He Is Crazy

He is crazy and he thinks we are, too.

I had been working on something serious for the past few days, but I just saw this story today.

Trump tweeted the following this morning: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN  I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”

The President of the United States, two weeks after the killing of George Floyd provoked daily protest demonstrations across the country, as he has seen his popularity ratings tumble while he dismissed protesters as thugs, offers that comment on the question of police behavior toward dissenters.

It needs a bit of explanation. He saw a story on the One America News Network, @OANN, a far-right purely pro-Trump network. Wikipedia says it is “prominent for promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories”, and offers a host of examples. OANN describes itself as one of the “greatest supporters” of Trump, which means he will pay attention to whatever they say. OANN has been granted a permanent seat in the White House press room, and their White House correspondent was one of most called-upon reporters by press secretary Sean Spicer.

OANN reported that “shoved Buffalo protester an antifa provocateur”. The report also raised the possibility that he had some kind of scanner, when the video shows he is holding his cell phone. Trump then repeated this slur in his tweet, adding more certainty about the “scanning”. The narrator of the OANN segment, Kristian Rouz, used to work for Sputnik, a Kremlin-controlled news outlet.

Meanwhile, Martin Gugino is in the hospital recovering from his head wound, which has been evaluated in the hospital as serious. His history as a peaceful activist is well-known in Buffalo.

Trump is crazy. He has just suffered through nearly universal condemnation for repeatedly suggesting that Joe Scarborough might have murdered his staffer. Even Fox's Brit Hume called that “crap”. Today, FOX News reported that conservative newscasters have criticized Trump for today’s tweet.

It’s crazy to believe a story concocted by a Russian disinformation specialist that is contradicted by all the evidence that has been reported so far. It’s crazy to commit yourself publically to a ridiculous story that will inevitably anger most Americans, even those who disapprove of the protests. It’s crazy to keep taking the most incendiary possible actions in the face of near universal condemnation as part of your reelection strategy.

And it’s crazy to think that Americans are so gullible, so willing to believe all of his lies, that this tweet was a good idea.

Trump’s judgment is severely impaired. Many have argued that it never was very good, and that the immense wealth his father gave him allowed him to skate out of bad situations he had created himself. Many would argue that Trump has made monumentally bad political decisions over the past three years about nearly every major issue that we care about.

But whatever your belief about the beginning of Trump’s derangement, there is no doubt that he is now stupidly flailing in every direction, demonstrating the most extreme forms of his deeply flawed personality. After reading about the incident with Martin Gugino, who would imagine that the President would make it his business to promote the image of an ANTIFA set-up, complete with imaginary technology?

Trump has only a limited range of political weapons. He will be President for the next 7 months. Things will get worse for him, as he burrows ever deeper into his perverted id. That means things will get worse for us, too.

 Watch out.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 9, 2020

Are Republicans Nasty People?

Characterizing entire groups of people is the basis of prejudice. Sweeping generalizations are the foundation of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and every form of discriminatory ideology. Offensive stereotypes appear often in crudely written op-eds, where selected evidence about individuals is applied to whole categories of people.

I have worked hard to avoid the easy tendency to overgeneralize. But this question persists in my mind: are today’s Republicans nasty?

Certainly there are nasty Republicans, as there are nasty people of every political persuasion. Perhaps it is too easy to make a long list of nasty Republicans. I think it’s enough to refer to the collective televised behavior of Republican Senators and Representatives during the impeachment hearings, where argument and nastiness were blended into a toxic brew designed to distract attention from what Trump had actually done.

What provokes my bigger question is the possibility that nastiness has become the essence of Republicanism. This process did not begin with Trump. Rush Limbaugh has personified the meanness of conservatism since 1988, calling feminists whores and Nazis, stereotyping gays, and repeating racist comments. His success spawned an industry of right-wing talk radio hosts, copying his nastiness, sometimes being rewarded with political office. Inspired by Limbaugh’s success as a Republican spokesman, nine radio hosts ran for Congress in 1994, all Republicans. A local article about Minnesota’s two radio-hosts-turned-Congressmen, Jason Lewis and Tom Emmer, says that on the air they “gladly played roles as bomb-throwers and provocateurs.”

Alex Jones began as a talk radio personality, then created InfoWars in 1999. His utter disregard for people in the deepest grief has now landed him in court, sued by the families of young victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. But before that, Jones’ willful nastiness earned him Trump White House press credentials. When Trump gave Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his State of the Union address in February, he placed public nastiness in front of his Party for their instruction.

Trump has changed the rules of public political behavior. When he was still a candidate vying for the Republican nomination, viciously attacking Hillary Clinton in ways unprecedented for a presidential campaign, Limbaugh said, “Trump can say this stuff as an outsider. He can say this stuff as a nonmember of the elite or the establishment”. That distinction is now gone. The Republican establishment, headed by Trump, says things like that every day.

Talk radio hosts helped eliminate moderation from Republican politics, says Brian Anderson, author of “Talk Radio’s America”. “Any Republican who sought out compromise or who rejected political warfare found him or herself a target of conservative media.” Turning politics into a blood sport, and kicking moderates off the team, made for good, passionate radio and meshed with listeners’ frustrations. Now many elected Republicans sound like radio commentators instead of statesmen.

How nasty can a Republican candidate be and still win the party’s official approval? Roy Moore ran for the Senate in 2017 with full approval of the Republican National Committee, despite having publicly disparaged Islam and homosexuality, being removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to comply with federal court rulings, and having said that America was great during slavery, because people “cared for one another”. He only lost RNC support when it turned out he was a child molester. But Trump endorsed him and the RNC reversed itself and got behind him again.

I think it’s also reasonable to argue that common Republican political maneuvers are nasty. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and taking away powers from newly elected Democratic governors are dirty political tools that have become the hallmark of 21^st-century Republicanism. The official policies of the Republicans in Washington are beastly: caging immigrant children and the treatment of Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria.

What about your neighbor who votes Republican, but seems like a nice guy? Is he responsible for the nastiness of other Republicans? I believe that supporting a politician, approving publicly of a politician, means accepting responsibility for that politician’s actions.

The approval of 90% of Republican voters for Trump is the basis for his complete lack of restraint of his nastiest impulses. In the month of May, he topped himself. He retweeted a video in which a Republican New Mexico county commissioner said that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat”. He repeatedly accused the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murdering a staffer, provoking that woman’s widowed husband to plead with Twitter’s CEO to take down Trump’s tweets.

That’s about as nasty as it gets. It may be too great a leap of generalization to say that Republicans are nasty people. But in their full-throated support for Trump, no matter how nasty he gets, America’s Republicans promote nastiness.

Isn’t that nasty?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 2, 2020

Things Have Been Worse

Could that be comforting? I don’t think it should be, but that comparison can at least put our current distress in perspective.

I was reminded how bad it can become in America by the movie “Trumbo” on Netflix. Netflix provides a service we’re happy to pay for. We can watch a film without the constant interruptions of cable channels and can stop it to go make popcorn. “Trumbo” is the story of Dalton Trumbo, a writer of books and screenplays, who was also a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s. In a series of infamous hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Trumbo and 9 other writers and directors refused to answer questions like, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Citing their First Amendment right to free speech didn’t work. They were charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to name other members of the CPUSA. Trumbo went to jail for a year, and the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted from work in the film industry for a decade. Walt Disney used charges of communism to attack cartoonists who were trying to unionize. Eventually the blacklist extended to hundreds of people who had been named as communist sympathizers by conservative publications.

The wider witch hunt for dangerous social reformers that is identified with Sen. Joseph McCarthy sought to prevent any questioning of the American political status quo. Thousands of people who had voiced political ideas anywhere to the left of center lost their jobs, homes, and social positions. Wikipedia summarizes the injustices of the McCarthy era: “Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts that were later overturned, laws that were later declared unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or actionable, or extra-legal procedures, such as informal blacklists, that would come into general disrepute.”

Far-right groups prospered in the 1950s by attacking anything that involved public collective action as “communist”. The Keep America Committee published a flyer denouncing fluoridation, the polio vaccine, and mental health programs as steps toward a “communistic world government”. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the self-appointed loyalty watchdog co-founded by Disney, announced ideological prohibitions of certain “subversive” ideas: “Don't smear the free-enterprise system ... Don't smear industrialists ... Don't smear wealth ... Don't smear the profit motive ... Don't deify the 'common man' ... Don't glorify the collective.” The FBI used the Red scare to target union activists and civil rights leaders, delaying the end of segregation by a decade or more. The House Un-American Activities Committee functioned under both Republican and Democratic leadership.

Government and private propaganda about the communist “menace” convinced half of Americans to support McCarthy in a Gallup poll in 1950. Good, loyal Americans who kept their mouths shut except to praise capitalism had little to worry about.

The Hollywood blacklist was broken by courageous people in 1960, who defied the witch-hunters. Otto Preminger asked Trumbo to write the screenplay for “Exodus” and promised he would credit him openly. Kirk Douglas, in the midst of starring in and producing “Spartacus”, announced that Trumbo had written the script. The American Legion boycotted the film, but President John F. Kennedy went anyway. After that the blacklist crumbled, but the effects of years of hiding and public vilification had long-lasting repercussions for many people.

Things got better in my lifetime when the blacklist and McCarthyism were defeated in the 1950s and 1960s, when the work of white supremacists began to be dismantled in the 1960s, and when the work of male supremacists started crumbling in the 1970s. Our situation now will keep getting worse, unless people like us make it stop.

Perhaps it doesn’t make much sense to compare how bad these different times were, because in each case, they were very bad for different groups of people. The Red-hunting era was bad for people who had committed themselves to reforming American society. More like our current crisis, the HIV/AIDS plague killed over 2 million people a year between 1982 and 2002, a far higher worldwide mortality than the coronavirus at its peak, “wreaking the most havoc among the world's poorest and most underprivileged communities.” In the US, AIDS briefly became the greatest cause of death in men and women 25–44 years old from 1993 to 1995, before anti-retroviral therapy significantly reduced mortality. Most in danger were particular groups of people: men who have sex with men, drug users, and blood recipients.

I am certainly comparing very different social problems: the sudden emergence of a pandemic is not like the long history of racial or gender injustice. But it still seems useful to me to recognize that American life has been much worse in the recent past for large groups of people. In fact, the same social groups keep reappearing as the most affected: the poor and minorities, the main sufferers from COVID-19. I think the high incidence of death among health care workers and nursing home residents is a new feature of this human disaster. Familiar is the much lower disruption to the lives of the well-off.

Each of these human disasters preys on or exacerbates existing social inequalities. Each examines our empathy for others, our willingness to challenge the social conventions that prop up inequality. Each requires government action or government reforms to end the crisis. Each tests American leaders, some of whom fail miserably or succeed gloriously.

Most of us will survive until the next crisis.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

May 26, 2020