Trump's Indictment and 2024

I can't see Trump winning the general in 2024. Voters will pick the least worst candidate if there's going to be a rematch of 2020, and while both Biden and Trump are very bad, respondents saw trump was the worst of the worst.

But if Trump is somehow --- only God knows --- reelected to the Oval Office, it will be both a political and legal victory. Team Trump has a plan to dismantle the deep state and streamline power in the hands of the executive. That would be really something to behold. 

We'll see, of course.

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, "Trump’s 2024 Campaign Seeks to Make Voters the Ultimate Jury":

Donald J. Trump has long understood the stakes in the election: The courts may decide his cases, but only voters can decide whether to return him to power.

The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election ensures that a federal jury will determine whether he is held accountable for his elaborate, drawn-out and unprecedented attempt to negate a vote of the American people and cling to power.

But it is tens of millions of voters who may deliver the ultimate verdict.

For months now, as prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him in multiple jurisdictions, Mr. Trump has intertwined his legal defenses with his electoral arguments. He has called on Republicans to rally behind him to send a message to prosecutors. He has made clear that if he recaptures the White House, he will use his powers to ensure his personal freedom by shutting down prosecutions still underway.

In effect, he is both running for president and trying to outrun the law enforcement officials seeking to convict him.

That dynamic has transformed the stakes of this election in ways that may not always be clear. Behind the debates over inflation, “wokeness” and the border, the 2024 election is at its core about the fundamental tenets of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power, the independence of the nation’s justice system, the meaning of political free speech and the principle that no one is above the law.

Now, the voters become the jury.

Mr. Trump has always understood this. When he ran for president the first time, he channeled the economic, racial and social resentments of his voters. But as his legal peril has grown, he has focused on his own grievances and projected them onto his supporters.

“If these illegal persecutions succeed, if they’re allowed to set fire to the law, then it will not stop with me. Their grip will close even tighter around YOU,” Mr. Trump wrote to supporters on Tuesday night. “It’s not just my freedom on the line, but yours as well — and I will NEVER let them take it from you.”

Mr. Trump’s arguments have so far been effective in his pursuit of his party’s nomination. After two previous indictments — over hush-money payments to a porn star and purloined classified documents — Republican voters rallied behind the former president with an outpouring of support and cash.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week found that Mr. Trump has a commanding lead over all his Republican rivals combined, leading Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by a two-to-one margin in a theoretical head-to-head matchup. Mr. Trump, even as America’s best-known criminal defendant, is in a dead heat with Mr. Biden among general election voters, the poll found.

About 17 percent of voters who said they preferred him over Mr. Biden supported Mr. Trump despite believing that he had committed serious federal crimes or that he had threatened democracy after the 2020 election.

The prevailing Republican view is that the charges against Mr. Trump are a political vendetta.

Republicans have spent two years rewriting the narrative of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, reimagining the violent attempt to disrupt the Electoral College vote count as a freedom fight against a Washington “deep state.” The result is that in many quarters of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is more trusted than the prosecutors, special counsels and judges handling the cases against him.

“Even those who were fence sitting or window shopping, many of them are of the belief that the justice system under President Biden is simply out to get the former president,” said Jimmy Centers, a former aide to former Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, a Republican who later served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to China. “It has only strengthened his support in Iowa, to the point at which his floor is much more solid than what it was earlier this spring.”

Whether Republicans continue to stand by Mr. Trump, as they have for months, remains to be seen in the wake of Tuesday’s indictment.

“At a certain point, are you really going to hitch your whole party to a guy who is just trying to stay out of jail?” asked former Representative Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who lost her seat when suburban voters turned against Mr. Trump in 2018. “There may be another strategy that Republicans could come up with. And if they can’t, I think they lose.”

Strategists supporting rivals of Mr. Trump say that over time, the continued charges could hurt his standing with Republican voters, distract Mr. Trump from focusing on presenting his plans for the future and raise questions about his electability in the general election.

“Even though people will rally around him in the moment, it starts to erode favorablity and his market share,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, the super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis. “More people will start to look forward.”

Or they may not...

Donald T. Critchlow, Revolutionary Monsters

At Amazon, Donald T. Critchlow, Revolutionary Monsters: Five Men Who Turned Liberation into Tyranny.

Why Elites Like Greta Thunberg Hate Capitalism

And she's so young. What a waste of a great potential.

From Michael Shellenberger, on Substack, "Free markets have lifted millions out of poverty, liberated women, and protected the environment. Why, then, are so many progressives against them?":

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. But last Sunday, she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow "the whole capitalist system," which she says is responsible for "imperialism, oppression, genocide... racist, oppressive extractionism." Her talk echoed the World Economic Forum's calls for a “Great Reset” away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. There is no “back to normal,” she said.

But her claims are absurd. The "whole capitalist system" has, over the last 200 years, allowed for the average life expectancy of humans to rise from 30 to 70 years of age. The "whole capitalist system" produces larger food surpluses than any other system in human history. And the "whole capitalist system" has resulted in declining greenhouse gas emissions in developed nations over the last 50 years.

Capitalism is far from perfect. It worsens inequality by making some people so rich that they can rocket into space on liquified hydrogen while leaving others too poor to afford natural gas. It is characterized by cycles of boom and bust that create frenzies of wealth followed by high unemployment. And it is constantly turning non-market relationships, including intimate ones, such as between parents and caregivers, into exchanges between buyers and sellers.

But capitalism is plainly better than any other system of economic organization yet devised. High levels of inequality are the result of more rich people, not more poor people, who are much better off under capitalism than feudalism or communism. The business cycle of booms and busts provokes manias and depressions, but it is much more efficient, and less oppressive than governments deciding what should be produced, by whom, and at what price. And while it’s true that capitalism undermines non-market relationships, that’s often a good thing, even in the case of childcare, since it allows women and others to be compensated for their labor.

Some of the people who have benefitted the most from industrial capitalism are people like Thunberg and her family. The remarkable wealth of their home nation of Sweden is due to the industrial revolution, which allows for a tiny number of people to produce food, energy, and other necessities for life so that the majority of Swedes can do other, less arduous, and more pleasurable things. The same is true across the West. In the U.S., just 2% of the population works on farms and just 8% in factories. And industrial capitalism allowed Sweden to create a generous social welfare state consisting of free health care, free education, and 480 days of paid leave for parents when a child is born or adopted. The Thunbergs are, by any global or historical standard, rich: the annual per capita income globally, according to the World Bank, is $11,000, which is less than the cost of the two chairs in Thunberg’s living room.

Capitalism is far better for the natural environment than feudalism or communism. Under feudalism, subsistence farmers rely on wood and dung for cooking fuels and must farm large tracts of land to produce a small amount of food. The industrial revolution not only liberated most people from back-breaking farming but also reduced the amount of land required, thanks to fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors. The same process allowed humans to switch from using wood to coal to natural gas and uranium as primary fuels.

The result has been the return, and “re-wilding,” of grasslands and forests around the world, including in Sweden. The reason is that market capitalism rewards economic efficiency and thus reduced natural resource use. Consider the whales. What saved them, in capitalist nations, was cheaper substitute oils, first petroleum and then vegetable oils. The Soviet Union, by contrast, kept whaling long after it was economically efficient to do so because whalers were protected from market competition.

All of this and yet, around the world, it is affluent and educated progressives like Thunberg who are anti-capitalist...

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader, Is Dead at 91

One of the biggest, most important leaders of the second half of the 20th century. He wrought monumental change, literally bringing about the end of the post-WWII Cold War era.

At the New York Times, "Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.":

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.

At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.

For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not. It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.

But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Mr. Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir V. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For Mr. Putin — and his fellow K.G.B. veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia — the end of the U.S.S.R. was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo.

“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” A friend of his, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview that Mr. Gorbachev was “upset” about the war, viewing it as having undermined “his life’s work.”

When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.

A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.

The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.

The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Mr. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.

It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.

The openness Mr. Gorbachev sought — what came to be known as glasnost — and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him. Still, Mr. Gorbachev’s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:

■ He presided over an arms agreement with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons, and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.

■ He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.

■ While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.

■ He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform that in many places drove stunned Communist leaders out of office.

■ He permitted the release of the confined dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

■ He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.

■ In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom-of-conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to “satisfy their spiritual needs.”

But if Mr. Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world — he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 — he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Mr. Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.

After five years of Mr. Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Mr. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.

Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: “We see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.”

A Son of Peasants

There was little in his early life that would have led anyone to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev could become such a dynamic leader. His official biography, issued after he became the new party chief, traced the well-traveled path of a good, loyal Communist.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, a farming village in the Stavropol region of the Caucasus. His parents were genuine peasants, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. During his infancy, the forced collectivization of the land turned a once-fertile region into “a famine disaster area,” the exiled writer and biologist Zhores A. Medvedev wrote in a biography of Mr. Gorbachev.

“The death from starvation was very high,” he added. “In some villages, all the children between the ages of 1 and 2 died.”

Misha, as Mikhail was known, was a bright-eyed youngster whose early photographs show him in a Cossack’s fur hat. He grew up in a house of straw held together with mud and manure and with no indoor plumbing. But his family was well respected among the Communist faithful. Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his book “Memoirs” that both his grandfathers had been arrested for crimes against the Czarist state.

Still, the family’s embrace of Soviet ideology was not all-encompassing; Mr. Gorbachev’s mother and grandmother had him baptized...

Still more.

 

How China Could Choke Taiwan

 At the New York Times, "How China Could Choke Taiwan's Economy With a Blockade":

China is honing its ability to blockade Taiwan, giving Beijing the option of choking off the self-ruled island in its campaign to take control. https://t.co/mkbxUrNQ0G

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 25, 2022

China is honing its ability to blockade Taiwan, giving Beijing the option of cutting off the self-ruled island in its campaign to take control of it.

For decades, Beijing has had its sights on Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own. It has built up the People’s Liberation Army with the goal of ultimately taking Taiwan, if efforts to unify peacefully fail. It has modernized its forces, developing the world’s largest navy, which now challenges American supremacy in the seas around Taiwan.

While China likely still lacks the ability to quickly invade and seize Taiwan, it could try to impose a blockade to force the island into concessions or as a precursor to wider military action. In this scenario, China would attempt to subdue Taiwan by choking it and its 23 million people in a ring of ships and aircraft, cutting it off physically, economically and even digitally.

China tried to use its military exercises this month to signal confidence in the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to encircle Taiwan. The military fired ballistic missiles into the waters off Taiwan, 80 miles off China’s coast, sending at least four high over the island itself, according to Japan, and conducted exercises in zones closer to the island than ever before.

In “The Science of Strategy,” a key textbook for People’s Liberation Army officers, Taiwan is not mentioned, but the target is clear. The textbook describes a “strategic blockade” as a way to “destroy the enemy’s external economic and military connections, degrade its operational capacity and war-fighting potential, and leave it isolated and unaided.”

During this month’s exercises, China avoided more provocative moves that could have triggered a more forceful response from Taiwan. But it still sought to convey real menace, putting Taiwan on notice about the risks of not meeting Beijing’s demands.

“I think they have shown their intentions, encircling Taiwan and countering foreign intervention,” said Ou Si-fu, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is affiliated with Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. “Their assumption was ‘Taiwan can be isolated, and so next I can fight you.’”

Real Blockade Would Seek to Repel U.S. Forces

After Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied Beijing’s warnings and visited Taiwan on Aug. 2, China retaliated by deploying warplanes, ships and missiles for 72 hours of drills. It declared six exercise areas around Taiwan, including off the island’s eastern coast, in an effort to project its power farther from the Chinese mainland.

The exercises were not a full-scale rehearsal. In a real blockade, the 11 missiles that China fired into seas around Taiwan would have served little military purpose because they were designed to strike land targets, not ships. China did not roll out its most advanced weaponry. It flew planes near Taiwan, not over it. Although three of the sea zones China had designated for exercises intruded on territorial waters claimed by Taiwan, in practice Chinese missiles and ships avoided those waters.

“This is political warfare,” said Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore who formerly worked in the Pentagon. “The political aspect of what they do is sometimes more important than the actual training that they’re undertaking.”

An actual blockade would involve hundreds more ships and aircraft, as well as submarines, trying to seal off Taiwan’s ports and airports and repel possible intervention by warships and planes sent by the United States and its allies.

In a blockade, China would also need to control the skies. China has an array of naval and air bases on its east coast opposite Taiwan, and many more up and down its coast. The Chinese military could also try to shoot down enemy planes with surface-to-air missiles, or even strike at U.S. bases in Guam and Japan.

China’s military strategists see a blockade as a strategy that gives them flexibility to tighten or loosen a noose around Taiwan, depending on Beijing’s objectives.

China could impose a limited blockade by stopping and screening ships, without attacking Taiwan’s ports. Given Taiwan’s dependence on imports of fuel and food, even a temporary blockade could shock the island politically and economically, allowing China a forceful way to press its demands.

“This makes it possible to start and stop once Taiwan ‘learns its lesson,’” said Phillip C. Saunders of the National Defense University, who is a co-editor of a new collection of essays assessing Chinese military choices for Taiwan.

But the People’s Liberation Army trains for a blockade that “would be violent and would generate a lot of international costs,” Mr. Saunders said. In that scenario, China could use a blockade to support an attempt at a full invasion. That step could unleash a potentially protracted and devastating conflict, as well as a major international backlash against China that would bring it economic damage and political isolation.

The uncertainties of the outcome from any war at sea and in the air would be immense for all involved.

China Sees Information as a Key Battleground

In a real conflict to seize Taiwan, China would also seek to control the information landscape. It could use propaganda, disinformation, cyberwarfare and other tools in the hope of drumming up support at home and sowing fear and discord in Taiwan and across the world.

During the recent exercises, the People’s Liberation Army put out a torrent of videos, pictures and reports that blurred the line between propaganda and misinformation. The campaign included footage of jet fighters taking off, missiles fired, warships on patrol and a hospital train ferrying troops, all intended to show a force ready for combat. But it also appeared to exaggerate Chinese capabilities by depicting its forces as bigger and closer to Taiwan than they were in reality.

Chinese military planners regard cyberwarfare as important in any conflict, and experts say that in a real conflict China would use cyberattacks to try to knock out Taiwan’s communications and even paralyze some of its weapons. “Whoever controls information and controls the internet will have the whole world,” the Chinese military’s main textbook on strategy says, citing the late American futurist, Alvin Toffler.

During Ms. Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the island experienced sporadic, unsophisticated cyberattacks of unclear origin, creating more nuisance than disruption. At least four Taiwanese government websites endured brief cyberattacks. Hackers took over electronic displays at several 7-Eleven stores and at the Xinzuoying train station in Kaohsiung to display messages condemning Ms. Pelosi.

“The sneaky visit of the old witch to Taiwan is a serious provocation to the sovereignty of the motherland. Those who actively welcome it will eventually be judged by the people. The blood ties of the same race are hard to cut and will continue to be bonded together, and the great China will eventually be unified!”

In an actual conflict, China could also try to sever or disable undersea cables that carry about 90 percent of the data that connects Taiwan to the world, some military experts on the island said. The cables’ “main weak point is where they emerge from the bottom of the sea,” said Mr. Ou, the Taiwanese researcher.

Cutting Taiwan’s undersea cables would also spark chaos affecting other interconnected countries in the region, such as Japan and South Korea.

China Is Creating a New Normal Even after completing this month’s large-scale drills, the People’s Liberation Army has continued to intensify its presence in the Taiwan Strait. Chinese military forces have increased their flights over the so-called median line, an informal boundary between the two sides that they had rarely crossed in the past.

These flights signal a new normal for Chinese military activity closer to Taiwan, underscoring Beijing’s position that it does not accept the island’s claims of sovereign boundaries. Increasingly frequent and close-up exercises also raise the risk that Taiwan could become desensitized and be caught by a surprise attack. It would take minutes for a jet screaming across that line to be over the island if it stayed its course, instead of turning back as the aircraft do now.

“Maybe in the future this kind of action will be like the frog being cooked in boiling water,” said Shu Hsiao-huang, a researcher at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research. “This kind of harassment may become the norm.”

China’s Strategy in the Skies Near Taiwan

In the first three weeks of this month, China dispatched more than 600 military aircraft to buzz the airspace near the island, an unprecedented jump in these flights.

“As the United States and external forces, including Taiwan independence forces, make constant provocations, exercises will become more intense and more frequent, broader in time and scope,” said Song Zhongping, a military commentator in Beijing who is a former Chinese military officer.

China has in recent years made more and more military flights into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, a space bigger than the island’s sovereign airspace, as a controlled way of demonstrating Beijing’s anger with Taiwan. Now, by intruding daily into the zone, China’s forces are also potentially attempting to wear down Taiwanese air force planes and pilots. Among the flights recorded by Taiwan this month, many have been fighter jets, but surveillance planes, helicopters and other craft have also been identified...

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Smears Republcans as 'Fascists'

On Twitter:

If this is what they believe—and they do—how do they allow “fascists” and “attackers of our democracy” to vote at all? Do you understand that this is where it’s going? https://t.co/7ndezQC9HQ

— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) August 27, 2022

TikTok Influencers Push to Unionize Amazon

These people are kids with millions of followers on social media.  And they're demanding Amazon pay its workers $30.00 an hour. Right. Fucking brats. 

At WaPo, "Gen Z TikTok creators are turning against Amazon":

A coalition of top TikTok stars is pledging to cease all work with Amazon — including shutting down storefronts and halting new partnerships with the e-commerce platform — until the company meets the demands of the Amazon Labor Union.

Boasting a combined following of over 51 million, the group of 70 TikTok creators says that the campaign, called the “People Over Prime Pledge,” is designed to pressure Amazon to meet the requests of its workers, which include a $30 minimum wage, increased paid time off and halting activities the group considers “union busting.”

“Amazon’s widespread mistreatment of their workers and blatant use of union busting tactics will no longer be tolerated by the TikTok Community,” reads a statement from Gen Z For Change, an advocacy group that coordinated the pledge and works frequently with creators.

Amazon Labor Union, which did not help organize the People Over Prime Pledge, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The campaign is a public setback for Amazon, which has sought to develop tighter relationships with young influencers in recent years. In 2017, the company launched the Amazon Influencer Program, allowing creators to earn revenue by recommending products in personalized Amazon storefronts. Earlier this year, Amazon flew more than a dozen Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok stars to a luxurious retreat in Mexico to encourage influencers to grow their presence on the platform. In June, Amazon built a massive VIP lounge at VidCon, an annual conference for online video stars, where influencers could learn about ways to work more closely with the company.

Instagram knows you don't like its changes. It doesn't care.

“I think their method of offering influencers life-changing payouts to make them feel as if they need to work with them while also refusing to pay their workers behind the scenes is extremely wrong,” said Emily Rayna Shaw, 24, a TikTok creator with 5.4 million followers who has partnered with Amazon in the past. “I want to feel comfortable recommending Amazon products to my community because it is so reliable, but I can’t do so until I know that they are treating their workers fairly.”

Many of the creators behind the People over Prime Pledge have done promotional deals with the company but plan to shut down their storefronts and decline future partnerships because of concerns over worker treatment. Creators who have worked with Amazon say that the company requires them to sign nondisparagement agreements, so that they can’t speak negatively about the platform even when the deals are over.

Amazon — which is the second-largest private employer in the U.S., where it has a higher rate of worker injuries than its competitors — has increasingly become a target for organized labor. In April, the independent Amazon Labor Union won an election at a large fulfillment center in Staten Island, marking a major union victory. Amazon workers are also organizing facilities in Bessemer, Ala.; Garner, N.C.; Albany, N.Y.; Campbellsville, Ky., and San Bernardino, Calif.

But the company has cracked down on these efforts, disciplining, firing, and even calling the police on some workers who show support for unions. The National Labor Relations Board has said some of the company’s conduct violates labor law, but the agency has limited resources to police a company of Amazon’s size. Even at the warehouse where Amazon Labor Union won the election, the company has successfully delayed the start of the contract-bargaining process, which itself could take months or years to complete.

[Amazon could stymie unions for years by going to the courts.]

Jackie James, 19, a TikTok creator with 3.4 million followers said that she will not be doing deals with Amazon until they change their ways. “As an influencer, it’s important to choose the right companies to work with,” she said. “I don’t think that workers should be treated the way they are under Amazon.”

Yet as labor organizing efforts within Amazon have hit speed bumps — Amazon Labor Union lost a second election in Staten Island in May — the movement has remained high profile, attracting support from Sen. Bernie Sanders and President Biden. Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls appeared on a prominent Twitch stream last week, and the hashtag #hotlaborsummer has popped up on Twitter.

Amazon has previously denied discontent among its workers, arguing turnover is a function of the company’s flexibility. “A large percentage of people we hire are re-hires, showing that they will choose to work for us when they want to,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, told The Post in June. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

“We’re demanding that Amazon listen to their workers and make changes to provide a healthy workplace environment,” said Aidan Kohn-Murphy, founder of Gen Z For Change, who also posts on TikTok. “Until Amazon institutes these changes, we as creators will block Amazon from monetizing one of the largest social media platforms in the world.” ...

The Commie Colonization of America

From Michelle Malkin, at the Unz Review":

From California to the New York island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf stream waters, the land that used to belong to Americans has been milked and bilked by investors and paid government agents of the People’s Republic of China. The National Association of Realtors reported last week that wealthy Chinese spent $6.1 billion on U.S. real estate in the past year. They’ve captured more than 10% of the market and have the highest average purchase price of all foreign real estate investors at over $1 million per home.

California is their top pick, with more than a third of all homes located in the Golden State. (Or is it the Maoist Red State now?) In addition, China-tied entities own nearly 192,000 acres of American farmland and forest land — the bulk controlled by ShuangHui International after it acquired U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods in 2013.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis made headlines this week blasting the takeover as a “huge problem.” Indeed, the commie colonization of America has been taking place for decades. But it’s not rapacious Beijing enemies abroad who deserve the most blame. It’s traitorous Democrats and globalist Republicans who’ve pimped and profited off of fraud-ridden green card rackets that allowed foreigners to gobble up our country.

In my books “Invasion” (2002) and “Sold Out” (2015), my 2017 mini-documentary, “The Dark World of EB-5: U.S. Citizenship for Sale,” my 2016 report on Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s China deals, and countless syndicated columns dating back to 2001, I’ve blown the whistle on the national security nightmare posed by China’s favorite vehicle for gobbling up our neighborhoods: the bipartisan-boosted EB-5 investor visa scam. This is the same racket exploited by former Democrat Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, lobbied for by the late Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and Department of Homeland Security official Alejandro Mayorkas, and embraced by South Dakota Republican officials.

In “Sold Out,” I plunged into the Atlantic Yards EB-5 boondoogle, 70% owned by the Shanghai government-run Greenland Group. A source in the foreign real estate investment industry alerted me in 2016 to some of the other top Chinese land grabs facilitated by the bipartisan EB-5 racket, including:

— A $620 million luxury condo project in San Francisco by Chinese-owned Vanke;

— A $1.5 billion development deal in Oakland, California, with Chinese company, Zarsion; and

— The $60 million Europa Village residential development in Temecula, California, wine country involving over 100 Chinese EB-5 investors.

The Chinese are buying up north Texas, charter schools and adjacent properties in Arizona, North Carolina and Florida, and 40% of the iconic General Motors building in New York. Just last week, a pair of Chinese investors were finally arrested for their alleged role in an EB-5 scheme to create a “China City” in the Catskills. The liberal media only pounced on the story because the investors illegally gave money to the Trump campaign; but the scam had been exposed back in 2013 by the Center for Immigration Studies’ EB-5 watchdog, David North.

Still more.

Yes, Things Are Really As Bad As You've Heard [In Public Education]

Another outstanding inside look at the continuing eradication of standards in the schools, with emphasis here on how so-called "progressive" policies end up hurting most those kids who were targeted for affirmative compensatory policy change in the first place. 

There is a backlash afoot, with the San Francisco school board recall being the prime example. But getting things back to where they were just a decade or so ago (when it was bad enough already) is going to be extremely difficult. Leftists are like venomous poisonous species that will kill regardless of what and how fast medical intervention takes place.

See, "A Leftist Schoolteacher Struggles To Say Aloud the Things He Regularly Witnesses That Are So Outlandish They Sound Made Up By Right-Wing Provocateurs."

Norman Podhoretz Interview at Claremont Review: 'The Rise of the Anti-Ameican Left'

At the Claremont Review of Books, "Present at Creation. Norman Podhoretz on the Rise of the Anti-American Left":

Anyway, what’s going on now with “anti-racism” is really different from the past, because it’s one of the main, or perhaps the main, weapon of attack on America. What’s happened today is that the gloves are off, the disguises are off, the leftists, black and white, talk now publicly the way they only used to talk privately, it’s out in the open and there is a tiny bit of resistance being mounted recently, but only a tiny bit so far. So, it is worse and a lot of people are now saying, “We are in a cold civil war.” And we were not in a civil war yet in those days, in the 1960s. We were so to speak in the 1840s or early 1850s, not in the 1860s. But we’re there now (except, thank God, for the guns). I don’t know how this divide is going to work itself out, but I consider it evil because I still believe, and I believe in a way more than ever, that this country is not only a force for good in itself and in the world at large, but one of the high points of human civilization...

RTWT.

International Workers' Day

Yesterday, actually, May 1st.

According to Wikipedia,"the date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association."

Here's more, "Workers of the World Unite! May Day Celebrates Working-Class Solidarity":

The origins of a holiday celebrating workers can be traced back to labor and trade union movements in the late 19th century. As dreadful working conditions in factories became highly publicized during this period, particularly in meat packing plants, through works such as Upton Sinclar’s The Jungle, movements to improve working conditions (both for workers and for public health and safety) grew in size and intensity. On May 3, 1886, as workers rallied to demand an eight-hour workday in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, mass confusion erupted when a bomb exploded in the crowd and the police opened fire on the crowd. The Haymarket Affair, as this event is remembered, was used as pretext for widespread repression of workers and for the arrests of labor organizers, radicals and immigrants.

Not coincidentally, as progressive organizations and labor parties around the world began to celebrate International Workers Day on May 1 in commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, Labor Day was established in 1894 in the U.S. on the first Monday of September with the support of the American Federation of Labor, in part to distance the labor movement from its more radical elements. May Day continues to be celebrated around the world; and in the US, it has taken on special significance for immigrants’ rights activists. The convergence of the demands of workers for better wages and working conditions, and the demands of immigrants for dignity and freedom from the violence imposed by the immigration enforcement regime, is a fitting tribute to the role that immigrants have played in the labor movement in the United States.

The history of the labor movement is largely the history of human beings, living at the margins of mainstream society, uniting in solidarity, asserting their rights and fighting for a better, more fair world. It unfortunately remains true that racism, xenophobia and white supremacy redound to the benefit of those with economic and political power. From racist appeals to white supremacy that destroyed radical efforts during Reconstruction towards true multiracial democracy, to the xenophobic red scare that followed Haymarket and the repression of the Black Panther Party, racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric represent not only an existential threat of violence for marginalized people, but also a powerful weapon used by the ruling class to undermine solidarity among working people. Immigrants and marginalized people continue to be used as scapegoats for crime, poverty and other societal problems which can rightly be attributed to systems of exploitation that entrench privilege and power, and not those oppressed by these same systems.

It is, in many ways, the time of monsters. The Trump presidency ushered in a new era of domestic repression of Black and brown people and brought violent white supremacist rhetoric back into American mainstream political discourse. President Biden was elected with broad progressive support but has largely failed to roll back the worst Trump-era immigration policies. The COVID pandemic laid bare the harsh reality facing American workers, forced to risk their health and livelihood, often without adequate workplace protections, while America’s billionaires added nearly $2 trillion to their net worth. The United States continues to spend more on its military than the next nine countries combined while millions of its people are unhoused.

And yet, a new generation of the working class—union members and unorganized workers alike, students, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, Black, brown, and Indigenous people—stands ready to meet this political moment and organize to demand a better future. Workers at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island recently won the first union victory at any Amazon facility, led by a Black supervisor who was fired after organizing a walkout to protest unsafe working conditions at the start of the pandemic. Activists throughout the state are mobilizing to shut down the ICE Processing Center in Folkston in solidarity with detainees on hunger strike in the facility. And here in Athens, a coalition of organizations are demanding Community Benefits Agreements for large public projects, and United Campus Workers of Georgia are campaigning for a living wage for UGA workers. This May Day, let their struggles be our struggles. The only way forward is with solidarity among the multiracial working class of the United States and workers of the world.

Yes, because our pampered and privileged "students" and LGBTQIQ+ plus activists are taking all the assembly line-workers' jobs, low-skill manual laborers' jobs, fast-food and retail workers' jobs, and those in cleaning and janitorial services, the food industry, construction labor, longshoreman, parking lot attendants and car washers, truck drivers, and low-level white-collar worker positions, and more! 

Down with the colonialist, racist, multi-phobic finance capitalists of the world! 

Hey, hey! Ho ho! Late-stage capitalism's got to go! 

Yes, these "industrious" purple-haired campus proletarians have joined in working class solidarity with all the world's expropriated and oppressed! *Yawn.*

More here, "Workers around the world mark May Day with rallies for better working conditions."

Jeremy Friedman, Ripe for Revolution

Jeremy Friedman, Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World.

Jason M. Kelly, Market Maoists

At Amazon, Jason M. Kelly, Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent.

Edward N. Luttwak, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy

At Amazon, Edward N. Luttwak, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy.

Eileen Gu or the Chained Woman?

I've already blogged about Eileen Gu, but nothing like this. 

There are at least 600,000 million Chinese living in abject poverty, but Chairman Xi can't let the cat out of the bag. So, Ms. Gu is promoted to the top of Wiebo while human-trafficking victim Xiaohuamei (little flower plum) is censored and crushed under the boot-heel of totalitarianism.

Absolutely unreal story. I already loathe China. I'm to the point of no longer reporting on the regime because it makes me furious. The diabolical hypocrisy is stunning. Americans like Eileen Gu to the cretins of the International Olympic Committee --- with this whole Olympics propaganda regime --- have blood on their hands. And that's to say nothing of the Chinese Communist Party thugs who should be destroyed rather than coddled. This is all so sickening, even anti-American. 

At the New York Times. "Who Is the Real China? Eileen Gu or the Chained Woman?":

Two women have dominated Chinese social media during the Beijing Winter Olympics.

One is Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old skier born and raised in California who won a gold medal for China. The other is a mother of eight who was found chained around her neck to the wall of a doorless shack.

The Chinese internet is exploding with discussions about which of the two represents the real China. Many people are angry that the government-controlled algorithms glorify Ms. Gu, who fits into the narrative of the powerful and prosperous China, while censoring the chained woman, whose deplorable conditions defy that narrative.

The two women’s starkly different circumstances — celebrated vs. silenced — reflect the reality that to the Chinese state, everyone is a tool that serves a purpose until it does not.

Whether she wants it, Ms. Gu has become a powerful propaganda tool for Beijing to demonstrate its appeal to global talent and the benefits of being loyal to China. She represents the successful China that Beijing would like the world to admire.

The chained woman represents the poor and backward China that hundreds of millions still inhabit. They sometimes appear in the state media to demonstrate the country’s success in eradicating extreme poverty until their miseries become an inconvenient truth.

“Does Eileen Gu’s success have anything to do with ordinary Chinese?” goes the headline of one viral article that was censored later.

“Can we remember these women while cheering for Eileen Gu?” asks another headline.

“To judge whether a society is civilized or not, we should not look at how successful the privileged are but how miserable the disadvantaged are,” the article said. “Ten thousand sports champions can’t wash away the humiliation of one enslaved woman, not to mention tens of thousands of them.”

The Chinese government doesn’t like where the debate is heading. The juxtaposition of the two women highlights that underneath the glamorous surface of one of the world’s largest economies lie jarring poverty and widespread abuse of women’s rights.

It defeats the purpose of recruiting star athletes like Ms. Gu: to showcase a powerful China with global appeal.

“The reality is that the vast majority of Chinese won’t have the opportunity to become Eileen Gu,” Li Yinuo, founder of a prominent education company in Beijing, wrote in an article. But the tragedy of the chained woman, she wrote, could happen to anyone.

A few hours later, her article was deleted.

Embedded in the debate is a deep disappointment among middle-class Chinese who are usually willing to go along with the government’s narratives but are incensed by the repeated lies, lack of action and subsequent censorship in the case of the chained woman.

They feel that the government is pouring too many resources behind a privileged member of the society while neglecting another member in dire need of help. They’re worried that the latter’s misfortune could happen to them or their daughters.

Many social media users, including some self-claimed nationalistic little pinks, posted a quote from a famous Chinese novel: “I love the country. But does the country love me?”

The story of the chained woman — whose name, according to the government, is Xiaohuamei (little flower plum) — has captivated the Chinese internet since a short video went viral in late January. In it, a middle-age woman with a dazed expression stood in the dark shack with a chain on her neck. Subsequent videos revealed that she had lost most of her teeth and seemed to be mentally disturbed.

The local authorities issued four conflicting statements in the following two weeks. In the latest statement on Thursday, the authorities reported that Xiaohuamei could be a victim of human trafficking and that her husband was under investigation for false imprisonment. The government had denied both earlier.

The fates of the two women converged online last week after Ms. Gu won her gold medal.

At one point, Ms. Gu, who grew up in an upscale neighborhood in San Francisco and represents some of the biggest brands, like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Company, occupied 10 of the 20 hottest hashtags on Weibo. The hashtag about Xiaohuamei was nowhere to be seen, even though many people were still talking about her.

Some social media users were outraged by the lopsided treatment of the two women. They felt that even though they had tried their best to be the obedient and useful tools in the giant machinery of the Chinese state, Xiaohuamei’s tragedy showed that the state won’t necessarily offer them protection...

And watch here, "To give the full story, here is the original video that caused the social media storm, which is still ongoing today (tw distressing content, not sure why the lock is blurred, as if that is the most shocking thing about this video..)."

Three San Francisco School Board Members Recalled (VIDEO)

This is very big news. It's every time now: Every time there's an election this year, Democrats will get fucking shellacked. 

And the three members recalled last night weren't "liberals." They're radicals, way outside of the mainstream. While overall turnout was low at 25 percent, the percentage of Chinese-Americans voting was near 80 percent. That never happens. San Francisco's Chinese community is very hands-off toward politics, but not this time. When you fuck with the schools you're fucking with a bloc of voters who aren't going to take any shit. 

S.F.'s District Attorney, Chesa Boudin --- who was raised by Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn --- will be up for recall in June. No doubt this race will be fought ferociously, and it may be tight, but once this dude gets the boot local districts throughout the entire country will be given notice: We will take you out. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "From liberal San Francisco, school board recall is a three-alarm warning for Democrats":

San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those.

Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The result of Tuesday’s recall was neither.

The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash.

What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls.

The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.

In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and, Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.

The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.

In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time that was wasted.

Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.) Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.

All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened.

Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it.

He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for recall.

It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in the lifetime of any adult within sight of Coit Tower. But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco...

San Francisco is not "liberal." It's a communist enclave, Moscow by the Bay, and the voters have had enough with this takeover by critical theory. 

Leftists around the country (and Canada, in the worst way) are not learning the lessons of the 2021 elections. Democrats will pay for their snobbery and elitism. These are wealthy champagne socialists who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with the poor and working class proletarians delivering their goods from Amazon Prime and their Door Dash dinners. Workers, truck drivers, literally front-line health care professionals, kept this country functioning through the damned pandemic/lockdown. Enough is enough. 

No, not only do these clowns know "what's best" for everybody else, they don't have to live with the horrific consequences of their experiments in creating the communist utopia.

I'd like to say "take them out" in a more literal sense, but mostly I mean take them out at the ballot box. 

What's Really at Stake in America's History Wars?

At WSJ, "In debates about monuments, curricula and renaming, the facts of the past matter less than how we are supposed to feel about our country":

In January, McMinn County, Tenn., made international news for perhaps the first time in its history when the school board voted to remove “Maus,” the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the 8th-grade curriculum. The board stated that it made the change on account of the book’s “use of profanity and nudity,” asking school administrators to “find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion.”

This curricular change, affecting a few hundred of the approximately 5,500 K-12 students in McMinn’s public schools, was quickly amplified on social media into a case of book banning with shades of Holocaust denial. The author of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, said that the decision had “a breath of autocracy and fascism.” “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” tweeted the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, earning more than 170,000 likes. The controversy sent the book to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.

This outrage of the week will soon give way to another, but the war over history—how to remember it, represent it and teach it—is only getting fiercer. America’s political and cultural divisions increasingly take the form of arguments not about the future—what kind of country we want to be and what policies will get us there—but about events that are sometimes centuries in the past. The Holocaust, the Civil War, the Founding, the slave trade, the discovery of America—these subjects are constantly being litigated on social media and cable TV, in school boards and state legislatures.

None of those venues is well equipped to clarify what actually happened in the past, but then, the facts of history seldom enter into the war over history. Indeed, surveys regularly show how little Americans actually know about it. A 2019 poll of 41,000 people by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that in 49 states, a majority couldn't earn a passing score on the U.S. citizenship test, which asks basic questions about history and government. (The honorable exception was Vermont, where 53% passed.)

Ironically, the year after the survey, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation announced that it would drop the historical reference in its own name, citing the 28th president’s “racist legacy.” It was part of a growing trend. Woodrow Wilson’s name was also dropped from Princeton University’s school of international affairs. Yale University renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Southern politician who was an ardent defender of slavery. The San Francisco school board briefly floated a plan to drop the names of numerous historical figures from public schools for various reasons, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders.

It makes sense that educational institutions are leading the wave of renaming, because it is above all a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. Actual historical understanding requires a much greater investment of effort and imagination than giving a thumbs up or down to this or that name. Often even a Wikipedia search seems to be too much to ask. One of the names that the San Francisco school board proposed to get rid of was Paul Revere’s, on the grounds that he was a leader of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which a board member believed was a campaign to conquer territory from the Penobscot Indians. In fact, it was a (failed) attempt to evict British naval forces from Penobscot Bay in Maine.

Clearly, the war over history has as much to do with the present as the past. To some extent, that’s true of every attempt to tell the story of the past, even the most professional and objective. In the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke saw it as his task to determine “how things really were,” but if that could be done, it wouldn’t be necessary for each generation of historians to write new books about the same subjects. We keep retelling the story of the Civil War or World War II not primarily because new evidence is discovered, but because the way we understand the evidence changes as the world changes.

That’s why so many of America’s historical battles have to do with race, slavery and colonialism—because no aspect of American society has changed more dramatically over time. It has never been a secret, for instance, that George Washington was a slaveholder. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon.

But when Parson Weems wrote the first bestselling biography of Washington in 1800, he barely referred to the first president’s slaveholding, except for noting that in his will he provided for freeing his slaves, “like a pure republican.” When Weems does inveigh against “slavery” in the book, he is referring to British rule in America. For instance, he writes that the tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, was meant to “insult and enslave” the colonies. Today it’s impossible to ignore this glaring contradiction. Weems didn’t notice it and clearly didn’t expect his readers to, either.

Another explanation for this blind spot can be found in the book’s full title: “The Life of George Washington: With curious anecdotes, equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen.” Weems was a minister, and his goal was moral uplift. That’s why he avoided writing about Washington’s treatment of his slaves but included the dubious story about young George confessing to chopping down the cherry tree. The point was to show Washington in a light that would make readers want to be better themselves.

Today’s war over history involves the same didactic impulses. Fights over the past aren’t concerned with what happened so much as what we should feel about it. Most people who argue about whether Columbus Day should become Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of what side they’re on, have only a vague sense of what Columbus actually did. The real subject of debate is whether the European discovery of America and everything that flowed from it, including the founding of the U.S., should be celebrated or regretted. Our most charged historical debates boil down to the same terms Weems used: Is America “exemplary” and “honorable,” or the reverse?

How we answer that question has important political ramifications, since the farther America is from the ideal, the more it presumably needs to change. But today’s history wars are increasingly detached from practical issues, operating purely in the realm of emotion and symbol. Take the “land acknowledgments” that many universities, arts institutions and local governments have begun to practice—the custom of stating the name of the Native American people that formerly occupied the local territory. For example, the Board of Supervisors of Pima County, Az., recently voted to begin its meetings with the statement, “We honor the tribal nations who have served as caretakers of this land from time immemorial and respectfully acknowledge the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.”

To their supporters, land acknowledgments are a way of rectifying Americans’ ignorance or indifference about the people who inhabited the country before European settlement. The use of words like “caretakers” and “time immemorial,” however, raises historical questions that the Pima Board of Supervisors is presumably unqualified to answer. People have been living in what is now Arizona for 12,000 years: Were the Tohono O’odham Nation really in their territory “from time immemorial,” or might they have displaced an earlier population?

Of course, the Board has no intention of vacating Tucson and restoring the land to its former inhabitants, so the whole exercise can be seen as pointless. Still, by turning every public event into a memorial of dispossession, land acknowledgments have the effect of calling into question the legitimacy of the current inhabitants—that is, the people listening to the acknowledgment.

The fear that the very idea of America is being repudiated has led Republican legislators in many states to introduce laws regulating the teaching of American history. These are often referred to as “anti-critical race theory” laws, but in this context the term is just a placeholder for a deeper anxiety. The controversial law passed in Texas last year, for instance, doesn’t prevent teachers from discussing racism. On the contrary, House Bill 3979 mandates the study of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. , as well as Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. However, it does insist that students learn that “slavery and racism are…deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” In other words, students should believe that the U.S. is “exemplary” and “honorable” in principle, if regrettably not in practice.

In the U.S., the war over history usually has to do with curricula and monuments because those are some of the only things the government can directly control. Removing “Maus” from the 8th-grade reading list can be loosely referred to as a “ban” only because actual book bans don’t exist here, thanks to the First Amendment. But other countries that are less free also have their history wars, and in recent years governments and ideologues have become bolder about imposing an official line.

In Russia last December, a court ordered the dissolution of Memorial, a highly respected nonprofit founded in 1989 to document the crimes of the Soviet era, after prosecutors charged that it “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” In 2018, Poland made it illegal to attribute blame for the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” In India in 2014, Penguin India agreed to stop publishing a book about the history of Hinduism by the respected American scholar Wendy Doniger, after a nationalist leader sued on the grounds that it focused on “the negative aspects” of the subject.

Such episodes are becoming more common with the rise of nationalist and populist movements around the world. When people invest their identity wholly in their nation, pointing out the evils in the nation’s past feels like a personal attack. Conversely, for people whose political beliefs hinge on distrusting nationalism, any refusal to focus on historic evils feels dangerous, like a tacit endorsement of them, as in the “Maus” episode. These extremes feed off one another, until we can only talk about the past in terms of praise or blame that would be too simple for understanding a single human being, much less a collection of millions over centuries.

It’s surprising to realize how quickly the American consensus on history has unraveled under the pressure of polarization...

Why the U.S. Military Isn't Ready for Civil War

A huge platter of food for thought.

At Foreign Policy, "Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War":

The unimaginable has become reality in the United States. Buffoonish mobs desecrating the U.S. Capitol building, tanks parading down the streets of Washington, running battles between protesters and militias, armed rebels attempting to kidnap sitting governors, uncertainty about the peaceful transition of power—if you read about them in another country, you would think a civil war had already begun. The basic truth is the United States might be on the brink of such a war today. Americans must now take the proposition seriously, not just as a political warning but as a probable military scenario—and a potential catastrophe.

The United States, of course, is not just any country—it is the world’s most enduring democracy and largest economy. But ever fewer Americans believe its size and power are going to save it anymore. In the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s election, Thomas E. Ricks for Foreign Policy asked a group of national security experts to assess the chances of a civil war over the next 10 to 15 years. The consensus stood at 35 percent. A 2019 poll from Georgetown University asked registered voters how close to the “edge of a civil war” the country was, on a scale from 0 to 100. The mean of their answers was 67.23, so almost exactly two-thirds of the way.

There are plenty of reasons to trust this assessment. The United States, as is stands, is a textbook case of a country on the brink of civil conflict. The political system has been completely overwhelmed by hyperpartisanship that renders each political decision, at best, representative of the will of only half the country. The legal system is increasingly a spoil of political infighting. The Oath Keepers, one of the largest anti-government militias, have effectively infiltrated police forces and the Republican Party. Elected officials have opened the doors to vandals who desecrate their own legislatures. It has now become perfectly normal for political representatives to call for acts of violence against their political opponents. “When do we get to use the guns?” is an acceptable question at right-wing rallies. Political violence is on the rise, and the response of the courts has been to legitimize vigilantism—see the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Only a spark is needed, one major domestic terrorist event that shifts the perception of the country—an anti-government patriot who takes his rage against the federal authority and finds expression in flying a drone loaded with explosives into the Capitol dome or a sheriff who decides to take up arms to defend the doctrine of interposition. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that a left-wing rejection of the police, like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, might force military action. Retired U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of military history at the Ohio State University, is a veteran of the Iraq War who now studies the insurgencies of the past. He doesn’t have any difficulty picturing a contemporary U.S. equivalent to civil wars elsewhere. “It would not be like the first Civil War, with armies maneuvering on the battlefield,” he said. “I think it would very much be a free-for-all, neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion. And it would be horrific.”

For the U.S. government, an outbreak of widespread political violence inside the country’s borders would necessarily become a military operation. U.S. militias are significant enough that the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security would simply be insufficient to deal with them. Only the U.S. military could be capable of dealing with insurgent forces. And from a tactical point of view, any engagement between U.S. forces and a militia (or any insurgent force of any kind for that matter) would be entirely one-sided. Despite the preparations of right-wing militias, and despite the sheer number of weapons available in the United States, the U.S. Marines are still the U.S. Marines. No militia or organized group of militias could compete with them in battle.

The real problems would be legal and bureaucratic, and these problems, in turn, would quickly take on a military character. The U.S. military isn’t culturally or institutionally designed to be an adequate domestic actor—rather, the opposite. Its role in American life has been specifically designed to make it ineffective in domestic operations. The use of the military would not be, in itself, a constitutional crisis; there are legal precedents and explicit executive orders governing the use of military force on U.S. soil. But any military response to civil unrest is highly likely to spin out of control into extended insurgency. And for all the U.S. military’s prowess, the outcome would be entirely uncertain.

Occupying forces in foreign countries are, almost without exception, seen as illegitimate by local populations. Would a U.S. force on U.S. soil face the same fundamental resistance? American forces would, after all, be American. But the United States is not like other countries. It was born in resistance to government. Its history has been filled with state resistance to federal authority. And it has experienced resistance to occupation by its own forces before. The United States currently contains a diverse assortment of anti-government movements, from groups that are little more than survivalist hobbyists to neo-Nazi accelerationists and sovereign citizens. They are armed; several members of these groups have been caught with the materials needed to build low-grade nuclear weapons. A significant portion of the American public is actively pursuing the destruction of political authority as such. What happens if they continue to enact their stated goals of overthrowing the federal government and imposing their vision of liberty by force of arms, as the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have shown they are already beginning to do?

Joint Publication 3-27 defines the armed forces’ role in homeland defense as protecting U.S. “sovereignty, territory, domestic population, and critical infrastructure against external threats and aggression or other threats, as directed by the President.” So which is it? Is the Army there to protect against “external threats”? Or is the category of “other threats” broad enough to include rebel militias?

The Insurrection Act stipulates the latter. Originally enacted in 1807, it provides for the suppression of an insurrection against a state government at the request of the governor. There is also Section 253 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to use the armed forces to suppress insurrection or domestic violence if it (1) hinders the execution of the laws to the extent that a part or class of citizens are deprived of constitutional rights and the state is unable or refuses to protect those rights or (2) obstructs the execution of any federal law or impedes the course of justice under federal laws. There is precedent for such direct engagement: Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War; President Dwight D. Eisenhower calling troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce desegregation; the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

But the rules of force issued to the 7th Infantry Division during the Los Angeles riots specified minimum levels of force in response to levels of civilian violence. Today’s political violence threatens to be far more organized. The question is, what would happen if the U.S. military were obliged to respond in kind? ....

*****

Sixty years of U.S. experience has taught the same lesson about counterinsurgency: If you lose, you lose. If you win, you still lose. At present, the official U.S. counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy remains a version of Petraeus’s 2006 “clear, hold, and build” strategy. In the current edition of Joint Publication 3-24, which provides the U.S. military with a doctrine for counterinsurgency operations, it is outlined as “shape, clear, hold, build, and transition,” part of a suite of COIN strategies that include the generational approach (engaging with youth who are most likely to join insurgencies) and network engagement (through social media). All of these strategies have the smack of desperation in their operating modes. The military holds on to these strategies because at least they are strategies, not because they work. For decades, the U.S. military has been defined by its ineffectiveness against insurgencies in foreign countries. Why would it do any better at home?

The central problem is that it is impossible to build legitimacy as an occupier; the process of holding, even with the best of intentions, is humiliating and disruptive. The illegitimacy of any occupying force—the French in Algeria and Indochina, the Russians in Afghanistan, the British everywhere—would meet greater opposition than ever in an American-on-American context. The defiance begins in a claim to the illegitimacy of federal authority. If you are occupying an anti-government patriot stronghold, any state-building, of any kind, will be forced. The locals don’t want government. That’s the point. But how could any force “address the underlying causes of violence,” as JP 3-24 states, without the machinery of legitimization?

You don’t have to look very far to find an example of a failed occupation on U.S. soil. The South, under Reconstruction, spawned the Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirts, and White League—terrorist organizations that beleaguered the Northern administration until it abandoned the project of reconciliation. The resentment of the occupation after the Civil War survives to this day. Many in the South have not forgotten the abuses of Sherman’s March to the Sea, nor forgiven the Northern authorities for the humiliation of subjugation. The occupied Americans hated the occupying Americans. That hatred endures.

It’s in the nature of insurgent conflict that violence builds on itself. Symbolic horrors echo. Resonance compounds. The most recent COIN manual has digested, or at least acknowledged, the problem of perception. Insurgencies and counterinsurgencies are engaged in competitive storytelling. “Insurgent groups harness narratives to communicate grievances, goals, and justifications for actions to both internal and external audiences,” JP 3-24 reads. “Insurgency narratives have three elements or components: actors and the environments in which they operate, events along a temporal continuum, and causality—cause and effect relative to the first two elements.” The key word here is “audiences.” And how good can any military force be at playing to audiences?

The tactical considerations of battles between the U.S. military and any domestic militia forces would be completely irrelevant. No one with any tactical expertise can imagine anything other than a one-sided engagement. Professional military forces are professional...

RTWT. 

Democrats Have Problems in Rural America

It's Steve Bullock, the former governor of Minnesota.

I actually disagree with the specifics of how he governed his state over the last decade, before this year, but his larger, "structural" analysis (that is, "systemic," to borrow from the radical left), is fundamentally sound. 

At NYT, "I Was the Governor of Montana. My Fellow Democrats, You Need to Get Out of the City More":

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.

The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats.

The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them.

I was re-elected as Montana’s governor in 2016 at the same time Donald Trump took our state by more than 20 points. It’s never easy for Democrats to get elected in Montana, because Democrats here are running against not only the opponent on the ballot, but also against conservative media’s (and at times our own) typecast of the national Democratic brand: coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.

To overcome these obstacles, Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month. And the most insulting thing is being told what your self-interest should be.

Get out of the cities and you will learn we have a libertarian streak, with a healthy distrust of government. We listen when folks talk about opportunity and fairness, not entitlements. We expect government to play a role in our having a fair shot at a better life, not solve all our problems.

We need to frame our policies, not in terms of grand ideological narratives, but around the material concerns of voters. Despite our differences and no matter where we live, we generally all want the same things: a decent job, a safe place to call home, good schools, clean air and water, and the promise of a better life for our kids and grandkids.

For me, that meant talking about Obamacare not as an entitlement, but as a way to save rural hospitals and keep local communities and small businesses afloat. It meant talking about expanding apprenticeships, not just lowering the costs of college. It meant framing public lands as a great equalizer and as a driver for small business. It meant talking about universal pre-K not as an abstract policy goal, but being essential for our children and for keeping parents in the work force. It meant talking about climate change not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create good jobs, preserve our outdoor heritage, and as a promise not to leave communities behind.

These lessons apply broadly, not just to swing states. We need to do the hard work of convincing voters that we are fighting for every American, regardless of party or where they live, or it’ll only get worse for us in the 2022 midterms and beyond...

Still more.

 

M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History

At Amazon, M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies.