Branko Milanovic on warmongering in Europe

Branko Milanovic recently commented on the evolution of US and European perspectives during the course of the Russia-Ukraine War that began in 2022 and has now gone on longer than the First World War. (1)

It is the case, of course, that Russian seized Crimea in 2014 and a low-level irregular war between Russia and Ukraine continued in eastern Ukraine until now. But when we hear about the “Russia-Ukraine War,” that is generally understood to mean the ongoing war since Russia’s large-scale invasion of 2022.

Milanovic notes that the strongest reaction to the 2022 invasion came from the United States under President Joe Biden. “Europe’s reaction was several octavos lower as it generally was during the Cold War. Finally, the rest of the world, while mostly condemning Russia for an obvious violation of the international law and UN rules, was not overly concerned.” He reminds us that Biden initially insisted that Ukraine refrain from strikes on Russian territory. “But even under Biden that policy was gradually abandoned and the US de facto entered the war through its selection and direct targeting of places in Russia.”

A critical part of the story is the bull-headed decision by the Cheney-Bush Administration to insist on a NATO declaration in 2008 that both Ukraine and Georgia, both former Soviet Republics, would become members of NATO at some unspecified time in the future. John Mearsheimer, the leading advocate of “offensive realist” approach to understanding great-power foreign policies, wrote a piece in the ultra-respectable Foreign Affairs magazine in 2014 “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault,” that has provoked much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing among foreign policy bigwigs and media figures ever since.

But you would have to listen very carefully these days to find anyone who would say that NATO’s 2008 declaration was a clever foreign policy move. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia in 2008 were anywhere close to meeting the minimum requirements for NATO membership. And still are not. Russia had never liked the idea of NATO expansion. But they hadn’t raised big objections, even when the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became members. But they had made it clear that Ukrainian membership in NATO was something they considered a serious threat to their national interest. And had made that clear, publicly and explicitly.

Even people who think that perception on their part was wrong, or overblown, or whatever, should also be able to recognize that declaring explicitly that Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members – even though they weren’t ready and NATO was not ready in 2008 to go directly to war against Russia over either country – was a dumb move.

The Russians didn’t seize Crimea and begin the active guerilla war in western Ukraine until 2014, just after the pro-Russian regime of President Viktor Yanukovych fell and was replaced by the pro-Western Petro Poroschenko. Both Russia and the US were playing active roles in supporting their preferred side in the Ukrainian internal political struggle. For all the usual highfalutin talk about democracy and national sovereignty from the US, what played out was very much hardnosed practical geopolitics. How right or wrong each side was is another question.

The European Union was pushing Yanukovych’s government to accelerate Ukraine’s accession to the EU. As Ursula Koch-Laugwitz explained at the time:

Yanukovych feared that his re-election could be endangered through the "adjustment costs" and structural reforms that would be generated by a closer association to the EU. Instead of asking for support for the integration, Brussels threatened to deny Ukraine the association if three EU conditions were not met: the release of [imprisoned former President] Yulia Tymoshenko [of the Fatherland party], an election law reform and an end to selective justice. At the same time, Russia, which most prefers to integrate Ukraine into Putin's pet project of a Eurasian Union, put the country under massive economic pressure and tempted the Ukrainian government in the short term with comprehensive financial assistance - successfully. But Yanukovych's decision to put the agreement with the European Union on ice placed his grip on power even more in question. (2)

Also in 2014, Paul Pillar commented on the considerations that the Obama Administration and Secretary of State John Kerry were applying to regime changes of the time in Egypt and Ukraine:

There are many criteria by which we in the West can assess what is good and what is bad about the events in these countries and any others in which similar political change occurs. What happens to democracy is only one of those criteria.

There are the various issues of human rights and governmental integrity, and in this respect an end to the more thuggish and corrupt aspects of Yanukovych’s presidency may be a good thing. (Zbigniew Brzezinski describes Yanukovych as “a mendacious schemer, a coward and a thief.”) And for realist observers, the foreign policy orientation of a government may be at least as important as any of the internal considerations.

Each individual case is worthy of assessment in its own right. The two cases mentioned here are quite different in important respects. Some of the cheering over Morsi’s ouster reflected an ignoble Islamophobia that is not a factor in Ukraine. The alternatives to the ousted leadership are also quite different; in Egypt it is a restored authoritarian military regime, while in Ukraine we can still hope it will be something not just different but more to the benefit of the Ukrainian people. [emphasis added] (3)

Now, 12 years later, we’re in the fifth year of war in Ukraine, in which there has been an essentially stalemated war of attrition on the ground since 2023, and which will leave Ukraine badly damaged with no reasonable prospects of becoming a NATO member, even if NATO survive the Trump policies in something like its current form.

As Milanovic writes:

Over the past two years, the situation has further evolved. The US has continued with a policy where it is a de facto participant in the war but has also shown a desire to wrap-up the conflict in one form or another. What was surprising is that the thirst for war has become almost insatiable in several European countries, principally in the Nordic and Baltic countries, but more recently also in Germany, and, for long-term historical reasons that go to the 18th century, in the UK too. [my emphasis]

We hear from other commentators, too, that warmongering attitudes toward Russia are prevalent in European NATO countries. To paraphrase a famous Gospel verse, warmongers we will have with us always. But I’m not convinced that specifically an aggressive policy toward Russia is something driving most European policymakers. It’s fairly obvious that European policymakers see some relative advantage in having Russia tied down in the war with Ukraine. That’s just how national security analysts look at things.

But Russia and Europe for the foreseeable future will look at each other as potential adversaries. And in a serious military confrontation, the European allies can no longer count on the United States to be a reliable partner in deterrence or in actual combat. In order to have a credible deterrence, the process that has already begun of Europe developing new arrangements for joint defense independent of the US will have to continue for the next several years. Whether or not the Russia-Ukraine War continues for years more, the idea of the EU countries actually promoting war against Russia is unlikely in the extreme. Unless maybe Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland all come under the leadership of crackpots and mobsters of the Donald Trump type.

There are certainly plenty of risks of which we all need to be aware! But Milanovic overstates the present situation when he writes, “The Nordic-Baltic coalition is essentially calling for a war with Russia, citing its own fears and traumas of Russian/Soviet control and occupation.”

But he has a valid point on a Korea-style protracted armistice for Ukraine:

The Nordic-Baltic alliance also forgets that if the cease-fire is established along the current lines of control, the [Ukrainian] territory of the Donbass etc. will indeed be controlled by Russia but no single country in the world would officially recognize it. Did they not notice that no country from the [Russia-aligned] Commonwealth of Independent States has recognized it? Did they not notice that not even Belarus recognizes it? Such, indeed fragile, peace not only puts an end to today’s carnage, but leaves open a possibility of eventual long-term solution between Russia and Ukraine. Neither Putin, nor Zelensky, nor the social forces that support them are eternal. Things will change in Russia, and in Ukraine. Negotiations can take place in ten or twenty years—but at least people would be alive rather than dead. [emphasis added]

What we are seeing right now are things like the following. Germany is responding to the recent appearance of what they claim to have been Russian drones sent with explosives to the Leipzig airport. Although there were no actual explosions involved. Although German Defense Minister Alexander Dobrindt describes the incident as being directed by a “foreign power.” Germany is publicly suggesting it may call for a NATO “Article 4” consultation.

Article 4 of the NATO Treaty foresees consultations, if according to one of the allies the integrity of their territory, the political independence or the security of one of the parties is threatened. In distinction to Article 5 [which authorizes joint action in defense of a member state under military attack], it doesn’t involve the triggering of the military defense obligations of the alliance. The outcome of such [Article 4] consultations is open. (4)

This is the European world of 2026: threats and counterthreats, provocations and responses, all in the world in which the NATO commitments of the US can no longer be trusted as they once were. It’s normal that the states of what Milanovic calls “the Nordic-Baltic alliance” would take the more role of making the most dire and urgent warnings. Because they would be the most likely targets of any military invasion by Russia. While a country like Germany, which has had both extremely hostile and relatively friendly relationships with Russia since 1918 or so, is better positioned to play the role of serious but cautious authority.

Here’s a very brief summary of what Articles 4 and 5 are. (5)



Notes:

(1) Milanovic, Branko (2026): On European hypocrisy and warmongering. Global Inequality and More 3.0 08/26/2026. <https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/on-european-hypocrisy-and-warmongering> (Accessed : 2026-29-08).

(2) Koch-Laugwitz, Ursula (2014): Ukraine: Protest ohne Projekt. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 3/2014. <https://www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2014/maerz/ukraine-protest-ohne-projekt> (Accessed 2014-07-02). My translation to English.

(3) Pillar, Paul (2014): A Selective View of ‘Democracy’. Consortium News 02/26/2014. <https://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/26/a-selective-view-of-democracy/> (Accessed 20236-30-08).

(4) Balser, Markus & Brössler, Daniel (2026): Suche nach Antworten an den Kreml. Süddeutsche Zeitung für Österreich 29-30-Aug-2026.

(5) What are NATO's Article 4 and Article 5 - AP explains. AP Archive YouTube channel 09/28/2025. <https://youtu.be/Y8j0mAF9qV8?si=YxCryta202Q-EZkw> (Accessed: 2026-30-08).

Dim hopes for approaching Israeli elections

With Israeli parliamentary elections coming up on October 27, it’s important to keep in mind that Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians are, unfortunately, very popular among his target constituencies: “Jewish Israelis are united in their support for perennial war, which effectively means charting an increasingly solitary regional and global path,” writes Ori Goldberg. (1)

And, as presumably most Israeli voters know, Israel is not observing the Gaza cease-fire it agreed to. More jaded observers talk about the concept of “a ceasefire with Israeli characteristics” - i.e.: you cease, we fire. The phrase is a play on the Chinese Communists’ concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

As Britain’s Channel 4 reports: (2)

Barry Malone recently reported for Middle East Eye:

How many people do you need to kill before you’ve violated a ceasefire? One, surely. But what about two? 10? 100? Or how about more than 1,200? That’s how many Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza since agreeing to an ostensible ceasefire with Hamas in October.

Israel has also continued to pummel southern Lebanon, despite a “ceasefire” there. But the western media appears to see no violations at all. Instead, it sees ceasefires that are “fragile”, “tested”, “strained” or “shaky”.

Given that news reporting is supposed to rely on precision and accuracy, you’d imagine organisations such as the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and CNN have read the terms of the deal that was signed between Israel and Hamas in Egypt. It’s unequivocal, and there really isn’t much room for interpretation. There were conditions that needed to be fulfilled within the first 72 hours before the truce could take effect, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed lines within Gaza, and the return by Hamas of all remaining Israeli hostages, living or dead.

Once the prerequisites were met, which they were, the text said that “all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations will be suspended”. [emphasis added, paragraph breaks adjusted] (3)

Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal has been to have weak and/or failed states in his geographic neighborhood. And now the war which Trump initiated jointly with Netanyahu against Iran is doing an awful lot of damage to countries in the neighborhood.

But the Netanyahu government doesn’t seem to be able to follow any policy other than a more-or-less chronic state of aggressive conflicts and disputes with nearby countries.

David Shulman in a sobering essay this past March lists four elements of what he describes as “the underpinnings for much of Israeli society and politics.”

1. The Land of Israel, from the Jordan River to the sea, belongs to the Jews and only to the Jews.
The state is a metaphysical entity worth dying for, if necessary, rather than a pragmatic framework meant to make life livable for its citizens.
2. What was initially an explicit drive to create a Jewish majority in Palestine - a goal realized in the course of the 1948 war and the Palestinian Nakba - has morphed into an obsession with ensuring Jewish supremacy throughout the land, and specifically in the occupied territories. To that end, Israel needs a harsh apartheid system in the West Bank
3. What was initially an explicit drive to create a Jewish majority in Palestine - a goal realized in the course of the 1948 war and the Palestinian Nakba - has morphed into an obsession with ensuring Jewish supremacy throughout the land, and specifically in the occupied territories. To that end, Israel needs a harsh apartheid system in the West Bank
4. An Israeli proverb: “If force doesn’t work, use more force.” Not even Thomas Hobbes entertained such a primitive notion of what constitutes power. International legitimacy no longer counts. (4)

The situation in Gaza can scarcely be described as a peaceful one, with Israel actively supporting violent militias opposing Hamas. This is an old story. Israel encouraged Hamas to act as an Islamist opposition to weaken the much more secular Palestinian Authority:

Israel, Jordan, and a few other Arab states were concerned about the growing strength of the PLO’s secular nationalist ideology and thus initially supported Hamas’s creation. Like other local Sunni Islamic political parties and movements ... Hamas was grounded in the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. (5)

Owen Jones brings us this grim report on Israel-Türkiye relations. (6)

Netanyahu’s regime in now claiming that NATO ally Türkiye is its new “Iran.” Although Iran itself is actually winning the war which Netanyahu encouraged Trump to undertake. As Jones points out, Israel attacking Türkiye would potentially be an “Article 5” event requiring its NATO allies to come to its defense: i.e., defense against Israel.

Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to militarily attack Oman. Oman was the first country in what we now call the Middle East with which the US established a diplomatic partnership. As the US Embassy to Oman says on its webpage:

The two countries formalized their relationship when they signed the “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” in 1833 - the first bilateral accord between the U.S. and an Arab Gulf state. In 1840, the Sultan’s envoy Ahmad bin Na’aman sailed to New York on the Sultanah, and bin Na’aman became the first Arab diplomat accredited to the U.S. The Sultanah was also the first Arab ship to sail to the United States. (7)

That was during the first Jackson Administration. Which brings me to one of my persistent pet peeves, which is that commentators who should know better push the narrative that Steve Bannon established during Trump 1.0 that Trump is somehow an admirer of Andrew Jackson. For all of Old Hickory’s real faults, he was the sworn enemy of John C. Calhoun, who still reigns as the Evil Spirit of American History. Trump is the modern-day John Calhoun.

Oman and the US had decent relations since the Age of Jackson. Until 2026, when the Orange Anomaly started threatening to bomb them if they don’t kiss his behind.

Notes:

(1) Goldberg, Ori (2026): As Iran and the U.S. talk, Israel chooses eternal war. +972 Magazine 07/03/20226. <https://www.972mag.com/us-iran-talks-israel-eternal-war/> (Accessed: 2026-07-08).

(2) Netanyahu rejects Trump’s Gaza peace plan and refuses to withdraw troops. Channel 4 News YouTube channel 08/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/qRIVIjto_qM?si=imH9zScPdNjz46B-> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(3) Malone, Barry (2026): Israel is not 'testing' its ceasefires. It's violating them. Middle East Eye 08/04/2026. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-not-testing-its-ceasefires-its-violating-them> (Accessed: 2026-07-08).

(4) Shulman, David (2026): Evil in the West Bank. New York Review of Books 03/12/2026, 11.

(5) Michaeli, Yarden et al (2026): 'Israel Is Sending Armed Militias in Gaza to Commit War Crimes – and I Have to Protect Them'. Haaretz 08/27/2026. Gift link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2026-08-27/ty-article-magazine/gaza-israel-sending-militias-commit-war-crimes-i-have-to-protect-them/0000019f-f0f0-df61-a3ff-f9fe6ca70000?gift=041a126ee36b4f4ebe8b3385c37af512> (Accessed: 2026-28-08).

(6) Israel At War With Turkey - Is It Coming? Owen Jones YouTube channel 08/17/2026. <https://youtu.be/bY0eEhYOH3s?si=5FsleU4MeiEDiYo5> (Accessed: 2026-28-08).

(7) History of the U.S.-Oman Relationship. U.S. Embassy Oman website, n/d. <https://om.usembassy.gov/history-of-the-u-s-oman-relationship/> (Accessed: 2026-28-08).

How to parse the Trumpists’ retro-1950s rhetoric

The Republican Party’s turn to blatant, 1950s style Anti-Communism is a real flashback to the days when Donald Trump’s future mentor Roy Cohn was the chief council for Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunting Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

It’s worth recalling how a onetime Hollywood union leader, Ronald Reagan, happily embraced redbaiting political rhetoric himself and used it to oppose what he considered a dangerous socialist program. That is, Medicare, which was enacted in 1965.

As Jon Schwarz recalls in a 2015 article for The Intercept on the 50th anniversary of the very successful Medicare program (1), Reagan made a recording in 1961 on a leading communication technology of the time - a vinyl record album - in which he warned about the danger of impending tyranny represented by the dastardly Medicare idea. Schwarz characterized it as “completely nuts.” Thanks to more recent technological advances in media that produced YouTube, we can conveniently judge it ourselves.

On the vinyl record, Reagan said:

[The Truman Administration] proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this. So with the American people on record as not wanting socialized medicine, [Democratic supporters promoted] the idea that all people of Social Security age should be brought under a program of compulsory health insurance.

Reagan explained why this whole idea was a devious Socialist plan:

[O]ne of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it now.

Medicare became law in the US over 60 years ago along with Medicaid. It’s safe to say it is still very popular. As is the idea of Medicare for All.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) published this graphic in 1946 in support of Truman’s national health insurance plan:

Yes, Harry Truman was proposing what we now call Medicare for All!

The Democrats today could bait the Republicans by finding some crank GOP Member of Congress who once said something about how if we don’t get rid of Medicare, the US will be a socialist dictatorship in five years’ time. Throw in Rand Paul’s 2025 proposal on his X account to raise the full Social Security retirement age to 70. And make that a major talking point against the Republicans from now through 2028.

Making a major theme of the idea that Republicans want to flush Medicare down the toilet is something that would catch the attention of most every voter who doesn’t live in a basement spending every day reading decades-old John Birch Society pamphlets!

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Schwarz, Jon (2015): Medicare Celebrates Its 50th Birthday, Despite Ronald Reagan. The Intercept 07/30/2015. <https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/medicares-50th-birthday-lets-forget-ronald-reagans-insane-diatribe-trying-stop/> (Accessed: 2026-27-08).

(2) Ronald Reagan speaks out on Socialized Medicine – Audio. Reagan Presidential Foundation YouTube channel 07/23/2009. <https://youtu.be/AYrlDlrLDSQ?si=ZKnMdD7FTLI0MuFQ> (Accessed: 2026-23-08).

(3) For the People’s Health. Economic Outlook (CIO) April 1946. <http://recordsofrights.org/assets/record/000/000/579/579_original.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-23-08).

Current German debates over military policy

Agnieszka Brugger is the deputy chairperson for the German Green party in the Bundestag (lower House of the German Parliament). She posted on Facebook on August 20 this call for the current government to become more assertive in its defensive posture in relation to Russia.

The current German government is a coalition headed by the conservative Christian Democratic Union (DCU/CSU) with the Social Democrats as the junior partner (SPD). CDU leader Friedrich Merz is the current Chancellor (Prime Minister) and the Vice Chancellor is Lars Klingbeil of the SPD. The Interior Minister responsible for internal security is Alexander Dobrindt (CSU).

It gives us an interesting glimpse at current national and European defense politics in Germany.

My translation to English:

What more still has to happen, Herr Merz and Dobrindt?

Make security the main thing. Be done with the irresponsible slowness, not just since the failed terrorist attack in Leipzig.

Such attacks on our country should not pass without consequences. Everyone who challenges us in this way should have to expect serious consequences.

Our country must become more resilient in the face of Russia’s strategy of testing us with drone overflights and hybrid attacks. We need real technical improvements in defense against drones, very clear responsibility and real consequences. That’s why we have made concrete recommendations in our proposal. The [German] Federal Government keeps on ducking away. And that means that every non-reaction will be read in the Kremlin as encouragement to escalate further to the next step. The necessary actions [by Germany] are missing.

That is not taking adequate responsibility for our national security and our democracy in these serious times. [emphasis added]

The “failed terrorist attack in Leipzig” refers the recent incident with a mystery drone showing up at the Leipzig Airport that I discussed in an August 10 post. Now there have been three drones discovered as part of the same incident. Kate Connolly reported on August 25:

German investigators uncovered a third drone and suspected military explosives thought to be connected to an attempted attack on Leipzig airport, local media have reported.

The drone was discovered in Kabelsketal, just to the west of the airport, along with about 50g (1.8oz) of a suspected military explosive on 14 August, 10 days after the unsuccessful sabotage. Leipzig airport is a cargo and military logistics hub used by Nato and Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines for transporting military supplies.

The office of the prosecutor general, which is leading the investigation, declined to comment on Tuesday. But the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said the government would soon provide information about who it believed was behind the drone attacks.

“They will pay for this,” Merz said, stopping short of naming a suspect, before a cabinet meeting in Brandenburg. He added that the government was “working intensively on this together with the security authorities and we will present our findings and comment on them shortly”.

The German government has so far avoided expressing a clear position as to whether it thinks Russia, or an actor close to it, is responsible. (1)

Based on the reports I’ve seen so far, it’s hard to imagine that the attack was a serious attempt to down or destroy a plane. Because of the Russia-Ukraine War, it’s very plausible that Russia could have been behind the attacks. And the German government of course has to take that seriously. But especially as long as that war goes on, there will be continual instances of Russia and the European NATO allies testing each other over how well the other side is responding to threats, including cyber-attacks of various kinds.

I’m chronically suspicious of the term “hybrid war.” Because acts of war are acts of war, espionage is espionage, and provocations are provocations. But Germany and its European allies are exceptionally unlikely to initiate a major military attack on Russia because of some half-assed drone “attacks” like the Leipzig incident. I’m particularly suspicious of characterizations of refugee flows like the strange recent incident in the Spanish city of Ceuta as part of “hybrid war.” That characterization plays into the lead issue used by far-right parties, i.e., xenophobia.

Agnieszka Brugger’s urgent message about stepping up national defense preparedness is consistent with the position the Green Party has been taking since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The Greens started as a militant environmentalist and pacifist party. And they maintain the environmental emphasis. And while they take more of a “realist” position in foreign policy than an aggressively “neoconservative” one, Green spokespeople aren’t necessarily emphasizing cautions against warmonger in the current situation.

With the Trump Administration increasing making disastrous blunders in military and economic policy, the European NATO members are in a serious moment of transition that includes developing more consistent shared European foreign and military policies. And that includes a broad range of risks in striking the right balances of realistic defense and diplomatic posturing, all the while trying to avoid direct military hostilities with either Russia or the US. And it involves complicated challenges in armament policies, particularly with the successful use of drone warfare that Ukraine and Iran have been demonstrating. It also involves messy possibilities and real challenges with the use of new AI technology in warfare. But those are also areas where the manufacturers of the most expensive missiles and airplanes and space-war system may not want to give up some of their very high-margin products for cheaper but more effective systems that may not have such high margins.

And the fact that the foreign policy of the US has to an amazing extent degenerated in ill-informed blundering around by a President seemingly suffering from serious dementia at operating with the mentality of a Mob boss doesn’t make calculations about the immediate future of European security practices any easier!

Notes:

(1) Connolly, Kate (2026): Third drone and suspected military explosives found near Leipzig airport. Guardian 08/25/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/25/germany-drone-suspected-military-explosives-found-near-leipzig-airport> (Accessed: 2026-27-08).

The weird Republican obsession over “woke”

I always thought the Republicans’ moral panic over “woke” was silly. It’s part of their standard practice of trying to create some verbal bogeyman that they can invoke and keep their opponents on the defensive.

Part of the weirdness of Republican anti-“woke” talk is the simple fact that the opposite of “Wokeism” would be Asleepism, i.e., unconscious and unaware of what is going on around you. Of course, if you listen with even a small amount of critical thinking to the stuff Republicans in Congress say, ignoring what’s going on (with anyone but wealthy oligarchs) is the general attitude of the Republicans.

And the approach of the legacy media that evolved over decades of concentrating on “horserace” coverage that focuses on polls and campaign styles mixed with a disinterest by much of the “quality media” in substantive policy issues has facilitated the reduction of political contests to superficial buzzwords.

So, we’ve seen Republicans and grouchy rightwing commentators obsessing over “pronouns.” This started as a mockery of dull corporate HR-training reminding employees that they should respect the gender identification of co-workers. And that deteriorated into Republicans candidates saying things like “I don’t use pronouns!” Republicans started making pronouncements like, “My pronouns are Make America Great Again!” The Trump Administration has been withholding approved federal aid from Oregon for victims of the current wildfires there:

In a blistering order on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Michael McShane explained why he granted the city of Salem a preliminary injunction on Aug. 13, blocking the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency from tying disaster grants to Trump's gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion agenda. (1)

The Republican effort to make “woke” a cussword was part of the Rush Limbaugh/FOX News trolling for the purpose of “owning the libs,” i.e., “irritating liberals.” That is, irritating the “libtards,” one of Limbaugh’s favorite words.

Lately, we’ve been hearing about Woke 1 and Woke 2, aka, Woke 1.0 and Woke 2.0.

Zito Madu in The Nation gives us an update on the latest iterations of using “woke” in politics, starting with this summary of the actual issues that were initially involved in the evolution of weird concepts like, “I don’t use pronouns.”

It’s far too late now to bemoan how the meaning and sentiment behind “stay woke,” which originally pertained to the recognition of the racist structures that condition Black life in the United States, was stolen from Black Americans and caricatured into the ultimate symbol of political correctness run amok. But that notion of a crazed population seeking to punish anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to the new social rules and demand absurd changes to the social and political world is at the heart of the current discourse around so-called “Woke 1”—a term that is now quickly coming to define the seminal year of 2020, when the Covid pandemic and the murder of George Floyd fueled one of the biggest social justice movements in American history and popularized concepts like abolishing prisons and defunding the police. (2)

For Trumpistas, anything that derived from African-American urban slang is by definition bad and contemptable. The thug in a uniform who strangled Floyd to death on a public street in front of witnesses, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of murder over the case. There were other Minneapolis officers on the scene, at least one of whom helped the killer cop hold Floyd down during the murder. All officers on the scene knew they had an obligation to prevent that Chauvin from murdering the guy right in front of them. But they didn’t.

Anyone who can defend Chauvin’s actions and the collaboration of his fellow officers is exactly the kind of person who would love to attend a public lynching in a city park.

Madu starts by commenting on an August 9 interview with AOC with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on This Week: (3)

Madu’s take:

The conversation started after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the phrase in a recent ABC News interview. Asked about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s onetime support for prison abolition and police defunding, Ocasio-Cortez quoted New York City Councilman Chi Ossé’s that “Woke 1 wascrazyyyy.” She did say that there had been a “huge opening of the Overton Window” in 2020, and that “the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.” But she concluded that “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

Centrists and conservatives —after all, here was one of the most prominent leftists in America seeming to agree with them that the left had gone, well, a little nuts back in 2020. The implication from Ocasio-Cortez and Ossé is obvious: The 2020 protests against police violence and the rhetoric that came from that time produced a kind of frenzy that led people, including themselves, astray. Now, with their heads clear, they’re focused on serious and mature politics.

He is obviously writing this as a criticism.

The strange dimensions of the politics of policing

Policing is primarily a function of local and county governments. For most white people in America, their most unpleasant experience with cops is getting a speeding ticket. The experience in black and other minority communities is often much, much worse.

But police departments and police unions – which often reflect the positions of police management – tend to be very good at arguing for increased budgets every year. And they have an endless supply of statistics and anecdotes to share with the public about how many times they’ve saved the city from thieves and murderers.

Madu’s piece gives a decent reference point for understanding how the politics of policing works:

Police abolition is the big boogeyman for a lot of the people who see Woke 1 as crazy. Though it has a long academic and social history, 2020 was the first time that many people had encountered it, and the gravity of the proposal felt unimaginable to them. But underneath that was the related but more minimalist concept of defunding the police.

The defund movement stems from an obvious truth: that the more contact people have with police over nonviolent offenses, the higher the chance those interactions could potentially become deadly. It’s not a matter of whether a police officer is a good or bad apple, but whether someone with a gun should be handling problems like stopping drivers for expired tags or petty theft. Because once that stop or call is made, there’s a real possibility that the person who is being stopped is killed. And every time police kill a person over a small issue, we collectively make and defend the argument that a human life is worth whatever offense that was. Defunding the police was an idea that stemmed from valuing human life more than a candy bar or a broken taillight. [emphasis added]

He references there the fact that academic studies of policing and incarceration often use very different terms and perspectives than those of the actual politics of policing. During the upsurge in popular demands for police reforms in the wake of the George Floyd murder, the concept of police and prison “abolition” and “defunding” became widely discussed. For anyone who took the time to pay attention to either concept beyond the slogans, prison-abolition may sound like “Let all the criminals out of jail!” But it actually focuses on fundamental reform of the US penal system.

Rankings as of Oct. 22. 2024 based on data from the World Prison Brief database showed that the US had 1.8 million people incorporated, the highest number of any country. It showed China with 1.7 million. (4) In that count, the US and China were the only two countries with more than a million people in prisons and jails. China has about four times the total population of the US. A change away from an incarceration model for dealing with drug addiction and practical controls on the massive number of firearms available in the US would go a long way toward reducing the number of prison inmates. And getting rid of the private prison industry would also be a big improvement.

But a phrase like “prison abolition” doesn’t convey all that, which is why Republicans stress such a phrase in political campaigns. Since no Democratic candidate I’ve heard of advocates ending all incarceration of criminals, the Democrats need to do a much better job of pushing back on that with something more creative than, say, “No I don’t want to abolish prisons, I want more, more, more prisons.

But the Democrats still far too often fall into the “don’t think of an elephant” trap of adopting the other side’s framing of issues. Joe Biden jumped in with both feet in his response to the “defund the police” slogan by using a hippie-punching approach, as he did in his 2020 State of the Union Address: “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.” (5)

Actually, Biden himself during his successful 2020 did take the issue of police reform more seriously in his public position. The basic point that the defund-the-police protesters were making was the idea was that city governments need to make personnel available in the way Biden did as reported here:

A statement from Mr Biden's communications team on 8 June said he supported the need for reform, focusing on funding educational programmes as well as mental health and drug abuse treatment projects, to allow police officers to focus on the job of policing.

These programmes should be separate from funding for the police, it says.

Mr Biden's campaign website also pledges a $300m investment in community policing, which would be conditional on hiring police officers who "mirror the racial diversity of the community".

He also proposes additional funding for body-worn cameras for the police. (6)

The basic concept advocated by the defund-the-police protesters was pretty much exactly what Biden is quoted as saying in the first two paragraphs just quoted. This is arguably one of the reasons Biden got elected, by acknowledging the real concerns of the Black Lives Matter protests about real problems in policing. And, in fact, responsible local official like Minnesota attorney general and former Congressman Keith Ellison has actually been doing in the state where George Floyd was murdered.

But it’s also important to notice those last two points from Biden just quoted. One is “community policing,” something that the Obama Administration promoted and that was implemented in many places. It’s a feel-good idea that having more interaction with minority neighborhoods would lead to less violent police misconduct. But in practice, if the police are viewing the members of a community as hostile and dangerous, more interaction between them can lead to more rather than less abusive behavior by the cops.

The other is the idea of police being required to wear bodycams, which is a good idea. But there seems to be little evidence that use of bodycams in itself has reduced policing abuses.

In other words, those latter two points are throwaway lines politicians can use to express superficial concern of abusive policing without having wrestled with the more contentious issues with policing.

Is AOC backing away from “woke”?

It seems to me that is reading too much into what AOC was conveying in that he reads it as backing away from the sentiments of the Black Lives Matter movement. What she actually said was a comment that vaguely referred to some positions of six years ago were overblown and sometimes a bit silly. Which, of course, can safely be said about some of pretty much any political trend.

But she didn’t use a Biden-esque line like fund, fund, fund the police. And she didn’t start ranting about “the Trans” or “boys in girls’ sports.” It was a way of deflecting a leading question about Francesca Hong, then still in the Democratic primary for Governor (which she has now lost). And AOC was defending here without falling into the don’t-think-about-an-elephant trap of bringing up favorite Republican oppo-research charges against Hong. She also deflected a “gotcha” question about defund-the-police.

AOC actually provided a good model all through the interview for how Democrats can and should respond to dumb attacks by Republicans without embracing the Republicans framing on issues. And also how to handle stock “gotcha” questions from lazy interviewers.

Notes:

(1) Edwards, David (2026): Judge bulldozes Markwayne Mullin as wildfire victims suffer amid Trump 'pronoun' rule. Raw Story 08/21/2026. <https://www.rawstory.com/trump-pronouns-oregon-wildfires/> (Accessed: 2026-23-08).

(2) Madu, Zito (2026): No, Woke 1 Was Not Crazy. The Nation 08/20/2026. <https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/woke-1-was-crazy-aoc-analysis/> (Accessed: 2026-22-08).

(3) This Week. ABC News YouTube channel 08/09/2026. <https://youtu.be/SgAl_1-GOy0?si=ARIEqUiIHhV8o4Qn&t=223> AOC’s interview begins at 3:53 in the video. (Accessed: 2026-22-08).

(4) List of countries by incarceration rate. Wikipedia 07/26/2026. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate&oldid=1366172365> (Accessed: 2026-22-08).

(5) Cillizza, Chris (2022): This was the single most revealing line in Biden’s State of the Union speech. CNN 03/02/2022. <https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/02/politics/defund-the-police-biden-state-of-the-union> (Accessed: 2026-22-08).

(6) Horton, Jake (2020): US 2020 Election: Does Joe Biden support defunding the police? BBC News 09/07/2020. <https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196> (Accessed: 2026-22-08).

Political violence in the US today (2 of 2)

I like Ed Kilgore's 2015 framing of the gun-proliferation argument that "that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution against ‘tyrannical’ government." (1) He cites versions of that from Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee. He comments on the rhetoric from the far right, which we hear even ones who pretend to regret such terrorist attacks as the murderous 2015 on a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility.

Conservative opinion-leaders should, however, be held accountable for two persistent strains of extremist rhetoric that provide a theoretical basis for violence against abortion providers specifically and enemies of "traditional values" generally.

The first is the comparison of legalized abortion to the great injustices of world history, including slavery and the Holocaust. The first analogy helps anti-choicers think of themselves as champions of a new civil-rights movement while facilitating a characterization of Roe v. Wade as a temporary and disreputable constitutional precedent like Dred Scott. [The Roberts Court has since overruled the right to abortion that was the key element of Roe.] The second follows from the right-to-life movement’s logic of regarding abortion as homicide and treats the millions of legal abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 as analogous to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other “undesirables.” [emphasis in bold added]

Historically, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee that critics of slavery would be unable to block the use of "slave patrols" in which white citizens in slave states were required to patrol for slaves who were somehow breaking the rules. It was a key institution in the slave South for gaining political and psychological commitment among nonslaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. They may not have owned slaves, but they got to take part in intimidating them. (Later Supreme Court ruling that expanded this to an individual right to own guns required some considerable legal imagination.)

Historically, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee that critics of slavery would be unable to block the use of "slave patrols" in which white citizens in slave states were required to patrol for slaves who were somehow breaking the rules. It was a key institution in the slave South for gaining political and psychological commitment among nonslaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. They may not have owned slaves, but they got to take part in intimidating them. (Later Supreme Court ruling that expanded this to an individual right to own guns required some considerable legal imagination.)

The right of revolution is not inherent in the Second Amendment, much less a specific right of armed revolution. No government is going to declare the right for it to be violently overthrown. The US Constitution obviously does establish democratic/republican mechanisms for making changes, even radical changes, within the Constitutional framework. The historian Henry Steele Commager – a great admirer of the Enlightenment and in the ways the American founding documents embodied it - wrote in 1974:

The men who made our Constitution were familiar with the history of executive tyranny. They were steeped in the history of the ancient world and knew well the story of usurpation of power, revolution and assassination in the city-states of Greece and in Rome.

They knew, too, the tragic history of England and the fate of a Richard II [King 1377-1399], a Mary Queen of Scots [Queen of Scotland 1542-67] and a Charles I [King 1625-1649, executed]; they had themselves just fought a war against what they thought to be the tyranny of George III [King 1760-1820]. They were determined to write a new page in history, and did. They accepted the necessity of change in government and in leadership. They invented the great institution of the constitutional convention - a legal way to alter and abolish government and institute new government. (2)

If those royal dates seem very distant now, it’s worth remembering that the year of his execution, 1649, was 127 years in the past in 1776. This year is the 250th anniversary of the official beginning of the American Revolution. The distance between us and the Revolution is nearly twice as far away in time as the death of Charles I was to 1776. And we’re still arguing over the meaning and significance of the American Revolution.

The Constitution itself provides for Amendments and even Constitutional conventions as one way of amending it – subject to the approval methods in the Constitution itself.

The right of revolution is a conviction expressed directly in the Declaration of Independence. In that form, it was based on a concept of "natural law" which is now often scarcely recognized as such. It was heavily influenced by English and French political theorist like John Locke and Rousseau. It is deeply rooted in American tradition, and it is not unusual for politicians to invoke it support of some cause. Remember the "Reagan Revolution" and the “Gingrich Revolution”? The Declaration’s version was a revolutionary conclusion from the liberal philosophy of government of that time.

Given the theocratic claims that Christian nationalists make about the nature of America’s founding ideas, it’s worth noting that while natural law is a concept that was developed by thinkers like Locke on the basis of Christian religious ideas, both David Hume (1711-1776) – a friend and colleague of Adam Smith – and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) defended natural law as just that, as a right of all people by virtue of their humanity rather than by divine sanction.

Apart from hair-splitting and/or downright absurd arguments invoking the Second Amendment, the right to self-defense is also widely recognized in theory and in law. But conservatives over the last couple of decades have successfully pushed in many states to loosen the laws on individual self-defense so that it would be easier to justify shooting and killing someone, e.g., "stand your ground" laws.

Violence in politics should be a last resort. There have been times in American politics when unofficial violence was necessary to preserve democracy and freedom. The guerrilla war between antislavery and proslavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas" (1854-1859) is one such instance. The proslavery side was definitely intending to use force and violence to make Kansas into a slave state, whether the force was legal or not. And the Southern-dominated federal government was not going to do its duty to prevent the slaveowners from imposing their will by force. We could moralize about whether people like John Brown and others who took part in that conflict on the antislavery side should have taken a different approach. But given the stakes the slaveowners perceived in that conflict and the amount of illegitimate power they brought to it, it's unlikely that the antislavery side could have prevailed or even survived without resorting to guerrilla warfare in that situation.

Labor unions in the 19th and 20th century often faced violence from company thugs, not infrequently hired from out-and-out mobsters. With the courts and governors and many local officials willing to overlook criminal acts by the bosses and willing to employ the police and National Guard as well as court injunctions against unions and strikers, union activists did sometimes use violence, and not always purely in self-defense.

Civil rights activists and ordinary black people, especially in the South, found it expedient on occasion to use guns in self-defense against Klan types. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., who was committed to a political strategy of Ghandian nonviolent activism, bought a gun to defend himself and his family when he started becoming prominent and receiving death threats from white supremacists. He was, of course, eventually assassinated himself in an act of political violence. Even people ideologically committed to pacifism usually recognize using violence in self-defense is legitimate

I've deliberately avoided trying to make an ethical point here about those situations. Those are decisions that were taken in particular situations responding to particular threats and obstacles. Those were serious decisions with real risks. But I'm not certainly making some blanket criticism or condemnation of the Abolitionists for fighting the violence of aggressively murderous slaveowners in Kansas Territory, or labor activists for defending themselves against violent opponents, or people using force to stop Klan thugs from hurting them or their families.

The far right and political violence in 2026

At the moment, virtually all political violence in the US is coming from the political right, including the ICE versions. I include violence from violent Muslim jihadists in that characterization, even though the white Trumpista right considers them deadly enemies. Because violent Islamic fundamentalists are not aiming to establish democracy or practical equality of all or democratic civil liberties. Much less a social-democratic state, radical or otherwise. (Although super-conservative Saudi Arabia doesn't mind state ownership of oil resources.)

But the violent white Christianist right, like the antiabortion bombers and assassins, are working on a model that resembles the Ku Klux Klan model of Segregation 1.0. They are in one sense independent operators, loose cannons even, in their relationship to governments or political parties. But they also benefit from the support and encouragement of sympathetic politicians and officials. In the segregated South, it wasn't unusual for the local white shurff to be either sympathetic to the Klan or even an active member. So they could be counted on to look the other way at Klan violence, both before and after the fact. The extremist Oath Keepers group in the US seemed to have been focused on developing that kind of sympathy in local law enforcement. (Thankfully, we haven’t heard much from them in more recent years.)

That's why it's important for people to pay attention to how those connections work. Digby Parton observed in a 2015 article about an infamous, fraudulent anti-Planned Parenthood video that made "no more baby parts" an emotional cause. It was prepared by a fringe, extremist group, the "Center for Medical Progress." But as Digby put it:

You’ll recall that [former House Speaker John] Boehner had tried for months to appease the social conservative base which had been smarting from its loss on marriage equality and felt that it was being take for granted by the GOP. When the edited footage from the Center for Medical Progress was publicly released, it gave this faction a new focus for its energy and the GOP establishment was happy to help. Indeed, the activist filmmakers had consulted with Republican members of congress weeks in advance of the release and they appear to have coordinated the response. From the moment the edited tapes were made public, Republicans at all levels pulled out every rhetorical stop to condemn them, with Boehner himself saying “I could talk about the video but I think I’d vomit trying to talk about it. It’s disgusting.”

Knowing that the fervor for shutting down the government over this issue was growing — and also knowing that it would be lethal for Republicans in an election year — Boehner and other establishment Republicans worked overtime to mollify these zealots by throwing out the most incendiary rhetoric they could imagine, almost always including their patented slogan: “baby parts.” They convened a variety of committee investigations and held hearings with names like “Examining the Horrific Abortion Practices at the Nation’s Largest Abortion Provider.” Boehner even created a “Benghazi” level select House committee which they fatuously named the “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives.” All of this was done in the hopes that if they threw out enough vitriol and anger, they could somehow keep the angry social conservatives under control.

Boehner thundered to reporters, “the goal here is not to shut down the government, the goal is to stop these horrific practices of organizations selling baby parts!” [emphasis added] (3)

If you light enough fuses, the fire will eventually reach some of the explosives on the other end. And when the Republicans howl long enough and loud enough that abortion is "murdering babies" and "worse than the Holocaust," some people are going to feel enticed to respond with violence to what the Republicans are constantly declaring to be mass murder.

And there's no indication that the antiabortion activists, January Sixers and the like intend to stop. Neither the more clean-shaven versions nor the rest. The ICE Gestapo is giving them a model to follow. And to the extent that such characters are employed directly by ICE, it’s giving them directly the means and the opportunity and even (substandard) training in how to apply political violence.

Notes:

(1) Kilgore, Ed (2015): Extremist Republican Rhetoric and the Planned Parenthood Attack Daily Intelligencer 11/30/2015. <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/gop-extremism-and-the-planned-parenthood-attack.html> (Accessed: 2015-03-12).

(2) Commager, Henry Steele (1974): The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character, 157. New York: Simon and Schuster.

(3) Parton, Digby (2015): Wing-nuts are impervious to tragedy: Why the Planned Parenthood shooting won’t curb their insanity. Salon 12/01/2015. <http://www.salon.com/2015/12/01/wing_nuts_are_impervious_to_tragedy_why_the_planned_parenthood_shooting_wont_curb_their_insanity/> (Accessed: 2026-20-08).

Political violence in the US today (1 of 2)

I was recently looking back at some of my posts from the 2010s. And I came across this one that still seems pretty relevant to today’s current events. I originally published in 2015, long before Substack had come onto the scene.

At the time, there was a mass shooting in San Bernadino that came just days after another mass shooting attack on the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood.

The one in San Bernadino involved an attack by two Muslim extremists on a combined training event and Christmas celebration put on by the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. There were 14 deaths and 22 serious injuries. Both were real instances of political violence. (1)

The Colorado mass shooting was an attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that killed three and wounded nine. This is a 45-minute retrospective from a decade later: (2)

Political violence in the US has obviously continued to evolve since 2015. Most notably with a sitting American President organizing and inciting a violent, howling mob to make what turned out to be a deadly attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election.

History is helpful in thinking about how things might go. But it can also be misleading.

Whenever journalists and political scientists touch on the topic of a possible “civil war” in the US, the main precedent of states – specifically slaveowning states defending their disgusting slave system vs. the federal government – often comes to mind.

The history of the Civil War and the Jim Crow system in the South have given the concept of “states rights” a dubious reputation, at least in terms of general political rhetoric. But the US is a federal system and the Constitution gives the states the responsibility to conduct elections.

But how reckless the Trump regime gets in 2026 and 2028 with its voter-suppression efforts could actually lead to a different kind of state vs. federal violence. In which state and local officials, including police and the National Guard, may find themselves facing off with armed federal officials, including violent, lawless, and generally poorly-trained ICE Gestapo goons. If that kind of conflict breaks out, attempts to fix the elections by having armed federal agents interfere with voting at local polling places is the most easily imaginable triggering event. (3)

In other words, political violence can be initiated by private actors, which is usually what comes to mind when we think about political violence in the US. But state terror is also a form of political violence, and the violent and sometimes murderous behavior of Trump’s ICE Gestapo certainly counts as state terror and political violence.

The eliminationist attitude

Bob Cesca wrote at the time in 2015 about the “eliminationist” attitude that encourages such attacks – and presumably justifies them in the minds of the perpetrators:

We’ve reached a tipping point in America’s political discourse. The shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility is merely the latest in an increasingly alarming series of tragedies connected to political issues, each of which has been notably distorted by conservatives — or in the case of the Planned Parenthood shooting, almost completely ignored — throughout the past year and beyond. So far, attacks have occurred in relation to the following: immigration, Muslims inside the U.S., reproductive rights, LGBT equality and racial justice.

As far-right propaganda grows louder and increasingly divorced from objective reality, it seems as if incidents of violence have escalated accordingly. While there might not be a direct one-to-one correlation, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the GOP’s eliminationist rhetoric, intentionally or not, serves to inflame those who are already prone to radicalism and violence. [emphasis added] (4)

Antiabortion zealots and rightwing gun nuts

Ed Kilgore wrote in 2015 about two strains of far-right rhetoric that have facilitated the current outbreak of violence. One strain involves the ways the antiabortion movement talks about their cause:

The first is the comparison of legalized abortion to the great injustices of world history, including slavery and the Holocaust. The first analogy helps anti-choicers think of themselves as champions of a new civil-rights movement while facilitating a characterization of Roe v. Wade as a temporary and disreputable constitutional precedent like Dred Scott. The second follows from the right-to-life movement’s logic of regarding abortion as homicide and treats the millions of legal abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 as analogous to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other “undesirables.”

Both the slavery and Holocaust analogies for abortion have become commonplace “truisms” in the right-to-life movement and in allied Christian-right organizations (where there is a natural tendency to take on the righteous mantles of religiously motivated abolitionists and of the German “Confessing Church” resistance to Hitler). Conservative politicians have been more circumspect in using these inflammatory comparisons — though George W. Bush pulled off a clever dog-whistle reference to Dred Scott in the 2004 presidential debates, leaving most watchers puzzled while anti-choice activists nodded knowingly. But the white-hot atmosphere of conservative “base” competition in the current Republican presidential nominating contest may be loosening the bonds of self-restraint.

Mike Huckabee is by far the least inhibited presidential candidate when it comes to American Holocaust rhetoric, despite repeated warnings from groups like the Anti-Defamation League. [emphasis in bold added] (5)

More recently, as Trump’s US Ambassador to Israel, Huckabee supported Israel’s genocide against Gazans that began in 2023 and has publicly declared he would be fine with Israel absorbing large parts of the territory of neighboring countries.

The other strain is the right-to-revolution rhetoric that the NRA and other players in the gun-proliferation lobby use:

But there’s a second element of contemporary extremist rhetoric from conservatives that brings them much closer to incitement of violence: the claim that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution against “tyrannical” government. Again, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz have embraced this idea most avidly. ...

It’s not difficult to see how toxic these arguments become when combined. If legalized abortion (and its alleged extension into open infanticide via the “barbaric” practices of government-subsidized Planned Parenthood “baby-killers”) represents government-sponsored mass extermination and/or a perversion of the Constitution comparable to slavery, and there is a fundamental right to violent resistance against this and other acts of tyranny, then it could definitely cross the minds of conscientious gun-owning anti-choicers to emulate John Brown or the conspirators against Hitler. After all, the two greatest wars in American history were undertaken to destroy the Slave Power and Nazism. Why not a small individual war against their contemporary equivalent?

Our political vocabulary has been so poisoned by the kind of actors that Kilgore and Cesca discuss that it's difficult to make straightforward statements and judgments about political violence.

But political violence is a part of our political life. Including the Trump regime using masked ICE Gestapo goons to literally carry out acts of state terror in the US. The ongoing bogeyman (and reality) of Muslim terrorism is also political violence, even if religious motives play a large role in it. We need to understand the nature and roots of it. And we need to understand the larger roots as well as the more technical law-enforcement issues.

But the analysis needs to be realistic. It also means keeping in mind that understanding isn't justifying, explaining isn't excusing. And a realistic understanding of causes and context may not lead obviously and immediately to a clear solution.

For instance, it's often observed that failure to effectively integrate Muslim populations into European societies produces conditions which make some of them open to violence and recruitment by jihadi groups. That doesn't justify resorting to violence or using violence directed at civilians. But it does give policymakers a framework to approach the problem of drying up the pool of potential violent jihadis. How well they approach it presents a whole new set of issues.

Part 2 tomorrow will look at arguments for political violence against tyrannical governments.

Notes:

(1) 2015 San Bernardino attack. Wikipedia 07/13/2026. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(2) 10 Years Later: The Shooting at Planned Parenthood. KOAA 5 YouTube channel 12/01/2025. <https://youtu.be/ZEGTodSBHUA?si=vQNb3KbtcYJZTeGJ> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(3) What Happens If Trump Tries to Seize the Ballots? Lincoln Square YouTube channel 08/15/2026. <https://youtu.be/PtLVdFjxpCc?si=yLzeWwbFj7VwEtm4> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(4) Cesca, Bob (2015): Wing-nuts have weaponized hatred: How the conservative echo chamber is making us all less safe. Salon 2/01/2015. (Accessed: 2015-03-12).

(5) Kilgore, Ed (2015): Extremist Republican Rhetoric and the Planned Parenthood Attack Daily Intelligencer 11/30/2015. <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/gop-extremism-and-the-planned-parenthood-attack.html> (Accessed: 2015-03-12).

Git US out of the UN?

The stereotypically crackpot John Birch Society, founded in 1958, used to be described as the mothership of conspiracy theories, e.g., the alleged danger of fluoride in water supplies. Now our crackpot Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK, Jr., is also a fan of the fluoride conspiracy theory.

That’s not the only nutty cause of the Birchers that still marches on. From the John Birch Society website:

From the English edition of the Israeli paper Haaretz: (1)

Now the idea is catching on with some rightwing Israelis. The Haaretz piece reports:

An Israeli right-wing think tank hired one of Washington's major lobbying firms to influence the work of Congress and the Trump administration, Haaretz has learned.

The lobbying services were commissioned by the Misgav Institute. According to the lobbying contract, the effort is designed to promote a report written by Gilad Erdan – Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations and until recently a senior member of the Misgav Institute – calling on the U.S. to withdraw from the UN. The lobbying firm was also hired to set up meetings with senior figures in Congress and the White House.

The lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs disclosed its contract with the Misgav Institute in a filing required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the United States, which requires American lobbyists to report on their activities on behalf of foreign entities. Mercury also represents customers such as the governments of Turkey, Japan and South Korea, and has in the past represented NSO, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware.

From that report, it sounds like Erdan is no longer with the Misgav Institute. But the report he co-authored for the Institute is available on its website. (2) Even though it’s written in foreign-policy jargon, don’t mistake it for any kind of independent academic analysis.

Notes:

(1) Slymovics, Nettanel et al (2026): Right-wing Israeli Think Tank Hires Lobbyists to Push U.S. Withdrawal From UN. Haaretz 08/13/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2026-08-13/ty-article/.premium/right-wing-israeli-think-tank-hires-lobbyists-to-push-u-s-withdrawal-from-un/0000019f-f822-d28e-a3df-f872492a0000?gift=406feb4001c5448ca5841b38bbb12f7a> (Accessed: 2026-18-08).

(2) From UN Bureaucracy to American Global Leadership: A Strategy for Advancing American Interests by Disengaging from a Failed UN. Misgav website. <https://www.misgavins.org/en/fredman-un-bureaucracy-us-leadership/> (Full report: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_sKLfgdKolNDKYuZixWiSPsMaQ1nQu9i/view> (Accessed: 2026-18-08).

The “spectacle” of Adbusters

Adbusters is a glossy, freewheeling leftie magazine that publishes images that are normally both fun and disturbing and often thought-provoking.

This full-page image from their third 2026 issue titled Design Anarchy 2 brought the phrase “Jürgen Habermas on LSD” to mind.

Is there actually such a thing as a Mental Liberation Front? Who knows?

Adbusters’ main claim to fame – maybe a footnote in history but an important one – is that they are credited with sparking the Occupy Wall Street movement back in 2011. Martin Kaste explained in a piece for NPR:

The Occupy protests seemed to come out of nowhere. But the early participants, like John Garcia in downtown Seattle, point to a very specific catalyst. ...

Adbusters is an anti-consumerism magazine based in Vancouver, British Columbia. This summer, it proposed a Sept. 17 "occupation" of Wall Street, and the idea caught fire.

Adbusters ... sees itself more as an idea shop, sort of an "anti-advertising firm" that takes special glee in creating fake ads to subvert the message of real products. ...

The man behind all this is Kalle Lasn, a puckish, Estonian-born former adman who still considers himself to be, in the language of the industry, a "creative."

In a 2006 speech, Lasn said, "I have a feeling that right now, this human experiment on planet Earth is hitting the wall!"

He was speaking to an audience of fellow "creatives" — graphic designers, in this case — at a conference in Berlin. Lasn lamented the environmental and psychological cost of modern capitalism, and he laid special responsibility on the shoulders of advertising professionals.

Adbusters’ style reminds me some things I’ve seen from the Situationists of decades ago:

Situationist International (SI), [was a] group of artists, writers, and social critics (1957–72) that aimed to eliminate capitalism through the revolutionization of everyday life. Instead of focusing on traditional sites of economic and social change, such as the factory, the Situationist International (SI) argued that a revolution would take place in the realm of everyday life because the alienating effects of capitalism were pervasive in modern society. Although it was an association of art movements from across Europe, its primary figures were French, and its primary writings, including its eponymous journal, were composed in French. (2)

One of the best-known political works from the Situationists was a pamphlet by Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. This was the cover of an English version published in Detroit in 1970 which proudly identified itself as “a Black & Red translation unauthorized.”

It contained some stereotypically “Sixties” highbrow leftie language. For instance:

The spectacle, understood in its totality, is simultaneously the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, its added decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, advertisement or direct consumption of entertainments, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The form and the content of the spectacle are identically the total justification of the conditions and the ends of the existing system. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, to the extent that it occupies the principal part of the time lived outside of modern production.

I’ve never felt like I quite grasped what that was supposed to mean. And maybe that’s the point. The Spectacle is a real thing - but not quite - but its still tells us something profound? Whatever that might be …

My reaction to that pamphlet is still pretty much like Huck Finn’s when listening to one of Tom Sawyer’s grand explanation of how the world works: I don’t understand it, but boy, it sure sounds grand!

Adbusters reminds me of that in being cool and interesting, even if What It Means isn’t always clear.

Notes:

(1) Kaste, Martin (2011): Exploring Occupy Wall Street's 'Adbuster' Origins. NPR 10/20/2011. <https://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins> (Accessed: 2026-17-08).

(2) Editors (2024): Situationist International. Encyclopedia Britannica 03/20/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Situationist-International> (Accessed 2026-17-08).

(3) Debord, Guy (1970): Society of the Spectacle, 6. The explicitly “unauthorized” edition specifies that it has “No copyright/No rights reserved.” Consistent with that spirit, you can download it for free from the Brown University Library website: <https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:89211/>

Israeli election coming up, war on Gaza continues

With Israeli parliamentary elections coming up on October 27, it’s important to keep in mind that Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians are, unfortunately, very popular among his target constituencies: “Jewish Israelis are united in their support for perennial war, which effectively means charting an increasingly solitary regional and global path,” writes Ori Goldberg. (1)

And, as presumably most Israeli voters know, Israel is not observing the Gaza cease-fire it agreed to. More jaded observers talk about the concept of “a ceasefire with Israeli characteristics” - i.e.: you cease, we fire. The phrase is a play on the Chinese Communists’ concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

As Britain’s Channel 4 reports: (2)

Barry Malone recently reported:

How many people do you need to kill before you’ve violated a ceasefire? One, surely. But what about two? 10? 100? Or how about more than 1,200? That’s how many Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza since agreeing to an ostensible ceasefire with Hamas in October.

Israel has also continued to pummel southern Lebanon, despite a “ceasefire” there. But the western media appears to see no violations at all. Instead, it sees ceasefires that are “fragile”, “tested”, “strained” or “shaky”.

Given that news reporting is supposed to rely on precision and accuracy, you’d imagine organisations such as the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and CNN have read the terms of the deal that was signed between Israel and Hamas in Egypt. It’s unequivocal, and there really isn’t much room for interpretation. There were conditions that needed to be fulfilled within the first 72 hours before the truce could take effect, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed lines within Gaza, and the return by Hamas of all remaining Israeli hostages, living or dead.

Once the prerequisites were met, which they were, the text said that “all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations will be suspended”. [emphasis added, paragraph breaks adjusted] (3)

Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal has been to have weak and/or failed states in his geographic neighborhood. And now the war which Trump initiated jointly with Netanyahu against Iran is doing an awful lot of damage to countries in the neighborhood.

Notes:

(1) Goldberg, Ori (2026): As Iran and the U.S. talk, Israel chooses eternal war. +972 Magazine 07/03/20226. <https://www.972mag.com/us-iran-talks-israel-eternal-war/> (Accessed: 2026-07-08).

(2) Netanyahu rejects Trump’s Gaza peace plan and refuses to withdraw troops. Channel 4 News YouTube channel 08/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/qRIVIjto_qM?si=imH9zScPdNjz46B-> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(3) Malone, Barry (2026): Israel is not 'testing' its ceasefires. It's violating them. Middle East Eye 08/04/2026. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-not-testing-its-ceasefires-its-violating-them> (Accessed: 2026-07-08).

Navigating today’s neo-McCarthyism in politics

I’m hesitant to even mention this for several reasons.

One is that it involves referencing some really dull prose.

Another is that it involves possibly falling into the “don’t think of an elephant” trap that linguist George Lakoff warned against. That is, if you are responding to an attack or especially to a falsehood by the other political side, you need to avoid responding in a way that reinforces the opponents’ framing. Because if you tell someone not to think of an elephant, it instantly makes the hearer think of an elephant.

Josh Marshall, who is definitely sympathetic to Democrats in general and not in a Joe Manchin or Joe Lieberman kind of way, brings up something I had never heard of before in a piece titled, “Houston, We Have a Problem … What’s Up With the National DSA?” (1)

That would be the Democratic Socialists of America group with which some Democratic progressives like AOC have associated themselves. And Josh is telling us we need to be really concerned about this!

I’ll digress here a bit to recall an incident from Ronald Reagan’s political career when he was challenged on his flirtation with the far-right John Birch Society, a white supremacist group famous for its for its dogmatic anti-Communism who was influential with some rich rightwing Republicans. (2) They thought Dwight Eisenhower was a commie. The Birchers endorsed Reagan in his 1966 campaign for California governor. He effectively dispatched that criticism by saying that if someone endorsed him, it meant that they were buying into his program, not that he was buying into theirs. The Bircher brand was toxic for mainstream voters.

In his 1980 Presidential campaign, which had plenty of racist overtones, Reagan did explicitly reject the endorsement of a Ku Klux Klan group. Which is something in his favor.

Which brings us back to Josh’s recent article. I certainly don’t have anything against today’s social- democracy as such. It’s a quirk of American politics that welfare-state measures like Medicare, Social Security, minimum wage and union rights are considered “liberal,” although those are also the types of programs social-democratic parties support. In fact, the US and Canada are the only countries that I know of that use “liberal” to mean left-of-center. In Europe and Latin America, “liberal” generally refers to parties that support “free market” policies and are even may be considered to the right of “conservatives.”

So if Republicans want to let their Bircher flags fly and say out loud they want to get rid of all this here socialism stuff like Medicare and Social Security – they should go for it!

Since no two Democratic elected officials totally agree on everything anyway, they don’t need to apologize for or denounce positions taken by people with whom they have one or two or three degrees of separation. But the title of Josh’s article alerts his readers to think there is something really dangerous about the “national DSA.” Most of his readers will probably know that DSA refers to a particular democratic-socialist group.

I certainly have no phobia against left publications or groups or podcasts as such. On the contrary. I’m on board with the slogan Sam Seder’s Majority Report podcast sometimes uses: Left Is Best!

So imagine my surprise at reading Josh Marshall in full scold mode over the infamous Red Star Caucus group. (3) Never heard of that? Neither had I until I read his piece. It turns out that DSA, which is an ideological and activist group but not a part of the Democratic Party, also includes a “Red Star Caucus” that has a “points of unity” statement that sounds like something out of the late 1970s in which they identify themselves as Marxist-Leninists who would like someday to have an actual communist system. And who apparently have a fondness for dull sectarian prose.

Josh’s approach seems uncomfortably like naively walking into Lakoff’s “don’t think of an elephant” trap. Look! Some progressive candidates in Democratic primaries have some association to that DSA thing (that most voters probably couldn’t identify what it is)! And some other people who associate with the DSA are actual Marxists!! And these Red Star Caucus people – who most people including hardcore political junkies have never heard of - are spreading “the seed corn of left-wing authoritarianism”!!

Next step in the process is for rightwingers to flag his article with a description like “even the flaming leftwing borderline commie Josh Marshall says the DSA Dumb-ocrats want to take your take your house and your cars away from you and make you work on a collective farm!!”

Unfortunately, rightwing media may see that as an invitation to do that. The New York Post already just last week ran an opinion piece by longtime Republican hack and editor of the National Review Rich Lowry with a headline warning, “the DSA’s communist coup is real.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans have given us a Reagan Revolution, a Gingrich Revolution, and a mob of murderous Trumpistas storming the US Capital on January 6, 2021 to overturn the results of the Presidential elections. And masked ICE Gestapo thugs prowling the streets and exercising literal state terror.

It’s worth noting that DSA is not a party-within-a-party. Harold Meyerson, who has been formally associated with the DSA long before the AOC era writes:

America’s most prominent democratic socialist, the man who stamped that political tendency on the current American map - Bernie Sanders - is not now nor has he ever been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. As a young man, Sanders belonged to some fringe leftist organizations and apparently swore off such affiliations - whether the groups were fringe or not - as he grew older. (4)

That “is not now nor has he ever been a member …” line is an ironic reference to the Congressional witchhunt committees of the 1940s and 1950s, who liked to ask people dragged before their tribunal as a perjury-trap question: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

And, speaking of Bernie, here is his take from August 12 on the current situation: (5)

Notes:

(1) Marshall, Josh (2026): Houston, We Have a Problem … What’s Up With the National DSA? TPM 08/10/2026. <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/houston-we-have-a-problem-whats-up-with-the-national-dsa> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(2) Hill, Gladwin (1966): REAGAN ACCUSED OF BIRCHER LINKS; Democratic Report Calls Him 'Extremists' Collaborator'. New York Times 08/12/1966. <https://www.nytimes.com/1966/08/12/archives/reagan-accused-of-bircher-links-democratic-report-calls-him.html> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(3) Red Star (2025): Points of Unity. Red Star Caucus 02/24/2025. <https://redstarcaucus.org/points-of-unity/#anti-imperialism-must-be-at-the-core-of-the-future-party> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(4) Meyerson, Harold (2026): Why Have Less Than One Percent of American Socialists Joined DSA? The American Prospect 08/10/2026. <https://prospect.org/2026/08/10/why-have-less-than-one-percent-of-american-socialists-joined-dsa/> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(5) Primary Results; Building On Victories. The Majority Report YouTube channel 08/12/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/X8TW2t9r8O8?si=3wHTM9kvf8UcpXfh&t=3820> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).