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).

“Hybrid” threats and a mystery drone at the Leipzig Airport

One of the recent events that at least looks like a Russian provocation was the appearance of a drone loaded with explosives at the Leipzig, Germany airport.

Well, maybe loaded with explosives. Because some explosives were found lying on the airport runway at some distance from the drone, that was flying just over the runway. This is one of those stories on which the early reports makes you go, “Huh?” [Corrected 08/12/2026: The drone was not lying directly on the runway when the bus driver kicked it while it was still in the air.]

The Guardian’s early report described it this way:

The discovery of a small drone carrying explosives at Leipzig airport, a leading shipping and military hub, set off alarm and caused flight diversions on Wednesday morning [Aug. 5]. German police deployed a bomb disposal robot to defuse and destroy the explosive device.

In public remarks on Wednesday evening, the [German] interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, said the incident did not appear to be the work of amateurs, and that investigators were treating it as part of a “professional hybrid threat scenario”. (1)

There was also a possibly related incident at the Leipzig airport on the same day, in which a DHL cargo plane “collided mid-air ‌with an unknown object shortly after take-off from Leipzig airport, prompting ⁠an immediate unscheduled landing in Hanover.” (2)

FRANCE 24 reports: (3)

The Interior Minister (responsible for federal security matters) say it “did not appear to be the work of amateurs.” Although as described below, lethal professionalism wasn’t necessarily a part of this incident, either.

The use of the “hybrid” concept gets dodgier all the time. NATO officially defines it very broadly:

Hybrid methods of warfare – such as propaganda, deception, sabotage and other non-military tactics – have long been used to destabilise adversaries. What is new about attacks seen in recent years is their speed, scale and intensity, facilitated by rapid technological change and global interconnectivity. NATO has a strategy for its role in countering hybrid warfare and stands ready to defend the Alliance and all Allies against any threat, whether conventional or hybrid. (4)

Since one of the worst problems in US foreign policy since the Second World War has been threat inflation, a concept like “hybrid warfare” is especially slippery. Invading a country is warfare. A Pearl Harbor sneak aerial attack is warfare. Assassinating the senior leadership of a country is an act of war.

But not everything somehow connected to outright military conflict is war. War includes propaganda, sabotage, espionage, duplicitous diplomacy, and public diplomacy designed to influence domestic and foreign opinion. But putting out some false story or inventing a conspiracy theory is not war. Hacking computer systems in another country is not in itself war. Encouraging refugees to go into another country is not war. (See: Belarus and Poland, and the recent Ceuta incident with Spain and Morocco.)

And if “deception” is an equivalent of warfare, diplomats all over the world are declaring warfare on each other’s countries all the time!

There are certainly grey areas. A foreign hack of computer systems controlling nuclear missiles could legitimately be considered an act of war. Iran’s recent Lego propaganda videos are part of Iran’s broader war effort, but propaganda in itself is not war. (And in any case, we actually are at war with Iran.) Assassinating the head of state or government of another country is a classic example of a legitimate cause of war. Some actions do fall into a gray area. But not every hostile or threatening or even murderous action is a legitimate cause for war. Opting for war is still a choice. Gavrilo Princip assassinating Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was a legitimate justification for war in the abstract. But it didn’t work out so well for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which disappeared from the map entirely at the end of the war. Which Germany had pushed them hard to initiate.

Considering refugee flows as acts of war is especially risky at the moment for Europe. We’ve seen in the US how the Trump Administration went back to a statute from the 1790s, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as its excuse for unleashing the ICE Gestapo in 2025 to beat, kidnap, and kill people who don’t look “American” enough to masked ICE goons. Some countries, including Morocco and Türkiye, do use refugees as provocations against their neighbors. But the radical right parties and sectarian groups in Europe – many actively supported by Trump and J.D. Vance as well as by Putin – try hard to use immigration in the way Trump uses it, as an excuse to exercise state terror with some old-fashioned vigilante violence to supplement it.

Government officials, journalists and politicians in democratic countries need to be especially careful of treating immigration problems as “hybrid warfare.” Democracy has enough enemies without its centrist supporters piling on to undermine it.

The Leipzig drone incident does look at least plausibly like a Russian provocation and warning signal to the EU and European NATO allies. The recent incident of a Russian missile landing and exploding in a field in Poland with no people around also legitimately raised questions about whether it was an accidental misfire of a missile aimed at Ukraine. That’s one of those things for which researchers 30 years from now may dig out solid answers about from declassified documents.

Anne Hähnig reported early today for the German Die Zeit:

Since an armed drone was discovered at Leipzig Airport on Wednesday night, many details have become known. For example, how big the drone was (a quadrocopter with the approximate dimensions of a microwave, four rotors). Where it was found (near a Ukrainian cargo plane, which is also used to transport military equipment). Or what explosives it was carrying (Semtex).

However, some crucial questions about the process so far remain unanswered. Among other things, how the armed drone got close to the Ukrainian plane in the first place, what route it took, whether it scouted out the machine or, for instance, tried to fly underneath it. (5)

According to information obtained by Die Zeit, video recordings have now been evaluated that provide information about it. This is because the majority of the airport grounds are monitored by cameras. The videos show that Leipzig escaped a catastrophe by a much narrower margin than previously known.

As quoted below, Hähning notes that there were cameras filming the area where the drone was found. But there were no radar signs, or observations by the pilots or air controllers, of a drone closely tracking the plane?

The videos show the [Ukrainian] Antonov cargo plane parked at the airport. And they apparently show that already on Tuesday evening at around 7:30 PM., an object flew directly towards this aircraft. It eventually hit one of the wings. The wings are particularly sensitive parts of the aircraft because they usually contain fuel tanks. If you want to blow up an airplane, you detonate a bomb there. However, this did not happen in Leipzig. The footage shows that the object bounced off the wing and fell to the ground. Traces on a wing of the Antonov confirm this presumed sequence of events. Why the explosive device did not explode is still unclear.

(I did a double-take on that one. On 7:30 PM Tuesday, an “object” was seen and recorded on video - but the drone itself wasn’t discovered at the airport until Wednesday evening? A simple translation can be misleading: the report reads in German “in der Nacht auf Mittwoch,” which means the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.)

The report leaves open whether the drone was following the aircraft in the air or whether it was hidden on the ground and struck first after the landing.

The drone was not discovered by chance until four hours later. Die Zeit had already reported on Wednesday that it was the bus driver of a tourist group who became aware of the device. Previous reconstructions had assumed that he had kicked the device and later fixed it to the ground. …

Camera footage, on the other hand, now shows that the drone was already on the ground when the bus driver arrived. After a short hesitation, he put his foot on it and informed the security staff. In the end, the explosive device was not found on the drone itself – contrary to what was previously known – but at some distance. It is possible that it detached itself on impact with the aircraft.

I would say that if you see a strange object that kind of looks like a drone lying randomly on the ground on or near an airport runway, walking over and kicking it  - in this case apparently driving by it in a bus and kicking it while it's in the air - probably isn’t the safest way to check it out! And the explosives were lying well away from the drone. And the drone with the explosives may have hit the plane but the explosives just fell off and didn’t detonate?

Hähning’s report continues:

For the officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office, who took over the investigation at the weekend, this results in new insights. It is now more clear how exactly the drone approached the aircraft: not carefully, but with the obvious intention of damaging it. It is also more clear what purpose it served. So far, one of the investigative hypotheses has been that it could have been meant merely as a kind of warning. Armed yes, but not intended to actually explode. (emphasis added) This hypothesis can now hardly be maintained. Leipzig Airport narrowly escaped a devastating attack.

When Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) interrupted his vacation on Wednesday to travel to Leipzig, he avoided clear statements about who he suspects to be the culprit. But he spoke of a "hybrid attack scenario" and of "foreign powers", which is commonly read as a reference to Russia. But Dobrindt avoided explicitly naming Russia as the perpetrator. ...

So far, the investigations have not yielded any clear indications that Russia is behind the attempted attack. However, several details point to highly professional perpetrators. … That a state actor was involved in the attack – in whatever way – is … one of the investigative hypotheses that has now become more likely.

After her own description of what is known about the attack, I’m not sure that adds up to making the idea that “a state actor was involved in the attack … more likely.”

Hopefully we’ll get a more complete description at some point. But the beginning of a Russian Blitzkrieg it’s definitely not!

[08/12/2026: This post deliberately highlighted uncertainties in the early report. Two articles with additional information are Bus driver kicked explosive drone out of the air at German airport, lawmaker says (Reuters 08/08/2026) and How a German Bus Driver May Have Averted a War (The Bulwark 08/12/2026) 08/12/2026.]

Notes:

(1) Cole, Deborah & Roth, Andrew (2026): Drone carrying explosives at German airport marks ‘new level of danger’, says interior minister. Guardian 08/05/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/05/drone-german-airport-dhl-cargo-plane-collides-object-leipzig> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(2) DHL cargo plane lands in Hanover after mid-air collision with object, source says. Reuters <https://www.reuters.com/world/dhl-cargo-plane-lands-hanover-after-mid-air-collision-with-ob.ject-source-says-2026-08-05/> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(3) Bomb-disposal robot and drone with explosives discovered at Germany's Leipzig airport FRANCE 24 English YouTube channel 08/06/2026. <https://youtu.be/7F1z4HFuT3k?si=q77nxRDaSFnjmnq6> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(4) Countering hybrid threats. NATO website 01/29/2026. <https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/deterrence-and-defence/countering-hybrid-threats> (Accessed: 2026-10-08).

(5) Hähnig, Anne (2026): Das war keine Warnung, das war ein Angriff. Die Zeit 08/10/2026. <https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-08/drohne-leipzig-flughafen-sprengstoff-kameraaufnahmen?freebie=1e4ac99d> (Accessed: 2026-10-08). My translation to English, with emphasis added in italics.

Ukraine and European diplomacy

Bloomberg has reported, “Former senior officials from the UK, France, Germany and Russia met in Vienna last month to explore potential conditions for peace talks to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine, according to people familiar with the matter.”

This was a follow-up to a previous meeting:

In fact, another secret European-Russian meeting took place in July: in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the authoritarian President Ilham Aliyev revealed. As a result, the talks apparently moved on to Vienna. In Baku, in addition to the chairman of the Gazprom supervisory board and close Putin confidant Viktor Zubkov, the chairman of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Valery Fadeyev, was also present from the Russian side. Both are under heavy international sanctions. (1)

It’s no surprise that such diplomatic talks are happening. And it’s not unusual for governments to use news of such conferences to send messages to other foreign actors and to test public and official reactions.

Britain and the EU countries are generally supportive of Ukraine in their war with Russia and have been all along, since the Russia occupation of Crimea in 2014, the low-intensity irregular warfare in the Donbas region that followed, and then the full-blown Russian invasion of 2022, which is generally taken as the beginning of the current Russia-Ukraine War. The military seizure of another country’s sovereign territory is an illegal act of aggression under international law.

I won’t recap here is spectacularly foolish, reckless diplomacy beginning with the Cheney-Bush Administration over NATO membership for Ukraine.

Major parts of the context are the EU and NATO, both of which require their members to maintain democratic forms of government. For some member governments over the decades, that has been a challenge. But the European members of both alliances do see democracy and the rule of law as a basic foundation for the success and survival of both alliances. T he EU has an Eastern Partnership program that provides Ukraine and other countries including Moldova assistance in bringing their countries into compliance with the minimum EU standards. And that in itself is a powerful incentive for those countries to aspire to EU membership, and an important means of enhancing the power of the EU itself.

The Russian objections to Ukrainian partnerships with the West have focused heavily on NATO rather than on the EU. NATO is a defensive partnership that of course still includes the United States, however unreliable the US now looks as an ally for its European partners. But it’s also important to remember that the EU has a mutual defense clause itself. So as long as Russia occupies part of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, formal Ukrainian membership in either the EU or NATO would be highly problematic. Diplomacy can be very creative, but joining an alliance with a country that has significant parts of its territory occupied by Russia would be uncomfortably close to a declaration of war against Russia. The EU is not going to do that – though again, diplomacy can get very creative.

But the Russia-Ukraine War remains largely a frozen conflict. Both countries can very probably keep the war of attrition going for a while. It’s already gone on longer than the Firsst World War. But it’s at a tremendous cost to both sides. There are good reasons that both countries would see advantages in a stable armistice. And with the Western supplies of interceptor missiles running short while the US is also locked into a war with Iran with no near end in sight, Ukraine is more vulnerable to Russian missiles that are already doing some serious damage to Ukrainian infrastructure. But the most obvious barrier to a peace settlement is that it would have to involve assurances by the US on economic sanctions and various military issues.

And while the EU is still very much capable of diplomacy, we are seeing on a daily basis that the Orange Anomaly in the White House is not.

When we look at European options in grubby power-political terms, it’s a very safe assumption that European NATO allies have been very aware all along that not only was helping Ukraine an important deterrence measure. But also that a prolonged war like Russia is now having with Ukraine also weakens Russia in important ways. Obviously, Russian propaganda emphasizes that point about Western intentions, but it’s also an obvious factor to take into account. On the other hand, Russian experience in warfare the last four years and the expansion they have made in their military production capabilities during the war are not factors that work in favor of potential European adversaries of Russia.

However, I do think claims like the one made by Almut Rochowanski in a 2025 article are overblown, or at least unhelpfully vague: “It is by now clear that European leaders prefer the war in Ukraine to continue, that they fear peace (a “quick” one anyway), that many believe Europe is already at war and seem “gung ho” to turn it into a shooting war, and that they are obsessed with inflicting defeat on Russia.” (emphasis added) (2)

Military industries are inherently problematic in that they are dependent on public spending but as private corporations, they have maximum incentive to paint the most gloom-and-doom picture of the state of national security that they can to maximize defense spending and their own profits. Politicians very often find it much more convenient to tout the benefits of military spending for their own districts than to exercise critical oversight over military programs.

Yet as devastating as climate change is, no human activity does so much damage so far as wars do. Even in the middle of wars, the military budget and how the government manages it is a critical function that is often badly performed. Aaron Sobczak noted in a 2025 report that the Department of Defense “has failed every audit since it was legally required to submit to one each year beginning in 2018. In fact, the Pentagon is the only one of 24 federal agencies that has not been able to pass an unmodified financial audit since the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.” (3)

Anne Applebaum talks about the state of the Russia-Ukraine War in this interview just after 20:00, and about what kinds of things EU states are watching about potential threats from Russia, after talking about the latest Trump messes. She argues that Russia at the moment is not in any position to launch some kind of full-scale military action against NATO members. But Russia is arguably looking to make trouble for Europe where it can, including by promoting far-right parties and boosting xenophobic scares like the recent one over Moroccan immigrants in Ceuta, Spain. She also comments about that recent incident and who may have incited it. (Applebaum is not part of the Polish government but she is married to the Polish Foreign Minister. So she has incentive to be very mindful of how she describes such things.) (4)

(Near the end of the interview, supposed Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes smugly badmouths Michigan Democrats for voting for a left-leaning Democrat in the Senate primary. He’s basically promoting the Republican candidate. Applebaum is obviously reserved in her response.)

John Mearsheimer has started his very own podcast, as well as still giving lots of interviews. His first contribution was this one on the background of the Russia-Ukraine War. (5)

Notes:

(1) Sommavilla, Fabian (2026): Geheimtreffen in Wien: Europäische Diplomaten trafen Russen ohne ukrainische Beteiligung. Der Standard 08/07/2026. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000334664/geheimtreffen-in-wien-europaeische-diplomaten-trafen-russen-ohne-ukrainische-beteiligung> (Accessed: 2026-08-08). My translation from German.

(2) Rochowanski, Almut (2025): Europe’s Leaders Have No Strategy for Peace. Jacobin 11/27/2025. <https://jacobin.com/2025/11/europe-war-ukraine-strategy-peace> (Accessed: 2026-09-08).

(3) Sobczak, Aaron (2026): Report: Pentagon will likely fail audits through 2028. Responsible Statecraft 05/07/2026. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/department-of-defense-audit-failures/> (Accessed: 2026-09-08).

(4) Anne Applebaum: “I Can’t Think of Anything More Corrupt”. To the Contrary … YouTube channel 08/08/2026. <https://youtu.be/0JqHtslRdv4?si=bWiPO8Kz9HTULWYK> (Accessed: 2026-08-08).

(5) Episode 1: Origins of the War In Ukraine. John Mearsheimer-Offensive Realism YouTube channel 07/30/2026. <https://youtu.be/0LmCveTM788?si=yu8nplEfDYkm9Eo-> (Accessed: 2026-08-08).

More on the Ceuta incident and its international context

Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political scientist and author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023), commented on the idea that Israel may have encouraged last week’s incident in Ceuta, in which 72 thousand people starting on Thursday crossed the border from Morocco to Spain, causing a flap among some panicky EU politicians - though most of them had returned to Morocco by Monday. She calls it “conspiratorial hogwash.“ (1)

I find her description overblown. We don’t know exactly who incited the incident. We do know that there was a flood of social media messages inciting people to cross the border, and with deadly results for at least 88 of the border-crossers. There has been no immediate confirmation of who was behind those messages. And the Moroccan government hasn’t fessed up to anything. But it is clear from the circumstances of the initial crossing and the rapid returns as well as from some of the new reporting that the Moroccan government was facilitating if not directly inciting it.

Here is an August 4 BBC report on the Ceuta incident: (2)

That report contains an error I’ve seen elsewhere, in that it calls Ceuta a Spanish territory. It is not. It is a part of Spain. The UN does not count Ceuta and the nearby city of Melilla as unresolved colonial issues. It does consider British occupation of the Spanish island of Gibraltar as one.

European governments have to be prepared for foreign governments inciting immigration incidents. As immigration experts like Gerald Knaus and Judith Kohlenberger point out, how the EU immigration system functions depends by definition on conditions in nearby countries and on those governments’ policies. That’s a truism in the sense that immigrants have reasons for leaving their countries and going to other ones, usually economic reasons but also a result of military conflicts. If there had been no wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine in the last fifteen years, and if countries in the Middle East and North Africa had consistently robust and prosperous economies, not so many people would have been determined to come to Europe. In immigration jargon, there are “push” effects and “pull” effects on immigration.

In America, even the most besotted fans of the White House czar of ethnonationalism, Stephen Goebbels-Miller, know that most immigrants to the US have primarily economic motives, though a lot of them will claim it’s all part of a George Soros Jewish conspiracy. Nativists in EU countries operate on similarly primitive assumptions.

That notion of immigration being a terrible threat and part of a Jewish plot actually does play a big role in the ideology of far-right parties like the AfD in Germany, the FPÖ (“Freedom” Party) in Austria, and Georgia Meloni’s party and coalition government in Italy. Meloni has shown some real pragmatism at times, and her Brothers of Italy party tends to be anti-Russian so her government has been cooperative on genuine defense concerns in the Trump 2.0 era. But her party is organizationally a lineal descendent of Mussolini’s Fascist Party and Meloni does promote xenophobic politics.

In the Ceuta incident of the past week, she declared that she was suspending the free movement of people in the Schengen Zone, of which Italy is part, for air and sea travelers, and called for kicking Spain out of the Schengen Zone. This was cheap demagoguery and a political gesture toward anti-EU sentiments. And her close-the-borders move is almost certainly illegal under Schengen and EU laws.

And Europe does have foreign actors interested in using immigration to give European countries real headaches. And they see xenophobic far-right parties like Meloni’s as an exploitable weakness. Trump and Vance support far-right parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary. Vance even took himself and his negative charisma to Hungary to campaign for the anti-democracy Orbán in the election this year, thereby helping Fidesz to lose the election in a landslide. They would like to promote Meloni’s party, too, but Trump’s ham-fisted imitation of diplomacy has been screwing that up.

This means that both Washington and Moscow see opportunities to exploit immigration scares like the Ceuta one over the past week to promote the political fortunes of their favorite parties. Neither Putin nor Trump want to see Europe coalesce around a revised collective defense arrangement, so they are looking for ways to exploit xenophobia and Islamophobia to divide EU nations from each other as much as possible. And we see some of that in the Ceuta incident, with some other EU leaders badmouthing Pedro Sánchez’ Spanish government over it. Although most of them seemed to have pulled it together after a couple of days and express solidarity with Spain’s over the crisis. (3)

The EU countries with the five biggest armies are Poland, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. If they are serious about European defense arrangements much more independent from the US than even now, their leaders have to keep in mind that both Russia and the Trumpified US will seek to exploit their political weaknesses, of which xenophobic far-right parties are the single biggest one. Trump of course fanned the flames by calling Ceuta incident an “invasion” and a catastrophe.” (It was a deadly catastrophe for the estimate 88 immigrants who died and for their families.)

As Judith Kohlenberger observes, this was the first stress test for the recently-implemented Common European Asylum System (CEAS), and the EU didn’t do so well. At least not initially.

Both the US and Israel are angry at Spain for not allowing their air space to be used by US planes involved in the US-Israel War on Iran. As I noted in a previous post, Morocco is a party to the Abraham Accords, and Israel has backed Morocco’s claims that the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilli should belong to Morocco – a highly dubious claim in international law. In addition, Morocco has a long-running dispute with its neighbor Algeria over the Western Sahara, which was once occupied by Spain. Spain’s government recently endorsed Algeria’s position on control of Western Sahara, which of course did not please Morocco’s government.

Immigration is by definition an international event. So it’s nothing unusual that several governments besides Spain and Morocco have interests that touch on the question of immigration to Spain through Ceuta and Melilla.

And, of course, actual conspiracy-mongers and governments with an interest in creating information fog around an event like Ceuta are more than willing to push garbage into the information sphere.

Scheindlin writes:

The surge of Moroccans to Ceuta desperately seeking a better life seems unusual? If you are an Israel or Palestine fanatic, it explains that too. This is how conspiracy theories are born.

As tens of thousands of would-be migrants rushed the Spanish territory in Morocco last Thursday, by Friday, the conspiracy theories were already flowing. An X account posing as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called Morocco a "tool" of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, and wrote "they are punishing Spain for supporting Palestine."

That’s a valid criticism by Scheindlin. Unfortunately, it’s only in the last paragraph that she notes: “Israel's position on the Morocco-Spain crisis is idiotic enough without [the help of conspiracists]. Its officials only offer up snark, and its influencers parade their ignorance around by trying to compare immigrants to Palestinians. Let that speak for itself.“ [emphasis added]

She focuses on an article by Stephen Zunes in The Nation, a longtime left-leaning US publication, to use as an example of insinuating an unfounded conspiracy theory. He gives this description, accurate so far as I can see, of Trump’s position – although Trump’s position can literally fluctuate from one sentence to the next these days:

Trump has labeled Spain as “hopeless,” with “bad people,” in response to Sanchez’s not increasing the country’s military budget as much as he demanded and, in particular, Madrid’s refusal to allow US military bases on Spanish territory to be used in the war on Iran or to allow overflight by US military aircraft. Last month, Trump directed the secretary of the treasury to cut trade ties with Spain, despite that being impossible due to Spain’s membership in the EU, and he was looking for other ways of punishing Madrid.

Given how Trump has developed a greater affinity with repressive Arab monarchs like Morocco’s King Mohammed VI than with traditional European allies, it is perhaps not surprising that he would criticize rather than defend a NATO ally faced with a violation of their sovereign territory. [emphasis added] (4)

And he mentions the actual initial US public response:

In addition, the wave of border crossings has created images that far-right parties in Europe are now using to claim that there is an uncontrollable refugee crisis, feeding racist and xenophobic attacks against Sanchez and other left-leaning governments for allowing a foreign “invasion” of EU territory. Conservative European governments have demanded that Spain be removed from the Schengen Zone that allows for passport-free movement within most of Europe despite the fact that Spain maintains tight internal migration control between the presidios and the Spanish mainland and that none of 50,000 who illegally crossed into Ceuta have made it onto the European continent.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Vice President JD Vance blamed the border crossings on “radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West,” while Trump warned that scenes similar to those of the tens of thousands of dark-skinned people storming the border in Ceuta would occur in the United States as well if Democrats get back into office. [emphasis added]

By the way, Vance knows very well that his fans assume that “globalist policies” refers to an imagined World Jewish Conspiracy.

Zunes concludes that the Ceuta incident was “part of efforts by the growing US-Israeli-Moroccan nexus - codified and strengthened by the so-called Abraham Accords - to weaken a progressive European government [Spain’s], divide Europe, and undermine international law and human rights.”

From the news I’ve seen, that particular conclusion does go beyond what has been clearly established in the reporting on the incident. But from what we do know from information currently public is that the Moroccan government is very likely to have actively facilitated the Ceuta incident. And it’s highly likely that their Israeli and US allies at least gave them tacit approval, though I haven’t yet seen that specifically documented. (But, really, neither the CIA nor the Mossad knew that something like this was in the works?)

To be clear here: Dahlia Scheindlin is an excellent source for analysis of Israeli politics. I highly recommend her work.

Notes:

(1) Israel, Ceuta and 'The Real Story': How to Spot Conspiratorial Hogwash. Haaretz 08/04/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2026-08-04/ty-article/.highlight/israel-ceuta-and-the-real-story-how-to-spot-conspiratorial-hogwash/0000019f-cd36-d312-a3ff-ef3fd1a90000?gift=72e0ee8696114a4d9b0e77c1f7833ddc> (Accessed: 2026-05-08).

(2) Who is to blame for the chaos on Spain’s border? BBC News YouTube channel 08/04/2026. <https://youtu.be/UUnxNtqR3kg?si=2FE6UMmyYMrI6yaM> (Accessed: 2026-05-08).

(3) Gilmartin, Eoghan (2026): Spain’s Pedro Sánchez is a progressive outlier in Europe – and over Ceuta, he is being made to pay for it. Guardian 08/06/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/06/spains-pedro-sanchez-is-a-progressive-outlier-in-europe-and-over-ceuta-he-is-being-made-to-pay-for-it> (Accessed: 2026-06-08).

(4) Zunes, Stephen (2026): The Real Story Behind the Human Wave That Entered Ceuta. The Nation 08/03/2026. <https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ceuta-spain-morocco-border-crisis-western-sahara-geopolitics/> (Accessed: 2026-05-08).