Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,494]

The Supreme Court Can’t Escape a Mess of Its Own Making on Guns, Abortion, and Donald Trump

As a new term kicks off this week, the archconservative court that John Roberts leads remains deeply unpopular, plagued by ethics scandals, grappling with the fallout from Dobbs, and girding for 2024 election disputes. Can this institution be saved?

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/supreme-court-guns-abortion-donald-trump-2024-election

 

For John Roberts, now approaching his 20th year as the chief justice of the United States, one expectation of his role as the institutional leader of the Supreme Court is announcing, on the first Monday in October, that it’s time to turn the page. “I have the honor to announce, on behalf of the Court, that the October 2023 term of the Supreme Court of the United States is now closed, and the October 2024 term is now convened,” Roberts recited in open court today as he and his eight colleagues retook the bench after a summer of discontent.

The Supreme Court did not have a good summer. And that’s because the institution, by just about every measure, remains unwell. Its public image has plummeted to historic lows. A sizable majority of Black people and those under 30 view the Court unfavorably. Many more believe the justices are more partisan than impartial arbiters of law. Ethics scandals, and proposals to fix them, cast a cloud over their work. Lower-court judges don’t know what to make of their rulings. Others, following the Supreme Court’s own lead in disrupting American governance, are doing just that by blocking Joe Biden’s latest attempt at student loan forgiveness, declaring that his cancellation of Donald Trump’s misbegotten border policies violated the law, and striking down the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on worker noncompete agreements—to name but a few areas where the national legal landscape changed while the justices vacationed or hit the summer speaking circuit.

That’s not all. Pregnant patients like Amber Thurman and Amari Marsh are either dying, suffering, or at grave risk of harm or criminal prosecution as a direct result of the Supreme Court’s edict in Dobbs. The future of gun rights and firearm restrictions remains as unsettled as ever. And just about every federal agency under the sun is facing, or can be expected to face, fresh challenges to new and even long-standing rules, owing to Roberts and company overruling 40 years of precedent, and then some, in the area of public administration and rulemaking. In the face of so much legal uncertainty, not even Elizabeth Prelogar, the federal government’s indefatigable solicitor general, may be able to contain the fallout.

Throw in the upcoming presidential election, and the host of electoral challenges and chicanery that are already brewing in the states—especially those, like Georgia and Pennsylvania, where Trump attempted to overturn the results in 2020—and people have little reason to turn the page. Or to expect that the Supreme Court will stay above the fray through it all.

As if trying to capture the current state of the high court, Lisa Blatt, a longtime litigator there, said last week: “Something does feel broken.”

Indeed, Roberts’s evident disinterest in the near-failure of our democratic system on January 6, 2021, and the political consequences attendant to it, are a big reason many people feel that things are beyond repair at the building just across the Capitol.

The call is coming from inside the house: Over the summer, The New York Times reported on an astonishing leak of private deliberations that made it clear that Roberts was in the driver’s seat of the three cases touching on the insurrection at the Capitol. In all three, his majority sided with those who instigated or participated in that day of infamy. And in all three, Roberts knew the outcome he wanted: Trump would not be left off the Colorado ballot under the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment; a rioter accused with obstruction of Congress would have that charge dismissed; and the former president would be clothed with broad criminal immunity for his derelictions of duty on what many consider the darkest day for our democracy since the Civil War. Consensus was all but absent. And as with other recent rulings without precedent, historians and legal experts were left aghast.

Whether the leak of this information came from a disgruntled justice, law clerk, or some other staffer is beside the point. What matters is that these disclosures came from the Supreme Court’s inner sanctum—the private conference where not even assistants are allowed, and where the junior-most justice serves as the doorkeeper. In other words. Roberts, once again, showed that he cannot keep his house in order. Linda Greenhouse, who began covering the Court in 1978 and had never seen a leak of that magnitude, suggested on Slate’s Amicus podcast that if the drip-drip-drip continues, the Court could well be en route to becoming part of the Washington swamp. “Maybe it always has been and we just didn’t know it or we didn’t care to plunge into the swamp,” she said.

Meanwhile, Jack Smith, the special counsel who has been piecing together the extent of Trump’s role in disrupting the peaceful transfer of power, has been left holding the bag. All the way in Florida, taking cues from Justice Clarence Thomas in an addendum to Roberts’s immunity ruling, Trump-appointed US district judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith’s prosecution over Trump’s retention of classified documents. And Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the ongoing election subversion prosecution in Washington, is now trying to make sense of the sweep of Roberts’s handiwork—and Smith’s view that “candidate” Trump’s conduct surrounding January 6 was not presidential and is thus punishable.

The special counsel, in a 165-page filing laying out his case-in-chief last week, pulled no punches—and reading between the lines, one can sense he has little patience for the arbitrary lines Roberts drew in placing Trump above the law: “Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith wrote. “Working with a team of private coconspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.”

That’s as close to an October surprise Smith can offer. Yet with no trial happening any time soon, Roberts may well believe, as Trump does, that the whole case should go away. With only four weeks to go before the election, you’d be forgiven for thinking the chief justice wants Trump reelected so he can do the dirty work himself, as chief executive, of making the charges against him disappear.

With all that tumult and uncertainty in the rearview, the Supreme Court’s new term almost feels like the least of the nation’s worries. That’s not to say people shouldn’t care about the fate of transgender rights, states’ oversight of the death penalty, attempts to limit porn access for minors, or whether the Biden administration may ban so-called ghost guns—all issues that will get their time in the spotlight in the coming months.

It’s just that the Supreme Court has been so slow at shaping its docket, with so many issues still making their way through the lower courts or awaiting consideration by the justices, that the term so far feels sleepier than the last. And much of this pending pipeline of cases is a consequence of the justices kicking the can down the road—as they did last term when they did not resolve whether federal law prevents Idaho and other antiabortion states from denying critical stabilizing care for pregnant patients who need it. Or else their less-than-clear rulings expanding the scope of the Second Amendment, over which judges are still scratching their heads.

That’s right: Emergency abortion access and Maryland’s push to ban so-called assault weapons in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy may soon get a hearing at the Supreme Court, which means that the justices are destined to keep revisiting again and again the mess that they themselves created. On Monday, they once again punted on the question of whether hospitals in antiabortion states like Texas have an obligation to provide emergency care when a pregnant patient’s health is at grave risk. (They may be waiting on the Idaho case, which is now being considered by the federal appeals court in California.)

And late last week, in a spurt of activity, the Supreme Court’s fairly light docket grew ever slightly with the addition of a slew of new cases to it. One of them stands out: a lawsuit by the Mexican government against US gun manufacturers accused of being complicit in arming the drug cartels that have brought so much death and misery to communities on the other side of the southern border. The Mexican government, which wants its day in a US courtroom, goes all out against the gun makers, who want the case thrown out; in a recent filing, Mexico’s legal team alleges that the gunmakers “deliberately chose to engage in unlawful affirmative conduct to profit off the criminal market for their products.”

In a separate pair of orders, the justices agreed with the Biden administration that environmental plans to limit emissions of mercury and methane may go forward despite pending industry and state challenges. Could Justice Elena Kagan’s outspokenness against the Supreme Court’s “hubris” in ruling against federal agencies be having a moderating effect?

In July, Kagan was asked whether she is anything like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has said that she has wept behind closed doors after the Supreme Court has announced a ruling that has changed the course of American law. “I’m not much of a crier myself,” Kagan said at a conference. “I’m more of a wall slammer. Come back to my room and punch.”

Edited October 8 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,494]

Lying Is Loyalty in Trump’s GOP

So how far will his allies go to keep their king happy?

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/lying-is-loyalty-in-trumps-gop

 

 

Donald Trump, who proved to be deeply dishonest as a candidate in 2016, and as president for four years, is lying with reckless abandon as he tries to return to the White House. Last week, for example, he claimed a fake endorsement from JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. When pressed on the claim, Trump said, “I don’t know anything about it,” and blamed a member of his staff. But the way in which the rest of the Republican Party has subscribed to the Trump unreality show is rapidly evolving into a kind of mass psychogenic disorder. Unlike in 2016, when he was an outlier, Trump now controls the entire Republican Party. You might even say that Trump—whose daughter-in-law is the co-chair of the RNC and whose son essentially picked his vice-presidential candidate—is the GOP, sort of like the Borgias without the religious affiliation.

Trump, of course, is not the only one who resides in the dis- and misinformation ecosystem of his own making. There is his running mate, JD Vance, who recently suggested that fact-checking is a partisan activity because one side is so profoundly stymied by facts. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance whined when fact-checked by CBS’s Margaret Brennan during the vice-presidential debate—which was how the right responded when moderators fact-checked Trump during his ABC debate against Kamala Harris. There are senators like Marco Rubio, who recently accused the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics of being fake news, writing on X: “Another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today.” And then there are business magnates like Elon Musk, who has parroted a number of Trump’s baseless claims and who joined the former president on the campaign trail this weekend.

In a world where everything that doesn’t support the MAGA narrative is considered “fake,” there is no room for inconvenient truths—or even just truths that don’t make the case for MAGA. In fact, simply saying the truth is a sign of disloyalty in Trump’s Republican Party, where reality has been destroyed and rebuilt by Trump’s fictions. The more truth-bending the lies, the more Republicans must buy into it, which has turned lying into a litmus test for the GOP. Take, for instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was recently asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Trump lost?” It’s a yes-or-no question, but Johnson refused to answer in kind, saying that it’s somehow “a gotcha game.”

This past week, the depths of MAGA mendacity reached a new low when Trump used Hurricane Helene—which devastated parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, and beyond, leading to over 230 deaths—to promote another smear against his opponents: On Monday, he said of Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp, “He’s been calling [Biden]” and “hasn’t been able to get him,” as if Biden has been twiddling his thumbs amid the disaster. This was apparently a bridge too far even for Kemp, a pro-Trump Republican, who eventually debunked Trump’s claim: “[Biden] just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, ‘We got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process,’” Kemp said, correcting the record. “He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which—I appreciate that.”

Nevertheless, Trump and his allies, including Musk, spent the rest of the week spreading falsehoods about the hurricane response. Few baseless claims were more disturbing than the one that Trump spewed about immigrants and Harris: “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country,” he said Thursday in Michigan, suggesting that Harris diverted disaster relief for political reasons. “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” It was a “bald-faced” lie, as the White House declared, but it’s one that Trump continued to repeat at least twice this past Friday, despite it already having been roundly debunked.

The big irony here is that it is not Harris but Trump who is guilty of doing this. According to The Washington Post, “In 2019, the Trump administration, in the middle of hurricane season, told Congress that it was taking $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the disaster fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers who had been forced to wait in Mexico.” Indeed, Trump, as I pointed out earlier this cycle, has repeatedly accused Democrats of doing things he actually did (see: his claim that Harris heading to the top of the ticket was a “coup”).

Again, Trump lying is nothing new. But the sheer volume of his falsehoods—and the way they’re systematically endorsed by leading members of the Republican Party—has tipped the base into the unreality that the Democratic political establishment is utterly nefarious and partisan. But the actual reality is more boring: The federal government is staffed largely by nonpartisan career civil servants, and it is, rather, Project 2025 that would reshape it into something nefarious and partisan. As another hurricane heads toward Florida, one has to wonder how deadly the consequences of the GOP’s unreality will be in the coming days—not to mention in the next four years if Trump’s government is tasked with relieving the disasters to come.

[Vesper 28,494]

Putin’s dangerous power play: How a century-old Russian strategy threatens the west

https://www.socialeurope.eu/putins-dangerous-power-play-how-a-century-old-russian-strategy-threatens-the-west

This is not strictly a review of Sergey Radchenko’s recent book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power. Rather, it is an invitation to find in the book a fresh take on the sources of Russian foreign-policy conduct, in line with the American diplomat George F. Kennan’s famous 1947 assessment of the “sources of Soviet conduct.” By focusing on the logic driving Soviet leaders’ foreign-policy decisions, Radchenko hopes to shed light on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s often-bloody quest to reclaim Russia’s status as a great power on par with the United States. 

From Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leaders shared Putin’s desire for “great power” prestige. Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, envisioned a world “co-managed” by a Soviet Union and US that respected each other as “equals.” But while the US agreed to an equal relationship on paper, Radchenko explains, the Soviets felt as though they had been “forced into a humiliating position of delinquents, being presently taught by someone who (in all truth) was also not beyond reproach.” 

Putin has had a similar experience. Since coming to power nearly a quarter-century ago, he has sought equality with the US-led West. There was a time, for example, when he accepted NATO, and even aspired to Russian membership. But Putin always believed that Russia’s size and historical role in global affairs entitled it to special treatment: Russia is not just another country, and the West should act accordingly. That meant carefully weighing how its decisions might affect Russia’s interests and risk perceptions. 

The West felt otherwise. When NATO admitted three former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) in 2004, Putin began to view the Alliance as an existential threat. But it was the prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO that pushed Putin over the edge: it was a key motive for Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. 

This reaction might seem excessive, but it is quintessentially Russian. As Radchenko argues, Putin – like all Soviet leaders – shares a fundamental fear with Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment: one who does not respond forcefully to life’s humiliations is a “trembling creature,” without rights or interests anyone will protect. Accepting other powers’ neglect, let alone hostility, is simply not an option. 

Putin was clear about this from the start. When he assumed the presidency in 2000, he was already warning the West that, if it pushed Russia away, “we will be forced to find allies and reinforce ourselves. What else can we do?” So, when the US openly supported Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution, which brought about the ouster of its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, Russia annexed Crimea. 

US President Barack Obama’s quip dismissing Russia as a “regional power” only strengthened Putin’s resolve to affirm Russia’s global standing. In 2022, he proved just how serious he was, by launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If the West would not give Russia its due, Putin would defend its interests by force. What else could he do? 

So, when the Russian president says that a NATO-Russia war would become unavoidable if the US and the United Kingdom permit Ukraine to fire Western long-range missiles at Russia – as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has requested – he should not be dismissed out of hand. While Putin did not overtly threaten to use nuclear weapons – saying only that the changed nature of the conflict would require a specific response, and therefore the Russian nuclear doctrine now will have a lower threshold for action – others in his circle have invoked that specter even more directly. 

To be sure, such a response is not guaranteed. As one Washington Post headline recently noted, “Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.” But this thinking can prove dangerous. After all, the Kremlin has always followed a clear escalation formula: it withstands growing pressure for a while, but eventually it snaps, much like a rubber band. 

So, Putin’s decision not to respond forcefully to Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region does not mean that he will swallow anything. At a certain point, he will decide – with little regard for the cost – that he has no choice but to prove that he is no “trembling creature.” Missile attacks deep inside Russian territory could well bring him to that point. 

Western observers seem largely convinced that Russia would not actually deploy nuclear weapons, because there is no “winning” a nuclear war. But that pesky Dostoyevskyan logic suggests that, for Putin, exposing Russia to nuclear retaliation may well be the price of standing up to those who would seek to subjugate it. Russians writhing in pain from burns and radiation poisoning can at least feel proud that they didn’t back down. Europeans, also burned and poisoned, can calm themselves with thoughts that they didn’t blink. 

The West’s willingness to dismiss Putin’s threats as mere bluster runs counter not only to historical experience, but also to its own admonitions that Putin is intent on attacking NATO countries. For example, US President Joe Biden warned in August that Russia will not stop at Ukraine. Even here, however, the West is fundamentally misunderstanding Putin: he would prefer not to engage directly with NATO. The risk is that he will decide that the West has forced his hand. 

In 1997, Kennan cautioned that the expansion of NATO “may be expected to inflame” Russia’s “nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies,” as it gave Russians the impression that their prestige – “always uppermost in the Russian mind” – and security interests were being “adversely affected.” But confrontations don’t have to end in a disaster, as Khrushchev demonstrated during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and Gorbachev with his policies of perestroika (restructuring) when responding to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. The challenge for the West is to ensure that the tragic confrontation playing out in Ukraine does not become apocalyptic.

[Vesper 28,494]

Palestine and Israel’s cycle of tragedy

https://feps-europe.eu/palestine-and-israels-cycle-of-tragedy/

07/10/2024

One year after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the beginning of the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza, over 41,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis are dead. For decades, the Palestinians’ tragedy has been left to fester, with little meaningful international action to end their suffering and bring about a just solution.

It has now been 365 days since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government’s terrible military offensive in Gaza. The number of people killed since then has continued to rise: 1,200 Israelis were murdered on 7 October, and nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that day, according to data provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). A recent article in The Lancet estimates that the number of deaths related to the conflict (due to malnutrition or lack of healthcare) reached 186,000 by June 2024.

Although the humanitarian tragedy of this year of war is chilling, with the highest daily death toll of the 21st century, there is one crucial point to highlight: the Palestinian people have been trapped and abandoned in this spiral of violence since 1948. That was the year the state of Israel was created, and when the Nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) occurred, which saw 15,000 Palestinians killed and 750,000 expelled from their homes. In 1967, Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, forcing another 300,000 Palestinians to leave their homes. Since October 2023, the Israeli government has caused the forced displacement of almost two million people in Gaza, without providing safe passage, a final destination or basic humanitarian needs.

Faced with this situation, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed in July what we have known for decades: the Israeli government is violating international law in various ways through the occupation and colonisation of, and the subsequent apartheid regime in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This apartheid is manifested through institutional discrimination. It is recognised and prohibited by several international treaties, such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and various United Nations resolutions. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998 also consider apartheid a crime against humanity.

In the West Bank, this has been carried out through the confiscation of more than a third of the land, the demolition of homes, the expansion of illegal settlements, and movement restrictions within the territory, which materialised in the form of more than 645 checkpoints. Additionally, there is a two-tier legal system that privileges Israelis and suspends basic civil rights for millions of Palestinians. This situation has worsened in the past year, with more attacks, murderers and military incursions by the Israeli army. Just a few days ago, Israel bombed the West Bank, killing 18 people, adding to the more than 600 killed since October 2023, according to OCHA and the Office of the United Nations High Commissions for Human Rights (OHCHR). Gaza has been under an air, sea and land blockade for over 16 years, imposed by Israel since 2005, when then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon dismantled settlements and withdrew soldiers from the strip. A year later, Hamas won the elections. Since then, there have been three terrible conflicts in 2014, 2021 and 2023. 

An immediate ceasefire and the end of hostilities is necessary. It is urgent to release the hostages and return the deceased to their families. Undoubtedly, Israel has the right to live in peace and security. Jews have been persecuted for centuries and continue to suffer hatred in many parts of the world. But that does not mean we should refrain from denouncing the fact that what the Israeli government has been committing in Palestine for years is illegal and dangerous. It sets a precedent, delegitimising international law. And this does not mean, as Netanyahu insists, that it is a symptom of anti-Semitism.

It is important to highlight that Arabs, including Palestinians, are also a Semitic people. The term ‘Semite’ refers to a group of languages and peoples that includes both Jews and Arabs, which underscores the fallacy of accusing those who criticise the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestine of anti-Semitism. To advance towards a lasting peace, it is essential to end the occupation, halt the expansion of illegal settlements and return to the 1967 borders, as outlined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. These actions are necessary to ensure a future of peace and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. They must be able to coexist in peace, security and prosperity. 

All peoples and countries should live in peace, and that includes the Palestinians. We have seen them suffering so often and so extensively that we have become indifferent to it. In the international public opinion’s social imagination, it seems that Palestinians are doomed to accept their fate and continue to suffer occupation and violence. But that does not have to be the case. We must break with the established global inertia and take meaningful steps, such as recognising the state of Palestine, as Spain and other countries have done this year. Otherwise, once again, we will have to look back in shame and remember that we did nothing. 

Edited October 8 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,303]

51 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Palestine and Israel’s cycle of tragedy

https://feps-europe.eu/palestine-and-israels-cycle-of-tragedy/

07/10/2024

One year after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the beginning of the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza, over 41,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis are dead. For decades, the Palestinians’ tragedy has been left to fester, with little meaningful international action to end their suffering and bring about a just solution.

It has now been 365 days since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government’s terrible military offensive in Gaza. The number of people killed since then has continued to rise: 1,200 Israelis were murdered on 7 October, and nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that day, according to data provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). A recent article in The Lancet estimates that the number of deaths related to the conflict (due to malnutrition or lack of healthcare) reached 186,000 by June 2024.

Although the humanitarian tragedy of this year of war is chilling, with the highest daily death toll of the 21st century, there is one crucial point to highlight: the Palestinian people have been trapped and abandoned in this spiral of violence since 1948. That was the year the state of Israel was created, and when the Nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) occurred, which saw 15,000 Palestinians killed and 750,000 expelled from their homes. In 1967, Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, forcing another 300,000 Palestinians to leave their homes. Since October 2023, the Israeli government has caused the forced displacement of almost two million people in Gaza, without providing safe passage, a final destination or basic humanitarian needs.

Faced with this situation, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed in July what we have known for decades: the Israeli government is violating international law in various ways through the occupation and colonisation of, and the subsequent apartheid regime in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This apartheid is manifested through institutional discrimination. It is recognised and prohibited by several international treaties, such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and various United Nations resolutions. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998 also consider apartheid a crime against humanity.

In the West Bank, this has been carried out through the confiscation of more than a third of the land, the demolition of homes, the expansion of illegal settlements, and movement restrictions within the territory, which materialised in the form of more than 645 checkpoints. Additionally, there is a two-tier legal system that privileges Israelis and suspends basic civil rights for millions of Palestinians. This situation has worsened in the past year, with more attacks, murderers and military incursions by the Israeli army. Just a few days ago, Israel bombed the West Bank, killing 18 people, adding to the more than 600 killed since October 2023, according to OCHA and the Office of the United Nations High Commissions for Human Rights (OHCHR). Gaza has been under an air, sea and land blockade for over 16 years, imposed by Israel since 2005, when then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon dismantled settlements and withdrew soldiers from the strip. A year later, Hamas won the elections. Since then, there have been three terrible conflicts in 2014, 2021 and 2023. 

An immediate ceasefire and the end of hostilities is necessary. It is urgent to release the hostages and return the deceased to their families. Undoubtedly, Israel has the right to live in peace and security. Jews have been persecuted for centuries and continue to suffer hatred in many parts of the world. But that does not mean we should refrain from denouncing the fact that what the Israeli government has been committing in Palestine for years is illegal and dangerous. It sets a precedent, delegitimising international law. And this does not mean, as Netanyahu insists, that it is a symptom of anti-Semitism.

It is important to highlight that Arabs, including Palestinians, are also a Semitic people. The term ‘Semite’ refers to a group of languages and peoples that includes both Jews and Arabs, which underscores the fallacy of accusing those who criticise the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestine of anti-Semitism. To advance towards a lasting peace, it is essential to end the occupation, halt the expansion of illegal settlements and return to the 1967 borders, as outlined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. These actions are necessary to ensure a future of peace and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. They must be able to coexist in peace, security and prosperity. 

All peoples and countries should live in peace, and that includes the Palestinians. We have seen them suffering so often and so extensively that we have become indifferent to it. In the international public opinion’s social imagination, it seems that Palestinians are doomed to accept their fate and continue to suffer occupation and violence. But that does not have to be the case. We must break with the established global inertia and take meaningful steps, such as recognising the state of Palestine, as Spain and other countries have done this year. Otherwise, once again, we will have to look back in shame and remember that we did nothing. 

In the war bombardier Harris wanted to bomb German cities out of existence.
He even objected to the bombing of German military installations in occupied France and Belgium and he wanted the air force to concentrate on the cities, go after them and bomb as many civilians as possible.
Churchill did not agree with this strategy but he tolerated him.
Eventually Harris bombed Dresden and Leipzig for no reason, killed many people and for this reason he was never given a knighthood.

In April 1945, the Soviets, the British RAF and the American USAF flattened Berlin into a pancake.
I don't know, maybe they believed Adolph was about to launch the A-bomb and they were in a hurry.

But this is what happens inevitably when cities are not declared undefended.
Paris - Amsterdam - Athens - Rome escaped destruction because they were declared undefended.

Edited October 8 by cosmicway

[Fernando 6,428]

47 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Palestine and Israel’s cycle of tragedy

https://feps-europe.eu/palestine-and-israels-cycle-of-tragedy/

07/10/2024

One year after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the beginning of the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza, over 41,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis are dead. For decades, the Palestinians’ tragedy has been left to fester, with little meaningful international action to end their suffering and bring about a just solution.

It has now been 365 days since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government’s terrible military offensive in Gaza. The number of people killed since then has continued to rise: 1,200 Israelis were murdered on 7 October, and nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that day, according to data provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). A recent article in The Lancet estimates that the number of deaths related to the conflict (due to malnutrition or lack of healthcare) reached 186,000 by June 2024.

Although the humanitarian tragedy of this year of war is chilling, with the highest daily death toll of the 21st century, there is one crucial point to highlight: the Palestinian people have been trapped and abandoned in this spiral of violence since 1948. That was the year the state of Israel was created, and when the Nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) occurred, which saw 15,000 Palestinians killed and 750,000 expelled from their homes. In 1967, Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, forcing another 300,000 Palestinians to leave their homes. Since October 2023, the Israeli government has caused the forced displacement of almost two million people in Gaza, without providing safe passage, a final destination or basic humanitarian needs.

Faced with this situation, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed in July what we have known for decades: the Israeli government is violating international law in various ways through the occupation and colonisation of, and the subsequent apartheid regime in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This apartheid is manifested through institutional discrimination. It is recognised and prohibited by several international treaties, such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and various United Nations resolutions. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998 also consider apartheid a crime against humanity.

In the West Bank, this has been carried out through the confiscation of more than a third of the land, the demolition of homes, the expansion of illegal settlements, and movement restrictions within the territory, which materialised in the form of more than 645 checkpoints. Additionally, there is a two-tier legal system that privileges Israelis and suspends basic civil rights for millions of Palestinians. This situation has worsened in the past year, with more attacks, murderers and military incursions by the Israeli army. Just a few days ago, Israel bombed the West Bank, killing 18 people, adding to the more than 600 killed since October 2023, according to OCHA and the Office of the United Nations High Commissions for Human Rights (OHCHR). Gaza has been under an air, sea and land blockade for over 16 years, imposed by Israel since 2005, when then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon dismantled settlements and withdrew soldiers from the strip. A year later, Hamas won the elections. Since then, there have been three terrible conflicts in 2014, 2021 and 2023. 

An immediate ceasefire and the end of hostilities is necessary. It is urgent to release the hostages and return the deceased to their families. Undoubtedly, Israel has the right to live in peace and security. Jews have been persecuted for centuries and continue to suffer hatred in many parts of the world. But that does not mean we should refrain from denouncing the fact that what the Israeli government has been committing in Palestine for years is illegal and dangerous. It sets a precedent, delegitimising international law. And this does not mean, as Netanyahu insists, that it is a symptom of anti-Semitism.

It is important to highlight that Arabs, including Palestinians, are also a Semitic people. The term ‘Semite’ refers to a group of languages and peoples that includes both Jews and Arabs, which underscores the fallacy of accusing those who criticise the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestine of anti-Semitism. To advance towards a lasting peace, it is essential to end the occupation, halt the expansion of illegal settlements and return to the 1967 borders, as outlined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. These actions are necessary to ensure a future of peace and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. They must be able to coexist in peace, security and prosperity. 

All peoples and countries should live in peace, and that includes the Palestinians. We have seen them suffering so often and so extensively that we have become indifferent to it. In the international public opinion’s social imagination, it seems that Palestinians are doomed to accept their fate and continue to suffer occupation and violence. But that does not have to be the case. We must break with the established global inertia and take meaningful steps, such as recognising the state of Palestine, as Spain and other countries have done this year. Otherwise, once again, we will have to look back in shame and remember that we did nothing. 

Would love for that to happen. A two state solution so they can " They must be able to coexist in peace, security and prosperity. "

But that is the problem that will never happen. This rivalry, hatred is rooted for centuries and making two state won't solve that. 

For example take a look at the overall of those two when one is attacked. When Israel gets attack they celebrate in the streets. When is the opposite no one celebrates. 

The hate and animosity will not be solved by just a two state solution. It will be always be there. 

[Vesper 28,494]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-08-texas-will-mess-with-you/

Goliad County, Texas, is a pleasant jurisdiction of about 7,000 people nestled in the state’s coastal plain, on an indirect driving route from San Antonio to Corpus Christi. It is generally unremarkable except for its historical sites, which recount centuries of resistance to central, and federal, authority. Goliad exemplifies a certain bullheaded tendency that Texans have traditionally cherished above all other qualities.

During the Mexican War of Independence, the opponents of New Spain hid here. When Texans chose to revolt, the Mexican army massacred some 425 prisoners of war here, causing Anglo soldiers to cry Goliad’s name for the rest of the war. After Goliad voted in favor of secession in 1861, it prospered as a stop on the Cotton Road, by which planters would smuggle their crops to Mexico past that tyrant Abraham Lincoln’s dreaded navy. When the federal army attempted to reconstruct Goliad, the courthouse burned in suspicious circumstances, destroying postwar land deeds.

Generations of the state’s schoolchildren have been taken to the site of the massacre, the Presidio La Bahía, and told about the crimes of the Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna and his centralists. In Texas, it is in the blood: Resistance to tyranny—or bureaucracy, or the White House—is obedience to God, though what party is the tyrant and what party is the tyrannized is, as always, in the eye of the beholder.

That mindset makes it perhaps a little easier to understand what happened on August 28, 2023, in the Goliad County Courthouse—the one built to replace the building that burned. The County Commissioners Court, the Texas form of a county council, passed a measure that at first glance resembled the kind of toothless resolution local governments often pass to comment on national issues. “The Goliad County Commissioners’ Court finds that abortion is a murderous act of violence,” the ordinance read. Abortion and abortion-inducing drugs would now be banned in the unincorporated parts of the county.

Standard stuff. Because by this point abortion had already been banned for more than a year under Texas law, this meant little. But then, in the text, a legal theory emerged that may as well have come from Mars. With immediate effect, the county government created a new offense of “abortion trafficking.” Any individual who assists a pregnant woman in procuring an abortion—a woman who drives her friend, say, from Baltimore to a clinic in Los Angeles, both jurisdictions where abortion is legal—would commit an offense if their route clipped through any of the unincorporated parts of Goliad.

Stranger still was the relief prescribed in the ordinance, which mimicked a novel legal device used by the Texas state legislature in Senate Bill 8, the so-called “abortion bounty” law. “Any person” other than a member of county government could sue someone who facilitated an abortion in some way connected to the county roads, and potentially receive injunctive relief from the Goliad courts, damages for emotional distress, statutory damages of “not less than $10,000,” and attorney’s fees.

The legislature and elected leadership of Texas, in its infinite wisdom, has taken it upon itself to exert its influence abroad.

Goliad was the second Texas county to pass such a law, which slowly spread around the state from small counties to larger cities like Lubbock in West Texas. They are questionably constitutional, and difficult to imagine being enforced, and thus may be easy to dismiss. But they’re backed by powerful forces in the state—especially the right-wing legal activist Jonathan Mitchell, who earlier this year began attempting to question women under oath who have had abortions beyond Texas’s borders. The goal is intimidation: to create a patchwork of counties and municipalities where seeking legal abortions, even outside of Texas, creates legal risk.

And the goal is, in turn, to create pressure on the Republican legislature to act, even beyond what they’ve already done in the name of the right to life. The state of Texas, with its expansive police forces and activist attorney general, would have the actual resources to pursue those who use Texas roads to seek abortions across state lines.

There’s precedent for this. Nearly a third of Texas counties have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” where federal gun regulations the locals perceive to be unconstitutional are declared to have no force of law. A good idea, said state lawmakers. Pressure built, and eventually Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Second Amendment Sanctuary State Act, which barred state agencies and police from assisting in the enforcement of any federal gun control law passed after January 19, 2021.

But most of all, it’s the legal reasoning in the travel bans that is most worth paying attention to. In a way, Goliad was offering an inversion of the interstate commerce clause, the constitutional provision that gives Congress broad powers to regulate the economy. Because Congress regulates trade between the states and its cities, its regulations must also apply to states and cities. Goliad reasons in reverse. Because it has jurisdiction over short stretches of highway that in turn connect to every road in the nation, Goliad claims a kind of national jurisdiction.

This may seem nonsensical, but it is an increasingly important part of how politics works in Texas. The Lone Star State has been subject to one-party rule since 2003, when Republicans finally took control of the Texas House. For most of the next 20 years—even as the state’s voters drifted slowly back to the Democratic Party—the Republican Party has moved sharply to the right. Texas Republicans have been efficient and unnervingly extreme, leaving little for the GOP to run on come election time.

But because Texas sits at the crossroads of so many nationally contested issues, the same way that the city of Goliad sits at the crossroads of state highways 59 and 183, the legislature and elected leadership of Texas, in its infinite wisdom, has taken it upon itself to exert its influence abroad. Standing up to tyrannical outsiders, after all, plays well at the ballot box. You may not be interested in messing with Texas, as the saying goes, but Texas will mess with you.

TEXAS LEADERS AND LAWMAKERS HAVE TAKEN so many aggressive actions against other governments and private citizens in other states in the last five years that it is difficult to organize them into coherent categories. They run the gamut from the silly and venal to the deadly serious.

With increasing regularity, Texas is launching direct challenges to the constitutional order. This January, Abbott ordered state troops and police to seize control of Shelby Park in the border town of Eagle Pass. He evicted the federal Border Patrol from the park, which contained the one usable boat ramp in the area. He fenced off the park with concertina wire and dared President Biden to send in his own troops. The Biden administration sued, and the Supreme Court ordered that federal officials could cut the wire, but Texas refused to let them in. (Amid this posturing, at least three migrants drowned in the Rio Grande.) The crisis only abated when the Mexican government began applying heavy coercive pressure to steer migrants away from Eagle Pass. In a sense, Abbott’s brinkmanship worked—though he would surely have preferred to extend the crisis.

On the other hand, you have cases like state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 2020 crusade against the Gunnison County, Colorado, Department of Health and Human Services. In the early days of the pandemic, Gunnison tried to kick out nonresidents who were potentially bringing COVID to its many vacation homes. This included Robert McCarter, a Dallas businessman who owned a lake house in the county and had given Paxton more than $250,000 in campaign donations. Paxton’s office leapt into action, demanding a change of course and threatening to bring the state’s full might to the Rockies—until the county gave McCarter a waiver and allowed him to stay.

In between challenging long-standing federal immigration law and the health system of a county with a population of around 17,000 runs the full spectrum of Texas-sized hostility. Many of the most successful bids to exert the state’s will on others have come from the governor’s office. Abbott has access to substantial discretionary funds and men with guns. He proved in Eagle Pass he could convert those two resources into political capital. Defying the federal government was only the first step. The Department of Public Safety, which administers the state police, was run by a longtime Abbott crony: It maintained a public relations division that was effectively an arm of the Abbott campaign.

ERIC GAY/AP PHOTO

In January, Gov. Greg Abbott evicted federal Border Patrol from a park in Eagle Pass and fenced it off with concertina wire.

With endless footage of lethal obstacles in the river and state military equipment built up at the border, Abbott was able to put himself in the news more frequently than he ever had in his nine years in office. At a press conference on the river in February, 14 Republican governors made the pilgrimage to give their support to Abbott—paying fealty to a man who had never before, despite his long tenure, been considered a first-rank Republican governor or contender for higher office.

By far the most successful of Abbott’s stunts has been his migrant busing program. Texas has spent $230 million and counting on running charter buses with at least 120,000 border-crossers to blue cities and blue states. For the governor, it has been worth every penny. He derives political capital not only from the perception that he is ridding the state of undesirables—many of whom appreciate the free bus ticket—but also in creating chaos in blue cities. The anguished complaints of New York City Mayor Eric Adams are among the greatest political gifts Abbott has received.

But the success of these measures goes beyond the direct policy impact and the elevation of Abbott’s profile—and even the manner in which it centered core Republican issues in an election year. Abbott was offering policy innovations, drawing in other red states to take a harder line. Some states may be “laboratories of democracy,” as Justice Louis Brandeis said. But Texas, as the political writer Molly Ivins declared, is the “national laboratory for bad government.”

Republican governors who wanted their own political capital emulated his example. Multiple states sent their own troops to bolster the Texans in Eagle Pass. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to one-up Abbott by flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s never enough. As press attention declined, Abbott was asked by right-wing gadfly Dana Loesch what else the state could do to up the stakes. The governor declared, almost regretfully, that Texas had done everything they could besides open fire. It was hard not to wonder if that might be coming next.

OTHER TEXAS POLITICIANS WRING POLITICAL CAPITAL out of measures that aren’t successful at all. In 2021, the state legislature banned California tech companies from discriminating against conservatives by censoring their social media posts. In testimony before committees, tech representatives mostly seemed confused. (The law is currently blocked in the courts.) Paxton sued in federal court to overturn the 2020 election. This was as poorly executed as it was reprehensible, a hallmark of Paxton’s efforts more generally. In November, alleging that a Seattle children’s hospital was providing care to transgender Texans remotely, Paxton sued to obtain their patient records. Five months later, he quietly dropped the case.

Another set of initiatives relies on the economic power of the state to coerce private companies. While Paxton has done some work on this, the key actor is most often Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who as the president of the Texas Senate lacks Abbott’s firepower but has a fine control over policy and a keen understanding of the needs of the donor class. On several occasions—most notably, a strange, slightly manic tirade against Fort Worth–based American Airlines in 2021—Patrick has pressured large companies in Texas to keep quiet on social issues if they want to be heard in his Senate.

But Patrick’s strongest interventions have involved so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing strategies. For several years, large New York financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock have proclaimed their desire to shift their investment portfolios in the direction of environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Even if this was window dressing, it was taken by the Texas oil and gas industry, which still controls much of the legislature, as an existential threat.

Texas could not pass a law mandating that BlackRock subsidize carbon production, though it surely would have liked to. But it had some leverage: its enormous state investment and pension funds. The Texas Permanent School Fund, which subsidizes public schools, controls some $56 billion in assets: The 347 retirement funds overseen by the Texas Pension Review Board total some $394 billion in assets. In 2021 and 2023, Patrick led Texas to pass laws that barred state money from being invested with firms the state judged insufficiently invested in the carbon economy.

STEVE MARCUS, BRYAN OLIN DOZIER, DELCIA LOPEZ/AP PHOTO

 

The state did this despite protests from pension fund managers that it would lose them money, which would ultimately have to instead be extracted from employees or expended by the state. During last year’s legislative session, Amy Bishop, executive director of the $42 billion Texas County and District Retirement System, testified that she anticipated a $6 billion shortfall over the next decade from not being able to work with a widening set of state-proscribed investment firms. The state tightened the restrictions anyway. On March 20, the Permanent School Fund announced that it was withdrawing $8.5 billion from BlackRock management.

That’s a lot of money for Texas, yet a piddling amount for BlackRock, which reports more than $10 trillion in assets. But a week after the state began pulling out, the firm’s CEO Larry Fink issued his annual chairman’s letter, which seemed to confirm at least a tonal shift at the company as a result of increasing political pressure. He now spoke of “energy pragmatism.” Instead of decarbonization, the company aimed to support a responsible energy “transition.” At a potentially significant cost to its own employees and taxpayers, the legislature appeared to be bending the direction of some of the world’s largest companies.

It was a strange echo of another period in Texas history, where the legislature attempted to hold Northeastern financiers to account. At the end of the 19th century, a very poor Texas tried to shield its mostly agrarian population from predatory lending and business practices. The Railroad Commission, founded in 1891, regulated interstate shipping rates. It was soon given oversight of the nascent oil industry, and enacted rules to keep the money flowing from the gushers at home. In 1905, the legislature created a state banking system, complete with its own predecessor of the FDIC, intended to cater to the needs of those with no access to the national lenders.

Then, as now, state financiers understood that their role was to counteract national economic forces for the good of the state. But where the impetus in 1890 was to marshal state resources to broaden the economic base, it is now to consume state resources to maintain the pools of capital claimed by the very richest people in the state—who are, of course, well represented among the political donor class.

IN SOME WAYS, WE’VE COME FULL CIRCLE. An earlier collection of the state’s most important leaders—with the blessing of the legislature—once issued a proclamation to explain why Texas needed to take new and unorthodox measures to maintain its rights. Those measures were necessary, the Texans said, because they could no longer win elections at the federal level. Texas was part of a “hopeless minority.” The opposition—the “controlling majority” of the federal government, backstopped by stupid do-gooders in “Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania”—was inimical to core Texas values, and wholly committed to destroying them from within, spreading seditious ideas and sending money to sway minds.

Worse still, the knaves running the federal government had failed in their most basic duty: to secure the border. The Beltway class had “failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas … against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico.” The state had long had to expend its own funds to do so, and Congress wouldn’t pay them back.

Maybe this sounds like it came out last week, but I’m talking about Texas’s 1861 secession declaration. Banditti aside, the loudest complaint in the declaration is that Northern states had failed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Texas didn’t just want to preserve slavery—it wanted Vermont to enforce slavery. Having been denied the right to extend Texas to the Canadian border, it seceded at the urging of the state’s wealthiest planters and least responsible politicians, knocking off its own elected governor by a coup d’état.

Goliad County’s effort to effectively make legal abortion in other jurisdictions illegal bears echoes of this, and it is hard not to hear those historical echoes elsewhere. This isn’t the 1860s, of course. Abbott and company are playing a dangerous game, riling up the most extreme factions in the state and stirring memories of taking up arms against federal power. Bluster or not, it would be quite easy for it to tip into conflagration.

But this constitutional tightrope walk is embedded into the structure of Texas politics. The state’s most hard-right politicians, the ones responsible for the dumbest and most unwise provocations, belong to a rump minority of the Republican caucus that is able to exercise controlling power over the majority party. It is a very particular kind of polarization that is unique to Texas. Some 3 percent of the state votes in the Republican primary, and that 3 percent has effective control of the ninth-largest economy in the world.

That control can feel like a permanent feature of Texas politics, and it may live for a while yet. But it will end someday. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won the state by just 5.6 points, a tighter margin than Ohio. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz won re-election by just 2.6 points. Both Cruz and Trump are in single-digit fights this year. Polls have shown at least a plurality of Texans thinking the state is on the wrong track for a long time, while a strong majority support abortion rights. (They also support busing migrants out of state, but with less of a dominant majority—52 percent—than you might think.)

When general elections become competitive again, Texas may become less of a hothouse for stupid ideas. And Gunnison County, Colorado, Seattle, and the banditti of Mexico will be able to breathe a little easier.

Edited October 8 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,494]

The Astonishing MAGAverse

Edited October 8 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,494]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-07-cold-civil-war/

Deep into the grimmest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicaid officials devised a stopgap plan that proved to be one of the federal government’s most consequential decisions. To slow the spread of the deadly and contagious disease and ease up on paperwork during the public-health emergency, the feds ordered states to maintain coverage for Medicaid recipients. As a result, Medicaid rolls grew by over 23 million beneficiaries during this period, swelling to around 95 million Americans.

But in March 2023, with the virus more or less contained, Medicaid eliminated this “continuous enrollment” provision. States could manage their Medicaid rolls any way they saw fit. And the results of this experiment were revealing.

Net Medicaid enrollment across the country has fallen by 14.1 million since last March, compromising the health of millions of very poor people. At one end of the spectrum, Montana, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and South Dakota each shed at least half of their enrollees who were on Medicaid when continuous enrollment was in effect. At the other, North Carolina, Oregon, Maine, California, Connecticut, and Illinois each have disenrolled 20 percent or less. (North Carolina is an outlier, because it expanded Medicaid when this all started last year.)

Florida cut short postpartum care for poor mothers due to a “computer error”; Arkansas dropped 427,000 recipients in the first six months, often for procedural reasons like not returning a renewal form. South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho led ten states that “disenrolled so many children in 2023 that they had fewer children enrolled at the end of the year than prior to the pandemic,” according to Georgetown University.

As one consumer advocate told NPR, “We have seen some amazing coverage expansion in places like Oregon and California. But if you live in Texas, Florida, and Georgia, since the pandemic your health coverage has been disrupted in ways that were preventable by state leaders.”

By now you may have figured out the pattern. In the vast majority of cases, states controlled by Republicans moved quickly to cull the Medicaid rolls, and states controlled by Democrats kept them on much longer. And this holds across nearly every policy area.

Red states have the most oppressive abortion restrictions; blue states have more realistic reproductive policies. If you can carry a concealed weapon without a permit, you are likely in a Republican state; if you need to pass a background check to purchase a firearm, you are in a Democratic state. Republican states have the weakest LGBTQ+ protections; Democratic states have the strongest. The 13 states with paid parental leave are all Democratic. Of the 20 states with a $7.25 minimum wage, 15 are Republican trifecta states and three have Republican legislatures.

In 1967 in a speech at Stanford University, Martin Luther King described “two Americas”: One with all the “material necessities for their bodies” and the other “perishing on a lonely island of poverty.” Nearly 60 years later, King perfectly captures the two Americas that we’re dealing with right now, bounded by a geographical reality: The laws that you live under are determined by the policymakers in the state where you live.

FROM THE BEGINNING, AMERICA STRUGGLED over the institution of slavery, leading to the epic clash between North and South 160 years ago. Partisans have eyed each other warily ever since. The post-Reconstruction era saw states splitting along the virulent racial, social, and economic prejudices that survived the Civil War. Yet as the federal government asserted itself during the New Deal, using incentives like highway funding to force standardization, interstate economic variation began to narrow. But a nearly all-white, largely Southern Republican Party took hold only after Ronald Reagan secured the White House, and state policy started diverging wildly once again.

Over the last 30 years, a state government’s partisan orientation is the overwhelming predictor of the policies it will adopt. One University of Chicago study shows that the effects of party control on state policies have doubled since the early 1990s. Divergent ideas and beliefs have always been with us, but divergent outcomes at the state level are new, and growing.

One reason for this is that there are fewer institutional brakes on policy disagreements. In 1980, 26 states split control of the legislature and the governor’s office, and each branch checked the other. But today, only ten states have split control; a whopping 40 states have unitary Republican or Democratic governance. With state lawmakers often responsible for gerrymandering state Senate and House districts beyond recognition, they cement one party’s control well into the future by picking their own voters, even if their overall electorates are closely divided.

A federal government mired in gridlock and dysfunction also has set the stage for partisan disrupters to surge into states. Legislative meddling has become a cottage industry for corporate bill mills like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which produces ready-made legislation for conservative lawmakers. While states have long produced models for national policies, encouraging the federal government to catch up to better ways of doing the people’s business, today policy extremism in the states has become an end in itself.

Over the last 30 years, a state government’s partisan orientation is the overwhelming predictor of the policies it will adopt.

Policy extremism has eroded quality of life in America. As much as half of the gap between the states in life expectancy is due to geographic variation. A 2023 study found that more liberal policies on tobacco, labor, immigration, civil rights, and the environment correspond to a one-year increase in how long a state’s residents live. (In this special issue, Kalena Thomhave takes a closer look at Oklahoma and Connecticut, which had the same life expectancy in 1959 and a 4.7-year spread as of 2019.)

Of the ten states with the highest rates of uninsured residents, seven are controlled fully by Republicans. Of the ten with the fewest uninsured, seven are controlled fully by Democrats. The ten worst health systems in the country, according to the Commonwealth Fund, are all in red states. Eight of the ten states with the most COVID-19 deaths are Republican-led; so are ten of the 12 states with the highest rates of smoking-related cancer deaths. Firearm deaths are lower in blue states and higher in red states. Even obesity levels show this correlation: Ten of the 12 states with the highest percentage of obese residents have Republican trifectas.

Where you live, in short, can determine how long you live.

This wide gulf between healthy and ailing America is bad enough. But red states in particular want their policy preferences to be reflected across the nation, and have engaged in numerous aggressive tactics to make that a reality.

Texas and Idaho have enabled private citizens to sue anyone providing assistance to help their residents obtain an abortion, even if another state provides the care. Cities and counties throughout Texas have barred the use of their roads for abortion travel. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sent over 120,000 migrants by bus into other states and dumped them there. Red-state attorneys general have issued subpoenas to force health facilities in other states to release information about gender-affirming care sought by their own residents.

Anti-ESG laws require businesses and financial institutions to change corporate governance practices in order to operate in red states. Companies and conservative advocates seek out red-state courts with conservative judges to obtain nationwide injunctions on regulatory policies affecting all of us. Red-state lawmakers have even seized the tools that cities use to set their own laws (see Texas and Austin, or Tennessee and Nashville).

Democrats have notched victories in states they control as well, but by and large they have not adopted draconian measures to force other states to accept their ways of operating. Red states, by contrast, aren’t interested in peaceful coexistence; they appear determined to carry on their battle for national political dominance. Just enough terror has been unleashed to signal that the state of the union is not strong. The melting pot threatens to boil over, a once savory recipe spoiled beyond recognition. You can call it a cold civil war.

THERE NEEDS TO BE A BETTER, MORE NUANCED understanding of this historical moment. Developments at the state level are too often ignored in the corridors of power in Washington, where Congress and the executive branch intend to set policy for the whole country. But the likelihood that this push and pull will grow stronger as the years go on forces us to pay attention, regardless of national electoral outcomes. If Donald Trump wins, he has already signaled the willingness to use federal leverage to force changes to blue-state policies, such as withholding funding for vital needs like firefighting. If Kamala Harris wins, conservatives will retreat to their power centers, use partisan courts to their advantage, and continue to develop pernicious strategies to make other states bend to their will.

This special issue of the Prospect lays out interstate divergence on anti-poverty programs, education, climate and energy, jurisprudence, labor rights, and more. We profile Texas, the intellectual and emotional center of this strategy of policy maximalism and interstate hostility. We look at the ways in which red states aren’t settling for dominion within their own borders, and seek control over others. And we lay out how blue states can fight back against red-state incursions into their policy territory, build power across the country, and advance critical policy objectives that preserve hard-fought rights.

Some may fear that a strategy of calibrated counteraggression could launch the country into a series of damaging reciprocal exchanges, much like the various skirmishes between free and slave states that sparked civil war. But there’s another path that doesn’t signal endless internecine strife, with strategic actions that can also lower the temperature, by proving to conservatives that their adversaries in the blue states will not be run over.

Democracy in the United States depends on state governments to safeguard basic human rights for their citizens no matter what far-flung corner of the nation they find themselves in. The circumstances of our country’s origin and its peculiar constitutional framework opened up vast ideological, political, and cultural divides over what those basic human rights are. Conscientious leaders who believe that federalism, or more likely a reconstructed federalism, is the way forward will need to step in to calm the waters and mediate these seemingly intractable political conflicts. This special issue offers a few road maps to bring the country back from the edge.

[cosmicway 1,303]

Bet365 now:
Trump 1.80 - Harris 2.00

What did they see ?
It was 1.90-1.90 early this morning.

[Vesper 28,494]

Sweden shifts focus towards war in new crisis booklet

https://www.thelocal.se/20241008/sweden-shifts-focus-towards-war-in-new-crisis-booklet

Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) has released a new version of its famous 'If Crisis or War Comes' booklet, with updated advice on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, airstrike or extreme weather situation.

The new booklet, which the government presented at a press conference on Tuesday, states that Swedes must be able to survive on their own, without assistance from the rest of society, for a week.

That includes securing a water supply, heating, transport and communications, food, medicine, money and toilet facilities. If you have pets, it says, you should make sure to have enough food, water and medicines for your pet to survive for a week, too.

In contrast to the last booklet, which was released in 2018, the 2024 edition is over ten pages longer and clearly has a stronger focus on war, including advice on the best places to hide during an air attack, how to help someone who is seriously bleeding, as well as what to do if Sweden is attacked with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. 

READ ALSO:

• What should foreigners in Sweden think about when preparing for a war or crisis?

The new focus is perhaps not much of a surprise, considering how the geopolitical situation has developed since 2018: Sweden joined Nato after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the country's threat level was raised in 2023 after a spate of Quran-burnings made Sweden the growing target of Islamist extremism.

There’s advice on digital security, and how to store information safely at home and at work in order to minimise the risk of a cyber attack, as well as how to protect yourself against disinformation and influence campaigns.

It also provides information on how you should talk to your children about a war or crisis, as well as how you can protect your own mental health if you feel worried or unsafe.

• Everything you need to know about Sweden's emergency warning system
• Everything you need to know about Swedish bomb shelters and where to find them

Despite these additions, much of the advice is repeated from the 2018 booklet, such as what you should include in your personal war or crisis supplies and Sweden’s rules on total defence (everyone in Sweden is expected to contribute to Sweden’s total defence, whether you’re a citizen or not). Swedish citizens living abroad are also expected to contribute, whether that’s by serving in the army or carrying out other activities to help Swedish defence.

The brochure is currently only available digitally and only in Swedish, although from November 18th a physical copy will be sent to all Swedish households, with digital copies in English, Arabic, Persian/Farsi, Ukrainian, Polish, Somalian, Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani and northern and southern Sami available from the same date.

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Your wallet, your vote: The essential economy voter guide for 2024

Crunch the numbers that truly count with Reckon’s simple cheat sheet for decoding the dollars and sense this election.

https://www.reckon.news/equity/2024/10/your-wallet-your-vote-the-essential-economy-voter-guide-for-2024.html

What’s the issue?

The U.S. has the largest economy in the history of the modern world. Precisely: $28 trillion. That’s twenty-eight-thousand billion dollars worth of goods, small business revenues, worker wage and productivity. And we’re all a part of it.

So when you hear that the economy is the No. 1. issue for voters, it means practically nothing. It also means everything. But essentially what we’re talking about are the prices of things and whether people can consistently afford to buy and pay for the things they need.

When it comes to the 2024 election, voters seem primarily concerned about the price of groceries, gas, housing (which includes the cost of rent, mortgages and/or the interest rate you’ll be charged if you buy a house), the availability of good-paying jobs and healthcare costs. Immigration and abortion are also considered top economic issues for voters this year. And of course, recent action for the courts is putting student loan debt cancellation back on the table as a top election issue.

Why does it matter? What’s at stake?

A healthy economy affects the quality of life each of us can enjoy. More economic opportunity can also address inequities such as poverty and homelessness — as long as companies pay fair and just wages, which doesn’t always happen.

Since 1990, for example, the increase in net income—profit—for corporations has significantly outpaced the increase in median household income, which remained stagnant until recently.

It’s worth stressing that the government (and that includes the president) doesn’t have a lot of direct influence over the economy. They can’t tell oil companies to charge less for gasoline or force Middle Eastern nations to pump more crude. They can’t force General Mills to put more cereal in the box or, sadly, make your landlord disappear.

However, the occupant of the Oval Office does have a few tools at their disposal. For example:

• They can work with Congress to lower taxes or raise the federal minimum wage (which has not happened since 2009).
• For adherents of supply-side policies, better known as trickle-down economics, cutting regulations or taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals can theoretically bring down prices as well.
• Theoretically. And because presidents appoint the Federal Reserve Bank’s board of governors, they can coordinate with the Fed to raise or lower interest rates to influence inflation rates.
• The president can work with agencies that they oversee to modify or eliminate regulations to lower costs. For example, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development can make it easier for builders to get financing to build new homes; the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid can loosen eligibility requirements so that more people qualify for low-cost health insurance, as was the case under the Affordable Care Act. Under the Trump Administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expedited processes to approve the first COVID vaccines; the Biden Administration capped the cost of insulin to $35.

Abortion access is also a significant economic issue in this election, as it allows people to make choices about their bodies that line up with their financial circumstances and goals.

• High childcare costs, for example, eat up a huge portion of household income, especially for low- and middle-income families. This makes it harder for parents to afford everything else housing, groceries, and healthcare, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. The average cost of childcare national is north of $11,000 per year.

Current status

Numerically speaking, the U.S. economy is a mixed bag. Here’s a snapshot of key economic indicators compared to four years ago:

• Unemployment rate: Compared to four years ago, when the world was gripped by a pandemic, the unemployment rate dropped 72%, from 14.8% in 2020 to 4.2% this year. Note: For some groups, like African Americans, unemployment remains higher than the national average.
• Median annual household income: Grew by 17.31% to around $82,000 and the
• Median hourly wage: Increased by 10.75%
• Housing costs have skyrocketed:
  • Median monthly rent rose by 28.4% to $1,521
  • Median home price increased by 28% to $412,300
• Overall inflation: rose 141.67% over the past four years, although the rate at which inflation is rising has slowed
• Healthcare premiums and poverty rate: Remained steady compared to 2020

Where do the presidential candidates stand on this issue?

Vice President Kamala Harris (Democrat)

The Democratic nominee is running an abbreviated campaign since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Early on, she was criticized for offering few policy proposals, including on her official campaign website and sitting for few unscripted media interviews.

But it should come as no surprise, then, that several of the policies that Harris has announced echo and continue many policies of the Biden Administration of which she’s been a part for that past four years.

Broadly speaking, Harris is crafting her economic program around supporting middle- and working-class families and addressing structural inequity. She has said she would crack down on price gouging to bring down the cost of living, although critics have characterized this as illegal price fixing. Harris has also proposed giving $25,000 in downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers

Additionally, Harris proposes expanding the child tax credit to $6,000 for newborns, an increase from the current maximum of $3,600 per year per child. She has also said she wants to invest $40 billion in affordable housing initiatives, doubling the amount the Biden administration initially proposed.

Harris advocates for the reinstatement of Roe v. Wade, which provided a constitutional right to abortion care. Ensuring the right to abortion means that people can avoid the financial burdens associated with being a parent, costly medical bills, including in the event of complications with a pregnancy; additionally, abortion access gives individuals the freedom to pursue educational and career opportunities or simply live child-free if they so choose.

Donald Trump (Republican)

The Republican nominee and former president is one of those proponents of supply-side economics that we talked about earlier. His economic proposals consist of a mix of tax cuts, tariffs and continued deregulation

At the core of his program is a sweeping extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with an even more aggressive reduction of the corporate tax rate to 15%. In doing so, he hopes to stimulate business investment and job creation, but detractors argue it could exacerbate income inequality and balloon the national debt.

Energy independence is a keystone of Trump’s economic vision. Or, in his words “drill, baby drill,” which would mean expanding domestic oil and gas production, including in protected and environmentally sensitive areas of the country.

In an extension of his trade war with China, Trump wants a 10% across-the-board tariff on all imports, which he says nations will eagerly pay; economists disagree, arguing that tariffs could lead to higher prices for American consumers and could prompt trading partners to impose tariffs on American goods.

Trump has also floated the idea of exempting tips from federal income tax, for which Harris has also expressed support.

Trump has boasted about appointing the justices who overturned the Roe decision, returning the issue of abortion to the states. Trump says the issue should remain with the states and he would not sign a national abortion ban despite the fact that his base of white evangelicals would press him to do so.

Some bills and ballot measures to know

• Minimum wage. Several states will vote on ballot initiatives to lift the state minimum wage (the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hours, but states can set limits higher), including:
  • California Proposition 32: Proposes increasing the state minimum wage to $18 per hour by 2026, with annual adjustments based on the cost of living.
  • Alaska Ballot Measure 1: Aims to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour and includes provisions for paid sick leave
  • Massachusetts Question 5: Focuses on increasing the minimum wage for tipped employees by raising the minimum wage for these workers until it meets the state minimum wage in 2029; it also continues to permit tipping in addition to the minimum wage.
  • Missouri Minimum Wage Initiative: Proposes raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour and implementing paid sick leave requirements
  • Michigan Minimum Wage Initiative: This measure seeks to gradually increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027
  • Massachusetts: Ballot Question 3 asks voters whether rideshare drivers, such as those working for companies like Uber and Lyft, should have the right to form unions for collective bargaining. If a majority of voters mark “yes” and the measure passes, these drivers would be able to negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions with the app companies. Massachusetts would be the first state to grant this right to ride-hailing drivers. Voting “no” means you oppose allowing these workers to have unionizing and collective bargaining rights.
• Debt Ceiling Agreement. Last year, President Joe Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy worked out a deal to suspend the nation’s debt limit and avoid a federal default or government shutdown. That plan expires Jan. 2, 2005 — before the next president is sworn in. If a deal is reached, it will go to Biden’s desk for signature but rest assured, depending on the outcome of the election, Harris or Trump will be working behind the scenes to ensure the package reflects their priorities.

Key Points for Voters

• • Can the candidate implement the economic policy they’re touting, such as whether they will have support in both chambers of Congress, including a 60-vote majority in the U.S. Senate for some bills?
  • Can the courts strike down a candidate’s proposal before it’s implemented? Also note, the next president will appoint dozens of federal judges and possibly one or two Supreme Court justices
  • Lastly, remember, that the economy moves slowly. You may not feel the effects of a particular action for months, possibly years

Resources and Further Reading

• Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s wildly different tax plans, explained (Vox)
• How Trump and Harris Compare on Economic Policy (Foreign Policy)
• Kamala Harris’s gamble (New Yorker)
• Donald Trump’s New Voodoo Economics (New Yorker)
• Marketwatch
• Planet Money
• FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data

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Kamala Harris: The 2024 60 Minutes Interview

 

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News says Harris is ahead, albeit by a small margin in the swing states.
Why has bet365 Trump as favourite ?

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AIPAC has US politicians ‘in a stranglehold’

 

Professor Elmasry,  at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, says that the US has enough leverage over Israel to control its policy in the region.

“It’s more a situation of the US being unwilling to exercise its leverage,” he told AP

Elmasy said that support for Israel is a “difficult calculation” for the US.

“On the one hand, the US long ago married itself to Israel for strategic reasons – the US wants a strong ally in the Middle East,” he said, adding that US politicians have to contend with the power of the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC.

“They have US politics in a stranglehold and they are able to wield a lot of influence over individual politicians … there’s no politician that wants to draw the ire of AIPAC,” he said.

“There is no indication at this point that the US is going to change course.”

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Israeli settlers attack olive farmers in occupied West Bank

 

Israeli settlers have destroyed about 70 olive trees in Husan village west of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, according to the official Wafa news agency, quoting the director of the local village council.

In the town of Sebastia, northwest of Nablus, Israeli soldiers attacked olive pickers and farmers, forcing them to leave their land, and seized a tractor from the area.

Such attacks have intensified over the years, with hundreds of incidents of settler violence, backed by soldiers, against farmers taking place since the start of the war on Gaza.

An olive farmer checks trees cut down by Israelis

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https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-09-our-cults-ourselves/

Last week, I quoted Donald Trump addressing women: “I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” On X, Kendall Brown observed, “This is nearly identical to how Warren Jeffs spoke to women in his cult.” Jeffs was the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect who went to prison in 2007 for child rape, leaving behind 78 wives and a helpless community he had ruled like a mad king.

In one of my first columns this year for the Prospect, I wrote of my frustration with how few products in the ostensibly “nonpolitical” corners of American culture wrestled with the traumatic descent of so many of our fellow citizens into right-wing authoritarianism. Almost all of the cultural output wrestling with the problem came at it allegorically: as science fiction, as fable, as historical cautionary tale, as stories in a future time or faraway place. Almost nothing has been set recognizably in our own political world. Nothing that dares name the thing.

One abiding reason is the numbingly insistent avowals of our polity that the worst thing a political culture can be is “polarized”—as if polarity between fascism and those who seek to fight it is a bad thing and not an imperative. Something similar has happened in political journalism. I’ve written voluminously about the failure of the press, whose job it is to name and explain things plainly, to break with the rigid genre conventions that serve to make it harder instead of easier to grasp the present reality unfolding right in front of our noses.

People are desperate to understand how something like MAGA could have happened. Political journalism having failed them, people are voting with their remote controls. How does American culture comment on Trumpism while steering clear of “partisan” waters? It seems to me through at least 30 cult documentaries, docuseries, and films that have appeared since Trump’s inauguration, including four about Warren Jeffs.

THE POPULAR FASCINATION WITH ALL OF THIS is not new, of course. My childhood in the cult-panicked ’70s and ’80s, and surely yours, was saturated with these stories. All these classics now get updates.

Charles Manson, for example, is practically his own industry: Charles Manson: The Final Words (2017), Manson: The Lost Tapes (2018), Manson: Music From an Unsound Mind (2019), Quentin Tarantino’s phantasmagorical 2019 reimagination of the Tate and LaBianca murders in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, even something from last year called The Resurrection of Charles Manson. (“When a couple edits a Charles Manson movie in an Airbnb, the film’s dark events begin to come true,” says IMDb; 3.2 stars.)

Many of the recent cult shows, especially the slapdash talking-head retellings available on streaming networks, are kitschy, cookie-cutter bad. Some are excellent, including actor Leah Remini’s riveting three-season examination, Scientology and the Aftermath (2016), showing how cruelly and cunningly Scientology works to ruin the lives of apostates like herself, pointing to the truism that the best indication of whether a religion is a cult or not is not merely what happens when you’re inside, but what happens when you try to leave.

The sheer diversity of cultlike formations you can learn about from your couch speaks to the breadth of our modern forms of alienation, anxiety, and trauma, and the bottomless ingenuity of the malefactors adapting to exploit them as they emerge. Our cults, ourselves.

The association of today’s Republican Pary and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did.

New Agers seeking perfected bodies are splendid marks for Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (2019). Southern women, taught to believe the Bible already contains all the answers to life’s dilemmas and eager to lose weight without exercising or restricting their food intake (the Gospel of Mark, after all, says all food is clean), flocked to the “Weigh Down” workshops at thousands of churches across the region. See the Lifetime film starring Jennifer Grey, Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation (2023), or the docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin (2021).

Shamblin was once a media sensation; Larry King’s fawning interview with her played in a loop in her home. Ministers who host her program show no apparent concern when she suggests Nazi concentration camps as a useful role model; those prisoners lost plenty of weight, after all. But her empire is threatened with collapse when she rejects the theological doctrine of the Trinity. Following the setback, someone who was previously merely a fantastically charismatic creep decides that her persecution must mean she’s really in fact the One, securing a core of followers who agree. “She was the one hearing from God … and who were we to question what God’s telling her?”

The quarry of the prosperity gospel minister at the center of Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult (2024) are kids flocking to Los Angeles to build online brands producing dance videos—an expensive proposition, it turns out, and thus the appeal of a group house with state-of-the-art production facilities. The promise of getting closer to God in the process sounds like a bonus. Things only get fishy when Rev. Robert tells them he’s in possession of a message of salvation that “nobody else knows,” and that you’ll go to hell without it.

Those anguished by the futility of online dating are ready to be hoovered up into the “Twin Flames Universe,” as chronicled in Desperately Seeking Soulmate, one of two 2023 series on the sect. And the tie-dyed guru at the center of Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (2023) leverages the banal promises of woo culture: “Be still & know that I am God,” a plaque reads, done up in the same style as the “Eat Pray Love” ones you might have seen in suburban kitchens.

Mother God is a former McDonald’s manager named Amy Carlson, and she specializes in harvesting minds cracked by psychedelics with the recruitment technique I learned to call “love bombing” in the cult awareness training sessions that were once a childhood commonplace, especially in Jewish communities. (“Michael opened the door, and it was the warmest feeling I’d ever felt … I literally went down to the bank down the street and emptied out my whole bank account. Cashed out my 401(k) and gave it to Mom.”) Many of those interviewed still affirm Mother God’s deity, after her mysterious death that drives the plot. (“We’re aware of the fifth dimension and the portal,” we hear the sheriff interrogate a witness, “so we don’t have to go through that again.”)

Surfing between these various cult stories reveals a number of classic patterns. One is setting acolytes against each other to compete to climb the ranks, to get closer and closer to Dear Leader, and thus ultimate holiness—a ruthlessly efficient machine exploitation, which often leads to economic exploitation. Like among the Mother God crew: “There were people who got to sleep in her room, and I wanted to work my way up to that level. The only way I could be of service was to clean.”

Or among the 7M TikTok-ers, “Hannah had full access to my bank account. Hannah said you had to do that, to get right with Robert. Which was getting right with God.”

Or Warren Jeffs, whose cult-controlled construction company won their contracts to build warehouses for Amazon and Walmart because “they had unlimited free labor through all the boys in the community … That’s your edge over legitimate businesses.”

THE ASSOCIATION OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did. But what would a docuseries about MAGA-as-cult—the one Netflix, Hulu, Max, or CNN would never produce, because that would make them unduly “partisan”—look like?

It could start with the truism that cult formation, as my binge-watch last week makes clear, works best among a population already primed for it: prosperity gospel evangelicals, psychedelic searchers, woo enthusiasts.

Or the modern Republican Party, since its capture by the conservative movement.

Amanda Montell, author of the bestseller Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, has a fun podcast called Sounds like a Cult, each weekly episode devoted to a phenomenon along a spectrum from obviously sickeningly and terrifying (the sex-slaver Keith Raniere; two documentary series about him, Max’s The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult on Starz, both from 2020) to, well … really? (Though the episode on pickleball is surprisingly convincing.)

The episode on conservative youth activism is somewhere in between. It’s centered on an interview with an apostate, journalist Tiffany Nguyen, who got me thinking about one of those things us adolescents learned in our cult awareness trainings in the 1980s: Be wary of innocent-seeming, attractive-sounding inducements. Like a free vegetarian meal, which was how the Hare Krishnas got you, or a psychological reading, in the case of Scientology. Or a free journalism training summer camp. That is how aspiring scribes like Nguyen got hooked.

Cult minions learn that any problem unenlightened outsiders might think was caused by the group’s principles is actually due to their insufficient application.

The name of the sponsor, the “Leadership Institute,” sounded no alarm bells; they’re usually bland. They advertised their value neutrally as well, noting their alumni who’d gone on to big print gigs (Malcolm Gladwell!) or the network news. The inducements into a world of us-vs.-them thinking come slowly, embedded in useful tips like what a lede is and how to do an interview. Dropping claims that only the right values free speech, and the left subverts it, might serve as a red flag, if you’re sophisticated—which is why, like so many cultish formations, the right prefers to scoop them up when they’re too young to know better.

In another cultish hallmark, novitiates move up a ladder of engagement, each new step a marker of trust that allows them to glimpse the entirety of the project. For Nguyen, that meant being placed with a mentor—who happened to be a white nationalist. Then, by the time they’re placed with a conservative organization, they’ll have accepted certain principles on faith: that they’re not merely reporting on the world but fighting evil, so the ends justify the means. They’ll be armed with an arsenal of what the pioneering scholar of coercive thought Robert Jay Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés”—like, when in doubt, to ask a Democratic official what they think the definition of “woman” is.

Similar formal apparatuses exist throughout the conservative movement: the Federalist Society to seduce young aspiring lawyers, the American Legislative Exchange Council for dewy-eyed state reps. And for mere foot soldiers, there’s the massive apparatus of campus recruitment, targeting alienated young people, especially young men, by weaponizing their sense of isolation through us/them narratives of a world that’s out to get them, to which they are taught they are, in fact, superior. The next step is a pilgrimage to CPAC—which has always been free for students to attend.

Cult minions learn that any problem unenlightened outsiders might think was caused by the group’s principles is actually due to their insufficient application. If you are a Republican, it’s the esoteric truth that conservatism never fails, it can only be failed; if a follower of Gwen Shamblin, that God wants you to be thin, and “the faster you do it, the holier you are.” (“By the grace of God I lost 117 pounds!”)

All failure signifies a failure to believe in those principles fervently enough, which means you’re not truly an insider, and therefore worthless. A “RINO” or a “cuck,” if you’re a conservative; a “suppressive person” if you are a Scientologist. An endless feedback loop, always leading back to the solution of fuller surrender. For “when you’re in that level of self-hatred, you’ll never see Mom as Mother God. You’ll only see her as Amy. She’ll only be a mirror of what you see in yourself.”

THE QUALITATIVE SHIFT THAT SIGNIFIES the post–Tea Party Republican Party as having finally passed into the realm of what I call fascism was the arrival of that missing piece, a leader taken as worthy of being worshipped, as if a prophet or saint or even God in the flesh. His “followers” experience him as a charismatic presence with mystical powers far beyond those of a normal being. Not merely someone who administers a government; someone who smites demons instead, cheating death through the grace of the Almighty.

If a cult is defined by what happens when you try to leave—well, listen to the harrowing episode of This American Life featuring the anguished arguments between Alexander Vindman, the colonel who testified against Donald Trump about his inducement of a quid pro quo from Ukraine, and his wife about whether they have to leave the country if Trump wins the election. If they work to isolate initiates from loved ones (always the most heartbreaking part of these documentaries)—well, there are whole support groups for people who can no longer be in the same room with red-pilled family members, anguished that they may never get their loved one back from the other side of the veil. Meanwhile, they drain the wallets of their adherents while promising to make them rich: Visit the websites hawking Trump Bibles, your Trump sneakers, your Trump watch—or Trump’s fantastic promises, 40 years after its first crashing failure, that tax cuts for the rich will miraculously flood the nation’s Treasury to bursting.

And did you ever notice how loyalists always find a way to excuse or not see sexual exploitation and violence committed by Dear Leader? And how it always, in the end, comes down to this: Surrendering to this new world of devotion and unitary thinking is the only way to be protected from an impossibly corroded outside world.

The suffusing unreality is the point. Their world must be entirely different from our world. All or nothing: That is how acolytes are convinced that they can never safely leave.

Is this too much, roping together January 6th and the mass suicide at Jonestown? Well, one of the attractive things about Amanda Montell’s book and podcast is that she understands the word “cult” as a heuristic, that cultishness is a continuum, and always context-dependent. In the case of MAGA, Tina Nguyen and Montell point to its “very specific plan to effectuate a vision that makes no sense to outsiders.” Cults have a built-in sunk cost dynamic: They depend upon ingraining people so deep within them that they feel like nothing without the cult.

Montel also noted something else—the part that arrested me most: “A cult tells on itself if it sounds too exciting.” That is, from the outside, it usually doesn’t look like a cult. The little town Warren Jeffs takes over, choosing its sheriff, writing its laws, is indistinguishable from those around it, just like the little community in a wealthy Nashville suburb where Gwen Shamblin establishes a perfunctory church overflowing with “bubbly, happy” people. The Duggars and their 19 kids, joined at the hip with the political operator Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, are normal enough on the surface to feature in ten seasons of a hit reality show. If you watch Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023), one of the best cult series out there, you realize that TLC Network was making billions of dollars by laundering the works of Bill Gothard, one of the most horrifying authoritarian figures on the Christian far right.

“Sanewashing” is the indispensable new word for how elite political journalism cheats news consumers out of understanding what’s most cultish about Trumpism, by relentlessly focusing on what seems most normal about Republican politics. Maybe the people understand it better than their journalists: The most effective cults are the ones easiest to sanewash. They see it. Why can’t The New York Times?

Edited October 9 by Vesper