Posts Tagged ‘CIVIL WAR’
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In Bureaucracy, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 1, 2023 at 12:12 am
Given the all-out Republican assault on their liberties, gays could become convinced that they are becoming the targets of state-sponsored terrorism—as were Jews in Nazi Germany.
In such a case, they may turn to a more drastic means than elections and the courts to protect themselves: Violence.
Political violence has a long and deadly history in the United States.
Before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, violence was commonplace along the Kansas-Missouri border as pro- and anti-slavery elements slaughtered one another.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, Ku Klux Klansmen across the South terrorized blacks into submission even though slavery was now illegal.
With the advent of the civil rights movement in 1960, blacks and their supporters once again became targets for violence.
A minority of black leaders like Malcom X and H. Rapp Brown told blacks they should violently defend themselves. But the vast majority of blacks—including bloodied civil rights workers—adhered to Martin Luther King’s call for non-violence.
Martin Luther King (left), Malcom X (right)
Still, there is no guarantee that those who suffer persecution and violence will remain non-violent. Their motive could be revenge—or to send a message to ward off future attacks.
Such was the fate of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich..
A tall, blond-haired formal naval officer, he was both a champion fencer and talented violinist. Heydrich joined the Schutzstaffel, or Protective Squads, better known as the SS, in 1931, and quickly became head of its counterintelligence service.
Reinhard Heydrich
In September, 1941, Heydrich was appointed “Reich Protector” of Czechoslovakia, which had fallen prey to Germany in 1938 but whose citizens were growing restless under Nazi rule.
Heydrich immediately ordered a purge, executing 92 people within the first three days of his arrival in Prague. By February, 1942, 4,000-5,000 people had been arrested.
In January, 1942, Heydrich convened a meeting of high-ranking political and military leaders in Wannsee, Germany, to streamline “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
An estimated six million Jews were thus slaughtered.
On May 27, 1942, two British-trained Czech commandos—Jan Kubis and Joseph Gabcik—waited in Prague at a hairpin turn in the road always taken by Heydrich. When Heydrich’s Mercedes slowed down, Gabcik raised his machinegun—which jammed.
Heydrich ordered his driver to halt so he could take aim at his would-be assassins. It proved a fatal mistake.
Rising in his seat, he aimed his revolver at Gabcik—as Kubis lobbed a hand grenade at the car. The explosion drove steel and leather fragments of the car’s upholstery into Heydrich’s diaphragm, spleen and lung.
Hitler dispatched doctors from Berlin to save the Reich Protector. But infection set in, and on June 4, Heydrich died at age 38.
Heydrich’s wrecked Mercedes
The assassination sent shockwaves through the upper echelons of the Third Reich. No one had dared assault—much less assassinate—a high-ranking Nazi official.
The Nazis had slaughtered tens of thousands without hesitation—or fear that the same might happen to them.
Suddenly they realized that the fury they had aroused could be turned against themselves.
Which brings us to the leaders of America’s own Right-wing.
The names of infamous Nazis were widely known:
- Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering;
- Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels;
- SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler;
- Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop;
- SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich;
- Adolf Hitler.
And so are the names of infamous leaders of the American Right:
- Texas Senator Ted Cruz;
- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas;
- Commentator Tucker Carlson;
- Evangelist Franklin Graham;
- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis;
- Former President Donald Trump.
The differences between these two infamous groups are these:
In Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans could not learn about the personal lives of their dictators—including their home addresses—and conspire against them.
In the United States, ordinary citizens can learn about the personal lives of their would-be dictators by newspapers, Internet and TV—even on the Right’s own propaganda network, Fox News. “People finder” websites, for a modest price, provide names and addresses of potential targets—and their relatives.
In Nazi Germany, firearms were tightly controlled.
In the United States, the Right-wing National Rifle Association has successfully lobbied to put lethal firepower into the hands of virtually anyone who wants it.
Since their reversal of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, at least six Right-wing Supreme Court Justices have lived under heavy guard by the U.S. Marshals Service. They may well be forced to do so for the rest of their lives.
But radical evangelists like Franklin Graham and Right-wing propagandists like Tucker Carlson cannot expect lifelong government protection. They would have to provide their own security—or take their chances.
So many Republicans are calling for an all-out war on gays that any number of them could become the targets—and victims—of retaliation.
Republicans boast that they want to “get the government off the backs of the people.” Yet they are waging war against people for the most intimate of reasons: Their choice of sex partners.
Reinhard Heydrich believed he was invulnerable to the hatred of the enemies he had raised against himself. That arrogance cost him his life.
The day may soon come when America’s own Right-wingers start learning the same lesson.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on February 28, 2023 at 12:13 am
The politics of “smear and fear” have been good to Republicans—and their Right-wing allies.
Meanwhile, the Republican “base” refuses to learn that those who portray themselves as morally superior are usually:
- Hypocrites, who are in effect saying: “Do as I say, not as I do,” or
- Fanatics, who intend to force their version of morality on others.
So long as millions of hate-filled Right-wingers support the endless succession of “two minute hates,” Republicans will continue to target an endless series of victims.
And Right-wingers who are stirred up by Republicans’ anti-gay rhetoric often target gays, lesbians and transgenders in violent attacks.
- According to the Southern Poverty Law Center: “In the first six months of 2022, the Proud Boys counterprotested or harassed people on at least 28 separate occasions at LGBTQ and reproductive justice events around the country – together acting as a coordinated attack on gender equity and bodily autonomy….
- “On June 26, library patrons attending a drag queen story hour at a public library in Sparks, Nevada, encountered what has now become an increasingly regular sight: a group of men clad in the Proud Boys’ black-and-yellow uniform.
- “They held signs that accused participants of ‘grooming’ children and yelled at parents that they were ‘sick.’ One of those Proud Boys allegedly approached the building with a gun, causing patrons – including a number of children – to flee inside to safety. ‘We had some people who were visibly shaken and sobbing,’ a librarian told a local reporter.”
Proud Boys Flag
Anthony Crider, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
According to a December 10, 2022 story in Business Insider:
- “By the end of November, far-right activists took part in at least 55 public actions targeting members of the LGBT+ community — up from 16 the year before, an increase of some 340% — with a corresponding rise in violent attacks on people perceived to be gay or transgender, according to a report released this week by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED….
- “While racism remains the primary driver of the far right, anti-LGBTQ actions have ‘fueled the largest increase in far-right protest activity,’ [according to an FBI annual risk assessment for 2022] with the rise in such activity ‘strongly’ correlating with a rise in violent attacks, of which there have been no fewer than 20, including the murder….of five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. Though we don’t have a specific motive the suspect has a history of online and offline bigotry.”
So what’s the reason for the GOP’s constantly dialing up fear and hatred of gays?
“They have an interest in keeping the base riled up about one thing or another, and when one issue fades, as with same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage, they’ve got to find something else. It’s almost frantic,” said Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor who authored Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.
According to Balmer, the rise of the Religious Right was now driving Republican support for anti-trans legislation.
White Right-wing evangelicals backed Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and catapulted him to the White House.
Any Republican who wanted to gain the Presidency had to pay homage to the evangelical base, Balmer says.
In 2015, Donald Trump initially campaigned on welcoming gays and lesbians into the Republican platform. But he soon dropped this stance to win support from Right-wing evangelicals.
Donald Trump
That support proved crucial to his gaining the White House—just as it had proved crucial to Reagan in 1980 and 1984.
Gays have fought back on political and legal fronts, with mixed success.
According to move.org, among the best states for gays are: California, Oregon, Colorado and New York.
It’s no coincidence that these states have a majority Democratic population and legislature.
Among the worst states for gays are: Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Arkansas and South Carolina.
Gays increasingly fear that the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade could lead to a reversal of its previous legalizing of same-sex marriage.
And this could very well happen. For decades, abortion rights advocates believed the Court wouldn’t dare strike down a right it had recognized as far back as 1973.
Immediately following the Court’s decision on Roe, Justice Clarence Thomas said that the landmark high court rulings that legalized same-sex marriage and contraception rights should be reconsidered.
Clarence Thomas
Thomas’ remark has been widely interpreted as an invitation to Right-wing states to bring challenges to those rulings.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hopes the state legislature enacts a law that criminalizes sodomy so he can defend it at the Supreme Court.
And Stuart Adams, the Republican president of the State Senate, would support Utah’s joining other states to press the Supreme Court’s ending the right to same-sex marriage.
Given the all-out Republican assault on their liberties, gays could become convinced that they are becoming the targets of state-sponsored terrorism—as were Jews in Nazi Germany.
In such a case, they may turn to a more drastic means than elections and the courts to protect themselves: Violence.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” said President John F. Kennedy in a 1962 address on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress.
His warning remains as valid today as it did 61 years ago.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on February 27, 2023 at 12:12 am
In a June 19, 2015 editorial, Rolling Stone magazine writer Jeb Lund noted:
“The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.
“Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically ‘legitimizes’ an armed insurrection against the government created by it.
“Those leading said insurrection are swaddled by the blanket exculpation of patriotism. At the same time, they have synonymized the Democratic Party with illegitimacy and abuse of the American order.
“This is no longer an argument about whether one party’s beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation.”
Not content with this, Republicans have aimed slander and hatred at those who dare to vote Democratic. In the past, this has included:
- Blacks
- Women
- The disabled
- Environmentalists
- Liberals
More recently, the groups Republicans most delight in vilifying are:
- Hispanics
- Gays
- Lesbians
- Transgenders
George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984, serves as a better guide to Republican electioneering strategy than any official statement of the GOP.
1984 is set in a futuristic dictatorship called Oceania, whose constantly alternating mortal enemies are Eurasia and Eastasia.
A daily fixture of life in Oceania is the “Two Minutes Hate.” During this, Party members must watch a film depicting the Party’s enemies and express their hatred for them in exactly two minutes.
Chief among these is Emmanuel Goldstein, who is obviously based on Leon Trotsky, the longtime antagonist of Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years.
The “Two Minutes Hate” serves as a form of brainwashing, whose purpose is to whip ordinary citizens into a frenzy of hatred and loathing for whoever the Party designates as its—and their—-mortal enemies.
It fully describes the motivations—and effects—of Republicans’ attacks on their self-proclaimed enemies.
Without a speck of evidence to back up such defamatory claims, Republicans—both politicians and their followers—attack Democratic candidates as “groomers” and “pedophiles.”
This has led to deadly attacks on gays, lesbians and transgenders.
In December, 2014, Republicans in the Michigan House of Representatives passed “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
The bill allows public agencies and private businesses to refuse service to anyone under the claim that their “religious beliefs” had been affronted.
And the State government is legally prevented from intervening if a person claimed that his/her “deeply-held religious beliefs” was the reason for acting—or not acting—in a certain way.
Thus:
- An emergency room doctor can refuse service to a gay or lesbian needing medical care.
- A pharmacist can refuse to fill a doctor’s prescription for birth control or HIV medication.
- A DMV clerk can refuse to give a driver’s license to someone who’s divorced.
- An employer can deny equal pay to women.
Republicans have introduced similar “right-to-discriminate” legislation in other states as well:
- On March 28, 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the “Parental Rights in Education” bill. This bans public school teachers from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through grade three.
- In October, 33 Congressional Republicans introduced a similar “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit, on a nationwide basis, the use of federal funds “to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, and for other purposes.”
- On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court’s reversed Roe v. Wade, guaranteeing a woman’s legal right to abortion. Soon afterward, Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton said that he would willingly defend at the Supreme Court any law the Legislature enacted that criminalized sodomy.
- In Utah, Stuart Adams, the Republican president of the State Senate, said he would support Utah’s joining with other states to press the Supreme Court to end the right to same-sex marriage.
Republicans have defended such legislation by equating gays with child predators.
In fact, the Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute states that 90% of child molesters target children in their network of family and friends, and the majority are men married to women.
Yet Republicans and their Rightist allies have refused to condemn such heterosexual—and Right-wing—child molesters as Dennis Hastert and Josh Duggar.
Josh Duggar, the “all-American” child molester
On May 21, 2015, responding to press leaks, Duggar resigned as director of the Family Research Council, a Right-wing organization dedicated to fighting sexually-oriented issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and pornography.
In 2002-3, as a 14-15 year-old, Duggar had fondled the breasts and vaginas of five underage girls—four of whom were his own sisters.
And on October 28, 2015, Hastert—Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007–pleaded guilty to structuring money transactions in a way to avoid requirements to report where the money was going.
The reason: One of his victims had started blackmailing him.
Dennis Hastert
The reason: To conceal the truth about his past as a child molester. Hastert had abused four young boys when he was their high school wrestling coach. One was only 14 years old.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on August 31, 2022 at 12:12 am
On September 2, 1964, the FBI launched a full-blown counterintelligence program against the Ku Klux Klan—COINTELPRO—WHITE HATE in FBI-speak.
Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, chronicles the methods used by the Bureau:
“WHITE-HATE intensified in the fall of 1964. It involved all the techniques in the FBI’s long-running attack on the Left. Once a week….FBI agents interrogated all known members of the White Knights of the KKK, blaming other Klansmen for being snitches and naming names, sowing deep suspicion among Klan members. Few knew who was an informer and who was not.
A Ku Klux Klan meeting
“The FBI dangled small fortunes before potential Klan informers, offered outright bribes to Klansmen who could serve as double agents inside state and local police forces, planted bugs and wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out black bag jobs to steal membership lists….”
Other tactics included:
- Contacting the news media to publicize arrests and identify Klan leaders;
- Informing the employers of known Klansmen of their employees’ criminal activity, resulting in the firing of untold numbers of them;
- Breaking up the marriages of Klansmen by circulating rumors of their infidelity among their wives.
“When the Klan reached 14,000 in the mid-sixties, I asked to take over the investigation of the Klan,” recalled William C. Sullivan, who headed the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division in the 1960s. “When I left the Bureau in 1971, the Klan was down to a completely disorganized 4,300. It was broken.”
William C. Sullivan
According to Neil J. Welch, the retired Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Buffalo, New York office:
“A Klan Bureau of Investigation (KBI) was created to counter the FBI, and its members placed the wives and children of agents under surveillance, harassing them with taunts and anonymous phone calls,” wrote Welch in his memoir, Inside Hoover’s FBI.
“It was a serious miscalculation. The most dangerous members of the KBI were systematically identified and assigned to agents selected solely because they were comparatively dangerous. The agents had full discretion.
“During the next few months, a number of men previously involved in Klan violence around the state seemed, by remarkable coincidence, to experience misfortune. Some disappeared from the area. Some were forced to leave Mississippi for health reasons. A few took unplanned trips to places like Mexico and seemed to lose all interest in the Klan upon their return.”
A similar effort, focusing on Right-wing terrorism, could include the following:
- The FBI’s designating Right-wing political and terrorist groups as the Nation’s #1 enemy.
- Reviving the FBI’s legendary COINTELPRO (“Counterintelligence Program”) that destroyed the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1960s. Among the methods that can be used:
- Turning the Bureau’s powerful arsenal—bugs, wiretaps, informants, SWAT teams—on them.
- Buying the cooperation of informants within Right-wing organizations.
- Conducting “black bag jobs” to steal membership lists of of Right-wing organizations.
- Breaking up the marriages of prominent Right-wingers by circulating rumors of their infidelity among their wives.
- Informing the employers of known Right-wing terrorists of their employees’ criminal activity, resulting in the firing of untold numbers of them.
- Contacting the news media to publicize the arrests of prominent Right-wing leaders.
- When Right-wing terrorists target Federal law enforcement agents and/or their families for harassment or worse, they can be targeted for similar intimidation or removal.
FBI SWAT member
A revised COINTELPRO could be supplemented by the following:
- Creating tip hotlines for reporting illegal Right-wing activities—and offering rewards for information that leads to arrests.
- Prosecuting militia groups for violating Federal firearms laws.
- Treating calls for the murder of members of Congress—as Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has done-–as felonies punishable by lengthy imprisonment.
- Prosecuting Right-wing leaders involved in the treasonous assault on the United States Capitol Building.
- Prosecuting as “accessories to treason” all those Republican members of Congress who stoked Right-wing anger by lying that the 2020 Presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump, although every objective news source proved he had lost.
- Directing the Treasury Department’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) at fundamentalist Christian churches that finance Right-wing terrorism—just as it halts the financing of Islamic terrorist groups by Islamic organizations.
- Using drones, planes and/or helicopters to provide security against similar Right-wing terror demonstrations—especially in Washington, D.C.
- Using the Federal Communications Commission to ban Fox News—the Nation’s #1 Right-wing propaganda network—from representing itself as a legitimate news network, and requiring that its stories carry labels warning viewers: “This is Right-wing propaganda, NOT news.”
- Encouraging victims of Right-wing hate-speech to file libel/slander lawsuits against their abusers—such as the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary School successfully did against Alex Jones.
- Using Federal anti-terrorist laws to arrest, prosecute and imprison Right-wingers who openly carry firearms and threaten violence, even if states allow such display of firearms.
- Seizing the assets of individuals and organizations found guilty of Right-wing terrorism offenses.
When you are constantly looking over your shoulder, your enemies are winning. When your enemies are constantly looking over their shoulder, you are winning.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on August 30, 2022 at 12:10 am
Donald Trump’s followers are doing what even the Mafia has never dared: Threatening the lives of FBI agents and openly challenging the authority of the Justice Department.
On August 8, the FBI, under a search warrant issued by the Justice Department, seized 11 sets of classified documents from the former President’s home at Mar-a-Lago. These included four sets that were classified as “top secret,” according to the unsealed search warrant.
Since then, Trump’s legions of fanatical Right-wing followers have vented their fury at a wide range of their self-declared enemies: President Joe Biden, Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department—-and especially the FBI.
On August 12, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security [DHS] issued a joint Intelligence bulletin warning of the increased threats aimed at federal law enforcement agencies.
FBI seal
“Since 8 August 2022, the FBI and DHS have identified multiple articulated threats and calls for the targeted killing of judicial, law enforcement, and government officials associated with the Palm Beach search, including the federal judge who approved the Palm Beach search warrant.
“The FBI and DHS have also observed the personal identifying information of possible targets of violence, such as home addresses and identification of family members, disseminated online as additional targets.”
“These threats are occurring primarily online and across multiple platforms, including social media sites, web forums, video sharing platforms, and image boards. The FBI and DHS would like to ensure that law enforcement, court, and government personnel are aware of the range of threats and criminal and violent incidents.
“The FBI and DHS have observed an increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities, including a threat to place a so-called dirty bomb in front of FBI Headquarters and issuing general calls for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion.'”
Even the Mafia—with one or two exceptions—has never threatened the lives of FBI agents. And when individual mobsters did, they found the consequences frightening.
In April, 1963, four New York mobsters knocked FBI agent John Foley to the ground, and then severely beat and kicked him. Foley had been conducting surveillance at the Brooklyn funeral of Carmine “The Doctor” Lombardozzi, a capo in the Gambino Mafia Family.
The FBI retaliated by launching an all-out war against the Gambinos. Agents leaned on the cartel’s boss, underboss, counselor and lieutenants. The Bureau also intensified the use of illegal electronic surveillance (wiretaps and hidden microphones) against the mobsters.
Map of Mafia families
Angelo Bruno, the boss of the Philadelphia crime syndicate, unwittingly informed a hidden microphone about how the FBI brutally drove home the message to “boss of all bosses” Carlo Gambino:
BRUNO: “They [the FBI] went to Carlo and named all his capos [lieutenants] to him. The FBI asked him: “Did you change the laws in your family, that you could hit FBI men, punch and kick them? Well, this is the test—that if you change the laws, and now you are going to hit FBI men, every time we pick up one of your people we are going to break their heads for them.’
“And, really, they picked up our guy, they almost killed him, the FBI. They don’t do that, you know. But they picked up one of his fellows and crippled him. They said, ‘This is an example. Now, the next time anyone lays a hand on an FBI man, that’s just a warning. There’s nothing else we have got to tell you.'”
Word traveled quickly through the nationwide organized crime network—and its leaders decreed there should be no further assaults on FBI agents.
The FBI may be gearing up to declare war on the radical Right. And it could be done the same way the FBI destroyed the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1960s.
Klansmen had shot, lynched and bombed their way across the Deep South, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Many Southern sheriffs and police chiefs were Klan sympathizers, if not outright members and accomplices.
On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
President Lyndon B. Johnson called J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary director of the FBI, and ordered an all-out investigation: “I want you to have the same kind of Intelligence [on the Klan] that you have on the communists.”
Poster for missing civil rights workers
For decades, Hoover had refused to tackle white hate groups. And, in truth, no President had been willing to give him the order to do so. But now a President had given him such an order.
In August, the FBI uncovered the bodies of the three missing civil rights activists—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.
On September 2, 1964, the Bureau launched a full-blown counterintelligence program against the Klan—COINTELPRO—WHITE HATE in FBI-speak.
Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, chronicles the methods used by the Bureau:
“WHITE-HATE intensified in the fall of 1964. It involved all the techniques in the FBI’s long-running attack on the Left. Once a week….FBI agents interrogated all known members of the White Knights of the KKK, blaming other Klansmen for being snitches and naming names, sowing deep suspicion among Klan members. Few knew who was an informer and who was not.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on August 29, 2022 at 12:10 am
After taking office as President, Donald Trump openly waged war on his own Justice Department—and especially its chief investigative agency, the FBI.
FBI headquarters
Among his attacks on federal law enforcers:
- Fired James Comey, the FBI director pursuing an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 Presidential race to ensure Trump’s election.
- Threatened to fire Independent Counsel Robert Mueller, who continued that investigation after he fired Comey.
- Repeatedly attacked—verbally and on Twitter—his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation.
- (Sessions did so after the press revealed that, during the 2016 race, he twice met secretly with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.)
- Repeatedly attacked the integrity of the FBI, raising the possibility of his firing more of its senior leadership for investigating his ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
- Forced House Republicans to release a memo falsely accusing the FBI of pursuing a vendetta against him.
But the FBI could have refused to meekly accept such assaults.
A February 2 episode of the popular CBS police drama, “Blue Bloods,” offered a vivid lesson on bureaucratic self-defense against tyrants.
A shootout erupts in a crowded pub between a gunman and NYPD officers. Results: One dead gunman and one wounded bystander.
Problem: The bystander is an aide to New York Governor Martin Mendez.
Mendez visits One Police Plaze, NYPD headquarters, for a private chat with Commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck). From the outset, he’s aggressive, rude and threatening.
MENDEZ: I know you guys like to whitewash officer-involved shootings.
REAGAN: I do not.
MENDEZ: That’s not going to happen here. I want the cop who shot my guy fired and charged.
REAGAN: If the grand jury indicts, my officer could be terminated.
MENDEZ: We all want to protect our people, but mine come first.
Governor Mendez leaves Commissioner Reagan’s office. Later, he returns:
MENDEZ: We’ve got a serious problem.
REAGAN: Why? The grand jury declined to indict my officer.
MENDEZ: Your cop fired into a crowded room.
REAGAN: She returned fire, took out the shooter and likely saved lives.
MENDEZ: What are you going to do?
REAGAN: Our Internal Affairs investigation supports the grand jury’s finding, so the case is closed.
MENDEZ: Either you fire this cop, or I’ll order the Attorney General to investigate every questionable police shooting in the past 10 years and hold public hearings out loud and lights up.
REAGAN: Everybody loves a circus.
MENDEZ: Except the guy who’s got to shovel up afterwards.
At the end of the episode, a third—and final—meeting occurs in a restaurant between Reagan and Mendez.
MENDEZ: Have you dumped the cop who shot my guy?
REAGAN: No.
MENDEZ: Bad news.
REAGAN: Depends on what you compare it to. It turns out that your aide wasn’t drinking alone the night he was shot.
MENDEZ: So what? He’s single.
REAGAN: He was with a married woman.
MENDEZ: That’s on her, not on him.
REAGAN: Except she is married to his boss, your Chief of Staff.
MENDEZ: Sheesh!
REAGAN: Turns out this has been going on for over a year.
MENDEZ: So what are we doing?
REAGAN: If this gets out, the circus comes to Albany [where the governor has his office].
MENDEZ: Who else knows?
REAGAN: Right now it’s safe in the notebook of my lead detective. Whether or not it finds its way into an arrest report that’s subject to a Freedom of Information Act request—that’s a judgment call.
MENDEZ: Your judgment?
REAGAN: Yes.
MENDEZ: And if my investigation goes away?
REAGAN: Neither of us is shoveling up after the circus.
MENDEZ: I have your word on that?
REAGAN: Yes.
MENDEZ: You have a good evening, Commissioner.
J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary FBI director, used Realpolitik to ensure his reign for 48 years.
J. Edgar Hoover
As William C. Sullivan, the onetime director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, revealed after Hoover’s death in 1972:
“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator, he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter.
“‘But we wanted you to know this. We realize you’d want to know it.’ Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”
Donald Trump has long pursued a strategy of intimidation. But when people have refused to be cowed by his threats, he’s backed off.
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, more than a dozen women accused Trump of sexual misconduct, ranging from inappropriate comments to assault.
Trump responded: “The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”
Yet he didn’t file a single slander suit.
Similarly, when New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Trump for running a fraudulent university, Trump initially said he would fight the charge.
Instead, he settled the case by paying $25 million to compensate the 3,700 students Trump University had defrauded.
“You never have to frame anyone,” says Governor Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1946 novel, All the King’s Men. “Because the truth is always sufficient.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on August 12, 2022 at 12:12 am
On November 3, 2020, 81,255,933 Democratic voters elected former Vice President Joseph Biden the 46th President of the United States.
President Donald J. Trump, running for a second term, got 74,196,153 votes. Biden also won decisively in the Electoral College: 306 votes to 232 for Trump.
Yet more than two months after the election, Trump refused to concede, insisting that he won—and repeatedly claiming falsely that he was the victim of massive vote fraud.
Immediately after the election, Trump ordered his attorneys to file lawsuits to overturn the election results.
Throughout November and December, cases were filed in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia challenging the election results. None were supported by evidence of fraud—as even Trump’s lawyers admitted when questioned by judges.
On November 13, nine cases attacking President-Elect Joe Biden’s win in key states were denied or dropped. A law firm challenging the vote count in Pennsylvania withdrew from the effort.
By November 21, more than 30 cases were withdrawn by Trump’s attorneys or dismissed by Federal judges—some of them appointed by Trump himself.
Ultimately, from November 3 to December 14, Trump and his allies lost 59 times in court, either withdrawing cases or having them dismissed by Federal and state judges.
Donald Trump
On November 19, losing in the courts, Trump invited two Republican legislative leaders from Michigan to the White House. The reason: To persuade them to stop the state from certifying the vote.
The Michigan legislators said they would follow the law.
On December 5, Trump called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and asked him to call a special legislative session and convince state legislators to select their own electors that would support him, thus overturning Biden’s win.
Kemp refused, saying he lacked the authority to do so.
Brian Kemp
On December 8, the Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s bid to reverse Pennsylvania’s certification of Biden’s victory.
Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA), a Trump ally, argued that the state’s 2.5 million mail-in votes were unconstitutional.
The Court’s order read, “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice [Samuel] Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”
Although Trump had appointed three of the Court’s Justices, not one of them dissented.
On December 8, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed his own lawsuit at the Supreme Court. A Trump ally, Paxton has been indicted on felony securities fraud charges.
In Texas v. Pennsylvania, he alleged that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin violated the United States Constitution by changing election procedures through non-legislative means.
On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the court said without further comment. It dismissed all other related claims as moot.
Seventeen Republican state Attorney Generals—and 126 Republican members of Congress—supported the lawsuit. They did so in an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief.
They feared Trump’s fanatical base would “primary” them if they didn’t publicly declare their loyalty—to a man they knew was slated to leave office within two months.
The Supreme Court
Had the Court acted on Paxton’s request, the results for democracy would have been catastrophic.
“Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told the justices in legal papers.
“Its request for this court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for president is legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy.
“The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,”
The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election marked the first time a losing candidate tried to overturn the will of millions of American voters.
It also marked the first time that state Attorney Generals and members of Congress tried to overturn the results of a Presidential election.
The signers represented nearly two-thirds of the House GOP.
Among them: The House’s top two Republicans: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.),
Only 70 Republican House members refused to sign the brief.
By December 11, 2020, only 23 Republicans in Congress—14 Representatives and nine Senators—had acknowledged Biden’s victory.
On January 6, Trump instigated an attack on the Capitol Building to stop the counting of Electoral College votes, which was certain to prove Biden the winner.
Despite this, Republican members of Congress continued trying to throw the election Trump’s way.
Six Republicans in the Senate and 121 in the House backed objections to certifying Arizona’s electoral outcome. Seven Republicans in the Senate and 138 in the House supported an objection to certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral outcome.
Not since the American Civil War (1861-1865) has the United States seen a more blatant—and deadly—case of sedition.
In 1861, 11 Senators and three Representatives were expelled from Congress for refusing to recognize Abraham Lincoln’s election—and supporting insurrection.
Democrats need to summon the same courage and ruthlessness against their sworn enemies.
Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost fuels the danger of another attack on Congress and/or President Biden.
He—and his Republican accomplices—must be forcibly taught there are penalties for treason.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on August 11, 2022 at 12:10 am
It’s the racism and sexism, stupid!
That’s how Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute, sees the reason for the animosity between Republicans and Democrats.
“Part of the reason that partisan animosity between Democrats and Republicans is so terrible right now is because what the parties are fighting over are really matters of racial and gender equality—the traditional social hierarchy—and whether we’re going to go back to being a country where White Christian men were always at the top of that hierarchy or become a more egalitarian, multiethnic democracy.”
Lilliana Mason
Referring to the book she co-wrote with fellow political scientist Nathan P. Kalmoe, Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy, she said:
“What we found in our data was that, particularly on the right, Republicans who really hated Democrats the most were also the highest in racial resentment and sexism.
“And those who hated Democrats the least were those who were lowest in racial resentment and sexism. Actually, in our data, racial resentment is one of the most powerful predictors of Republicans hating Democrats.”
Once again—as in the years leading to the Civil War—it’s the South trying to impose a slavocracy mentality and control over the rest of the nation.
From 1860 to 1865, the South—Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia—produced the greatest case of mass treason in America’s history.
Union (blue) and Confederate (red) states: 1860 – 1865
According to The Destructive War, by Charles Royster, it wasn’t the cause of “states’ rights” that led 13 Southern states to withdraw from the Union in 1860-61. It was their demand for “respect.”
“The respect Southerners demanded did not consist simply of the states’ sovereignty or of the equal rights of Northern and Southern citizens, including slaveholders’ right to take their chattels into Northern territory.
“It entailed, too, respect for their assertion of the moral superiority of slaveholding society over free society,” writes Royster.
It was not enough for Southerners to claim equal standing with Northerners; Northerners must acknowledge it. But this was something that the North refused to do.
Finally, its citizens dared to elect Abraham Lincoln President in 1860.
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln and his new Republican party damned slavery—and slaveholders—as morally evil, obsolete and ultimately doomed. And they were determined to prevent slavery from spreading any further throughout the country.
Southerners found all of this intolerable.
On April 12, 1861—just over a month since Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4—Southern batteries opened fire on Union Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, triggering the Civil War.
More than 750,000.Americans died—when the population of the United States stood at 31,443,321.
Four years later, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.
Now Southerners are trying to win through political manipulation what they couldn’t by open treason.
Red states are adopting Fascistic social policies on such issues as abortion, gay rights and classroom censorship. And they are trying to prevent the federal government or their own largest metro areas to resist those policies.
In the case of abortion, Red states are not only outlawing it within their own borders but trying to prevent states where abortion is legal from providing that service.
Thus Republicans, who began as the party of freedom, have mutated into the party now trying to end it.
According to Donald Kettl, the former dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland:
“The only time I can recall in American history even remotely like this [divergence] was after the Civil War when the separate but equal doctrine began to emerge” across the South as a backlash against the attempts of the 13th, 14th and 15th Constitutional amendments to ensure equality for the freed slaves.
CNN Correspondent Ronald Brownstein warns of this development:
“The real threat in the red state effort to set their own course may be less an advantage for one side or another than a challenge to the nation’s underlying cohesion.
“As red states grow more aggressive about going their own way, while working to preempt challenges from above (the federal government) or below (blue local governments), they are testing how much divergence the nation’s fundamental cohesion can take before it begins to unravel.”
Twenty-five states voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Of these:
- Twenty of these states rank in the bottom 25 of those who hold at least a four-year college degree;
- Most fall into the top half when states are ranked by the share of their population that are White Christians or who own guns;
- Twenty-three rank in the top 26 states that emit the most carbon from their energy sector;
- These states have long sought to reverse the “rights revolution” of the last 60 years—on such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception.
Today’s Republican party is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It has become the party of John Wilkes Booth, Benito Mussolini and Donald Trump.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on July 29, 2022 at 12:11 am
Whites comprised the overwhelming majority of the audiences at Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign rallies. Not all were racists, but many of those who were advertised it on T-shirts: “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.”
And the vast majority of the white votes Trump got were in the South.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first black President had shocked whites. His 2012 re-election had deprived them of the hope that 2008 had been an accident.
Then came 2016—and the possibility that a black President might actually be followed by a woman: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
And for macho, largely uneducated, anti-black Southern males, the idea of a woman dictating to men was simply too much to bear.
Thus, the third map of Southern infamy: The election of Donald Trump.
When Trump declared his candidacy:
- The country was essentially at peace.
- Thanks to government loans from President Obama, American capitalism had been saved from its own excesses during the George W. Bush administration.
- Employment was up. CEOs were doing extremely well.
- Unlike the administration of Ronald Reagan, there had been no corruption scandals during the Obama Presidency.
- Nor had there been any large-scale terrorist attacks on American soil—like 9/11 under President George W. Bush.
Above all, the news was filled with reputable reports—later confirmed—that Trump’s campaign was backed by Russian oligarchs linked to Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB and now President of Russia.
In short: Southerners—who had long portrayed themselves as America’s most dedicated patriots—flocked to the banner of a man who publicly called on “Russia” to interfere in an American Presidential election.
Red States voted for Donald Trump – 2016
BobWyatt07, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The fourth map of Southern infamy.
Donald Trump’s four-year Presidency produced a legacy of unprecedented racism, criminality, abuse of power and treason.
But the crime for which he will be longest-remembered—and which finally brought him down—was his unwillingness to protect Americans from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 catastrophe slammed into the United States in January, 2020. It was the inevitable result of a natural disaster colliding with an evil and incompetent administration.
Trump’s “cures” for COVID-19 included denial, lies, Republican subservience, chaos, extortion, propaganda as news, quackery as medicine, demands to “re-open the country,” Ignoring the danger and—finally—resignation (“Learn to live with the virus”).
Early on, Trump made the virus a referendum on himself. If you supported him, you didn’t wear a mask when you ventured out in public. This despite the fact that, throughout 2020, there was no vaccine available and hospitals were rapidly overwhelmed by debilitated and dying casualties of the virus.
“I think, once Donald Trump and other Republicans made it a manhood issue, or a freedom issue, or whatever kind of issue they made it, it’s hard to walk back that culture war signal,” said conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks on the PBS Newshour on July 23, 2021.
Washington Post Columnist Jonathan Capehart echoed him: “I think, if we had had a president of the United States who took this seriously when this first came on the scene, if we had a Republican party that took this seriously enough to warn everyone, their constituents saying, wash your hands, then put on a mask, then go get the vaccine, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
Jonathan Capehart
But neither Trump nor the Republican party urged Americans to “wash your hands, put on a mask, then go get the vaccine.”
By March, 2021, three vaccines—by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson—became available. A total of 90.4 million doses of these vaccines had been given. And 30.7 million Americans had been fully vaccinated against the virus.
But after a triumphant beginning, the pace of vaccinations slowed, then halted. By late July, 2021, only 49.6% of Americans had been fully vaccinated.
COVID-19 vaccination map – July 21, 2021
George Karabassis, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Many of those who had gotten one shot of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines refused to get the necessary second one. These must be given almost a month apart.
(The Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot.)
What had happened?
“The people I know personally who are not getting the vaccine, for them, it was like, ‘They rushed this thing,'” theorized David Brooks. “‘Who knows what’s going to happen to all these people who get the shots in 10 years or 20 years?’ So, why should I take the risk?’
“And that’s not completely crazy, but it’s not—it’s based on some sense of general distrust for the establishment, including the medical establishment. And that establishment—that distrust is the core of this thing.”
David Brooks
And leading the way to this catastrophe of self-destruction were the states of the South and Midwest: Mississippi (47.1%,), Alabama (50.5%), Arkansas (53.2%), and Tennessee (52.9%) with the lowest rates of residents who have gotten at least one shot.
By late July, 2021, three states—Florida, Texas and Missouri—with lower vaccination rates accounted for 40 percent of all cases nationwide.
And colliding head-on with the refusals of millions to get vaccinated was the newer—and deadlier—Delta variant of COVID-19.
Just as the South unleashed the Civil War on America, it has now ignited a new wave of COVID-19 on America.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on July 28, 2022 at 12:11 am
Throughout its history the South has been a hotbed of treason, racism and ignorance.
Today, it proudly continues holding fast to these traditions—even as it places the entire country in danger of contagion and dictatorship.
From 1860 to 1865, the South—Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia—produced the greatest case of mass treason in America’s history.
Southern infamy’s first map was called the Confederate States of America.
Union (blue) and Confederate (red) states: 1860 – 1865
Júlio Reis, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
According to The Destructive War, by Charles Royster, it wasn’t the cause of “states’ rights” that led 13 Southern states to withdraw from the Union in 1860-61. It was their demand for “respect,” which, in reality, translates into “e-g-o.”
“The respect Southerners demanded did not consist simply of the states’ sovereignty or of the equal rights of Northern and Southern citizens, including slaveholders’ right to take their chattels into Northern territory.
“It entailed, too, respect for their assertion of the moral superiority of slaveholding society over free society,” writes Royster.
It was not enough for Southerners to claim equal standing with Northerners; Northerners must acknowledge it. But this was something that the North was less and less willing to do.
Finally, its citizens dared to elect Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Lincoln and his new Republican party damned slavery—and slaveholders—as morally evil, obsolete and ultimately doomed. And they were determined to prevent slavery from spreading any further throughout the country.
Southerners found all of this intolerable.
Lincoln—during his First Inaugural Address—bluntly said that he did not intend to “directly or indirectly…interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Abraham Lincoln
But that was not enough for Southerners.
Only 10% of Southerners owned slaves. The other 90% of the population “had no dog in this fight,” as Southerners liked to say.
Yet they so admired and aspired to be like their “gentleman betters” that they threw in their lot with them.
On April 12, 1861—just over a month since Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4—Southern batteries opened fire on Union Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
This ignited the American Civil War, costing the lives of 750,000.Americans—at a time when the population of the United States stood at 31,443,321.
Four years later, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.
Huge sections of the South had been laid waste by Union troops and more than 258,000 Southerners had been killed.
And slavery, the mainstay of Southern plantation life, had been ended forever.
The South had paid a high price for its investment in treason.
Southern infamy’s second map dates from 1964 to 2016.
In 1964, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress, ending more than a century of blatant discrimination against blacks.
The South—which before the Civil War had been solidly Democratic—suddenly went solidly Republican.
To understand this mammoth shift, it’s vital to realize: In Lincoln’s time, the Republicans were the party of progressives.
The party was founded on an anti-slavery platform. Its members were thus reviled as “Black Republicans.” And until the 1960s, the South was solidly Democratic.
Democrats were the ones defending the status quo—slavery—and opposing the rights of freed blacks in the South of Reconstruction and long afterward.
When, in the early 1960s, Democrats championed the rights of blacks, Southerners bolted for the Republican party—which held to the same values that slavery/discrimination-supporting Democrats once did.
After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, President Lyndon B. Johnson told an aide: “We have just lost the South for a generation.”
Johnson was wrong: A generation lasts 20 to 30 years. It’s been 58 years since the signing of the Act, and the South is still solidly within the Republican camp.
1968 election
The South’s third map of infamy culminated with the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016.
Repeatedly, when asked why they supported Trump, his followers said: “He says what I’ve been thinking!”
And what Trump appealed to, above all else, was hatred.
From June 15, 2015, when he launched his Presidential campaign, until October 24, 2016, Trump fired almost 4,000 angry, insulting tweets at 281 people and institutions that had somehow offended him.
Donald Trump
The New York Times needed two full pages of its print edition to showcase them.
Among his targets:
- Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton
- President Barack Obama
- Actress Meryl Streep
- Singer Neil Young
- Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Comedian John Oliver
- News organizations
- The State of New Jersey
- Beauty pageant contestants
Others he clearly delighted in insulting during the campaign included:
- Women
- Blacks
- Hispanics
- Asians
- Muslims
- The disabled
- Prisoners-of-war
Whites comprised the overwhelming majority of the audiences at Trump rallies. Not all were racists, but many of those who were advertised it on T-shirts: “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.”
And the vast majority of the white votes Trump got were in the South.
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IF “QUEERS” STRIKE BACK: PART THREE (END)
In Bureaucracy, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 1, 2023 at 12:12 amGiven the all-out Republican assault on their liberties, gays could become convinced that they are becoming the targets of state-sponsored terrorism—as were Jews in Nazi Germany.
In such a case, they may turn to a more drastic means than elections and the courts to protect themselves: Violence.
Political violence has a long and deadly history in the United States.
Before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, violence was commonplace along the Kansas-Missouri border as pro- and anti-slavery elements slaughtered one another.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, Ku Klux Klansmen across the South terrorized blacks into submission even though slavery was now illegal.
With the advent of the civil rights movement in 1960, blacks and their supporters once again became targets for violence.
A minority of black leaders like Malcom X and H. Rapp Brown told blacks they should violently defend themselves. But the vast majority of blacks—including bloodied civil rights workers—adhered to Martin Luther King’s call for non-violence.
Martin Luther King (left), Malcom X (right)
Still, there is no guarantee that those who suffer persecution and violence will remain non-violent. Their motive could be revenge—or to send a message to ward off future attacks.
Such was the fate of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich..
A tall, blond-haired formal naval officer, he was both a champion fencer and talented violinist. Heydrich joined the Schutzstaffel, or Protective Squads, better known as the SS, in 1931, and quickly became head of its counterintelligence service.
Reinhard Heydrich
In September, 1941, Heydrich was appointed “Reich Protector” of Czechoslovakia, which had fallen prey to Germany in 1938 but whose citizens were growing restless under Nazi rule.
Heydrich immediately ordered a purge, executing 92 people within the first three days of his arrival in Prague. By February, 1942, 4,000-5,000 people had been arrested.
In January, 1942, Heydrich convened a meeting of high-ranking political and military leaders in Wannsee, Germany, to streamline “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
An estimated six million Jews were thus slaughtered.
On May 27, 1942, two British-trained Czech commandos—Jan Kubis and Joseph Gabcik—waited in Prague at a hairpin turn in the road always taken by Heydrich. When Heydrich’s Mercedes slowed down, Gabcik raised his machinegun—which jammed.
Heydrich ordered his driver to halt so he could take aim at his would-be assassins. It proved a fatal mistake.
Rising in his seat, he aimed his revolver at Gabcik—as Kubis lobbed a hand grenade at the car. The explosion drove steel and leather fragments of the car’s upholstery into Heydrich’s diaphragm, spleen and lung.
Hitler dispatched doctors from Berlin to save the Reich Protector. But infection set in, and on June 4, Heydrich died at age 38.
Heydrich’s wrecked Mercedes
The assassination sent shockwaves through the upper echelons of the Third Reich. No one had dared assault—much less assassinate—a high-ranking Nazi official.
The Nazis had slaughtered tens of thousands without hesitation—or fear that the same might happen to them.
Suddenly they realized that the fury they had aroused could be turned against themselves.
Which brings us to the leaders of America’s own Right-wing.
The names of infamous Nazis were widely known:
And so are the names of infamous leaders of the American Right:
The differences between these two infamous groups are these:
In Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans could not learn about the personal lives of their dictators—including their home addresses—and conspire against them.
In the United States, ordinary citizens can learn about the personal lives of their would-be dictators by newspapers, Internet and TV—even on the Right’s own propaganda network, Fox News. “People finder” websites, for a modest price, provide names and addresses of potential targets—and their relatives.
In Nazi Germany, firearms were tightly controlled.
In the United States, the Right-wing National Rifle Association has successfully lobbied to put lethal firepower into the hands of virtually anyone who wants it.
Since their reversal of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, at least six Right-wing Supreme Court Justices have lived under heavy guard by the U.S. Marshals Service. They may well be forced to do so for the rest of their lives.
But radical evangelists like Franklin Graham and Right-wing propagandists like Tucker Carlson cannot expect lifelong government protection. They would have to provide their own security—or take their chances.
So many Republicans are calling for an all-out war on gays that any number of them could become the targets—and victims—of retaliation.
Republicans boast that they want to “get the government off the backs of the people.” Yet they are waging war against people for the most intimate of reasons: Their choice of sex partners.
Reinhard Heydrich believed he was invulnerable to the hatred of the enemies he had raised against himself. That arrogance cost him his life.
The day may soon come when America’s own Right-wingers start learning the same lesson.
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