The Limitations of Originalism

 

Around this 4th of July, there was much talk about originalism. After the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence, which was accomplished exactly 246 years ago, the men whom we now call founders spent 13 more years thinking and arguing about how to set up a newly independent nation. That historically unique process of political creation not only established our country, but inspired millions of people across the human world to dream about their own nations, some with long historical traditions, others as yet only imagined. The survival of the United States of America based on that original vision has been an unprecedented historical achievement.

Originalism is the idea that the continued development of the United States must adhere to the political structure enshrined in the Constitution. Through two and half centuries of the most rapid political changes in human history, originalism has preserved the political inventions of the founders: power separated among three dissimilar branches of government; division of legislative authority between many states and one federal government; the protection of unprecedented rights for all citizens against governmental coercion; and the free and regular exercise of voting by citizens as the ultimate authority. No American government or person may legally violate those Constitutional rules.

But many of the founders’ firmest political beliefs, also clearly written into the Constitution, have not survived. The same intellectual and moral progress which brought forth the ideals of the American revolutionaries continued after 1789, progress which eventually challenged some of their original decisions. The two sides in the Civil War argued for contrasting sets of those original ideas, which had become by 1860 irreconcilable: the political structure of the national government versus the social structure of American society. The Southern rebels asserted the primacy of white racial superiority, which was a founding tenet of the Constitution, over the unity of the nation created by the Constitution.

Although the Confederacy was defeated and the Constitution was legally amended by the processes outlined by the founders, the original ideas of white supremacy reigned in the US for another century. The apparent promise of the 14th Amendment of 1868, like the apparent promise of the 19th Amendment of 1920, was overwhelmed by stubborn political adherence to the racist and sexist beliefs upon which the US was founded. All branches of American government, Presidents, Congresses, Supreme Courts, and state legislatures, ignored the wording and ideals that represented human moral progress in favor of the outdated original meanings of the Constitution.

The civil rights movements in our lifetimes on behalf of African Americans, women, Native Americans, and LGBTQ Americans were moral revolutions against the founders’ original intentions. The firsts that have occurred in this young 21st century, the first Black President and Vice President, the first Black female Supreme Court justice, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, show how much further American society must travel before we achieve the human equality that the founders proclaimed only for white men.
                                
We must remain true to the original political structures that the founders invented if we hope to make further progress. That structure has been under attack for the past two years from within the government and from outside, by telephone calls and mob violence. We must rely on the political institutions whose outlines were put  in place in 1789 to repel those attacks.

We must also rely on the moral progress which has transformed human society since 1789 to guide our journey toward making those institutions more and more egalitarian, more and more democratic, more and more fair to all.

Originalism as an ideological guide is exactly as useful and as limited as the original visions of the founders themselves. They were revolutionaries, and the revolution must go on.

Steve Hochstadt
Roslindale, MA
July 21, 2022

The Republican Problem With the Holocaust

 

 

Republicans are having difficulty deciding how they should think about Nazis and the Holocaust. They deny actions they have publicly taken, propagate and then delete messages, verbally promote and legislatively limit teaching about what the Nazis did. They seem confused, but aren’t. Some Republicans cozy up to Nazis. Some Republicans, often the same ones, call Democrats Nazis. Many Republicans across the country are attacking the foundation of Holocaust teaching. These three arms of Republican behavior around the Nazis have a single result: to trivialize the Holocaust.

 

Embracing Nazis always makes news. Carl Paladino, Republican nominee for NY Governor in 2010, Trump’s NY campaign chair in 2016, and current House candidate, is simply the latest fascist advocate. In a radio interview last year, which somehow did not become public news until this month, he praised Hitler: “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.” Paladino combines admiration for Nazis and old-fashioned American racism: in 2016, he hoped that Barack Obama would die of mad cow disease and suggested that Michelle Obama be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

 

The overlap between conservative Republicans and neo-Nazism has a long history. Former Nazis and neo-Nazis were founders of the Republican Heritage Groups Council in 1969, which excluded Black and Jewish Americans. Some Republican candidates in the 2018 elections were open Nazis, white supremacists and/or Holocaust deniers: Vox said 5, the Forward said 9. Illinois Rep. Mary Miller approvingly quoted Hitler the day before the January 6 riots, and recently won the Republican primary.

 

More Republicans stand next to Nazis without themselves praising Hitler. Arizona Republican office holders and candidates appeared at a 2021 rally organized by Matt Braynard, former director of data and strategy for Trump’s 2020 campaign, featuring Greyson Arnold as a speaker, who calls Nazis “the pure race” and supports the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared this year at the America First Political Action Conference, which is hosted by white nationalists who express antisemitism and deny the Holocaust. She posed for pictures with Holocaust denier Vincent James Foxx. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood proudly next to Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes at the same conference, where he later praised Putin and Hitler.

 

White supremacy has become integral to Republican messaging. A Twitter employee in 2019 argued internally that getting rid of racist content would involve deleting Republican Party messages, including Trump’s: “on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material”. Prominent Republicans who have openly promoted the “white replacement theory” that Democrats are trying to replace real Americans with ethnic minorities in order to win elections include Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. FOX’s Tucker Carlson has been the most vocal propagator of this theory. German Nazis could not have been so bad if our political celebrities want to take selfies with their American cousins and parrot their racist nonsense.

 

It only seems contradictory that for many Republicans, including those who happily consort with American fascists, “Nazi” is a favorite label for politicians and government employees they don’t like.  Donald Trump, Jr., in 2018 said the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform was “awfully similar” to Nazi Party platforms. Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania nominee for governor, compared Democrats’ gun control proposals to the Nazis in 2018 and again this year. In June 2021, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said Democrats were like Nazis who want to destroy America. Even though Trump’s most notable achievement was the development of a vaccine, Republicans as a Party have criticized every government effort to save lives through masks and vaccines. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert called government advocates of vaccinations “needle Nazis” and “medical brownshirts” in front of a cheering CPAC crowd in July 2021. Sen. candidate Josh Mandel in Ohio in April 2021 and Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson in January 2022 compared our government’s health policy to the Nazis. Lara Logan, a host on Fox News Media’s streaming service, said in November that Anthony Fauci “represents Josef Mengele”.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the media for comparing Republicans to Nazis in May 2021, then said the Democrats were the “national socialist party”. When Nancy Pelosi announced rules in May 2021 requiring unvaccinated members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor, Greene said on a Christian Broadcasting Network program: “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” After the American Jewish Congress tweeted back, “Such comparisons demean the Holocaust”, she insisted: “I stand by all of my statements; I said nothing wrong, I think any rational Jewish person didn’t like what happened in Nazi Germany, and any rational Jewish person doesn’t like what’s happening with overbearing mask mandates and overbearing vaccine policies.” She was so convinced of her imagery, she used it the next week in a tweet about one company’s vaccination policy: “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

 

Greene is not demeaning the Holocaust. Playing with Nazis, calling her opponents Nazis, and comparing herself to Jewish Holocaust victims all serve to diminish the Holocaust. Republicans are attempting to remake the Holocaust into a normal political event. If America’s doctors are like German Stormtroopers, if requiring one’s employees or our members of Congress to follow the most obvious public health rules is like murdering thousands of Jews and others every day for years, then the Holocaust as a singular event has disappeared.

 

Weeks later Greene apologized. As one of the most public faces of the Republican Party, she had gone one step too fast in pursuit of the Party’s goal of normalizing the Holocaust.

 

The Holocaust is a dangerous subject for American conservatives, because it was the mass murder of Jews by Christians. A few prominent Nazis espoused crackpot theories of Aryan paganism, and Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox Christians were also slaughtered in vast numbers. But the murder of 6 million Jews was the culmination of centuries of official Christian persecution. Teaching about the Holocaust should begin with the Bible and must explain the violent antisemitism of nearly all Christian denominations right into the 20^th century. Anti-Jewish racism was embedded in Christian European and American societies and their legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white Christians. The recognition of Christian responsibility for Western antisemitism and the Holocaust led every Christian denomination in Western Europe and America after 1945 to repudiate centuries of their own dogma.

 

The wave of Republican censorship of public school and university curricula in response to the sudden American reckoning on race after George Floyd’s murder purports to be about “critical race theory”. When Florida’s Board of Education banned “critical race theory” from public school classrooms one year ago, the Board seemed to protect Holocaust education by also banning any teaching that denies the Holocaust. But their language points in the opposite direction. Critical race theory “distorts historical events” by asserting “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” The Holocaust was caused by precisely such embedded white supremacy. And like American anti-Black racism, that white supremacy had deep roots in official Christianity.

 

I have seen my students become uncomfortable when confronted with facts about Christian persecution of Jews and Nazi admiration for American Jim Crow legislation in the 1930s as a model for the Nuremberg laws. The American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose 1916 eulogy for Nordic supremacy was entitled “The Passing of the Great Race”, was equally popular with American segregationists and Adolf Hitler, who called the book his “bible”. They were disturbed by the realization that German Jews, from the passage of Nuremberg Laws in 1935 until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, were treated essentially the same as African Americans here, whose racial persecution continued unabated into the 1960s. That same knowledge frightens today’s right-wing Christians across the Western world. The Christian nationalist parties in Europe all seek to diminish the Holocaust, especially the role played by Christians in their own nations: those in power in Poland and Hungary, and those trying for power in Germany and France.

 

The literal wording of recent Republican censorship laws bans education that doesn’t exist. The fake narrative that critical race theory is taught in public schools is the basis of this wave of legislation. A different and broader invention imperils Holocaust education: the claim in Wisconsin’s 2021 law that it is necessary to forbid teachers from indoctrinating their students with the idea “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex and that an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex.” That kind of systematically damaging pedagogy was in fact integral to American education for centuries. The long racial reckoning which began in the 1960s demonstrated how white supremacy was written into all levels of educational curricula. The claim that American racism is over, the foundation of the attacks on critical race theory, ignores the continuing power and weight of adult Americans who were subject for years to those curricula, as I was.

 

Any hint that a teacher is promoting racial or gender superiority is likely to be called out without any help from new laws. The Republicans are not anxiously hunting for hidden examples of white supremacy or male superiority. That’s what they promote. They want their supporters to believe that they will reveal and defeat the teaching that blacks are superior to whites and that women are superior to men, exactly the kind of fake crisis that dominates the politico-cultural war.

 

Over years of interacting with teachers of the Holocaust, I never heard of any who told students that they bore “responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex”. Holocaust teachers do mention that this was precisely what Christian churches had been saying for centuries about Jews. Such claims were fundamental to murderous persecution. But inducing guilt in today’s students is hardly useful in teaching history.

                                                                                     

The discussions during the Republican effort in Louisiana to ban critical race theory display how the right-wing ideology of the Holocaust plays out at the state level. Republican state representative Valarie Hodges sponsored a bill in 2021 to mandate Holocaust education in Louisiana. Hodges was an avid promoter of the idea that Democrats are as bad as Nazis. She was part of the effort of conservative Republicans in the state to require the teaching of patriotic themes in American history and to block more teaching about America’s racial history. Hodges brought a Metairie resident to testify about the dangers of “communism” in our government: “To put it in Holocaust terms, the communists are now the Nazis and we are the Jews. They are the predators. We are the prey. We need to teach this history to our future citizens so we don’t end up like the Jews.” No Jewish organizations testified in favor of Hodges’ bill. The executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, speaking for professional historians in America, recognized the ultimate goal. “You’re saying, ‘You have to teach the history of Holocaust, but you can’t teach the history of institutionalized, deeply embedded racism in the United States.’”

 

Rep. Ray Garofalo, the head of the Louisiana House Education Committee, sponsored a bill barring teaching about institutional racism. He then slipped and said the right-wing truth: any lessons about American slavery should include “the good, the bad, the ugly”. Garafalo’s other unprofessional antics made him such an easy target, that the Republican Speaker of the House removed him as chair, and replaced him with another Republican. All the bills about mandating and preventing subjects in Louisiana public education ultimately failed.

 

The legislative history of Republican censorship in Arizona offers similar clues about what the issues are and what will be attempted in the future. Arizona Republicans in the state legislature are unanimously in favor of putting an amendment to the state’s constitution before the voters. The bill’s lengthy section B enumerates seven varieties of fake complaints about non-existent educational practices. The key is section A: teachers in public schools from elementary to high school: “may not use public monies for instruction that promotes or advocates for any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex”. The bill’s sponsor, Michelle Udall, argued that, “If a teacher can’t teach [history] without placing blame or judgment on the basis of race, they shouldn’t be teaching.” She was clear about what she meant: it will be okay to say that a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery story happened, but it would “not be appropriate” to say that the mass murderer was a white supremacist. Her bill would insure that such teachers could be personally punished. Republicans in the Arizona House and Senate unanimously voted in favor. The bill was signed into law as part of a budget whose main item was a tax cut for better-off Arizonans.

 

How does one teach the Holocaust or slavery without detailing the responsibility of particular human groups for inhuman treatment of fellow humans of other groups based on racist ideologies?

 

Conservative politicians can count on well-funded organizations to create the local crises around curriculum that alarm enough parents to get educators fired. Nearly 900 school districts across the country, educating one third of all public school students in the country, were targeted by anti-CRT efforts from September 2020 to August 2021. The most thorough study of the nationwide campaign against teaching about race concluded: “The anti “CRT” effort is a purposeful, nationally/state interconnected, and locally driven conflict campaign to block or restrict proactive teaching and professional development related to race, racism, bias, and many aspects of proactive diversity/equity/inclusion efforts in schools, while — for some — gaining political power and control. The conflict campaign’s loudest, most powerful voices caricature actual teaching and stoke parent anxiety in a quest to control both schools and government.”

 

The real danger that Republican curricular censorship presents to Holocaust teaching is not the occasional eruption of stupidity, as in Southlake, Texas. Texas House Bill 3979 requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, told teachers,

“Just try to remember the concepts of 3979 . . . make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” That caused a small scandal. Despite posing for photographs with Holocaust deniers, Republican politicians don’t yet demand that Holocaust denial become part of the curriculum.

 

But when Holocaust denial comes from within the community, from antisemitic parents, the new laws make teaching difficult. A North Carolina teacher wrote: “My SUPERINTENDENT asked us to advise students to ‘ask your parents’ rather than insist that the Holocaust was real. We received professional development to help us navigate this political environment safely. Our superintendent attended and told us to advise kids to ‘ask your parents’ instead of try to show evidence to a child whose family swears the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

 

New Republican laws and their emboldened approach to white supremacy will inevitably lead to an attack on any Holocaust teaching which goes beyond the discussion of prejudice to analyze the power of embedded racism and Christian white supremacy.

 

For Republicans, teaching the histories of America and of the Holocaust is too dangerous to allow. Those educations cause intellectual, then social disturbance. Both explain the role of embedded racism in Western society and the disastrous consequences. The Holocaust is over, and Christian nationalists all over Western society have been calling for Jews to get over it. But American racism and sexism are not. The success of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in demonstrating the continuing influence of male and white supremacy has frightened Christian conservatives. They are using the inevitable discomfort of students learning that their predecessors committed genocide to try to sanitize the history they will learn.

                                                                                               

The American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association, along with other educational organizations, released a statement in June 2021 opposing the new rollout of bills restricting the  teaching of history. The statement focuses entirely on “the role of racism in the history of the United States”. Thus far, Holocaust teaching has suffered only collateral damage in the Republican war against American history. But without trivializing Holocaust education into anodyne lessons on intolerance, Republicans will never be able to cover up the historical truth that critical race theory foregrounds: racism has been and may still be embedded in American life.

 

Today teachers of American history are the targets of Republican censorship. Holocaust teachers, you’re next.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

22 June 2022

The Zoo

 

While visiting Indiana, I went to the Indianapolis Zoo with my 2- and 4-year-old grandchildren. There was a lot of excitement about cheetahs wrestling with each other, orangutans swinging from ropes, and dolphins performing athletic tricks. But I found the visit depressing.

As a kid, my parents took us to the Bronx Zoo, at that time a world-class zoo. Since then, zoos have transformed themselves from exotic animal incarceration facilities to thoughtful educational institutions, replacing cages with landscapes, building environments which mimic natural settings, and rescuing instead of capturing wild animals. The headline on the Bronx Zoo’s website says “Saving Wildlife and Wild Places”. Still, I can’t get over seeing eagles confined to enclosures barely large enough for one beat of their wings, observing fellow primates behind glass with nothing to do, and clapping for dolphins as a circus act.

I have not forced myself toward a firm position on animal rights, but I no longer get a thrill from the human ability to put wild and wonderful creatures on display for our viewing pleasure.

The educational messaging of the Indianapolis Zoo was the most depressing aspect of my visit. Over and over again, at many, perhaps most stations with carefully worded signs, we were told in plain language about the predictable results of our murderous heedlessness toward other life forms. Humans kill large, complex animals just for “fun”. Rich men pay enormous sums to fly to faraway places, so they can sneak up on unsuspecting animals and shoot them. I find that impulse sickening.

But big game trophy hunters are not the main problem for the world’s wildlife. Elephants and rhinos are regularly hunted for their tusks and horns, which some people believe have magical curative powers. Extinction is on its way.

Even more destructive are the normal human processes of making land “useful”, cutting down rain forests to create farms and grazing land. Signs all over the Indianapolis Zoo repeated the warning that animal habitats are being transformed into human habitats, driving the Earth’s living diversity toward irreversible extinction.

Human heedlessness, or better selfishness, is demonstrated every day by the unnecessary pollution of the atmosphere and the oceans. These vast reservoirs of life-giving resources have been human garbage dumps from the earliest societies until the most “advanced”. Now that our “civilization” has developed more technologically sophisticated methods to promote human convenience, now that humans have multiplied beyond sustainability, we are not only killing the world’s animals, but are hurtling toward mass suicide.

Humans have the unique capacity to rationalize the mass killing even of our own species. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is merely the latest instance among countless human wars against ourselves, never about survival, always about human hatred for other humans, justified by the most elaborate systems of “moral” or “religious” belief. “Useful” always means useful for us, regardless of earthly consequences.

I am not trying to be cute with quotation marks. The words I have modified in that way are tendentious, although I have taken a long time to recognize that fact. Moralities can rationalize mass murder with abstract syllogisms. Religions whose texts condemn killing in plain language find ways to bless murderous enterprises on a grand scale. Other ways of thinking are possible.

The uniquely human creation over the past few centuries of a detailed understanding of the world we inhabit appears to be no match for much older stories that humans have made up about how our inherent superiority allows us total control over all forms of life and death. The messages the Earth is sending us are no less clear than the printed signs at the Indianapolis Zoo about what “human impact” means for all life forms.

As the plastic pollution of our oceans threatens us on land, as the modern great extinction picks up speed, as the weather predictably endangers life and property, the biggest adherents of divine human right are barely discomfited by the clash of reality with belief. The zoo should remind us that humans have the power over life and death for everything on Earth. Thus far our species has not been pro-life.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

6 April 2022

Treason in the 21st Century

 

We are at war with Russia. Economic war certainly, political war at the highest level, military assistance but no actual fighting for us. Yet.

The fighting is being done by our ally Ukraine, to whom every administration has given economic and military aid since the last time Russia invaded Ukraine to carve off Crimea in 2014. Like modern wars, the Russian attack on Ukraine is televised. Everybody knows what is happening, except perhaps the few remaining Russians who still believe the lies their governments have been telling them their whole lives.

Until two weeks ago, Russia was merely our global adversary. Shooting changes everything. For our military and all the militaries in NATO, for our government forced to respond to invasion of our ally, for populations and governments around the world, Russia is now the enemy.

That is global news, but a few people here at home openly support the other side. On the wide and colorful right fringe of our national tapestry, the news is hard to swallow. Their years of public admiration for the Russian strongman and his government, led by our own fawning circus strongman, now suddenly look naive at best, and certainly stupid.

But stupid can also be dangerous. If “loose lips sink ships”, then shouting public voices can aid the enemy. For years, RT America, set up in the US by Margarita Simonyan under Putin’s control in 2005, has been proselytizing for him. Simonyan served on Putin’s reelection team in 2018, after informally helping to elect Trump in 2016. The obvious Russian media project to interfere in our elections forced even the Trump administration to make RT register as an “agent of a foreign government”. Now Simonyan on RT explains that Ukrainians greeted Russian troops with homemade pies, and the line of tanks is “a standard parade rehearsal”.RT reports Putin’s claim that Russia is attempting the “denazification of Ukraine”.

According to a social scientific study by Mona Elswah and Philip N. Howard, “RT is the most richly funded, well-staffed, formal organization in the world producing, disseminating, and marketing news in the service of the Kremlin. RT is used as an instrument of state defense policy to meddle in the politics of other states. The channel has been established in the shadows of the Soviet media system and its organizational behavior is characterized by Soviet-style controls.” The EU personally sanctioned Simonyan two weeks ago, along with many Russian people and entities, calling her “a central figure of the Government propaganda”.

War is always an opponent of freedom of information and opinion. RT is a paid arm of the enemy trying to derail the current American war effort. It may reach millions of Americans with enemy propaganda disguised as news. Can they masquerade under the banner of freedom of the press?

I care more about the outsized influence of right-wing Americans flirting with treason in alliance with RT. RT’s current BFF is Tucker Carlson. When the bombing of cities was still in the future, Carlson constantly promoted his preference for the Russian leader over our own President and VP, who are “a senile man and an imbecile”: “I think we should probably take the side of Russia, if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

The idea of Ukraine possesses enormous negative significance for conservatives who have never seen it: they tried and failed to make Hunter Biden’s questionable activities in Ukraine a bigger moral and political issue than Donald Trump’s. So Carlson explained his understanding of world politics at the beginning of February: “Texas is a state that’s had well over 1 million foreign nationals pour into it illegally over the last year. Right over the border. That is a far bigger invasion than anything Vladimir Putin is planning in Ukraine.” Worry about desperate impoverished families who would love to live in America, carrying their belongings on their backs, not Putin. The policy of the Biden administration, as in everything else, is “lunacy”. Hours before Russia’s invasion, he tweeted: “Ukraine isn’t a democracy. It’s a State Department client state.”

Russian state television has been delighting Russian officials and the official media by broadcasting translated Carlson clips. Russian senator Alexey Pushkov claimed the West is “provoking war”, and cited his source: “This isn’t just my opinion. Prominent Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson says that the mainstream media is getting us ready for war, demanding war.”

Russian media rebroadcast Carlson’s friendly portrayal of Putin himself: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?”

So RT loves Tucker. Simonyan raved about one of his video clips shown on Russian airwaves: “You showed the clip of wonderful Tucker Carlson, who, by the way, is dreaming of interviewing Vladimir Putin, simply dreaming about it! He is the most popular host in the United States, who understands everything the way it should be understood.”

The extreme right committing treason for the Russians is a double historical irony. Right after World War II, American conservatives, led by Joe McCarthy and Robert Welch, propagated the nonsensical story that the whole political establishment to their left, including President Eisenhower, was in league with the Russians, then called Soviets. Richard Nixon pioneered the winning use of “pink” in California politics. American conservatism has proclaimed its unique loyalty to America for my whole lifetime. A weaponized patriotism was directed at everyone with the flimsiest links to Russia or whom the right didn’t like. Now the far right is in bed with the enemy and it is Russia.

Some are scrambling to get out. Others are hiding under the covers. On February 25, Carlson retreated: “Vladimir Putin started this war. He is to blame for what we're seeing tonight in Ukraine.” That only lasted a day, as Carlson said “the invasion of Ukraine is a humiliating defeat for Joe Biden.” The biggest shots can’t bear to recant.

After the US declared war on Germany in 1917, the Trading with the Enemy Act gave a newly created Office of Alien Property Custodian the power to confiscate the property of people whose actions could threaten the war effort. The president has the authority to restrict trade with “hostile” nations or with their allies. Those provisions are now solely applied to Cuba, where actual fighting has only taken place when the US invaded in 1961, another irony.

Have FOX News and its even less scrupulous epigones on the right, like Breitbart and Infowars, who have been spreading and amplifying RT’s message, all committed treason? Should their property be confiscated?

I wonder why any American would follow stupid, traitorous people who have been making a fortune sleeping with the enemy? Maybe this finally is the wake-up call.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

9 March 2022