Black people in America must carry their receipts, both literal and metaphorical.

My mother used a payphone to call the store's security office and "confess" to her accidental shoplifting. Almost unbelievably, the security guard who picked up the phone told her not to bother bringing the robe back — it was being marked down for the end-of-season sale and, more to the point, his shift was nearly over. My mother accepted this strange gift reluctantly. Some 25 years later, I still have that robe: I think of it as a magical security blanket, and wear it often.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

While watching the newly-hatched fake scandal about the classified documents that Joe Biden apparently took with him after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, I keep thinking about my mother and that robe.

As ABC News summarizes the case, Biden's lawyers have found various classified documents during their own searches of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and his private office in Washington. Attorney General Merrick Garland has felt compelled "to appoint a special counsel to review Biden's handling of classified materials."

As others have observed, up to and including right-wing operatives on Fox News, Joe Biden (or perhaps member of his staff and aides) almost certainly took these documents by accident, in a case of accidental shoplifting categorically similar to the one involving my mother and the robe. There is no direct or fair comparison between Biden's documents case and the top secret or classified documents that Donald Trump took from the White House, and his repeated and blatant attempts to defy the law.

Biden and his representatives are fully cooperating with the Department of Justice, and have immediately returned classified documents as they are discovered — not two years later, after repeatedly lying about them. The documents in Biden's possession, by all accounts, do not include nuclear secrets, intelligence sources and methods, and other information that might legitimately compromise national security.

Republicans and their propagandists, of course, do not care about the truth. This "scandal" has become a prop in their political theater, and part of a larger effort to undermine the Biden administration through impeachments, bogus investigations and show trials.

Predictably, the mainstream news media is helping to amplify this fake scandal. It is almost inexorably compelled toward stories of scandal and controversy, especially around presidents and other leading political figures. Those stories are driven by personality, gossip and conflict, feature a supposed mystery or "unanswered questions" and follow a familiar script. Even more important, mainstream media has also been systematically bullied by the right wing into overcorrecting for supposed "liberal bias." That leads to false equivalencies, in which the gross misdeeds and actual law-breaking of Republicans are routinely downplayed and any unethical or questionable behavior by Democrats, no matter how minor or inconsequential, is amplified.

Indeed, the Trump regime and today's Republican Party are so spectacularly corrupt and criminal that the mainstream media still struggles with how to report on their misdeeds accurately. As Salon columnist Brian Karem wrote recently:

There are some — especially among my brethren in the press — who refuse to look beyond the surface similarities of the [Trump and Biden] cases in a brazen and crude attempt to be "even-handed." Then there are those who refuse to look at either case objectively because they feel either Biden or Trump are above reproach. There are also those who are incapable of discerning the differences and those who benefit from refusing to recognize them. The press is filled with the same face paint, rubber noses and oversized shoes as the GOP.
All these viewpoints are based upon perception and appearance, not reality. There are those who believe it is horrible that Biden is being investigated by the DOJ. For them, it makes him look guilty, and they argue about why the DOJ picked up the Biden case so quickly when it took so long to investigate Trump, "and he's the real criminal here." Then there are those who have the mental acuity of a moth circling a light bulb, believing it's circling the sun (I speak of reprobates like Jim Jordan), so convoluted in their thinking that they believe a DOJ investigation, should it exonerate Biden, will have been conducted merely to give the president cover. Appearance versus reality.

Democrats, meanwhile, continue to be experts at self-sabotage. Rather than defending Biden and highlighting his great accomplishments across a range of issues — from the economy to the COVID pandemic, student loan reform, infrastructure and the war in Ukraine — some leading Democrats are choosing to advance the narrative about the classified documents, undermining their own president.

Of course Republicans don't care about the truth. The Biden "scandal" is just a prop in their political theater, and part of a larger effort to undermine not just the Biden administration, but democracy in general.

Republicans and "conservatives," for all the evil they have done over the last few decades, do have some important lessons to teach Democrats and the "left." Most prominent is the importance of message discipline and rallying around their leaders. In this existential battle for American democracy and the country's future, Democrats would be wise to finally learn those lessons and resist the perpetual temptation to convene a circular firing squad.

At this point, Biden's documents "scandal" has been amplified to such a degree that it is clearly beginning to impact public opinion. Andrew Romano reports that a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds that nearly two-thirds of adults surveyed (64%) favor a congressional investigation of the documents found at Biden's home and office. That includes a majority of Democrats, only 27% of whom oppose such an investigation:

This broad bipartisan consensus represents unwelcome news to the White House, which has struggled over the last two weeks to manage a steady drip of revelations about additional documents discovered in various locations — revelations that echo the ongoing clash between former President Donald Trump and federal authorities over the "highly classified" materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.

If this pseudo-scandal grows into a conflagration that burns down Joe Biden's presidency, Democrats and the mainstream media will only have themselves to blame. The winners, as usual, will be the Republican fascists and their endless campaign to end American democracy. The losers will be the American people.

The Republican coup plot was also reliant on state-level operatives who sought to sabotage American democracy, overturn the results of the 2020 election and return the Trump regime to the White House through a combination of false claims, threats of violence, voter nullification and a calculated attack on the weak spots in America's electoral mechanisms.

Donald Trump was personally at the center of this coup conspiracy. He was not a hapless bystander or useful idiot simply swept up in the catastrophic events of that day.

Violence was central to the coup plot and not peripheral or somehow accidental to it. There remain many unanswered questions about the Trump cabal's coup attempt. What was the role of the Secret Service, and how badly where its agents compromised or implicated? Who planted the bombs that apparently targeted the Democratic and Republican national headquarters, as well as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris? Was there a stand-down order that prevented Capitol Police and the National Guard from defending the Capitol? How much influence did conspiracy theorist and coup supporter Ginni Thomas wield over her husband and other Supreme Court justices? How close did Donald Trump come to invoking the Insurrection Act and trying to declare martial law in order to stay in power? Had he done so, would it have worked?

To this point, approximately 1,000 of Trump's MAGA foot soldiers and insurrectionists have been charged by the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies in connection to Jan. 6. This includes right-wing paramilitaries and street thugs from the Oath Keepers, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys and others.

Donald Trump has of course never been charged with any crime. He is still issuing threats of a possible violent uprising and demanding that Joe Biden be removed from office. He has not yet returned to Twitter, but under Elon Musk is free to do so. He will likely return to Facebook soon as well. Trump has declared that he will once again run for president in 2024. If he seriously does so, he will be the Republican frontrunner once again.

Republicans in Congress, a group now dominated by Jan. 6 insurrectionists and Trump loyalists — to the virtual exclusion of so-called moderates — now control the House of Representatives.

America's democracy crisis, in other words, continues largely unabated. The Republican fascists are destroying the system from within. As I wrote recently for Salon, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his party will "do everything they can to sabotage any and all investigations into the crimes of Jan. 6":

Even worse, the Republicans in Congress will work to remove any oversights or other guardrails that could limit their corrupt behavior and fend off attempts to end American democracy. They will launch "investigations" into nonexistent "abuses" by the federal government, including the Department of Justice and FBI, for daring to investigate Trump and his allies' blatant criminal conspiracy.
In short, Kevin McCarthy and the other Republican insurrectionists — especially the right-wing shock troops of the so-called Freedom Caucus — are working to make the crimes against democracy committed by Donald Trump and his allies and followers appear to be normal, "legal" and even noble conduct. This corrosion and inversion of the rule of law as part of a larger assault on reality is one of the distinguishing features of fascist and authoritarian movements.

On Tuesday, the Defend Democracy Project issued a warning about the just-announced committee assignments for the 118th Congress, which will be filled and run by "election deniers and MAGA Republicans, Donald Trump's closest allies":

The most extreme members, the ones who incited a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6 and were the most hands-on in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, are the ones calling the shots. These committee appointments to the Oversight, Homeland Security, and more are filled with election deniers, subpoena defiers, and underminers of democracy. They have already shown they will stop at nothing to secure more power for themselves and their leader, Donald Trump, all to undermine our rights.

At the Independent, John Bowden focuses on perhaps the most ignominious, and certainly the most infamous, member of the Republican House majority:

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to join the House Homeland Security committee in a decision that is drawing disbelief and disgust from her critics who find themselves unable to fathom that a onetime 9/11 truther and spreader of countless conspiracies will now sit on a committee making decisions about America's defense. ...
She will now have access to potentially sensitive classified information, a significant change of fortune for the Georgia congresswoman who was stripped of her committee memberships during the last Congress after a Facebook account in her name was found to have "liked" comments endorsing violence against Democrats including Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker.

In all, the Republican fascists and their allies are undeterred in their attacks on democracy. Contrary to what many observers have deluded themselves into believing, Jan. 6 and the rise of American neofascism were not isolated or anomalous events. They were decades in the making, and cannot be understood as a moment of crisis that is now passing.

Donald Trump has not been arrested, tried or convicted for his many obvious or likely crimes. In all likelihood — and contrary to the vivid fantasies of many liberals, progressives and others — that will never happen. Despite the recent appointment of a special counsel to lead the Trump investigation, Attorney General Merrick Garland has shown no inclination to move toward arrest or indictment.

Trump's allies in Congress, of course, have also not been held to account for their misdeeds. If anything, they are more powerful now than they were before the events of Jan. 6 two years ago.

Even after everything we endured through the Age of Trump and what it exposed about our ailing democracy, the mainstream political class, the news media and many members of the public still cling to a desperate belief in "shared values," "democratic norms" and the power of "institutions" to constrain the Republican fascists and other malign actors. They have concluded that somehow the House Jan. 6 investigation under the previous Congress, along with the prosecution of hundreds of Trump's followers, will be sufficient to deter the next coup attempt, whether by the MAGA movement or some other would-be autocratic force.

That is clearly incorrect. Since there has been no serious punishment for those who planned and executed the Jan. 6 attack, the Republican fascists or some future heir to their project will certainly attempt another coup. That is the only logical conclusion in the world as it actually exists, rather than in some fantasyland where shame, public embarrassment and soaring rhetoric about "history" might hold real power.

Ultimately, the investigations into Jan. 6 and the larger coup attempt against American democracy have effectively created a roadmap or guide for how to do it again, avoiding the mistakes and pitfalls of 2021, and succeed next time.

In a new essay for the New York Review of Books, Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole suggests that "the most important question" about the Jan. 6 coup attempt "is why it failed":

Or to put it another way: If you were planning a future coup, what could you learn from this one? From the evidence accumulated by the House of Representatives inquiry into the attack, two aspects of this failure are obvious. Too many Republican officials in crucial states refused to subvert their own elections. And what we might call the institutional right — Donald Trump's appointees to the judiciary and the Department of Justice — did not support the conspiracy. Yet the most important factor may be one that is much more intangible. At its heart was Trump's political persona.
For Trump's hard-core followers and the legal and judicial arms of his movement, the coup's fault line ran through the unstable terrain between performance and action, gesture and reality, signals transmitted and signals received. If Trump himself had understood his relationships with those groups more clearly, the insurrection might well have got much further than it did. "Fascism," as Guy Debord once wrote, "is technologically equipped primitivism." Trump unleashed the primitive anarchy on January 6, but he was not technically equipped to make it effective.

Trump failed on two important counts, O'Toole continues. He never told a coherent and consistent story about why it was necessary for him to stay in power, and "he did not do enough homework" to grasp how he might do so even after an obvious defeat:

A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. Trump, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it in his book "The Chief's Chief," was merely seeking "to uphold the democratic process." In any conceivable future coup, this will again be the necessary narrative. We won, they are stealing our victory, we need to take extraordinary measures to defend democracy.
It is important for actual democrats to understand this. Dark fantasies about martial law and mass repression may deliver a certain masochistic thrill. Yet the lesson from the events of two years ago is that, spectacularly horrifying as it was, the attack on the Capitol was not the main event. It was a poorly conceived and (by Trump) badly led reaction to the failure of the much more feasible coup — which Trump just might have pulled off in November or December 2020. He lost that opportunity because he could not create the necessary heroic drama — the one in which he was not sullenly subverting the presidential election but selflessly upholding its real results.

O'Toole concludes by arguing that the next coup probably won't look much like that one: "Next time, if there is one, the plot will be much tighter, the action less outlandish, the logistics much better prepared, the director more competent. And the show will be called Defending Democracy."

Communicating to the American people the enormity of the existential crisis facing the country and its democracy is unquestionably a difficult task. But the news media can only meet that task with clear moral language and direct examples: Today's Republican Party is a fascist and corrupt organization, not a legitimate partner in the political process. It cares only about obtaining and expanding its power, and it holds democracy, the rule of law and the overall well-being of the American people in utter contempt. Saying that is not easy, but for the most part the American news media has utterly failed to do so.

In a recent essay for the American Prospect, media critic Eric Alterman makes this case forcefully: "These people don't believe in anything save satisfying their own twisted needs and deploying whatever power available to them to defenestrate the people who stand in their way," he writes. "That's the essence of American fascism, and you can see it on display literally every day at the center of our political life, even if it's impolite to say so. You don't need the folks at the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or National Review to come up with sophisticated ways to justify it. Trump's followers get it. When will the mainstream media?"

The deeply rooted narrative that a return to "normal politics" will inevitably occur, because underneath all this drama the Republican Party and its voters are fundamentally decent Americans, has been proven wrong over and over again. America's democracy crisis and the rise of neofascism are the inescapable consequences of a deep societal sickness. As long as that remains unaddressed, our democracy will continue to descend into worsening dysfunction.

If Donald Trump and the other high-level coup plotters are not punished, then Jan. 6, 2021, will appear to future historians as preview of the American future, in which illegitimate attempts to seize power and right-wing political violence become a recurring feature of a disordered landscape. That America will eventually no longer be a real democracy, but whatever remains of the political and media classes will wring their hands and exclaim, "How could this possibly have happened?" That outcome is still preventable, but time is growing short.

Vastly outnumbered, lacking reinforcements, failed by their leaders and with limited resources overall, the Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers bravely fought back against Trump's mob. Beyond the physical stress and violence, Black and brown officers were also assaulted by Trump's followers with racial slurs and symbols and acts of white supremacist hatred.

After hours of hand-to-hand medieval style combat that one police officer said was more intense than what he experienced in Iraq, Trump's attack force overran the defenders and rampaged throughout the Capitol, eager to hunt, kidnap and kill Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats and Republicans alike who refused to participate in Trump's coup plot.

Infamously, Trump's attack force carried the Confederate battle flag inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, something that never happened during the Civil War as hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the struggle over the "right" to keep Black people as slaves.

New Yorker editor David Remnick offers this context in his essay "The Devastating New History of the January 6th Insurrection":

The insurrection at the Capitol was of such grave consequence for liberal democracy and the rule of law that commentators have struggled ever since to find some historical precedent to provide context and understanding to a nation in a state of continuing crisis. Some thought immediately of the sack of the Capitol, in 1814, though the perpetrators then were foreign, soldiers of the British crown. Others have pointed to contested Presidential elections of the past — 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000 — but those ballots were certified, peacefully and lawfully, by Congress. None of the losers sought to foment an uprising or create a national insurgency. Compare Trump's self-absorption and rage with Al Gore's graceful acceptance of the Supreme Court's decision handing the election to George W. Bush: "Tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."…
For Trump, the choice was simple. The insurrectionists were his people, his shock troops, there to do his bidding. Nothing about the spectacle seemed to disturb him: not the gallows erected outside the building, not the savage beatings, not threats to Pence and Pelosi, not graffiti like "Murder the Media," not the chants of "1776! 1776!" And so he ignored calls to action even from his own party. At 3:11 P.M., Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, tweeted, "We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now. @realdonaldtrump you need to call this off." Trump would not tell his supporters to go home until the early evening, when the damage had been done….

What happened on Jan. 6, Remnick observes, was "rooted both in the degraded era of Trump and in the radicalization of a major political party during the past generation." The net effect, he continues, is that many people will approach the Jan. 6 select committee's final report "with a sense of fatigue, even denial." One of Trump's most important accomplishments "has been to bludgeon the political attention of the country into submission."

Although the Capitol's defenders could not keep the mob out of the building on that fateful afternoon, they succeeded in protecting the lives of the vice president, all the members of Congress and others who were in the Capitol for the certification of the Electoral College vote. Several Capitol police officers subsequently died, at least partly because of the physical and emotional injuries they suffered on Jan. 6. Many more members of both the Capitol Police and the Washington Metro Police were forced to retire and will suffer the physical and emotional effects of that day for the rest of their lives.

Ten days ago, on the two-year anniversary of the attack, President Biden honored 14 people — a group that included law enforcement officers and election workers — with the Presidential Citizens Medal for their service to the nation on Jan. 6 and during the 2020 election. In his speech during the White House ceremony, Biden said that "on this day two years ago our democracy held because 'We the People' ... did not flinch. … History will remember your names. They'll remember your courage. They'll remember your bravery. They'll remember your extraordinary commitments to your fellow Americans. That's not hyperbole, that's a fact."

The president offered special praise to election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss — who were important witnesses before the Jan. 6 committee — for their courage, dignity, self-sacrifice and service to American democracy:

Both of them were just doing their jobs until they were targeted and threatened by the same predators and peddlers of lies that would fuel the insurrection. They were literally forced from their homes, facing despicable racist taunts.
But despite it all, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss found the courage to testify openly and honestly ... to the whole country and the world about their experience to set the record straight about the lies and defend the integrity of our elections.
Ruby and Shaye, you don't deserve what happened to you, but you do deserve the nation's eternal thanks for showing the dignity and grace of We the People. Presumptuous of me, but I'm so proud of you both.

Watching this, I felt a solitary tear run down my cheek. These men and women are among the best of us, the "real Americans." I would include Joe Biden allowing for all his flaws, among that group.

I am committed to critical patriotism — and that means telling the truth about America, be it good or bad, and then working to force the nation and its people to live up to their full potential.

Critical patriots have a deep love of America. We are passionately committed to truth-telling even if it makes us unpopular with those who want simple answers and happy narratives of American exceptionalism, those who believe that "patriotism" consists of whitewashing history and reality rather than confronting the sometimes-ugly truths and complexities of who we are as a nation and people.

On that same Friday I also felt my blood pressure go up as I confronted an ugly juxtaposition. While President Biden was honoring those true heroes of democracy, the Republican insurrectionists who attempted to end American democracy on Jan. 6 were taking control of the House of Representatives and installing Kevin McCarthy — an especially craven minion of Donald Trump — as speaker.

While Joe Biden honored the heroes of democracy for their sacrifices, the Republican insurrectionists who tried to overthrow democracy were taking control of the House of Representatives.

McCarthy and his party will now do everything they can to sabotage any and all investigations into the crimes of Jan. 6. Even worse, the Republicans in Congress will work to remove any oversights or other guardrails that could limit their corrupt behavior and fend off attempts to end American democracy. They will launch "investigations" into nonexistent "abuses" by the federal government, including the Department of Justice and FBI, for daring to investigate Trump and his allies' blatant criminal conspiracy.

In short, Kevin McCarthy and the other Republican insurrectionists — especially the right-wing shock troops of the so-called Freedom Caucus — are working to make the crimes against democracy committed by Donald Trump and his allies and followers appear to be normal, "legal" and even noble conduct. This corrosion and inversion of the rule of law as part of a larger assault on reality is one of the distinguishing features of fascist and authoritarian movements.

Writing at the Bulwark, Mona Charen focuses on one of the most dangerous figures of the new Congress, and what she embodies within the Republican Party and current "conservative" movement:

During one of Kevin McCarthy's gauntlet of punishing votes, it was striking to see with whom he passed the time. There she was, dressed in sophisticated black, the member hailed as a "key ally" to the new Speaker of the House: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Her choice of color (in the past she has donned stark reds, whites, or blues — get it?) is perhaps a signal of the new Greene — a mainstream figure, a serious politician. Her status was signaled by a respectful, not to say softball interview with Howard Kurtz on Fox News.
Doubtless Fox would like to sanitize her since she played a significant role in elevating McCarthy to the speakership. She must be a changed person or the GOP will have to ask itself some uncomfortable questions.
Things move fast, so cast your minds back only to 2021 when Mitch McConnell described Greene as a "cancer" on the Republican party and John Thune warned that the party had to draw some lines: "They have to decide who they want to be. Do they want to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, free markets, peace through strength, and pro life, or do they want to be the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon?"…

Greene's "makeover," Charen observes, has been an extended process. She denounced Nick Fuentes (but not Trump) after the infamous Mar-a-Lago dinner, and has tried to create some distance between herself and her former friends Rep. Lauren Boebert, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Alex Jones. "But this is not a case of a politician who misspeaks or commits a gaffe and must make amends," Charen writes. "She has a disordered personality. ... She is drawn to hatred as a moth to a flame. She is the poison that courses through the veins of parts of the right — the vicious, reality-challenged right. If she is to be normalized by the GOP, it is the party, not she, that is changed."

This stomach-churning contrast between Joe Biden's tribute to the heroes of Jan. 6 and the Republican fascists in Congress points to fundamental questions that must be answered if American democracy is to survive the Age of Trump. What does justice mean in America when Donald Trump and his allies and acolytes not only go unpunished for their evident crimes but now control one house of Congress? What does it mean that Kevin McCarthy, who flew to Florida only weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection to kiss the ring at Mar-a-Lago, is now second in the presidential line of succession?

David Remnick notes in his New Yorker essay that it's urgent for us to find out "whether a two-and-a-half-century-old republic will resist future efforts to undercut its foundations — to steal, through concerted deception, the essential legitimacy of its constitutional order." These next two years, with insurrectionists holding what is supposed to be the "people's house" in Washington, will put that question to the test.

The internet and social media are a type of experience machine.

At their worst, the internet and social media function as a self-reinforcing echo chamber and closed episteme in which many people confuse huge amounts of free and otherwise readily available "information" and "content" with true knowledge and hard-earned expertise.

The Algorithm is designed to keep "users" "engaged" by amplifying negative emotions and feelings of conflict where individuals who are experiencing emotional and spiritual emptiness, loneliness and other unmet human needs are stimulated into an endless if not compulsive cycle of clicks, scrolling, posts, comments, "likes", "shares" and other reactions. To that point, people who engage in "compulsive" internet use are more likely to exhibit the "Dark Triad" traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

In many ways, rage, anger and other negative emotions and behavior are the currency (and business model) of social media and the internet.

A 2021 Pew Research survey showed that 31 percent of American adults report being "constantly" online.

In a new essay at TomDispatch (republished at Salon) investigative journalist Andy Kroll reflects on what he learned researching conspiracy theories online and the toxic seductive power and allure of such spaces:

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.
Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I'm an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?
The correct answer is indeed: Right. And yet……
That frictionless glide from one post to the next, video after video, tweet upon tweet, plays tricks on the mind. Spend enough time in that realm and even the most absurd theories and narratives start to acquire the patina of logic, the ring of reason. How else to explain the sheer number of QAnon adherents — one in five Americans, according to an analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?

Kroll continues:

Put simply, we don't stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize "engagement" at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest of them don't simply entertain, inform, or "connect" us. As New York Times reporter Max Fisher writes in his book "The Chaos Machine," "This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself."
Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there's no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

As seen on Jan. 6 and throughout the Age of Trump and the global democracy crisis, the internet and social media are a playground and a type of force multiplier for right-wing extremists including fascists, conspiracists, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and other malign actors to organize and plan, as well as to radicalize and recruit new members.

Donald Trump embodies the worst of human behavior. As the leader of a political cult movement, he has given his followers permission to be their true horrible selves. Fascism and other types of illiberal politics are those antisocial and antihuman emotions and impulses harnessed in the form of a reactionary revolutionary destructive political project.

To that end, Trump, the Republican fascists, and the larger white right were able to use the internet and social media to grow their base of support into a movement comprised of many tens of millions of (white) Americans. As many democracy experts and other observers have concluded, Trump's rise to power was empowered by the internet, social media, and how the American right wing has spent several decades creating a parallel media machine and other institutions that together function as a type of alternate universe for its followers.

Democrats, liberals, progressives and other pro-democracy Americans have no such equivalent countervailing force.

Writing at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, journalist Alan Miller offers this context:

The 2016 presidential election was a watershed in the evolution of misinformation and disinformation. It was also a breakthrough in public awareness of the scope and impact of harmful misinformation online and of the kaleidoscope of bad actors who produce it.
The public learned how much the companies running the platforms knew (especially Facebook), and how little they had been willing to do to curb it. The public also found out about the Russians' aggressive disinformation campaign to influence the election's outcome, pit Americans against each other, and undermine faith in democracy.
All these forces were at play before Donald Trump became president, but he relentlessly exploited and exacerbated them with constant prevarications and attacks on the news media. When journalists sought to hold him accountable, he dismissed their reporting as "fake news." He systematically eroded political norms and the rule of law. He spread harmful falsehoods about COVID-19 that cost an untold number of lives. And he undermined his supporters' faith in the election process.
Having gone from "alternative facts" (a phrase that entered the lexicon just two days after Trump's inauguration) to alternative realities upon his contentious departure from office, Americans now not only cannot agree on what the facts are; they cannot even agree on what a fact is.
This poses one of the great challenges of our time, because facts are the central nervous system of public life. They are the basis for what is taught in schools. For scientific inquiry and findings. For the legal system and jurisprudence. For societal debates and decisions about what constitutes effective public policy.
And facts most certainly are not partisan. If they are in trouble, we are on the path not only to an information dystopia, but very possibly to autocracy.

Trump, the Republican fascists and their allies were able to use the internet and social media to take control of the White House and other governing institutions as part of a much larger and ongoing assault on American democracy and freedom.

During the midterms, enough Americans voted to slow down the Republican fascists' assault on democracy and freedom. The Democrats would maintain control of the Senate. Instead of a clear majority in the House, the much-discussed "red tide" largely dissipated, leaving the Republican Party with a tenuous majority.

Recent research by Shaun Bowler, Miguel Carreras and Jennifer L. Merolla, which is featured in the journal Political Research Quarterly, suggests that the results of the midterm elections are a sign that Trump's power to use social media and the internet as part of his war on American democracy has been diminishing over time. Moreover, Trump's attempts to mobilize Republican voters and his cultists online may have actually helped the Democrats in the midterms.

Writing at PsyPost, Eric Dolan summarizes these findings:

Carreras and his colleagues found limited evidence that exposure to some of Trump's rhetoric moved people in a more anti-democratic direction. Independent participants who read Trump's attack on Congress tended to be more supportive of the idea of the president disregarding Congress and the courts. Trump's attack the media also lead to a greater endorsement of the president disregarding Congress among Republicans. These effects were mostly reversed among Democrats.
But the researchers found no evidence that exposure to Trump's tweets attacking the media, Congress, or the courts influenced attitudes regarding support for democracy. Those exposed to the control tweet were just as likely as those exposed to Trump's attacks to agree with the statement "Democracy may have problems, but it is better than any other form of government."
Trump's tweets attacking the media, Congress, or the courts also appeared to have no impact on support for strong leaders among Republican participants but decreased support for strong leaders among Democratic participants. In addition, those exposed to Trump's attack on the media were more likely to disagree with the statement "When the press publishes inaccurate information about the government, the president should be able to remove their license," an effect that was largely driven by Democrats.
"The key finding is that Trump's undemocratic messages in 2019 (a series of Tweets attacking other liberal institutions) did not lead to an erosion of democratic attitudes. On the contrary, the results suggest there is significant pushback against anti-democratic messages, especially among Democrats," Carreras told PsyPost.

Carreras concludes: "Our results add an important caveat to the literature on polarization and democratic erosion in the United States. Previous studies have emphasized the risk posed by partisan polarization for citizens' attachment to democratic norms. One possible silver lining of partisan polarization is that it can lead supporters of a pro-democracy outparty (i.e., the Democratic party during the Trump administration) to coalesce around democratic norms to fight against authoritarian excesses by the incumbent party."

This research complements the findings by Jon Green, William Hobbs, Stefan McCabe, and David Lazer as recently published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that right-wing conspiracy theories about the Big Lie and "stolen elections" are correlated with lower turnout for Republican candidates in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election and increased voting for Democratic candidates.

The abstract of "Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election" summarizes these findings as: "Liking or sharing messages opposed to conspiracy theories was associated with higher turnout than expected in the runoff election, and those who liked or shared tweets promoting fraud-related conspiracy theories were slightly less likely to vote."

At their best, the internet, social media and other digital technologies can be used to improve the human condition by providing information and facilitating communication and coordination in ways, that until very recently, were viewed as almost impossible. Unfortunately, those same traits have empowered malign actors and other anti-social and anti-human forces to attack and subvert democracy and the good society.

As many democracy experts and other watchdogs have repeatedly warned, the ability of the internet and social media and other technologies to exercise an outsized and often profoundly negative impact on society – and to do so under the near exclusive and accountability-free control of corporations and other private actors – highlights the need for more transparency, public accountability and regulation of such technology.

The future of global democracy (and society) may literally depend on how we collectively decide how much and in what ways the internet and social media, and these new technologies more broadly, should influence our lives, futures, and relationships to one another -- and the powerful.

Some people stricken by fear may literally feel stuck in place, the phenomenon known as "cement feet," where they are rendered helpless and unable to move. Others faced with extreme danger and peril will remain calm, take command of the situation and lead themselves and others to safety.

Many things in that litany may seem uncomfortably familiar, given what Americans have lived through since 2015 or so. These examples of the "fight or flight" response can apply to societies and groups as well as individuals. American society as a whole has suffered great physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, intellectual and financial trauma from the Age of Trump and the rise of neofascism. That trauma has been most acutely felt by members of marginalized and other vulnerable communities.

Today's Republican Party and "conservative" movement are experts at using political sadism and other forms of cruelty to advance their goals and agenda. The net effect is that many Americans feel disoriented and lost in time. Thus, the questions: What year is it really? Why have the last few years in America, dominated by the Trump fever dream and the COVID pandemic, simultaneously seemed to pass in the blink of an eye and to be endlessly, painfully slow?

The Age of Trump was preceded (and made possible) by decades of previous abuse delivered by "conservative" politics and gangster capitalism, with its religious doctrine that profit comes before people, as well as by a larger culture of cruelty that has fueled a profoundly unhealthy society. This trauma and abuse have become so normalized that many Americans have literally lost the ability to imagine a more humane and truly democratic culture and way of living.

The result is that American society is sick with what social theorist David Theo Goldberg describes as "political depression." He explored this in a 2018 essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

We awaken each day to the question: what horror faces us now? And we struggle to put our collective finger on the feeling of this moment, the gnawing sensibility of our time.
Political depression is too common a phrase to capture it. This is not the momentary defeat of a political party. There is something else at work now, responding to larger, more tectonic shifts.
The quality of "dread" has become a driver of our time. Prolonged dread is the mark of this moment, of its seeming inscrutability, its illegibility, where the improbable has become likely. Dread has many overlapping, interactive sources…. Less like fear and more in keeping with melancholia, dread has no defined object. It follows from lack: of possibility, of predictability, from denial of principle. Dread emerges out of an unpatchable tear in being, existential or social. It always seeks out that which will increase its own velocity, deepen its hold, magnify its unsettlement....
Dread freezes out all other feeling. It is world-surrounding, world-infusing. Vulgarity and violence, bigotry and brutality against the vulnerable become the bitcoin, the stealth cryptocurrency, of the politics of dread.

How are the American people grappling with their collective political depression at the dawn of 2023? Some better than others, of course. Here is an obvious bright sign: In the midterms, many Americans decided to vote against the Republicans and win a momentary victory in the long struggle to protect, strengthen and improve American democracy and freedom.

Public opinion and other research shows, however, that feelings of mental and emotional unwellness, loneliness, feelings of social atomization and alienation, depression and anxiety, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction still dominate the American people's collective mood and thinking.

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The dread is legitimate. The political depression and disorientation are understandable. But the American people cannot afford to succumb to hopelessness, learned helplessness and surrender. These moments of challenge and crisis also represent great opportunities for positive and potentially transformative social change.

This American interregnum, when the country's democracy is still very much in flux, marks a moment when the American people still have agency, even against oppressive or hegemonic forces that sometimes feel impossible to defeat.

Shane Burley, the author of "Fascism Today" and "Why We Fight," reflected on these possibilities in a 2021 interview with Truthout:

I think we need to take time to unpack the apocalypse. There is a cultural feeling of doom, this sense that Cthulhu underlies modern society, and we are waiting for it to collapse, or worse. And we can't necessarily stop that. The far right is driven fully by this sense of millennialism, this questing after the end, and it only takes a small group of people committed to apocalypse to actually bring it to fruition in the form of mass shootings, bombings and other racist horrors. We have also reached (or passed) a tipping point ecologically and economically, it's hard to see how the political challenge of the 21st century is anything other than organizing amid a collapse.
So, the stakes have been raised by conditions, but that also opens us up to what is possible. In the 21st century, the instability and rapidity of escalating technology and social relationships allows the possibility of cataclysmic shifts at an unprecedented scale.

But this moment of potential doom or apocalypse, Burley continues, contains other possibilities as well;

Just think about the mass actions in 2020, the culmination of the last decades of really huge social movements exploding quickly aided by a new multitudinous set of social relationships. Likewise, the failures of capital and states is on full display, and only increasingly so in the age of COVID-19. ... This dialectic brings about a dual power situation, one whose ability to challenge the legitimacy of dominant institutions probably would not have been similarly possible 10 years ago. So, we don't have to live in the misery of the end times, we can live in the optimism of what is possible, and we can do it by committing to that process of healing and with the hope that it will really bring human suffering to an end.

Ultimately, "democracy" is something we do. That consists of much more than voting in elections, important as that is. It also means joining civic groups or cooperative and mutual aid associations, building activist and advocacy movements, working on or donating to political campaigns and even running for office.

We can also do "democracy" in other, more surprising ways that on the surface may not seem "political." Those might include talking to strangers, fostering animals that need homes, teaching adult literacy, visiting elderly or vulnerable people in residential facilities, supporting the arts, working in community gardens or food pantries, or helping maintain public parks, public libraries and other shared spaces.

All those activities and more can help generate the type of social capital that builds solidarity, community and a sense of human connectedness. Those kinds of relationships are a crucial bulwark against American neofascism and other civic evils that can flourish when individuals feel lost, lonely and alienated from society and community.

Several weeks before the midterms, I had the privilege of speaking with historian and journalist Adam Hochschild about America's democracy crisis and its deep origins. I asked him to speak metaphorically about what time of day it is in the American story: Have we reached the darkness of midnight?

Hochschild understood the question. "I don't think we're at midnight yet," he said. "But let's put it this way: If we go one direction we're heading for midnight and if we go another direction, then we're heading for noon."

One of the defining events of 2022 is that just enough Americans — or perhaps we should say almost enough Americans — chose the direction of sustained democracy. No one, however, can recapture the lost time, lost energy or lost lives of 2022 (or the preceding several years) that were stolen away by the traumas of the Age of Trump. In 2023 and moving forward, the American people have more crucial choices to make. Will they regain control and agency over their own lives and their society by organizing to resisting the Republican fascists on every level of political and cultural life, or will they default back to inaction and learned helplessness, once again becoming bystanders to history?

To make the question even more basic, how will they use their time? How will those of us still fortunate enough to be here use this precious year? America's future hangs in the balance.

Many Americans are understandably exhausted by this reality, and by the last seven years of the Age of Trump. Public opinion research makes clear that many of the American people are sick to death of Trump and the Republican fascists and wish they would just disappear.

At least arguably, Trump himself is in serious trouble. He faces increasing pressure from the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies for his many obvious crimes. It's increasingly likely that he will be prosecuted on one or more criminal charges — although conviction is an entirely different matter. That possible or likely prosecution is imagined by many as an immense relief, an end to this long nightmare.

Trump's support among Republicans appears to be softening every day — another reason why many Americans are exhaling, convinced that relief from their collective pain is imminent. Of course, other factors are at play as well. Most Americans are generally uninterested in politics and politically unsophisticated. Most do not follow the news closely and rely on trusted sources of information to tell them what is important and which details they should notice.

Of course it's true that many Americans voted in the November midterm elections with the aim of slowing or stopping the Trumpist assault on their democracy and freedom. But voting is only one aspect of political participation in a democracy. Too many Americans appear convinced themselves that democracy was "saved" with a great "victory" by the Democrats in the midterms. First of all, that is factually incorrect, given that Republicans will control the House of Representatives (and continue to dominate the Supreme Court and other power centers. Secondly, the 2022 midterms were just one battle in what will likely be a decades-long battle to defend, heal and expand American democracy.

Here are some of the events that too many Americans are deliberately avoiding, at their own peril. Donald Trump is continuing to threaten acts of widespread violence and public disorder if he is prosecuted or punished for his crimes. In a series of recent posts on Truth Social. Trump responded to the criminal referrals by the Jan. 6 select committee:

The Unselect Committee of political hacks are the same group that came up with the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, not to mention many others. They are Corrupt cowards who hate our Country...
Republicans and Patriots all over the land must stand strong and united against the Thugs and Scoundrels of the Unselect Committee. It will be a dark period in American history, but with darkness comes light!!!
The so-called Deep State, often referred to by many other names, including 'Cheaters, 'Insurrectionists,' 'Communists,' and yes, even our good old 'RINOS,' have been working on sinister and evil 'plots' for a long time, even well before I came to office. They are long seated Swamp Creatures, and are bad news for the USA.

He then returned to a familiar but still disturbing theme, contending that President Biden should be removed from office and the government overthrown:

In other words, the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLEN. It all began a long time ago, they SPIED on my campaign, and tried to "RIGG" the 2016 Election, but failed. Remember, our government is doing this, not a person or party. What should be done about such a terrible thing, or should we let someone who was elected by cheating and fraud stay in office and continue to destroy our Country?

These recent threats continue Trump's recent pattern of stochastic terrorism and incitements to political violence. He has said the Constitution should be "terminated" so that he can be returned to power immediately; he has publicly embraced white supremacists, neo-Nazis and antisemites and right-wing extremists; and he has declared that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists are heroes and "victims" whom he will pardon if he returns to the presidency.

Federal law enforcement and other security experts continue to warn that the country is in a state of extreme danger from right-wing extremists. The recent trial and conviction of leading figures of the Oath Keepers paramilitary organization for their role in Trump's coup attempt and the Capitol attack is further confirmation of how close the U.S. came on that day to martial law and sustained violent chaos. The upcoming trial of senior members of the Proud Boys on similar charges may well provide further insights into the Trump coup plot.

A new investigation has again confirmed the widespread infiltration of the U.S. military and American law enforcement agencies by fascists, white supremacists and other enemies of multiracial democracy.

According to a report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), over 300 members on Oath Keepers membership roles have worked for the Department of Homeland Security. Truthout reports that these people include members of the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, ICE and even the Secret Service:

Some of the members on the list, when contacted, denied Oath Keepers membership or said they have let their membership lapse; government insiders say, however, that the list is only the "tip of the iceberg" in terms of the overlap between dangerous far right groups and government agencies like DHS. ...
Such an overlap at DHS is of particular concern because the agency is tasked with protecting against far right threats. POGO and OCCRP specifically looked at DHS because employees within the agency often have access to classified intelligence about groups like the Oath Keepers.

Talking Points Memo recently obtained thousands of text messages between former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and dozens of Republican members of Congress, discussing how they could assist Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the election and stay in power illegally:

The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it.
The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden's victory.

At a gala event held Dec. 11 in New York, leading figures in the MAGA movement, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon, all but openly declared war on American democracy. In a subsequent speech to a group of young conservatives, Bannon deployed the language of political violence, threatening "war" and calling for an "army" to fight back against "the administrative state."

The Republican-fascist attempts to end American democracy through a "legal" coup continue as well. The U.S. Supreme Court is now hearing a case which could grant state legislatures (as a practical matter, Republican state legislatures) unlimited power over federal elections, including the ability to nullify the popular vote and appoint their own presidential electors.

How has the mainstream news media covered these developments? Not much. With a few notable exceptions, the media now seems committed to a "hear no evil" approach.

Yes, the "shocking" and "important" developments of the day will be highlighted, sometimes with great insight, but we do not see the kind of sustained coverage that locates the Republican-fascist attacks as part of a larger narrative of America's democracy crisis. To a large extent, the media is still beholden to the conventions of "normal politics, including obsolete notions of "fairness," "balance" and "objectivity," as well as to horserace political coverage and Beltway access journalism.

For instance, too many journalists continue to circulate and launder the language used by Republican Party spokespeople and propagandists, effectively treating their claims as worthy of discussion and debate. But today's "conservative" movement almost entirely consists of malign actors who are incapable of intellectual honesty or good faith.

David Corn of Mother Jones addresses this in a recent article that merits lengthy quotation:

Consequently, an outrage more outrageous than the usual outrage becomes part of the never-ending rush of events. And the growing authoritarian threat Trump presents — empowering antisemites, excusing political violence, encouraging paranoia and conspiracism, and undermining the fundamental rules of American democracy — is not appropriately highlighted. The transgression of the moment joins a long line of transgressions, diluted in a giant cauldron of wrongdoing. Some folks — most recently, Patti Davis, a daughter of Ronald Reagan — have advocated ignoring Trump and denying his lies and scoundrelism oxygen. Yet as a former president and leading GOP presidential aspirant with a following of millions, he remains an important figure in American life who must be reckoned with. With Trump perhaps the No. 1 risk to democracy — as far as any one person can be — Trump TV cannot simply be turned off.

Trump's recent statement about "terminating" the Constitution, Corn writes, "deserved more elaborate and sustained treatment":

Even against the steady stream of Trump excesses over the past seven years, a demand to burn the Constitution stood out — especially with Trump's recent and deeper forays into the realm of authoritarianism. If he is beginning his latest White House chase with a call to abolish the Constitution — while hailing the January 6 rioters and hobnobbing with antisemites and a white nationalist — imagine where he might be heading. Armed resistance?

Media critic Parker Molloy examined the media whitewash of Donald Trump's 2024 campaign announcement:

Oh, The New York Times… *sigh* What are we going to do with you? Times reporters Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman covered Trump's announcement. In their headline, the Times went with the words "ignoring the midterms' verdict on him." And once you got into the story itself, it didn't get much better. "Historically divisive presidency" that "shook the pillars of the country's democratic institutions" sounds tough, but what does any of that mean? Why dance around it?...
The Associated Press fumbled its coverage by going with a real view-from-nowhere type headline, simply stating, "Trump seeks White House again amid GOP losses, legal probes."…
CNN's initial write-up (and push notification) for Trump's announcement was a simple "Former President Donald Trump announces a White House bid for 2024." Bizarrely, the story opened with a bit of trivia: if he's elected, he'd become "only the second commander-in-chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms." (Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president, is the other one, FYI). That's great and all, but it omits some important context about what a Trump win would actually mean for the country.
Additionally, while the story does at least mention Trump's "own role in inciting an attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021," the piece danced around the topic.

At his PressWatchers site, Dan Froomkin focused on one particularly illustrative example of how the mainstream media — in this case, the New York Times — continues to normalize Trumpism and the Republican-fascist assault on democracy:

New York Times political reporters and editors are probably high-fiving each other today in celebration of the incredible bravery of their colleague Peter Baker, who definitively declared in Friday's Times that Donald Trump has "embraced extremism."
But as usual with the New York Times, it's way too little, way too late.
Indeed, every baby step the New York Times takes toward recognizing the extraordinary danger posed by elements of the Republican Party to our democracy and our polity only further exposes how far they still have to go.
There is nothing bold about saying Trump has now aligned himself "with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics." The appropriate wording is "with forces whose views are so abhorrent that they have historically been shunned by all respectable people and institutions."…
My question is: What more will it take for journalistic institutions like the Times to acknowledge that what Trump is saying requires condemnation, not speculation.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 select committee's criminal referrals to the Justice Department, recommending a series of criminal charges against Donald Trump, the question now is whether the news media and the public as a whole view those potential charges as an end in themselves, and a sign that America's democracy crisis is over? That would be an error of massive proportions, offering Trump and the larger white-right movement he represents time and space to regroup, mobilize and mount a new series of attacks. There are many battles left to fight. Now is the time for more vigilance, not less.

To this point, the Russian military is losing the war in Ukraine despite overwhelming numerical superiority. Western intelligence agencies believe the Russians have suffered casualties of more than 100,000 killed or wounded and that some of the most elite and best-equipped Russian military units have been destroyed. The collective morale and will of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine — and likely of the Russian military as a whole — has been severely degraded. A significant portion of the territory that the Russians captured during their initial invasion nine or 10 months ago has since been retaken by the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian military is consistently outmaneuvering the Russian military and defeating it on the battlefield for a variety of reasons, including superior leadership and soldiering, a fully mobilized population that is dedicated to resisting the invasion and, of course, a large amount of weapons, supplies, intelligence, training and other support provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries. Recently the Ukrainian military has become so confident it has begun attacking military bases, airfields and other targets well inside Russia.

Military experts have concluded that it will take decades for the Russian military to rebuild, whatever the final outcome of the war may be. Vladimir Putin's reputation as a fearsome strategist and powerful leader, with an unusual ability to outflank and defeat adversaries has also suffered enormous damage

How do we separate myth from reality in our understanding of Vladimir Putin and the results of this conflict so far? To what extent is the war in Ukraine an extension of Putin's raw force of will, unquenched ambitions, ego and misguided dreams of recreating the lost Russian Empire — and how difficult does that make it to end this war and bring peace to the region?

Was Putin's previous image purely a concoction of the Kremlin's propaganda machine? Has that false image led America and the world to miscalculate in its strategic and tactical approach to Russia on the global stage?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Andrew Weiss, who is James Family Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia. Prior to joining Carnegie, Weiss was director of the RAND Corporation's Center for Russia and Eurasia and executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum.

Weiss has also served in a range of public policy roles at the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon during both Republican and Democratic administrations. His new book (with art by Brian "Box" Brown) is "Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin."

In this wide-ranging conversation, Weiss reflects on the successes of the Biden administration in supporting Ukraine, maintaining stability in Europe and countering Russia's aggression. He counsels against overreacting to Putin's threats of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, which he sees as an example of bullying behavior and bluster intended to test the resolve of the U.S. and NATO.

Weiss warns toward the end of this conversation that Putin's long-term plan — and one of the few ways he could still "win" the war in Ukraine — is to support Donald Trump and other Republican extremists in the United States, in the hope that if Trump or another Trump-like conservative returns to power in 2025, American foreign policy will once again favor Putin and Russia's interests.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Given the war in Ukraine and the general state of America and the world, how are you feeling?

The past year has been quite an emotional rollercoaster. The war in Ukraine has been a truly wrenching and horrible thing to witness. Of course, my personal situation and feelings are not remotely as bad as what's happened to people who actually live in Ukraine or who have family over there.

What is it like to have a job where you are most busy under conditions of dangerous conflict?

I am fortunate to work at a truly outstanding think tank in Washington, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I work alongside a team of American and Russian colleagues who are the best analysts of that region anywhere in the world, outside perhaps government circles. I've been working on Russia for the better part of my entire career, 30 years or so. Having a job where I can apply my expertise and help policy audiences and the public understand issues like the war in Ukraine is a unique opportunity. I also realize that it's a privileged position: I don't envy anyone who is working on these issues on the frontlines inside Ukraine or at places where I used to serve, like the Pentagon. There are no easy solutions or magic bullets for the issues they're grappling with.

One thing that motivates me is how best to communicate what I know to audiences that are heavily dependent on mainstream news sources and "conventional" wisdom about the war in Ukraine. All of us are being inundated with information in near real time, but much of it is incomplete or misleading. When I have a chance to write op-eds and longer research projects, or to provide comment to a reporter who's working on Ukraine, I'm conscious of the fact that my views may not be much better, or all that different, from what a dozen other people in my field might say.

All of us are desperate for good news and broadly sympathetic to Ukraine. Images of people celebrating in Kherson are infectious, but they may not tell us much about what's going to happen next.

I also recognize that it can be very hard, in that format, to capture the nuances of Russia's complex history or the bigger picture of why the war in Ukraine broke out in the first place. That is precisely why I wrote a graphic novel on Vladimir Putin. How did we end up in a horrible head-on collision with Russia? Who is the real Vladimir Putin? Is he different from the person he presents himself to be on the world stage?

At the core, I am an old-fashioned Russia analyst. I read and speak Russian. I read tons of material and try to determine if there is anything substantive there. Increasingly, the open source data that we all have access to is poor or unreliable. As a result, many Western observers often project their own views onto events in Russia. I do my best not to fall into that trap, but I am far from infallible in that department.

What are some common misunderstandings or misperceptions about what's going on with Russia and Ukraine, even among members of the public who consider themselves well-informed?

One recent notable example would be the consequences of the very impressive victory by the Ukrainians in recapturing the southern city of Kherson. The Russians had conquered it early in the war. The Ukrainians were then able to take back Kherson, and it did not turn out to be the bloody house-to-house urban battle many of us had feared.

But I trust what Gen. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in the wake of Kherson. When asked to assess the current state of the war, he said that Ukraine will not be able to achieve its stated military objectives and win the war anytime soon.

All of us, obviously, are desperate for good news and broadly sympathetic to what Ukraine is trying to do on the battlefield. Images of people celebrating the victory in downtown Kherson or elsewhere are infectious. Unfortunately, those images may not tell us all that much about what's going to happen next.

For people of a certain age and generation the idea of a land war in Europe and these discussions of nuclear weapons summon up fears and memories of the Cold War and those moments where it almost turned "hot." How does that color our understanding and analyses of the events in Ukraine?

The incident with the missile that landed in Poland is quite revealing in this regard. The stakes of the war expanding outside of Ukraine's borders are self-evident. When that incident occurred, it wasn't immediately clear what had actually happened. Was it a Russian missile that had hit a small Polish town and killed a couple of people? Was Putin testing NATO's resolve? Was it a horrible accident? It was remarkable to see how quickly people began to jump to conclusions. There were even voices on cable news demanding immediate U.S. military action before all the facts were known.

In this case, the Biden administration did precisely the right thing: They let their military and intelligence experts gather the facts about what really happened, and then acted to make sure our allies were lined up alongside us.

All the hysterical talk after the missile strike in Poland was a reflection of how we haven't had to think about all-out nuclear war for a long time. All this breathless news commentary can be counterproductive.

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, President Biden made clear that he did not want, in his phrasing, to start World War III as a result of what was happening in Ukraine, nor did he want to see any widening of the conflict. He insisted that the war should be confined within the boundaries of Ukraine and it not be allowed to escalate to a U.S.-Russia nuclear conflict.

All of the hysterical talk right after the incident in Poland really was another reflection of how we haven't really had to think about all-out nuclear war for a long time. On social media and our 24/7 news culture, not enough people were looking at these fast-moving events with enough sobriety and sufficient caution. It's simply a fact that the war in Ukraine is nowhere close to ending and that all of this breathless news commentary can be counterproductive.

There is a narrative that the world is actually much safer, in terms of the number of wars and conflicts, than it has been for a long time. Your thoughts?

I think there's no question that the world is going through a really convulsive and dangerous phase. The Ukraine war shows us that the world is vulnerable to opportunists and other dangerous people such as Vladimir Putin. He believed that he could attack Ukraine without much pushback. That was a huge miscalculation. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there are other very powerful structural forces at work in the world today. The war in Ukraine is a microcosm of some of those drivers, but it is not the be-all and end-all. For example, the world has shifted to a place where the U.S. is no longer an unchallenged dominant force. This is what the Russians like to call a multipolar world, where powers like China, Russia, India and other countries have started to take on more and more authority. It basically means that the U.S. just can't dictate to everyone else what to do.

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There is also a broken Middle East, which is spewing out all sorts of instability and challenges. We are experiencing a massive environmental and economic transformation of the energy economy, of which Russia was a prime beneficiary for many years. Nationalism and populism are also ascendant in various parts of the world. There are huge shifts in the ways that technology impacts our lives. All of this is happening on top of a breakdown of order and peace and tranquility in delicate regions of the world like Ukraine.

America and the world are facing challenges that are both immediate — such as the war in Ukraine — and long-term, such as the global climate disaster. How should policymakers balance those priorities and agendas?

It is really hard. My heart goes out to anybody who's trying to do this type of work at the most senior levels of any government right now. Back in 2021, the Biden administration was eager to try to short-circuit any sense that we were in a spiraling crisis with Russia. That would have allowed the Biden administration to focus on the other challenges you highlighted. The goal was to avoid a situation where Russia found itself in a test of wills with the United States.

But then Afghanistan happened. The world saw a U.S.-supported government crumble when it faced a real threat to its control over the country. Putin took that outcome and incorrectly applied it to Ukraine. Putin also misread how the Europeans would respond to his war against Ukraine. Most importantly, the Russian military has committed horrible crimes and atrocities. By engaging in naked aggression and criminality, Russia's basically blew up the sense of restraint that the U.S. and other countries had exercised up to that point. It basically propelled us into the world we're in today, where the U.S. has provided $20 billion in military aid to Ukraine. This is not going to be over anytime soon. The stakes will only grow higher the longer this goes on.

Unfortunately, it is going to be difficult for the United States not to get sucked into this crisis directly and to preserve its ability to effectively manage all the other global challenges we are facing.

Most wars are the result of a failure in signaling between leaders and governments. War is often the result of a series of breakdowns in communication and intent. In terms of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, what signals were being sent and what signals were misunderstood?

The war in Ukraine is not new. It actually started eight years ago. Putin can be very cunning and nimble, but sometimes he overreaches and tries to seize opportunities that blow up in his face. Much of what we are seeing with the war in Ukraine began in 2014, when the biggest thing on Putin's agenda was having a flashy show at the Olympics to show off all the great things Russia has accomplished. He wanted more respect from the world and then, out of nowhere, a popular uprising began on the streets of Kyiv and upstaged everything.

The Russian leadership truly believes that such events happen only because there are U.S. intelligence operatives who go out and instigate uprisings and protests, and not because average people might want to get rid of an authoritarian leader. As a result, Putin annexed Crimea and started a covert war in Donbas, with the thinnest of deniability that it wasn't a Russian-orchestrated war. Throughout this whole crisis, the Russians keyed in on Barack Obama's statements about Ukraine as a good example of a situation where we have to be crystal-clear about where our vital interests are, and where we are and aren't willing to go to war.

The lesson the Russians took away from that posture was, "OK, if we act really crazy, and do really crazy, dangerous stuff, the United States is going to back off because no one wants to tangle with a nuclear power." With the war in Ukraine, Putin and Russia unleashed a series of events and outcomes that they thought they would never have to confront. Likewise, I am of the opinion that the U.S. and its allies probably did not think that the Ukrainians would be as successful as they have been so far in pushing the Russians back.

How alarmed should we be at Russia's repeated statements about the possibility of using nuclear weapons, or other "special weapons" if they deem it necessary to "defend" their territory? Is this just saber-rattling, or a real threat?

What makes it tricky these days is that the Russians deliberately create dangerous situations. They believe that other countries do not want to tangle with them, and they try to exploit that as a tool of intimidation.

Russia is acting like a big drunk guy in a bar who is causing trouble for the other patrons. That person keeps coming closer and closer to you to see what you will do. The challenge is knowing when it's appropriate to show resolve and to enforce what you believe are vital interests. We saw this during the conflict in Syria, where the Russians were doing similarly dangerous things on purpose and trying to push American forces out of the areas they wanted to control. That culminated in 2018 when a Russian-backed force of "mercenaries" attacked a U.S. Special Forces base in Syria. The U.S. military ended up killing several hundred Russians. The United States warned the Russian government what would happen if they didn't back off, but they failed to listen to our warnings.

Now we're in a world where the Russians have made a similar miscalculation. They did not believe that the war would last more than a few weeks or that the U.S. would aid Ukraine to the extent we have been doing. We should not assume that the Russians are always good at reading America's intentions correctly. Any communication with the Russian government must be very disciplined and carefully managed.

The people of Ukraine are fighting for their very existence in the face of a quasi-genocidal onslaught. The Russians are great at using nuclear threats to unsettle the U.S. and its allies. When Ukraine shifted the momentum in the war through its successful counter-offensive in the autumn, these Russian threats served as an intentional distraction and cause for worry.

Now things are a bit different. Russia is mainly trying to buy time to regroup. The Russians are trying to wait us out and make Ukraine totally unlivable in the meantime by bombing sites like civilian power plants. If there is no heat or electricity, they're hoping that average people will flee the country and alienate Ukraine's key European partners. The ultimate bet for Russia is that Donald Trump or someone like him returns to the White House in 2025. They want someone like Trump who will shift U.S. policy onto a trajectory that de-emphasizes support for Ukraine in its moment of need.

The Russians are trying to wait us out and make Ukraine totally unlivable. The ultimate bet for Russia is that Donald Trump or someone like him returns to the White House in 2025.

In the meantime, the Russians will keep doing things, through trial and error, to disrupt our economy and critical infrastructure. While this is happening, Russia's conventional military is being destroyed on the battlefield. Russia is going to have a very difficult time trying to regenerate those forces. In the end, this means that Russia will become even more dependent on its nuclear forces during the long period it will require to rebuild the conventional military.

How do we separate fact from the fiction about Vladimir Putin? He is an almost legendary figure in American and Western popular culture as some type of super-spy and KGB killer who is always playing 3-D chess and outthinking his opponents. The war in Ukraine has certainly complicated that narrative.

My new book opens with a scene where Putin has already been serving in the KGB for 10 years. For his whole life, Putin has wanted to serve in the KGB. After 10 years in a series of low-end jobs, like the HR department and the counterintelligence department, he was still far from where the action was. At some point in the mid-1980s, Putin was finally invited to join a training program to go to an overseas assignment. Putin went home to Leningrad, but he got into a fight on the subway and broke his arm. In the scene he tells his buddy that there are going to be consequences for what has just happened. Instead of staying in that training program for a couple more years, he was asked to leave after one year.

That seems to explain why Putin ended up being sent to Dresden in East Germany, which was not what anyone would have called a prestigious assignment. That episode is a revealing indication of who Vladimir Putin is. Instead of fixating on the familiar iconography of Putin without his shirt on or carrying guns and looking like an action hero, we need to remember that beneath all that artifice he's a real hothead.

Much of Putin's original image was artificially created by the Kremlin because they wanted to draw a contrast to Boris Yeltsin, the previous Russian leader, who was frequently incapacitated because of his alcohol abuse. The Kremlin wanted to show the Russian people that they had a young, intelligent, competent, former intelligence officer who was going to make Russia much stronger than Yeltsin did. But now all of that Kremlin image manipulation and propaganda has boomeranged back on to the U.S. and the West, and not everyone is in on the joke. That is dangerous. We have misread Russia and Putin, turning them into a force that is far more powerful than is actually the case, as we see nearly every day in Ukraine.

Was the war in Ukraine the result of Putin's will, or were other structural and institutional factors at work?

Part of what's going wrong in this stage of Putin's tenure is that there aren't any counterweights to his impulses and whims nowadays. Putin went into self-isolation because of COVID. He retreated into a very small inner circle and spent lots of time reading distorted histories about Russia's relationship with Ukraine. Putin convinced himself that Ukraine had to be conquered to cement his legacy. There are not many people left in Russian leadership circles who can confront Putin and talk to him straight. No one was around who could tell the boss that invading Ukraine was a really bad idea. The world is suffering because of that lack of counterbalances.

The global right, and in particular the neofascist white right, admire Putin and what they see as his vision for a reborn Holy Roman Empire as a champion of "white Christendom." What is Putin's actual vision and intent?

Why is Putin viewed so positively and admiringly by the Trumpists and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party? Part of that is rooted in Putin's image as someone who embraces "family values" and moral conservatism. That image is largely artificial. In 2011 and 2012 there were a series of street demonstrations in Moscow and other major cities after Putin flamboyantly announced that he was trading places with his friend Dmitry Medvedev and would be Russia's next president. The Kremlin's response to the public uproar was to claim that the demonstrations were secretly organized by Hillary Clinton. They were trying to tell their core electorate that these demonstrations are being led by people who are not like you, the "average Russian."

What happened with the group Pussy Riot around this time is particularly illustrative. The Kremlin claimed that Pussy Riot were outsiders and enemies who would defile the biggest Orthodox cathedral in Moscow and promote LGBTQ equality. They will try to teach your children gay lifestyles, they are American agents, they are henchmen of George Soros.

Putin is viewed so positively by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party because of his image as someone who embraces "family values." That image is largely artificial, part of a propaganda and influence operation.

During that same time period, people in the Christian right in America and the tea party movement were also being cultivated by Putin and his operatives. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, traveled to Moscow and started saying that Putin was a "real Christian" who was "protecting the family," unlike Barack Obama. Fox News mainstays like Sheriff David Clarke, a tea party activist, and others in that orbit were flown over to Moscow. NRA representatives were flown to Moscow. This was all part of a propaganda and influence operation where the Russians were able to present Putin as a great leader who would protect "family values" and a "traditional way of life." These connections, of course, blossomed even more under Donald Trump.

What is Putin's own internal narrative? How does he imagine himself and his mission?

First and foremost, there is always the need to preserve his regime and power intact, in its current configuration. The second thing is that Putin is fixated on his belief that the U.S. has hurt and embarrassed Russia. Putin wants to knock the U.S. back down to size and get revenge. Finally, Putin believes that the world just shouldn't be led by the United States anymore, that Russia and China should have much more influence in the world. This shows us how shortsighted Putin's behavior has been, because the war in Ukraine has actually backfired in that regard. More countries in Russia's neighborhood now feel totally unsafe and are going to look to the United States for leadership and protection. If Putin were really so smart and such a great strategist, he would not have launched a war against Ukraine. It has set his agenda back by decades.

If you had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin, what would you ask him?

I spent some time with Putin at an earlier stage of his career when I was at the White House, and it made me very skeptical that you can really level with him, or that he will ever level with you. Vladimir Putin has been in power for more than two decades. He generally runs circles around most of his foreign counterparts. Joe Biden is an interesting exception to that, given that he has been in public life for much longer than Putin. Still, Putin is formidable and clearly knows how to conduct himself at a high-level meeting. He's always well prepared and he gives nothing away. He's no slouch.

The problem, of course, is that Putin is a product of the Soviet KGB, and you can't necessarily put much stock in what he says publicly or privately. Trust between Western and Russian leaders has evaporated since the war in Ukraine started in 2014. Throughout this period, Putin has refused to acknowledge basic facts. It's hard to conduct a dialogue with someone like that, who doesn't live in the same universe or accept basic principles.

A senior diplomat once explained to me why it's so maddening to deal with Putin. He said that there are three sections to Putin's brain. The first section consists of all the garbage that's poured into him by the Russian intelligence services that are the KGB's successors, as well as the career bureaucracy. It's laden with conspiracies, it's just hall-of-mirrors nonsense. The second hemisphere of his brain consists of all of the things that he has personally been involved with during his 20 or more years in power — making deals and dealing with international issues — as well as all the grievances and anger that have been built up along that journey.

The last part of Putin's brain is the real world, which consists of what anybody who reads a good newspaper and follows world events would know about. The maddening aspect of dealing with Putin is that he's constantly toggling between these three hemispheres every time you're talking to him. You're just never sure which one he's in when he's talking to you.