Encouraging Mob Violence Leads to Disaster

A classmate’s lecture asserted Trump’s encouragement of self-appointed armed vigilantes, militias, and MEGA toughs, filled with racism and hostility toward rules of law and order, would blow over. But those guys think they’ve the right to use weapons to make the rest of us to do what they want. Once tasting power people don’t lay it aside easily. Adding prejudice poisons the land. Add weapons and official encouragement, watch out.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that political violence is nearly a daily phenomenon. The FBI itself has been targeted. Threats against the FBI have spiked, “includ[ing] a bomb threat at FBI headquarters … calls for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion,’” and a nail gun was fired into one FBI office. The FBI erected additional barriers around its Washington headquarters because of the threats.

Attacks on the courts threaten fair and impartial justice – like the 2020 murder of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas’s son and the shooting of her husband in their family home in New Jersey. Recent violence includes an attack on Justice Kavanaugh’s life and the murder of a retired circuit judge in Wisconsin. Threats against federal judges and their families are “a disturbing trend” and “on the rise….” Some 1,100 serious threats were leveled against one judge for a temporary order on Trump’s first travel ban. 60 Minutes reported a 400% jump in threats to federal judges over five years.

Members of the Congress, governors and other state officials have been attacked and threatened.

• Since 2011, Representative Gabby Giffords was shot and suffered severe brain injury from an assassination attempt; Representative Steve Scalise was shot and seriously wounded by a terrorist; and Representative Rand Paul was tackled from behind, fracturing five ribs.
• Threats to members of Congress doubled since Trump’s 2020 election defeat and continue to soar. One anonymous video showed a man with a gun following Rep. Torres saying “I got something for you.” Another left “a dead rat with a noose around its neck and a brick with a family member’s name” on Rep. Tom Reed’s doorstep.
• On the very morning he was interviewed, Republican Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota reported “one of my offices received a threat against my life” among other threats. “My address, a picture of my home where my family lives was posted on kind of an anti-Dusty Facebook page.”
• Others described their fear of threats to CNN.
• Just a decade earlier, Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle of South Dakota received letters with anthrax spores.

Replacing law, order and democracy, with fear, violence and intimidation endangers everyone. Official encouragement or support aggravate it. Authorities in Franco’s Spain stole children from their parents for money. Drug lords in Columbia and Mexico absorbed forces of law and order. Gangs demand payments or force children to join. Authorities disappeared 43 students in Mexico. Families run away only to be turned down at the US border and forced back. Breakdown of law and order is serious business. Authorities’ ability to act with impunity, as if rules were irrelevant to them, makes everyone slaves. When society gives up on law and order, no funding of police solves the problem.

Storming the Capital disempowers the people. Force, violence and intimidation make us surrender everything that’s precious. That’s where officially encouraged mob violence leads.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on October 18, 2022.

How Civil Wars Start – The Threat

A new book by Barbara Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, discusses The Political Instability Task Force, and its predecessor, the State Failure Task Force, which uncovered what leads to civil war. I used their work to discuss preventing Trumpian extremism in my book, Unfit for Democracy. Walter is trying to help us survive him.

911 took our eyes off domestic American terrorism which has been deadly ever since the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, and the principal terrorism threat most of the time since. As Walter describes, by 2007, a Department of Homeland Security team found “bomb-making manuals, weapons training, and hundreds of militia-recruitment videos” on “‘right-wing’ … extremist websites and message boards.” But an “outcry” from congressional Republicans pressured DHS to withdraw the report and repeatedly blocked investigations into domestic terrorism because of extremist support. Still, the FBI found extremists infiltrating law enforcement much like the KKK had done in the age of segregation.

A student of mine described how domestic terrorists used threats of violence to intimidate judges and elected officials where he came from. We’ve now had judges, congressmen and other officials threatened, shot, sometimes killed, a plot intercepted before the perpetrators could kidnap and execute a state governor, and threats to the FBI have spiked.

Unfortunately, that’s what the gun movement has been about. The NRA started as an organization of hunters but hunters’ rights have never been threatened. The issue has been the ability to threaten, shoot and kill Blacks and public officials.

The extremists have been arming for decades. The NRA disavows subversion, but it was taken over by extremists using Confederate rhetoric about fighting Washington tyranny. It supported people arming themselves with powerful weapons that could take on the police or the Army. It backed extremists turning themselves into fighting forces with caches of guns. The thrust of private militias trying to take on American government by force and violence has long been obvious. They’ve been using gun shows and social media to advertise the need to deal with what they call tyranny in the U.S. Their ads, militias and videos shaped domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, whose bomb killed more than two hundred people in Oklahoma City, those who tried to kidnap the Michigan governor, shot members of Congress and attacked the capital on Jan. 6. Their threat to America is very real. The portion of America that sympathizes is closer to the size of some of the world’s most vicious takeovers than most of us would like to realize.

That leaves two questions: What are the likely effects, and what can we do to stop it?

The likely effects are disastrous. Violent revolutions almost always result in the rule of rufians who have only their own interests at heart. The American Civil War was fought over the right to enslave other people. Not surprisingly it resulted in self-appointed bands of thugs committing murder and mayhem long after the War was officially over. The extremists aren’t fighting for equality but to reinstitute “white” racial dominance. The right to control or attack others with guns turns people into tyrants, and a gun-toting mob we should fear. It’s the first step to the violent overthrow of our Constitution and country. As Walter pointed out, terrorists magnify their power by intimidating those who don’t “believe the government can take care of them or protect them from violence.”

I’ll get back to what we can do to stop it next week.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Sept. 6, 2022.

The Threat of White Nationalist Violence

A number of us have been trying to communicate that Confederate symbols reflect the ideology that underlies much of the gun movement, various private militias and armed organizations.[1] White nationalist racism has been evident for decades at gun shows, militia get-togethers and in their social media. With NRA help, they’ve been working to refight or reverse the results of the Civil War.  Their guns are intended to give white nationalists political power, and the killing sprees, often with streaming video, are welcomed to generate copycats and trigger the new war, which they’re convinced they have the weapons to win. They are not for democracy in America; the Confederacy is the future, not the past.

Reporting makes it look like school shooters are a random bunch of deranged individuals. But those killers study white nationalist literature, read the manifestos and watch the videos of their predecessors. Nothing is truly random. White nationalist antipathy toward African-Americans, people of color, Jews, Muslims and liberals leads to murders in churches, Temples, Mosques, grocery stores, and concerts.  These extremists are fundamentally disloyal, arming themselves for war against America.

Their disloyalty drives taking law into their own hands. Dislike for rules about grazing on federal lands led to an armed standoff with park rangers. Dislike for election results led to storming the capital. As their arrogance spreads, we’re all in their sights.

After the Civil War, supporters of the defeated Confederacy used murder to reduce their opponents’ voting power. Malcolm Nance, whose new book, They Want to Kill Americans, I strongly recommend, updates that story. Terrorists have no moral scruples. All of us are potentially in their sights.

Of course the white nationalists are being taken for a ride. Nance eloquently summarized a point analysts and economists have been trying to make, that under the white-nationalist-driven-Republican Party, most Americans “would see none of the profits of America but would literally pay for the wealth and prosperity of the richest of the rich.” Neo-Confederates haven’t connected their financiers and candidates with damage instead of service to the working classes who make up the bulk of the whites these racist extremists claim to defend. They’re for a lawless jungle run for the benefit of wealthy kleptocrats.

So what do we do?

First, we can take the wraps off investigating domestic terrorism – it should have been obvious since McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 that homegrown white terrorism is a major problem in the U.S, and getting worse. But because of ties between violent white nationalist groups and the Republican Party, Congress hasn’t dealt with it effectively, though the FBI is finally catching up.

Second, despite the Court, we can put limits on guns; we can remake the illegitimate Court; and, if necessary, rewrite the Second Amendment.

Third, with our votes, we can make Republican support for violent extremists toxic.

Fourth, vote – we can wrap up our skepticism and get ourselves, family and friends to the polls. The religious right, their white nationalist allies, and corporate supporters can tell you voting pays huge dividends. There are enough of us to restore our country – if we get ourselves, families and friends to the polls.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary, with minor changes, was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on July 19, 2022.

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[1] See my Unfit for Democracy (NYU Press, 2016), chap. 8.

The Rise of Intolerance in America

For the podcast, please click here.

I have to report a problem and I don’t know how to deal with it.

One of my professors, Karl W. Deutsch, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote a book in which he showed the connection between violence, the speed of integration and the relative size of the integrating group.[1] Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were certainly correct that it’s hard to go slower than the centuries it has been taking to incorporate the African-American people into the body politic. But we liberals are changing America and to the wrong wing it seems we are doing it very fast. We’re changing American morals, what you can see in a movie theatre or on your screen (though many of them watch), our sexual codes, who can marry and what they can do together, religious pluralism replacing a strictly Christian perspective and our acceptance of people of darker hues. And the people of color seeking integration into American culture is proportionately large. Frankly I am infinitely more comfortable in gatherings in the Black community than I am with the wrong-wingers who challenge the very idea of mutual acceptance and respect. The polls are making it clear that the pushback, the violent pushback, is coming from the racists who can’t imagine living in a multi-color world, are terrified and outraged by it. What Karl Deutsch uncovered many decades ago scares me.

Some of us have been reporting for years on the connection between so-called patriot militias, gun sales, and a gun culture that has gone way beyond hunting and become political and racist, indeed revolutionary as their literature and signs proclaim. I certainly don’t mean everyone who owns a gun but it doesn’t take all of them to create a huge problem. The political use of weapons became obvious in the shooting of members of Congress like Gabby Giffords, the armed insurrection in Michigan, at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere. Domestic terrorism, much of it wrong-wing, has become the number one form of terrorism in the U.S. Threats of violence are being built into statutes and “normalized” as part of American politics. The social science literature tells us that the prevalence of guns predicts the end of democracy.[2] But we have not been able to do anything about it until very recently, not just gun control, but combat it via law enforcement and terrorism investigations and prosecutions. In other words the wrong wing has dug in politically and are blocking any attempts to hold them in check. So they get ever more dangerous.

Thomas C. Schelling, wrote a very famous article[3] in which he showed that in any population with a distribution of feelings about living near neighbors who differ in such ways as race or religion, even where most people are fine with it, the community will resegregate because those most nervous will move out and the community will become proportionally more dominated by the other group. Good riddance perhaps except that the next most nervous group will move out until the community resegregates.

My own Albany neighborhoods have been integrated and I like it that way – some of the people of color have been students of mine and I’m delighted to have them as neighbors. It’s also clear that the neighborhood is slowly darkening because there has been no violence and lots of acceptance. I like a polyglot world and feel quite safe in it, but I’ve no idea who will leave, and what part color will play in their decisions. If integration improves understanding, resegregation does not.

In other words I don’t see good and peaceful solutions. Edward R. Morrow used to end his broadcasts by saying “Good night and good luck.” Yes, for all of you, in spades.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Feb. 1, 2022.

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[1] Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1953).

[2] I described and cited the literature in Unfit for Democracy (NYU Press 2016), particularly Chapter 8, at 175-77.

[3] On the Ecology of Micromotives, 25 Public Interest 59 (Fall 1971).

A Taste of Their Own Medicine

I find myself getting angrier by the day and wanting to give the extremists, the alt-WRONG, the Trumpistas, the people who think the road to greatness is violence against each other, a taste of their own medicine. They chanted “Lock her up” and I want to lock HIM up, and THEM too.

More than that, I keep thinking of the loyalty oaths we had to sign in the 50s and 60s, spread by Joe McCarthy and used to attack liberals. It was very effective in destroying the pro-labor movement, the left that called for measures to make life better for working people. That was what the McCarthy loyalty oaths took down. The left morphed, of course. In the 60s it switched to integration and the women’s movement so that the Trump crowd could now slander the left claiming we liberals don’t care about workers.

But now, like the old loyalty oaths, it’s time to make people swear under penalties of perjury that they have never brought guns or other weapons to demonstrations, or into public buildings, or threatened public officials with them. It’s time to fence in those who believe that politics is a blood sport, decided not by votes but by force. This goes much deeper than Trump and it needs to be removed from the body politic. Maybe the alt, the racists, misogynists and extremists who are afraid of fair competition with Blacks and women will morph into something more constructive – though I don’t have a prayer that they will ever understand that we all do better when everyone does better.

The South took back their loss in the Civil War with continued violence, guerilla violence where necessary until they took over a part of this nation and ruled it for a century of segregation and intimidation. Now it’s time to finish the job of taking this country back and threaten and intimidate those who think threats, intimidation, assault and murder are fine means of politics. This country has no place for people who put victory and murder above democracy. We talk about violence in this country but the way-over-the-top racists are the problem and before we tear down the prisons, we should use them to lock the violent racists up. What goes around comes around and that includes gun violence as well as biological violence by refusing to abide by the rules of public health, overwhelming our hospitals and killing people both ways. They don’t believe in life. When you take away the idea that they care about human life, what you are left with in the anti-abortion hysteria is misogyny. Blacks and women, that’s what these extremists are afraid of. They are cowards in daily life trying to claim bravery with their weapons, mobs and threats.

Frankly, it’s very disturbing that there are people who still support the monster called Trump, who will work against any non-Trumper in politics even though there are no Trump policies – he got rid of every idea as soon as he announced it: love the uneducated but support the rich; love the workers in middle-America but ditch the infrastructure projects he promised. He lies to his most devoted supporters because he can.

The biggest dupes of Trump are the ones in the Red hats. He’s filled their minds and bellies with words. And turned many into traitors.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on the WAMC Northeast Report, on January 12, 2021.

No prior violence at the Capitol was instigated by the person responsible to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed….”

WP listed 7 incidents in the history of the U.S. which involved violence at the U.S. Capitol, Elahe Izadi, A history of violence at the U.S. Capitol, WP, March 28, 2016, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/03/28/a-history-of-violence-at-the-u-s-capitol/.

Makenzie Koch, A history of shootings, other violent attacks at the US Capitol, available at https://fox4kc.com/news/a-history-of-shootings-other-violent-attacks-at-the-us-capitol/, Posted: Jan 6, 2021 / 03:56 PM CST / Updated: Jan 6, 2021 / 03:56 PM CST reported “Since the Capitol was opened in 1800, there have been two other shootings and several other serious attacks.”

I can remember reporting of several of those incidents, going back to the 1954 attack by Puerto Rican nationalists, when I was in Junior High School.

Never before has the person acting as Commander-in-Chief been the leader and supporter of the violence – effectively a traitor. There have been many warnings going back several decades that gun rights groups and those gathering at gun shows, private militias and congregation of militia organizations, have been preparing to attack federal authorities. One of that number, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds, including the children in a day care center in the building. But those warnings ran afoul of politics because the gun rights groups were allied with one of the political parties. Enough, people with guns planning conspiracies against the government and against people whose politics differ from theirs, must be stopped. Those involved in the violence at the Capitol must be tried, convicted and sentenced, from the top down.

For the Left Wing of the Party

Did you feel safer in the Biden-Trump debate with Joe, who spoke like a caring uncle, or Donald with the demeanor of a raging bull? We know enough about Trump’s admiration for Hitler, his bringing extremists into Republican politics, to realize that his coy remarks  about what his supporters could do with their “Second Amendment rights,” his calls to “Liberate Michigan”, “Liberate Minnesota,” “Liberate Virginia,” and to “go into the polls and watch very carefully” while intended to protect deniability, were in fact aimed at the extremists among his supporters, the Klan, Proud Boys, Nazis, white supremacists, and gun toting extremists, inviting them to keep Black and Brown people and others likely to vote Democratic away from the polls or at least prevent their votes from counting. That world’s not safe for any of us.

Defeating the bully in the White House isn’t all people like me want from elections. We want environmental action, action to bring police and prosecutors under control, nominations to bring the courts back to the side of justice for all. We want tax policy that doesn’t make you and I pay more taxes than billionaires like Donald Trump (who claims to be a billionaire) or Warren Buffet. Buffet had the grace to object.

Joe won’t get me all I want – no one could. I’ve been working for equal rights since I graduated from law school, walked into the office of the NAACP in New York City and worked as a full-time, unpaid volunteer on their legal staff. Joe wasn’t my candidate in the primaries but the American people weren’t ready for her, which means we have work to do. That’s about building support within the party and the public, not about tearing the house down around us. Go for it in the primaries: educate, explain, build. But building for the future in the general election requires grace, teamwork and joining with other party members in expressions of mutual respect.

We could seek purity if we had a parliamentary system which includes minority voices, and doesn’t force compromise candidates. But Big Donald makes clear the dangers of the presidency by concentrating power in his hands.

Our system has other ways to take account of minorities except where voters are so polarized that they shun candidates who merely try to take account of everybody’s needs. In such states, prejudice against Black and Brown Americans can leave them with zero influence in the legislature and every harm done to minorities wins applause, leading to the most hateful policies. That, thank God, is not the way it’s supposed to be. When lawyers could prove polarized voting, they often got courts to redesign voting districts so that minorities could elect candidates and get into legislatures. We’re not in heaven and have made mistakes but, yes, we’ve made progress.

I respect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others like them but they’re supporting Joe. There is no path to success by way of Donald Trump.

Obama never got the free hand that Mitch McConnell gave Trump with the help of white supremacists, gun-toting militias, Proud Boys, and the Nazis who rose from defeat by American soldiers in World War II.

No movement that could consistently defeat opposition candidates in primaries has taken over the Democrats. So Democratic leaders have to function as coalition builders. Those of us who want more should build and prepare to flex some muscle in future primaries. But electing the bully will cut off democratic alternatives. He and his supporters have no respect for democracy and will do their best to close it off. They want to rule like slave-owners and tyrants.

Parties respect and cater to people they can get to the polls. Sitting elections out doesn’t convey protest. Politicians read no-shows as apathy, lack of interest, people they don’t need to worry about. Let me make the point another way – the most extreme and violent people in the Republican Party are terrified the people will elect Biden and depose Trump. There’s a reason for that.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on October 20, 2020. I posted an earlier version on Sept. 30 under the title “Uncle Joe or Donald the Bully” without waiting to put it on WAMC.

An NRA Foreign Policy

 

Think about the NRA position that guns don’t kill people, people do, and therefore that we should protect the rights of gun ownership. Just think about the contribution that the NRA could make to the discussion of foreign affairs. The NRA position reveals that it is a big mistake to control arms trafficking. They’re spot on – we should just arm everyone, friend and foe, all the contending parties in Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda? Their guns don’t kill, they do. No problem. ISIS? No problem. But we can learn from the NRA that the biggest mistake is the nuclear deal with Iran! After all, if everyone had nukes, no one would use them. Peace on earth. Goodwill toward men and women. Solved that one. Thanks to the NRA.

There is the problem of identifying perpetrators. NRA’s got that solved too – tracing weapons is not allowed because it might lead to regulation and prohibition which would undermine everything they stand for. No, we’ll just have to guess who bombed whom. But the perpetrators will be scared because we might guess right among the hundreds of nations and many more terrorist groups. Peace reigns.

But the real threat is from folks who don’t have any apparent weapons – they’re hiding it. So just like Trayvon Martin and all those other souls who got what the NRA reserved for them, we have to be ready to shoot first and ask questions later. There is a chance that someone might have evil intent, especially if they don’t look right. Kill, kill, kill. Oh scratch that, Arlo used that phrase in Alice’s restaurant. Let’s say, historicize them. Remember Dick Cheney’s idea about Iraq – there was a chance they’d turn out bad, so let’s just make a mess of their place first, and let the whirlwind blow where it may – even if it whirls back on us.

Try that in Libya and Syria. Let everyone have guns, mortars, grenades and landmines. We can imagine them blowing each other’s brains out until they have depopulated the area and removed any threat to us. They already blame the U.S. anyway. Of course the weapons will end up in the hands of terrorists who will use them to fleece the people and turn the profits against new targets in America or among Americans. But then the American arms industry will really get going and we can have all-out war – now that’s a heroic future.

Now just think of the environmental advantages. China has ended its one-child policy. What to do? Nukes. How many nukes would it take to lower the earth’s population to about 3 billion? Of course radiation from that many nukes might lower the population to zero. But we could end the release of carbon and methane into the atmosphere. That way we could gain some control over global warming. The place might actually be livable again for a new race of people who emerge from the sea and the apes into homo sapiens in another two billion years. Think of that, the NRA could save the planet.

Oh my heavens where is my tongue. In my cheek? Or is it deadly accurate?

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, November 3, 2015.

 

The Arab World and Us

I have been quite disturbed by events in Egypt. We won’t know for some time what has been happening behind the scenes, but it appears that the Obama Administration told the Egyptian military that our support would not flag, which I, and certainly they, would have read as a green light to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood.

Look at that geographically.

Intransigence – the Auto-immune Disease of Democracy

Obviously I’ve been following the news from Egypt like everyone else. You don’t need commentators to tell you that ousting a democratically elected government is undemocratic and unacceptable. But I want to talk about Morsi’s mistakes because they illustrate a major misunderstanding of democracy.