Donald Trump has repeatedly explained the critical importance of vengeance (Mother Jones, 10/19/16): “When somebody screws you, you screw them back in spades. And I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve gotta hit people hard. And it’s not so much for that person. It’s other people watch.”

“Revenge—it’s a big part of Trump’s life,” Mother Jones‘ David Corn (10/19/16) wrote just before Trump was elected to the presidency the first time:

In speeches and public talks, Trump has repeatedly expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, to explain how he had achieved his success. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that successful people must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”

Knowing this about Trump, Democrats and liberals worry that he will use the Department of Justice, especially if Matt Gaetz is confirmed as attorney general, as an unrestrained vehicle to pursue the prosecution of political enemies.

But given Trump’s constant attacks on media—“the opposition party,” as his ally Steve Bannon called the fourth estate (New York Times, 1/26/17)—journalists fear that he will use the power of the state to intimidate if not destroy the press.

Defunding public broadcasting

If you run a journalistic outfit, like PBS president Paula Kerger (Politico, 3/27/19), and don’t know why Trump doesn’t like you, you probably aren’t doing your job very well.

Trump called for defunding NPR (Newsweek, 4/10/24) after a long-time editor accused the radio outlet of liberal bias in the conservative journal Free Press (4/9/24). Rep. Claudia Tenney (R–NY) introduced legislation to defund NPR because “taxpayers should not be forced to fund NPR, which has become a partisan propaganda machine” (Office of Claudia Tenney, 4/19/24). With Republicans also holding both houses of congress, bills like Tenney’s become more viable. Trump has previously supported budget proposals that eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Politico, 3/27/19).

The infamous Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda many see as a blueprint for the second Trump term, calls for the end to public broadcasting, because it is viewed as liberal propaganda:

Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first president in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.

In other words, all Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”

All of which means that the next conservative president must finally get this done, and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,” but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.

PBS and NPR, as FAIR (10/24/24) has noted, has for decades caved in to right-wing pressures—PBS by adding conservative programming, NPR by trying to rid itself of political commentary altogether. But the right will never let go of its ideological opposition to media outlets not directly owned by the corporate class.

‘Whether criminally or civilly’ 

A bill—defeated for now—”would have granted the Department of the Treasury broad authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed to be supporting ‘terrorism'” (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24).

Trump also has a well known track record of revoking the credentials of journalists who produce reporting he doesn’t like (Washington Post, 2/24/17, 5/8/19; New Republic, 11/5/24). It is realistic to assume that a lot more reporters will be barred from White House events in the years ahead.

While a bill that would grant the secretary of the treasury broad authority to revoke nonprofit status to any organization the office deems as a “terrorist” organization has so far failed (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24), it is quite possible that it could come up for a vote again. If this bill were to become law, the Treasury Department could use this ax against a great many progressive nonprofit outlets, like Democracy Now! and the American Prospect, as well as investigative outlets like ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The department could even target the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has already said in response to Trump’s victory, “The fundamental right to a free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, must not be impaired” (11/6/24).

Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24), an avid media observer, said there is no reason to think Trump will soften his campaign against the free press. She said:

In 2022, he sued the Pulitzer Prize board after they defended their awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers had won Pulitzer Prizes for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.

More recently, Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation over the way the anchor characterized the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual misconduct case against him. Each of those cases is wending its way through the courts.

Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24): “Donald Trump poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organizations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.”

She added:

There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression.

Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Trump has already gone after the New York Times and Penguin Random House since Sullivan wrote this. CJR (11/14/24) said:

The letter, addressed to lawyers at the New York Times and Penguin Random House, arrived a week before the election. Attached was a discursive ten-page legal threat from an attorney for Donald Trump that demanded $10 billion in damages over “false and defamatory statements” contained in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.

It singles out two stories coauthored by Buettner and Craig that related to their book on Trump and his financial dealings, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, released on September 17. It also highlighted an October 20 story headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and an October 22 piece by Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”

And just before his victory, Trump sued CBS News, alleging the network’s “deceitful” editing of a recent 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris “misled the public and unfairly disadvantaged him” (CBS News, 10/31/24).

Expect more of this, except this time, Trump will have all the levers of the state on his side. And whatever moves the next Trump administration makes to attack the press will surely have a chilling effect, which will only empower his anti-democratic political agenda.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Papua New Guinea police say 10 people have been tragically killed after a series of violent “revenge killings” along the Laiagam-Sirunki Highway in the Highlands province of Enga.

The attacks, which occured last Friday and Monday, are believed to be connected to an unresolved death that took place in March earlier this year.

Police said that gunmen from the Mulapin tribe ambushed a vehicle packed with passengers from the Sakare clan near Tambitanis Health Centre in Sirunki on October 11 at 8am.

• READ MORE: Deadly bus ambush in PNG’s Enga province kills, wounds many
• Other PNG crime reports

The vehicle, carrying a body, was fired upon in a surprise attack. A woman lost her life, several others sustained serious injuries, and the gunmen escaped.

An hour later on the same day, the Sakare clan retaliated by shooting the driver and his passenger from close range. They reached a nearby hospital but succumbed to their injuries on arrival.

The leadership of the Kunalin and Lyain tribes is urging restraint and for the clans not to resort to violence, police said.

They have also called for the immediate surrender of suspects from both the Mulapin and Sakare tribes to law enforcement.

Investigation into ‘root causes’
Assistant Police Commissioner Joseph Tondop, who is responsible for the state of emergency in Enga, is calling for an investigation into the root causes of the recent conflict.

“This sort of revenge killing is unheard of in the history of tribal conflicts in Enga Province where innocent people unrelated to the conflicts where killed,” he said.

“All tribal clans taking part in the conflicts (Sakars, Mulapian, Kunalins, Myom and people form Kulapi 4 in Porgera) are all under the scope and ordered to refrain from further escalating the situation.”

The investigative teams will start their work immediately, and individuals or groups found to be involved will be apprehended, he said.

“This task force is given strict orders to carry out a thorough investigation, leaving no stone unturned.”

RNZ Pacific’s correspondent in PNG, Scott Waide, said the public was frustrated that police were yet to make arrests.

He said police found it difficult to deal with the clans and arrest people who were armed.

Waide said people were reluctant to give up weapons because it gave them a sense of security in tribal conflicts.

“It is a difficult situation that both lawmakers, citizens and police are in. The longer this drags on and guns are in the hands of ordinary people, killing will continue.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Politicians have also played an active role in exacerbating the situation. For example, BJP MLA Nitesh Rane posted a tweet on August 5, asking if Hindus were being attacked in Bangladesh, why should Indians spare a single Bangladeshi in their country. He added that they would hunt down and kill every Bangladeshi living in India. Rane deleted the tweet after it had sparked a controversy. However, this is not the first time that he has made such an inflammatory statement. In January of this year, during the Ram Mandir Pran Pratishtha procession in Mira Road, Mumbai, when communal tensions broke out, Nitesh Rane made a similar incendiary statement, threatening to hunt down individuals.

The impact of inflammatory social media posts and fake news has been significant, leading to targeted attacks on the minority Muslim community in India. Criminals, motivated by a desire to avenge the attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, have been attacking people living in slums in various parts of the country, branding them as Bangladeshis. Several Hindu organisations have been directly involved in these attacks, and the accused are closely associated with the ruling BJP. In many places, Bengali-speaking workers from West Bengal and other residents of slums have been harassed and attacked under the suspicion of being Bangladeshis.

Shastri Park, New Delhi

On August 8, a group of Hindu extremists attacked garbage collectors in the darkness of night, accusing them of being Bangladeshis, and beat them up with sticks and rods. In a video that went viral, the attackers could be heard saying that these snakes were thriving here while their Hindu sisters and daughters were being raped in Bangladesh. Cow-vigilante and Hindu Raksha Dal member Daksh Chaudhary could be clearly identified in this video. He posted this video on his social media account with the caption, “We will not allow them to stay in this country anymore; if the government cannot remove them, we will.”

After attacking people living in slums branding them as Bangladeshis, Chaudhary released another video stating that he had no regrets over his actions. He made an open call, stating that they had started the process and that the youth and various organizations of India knew what needed to be done. He declared that no Bangladeshi Rohingya Muslims would remain in this country and though the government may be powerless, they were not.

Taking cognisance of the video of the attack on garbage collectors by Daksh Chaudhary and his associates, Delhi Police registered a case in the matter. However, no arrests had been made so far. It is worth noting that Chaudhary has several cases registered against him in different police stations. In February year, he entered a mosque in Sahibabad wearing shoes and pushed the Muslims present there, warning them against praying there. He also threatened to kill them if they tried to go to the mosque’s roof. He was later arrested by the police for hurting religious sentiments and disturbing the peace. During the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Chaudhary and his associates had attacked Congress candidate Kanhaiya Kumar and abused voters in Ayodhya (Faizabad) when the BJP lost the election there.

Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh

On August 7, Pinky Chaudhary, the president of the Hindu Raksha Dal, released a video threatening that if Hindus were being persecuted in Bangladesh, Bangladeshis would be treated the same way in India. They would be killed and driven out. In another video, Pinky Chaudhary gave a 24-hour ultimatum. He stated that the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh had to stop and that areas in which Bangladeshis were living in India were on the radar of the Hindu Raksha Dal.

On August 9, Pinky Chaudhary and his supporters attacked people living in shanties, branded them as Bangladeshis, and vandalised and set fire to the slums. Several Right-wing users shared the video of this incident in solidarity with the attackers, claiming that the people living there were Bangladeshis. Ashok Srivastava, editor of India’s state-run news channel Doordarshan, also defended Pinky Chaudhary on Twitter, stating that Hindus in India were distressed and angry, and it was possible that Pinky Chaudhary was unable to control his emotions.

उत्तर प्रदेश : गाजियाबाद में हिंदू रक्षा दल ने कुछ झुग्गी झोपड़ी तोड़ दीं। सामान में आग लगा दी। यहां रहने वाले लोगों को बांग्लादेशी बताकर खदेड़ दिया। pic.twitter.com/WxyqWw50xD

— Sachin Gupta (@SachinGuptaUP) August 10, 2024

After the video had gone viral, Ghaziabad Police took cognisance of the matter and registered an FIR against Pinky Chaudhary and his supporters and subsequently arrested him. In a statement to the media, police clarified that based on the facts that emerged during the investigation, the people who were beaten up for being Bangladeshis were actually Indian citizens from Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh.

UP : गाजियाबाद पुलिस ने मुस्लिमों को बांग्लादेशी बताकर पीटने में हिंदू रक्षा दल के अध्यक्ष पिंकी चौधरी सहित 15–20 समर्थकों पर FIR दर्ज की।

पुलिस ने कहा– झुग्गी झोपड़ियों में कोई भी बांग्लादेशी नहीं था। ये परिवार शाहजहांपुर (UP) के हैं। https://t.co/lWDuR8IifG pic.twitter.com/ZR3VeqDqgT

— Sachin Gupta (@SachinGuptaUP) August 10, 2024

दिनांक 09.08.2024 को गाजियाबाद के थाना मधुबन बापू धाम क्षेत्रांतर्गत मजदूरों की झोपड़ी को क्षतिग्रस्त करने एवं उनके साथ मारपीट की घटना के मुख्य आरोपी हिस्ट्रीशीटर पिंकी भैया उर्फ भूपेन्द्र तोमर को #ghaziabadpolice द्वारा गिरफ्तार कर आवश्यक विधिक कार्यवाही की जा रही है।@Uppolice pic.twitter.com/6YriJgCx14

— POLICE COMMISSIONERATE GHAZIABAD (@ghaziabadpolice) August 11, 2024

Eyewitnesses to the incident reported that people were asked about their religion before being attacked. A child present at the scene said that Pinky Chaudhary and his supporters asked whether they were Muslim or Hindu. As soon as someone identified as Muslim, they started beating them up.

गाजियाबाद में बांग्लादेशी बताकर झुग्गी-झोपड़ियां तोड़ीं : ” जैसे ही बताया की मुस्लिम हैं, तो उसने मारना शुरू कर दिया ” pic.twitter.com/KS1C1Ksmw7

— Amit Pandey (@yuva_journalist) August 10, 2024

On August 10, Pinky Chaudhary released another video claiming that they had done what they had claimed and called on all Hindus to kill Bangladeshis and drive them out of India.

Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh

Satyam Pandit, associated with the Hindu Veer Sena, issued a warning to Rohingyas and Bangladeshis to leave the country within 24 to 72 hours. He threatened that if they did not comply, every worker of the Hindu Veer Sena would cut their beards, pull out their hair, and bury them in Bangladesh.

“रोहिंग्या, कटुए, बांग्लादेशी अगले 24 घंटे में भारत को छोड़ दें। अन्यथा राष्ट्रीय हिंदू वीर सेना इनकी दाढ़ी उखाड़कर एक–एक बाल को बांग्लादेश में गाढ़ देगा”

ऐसा कहने वाले सत्यम पंडित पर UP की गाजियाबाद पुलिस ने FIR दर्ज की। सत्यम की तलाश जारी है !! pic.twitter.com/W4QtFxJ40q

— Sachin Gupta (@SachinGuptaUP) August 10, 2024

The Uttar Pradesh Police took cognisance of the matter and registered an FIR against Satyam Pandit, arresting him on August 12.

उत्तर प्रदेश : गाजियाबाद पुलिस ने राष्ट्रीय हिन्दू वीर सेना के अध्यक्ष सत्यम पंडित को गिरफ्तार किया। कोर्ट ने जेल भेजा।

सत्यम पंडित ने कहा था- ”रोहिंग्या, कटुए, बांग्लादेशी 24 घंटे में भारत छोड़ दें। अन्यथा इनकी दाढ़ी उखाड़कर एक-एक बाल बांग्लादेश में गाढ़ दिया जाएगा” https://t.co/wmjTAQ3UPu pic.twitter.com/EJ78AzlvRS

— Sachin Gupta (@SachinGuptaUP) August 12, 2024

Odisha

According to a report published on The Times of India’s website, several videos had surfaced on social media showing attacks on Bengali-speaking workers from West Bengal in the districts of Jajpur, Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpur, and Sambalpur of Odisha, in which they were branded as Bangladeshis. Local people demanded proof of their Indian citizenship. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee contacted her Odisha counterpart Mohan Charan Manjhi, urging him to intervene following reports of the attacks on Bengali-speaking workers.

According to a report by The Indian Express, several workers of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the youth wing of Odisha’s ruling party BJP, surrounded 34 individuals at a construction site in Sambalpur district on suspicion that they were Bangladeshi nationals and handed them over to the police. After investigation, police officials stated that they were not from Bangladesh, but from the Murshidabad area of West Bengal, after which they were released.

Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh

On August 11, a Hindu organisation held a rally against the atrocities committed against Hindus in Bangladesh. In the video of this rally, one can clearly hear calls for taking up arms to protect Hindus. The video also shows intense sloganeering against Muslims, with offensive comments made against Islam.

After the video went viral, the local Muslim community lodged a complaint with the police, following which the person seen in the video, Devraj, apologised to the Muslim community in a video, stating that the words were not directed at Indian Muslims. However, there is currently no update on the police’s response in this case.

The post Muslims, Bengali-speaking migrant workers branded as ‘Bangladeshi’; ‘revenge attacks’ in Delhi, UP, Odisha appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

“This is one of the most perilous moments in the [Middle East] region in years,” says Ali Vaez, director of the International Crisis Group Iran Project, after Israel’s assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday in Tehran. Iranian retaliation against Israel appears imminent. “All bets are off,” warns Vaez, adding that Israel’s latest maneuver will put Americans “in harm’s way,” as Iran will no longer hold back fellow Axis of Resistance members, especially Islamic militias in Iraq and Syria, from launching attacks on U.S. military bases in the region. “It is disastrous for a superpower who cannot control, basically, a client state that is destabilizing the region,” Vaez explains. We also hear from Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu, who responds to Israel’s announcement that its July strike on al-Mawasi, an alleged safe zone in Gaza, killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif along with nearly a hundred civilians. Buttu argues it is Israel’s international impunity over the course of its campaign against Palestine that has led to this dangerous moment of escalation. “This is a monster that’s been unleashed,” she says. “This is going to spread, and this is exactly what Netanyahu wants.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israel has vowed to retaliate against Hezbollah after blaming the Lebanese group for a rocket attack Sunday in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria that killed 12 children at a soccer field. Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the attack in the village of Majdal Shams, home to members of the Druze community, an Arab-speaking minority group. Israel claimed the victims were Israeli citizens, though many Druze in the area do not have Israeli citizenship and are in fact Syrian citizens. The deadly attack has further stoked fear of a wider regional war. Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri says that while the rocket attack looks as though it could have been an accident, there is still risk of more violence. “The danger is always there that an accident could spark a bigger confrontation,” he says. “Militarism isn’t a solution. Militarism is part of the problem.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A magistrate judge ordered a legal journalist on June 20, 2024, not to publish the name of a plaintiff that had mistakenly appeared on court documents in a revenge porn case. The ruling was overturned a month later.

Eugene Volokh — co-founder of the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, a law professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — was singled out in the ruling by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth S. Chestney as the only person who was barred from using the plaintiff’s name.

The case, initially filed in 2019, involves a woman who ended an extramarital affair with a man, who she said then posted revenge porn to several adult websites. The case was sealed to protect her privacy. She and the defendant later settled, but the question of whether the case was improperly sealed remained.

Volokh told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he initially noticed the case in an alert from Westlaw, a database of legal documents, and thought it raised First Amendment questions that he might want to write about, given his expertise as a free speech scholar.

Even though the case was sealed, the names of both the plaintiff and defendant were published in an opinion available on Westlaw, along with other documents that should have been sealed under the judge’s order. It’s not clear exactly why they were published, but Volokh said it appeared to be an error.

“It was just a simple mistake,” he told the Tracker.

Volokh moved to intervene in the case and have it unsealed. Chestney, the magistrate judge, agreed on July 18, 2022, to let him intervene but ruled that Volokh could not write about the case until a decision was made on unsealing the case.

“Professor Volokh may not blog or write about this case until any renewed motion to unseal has been granted,” the ruling ordered.

Volokh appealed the case to District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, who on Aug. 3, 2022, vacated the prior restraint language and said the entire case should be unsealed. Volokh then published the plaintiff’s name in a blog post in August 2022 since, he said, it was also the name of the case.

The plaintiff appealed the unsealing of the case to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that it should be partially sealed with certain personal information redacted.

The case then returned to Chestney to determine what exactly should be redacted and whether the plaintiff could retroactively use a pseudonym, Jane Doe.

In her June 20, 2024, ruling, Chestney ruled in favor of the retroactive pseudonym.

“And then to my surprise, she says that even though I don't have to take down past writings that mention the plaintiff’s name, I cannot use her name in future writings,” Volokh told the Tracker.

The ruling stated: “Professor Volokh may not, however, publicly disclose Plaintiff’s name or personal identifying information in any future writings, speeches, or other public discourse.”

Volokh again appealed and on July 16 Rodriguez vacated that prior restraint language.

“The order restricts Volokh from sharing information that is publicly available through his prior writings but allows for any of Volokh’s readers to share that same information,” Rodriguez wrote. “As such, the language at issue here is an unconstitutional prior restraint.”

Volokh detailed the ruling in a post on The Volokh Conspiracy.

The plaintiff could still appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit.

Volokh said he was deciding whether to go back to his August 2022 article and redact the name.

But whether he uses her name in future articles, he added, should be a matter of editorial discretion, not a judge’s ruling.

“I think it’s important that this be a decision for the individual journalist, the individual speaker, and not something that they’re ordered to do,” Volokh told the Tracker.

Volokh said he sees this case as an example of the system working. But he noted that he was uniquely positioned to fight these instances of prior restraint.

“I should also acknowledge that maybe if I weren’t a law professor, if I weren’t a specialist on the subject, if I had to pay a lawyer to challenge the prior restraints, maybe the situation might not have come out as well,” he told the Tracker.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Enforcement of the 50 percent rule largely falls to local officials in flood-damaged regions, who are charged with ensuring that their constituents aren’t rebuilding in flood zones. In exchange for this diligence, the federal government subsidizes low-cost flood insurance for homes in communities that certify their compliance with the rule, goosing red hot real estate markets in Florida and other scenic but climate-threatened regions.

As Florida continues rebuilding from 2022’s devastating Hurricane Ian, however, the Biden administration may be signaling that this era of easy money is over. Late last month, FEMA sent an explosive letter to local officials in Lee County, Florida, where over 750,000 people live near some of South Florida’s most prized coastal land. FEMA claimed that almost 600 homeowners in the city of Cape Coral and other nearby towns had rebuilt vulnerable homes in the flood zone over the 18 months since Hurricane Ian, violating the 50 percent rule as well as local construction laws. 

The agency had long given the county and its cities a 25 percent discount on flood insurance in recognition of the county’s efforts to control flood risk, which saved residents millions of dollars a year. The letter threatened to yank away that discount, arguing that the county’s lax approach to the Hurricane Ian rebuild had negated those earlier efforts. The message was clear: After decades of risky construction in floodplains, the feds were putting their foot down. 

This new effort to penalize floodplain construction is yet another sign that the long-hidden costs of climate change and development are starting to catch up with homeowners in coastal states — and at the very same time that housing costs more broadly are increasing for many Americans. FEMA has already raised flood insurance premiums across the country in recent years to keep up with mounting risk, and private home insurance companies have also hiked premiums for wind insurance in several states along the Gulf Coast. 

The crackdown in Lee County represents an attempt by FEMA to shift the cost burden of climate risk away from the federal government (and the public that funds it) and onto local homeowners. This will test the strength of the area’s white-hot real estate market, potentially forcing many homeowners to walk away from their waterfront properties. As the federal government and private insurers both try to reduce their exposure to climate change, Lee County and its cities could be canaries in the coal mine for a housing market disfigured by mounting flood risk.

The reaction from these canaries has been swift and furious. Elected leaders from the county and the city blasted FEMA as “villains” and accused the agency of hampering Florida’s hurricane recovery at the behest of President Joe Biden. Lee County’s board of commissioners mulled suing the agency at a tense meeting a few days after the announcement. Local TV stations ran dozens of stories about the impact FEMA’s decision would have on homeowners, who are already dealing with a steep rise in both flood insurance and traditional property insurance, which covers wind damage. 

“It’s almost like revenge politics,” said Cecil Pendergrass, a Lee County commissioner, during the county meeting after the announcement. “Our citizens, our taxpayers are being held hostage here.”

FEMA soon put its decision on pause, giving the county an extra 30 days to prove it hadn’t let homeowners break the 50 percent rule or build in the floodplain. It is unclear whether Lee County or cities like Cape Coral will be able to do that. Federal and local officials declined to provide Grist with details about the post-Ian violations, citing privacy concerns, but if homeowners have already rebuilt their destroyed properties, the county won’t be able to fix that within a month.

The bigger question for communities around the country is whether FEMA is changing how it enforces the 50 percent rule in an effort to force homeowners out of flood-prone areas.

“The floodplain management community is tracking this very closely,” said Susanna Pho, the founder of a flood risk firm called Forerunner, which helps flood-prone communities with FEMA compliance.

Lee County has long been a poster child for risky waterfront development. The city of Cape Coral sits on artificial filled land in what used to be a swampy section of Florida shoreline, with no barrier between the city’s urban landscape and the Gulf of Mexico. When hurricanes strike, as Ian did in 2022, they can push as much as 15 feet of storm surge through the city, inundating thousands of homes. Nearby cities such as Bonita Springs, which also caught a penalty from FEMA, aren’t much safer.

The 50 percent rule is supposed to reduce this risk over time by ensuring that flood-prone homeowners don’t rebuild the same vulnerable properties over and over. If a county determines that a home has suffered what FEMA calls “substantial damage,” it must force the homeowner to tear it down and elevate a new home above flood level, often on concrete pilings. If a county doesn’t comply, FEMA can kick it out of the federal flood insurance program, rendering homes more or less uninsurable, or downgrade its discounts as it did with Lee County. This rule acts as a de facto tax on risky property: Flood insurance payouts max out at $250,000 per home, which means homeowners are often on the hook for tearing down their houses and building new ones.

The problem is that determining what counts as “substantial damage” is a complicated process. Local officials conduct basic “windshield assessments” in the first few weeks after a storm, logging damage information that they can see from the street as they clear debris. They only do detailed examinations for the 50 percent rule when homeowners request permits to rebuild. But many homeowners never request permits from their city or county. Instead, they come back and patch up homes that they should be tearing down and rebuilding at higher elevations, and the local government either never catches them or looks the other way.

This mandate puts local governments in a tough political situation: They have FEMA on one side, urging them to enforce strict flood rules, and displaced homeowners on the other side, trying to get back in their homes without going broke. It’s unclear how much Lee County and its cities knew about the hundreds of rebuilt homes that FEMA alleges were noncompliant after Ian, but attempts to flout the 50 percent rule have been a scourge for the agency going back decades.

Albert Slap, a coastal planning consultant in Florida, said he understood why Lee County or cities like Cape Coral might have allowed homeowners to repair their homes without elevating.

“It’s pretty clear that the motivation is voters,” he said. “The people who got damaged are voters, and they’re going, ‘If you make me build back better, I’m not gonna be able to do it, and I’m leaving. I voted you guys into office and you’re screwing me.’”

Lee County says it followed normal protocol after Hurricane Ian, conducting basic damage assessments in the immediate aftermath of the storm and inspecting homes only later on when homeowners requested permits. Flood and disaster experts who spoke to Grist said this protocol is more or less standard across Florida and other hurricane-prone states, which raises the question of whether FEMA is changing the way it enforces the 50 percent rule and cracking down harder on rogue rebuilds.

FEMA didn’t answer questions about its enforcement strategy. In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson said the agency is “committed to helping communities take appropriate remediation actions” to fix the rebuild violations. A spokesperson for Lee County said the county “will work with its partners at FEMA during a 30-day extension period.”

Adam Botana, a Republican state representative whose district encompasses much of Lee County, said he had faith that Lee County and other local governments would address the violations that FEMA identified and take action against homeowners who rebuilt without following FEMA regulations.

“Nobody likes the 50 percent rule, but I understand there have to be rules,” he told Grist. “Some municipalities may be a little more lax than others, but we have to keep everybody in line.” He added that he thinks the county will be able to prove many of the alleged violations didn’t take place.

Even if Lee County manages to contest the decision, homeowners in Southwest Florida are almost guaranteed to suffer more financial pain as a result of this enforcement effort. If FEMA stays the course and removes the discount, it will raise flood insurance costs for homeowners in unincorporated parts of the county between $14 and $17 million per year, equating to a $300 annual hit for each flood insurance customer in the area. But if Lee County cracks down on the 50 percent rule and FEMA restores the discount, homeowners who rebuilt in flood zones may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elevate their homes.

This new penalty comes on top of a much larger rate hike that FEMA has rolled out over the past few years as part of an effort to fix issues with the flood insurance program. This new system, called Risk Rating 2.0, will triple insurance costs in Lee County by the time it takes full effect, raising the average annual premium from around $1,300 to almost $4,000, with some of the most extreme bills ballooning well over $10,000 per year. Florida’s private insurance market for wind damage is also in a tailspin: More than 30 private carriers have pulled back from the state over the past two years, thanks in part to mounting hurricane risk. Those that have stuck around have doubled or tripled their prices.

Lisa Miller, a veteran Florida political consultant and former state insurance regulator, said the burden of rising costs shouldn’t trump the need to ensure that Lee County homes are resilient to future disasters.

“When I hear someone tell me they don’t want to pay $12,000 a year, I remind them, ‘we live in Florida,’” she said. “Our catastrophe risk is higher than almost anywhere in the world. What matters is, the homes that were repaired when they should have been torn down and rebuilt — will they withstand the next storm? That’s the question.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is making an example of this Florida boomtown. Locals call it ‘revenge politics.’ on Apr 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist, and Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent

As women and children seek hope of a future without tribal fighting, the cycle of killing continues in Papua New Guinea’s remote Highlands.

Tribal warfare dating back generations is being said to show no signs of easing and considered a complicated issue due to PNG’s complex colonial history.

Following the recent massacre of more than 70 people, community leaders in Wabag held mediation talks in an effort to draw up a permanent solution on Tuesday, with formal peace negotiations set down for yesterday between the warring factions.

• READ MORE: Other tribal warfare reports

A woman, who walked 20 hours on foot with seven children to flee the violence in the remote highlands, was at the meeting and told RNZ Pacific she wants the fighting to stop so she can return home.

In 2019, the then police minister said killings of more than two dozen women and children “changed everything”.

But a tribesman, who has asked to remain anonymous, told RNZ Pacific the only thing that had changed was it was easier to get guns.

Multiple sources have told RNZ Pacific the government appears to be powerless in such remote areas, saying police and security forces are sent in by the government when conflict breaks out, there is a temporary pause to the fighting, then the forces leave, and the fighting starts again.

There are also concerns about a lack of political will at the national level to enforce the law using police and military due to tribal and political allegiances of local MPs, as recommendations made decades ago by former PNG Defence Force commander Major-General Jerry Singirok are yet to be fully implemented.

While the government, police and community groups look at peaceful solutions, mercenaries are collecting munitions for the next retaliatory fight, multiple sources on the ground, including a mercenary, told us.

Killing pays
After “Bloody Sunday”, which left dozens dead in revenge killings, the men with guns were out of bullets.

Tribal fighting in Papua New Gunea’s Enga Province reached boiling point on February 18, fuelled by a long-standing feud between different clans, which resulted in a mass massacre.

The tribesman who spoke to RNZ Pacific said they did not want to fight anymore but believed there was no other option when someone from the “enemy” turned up on their land wanting to burn down their village.

“Prime Minister [James Marape] — we want development in our villages,” he said, speaking from a remote area in the Highlands after his village was burnt to the ground.

There is no employment, no infrastructure, no support, he said, adding that those were the things that would keep people busy and away from engaging in tribal conflict.

At the moment killing people paid, he said.

‘Hundreds of lives lost’
“Businessmen, leaders and educated elites are supplying guns, bullets and financing the engagement of gunmen,” Wapenamanda Open MP Miki Kaeok said.

The MP is worried about the influence of money and guns, saying they have taken over people’s lives especially with the increase in engagement of local mercenaries and availability of military issued firearms.

“Hundreds of lives have been lost. Properties worth millions of kina have been ransacked and destroyed. I don’t want this to continue. It must stop now,” Kaeok pleaded.

Meanwhile, men in the Highlands are paid anything between K3000 (NZ$1300) to K10,000 (NZ$4,400) to kill, the tribesman claimed during the interview.

Then, he called over one of the men involved in that fight, an alleged killer, to join the video interview.

“Um this is the hire man,” he introduced him. “If they put K2000 (NZ$880) for him and say go burn down this village — he goes in groups — they clear the village, they give him money and he goes to his village . . . ”

The “hire man”, standing slouched over holding a machete, looked at the camera and claimed 64 people were killed on one side and eight on another pushing the total death toll to more than 70.

Wabag police told RNZ Pacific on Tuesday that 63 bodies had been recovered so far.

“A lot of people died,” an inspector from Wabag told RNZ Pacific.

The killings have not stopped there; a video has been circulating on social media platforms of what appears to be a young boy pleading for his life before he was killed.

The video, seen by RNZ Pacific, shows the child being hit by a machete until he falls to the ground.

The man who allegedly carried out the brutality was introduced to RNZ Pacific by the tribesman via video chat.

“They recognise that this person was an enemy,” the tribesman — translating for the killer, who was standing in a line with other men holding machetes — told RNZ Pacific.

“This small guy (referring to the dead child) came out of the bush to save his life. But he ended up in the hands of enemies.

“And then they chopped him with a bush knife and he was dead.”

“In revenge, he killed that small boy” because the killer’s three family members were killed about five months ago.

Asked whether they were saddened that children have died in the violence, the killer said: “No one can spare their lives because he was included in the fight and he’s coming as a warrior in order to kill people,” our source translated.

Killing people — “that’s the only way”, they said.

He said that while fighting had been going on most of his life, military style weapons had only been in the mix for the last decade or so.

He said getting a gun was relatively easy and all they had to do was wait in the bush for five days near the border with Indonesia.

“We are using high-powered rifle guns that we are getting exported from West Papuans.”

He added the change from tribe-on-tribe to clan-to-clan fighting has exacerbated the issue, with a larger number of people involved in any one incident.

Mediation underway
A Wapenamanda community leader in Enga Province Aquila Kunza said mediation was underway between the warring factions in the remote Highlands to prevent further violence.

“The policemen are facilitating and meditating the peace mediation and they are listening,” Kunza said.

Revenge killings had been ongoing for years and there was no sign of gunmen stopping anytime soon, Kunza said.

“This fight has lasted about four years now and I know it will continue. It occurs intermittently, it comes and goes,” he said.

“When there’s somebody around (such as the military), they go into hiding, when the army is gone because the government cannot support them anymore, the fighting erupts again.”

Kunza has been housing women and children who fled the violence and after years of violence and watching police come and go, he is calling for a community-led approach.

At a large community gathering in Wabag the main town of Enga on Tuesday people voiced their concerns.

“The government must be prepared to give money to every family [impacted] and assist them to resettle back to their villages to make new gardens to build new houses,” Kunza said.

He said formal peace negotiations are taking place today as residents from across the Enga Province are travelling to Wabag today for peace talks between the warring factions.

‘Value life’
Many Engans have lamented that the traditional rules of war have been ignored as children have not been spared in the conflict and societal norms that governed their society have been broken.

A woman who was kidnapped last year in Hela in the Bosavi region — a different area to where the recent massacre took place — and held for ransom said PNG was on the verge of being a failed state.

“I’ve gone through this,” Cathy Alex told RNZ Pacific.

“People told us who gave them their guns in Hela, people told us who supplied them munitions. People told us the solutions. People told us why tribal fights started, why violence is happening,” Alex shared.

She said they managed to find out that killers got paid K2000 (NZ$880) for killing one person, that was in 2017.

“For a property that’s worth K200/300,000 [up to NZ$130,000] that’s destroyed, the full amount goes to the person who caused the tribal fight,” she said.

“How can you not value the life of a person?”

Government help
With retaliations continuing the “hire man” who claims to have killed more than 20 people from warring tribes, said he is staring down death.

“He would have to die on his land because…when they come they will fight…we have to shoot in order to protect my village,” the tribesman explained.

“He said he’s not scared about it. He is not afraid of dying. He got a gun in order to shoot, they shoot him, and that’s finished.”

“He’s really worried about his village not to burn down.”

The tribesman said that without government committing financial support for infrastructure, jobs and community initiatives the fighting will continue.

He also wants to see a drastic change in police numbers and a more permanent military presence on the ground.

“We don’t have a proper government to protect us from enemies in order to protect ourselves, our houses . . . and to protect assets we have to buy guns in order to protect them.”

Parliament urged to act
Last week, the PNG Parliament discussed the issue of gun violence.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird, who is on the opposition benches, has called on the government “to respond”.

He said the “terrorists in the upper Highlands” needed their guns to be stripped from them.

“We are a government for goodness sake — let’s act like one,” Bird said.

Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso agreed with Bird’s sentiments and acknowledged that the situation was serious.

He called on the whole of Parliament to unite to fix the issue together.

RNZ Pacific has contacted the PM Marape’s office for comment with no response yet.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zeleinskiy told his countrymen in a recorded video address from a Kyiv-area airport that was a scene of intense fighting early in the invasion that two years of bitter fighting means "we are 730 days closer to victory."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

"Two years ago, we met an enemy landing force here with fire," Zelenskiy said, before adding in a reference to the array of foreign leaders in Ukraine and at Hostomel Airport to mark the anniversary that "two years later, we meet here our friends, our partners."

He added that it was important that the war end "on our terms."

European Commission President Von der Leyen reportedly traveled to the Ukrainian capital from Poland by train along with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, whose country currently holds the rotating EU Presidency.

Meloni is scheduled to host a videoconference involving Group of Seven (G7) democracy leaders during which Zelenskiy is expected to encourage ongoing support to beat back Europe's first full-scale military invasion since World War II.

On her arrival, von der Leyen said alongside a photo of herself on a train platform in Kyiv that she was there to mark the grim anniversary "and to celebrate the extraordinary resistance of the Ukrainian people."

"More than ever, we stand firmly by Ukraine," she said, "Financially, economically, militarily, morally...[u]ntil the country is finally free."

Before arriving in Ukraine, Trudeau shared his Foreign Minister Melanie Joly's sentiment via X, formerly Twitter, that Canada and its allies were "sending a clear message to [Russia]: Ukraine will not be defeated in the face of Putin’s illegal war."

Words of support have been pouring in from Western leaders.

U.S. President Joe Biden praised the determination of Ukrainians and said "the unprecedented 50-nation global coalition in support of Ukraine, led by the United States, remains committed to providing critical assistance to Ukraine and holding Russia accountable for its aggression."

"The American people and people around the world understand that the stakes of this fight extend far beyond Ukraine," he said.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged Germans and all Europeans to "do even more -- so that we can defend ourselves effectively."

Scholz said that Germany was completely fulfilling its NATO target of 2 percent investment of total economic output into its military for the first time in decades.

Recently installed Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk cited "Two years of Ukrainian heroism. Two years of Russian barbarism. Two years of disgrace of those who remain indifferent."

Maia Sandu, the president of Ukraine's neighbor Moldova, where concerns are high and a long-standing contingent of Russian troops has refused to depart, thanked "Ukrainians for their tireless fight for freedom and for protecting peace in Moldova too."

"In these two years, the free world has shown unprecedented solidarity, yet the war persists; our support must endure fiercely," she said on X.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said "We must renew our determination…on this grim anniversary. This is the moment to show that tyranny will never triumph and to say once again that we will stand with Ukraine today and tomorrow."

The anniversary falls one day after the United States and European Union announced new rounds of hundreds of sanctions targeting Russia and officials responsible for the war, but with Ukrainian officials desperately pleading with the international community to avoid cutoffs in support or a "depletion of empathy."

Ukrainians have battled fiercely since a Russian invasion of hundreds of thousands of troops began on February 24, 2022, after Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to cast doubt on Ukrainian nationhood and eventually said Moscow's goal was the "denazification" and demilitarization of Ukraine's government.

It was a new phase in a land grab that had begun eight years earlier in 2014, when Russia covertly invaded and then annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began intensive support of armed Ukrainian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The United Nations has overwhelmingly voted to back Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty.

WATCH: Current Time correspondents Borys Sachalko, Andriy Kuzakov, and Oleksiy Prodayvod reflect on their wartime experiences together with the cameramen and drivers who form a critical part of their reporting teams.

But a massive assistance package proposed by U.S. President Joe Biden's administration has been blocked primarily by Republicans in Congress.

The European Union managed to pass its own $54 billion aid package for Ukraine earlier this month despite reluctance from member Hungary and talk of Ukraine fatigue.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a recorded statement for the anniversary that "the situation on the battlefield remains extremely serious" and "President Putin's aim to dominate Ukraine has not changed, and there are no indications that he is preparing for peace. But we must not lose heart."

Earlier this week, Stoltenberg told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that the alliance was an advantage that neither Russia nor China could match.

At the UN General Assembly on February 23, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said "Russia's aim is to destroy Ukraine and they are quite outspoken about it," adding that "The only reason for this war has been and remains Russia's denial of Ukraine's right to exist and its continued colonial conquest."

Russian forces last week captured the mostly destroyed eastern city of Avdiyivka as remaining Ukrainian troops withdrew amid reported ammunition shortages to hand Moscow its first significant gain of territory in nearly a year.

The Russian military said on February 24 that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited troops in occupied Ukraine in a clear effort to send a message to Ukraine and its defenders, as well as to a Russian public subjected to heavy censorship and punishments for anti-war dissenters as the "special military operation" has ground on.

"Today, in terms of the ratio of forces, the advantage is on our side," officials quoted Shoigu as telling troops at a Russian command center.

The Russian military further said its troops were on the offensive after having taken Avdiyivka, in the Donetsk region.

Zelenskiy used an interview on the conservative Fox News channel this week to urge the U.S. Congress to pass a $60 billion aid package to help his country defend itself, saying it is cheaper than the consequences of a Russian victory.

Zelenskiy echoed warnings among Russia's other neighbors that Putin will push further into Eastern Europe if he conquers Ukraine.

"Will Ukraine survive without Congress's support? Of course. But not all of us," Zelenskiy said.

On February 24, senior Zelenskiy aide Mykhaylo Podolyak said Ukraine was auditing its "available resources" and said it's impossible to predict when the war might end without a good idea of the amount of weapons and ammunition Kyiv will have at its disposal.

He also suggested the Ukrainian president's office is not currently in favor of peace talks with Russia as it would mean the "gradual death of Ukraine."

Separately, Swiss President Viola Amherd was quoted as telling the Neue Zuercher Zeitung newspaper that Russia was unlikely to participate at the start of a senior-level peace conference that neutral Switzerland hopes to host in the next few months.

The remarks followed Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis telling the United Nations that the idea was broached in January and Bern hoped for such a conference "by this summer."

Russia currently is thought to control around one-fifth of Ukraine's territory.

The Ukrainian military said it had destroyed a Russian A-50 surveillance aircraft after a new round of Russian drone and missile strikes on several Ukrainian regions on February 23, which if confirmed would mark the loss of the second A-50 in just over a month.

The general appointed recently by Zelenskiy as commander in chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskiy, said on February 24 that he is "convinced that unity is our victory."

"And it will definitely happen," he said, "because light always conquers darkness!"

Noting the two-year mark in the invasion, Ukraine's General Staff asserted that Russia had suffered troop casualties of around 409,000 since February 24, 2022.

Both sides classify casualty figures, and RFE/RL cannot confirm the accuracy of accounts by either side of battlefield developments in areas of heavy fighting or of casualty claims.

With reporting by dpa, AFP, and Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to continue the assault on Gaza, we speak with the first Israeli to refuse mandatory military service since Israel’s offensive began over three months ago. Last month, 18-year-old Tal Mitnick announced he would refuse military service in what he called a “revenge war” on Gaza, and was sentenced to 30 days in a military prison. Just released from jail, Mitnick faces another draft summons and says he will refuse “over and over until someone gives up, until the army gives me an exemption.” Mitnick says the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel broke the idea Israel could live with occupation. “We need to keep fighting for a just future,” he says, urging the younger generation of Israelis to use their voices for peace. “We’re the future, and we can change.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Shall we pour over the grotesque statistics one more time? In less than 3 months, the state of Israel has slaughtered over 22,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including nearly 10,000 children. Another 50,000+ have been wounded and everyone on the ground with a functioning calculator seems to agree that this estimate is likely extremely low. Another 7,000 people are missing, including about 5,000 women and children, most of whom are presumed to be dead or dying, crushed beneath the rubble of a crowded urban graveyard decimated by million-dollar murder machines. 85% of a population of 2.3 million is now homeless with 70% of all homes in Gaza and half of all buildings damaged or destroyed. At least a quarter of this population is now on the brink of famine and infectious disease, with public health experts predicting nearly 500,000 to drop dead where they cower within the next year.

Genocide is the word for this, and we all know it, but we all just sit by every day and watch it happen as if it were some kind of sick new reality TV show about blowing up brown children. It’s fucking sickening and the western media’s posture of detached objectivity is the worst kind of complicity money can buy. That’s because this genocide isn’t simply an Israeli genocide, it is an Israeli facilitated proxy genocide and American tax dollars pay for every bomb dropped on another hospital. While the Biden Administration gasps like a soap opera debutante at the deeds of their increasingly unhinged Zionist golem, they hand that sick thing another blank check to keep the bodies rolling. We arm these cannibals with $3.8 billion dollars in aid a year and Genocide Joe still has to circumvent Congress to hand them another $106 million bucks in tank shells so they can shoot orphaned teenage amputees in the ICU.

This is an American holocaust, and we all have blood on our hands now. We can no longer pretend like we don’t know but what do we do? What can we do? What can anyone do? The sense of helplessness hangs heavy in the air with the stench of burning corpses like fog. But then, like a flash of lightening in the desert sky, the Houthi rebels appear. A rugged, swashbuckling, renegade militia of bearded brown pirates straight out of some bygone era of guerrilla solidarity and radical chic. It’s hard for any self-respecting anti-imperialist not to smirk while these Shia Che Guevaras slice up the Red Sea with AKs and Zodiac boats and finally hold western capital responsible for their crimes by simply taxing their access to the waters off their impoverished shores.

The Houthi rebels have boldly hijacked Israeli linked cargo ships and scared many more away with a driving steel rain of drone strikes and missile attacks, and the enemy is feeling the pain. 12% of all global trade passes through the Red Sea, which connects the Mediterranean to Asia via the Suez Canal. This includes a whopping 30% of the world’s shipping traffic. While the Houthis daring nautical stunts have carefully avoided a single civilian casualty, they have effectively rerouted global trade by forcing freight companies to sail all the way around the Cape of Africa for their imperial plunder, causing two-week delays and raising costs by 15%.

And the beautiful thing about this pirate insurgency is that the west is totally powerless to prevent it. America is rattling its silver saber with Operation Prosperity Guardian, a ten-nation coalition that conspicuously excludes any state actually on the Red Sea, with an armada of 20 warships led by two aircraft carrier battle groups. But what have they achieved? A few downed dinghies and a dozen dead rebs? The Houthis laugh and bark “bring it on!” That’s because they know that there is nothing the masters of the universe can do that will save them one dime. Any military action in those waters will only drive business farther away.

For once, the peasants have these fuckers by the balls and the only weapons that Babylon has left at their disposal are your television set and your smartphone. They are working very hard to tell you exactly who they want you to believe these rebels really are and roughly 90% of what they are telling you is pure weapons-grade horseshit. “Iranian proxies! Iranian proxies!” Every time a Shia picks up a gat, you can hear some retired five-star American pigfucker with a merkin toupee squealing “Iranian proxies!” and it’s often half-true but not this time. Yemen’s Houthi rebels may be Shiites but only technically. The Houthis actually belong to a renegade strain of Shia Islam known as Zaydism which is closer in its fundamental theology to Sunni Islam than it is to the dominate Twelver Shiites of Iran who tend to view the Zaydis as heretics.

The Houthi movement formed in the northern Saada province of what was then North Yemen in the 80s as a broad coalition of tribal groups committed to the revival of Zaydism which had previously ruled the region as an imamate for over a thousand years before the west stepped in with their endless procession of proxy strongmen. One of those strongmen was an ambitious thug named Ali Abdullah Saleh who came to power in 1978 and united Yemen for the first time with his conquest of the communist South in 1990. Saleh didn’t take too kindly to the flamboyantly anti-imperialist Houthis who calling him out for being a hired gun for infidel conquistadors, so he violently cracked down on what had originally been a fairly moderate movement with a series of massacres that culminated in the assassination of the Houthi’s founder and namesake, a Zaydi religious scholar and former member of parliament named Hussein al-Houthi, in 2004.

This is when the insurgency really began. Hussein’s brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, quickly transformed the movement into a formidable militia modeled after Lebanon’s Hezbollah and in 2012, on the heels of the Arab Spring, his insurgency exploded into a nationwide popular rebellion. The US and their Saudi henchmen attempted to stop the bleeding by swapping out Saleh for his top general, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, but he didn’t last two years before being overthrown in 2014.

While it is true that the Houthis quite openly take inspiration from Iran’s Islamic Revolution and that the Mullahs have frequently stated their moral support for the movement, their influence has been grossly overblown by the western powers who this rag-tag militia have consistently humiliated. The Iranian’s actually financed Hadi and begged their Houthi admirers not to overthrow the prick. Even after Tehran’s arch enemies in Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen with America’s support in 2014 there exists no verifiable proof of any kind of substantial Iranian assistance.

Even the State Department has admitted as much in cables released by Wikileaks, stating that their analysts believed that the lion’s share of the Houthis growing arsenal actually came from corrupt officials within Yemen’s American-armed Republican Guard who would later collapse and largely join the Houthis after Hadi hit the bricks and sided with the Saudi invaders. The real motivation behind the Houthi’s bombastic campaign in the Red Sea is actually a simple thirst for revolutionary justice.

Much like Gaza, Yemen has been the victim of an atrocious American proxy genocide. After kicking Hadi out, America had their tools in Saudi Arabia cut Yemen off from the outside world with a crippling blockade before financing a seven-year carpet bombing campaign. By the time Washington’s Wahhabi puppets finally forfeited in a truce in 2022, 377,000 Yeminis had been slaughtered, the overwhelming majority of them being women and children of Zaydi decent.

What the Houthis are doing in the Red Sea right now is what the Houthis have always done best and it’s something that any aspiring enemy of the pigfucker state should steal a chapter from. The Houthis are turning the tables on their cowardly tormentors by flipping the script. They have affectively launched their own counter-blockade against another one of America’s proxy states and in the process, they have brilliantly highlighted the fact that the genocide in Gaza is actually just one piece in an international campaign of Washington sponsored terrorism that also includes the genocide in Yemen.

This is what makes the Houthi rebels truly dangerous to empire. It’s not their ideology. It’s their strategy. A form of decentralized guerrilla solidarity that we could all benefit from. Just think about it; Queer anarchists like yours truly hit the streets demanding to abolish the RICO Act which is used to lynch non-binary Atlanta Forest Defenders and outlaw bikers alike. The Hell’s Angels return the favor by trafficking bootleg hormone blockers into states banning their use by minors, selling them to teenage runaways at cut-rate prices using untraceable crypto currencies, empowering hackers to expand the dark web to include humanitarian supplies to besieged polities like Gaza and Yemen, encouraging the decentralization of power among their people which would in turn allow local Queer groups to rise up in solidarity with their conservative Muslim brethren which would in turn encourage conservative Muslims to reproach the third genders that they once coexisted with prior to western colonization.

Local actions directed at a single enemy, provoking a chain reaction of international revolutionary upheaval. I believe that this is what that ghoul Henry Kissinger warned us about with his infamous “Domino Theory” and I do believe that it could still be a beautiful thing.

The post Revenge of the Renegades of the Red Sea appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

The new year may well be shaped – and remembered – by the outcome of the elections.  Will Joe Biden be reelected in the face of the ever-worsening situations in Israel/Gaza and the Ukraine? Will Donald Trump secure the Republican nomination – let alone be reelected — in the face of the serious legal cases he faces?  Will the Democrats hold onto the Senate, let alone recapture the House or will the MAGA Republicans capture more seats in both Houses?

While these are open questions, a rightwing Christian campaign is being waged to finally (!) claim victory in the culture wars.  These wars have been fought on many fronts.  In his 1970 book, Dare to Discipline, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, ranted against the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, “God is dead; immorality is wonderful; nudity is noble.” He was repulsed by the permissiveness championed by A. S. Neill’s Summerhill.

Dodson feared the “rapid reversal of social mores [that] is unparalleled in man’s history” and warned, “Never has a society abandoned its concept of morality more suddenly than … in America during the decade of the sixties.”  For many traditionalists and mainstream Americans, pot, LSD, rock-&-roll, sex, civil rights anti-war politics and the new sexual freedoms were threats to the nation’s moral order.  His sentiments were shared by California’s newly elected governor, Ronald Reagan, who denounced a 60s hippie as someone who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”

The Christian right’s culture wars were undercut by the capitalist market economy.  Noting more effectively softened the sting of long-haired hippies, uppity Blacks, pushy women, challenging music or looser morals than their absorption into the marketplace.  Styles changed, fashion was reinvented, social relations began to change, and corporate America realized it could make lots of money from the new secularized and sexualized culture. Slowly, the nation’s values changed.

Amidst the neo-liberal remaking of the nation’s values, the Christian right was slowly regaining power. In 1992, Republican strategist Pat Buchanan gave an impassioned speech at his party’s convention, recalling the past and foreshadowing struggles yet to come:

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

Bill Clinton won the ’92 presidential election.

***

By 2016, a new, new right was in ascendency marked by Donald Trump’s election as president and the Republicans’ capture of the House of Representatives in 2022.  The most consequential–and Trump’s most lasting action–was packing the Supreme Court with three conservative Christian Republicans. Their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health (2022) helped repeal Roe v. Wade (1973), thus limiting a woman’s right to the privacy of medical care for an abortion. Symbolically, Dobbs ended the culture wars.  Since Dobbs, 14 states have enacted near-total abortion bans and two states – Georgia and South Carolina – have banned abortion past roughly six weeks of pregnancy.

The Court’s ruling appears to have been a politically calculated decision.  As The New York Times reported, “Justice [Samuel] Alito appeared to have pregamed it among some of the conservative justices, out of view from other colleagues, to safeguard a coalition more fragile than it looked.”  It noted:

The most glaring irregularity was the leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft. The identity and motive of the person who disclosed it remains unknown, but the effect of the breach is clear: It helped lock in the result, The Times found, undercutting Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer’s quest to find a middle ground.

The Dobbs decision – and more yet to come – will have rippling effects throughout the country that will likely only get worse in 2024.

Many of the Christian right are nationalists and need an enemy to target their rage. They have singled out non-documented immigrants for attack.  At a December 16^th Republican rally in New Hampshire, Trump gave voice to this nationalist rage by ranting, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”  Going further, he complained that immigrants were coming to the U.S. from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. “All over the world they are pouring into our country.” This rage will likely only get worse in the new year.

The Christian right has also targeted education, both public grade schools and higher ed.  Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school.  As has been reported, “A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

Parallel to this effort, 32 states plus Washington, D.C., offer some type of school choice program, an effort to employ free market principles to the K-12 education.  Many of these programs use school vouchers, education tax dollars diverted from public schools to help subsidize the tuition of private and religious schools. These programs are being pushed to end “public” education.

Republican-controlled state legislations and governors across the country have moved aggressively against what children and college students can read.  Book bans are soaring in number. PEN America reports during the year from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, there were 3,362 instances of book banning in public school classrooms and libraries. This is a 38 percent increase from the year prior and is spreading throughout the country, with 1,406 in Florida; 625 in Texas; 333 in Missouri; 281 in Utah and 186 in Pennsylvania. Sadly, additional bans in more states are likely in the school year 2024.

Equally troubling, right-wingers have moved aggressively to reshape the school curriculum.  In Texas, Republicans want to see the Bible, prayer and the Ten Commandments back in the classroom and other government buildings.  “Critical race theory” has been banned and 20 states have introduced more than 30 bills targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs.

Part of the broad attack on education is the challenge to science and public health. This gained great visibility during the Covid pandemic and the rise of the anti-vaxxer movement.  It is promoted by Robert Kennedy, Jr., and championed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). One study reports “22 percent of Americans self-identify as anti-vaxxers.”

And then there is the targeting of transgender youths.  The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 75 percent of white evangelicals felt strongly that there are only two genders, “man or woman,” compared to only 44 percent of adult Americans overall. The Equality Federation reports that in 2023, state lawmakers introduced 200 anti-transgender bills, more than all of the anti-trans bills introduced in 2022.  These measures would ban gender-affirming health care for youth and young adults; restrict bathrooms; prevent families in hostile states from traveling elsewhere for care; and force teachers to “out” transgender students to their parents even if those parents will harm the kids as a result.

The Christian right has also targeted “drag” or cross-dressing performers.  For example, the Judicial Committee for the Nebraska Legislature heard public testimony over LB 371, a bill that would criminalize drag shows where minors are present.  Will “homosexuals” — whether female, male or non-gendered identified — be the next target?

Elements of the Christian right are moving to redefine the meaning of U.S. democracy. One example is Texas GOP’s proposed “right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”  Another involves the well-funded campaign by ALEC and others of the right to gain control of state legislatures.  As detailed by The Progressive, “Citizens for Self-Government” seeks “to return this nation to its pre-Constitution roots under the Articles of Confederation, with a weak central government and sovereign states.”

And then there is global warming, the environmental crisis.  As clearly revealed in the UN’s COP-28, profits come first, and the environment and humans come a far second.  The U.S. ranks second to China as the worst global polluter and four-fifths (81%) of the nation’s energy comes from fossil fuels – i.e., oil, coal and gas.  Little is likely to change — and it might well get worse – in the foreseeable future.

***

The current rightwing Christian insurgency is a result of significant, structural changes remaking the nation.  The 2008 fiscal crisis helped ushered in the growing shift from a U.S.-dominate “unipolar” world order to one John Mearsheimer identified as a “change in the balance of power has created a situation where we’re moving away from unipolarity and toward multipolarity.”

Perhaps more indicative, the 2020 Census makes clear that the demographic clock is ticking against the white Republicans – and they know it!  The racial/ethnic composition of the country is changing and by 2050, the U.S. will be a “majority-minority” country, with white non-Hispanics making up less than half of the total population.

Equally critical, the U.S. is becoming an ever-increasing urban nation with about 83 percent of the population living in cities.  Rural America is losing it population to more attractive urban centers, most often supporting Democrats.  It seems that as their relative proportion of the U.S. population shrink, their rage increases.

But most troubling, income inequality is deepening.  As Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) wrote, “The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people.”

This perception was confirmed by the U.S. Census Bureau that, in January 2022, the U.S reported that in 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019 – that’s an official poverty rate of 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019.  The “poverty threshold” for a four-person family in 2020 was $26,496.

The Census Bureau also reported that between 2019 and 2020, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites and Hispanics. Among non-Hispanic Whites, 8.2 percent were in poverty in 2020, while Hispanics had a poverty rate of 17.0 percent.  In addition, Black Americans had the highest poverty rate at 19.5 percent.

2004 may well be a fateful year.  The Dobbs decision formally ended the half-century culture wars, marking the ascendency of the Christian right.  The conservatives’ victory is reverberating through menacing campaigns being waged on innumerable fronts, from privacy rights and education to global warming, the nature of U.S. democracy and beyond.  Republicans in smaller and more rural states are moving aggressively to impose their values on not only Congress but the nation as a whole, especially more “liberal,” urban states.

In the face of these challenges, 2024 may well see the resurgence of a new “liberal,” “progressive,” critical and humane social movement – one anchored in the redistribution of wealth and the end of ever-growing inequality.  Such a movement may well be able to save the nation from its long-held fears of the other, the unknown and the different.

The post Revenge of the Repressed in 2024 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When I was in my early twenties, I seriously considered murdering someone. He had given my best friend genital herpes, which many health practitioners then believed was the agent responsible for causing cervical cancer in women. (It wasn’t.)

Back in the 1970s, though, I believed that, by infecting my friend, he might have set in motion a process that would someday kill her. That he was an arrogant jerk made it that much easier for me to contemplate murdering him. But there was a larger context to my private dream of revenge. My anger was also fed by a growing awareness that so many of us were just then acquiring of the history of systematic patriarchal threats to, and constraints on, the lives of women. And in those heady days of second-wave radical feminism, I could imagine killing that man as a legitimate response, however brutal, to the male violence that seemed to surround me, and as part of a larger uprising of women.

Lest you think that my sense of systemic, state-supported male violence was nothing more than a fever dream of the times, remember that, in the 1970s, domestic violence was still often treated as a predictably normal possibility in marriage. Men’s white sleeveless T-shirts were known as “wife-beaters” and, on reruns of The Honeymooners, I could still watch comedian Jackie Gleason threaten to use his fist to send his wife Alice “to the moon.” Oh, and should you think that everything has changed since then, today, more than half a century after my murderous daydreaming, the Supreme Court is considering a case that could overturn a federal law prohibiting someone from buying a gun while still under a domestic-violence restraining order.

When I remember what I considered doing at the time, however, I’m now horrified. Even then, I was an antiwar activist, a proponent of nonviolent action against the still-ongoing American war in Vietnam and in the struggle for Black rights here at home. But truly grasping the level of woman-hatred then drove me a little crazy and gave me the urge to fight back in kind.

Epistemic Certainty and War

Was I overreacting to the idea of my friend getting a sexually transmitted disease? Of course I was, especially by trusting so completely my “knowledge” about the connection between herpes and cervical cancer. In fact, what I “knew” would prove dead wrong decades later. Indeed, I didn’t even know (with what a philosopher might call “epistemic certainty“) that my friend had gotten herpes from that particular guy in the first place. But someone gave it to her, and someone, I thought, should pay.

My murderous intentions then might serve as a miniature version of President George W. Bush’s epistemic certainty in 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t.) Did Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, truly believe in those weapons of mass destruction? My guess is that they just wanted to invade Iraq and didn’t care one way or the other. Nonetheless, enough people in this country did believe in them — including that illustrious flagship newspaper the New York Times— for the invasion to take place with the support of a majority of Americans.

According to the Iraq Body Count project, at least 300,000 people would die in that war, a substantial majority of them civilians. Brown University’s Costs of War Project has tallied up the human costs of all of America’s post-9/11 wars of revenge and found that “at least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher.”

Millions more, Costs of War’s research suggests, were killed indirectly through economic collapse, the disruption of public services and health systems, and environmental contamination. And 38 million people were displaced from their homes thanks to Washington’s post-9/11 “Global War on Terror.” That’s about 1,300 people made homeless for each of the almost 3,000 who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Those 9/11 attacks were a hideous crime. But none of the 19 men directly responsible for them were citizens of any of the countries against which the United States launched its wars of reprisal. (Fifteen were Saudis, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was Egyptian, and one Lebanese.) Still, it didn’t matter to the people of this country. Someone had killed almost 3,000 of us that day, so someone had to pay.

Horror from Gaza, Horror in Gaza

On October 7, 2023, as the world watched in horror, the military wing of Hamaslaunched a surprise attack from Gaza, murdering about 1,200 people, most of them Israelis, most of them civilians, significant numbers of them children. They kidnapped as many as 240 others, a few of whom have since died and a few of whom have been released. I must admit that I’m glad my father, raised as an Orthodox Jew in this country, didn’t live to see that day.

Like the U.S. in 2001, Israel has now launched its war of reprisal. The announced goal is the complete destruction of Hamas, which, whether achievable or not, now seems to entail the destruction of much of Gaza itself.

More than 12,000 people, nearly half of them children, have already been killed as of this writing. Half the population — over a million people — have been forcibly displaced from the northern to the southern part of Gaza, supposedly to avoid a crushing aerial war. Meanwhile, an estimated 45% of all housing units in the north have been damaged or destroyed. On November 16th, however, Israel began warning people in Khan Younis, a town in southern Gaza that they would have to move again, as its ground war continued to expand.

To understand what this means, it’s helpful to look at a map of the area. It’s called the Gaza “Strip” because it’s a roughly rectangular little strip of land, less than 25 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point. Yet it houses 2.2 million people (half of whom are 18 or younger). It’s surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, Egypt to the south, and Israel on the east and north. Because most Gazans can never leave and communication with the rest of the world has largely been controlled by Israel, it has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Epistemic Certainty (and Bombs) Strike Again

Despite the fact that international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, absolutely forbids attacks on medical facilities in wartime, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched repeated raids on a number of hospitals and health centers, including the Al-Shifa Hospital, a sprawling medical center in northern Gaza. Here we encounter another instance of how epistemic certainty is used to justify wars and their inevitable collateral damage. In this case, the Israeli government maintained that Al-Shifa sat atop a major Hamas command-and-control center, part of a network of underground tunnels. Just as certainty about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction justified American crimes in those post-9/11 wars, certainty about a command center that may well turn out not to exist justified attacks on one of northern Gaza’s last functioning hospitals.

There’s no need to further catalog the horrors of this war here. The world’s media has done little else for the last month and a half. Meanwhile, wars continue elsewhere: an ongoing conflict in Sudan has killed thousands and displaced millions to almost no notice in the U.S. media; Europe is living through a World War I-style conflict in Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian armies continue to chew through the lives of thousands of soldiers to advance a few yards in one direction or the other.

War Works — for the Weapons Companies

“War! What is it good for?”

That’s the question the Motown group the Temptations asked back in 1968. Their answer, as people my age will remember, was: “Absolutely nothing!” Modern wars almost always kill more civilians than combatants, especially when collateral effects like the destruction of infrastructure are taken into account, and they rarely achieve their stated objectives.

And yet, today’s wars are regularly fought because people believe war is the best, often the only method of protecting innocent people from violent death. Collective human experience would seem to suggest the opposite. As a means of preventing death, war really does leave something to be desired. Even if you’re willing to treat the deaths of enemy civilians as a “necessary” price to pay for your own people’s survival, history suggests that, in the long run, those deaths won’t protect you. Unless the IDF is prepared to kill everyone in Gaza, it’s unlikely that those who live through the present nightmare will come out of it with less desire to kill Israelis than they had before it started.

It turns out, however, that wars — big and small — are good for something: enriching the corporations that manufacture weapons. As the Los Angeles Times reported in September, the war in Ukraine has been a boon to weapons manufacturers, especially in the United States:

“Weapons companies are seeing their shares rise on the stock market to their best level in years, with indexes for the defense sector outperforming those tracking the broader market by a wide margin… The combat in Ukraine, now in its second year, has jacked [up] the global arms trade, fueling a new appetite for matériel not just in Moscow and Kyiv but also around the world as nations gird themselves for possible confrontations. The war has rocked long-standing relationships within the weapons industry, rejiggered the calculations of who sells what to whom and changed customers’ tastes in what they want in their arsenal.”

One example of this realignment: Israel and the United Arab Emirates have started a joint weapons development project. European governments, too, from the United Kingdom to Germany, have raised their weapons-production game, with Germany pledging to spend $100 billion to re-equip its armed forces in the next few years.

Now, Ukraine seeks to kill two birds (and a lot of people) with one stone, by partnering with U.S. companies to turn the country into what the Associated Press calls a “weapons hub for the west.” As the Ukrainian Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin told the AP, “We’re really focusing on making Ukraine the arsenal of the free world.”

War may not be healthy for children and other living things, but it’s great for the arms industry.

Is There No Alternative?

Why, when war so rarely seems to achieve its stated aims, are the people who seek alternatives to it invariably considered naïve or stupid? Where is the wisdom in doing the same murderous thing again and again, each time expecting a different outcome?

War, we are told, is necessary because there is no legitimate alternative. Refusal to use violence when you’ve been attacked or when you live under a regime of grinding oppression is at best stupidity and at worst cowardice. Yet for decades, as journalist Peter Beinart wrote eloquently in the New York Times after the October 7th attacks, Palestinians, who are neither stupid nor cowards, have done precisely that — employing time-honored strategies like the 2018 March of Return, a series of massive peaceful demonstrations at the Israeli wall surrounding Gaza. In the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, Palestinians have adopted a method once employed by the African National Congress to bring pressure on South Africa’s apartheid regime. As a senator, Joe Biden voted for sanctions on South Africa, but as president, he’s condemned the BDS movement as “too often veer[ing] into antisemitism.”

In Israel/Palestine, it turns out there is an alternative to war, indeed more than one. It’s not easy or safe, however. The Israeli organization Standing Together, for example, unites Palestinians and Jews in concrete work, like running a bilingual hotline for people affected by violence or racism, in an effort to bypass what they see as the stagnation miring both major NGOs and the leftist parties in Israel. In the wake of the October 7th attack, they wrote to their supporters:

“After over a month in this horrific reality, the feelings of despair are starting to creep up on everyone. It’s in moments like these that solidarity and hope are more important than ever. If we let despair win, we lose our ability to act, and if we don’t act, we won’t have an impact on our reality. We know that, in these incredibly difficult times, we must continue to act — by strengthening the partnership between Jews and Palestinians — and working together to start to think about what happens the day after this deadly war ends, and what kind of society we want to build.”

Standing Together is not alone in seeking another way. One of those killed by Hamas was peace activist Vivian Silver, who spent her life building connections between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. She served on the board of B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, and routinely drove Gazans in her car to healthcare appointments in Israel. In her newsletter, her friend Dana Mills, a former director of the Israeli group Peace Now, wrote that “the only way to avenge this horrific loss of Vivian’s life” is to continue to support her demand for justice and peace for everyone “between the river and the sea.”

That response to Silver’s death continues the tradition of nonviolent action as the only possible means of interrupting a deadly cycle of revenge and counter-revenge.

In her essay “On Revolution and Equilibrium,” written at the height of the Black Power movement, the nonviolent activist Barbara Deming addressed a number of critiques of nonviolent action by her comrades. Far from being a coward’s way out, Deming argued, nonviolence in response to aggression is so difficult precisely because it’s so dangerous. On the other hand, nonviolence doesn’t condemn your own side to mass suicide. Take the long view, the one that might extend beyond our own personal deaths, and you’ll see that eventually those who oppose violent oppression with nonviolent obstruction will take fewer casualties than those who choose armed struggle. Eventually (though never soon enough), we’ll wear out the opposition. Yes, some of us will certainly die in the process, because we face real violence. But we’re already dying. The only question is how to prevent more death.

As Deming wrote,

“In nonviolent struggle, the violence used against one may mount for a while (indeed, if one is bold in one’s rebellion, it is bound to do so), but the escalation is no longer automatic; with the refusal of one side to retaliate, the mainspring of the automation has been snapped and one can count on reaching a point where de-escalation begins. One can count, that is, in the long run, on receiving far fewer casualties.”

I am glad that I encountered this tradition of vigorous nonviolent struggle back when I was in the grip of that murderous rage. It convinced me that I could take more effective action against the systems that demeaned and constrained me than any of my nightmare dreams of violent revenge could offer. The longer I live, the surer I become that, in a world filled with deadly armed struggles, nonviolent rebellion is the only way off the hamster wheel of war.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

The post On Ending Dreams of Revenge in Israel, Palestine, and Elsewhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rebecca Gordon.

Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

—Ruby Freeman, Georgia election worker

“Hey, you stupid slave nigger…You are in our sights, we want to kill you. If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch.”

—Abigail Jo Shry, Texas Trump cultist’s threat to Judge Tanya Chutkan

“They must serve as examples for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

—Donald Trump on the Central Park Five

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

—Richard Nixon,

Revenge porn is the GOP’s new black.

“I am your retribution,” Donald Trump, America’s bloated, bloviating Batman, declares.

“We’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” promises Ron DeSantis, glitchy governator of Florida, the state where history goes to die, and being comatose is touted as a virtue.

Meanwhile, in congressional hearings, the queen of laptop porn, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, parades explicit photos of a naked Hunter Biden and his redacted junk to score MAGA points against President Joe Biden. This conduct is relatively tame for the rabid Greene, who has labeled Pelosi a “traitor,” advocated for her assassination, and spread baseless innuendos when a homicidal home intruder fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.

It seems that Trump and his supporters will not be satisfied until MAGA cultists take down his political enemies and, ultimately, the country.

They are encouraged by Trump, who has always spoken, unfiltered, the language of vengeance and violence. In 1989, as a real estate mogul, he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five since 2002, although Trump, who was found liable for sexual assault in the E. Jean Carroll case, refuses to acknowledge their innocence or to apologize. As a 2016 presidential candidate, he boasted of sexually assaulting women and condoned an attack on a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his campaign rallies. As president, he “joked” that police should rough up suspects they take into custody and once asked former Defense Secretary Mark Esper why White House demonstrators protesting the murder of George Floyd couldn’t just be shot.

Trump’s language, however inciteful, is protected by the First Amendment. His actions are not. And while Trump is many deplorable things – racist, psychopath, pathological liar, xenophobe, misogynist, and cis-supremacist – a fool is not one of them. He may notoriously boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” but, like the mafia dons he channels, he knows that rather than risk the consequences of committing such an act himself, it’s best to leave the dirty work to others. That is what minions and co-conspirators are for. After all, this is the bone-spurred no-show who promised his followers on January 6 that he would join them at the Capitol.

Despite his threats and intimidation, Defcon Don remains an imperiously impervious and untouchable pariah who, his 20-minute, whirlwind excursion to the Fulton County Jail aside, may never see the insides of an actual jail cell. The norms of the criminal justice system simply do not apply to him: mugshots are optional, perp walks are negotiated, arraignments are breezily expedited. Does anyone doubt that, unlike social media influencer Kai Cenat, if Trump had conjured up a flash mob in front of Trump Tower for a giveaway of mugshot¹ NFTs and a riot broke out, he and his followers would have been allowed to leisurely broker their arraignment dates, not arrested on the spot?

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 400,000 Americans are currently being detained pretrial – but not the quadruplely indicted Trump. In Georgia, the “billionaire” braggart’s bond was set at a mere $200,000, $300,000 less than that of his former fixer Michael Cohen who was convicted of hush money payments to a porn star on Trump’s behalf. One would think that conspiring to subvert democracy is a more serious offense.

Trump has already orchestrated one insurrection and is determined to incite another. Yet he remains not only a free man but the GOP presidential frontrunner, converting his many indictments into political currency. Of the eight “law and order” Republican presidential hopefuls on the debate stage in Milwaukee, all but two declared they would support Trump for party nominee even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” These duplicitous defenders of the Constitution see nothing wrong with backing a man for president who has proven himself incapable of upholding and protecting it.

After much stalling, it appears that with Trump’s Georgia booking our system of justice is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before, including two impeachments and a civil case, only to see him evade accountability.

This matters little to his supporters who hold his First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights more important than the rule of law, despite the threat of inciting stochastic terrorism Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric poses to the nation.

Trump has made no secret about whom he deems to be his enemies. His words have already endangered the lives of Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, New York County D.A.Alvin Bragg, New York A.G. Letitia James, and Washington, D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan. Encouraged by their puppet master, Trump supporters wasted no time doxing the Fulton County grand jury. That most of his targets are black and women should surprise no one.

Fulton County Jail’s nominal “inmate” No. P01135809 has been repeatedly warned about his threats. Yet despite a few tentative toe-dips in the shallow pool of judicial equity, everything so far indicates that Trump is above the law, where he will remain so long as optics takes precedence over principle and the equal application of justice.

The optics of concern here is not that of a two-tiered justice system. Rather, it is that the sight of Trump’s conviction and imprisonment would send the wrong message to the world that America has become a Third World “shithole country.” Sadly, concern over such optics overrides any about the fate of our democracy should his crimes go unpunished.

Some seem to think that Trump’s disgrace and humiliation are punishment enough. The media point to the dilapidated, overcrowded conditions of the Fulton County Jail, which are good enough (or bad enough) for mundane criminals but apparently too “extreme” for the former president. Crocodile tears fully primed, the media mouths concern about the “nightmarish public health” conditions at the jail, fully aware that the odds of Trump spending a night – or any time – behind its bars are nil. And even if Trump were incarcerated, does anybody believe that he would be treated like any other inmate or come to share the same fate as LaShawn Thompson, whose body was found “dehydrated, malnourished, and infested inside and out with insects”? Or would maggot removal be added to the roster of duties of the Secret Service?

For some, the optics of Trump’s booking and scowling mugshot might inspire optimism that the system is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before with Trump, only to witness the gravity-defying farce of trickle-up justice. Of course, it has yet to be proven in a court of law that Trump conspired to steal the election, but the question remains: What consequences will he face if and when it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he has? Moreover, what happens if Trump is convicted of his felonies in New York and Georgia but wins the Republican primary and the general election? Will he be imprisoned? Will the big house become the new White House?

The threat remains that if Trump is not convicted, he will run for president in perpetuity if only to stay out of prison. As early as August 2020, years before his serial indictments, Trump telegraphed his intent to cling to the presidency “4eva.” The means to thwart his authoritarian ambitions exist, but their use will require a measure of political will that those currently in a position to act lack.

Some comfort may be taken in the fact that legal scholars have revisited the theory that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the so-called disqualification clause, which bars elected officials who have violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and engaged in insurrection against the United States from running for and holding political office, could be invoked to derail a Trump dictatorship that would see him and his allies enact political retribution against individuals and institutions responsible for his present predicament.

Realpolitik, however, reveals that its successful use is far from guaranteed. Except for New Mexico County Commissioner Couy Griffin, attempts in 2022 to invoke the clause to remove insurrectionist Republican officials from office have uniformly failed. In Georgia, the non-profit group Free Speech for the People invoked the clause in a suit to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene’s name from the ballot there. Similar campaigns were launched against North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar. None succeeded. And while Republican New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is reportedly listening to those advocating use of the clause to block Trump’s name from appearing on ballots in his state’s presidential primary, and Florida lawyer Lawrence Caplan has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, it is unlikely that other Republican secretaries of state will cooperate in these efforts and far more likely that they will move to stymie them.

Still, a bevy of legal scholars and jurists, including Lawrence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig and William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, have argued that the disqualification clause is “self-executing,” claiming violators are automatically disqualified from running for and holding political office and that disqualification does not require a criminal conviction. As Luttig explained on CNN,

All officials, federal and state, who have a responsibility to put on the ballot candidates for the presidency of the United States…are obligated under the Constitution to determine whether Donald Trump qualifies to be put on the ballot. That is, they must determine themselves whether he is disqualified from being listed on the ballot by Section 3. Now, here’s how this will work: Any secretary of state or other state election official who’s charged with that responsibility will make the determination. Now, whether that person decides that former President Trump is qualified or whether he or she determines that he is disqualified by Section 3 and therefore doesn’t list him, that decision will be immediately challenged in federal court, and it will quickly move to the Supreme Court of the United States, where this decision will have to be made prior to the 2024 election.

Nonetheless, some serious doubts temper any optimism. Congress, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, can remove the disqualification, something it has done twice: In 1872, in the name of national reconciliation, it enacted the Amnesty Act, which lifted restrictions barring former Confederates from voting and holding office, and in 1898, it voted to end Section 3. The only other time Congress invoked the clause was in 1919 when it refused to seat socialist Victor Berger for his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, a decision that was later overturned (Berger eventually served three terms). On the other hand, in the 1970s, Congress passed joint resolutions to grant Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis posthumous Section 3 amnesty. Here, too, the aim was national reconciliation in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War. According to New York City Bar, there is currently no congressional legislation to enforce Section 3.

Given its rightwing majority, placing one’s faith in the Supreme Court seems criminally naïve. Aside from the fact the initial intent of the clause has repeatedly been nullified by a desire for “national unity,” and with rumors of impending civil war now indelibly a part of the zeitgeist, it seems unlikely that Congress or SCOTUS will rise to the challenge.

Note

1. The Fulton County mugshots have proven anticlimactic, as they are little more than mostly dour DMV portraits. I had envisioned front view and side view shots, height backdrops, and handheld slates with names and inmate numbers on them. But I guess what’s good for Young Thug is good for Old Thug and his gang of eighteen.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

Photograph Source: Victoria Reay – CC BY 2.0

For decades now I’ve written columns for local papers. Like Wendell Berry (and here’s where the comparison ends) the scribbling was typically on a yellow pad with the tweaking shown though cross-outs, arrows pointing this way and that, and other tells declaring a work-in-progress.

Almost 20 years ago however a local editor offered me a weekly column. “How many words?” I asked.

“About a thousand,” he said. But…. he continued, a computer would be preferred for composition and delivery. I resisted, and for some time continued the pen/paper method and hand-delivered the typed efforts to his office. The paper then delegated one of the staffers to enter the piece into the system, retyping the thing into the paper’s computer matrix.

But sometimes there were typos or things left out. That annoyed me enough that I finally got a (very) used Mac and learned how to type and finagle just enough to file stuff using the supposedly more efficient/ “green(?)” technology based on strip-mined coal, nuclear reactors, scarce earth metals, and the endorphin-enthrallment of the tele-screen.

So I got-with-the-program. But then there was the time when the gizmo ate my column. (Just like today.)

Back then, a friend and I had ventured to Maine’s  agricultural trade show. It’s still an annual ritual; walking among the increasingly aged ruralists, slower (and gimpier) each year, between the aisles of tractors, 3 point hitch winches, hydraulic attachments, and various vendor tables.

On our way back there was a stop to pick up some feed-grain. Dark was coming fast as we turned off the interstate and down a country road to a failed dairy farm. We passed a derelict silo and a weathered 50s Farmall, finally arriving at an old barn where the grain had been left for loading. Cargo aboard we turned back toward the lights of “northern Massachusetts”/ southern Maine.

That twilight excursion brought to mind the literary themes around what used to be called “mutability”—— entropic withering and “the fleeting lives of human beings.” So I wrote about it and the piece seemed to work, but when I attempted to paste it into an email it disappeared. In flailing  distress, I tried to retrieve the draft but no luck. I called the editor as deadline approached. He assured me that the thing wasn’t REALLY gone—— just bring the machine over and he’d retrieve it. I did. He couldn’t.

Returning home I attempted a re-write with deadline bearing down, but the fickle muse was on-break. It was disappointing.

Lost in translation? Live by the sword, die by the same?

Being more diligent since then, fewer files have been mistakenly lost/deleted, but about 400 words in, today’s draft went missing, apparently due to an errant key stroke. For someone as unschooled in the mysteries of the digital nether-world as your humble narrator, such episodes bring on a sense of powerlessness usually only experienced at city council meetings, or in the voting booth.

Yes, dear reader, we have had writing and agriculture for thousands of years—— computers for mere decades now. While a GPS-guided tractor can conceivably plant a straighter row than a flesh-and-blood farmer, the emotional bond of people to a place is something that AI and pulsing diodes cannot replace. We are told that self-driving cars will be a boon to the species and worth the road-kill along the way. Writers can be replaced by Artificial Intelligence-enabled chatbots we’re told. Who needs pesky union writers when a bot can write the lead-in to Smack-Down installments, the celebrity-crime distraction, or the latest (good vs. evil) war-of-opportunity fable.

So meetings and experience become virtual, newspapers disappear and abbreviated tweets proliferate as life expectancy declines here, the homeless sick and despairing wander our streets, and human society appears utterly unable to face the existential crisis of a relentlessly heating planet (or frankly any other serious issue).

In a country all gizmo-ed up, any change to business-as-usual seems quite unlikely, though those given to magical thinking or “hopium” may tell you otherwise.

June 16th the local paper’s “Business section”  carried a few words from Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General, one not given to magical thinking. The AP report noted that his “blunt attack” on the fossil fuel industry “reflects growing frustrations at the industry’s recent profit bonanza, despite scientists’ warnings that burning fossil fuels will push the world far beyond a safe climate threshold.” He called their product “incompatible with human survival,” and argued that, “Trading away the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral.”

Well….. yeah.

Sharing Guterres’ remarks was the original point of the column that my gizmo ate. So there it is.  Should the reader regret my lack of table-setting for Guterres’ refreshing candor, the problem might be partly gizmodal malfunction and my tech-ineptitude.

Sorry.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Rhames.

The agent of chaos is at it again. Boris Johnson, frontman of the Brexit disaster show, prime minister responsible for breaking regulations, rules and laws, and overall self-serving gross figure of indulgence, has decided to throw in the towel. He is leaving the House of Commons. The time had come for him to walk to the cricketing Pavilion, accepting the Umpire’s verdict.

Not that Johnson was exactly thrilled with the decision. The findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee in what is known as the Partygate Report were damning. Released on June 15, 2023, the 30,000-word document details the numerous instances the then Prime Minister systematically undermined the very same pandemic regulations that his own government had implemented, only to then consistently mislead and deceive, most notably the Commons itself. In “deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government.”

The nature of that misleading conduct centred on Johnson’s refusal to double-check advice given to him by, for instance, Jack Doyle, his former press secretary, over a number of gatherings on whether they were compliant with COVID-19 rules and guidance. Johnson’s Principal Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds, had also pressed Johnson on the issue as to whether the guidance “had been followed at all times”, notably on the December 18, 2020 gathering. He wondered “whether it was realistic to argue that all Guidance had been followed at all times, given the nature of the working environment in No. 10. He agreed to delete the reference to Guidance.”

The report had to be rewritten at short notice to take into account Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Had he remained, the Committee members would have recommended a 90-day suspension for, among other things, the former PM’s deliberate misleading of the House, members of the Committee, and being “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of” its members. Instead, it concluded that Johnson should be deprived of his Member’s pass.

The Committee took umbrage at Johnson’s attack upon its members, which he condemned as undemocratic, a kangaroo court, and executioners of a witch hunt. “We consider,” states the report, “that these statements are completely unacceptable. In our view this conduct, together with the egregious breach of confidentiality, is a serious further contempt”.

His overall contemptuous attitude to the inquiry was also conveyed by his effort “to re-write the meaning of the [pandemic] rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”. One example was the “assertion that ‘imperfect’ social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.”

Johnson’s base of supporters is a shrinking one; but from pandemonium land some continue to express their support. Nigel Adams, MP for Selby and Ainsty, wished to no longer occupy his position in the Commons. Then came former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who initially claimed she was going to “immediately” step down, only to then do a bit of fence sitting. Bruised in not getting her promised peerage from Johnson, she is seeking answers from the House of Lords appointment committee. She has also warned that any Tory MP who would side with the findings of the report “will be held to account by members of the public. Deselections may follow. It’s serious.”

Brendan Clarke-Smith, MP for Bassetlaw, was similarly “appalled” by the “spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report.” He promised to “be speaking against them both publicly and in the House”. The comically anachronistic Tory Man of the Nineteenth Century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, found himself in agreement, observing that Parliament, when standing “upon its dignity […] often ends up looking foolish. The Privileges Committee report is a case in point.”

Many of the supporters can be said to be part of the scandalous “Honours List” that Johnson drew up on grounds of gratitude, a veritable Who’s Who of fans and flunkeys that was, for the most part, approved by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. One was the 29-year-old Charlotte Tranter Owen, who has become the youngest life peer in British history. Her less than distinguished journey from York University graduate to a life peer took a mere six unremarkable years.

While some Tories have been desperate to jettison the Johnson link, many were complicit in stacking the compendium of deception. As Peter Oborne explains, the Tory party saw Johnson as an election winner. For three years, they were “thus prepared to put up with his false claims. Ministers and MPs appeared happy to repeat claims on radio and television, in print, and inside the Commons chamber.”

Sunak is, therefore, in more than a spot of bother, not least because Johnson will be holding fort as a newly appointed columnist at the Daily Mail. His plight is made worse given his struggling efforts to keep the party together before potential electoral oblivion. Johnson, with his poison pen tirades, is unlikely to help.

A final note on the whole Boris Bonanza is also worth reiterating. For Oborne, “Johnson will be remembered by history as the most immoral, dishonest and morally squalid of all British premiers.” This is going a bit far; it was a certain Tony Blair who, playing the role of sidekick to US President George W. Bush, embarked upon an illegal war that led to the destruction of Iraq and a good portion of the Middle East. His conduct, both directly or otherwise, in the confection, and intentional misreading of intelligence material elevating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the level of globally dangerous despot, must surely be seen as squalid as any. Along the way, he corrupted public life and politicised institutions. And yet he moves and speaks, to this day, with impunity – the one who got away.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Boris Johnson

Not that Johnson was exactly thrilled with the decision. The findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee in what is known as the Partygate Report were damning. Released on June 15, 2023, the 30,000-word document details the numerous instances the then Prime Minister systematically undermined the very same pandemic regulations that his own government had implemented, only to then consistently mislead and deceive, most notably the Commons itself. In “deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government.”

The nature of that misleading conduct centred on Johnson’s refusal to double-check advice given to him by, for instance, Jack Doyle, his former press secretary, over a number of gatherings on whether they were compliant with COVID-19 rules and guidance. Johnson’s Principal Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds, had also pressed Johnson on the issue as to whether the guidance “had been followed at all times”, notably on the December 18, 2020 gathering. He wondered “whether it was realistic to argue that all Guidance had been followed at all times, given the nature of the working environment in No. 10. He agreed to delete the reference to Guidance.”

The report had to be rewritten at short notice to take into account Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Had he remained, the Committee members would have recommended a 90-day suspension for, among other things, the former PM’s deliberate misleading of the House, members of the Committee, and being “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of” its members. Instead, it concluded that Johnson should be deprived of his Member’s pass.

The Committee took umbrage at Johnson’s attack upon its members, which he condemned as undemocratic, a kangaroo court, and executioners of a witch hunt. “We consider,” states the report, “that these statements are completely unacceptable. In our view this conduct, together with the egregious breach of confidentiality, is a serious further contempt”.

His overall contemptuous attitude to the inquiry was also conveyed by his effort “to re-write the meaning of the [pandemic] rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”. One example was the “assertion that ‘imperfect’ social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.”

Johnson’s base of supporters is a shrinking one; but from pandemonium land some continue to express their support. Nigel Adams, MP for Selby and Ainsty, wished to no longer occupy his position in the Commons. Then came former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who initially claimed she was going to “immediately” step down, only to then do a bit of fence sitting. Bruised in not getting her promised peerage from Johnson, she is seeking answers from the House of Lords appointment committee. She has also warned that any Tory MP who would side with the findings of the report “will be held to account by members of the public. Deselections may follow. It’s serious.”

Brendan Clarke-Smith, MP for Bassetlaw, was similarly “appalled” by the “spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report.” He promised to “be speaking against them both publicly and in the House”. The comically anachronistic Tory Man of the Nineteenth Century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, found himself in agreement, observing that Parliament, when standing “upon its dignity […] often ends up looking foolish. The Privileges Committee report is a case in point.”

Many of the supporters can be said to be part of the scandalous “Honours List” that Johnson drew up on grounds of gratitude, a veritable Who’s Who of fans and flunkeys that was, for the most part, approved by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. One was the 29-year-old Charlotte Tranter Owen, who has become the youngest life peer in British history. Her less than distinguished journey from York University graduate to a life peer took a mere six unremarkable years.

While some Tories have been desperate to jettison the Johnson link, many were complicit in stacking the compendium of deception. As Peter Oborne explains, the Tory party saw Johnson as an election winner. For three years, they were “thus prepared to put up with his false claims. Ministers and MPs appeared happy to repeat claims on radio and television, in print, and inside the Commons chamber.”

Sunak is, therefore, in more than a spot of bother, not least because Johnson will be holding fort as a newly appointed columnist at the Daily Mail. His plight is made worse given his struggling efforts to keep the party together before potential electoral oblivion. Johnson, with his poison pen tirades, is unlikely to help.

A final note on the whole Boris Bonanza is also worth reiterating. For Oborne, “Johnson will be remembered by history as the most immoral, dishonest and morally squalid of all British premiers.” This is going a bit far; it was a certain Tony Blair who, playing the role of sidekick to US President George W. Bush, embarked upon an illegal war that led to the destruction of Iraq and a good portion of the Middle East. His conduct, both directly or otherwise, in the confection, and intentional misreading of intelligence material elevating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the level of globally dangerous despot, must surely be seen as squalid as any. Along the way, he corrupted public life and politicised institutions. And yet he moves and speaks, to this day, with impunity – the one who got away.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Boris Johnson

Not that Johnson was exactly thrilled with the decision. The findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee in what is known as the Partygate Report were damning. Released on June 15, 2023, the 30,000-word document details the numerous instances the then Prime Minister systematically undermined the very same pandemic regulations that his own government had implemented, only to then consistently mislead and deceive, most notably the Commons itself. In “deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government.”

The nature of that misleading conduct centred on Johnson’s refusal to double-check advice given to him by, for instance, Jack Doyle, his former press secretary, over a number of gatherings on whether they were compliant with COVID-19 rules and guidance. Johnson’s Principal Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds, had also pressed Johnson on the issue as to whether the guidance “had been followed at all times”, notably on the December 18, 2020 gathering. He wondered “whether it was realistic to argue that all Guidance had been followed at all times, given the nature of the working environment in No. 10. He agreed to delete the reference to Guidance.”

The report had to be rewritten at short notice to take into account Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Had he remained, the Committee members would have recommended a 90-day suspension for, among other things, the former PM’s deliberate misleading of the House, members of the Committee, and being “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of” its members. Instead, it concluded that Johnson should be deprived of his Member’s pass.

The Committee took umbrage at Johnson’s attack upon its members, which he condemned as undemocratic, a kangaroo court, and executioners of a witch hunt. “We consider,” states the report, “that these statements are completely unacceptable. In our view this conduct, together with the egregious breach of confidentiality, is a serious further contempt”.

His overall contemptuous attitude to the inquiry was also conveyed by his effort “to re-write the meaning of the [pandemic] rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”. One example was the “assertion that ‘imperfect’ social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.”

Johnson’s base of supporters is a shrinking one; but from pandemonium land some continue to express their support. Nigel Adams, MP for Selby and Ainsty, wished to no longer occupy his position in the Commons. Then came former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who initially claimed she was going to “immediately” step down, only to then do a bit of fence sitting. Bruised in not getting her promised peerage from Johnson, she is seeking answers from the House of Lords appointment committee. She has also warned that any Tory MP who would side with the findings of the report “will be held to account by members of the public. Deselections may follow. It’s serious.”

Brendan Clarke-Smith, MP for Bassetlaw, was similarly “appalled” by the “spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report.” He promised to “be speaking against them both publicly and in the House”. The comically anachronistic Tory Man of the Nineteenth Century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, found himself in agreement, observing that Parliament, when standing “upon its dignity […] often ends up looking foolish. The Privileges Committee report is a case in point.”

Many of the supporters can be said to be part of the scandalous “Honours List” that Johnson drew up on grounds of gratitude, a veritable Who’s Who of fans and flunkeys that was, for the most part, approved by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. One was the 29-year-old Charlotte Tranter Owen, who has become the youngest life peer in British history. Her less than distinguished journey from York University graduate to a life peer took a mere six unremarkable years.

While some Tories have been desperate to jettison the Johnson link, many were complicit in stacking the compendium of deception. As Peter Oborne explains, the Tory party saw Johnson as an election winner. For three years, they were “thus prepared to put up with his false claims. Ministers and MPs appeared happy to repeat claims on radio and television, in print, and inside the Commons chamber.”

Sunak is, therefore, in more than a spot of bother, not least because Johnson will be holding fort as a newly appointed columnist at the Daily Mail. His plight is made worse given his struggling efforts to keep the party together before potential electoral oblivion. Johnson, with his poison pen tirades, is unlikely to help.

A final note on the whole Boris Bonanza is also worth reiterating. For Oborne, “Johnson will be remembered by history as the most immoral, dishonest and morally squalid of all British premiers.” This is going a bit far; it was a certain Tony Blair who, playing the role of sidekick to US President George W. Bush, embarked upon an illegal war that led to the destruction of Iraq and a good portion of the Middle East. His conduct, both directly or otherwise, in the confection, and intentional misreading of intelligence material elevating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the level of globally dangerous despot, must surely be seen as squalid as any. Along the way, he corrupted public life and politicised institutions. And yet he moves and speaks, to this day, with impunity – the one who got away.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post Kinsey’s Revenge: What 75 Years Has Brought appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.

Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives are furious and out for revenge. Two Black Democratic members and a Democratic woman had confronted them — and embarrassed them — over their unwillingness to do anything about the slaughter of Tennessee’s children in that state’s schools.

To punish them and teach women and other young men Black men — who might think of being too troublesome in the legislature — a lesson, the GOP ran a pathetic Kangaroo Court for the world to see. And got their revenge.

Jim Jordan and his buddies in the GOP are furious and out for revenge. Donald Trump is being held to account by a Black district attorney in New York City for falsifying business records to affect the outcome of an election and to avoid paying taxes and Jordan is attempting to intimidate the prosecutor’s office.

Ron DeSantis is furious and out for revenge. After the CEO of Disney publicly disagreed with the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, DeSantis thought he could hurt the company, but they outfoxed him. Now he’s demanding an investigation to harass and bully the company.

Brett “Beerbong” Kavanaugh is furious and out for revenge. Several women pointed out his drunken sexual assaults when he was a teenager and he told the Senate:

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades … and as we all know, in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”

Donald Trump is furious and out for revenge. For the first time in his 76 years on this Earth, he’s being held to account for a small slice of his lifetime of criminal behavior, and being held to account by a Black man. He’s apparently trying as hard as he can to trigger another of his stochastic terrorist followers to threaten or assassinate the DA, the judge, and their families.

The Republican Party has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge, because the people of America are rejecting their version of leadership and their abandonment of the principles of democracy. Facing increasing rejection by voters, they have turned to gerrymandering, threats, blocking the right to vote, and inciting violence.

Having failed at holding power through the democratic process, Republicans have turned instead to revenge tactics.

Revenge is violence.

Revenge as a political philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth and political power being used to destroy one’s enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.

But at its core, revenge is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It’s war brought into politics and governance.

Vengeance like this has its own power and its own attraction. The media is drawn to it, making it attractive to Republicans as a way of bringing together their followers.

Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in revenge-fueled violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.

And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of revenge and political violence.

Democrats watch revenge threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare — and try to put into law — are less than human or “aberrations” that must not be tolerated in a “free society.”

“It’s the exception,” the media notes, and moves on to the next story.

In fact, these displays of revenge-based violence and the willingness to use violence are Republican declarations. They are statements of purpose. They’re spoken and executed with pride.

They are assertions by Republicans and their followers that they are perfectly willing to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human lives, as they did against three police officers (and tried to kill others) on January 6th.

Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police revenge against Black people with “thin blue line” flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one’s political opponents.

They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, “Free helicopter rides for liberals.” Their leader said there are “very good people on both sides” after his followers — demanding revenge against Jews they say are trying to “replace” them with Black people — murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.

Republicans running for office feature guns and imply threats to kill people for political revenge in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie’s Christmas Card, but he’s just one of many members of Congress to pose their white children with deadly assault weapons.

These are all expressions of a political philosophy that is based in revenge.

When men like Rusty Bowers, Adam Kinsinger, and Brad Raffensperger — Republicans who dared stop Trump’s criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election — describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.

Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of revenge-driven violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.

Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of revenge by the base of the Republican Party she leads, there was not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives like Liz Cheney now face, nor a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications about why they must seek revenge.

Because revenge is now their brand. They revel in it.

They boast of it in ways they sometimes claim are just hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of “Second Amendment solutions” to Democratic successes at the polls, or when Donald Trump sent his mob to hang Mike Pence in revenge for failing to flip the election to him.

Their followers know what they mean: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse revenge-based violence, and carry explicit threats.

Revenge is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of revenge against an “other” they claim have stolen from them or persecuted them.

Rightwing media revel in the language of revenge. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like “invaders” and “vermin” and “illegals” and demand revenge for the lost jobs, integrated schools and neighborhoods, and other insults they imagine.

To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they also squeal a phony claim to victimhood: wealthy Republicans claim Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They pretend teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Revenge, they say, is their only option.

Over the past four decades, as this revenge-fueled movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists who invariably claim they’re rightfully seeking revenge.

Republicans justify their violence as necessary to get revenge against those they say have assaulted their faith, their families, and the “identity” of their homeland. They will tell you it’s the unfortunate last-ditch “necessity” provoked by the Democrats and dark-skinned or queer “others” who “threaten our way of life.”

In reality, revenge is not the fascist’s final, last-gasp option: it’s their first.

— It’s their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance and control of society and society’s institutions.

— It’s how they cow dissent.

— It’s the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.

— It creates chaos, and revenge needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.

The final cause to which fascist revenge is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every vengeful act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly and vengefully kill their enemies — particularly people of color and “liberals” — in the streets of the nation.

It’s why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680: he told the world it was revenge for Waco and other “big government” violations of his rightwing world. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and left over 550 wounded, and the Boston Bomber. Revenge against Black people was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and revenge against Hispanics motivated the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people. Revenge against Jews enraged the Tree of Life synagogue shooter.

It’s the story line of the two best-selling books within this part of the modern Republican movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with revenge-fueled mass slaughter leaving a nation of “pure” white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of brown and Jewish bodies.

Most Americans are not driven by revenge. It’s not how they think politics should work.

They’d just like a country that works for all of us, instead of just white people, the billionaire class, and giant, monopolistic corporations. Most Americans are sick of Republicans saturating our airwaves with their revenge fantasies, their revenge investigations, their revenge against voters, their revenge programming on hate-driven TV and radio.

Revenge is a poison, and it’s deeply embedded now in the political bloodstream of our nation because Republicans who haven’t gotten their way have proclaimed the political and social equivalent of revenge-fueled holy wars.

They showed up with revenge in their hearts to make right Trump’s loss on January 6^th; they sought revenge for having to wear masks during the pandemic; they seek revenge on women, racial, and gender minorities who merely want equal rights and freedoms as citizens of the United States.

A 2003 study by University of Oklahoma psychology researcher Ryan P. Brown found a strong association between revenge and narcissism, a personality disorder that has become a defining characteristic of many Republican politicians, from Donald Trump to, apparently, Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Jim Jordan.

“As expected,” Brown noted, “people low in dispositional forgiveness were more vengeful than were people high in dispositional forgiveness, but particularly so among those high in narcissism; among those low in narcissism, forgiveness was less strongly related to vengeance. Thus, the most vengeful people were those who were both low in forgiveness and high in narcissism, independent of gender differences and healthy self-esteem.”

Republicans in Tennessee, preening for the cameras and high on their own white privilege self-righteousness, got their revenge yesterday. They bullied and humiliated their Democratic colleagues who were acting on behalf of that state’s schoolchildren, and expelled two “uppity” Black members.

Now, hopefully, America sees how disgusting and pathetic revenge is when compared to governing on behalf of the people, instead of just the gun industry and the morbidly rich.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

In this book the scandal du jour is the $130,000 hush-money payment that Cohen made, on behalf of Trump, to the porn star and apprentice paramour Stormy Daniels (her non-stage name is Stephanie Cliffords) so that word of a Trump-Daniels romp at a 2006 golf tournament might not cloud voters’ judgments of candidate Trump during the 2016 presidential election (when the electorate was already weighing the pros and cons of pussy grabbing).

* * *

Ever faithful to his patron—until he became The Trump Fall Guy and headed off to prison—Cohen went along with the spin doctoring and said that he had paid off Stormy from the goodness of his heart, using his own money, and that the hush payment had no connection to the Trump presidential campaign (which otherwise might be seen in violation of campaign finance laws, at least those that say how and where candidates can pay off a troublesome porn star).

During the 2016 presidential campaign, no word came out about the Daniels-Trump condom-less encounter. As Cohen writes in Revenge: “Donald Trump ran for the presidency seeking to make money. The campaign was designed to be the greatest infomercial in the history of politics and to increase the value of the Trump brand. I know. I was there. I helped orchestrate it.”

Then, against all odds, the cable guy was elected, and no sooner was he in office than his presidency turned into a bizarre sitcom and crime-scene investigation that mixed the genres of Dallas and The Americans, with dialogue that sounded like Archie Bunker or The Sopranos.

* * *

In the first season (2017), Trump’s attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III recused himself from any Trump-in-Russia investigations and appointed as a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, an ex-FBI director and Dick Tracy look-a-like.

While rounding up the usual Trump suspects (Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn, etc.), Mueller came to the conclusion that after colluding with Russians and other lowlifes during the campaign, Trump obstructed justice and broke numerous laws, but that it was up to Congress to collar a sitting president.

Meanwhile, Trump fired Attorney General Sessions and replaced him with his own bought cop, William Barr, who read the Mueller Report with rose-colored glasses and—without a trial or sleepless night—cleared Trump of all its allegations (“Keep moving, folks. There’s nothing here to see…”).

At the same time, Mueller had come across kopromat about in-house Trump organization attorney and fix-it man Cohen, who in short order was sent up the river to a federal correctional institution in Otisville, New York, where he would be taught new life skills so that once out of prison he would stop spontaneously paying off his boss’s mistresses.

* * *

Revenge is largely a memoir—of the federal and state charges brought against Cohen, his copping a plea deal, his unfair sentencing, his time in prison, and his encounters with the justice system (or as he would say, the “injustice” system that Donald Trump manipulated to silence one of his boys who was now singing to the feds and other gumshoes going after TrumpWorld).

Actually the “revenge” in the title refers not to Cohen’s vindictiveness toward his former boss, but to his perception that the Trump presidency and Justice Department operated to settle scores as if part of a mafia state. Cohen writes:

There are investigators inside the government who spoke with us for this book who believe the same thing. These investigators—who work in New York and Washington either for the State of New York or the U.S. Department of justice—all told me the exact same thing: (1) Donald Trump manipulated the system to go after me, and (2) he wouldn’t have had the success he had unless there was a pre-existing problem inside the Department of Justice.

Cohen tells the story of his fall from grace to illustrate the extent to which the Trump presidency weaponized the Justice Department to take down Donald’s enemies (Cohen among them), and he predicts that new Trump bodyguards (the sycophantic likes of representatives Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan) will fall into the same black hole that consumes anyone who thinks that they can put lipstick on the porcine Trump.

* * *

Cohen also uses his own case to highlight the inequities in the criminal justice system (in particular, he thinks that the adjudication of plea deals is a sham, and plea deals are what resolve a large majority of criminal cases). In some instances his collaborator on this book interviews some of the prosecutors who put Cohen away.

While advancing criminal justice reforms, the overall narrative voice of Cohen’s text is that of an aggrieved New Yorker, telling his story in, say, a bowling ally, prone to using “shit”and “fuck” in his breathless, if engaging, account.

His tone isn’t exactly that of Marlon Bardo in On the Waterfront (“I coulda been a contender…”) or Robert De Niro playing Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas (“Look what this fucking mutt did to my shoes…”), but it doesn’t always match the style of a white paper on sentencing reform.

Here, for example, is what Cohen says about the Steele Dossier, the oppo research that the 2016 Clinton campaign sourced in Russia to prove that Trump was a Manchurian candidate. As it turned out, the bill of goods that Michael Steele sold to Hillary and the Democrats for $168,000 was a collection of half-baked innuendos and golden-shower rumors, nearly all of which Cohen says were false (while he says there was a lot of truth, which the feckless Steele overlooked, about how the Russians had other hooks into Trump’s soul).

Steele missed with Trump but he brought down Cohen, who writes:

As the shitstorm got underway, I simply couldn’t believe the questions and smarmy insinuations based on the Steele report that were thrown at me by reporters and journalists of every stripe. Did I travel to Prague? Did I meet with Russian oligarchs and act as a go-between for Putin in Russia and Trump in the United States? Did I hack the Clinton server? Did I hack the DNC computer? Did I pay off Russians to clean up Paul Manafort’s mess? Did my family own a dacha in Sochi directly next door to Vladimir Putin’s house?

It wasn’t just patently absurd; it was fucking ridiculous.

* * *

Influenced partly by Steele’s rumor mongering, Special Counsel Robert Mueller tipped off Southern District federal prosecutors in New York that Cohen was a wiseguy who ought to be brought in for questioning.

In the next instant, the feds had raided his home and offices, audited the books of his taxi medallion company, and pushed him up against a metaphorical wall, saying they would indict Cohen and his wife in the next 48 hours if he didn’t plead guilty to a variety of charges, including tax evasion and making an excessive and illegal campaign contribution (to one Donald J. Trump, in the form having paid off his goomah).

Cohen describes the takedown from the inside:

When it was found out that I wasn’t the encyclopedia of Donald Trump and the raid the government conducted on my home, apartment, law office and safety deposit box came up with tens of thousands of pages of useless information—I was prosecuted anyway. It was inevitable for two reasons that led to the perfect storm: First, Donald Trump wanted it and, secondly, he used the Justice Department’s inherent flaws to make it happen.

Cohen continues:

Finally, as for the Russia stuff—as we now know by others who were in Trump’s orbit, including Stephanie Grisham—Trump was indeed Putin’s puppet. But I wasn’t. Never had been and wouldn’t be. And I never dreamed prosecutors would go after me for some of the things I was accused of doing. Sure, I paid off Stormy Daniels. But that doesn’t make me Sammy the Bull Gravano to Trump’s John Gotti. Trump isn’t that smart and I’m not Sammy. I dealt with campaign issues. We stiffed contractors. I fixed an CNBC poll to assuage Trump’s fragile ego. I paid off Stormy Daniels—for Donald Trump. So, yes, I paid off a porn star so my employer and Republican presidential candidate could avoid embarrassment and destroy the little hope everyone had in the general election. Those are the shitty things I did. Trump may have sold out his country, because Trump has no loyalty to anyone but himself. He doesn’t care what happens to any of us. I was stupid for hitching myself to that wagon—but it’s a far cry from messing over a bunch of contractors to being a traitor to your country.

Cohen also quotes a legal scholar on the obvious flaw in his prosecution:

Most will say, as did Mark Zaid, a nationally known attorney who deals with free speech constitutional claims and government accountability: “It is inconceivable to me that you would prosecute Michael Cohen for committing a crime and not prosecute the man who instructed him to do so.”

So far, however, Donald Trump has proved that it pays to suborn witnesses, obstruct justice, tamper with federal elections, sexually abuse women, defraud banks, cook corporate books, lie to Congress, shortchange the IRS, steal classified documents, and plot sedition.

* * *

It’s probably a little rich to speak of Michael Cohen as a political prisoner, as one of his lawyers does; at the same time, it was in the service of presidential politics—not justice—that he was sentenced to three years in prison, just as it is thanks to the invisibility cloak of his political career that Donald Trump is not doing time in the big house for crimes ranging from sexual assault to high treason.

Nevertheless, the most evocative writing in Revenge concerns Cohen’s time in Otisville, a prison in upstate New York west of Newburgh, where one of his fellow inmates was Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino from the TV show Jersey Shore.

Comparing his own situation to that of “The Sitch,” Cohen writes:

“The Sitch” pled guilty to just one count of tax evasion. Three different years of tax returns for him yielded one charge. I had five different years that led to five charges. He didn’t pay taxes on $8.9 million in income. He didn’t even file tax returns. I filed, and on time, and paid what I was told by my accountant was due on my income. I just underpaid by $1.39 million.

He received an eight-month sentence. I received thirty-six.

Clearly, on life’s Monopoly board, Palm Beach is worth more than the Jersey Shore.

* * *

Although Otisville is branded as a minimum security prison, where escape is no more complicated than calling an Uber, Cohen’s description of his jail time is complete with prisoner disputes, terrible food, rats, and loneliness (he read 97 books in the year there), although nothing is more discouraging than his account of how the president takes his revenge when he learns that Cohen is soon to publish a memoir (Disloyal) about his years propping up the Trump house of cards.

At that point, in summer 2020, during the worst of the pandemic, Cohen had been released early to home confinement. Prisons such as Otisville were superspreader joints, and it was decided that Cohen could serve out the remainder of his stretch at home while wearing an ankle bracelet. But as soon as he was home and asked to come in for “a fitting”, the Trump Justice Department (William Barr, presiding) revoked Cohen’s get-out-of-jail card and threw him back into Otisville, this time in solitary confinement. Quoting one of his lawyers, Danya Perry, Cohen describes the situation:

“Very quickly I saw that the government had over-reached,” Danya told us for this book. “A first year law student could see it.” And Danya also saw the taint and stench of Donald Trump in the case. “At the end of the day I’m certain it went to the highest levels and given the open borders between the DOJ and the White House—Donald Trump went out of his way to threaten and ridicule Michael Cohen. It would surprise me if he weren’t aware of this.”

(By the way, she was right—I would later hear from reporters and others that members of Trump’s inner circle bragged about putting me back in prison.)

She filed a writ of habeas corpus and an emergency restraining order.

Cohen finally gets home, and concludes: “If you get nothing else from what I’m writing here, understand it plain and clear: Justice in the United States is an illusion unavailable to most of us.”

* * *

It was while he was doing time in Otisville that Cohen began cooperating with a number of Trump criminal investigations—notably those of Mueller, the Manhattan District Attorney, and the New York State Attorney General—but none of these efforts resulted in Cohen earning credit toward an earlier release from his electronic ball and chain.

Throughout Revenge, one of the subtexts is that Cohen was railroaded (by the threat to indict his wife) into making a plea deal rather than fight the government at trial, even though he still insists his only crime was the campaign contribution violation of paying off Stormy Daniels (at the clear instruction of his don).

Instead of fighting that charge and others, most having to do with income tax, Cohen decided to fold his legal hand without knowing exactly how much time he would have to serve in prison. He writes: “Donald Trump once famously said ‘only suckers’ pay taxes. Is that justice? Can he get away with that while the rest of us are dealt with differently? Hell, when I was forced to sign a plea deal I had never even been served a letter from the IRS claiming I owed money. Worse, I wasn’t even told how much I owed when I pleaded. It was like signing a blank check and being forced into prison to boot.” (So why take that deal? As an attorney, Cohen seems on surer ground as an attack dog than a defense lawyer.)

Likewise, when Cohen copped his plea, he admitted that he had lied to Congress (what Trump official has not?) when he said that Trump had no business dealings in Russia during the 2016 election year.

Again, it was the candidate (not his made man) who didn’t want the election world to know that Trump had suggested making a gift of $50 million (in the form of a free penthouse) to Vladimir Putin if the Russian government were to give the Trump Organization sweetheart terms to build one of its gilded towers in Moscow.

* * *

After repenting his sins of commission (in TrumpWorld they run to about thirty percent, plus expenses), Cohen would like us to believe that his was among the early voices equating Trump’s politics with a renewal of fascism. (The book ends: “We must recognize that Trumpism is fascism. We must destroy it and erase [it] from our body politic.”) Not being a political theorist, Cohen never goes into the finer points differentiating Trump’s primetime fascism from that of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or Francisco Franco. From his descriptions, however, Trump sounds more like a Bensonhurst mob boss (waging turf wars and ordering hits) than the founder of a modern political ideology.

Beyond wanting to drive a stake through the heart of Trump’s MAGA political movement, Cohen does not speculate on the chances of a Trump resurgimiento (it works with the fascist angle) in 2024, or whether a 2023 Republican majority of election deniers in Congress would spell the end of American democracy. It’s worth consideration—maybe in another Cohen book, one perhaps entitled Doomsday?

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump was willing to launch an attack on the Capitol, lie under oath, threaten public officials with execution (“Hang Mike Pence!”), seditiously arm insurrectionists, watch passively while members of the D.C. Capitol Police were killed, and march a phalanx of counterfeit electors—all wearing Trump buttons passed around by Willard Hotel co-conspirators Roger Stone and Steve Bannon—into the Electoral College. Why should we expect any better of the Trump gang in 2024?

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

Eight local People’s Defense Force groups raided the pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia-occupied village in Pauk township early on Tuesday in revenge for the weekend executions of four democracy activists, a statement from the PDF groups said.

Former student leader Ko Jimmy, former National League for Democracy MP Phyo Zeya Thaw, and two other democracy activists, were hanged Saturday in Yangon’s Insein prison - the first judicial executions in decades. That has further fueled opposition to the military council that seized power from an elected government in February 2021. 

A PDF officer said the village, Tat Kone, had strong leanings towards pro-junta militias and locals were heavily armed.

“Fighting started at 5.30 a.m. and continued beyond 7 a.m.," said the officer-in-charge of the Southern Pauk Guerrilla Force, who did not give his name for security reasons.

A PDF news release on Tuesday named the attack “Operation Zeya Thaw.” 

It said eight joint PDFs, including the Southern Pauk Guerrilla Force, banded together to launch the attack. It said the seven people killed were from Pyu Saw Htee militia.

A video posted on Facebook, credited to the guerrilla force, showed the attack underway in the early morning. Militiamen can be seen running across a farm field and crouching for cover amid the noise of heavy gunfire.

State newspapers reported Wednesday that the seven fatalities were civilians, including two members of the village defense force and two children, and that 41 houses were burned down. Kyemon Daily newspaper printed blurred photos of blackened corpses. 

The PDFs said they had warned the public about the attacks in advance and civilians had not been deliberately targeted.

This year has seen an upsurge in arson attacks and killings in Myanmar's Magway and Sagaing regions as violence has spiraled between junta forces and PDFs. 

Last month, independent research group Data For Myanmar, which studies the effects of conflict on communities, said that at least 18,886 houses had been destroyed by military arson across the country since the coup. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

“If abortions aren’t safe, you aren’t either” is spray-painted on the exterior of Wisconsin Family Action offices in Madison on May 8, 2022.

Photo: Alex Shur/Wisconsin State Journal via AP

While the barely disguised call to violence scares me, the call to emotion nails the problem, and the start of the solution.

How can the movement for reproductive justice become more militant without escalating our tactics to mimic those of our opponents?

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Judith Levine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jelena Prtorić.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jelena Prtorić.

On April 27, junta deputy information minister, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, told reporters at a press conference in the capital Naypyidaw that the sealed-off homes of detained activists had been “presented to the court” and would be sold at auction sometime in the future.

When asked for clarification on Thursday, Zaw Min Tun told RFA’s Myanmar Service that the junta had obtained court permission to proceed with the sales.

“You must present evidence according to court procedure,” he said. “Once the court has ruled on the evidence, there are certain procedures to follow. Right now, we have presented the evidence as needed.”

The deputy minister provided no other details on the homes in question, including who they had belonged to or what the former owners are being charged with.

Last week’s announcement came six days after National Unity Government (NUG) Minister for Finance and Investment Tin Tun Naing told RFA of plans to sell a number of properties he said were identified by the shadow government as having been illegally occupied by senior junta officials when the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup.

Among the properties is the former guesthouse of Myanmar’s military and accompanying two-acre plot of land at No. 14 Inya Road in Yangon, which now serves as Min Aung Hlaing’s home. Tin Tun Naing said the NUG plans to sell the estate for U.S. $10 million — about one-third of the property’s current value — in 100,000 shares of U.S. $100 each.

On Thursday, Tin Tun Naing provided additional details of the sale, which he said involves 100,000 shares of the estate priced at U.S. $100 apiece.

“Once we identified it as state property, we started to sell it to facilitate the end of the dictatorship and to raise funds needed for the success of the Spring Revolution, in the interest of the people,” Tin Tun Naing said.

“As soon as it was announced that it would go on sale, there were several purchases. One single person has already bought shares worth U.S. $100,000.”

The NUG’s Ministry of Finance and Investment said the sale will involve around 400 acres of land occupied by junta officials in Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw, which will be “confiscated and made available to the public in May on a pre-purchase basis.” The sale assumes that the NUG will claim control of the country from the junta, at which point it would deliver on the promised asset.

Proceeds from the sale will be donated to the opposition movement and used to compensate victims of junta arrest and torture, rehabilitate members of the Civil Disobedience Movement who left state jobs in protest of the coup, and assist people whose homes have been burned in arson attacks by junta forces, the ministry said.

The NUG said that its plan to seize junta assets “is to discourage likely dictators who want to abuse power from illegally taking over state-owned land and properties in the future.”

‘No legal right to confiscate’

Lawyers and political analysts told RFA that while the sale of the former military guesthouse involved returning public property to the people, the military has no legal right to confiscate and sell private assets.

A spokesman for the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) called the junta’s announcement a form of “retaliation” against democracy and human rights activists, adding that many of the homes belong to people whose trials have not been ruled on by the courts.

“The law does not allow for the confiscation of properties of innocent people,” they said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Some of the houses they sealed off were not even owned by the person they arrested. Now we are seeing family-owned properties being confiscated too. It’s a form of revenge.”

High Court lawyer Kyee Myint, who assists with human rights cases, told RFA that the junta plan to sell private property is in violation of the law.

“I am very pleased that the NUG has said it will auction off the former military guesthouse on Inya Road, now taken over by Min Aung Hlaing. But how can it be legal for them to retaliate against us,” he asked.

“They are robbers. The courts are now under their control. The chief justice is a military officer. The judiciary in our country has been destroyed for a long time. It is a violation of the law to seize properties of ordinary politicians.”

Well-known singer Chan Chan, who has a warrant out for her arrest on charges of incitement, said in a May 1 post to her Facebook page that she heard the junta is preparing to sell her house in the port city of Thanlyin near Yangon and urged fans to protest.

Other properties seized by the junta are owned by artists, anti-junta activists, members of the deposed National League for Democracy and paramilitaries with the prodemocracy People’s Defense Force.

On May 3, authorities sealed off the family home of Myint Zaw Oo, an NLD member of Parliament in Sagaing region’s Kanbalu township.

“They have no rules or laws. They just act blindly,” he said.

“They think we may be demoralized if they do these things. It is seen as a kind of psychological warfare. But we have already thought of the consequences of our actions, so it doesn’t matter whether they seize our property or even burn it.”

According to the AAPP, authorities have killed 1,825 civilians and arrested some 10,545 since February last year, mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests. The group said the junta has confiscated more than 570 homes and buildings since the coup.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Myanmar Service.

Following this, videos of temples being demolished in Rajasthan’s Alwar district were widely shared on social media and covered by mainstream media. It was claimed that the Congress government in Rajasthan demolished temples in seeking “revenge” for the demolition of Jama Masjid’s gate in Jahangirpuri. A 300-year-old Shiva temple was among the structures demolished in Sarai Mohalla, Rajgarh in Alwar.

According to a report by Aaj Tak, a master plan was devised for the construction of a “Gaurav Path”. All “encroachments” coming in the way of this construction were removed including the Shiv temple. Congress alleged that the Rajgarh Municipal Corporation where the BJP has a thumping majority was responsible for the decision to demolish the temple whereas the BJP has accused Congress and alleged this was an administrative decision taken by the party.

News18 TV channel ran the story in its show “Desh Nahin Jhukne Denge” with Aman Chopra and claimed thus follows: “जहांगीरपुरी का बदला, महादेव पर हमला ” (Revenge for Jahangirpuri, attack on Mahadev). During the show, a video of the mosque in Jahangirpuri being demolished was shown with graphics suggesting that the event took place on April 20, 2022, while the video of the temple in Alwar being demolished was played stating that it took place two days later on April 22, 2022.

Host Aman Chopra tweeted a part of the show with the question, “जहांगीरपुरी में बुलडोजर का दंड, अलवर में शिवलिंग खंड खंड?” (Bulldozer justice in Jahangirpuri, Shivling broken into pieces in Alwar). Although he later deleted the tweet (archive link). Chopra stated during his show, “It is such a big coincidence that two days after a bulldozer was used to demolish the gate of a mosque in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri, three temples were demolished in the Alwar district of Rajasthan. One of the temples is 300 years old. Is this a mere coincidence or are these events interconnected? Is this revenge for Jahangirpuri?” (Archive Link)

On Aaj Tak’s show, “Halla Bol With Anjana Om Kashyap”, the story was run with the graphics “मंदिर पर बदले का बुलडोज़र” (Bulldozer of revenge against temple). BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra claimed on the show that the manner in which Congress attempted to make a legal demolition drive in Jahangirpuri a communal issue, using bulldozers to demolish the temple in Alwar clearly shows that it is an act of revenge. Sambit Patra can be heard making this claim at 4:10 minutes into the broadcast. Another BJP spokesperson, Gaurav Bhatia, made similar claims regarding the demolition of the temple in Alwar insinuating that it is an act of revenge in response to the demolitions that took place in Jahangirpuri. Gaurav Bhatia can be heard making this claim at 9:55 minutes. (Archive Link)

On April 22, 2022, Republic Bharat ran a promo for its 5 PM show claiming that Hindu sentiments have been hurt after the demolition of the temple in Alwar. The channel took a jibe at Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot insinuating the Congress party’s involvement in the demolitions. Himani Naithani, the show’s host, reiterated the claims in a tweet. (Archive Link)

हिंदुओं की आस्था पर चोट, गहलोत की नियत में खोट! देखिए ‘5 का प्रहार’ 5 बजे सिर्फ रिपब्लिक भारत पर LIVE- https://t.co/2G7CKH45An pic.twitter.com/CXWbUnASRT

— रिपब्लिक.भारत (@Republic_Bharat) April 22, 2022

A tweet from BJP Rajasthan’s official Twitter handle claimed when the demolition drive against “rioters” in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri was taking place, temples were being razed in Alwar under the Congress government’s watch. This tweet was later deleted. (Archive Link)

These claims are also widely circulating on social media.

Fact-check

Upon performing a keyword search on Google, we found an article published by Aaj Tak. The report mentions that the Alwar district administration carried out the demolition of the “encroachments” on April 17 and 18. We also found a tweet dated April 17, by Zee Rajasthan, referring to the demolition of houses and shops in the Alwar district under the Rajgadh master plan. Therefore, this incident had clearly taken place before April 20, when Jama Masjid’s gate was demolished in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri.

We then performed a keyword search on Twitter using the date filter and found two different videos from Alwar documenting the demolition of temples, dated April 18 and 19. The two videos aired on News18 and passed off as events that took place in Alwar on April 22 were already in existence on social media before the demolition drive in Jahangirpuri was carried out on April 20. This means that the temples in Alwar could not have been demolished as “revenge” for Jahangirpuri demolition drive.

The District Collector and Magistrate of Alwar tweeted a press note which also said that “encroachments” were removed on April 17 and 18.

Several mainstream TV channels and BJP leaders and supporters falsely claimed that temples were razed in Alwar as a response to Jama Masjid’s gate being destroyed in a demolition drive in Jahangirpuri. Rajasthan police have reportedly filed an FIR against News18 anchor Aman Chopra under sedition and other sections for publishing a provocative report.

The post News18 falsely claims temple razed in Alwar as “revenge” for Jahangirpuri demolition drive appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Yes, that’s right, folks, Vladimir Putin, leader of the Putin-Nazis and official “Evil Dictator of the Day,” has launched a Kamikazi attack on the United Forces of Goodness (and Freedom) to provoke us into losing our temper and waging a global thermonuclear war that will wipe out the entire human species and most other forms of life on earth!

I’m referring, of course, to Putin’s inexplicable and totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a totally peaceful, Nazi-free country which was just sitting there minding its non-Nazi business, singing Kumbaya, and so on, and not in any way collaborating with or being cynically used by GloboCap to menace and eventually destabilize Russia so that the GloboCap boys can get back in there and resume the Caligulan orgy of “privatization” they enjoyed throughout the 1990’s.

No, clearly, Putin has just lost his mind, and has no strategic objective whatsoever (other than the total extermination of humanity), and is just running around the Kremlin shouting “DROP THE BOMBS! EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES!” all crazy-eyed and with his face painted green like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now … because what other explanation is there?

Or … OK, sure, there are other explanations, but they’re all just “Russian disinformation” and “Putin-Nazi propaganda” disseminated by “Putin-apologizing, Trump-loving, discord-sowing racists,” “transphobic, anti-vax conspiracy theorists,” “Covid-denying domestic extremists,” and other traitorous blasphemers and heretics, who are being paid by Putin to infect us with doubt, historical knowledge, and critical thinking, because they hate us for our freedom … or whatever.

Let’s take a quick look at some of that “Russian disinformation” and “propaganda,” purely to inoculate ourselves against it. We need to be familiar with it, so we can switch off our minds and shout thought-terminating clichés and official platitudes at it whenever we encounter it on the Internet. It might be a little uncomfortable to do this, but just think of it as a Russian-propaganda “vaccine,” like an ideological mRNA fact-check booster (guaranteed to be “safe and effective”)!

OK, the first thing we need to look at, and dismiss, and deny, and pretend we never learned about, is this nonsense about “Ukrainian Nazis.” Just because Ukraine is full of neo-Nazis, and recent members of its government were neo-Nazis, and its military has neo-Nazi units (e.g., the notorious Azov Battalion), and it has a national holiday celebrating a Nazi, and government officials hang his portrait in their offices, and the military and neo-Nazi militias have been terrorizing and murdering ethnic Russians since the USA and the Forces of Goodness supported and stage-managed a “revolution” (i.e., a coup) back in 2014 with the assistance of a lot of neo-Nazis … that doesn’t mean Ukraine has a “Nazi problem.” After all, its current president is Jewish!

If a traitor mentions the Ukrainian Nazis, switch your mind off as quickly as you can and hit them with that thought-terminating cliché … “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UKRAINE IS JEWISH!” Or “EVERY COUNTRY HAS NAZIS!” That’s another good one!

The other thing we need to look at, and dismiss, and never think about again, is the role the United Forces of Goodness played in orchestrating this mess, starting with how members of the US government stage-managed that coup in 2014, and how they funded and worked with known neo-Nazis — not secret, dog-whistling, half-assed Nazis, but big fat, Jew-hating, Sieg-heiling Nazis — to foment and eventually execute it. All that, of course, is just “Russian propaganda,” despite the fact that it has been thoroughly documented, not just by the usual “conspiracy theory outlets,” but by official mouthpieces of the Forces of Goodness, like the BBC, The Nation, and even The Guardian.

If some Putin-Nazi traitor mentions these facts (or sends you links to the numerous articles documenting the 2014 coup), again, switch your mind off immediately and shout “ANCIENT HISTORY! ANCIENT HISTORY!” and then shoot yourself up with a massive “booster” of fact-checked Truth from the Forces-of-Goodness media. I recommend The Guardian and The New York Times, but if you want to go directly to the source, just follow Illia Ponomarenko of the Kyiv Independent on Twitter. I’m sure that Illia and his neo-Nazi Azov-Battalion “brothers in arms” will cleanse you of all that “disinformation” and “Putin-Nazi propaganda.”

OK, that’s enough “inoculation” for now. We don’t want to expose ourselves to too much of that stuff, or we’re liable to end up supporting the wrong Nazis.

Fortunately, the United Forces of Goodness (and Freedom) are censoring most of it anyway, and instead are feeding us sentimental stories, like the one about “the Ghost of Kyiv,” the completely fictional Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down the entire Putin-Nazi Air Force while delivering pithy one-liners like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films!

As The New York Times explained, fake stories like that, or the one about the Snake Island martyrs who told the Russians to “go fuck themselves,” and then were genocided by a Putin-Nazi kill squad, but then turned up alive a few days later, are not disinformation, and even if they are, it doesn’t matter, because they’re good for morale!

And that’s the important thing, after all. If we’re ever going to defeat these Putin-Nazis, and the imaginary apocalyptic plague, and Trump, and terrorism, and domestic extremism, and climate change, and racism, and whatever, we need to keep the Western masses whipped up into a perpetual state of utterly mindless, hate-drunk hysteria like an eternal episode of the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984.

It doesn’t really matter who the masses are being told to hate this week … the Russians, the Unvaccinated, the Terrorists, the Populists, the Assad-Apologists, the Conspiracy Theorists, the Anti-Vaxxers, the Disinformationists … or whoever. In the end, there is only one enemy, the enemy of the United Forces of Goodness, the enemy of the unaccountable, supranational global-capitalist empire (or “GloboCap” as I like to call it).

This multiplicitous, Goldstein-like enemy of GloboCap is an internal enemy. GloboCap has no external enemies. It dominates the entire planet. It is one big global-capitalist world. It has been for the last 30 years or so. Most of us can’t quite get our heads around that bit of reality yet, so we still see the world as a competition between sovereign nation states, like the USA and Russia. It is not. Yes, there are still nation states, and they compete with each other (like corporations compete for advantage within the system they comprise), but the fundamental conflict of our age is a global counter-insurgency op.

What we’ve been experiencing for the last 30 years, over and over, in many different forms, is a globally hegemonic power system carrying out a “Clear and Hold” operation. GloboCap has been gradually destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the post-Cold-War world, first, in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East, and, more recently, here at home in the Western nations. For those not familiar with the term “Clear and Hold” …

“Clear and hold is a counter-insurgency strategy in which military personnel clear an area of guerrillas or other insurgents, and then keep the area clear of insurgents while winning the support of the populace for the government and its policies.”

Take a minute and think about that. Think about the last two years. Think about the last 30 years. Seriously, just as an exercise, imagine GloboCap as an occupying army and the entire world as the territory it is occupying. Imagine GloboCap establishing control, targeting and neutralizing a variety of insurgencies … any insurgency, regardless of its nature, any and all resistance to its occupation, or lack of support for its “government and policies.” It does not matter who the insurgents are … diehard communists, Islamic fundamentalists, nationalists, populists … it makes no difference. The occupation couldn’t care less what they believe in or why they’re resisting. The objective of the op is to control the territory and get the populace on board with the new “reality.”

Welcome to the new reality … a “reality” in which “history has stopped [and] nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” Yes, I know you are sick of me quoting Orwell, but, given the circumstances, I cannot help it. Just reflect on how seamlessly GloboCap segued from the Apocalyptic Pandemic narrative back to the Putin-Nazi narrative, which had seamlessly replaced the War on Terror narrative in the Summer of 2016, and how instantly the New Normals switched from hating “the Unvaccinated” to hating the Russians, and then scold me again for quoting Orwell.

Look, I hate to disappoint Edward Norton and millions of other fanatical liberals, but the USA is not going to war with Russia, or not intentionally in any event. Russia has ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads on them. This isn’t a rerun of World War II. And it isn’t World War III, or the Cold War redux. That is not what is happening in the Ukraine.

What is happening in Ukraine is, Russia is not playing ball. For some reason, it does not want to be destabilized, and restructured, and privatized by GloboCap. It is acting like a sovereign nation state … which it is, and isn’t, which paradoxical fact GloboCap is trying to impress on Russia, just as countries throughout the global-capitalist empire impressed it on us for the past two years, as Trudeau impressed it on those protesters in Ottawa when he cancelled their rights and went full-fascist.

What is happening is, Russia is rebelling against GloboCap, and, unlike the other rebellious parties that GloboCap has been dealing with recently, Russia has thermonuclear weapons.

I’m not trying to tell you who to root for. Root for GloboCap if you want. I’m just urging you, before you fly over to “Kyiv” and join the fight against the Putin-Nazis, or make a jackass of yourself on the Internet shrieking for nuclear Armageddon, or fire-bomb your local Russian restaurant, or beat the crap out of some Russian-looking person, to maybe take a moment or two and try to understand what is actually going on, and who the major players actually are, and where GloboCap’s efforts to “clear and hold” the entire planet are inexorably taking us.

I know, that’s a lot to ask these days, but I can’t help thinking about all those nukes, and the fallibility of human beings, and yes, all the non-Nazi Ukrainians who are going to needlessly suffer and die while we watch the action on TV, and root for our favorite characters to win, and so on … as if it were a fucking movie.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.