A Must-Read Article From The Guardian: "The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it"

Here's the link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

Here are some excerpts: 

The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions....

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls....

Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power....

An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism....

Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times....

The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport....

It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t.

'Slate' Article: Sheriffs Helped Lead This Insurrection

Subtitle: "Sheriffs play a key role in right-wing white supremacist movements."  Here's an excerpt (link below for the full article):

Ninety percent of American sheriffs are white men, and in recent years they’ve become strongly affiliated with white supremacist groups. Across the country, sheriffs have declared that they will not enforce laws they deem “unconstitutional,” like COVID-19 public health orders or gun laws limiting weapons possession and permits. Their influence has only grown since the pandemic began, as mask wearing became affiliated with progressive liberals and a bare face was a sign of Trump support. Trump has always had an affinity with sheriffs. He met with more sheriffs at the White House than any other president and pardoned ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for failing to abide by a nondiscrimination order, calling him an “American patriot.”

Here's the link to the full Slate article dated 1/15/21 at 2:40 p.m.:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/constitutional-sheriffs-white-supremacists-capitol-riot-insurrection.html

It’s Time to Sum Up the Dumpster Fire We Know as the Trump Presidency

   I have done exactly what Donald Trump has asked of every American since he came down that gold escalator in June 2015 — to think only about him day and night.

The books I read before going to bed each night? They are all about Trump. The email newsletters I read between my real estate newsletters? All about Trump. The news programs and specials I watch every evening and on Sunday? Mostly about Trump.

This is how he likes it, and it has been exhausting for me and I suspect also for you. I look forward to ignoring him starting in 2021.  It will drive him nuts.

As I sit down to write this 28th and final “Talking Turkey,” it’s a challenge to do more than breathe a hopeful sigh of relief that our long national nightmare is coming to an end — and peacefully so. Here are my closing thoughts.

First, it’s apparent to me that Donald Trump’s two “winning arguments” are that he is against abortion and that Joe Biden is a Trojan horse for a radical left “Democrat party” that will destroy America through socialism and communism/Marxism. A third argument, that he inherited a bad economy from Obama and made it great, is hardly worth discussing. His shameful tax cuts for the wealthy, which gave crumbs to the middle class, merely supercharged the already healthy economy he inherited and massively ballooned our national debt, benefiting only Wall Street.

The argument about socialism also deserves dismissal. The programs that are identified as “radical left” and “socialistic” — Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — are essentially ones that have been in place for years or even decades in Canada, the United Kingdom and most European countries. We are laggards in adopting them.

Regarding abortion, I have pointed out that being pro-life is something Trump only adopted to court evangelicals and is not a core belief.  He was a pro-choice Democrat in New York.

I have gotten the impression that people cite opposition to abortion as their reason for supporting Trump, using it as a cover for their unspoken support of white supremacy and anti-black and brown immigration. This is particularly true for the evangelicals, because there are so many non-Christian aspects of the man they are required to overlook.

After all, why would someone opposed to abortion support a President who separated babies from their mothers as a method of discouraging refugees and immigrants, encouraged rally-goers to beat up anti-Trump demonstrators, and said that the white supremacists included "many fine people," not to mention supports the killing of adults (i.e., the death penalty)?

As we all know by now, there are countless lies and conspiracy theories, many of them by QAnon, charging various Democrats (especially Trump’s guilty pleasure, Hillary Clinton) with crimes. Here’s the question I keep asking those who believe the charges of crimes by Democrats: If these stories were true, it is totally within the power of the Republican-controlled Senate to hold hearings on them. Why don’t they hold those hearings? Obviously it’s because public testimony would prove them to be false. It’s more useful politically for McConnell and Trump's other enablers to keep those lies circulating on social media instead of providing an opportunity to disprove them.

    Most Trump supporters agree he’s a terrible human being, but there are some who think he’s “a good man,” citing an urban legend about him paying off the mortgage of a black man who changed a flat tire on his limo. It was totally disproved on snopes.com in 1998, but when I informed a Trumper of this, his response was predictable: “Snopes is owned by George Soros” (another urban legend). Trump supporters simply can’t handle the truth.

Assuming (again, hopefully) that Donald Trump is defeated next week and his sycophantic majority in the Senate evaporates, Trump will cease to hold the sway that he has held over Republicans, and “the truth will out.” It may take time for his hard core alt-right white supremacists to withdraw into the shadows where they resided before Trump emboldened them to “unite the right” as they did in Charlottesville. The majority of Trump supporters will, I believe, follow the path of Germans after Hitler’s downfall and come to realize how badly they were duped and misled by the worst president in American history. It will take a while, but it will happen. America is too strong to fall. We will recover.

Trump’s Hostility to Obamacare Is Emblematic of His Psychopathy

   From everything I’ve read and seen, Donald Trump is a profoundly insecure person, and it’s most evident in his antipathy to everything identified with his predecessor, Barack Obama.

We all saw it on day one, when he couldn’t abide the fact that Obama’s inauguration had drawn a bigger crowd than his own. That was when Kellyanne Conway introduced us to the concept of “alternative facts.”

Since that day he has been focusing single-mindedly on reversing or voiding everything with Obama’s stamp on it, and the Affordable Care Act, because of its more common identification as Obamacare, is at the top of his hit list.

What proves my point is the claim that he wants to repeal and replace it with the same provisions, notably protection against pre-existing conditions. He can’t be satisfied with amending the law, which would be far more practical than kicking millions of people off of Obamacare with only a vague promise of replacing it at some future date with a law that has the same provision.

It has been demonstrated in multiple ways by multiple former insiders that Donald Trump is only interested in himself. He’d be a pro-choice Democrat (as he was before) if that provided a path to power, but the path which opened for him was to be a pro-life Republican. He doesn’t actually care about this or any issue.

He thought he should get the Nobel Peace Prize because of his meeting with Kim Jung Un. Clearly it bothers him that Obama won that prize during his first term.

Trump had to replace NAFTA because Obama created it. Again, he couldn’t amend it, he had to replace it with the USMCA, which is only a minor tweaking of NAFTA.

He had to withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate Change because it was Obama’s, despite the fact that virtually every other country in the world joined it, thanks to Obama's diplomacy on the topic. It goes deeper than that, however. He is a climate change denier only because Obama accepted climate change and was working to address it.  Again, he doesn't actually care about the issue.

Indeed, the failure of this president to marshal the federal government in addressing climate change will be one of his many terrible legacies which a Biden administration will need to deal with. With all the evidence of having passed the “tipping point” on climate change, it’s going to be hard. It could well be impossible after four more years of Donald Trump as president ignoring the issue.

Trump had to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal because it was Obama’s deal. One of the biggest lies that he and his sycophants like to repeat is that Obama sent a plane-load of money to Iran to secure the deal, even though it was Iran’s own assets that had been seized and were now being released to them as part of the deal. Yes, it was dollars and was in cash, but it was Iran’s dollars.

The lies and deception put forth by Donald Trump and echoed by his supporters are astounding, but thankfully they don’t appear to be working, since Biden’s lead in the polls keeps widening. As the election approaches, the lies and distortions will probably get worse and Biden’s lead will hopefully increase as a result.

Can Americans really be fooled into thinking that Obama’s former vice president is going to foment a communist takeover of America? And forget about white supremacists — Trump won’t even disavow Qanon, with its theory that the leaders of the Democratic Party and Hollywood celebrities are a Satan-worshipping cabal engaged in child sex trafficking and drinking the blood of babies. No wonder the president is finally losing credibility except among his base who so love his racist attitudes and policies that they will accept things in him that they wouldn’t ever accept in any other human being.

Trump’s desperation, I believe, is rooted in his fear of prosecution once he is out of office.  I predict that once he finally accepts that he has lost re-election and his 2nd Amendment followers haven't created a coup, he will resign so President Pence can pre-emptively pardon him, although that would only protect him from federal, not state, prosecution. He knows that New York, among other jurisdictions, is waiting to indict him. 

Trump Appears Uninterested in Winning Others Over, Content to Energize His Base

In previous columns, I have shared my belief that Trump supporters are unreachable. (They have been labeled “Cult 45.”) One could conclude from watching Trump’s rally in Tulsa that either he believes he can win over the rest of us or, more likely, that he sees electoral success in further demonizing us and thereby energizing his base to turn out for him on Nov. 3.  What he doesn't seem to realize is that his words energizes his oponents to turn out, too.

Rita and I watched his full speech at the Tulsa rally, fascinated as always at how he appeals to that base. But that base may be shrinking. He was understandably furious about the poor turnout, filling only 6,200 of 19,000 seats, but that was an improvement from how he boasted that attendance at his inauguration was the largest ever. (It was in defense of that claim that Kellyanne Conway made her famous statement about “alternative facts” on Meet the Press two days later, setting the tone for his entire presidency.)

We continue to be intrigued by how Trump supporters are able to overlook his lies, dog whistles to the “deplorables,” scorning of allies and flattering of dictators, obscene language and generally despicable behavior. How would you feel if someone you supported (or just liked) was adored by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists and the like? (I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s now-famous September 2016  “deplorables” speech last week, when this column appeared only on this blog.)

Like me, you probably know respectable, college-educated professionals who say they like Trump, and I enjoy conversing with them to figure out why. What I usually find is that they like how his tax cuts benefited them financially — as they did Donald Trump himself. 

One such supporter is a friend of mine, a highly successful Realtor whom I’ve known and admired for over a decade.  She said she supports Trump because his tax cuts have benefited her personally. (She’s far more successful that I am, with 59 closings, two of them over $1 million, in the past 12 months.)  She told me she is willing to overlook his negatives because of that, which I find disappointing.

    There’s another group of non-deplorable Trump supporters that surprises me, because it is in our local Rotary club, to which Rita and I both belonged.  I love and appreciate Rotary for  its “Four-Way Test of the things we think, say or do,” which Rotarians recite at every meeting following the Pledge of Allegiance.  It goes like this:

•  First, is it the truth?
•  Second, is it fair to all concerned?
•  Third, does it build goodwill and better friendships?
•  Fourth, will it be beneficial to all concerned?

As Rita and I joined in reciting the Four-Way Test every Tuesday, it occurred to me after Trump took office, that our president’s thoughts, words and deeds would fail that test. We will never forget when a visiting Rotarian leader gave a talk about the Four-Way Test early in Trump’s reign.  During the Q&A part of the meeting, I thought it appropriate, despite the unspoken rule about avoiding politics, to ask the speaker how we as Rotarians should relate to a president who consistently violates all four tenets of the Test.

The following week, I was told by the club president that “several” Rotarians had complained about me asking that question — although not to me directly. The following week four female members of the club, including Rita, all resigned in protest. I stayed on, but only for another year. I believe in my heart that the vast majority of Rotarians are good people who reject Donald Trump’s leadership or lack thereof.

I considered submitting an article to Rotarian magazine raising this issue, but I never did.  I decided — hopefully wrongly — that it would not have been published, because Trump’s 30% base probably includes many Rotarians, and the organization can’t afford to offend them.  I’m happy to raise the subject in print here for the first time. 

I’m disappointed that any Rotarian thinks the Four-Way Test need only apply to them and it’s okay to support others who blatantly violate it, as Trump does every day.

What Values Would You Like to See Reflected in Our Social & Political Discourse?

Like many of you, I have stood by in dismay, watching the decline of civility and the rise of extremism in American society over the past few years.

There was a time — very recently, in fact — when politicians spoke respectfully of their political opponents, when they didn’t assign them crude nicknames, and when they weren’t outright mean to each other.

There was a time when the anchor of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, was “the most trusted man in America” and factual reporting of events was respected and not discarded as “fake” or “partisan” news.

There was a time when the work of scientists was respected. Indeed, the word “STEM” entered the dictionary as Americans saw the value of promoting science, technology, engineering and math in school curricula.

There was a time when 99% agreement (actually, less than that) among scientists on topics like global warming was considered enough to consider it “settled science.”

Americans fooled themselves after the election of Barack Obama into thinking we had entered a “post-racial” era, but now we realize racism will never die. Instead there are times when it’s not considered appropriate to voice those impulses or put them into action.

The election of Donald Trump was different. Seeing and hearing the President of the United States mirror one’s own thoughts emboldens him or her to express them or perhaps take to the streets with them, as we saw in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Thus emboldened, they often go further than the President, such as when the demonstrators chanted, “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” Making matters worse afterwards was when the President said there were “very fine people” among those demonstrators.

What brought this topic to mind for this inaugural edition of this column was a segment on last week’s Bachelor program on ABC, “The Women Tell All,” in which Rachel Lindsay described the hate and death threats which she endured as an African-American celebrity when she was the “Bachelorette.” The black women who were contestants in this season’s Bachelor program nodded their heads in acknowledgement of experiencing similar hatred.

That’s what has been so destructive of the current presidency — the emboldening of racists, white nationalists and others who in years past would have kept those thoughts to themselves and their loved ones, and certainly not acted on them as they so freely do nowadays.

But there’s more.

The President’s baseless demeaning of the mainstream media, abetted shamelessly by Fox News, has not been fatal — the press will survive and thrive after this president is gone — but it has contributed to the emboldening referred to above.

The most serious long-term effect of this presidency, however, will be the four-year hiatus in the national effort to address climate change. This is a president who has given voice to that 1% of climate scientists who are blind to this worldwide threat at a time when action is so critical. Fortunately, cities, states and corporations have understood the threat and are, to an extent, taking up the battle without the White House support they should be receiving.  Let’s hope it’s enough.

From the beginning, most Americans recognized Donald Trump as a narcissist and pathological liar, someone who returned love only for those who loved or pretended to love him through flattery, such as smart ex-KGB officers like Vladimir Putin.

What’s most surprising to me is not just the self-serving Republican enablers who have tied their wagon to Trump’s star, but how many day-to-day Americans see in Trump’s personality something to admire.