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hannah arendt
The No Kings Protests Proved That Seeing and Naming the Problem Is Not Enough
What do we do when 7 million people can see clearly and it changes nothing? When recognition is no longer power but only knowledge of the condition we are trapped inside?
Oct 20, 2025
In March 2023, anticipating his indictment, Donald Trump stood before a Conservative Political Action Conference audience and delivered what seemed like two speeches at once. "I am your warrior, I am your justice," he declared. "And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." The crowd roared. But in the same breath, he pivoted to grievance: The radical Left was "indicting me in a disgusting witch hunt." Within minutes, he had performed both triumph and victimhood, the strongman and the martyr. His supporters saw no contradiction. His poll numbers surged.
By October 2025, over 7 million Americans took to the streets in the largest protests in the nation's history. The "No Kings" demonstrations erupted in every major city and hundreds of smaller towns, a collective outcry against government overreach and authoritarian drift. Millions saw the danger clearly enough to leave their homes and march. They named it. They refused it. They made it visible.
Trump's response deployed the same contradictory logic. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called it a "hate America rally" funded by George Soros and the Communist Party. Fox News warned of "Antifa terrorists descending on American cities." Yet when protests remained peaceful, those same outlets pivoted within hours. The demonstrators were "pathetically small," just "crybabies." A White House spokesperson's official response: "Who cares? Cry more, libs." The protesters were both too weak to matter and too dangerous to ignore, often in the same sentence.
What happened next revealed something darker than hypocrisy. Seven million people saw clearly, organized, and marched. And they discovered that seeing changes nothing when power no longer requires coherence. The contradiction is not a flaw. It is the performance itself.
We are not living in a failure of awareness. We are living in the space after awareness, in the gap between recognition and power, and that gap is where the system has learned to thrive.
How he got there reveals the pattern. Two years before those protests, Trump had been trailing badly. Two-thirds of voters said he should not run again. Primary challengers drew real support. His legal troubles should have finished him. But the contradiction that should have destroyed him became the engine that restored him. The party was remade not despite the oscillation between victim and victor, but because of it.
Hannah Arendt saw this coming decades ago. Writing in 1951 after fleeing Nazi Germany, she observed that "the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." Totalitarian propaganda discovered that its audience no longer demanded consistency. When confronted with proof of falsehood, people would not abandon their leaders. They would take refuge in cynicism and admire the leaders for their "superior tactical cleverness."
Trump embodies this contradiction instinctively, moving between narcissistic wound (he is persecuted, silenced) and narcissistic grandiosity (he is unstoppable, the sole force capable of restoration). But figures like Stephen Miller have systematized what Trump performs on instinct. Miller's invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act shows how emotional oscillation becomes policy. The law, designed for wartime, was reframed as defensive necessity: a persecuted administration forced to use emergency powers because "radical judges" tied their hands. Victimhood becomes justification. Dominance becomes outcome.
The mechanism works because it offers psychological completion. Most political movements offer either victimhood or triumph. Grievance movements mobilize through persecution but risk feeling powerless. Triumphalist movements mobilize through strength but alienate those who feel left behind. This offers both simultaneously. Followers never have to choose between feeling wronged and feeling victorious. They get the emotional satisfaction of grievance and dominance at once. Umberto Eco observed that in fascist ideology, "The enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak." The contradiction structures belief itself.
In September 2025, that belief became policy, enacted on bodies in the middle of the night.
Residents of a Chicago apartment building were woken by helicopters overhead. Hundreds of armed federal agents swarmed the building, some rappelling from Black Hawks. They kicked down doors, deployed flash-bang grenades, overturned mattresses. By dawn, dozens of Venezuelan nationals had been detained. But American citizens were swept up too. Residents were forced from apartments at gunpoint, zip-tied, marched outside in whatever clothes they had been sleeping in. Families were separated. One witness described an agent forcibly removing an infant from its mother's arms.
Chicago's mayor protested: "This was a show of authoritarianism, a forceful display of tyranny." But the images had done their work. They circulated on Fox as proof of law and order restored. Yet even as children were separated from parents and citizens detained without cause, Trump's social media performed pure victimhood. He posted about persecution by Democratic mayors and radical judges. The contradiction traveled through separate channels, reaching separate audiences, never forced into the same frame. Fox broadcast strength. MSNBC covered constitutional violations. Truth Social performed grievance while Homeland Security performed dominance. Both worked.
The same logic framed the No Kings protests. Before they began, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declared the peaceful demonstrations would be "part of Antifa." When millions showed up and remained peaceful, the narrative pivoted instantly. Newsmax dubbed it, "No Kings, Just Crybabies." But the framing went beyond weakness. It extended into psychiatric territory. Commentators called protesters "deranged," "unwell," "delusional." The language recycled an old tactic: Discredit protest by diagnosing the protester. In the 1960s, diagnoses of schizophrenia spiked among Black civil rights activists. The DSM was revised to include "hostility" and "aggression" as symptoms. Men demanding rights were labeled schizophrenic. In 2025, Minnesota legislators introduced a bill classifying "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as a formal psychiatric condition. It did not pass. It did not need to.
The paradox persists because it never occupies a single frame. Media fragmentation ensures different audiences encounter different versions of reality. Fox broadcasts the strongman: Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, military flights, executive orders. Mainstream outlets emphasize grievance: persecution narratives, legal battles, claims of being silenced. Algorithmic systems ensure most people encounter only one version. The contradiction never gets forced into the same space where it would have to be reconciled.
Social media algorithms reward emotional extremes. A message declaring, "We are wronged" enrages opponents, who boost its visibility by arguing. The same message proclaiming, "We will prevail" energizes supporters who share it widely. A single post can simultaneously trend on Truth Social as evidence of persecution and on Twitter as evidence of dominance, the two narratives never intersecting. The administration posts images of people in chains, then hours later claims of censorship. Both spread efficiently. Both accomplish their purpose.
This creates exhaustion that functions as a weapon. Every news alert feels like whiplash. He is persecuted. No, he is ordering deportations. He is under attack. No, he is deploying troops. Courts rig the system against him. No, he appoints the judges. The exhaustion hardens into cynicism: "Both sides lie." "It's all performance." "I'm checking out." When the exhausted middle withdraws, they stop bearing witness. When people stop expecting coherence, accountability disappears.
Arendt wrote that totalitarian movements thrive when people believe nothing. Followers "do not particularly object to being deceived because they hold every statement to be a lie anyhow." The lie is not a problem. Its exposure creates no crisis. What matters is emotional alignment, belonging, shared enemies. The leader who can be both victim and victor is winning on multiple levels simultaneously.
When power no longer requires coherence, accountability becomes impossible. How do you hold someone responsible for contradictions when supporters admire them as tactical brilliance? The administration passed a reconciliation bill allocating $170 billion for immigration enforcement through standard procedure. Democratic forms persist. Democratic substance drains away. This is not a coup. It is a hollowing.
Dissent faces a trap with no exit. When protesters wept at family separations, they were mocked as "liberal tears." When activists cited asylum law and statistics, they were dismissed as coastal elites. When silent, they were accused of complicity. When marching, they were cast as mobs. Every response is pre-discredited. Emotion is hysteria. Reason is elitism. Silence is complicity. Action is extremism.
The asymmetry reveals where power lives. When the Tea Party filled town halls with rage in 2009, their anger was received as patriotic conviction. When college students mourned the 2016 election, "liberal tears" became memes within days. Conservative anger is always righteous. Liberal grief is always weakness. Power decides whose feelings count and whose pain gets laughed off stage.
Seven million Americans marched in October 2025 believing that visibility would matter, that naming the threat clearly would create accountability. They understood exactly what was happening. The problem was that understanding provides no protection when power has learned to function without requiring coherence.
The No Kings protests represented the largest collective act of recognition in American history. Millions simultaneously saw the danger, named it accurately, organized around shared perception, and took to the streets. And they discovered that recognition without power is the new condition. The system continues not because it has convinced them, but because it operates in the space between recognition and action, in the gap between seeing and being able to stop what you see. The administration does not need to hide. It does not need to persuade people that contradictions make sense. It only needs to ensure that recognition alone cannot interrupt the machinery.
This is what the protests proved. Not that Americans are unaware or complicit. Millions are paying attention. They see what is happening. They name it correctly. They refuse it loudly. Yet the system continues. We are not living in a failure of awareness. We are living in the space after awareness, in the gap between recognition and power, and that gap is where the system has learned to thrive.
The strongman's paradox is not really a paradox. It is the logic of authoritarian power when truth has become optional, when coherence is no longer required, when contradiction works better than consistency ever did. To see with clarity that coherence no longer governs, that the contradiction is the point, that demanding truth from power is the wrong question—this is not despair. It is the beginning of sight.
Then we face the harder question. What do we do when 7 million people can see clearly and it changes nothing? When recognition is no longer power but only knowledge of the condition we are trapped inside? The protests made one thing certain: We are living in the gap between recognition and power. The question is not whether we see. The question is what we build in the space where seeing is not enough.
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Are We on the Road to a Totalitarian US?
In important ways the Trump brand of authoritarianism contains hallmarks of totalitarianism in seeking to ensure that there is only one permissible way to think.
Oct 07, 2025
Americans of a certain age are well acquainted with the idea of totalitarianism—a regime or form of government that exercises total control over all aspects of life in society. We were bombarded with warnings about the totalitarian Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. George Orwell’s 1984 showed us a world where people could never escape the all-seeing eye of “Big Brother.” If they acted in any way the Party considered suspicious or subversive, they would be brainwashed or vaporized.
The United States was widely assumed to be the counterweight to these totalitarian systems, given the principles of liberalism—government limited by the individual rights of people with protections against the arbitrary exercise of power—that legitimized our constitutional system of government. Yet, Orwell himself was critical of Western groupthink during the Cold War, and the US had launched the long era of post-WWII imperialism and consumer-driven capitalism.
We are currently living under an authoritarian regime. At the national level, we live in a one-party state. Each of the three branches of government are controlled by the Republican party–checks and balances are meaningless or ignored. The president rules by his self-serving personal whim. He has assembled an administration of misfits and incompetents who will never challenge his views in public. Donald Trump's rule is by definition arbitrary rule. Rather than giving sound reasoning and evidence to support his claims, he just makes stuff up. He got where he is by ridiculing and attacking others, particularly those who are vulnerable.
Back in 1951, as the Cold War cast a huge shadow over American life and the Red Scare was taking off, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, focusing on Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Here are three brief quotations from Arendt:
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
I ask you, do these words remind you of anything going on under the Trump administration?
Authoritarianism relies on keeping the people isolated, divided, and fearful—which underscores the importance of communities coming together, protecting valued institutions, and raising our voices effectively. Yet in important ways the Trump brand of authoritarianism contains hallmarks of totalitarianism in seeking to ensure that there is only one permissible way to think.
Thus the intimidating attacks on universities, seeking to rewrite their curricula and admissions policies to conform to the administration’s “values.” Thus, too, the intimidation of corporations, especially the mass media, including efforts by Trump henchmen to take ownership of CBS and CNN. Also efforts to ostracize, if not imprison, critics of Israel—to say nothing of critics of Trump himself. Thus, too, the Department of Government Efficiency's effort to access individuals’ social security data and the Republicans’ quest for voting data. And of course, corporations have for years been gathering data on gullible consumers. Even our phones can be used to spy on our thoughts and conversations.
After spewing outrageous claim after outrageous claim before the United Nations General Assembly (not to mention the military brass), Trump declared, “You [the other nations of the world] are going to hell.”
The reality is the United States under Trump totalitarianism is going to hell. Policies his administration has imposed will inevitably lead to a rapid decline of the quality of life in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. The short-sighted stupidity of boosting fossil fuels and eliminating renewable energy as much as possible, and of slashing funding for scientific and medical research—these will result in untold numbers of people needlessly dying from illnesses, epidemics, or increasingly horrific environmental disasters.
And of course, there are the special targets of the Trump agenda. Not only does his administration make clear their intention of making life miserable for anyone who is economically or socially vulnerable in this country, the Republicans are actively cutting them off from voting. Arendt refers to these targets of totalitarianism as “superfluous people.”
In the end it’s up to us, the American people, to come together around a vision of a humane, fully democratic society, and rise up in determined opposition to these forces who so perilously threaten our world.
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The Real-Time Demise of American Democracy Under Trump
Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few oligarchs at the expense of working people and ordinary families.
Oct 06, 2025
For generations, Americans have been taught that the United States is the world’s beacon of democracy. Politicians across the spectrum speak of the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” a place where freedom and the rule of law set the standard for the rest of the world. But the truth is harder to swallow: the U.S. is drifting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.
A survey of more than 700 political scientists conducted by Bright Line Watch in 2020 found that the vast majority believe the U.S. is rapidly moving toward some form of authoritarian rule. Scholars rated American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, they gave it a 67. Several weeks into his second term, the score had plunged to 55. Elections, rights, and freedoms are under attack—and America is running out of time to save its democracy. The experts’ warnings are not abstract; they reflect a country where voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate influence, a compliant Supreme Court, and executive overreach are eroding the foundations of democratic governance. When citizens are uninformed—or choose not to vote—the systems of power tilt toward elites, making it easier for authoritarian forces to consolidate control. Authoritarian forces also thrive on fear—fear of immigrants, political opponents, or anyone deemed an outsider—turning Americans against one another and eroding the inclusive ideals that once defined the nation as a melting pot.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarian systems is the concentration of power in a single office. In the US, the presidency has been steadily amassing authority for decades. Presidents of both parties have expanded executive power—from Woodrow Wilson, who during and after World War I oversaw a massive expansion of federal authority, centralized control over the economy, and signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, to more recent administrations. After September 11, 2001, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping powers through the Authorization for Use of Military Force, essentially giving presidents a blank check for war. Since then, presidents have increasingly governed through executive orders and “emergency” declarations, bypassing Congress altogether. Barack Obama further expanded executive authority through extrajudicial drone strikes, targeting individuals abroad without judicial review or due process, demonstrating that executive power can be exercised unilaterally and with limited accountability. Meanwhile, Congress has been paralyzed by polarization and gridlock, leaving lobbyists and corporate donors to fill the vacuum. The Senate’s structure, which gives Wyoming and California the same representation despite a 70-fold population difference, allows minority rule to dominate national policy. Gerrymandering and voter suppression further hollow out electoral accountability. A government that concentrates power in the executive while undermining the voice of ordinary citizens is not functioning as a democracy.
Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action.
Authoritarian governments also justify extraordinary powers in the name of “security.” The U.S. is no exception. The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed a government that watches its citizens on a scale once unthinkable. At home, local police departments increasingly resemble military units, rolling out armored vehicles and tear gas against peaceful protesters. We saw this during Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. The deployment of force against citizens exercising their constitutional rights should alarm anyone who values democracy. Yet the normalization of militarized policing has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote as a “state of exception”—where emergency measures become everyday tools of governance.
Yes, Americans still enjoy constitutional rights—but too often these rights exist more on paper than in practice. Free speech? Tell that to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Snowden, or Reality Winner, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for revealing government misconduct. Voting rights? They’ve been under relentless attack, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted protections for minority voters. States have since imposed strict voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, and closed polling places in Black and Latino communities. Even fundamental rights like reproductive freedom are being stripped away. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans. Millions of women and people who can become pregnant no longer have control over their own bodies. That’s not democracy; that’s state control of private life.
Another clear sign of authoritarian drift is the domination of politics by wealthy elites. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, corporations and billionaires have been able to pour unlimited money into elections. Political campaigns are dominated by super PACs and billionaire donors. Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014 that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” leaving ordinary voters almost powerless to shape the laws that govern them.
The authoritarian character of the United States cannot be understood solely within its borders. With more than 750 military bases worldwide and a defense budget larger than the next ten nations combined, the United States functions as a global empire. Military interventions—from Iraq to Afghanistan to drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa—have often been launched without meaningful Congressional approval. Empire abroad normalizes authoritarianism at home. Militarized policing, mass surveillance, and a bloated national security state are justified by the logic of “permanent war,” which also benefits defense contractors, private security firms, and other corporate interests that profit from endless conflict. As Hannah Arendt wrote, imperialism abroad often requires repression at home. That warning has become reality.
The United States still holds elections and maintains a written constitution, but appearances are misleading. The US still calls itself a democracy, but in practice, authoritarian forces are calling the shots. What makes American authoritarianism distinctive is its velvet glove: it is not a dictatorship in the classical sense but a regime where democratic symbols cloak undemocratic realities. Its most effective disguise is the illusion of freedom itself—an ideology of free market capitalism that promises choice while consolidating power in the hands of a few. Americans are told they live in the land of opportunity, yet the choices available to them—whether in the marketplace or at the ballot box—are increasingly constrained by corporate monopolies and two political parties beholden to the same economic elites. Recognizing this drift is the first step toward reversing it. Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
It is a bitter irony that 66,000 living World War II veterans—who risked everything to fight authoritarianism abroad—now witness the creeping authoritarianism at home and the steady erosion of the freedoms they fought to secure. Their sacrifices are a reminder that democracy is fragile and must be actively defended.
Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. If Americans care about preserving freedom, they must act: vote in every election—from school boards to city councils to state legislatures—and recognize that their power extends beyond the ballot box. As consumers and shareholders, they can choose carefully which corporations they support, amplifying businesses that align with democratic values while withdrawing support from those that undermine them. Citizens can also engage directly with elected officials, starting meaningful discussions to make their voices heard, and volunteer with nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy organizations and watchdog groups that protect the democratic process, civil rights, and corporate and government accountability and transparency. Pushing for structural reforms that rein in executive power and corporate influence, challenging fear-mongering narratives, and defending the rights of marginalized communities are all essential steps to reclaiming and preserving democracy.
We each have a role to play. Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action. Be no bystander; democracy depends on participation. We ignore its demise at our peril.
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Why Elon Musk Is Wrong About Empathy
History has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives.
Mar 21, 2025
“The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Elon Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”
As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules, and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.
And as (let us acknowledge it) the Trump revolution is currently popular with at least large parts of the U.S. electorate, and some overseas too, what Musk said summarizes also the worldview of a social-cultural moment and movement on the march.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.”
Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.
Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.
They include the ripping up of international cooperation; the gutting of life-saving programs for people in poverty abroad and at home; and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities, and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.
A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded, “The death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.
So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?
One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.
This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.
Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.
What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.
That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are,” that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.
It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”
Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)
So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros.”)
But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak, but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”
The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.
“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”
Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.
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Today's Social Media Are No Longer Safe for Journalism
This existential moment calls for a global social media platform for independent news media.
Mar 21, 2025
Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist who studied totalitarian regimes, noted in 1974 that “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”
Fifty years later, we have nearly reached that moment. This is existential for all independent (i.e., not allied with a political party or authoritarian regime) news organizations and their ability to reach audiences in the social media space.
Social media like Twitter (now X) and Facebook became important environments for the news media to enter two decades ago because they are where millions of people congregate online. For journalism organizations, the goal has been to post interesting stories and get referrals—those users who click through to the news site and boost web page views.
Yet, that relationship has fallen apart. Ultimately, tech companies are not interested in helping journalism or aiding civil discourse. The annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report for 2025 notes “big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.”
The even bigger problem for independent news media is that most social media platforms are increasingly antithetical to freedom of the press.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and turned it into X, it’s become the disinformation-drenched social platform of the Donald Trump administration. This year, genuflecting to Trump, Meta (corporate parent of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) announced it would drop its independent fact-checking program in the U.S. in favor of an anemic, crowd-sourced “community notes” system, which has already been a failure at X. Another popular news platform, TikTok, has serious disinformation problems, security liabilities and an uncertain future.
Several news organizations around the globe decided they won’t take it anymore. NPR stopped posting on X in 2023, after the platform insisted on designating it as “U.S. state-affiliated media.” More recently, The Guardian announced it would stop posting on X, concluding it is “a toxic media platform.” Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper of record, Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, and La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper in Barcelona, quit X, too. The European Federation of Journalists, representing about 320,000 journalists, did the same. “We cannot continue to participate in feeding the social network of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists,” EFJ president Maja Sever wrote.
But, simply quitting X only eliminates the worst option and settles for the slightly less bad options that remain.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind. For example, 54% of Americans get their news often or sometimes from social media. Adults 18-29 are the heaviest users of social media platforms. They deserve a social media platform that respects and informs them.
That’s why legitimate news media should band together and regain the autonomy they ceded to third-party social media. Independent news organizations–large and small–should cooperatively create and control their own social media platform that amplifies news and public information, encourages links to member news organizations, and excludes misinformation and disinformation.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things.
The model for this is something almost as old as modern journalism, too: The Associated Press, an international cooperative nonprofit news agency. As the AP tells its founding story, “In 1846, five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.” The problem with social media is similar–if it’s not working, work collectively to build another way. And, like the AP, it could be a global cooperative.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things. But, a news-controlled social media platform could develop features that would demonstrate the multimedia ability of news organizations and enable the audience to create social connections in new and entertaining ways. Users could adjust their feeds to focus on local, regional, national, or international news, or whatever mix and topics makes sense to them, so all legitimate news organizations of any size get to be part of the platform.
Which news organizations and journalists could be part of such a social media cooperative?
Reporters Without Borders, the international journalism nonprofit, already has a powerful statement for fostering global information spaces for the common good, where “information can only be regarded as reliable when freely gathered, processed and disseminated according to the principles of commitment to truth, plurality of viewpoints and rational methods of establishment and verification of facts.” This would enable a broad range of journalism organizations to participate, and draw a bright line to exclude media propagating disinformation.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle.
From a business perspective, journalism organizations, not third-party social media, would retain analytic data and any advertising revenue. The social media app could be free for any person with a subscription to any member news organization (e.g., a local newspaper, a national magazine of opinion, or digital news site), or with a nominal subscription fee, to provide built-in authentication and help prevent bot accounts. There are also strong global standards for content moderation through the International Fact-Checking Network, which was formed in 2015 and has a nonpartisan code of principles and more than 170 fact-checking groups around the world.
What would such a social media platform cost to create?
Clearly, $44 billion is too much. Bluesky, which has gained favor as an X alternative in recent months, offers a case for comparison. It started internally with just a handful of workers at then-Twitter in 2019. In the past two years, it’s received $23 million in seed funding to get it where it is today.
Bluesky may be the current favorite of many journalists, and has many advantages over other social media platforms, but its worthy purpose to encourage a less toxic space for public conversation does not primarily serve the goals of globally disseminating independent journalism.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle. There has been talk for several years about Europe having its own social media platform to highlight democracy, diversity, solidarity, and privacy, and to avoid “foreign information manipulations and interference” from platforms based in the U.S. that have fallen into Trump’s power orbit and China-based platforms as well.
But, a nongovernmental platform, with a consortium of democracy-minded news organizations, may be most resistant to nationalisms and authoritarianism. The project could be built on an open-source structure like ActivityPub (the infrastructure behind Mastodon) or the AT Protocol (behind Bluesky), which would give more power to users.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse. The alternative is the independent press’s passive acceptance of whatever social media ecosystems Silicon Valley plutocrats or authoritarian governments decide to make, which is bad news for a free press.Keep ReadingShow Less
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Böll Would Despise What's Been Done to Masha Gessen
Gessen’s real sin was the recognition that the exterminating impulse is not unique to one set of villains and victims.
Dec 21, 2023
Pro-Palestinian speech is routinely punished in the liberal Western world — in the name of democracy, of course. Now, the memories of German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and German writer Heinrich Böll have been violated in a way that both would despise.
Masha Gessen (pronouns they/them), the Russian-Jewish émigré best known for in-depth reporting on their former country, has been denied the honor of a ceremony after receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize from Germany’s Heinrich Böll Stiftung (foundation).
Why? In the December 9 issue of The New Yorker, Gessen wrote:
… the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
Cue the predictable blowback. Gessen wasn’t factually wrong; instead, the outrage was driven by context. It is culturally verboten in Germany (and the US) to equate any aspect of the Holocaust to the suffering endured by any other people – especially when that suffering is being inflicted by Israel. As others have noted, Arendt faced similar attacks over her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was based on reporting for the same New Yorker magazine.
What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism... can make a monster of almost anyone.
The Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s statement is a masterpiece of deflection and the use of the passive voice. It says that Gessen’s essay “led to heated debates in many places,” and that:
Against this background, the Senate of the City of Bremen has decided to cancel the event and award ceremony that was to take place on December 14th, 2023 and, as a consequence, the event has lost its venue.
The city’s decision is disgraceful but hardly surprising, given the German government’s expressed determination to crack down on pro-Palestinian voices. In fact, several Muslim countries have already brought complaints against Germany before the United Nations human rights forum over that issue.
In an attempt to deny the obvious, the foundation says:
We will try to organise a different type of event with Masha Gessen, an event enabling a nuanced dialogue – including about certain statements made by Gessen that we do not fully endorse – as today such dialogue is more important than ever before.
Why “different”? The foundation could have found another venue. Or it could have held the ceremony in a bus station some other public place, which would have made a dramatic statement against censorship. It would also have been very much in the spirit of its namesake, the writer and pacifist Heinrich Böll.
Böll was president of P.E.N. International, a group dedicated to protecting writers’ freedom of speech, and was fearless in expressing unpopular opinions of his own. Most famously, Böll defended the right to a fair trial of the much-loathed Red Army Faction (the so-called “Baader-Meinhof gang”) rather than trial by tabloid headline and mass media. For that, he weathered a firestorm of criticism that equaled Arendt’s.
Any organization bearing Böll’s name might be expected to defend unpopular speech. But the Stiftung is a political institution, not a moral or literary one. It is a wing of Germany’s Green Party, a formerly left-leaning and pro-environmental group that has become increasingly hawkish, tacking to the right of even the “centrist” Social Democrats on military matters.
But then, what’s in a name? The Greens have even pushed to re-open coal plants.
Like other elite-led ‘liberal’ institutions, the Greens have an organizational imperative to spout the language of inclusion, even when (as in this case) they suppress dissenting voices. This is how they presented their decision not to honor Gessen:
We want to make it very clear that this withdrawal does in no way mean that we are distancing ourselves from Gessen, nor that we want to strip Gessen of the award, or that we no longer value Gessen’s works.
We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them. And, of course, Geffen won’t be allowed to give a speech. But we do hope to permit a ‘nuanced dialogue,’ wherein Gessen will no doubt be forced themselves against a tribunal of hostile interlocutors. That’s ‘dialogue,’ Star Chamber-style.
Does anybody think this would have happened if that recent New Yorker article had not been published? And does anyone think the Greens would have refused Gessen a ceremony and a speech if the article had praised, rather than criticized, Israel?
We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them.
Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates. Why? For criticizing a country (Israel) that denies basic freedoms to millions and where same-sex (and interfaith) marriages cannot be performed, by law.
There’s no time to adjudicate all the arguments surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem but, whatever the criticisms, it is clearly the spiritual sibling of Gessen’s essay. The onslaught of accusations against Arendt was front page news at the time, resulting in what Israeli journalist Amos Elon likened to an “excommunication.” For one thing, as Elon writes, Arendt had fallen away from the Zionism of her youth and concluded that,
like other nineteenth-century nationalisms, Zionism had already outlived the conditions from which it emerged and ran the risk of becoming, as Arendt once put it, a “living ghost amid the ruins of our times.’”
A “living ghost” … that was heretical in 1963. It still is today.
Elon writes that Arendt also foresaw “the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians.” As he puts it, “The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.”
Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates.
Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem, as I did recently, it was more striking than ever to consider the courage it took to write it. Less than two decades after the Holocaust, Arendt was challenging an already-established orthodoxy, one which Elon describes this way:
“... in Israel, the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat.”
Arendt saw the role that this orthodoxy played in the conduct of the trial, writing of the prosecutor:
Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court ...”
This has never been an abstract intellectual debate. The immensity and horror of the Holocaust wields tremendous moral force, as it should. Israel’s leadership had by then developed an ideology based on the centrality of Jewish victimhood and the idea that only Jewish military might could protect Jews from future pogroms. Arendt saw that agenda at work in the Eichmann trial and describes it this way:
The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how Judaism, “four thousand years old, with its spiritual creations and its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations,” had always faced “a hostile world,” how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders.
This argument was used to justify Israeli military actions. It also imbued Diaspora Jews, especially those living comfortably in the West, with the feeling that they had it too easy. They should be in Israel, fighting its wars and plowing the land. They certainly should never question its decisions.
To reinforce this argument, some Jewish victims of Nazism were judged as weak and compliant, in contrast with Israel’s vigor and strength. Arendt was attacked for criticizing Jewish leaders who cooperated with the Nazis, but the opposite is true: she challenges the prosecution’s implication that some Jews were to blame for their own suffering – which reinforces the idea that Jews must “hit back.”
Arendt saw things differently. To her, Nazism and the Holocaust reflected a crisis of modernity and totalitarianism, rather than a uniquely Jewish-centered phenomenon. It can be both, of course. But to deny that Jewishness and only Jewishness drove the Holocaust was to deny the Israeli state the moral impunity it sought.
To say that anti-Semitism is the sine qua non of Nazism also diminishes the suffering of Nazism’s other victims, including the Roma community, leftists, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people like Gessen. It also preemptively renders the suffering of the Palestinian people invisible. Arendt wasn’t willing to do that.
She also points out that those questions have nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of Adolf Eichmann, who – in the spirit of Heinrich Böll– she insists should receive a fair trial. “On trial are his deeds,” she wrote, “not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.” She criticizes the prosecutor as a media hound and Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion for orchestrating a “show trial,” but shows genuine respect for the judges and their devotion to justice.
Arendt felt that totalitarianism must be understood and punished as totalitarianism, because it’s both a crime against humanity and a global threat. That was her main complaint about the trial. Arendt was not alone in this interpretation. Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist and concentration camp survivor, was among the public figures who agreed with her. Bettelheim wrote a glowing review of Eichmann in Jerusalem in which he called totalitarianism “the greatest problem of our time” and “the most important issue of our day.”
To Bettelheim the survivor, Eichmann personified a horror that was universal and a threat that was existential. In describing the value of Arendt’s book, Bettelheim wrote, “the best protection against oppressive control and dehumanizing totalitarianism is still a personal understanding of events as they happen.”
Arendt despised Eichmann but, correctly or not, she didn’t see him as specifically anti-Semitic. To her he was a dimwitted bureaucrat, a cog in a totalitarian machine, a personality type that had become common in the modern world. She thought he embodied a more universal and institutionalized depravity. (Gessen describes Vladimir Putin similarly: as dim and self-seeking, more of a pencil pusher than the incarnation of evil.)
The attacks on Arendt followed a blueprint that’s still used today. She was repeatedly described as a “self-hating Jew” — a phrase that has never gone out of currency — as when an author described both her and Bettelheim as suffering from “an essentially Jewish phenomenon...self-hatred.”
The attacks were well-organized, as Amon Elon writes:
A nationwide campaign was launched in the United States to discredit her in the academic world. There was a startling disproportion between the ferocity of the reaction and its immediate cause. A group of lecturers—some flown in from Israel and England-toured the country decrying Arendt as a “self-hating Jew,” the “Rosa Luxemburg of Nothingness.”
Four separate Jewish organizations hired scholars to go through her text, line by line, in order to discredit it and to find mistakes though most of them turned out to be minor: incorrect dates and misspelled names. A review of the book in the Intermountain Jewish News was headlined “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book.”
Arendt emphasized the universal nature, and universal threat, of totalitarianism. Her book’s controversial subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” makes that clear. If evil can be ordinary—if it can be done by people who don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, by people who follow the rules—that might implicate anyone.
There have been endless debates about Arendt’s use of the word “banality,” but what matters most is not whether it’s the best label for Eichmann. What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism—whether it’s the old-fashioned, jackbooted kind, or the seemingly democratic misdirection of Prof. Sheldon Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism”—can make a monster of almost anyone.
Journalists who censor themselves. Politicians who curry favor for campaign cash. Executives at Lockheed or Boeing. US government officials who ship antipersonnel weapons bound for Gaza. The leaders of Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Citizens who won’t question their own preconceptions. You. Me.
Bettelheim, like Arendt, was not afraid to implicate his adopted country. In his review of her book he wrote,
... it is also totalitarianism when a nation plans for atomic destruction on a grand scale, even if that nation is democratic and plans only for defense. This is because such plans fail to set limits within the human scope. To entertain the possibility of risking atomic destruction for millions is to toy with totalitarianism because it implies the right of a state to pursue its goals no matter what.
Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine provides a vivid glimpse of the architects of global destruction at home in their bureaucratic habitat.
In the end, the word “banality” suggests that the Nazis were not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Masha Gessen’s real sin, like Arendt’s, was the recognition that the exterminating impulse is not unique to one set of villains and victims. It can arise and be executed anywhere, by anyone, at any time — in this country and its allies, among people who look and act like us, on a day like today. Even here, even now, even as these words are being written.
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German Group Won't Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay
"The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost," said one critic.
Dec 13, 2023
A left-wing German political foundation said Wednesday that it will no longer give a prestigious award to Masha Gessen over an essay the Russian American journalist wrote drawing parallels between the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany and Palestinians today under what many critics say is a genocidal assault by Israel.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation—which is affiliated with Alliance90/The Greens, a leftist political party in Germany—and the Senate of Bremen agreed to withdraw from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to Gessen, Literary Hub reported, citing a German-language article in Die Ziet.
Instead, the prize will be presented to Gessen without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
The Hannah Arendt Prize, named after the eponymous 20th-century German American historian and philosopher, "was created to honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions," the Heinrich Böll Foundation explained on its website.
According to Die Zeit, the move came in response to an essay Gessen published earlier this week in The New Yorker in which they highlighted similarities between Palestinians living in Gaza—often described as the world's largest open-air prison and, sometimes, it's biggest concentration camp—and Jews in Eastern European ghettos during the Third Reich.
Gessen wrote:
For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
The Bremen chapter of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) reportedly took exception with Gessen's essay and argued that honoring them "would contradict the necessary decisive action against the growing antisemitism."
As Literary Hub noted, Gessen is Jewish; their grandfather survived the Holocaust.
"The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost on the Bremen DIG," Dan Sheehan wrote at Literary Hub.
Saddled with guilt over perpetrating arguably the most notorious genocide in human history, Germany has made defending Israel a critical component of its national mission. In doing so, it has often conflated criticism of Israeli policies and practices or advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism. Ironically, that often means silencing Jewish voices that speak out against Israeli apartheid, occupation, colonization, and now, what many critics around the world say is a genocide in Gaza. A disproportionate number of the silenced are artists and other creators like Gessen.
"The German government has come under intense criticism over the past two months for its unqualified support for Israel's war on Gaza, as well as for its aggressive crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism and advocacy," Sheehan added. "This silencing of Palestinian voices has been acutely felt within Germany's cultural community, where museum shows, book prizes, and artist commissions have all been canceled in recent weeks."
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Defending and Respecting Rashida Tlaib’s Standpoint Does Not Mean Abandoning My Own
In the same spirit of real engagement with which I have defended her, I also take issue with some of what she has been saying.
Nov 15, 2023
Rashida Tlaib has been long been demonized and denounced for her general outspokenness and her strong and unyielding defense of Palestinian rights and Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. In the weeks since Hamas’ vicious October 7 attacks, the vitriol leveled against her has increased exponentially.
I consider the attacks on her nasty, intellectually unserious, and contrary to a basic principle of pluralist democracy—the principle that fellow citizens with whom one disagrees are not thereby existential enemies to be attacked and defeated. I also think that the refusal to listen to Tlaib, and understand where she is coming from, is an awful way to respond to the ongoing crisis in Israel-Palestine, by blinding U.S. foreign policy to Palestinian perspectives and deafening U.S. political leaders and citizens to the criminal death and destruction now being rained down on Gaza by the Israeli military, even as Hamas continues its dangerous but much less deadly rocket attacks and continues to hold over 200 innocent civilians hostage in the manner of a terroristic pirate gang.
For these reasons I have defended Rashida Tlaib in three recently published pieces, insisting that censuring her means censuring democracy and seeking to silence the U.S. Congress’s only Palestinian voice, and also insisting that it is essential more generally to distinguish between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism, and to stop demonizing the former.
The same ethos of “thinking from the standpoint of the other” that should ethically require Tlaib’s critics to listen to her without demonizing her should also ethically require her to realize that these words genuinely engender fear, anxiety, and even defensive aggressiveness in many Jewish people.
In doing so, I have drawn on something that political theorist Hannah Arendt said long ago about properly political thinking: “The power of judgment finds itself... in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity... It needs the special presence of others ‘in whose place’ it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration...”
This has led some critics to charge me with a kind of “relativism,” and of suspending my own critical faculties in order to lionize the perspective of a victim-claiming Palestinian “Other.” I have been asked: “Why must you validate what Tlaib says simply because she is a Palestinian, and can’t you think for yourself?”
The question is fair. But it rests on a misunderstanding of both Arendt and my appeal to her.
First, Arendt writes about thinking from the standpoint of others, not some singular, essentialized Other. Plurality of opinion is central here, within any group and indeed even within any person, for human beings are very capable of holding a range of opinions that are not always perfectly consistent—something ordinarily called ambivalence, and something that political crusaders of all stripes consider anathema. To listen to and think from the perspective of Rashida Tlaib is to listen to her, what she says, and how and from where she says it, not to imagine that she speaks for all Palestinians or that there is an essential “Palestinian victim” (or that victimhood is the essence of Palestinian identity). It also means trying to understand how what she is saying or doing relates to and differs from what others, including other Palestinians—and especially Hamas–are saying and doing.
Second, to think from the perspective of others, and to take their perspectives “into consideration,” is not simply to submit to those perspectives, to deny one’s own experience and standpoint, or to suspend one’s own critical faculties. It means to understand, and by doing so to expand one’s own perspective, not to uncritically agree with some other perspective. For thinking is a process, and it is possible to seriously consider a range of possibilities before deciding, often provisionally, on one of them. This too political crusaders despise; they prefer always that people respond instantly to triggers and slogans that are easier to mobilize and to drive to extremes.
If Rashida Tlaib were promoting antisemitism, or celebrating the October 7 massacre of Israeli Jews (and not all of the victims were Jews), or extolling the virtues of Hamas, or calling for a Jihad against Jewish people, it would be impossible for me to defend her in the way that I have done—though I would still hold that First Amendment protections apply to her no less than to anyone else, and that the physical threats she receives for saying what she thinks are both immoral and illegal.
But that is not what Rashida Tlaib has been saying.
She has by and large been calling for a cease-fire and a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a linkage between the two, insisting that the “resolution” of the current Israel-Gaza war must also address the broader conflict—which has long preceded this war—in a way that ensures the rights and dignity of Palestinians. (And please note: a not insignificant number of her House Progressive and Justice Democrat colleagues, most of them neither Palestinian nor even Arab, have joined with her in this appeal for justice).
Having listened to her, I have defended her because I believe her perspective is important and valuable, but also because I basically agree with most of what she says.
But not all of it. Her recent and much-criticized video made this clear to me and, in the same spirit of real engagement with which I have defended her, I also take issue with some of what she has been saying.
I do not believe the video—in which she accused President Joe Biden of supporting “genocide,” and included footage of a mass pro-Palestinian rally chanting “from river to sea, Palestine will be free”—is antisemitic. Nor do I think it represents a call to drive Israeli Jews into the sea. I believe her when she says that for her the slogan is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” For there is no evidence of her advocating violent attacks on Jews or even Israeli Jews—and not all Jews are Israeli Jews.
But from my perspective—and I do not imagine that she shares this perspective, because she and I are different people—that video is problematic in two ways that are politically consequential and warrant criticism.
The first problem involves questionable political judgment.
In the video, Tlaib contravenes the very Arendtian sentiment that I have invoked to defend her, by employing language that has a range of meanings, some of which are obviously very disturbing and triggering to her principal “Others.” I do not agree with some of my Jewish-American friends who assert that “from the river to the sea” is “obviously” an eliminationist call for the conquest and expulsion of Jews or at least the violent defeat and destruction of Israel. But it is obvious that this is how most American Jews and their allies, and virtually all Israeli Jews, interpret this phrase—as not simply a statement to which they might object, but as a rallying cry that threatens them, especially in Israel but not only there, for there is no doubt that the slogan has furnished an occasion for acts of antisemitism in many places in the Middle East but also Europe and the U.S. (There is also no doubt that many of Tlaib’s critics are hypocrites who either support or turn a blind eye to right-wing Zionists who employ a very similar rhetoric to justify their vision of a Jewish state that runs “from the river to the sea”—and these hypocrites are even more culpable, because they are actually making headway in their efforts to dispossess and displace Palestinians.)
And the same ethos of “thinking from the standpoint of the other” that should ethically require Tlaib’s critics to listen to her without demonizing her should also ethically require her to realize that these words genuinely engender fear, anxiety, and even defensive aggressiveness in many Jewish people, who have two good reasons to feel this. One is that the Holocaust was not that long ago, and its intergenerational legacies are no less powerful for Jews than memories of what Palestinians call “the Nakba” are for Palestinians. The other is that the most politically organized force promoting the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is Hamas, a violent, Islamic fundamentalist, and terroristic organization whose charter preaches jihad and is explicitly antisemitic, and whose militants just murdered 1,400 Israeli citizens and kidnapped another 200-plus as hostages.
I agree with Juliette Kayyem, who notes that “by amplifying a loaded slogan, the Michigan representative isn’t helping anyone’s cause.” To be clear, Tlaib’s constituency is distinctive, and her outrage and passion at this moment is surely as valid as any supporter of Israel’s—and there is no shortage of passion and hyperbole these days. But Tlaib’s posting of the video represents an instance of unwise rhetoric and poor political judgment, for it was bound to inflame her adversaries but also to discomfort many allies or potential allies. It is possible that mobilizing her own base is now more important to her. That too is a judgment call. But I believe that Tlaib might do well—for her own sake and for the sake of her cause—to avoid “loaded slogans” and focus more on the concrete injustices that she rightly opposes, for doing so can spare her much grief and allow her to gain more support for what is really a quite reasonable perspective.
It would represent a real contribution if Tlaib would distance herself from many of those supporters who are much more radical than she, not necessarily by issuing blanket denunciations, but simply by being much clearer about what she supports.
At the same time, I also believe that the video’s slogan, even generously interpreted as merely unwise, is problematic in a second and more directly political sense, related to the rhetoric and even the vision of “One Palestine” that it invokes.
I believe that Tlaib speaks sincerely and for a great many when she says that this slogan is “an aspirational call” for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence. But I think Tlaib does not simply mean by this a hope that all the individual human beings who live between the river and the sea will eventually enjoy freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence. For the statement “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Palestine, in other words, it will not be Israel.
Tlaib, like a great many, including even some American Jews and Israeli Jews, clearly means that it should become a single, secular democratic state. And in ideal terms this is not simply a legitimate idea but the only idea that corresponds to modern conceptions of liberal democratic legitimacy.
I understand the appeal of such a “one-state solution,” especially for someone like Tlaib. For the so-called “two-state solution” is deeply problematic and has become little more than a platitude. On the one hand it reinforces an illiberal Israeli state that is the state of its Jewish citizens, in which its non-Jewish citizens are second class citizens, while imagining a Palestinian state that is so fragmented, interlaced with Jewish settlements, and powerless as to not be very “statelike” at all. This is normatively problematic. On the other hand, normative problems aside, “the two-state solution” was the product of a time that has long passed, and however desirable it might seem to some, especially among the much-weakened Israeli peace movement and a Biden administration that seems to be grasping at straws, this “solution” seems almost impossible under current circumstances, which include heightened fears and resentments and the weakening of the political forces for political decency and reason on both “sides” of the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
But to be equally clear: I consider the so-called “one-state solution” to be no more realistic a “solution” to the awful war or the underlying crisis. It has the advantage of sounding more universalist and thus more liberal democratic—and thus more legitimate to everyone who rejects tribalism and is serious about human rights. It has the additional advantage of making young people who want to express their legitimate outrage at the unjust treatment of Palestinians feel like they are actually for something noble and not simply against “Zionism.” But it has these advantages only by obscuring three fundamental problems.
The first is simple: There is no strong political will for this on either side.
As critics have noted, mainstream Zionism has always centered politically on a kind of Jewish ethno-nationalism for which Palestinians are of secondary concern at best. But it is no less true that the driving force of the Palestinian movement has always been Palestinian nationalism and not cosmopolitan universalism—the sincere efforts of public intellectuals like the late Edward Said, and many others, notwithstanding. In an ideal world it should be possible for Jews and Palestinians everywhere “between the river and the sea” to be equal citizens of a liberal democratic state called Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or Canaan or Utopia or whatever—just as Rashida Tlaib and I are equal citizens of the United States. But we do not inhabit such a world. And in the world in which we live, the major political forces on both “sides” have no interest in a single, secular democratic state. What we have now are two competing forms of nationalism, one of which currently dominates the other, and neither of which has demonstrated anything that can credibly be regarded as a liberal democratic universalism. The situation is tragic. But it is the situation from which any reasonable political solution now and in any foreseeable future must proceed.
This leads to the second, related problem with the notion of one state “between the river and the sea”—the “right of return” to which it is almost automatically linked. During the time when there were serious discussions about mutual recognition linked to a “two-state solution,” some of them involving high-level diplomacy, it was understood that a Palestinian “right of return” would strictly speaking need to be compromised, for a range of reasons of which the most important is rather simple: In order for the Palestinians displaced in 1948 and their millions of descendants to return to the territory of Israel and even to their former homes, it would be necessary for millions of Israelis who have been born and lived and worked in Israel since 1948 to be somehow displaced or relocated. A literal Palestinian right of return would be literally impossible logistically speaking. (To be clear: In my view any just settlement would also require that all notions of Jewish “birthright” and “right of return” be similarly abandoned. There is no just basis, now, to maintain that the return of all Palestinian former-residents of Israel proper is impossible but the fictive “return” of many thousands of Jews whose families have lived in the U.S. or Europe for generations if not centuries is somehow rightful.)
To be fair, many Palestinian activists, and I would count Tlaib among them, are aware of these logistical challenges, and it is reasonable to assume that they might be amenable to forms of real reparation that compromise a literal interpretation of a Palestinian “right of return,” perhaps by building up the West Bank and Gaza as part of a single democratic state.
But as the “two-state solution” has politically languished—in large part due to the awful policies of the Netanyahu governments—the idea of a Palestinian compromise on the right of return seems to have languished as well. In recent days I have seen many videos in which individuals associated with Students for Justice in Palestine declare, in all seriousness, that Palestinians (and their descendants) ought to be restored the property and homes and neighborhoods that they lost in 1948, and that the “European Jews” who now occupy them ought to “go back to where they came from in Europe.” Such ideas are not literally “Nazi,” as some pro-Israeli activists say. Indeed, when coming from the mouths of young American protestors, some even Jewish, they are politically naïve more than anything else. But taken literally, the sentiments very directly threaten the more than 7 million Jewish Israelis who constitute approximately three quarters of the population of Israel, people who have already been legitimately shaken and outraged by the murderous Hamas attack on October 7.
Precisely because hers is a voice for justice, and there are many who support her, she perhaps bears a greater burden of responsibility to unambiguously perform the justice that she rightly seeks.
Further, right now the most powerful Palestinian organization in Palestine or anywhere else, Hamas, is very much committed to realizing this vision of a “Palestinian return” that displaces if not kills Israeli Jews, which it regards as settlers and occupiers everywhere in the territory of Israel-Palestine. And make no mistake, Israeli Jews are Israeli Jews, who have no other home and have no intention of leaving. And simply wishing them away is no more honest than Netanyahu now simply wishing that all Palestinians would simply go away or somehow not die when the IDF drops bombs on them. As a politics, this can mean only mass expulsion and slaughter.
Unfortunately, too many of those who are currently marching behind “Free Palestine” banners while chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” also regard Israel as nothing more than a gang of colonizing and marauding European settlers, and regard Hamas as a virtuous agent of “liberation.” Such people are not “terrorists” nor are they “accomplices” of terrorists. But they are supporters—whether knowingly or willingly, whether with hate for Zionism in their hearts or love of Palestinians or simple if naïve altruism—of a political project that is inherently dehumanizing and violent. And they are offering rhetorical promotion to a terroristic organization that is little different from the Taliban, whose “liberatory” virtues are on display every day in Afghanistan. I do not support the banning of these kinds of “pro-Palestinian” groups. But I definitely consider their Manichean approach to the conflict, and their uncritical celebration of “resistance” by any means, to be politically noxious and deserving of strong criticism.
But I do not believe that Rashida Tlaib is promoting such a harsh and Manichean approach.
I believe she is a humanist, and a progressive, who is serious about peace with justice and does not support terrorist violence or the ethnic cleansing of anybody, whether Palestinian or Jewish. But I also believe that her video, and her public position as a spokesperson for “Free Palestine,” can easily be mistaken for a position that sounds like it advocates the literal destruction of the Israeli state or the literal uprooting of both its political system and many or all of its Jewish citizens.
And in politics, the way things sound is largely the way they are taken to be. “Perception is politics.”
And so it would represent a real contribution if Tlaib would distance herself from many of those supporters who are much more radical than she, not necessarily by issuing blanket denunciations, but simply by being much clearer about what she supports, and by avoiding the kind of hyperbolic rhetoric that signals or seems to signal support for the complete national liberation of the entire land of “Palestine.”
This would be exceptionally difficult politically, especially at a time when Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel is killing and dispossessing tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and pillaging the West Bank; when she is being viciously attacked for speaking up against this; and when those more radical people are among her most vocal supporters, while many more mainstream Democratic politicians have chosen to demonize her. The pressures Tlaib faces—concern for the safety and well-being of her family on the West Bank, outrage at the IDF bombing of Gaza, and the grief, anger, sadness, and relentless stress that is only exacerbated by her sense of responsibility as a member of Congress who alone “represents” Palestinians—must be enormous.
But the mark of real political leadership is the ability to sometimes do what it is very hard in the name of what is right or even merely politically wise, even when it means distancing yourself from supporters or explaining to them that some of what they are saying and doing is wrong.
I say this as a political ally (with little influence much less power!) who opposes the ongoing Israeli bombing and supports a cease-fire, the return of hostages, and a just peace—though I for one have no idea what this would look like beyond the cessation of the war. I also say this as one of many on the American left who is horrified by the way many young people, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and many “progressive” organizations, like Democratic Socialists of America, have continued to regard Hamas as a “liberation movement” whose murdering and kidnapping of Israeli Jews constitutes a legitimate tactic of “just war” against “Zionism.”
To associate with these positions, or even to seem to associate with them, is to associate with dogmatic idiocy and political barbarism, and to pour gasoline on a fire that is already burning out of control, a fire that indeed threatens to consume us all.
Rashida Tlaib is hardly responsible for either the fire or the gasoline, and those who currently attack her bear a substantial responsibility for both.
All the same, precisely because hers is a voice for justice, and there are many who support her, she perhaps bears a greater burden of responsibility to unambiguously perform the justice that she rightly seeks. This is not necessarily “fair.” It is never fair to hold those who are marginalized to a higher standard than those who do the marginalizing. But the “moral arc of history” does not automatically bend toward justice. To bend in that direction, it must be bent, by savvy political leaders who can speak their truth while also recognizing the limits of that truth, and who can thus transcend it. For only by doing so can such leaders expand the reach of the justice they seek and the alliances necessary to bring it closer to realization.
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The Familiar Propaganda of US Media Makes Horrors in Gaza Possible
The wars and the killing go on, day after day, year after year, out of sight and out of mind for most Americans.
Nov 13, 2023
We have both been reporting on and protesting against U.S. war crimes for many years, and against identical crimes committed by U.S. allies and proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia: illegal uses of military force to try to remove enemy governments or “regimes”; hostile military occupations; disproportionate military violence justified by claims of “terrorism”; the bombing and killing of civilians; and the mass destruction of whole cities.
Most Americans share a general aversion to war, but tend to accept this militarized foreign policy because we are tragically susceptible to propaganda, the machinery of public manipulation that works hand in hand with the machinery of killing to justify otherwise unthinkable horrors.
This process of “manufacturing consent” works in a number of ways. One of the most effective forms of propaganda is silence, simply not telling us, and certainly not showing us, what war is really doing to the people whose homes and communities have been turned into America’s latest battlefield.
With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.
The most devastating campaign the U.S. military has waged in recent years dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and other areas occupied by ISIS or Da’esh. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa was even more totally destroyed.
The shelling of Raqqa was the heaviest U.S. artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War, yet it was barely reported in the U.S. corporate media. A recent New York Times article about the traumatic brain injuries and PTSD suffered by U.S. artillerymen operating 155 mm howitzers, which each fired up to 10,000 shells into Raqqa, was appropriately titled A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence from the Pentagon.
Shrouding such mass death and destruction in secrecy is a remarkable achievement. When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, in the midst of the Iraq War, he titled his Nobel speech “Art, Truth and Politics,” and used it to shine a light on this diabolical aspect of U.S. war-making.
After talking about the hundreds of thousands of killings in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, Pinter asked: “Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy,”
“But you wouldn’t know it,” he went on.”It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
But the wars and the killing go on, day after day, year after year, out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. Did you know that the United States and its allies have dropped more than 350,000 bombs and missiles on 9 countries since 2001 (including 14,000 in the current war on Gaza)? That’s an average of 44 airstrikes per day, day in, day out, for 22 years.
Israel, in its present war on Gaza, with children making up more than 40% of the more than 11,000 people killed to date, would surely like to mimic the extraordinary U.S. ability to hide its brutality. But despite Israel’s efforts to impose a media blackout, the massacre is taking place in a small, enclosed, densely-populated urban area, often called an open-air prison, where the world can see a great deal more than usual of how it impacts real people.
Israel has killed a record number of journalists in Gaza, and this appears to be a deliberate strategy, as when U.S. forces targeted journalists in Iraq. But we are still seeing horrifying video and photos of daily new atrocities: dead and wounded children; hospitals struggling to treat the injured; and desperate people fleeing from one place to another through the rubble of their destroyed homes.
Another reason this war is not so well hidden is because Israel is waging it, not the United States. The U.S. is supplying most of the weapons, has sent aircraft carriers to the region, and dispatched U.S. Marine General James Glynn to provide tactical advice based on his experience conducting similar massacres in Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq. But Israeli leaders seem to have overestimated the extent to which the U.S. information warfare machine would shield them from public scrutiny and political accountability.
Unlike in Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa, people all over the world are seeing video of the unfolding catastrophe on their computers, phones and TVs. Netanyahu, Biden and the corrupt “defense analysts” on cable TV are no longer the ones creating the narrative, as they try to tack self-serving narratives onto the horrifying reality we can all see for ourselves.
With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.
Michael Crowley and Edward Wong have reported in the New York Times that Israeli officials are defending their actions in Gaza by pointing to U.S. war crimes, insisting that they are simply interpreting the laws of war the same way that the United States has interpreted them in Iraq and other U.S. war zones. They compare Gaza to Fallujah, Mosul and even Hiroshima.
But copying U.S. war crimes is precisely what makes Israel’s actions illegal. And it is the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable that has emboldened Israel to believe it too can kill with impunity.
The United States systematically violates the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force, manufacturing political justifications to suit each case and using its Security Council veto to evade international accountability. Its military lawyers employ unique, exceptional interpretations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, under which the universal protections the Convention guarantees to civilians are treated as secondary to U.S. military objectives.
The United States fiercely resists the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), to ensure that its exceptional interpretations of international law are never subjected to impartial judicial scrutiny.
When the United States did allow the ICJ to rule on its war against Nicaragua in 1986, the ICJ ruled that its deployment of the “Contras” to invade and attack Nicaragua and its mining of Nicaragua’s ports were acts of aggression in violation of international law, and ordered the United States to pay war reparations to Nicaragua. When the United States declared that it would no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ and failed to pay up, Nicaragua asked the UN Security Council to enforce the reparations, but the U.S. vetoed the resolution.
Atrocities like Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the bombing of German and Japanese cities to “unhouse” the civilian population, as Winston Churchill called it, together with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi holocaust, led to the adoption of the new Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, to protect civilians in war zones and under military occupation.
On the 50th anniversary of the Convention in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is responsible for monitoring international compliance with the Geneva Conventions, conducted a survey to see how well people in different countries understood the protections the Convention provides.
They surveyed people in twelve countries that had been victims of war, in four countries (France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.) that are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and in Switzerland where the ICRC is based. The ICRC published the results of the survey in 2000, in a report titled, People on War - Civilians in the Line of Fire.
The survey asked people to choose between a correct understanding of the Convention’s civilian protections and a watered-down interpretation of them that closely resembles that of U.S. and Israeli military lawyers.
The correct understanding was defined by a statement that combatants “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone.” The weaker, incorrect statement was that “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible” as they conduct military operations.
Between 72% and 77% of the people in the other UNSC countries and Switzerland agreed with the correct statement, but the United States was an outlier, with only 52% agreeing. In fact 42% of Americans agreed with the weaker statement, twice as many as in the other countries. There were similar disparities between the United States and the others on questions about torture and the treatment of prisoners of war.
In U.S.-occupied Iraq, the United States’ exceptionally weak interpretations of the Geneva Conventions led to endless disputes with the ICRC and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), which issued damning quarterly human rights reports. UNAMI consistently maintained that U.S. airstrikes in densely populated civilian areas were violations of international law.
For instance, its human rights report for the 2nd quarter of 2007 documented UNAMI’s investigations of 15 incidents in which U.S. occupation forces killed 103 Iraqi civilians, including 27 killed in airstrikes in Khalidiya, near Ramadi, on April 3rd, and 7 children killed in a helicopter attack on an elementary school in Diyala province on May 8th.
UNAMI demanded that “all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (Multi-National Force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”
A footnote explained, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”
UNAMI also rejected U.S. claims that its widespread killing of civilians was the result of the Iraqi Resistance using civilians as “human shields,” another U.S. propaganda trope that Israel is mimicking today. Israeli accusations of human shielding are even more absurd in the densely populated, confined space of Gaza, where the whole world can see that it is Israel that is placing civilians in the line of fire as they desperately seek safety from Israeli bombardment.
Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are echoing around the world: through the halls of the United Nations; from the governments of traditional U.S. allies like France, Spain and Norway; from a newly united front of previously divided Middle Eastern leaders; and in the streets of London and Washington. The world is withdrawing its consent for a genocidal “two-state solution” in which Israel and the United States are the only two states that can settle the fate of Palestine.
If U.S. and Israeli leaders are hoping that they can squeak through this crisis, and that the public’s habitually short attention span will wash away the world’s horror at the crimes we are all witnessing, that may be yet another serious misjudgment. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950 in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism.
“We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”
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Rise of Fascism Feeding Off a Meaner, More Violent United States
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence.
Jun 24, 2022
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
-Benito Mussolini
"Have you noticed that people are getting meaner?" the villain asks in a Paramount+ promo for their new show Evil.
"What does it mean?" asks the "nice" character.
"It means," says the evil character with a note of triumph in her voice, "that your side is losing."
And here we are. The lede of an above-the-fold story in yesterday's Washington Post lays it out:
"In the past 24 hours, there has been an uptick in the number of violent threats against lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and all lawmakers on the committee are likely to receive a security detail..."
We need to discuss the violence and threats of violence now endemic to the GOP, because they signal a hopefully reversible--but possibly terminal--slide into fascism.
Fascism is violence.
Its philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth or political power being used to destroy one's enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, fascism is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It's war brought into politics and governance.
Violence like this has its own power and its own attraction.
The media is drawn to it, making it the most powerful recruiting tool a fascist movement has.
Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in fascist violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of political violence.
Democrats treat the violence associated with today's Republican Party as if it were coming from outliers, as if it's "a few bad apples," as if it's simply a troublesome weirdness on the extreme periphery of the conservative movement.
We see this in their response to the violence of January 6th, to the threats of violence directed at members of the January 6th Committee who are now getting security details, and to the frequent but scattershot violence that erupts across the country almost daily.
Democrats watch threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare--and try to put into law--are less than human or "aberrations" that must not be tolerated in a "free society."
The media continues to largely ignore those frequent moments when fascist-infiltrated police--the only group within our society who are legally authorized to use violence without consequence--overlook or overtly encourage the violence that breaks out when Americans dare stand up to fascist militias.
"It's the exception," the media notes, and moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of violence and the willingness to use violence are declarations. They are statements of purpose. They're spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by fascists that they intend to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human life.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police violence with "thin blue line" flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one's political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, "Free helicopter rides for liberals." Their leader said there are "very good people on both sides" after his fascists murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns or imply threats to kill people in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie's Christmas Card:
These are all expressions of fascism.
When men like Rusty Bowers and Brad Raffensperger--who dared stop Trump's criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election--describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of violence by the base of the Republican Party she leads, not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives now face, not a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications.
Because violence is now their brand. They revel in it.
They boast of it in ways that are often misinterpreted as either hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of "Second Amendment solutions" to Democratic efforts, or when Donald Trump said he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected.
Their fascist followers know better: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse violence, and carry explicit threats.
Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"[T]he propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.
"The Nazis 'were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,' ... and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.
"The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet 'deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean, but it is very clever.'"
When a nation goes fascist, it happens quickly. It takes people by surprise.
In 1919, Benito Mussolini started out with 300 armed volunteers, his Blackshirts. They began by terrorizing gay men, striking union members, and socialists; newspaper reports of their violence, beatings, and the occasional murder swept across Italy.
Over the next three years Mussolini's Blackshirt militia burgeoned to over 20,000 men, so when, on the last day of October 1922, he directly confronted King Victor Emmanuel III with the threat of violence, the king gave in, dissolved the government, and appointed Mussolini Prime Minister of Italy.
No campaign, no election, just three years of unrelenting violence and the threat of more violence.
Hitler rose to power on the wings of violence as well, first in the Beer Hall Putsch and later, when he became Chancellor, through his volunteer militia the Brownshirts terrorizing gays, Jews, and union members. Paul von Hindenburg thought Hitler would set aside the violence, as promised, if he was given the power he demanded. Hindenburg didn't understand fascism.
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence. And then continues to rule with violence.
Fascist media revel in the language of violence. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like "invaders" and "vermin" and "illegals."
To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they squeal a phony claim to victimhood: They think Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They believe teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Violence, they say, is their only option.
Over the past two decades, as this fascist movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists.
Terrorism is fascism. Isis and Al-Qaeda are fascist organizations, just like the various militias that attacked our Capitol on January 6th and today stalk our streets from the backs of pickup trucks while brandishing assault weapons.
For the Republicans in Congress, this is not a problem until violence is threatened against one of their own; when a lone mentally ill man calls police to confess he's hallucinating voices telling him to kill Brett Kavanaugh, legislation is passed within days to protect the Court's justices.
Two years earlier, when "men's rights" advocate Roy Den Hollander murdered the 20-year-old son of Judge Esther Salas and was carrying detailed plans to kill Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor next, Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked legislation in the Senate to provide federal judges with that protection.
Not even one Republican objected to Paul's obstruction, and Mitch McConnell let it stand. Violence is their brand.
When violence is threatened against the few remaining non-fascist Republicans, theoretically members of their own tribe, that's just fine with the "base voter" fascists who now control the levers of power in the party. Just ask any of the Republicans who have testified before the January 6th Committee or who voted to impeach Trump.
Fascists justify their violence as necessary to protect their faith, their families, and the "identity" of their homeland. They will tell you it's the unfortunate last-ditch "necessity" provoked by the "others" who "threaten our way of life."
In reality, violence is not the fascist's final, last-gasp option: it's their first.
- It's their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance of society and society's institutions.
- It's how they cow dissent.
- It's the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.
- It creates chaos, and fascism needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.
The final cause to which fascist violence is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every murderous act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly kill their enemies--particularly people of color and "liberals"--in the streets of the nation.
It's why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and the Boston Bomber. It was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people.
It's the story line of the two best-selling books within the militia movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with mass slaughter leaving a nation of "pure" white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of bodies.
Hannah Arendt noted in her 1969 essay "Reflections on Violence":
"[T]he danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end.
"If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely.
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently demanded that Republicans "take back their party." So far, they're not listening.
Every day that Republicans refuse to seize and root out the fascist violence now associated with their party is another day closer to a dystopia like the one through which Hannah Arendt lived.
It can happen here.
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