Two vigilantes

 

In May 2023, Daniel Perry took down Jordan Neely, an erratic homeless man who was making wild threats on a New York subway car. Perry then killed Neely by strangulation.

Police reacted nonchalantly to the Perry-Neely killing, at first letting Perry go without charges.

In December 2024, Luigi Mangione fired bullets at the back of a prominent accountant, Brian Thompson, who was minding his own business on a midtown Manhattan street.

Police mobilized an intense manhunt for the Thompson killer, with the police commissioner appearing daily flanked by a phalanx of top NYPD officials vowing to track down the threat to the business district’s reputation for safety.

Perry’s defense fund quickly raised $1.5 million from people who cheered his permanent removal of the subway ranter. Tabloid news coverage noted that he was an ex-Marine, more for the heroic aspect than the implication that he knew how to kill people.

Other New Yorkers were uncomfortable with the extreme action. Dealing with unhinged riders on the underground trains is a daily occurrence for anyone who rides them regularly.

While we’re always wary of how things can get out of control, nearly all of the mentally ill passengers are merely exasperating. (There are exceptions.) We give them a wide berth or move to another car.

The hundreds of uniformed NYPD and MTA agents swarming the platforms don’t ever seem willing or authorized to do anything about the assorted monologuists and dazed spirits. One occasionally sees security talking to a lost soul in the station, getting them to stand up from their squats, or nudging people unconscious on the platforms or sound asleep at the system’s terminal stations.

But I have never once seen police climb onto the subway itself and remove someone causing a disturbance, (illegally) flogging chocolates to every rider one by one, or preaching The Word to a captive audience.

I’d support them if they did.

I’d be even gladder if the city ever figured out how to attend to the untold thousands of mentally ill people who have taken up residence in the subway system in the absence of anywhere else to go. We certainly spend enough city cash on policing the place with the very inadequate results we all can see.

Perry was acquitted yesterday just as Mangione was nabbed at a Pennsylvania Macdonald’s. The latter can expect to get a multi-decade sentence for his act and didn’t seem terribly eager to get away with it, given his indifference to the horde of incriminating evidence he was still carrying around.

From early accounts, Mangione was moved to commit homicide by the state of our health payment system, which empowers people like his victim to engage in financial legerdemain that enriches accountants while denying people the healthcare they pay enormous sums to obtain—sometimes resulting in their deaths.

Maybe he’ll express disdain for the judicial system that lets people off while the elites get away with, well, murder.

Assassination is not a good way to address injustice (ask the Mexicans). Then again, when other avenues are cut off, we can’t be surprised to see it occur.

 

The Biden Crime Family and its loyal claque

How appropriate that the Biden Era should begin with a shadow state maneuver to protect the Big Guy from the damning contents of Hunter’s laptop by declaring it a Russian fake news operation and end with the pardoning of the family bagman. 

Predictably, the clapping seals on state media like MSNBC immediately mobilized to justify it. These debased sycophants who assured us that Joe was compos mentis (until suddenly he wasn’t) signed up to shill for him even as he poked a stick in their eyes. All those solemn promises that he wouldn’t exercise the pardon power turned to dust, but hordes of media comfort women (and men) rushed to his defense in exchange for nothing. A self-respecting sex worker at least demands payment. Maybe they’ll get book contracts.

None of the commentators have much to say about the 10,000 non-violent offenders still in federal prison for marijuana possession who are not, so far, the beneficiaries of a Biden pardon. Instead, we hear about how we should respect family feeling though obviously not every family.

After all that panic about Trump being a dictator-in-waiting, virtually the new Hitler about to seize power, we see that none of it was to be taken seriously. Joe, playing the part of Hindenburg, welcomed The Donald to the White House with a broad grin, as one capo di tutti capi entertaining another. 

The aghastitude over January 6 that we were supposed to see as an attempted dismantling of the Constitution (which it certainly was) turned out to be a big, phony wrestling match as far as the outgoing crowd is concerned. If 1/6 truly mattered to Biden, he wouldn’t have given Trump a golden invitation to use the pardon power to free all the day’s rioters by arguing that they were unfairly targeted, just like Hunter. The moral high ground, if it ever existed, is gone.

Hunter’s laptop, as we now know, was completely genuine and had a slew of data about his dubious business dealings as well as distracting sleaze. But the politicized FBI went to Capitol Hill and lied about it, for which it merits the sound thrashing that I fervently hope will be forthcoming at the hands of nominee Kash Patel. How luscious that the citadel of jughead white dudes should be thoroughly scoured by a dark-skinned guy who thinks half of them should be behind bars. They should have pushed Biden to close Guantánamo before Trump gets the idea of sending them there. 

Some of my liberal friends will probably leap to the defense of the FBI since it was so reliably anti-Trump during the Russiagate scandal, which was a far worse assault on the constitution than Watergate. It was even worse than the January 6 circus, in part because 1/6 only lasted one day while Russiagate was a 4-year campaign by intelligence and police agencies to undermine an elected president. Trump seems determined to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and if the Revenge Tour is properly directed, it could be very healthy. (Trump should also get a food taster.)

I remember the old FBI that snooped on every left-wing social movement under COINTELPRO, kept files on our protected political activities, and helped murder Black Panther Fred Hampton in his bed. But those days seem forgotten now that the security-intelligence apparatus boosts the fortunes of Democrats, and erstwhile radicals scurry to hop onto the party’s tail and help wag it because Trump is a threat to “democracy.” (No matter that people voted for him.) 

Biden’s pardon of Biden fils covers anything he did all the way back to 2014, precisely the date of the Maidan coup that brought a NATO handmaiden regime to power in Ukraine. Joe was on the scene immediately, even chairing a foreign country’s cabinet meeting IIRC. It was also the year Hunter got a $60K per month gig sitting on the board of Burisma for which his sole qualification was shared DNA with a powerful oligarch. 

How convenient for the neocons who wanted to use Ukraine to push war with Russia to have a willing partner busily extracting millions for his family accounts from the place and easily kept in line for the pursuit of their geopolitical games. The Sullivans and Nulands could rest assured that no annoying attention would be paid to the interests of U.S. citizens in getting ourselves involved in yet another expensive war based on the fantasy that the American military is the “greatest fighting force” in world history and more than a match for the “gas station parading as a country.”

Living in Lalaland is fun until reality intrudes. It will soon be impossible to ignore the fact that the expensive weapons we pay our left nut for don’t work and that we’ve sent a million Ukrainian men to their deaths for nothing. The deals available in 2014 (Minsk 1), 2015, (Minsk 2), 2022 (Istanbul), and even as recently as last year when the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed would have left Ukraine with an intact state and a chance for neutrality and eventual reconstruction. Now, it will be lucky to exist at all. Meanwhile, they continue to send untrained kids into doomed battles to be slaughtered by the thousands.

Trump’s loony-tunes advisors like the deranged friend of MI6 Sebastian Gorka will help him bluster into further stupidity and makes things worse. The collapse when it eventually comes will be dramatic; the finger-pointing should be quite a spectacle. But the Bidens will be long gone, their foreign accounts intact and their deals beyond the reach of investigators and prosecutors. Historians will have to uncover the saga of the crime family whose surname doesn’t end in a vowel, and Biden will die in his bed. May the rest of us be so lucky.

We can oppose Trump without losing our minds

A reaction to the results of Nov. 5 is setting in that will do us no favors: Trump (bad), Trump’s people (worse), Trump’s actions (awful, by definition). Therefore, we should oppose everything Trumpian, and devil take the details. This is a mistake.

A few nights ago, I was on a call convened by a respected epidemiologist, whom I know slightly. It was for people in the public health universe, which I am, and was attended by 100 early logins with another 900 frustrated parties stuck in the waiting room for technical reasons.

We were well into the first 20 minutes of the ad hoc meeting, hearing about a survey in which potential participants listed their areas of expertise and interest. We then had a discussion of what working groups to form and how to sign up as volunteers or to take on leadership roles.

But something was missing. No one told us why we were there.

One obvious answer is that people are worried about what the Trump II experience is going to mean for public health. Fair enough. In fact, there were hints in the chat and in some passing comments about the need to protect “Science” and the potential dangers for the health of our people represented by certain Trump nominees.

But no one felt the need to lay out in even the vaguest general terms any guiding principles shared by those present and by the organization that clearly is intended to emerge from this assembly. That means we were assumed to share a set of foundational, core beliefs [see above]: that Trump and Trumpism are profoundly bad and dangerous things, that this is evident on its face, and that no precision is required to start the motors running for resistance.

I did make a feeble attempt to raise this question and was told that the convening alarm was not just about Trump and his appointees and that “policy” issues will be developed in due course. Others said that the details will emerge “from below” as the working groups take hold. I appreciate the spirit and await more information.

That said, I find the exercise, so far, completely lacking in nuance and, by implication, lacking any critical distance from the pre-Trump state of affairs. Now, I have been paying attention to the statements of the Trump nominees. While I certainly shake my head with my public health colleagues at much of what I hear, these figures also issue critiques that echo the forgotten cries of the Bernie campaigns: regulatory capture of federal agencies by the industries they monitor; horrible food choices foisted on the unsuspecting; and yes, brute censorship of non-mainstream views in the name of “misinformation” suppression.

A new advocacy body that starts out without the merest recognition that there are points of agreement even with the most crackpot of Trump’s hangers-on is hamstringing itself. After all, the RFK Jr. confirmation hearings are going to be a unique opportunity to air not just Kennedy’s vaccine views but also his denunciations of nefarious pharmaceutical and Big Ag practices. Shouldn’t we welcome that and look for ways to boost his timely messages? The Manichean view of the present (bad because Trump) versus the past (imperfect but basically sound) is far too cozy.

The cards are stacked against Kennedy and anyone else who actually tries to confront corporate interests and their armies of lobbyists, especially given Trump’s well-known affinity for the rich and powerful. The most likely outcome of all the stir around the incoming president’s unusual nominees is that they will be outmaneuvered by their respective bureaucracies and eventually dumped by The Donald shortly after they annoy one of his golf buddies. Do we want to pitch into that process by denouncing them all in advance?

The quick defenestration of Matt Gaetz as a possible Attorney General is a good example of a lost opportunity. Whatever Gaetz’s faults, he was good on censorship, good on antitrust, and openly called for former A-G Bill Barr to be sharply questioned on the Epstein “suicide.” He was quickly burned by a dubious accusation of sex crimes (for which there is to date zero evidence), which most of my Democrat friends nonetheless believe, because Trump. No one asked why the Republican establishment hates Matt Gaetz or what they wanted to avoid.

I don’t diminish the real dangers represented by the Trumpian zealots’ slash-and-burn approach to government. Civil service protections date back to the Garfield-Arthur Administrations of the 1880s and have shielded Federal employees from partisan hackery for many decades. Trump wants to further consolidate executive powers, which should alarm us all—which it mostly did not while Democrat presidents wielded them.

That said, the Federal bureaucracy was fully mobilized to undermine Trump’s first presidency with the bogus Russiagate conspiracy, a far worse attempt to subvert democracy than Watergate and for which hardly anyone has paid a price. Trump has good reason to want to bring it back under control and clip the wings of the secret societies that populate the CIA, FBI, DoJ, and who knows what other mysterious three-letter outfits.

Trump is wacko, a loose cannon, undisciplined, erratic, and a disagreeable human being. He was also the choice of the majority of voters, and in a democracy that means he gets to make policy. Refusing to engage with that fact will condemn critics to the upper-middle-class wilderness that the Democratic Party now represents, all the more easily ignored by the struggling citizens who brought him back to power. We need to get over ourselves and the partisan obsession with Trump’s innate horribleness, which only discredits us in the eyes of his followers who, like it or not, must be our interlocutors.

 

The "F" Word

Photo: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, Heinrich Hoffmann collection, PD-US https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22501218

FASCIST. Are you one? Who is bringing fascism to the United States? It’s been a term loose on the lips for a good while in political discourse here. Now, it’s taking off like a TikTok video. 

We have a general notion of what fascism is; academic historians and political scientists, even literary figures, have more formal ways of talking about it. Here and now, it’s just a sound-bite insult. But given the importance of whether or not we’re heading there, we ought to stop and consider the concept during these last few days of shaky calm before The Vote.

What do we think of when we think of fascists and fascism? Storm troopers burning books; thugs in distinctive clothing (blackshirts, brownshirts) marching on/intimidating elected officials; vigilante justice and police/secret police impunity; sustained attacks on a scapegoated minority; centralized political power and persecution of dissidents; censorship, fear, regimentation, and a charismatic (to some—ridiculous to others) chief demagogue—does that cover it?

Wikipedia says fascism (FASH-iz-əm) is “a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Merriam-Webster adds a detail. It says fascism is a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime “that exalts nation and often race above the individual.” Can’t have populism, then, even though that used to mean “the people,” i.e., the regular people in their struggle with their bosses, the banks, and the elites in general.

The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that “fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another” historically, but they have in common “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism” as well as belief in “the rule of elites.” So, EB says they aren’t populist at all even though they might pretend to be. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Humberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) once wrote a long essay on the topic and listed a dozen elements (14 actually) that he thought characterized fascism. Unlike the three definitions above, Eco emphasized that fascism is hard to pin down because it is essentially anti-intellectual and emotive. So, “fascism” may be something like pornography: a thing very hard to precisely distinguish from close cousins like erotic art but pretty easy to recognize when it’s, um, in your face. “Fascism” thus could just mean extreme bloody-mindedness for one person while for another the same behavior or policy would merit massive, even extra-constitutional resistance.

In my view, this is the key distinction that we should examine because there are plenty of signs that our polarized polity is stepping right to the edge of that conclusion, i.e., that our “democracy” is in danger and must be preserved by any means necessary, including anti-democratic ones. (“Democracy,” of course, being another emotive and hard-to-define object.)

I’m going to go through Eco’s 14 signs and see if Trump really is one, but [spoiler alert] I’ll also suggest that the finger-pointing Democrats are not immune to the accusation in certain important ways.

Eco 1: The Cult of Tradition, the idea that things were great once and we just have to get back there. MAGA sums that up nicely, and Trump’s Christian fundamentalist base certainly harkens back to a Golden Age when we were a “Christian nation” (First Amendment be damned). The Dems are really on the opposite side of this. Hillary famously praised the “innovative” coasts and the brave new world of hi-tech.

Eco 2: Anti-Modernism, a rejection not just of recent changes like civil rights, gender equity, and sexual emancipation but, in extreme cases, the Enlightenment itself, the Age of Reason that shed religious dogma for science, individual liberty, and the expanded franchise to non-property holders. Trump doesn’t reflect this much, but some of his supporters do, like Peter Thiel who laments women’s suffrage. 

Eco 3: The Cult of Action, often expressed in contempt for pointy-headed intellectuals. This is present in Trump’s movement, but it’s nothing new. The GOP has embraced this resentment since the days of Nixon and Agnew (“nattering nabobs of negativism”), and Democrats regularly play right into it, for example, by the shoddy “expert” handling of things like Covid and, most famously, Hillary’s “deplorables” line. Iva League graduate Vance says universities are the enemy except when they shut down protests against genocide.

Eco 4: Disagreement is Treason. Trump hates turncoats worse than anything and doesn’t forgive. Mike Pence isn’t welcome at his rallies (though he could go to Kamala’s and get a round of applause.) The censorship-industrial complex put together by the Dems (and cheered by most liberals) is authoritarian if not fascism-lite and certainly a solid precedent for an uglier version to come. And P.S., the Guantánamo dungeon is still open after both R and D presidencies could have shut it down. Lest we forget: no one was ever punished for torturing defenseless prisoners. The apparatus for crushing dissent has been in place for a while. If fascism is so dangerous, why did everyone sign off on its tools?

Eco 5: Fear of Difference. Trumpism is guilty, witness the anti-Obama birther conspiracy and rhetoric about immigration “poisoning the blood of our nation.”  Not to mention the allergy to transgenderism. Dems embrace “diversity” in superficial traits like ethnicity and sexual partners but draw the line at people who dare to challenge them or run against their anointed candidates (vade retro, Bernie S).

Eco 6: Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class. Democrats handed this to Trump by not taking care of people’s concrete material wellbeing over the last few decades. So, yes, they’re resentful and have every right to be. We could say those voters are more resentful of a loss of status than survival issues, but in most cases it’s probably both. And what’s wrong with wanting some status?

Eco 7: Obsession with Plots. Q-Anon, of course; Stop the Steal, of course. But wait a minute—Russiagate? Misinformation spread by Iran? Both sides get an F.

Eco 8: Deceptively Strong/Weak Eternal Opponent. Eco says that fascism requires an enemy that is both too strong (justifying harsh measures) and essentially weak (undermining the nation). Jews fit the bill for Hitler, inferior and weak but also secretly in control of everything. I suppose the Deep State could serve here with the accusation that they’ve taken over the government but then can’t deliver in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, etc. Dems treat the MAGAs similarly, an internal fifth column (strong) but also “deplorable” and incompetent (weak).

Eco 9: Life as Permanent Warfare. This seems like a stretch to lay on one side or the other though the Trumpians are more openly belligerent.

Eco 10: Contempt for the Weak. Like true fascists, Trump mocks the weak, mocks his enemies as being weak, and seems congenitally incapable of recognizing that he ever did anything wrong. OTOH, Kamala doesn’t recognize that she ever did anything, so there’s that. And could Blinken, Biden, Harris, Sullivan be any more contemptuous of the Palestinians of Gaza? They’re defenseless, so naturally we slaughter them, right?

Eco 11: Cult of Heroism. This doesn’t seem to be a big factor in U.S. politics at present though Dems love to parade military types, showcase generals on talk shows, and run CIA agents for elective office. Who are the MAGA heroes? Kyle Rittenhouse? Trump doesn’t like to share the stage with anyone.

Eco 12: Machismo. Bingo.

Eco 13: Selective Populism: Fascism claims to speak for “the People” while enriching the elites. Both sides guilty as hell.

Eco 14: Newspeak. Where to begin? The English language long ago entered its decadent period with the shift from “torture” to “enhanced interrogation.”

Speaking of fascism, was Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally a fascist display? Liberal media certainly think so. All the Dem-leaning talk shows went absolutely ballistic, comparing it to a Nazi event held there a century ago.

Sorry, people, not convincing. After all, 400 members of BOTH parties stood and cheered a real, bonafide fascist on the floor of the House of Representatives not so long ago, one who is actively carrying out a mass murder of untermenschen before the entire world with U.S. weaponry, money, and support. Clips of that infamous display will someday terrify our grandchildren. The same liberal outlets clutching their pearls actively collaborate every day by pushing out the genocidal party line from Jerusalem. Their piously “democratic” university presidents attack anyone who objects. Now we’re supposed to forget all that and lose our minds over Trump.

Is Trump a fascist? If so, he’s got company and plenty of it.

At BRICS summit, Global South not playing along

Dozens of Global South leaders dared to gather last week at a world summit meeting hosted by Voldemort Putin in the Tatar capital, Kazan. So hey, the world didn’t stop turning because we have an election next week, imagine that.

Apparently, they didn’t agree that Mr Putin is the new Hitler, as Hillary Clinton opined in 2014, i.e., long before the Ukraine war broke out. Whatever they might think of the battle raging in eastern Europe, 30 heads of state and top officials from BRICS member and observer countries came to the powwow.

They wanted to see whether they could collaborate on a new trade and development architecture, given that the record of the last 500 years of Western-led domination has left many of them in an unenviable state.

And these were not minor players. Aside from the five original BRICS states—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—there were the newly incorporated members such as oil giants Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, plus Ethiopia and Egypt, suggesting the door is open for more African countries.

And sure enough, the list of 11 new candidate members includes Algeria, Nigeria, and Uganda. Southeast Asia is also heavily represented among the newcomers: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, that is, the four biggest and most prosperous countries of the region.

Only Latin America is largely on the sidelines. Cuba and Bolivia will be invited to join, but these are minor economic players to say the least. Venezuela was vetoed by Brazil after the glaring election theft by Maduro & Co.

News coverage has highlighted the fact that the ever-expanding BRICS far outdistances the G7 Masters of the Universe countries in real GDP, population, and geographic reach.

Less often mentioned is the fact that most of the BRICS countries aren’t keen on wars, unlike their erstwhile colonial powers, historically incapable of imagining a world that they don’t dominate. Could world trade be mutually beneficial and not inevitably exploitative? Let’s see.

The summit set itself the task of finding new ways to engage in trade without kowtowing to the interests of the Americans and the Europeans as they have had to do for centuries. That’s plenty complicated, but the meeting outlined ambitious ideas.

Western reaction has been twofold: ignore the whole thing as not worthy of our attention or mock it as Putin’s attempt to prove he’s not isolated.

News flash: he isn’t and neither is Russia.

The New York Times’ headline was typical: “BRICS Summit Offers a Glimpse Inside Putin’s Alternate Reality.” Yeah, a reality that the Times’ writers and their friends in Washington should explore, including side-to-side comparisons with their own. Narrative management—at which the U.S. is particularly expert—is no substitute for looking at facts and basing one’s actions on them.

The BBC put it this way: “Putin gathers allies toshow West’s pressure isn’t working.” Hey, Beeb, that was demonstrated 2 years ago, time to catch up! And the influential Associated Press insisted that the summit was “shadowed by Ukraine.” It certainly was for the western media, which are laser-focused on the war their countries are losing. No evidence that the rest of the world is “shadowed” by it.

Perhaps they’re less obsessed with Ukraine after having witnessed the U.S. and its allies illegally invade and destroy one disobedient country after another. Or it could be that seeing a U.S. ally slaughter defenseless civilians in Gaza for a year makes them less likely to sit up and salute at the demand that they “isolate” the Russian leadership.

The point of BRICS is that through joint cooperation they hope to carve out room to stay independent of the West’s demands and think and act for themselves. Maybe that’s why it’s proving so popular in this early stage.

Our mainstream reporters continue to whistle confidently that Russia’s economy—that they were shocked to discover was not crushed by the mighty sanctions regime imposed in 2022—still has “severe cracks beneath the surface” (BBC).

They also scoff at the idea that the diverse member states of the BRICS could ever reach agreement on important issues of trade, commerce, and finance, no doubt because they’re used to the western version where one country imposes the rules, and everyone else obeys. China and India overcoming their differences is simply “bonkers,” according to one quoted expert.

The lengthy Kazan Declaration issued at the end of the summit suggests that the BRICS countries can indeed find areas of considerable consensus, notwithstanding the ponderous turgidity of such documents. The signatories call for a reform of the outdated UN apparatus, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation, and an end to “unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions.”

The Declaration includes consensus language on climate change, biodiversity, species conservation, water scarcity, terrorism, money-laundering, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, and a bunch of other stuff.

It finally gets to the much-anticipated talk of new cross-border payments mechanisms, now that the U.S. has queered the dollar by stealing other countries’ cash. They “welcome the use of local currencies in financial transactions” and want to see interlinked banking networks free of American control.

Does all this add up to a New Bretton Woods, a reformulated UN, displacement of the dollar in international trade, a “South” bloc to oppose the West in a new stand-off? Yes, no, and maybe.

Turkey’s presence at the summit suggests NATO is in serious trouble, having demonstrated to the world that its expensive weapons don’t work. The UN Secretary General also attended, to howls of Atlanticist outrage.

BRICS has its own development bank and has started to lend money although the World Bank still dwarfs it. These alternatives will take years, perhaps decades, to evolve.

Reuters, to its credit, diverged from lamestream coverage by taking note of the attending countries’ serious grievances with the status quo. “People see institutions which are not really representative or democratic," it quoted one expert saying. "Infrastructure established in the 1940s after the world war, and nothing changes.” 

Net financial flows, Reuters continued, “turned negative for developing countries, meaning they paid more to service external debts than they received in new external finance.”

That is, the poor are now funding the rich. As a matter of fact, that feels a lot like how economics works here at home lately. No one should wonder at the world’s marginalized billions feeling rebellious, unrepresented, taken advantage of, and scolded. After all, so are we.

Eric Adams just doesn't know how to grift

 

I read the entire indictment issued by federal prosecutors that outlines Mayor Adams’ attempt to play with the big guys. Since influence peddling and favor-trading for campaign cash is how our system runs, it’s a bit much to see Adams tackled for business as usual. Unfortunately for Adams, he didn’t learn the basics on how it’s done.

Adams should have had better instruction from the real experts in how to move in power circles and get everyone’s back mutually scratched smoothly and silently. He didn’t get the right lawyers who know how to do deals without leaving tracks.

Adams and his staff thought they were slick OGs who had parleyed themselves into power and could sail into the big time. In fact, they’re nouveau hustlers with sloppy methods.

A good chunk of the evidence federal prosecutors have lined up against Adams is based on text messages. Text messages?? Seriously, did these folks really not get the memo about how none of that is safe or private? They even write things like, Let’s not text each other about this!

I sat on a jury last year in which a kid who conceivably could have gotten away with a serious crime screwed himself by texting incriminating statements. You get the exact same vibe from reading Adams’ staff work.

And who’s bright idea was it to organize the cash slurry for Adams’ campaigns through Turkiye? Anyone with a pulse knows that you rely on Israeli cash nowadays, and nobody will dare bother you. Some powerful people had to be very unhappy about city government being penetrated by a Muslim country. Ukraine, okay, maybe some East Europeans, solid Anglo allies elsewhere, no problem. But Istanbul? Not done!

It's almost sad to see how cheaply Adams was seduced by things like a business class seat on Turkish Airlines and a few days in a luxury hotel. No wonder we went along with Bloomberg for so long since he could buy the same hotel out of his petty cash box.

New York City tries to lessen the influence of big money in elections by matching small donations with public funds 8 to 1. That’s real money, and Adams stole it, essentially, by lining up illegal major donations and hiding them through straw donors, like a business guy’s driver who then gets reimbursed by the boss. It’s a very old game, and everyone knows it goes on. But that’s why you need experts in covering it up.

Intrepid muckrakers at The City dug up the details, which started the investigative ball rolling. (Everyone should subscribe to their daily bulletin and send them money.) While that took work, it wasn’t hard to unravel the corrupt threads.

Adams might beat the bribery charge because the Supreme Court helpfully limited those prosecutions to provable quid pro quos. But the manipulation of campaign finance restrictions is clearly laid out; I can’t see how he escapes those counts. His career is over, and the fantasies of moving on to national office and even the White House (yes, there are delusional messages in that vein) are consigned to dreamland.

That said, liberal New York shouldn’t wallow in self-righteousness because we put Eric Adams in office, and we can’t pretend we didn’t know what he was about. People succumbed to fear-mongering over crime in the subways, and Adams, a former cop, promised to pour police officers onto the platforms, which he did. We all know perfectly well what a policing response means, and we got what the majority asked for—a baton-led response to social ills. The tabloids and Murdoch’s empire were delighted and now keep up the drumbeat of scare stories so that the only possible response to the current failing policy is to double down on it.

Adams’s shamelessness was on display even before he took office. He smiled glibly and was surrounded by dubious comrades with disturbing records. His word salads could compete with Kamala’s indecipherable ramblings, and his interest in keeping the rich and powerful happy was obvious from Day One. But we demanded SAFETY above all else, and we got cops everywhere, which isn’t that but reassures white people. The sad evidence that Adams was in it for himself should have been a bright red warning light. But our overlords reminded us to be scared, and we did what they suggested. Will we do better next time?

 

World War Two started 85 years ago

[M.Świerczyński, "Warsaw, 1945"] 

“The unmentionable odour of death/Offends the September night.”

            —W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

It all looks so inevitable in retrospect: the build-up of a dictatorial, war-mongering regime, the feckless response from neighboring states, the indifference to pogroms, the sniggering glee at the crushing of local communists and perhaps a coming blow to the hated Russians, and finally the gigantic explosion of all-out war, Europe consumed, quickly conquered, eventually destroyed. Sixty million dead.

Our historical memory of World War 2 is of the triumph of decency over barbarism, performed by the “Greatest Generation.” The principal lesson we carried away is to avoid “appeasement,” how Naziism arose and flourished step by step without resistance until there were no options left except a cataclysmic slaughter. The war carried off 3% of the world population, including 20% of Poland’s (5 million) and 15% of the USSR’s (26 million).

We hear quite a bit about the 1938 Munich debacle that remains the symbol of how foolish it is to attempt diplomacy with an organically aggressive state and ever to trust its promises. There is no historical figure more mocked than Neville Chamberlain returning from his final powwow with Hitler flourishing a sheaf of papers that guaranteed Czech independence.

Sullivan and Blinken share the honors as today’s Chamberlain. They flit from capital to capital emitting hollow phrases about peace and ceasefires while winking broadly to the Israelis to hurry up and complete the massacre. The world looks on placidly as real-time pogroms are committed before our eyes. Erstwhile defenders of “the rules-based order” stand by as the indulged warfare state attacks multiple enemies. America’s allies insist only that each victim stand down and never retaliate.

As their client state openly trumpets its supremacist underpinnings and applauds marauding soldiers and police as they commit atrocities and upload them to YouTube, the West turns instead to domestic dissidents, bans anti-genocide organizations, jails reporters on “terrorism” charges,  and declares the use of the term “Zionist” to be a racial slur. 

Israel may yet get its wish to drag the world into another conflagration. If they succeed, we will look back at this period as the moment when the world failed to learn the key lesson of World War Two and doomed itself to a tragic repeat.

 

Sarajevo on my mind

 

[Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir, and his wife minutes before their deaths.]

If we’re in a rerun of 1938 and Vladimir Putin = Hitler, then obviously we must avoid negotiation (“appeasement”) and quickly reindustrialize to save decency and democracy. 

But what if we’re actually reliving a different historical period, say, 1914?

That was an era in which the last round of extended European bloodletting—the Napoleonic wars—was a distant memory, already a full century in the past. Those disasters were ancient history. Governments were afraid of revolution at home (1848, 1871, 1905, etc.) but not too worried about a little inter-state dust-up. They knew how to handle those.

A lot has been written about how Europe stumbled into WorldWar 1 and how no one had anticipated the enormous destruction that followed. Given that human beings haven’t changed much, we can imagine that Europe’s leaders, then as now, were confident of their respective strengths, determined not to be pushed around by [insert enemy country X], and bursting with patriotic, martial spirit. No doubt they had all read The Iliad in the original Greek. 

What sparked the Great War was the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne and his wife by a Serbian nationalist. “The killing put both Austria-Hungary and Russia, which saw itself as the Serbians’ protector, in a bind. Neither one of them wanted to back down and appear weak.” Can’t appear weak! Rival alliances mobilized; armies faced off; ultimata issued forth; war ensued. But that was then.

As it turned out, stopping the war turned out to be a lot harder than setting it off. It ground on for 4 years and left 20 million dead out of a European population of some 500-plus million.

We’re not quite 100 years removed from the last cataclysm, the bloodletting of the 1940s that killed another 60 million. But hardly anyone alive today lived through that as a conscious adult.

From watching our leaders sleepwalk us towards the next round, I guess they’re comfortable with the vastly increased destructive power of modern weapons. Nukes, introduced in 1945, have remained taboo since then, but from the way world leaders talk, they’re back in play, just in case. After all, there are 8 billion of us now—maybe they’re relaxed about knocking that down to 7, a masspopulation cull as a sort of greening event, something to get us closer to Net Zero—meaning emissions, of course, not people. 

Israel is said to have a couple hundred nukes,  and many commentators say they’re not doing well at present. In any case, it’s hard to see what “success” might look like for them. A million dead Palestinians? Two million? Expulsion of the rest into Jordan and Egypt? Provoking a war between Iran and the U.S.?

All these rosy scenarios lead to a regional conflagration, and it seems that our Christian Zionists are cool with that. Armageddon is supposed to bring on the Rapture, so that’s exciting since it will mostly occur several thousand miles from Oklahoma. Maybe that’s what got them out of their seats 58 times at the recent Nuremberg rally.

And hey, assassination is back! Just like in 1914! Yes, assassination is an okay thing to do if you’re a U.S. client state. We certainly practice it ourselves when we feel the need. No one on our side is bothered by the latest iterations visited on Lebanon and Iran. It’s just policy: we kill our enemies. What could go wrong?

Probably nothing. No doubt cooler heads will prevail.

And yet, I got Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, on my mind.

Losing a war upends governance

 

“War is hell,” said General Sherman, and he was winning. It’s worse than hell when you lose, especially for the folks at the top who always promise glorious triumphs when sounding the trumpet to get the war going.

Biden may be old and sick, but if he were presiding over victory in one of his wars, I’m not sure anyone could have browbeaten him into stepping aside. FDR was half dead in 1944 when he ran for his fourth term, and he carried 38 states.

When wars go badly, the disgruntled tend to keep quiet about it even in countries where dissenters aren’t shot. Loyalty to the boys (and girls) in uniform requires that citizens keep “supporting” them long past the point when doubts about the outcome are impossible to ignore.

Unhappiness about the progress of warmaking is therefore likely to be sublimated, channeled into other forms of discontent. I lived through an illustrative episode in my adolescence watching support for LBJ, a wildly popular figure in 1964, collapse.

Of course, there were others factors aside from the Vietnam quagmire. Johnson pushed through major civil rights legislation and alienated racists. Some people disliked the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid although there was a broad national consensus in their favor. He was an effective horse-trader and acknowledged to be a master politician.

But Johnson’s decision to gamble everything on war in Asia did him in. The death toll was unacceptable—of Americans, that is. (After Vietnam, the war party kept the body counts way down.)

Nixon promised to put an end to the war and then, once in office, escalated. It wasn’t for a proud militarist to preside over humiliating battlefield defeat. Eventually, he too was ousted, ostensibly over electoral shenanigans that would be scarcely noticed today.

The unpopular war had undermined two presidents. Young draftees kept dying—until compulsory service ended in 1971. Atrocity tales filtered back home, even before the notorious My Lai massacre came to light. The secret expansion into Cambodia sparked new horrified amazement.

All the while, official discourse was dominated by Kissingerian types promising that things were going just fine, that we should stick with the leadership just a little longer, and that dissent aided the enemy. Extreme militarists continued to denounce grumblers and call for even heavier bombing of North Vietnam’s cities and ports, even for nuking them. Demagogues encouraged blue-collar workers to attack antiwar protests and to hate “draft dodgers” and peaceniks.

But a substantial minority of the population viewed all this as profoundly immoral as well as stupid. Happy talk about progress on the battlefield wasn’t as convincing in 1971, ‘72, ‘73, even as Nixon racked up a historic electoral victory over George McGovern. Nixon’s support was broad but paper-thin. Less than 2 years after his historic 49-state victory, Nixon was out.

Fast forward to today: we’re doing great in Ukraine; Russia is a gas station parading as a country (Nigeria with snow); its soldiers are drunks; and its equipment is all rusty. No one can challenge mighty NATO with the greatest fighting force in history behind it. Any day now, the Ukrainians will bounce back and chase Putin/Hitler’s armies back into Russia, which will then collapse and shatter into various parts, just like in 1991.

And Joe Biden is at the top of his game and not at all senile.

The defeat of the West in its European war of choice will be far more destabilizing than the ragtag departure from 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan. No one will take the blame for the debacle because in this country we don’t do responsibility. But someone will have to preside over it, and a likely candidate is someone expendable, a last-minute placeholder pushed into the spotlight at exactly the worst moment.

In 1974 it was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., who had been shoehorned into the vice presidency just months before after an old-fashioned cash-in-shoeboxes scandal. Leslie was better known by the name he adopted after his mother got remarried—to Gerald Ford, Sr.

Poor Leslie/Gerald was left holding the bag as the helicopters sailed away from the rooftop of the Saigon embassy. Who will get that undesirable job when the U.S. decides that Ukraine is Europe’s problem and walks away from another ignominious debacle?

Welcome, President Kamala.

 

Pending Questions

By coincidence, I just finished James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It led me to wonder aloud—and comment to friends—about the possibility of assassination—pre-July 13.

Douglass compiled a mass of information about the 2-plus years of Kennedy’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s readiness for neutrality in Laos and allegedly Vietnam. Everything that the war party hated.

I hadn’t known how eager Kennedy’s military chiefs were to follow up the Bay of Pigs with an invasion and, in some cases (Remember Curtis LeMay?) to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. They hated JFK’s compromises in Southeast Asia and resisted disarmament.

They weren’t called neocons back then, but the mentality is recognizable in the unified war party of today, those calling always for more escalation, more belligerence, more “force projection,” and of course more spending on all the supposedly necessary weapons.

Today, like back then, anyone resisting or questioning the drumbeat of war was and is quickly labeled a wuss and a softie for starters, followed by accusations of doing the enemy’s bidding, a virtual or actual traitor (a la Russiagate). Back then, you were smeared as a pinko or outright commie; today’s equivalent is “agent of Putin,” someone who fails to see him as the new Hitler and probably has a secret bank account in rubles. Kennedy had a hard slog getting Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty until it became clear that he had a potent ally: the American people.

Douglass’s thesis is that the war party—what we have begun to call the Deep State now, headquartered at the CIA—hated JFK and had him whacked. They then covered up the inconvenient facts, threatened and harassed skeptics and witnesses, and quietly eliminated any who wouldn’t shut up. (That list is extensive.) He marshals disturbing evidence to support his conclusions.

Douglass shows through 400 pages how a conspiracy at that level can work with relative ease once people realize the power of the forces determined to impose their official narrative. Many people had important facts that undermined the Oswald-as-assassin story, but they quickly saw how dangerous it was to stick to their stories, even for the first autopsy pathologists who clearly saw the front-entry bullet wound in the president’s remains and later allowed themselves to be misinterpreted.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the July 13 shooting, and old-fashioned incompetence should never be dismissed as an explanation. Why should the Secret Service function any better than the rest of our crumbling institutions?

That said, in piecing together the truth about the attempt on Trump’s life, we should be alert to stonewalling, crazy claims of easily disprovable facts, and especially pressures on eyewitnesses to unsay what they’ve already stated on the record and on camera. We should watch the composition of investigative bodies, check the members’ connections to the intelligence and Homeland Security agencies, and pay attention to the handling of forensic evidence.

We should listen carefully for news of the dead shooter’s recent movements and contacts and an explanation of his curiously opaque past.

Meanwhile, I am frankly shocked by how many people close to me find the attempted murder worthy of kinda-sorta jokes about how close the shooter came. Spare me your sick humor—assassination is no substitute for politics, and also, be careful what you endorse. What goes around, comes around as  Trump—himself the proud assassin of an Iranian general—should recall.  

2024: A Space-out Odyssey

 

 

Joe Biden’s debate meltdown exposed the lies we’ve been systematically fed for months—probably years—about his health and mental capacities.

That’s one set of lies. There are others.

Narrative management is a useful skill, perhaps more highly developed here given our foundational relationship to the art of selling. We really know how to establish a story line and pitch it relentlessly.

At the same time, all those generations of commercial culture have induced in us a certain degree of skepticism. Growing up as consumers, caveat emptor comes with our mothers’ milk. We know how the game is played: you paint me a fantastical picture, and I discount two-thirds of it. We expect to be hustled and fed a line by everyone—peddlers of cars, toys, stocks, or flood insurance, office-seekers, and now modernity’s latest curse, paid “influencers.”

But while we understand that success isn’t dependent on a pitch’s attachment to facts, that doesn’t mean we like being cheated. Plenty of Biden sympathizers are royally pissed off that the party pooh-bahs shepherded rickety Joe through rigged or non-existent primaries to keep him carefully screened off from anything that would have exposed his disqualifying frailty.

Our cowed and complicit news outlets played along even though they must have known. Announcing that the emperor not only had no clothes but no working mind meant professional ostracism at least, as experienced by Axios reporter Alex Thompson, one of the few who dared to go off script.

The debate debacle leaves the Democrat establishment with no pleasant options. Early polls are predictably bad and set to get worse as safe blue states—New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico—move into the toss-up column, and that’s after just one week. More are likely to follow. Dumping Biden might stop the bleeding—or make it worse. At this rate Trump could pull off a Nixon- (1972) or Reagan- (1980) level landslide.

All the horserace talk, while amusing, obscures the other acts of narrative massage that are about to blow up messily. For example, we’ve been promised that our mighty (and expensive) military machine would power noble Ukraine to victory against Russia.

I remember an early panel discussion featuring Axis-of-Evil speechwriter David Frum (now a Democrat since it’s the war party). Frum confidently predicted that the Russian army would collapse as the troops were offered pleasant lives in Barcelona in exchange for deserting. Biden himself crowed that the Russian ruble would soon be “rubble.”  

Two years later, Russia is dictating terms of surrender, which become more humiliating with each iteration. That one will be harder to spin, and the panic over Biden’s Madame Tussaud act will pale in comparison.

Like the Biden dementia taboo, no one was allowed to question the fairy story about Ukraine’s imminent triumph. No one could doubt that Russia was a gas station parading as a country, “Nigeria with snow,” a failed, beaten state with drunk soldiers and rusty weapons. No one could suggest a compromise settlement or question the ongoing war and slaughter. That was all considered naïve Putin-enabling, the equivalent of cheering the Munich surrender of 1938.

We will pay a high price for the successful suppression of critical engagement, the homogenization of permitted speech, and the proliferation of bogus “disinformation” monitors, a.k.a. censorship boards policing our public debates. Like feeble Joe wandering off the public stage, we have been reduced to repeating stock lines and expecting rounds of stormy applause.

Reality has begun to bite. It won’t be pretty.

 

Cheap Thrills

 

The manifest delight among the anti-Trump camp over his conviction in the hooker payoff case will be short-lived.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s pursuit of Trump on the flimsy case of felonious falsification of business records in furtherance of some vaguely defined higher crime has produced a frisson of satisfaction among assorted Democrats, liberals, and those who find the man appalling for a variety of good reasons. But it will undermine the case against him that really matters—his conspiracy to steal the election of 2020.

Among the people I have seen send cheers heavenward at the jury’s multiple guilty verdicts, remarkably few—none in fact—can explain to me the details of the accusations or the legal reasoning behind condemning him 34 times for essentially a single episode. To all appearances, they don’t really care. He’s guilty, he's a felon, and that’s that.

His supporters, equally removed from or uninterested in the tedious minutiae of the case, think he’s being prosecuting for paying off a hooker, which they don’t see as a crime (correctly) and are easily persuaded that he’s being singled out in a political vendetta. The convoluted reasoning that convinced a jury to convict escapes them, as well it might. I’ve read a lot about it, and it escapes me.

As for criminalized sex, Bill Clinton pretended not to know where his cigar ended up, and Republicans made endless damp hay out of that. In the end, nobody really cared.

Yeah, I know, it’s not the sex per se but Trump’s signature on documents that called the payoff legal fees—the sort of thing that Hillary’s campaign did to obscure its role in the origins of the Russiagate hoax.

As CNN summarized, “The FEC concluded that the Clinton campaign and DNC misreported the money that funded the [Steele] dossier, masking it as ‘legal services’ and ‘legal and compliance consulting’ instead of opposition research.” The DNC eventually coughed up $113,000 in fines, but no one faced prosecution over it. Given the number of documents signed by various DNC officials covering up the oppo research as payments to lawyers, the Clintons’ allies would certainly be looking at hundreds of felonies under the Bragg jurisprudence.

But the hundred grand was worth every penny as the Steele dossier, secretly funded by the Clinton campaign, led to years of propaganda over Trump’s alleged “back channel” to Moscow and “Russian interference” in the 2016 election, fact-free concepts most Democrats still revere to this day, their team’s happy BlueAnon conspiracy.

The Clintons got off Scot-free after years of peddling these far more consequential falsehoods, utilizing the full power of the surveillance state to do so. Do we think dumb middle Americans didn’t notice?

Unfortunately, a whole slew of Trumpians also think that some combination of phony absentee ballots and computerized vote manipulation caused Trump to lose several key swing states in 2020, that he really won, and that any attempt to disprove their paranoid certainties is bogus, biased, partisan trickery.

Given the partisan trickery involved in the Bragg prosecution, they have a point. When the Dem-leaning establishment gets around to their criminal cases against Trump and his minions for things like organizing fake slates of Republican electors for VP Pence to accept as valid, egging on the Georgia secretary of state to “find” Trump another 18,000 votes and flip the state, and encouraging his loyal yahoos to break into the Capitol to intimidate congress members into voting their way, the whole thing will fall flat. It will look like yet another lame excuse to “get” Donald Trump and prevent him from staging a comeback campaign.

Trump deeply discredited himself with the post-vote events of 2020-21, and a disciplined political and legal team could have pursued Trump for trashing our electoral process. He and his sleazebag lawyers did plenty, and there was no need to make shit up.

Instead, they put on a series of judicial spectacles so that they can label Trump a felon during the campaign and thereby can keep their jobs for another four years.

Ever since Trump sailed down the escalator to announce his bid in 2016, we have relentlessly heard how his candidacy was a joke, how the “walls are closing in” on his fake presidency, and how his comeback for a second term is doomed. The chorus of imminent victory over Trumpism is now about as credible as the Ukrainian vow to retake Crimea.

Any American not living in a cave knows that there is plenty of felonious behavior taking place around us, especially at the top of our get-it-while-you-can political establishment. A few of us even think things like instituting a torture regime, sending off troops to conquer foreign countries for no reason, smashing the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to bits, and presiding over a genocidal slaughter of defenseless civilians are also arguably criminal acts. Slamming a political enemy over crimes of the willie while ignoring the mountainous slurry of sleaze threatening to drown our fragile polity is a good way to discredit everything for which we once held a modicum of respect.

Why I have been silent — and why now I won’t shut up

 

A Cold War era joke went like this: A Russian from the USSR sitting next to an American on a flight to New York is asked a question about why he is visiting the United States. He answers that he has come to study American expertise in propaganda.

“What propaganda?” asks the puzzled passenger.

“Exactly,” concludes the Russian.

We have witnessed a magisterial deployment of narrative management over recent months and years that is worthy of study by future generations. In fact, it is the sole triumph notched by our otherwise mediocre political class in the entire course of the European war that they sought, confident of victory, and got. The populace bought the official line without even realizing that it had made a purchase. Edward Bernays would be proud.

However, the sheen on this bright object has become seriously dulled to the point where dissident voices have begun to break through. They were always present, but now they have infiltrated the uniparty, mostly through the populist/extremist/MAGA (choose one) wing of the GOP. There was never a possibility that war funding would get bottled up in a Congress that has long been an affiliate of the MICIMATT complex*. But remarkably, a subset of troop-saluting, flagpin-wearing, war-cheering Republicans resisted the idea of tossing another $60 billion into the bottomless Ukrainian pit as they noticed that the war is lost and that its partisans have no strategy for success or exit.

With this window into a fuller debate now wedged open (supercharged by the appalling crimes occurring in Gaza) and major changes looming, the environment for previously unwelcome questions is more benign. We can observe, speculate, and attempt to analyze without inevitably having to face abuse and name-calling. The campuses are again hotbeds of dissent and rejection of the Received Wisdom descending from above.

Furthermore, we are entering an electoral season during which we are theoretically invited to engage in debate about our proper course as a nation. Despite the crudity of what passes for political discourse on most issues of importance, we may still manage to share some thoughts and feelings about current events without promptly turning purple.

No doubt there will be lingering accusations that dissent is attributable to Putin-worshipping Russophilia. That’s an old story. In the Vietnam war days, we were called socialistic, drug-addled hippies too cowardly to “fight for our country.” Before that, MLK and his followers were “outside agitators” (a phrase making a remarkable comeback), who had set out to disturb the amicable social relations enjoyed by all in the Jim Crow South. Over Gaza, objection to genocide is painted as resurgent antisemitism, often by the same neo-Confederates indignant over discussions of American slavery in the classroom.

I think there is—or soon will be—considerable appetite for outsider views on our nation’s rapidly changing place in the world. It opens up all sorts of opportunities for useful dialogue, and I am, at long last, feeling like participating in it once again.

*Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex, h/t former CIA analyst Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)