The meeting comes as the Biden administration looks for its role in addressing student demonstrations around the Hamas-Israel conflict that have roiled college campuses, and as groups say they’ve seen an uptick in antisemitism and Islamophobia.
103 The Making of a Conspiracy Theorist: The Fallacy of “Vote Harder” and Why There’s no Moving on From 2016
UPDATE: Perry Bacon is right but does he understand why the GOP keeps winning?
UPDATE:
UPDATE: Place below at conclusion-Donna Marsh
As she says in her Season 1 Episode 1 with Jesse Ventura: “You say when 9/11 ended. It will never end for me. It will never endn for the country until we investigate what actually happened”
UPDATE: Place below in discussion about JFK-maybe in the final section?
So Who Killed JFK? — The JFK Historical Group
Another interesting book-the truth shall set us free
Short answer for me I dont believe it was a lone nut and strongly suspect the CIA or at least rogue agents within were involved. The word “rogue” being used advisedly when you consider that the FBI agents who elected Trump were called rogue but it seems that the majority there hated Hillary Clinton and wanted to see her taken down. Rogue doesnt necessarily mean a minority within. More preciesly, perhaps it means unoffiical channels.
Finally-Trumpland. John Neuman wrote a great and consequential book called Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA but what about the FBI? Note that the entire premise of the Warren Report-the Lone Nut Theory-was the FBI’s narrative. Initially the Commision intended to use J Edgar Hoover’s report verbatim, but it was such a mess that the Commision had to pretty it up but, it basically used the Trumpland FBI wine in more palatable bottles.
Below describe my six years and counting on this book as my dissertation
UPDATE: The argument is the CIA could have been involved not that they did it alone… John Newman
UPDATE 2.0: Oops the FBI did it again
The Sordid Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop (nymag.com)
Not sure which chapter this belongs in yet-there’s a few candidates
September 8, 2023
It didn’t take long-no sooner was Trump’s coup finally over post January 6 than you started seeing the earnest savvy pieces by the savvy pundits arguing that we should just move on and not punish Trump or any of his GOP co-conspirators. Some argued that Trump wasn’t guilty.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, don’t prosecute Donald Trump (opinion) | CNN
Some argued that because what Trump did was unprecedented it didn’t break any actual existing statutes.
Opinion | The Clamor to Prosecute Trump for Election Interference Is Misguided – POLITICO
“His behavior is so unprecedented that it outstrips existing statutes. That’s where Congress needs to step in.”
Really Renato Mariotti? It was rather surprising to hear an elite prosecutor on his level say that-but perhaps revealing as demonstrating the timid attitude of many in the elite legal community. I mean I never went to law school but what about the 14th Amendment? The laws against insurrection were put in the Constitution post the Civil War-the Grandaddy of all insurrections.
Far more argued even though Trump was guilty it would be better for the country to just drop the whole thing.
Prosecuting Trump May Be Right but Unwise | Austin Sarat | Verdict | Legal Analysis and Commentary from Justia
This Boston Globe editorial argued that prosecuting Trump is what he wants was written January 4, 2021..
Don’t prosecute Trump. Center stage is what he craves – The Boston Globe
James Comey-of all people-argued the same.
Comey Argues DOJ Shouldn’t Prosecute Trump After He Leaves Office : NPR
Sure, I mean he’s responsible for the whole mess and not only did he not investigate Trump effectively in 2016 but he elected him-the candidate Comey knew was a potential grave counterintelligence risk. But then in 2021 just 6 days after J6-the full fruits of Comey’s disastrous and abusive actions in 2016 were in full display Comey figured: bygones be bygones. Once again, I know he says he left the Republican party but he still doesn’t sound like it.
CF: The Chapter Comey can Apologize Just not to Democrats.
At the time it was not only Et tu Comey but Et tu just elected President Elect Biden. Biden hadn’t even gotten to the Oval yet but was already publicly voicing his preference to let Trump-the man who at that point had bolted himself in to the Oval and refusing to let Joe in-off the hook.
Biden hopes to avoid divisive Trump investigations, preferring unity (nbcnews.com)
Biden revealed this just nine days after his defeat of Trump-who was just in the early stages of his running attempted coup. Biden was in a rush to forgive and forget. Indeed, in basically his first act as President he confirmed Christopher “Bridgegate” Wray was staying on.
FN: Chapter President Joe’s First Mistake
At the time the first thing that came to mind was: we’ve seen this movie before. Too many times-so many times it’s like we’re stuck on a recurring feedback loop-talk about Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence of the Same bad decisions!
I mean we’ve done this one before, so many, many times before. Forgive and forget. Or as Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign put it ‘don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.’
CF. Chapter Iranian Jimmy Carter-Robert Parry’s book, etc.
And this comes back to the thematic title of this chapter-no moving on. The making of a conspiracy theorist. We’ve tried moving on. We moved on from 1968 when Nixon scuttled LBJ’s peace talks with North Vietnam to steal the 1968 election by a whisker. We moved on from Watergate-the big dirty trick relative to the 1972 election wasn’t the Watergate break-in but the Canucks letter masterminded by Don Segretti, written by Ken Clawson, and hand delivered by: a 19 year old Roger Stone to the Manchester Union Leader which would be the winning shot to knock Ed Muskie-who Nixon believed was his toughest opponent-out of the primary.
FN: CF Chapter Roger Stone
FN: Nixon, of course, had believed his ideal candidate was McGovern, a belief that in retrospect looks pretty darn accurate.
But we moved on from Watergate pretty quickly. Nixon wasn’t prosecuted-many in early 2021 were urging Biden to do a Gerald Ford, and as we saw above, Biden himself was sympathetic to this idea. Carter himself pardoned greatly reduced G. Gordon Liddy’s sentence in 1977.
White House deputy press secretary Rex Granum, who announced the decision, said Carter’s action was based largely on the length of sentences imposed on other figures in the Watergate scandal.
“The President took this action in the interest of equity and fairness, based on a comparison of Mr. Liddy’s sentence with those of all others convicted in Watergate-related prosecutions,” Granum said.
Carter Cuts Liddy’s Term to 8 Years – The Washington Post
The difference being that Liddy stonewalled the investigation and refused to cooperate so it wasn’t unfair.
FN: Just like how yesterday’s conviction of Peter Navarro isn’t unfair as he stonewalled the J6 investigation to protect Trump-as Liddy had done to protect Nixon.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro convicted of contempt of Congress (msn.com)
Trump as usual got things twisted:
“I can’t believe that these Fascist Monsters have so viciously gone after the great Peter Navarro for defying the totally partisan January 6th Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.”
Trump defends Peter Navarro after contempt conviction (yahoo.com)
No, the Fascist Monsters are Trump and his GOP co-conspirators.
End FN
Then we got over the Reagan-Bush campaign’s collusion with Iran’s Ayatollah in 1980-and the subsequent, related Iran-Contra scandal-in reality Iran-Contra was just one episode in the larger Iran Collusion scandal. But by the late 1980s, the mainstream media had decided Iran-Contra was over that ‘people are tired of Iran-Contra’ much like Kasey Hunt declared on the eve of the release of the Mueller Report Bill Barr’s fake exoneration letter that ‘people are tired of Mueller.’
FN: As a side note, the Savvy Punditocracy is till very keen to deny Iran Collusion. I really enjoyed Rich Perlstein’s trilogy that tracked American’s move to the Right from Goldwater to Nixon and finally to Reagan. When I tried to compliment him on Twitter he was having none of this after I mentioned 1980-that was all he needed to here, for the rest of our converation he was at pains to insist there was nothing to it.
Then Bill Clinton won in 1992 breaking 12 years of GOP dominance and presumably in keeping with his campaign song-Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorow-dropped all remaining investigations into Iran-Contra. The GOP and mainstream media-which already had a terminal case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome-“thanked” Clinton for forgiving and forgetting the real crimes of Reagan-Bush by investigating the imaginary crimes of Clinton the next 7 years.
FN: Again, those who forget history. Because the conventional wisdom-as Nietzsche would say, a contradiction in terms-has the attention span of a gnat and forgets not just the history of a few years ago, but a few days ago, no one recognizes what is actually being done to President Joe’s son, Hunter Biden. He’s been railroaded, Ken Starred, Hillary Clintoned. Or perhaps in light of the determination of Trump’s handpicked prosecutor to put Hunter in prison despite the trivial fact he committed no crime, the best operative analogy is “Susan McDougaled.”
See Chapter They’re Doing it Again
Right Wing Operatives Say Hunter Biden Shouldn’t Get Same Treatment as Dmitry Firtash – emptywheel
Regarding Susan McDougal who Ken Starr put in prison after she refused to lie on the witness stand so as to incriminate President Clinton…
CF Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater: Lyons, Gene: 9781879957527: Amazon.com: Books
and
Biden prides himself on his “institutionalist” cred but enough to sit idly by and watch his own son wrongfully sent to prison? Apparently so.. To be clear I’m not suggesting for one moment that Hunter deserves special treatment just that as EW has documented his treatment has been especially bad-as Hillary Clintons’ was a la Emailgate.
Meanwhile, Merrick Garland, Biden’s AG is too busy defending Trump in court against Peter Strozk’s lawsuit to notice Hunter Biden is being railroaded. Though actually even this is too charitable-Garland notices, after all it was his bright idea to fire all the US attorneys except for David Weiss to avoid bad optics.
Peter Strzok: Judge rules Trump can be deposed in lawsuit from ex-FBI agent | CNN Politics
End FN
Then the GOP Supreme Court stole the WH back from Clinton’s VP in 2000. Once again, we all “moved on.” Within a few months of W’s “Inuguration” the media had declared the debate over Bush v. Gore over-it happened 3 whole months ago! Time to move on! Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.
Then we moved on from learning the real truth about what happened on 9/11. The tragic day served its purpose-got us into the War on Terror, which somehow included Iraq-that Bush-Cheney Cheney-Bush had wanted all along-long before 9/11, even before they got into the WH-thanks to the GOP SC, true.
And-I get it. To question the official-ie the Cheney-Bush-story of 9/11 already unmasks you as a “conspiracy theorist” only conspiracy nuts believe anything happened on 9/11 other than what Bush-Cheney-I mean Cheney-Bush-tell us happen, just like only conspiracy nuts doubt that the Warren Commission was the sole and total truth of JFK’s assassination.
Skull and Bones Pt. 1 – Conspiracy Theories | Podcast on Spotify
For the uninitiated, if something is called a “conspiracy theory” that means not only that it’s-trivially-not true but it’s “outlandish” to use one of Mike Isikoff’s favorite words-it’d be interesting to count how many times he used the word in the above linked podcast. True, it’s kind of ironic that the man who seriously investigated Whitewater-which begun with the question of Who Killed Vince Foster-accuses others of believing in outlandish conspiracy theories.
To believe in something “outlandish” means you aren’t seen as a credible person by the Jay Rosen’s Savvy-aka Paul Krugman’s Very Serious People. It means what you say doesn’t even dignify an answer other than perhaps, Savvy laughter.
UPDATE: FN: Contrast Isikoff’s snarky comments about Jim Garrison with what Garrison said about the Warren Report: the only way to believe in the Warren Report is to never have read it-and indeed even the US government doesn’t actually believe it at least officially-see the House Select Committee of Assassinations Circa the late 1970s.
Indeed, in Isikoff’s snarky, savvy, slander of Garrison he’s part of a long and Savvy history. In 1968 when Garrison prepared for charges against Clay Shaw, the CIA gathered together some friendly journalists to destroy Garrison’s reputation. To be sure, no criticism of Garrison is less apt than the notion he did it for a political payoff, to the contrary, it destroyed his political career.
See: James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed
CF the snide Seth Abramson hitpiece in unfinished chapter.
Below I’ll discuss more the etymology of my own trajectory-in as this chapter’s title puts it becoming a “conspiracy theorist.” Suffice it to say, when folks ask too many inconvenient questions a very effective way to deal with it is to marginalize them. You’re a conspiracy theorist and therefore not worth the time to listen to.
UPDATE I’ve just recently started reading Peter Dale Scott’s fascinating work which sheds a lot of light on the point of this whole book; while I use the term “conspiracy theorist” in this chapter in an ironic tongue in cheek way, after reading Scott’s Dallas ’63 it seems to me the more precise way to put what happened to me in 2016 is that I gained insight into the true working of our political system-beneath our electoral politics exists another level or dimension of our politics: what Scott calls Deep Politics.
End FN
And this is what happens to anyone who questions the official-that is to say Cheney-Bush-story of 9/11, they are simply marginalized by the Savvy mainstream. Such conversations aren’t fit for polite society. The MSM has long since declared any lingering questions about 9/11 closed. If you don’t observe this piece of Savvy etiquette, you are thereby marginalized. The trouble is that many Americans if not most question the official story-as they also always have questioned the Warren Commission.
FN: Like looking past the usual savvy calumny about “conspiracy theorists” the bigger takeaway of this article is: people haven’t given up, they still-quite rightly-want answers about 9/11 beyond the Cheney-Bush “Commission report” which raised far more questions than answered.
11 September 2001: The conspiracy theories still spreading after 20 years – BBC News
FN: As a side note, the Savvy Punditocracy is till very keen to deny Iran Collusion. I really enjoyed Rich Perlstein’s trilogy that tracked American’s move to the Right from Goldwater to Nixon and finally to Reagan. When I tried to compliment him on Twitter he was having none of this after I mentioned 1980-that was all he needed to here, for the rest of our conversation he was at pains to insist there was nothing to it.
Some of these folks have distressingly high profiles. In these cases, it’s tougher to marginalize the inconvenient questions and shut them, in these cases they have to go to the big guns: baseless accusations of pedophilia do the trick… A few years ago, Maddow had an excellent show that discussed the practice of destroying political opponents by accusing them of about as disgusting a crime as is imaginable by a human being.
It’s interesting that many people who fit this profile-people with a high-profile raising inconvenient questions and can’t be shut up easily and are later accused of pedophilia end up dead with the official explanation being they killed themselves. Indeed, a number of these cases in exactly this pattern were those raising inconvenient questions about 9/11.
Like the 9/11 families
There are certainly a lot of questions regarding the conduct of the 9/11 Commission-starting with the fact that Cheney-Bush had a stooge installed to run it in Phillip Zelikow.
Cheney himself would literally call the commission and browbeat Tom Daschele that it was taking too long. Many obvious and important questions were ignored-as we saw in more detail in Chapter The Russian 9/11.
Of course Cheney’s stand down order wasn’t discussed-he claimed he actually gave a shoot down order which begs all kinds of questions-notably the trivial fact that Flight 93 wasn’t shot down.
FN: Another trivial question is why Cheney was deciding the question of such gravity in the first place as he had no legal authority to do so-it was the President’s call. If not him there was a further chain of command of who should make the call if W wasn’t around which apparently he wasn’t but Vice President wasn’t on the list. See both 9/11 families and book on Cheney “Angler”
Amazon.com: Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency eBook : Gellman, Barton: Kindle Store
Cheney himself had told Dan Quayle this fact 12 years earlier. pg 119
It’s rather fascinating as the 9/11 Commission was in session almost exactly 40 years to the date the Warren Commission did its work and in 40 years nothing had changed-many of the same problems of the Warren Commission were present in the 9/11 Commission. In both cases the Commissions had essentially made their conclusion before even beginning what was supposed to be an intensive investigation.
FN Indeed when thinking about the Warren Commission report almost 60 years later the first thought that comes to you is: Trumpland the FBI did it again. With all the-perfectly legitimate talk-of the CIA connection to November 22 and Oswald
it was the narrative of the Warren Report-the Lone Nut Theory-was the brainchild of the FBI, indeed, of J Edgar Hoover himself though the WC had to gussy up his initial FBI report as it was such a stylistic mess. Then you add the fact that-as many knew at the time and what was verified with the 2017 release of assassination materials-Oswald was actually a FBI informant. While Oswald and the CIA is a great and very important book, you could with at least as much if not more accuracy and justice speak of “Oswald and the FBI.”
Which brings us full circle to 2016 when the FBI elected Trump. This is in a sense the brilliant aspect of Trump’s popularizing of the phrase the Deep State-he totally belies the fact that the Deep State elected him and continued to carry water for him in 2020, when the FBI failed to prepare for the J6 insurrection that they knew was coming and when the Secret Service “lost” all those J6 texts, much like so much of the JFK evidence was “lost” by a number of Deep State agencies. Indeed, the Deep State has continued to have Trump’s back post 2020 as is clear from the fact that many FBI offices across the country refused to investigate J6-see Chapter Barr-Durham Fiasco.
And despite all the questions and problems with the final 9/11 report, like with the Warren Report 40 years before it quickly became an article of faith among the Savvy where to question any part of it was to by definition disqualify yourself from polite society and public debate. Why listen to a “conspiracy theorist?”
One trope, one favored mainstream media narrative is American Exceptionalism. On this premise certain questions logically can’t be asked-if we’re an exceptional nation, surely we wouldn’t have leaders that did what the facts seem to suggest Cheney did on 9/11: at a minimum wrongly arrogate himself a role in making decisions on that fateful day he had no legal right to make even prior to the very uncomfortable question as to why if he did put in a shoot down order it wasn’t shot down?
Such questions are beyond the pale for, again, reasons of American Exceptionalism-they can’t be true because they’re presumed to be impossible. We will revisit this whole question in more depth below.
In any case, the country “moved on” from the compromised 9/11 Report. Let’s just think positively. We don’t want Hillary she says governing is more prose than poetry. We don’t want to hear that. The Black guy with the Arab sounding name keeps it positive, he says “Yes, we can.”
Nevertheless many of us who voted for Obama had hoped there would finally be some accountability for the Cheney-Bush criminals. Obama didn’t waste much time disabusing of us that.
Aide: Obama Won’t Prosecute Bush Officials – CBS News
“In his statement last week, the president said: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
Once again, the whole ‘Gotta look forwards not backwards’ thing.
Obama made this statement in April, 2009, just four months into his term. But he’d actually first telegraphed his disinterest in accountability for Cheney-Bush in early January before being sworn in.
Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.
In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”
This sounds strikingly similar to the narrative Biden began to thread soon after his election-as we saw above he was already singing this song November 18, just nine days after his election win-though the entire post election period was marred by Trump’s intransigence. Nevertheless, Biden took pains to assure Trump he had nothing to worry about very quickly, despite Trump refusing to even acknowledge Biden’s victory and refusal to even allow him in the building-that was now his.
While there are a lot of issues with the work and legacy of Glenn Greenwald-see Chapter Useful Idiots-in 2014 he did do a very good piece enumerating the history of Obama’s total whitewashing of the crimes Bush-Cheney Cheney-Bush
“To see what a farce this is, it is worthwhile briefly to review the timeline of how Obama officials acted to shield Bush torturers from all accountability. During his 2008 campaign for president, Obama repeatedly vowed that, while he opposed “partisan witch-hunts”, he would instruct his attorney general to “immediately review” the evidence of criminality in these torture programs because “nobody is above the law.” Yet, almost immediately after winning the 2008 election, Obama, before he was even inaugurated, made clear that he was opposed to any such investigations, citing what he called “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”.
Throughout the first several months of his presidency, his top political aides, such as the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, publicly – and inappropriately – pressured the justice department to refrain from any criminal investigations. Over and over, they repeated the Orwellian mantra that such investigations were objectionable because “we must look forward, not backward”. As Gibbs put it in April 2009, when asked to explain Obama’s opposition, “the president is focused on looking forward. That’s why.”
On 16 April 2009, Obama himself took the first step in formalizing the full-scale immunity he intended to bestow on all government officials involved even in the most heinous and lethal torture. On that date, he decreed absolute immunity for any official involved in torture provided that it comported with the permission slips produced by Bush department of justice (DOJ) lawyers which authorized certain techniques. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” the new president so movingly observed in his statement announcing this immunity. Obama added:
“[N]othing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past … we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”
Note how, in Obama’s new formulation, those who believed that Bush officials should be held criminally accountable for their torture crimes – should be subjected to the rule of law on equal terms with ordinary citizens – were now scorned as “the forces that divide us”. On the same day, Holder issued his own statement arguing that “it would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the justice department.”
The aside about “partisan witch-hunts” telegraphed where Obama would end up-eschewing any level of accountability. In reality no one should have been disappointed as Obama telegraphed where this was going all along-nowhere. Everyone was disappointed as no one was listening-or to the extent they were they were hearing what they wanted to hear-yes we can, “there is no Red State America or Blue State America there’s just the United States of America.” Again, this is a recurring theme of our last now 55 years-again going back to Nixon’s North Vietnam Collusion Circa 1968-or maybe November 22, 1962? Forget about accountability, let’s just “look forwards not backwards” let’s just “for the good of the country” a la Gerald Ford “just move on.”
FN: Regarding Greenwald, however, this may have been the last decent article he wrote at least about American domestic politics. He himself seems totally uninterested in accountability for Trump’s crimes-Greenwald is yet another Bernie Bro who has since gone anti anti Trump and somehow seems to believe that Trump was a breath of fresh air or something. As noted in Chapter Useful Idiot, Greenwald dismissed criticism of Bill Barr’s setting aside Roger Stone”s conviction in 2019 by claiming that there were all these Center Left Democrats in 1989 who didnt’ want to prosecute Casper Weinberger. Somehow he managed to defend Bill Barr’s misconduct of 2020 by pointing out his miscondcut in 1990.
But clearly, we have not been moving on, quite the contrary, which is why our legitimacy crisis and our democracy deficit keeps getting worse where no matter how bad it gets-and we now live in a country where a rapist of a 13-year-old girl has more rights than his 13-year-old victim-there is evidently no bottom. There is no moving on without accountability and there’s no accountability without the truth as Sarah Kendzior clearly understands. We will look at her very important book below.
FN: True, here in September 2023, two and three quarters years later Trump now stands having been indicted four times for 91 counts, there seems now finally to be a realistic chance of accountability. How much this happened because of rather than despite Biden is an interesting question, however. In any case it’s clear that to a large extent that Biden and his fellow Old Guard Dem leaders still don’t get it. More on this below. Suffice it to say if Biden really got it he wouldn’t be in close to a statistical dead heat with Donald Trump in many polls.
Biden is a very good and fine man and public servant. But he remains beholden to his formative years in Washington DC which he-in many cases wrongly-imagines was an idyllic bipartisan world where even Republicans played nice and fair. In truth things during the 1970s and 1980s-to say nothing of the 1990s were far more complex than Joe imagines things were.
I do think that in many ways we’ve been fortunate. It’s arguable that Biden-Garland intended not to investigate Trump-just focus on the rank and file insurrectionists who actually stormed the Capitol. How much the J6 SC changed the calculus for Merrick Garland remains a pretty interesting open question, just like I suspect the Democrats were saved in 2022 from the disastrous Red Wave forecasted despite themselves-Dobbs had an outsized role in what happened. Arguably without that disastrous Supreme Court decision the Dems wouldn’t have done as well that November.
End FN
Then we had the fiasco of Debt Ceiling Chicken in 2011 where the new normal became Republicans would play chicken with the national debt every 3 to 6 months and demand concessions-ie, budget cuts for the nonrich.
FN: The latest version of this here in 2023 is the knuckle draggers in the GOP House won’t raise the debt ceiling unless-unless what? Biden is impeached and/or Kevin McCarthy steps down? On general principle to be sure McCarthy should step down seeing as his problems are entirely self inflicted as should Suffolk Democratic party chairmen Rich Schaffer and Friends as they’re responsible for the Dems losing the House in 2022 anyway.
Then we had Mitch McConnell essentially stealing Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court. Yet Biden and Chris Coons and Friends still don’t want to talk about court packing or any radical reforms of the Court. ‘
I seem to remember Krugman in the past referring to 2000 as a radicalizing election for him. For me the ultimate radicalizing election was 2016-not that 2000 wasn’t. What was important about 2016 is this was when I finally became a “conspiracy theorist.” I saw with my own eyes how the FBI-our top domestic intelligence agency- elected Trump, how they leaked so much to harm Clinton, how you had rogue agents in October, 2016 threatening to leak HRC’s emails to Julian Assange.
FN: Again, as noted above, what 2016 underscored so clearly is another dimension to our politics-what Peter Dale Scott calls Deep Politics. On her Monday broadcast-10/16/23-Maddow discussed the defeat of Poland’s Far Right party in their recent election. Maddow also pointed to other defeats for authoritarianism-ie wins for democracy, starting with Trump’s 2020 defeat. So is democracy winning? There are some positive developments but also many worrisome ones-as is the nature of any war.
While we have been seeing some wonderful electoral victories, it’s vital to fully appreciate Scott’s point that electoral politics are one thing, Deep Politics are another. Time and again we have seemed to be on the right track through electoral victories only to see them undermined via Deep Politics. Right now there seems to be a number of green shoots-the J6 Select Committee did some great work where virtually Trump’s entire cabinet testified against him. At present here in October, 2023, Trump has been indicted four times on 91 counts.
The idea that he could face serious punishment and accountability seems a real possibility. Meanwhile, Ukraine has shocked the world in how its stood up to Putin’s Russia, which has been among other things a real feather in the cap for President Biden and his intelligence agencies-with so many embarrassments for the CIA like WMDs, this is a moment of great success in telegraphing Putin’s invasion at a time when the almost universal piece of “conventional wisdom”-among mainstream pundits and alleged foreign policy experts to the “anti imperialist Left” a la Chomsky-Matt Taibbi- was that Putin would never do this.
But there are other countervailing factors to be quite concerned about. While overall the J6 Committee did a great job and the report was excellent, the one glaring omission was its total whitewash of the law enforcement and intelligence failures-ie the Deep State. To be sure even the word “failures” must be used advisedly. Indeed, this is a recurring theme with intelligence agencies-when they admit to “failures” there’ often something even worse they are trying to hide. Like currently we’re hearing a lot about Netanyahu and Mossad’s “failures”-but are they really failures?
One canard we keep hearing post 10/7 in Israel is the notion that ‘this is what Hamas wants, they want war.’ Indeed, the best argument for restraint on the part of Israel post 10/7 in Gaza even among Israeli liberals is that Israel shouldn’t overreact as this is what Hamas wants.
(1) Hamas and Gaza | A Liberal Israeli’s View – Yuval Noah Harari – YouTube
Yet what seems clear is that if this is what Hamas wants it’s also what Bibi wants-who if nothing else, is clearly the political Lazarus of our generation if not all time-just a few years ago, he was indicted, and convicted and lost the Prime Minstership. Yet it took him under two years to get back and begin his attack on the independent judiciary-so as to bury the case against himself. As unpopular as these “reforms” are it seemed nothing could save him-then 10/7 happened. The Israeli 9/11 indeed…
Because you can’t help but notice the similarities between Netanyahu’s position in 2023 prior to 10/7 and Bush-Cheney Cheney-Bush prior to 9/11. With 9/11 we also heard a great deal about the failures of the intelligence agencies, etc.
On January 6, OTOH there were many supposed failures-like with 9/11, there are plenty of advanced warnings of the coming insurrection, yet Trumpland the FBI failed to prepare for Trump’s insurrection. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter Barr-Durham Fiasco, many FBI offices post 1/6 have refused to investigate Trump’s insurrection. Shocking that Trumpland didn’t defend against Trump’s insurrection and now doesn’t want to investigate and prosecute it…
Meanwhile Trumpland 2.0 the Secret Service “lost” all the J6 texts on the supposed premise that they were all deleted in a routine mass deletion. Oops! Much like the law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies all “lost” all that JFK evidence due to “routine” deletions, etc. Talk about everything old is new again…
Yet another “failure” were all the off duty law enforcement and military men who actually participated in the insurrection. All this was whitewashed in the 1/6 report with a terse “no one could have known”-which funny enough, was also what the 9/11 Commission report as well as the Warren Commission report said.
Another one of those Savvy mainstream media coinky-dinks.
As for Trump it often feels like the inevitable outcome of all this is he will be convicted and elected a la Netanyahu-you think he misses the lesson of Bibi? Again we ignore other non electoral dimension of power at our peril.
End FN
This brings us to “vote harder.” People have been voting hard. Again 1992 was my first voting age election and I was very enthusiastic about Bill Clinton’s candidacy after 12 years of Republican rule.
FN: Although in truth Bill was only my second choice for President-my first being-yep-his wife-who else? While when Bill said ‘two for the price of one” he was-as usual-roundly criticized for me it really was a selling point. Hopefully at this point-if you’ve followed me this far!-it goes without saying Obama was also only my second favorite candidate in 2008.
FN: It was my first election I could vote but actually I didn’t vote. It didn’t occur to me at the time I could LOL. My first actual voting election would be 1994. This reflects a known pattern-young people vote less…
Certainly, I and others were hopeful after Clinton’s near 6 million vote margin over Bush Sr. this was the start of a new trend, a new Democratic trend in the country. And in fact, for many years after the fact it seemed that it was not a trend. Clinton would defeat Bob Dole-this time I voted-by an even larger margin in 1996 but it hardly seemed like we were in the middle of a new political realignment to the Democratic party. In 1994 the GOP took over Congress for the first time since 1954, and of course, spent the next 5 years in a holy war to take down Clinton.
And for years after looking back it seemed that if anything the realignment in 1992 wasn’t a move towards the Democrats but more a trade between the parties-the GOP had a lock on the WH between 1968-1992-they cheated in most of these elections, true, as we have documented throughout this book-while the Democrats had remained in control of the House for 40 years.
However more recently I looked at the numbers more closely in the face of Biden’s 7 million vote crushing of Trump in 2020. At first glance Biden’s win seemed impressive but not a landslide. I mean a landslide is like Reagan’s win over Carter. Reagan won in 1980 by almost 10 percent of the vote with 479 electoral votes. Reagan also won 44 of 50 states.
Comparatively, Biden won only 324 electoral votes-which was the same margin of Trump’s electoral win in 2016 which he won despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. Which once again underscores the large GOP advantage in the electoral college-Trump got the same numbers in losing by 3 million that Biden got in winning by 7 million.
Meanwhile Biden won only 26 of 50 states. But this really underscores that the GOP gets a further big advantage from the way state lines are drawn. As has been discussed in recent years the distribution of Democratic voters are denser-more Dem voters in fewer states, so not only does the EC give the Republicans a big advantage, but the distribution of partisan voters also gives them another major advantage.
We’re going to next touch on the GOP process advantage in the Senate but we see with Presidential elections the Dems are once again disadvantaged by the overrepresentation of small states.
When you look at actual vote margins-ie the popular vote which one could argue is the correct barometer as other democratic countries use-you see that while Reagan’s 1980 margin was somewhat larger than Biden’s in 2020, it’s not a huge margin: Reagan won by 8.5 million votes while Biden won by 7 million. But the GOP congenital advantage in the EC and the population distribution in states makes the difference seem much starker.
FN: Again, putting aside the trivial fact of Iran Hostage Collusion.
United States presidential election – Wikipedia
Presidential election results: Live map of 2020 electoral votes (nbcnews.com)
Let’s compare another election-Bush Sr’s 1988 landslide win over Dukakis in 1988 and Bush’s near landslide in 1992 loss to Clinton in 1992.
To call Bush’s win a “landslide” but Clinton’s a “near landslide” is almost entirely predicated once again on the Republican EC and state distribution advantage. Indeed, this point is made even starker if you compare Bush 1988 to Biden 2020. The vote margins between Bush 1988 and Biden 2020 are fairly similar: Bush won by 7.8 million, Biden by 7 million. But Bush had 41 states and 432 electoral college votes-ie seemingly landslide numbers-while Biden had 324 EC votes and just 26 states. Indeed, what we’ve seen is the GOP EC and state distribution advantage increasing markedly over time. Biden 2020 actually had a larger vote margin-again 7 million votes-than Clinton 1992-5.8 million votes-yet Clinton had 379 EC votes and 36 states while Biden 2020 had just 324 and 26 respectively.
Actually, the best comparison however might be 1996 where Clinton’s margin- was similar to Reagan 1980 with an 8.3 million vote margin and even somewhat better than Bush 1988-7.8 million. But Clinton got “only” 379 EVs and 36 states-where Reagan had 489 and 44 states and Bush 432 and 41. So while Reagan 1980’s advantage over Clinton 1996 was only .2% he got over 100 more EVs. Obama 2008 if anything compares even more favorably with Reagan 1980 and Bush Sr 1988-he had the largest vote margin with 9.5 million more votes and a nearly 10% percent margin.
United States presidential election – Wikipedia
So these undemocratic advantages of our electoral process have increased markedly in the GOP’s favor in the 30 years since Clinton 1992 where it was still clearly present then.
Look at it this way: Clinton’s nearly 6 million vote win in 1992 begun a period in which Democratic Presidential candidates have won 40 million more votes. The Republican candidate has won more votes only once-Bush W had a mere 300,000 vote margin over Kerry in 2004.
Yet in those eight elections, the Republicans nevertheless won or should we say “won” the election three times. To be sure, even in the case of W’s meager 2004 margin, he’d originally “won” in 2000 despite winning 500,000 fewer results so 2004 was still only thanks to the EC.
And this is without even mentioning once again the trivial fact that in fact the Republican Supreme Court elected W. But speaking of the Supreme Court and of the GOP’s numerous undemocratic advantages in our allegedly democratic process, in those three Republican Administrations five SJC Justices were confirmed compared to three in the five Democratic Administrations-notably none of the Dem appointments changed the ideological balance of the Court.
FN:
So the GOP has a big EC advantage, a big state distribution advantage, and a big advantage in the Supreme Court. If you’re counting-few seem to be apparently-the Democrats have not had an ideological advantage in the Supreme Court since 1968-when Nixon blackmailed Abe Fortas off the Court this begun a now 55 year era of Republican Supreme Court dominance and with the relative youth of the Trump appointees there’s no end in sight.
Yet the Dem Old Guard like President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Chris Coons are lukewarm on packing the Court or any radical reforms. Please spare us the whining about fairness-there was nothing fair about what Mitch McConnell did to Merrick Garland or the way this same #MoscowMitch
FN: for should we now say Sleepy Mitch?
Speaking of Sleepy Mitch-I wouldn’t say this if the GOP co-conspirators hadn’t bought into this whole “Sleepy Joe” thing that has much less basic in fact than “Sleepy Mitch”-let’s talk about the Senate.
If you doubt how undemocratic an institution the Senate is consider that the GOP Senate hasn’t actually represented a majority since 1996.
GOP Senators Haven’t Represented a Majority Since 1996 (nymag.com)
Stephen Wolf has done some great work on this.
I also myself figured out I believe a few years ago thinking it was 2020 that at that point at least Democratic Senate candidates had received something like 51 million more votes than Republican Senate candidates-and even larger margin than Presidential election candidates have received.
FN: I believe I found this information on Wikipedia but I can’t seem to find this information now.
And just like with the Presidency the GOP has accomplished a lot more in their half of the time holding power in the Senate. I big part of this is thanks to Mitch McConnell-which is why I make no apologies in holding him in such scorn. His whole Senate career has been about empowering and ensconcing minority rule both nationally as well in his own state of Kentucky. It was he who popularized the GOP practice of basically blanket obstruction of any Democratic President’s agenda via the un-Constitutional filibuster. Despite the filibuster’s power in tanking much of Biden’s agenda, he seems no more interested in ending it than reforming the GOP Supreme Court.
Again, this is the problem with the facile slogan of Biden and the Old Guard Democrats-Vote Harder. People have been voting very hard for 30 years. It’s not a question of building a Democratic majority-there already is one.
This brings us to the question of “conspiracy theorists” etc. In the parlance of the Savvy Mainstream a conspiracy theorist is basically anyone who doubts American Exceptionalism or holds any views that contradict it and thinks there’s more to it than simply voting harder.
America -according to American Exceptionalism-is the most democratic of nations, if you’re unhappy with the direction of the country simply mobilize the vote for your preferred party and candidates. But the reality is that year after year the majority makes its preferences known but year after year at the end of the day the minority gets its way.
We talked above about the radically undemocratic nature of the Electoral College, Supreme Court, and the Senate- both how power in the Senate is determined-the two Senators per state regardless of size greatly overrepresents smaller, Whiter, more rural states-but also how power is wielded in the Senate, where, thanks to the filibuster, it’s basically impossible for the Democrats to ever pass much of their agenda.
But then there’s the-ahem-real Deep State-starting with the FBI that elected Trump. Above I suggested that 2016 radicalized me. Yes, Russia interfered, and the Trump campaign colluded with that interference. But even more shocking and appalling was that so did the FBI. The FBI which had spent the entire 2016 election leaking things meant to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign, threatened in October 2016 to leak Huma Abedin’s emails to Wikileaks if the FBI leadership didn’t reveal them publicly.
Believe it or not there was a time not so long ago that I drank the Savvy water and bought the ideology that “conspiracies don’t happen” etc. I thought the idea of talking about who “really” killed JFK was absurd, the obsession of never do wells tilting at windmills-the idea of conspiracies evoked the image in me of someone both pathetic but entirely perverse like Alex Jones claiming Sandy Hooks never happened or the anti vaxxers who you’d laugh at if they hadn’t done so much damage, as would be in even sharper relief during Covid. But then 2016 happened. I saw with my own eyes how our top domestic intelligence agency put its finger on the scale to elect Trump-a candidate they knew was a potential counterintelligence risk due to his relationship with Putin’s Russia.
To be sure it’s not so much that Emailgate cum the Comey Letter was the great Uncaused Cause that turned me into a “conspiracy theorist’ but rather it was the last straw, that had been building up in the many years post Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 that I saw We The People’s will subverted again and again, how again and again the minority prevailed culminating in a travesty like Dodd where despite the fact that you can’t find 10% support for this position, it’s now the law of the land in much of the country that rapists are empowered to sue their victims not to “murder” their rape babies.
So, after all these years of watching the People’s Will thwarted, I felt sort of like Robert Graves: goodbye to all of that.
Amazon.com: Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography: 9780385093309: Robert Graves: Books
Goodbye to all this savvy “wisdom” that “conspiracies” are simply “unpossible” and we should simply Vote Harder, and that the truth lies with only the most boring, banal explanation-a la “Occam’s Razor.”
FN: Again, note in the case of a classic member of the conspiracy theory police a la Michael Isikoff, it’s never ok to believe “outlandish” things-his favorite work-unless it’s about Hillary Clinton a la Whitewater.
It’s fascinating when you think about Emailgate. During the election most pundits certainly disagreed with Bernie Sanders when he said people were tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s emails-they could never talk about them enough. But then after they caught their car and THAT UPPITY WOMAN was defeated, they lost interest in all things Emailgate over night-not surprising as after they elected Trump their hysteria over the faux scandal is impossible to defend.
The fact that James Comey’s FBI with a major assist from Dean Baquet’s NYT elected Trump itself contradicts and debunks American Exceptionalism, ergo, this history was erased overnight as if it never happened. HRC didn’t lose because of the emails, it was because she didn’t go to Michigan the last weekend.
When you see what the FBI did to impose their will on the country in 2016 in electing Trump you wonder what they wouldn’t be capable of. Vote Harder only makes sense if we are already an exemplary democracy but as this book has made abundantly clear this is so far from the truth even the suggestion that we are doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Vote Harder works in a functioning democracy but as we saw above, our actual electoral process is decidedly undemocratic on many different tracks-the Senate-both in how its’ determined, and how the Senate is run-a la the filibuster-, the EC, the Supreme Court, and we didn’t even discuss redistricting at the House level.
What 2016 made abundantly clear is that if we are to become the exemplary democracy we should be destined to be we have to radically reform our entire electoral process. It’s clear, however, our geriatric Dem leadership are not the leaders for this time; they come from a time that apparently renders them incapable of understanding this need to radically reform the process-they seem not much less under the illusion of American Exceptionalism than the MSM.
Once you digest the true lesson of 2016, then you look at recent US history with new eyes and you realize that what happened in 2016 was less an aberration than the rule. This book has chronicled how this has been going on since Nixon scuttled LBJ’s peace talks then blackmailed Abe Fortas off the Court in 1968 and only picked up more steam and snowballed since then. If the FBI elected Trump in 2016, in 1980 to a large extent it was the CIA who elected Reagan-Bush.
FN: See Chapter Iranian Jimmy Carter
Or Bush-Reagan? Remember that in 1980, Bush had been CIA Director just a few short years ago. When you realize the extent of the leaks from the CIA that was supposed to by law serve President Carter at that time it’s important to remember that it was Carter who had thwarted Bush’s wish to continue as Director and that Bush may not have been Director very long but he was clearly widely revered among CIA brass seeing as they soon after renamed headquarters after him.
FN:
As a side note, the Savvy Punditocracy is till very keen to deny Iran Collusion. I really enjoyed Rich Perlstein’s trilogy that tracked American’s move to the Right from Goldwater to Nixon and finally to Reagan. When I tried to compliment him on Twitter he was having none of this after I mentioned 1980-that was all he needed to here, for the rest of our converation he was at pains to insist there was nothing to it.
Regarding the famous “Deep State” I’ve been listening to some “conspiracy” podcasts recently and while there is some good work on JFK and Oswald, etc, but when these podcasts discuss the “Deep State” their limitation is many of them remain these sort of frustrated Marxist types who tend to take Trump’s own fulminations against the Deep State at face value.
FN: Exhibit One of this type, of course, is Oliver Stone himself. On the one hand his 1992 film was epic and groundbreaking-it lead to a lot of trepidation and panic amongst the powers that be and lead to an actual bipartisan moment as the entire Congress voted for the CIA to release all revelant documents on JFK cum Oswald, et al.
On its own terms, the movie was good but certainly didn’t get everything right-but it was groundbreaking. OTOH, Stone’s subsequent fawning interview of Putin a few years ago certainly hasn’t aged well. Stone seems to still now continue to harbor all kinds of illusions about Russia which remains in his mind and of many frustrated leftists, this great Communist hope. No doubt one reason so many on the Left seem to be susceptible to anti anti Trumpism is their offended with the idea that Russia is the bad guy in the 2016 story-that Putin elected Trump. Many of them are fans of both Putin and Trump, indeed many continue to carry Putin’s water even now post his barbaric invasion of Ukraine. Usually they reach for Whataboutism-like the first thing Chomsky will say is “Iraq” then “Vietnam” then recite a bunch of CIA led US coups in South America during the Cold War years. This amounts to apologetics for Putin’s invasion just as they also apologized for Assad’s violent crackdown of protesters during the civil war.
As for the anti anti Trumpism of much of the Far Left it seems to me that Trump had them with “lock her up”-I for one will never forget the Bernie Bros-not all Bernie supporters were Bernie Bros-who showed up in Philly the night of the Democratic convention marching down the streets chanting “Lock her up!”
If Trump had them at Lock Her Up! he had them for keeps after inveighing about the “Deep State” which is even more ironic when you consider what Abraham Bolden revealed in a recent podcast interview: that Trump sent Trumpland the FBI after him after which they interrogated him for four hours. This is shocking only because of the trivial fact that the FBI elected Trump is always ignored and memoryholed. Meanwhile, much of the Left hates Biden but it was he who very belatedly pardoned the 88 year old Bolden-after years of being attacked and prosecuted by the (Republican) Deep State.
Chomsky is a particularly interesting case as he was one of the few leftists making sense in 2016 when he said of course you vote for the lesser of two evils. This was in contradiction to the pious Bernie Bro talk about “the lesser of evils is still evil.” Chomsky’s pre election warning was prescient.
An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting) (chomsky.info)
The broader lesson to be drawn is not to shy away from confronting the dominance of the political system under the management of the two major parties. Rather, challenges to it need to be issued with a full awareness of their possible consequences. This includes the recognition that far right victories not only impose terrible suffering on the most vulnerable segments of society but also function as a powerful weapon in the hands of the establishment center, which, now in opposition can posture as the “reasonable” alternative. A Trump presidency, should it materialize, will undermine the burgeoning movement centered around the Sanders campaign, particularly if it is perceived as having minimized the dangers posed by the far right.”
The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.”
“Over seven years after Chomsky wrote this, over a year post Dobbs many-mostly male Bernie Bros-continue to minimize this despite the fact that it is indeed the most vulnerable who are feeling the full brunt of living in a country where in many states and regions, rapists have more rights than their victims, who can in theory get their victim put in jail for “killing” their rape baby. And yes-I think it’s necessary to put it this starkly. But then much of the Far Left was always fairly lukewarm about choice-it was Planned Parenthood Bernie dismisses as a special interest group.
The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.”
There were a few other leftists who wrote persuasive essays at the time to vote for Clinton.
Why Leftists Should Have No Problem Voting For Hillary Clinton | Current Affairs
But, of course, many leftists did not heed this persuasive argument-Zizek himself essentially endorsed Trump and STILL thinks Assange-who elected Trump-and Snowden-who at a minimum gave Putin a propaganda victory in the face of his brutal repression of Russian journalists; and as I argued in Chapter Useful Idiots wonder how plausible it is that Snowden has NOT given Putin information on many US secrets-are free speech heroes. That’s why I argue the “anti imperialist Left” is like 7 UP-they never had it and they never will as they did the same thing with Hitler-‘gee the Social Democrats are Social Fascists…
After the election, Chomsky’s words were again prescient.
“Noam Chomsky tells those who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton to stop Donald Trump: You made a big mistake.”
Late in Trump’s disastrous, criminal, and illegitimate term, Chomsky declared Trump “undeniably the worst criminal in history”.
And yet, and yet, just a year later he was declaring Trump alone amongst statemen got it on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Scahill on the Russia-Ukraine War (theintercept.com)
But it’s even worse than you think, In this link he doubles down on Trump-and also praises, yep-Henry Kissinger on Russia. So after all these years Chomsky and Kissinger finally agree-on being Putin apologists and useful idiots:
Under fire for praising Trump’s Ukraine stance, Noam Chomsky says US ex-president ‘not the issue’
Unlike Trump, Biden administration doesn’t seem to be supporting peace negotiations & is focused on sanctions against Russia, says the linguist & political activist.
Hopefully I don’t have to unpack how appalling this formulation by Chomsky is-he uses the morally neutral language of “negotiation” between two squabbling children not where Russia has invaded Ukraine and is targeting schools and hospitals. The notion that you should take a neutral stance is morally obscene and, interestingly, here Chomsky is not only on the same side as Trump and Kissinger, but also-yep-Bibi Netanyahu.
As I criticized Zizek above for endorsing Trump while praising Chomsky for getting it in 2016, ironically the two flipped here as Trump has not been a Putin apologist.
But overall, the Left has shown yet again “imperialism” is only a problem if it’s American-or a friend of America-Putin is fine as is Assad. You can dismiss the importance of Chomsky’s implicit defense of Putin-again to say they both should be reasonable is obscene-but it’s not lost on Breitbart.
Chomsky: Trump the ‘One Western Statesman’ Pushing Peace in Ukraine (breitbart.com)
Once again Chomsky and Friends give some pretty terrible people a propaganda victory.
At the end of the day, while many consider Chomsky a “moral giant”-he himself likes this term-there are also victims he can’t see-in Ukraine, in Syria, etc. We’ll give a Ukrainian victim the last word:
A short letter to some Western intellectuals. Please share to whom it may concern. I can’t write anything long because we’re still on the run, with my kids who are right here next to me. So, in brief: Ukraine was not “dragged into” war, it was attacked. Without even a pretext like Hitler’s attack on Poland. I know other countries have faced their share of foreign intervention, and right now you’re witnessing overt Russian imperialism. I don’t want to make any flawed historical comparisons, but empires have lost wars against smaller peoples before, and in the end, the Russian imperialist government must lose. When you’re being bombed, when you’re thinking of ways to evacuate your kids, you have a different perspective than when you’re sitting cozy in an office somewhere in Arizona. Yes, Noam Chomsky, I’m looking at you, among others.”
Exactly Chomsky seems to harbor the illusion that this is a US war-this is not Iraq despite the fact Chomsky keeps trying to switch the subject to Iraq.
But I guess maybe we’ll give the Ukranian people the second to last word. The last word should go to the Syrian people who could only have dreamed of 5% of the US and international support Ukraine has-rightly-received. On Assad’s brutal crackdown, Chomsky channeled his inner Dick Cheney:
During his September 2015 Harvard lecture, Chomsky was asked whether Russia’s deployment to Syria was imperialistic. In response, Chomsky repeated the capricious claim that the entire Syrian opposition is either part of ISIS or some variant of al-Qaeda.
As even the most casual observer of the Syrian conflict knows, however, this claim is false. A major contingent of Syria’s rebel forces is not “jihadist” in any sense. Even among those who are Islamist, many support a democratic government, in some form, and are more similar to Hamas than ISIS or al-Qaeda.
Instead of reckoning with these and other realities of the Syrian revolution, Chomsky has tacitly endorsed the logic of the “war on terror,” accepting the view that allying with dictatorships in order to defeat terrorism is perfectly ok.
How Noam Chomsky Betrayed the Syrian People — Syria Deeply (thenewhumanitarian.org)
This writer does a great job of crystallizing the central problem of Chomsky’s approach-basically he’s a anti (American) imperialist hammer and so every solution is a nail:
The noted critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein once wrote that it was a rite of passage for “left apostates,” namely those who had allegedly abandoned their left-wing principles, to criticize Noam Chomsky. As Finkelstein observed, Chomsky “mirrors their idealistic past as well as [their] sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles … that they sold out but he didn’t.”
In some sense, this is true. Chomsky is a political rock, unchanged by the elements and unaltered by time, no matter how powerful the tidal waves of change crashing against his worldview. While there is no doubt Chomsky’s politics arose from genuine, much-needed dissent against U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era, the stasis that defines his approach has left him unable to reckon with the Arab Spring’s complexities and contradictions.
Chomsky’s stance on Syria is the clearest example of this. As he stated during a talk at Harvard in September 2015, and as he has repeated during other interviews, Chomsky believes the idea of conducting a humanitarian intervention in Syria is a red herring. Just about “every use of force is called humanitarian intervention” and almost always intervention is not humanitarian at all and is, in fact, “in the interest of those carrying out the force,” Chomsky said. From his point of view, in intervening in Syria, the United States has done little other than support the forces that are creating and sustaining the country’s “jihadist” movement.
While those who support Chomsky’s position on Syria may label supporters of the revolution, like myself, as “neoconservatives” or “pro-imperialists,” they are, in fact, more deserving of these epithets themselves.”
Chomsky’s never been big on complexities. Once again-batting 1.000.
End FN
So much for the Far Left-as I say in another chapter, the “anti imperialist Left” is pretty much batting 1000 as they’re always wrong.
As a member of the Center Left otoh I have to admit that much of Center Left also misses the big picture as many of them fall for the Vote Harder canard and that ‘conspiracies are unpossible and outlandish.’ Just Vote Harder.
If anything, much of the Center Left makes the mistake of denying there is a Deep State at all, In point of fact there is a Deep Sate but it’s Republican and always has been.
The Far Left is correct there is a Deep State but fail to accurately understand it as they seem to always try to somehow eschew the Center Left so as to somehow ingratiate themselves to the Far Right. This happened in Germany 1932 leading to Hilter’s “victory” despite having popular support less than 40% of the vote.
Meanwhile the Center Left has made the cardinal mistake of imagining the Deep State will ever help US. It’s certainly arguable a large segment of the Center Left is still even now under the illusion of American Exceptionalism but OTOH the trouble with the Far Left or the “anti imperialist Left” is they believe in American Exceptionalism in reverse: they believe not that America is especially good but that it’s especially bad. Matt Taibbi had made this admission straight after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He like the rest of the Far Left-as well as the Savvy MSM and most conventionally minded foreign policy experts-had assumed that Russia would never do something like that. Tabbi in that moment offered a mea culpa post-but soon he was back doubling down on the only America is bad narrative writing about Hillary Clinton’s emails again. Again it’s amazing but do the history and you’ll see how often through history the Far Left scorns the Center Left for the Far Right.
So while to discuss the Granddaddy of Conspiracy Theories” as Mike Isikoff’s recent podcast put it the Far Left is right not to let JFK’s assassination down the memory hole, they’re commentary gets sidetracked by their illusions even today about Russia and JFK to say nothing of the “Deep State.” The Far Left is right to believe in its existence but their own ideological blinders leads them to understand it only in a very blinkered way-while too much of the Center Left-again my own ideological home-tends to drink the Savvy water here and dismiss its existence. Indeed, in the aftermath of Trump, they believed the Deep State would save them! Kind of missing the crucial fact that the Deep State elected Trump.
We’ll discuss JFK more below. Again for many years I dismissed this as a silly “conspiracy theory” but after seeing what happened in 2016 and what has been done since 1968 you begin to wonder what exactly is “too far” for such a malign agent as the US Far Right -which in fact is who dominates the “Deep State” and their determination to ‘turn the clock back to 1954″ as Paul Weyrich put it in 1980-see Faludi.
But the Deep State Circa 1980 elected Reagan-Bush Bush-Reagan-I think in a sense Bush-Reagan is more accurate as Bush was the one with the Deep State connections. In a sense Reagan’s position in his own Administration was similar to Bush’s son in W’s own Administration 20 years later-often the last to know things.
FN: Even if you don’t want to believe in the “conspiracy theory” that Cheney offered a stand down order and accept his unverified and question begging claim he made a shoot down order the question is why was he who had no place in the chain of command for such a decision making the call and why did W in his first answer to questions contradict Cheney’s version and only later correct himself?
And so it goes on, with the crisis of our democracy continuing to snowball. So yeah if you must call me a conspiracy theorist, go ahead there are a lot of worse things to be, like a Savvy hack. As Dan Quayle once said ‘I wear their scorn like a badge of honor!’
FN: See even I have my bipartisan moments…
At the end of the day conspiracies happen, and here in America-not only, here-they’ve been happening a lot. Often conspiracy theories have the inconvenience of being true. Yes-even Oswald. Maybe Isikoff and Friends consider any theory beyond the official Warren Report “outlandish”-though he didn’t find Vince Foster “outlandish” most Americans don’t believe in the Lone Nut Theory. Indeed, most Americans-including many of the Iranian hostages themselves-believed the Reagan-Bush campaign colluded with the Ayatollah to delay the release of the hostages.
Indeed, many if not most question the official 9/11 story as well-and most understand that contrary to Ken Dilianian and Friends, Russian Collusion did happen. But what happens is at the end of the day folks are so browbeaten-between the Savvy media burying so many important stories. to the coordinated practice of marginalizing anyone with any profile who raises questions-again if need be, sometimes high profile folks have to be more than simply ignored but actively slandered and libeled-preferably as a pedophile-often this leads to a final chapter where supposedly they commit suicide-a very familiar theme for many with high profiles who questioned the official version of 9/11.
Another way to marginalize serious questions is to create a lot of phony conspiracy theories-QAnon or like Whitewater, et al-so that nice and reasonable people-often found on the Center Left-want nothing to do with “conspiracy theories.”
Now as promised this is a good place to talk about Sarah Kendzior’s book that does so much to correctly elucidate the whole weaponized issue of conspiracy theories.
She speaks of “conspiracy culture.”
“Conspiracy theories are on the rise because officials refuse to enforce accountability for real conspiracies. Uncritical faith in broken institutions is as dangerous as false narratives peddled by propagandists.”
“The truth may hurt—but the lies will kill us.”
“They Knew discusses conspiracy culture in a rapidly declining United States struggling with corruption, climate change, and other crises. As the actions of the powerful remain shrouded in mystery—“From Norman Baker to Jeffrey Epstein, Iran-Contra to January 6″ (VF)—it is unsurprising that people turn to conspiracy theories to fill the informational void. They Knew exposes the tactics these powerful actors use to placate an inquisitive public.”
So right off the bat we see she doesn’t deny conspiracies happen-there are real conspiracies and fake ones-and that the powers that be use the fake ones to discredit anyone trying to get to the bottom of what happened in genuine criminal conspiracies-which happen every day in America-but again not only here. Putin is a great expert at using so many lies people give up on the truth.
As she says on page 29 conspiracy theories are “rarely totally true or totally false” but inhabit the “uneasy world of unknowns.”
“A conspiracy is a form of betrayal. Conspiracy theorists feel betrayed because important information has been withheld and because information is not just a matter of power, but of status. To be believed is an act of power that you cannot control. People therefore search for evidence that will overwhelm the power of those who deny the truth and force it into the light. A conspiracy theory, when rooted in a sincere desire to find and expose the truth, is a refusal to move on from betrayal. Conspiracy theories are expressions of grief and memory.”
FN: Indeed, and this point is the central theme of this chapter-that we can’t move on-at least not really-without the truth and this is hardly not for trying on the part of the Savvy Media and the Democratic leadership going back to LBJ burying the truth of what he knew about Nixon’s scuttling of his own peace talks to defeat Humphrey in 1968
“This type of evidence-gathering is not solely the domain of conspiracy theorists. It is what historians, detectives, and human rights activists do. It is what investigative journalists and state officials are supposed to do, but frequently do not, because the professional incentive is to remain compliant in order to receive access to the conspirators or maximize a personal payout. The conspiracy theory label is slapped on both hostile actors who seek to deceive and honest actors who seek to enlighten, with the commonality being that they all tread uneasy ground, the kind of ground that, when split, opens the door to hell.”
Pg 31
Indeed, I use the phrase “conspiracy theorist” glibly in this chapter to thumb my nose at the Savvy punditocracy-and in some ways to disempower this Savvy weapon meant to marginalize anyone with a genuine desire to learn the truth-but as she notes there’s often a fine line between a conspiracy theorist and an award-winning investigative journalist. Often it just comes down to success and popularity.
“The definition of “conspiracy theory” is extraordinarily malleable. When verified, a conspiracy theory is recast as “investigative journalism” or “unburied history” and, in some cases, a legal slam-dunk. Watergate, Iran-Contra, the CIA’s MKUltra mind control experiments, the aborted 1960s false flag Operation Northwoods, and other US government plots were all, at some point, labeled wild conspiracy theories—until they were investigated and proven real. Many examples of systemic sexual abuse by the wealthy—Harvey Weinstein’s use of the Israeli mercenary spy group Black Cube to track and silence dozens of Hollywood actresses he assaulted while countless witnesses stayed silent, for example—sounded unbelievable until painstakingly revealed as true. Systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic Church was deemed a conspiracy theory until it became documented with heartrending evidence. Thanks in large part to fossil fuel corporations, climate change was dismissed as a conspiracy theory for decades, long after it had been documented by scientists, and today it is only acknowledged as real by most political officials now that it is too late to stop it.”
Certainly, as she notes, one widely held human tendency that the savvy pundits and propagandists count on is that unlike Fox Mulder-many people don’t want to believe, it’s more reassuring in the end to throw one’s hands up and believe official lies-see chapter Iranian Collusion for Robert Parry’s reaction to-find name. It’s a fact that many folks prefer to hold on to their-erroneous-preconceptions-that is to say misconceptions.
FN: One reason I really enjoy Kendzior’s work is like myself she’s a Generation Xer who discusses the X Files in the book in showing the correct attitude of investigative journalism etc-the truth is out there.
The greatest advantage all these individuals and institutions have is not that people do not want to know the truth about what they have done, but that they do not want to believe it.”
People are understandably afraid to hear the worst about the people and organizations whose job it is to protect them. This embrace of denial has accelerated despite (or perhaps because of) ample evidence of elite criminality available in the public domain. Trump and his cohorts’ long-standing dealings with the mafia and the Kremlin—a saga exhaustively documented over multiple decades often labeled a conspiracy theory by those terrified by the national security ramifications of it being real. Centuries of state abuse of Black and Native Americans—the torching of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in 1921; the 1985 MOVE bombings of Black citizens, including children, in Philadelphia; the ongoing unearthing of mass graves of Native Americans—were dismissed as conspiracy theories until people from those communities gained the structural power to publicize them and found an audience willing to listen. It is notable that as knowledge of these atrocities increases among white Americans, other white Americans seek to ban this history from being taught in schools. Both conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies revolve around questions of preexisting power dynamics and the potential to shift them. Who to believe, who controls information, whose pain matters, what constitutes evidence: these questions form the nexus of the crisis of belief. Today truths are not self-evident. Propaganda and disinformation operations aim to divert people away from the search for the evidence and toward easy answers and echo chambers.”
Pg 32
She then discusses the Savvy Dean Baquet cum Erik Wemple cum Mike Isikoff media sneering and dismissing “conspiracy theorists”-‘gee, that’s outlandish’-so long as it’s not about Hillary Clinton.. According to Isikoff Jim Garrison was a total nut.
“Similarly, the sneering dismissal of conspiracy theories in favor of uncritical acceptance of institutionalist narratives is aimed at protecting the powerful, bolstering the reputation of disdainful as a “rational actor,” and again directing people away from the search for accurate information. The mantra of the “rational actor” is Occam’s Razor—the belief that the simplest explanation is the correct one—but this belief not only falls apart when examining an actual criminal conspiracy, it enables the criminals by making a mockery of the spirit of inquiry. In the 21st century, American democracy slit its write on Occam’s Razor, and no one answered for the blood.
Pg 32
Let me say I fully share her disdain for “Occam’s Razor”-the truth is usually anything but simple or boring as prosaic as Isikoff and Friends want us to believe-for them the truth is always boring and uninteresting-always a prosaic explanation for everything. To be clear Isikoff is by no means the only Savvy propagandist for the powers that be, in surveying the real of podcasts that discuss JFK-Oswald, etc, a large number of them focus on the idea that the very idea of a conspiracy is absurd. Like I came across this podcast called “Last Podcast on the Left” that initially whet my interest as it did a 6 episode deep dive on JFK-Oswald, etc. Nothing better for me than an intellectual deepdive with 6 episodes of over 1 hour per episode-I’m a Doordash driver so it’s a great way to pass the time. But I only had to listen to the first few minutes of the first episode to lose interest. It seemed clear they were purveyors of the Warren Commission premise-the Lone Nut Theory-and even more the tone was so silly it seemed designed to impress you with how ridiculous the whole thing of “conspiracies” are. I mean c’mon dude! That’s the tone.
But as Kendzior notes:
One of the most common techniques used to keep inquisitive minds in check is to state that a conspiracy is, by definition, impossible. Skeptics claim conspiracies cannot exist because no complex organization can keep a secret. When challenged they are forced to concede that exceptions include law enforcement, intelligence, religious groups, and organized crime. They must then acknowledge that the institutions tasked with investigating conspiracies are at times the originators of them. They must then admit that the two main industries framing an exposed conspiracy as either a lunatic lie or a certified truth are the media and public relations: industries that are easily influenced by wealthy elites when they are not simply stocked with their own peers.”
Pg 33
She then quotes Noam Chomsky-which is a little ironic.
“If you’re down at a bar in the slums, and you say something that people don’t like, they’ll punch you or shriek four-letter words,” scholar Noam Chomsky observed in a 2007 interview about cover-ups of institutional corruption. “If you’re in a faculty club or an editorial office, where you’re more polite—there’s a collection of phrases that can be used which are the intellectual equivalent of four-letter words and tantrums. One of them is ‘conspiracy theory.’ [It’s part of] a series of totally meaningless curse words, in effect, which are used by people who know that they can’t answer arguments, and that they can’t deal with evidence. But they want to shut you up.”
Correct though ironic coming from him as Chomksy himself has totally dismissed people who question the official story-ie the Warren Commission-as well as those who question the official story of 9/11.
The central premise of Rethinking Camelot is that Chomsky dismisses a central premise of many who question the Warren Report-that JFK was killed because he was this potential progressive hero if not savior who would have ended the Vietnam war.
A good example of this lionizing of JFK is James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed.
To be sure, overall Destiny Betrayed is an excellent book but I myself do wonder if this picture of JFK as this would be Great Progressive Hope isn’t overstated. Nevertheless he makes a compelling case for JFK-and Chomsky makes a fairly compelling case against JFK as this Great Progressive Hope.
I won’t take a side here as it’s not in my mind the central point. Indeed, the subtext of Chomsky seems to be that since JFK in fact had no intention of drawing down in Vietnam it really doesn’t matter who killed him. He doesn’t say that explicitly, of course, but that’s the implication. He doesn’t focus on justifying the Warren Report, or analyzing Oswald’s movements but rather just argues-perhaps correctly-JFK wouldn’t have drawn down in Vietnam.
What he seems to miss is that whatever the truth of what JFK’s Vietnam policy would have been if the CIA or rogue agents within were involved in JFK’s assassination it would be a Big Fucking Deal-a la Biden-indeed.
Putting aside the diversionary issue of JFK’s progressive bonafides-real or imagined-what from Chomksy’s point of view is so “outlandish” about the idea that CIA could have been involved with the assassination of JFK? He never stops discussing the role the CIA had in assassinating foreign Presidents in South America-Guatemala, etc. In a way if this is true the big news would be that the Right wingers at the CIA were so brazen they did the same thing to the American people they did many times to the peoples of foreign countries during the Cold War years. We did see in broad daylight the FBI elect Trump so the circle of what the (Republican leaning) Deep State will do to impose its political preferences on the rest of us keeps getting smaller.
FN: Chomsky actually explicitly said it doesn’t matter who killed JFK in 1979-people die every day!
The Deceptions and Disguises of Noam Chomsky (kennedysandking.com)
He also doesn’t care what happened on 9/11.
Chomsky: Who cares who caused 9/11, who killed JFK. So many people die. – YouTube
He’s strikingly incurious about anything that doesn’t’ confirm his own narrative. Peter Dale Scott persuasively argues that Marxist types tend to dismiss “conspiracies” as they see everything as understandable in structuralist terms-if not structuralist economic terms. Chomsky’s technically not a Marxist but a Bakunist but it seems to me this is just as true him. Scott argues there’s another way to look at things beyond the idea that you have to choose-can things be explained by structuralist or in terms of a conspiracy theory…
FN: At the end of the day if it’s fair to question the progressive bonafides of JFK it’s also fair to question Chomsky’s. His concern and support for victims of state violence is actually just as selective as he-often correctly-accuses US elites of being just in the opposite direction. Chomsky only has solidarity with victims of US or US allies state violence-as we’ve seen the last 12 years pointedly not the state violence of Putin-Assad.
Indeed, beyond this, I have to say for someone who many believe to be such a deep and profound thinker as many believe Chomsky to be he’s always struck me as surprisingly incurioius-again it’s his “strucuralism” and his desire for a very simple, if not simplistic narrative that “even a 10 year old child can understand.”
Chomsky himself then, lacks the correct investigative attitude which is underscored by the fact that Chomsky is someone who evidently accepts both the Warren Report and the 9/11 Commission Report at face value. His premise seems to be that even if there were conspiracies it wouldn’t matter anyway which is simply an absurdly intellectually incurious attitude to take.
As Orwell-someone who Chomsky in the past has claimed to admire-said: he who controls the past controls the present and he who controls the present controls the future. We will never be able to control our future if we don’t reclaim our past. The idea that if there were conspiracies behind JFK’s assassination or 9/11 are of little consequence couldn’t be more wrong.
Again, as intellectually incurious as the Savvy punditocracy is neither have I ever been terribly impressed by the “anti imperialist Left”-as Nietzsche argues intellectual incuriosity comes from the desire not to have ones preconceptions challenged-again the opposite of the correct attitude in a real search for truth.
FN: Nietzsche argues that holding on to your preconceptions is for those who prefer the least expenditure of intellectual energy possible.
Indeed, speaking of the right investigative attitude, in many ways I suspect that it’s actually those in intelligence who are deeper more searching thinkers-deeper thinkers take pleasure in paradoxes rather than quickly dismissing them. See Robert Parry’s first meeting with Ari-Ben Menasche.
And that’s why all this matters-because the powers that be have been subverting not just democracy in foreign countries but our own.
And this brings us full circle to 2016 when the FBI elected Trump and that it turns out on closer inspection this was not an aberration but business as usual the last 60 years-we’re just two months away from the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
UPDATE:
This can be placed below at some point .
A few points to make: while I consider myself to reside roughly on what can fairly be called the Center Left, the Center Left at this moment has a few of its own illusions-namely Vote Harder and that there’s either no Deep State or that it will save us-or “institutions will save us.”
So we’ve critiqued everything from the Far Right-Trump and the GOP co-conspirators, the Deep State-full of Far Right sympathizers a la the FBI cum Secret Service-the Savvy Mainstream media, the Savvy Dem Old Guard leadership, the Institutionalist illusions of the Center Left and the “anti-imperialist Left”-scare quotes are in order as the Far Left is not against imperialism per se but only when the finger can be pointed at American or its friends or client states as we see by the Left’s current apologetics for Putin cum Assad-the Whataboutism of Chomsky-Tabbi et al.
Another illusion is the “independent” illusion as well as the closely related “bipartisan” illusion. The goal should not be bipartisanship but partisan victory-of the Democratic party. Today this is a very widely held misconception. Partisanship, however, isn’t the problem its the solution. If there’s a partisanship problem it’s that the Democratic party isn’t nearly partisan enough. Democrats in power in particular tend to be seduced by the illusions of “institutionalism”-in our top Deep State agencies-military, intelligence, legal, etc-you tend to see two very prominent animals: GOP hyperpartisans-who run these Deep State institution and agencies and Democrat “institutionalists” who wrongly convince themselves that ‘partisanship doesn’t matter.’
FN: Like the First Cause of the unpredicated Hunter Biden boondoggle is Merrick Garland, a typical dyed in the wool Democratic “instutionalist”
See Chapter They’re Doing it Again
End FN
FN: Heck in my own neck of the woods, here in Long Island, NY, much of the alleged Democratic leadership a la Suffolk “Democratic Chairman” Rich Schaeffer is in bed with the Republicans-when you look at the failure of the Democrats to win back Peter King’s seat in 30 years, Rich is probably more responsible for this fact than anything else. In many parts of the country the Dem leaders are hacks only in it for personal power-though it’s nowhere more true than Long Island-if it weren’t for the utter failure of the Long Island Democrats, the Dems would have held on to the House nationally. Then all that would have been left to do would be ending the filibuster-though of course with Schumer-Biden-Chris Coons running the party that wasn’t ever going to happen in any case.
Indeed, this is a fact of the greatest consequence on so many levels. Consider just one example: Ukraine If not for Rich and Friends in the alleged LI Democratic party, the Dems would control the House and now Ukraine’s aid wouldn’t be at risk. Biden made the typical Dem assumption that the GOP would operate in good faith-but the new Mike Johnson House replied no thanks we’ll just take the Israeli aid and forget about Ukraine thank you.
This of course touches on the general illusion in Biden’s recent speech where his heart was in the right place but substantively drawing a parallel between Zelensky’s Ukraine and Netanyahu’s Israel simply fails on every level. For starters consider that post 10/7 Zelensky was one of the first world leaders to reach out to Netanyahu and was rebuffed-Bibi literally told the Jewish leader of Ukraine not to come to Israel. Guess not all Jews are welcome in Bibi’s Jewish theocratic state Israel.
Nevertheless, if we can imagine a future where we become the healthy democracy we were meant to be it will come through the Democratic party. Again, there are a lot of illusions here. Strong partisan parties are a feature not a bug. Look at the history. Most progressive change in the 20th century-starting with Wilson-went through the Democratic party. The New Deal, the Great Society-this entire progressive legacy is a Democratic legacy. The New Deal was passed in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s with Dem super majorities. The GOP wanted to stop it but lacked the votes.
However, a lot of conventional commentary falsely extrapolates from the immediate Postwar era as some kind of Bipartisan Golden Era. It is true that to an extent there were more opportunities for positive bipartisan legislation-thinking here particularly of civil rights, but also on some bills continuing and strengthening New Deal programs, etc. But if anything this strange idiosyncrasy of the Postwar was exceptional and against the larger historical thrust of our history.
This was part of a transitional time between the early passing of the New Deal and Reagan Circa 1980-basicallly the arrival of the anti New Deal era we still haven’t entirely left-far from it. What explained the opportunities for bipartisan cooperation was that this was a period of a long-term realignment of the South from the Solid Democratic South to the Solid Republican South. During this period the two parties were ideologically divided from within-during this period the Southern Dixiecrats tried to beat back the thrust of the Democratic party towards antiracism and civil rights. So there was a considerable bloc of conservatives within the party-a la George Wallace-with a considerable bloc of liberals or moderates in the Republican party.
But this was accidental and unusual and it doesn’t change the fact that both the New Deal and Great Society were overwhelmingly Democratic party achievements. If anything, the point about partisanship being a feature not a bug is more true now than it even was then due to the unusual aspects of the Postwar period.
Positive change usually comes via a party-a party is a great simplification, it’s much more efficient for action than this fantasy of “independents.” In the Civil War time it was the Republican party which to a large extent drove positive change.
FN: Though even this was a little more complex than today-as the Democratic party in this period and through most of its history wasn’t one national party but three regional parties. It’s true in a sense we’ve never seen such ideological consistency between the parties. So while this is the typical trend of our history, the normal case, it’s true that it’s especially true today, it’s truer today than it’s ever been-and it was always true…
OTOH there are the Bernie Bro types full of disdain for the Democratic party who prior to Bernie dreamt of a new-socialist-party. But that would take years. Bernie rightly understood it’s much more efficient to take over the Democratic party than to destroy it.
However, again, as we noted above, it’s not a question of building a Democratic party majority-we already have one that has grown post Clinton’s ‘1992 win what remains to be done is to remove all the anti democratic guard rails preventing the Democratic party from exercising the power the country keeps trying to give to them-one of the biggest barriers are ossified leaders a la Chris Coons-we don’t care about the Insurrection we just want to go home for Valentines Day-or Dick Durbin exactly the wrong man to be Judiciary Chairman-who gently asks John Roberts would like to discuss Supreme Court reform. Turns out Roberts wouldn’t like to. Who saw that coming?
Again let’s end this book where we started: Hillary Clinton. She was criticized in 2008 over “prose not poetry” Obama had all the poetry: “Yes we can” and “There is no red state or blue state America just the United States of America.”
These were beautiful, poetical thoughts-and history has shown beautiful fictions. Unlike Obama-or for that matter her husband or Bernie Sanders-HRC understood the difference between campaign speechifying and governing.
Ezra Klein piece..
So where does all this leave us, where do we go from here? Again there’s no moving on without accountability, and there’s no accountability without the truth. To get the truth you have to value the truth and have the correct investigative and research attitude for the truth. Spoiler alert: a lot of people today don’t have that correct attitude. Like Crimson Tide they can’t handle the truth-they’d rather feel comfort-as Nietzsche would say they desire a comfortable pillow-made out of their own preconceptions-not the truth.
Back to Kendzior:
While Lost proved relatable and Eerie, Indiana educational, my ultimate plague comfort TV show was The X-Files because of its wild conceit that competent people work at the FBI. “Time for civics class!” I would yell to the kids, and we would gather together to watch the opening credits mantras: “The Truth Is Out There,” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything,” “Fight the Future.” These were the baseline beliefs of the 1990s, when distrusting authority was common and then commodified.”
Pg 138
FN: The FBI was, is, and always has been run by partisan Republican, and often quite incompetent, hacks. However… this brings up yet another Savvy canard you heard a lot during the Trump years-Trump is too incompetent to be seriously corrupt. You absolutely can be totally incompetent AND seriously corrupt, indeed, this is the general case-the inclusivity of incompetence and corruption. Trump and the GOP co-conspirators is very much both: corrupt, incompetent, partisan hacks.
End FN
It strikes me that Gen Xers like Ms. Kendzior and myself come from a transitional generation-we were the last generation to be raised in an analog world but in our 20s and 30s the world changed overnight to our virtual world of today. In this vein she discusses a favorite show of hers-and mine. Don’t get me wrong I don’t miss the analog world. But it does seem to me that this sense of being born in an analog world and then watching as overnight it becomes digital gives us a unique perspective. Indeed, for me the digital world never loses its magic I felt with the X-Files. It gives us an intense idea of what seeking the truth means-what it means to investigate it.
She discusses this tendency among us Gen Xers:
I had just turned fifteen when The X-Files debuted, putting me at the tail end of its Gen X target audience. I have wondered if Gen Xers are more attracted to conspiracy theories, and possibly more adept at deciphering them, because they grew up in an era of information scarcity, and enjoyed the process of search and discovery. The last generation to have an analog childhood, we spent our youth hunting down obscure movies, music, and magazines, developing selective expertise and curated collections. Building up that knowledge was beyond a hobby for many: it was a journey. We were raised in an era of ubiquitous corruption and lies—Watergate and Vietnam in the 1970s, Iran-Contra and white-collar crime in the 1980s and early 1990s. When you combine political cynicism with an obsessive urge to track things down, you wind up with a bootleg culture of information exchange.”
Pg 139
I find that a very interesting idea that we Gen-Xers may be especially attracted to conspiracy theories. I really appreciate her evocation of the idea that building knowledge is a journey. In my mind this is the correct investigative attitude. You see the opposite of this in the Savvy pundits who always impatiently demand ‘so you’re saying Trump committed a crime what charges can you make stick though? If not then what’s it matter?’ What’s really needed is not the elite prosecutor’s attitude that all that matters is wether or not you think a particular charge is a “slam dunk” but the researcher and the investigator, for who, knowledge is a journey. Again-no closure without accountability, no accountability without the truth, but to get the truth we need the correct investigative attitude-valuing knowledge, knowledge is a journey. Folks who get impatient for the answer, the punchline, don’t have the correct attitude, the lack the spirit of inquiry as they don’t value knowledge as they worry too much knowledge will upset their complacent preconceptions.
You saw this when the Mueller Report came out with the Dem Congressional leaders when within 45 minutes Steny Hoyer declared he’d read it-right 450 pages in 45 minutes-there were no impeachable offenses in it. This didn’t pass the laugh test, but then so did the idea he read it in 45 minutes. But the larger point is it showed Hoyer and Friends lacked any interest in the search for knowledge, all they cared about was their-false premise-that impeachment would have been a political disaster for them. The only “truth” they cared about was what they thought polls showed. Below I talk more about the need for citizen journalists-a la you and me-to create a new media to counter the Savvy.
She then discusses how Mulder himself-in the X-Files reunion in 2017 post the Russians and the FBI electing “President Trump”-would remark:
“The world was so dangerous and complex then,” he says, referring to the 1990s. “Who would have thought we’d look back with nostalgia and say that was a simpler time, Scully? How the hell did that happen?”
Mulder bemoans that the truth he struggled to find is now openly out there, but it makes no difference. No one in power will do anything beneficial to humanity, and the public is too saturated with both facts and disinformation to care. In a satirical episode mocking both the show and its audience, Mulder meets a mysterious man who informs him that his quest is over: “Your time is past. We’re living in a post-cover-up, post-conspiracy age.” The man’s name, of course, is Dr. They, because They are behind everything, and They get away with it. “Our current president once said something truly profound,” Dr. They says. “He said, ‘Nobody knows for sure.’” “What was he referring to?” Mulder asks. “What does it matter?” Dr. They responds with a shrug and a grin.
Pg 140
She also discusses how in the 1990s investigating conspiracy theories was seen as something that was-if kind of the province of “weird nerds” relatively harmless. But then 9/11-perhaps the Mother of all Conspiracies?-took away its innocence.
Pg 141.
Indeed Cheney-Bush deliberately framed such questions as unpatriotic and perhaps a danger to the “homeland”-post 9/11 we became a “homeland.” They insisted that ‘no one could have ever imagined’ 9/11.
Pg 142
Indeed, rather unbelievably the plot of the first episode of the Long Gunman-the spinoff to the X-Files had the idea of a plane being highjacked and driven into the WTC.
The plot of the first episode, which aired on March 4, 2001, is as follows: the Lone Gunmen discover that a commercial flight headed to Boston had been hijacked. Initially fearing there was a bomb on board, they learn that the plane itself is the weapon, and that it had been commandeered to fly into the World Trade Center and cause the buildings to collapse. “They intend to bring this down in the middle of New York City?!” John Fitzgerald Byers, one of the Lone Gunmen, says in disbelief. The series depicts the plane, hijacked via computer, heading to the same sections of the Twin Towers that were hit on 9/11, until the Lone Gunmen override the system and prevent disaster.”
“The episode concludes with a horrifying reveal: rogue forces from within the US government had staged the World Trade Center attack themselves. Byers’s father, a retired government consultant, explains their plot to his son: “The Cold War is over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market is flat. Bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed.” Byers implores his father to tell the world the truth. His father replies that doing so would be both pointless and dangerous: “My silence will keep me alive. And you. I know you and your friends are fighting for the American dream. Just don’t expect to win.”
“The point of this anecdote is not to imply that the US government carried out the 9/11 attacks, or that The Lone Gunmen production staff had advance knowledge of them. It is to note that, once again, a terrible threat that “nobody saw coming” was so foreseeable that it played out on a high-rated television show six months before it played out in reality.”
FN: Speaking only for myself here I don’t mean to imply it wasn’t an inside job either-I’m not saying the tv show producers knew anything-though it was a good conjecture you have to admit. Agaoin as noted in Chapter the Russian 9/11, not only do conspiracies happen, false flags happen. Putin seized power with the Russian 9/11, Hitler had the Reichstag fire. Nor is the use of a false flag unprecedented for our own government-a la Operation Northwoods. And let’s not even discuss Israel…
End FN
As she notes on pg 144 the idea that the public doesn’t have the full truth on 9/11 is hardly a fringe view.
Twenty years after 9/11, there are conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories, propaganda about propaganda, obfuscation about obfuscation. But what we do not have is truth or a reliable avenue through which to find it. The belief that the public does not know the full story of the 9/11 attacks is not fringe or unfounded. It has been expressed by multiple elected officials, intelligence experts, investigative journalists, and members of the 9/11 Commission, some of whom, like former Florida senator Bob Graham, wrote about their anguish that the full facts have not been made available to the public.”
“September 11 was an avoidable tragedy,” Graham wrote in his 2004 book Intelligence Matters. He described “a cover-up orchestrated by the White House to protect not only the agencies that had failed but also America’s relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”26 He called out FBI head Robert Mueller, in particular, as a key player in the cover-up—a chilling echo in light of Mueller’s later refusal to fully investigate Trump’s criminal ties—as well as Bush, who he said should be impeached. In September 2021, Graham was vindicated when the Biden administration released declassified FBI documents that ran counter to the 9/11 Commission’s prior report and showed that Al Qaeda had in fact operated in the United States with the active, knowing support of members of the Saudi government.27,28 But vindication seventeen years later, after two catastrophic wars justified by the “war on terror” that followed the attacks, is cold comfort.”
That we don’t know the full story of 9/11 is very widely held indeed-including many of the 9/11 families-similar to how many of the hostages in Iran in 1980 didn’t believe the full story and many believed that Bush-Reagan did make a deal to hold back their release with the Ayatollah-as did the majority of the public.
But the marginalization of those who ask tough questions and dispute the official, Savvy, line continues apace.
9/11 was by any definition a conspiracy: an organized secret plan by nefarious actors working together to carry out an illegal act. But in an era where “just asking questions” has been demonized as the purview of people who falsify answers, it has become harder to dissect the nuances of a plot in public. Declaring “We do not have all the facts, but we deserve to know them” is different from professing faith in an alternative narrative or regurgitating rumors, but deriders often label them as one and the same. The identities of the conspirators, the enablers, the abettors, the obscurers, and the beneficiaries are all still up for debate—at least, when people feel brave enough to weigh in.”
Pg 145
So to recap: we can’t move on without closure, and there’s no closure without accountability, and no accountability without the truth. As I noted elsewhere in this book dissertation this was a project I initially started in November of 2017-yep. Six years later I think this is the last, penultimate chapter of this book. I do wish in retrospect I’d done sequels LOL.
What has become clearer to me as I’ve continued to work on what turned out to be not a book but a dissertation-which is perhaps appropriate for the huge problems faced by our country at this point in time- is that if we are to ever get to the truth it’s on us to do it. I mean you and I, John and Jane Q. Citizen.
CF: Gaslitnation Andrea Chalup and Black Diplomats
This is going to require more work than simply voting-again as noted above Vote Harder isn’t enough-and we’ve been voting hard. Certainly we in the Center Left need to demand more from our Democratic leaders-as noted above the Democratic party shouldn’t be destroyed but it does need reform. More precisely, it needs new blood. Since 2016 we’ve been seeing some but we need a lot more. That at the end of the day it’s on us is something I at least implicitly understood-as did the many who ran for Office for the first time after Putin and the FBI conspired to steal the 2016 election.
FN: We’ve seen some good ones among the new blood like John Fetterman laughing off the GOP’s baseless impeachment talk or Senator Hank Johnson’s excellent and germane questions to Merrick Garland last week-as Andrea Chalupa points out however, Garland’s response left a lot to be desired. He seemed to push back harder against Johnson”s questions than the harangues of the GOP co-conspirators. He all but scoffed in response to Johnson’s inquiring what happened to his request that the DOJ consider a probe of Clarence Thomas’ corruption. I noted above that if Garland is between a rock and a hard place its’ of his own making. Again it’s important to remember that Garland is who continues to breath life into the unpredicated fishing expedition of Hunter Biden.
I too begun working on this-my first book, presumably the longest… and when I ran in the NY2 Democratic primary in 2017-I discuss this elsewhere in this book. That it was on us was already becoming clearer to me then but it’s only taken on a sharper relief since, especially after 2018 when it became very clear we can’t just trust the Old Guard Democratic leadership to ‘take it from here.’
As noted above, for years Americans have been trying to give the Democratic party the power to save our democracy and end our 45 plus years of a “low wage epidemic” but the Dems keep punting. Basically we need better leaders, a better Democratic party, and also, not to put too fine a point on it. a better media.
And that’s where we come in-it’s on us to become these better leaders, Democrats, and journalists. As is clear from this book, I’m a big fan of Seth Abramson and he’s clearly a very decent person as well as doing such great work. I recently had an issue updating my membership on his Substack page-it’s just $5 a month but the system wasn’t updating my payment info no matter how many times I sent my new info-and emailed the email on his website and he responded personally and the problem was fixed.
I emailed back to thank him profusely but did offer the unsolicited lament that I wish he did take sources. He didn’t respond to that not surprisingly. My comment was regarding his past post that explained he considers himself a “curational journalist”-he doesn’t take any sources, he just uses the source journalism and others for his brand of journalism. It turns out that the Savvy have a real bee up their bonnet over what Seth calls curational journalism.
FN: He offers up an excellent big picture critique of savvy journalism which is very much needed and the battle that he describes between “Old Media and New Media.”
Archive – Media of Proof (substack.com)
Again we very much need a new media. And I will go out on a limb and suggest, at the risk of it sounding self serving-this book could contribute to this New Media we need to build-as, again, it all starts with the truth. That’s what this book has endeavored so mightily to get to the bottom of. If you want to think of it as a kind of intellectual dossier of raw intelligence that’s fine with me, however, you construe it. But imagine if the many conjectures and leads in this book were followed up by researchers and journalists. Like maybe, I don’t know, someone could actually call Jason Wilson again-as we saw in Chapter Ari Melber Papadopoulos, he’s the Chicago sports bar patron who told the Daily Beast the Coffee Boy DID tell Jeff Sessions about Mifsud’s claim the Russians had incriminating emails about Hillary. There’s dozens if not hundreds of such leads that could be followed up with-like following up on the breadcrumbs that GOP co-conspirators Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi left in their respective books regarding what turns out to be a central role in Weinergate-see chapter Unreported Background. Maybe someone could drill down on what is the Whitewatering cum Hillary Clintoning of Hunter Biden.
While Seth considers himself a curational journalist, I don’t know how I would construe what I do-I kind of think I do a number of things-as for that matter does Seth. Can what I do be construed as also curational journalism? For me the way I’m construed in that sense is not a great concern. What matters to me is that we finally begin getting to the truth about what happened in 2016-and what has in fact been going on 60 years if you start with JFK it’s 60 years this November 22 and I certainly want to do anything I can to help move this vitally important work forward-as hopefully this book makes abundantly clear.
Seth prefers not to take on sources, but I’d be happy to take them if I got any as-again-we need new journalists and if you agree then it falls to you and I to fix this problem-not the vain hope that one day the Savvy punditocracy will get it-hopefully this book has helped you see that they never will.
It’s on us to make sure that 2016-or 1968, or 1972, or 1980, or 2000 never happen again. And maybe figure out what really happened in 1962 Dallas or NYC 9/11-or what really happened to all those deleted Secret Service texts on January 6 to boot.
For the rest of it, we must do our own investigations-through citizen journalists and indie outlets. Hopefully we can also light a fire under savvy MSM butts as well but here too, the mistake is in thinking their efforts will ever be sufficient. The strengths and limitations of the Savvy have been abundantly clear the last few years no less than the Dem leaders.
Fundamentally as Michael Wolff puts it the Savvy negotiate with themselves on how much that they know they will actually report. That and their View From Nowhere style of journalism-that Jay Rosen has discussed in considerable detail. In their mind to be good, objective journalism you should have no point of view, much less advocate for an agenda.
But for US?-we are advocates. We very explicitly take a side-the side of the future health and success of our democracy.
Again, as I’ve argued elsewhere in this book, if you are a young up and coming journalist who wants to see some action and make a name for yourself the water here is very warm-and very deep; more than enough fish in this lake for 1000 enterprising and dogged citizen journalists.
Imagine if there was a single citizen journalist investigating every single discrete question raised in this book alone? That’d probably give us 1000 different investigations by itself.
The mistake is sitting back and expecting the Powers That Be-the Savvy pundits, the Old Guard Dem leaders to ever get it right. So for those as concerned about the state of our democracy as I am I urge you to join with me and many others to give us the leaders, Democratic party, and media we need and deserve. Again, as we saw in our post Clinton election analysis above, we’re already the majority, we are not in charge only because our democracy has been continually subverted.
Regarding the point above about having the “correct investigative attitude” at the end of the day it’s not about always being right-nobody is, and I’m certainly not claiming that everything I say in this book is right-a lot of it is sort of a raw intelligence deep dive, though I painstakingly document my many assertions of various facts. But it’s not about being right about everything it’s having a genuine spirt of inquiry vs Savvy pundits who could care less-indeed, it’s been said that to go far in mainstream US journalistic circles the precursor is to have an aggressively incurious attitude towards knowledge and the world. At the end o the day it’s not about having all the right answers-nobody does-but asking the right questions, or even being willing to ask the wrong questions
It’s past time that we begin to change this as a supermajority of Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck. And this fight for democracy-a dream deferred far too long is international-at home and abroad in places like Ukraine and Syria.
FN: To say nothing of Israel where democracy looks as dead as in Russia.
I was very inspired by an interview Andrea Chalupa did yesterday with the Black Diplomats host.
Everybody has their own moment of “radicalization” when enough is enough. This is when you plant your flag. For many it was JFK’s assassination and the subsequent broad and deep coverup. For others it was 9/11. As I said above, for me it was 2016 in seeing the FBI-with an assist by the NYTimes-elect Trump.
Again, this fight is not only in the US-the fight between democracy and authoritarianism that has been bubbling up in recent years is international in scope. Nowhere more today than in those struggling under Putin’s oppressive boot-both in the countries Russia menaces, starting with Ukraine, to be sure, but also within Russia itself where Putin victimizes his own citizens.
Indeed, within Russia itself-Masha Gessen talks about the activist who dreamed of holding the Communist leaders accountable.
Since then you had Putin’s 9/11-wether or not our 9/11 was an inside job, Putin’s certainly was-which led to the assassination of Litvinenko.
Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko – Wikipedia
The Suspected Poisoning of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s Most Prominent Adversary | The New Yorker
A list of Putin’s critics that have been poisoned or killed – NBC New York
link to Gaslitnation Chalupa-Black Diplomats
Again the title of this chapter is the making of a “conspiracy theorist” I wasn’t born this way , I got here through long experience as a concerned citizen trying to make my own society better. It was 30 years of voting with the majority only to see the minority become even more powerful and entrenched.
I’ve come to see “conspiracy theorists” differently. There’s something truly romantic, indeed, inspiring about those who refuse to just move on. Not without truth and only then accountability. That’s our only chance at genuine closure.
In this book I discussed many anti democratic conspiracies meant to empower the minority to prevail over the majority. Nixon’s North Vietnam Collusion in 1968, Nixon’s Watergate n in 1972-where as we see in this book, Roger Stone had a leading role-Reagan-Bush Iranian Ayatollah Collusion 1980, Bush-Gore 2000, all the many questions begged by 9/11’s version of the Warren Report starting with Cheney’s alleged stand down order, and, yes, Russian cum FBI Collusion 2016.
But JFK-Oswald? Really? But post 2016 I’ve come to realize-why not? Again if you are a JFK “conspiracy nut” you are not alone-again you are in the majority. The fly in the ointment is that as America is not a democracy-at least not a fully functioning one-you have been marginalized.
So Who Killed JFK? — The JFK Historical Group
Yes indeed, that’s the question. But again, as we saw above on Ms. Kendzior’s thoughts on the X Files, it’s not just about the destination, it’s about the journey. A lot of time you find Savvy folks in a rush-‘Ok who killed him then? You don’t know? So drop the conspiracy theory.’
But to get the right answers you have to ask the right questions. David Denton:
Having taught a class called “The Political Assassinations of the 1960s” on my Olney Central College campus since 2001, as well as being heavily involved in the pursuit of the truth of what happened in the JFK assassination for much longer than that, it is not surprising that I’m asked the question “So who killed JFK?” quite often.
With the imminent release of many of the JFK files last October, and the corresponding renewed interest that came along with it, it is also not surprising that the frequency of that same question reached a crescendo last fall.
Many Americans, nominally interested but understandably curious about what is arguably the most controversial event in American history, thought perhaps the release of these files might finally give them an answer to what really happened in Dallas. The establishment American media, despite its typically short attention span, also appeared at least temporarily transfixed on the upcoming release, although their interest, in general, seemed to be centered more on the hope that it would finally put to rest any notions of conspiracy in the Kennedy murder.
Neither the public in general, nor the nation’s media, really obtained the final answer they were looking for, primarily because the simple conclusion to the story does not exist. What has become clear and simple for most Americans to understand over time is that the Kennedy murder was not the act of a lone assassin. They have arrived at that conclusion not because of some national paranoia foisted upon them by conspiracy theorists, but by the incontrovertible facts that have come to light in this case that simply cannot be dismissed or explained away. Most Americans see the impossibility of the single bullet theory, an essential part of any “lone nut” scenario. They are also aware of the numerous witnesses whose stories contradict the official version of what happened in Dallas.”
He also notes the Savvy conventional wisdom a la Michael Isikoff cum Devlin Barrett-once again, talk about a contradiction in terms-that tries to marginalize anyone with questions-and again, millions of Americans have these completely reasonable questions:
Despite where the public, in general, appears to be regarding the JFK assassination, many conspiracy skeptics in the nation’s media continue to circulate a particularly tiresome narrative that some Americans need to believe that the assassination must be the work of greater forces rather than a victim of a mere lone gunman. This simply has no basis in fact. Americans have not fallen victim to some mass psychosis, at least as far as the JFK murder is concerned. The country as a whole, due to the facts they have been confronted with that contradict the official version of history, has come to realize that November 22, 1963, is an unresolved event in our shared past. Bringing a conclusion to that part of our history has proven to be elusive.”
But, again, as this book attempts to do in great-if not spectacular-granular detail, there are many such major unresolved historical events over the last 60 years of US history going back to November 22, 1963. It’d be much easier to let these things go if they didn’t keep happening. Like, again, Hunter Biden is nothing new. This is the same thing the GOP did with Billy Carter, or the Clintons in the 1990s. or with the Swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004, or Obama’s birth certificate, Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, et al. In many ways the role the GOP co-conspirators have written for Hunter Biden is the the role Weiner very successfully filled in October 2016. PACE Led Zeppelin, The Song Remains the Same.
A longtime friend of mine who has been generally interested in this topic asked me a tough question about the recent release of documents and the seeming lack of answers that some hoped for: “At what point does this become beating a dead horse?” It is understandable the frustration many Americans have that there has been no final resolution to this story. In order to find the truth about this murder we have to look through a broader lens and see the numerous revelations and pieces of evidence that have accumulated over a period of time that point toward conspiracy and give us strong clues to who was involved.
As my son, also a history teacher has stated, at what point does coincidence become conspiracy? The large percentage of the American public sees the probability that larger forces were at work in the death of Kennedy, even if they are uncertain as to who they were. However, the problem lies not with the American people’s perception of the event, but with a lack of institutional validation coming from the media, the government, and the academic world in regard to what really happened in Dallas. Until any or all of these institutions come to grips with the reality of conspiracy in this case, there simply isn’t going to be closure.”
This is roughly where I am at this point as we approach the 60th anniversary of November 22, 1962-it’s clear to me that Oswald didn’t act alone and that it was some sort of conspiracy-I know that word again, the Savvy Michael Isikoff Media has labored so mightily to stigmatize any “conspiracy” not about Hillary Clinton, then the more “outlandish”, the better; but at the end of the day conspiracies great and small happen every day it’s part of human society much less the administration and governing of human society-that quite possibly included at a minimum “rogue” agents of the CIA and likely other intel and defense agencies.
FN: Indeed while everyone talks about the CIA-see Newman’s The CIA and Oswald-Newman could have written with at least as much justice of Oswald and the FBI as the Warren Report was the direct brainchild of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and as was confirmed by 2017’s documents but was widely known since the time of the Warren Commission, Oswald was a FBI informant.
If you’re interested, what got me here was-besides 2016, and in looking at history through fresher eyes, seeing the clear patterns in the political chicanery of many allegedly “nonpartisan, apolitical” but powerful institutions and agencies-probably in the case specifically of JFK was Oswald. More than the technical, granular details of how many bullets were shot on that day or from where, was the fascinatingly enigmatic figure of Lee Harvey. The more I read up and learned about him, the less plausible the official story became. The way Oswald carried on when he was in the US Army in the late 1950s as teenage young man was inexplicable. Here it was just a few years after Joe McCarthy was finally stopped and yet Oswald ran around in the army shouting from the heavens his love and support for the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. He walked into the US embassy, purportedly a dyed in the wool Communist looking to defect declaring his intention to go the USSR and betray all our secrets to the Reds. Yet he was never arrested or even interviewed?
Then he continued the same extravagant behavior when he was back in the US in the Summer of 1963 hanging out in New Orleans giving out leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba-an organization hated by the Right the Right leaning folks in intelligence and law enforcement.
It just seemed blindingly clear to me that Oswald was some sort of agent provocateur because if he was a genuine American interested in defecting to the Soviet Union out of principled, fervent support for Lenin-Marxism he wouldn’t have acted like this, he’d have acted more or less the opposite of this. You’d want to keep an exceedingly low profile, but Oswald at every point did the opposite.
“ The nation, as a whole, did become fixated once again on the JFK assassination in October, 2017, as the perceived deadline established by Congress 25 years before for the release of remaining classified documents approached. President Trump, who technically was the only individual who could stand in the way of it, appeared to initially be in favor of a full release. However, in the end he capitulated to last-minute lobbying from the CIA and the FBI. He suggested that there would be “potentially irreversible harm” to national security if he allowed all the records out at that time and, instead, put some of the remaining classified and redacted files under a six month review. Trump officials have stated that these remaining files should stay secret after this review “only in the rarest of cases.” With April 26, 2018, quickly approaching, we will find out soon if the President will stick to his promise.”
The above, was clearly written in 2018 and spoiler alert “President Trump” did not stick by his promise-he’s Donald Trump for God’s sake, for him to stick to a promise would be wildly out of character. Again, above, I’d argued that many of the old guard leftist types are interested in getting to the truth about JFK but they have a lot of blinkers-like many of them were sort of anti anti Trump. I suspect many of them saw Trump as a potential ally against the Deep State but, again, this couldn’t be more mistaken. After all, why would the “President” who only “won” the election because the FBI elected him put out stuff on Oswald the FBI didn’t want released? Trump, his GOP co-conspirators, the FBI, they’re all on the same team. And just so, as we see above, the FBI at Trump’s direction picked up Abraham Bolden and interrogated him about his writing for four hours.
The document dump did contain one truly earth shaking revelation:
According to Judyth Baker, one of the speakers at our Washington, D.C. conference and Lee Harvey Oswald’s mistress in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, one of the new documents reveals that Chief of CIA Counterintelligence Jim Angleton’s right-hand man, Raymond Rocca, told Warren Commission Attorney David Belin that just weeks before Kennedy’s murder Oswald was in Mexico City because he was involved in a plot to kill Fidel Castro. Baker points out that this confirms what she has been suggesting since 1999 about Oswald’s trip. This document, in effect, means the CIA knew Oswald went to Mexico City, and why. Although the Warren Commission was interviewing Rocca, at times he appears to be the one asking questions. From the file, it is apparent that Rocca’s boss, Angleton, did not want any blame laid on his department. Rocca wasn’t sure what Belin and the Warren Commission had been told by Richard Helms, Head of the CIA, who was feeding the Warren Commission what Baker referred to as “the CIA’s public version of things.
The most telling thing about this document and its description of Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, including the use of a cover story, is that it destroys the notion still out there that he was just a lone nut. It is a clear indication Oswald was involved in intelligence activities leading up to the events in Dallas.
Oswald was an FBI informant and the agency tried to cover it up.”
This seems to make almost uncanny sense as if anything ought to be clear by now is that if the Deep State’s up to any political chicanery, expect Trumpland to be knee deep in it. All things being equal the FBI should always be considered the first suspect on general principle in terms of political interference in what’s supposed to be our democratic government just based on what we know about it before we even discuss JFK-Oswald and all that.
After all the FBI is in many ways THE (anti) hero of this book-with some stiff competition from the NY Times, true-as they elected Trump-they had been trying to take down the Clintons since prior to Bill’s 1992 victory-see chapter A Very Republican Place
But as the JFK author David Denton writes “There’s no statute of limitations for justice.” No matter how elusive it’s proven to be.
At the end of the day we’re like the abused children of Reaganomics or “neoliberalism” or whatever you want to call it.
The GOP is the abusive Daddy party.
The Democrats are the abused, enabling Mommy party, except that Mommy doesn’t stand up for herself much less her children and enables and apologizes for Daddy’s abuse.
It’s time for her abused children to start standing up for themselves.
At the end of the day the fight for our democracy is about the long game. It’s clearly not for those easily discouraged or who prefer to go along to get along.
It requires commitment and vigilance. The vigilance of folks like Andrea Chalupa and Terrell Starr. Starr, a Black man from Brooklyn who has completely dedicated his life to supporting Ukraine-he’s move there, follows events closely for his fellow Americans back home. I really appreciate his guest appearances on Andrea Chalupa’s Gaslitnation for a lot of reasons-starting with Starr’s evocation of the crucial need for a multi racial alliance.
FN: He notes that he has received some criticism from the Black community for not focusing solely on the specific plight of Black Ukrainians.
There are many places we can look for inspiration-the determined 9/11 families who continue to demand and probe for answers. It’s ironic to speak of the Israeli 9/11 as we still don’t know what actually happened on the American one over 22 years ago.
You have Alexei Navalny who survived Putin’s plan to poison him, then chose to go to a Russian prison rather than let his crusade for ending authoritarianism in Russia fade.
Again it’s about a better, democratic future. But he who controls the past controls the present and he who controls the presents the future. Or as Masha Gessen’s 2017 title puts it: the future is history.
In Gessen’s earlier book on Putin she tells the fascinating story of the Soviet dissident-and ultimately martyr-Galina Starovoitova. Ms Galina had the sort of quixotic sense of mission required for those who hope to take our democracy back.
She had a run to be sure before her fall.
Galina Starovoitova, whose name the newscaster was repeating over and over, was a member of the lower house of parliament, one of Russia’s best-known politicians, and a friend. In the late 1980s, when the empire teetered on the brink of collapse, Starovoitova, an ethnographer, became a pro-democracy activist and the most prominent spokesperson for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian exclave in Azerbaijan that was then engulfed in the first of many armed ethnic conflicts that would mark the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. Like several other academics turned politicians, she had seemed to emerge in the spotlight instantly.”
“Though she had lived in Leningrad since she was an infant, the people of Armenia nominated her as their representative to the first quasi-democratically elected Supreme Soviet, and in 1989 she was voted into office by an overwhelming majority. In the Supreme Soviet, she became a leader of the Interregional Group, a minority pro-democracy faction whose leadership also included Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. As soon as Yeltsin was elected president of Russia in 1990—at that point largely a ceremonial and even aspirational post—Galina became his closest adviser, counseling him officially on ethnic issues and unofficially on everything else, including government appointments. In 1992, Yeltsin was considering Galina for the post of minister of defense; such an appointment, of a civilian and a woman whose views bordered on the pacifist, would have been a grand gesture in classic early-1990s Yeltsin style, a message that nothing would ever be the same in Russia and perhaps in the world.”
Pgs 2-3
But what I particularly appreciate about her is she demanded accountability for the crimes and corruption of the Soviet Communist leaders. She wasn’t trying to ‘just move on.’
That nothing should ever be the same was the crux of Galina’s agenda, radical even by early-nineties pro-democracy activist standards. As part of a small group of lawyers and politicians, she tried unsuccessfully to put the Communist Party of the USSR on trial. She authored a draft law on lustratsiya (lustra tion), the word deriving from the ancient Greek for “purification,” a concept that was now coming into use in former Eastern Bloc countries to denote the process of banning former Party and secret police operatives from holding public office. In 1992, she learned that the KGB had reconstituted an internal Party organization—a direct violation of Yeltsin’s August 1991 post–failed-coup decree outlawing the Russian Communist Party. At a public meeting in July 1992, she tried to confront Yeltsin with this fact, and he had rudely dismissed her, signaling both the end of Galina’s career in his administration and his own increasingly conciliatory stance toward the security services and the many die-hard Communists who remained in power or close to it. Dismissed from the administration, Galina made a push for the lustration law, which failed, and then left Russian politics altogether and decamped to the United States, first to the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, and then to teach at Brown
University.”
Although she was unsuccessful her intuition was right-as we see with Putin, the old KGB spooks became as powerful as ever.
It was at Brown that Galina met Masha Gessen. However, Galina ended up returning back to Russian politics after the Russian fight against the Chechnyan insurgency in 1995.
I do not actually remember when I met Galina in person, but we became friendly the year she was teaching at Brown: she was a frequent guest at my father’s house in the Boston area; I was shuttling back and forth between the United States and Moscow, and Galina became something of a mentor to me in the world of Russian politics, though she occasionally protested that she had completely returned to academe. Those protestations must have ended in December 1994, when Yeltsin launched a military offensive in the breakaway republic of Chechnya: the people advising him now apparently assured him that the insurgency could be tamed quickly and painlessly for the federal center. Galina perceived the new war as the certain disaster it was, and as the biggest threat yet to Russian democracy. In the spring she went to the Urals to chair a congress aimed at resurrecting her political party, Democratic Russia, which had once been the country’s most potent political force. I covered the congress for the leading Russian newspaper at the time, but on my way to the city of Chelyabinsk—a journey that involved a three-hour flight, followed by a three-hour bus ride—I managed to get myself robbed. I arrived in Chelyabinsk close to midnight, shaken and penniless, and ran into Galina in the hotel lobby: she had just emerged from a long day of tense meetings. Before I had a chance to say anything, she pulled me up to her room, where she placed a glass of vodka in my hands and sat down at a glass coffee table to make me a bunch of tiny salami sandwiches. She lent me money for the ticket back to Moscow.”
Galina clearly felt motherly toward me—I was the same age as her son, who had moved to England with his father just as his mother was becoming a major politician—but the scene with the sandwiches was part of something else too: in a country where political role models ran from leather-jacketed commissar to decrepit apparatchik, Galina was trying to be an entirely new creature, a politician who was also a human.”
Pgs 5-6
FN: The very word “human” touches a nerve in Leninist-Marxism as “humanism” is dismissed as “bourgeoise.”
At the same time, she pursued her legislative agenda furiously, stubbornly. In late 1997, for example, she again tried to push through her lustration bill—and failed again. In 1998 she immersed herself in an investigation of campaign financing of some of her most powerful political enemies, including the Communist speaker of the Duma, the lower house of parliament. (The Communist Party was legal again, and popular.) I had asked her why she had decided to return to politics when she knew full well she would never again have the kind of influence that had once been hers. She had tried to answer me several times always stumbling over her own motivation.
Galina finally answered Masha Gessen and her answer is particularly striking and thought provoking I think.
“Finally, she called me from a hospital where she was going to have surgery; about to go under anesthesia, she had been trying to fix her view of her life and had finally found an image she liked. “There is an ancient Greek legend about harpies,” she told me. “They are shadows that can come to life only if they drink human blood. The life of a scholar is the life of a shadow. When one participates in making the future happen, even a small part of the future—and this is what politics is about—that is when one who was a shadow can come to life. But for that, one has to drink blood, including one’s own.” I FOLLOWED KATE’S STARE to the boom box, which crackled slightly, as though the words emerging from its speakers were causing it strain. The newscaster was saying Galina had been shot dead several hours earlier, in the stairway of her apartment building in St. Petersburg.”
Galina therefore joined a long history of political assassination victims in Russia.
I find her answer she gave with her own approaching assassination striking for her idea that politics is about having a part in making the future. And this really is the heart of this book dissertation: there can be no moving on without closure, no closure without accountability, no accountability without the truth. And, indeed, accountability for the old KGB commissars was a key focus of Galina’s.
But the reason accountability matters so much is because politics is about the future. Like Masha’s book linked above on how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia-the future is history. Politics is about having a role in making the future.
This is why this book has apparently ruminated so much on the past-both near, 2016, as well as more distant, in this last chapter we’ve even kicked the hornet’s nest of JFK’s assassination. As I finish this dissertation that was supposed to be a book, almost six years later, it’s not clear where we are going. Our future remains unclear. OTOH we see the constant headlines everyday about Trump’s legal travails. He now has been indicted four times on 91 counts. Many of my friends and fellow Center Left Dems are giddy with talk of Trump finally facing accountability if not hard prison time.
Last week Trump stormed out of the court room after he was ordered to pay another fine for yet again attacking the Judge’s clerk. He also lost his fight to get the case thrown out. Meanwhile Special Counsel Jack Smith is urging the judge to throw Trump in jail if he defies the Court again. Still part of me can’t believe he’ll ever spend a day in prison with Trump 2.0 the Secret Service hanging with him. To be clear I hope he does but I’m skeptical-I’ll (happily) believe it when I see it.
Even putting that aside, at this point it looks like if he is convicted he may also be elected. The future is blurry but sometimes I think I’m seeing or imagining him giving another Inauguration from a prison cell. This is hard to imagine-if he wins it’s hard to think he’ll really be locked up-again hope I’m wrong. To be clear he belongs in prison. Chris Hayes the other night said he’s a “bleeding heart liberal’ who doesn’t want to see anyone locked up-on this I disagree, my heart most certainly does not bleed for Trump and his GOP co-conspirators.
FN: By the same token, the lawsuits to take Trump’s name off the ballot have great merit-per the 14th Amendment he is disqualified but as usual I doubt the facts and the law will matter. Remember even if these folks-who I greatly appreciate-are successful, if Trump’s name were to be stricken of any ballots it will probably only be in states he was doubtful to win in the first place. Again, as always hope my pessimistic take is wrong.
Beyond this we’ve had two very bad signs for those on Team Democracy: the 10/7 Hamas attack in Israel and the ascension of Mike Johnson to lead the GOP House-as noted above we have Rich Schaeffer and his LI Democrat Friends for the GOP even being in control of the House.
I hate to say it but 10/7 may have long term ill effects for the democratic project and prove a real boon for Team Authoritarianism. It’s been discussed since the rise of Trump and Brexit how the Far Right has been ascendent in many Western democracies-technically Israel is not in the West but politically it can be seen in this bloc.
There have been some (electoral) victories over the Far Right-notably the recent rejection of a Far Right party in Poland.
But again, as this chapter looks at in sharp relief, what 2016 demonstrates very clearly is that electoral politics is only one dimension in our political system, there’s also Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics. And again, 10/7 is a potential major problem for the Team Democracy project. One recurring question that’s been on my mind throughout this book was Israel. For there’s a recuring mystery: why is the Democratic party so reflexively pro Israel when you consider the evident disdain of Israel towards the Democratic party.
What was always implicit became explicit in 2012 when Netanyahu blatantly snubbed President Obama to address Jim Boehner’s Republican House. Then there was beyond the fact of Russian and Saudi Arabian election assistance to Donald Trump in 2016
Israel’s assistance to Reagan-Bush in 1980-the arms deals to Iran which began not in 1985 with Ollie North but with the deal with Iran and the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980.
Israel has always preferred the GOP as their support for Israel is unconditional whereas at least in principle the Democrats believe in a two state solution-though often just in principle. I mean even now Biden evokes the two state solution but in no way pushes Israel to negotiate for one-quite the opposite. Post 10/7 Biden has pledged unconditional support. He emphasizes that Israel should not target civilians but does nothing to ensure it won’t-spoiler alert it will.
The Israeli President has stated they make no distinction between Palestinian civilians and Hamas. Biden OTOH say they must do so. But how does Biden propose to compel Israel? There’s all kinds of ways he could-even hint on the slowing of aid. But apparently Biden is incapable of even considering such an option. It sort of reminds you of the revelation that every US President upon taking Office must agree to publicly support the findings of the Warren Commission. It’s as if the US President himself is only see free. Biden clearly feels constrained to so no more about his alleged belief in the two state solution than lip service.
Meanwhile Yoav Gallant speaks of “human animals.”
FN: Indeed in trying to solve the riddle of the fervency of Democratic support for Israel, Yoav Gallant’s radical Far Right Kahanism movement has long courted New York Democrats.
Evidently they were able to get HRC’s support in 2000-even though she won her election without their support.
End FN
Biden is clearly unwilling or unable to even consider any path but a blank check for Israel now. Even if his very political survival-and the very survival of American democracy-appears on the line.
Biden’s White House confronts heaviest week in over 1,000 days (axios.com)
As for Netanyahu… You have to give it to him in a sense: he is the political Lazarus of our time if not all time. While Trump still speaks peevishly about Bibi’s refusal to embrace Trump’s Big Lie of 2020 being stolen, in reality Netanyahu is Trump’s ultimate inspiration right now. Just two years ago, Bibi, like Trump, lost his Office, and appeared headed to prison.
But somehow he got back in, and promptly launched an authoritarian campaign to end the independent judiciary-which of course had nothing to do with killing the charges against him, surely only a “conspiracy theorist” would believe that!
But now with “the Israeli 9/11” Netanyahu is pretty much set for life. True, there were tremendous protests against his attack on the judiciary. But now post 10/7 Bib appears set for life. Yes his disapproval rating is 80%. In fact Israelis want him to step down AFTER the war. But according to Bibi the war is going to take 10 years…
Again, I think this is potentially a real boon to authoritarianism around the world not just the Middle East. By way of an example, let’s start with Russia’s war on Ukraine. In Mike Johnson, the GOP has now elevated not just an election denier, but someone who voted against Ukraine aid last time. To be sure, Kevin McCarthy himself, before Matt Gaetz took away his job, had declared that while he supports helping Ukraine there cannot be a “blank check.”
McCarthy: No ‘blank check’ for Ukraine if GOP wins majority | AP News
Note he said this before the 2022 election, it was kind of a campaign promise. Apparently only Israel gets a blank check. Post 10/7 Biden tried to head off the threat to further Ukraine aid by linking it to aid for Israel in his recent speech. This didn’t work-the GOP said ‘Great. Never mind the Ukraine aid, let’s just vote on Israel’s aid ASAP.’
That’s how the GOP negotiates…
To be sure, while President Joe’s heart was in the right place, his narrative in drawing a parallel between Netanyahu’s Israel and Zelensky’s Ukraine wasn’t coherent conceptually as Israel is not Ukraine in this picture, it’s Russia. Netanyahu is the Israeli Putin. This is no hyperbole when you recall that he’s been in Office just as long.
Indeed, Israel knew this all along despite the illusions of Biden and other “institutionalist” Democrats.
Even prior to Netanyahu getting back in, Israel was one of the few West aligned countries not to take Ukraine’s side. Israel took an officially “neutral” position-AND actually sent Putin weapon systems during his still ongoing invasion.
Three Reasons Why Israel Is Hesitant to Condemn Putin Over Ukraine – Europe – Haaretz.com
Now, post Bibi’s return and 10/7, Netanyahu rebuffed Zelensky’s support and offer to visit Israel. Indeed, Israel has always been very cleareyed about itself and its agenda. Biden may live in his illusions but Israel understands it’s Russia not Ukraine in this story.
It’s been said many times in the last three weeks that 10/7 was Israel’s 9/11. RealClearPolitics asserted that in fact 10/7 was much worse than 9/11. OTOH Biden who recently sat in on an Israeli cabinet meeting warned them not to make the mistakes we made post 9/11. Very true other than the fact that they weren’t mistakes-Bush-Cheney Cheney-Bush-or maybe Cheney-Rumsfeld?-had been planning the invasion of Iraq for 10 years.
FN: The fact that Biden sat in on the cabinet meeting underscores the fact that Israel remains totally dependent on the United States and could not be doing this without our approval.
But Israel’s leadership seems to me have never had any illusions about what their true agenda is-genocide of the Palestinian people in the interests of a ethno national religious state. In a sense they’ve never even been hypocritical about it-just as they refused to criticize Putin-as they know they are doing the same thing to the Palestinians he’s doing to the Ukrainians-they always demurred on condemning South Africa.
This was clear to them for years before 1948 if you look at the discussions of the leading Zionists going back over 100 years, indeed, into the 19th century. They were also always very aware of the requisite political pitfalls of such a project. What’s clearer than ever 75 years in, is how effective they’ve been. Again, 9/11 indeed. Biden may warn them against our “mistakes” but these are just words and if RCP is correct and this was a far worse attack on Israel than 9/11 was on the US that means they get to make far worse “mistakes” than even Bush-Cheney did.
At the end of the day Israel knows well how to handle the Americans. There was recently the appearance of the video from 22 years ago, soon after Clinton left Office where Netanyahu laughed at how easy it is to con we Americans.
Netanyahu – who did not hold political office when the recording was made – was dismissive of the United States, calling it easily manipulated.
“I know what America is,” Netanyahu said. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”
Netanyahu also spoke extensively about undermining the Oslo Accords, the agreement signed in 1993 which set a framework for future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.”
Netanyahu: US easily manipulated | News | Al Jazeera
This is very interesting as its how Bibi always works-he pretends to be operating in good faith while he torpedoes the US agenda. This is a good understanding of Netanyahu’s larger very successful campaign to sink a two state solution.
This is why clearly Biden’s Secretary of State’s heart is in the right thing in his recent op-ed the impact of it is basically nil. Blinken’s evocation of the two state solution comes across as shockingly naive:
“In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, the U.S. Secretary of State writes ‘We don’t have to choose between defending Israel and aiding Palestinian civilians.’ He also re-affirmed the two-state solution as ‘the sole viable path to lasting peace’ ”
While the Israeli paper Haaretz calls this a “forceful” case to the extent that it evokes the two state solution it seems naive and effectual-as the Democrats always do when they attempt to exhort Israel to do better-without any meaningful carrots or sticks. Netanyahu hardly seems impressed by Blinken’s forcefulness.
Blinken had tweeted out in support of a pause a few weeks ago then was ordered to take it down. But Blinken’s boss-President Biden-hardly helps Blinken’s case by continuing to use Israeli talking points-at one point evoking the fiction that Hamas beheaded babies, then taking the word of Israel’s security forces that Hamas hit that hospital in Gaza which turned out to be yet another piece of Israeli disinformation.
Biden has dismissed the Palestinian death tolls reported by the Gaza health ministry with a simple wave of his hand-he says he can’t believe Hamas.
Biden’s dismissal of the reported Palestinian death toll – The Washington Post
Ok but how can you believe Netanyahu’s government? No matter how dishonest you believe Hamas is, it’s not possible to be more dishonest than Netanyahu and Friends.
But again, never do Democrats sound more naive than when they evoke the two state solution-it’s as if they missed the last 28 years of Middle East politics-going back to when Rabin was assassinated.
One of the many canards of the Warren Commission was the idea that political assassinations are unpossible-though they were speaking of America, they seemed to be willing to accept they happened in Europe or somewhere else. But in America only lone nuts assassinate Presidents, etc. Even John Wilkes Booth was according to the WC a lone nut.
Did Israel have its own Warren Commission post Rabin’s assassination? In any case no one can deny that this was a successful assassination-it succeeded beyond Yigal Amir’s wildest dreams.
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’
Twenty-five years after the death of the Israeli prime minister, those who were there recall the night two bullets altered the destiny of two nations.”
Should we call Yigal Amir the Israeli Oswald? Probably not as unlike Oswald he was really guilty AND is still alive. Oswald had to die because he was innocent.
In any case, it’s clear in retrospect that the promise of a two state solution died with Rabin as this very interesting Jerusalem Post editorial argues-written just 11 days ago.
Most Israelis above a certain age remember exactly where they were on November 4, 1995, when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot at a rally in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, an ultra-nationalist Israeli. I am not one of them. I was three years old, still in my birth country of South Africa and two decades away from making aliyah. But, as history shows, in the fall of 1995 supporting the Oslo Accords – which broke a generations-long impasse by giving a measure of self-governance to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – felt to most Israelis like a necessity.
Thirty years ago, on September 13, 1993, Rabin signed the first Oslo Accords with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the White House. Then on September 28, 1995, just months before his assassination, Rabin signed the second Oslo agreement with Arafat in Taba, Egypt
Israel was experiencing seething opposition. For months, spokespeople from the settlement movement had been vehemently criticizing Rabin’s government and mobilizing protesters, some openly advocating for Rabin’s elimination. Notably among them was a young Itamar Ben-Gvir.”
Who is now Israel’s Defense Secretary who calls Arabs “human animals.” It’s easy to treat him as a “marginal figure” but this is the mistake the Savvy types always make-if Bibi does fall, and I’m far from convinced of that either, again, as noted above he’s the ultimate political Lazarus and for all the criticism he gets he’s achieved everything he’s wanted over the last 28 years going back to Rabin’s murder.
But everything changed after Rabin’s assassination. It led to the end of the “peace process”-while Bill Clinton would work very hard on it the next five years the Oslo Accords were the equivalent of a zombie, a dead man walking-you know like in the movie, he’s already dead, he just doesn’t know that yet.
But it wasn’t only the end of any meaningful peace process with the Palestinians but the end of the Center Left as a political force in Israeli politics.
Rabin’s assassination cast a pall over Israel, where everything seemed surreal. It triggered an outpouring of tears and appeals for dialogue, healing, and, most importantly, unity. Little did those who supported the Oslo Accords realize that these calls would ultimately be used against them, becoming tools of their political downfall. In the years following Rabin’s death, the religious Right, staunch opponents of peace with the Palestinians, rose to prominence in Israeli politics. Meanwhile, champions of reconciliation, who had once been the country’s dominant political force, found themselves sidelined. This outcome was unthinkable at the time. The murder of the prime minister, a revered war hero and former chief of staff, by a right-wing extremist might have been expected to galvanize his supporters and weaken his opponents, many of whom were seen as having contributed to the atmosphere that led to the assassination. But this was not to be the case.”
I find this entire story fascinating as it seems to me true of the Center Left everywhere not just Israel, indeed, many times the American Center Left-may political home-falls for this same unity canard-in the US it’s the bipartisan fetish I discussed above. Heck, I love President Obama-voted for him twice-but his career was based on a fiction: ‘there is no Blue State American and Red State America…’
Talk about not aging well!
What is clear is that many times when the Right seems most weakened or imperiled is the moment before its greatest triumphs.
Back to the Jerusalem Post:
What followed was the implosion of the Israeli Center-Left, which was not solely due to Rabin’s murder nor solely from the failure of the peace process, but from something deeper. After Rabin’s death, the opponents of peace quickly distanced themselves from the assassin and pleaded for national unity. Many on the Left wanted to believe that the national trauma from the assassination had induced a contrition of sorts. But the imperative of unity was invoked mainly to stifle reaction and criticism: This meant that the Right could not be held accountable for inciting violence against Rabin, that its leaders were not answerable for their tactics, and that the religious authorities who sanctioned the assassination would not be prosecuted. Some shamelessly argued that the peace process had aggravated the country’s divisions, as if to blame Rabin for his own murder. Above all, the call for unity demanded that the assassination not be “politicized,” which meant that the assassin’s openly political cause—derailing the peace agreement—could not be mentioned.”
This is the Right’s playbook here in the US every time there’s another mass shooting-like just happened in Maine. Now’s not the time for partisanship but unity. And the Center Left Dem leaders swoon. Indeed, this book as documented the many times over the last 45 years-going back to Nixon’s theft of the 1968 election by scuttling LBJ’s peace talks-where Democratic leaders starting with LBJ chose “unity” over accountability.
I don’t want to mislead. While I believe it is a reasonable assumption to think Rabin would have been re-elected in 1996, it is just as reasonable to assume he would not have been able to reach a final status agreement with the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, the assassination sent a message to the liberal front: Peace with your neighbors means war with your brothers. Paralyzed by the continual threats of fraternal war and unable to resist the Right’s unity offensive, liberal Israelis surrendered the ability to define one of the nation’s most fateful events. Public rage evolved quickly into a sentimental theater of grief. Melancholy ballads sung over candles became the trademark of Rabin’s younger mourners, who became known as “the candle youth.” Stripped of causes and consequences, his assassination and legacy were effectively purged of their political significance; the extremists who imposed their will by threat of force were no longer seen as the offenders, while those who criticized them and promoted peace policies were labeled traitors.
This takes us back to the point of Galina, Masha Gessen’s Soviet dissident friend: politics is about making a piece of the future but also Orwell’s that without having control of your history you have no control of your future. The Center Left was dispossessed of the past and so lost control of the Israeli future.
Peace with Palestinians means war with the Israeli Right
Hence, it should be no surprise that at the current pro-government rallies advocating for the judicial overhaul, participants, predominantly from the settlements, label their adversaries as traitors. They can be seen donning T-shirts, distributing stickers, and displaying signs that celebrate Rabin’s assassin. This sentiment underscores the profound and inherent link between the events of 1995 and 2023, between the overhaul itself, the aspiration to change the situation on the ground from occupation to annexation, and the damage inflicted upon the democratic framework of the State of Israel.”
I would note that as critical as I am of the Israeli government, it seems to me the media over there is in may ways superior in its coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict than the US media which is largely just the worst Israeli boosterism.
Indeed, this takes us back to Netanyahu’s 2001 video where he laughs at how he played Bill Clinton and the United States. Again, the Far Right Israeli leaders have always been entirely clearheaded about their agenda. With all the talk of Israel being the only democracy in the region, it’s been one party state post Rabin, with its own very of Vladimir Putin-again Bibi has been in power just about as long as Putin has been.
Bibi himself can’t believe how gullible the American leadership is:
On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.
Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.
He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd”.
It is absurd, but it’s fascinating that Bib himself recognizes how absurd it is.
Again he’s completely clearheaded about what he’s doing:
“He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel’s harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats”
You have to admit: he’s not high on his own supply. Which is why I’m skeptical he’s going down despite the talk about the Biden Administration-what do they know anyway? Biden appears just as gullible as Clinton was.
Indeed, the level of US support for Israel is absurd-as Bibi says. It’s so absurd it begs the question: why is it so high? Having said that as I argued above it’s important to distinguish between electoral politics and Deep State politics. It’s America’s political leadership not the people who give Israel a blank check. Indeed, even now polls show that Americans-across party lines-support a ceasefire in Gaza.
The point of Peter Dale Scott’s analysis of “Deep Politics” is that many of these decisions, especially regarding foreign policy are made not in the electoral process, and not even by elected leaders, but through various intelligence and security agencies.
Again according to Christopher Fulton, US Presidents are sworn to publicly agree with the Warren Report.
So maybe they are also sworn to support Israel. Because, again, as Netanyahu says, the level of US elite support for Israel is absurd.
As for 9/11, it seems to me that 9/11 is back. We’ve heard a lot of talk about anti Semitism post 10/7 and considerably less about Islamophobia. Obviously they are both wrong, but has anti Semitism been more prominent than Islamophobia post 10/7?
Trumpland the FBI says anti Semitism has exploded.
Link to Christopher Wray.
Obviously anti Semitism should be fought and resisted. To the extent is has greatly increased it should be combatted. Having said that the worry is there is a clear tactic made famous by Alex Dershowitz and Friends where all or most criticism of Israel is “anti Semitic.” The clear intent is to collapse any distinction between criticism of Israel and anti Semitic attacks on Jewish people. The attempt to collapse the distinction is about criminalizing political speech.
So I have mixed feelings about this Politico article:
“We’ve seen hundreds of pro-Hamas events across the United States. So one of the things that struck me from this meeting is you heard multiple people from the Jewish community say we’ve never seen anything like this ever,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who attended the meeting.
Jewish leaders to Biden officials: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this ever’ – POLITICO
Already this raises some concerns. First of all the ADL tends to do what Dershowitz does-dismiss 96% of legitimate criticism of the Israeli state as anti Semitism. It’s arguable the ADL’s focus is less to protect Jews than the state of Israel.
As for “pro Hamas” evens how are those defined? Often you see anyone who criticizes Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza-where they are knowingly murdering civilians by the tens and hundreds in the push to take down one alleged “Hamas leader”
Watch: News anchor challenges IDF official over civilian deaths in Gaza bombing (yahoo.com)
I’m not sure these are all “pro Hamas” events are really “pro Hamas” but even if they are that’s not necessarily anti Semitism either. One of the problems is that Israel-and its US mouthpiece-keeps claiming Hamas is ISIS and it’s really not.
Israel says Hamas ‘is ISIS.’ But it’s not. – The Washington Post
This is fine so far as it goes:
Details of the recommendations: The recommendations included a “Dear Colleague” letter that strongly supports Jewish students on campus and has a similar forcefulness as the Biden administration’s national strategy on combating antisemitism, and a nationwide compliance initiative from the department that would preempt waiting for civil rights complaints to be filed.
But again should such a letter also be directed to Arab or Muslim students? That only Jews are being explicitly reached out to suggests again, that Jews are valued more than Arabs or Muslims.
But this is very problematic:
The groups also recommended the department examine actions from student groups on campuses supporting the Hamas attacks because they could be “engaging in material support for terrorism, which would be a criminal matter,” according to an attendee who spoke on background. They also want the department to consider training for K-12 educators on antisemitism.
This essentially criminalizes political speech. Again what counts as “supporting the Hamas attacks?” If simply criticizing Israel is what they consider being pro Hamas then this is really about censoring political criticism of Israel.
In fairness maybe those who are “pro Netanyahu” should also be spied on? After all he’s killed far more Palestinians than Hamas has killed Israelis. But this is the tenor of the US politics at present-if you criticize Israel then you should be watched in case you are a Hamas operative or so the ADL and Friends would like it.
Again the danger is losing the thread on our history. This was the big idea behind this book dissertation. The thought behind it was that for us to take back our country in the future we needed to properly take back our past. This has been a great struggle as the Savvy MSM is always trying to make folks forget. JFK-Oswald. Nixon 1968. Nixon 1972. Iran Collusion. Iran Contra. Bush-Gore. 9/11. Emailgate, Comeygate, Russian Collusion. Ukraine Extortion. January 6.
At every step of the way the mainstream press and the powers that be tries to push and coax folks into forgetting the past-let’s just move on. Now is not the time for recriminations but unity. This is what happened to Israel’s Center Left in the 1990s and they’ve never come back. Our future at this point looks pretty shaky.
Folks rightly talk about how in 2024 it’s about democracy itself in America. Very true. But in many countries democracy has long since lost. Israel has become a one party Far Right political enthno nationalist theocracy. It was always intended to be a theocracy but until Rabin’s murder it was at least something of a democracy for Jews. Since then democracy has vanished.
10/7 is like 9/11 before it also a major assault on our memory. It’s an assault on history. History doesn’t exist-nothing happened until 10/7. Even Biden who claims to believe passionately in the edict there shall be no more 9/11s is again falling into 9/11 mode thanks to the Israeli 9/11. It’s clear who benefits, is already benefitting from 10/7: Netanyahu and Putin. Also maybe Trump and the Far Right internationally.
Remembering history is only going to be that much harder post the Israeli 9/11. But we must try. It’s our only hope. If we fail to take back our history we will never own the present and never take back our future. And the true dream and hope of American democracy will remain a dream deferred. A dream denied.
UPDATE:
Russia benefits from war in Gaza. Was that the plan all along? (msn.com)
Dershowitz’s the opposite of a libertarian
UPDATE: ‘We’re Fed Up With It’: Survivors of the USS Liberty Look for Answers 55 Years Later | Military.com
Israel will be ‘gone’ in 20 years– says Wilkerson, former State Dept aide – Mondoweiss
For more on Rabin and Bibi’s complicity