The Real Crisis in American Politics in the Ominous Age of Trump

The Major Ongoing Crisis in American Politics (and Society) and Why Virtually No One Really Wants To Honestly Acknowledge And/Or Seriously Deal With It

by Kofi Natambu

February 13, 2018

The Panopticon Review

The conventional historical narratives governing the "nature and meaning” of modern American politics (i.e. since 1945) are often brazenly distorted and stubbornly ill-informed analyses that far too often over emphasizes how the two major national political parties (and the various intensely ambitious and obsessively media focused individual “candidates and leaders” of these institutions) shape and influence our system of government and thereby impact the pervasive social, economic, and cultural fallout stemming from their involvement and participation in the normative rituals of this system.  What is blatantly missing from the larger discourse however is a much broader and far more detailed and critical assessment and interpretation of how fundamentally existential factors and dynamics of U.S. history and social reality go far beyond those of self serving media personalities and careerist politicians within the structural and institutionally based bureaucratic parameters of mainstream political activity.  What needs to be critically identified and examined instead is how the larger society and culture itself—its values, motives, ideas, desires, fears, anxieties, perceptions, behavior, and perspectives not only ‘influence' but in many cases actually determine how and why major decisions are made regarding what happens to the general polity via the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government.

Nowhere is this major influence and determined intervention of large demographic groups of American citizens in the affairs of government and the political economy generally felt more intensely or pervasively than in the ideological and political minefields (boobytraps?) of “race and gender” (or more accurately the   omnipresent roles that the varying doctrines and practices of white and male supremacy—as well as state sanctioned xenophobia— plays in American society and culture generally at the levels of both material reality and ideological/social activity). The empirical evidence of these factors and their actual role can be found most tellingly and dramatically in the historical voting patterns of  white American citizens of every demographic class group in U.S. national and statewide elections over the past seven decades. What is revealed time and again is just how consistently and incessantly  these voting patterns have determined not merely the perennial outcomes of these elections but how they have in turn shaped the very form and content of the national discourse on what American politics "is and should be” with respect to the social and economic policy investment issues of labor, education, housing, energy, environmental protections, criminal justice, reproductive rights, and fiscal/budgetary management.  Furthermore the ways in which these voting patterns reveal how American citizens generally perceive and thus participate in its rituals on the basis of seeking and demanding social, political, and economic status that openly advantages their relative position(s) in the structural and institutional  hierarchies that systemically rules and dominates via specific demographic segments of our national population over that of “others" they deem are “not worthy” of social, political, and economic parity and equality in the society as a whole (e.g. oppressed national minorities as defined by the coercive and ideologically imposed white supremacist category of “inferior races”, and the sexist, misogynist and patriarchal domination and control of women generally).

For example it is painfully clear given the overwhelmingly well documented empirical evidence that generally speaking white American voters in particular are not by any stretch of the imagination either progressive or liberal and are certainly not even remotely leftwing in their fundamental political positions, values, beliefs, and attitudes.  In fact since 1945 the United States has been quite distinctive and even unique among so-called advanced and highly developed Western nations in that such a large major swath of their national population of voters are so consistently conservative to openly rightwing politically and their voting records at both the federal and state levels as well as locally reflect this blatant fact (by contrast European nations like England, France, Germany, and Italy not to mention politically progressive and social democratic scandinavian  countries like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a far wider range of ideological and political positions and representatives than are customary in the United States. Thus it is no mystery why in the past half century since 1968 the Republican Party has dominated national politics  (most ominously revealing stat: As of this very moment in 2018 Republicans have now been the occupants of the White House a commanding 60% of the time (30 out of the past 50 years or 8 out of 13 elections) and if not for the national black vote of over 90% on behalf of the Democratic Party in the specific elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008 and 2012  the Republicans would have won every single national presidential election in the past 50 years! 

In that light no one needs to ask how we all got here in the deadly Orwellian dystopian dungeon known as the 'Age of Trump.'


"What's Past is Prologue..."

https://www.poynter.org/news/ta-nehisi-coates-trump-and-duty-we-have-connect-dots

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump and the duty we have to connect the dots

by David T.Z. Mindich  

October 23, 2017

Poynter:  A Global leader in Journalism

Ta-Nehisi Coates is pictured in this YouTube video speaking to the the 2017 Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities at the U.S. Military Academy.

In the 2016 election, which age ranges of white supporters did Trump win? Which economic brackets? And which gender? If you answered all, all and both, you are correct. If you did not, what does your mistake say about the ability of journalism to paint an accurate picture of reality?

One of the most sweeping and thoughtful critiques of the media comes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ just-released book, "We Were Eight Years in Power." Coates argues that journalists missed an essential truth when we diminish Trump’s support among whites.

“Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31),” writes Coates. “He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won young whites, ages 18–29 (+4), adult whites, age 30 to 44 (+17), middle-age whites, age 45 to 64 (+28), and senior whites, age 65 and older (+19).” Trump also won among every economic bracket of whites, writes Coates, drawing on findings from Edison Research.

Coates argues that after the recent election, journalists lessened the consequences of whiteness and by extension, white supremacy. The reason why journalists discount the enormity of Trump’s support among whites is because to do otherwise would call into question the American self-image of goodness. This is a similar argument to the one Coates made in his writings about the shootings of unarmed black men: Many white Americans need black victims to be guilty because it protects an image of a fair America.

This misperception grips even thoughtful, enlightened writers like Nicholas Kristof and George Packer, Coates writes, and he suggests that the mainstream news media suffers from widespread delusion about whiteness. Can a democratic nation’s free press operate under a mass delusion about race?

Ida B. Wells

To answer this question, let’s travel back in time to the pinnacle of post-Civil War white supremacy: 1892. That's the year that lynching of African-Americans peaked in the United States. On March 10, 1892, the New York Times reported that three African-American men were “literally shot to pieces” by a white mob. One of the lynched men, Thomas Moss, was a friend of Ida B. Wells, a woman who was born the daughter of slaves and who became a journalist and anti-lynching crusader.

Moss and his associates, said the New York Times, were lynched because they had shot three white “Deputy Sheriffs.” In fact, as Wells quickly learned, a white mob surrounded a black-owned business and fired into it. The three African Americans defended themselves against the mob, firing back and injuring three men, none of whom were “Deputy Sheriffs.”

“This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” wrote Wells in her autobiography. “An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’” This led Wells to embark on one of the most courageous journalistic crusades in American history. Journeying across the South, Wells investigated lynching cases and discovered a disconnect between the perception of blacks as lawless and thus deserving of mob action, and the reality that many black victims were clearly innocent.

Wells was not only uncovering facts; she was operating against the deep-seated racism embedded in the reporting of the day. In an article in 1894, the New York Times referred to white lynch mobs as “savages,” but in the same paragraph stated that “The crime for which negroes have frequently been lynched, and occasionally been put to death with frightful tortures, is a crime to which negroes are particularly prone.” The crime the Times was alluding to was rape. The mainstream press believed that black men were lynched because they were raping white women.

In fact, through her investigations, Wells uncovered four truths about the “black rapist” trope. First, rape was not the stated cause in most lynching cases. Second, when rape was charged, it was generally done so after the lynching took place as an ex post facto justification. Third, in most cases where a sexual relationship was in fact real, it was generally between consenting adults. And fourth, the root cause of lynching could often be traced to economic competition.

For her efforts, Wells was met with incredulity and anger. In 1894, the Times said that Wells was a “slanderous and nasty minded mulattress, who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.” Despite all her courageous reporting, Wells could not break through a national narrative that protected a vision of white benevolence.

Even the great and otherwise enlightened Frederick Douglass told Wells that until he read her evidence to the contrary, he too was troubled by “lasciviousness on the part of Negroes,” Wells recalled in her autobiography. While Douglass and other African-Americans learned from Wells’ exhaustive reporting, white America clung to the myths. Twenty years after Wells finished her investigations, the blockbuster "Birth of a Nation" told a story a heroic Ku Klux Klan defending the innocence of white maidens against lascivious black brutes.

We live in different eras, and 2017 is not 1892. But parallels exist.

If Coates is right, Trump’s advocacy of white privilege and his erasure of Obama are the central features of his presidency. Imagine for a second that Trump’s perceived advocacy of white rights is not considered by his supporters to be a bug, but a feature.

That would explain why his outrageousness never seems to hurt his base. If many among his wide, white base voted for a racial realignment, then the wackier Trump is, the more muscular a white supremacist he could be.

A recent article in BuzzFeed reveals the extent that the so-called Alt-White radicals, in coordination with members of Trump’s team, promoted a white supremacist agenda. Coates believes that we have failed to grasp the brutal consequences of broad white support of President Trump.

“Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist,” Coates writes. “But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

When a writer as careful and probing as Coates tells us that we might be suffering from a widespread delusion, we should pay attention to the charge and understand that historical precedent suggests it is possible, that journalism as a whole can suffer from a widespread insensitivity to racial issues.

What should journalists do today? First, unlike the mainstream journalists of the 1890s — who rejected charges of bias — we should use the charges of Coates and others to goad ourselves to examine our perspectives.

When the media of a majority culture sees the world, it often perceives it as race-neutral, the “color of water,” to borrow a phrase, used in a different context, in James McBride’s best-selling memoir. But today’s journalists, with less overt racism and far more access to different perspectives, need to face the issue of race forthrightly.

The second thing today’s journalists should do is to connect the dots. The 1890s saw a relentless string of lynchings, and the era’s press was better at listing the horrors than finding the golden threads.

Journalism has often been a better strobe light than a searchlight. But when we list Trump’s endless tweets, proclamations and imbroglios, we could do a better job of seeing them as pieces of a whole.

When Trump maligns an American judge of Mexican heritage; defends neo-Nazis; attacks two Gold Star families, one Muslim and one black; or views Puerto Rico’s population as being too lazy to help themselves after a hurricane, we must avoid seeing these as distinct incidents.

Connecting the dots of white supremacy would challenge journalistic objectivity and require a level of self-awareness that is difficult to achieve, but reporters, above all else, are charged with creating a true picture of the world. And we must not avoid grappling with all the racial issues that hide in plain sight.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Mindich is the chair of the journalism department at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University; before that, he was a journalism professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where he served nearly a decade as chair. The author of two books and numerous articles.

 

HENRY A. GIROUX ON THE HEINOUS DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS INTEGRAL CONNECTION TO THE FERVENT RISE OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR THROUGHOUT THE WORLD TODAY

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36987-white-supremacy-and-sanctioned-violence-in-the-age-of-donald-trump
 
White Supremacy and Sanctioned Violence in the Age of Donald Trump
Wednesday, 27 July 2016
by Henry A. Giroux
Truthout | Op-Ed

Donald Trump accepts the Republican nomination for president on the final night of the Republican National Convention, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, July 21, 2016. (Photo: Eric Thayer / The New York Times) 

Peter Thiel, the silicon billionaire and one of the six ultra-rich financial elite to speak at the Republican National Convention once wrote that he did not "believe that freedom and democracy were compatible." This blatant anti-democratic mindset has emerged once again, without apology, as a major organizing principle of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. In addition to expressing a hatred of Muslims, Mexicans, women, journalists, dissidents, and others whom he views as outside the pale of what constitutes a true American, Trump appears to harbor a core disdain for democracy, bringing back Theodor Adorno's warning that "the true danger [of fascism] lay in the traces of the fascist mentality within the democratic political system" (a warning quoted in Prismatic Thought). What has become clear is that the current political crisis represents a return to ideologies, values and policies based upon a poisonous mix of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, opening up a politics that "could lead back to political totalitarianism."

Throughout the 2016 Republican National Convention the hateful discourse of red-faced anger and unbridled fear-mongering added up to more than an appeal to protect America and make it safe again. Such weakly coded invocations also echoed the days of Jim Crow, the undoing of civil rights, forced expulsions and forms of state terrorism sanctioned in the strident calls for safety and law-and-order. Commenting on Trump's speech, columnist Eugene Robinson argued that his talk added up to what few journalists were willing to acknowledge -- "a notorious white supremacist account." What is shocking is the refusal in many mainstream media circles to examine the role that white supremacy has played in creating the conditions for Trump to emerge as the head of the Republican Party. This structured silence is completely at odds with Trump's longstanding legacy of discrimination, including his recent and relentless derogatory remarks concerning President Obama, his race-based attacks on US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel (who is trying a case against Trump University), his denunciation of Muslims as terrorists and his attempt to paint Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists.

Neo-Fascism in the US
 
The visibility of such racist accounts and the deep investments in the ongoing mobilization of fear by political extremists in the United States surely has its roots in a number of factors, including dire economic conditions that have left millions suffering and proliferated zones of social abandonment. These economic conditions have resulted in an exponential increase in the individuals and groups condemned to live under machineries of inscription, punishment and disposability. The current mobilization of fear also has its roots, rarely mentioned by those critical of Trump, in a legacy of white supremacy that is used to divert anger over dire economic and political conditions into the diversionary cesspool of racial hatred. Racial amnesia was one consequence of the heralding of what David Theo Goldberg has called in his book Are We All Postracial Yet?, a "postracial" era in American history after the first Black president was elected to office in 2008. This collective racial amnesia (coded as postracialism) was momentarily disrupted by the execution of Troy Davis, the shootings of Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin and others, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, even today, in spite of the cell phone videos that have made visible an endless array of Black men being killed by police, much of the American public (and particularly, the white American public) seems immune to communications of the reach, depth and scope of institutional racism in America. As Nathanial Rich observes:

"Today, like sixty years ago, much of the public rhetoric about race is devoted to explaining to an incurious white public, in rudimentary terms, the contours of institutional racism. It must be spelled out, as if for the first time, that police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents; but outbreaks of a chronic national disease. Nebulous, bureaucratic terms like "white privilege" have been substituted for "white supremacy," or "micro-aggressions" for "casual racism."

Across the globe, fascism and white supremacy in their diverse forms are on the rise. In Greece, France, Poland, Austria and Germany, among other nations, right-wing extremists have used the hateful discourse of racism, xenophobia and white nationalism to demonize immigrants and undermine democratic modes of rule and policies. As Chris Hedges observes, much of the right-wing, racist rhetoric coming out of these countries mimics what Trump and his followers are saying in the United States.

One consequence is that the public spheres that produce a critically engaged citizenry and make a democracy possible are under siege and in rapid retreat. Economic stagnation, massive inequality, the rise of religious fundamentalism and growing forms of ultra-nationalism now aim to put democratic nations to rest. Echoes of the right-wing movements in Europe have come home with a vengeance. Demagogues wrapped in xenophobia, white supremacy and the false appeal to a lost past echo a brutally familiar fascism, with slogans similar to Donald Trump's call to "Make America Great Again" and "Make America Safe Again." These are barely coded messages that call for forms of racial and social cleansing. They are on the march, spewing hatred, embracing forms of anti-semitism and white supremacy, and showing a deep-seated disdain for any form of justice on the side of democracy. As Peter Foster points out in The Telegraph, "The toxic combination of the most prolonged period of economic stagnation and the worst refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War has seen the far-Right surging across the continent, from Athens to Amsterdam and many points in between."

To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

State-manufactured lawlessness has become normalized and extends from the ongoing and often brutalizing and murderous police violence against Black people and other vulnerable groups to a criminogenic market-based system run by a financial elite that strips everyone but the upper 1% of a future, not only by stealing their possessions but also by condemning them to a life in which the only available option is to fall back on one's individual resources in order to barely survive. In addition, as Kathy Kelly points out, at the national level, lawlessness now drives a militarized foreign policy intent on assassinating alleged enemies rather than using traditional forms of interrogation, arrest and conviction. The killing of people abroad based on race is paralleled by (and connected with) the killing of Black people at home. Kelly correctly notes that the whole world has become a battlefield driven by racial profiling, where lethal violence replaces the protocols of serve and protect.

Fear is the reigning ideology and war its operative mode of action, pitting different groups against each other, shutting down the possibilities of shared responsibilities, and legitimating the growth of a paramilitary police force that kills Black people with impunity. State-manufactured fear offers up new forms of domestic terrorism embodied in the rise of a surveillance state while providing a powerful platform for militarizing many aspects of society. One consequence is that, as Charles Derber argues, America has become a warrior society whose "culture and institutions... program civilians for violence at home as well as abroad." And, as Zygmunt Bauman argues in his book Liquid Fear, in a society saturated in violence and hate, "human relations are a source of anxiety" and everyone is viewed with mistrust. Compassion gives way to suspicion and a celebration of fear and revulsion accorded to those others who allegedly have the potential to become monsters, criminals, or even worse, murderous terrorists. Under such circumstance, the bonds of trust dissolve, while hating the other becomes normalized and lawlessness is elevated to a matter of commonsense.

Politics is now a form of warfare creating and producing an expanding geography of combat zones that hold entire cities, such as Ferguson, Missouri, hostage to forms of extortion, violence lock downs and domestic terrorism -- something I have demonstrated in detail in my book America at War with Itself. These are cities where most of those targeted are Black. Within these zones of racial violence, Black people are often terrified by the presence of the police and subject to endless forms of domestic terrorism. Hannah Arendt once wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism. She was right and we are witnessing the dystopian visions of the new authoritarians who now trade in terror, fear, hatred, demonization, violence and racism. Trump and his neo-Nazi bulldogs are no longer on the fringe of political life and they have no interests in instilling values that will make America great. On the contrary, they are deeply concerned with creating expanding constellations of force and fear, while inculcating convictions that will destroy the ability to form critical capacities and modes of civic courage that offer a glimmer of resistance and justice.

Trump and the Culture of Cruelty
 
Nicholas Confessore rightly argues that Trump's "anti-other language" and denigration of Mexican immigrants as "criminal rapists, murderers and drug dealers" has "electrified the world of white nationalists," who up until the Trump campaign had been relegated to the fringe of American politics. No longer. All manner of white nationalist groups, news sites (The Daily Stormer) and individuals, such as Jared Tayler (a self-described "race realist") and David Duke (a racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana lawmaker and talk show host) have embraced Trump as a presidential candidate. And in a less-than-subtle way, Trump has embraced them. He has repeatedly tweeted messages that first appeared on racist or ultra-nationalist neo-Nazi Twitter accounts and when asked about such tweets has refused to disavow them directly.

In short, this emerging American neo-fascism in its various forms is largely about social and racial cleansing and its end point is the construction of prisons, detention centers, enclosures, walls, and all the other varieties of murderous apparatus that accompany the discourse of national greatness and racial purity. Americans have lived through 40 years of the dismantling of the welfare state, the elimination of democratic public spheres, such as schools and libraries, and the attack on public goods and social provisions. In their place, we have the rise of the punishing state with its support for a range of criminogenic institutions, extending from banks and hedge funds to state governments and militarized police departments that depend on extortion to meet their budgets.

Where are the institutions that do not support a rabid individualism, a culture of cruelty and a society based on social combat -- that refuse to militarize social problems and reject the white supremacist laws and practices spreading throughout the United States? What happens when a society is shaped by a poisonous neoliberalism that separates economic and individual economic actions form social costs, when privatization becomes the only sanctioned orbit for agency, when values are entirely reduced to exchange values?

How do we talk about the way in which language is transformed into a tool of violence, as recently happened at the Republican National Convention? Moreover, how does language act in the service of violence -- less through an overt discourse of hate and bigotry than through its complicity with all manner of symbolic and real violence? What happens to a society when moral witnessing is hollowed out by a shameless entertainment industry that is willing to produce and distribute spectacles of extreme violence on a massive scale? What happens to a society when music is used as a method of torture (as it was at Guantanamo) and when a fascist politics of torture and disappearance are endorsed by a presidential candidate and many of his supporters? Instead of addressing these questions -- as well as the state-sanctioned torture and lynching that form the backdrop for this violence -- we have been hearing a lot of talk about violence waged against police. This is not to suggest that the recent isolated acts of violence against police are justified -- of course, they are not -- but the real question is why we don't see much more of such violence, given how rampant police violence has long been in the service of white supremacy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates observes, the killing of police officers cannot be addressed outside the historical legacy of discrimination, harassment, and violence against Black people. He writes:

When the law shoots down 12-year-old children, or beats down old women on traffic islands, or chokes people to death over cigarettes; when the law shoots people over compact discs, traffic stops, drivers' licenses, loud conversation, or car trouble; when the law auctions off its monopoly on lethal violence to bemused civilians, when these civilians then kill, and when their victims are mocked in their death throes; when people stand up to defend police as officers of the state, and when these defenders are killed by these very same officers; when much of this is recorded, uploaded, live-streamed, tweeted, and broadcast; and when government seems powerless, or unwilling, to stop any of it, then it ceases, in the eyes of citizens, to be any sort of respectable law at all. It simply becomes "force."

The call for even more "law and order" feeds even more police violence rather than addressing how it can be eliminated. What is often forgotten by such calls is that, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Brad Evans point out, "When human beings are valued as less than human, violence begins to emerge as the only response." Under such circumstances, as Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin argue, the call for law and order is in actuality a call to sanction even more state violence while telling white people that their country is spiralling out of control and that they yearn for a leader who will take aggressive, even extreme, actions to protect them. But the consequences of hate are marked or covered over with well-intentioned but misguided calls for love and empathy. These are empty calls when they do not address the root causes of violence and when they ignore a ruthless climate and culture of cruelty that calls poor people moochers; a culture that's increasingly militarized, that increasingly criminalizes and marginalizes people and social problems, and where a discourse of hate is normalized by the Republican Party and covered up by the Democratic Party.

Differences Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
 
What cannot be ignored is that Hilary Clinton has supported a war machine that has resulted in the death of millions, while also supporting a neoliberal economy that has produced massive amounts of suffering and created a mass incarceration state. Yet, all of that is forgotten as the mainstream press focuses on stories about Clinton's emails and the details of her electoral run for the presidency. It is crucial to note that Clinton hides her crimes in the discourse of freedom and appeals to democracy while Trump overtly disdains such a discourse. In the end, state and domestic violence saturate American society and the only time this fact gets noticed is when the beatings and murders of Black men are caught on camera and spread through social media.

Where are the mainstream public outcries for the millions of Black and Brown people incarcerated in America's carceral state? When the mainstream media can write and air allegedly objective stories about a fascist candidate who delights white nationalists and neo-Nazis, without highlighting that he advocates policies that are racist and constitute war crimes, it makes visible how America has forgotten what it should be ashamed of: the fact that we've built a society in which collective morality and the ethical imagination no longer matter. Comparisons to the 1930s matter but what counts even more is that they have been forgotten or are held in disdain. Much of the American public appears to have forgotten that totalitarian and white supremacist societies are too often legitimated by a supplicant mainstream media, cowardly politicians, right-wing and liberal pundits, academics and other cultural workers who either overlook or support the hateful bigotry of demagogues, such as Trump. What is also forgotten by many is the racist legacy of policies implemented by the Democratic Party that have resulted in a punitive culture of criminalization, incarceration and shooting of untold numbers of Black people.

Rather than engage in the masochistic practice of supporting Trump's nativism, ignorance and bigotry, and his warlike fantasies of what it will take to make America great again, white workers who have been driven to despair by the ravaging policies of the financial elite and their shameless political and corporate allies should be in the streets protesting -- not only against what is called establishment politics, but also the rise of an unvarnished neo-Nazi demagogue.

Evidence of such complicity comes in many forms, some of which are wrapped in the discourse of a supine liberalism that bows down in the face of an authoritarianism largely driven by the ethos of white supremacy. One example can be found in an article by Sam Tanenhaus in The New York Times: "How Trump can save the G.O.P." This stuff is hard to make up. In the article, Tanenhaus compares Trump to former presidents Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and praises him for the pragmatism of some of his economic policies -- as if the spirit behind Trump's policies had any relationship to the spirit that animated Eisenhower's resistance to the military-industrial complex or to Johnson's deep concern for eliminating poverty and dismantling racism in American society. Does it matter to Tanenhous that Trump is a bigot and potential war who wants to expel 11 million Mexicans, hates Muslims and speaks glowingly about instituting torture as president of the United States? Does it matter that Trump supports violence with a wink of the eye and is unapologetic about his huge following of neo-Nazis who are enthusiastic about waging a war against Black and Brown people? How is it possible to forget that, overall, Trump is a demagogue, misogynist, racist and bigot who is unequivocally dangerous to the promises and ideals of a democracy? Apparently, it is possible. Yes, the fascists and Nazis were also efficient, particularly in the end when it came to building a war machine and committing acts of genocide. So much for pragmatism without a conscience.

Trump is a real danger to the species, the country and the world in general. His views on war and climate change -- along with the promise of violence against his enemies and his unapologetic racism, bigotry and hatred of constitutional rights -- pose some of the greatest dangers to democracy and freedom the US has ever faced.

As Adam Gopnik says in an excellent article in The New Yorker, democracies do not simply commit suicide, they are killed by murderers, by people like Trump. Most expressions of support for Trump vastly underestimate the immediate danger Trump poses to the world and minorities of class, race and ethnicity. In contrast, while Hillary Clinton is a warmonger, a cheerleader for neoliberalism and a high-ranking member of the Democratic Party establishment, she is not threatening to take an immediate set of actions that would throw people of color, immigrants and working-class people under the bus. Instead, if she wins the election, she should be viewed as part of a corrupt financial and political system that should be overthrown. While posing danger on a number of economic, political and foreign fronts, Clinton would also expose by her actions and policies the mythological nature of the idea that democracy and capitalism are the same thing. Hopefully, all those young people who followed the dead-end of a Bernie Sanders movement -- and the false suggestion that a political revolution can be achieved by reforming the Democratic Party -- would seize on this contradiction. Sanders revitalized the discourse about inequality, injustice and the need to break down the financial monopolies, but he failed in choosing a political avenue in which such real and systemic change can come about.

Fighting for a Democratic Future
 
We live in a time in which people are diverted into a politics that celebrates saviors, denigrates democratic relations of power and policy, and provides a mode of escape in which heartfelt trauma and pain are used to mobilize people not into democratic movements but into venting their anger by blaming others who are equally oppressed. This signals a politics that kills both empathy and the imagination, a politics that uses pain to inflict further pain on others. Atomization on a global scale is a new form of invisible violence because it shackles people to their own experiences, cutting them off from a shared awareness of the larger systemic forces that shape their lives. Anger, indignation and misery need to take a detour through the ethical, political and social models of analysis that connect individual issues to larger social problems. Only then can we resist the transformation of grievances into a Trump-like version of American fascism.

Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state. With hope, these important social movements will continue to break new ground in experimenting with new ways to come together and form broad-based coalitions between fragmented subgroups.

In the end, it's vital to foster anti-fascist, pro-radical democracy movements that understand short-term and long-term strategies. Short-term strategies include participating in an electoral process to make sure a fascist or religious fundamentalist does not control a school board or gain  leadership roles regarding public governance. Such practices do not represent a sellout but a strategic effort to make immediate progressive gains on the way to tearing down the entire system. Strategies built on the divide of being in or out of the system are too simplistic. Progressives must forge polices that do both as part of a larger movement for creating a radical democracy. Such actions are not the same as giving into a capitalist world view, especially when the long-term plan is to overthrow such a system. There seems to be a certain kind of theoretical infantilism that dominates some segments of the left on this issue, a form of political purity stuck in an either/or mind set. Such ideological fundamentalism (which might assert, for example, that those who vote are "giving in" or "selling out") is not helpful for successful short-term planning or for long-term strategies for developing the institutions, cultural apparatuses and social movements necessary for radical change in the US and elsewhere.

If we are to fight for a democratic future that matters, progressives and the left need to ask how we would go forward if the looming authoritarian nightmare succeeds in descending upon the United States. What can we learn about the costs of allowing our society to become lawless in its modes of governance and to lose its historical understanding of the legacy of slavery, lynching and bigotry that have given rise to mass incarceration and the punishing state? What does it mean when money rules and corrupts politics, disavows economic actions from social costs, and wages war against public trust, values and goods? These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed in order to break free from a neoliberal system that spells the death-knell for democracy. All societies contain new beginnings -- we need desperately to find one on the side of justice and democracy.

The US is in a new historical moment in which the old is dying and the new is waiting to emerge. Such periods are as hopeful as they are dangerous. At the same time, there are young people and others intent on turning despair into hope, struggling to reclaim the radical imagination, and working to build a broad-based collective struggle for real symbolic and structural change in the pursuit of political and economic justice. We need to accelerate such movements before it is too late.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015) and coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.


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Dave Zirin and Jessica Valenti On Oscar Pistorius and the Deadly Global Terrorism of Violence Against Women

http://www.thenation.com/blog/173033/oscar-pistorius-and-global-death-cult-misogyny?rel=emailNation#

All,

The whole truth and nothing but about one of the major and most heinous forms of actual terrorism in the world today...Pass the word...

Kofi

Oscar Pistorius and the Global System of Deadly Misogyny
by Dave Zirin
February 20, 2013
THE NATION

Oscar Pistorius stands in the dock during a break in court proceedings over the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. (Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko)
  

A professional athlete; a home with an arsenal of firearms; a dead young woman involved in a long-term relationship with her killer. In November, her name was Kasanda Perkins and the man who shot her was Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher. Now her name is Reeva Steenkamp, killed by Olympic sprinter and double amputee Oscar “the Blade Runner” Pistorius. We don’t know whether Pistorius is guilty of murdering a woman he claims to have deeply loved or is guilty merely of being an unbelievably irresponsible gun owner, firing four bullets into the door of his bathroom in an effort to hit an imagined burglar. We do know that this is either an all-too-familiar story of a man and the woman he dated and then killed, or it’s the story of a man who thought a burglar had penetrated the electrified fence that surrounded his gated community to break into his house and use his toilet.

Just as with Belcher and Perkins, we will learn more than we ever wanted or needed to know in the weeks to come about the nature of Pistorius and Steenkamp’s relationship. We will learn about the “allegations of a domestic nature” that had brought police to his home in the past. We will learn about Pistorius’s previous allegedly violent relationships with women. We will learn about the variety of guns he kept at close hand. We will surely discuss male athletes and violence against women: the sort of all-too-common story that can create commonality between a football player from Long Island and a sprinter from Johannesburg. We might even ponder the way these gated communities, one of which was also the site of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s murder two years ago, become throbbing pods of paranoia and parabellums. We will learn about everything except what actually matters: there is a global epidemic of violence against women, and South Africa is at its epicenter.

Two days before Steenkamp’s death, there were protests outside of the South African parliament about the failures of the state to adjudicate the unsolved rapes and murders of women across the country. As the executive director of the Rape Crisis Centre Kathleen Dey said on February 12, “There are no overnight cures to the scourge of rape that is affecting South Africa. We have the highest instance of rape in the world and we cannot continue in this way.” The official statistics are shocking. Every seventeen seconds a woman is raped in South Africa yet just one out of nine women report it and only 14 percent of perpetrators are convicted. The Rape Crisis Centre and other organizations are starved for funds, with the demand for social services, counseling and even HIV tests far outstripping their capacity.

There have also had to be demonstrations against what the Women’s League of the African National Congress has termed “femicide.” In this country of 50 million people, three women a day are killed by their partners. When news of Steenkamp’s death became front-page news across the country, it pushed out ongoing headlines of the February 2 Western Cape gang rape and mutilation of a 17-year-old girl named Anene Booysen. Before her death, Booysen identified one of her perpetrators: it was someone she both trusted and knew.

This is hardly a South African problem, of course. We are confronting nothing less than a global system of brutal misogyny. Too many men across the world see too many women as repositories of their rage, frustration, narcissism or simply their will to enact violence. The World Health Organization’s reports that depending on the country, anywhere from “15% (Japan) to 71% (Ethiopia) of women report physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.” Like in South Africa, every statistic on this issue must be viewed with skepticism because of the transnational stigmas and shame that silence women who have survived.

In the United States, rape culture and the rape it produces have been normalized to the point where Notre Dame athletes accused of rape can take the field for a national championship football game without a peep from the sports pages. It’s a country where Fox News host Bob Beckel can ask incredulously, “When’s the last time you heard about rape on a college campus?” It’s a country, and a world, where people are now saying enough is enough.

It’s a global problem that will get solved only with a global response if we want to even dream of a world where violence against women is a relic of history. That’s the sentiment behind initiatives like “One Billion Rising to End Violence Against Women and Girls,” and this kind of brave solidarity and support is extremely welcome. This very solidarity was displayed by Reeva Steenkamp herself just before her death. Distraught over the murder of Anene Booysen, Steenkamp sent out an instragam message. It read, “I woke up in a happy safe home this morning. Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in SA. RIP Anene Booysen.” Short of a billion of us rising, happy and safe homes will not be a reality for the women of the world. It should be. We have to act now unless we want to keep telling the stories of Kasandra Perkins, Anene Booysen and Reeva Steenkamp over and over again, only with different names.

Follow @EdgeofSports by Dave Zirin

Where sports and politics collide.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/172951/american-horror-story-oscar-pistorius-and-misogynist-myth-making

American Horror Story: Oscar Pistorius and Misogynist Myth-Making
by Jessica Valenti  
February 15, 2013
The Nation

 

Oscar Pistorius is led from the Boschkop police station east of Pretoria en route to court for his bail hearing as a suspect in the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. (AP Photo)

 

Here we go again. Another woman shot dead by her partner, another round of media coverage fawning over the killer. Just over two months ago, it was Jovan Belcher—he was called a “family man” after shooting and killing Kasandra Perkins, his girlfriend and mother of his newborn daughter. Today its South African Olympian Oscar Pistorius, who has been charged with the murder of his 29-year-old girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Just one day after shooting Steenkamp four times, Pistorius has been called “calm and positive” and “inspirational.” (Steenkamp? She’s been called “a leggy blonde.”)

One reporter at The New York Times who spent a week with the double-amputee athlete, wrote that Pistorius was “not as cautious as he always should be…but I didn’t see anger in him.” The headline is “The Adrenaline-Fueled Life of Oscar Pistorius.” He was just an impulsive guy!

Give me a break.

Early media reports speculated that Pistorius shot Steenkamp mistakenly, believing she was a burglar. But prosecutors don't share that view. After all, the police had been called to his home multiple times in the past for domestic altercations. We’ve seen this happen before—many, many times before—yet still we insist on lying to ourselves. This murder may have happened in South Africa, but the misogynist response to the crime has become a familiar theme here in the United States.

The national conversation around domestic violence murders is not a discourse as much as it is a fairy tale—a narrative we create to make sense of the madness. After all, it’s more comforting to believe that Belcher had brain damage than it is to admit that someone people so admired was a controlling, violent abuser. It’s easier to think that Pistorius accidentally shot Steenkamp than realize the murder is a foreseeable end to a violent relationship.

It’s why we blame dead women for the unthinkable violence done against them—mostly because of misogyny, but also because it provides a false sense of safety. In the days after her murder, Perkins was criticized for staying out late (the nerve!), accused of trying to leave him and “take his money.” Given the sexualized descriptions of Steenkamp, I’m sure it won’t be long before someone suggests she somehow brought this on herself—she was making him jealous or flirted too much. We need to believe that these women did something to cause the violence, because then it means the same thing would never happen to us. (We’re not like “those girls!”)

Our culture is so attached to this myth making that some are willing to forgo all logic and ignore all facts. In the wake of Perkins’ murder, and now after Steenkamp’s, conservatives and gun enthusiasts insist that if these women were armed, they would still be alive. Never mind that both women lived in a house where guns were available, and yet they still died.

When I was a volunteer emergency room advocate for victims of rape and domestic violence, the first question we were trained to ask women who had been abused by their partners was whether or not there was a gun in the home. Because we knew that women whose partners had access to a gun were seven times more likely to be killed. In fact, women who are killed by their partners are more likely to be murdered by a gun than all other means combined.

Despite this tower of evidence, people will continue to insist that these women could have somehow stopped the violence. (Inaccuracies aside, the idea that women have a responsibility to keep someone from killing them rather than an abuser not to commit murder is baffling.)

The more we tell ourselves and others these lies, the more cover we give to those would do violence against women. We create a narrative where victims are to blame and abusers heroized. And perhaps worst of all, we create a culture where we fool ourselves into thinking these murders are something that just happens—unforeseeable tragedies rather than preventable violence.

The reality of domestic violence murders is stark and scary—but it is still the reality. And no amount of story-telling will stop the killings. Only the truth can do that.

A global movement to end violence against women, One Billion Rising, is taking off. Read Laura Flanders’s primer.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story reported that Pistorius claimed he had mistaken Steenkamp for a burglar. In fact, early media reports speculated that, not Pistorius himself. The story has been corrected.

The War On Women 2012: How the Vicious Sexism, Misogyny, and Patriarchial Demogoguery of the Right in the United States is Destroying the Country

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/10/war_on_women_and_its_consequences.html

All,

Question:  What is the actual structural, institutional, cultural, and ideological role of sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy (male supremacy) in politics, economics, and culture in the United Hates?

Answer:  It is exactly what it is with respect to all forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia--a very powerful systemic instrument for the comprehensive domination, control, oppression, and exploitation of women, people of color, and the LGBT community. 

Which is precisely WHY Romney and Ryan as well as many other vicious rightwing sexist and misogynist demagogues running for Congress in the Senate MUST be defeated in the 2012 national elections...

Kofi 

The War on Women and Its Consequences

by Hatty Lee
October 11 2012

Colorlines

After two years of relentless attacks on the infrastructure of family planning, poor and uninsured women are starting to see the impact in some states. In an article accompanying this infographic, Akiba Solomon reports from Texas, where women of color in both rural and urban areas have suddenly found themselves with starkly limited choices for reproductive health.

http://jezebel.com/war-on-women/

WAR ON WOMEN
OCTOBER 25, 2012

Voter ID Laws Are Actually a Sneaky Way to Silence Women of Color

by Erin Gloria Ryan

Any connoisseur of 80's and 90's era kids' sports comedies knows that when the bad guys can't win, they cheat. Cobra Kai tried it, the Urbania Cowboys tried it, and everyone The Mighty Ducks ever played tried it. Now that an increasingly nonwhite population trend has threatened the electoral clout of white people, terrified conservatives have responded to the realization that democracy is not on their side by trying to pass voter ID laws to address the imaginary problem of in-person voter fraud. But, when you cut through all the high minded talk about the CONSTITUTION and the SANCTITY OF WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT, it's painfully obvious that what voter-ID enthusiasts really want is for women of color to shut up and let the white folk run things.

The Center for American Progress released a fascinating but depressing report yesterday that found that voter ID laws screw women of color over in two ways — by making it more difficult for them to vote, their voice in the electoral process is minimized, which means the elected officials who would actually represent their interests are losing to guys who think rape is just a penis-kiss from God. They're getting denied at the voting booth and the people who do get elected are a bunch of jagoffs who think women are literally made out of man-ribs and legislate accordingly. It's a double whammy of suck.

First, the report shows that women of color comprise the largest block of voters of color, and their civic engagement is increasing. Latina turnout increased 21% between 2004 and 2008, and during the last Presidential election, a larger percentage of black women than white women voted. Furthermore, behind most voter ID laws are really obvious, painfully oblivious racists who don't think anyone else notices that the laws they're trying to enact are specifically designed to discourage black people from voting. From the report,

An Ohio elections board member, for example, in discussing his vote against weekend voting hours, stated: "I guess I really actually feel we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban - read African-American - voter-turnout machine."

Ohio has attempted to drastically limit both the periods for registering to vote and voting itself. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, the legislature passed a photo identification requirement, but because South Carolina has a history of racial discrimination and voter suppression based on race, a panel of judges in the District Court in Washington, D.C. was required to approve the law before it can go into effect. There was available evidence of racial animus, including an email discussion involving a South Carolina lawmaker. In the email exchange, the lawmaker affirmed a constituent's racially charged statement that if the legislature offered potential voters money to obtain identification cards, "it would be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon," by replying with an "Amen." Despite that evidence, the court approved the law for 2013.

But it's not just Ohio and South Carolina that are attempting to keep women of color quiet; 34 states have introduced voter ID legislation, and 8 have passed them. Four will be in effect on election day. CAP estimates that between 596,000 and 959,000 women of color will lose their ability to vote on election day 2012.

But here's the thing: in-person voting fraud — which these laws are ostensibly designed to prevent — is much, much rarer than fatal shark attacks. In-person voter fraud only happens at a frequency 2.5 times greater than the frequency of Rush Limbaugh getting married and divorced. Since 2000, only 10 incidents of in-person voter impersonation have been reported. But legislating around this imaginary problem makes things much worse for women of color; according to the report, 25% of black voters and 16% of Latino voters lack photo ID, compared with a single-digit percentage of white voters. In states like Florida and Indiana, these restrictions that prevent US citizens from voting could swing elections.

And the elections will swing — SURPRISE! — to the right. And the right sure does like to attack women when they're out of ideas on how to fix the economy. The report details how the 61 new reproductive rights-restricting state laws passed this legislative session disproportionately affect women of color — from attempts to target South Asian women with so-called "prenatal nondiscrimination" bills to defunding Planned Parenthood in states where many women of color rely on the organization for reproductive and sexual health care. And all this loudly bellowed bluster from the Romney camp about how Obamacare will be repealed on "Day One" is a dramatically delivered middle finger flipped at uninsured women (53.2% of whom are nonwhite).

CAP's proposed solution to this bang-your-head-against-the-desk problem of old white men trying to cheat their way back into relevance is: KNOCK IT OFF (Seriously, the report reads, in its conclusion: "Stop disenfranchising voters and stop attacking women's reproductive rights."). But we know that the Dick Mourdocks and Todd Akins and Darrell Issas and Trent Franks and Paul Ryans and Mitt Romneys of the world won't stop doing what they're doing just because a liberal think tank told them to. Women, and men who give a shit about women, need to stay angry, stay awake, and remember that all those patriotic platitudes on cheap America tchotchkes are on your side. They's nothing less American than wanting fewer people to vote.

[Center for American Progress]

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/10/collateral_damage_in_the_war_on_women.html

Collateral Damage in the War on Women

A woman stands at the registration window at Nuestra Clinica Del Valle in San Juan, Texas. About 85 percent of those served at the clinic are uninsured. Photo: AP Photo/Eric Gay

by Akiba Solomon
October 11 2012

On a patch of browning grass just 100 steps from the McAllen, Texas, headquarters of Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County stands an eye-level banner featuring an adorable white infant on either side.

Wide-eyed and pensive, baby number one grasps an adult’s fingers while gazing toward the familiar pro-life tagline, “Take my hand not my life…” Baby number two is sleeping, thumb in mouth and naked except for a jumbo red ribbon tied around its torso. “Life. The Greatest Gift of All!” the caption announces.

The placement of this PVC guilt trip is ironic. While the Planned Parenthood network is the largest provider of publicly funded family planning services along the Texas/Mexico border, none of its locations perform abortions.

To “get your period back,” as some locals describe it, you’ll have to cross the border for relatively cheap, maybe-safe, over-the-counter drugs that might trigger a miscarriage if you take it early enough in your pregnancy, at the right dosage and at the correct intervals. Or, if you have the cash, credit, or private insurance coverage, you can book an appointment across town or two cities away, at one of two private abortion providers in the entire Rio Grande Valley.



Race & Women’s Health


INFOGRAPHIC: War on Women and Its Consequences

Another bit of irony: Thanks to the anti-choice public health policies advanced by the state’s Republican leadership, Hidalgo County’s poor and uninsured women have fewer sources of the birth control and exams they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

“I would say that 85 to 90 percent of our clients live below the federal poverty line. They’re uninsured and many of them have two or three children and don’t want any more,” says Patricio Gonzalez, the network’s CEO. “Basic healthcare access is just very bad here so the women don’t get [regular] screenings for STIs or cancers, and when they do get them they often need more diagnostic services because they’ve delayed care. You’ll hear them say, ‘I don’t have $60 or $100 for this lab test, or this ultrasound or this mammogram.’ “

Up until last September, when massive state budget cuts took effect, Planned Parenthood had eight clinics throughout the county and served about 21,000 mostly poor and Latino clients a year. Now the network is down to four centers. Stripped of public funding, the rural sites were the first to go.

Two years into what NARAL Pro-Choice America has famously dubbed the War on Women, the wear is beginning to show in cities and towns around the country where poor, uninsured women live. In the right’s new abortion war strategy, taking apart the infrastructure for family planning services—providers like Planned Parenthood, Title X funding and, now, the Affordable Care Act—is as important as triggering a Supreme Court challenge that will overturn Roe v. Wade. In just one year, dozens of clinics throughout Texas have shut down or slashed their hours—limiting options for poor and working women in even big cities like Austin and Dallas, and closing the doors of clinics that have nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. The state offers a striking example of the collateral damage that’s inevitable when anti-choice Republicans use the legislative equivalent of drone strikes to attack abortion rights.

To show me what rural poverty looks like in Hidalgo County, Planned Parenthood promotora (outreach worker) Dora Alicia Proa takes me to a colonia nearly 15 miles away from McAllen, in San Carlos. Colonias are unincorporated subdivisions founded in the 1950s by predatory developers who sold lots of barren and flood-prone land to poor Latin American migrant workers without installing basic infrastructure. They are synonymous with poverty. Literally. The Texas Secretary of State defines these communities as “residential areas along the Texas-Mexico border that may lack some of the most basic living necessities, such as potable water and sewer systems, electricity, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing.”

Last year, Hidalgo County’s Planned Parenthood offered free birth control, STI testing, Well Woman exams and men’s health screenings at the San Carlos Community Resource Center. Now, to get the same services, patients have to drive up to 20 miles to the Edinburg clinic, where a physical, HIV test and Pap smear costs at least $60 and a monthly supply of birth control pills costs $20 at minimum.

The Hidalgo County Health and Human Services Department runs eight clinics where people of all ages can get a range of services, from tuberculosis treatment to newborn screenings. However, wait times are reportedly brutal, and the health department’s STI testing site is located in McAllen. Ostensibly to fill the void created by Planned Parenthood closures, the University of Texas Medical Branch opened a maternal health clinic in Hidalgo. But that site is also in McAllen; it specializes in pregnancy and prenatal care, and it doesn’t have weekend hours.

In one San Carlos household Proa and I visit—a cramped trailer on concrete blocks where the kitchen sink collides with bunk beds—Proa informs two young women that the Edinburg clinic is running a special on annual exams. They shake their heads at the mention of cash, then tsk tsk at six young boys and girls who are smiling shyly, pointing and calling me chocolate.

Next, Proa introduces me to a young woman standing in front of a three-room track house with dirt floors, a chunk of the roof missing and the toilet located in a crumbling shed next door. My Spanish is pitiful and neither Proa nor the homeowner speaks much English. But I can see that four small children and two adults share this space.

Within this context, it’s unclear how defunding conveniently located sources of free birth control, STI testing, Pap smears, clinical breast exams and other women’s health care is a pro-life activity. But this is what counts as logic in today’s abortion wars.

Two Years of Destruction

It’s hard to imagine a time when the Christian evangelical anti-abortion movement held such sway over the Republican party’s publicly stated agenda. Title X, a federal program that’s the leading source of family planning funds for low-income women, was established in 1970 under Richard Nixon and enjoyed wide bipartisan support despite chronic underfunding.

Since 2010, however, attacks on Title X have been relentless and overt. Between the tea party takeover of the House of Representatives and the steady stream of state-level anti-choice laws and ballot initiatives, radical anti-abortion Republicans have concentrated their power and they’ve been more than willing to wield it.

In Congress, an anti-choice dream team that includes Mike Pence of Indiana, vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Trent Franks of Arizona have turned their religiously based opposition to a legal medical procedure into a legislative priority. Among scores of anti-choice proposals, eight came to a full House vote in 2011, including Pence’s failed amendment that would have excluded Planned Parenthood from Title X funding.

During the marathon primary season, presidential hopefuls including a formerly pro-choice Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry tripped over themselves to condemn Planned Parenthood, Obamacare, contraception, abortion and unmarried vaginas. Romney even upped the ante and pledged to eliminate a major chunk of Title X funding altogether. This week his campaign reiterated his promise to be the “pro-life president,” after the notoriously hard-to-pin-down candidate told the Des Moines Register that he was unfamiliar with any “legislation with regards to abortion” that would become a part of his agenda. (In their endorsement statements, anti-choice juggernauts including Susan B. Anthony List and National Right to Life provide detailed lists of Romney’s agenda.)

The 2012 Republican Party Platform expands on the anti-abortion stance outlined in the 2008 version of the document. Now, it’s official GOP policy to defund health providers who “promote or perform abortion.” The platform also treats the scientifically unproven concept of first-trimester fetal pain as fact and praises congressional Republicans for banning Medicaid-funded abortions in Washington, D.C., a predominantly black city represented by a delegate without voting power.

In their attempt to stigmatize and outlaw abortion, some tea party-backed lawmakers have gone as far as to distort definitions of rape. In his amendment to the failed “No Taxpayer Support of Abortion” act, New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith changed the language of the so-called rape exception outlined in the Hyde Amendment to “forcible rape,” an outdated law enforcement term that excludes statutory rape and sexual violence against women who are intoxicated. This August, Missouri Republican senatorial candidate and sitting Congressman Todd Akin claimed that female bodies have the biological capacity to “shut down” conception during “legitimate rapes.”

Anti-choice activists and the lawmakers who represent them have also attempted to manipulate the legitimate concerns some people of color have about the history and modern limitations of publicly funded family planning. They have equated voluntary abortions with black genocide and compared the rights of fertilized eggs to those of enslaved Africans and freedmen denied citizenship via the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Arizona’s Franks coupled these race-baiting ideas with unsubstantiated claims of a growing trend in sex-selective abortion by Chinese immigrants. He floated two versions of an anti-choice bill called the Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.

On the state level, Republican lawmakers enacted a record 69 anti-choice measures in 2011. For example, South Dakota’s GOP-dominated legislature mandated that women who have already decided to have an abortion must first visit an openly anti-choice crisis pregnancy center (CPC) for “counseling” beforehand. Arizona voided charitable status for any entity that performs or refers patients for abortions. Seven states—Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin—legally restricted the flow of family planning dollars to Planned Parenthood affiliates that already, by law, were not using the money to fund abortions.

All of this has made reproductive health a flash point in the 2012 elections. But a hardening reality is buried in the culture war surrounding Rush Limbaugh’s slurs and Todd Akin’s shocking claims: reproductive healthcare options are increasingly limited for people who are poor, uninsured, without a medical home and reliant on an ever-fraying healthcare safety net. These women—disproportionately Latinas and African American—are bearing the true brunt of the renewed attack on publicly funded family planning services. Nearly a third of all women who used those services in 2010 were Latina, and nearly 20 percent were black.

Lone Star Falling

Texas provides a striking example of the changes taking place at the local level.

The cash-strapped state has the highest percentage of uninsured people in the nation. This year it was ranked dead last in health care delivery by the nonpartisan federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. In the most recent Texas Medical Association survey of private physicians in the state, only 30 percent said they would accept new Medicaid patients. (In 2000, 67 percent said they would.) Yet the Lone Star State has made a series of decisions that jeopardizes an entire network of family planning providers who do accept patients who need publicly funded care.

First, lawmakers slashed the state’s two-year family planning budget by 66 percent—from $111.5 million to $37.9 million. Then they created a three-tiered funding scheme for evaluating potential recipients of the federal family planning funds that the Texas Department of State Health Services administers.

Under this system, government agencies, universities, public hospitals and federally certified safety net clinics get the first crack at family planning service contracts. Comprehensive primary care providers are second in line. Last in line are nonprofits and community action organizations solely dedicated to family planning, including—you guessed it—Planned Parenthood.

Finally, lawmakers sabotaged the Texas’ Women’s Health Program (WHP), a widely heralded project that extended health care to a wider range of poor women.

Launched in 2005, WHP has allowed about 130,000 uninsured, low-income women ages 18 to 44 who weren’t able to meet Texas’s very narrow Medicaid eligibility requirements to receive no- or low-cost birth control and other preventative care each year. The program has been credited with saving the state about $183 million in Medicaid spending by averting nearly 17,000 unintended pregnancies. Planned Parenthood affiliates treated about 40 percent of women enrolled in WHP.

But last year—with the war on women in full tilt and Gov. Rick Perry in a presidential run—the GOP-dominated Texas legislature decided to enforce an existing rule that blocks providers that share a name, trademark or any other relationship with “an entity that performs or promotes elective abortions.” It was a blatant attempt to exclude Planned Parenthood from WHP.

The federal government, which supports the program via Medicaid, rejected the rule and threatened to withhold $35 million—90 percent of the WHP budget. Unlike Indiana anti-choicers who made a similar move last year, Texas stood its ground and lost the funding. Citing states rights, Perry vowed to “find the money” to maintain the program. The new Texas Women’s Health Program is set to debut on Nov. 1 and a lawsuit Planned Parenthood filed against the Texas health department is pending.

The WHP fiasco confirmed how far some anti-choice Republicans are willing to go to attack Planned Parenthood in 2012. Perry, a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative, turned away $35 million of federal funds in a presidential election year. Deficit reduction, fiscal responsibility and limited government intrusion in personal matters are supposed to be the bedrock principles of the post-tea party GOP. And yet Perry willingly entered a power struggle with the Obama administration at the expense of more than 100,000 poor women in his state.

Ironically, Texas clinics that are in no way affiliated with Planned Parenthood are at greatest risk of closure, says Fran Hagerty, CEO of the Austin-based Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.

“In the legislature’s effort to target Planned Parenthood and drive them out of Texas, everybody else has been caught in the net,” she says. “I have been telling [conservative legislators] for years that if they keep doing what they’re doing, we’re going to end up with no family planning providers except Planned Parenthood because they do such a bang-up job of getting national and local support. It’s the little guys in rural one-stoplight towns that no one has ever heard of—the community action organizations formed back in the 1950s under the Johnson administration—that are going under. The state is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

New data from UT Austin’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project confirm Hagerty’s thrown-baby theory.

The nonpartisan research team surveyed the 76 agencies that received public funding for family planning and reproductive health care in fiscal year 2010—before the most dramatic budget cuts kicked in. Of the 240 clinics run by survey respondents, a staggering 22 percent have closed their doors and 16 percent have cut their hours. Dedicated family planning groups fared the worst: more than one third closed their doors and nearly 40 percent reduced their hours.

Urban Upheaval

Armed with an ebullient voice, easy smile and bright almond-shaped eyes, Chenoa Elizabeth, 32, is an ideal volunteer for the North Texas Planned Parenthood clinic where she is also a patient. As she rattles off familiar talking points—how the Dallas-area center provides “amazing, compassionate, quality care” for low-income women like herself—I can’t help but think that she’s handling me the way she would a customer at the boutiques and cocktail lounges where she’s worked for most of her adult life.

Until she starts with the sobbing. In the stutter-step dialect of panic and humiliation, the Hurricane Katrina survivor of Trinidadian and Scottish descent tries to explain why she’s so attached to this particular clinic. She tells me that she was raped in her early 20s, that she terminated the resulting pregnancy and that she uses a Planned Parenthood-installed 12-year Paraguard IUD because she never, ever wants children. She also notes that she’s a severe asthmatic who didn’t see a non-emergency doctor from 2008 to 2011 because she didn’t have insurance. Elizabeth, who’s pursing her associates degree in peace and justice studies, did have private health benefits once. But then a global corporation acquired the music venue where she was working, transferred her to Dallas and cut her hours, rendering her ineligible for coverage. Today she has limited coverage under WHP, because administrators at this Planned Parenthood branch introduced her to the program and walked her through the enrollment process. But now that the clinic can’t take her WHP benefits, Elizabeth worries that she’ll lose access to an organization that gives her a sense of stability and safety. “I’ve always been able to take care of myself, and I’m trying so hard,” she tells me.

Rural towns like those in Hidalgo County aren’t the only losers in the defunding game. The cuts have wide ranging effects on providers that women like Elizabeth turn to in big cities as well.

Take Austin-based People’s Community Clinic, which has a patient population that is 78 percent Latino and 75 percent at or below the federal poverty line.

According to Celia Neavel, director of the clinic’s Center for Adolescent Health, the 42-year-old nonprofit received a half million dollars in federal funding prior to the budget cuts. As a Title X provider, the clinic could treat a wide range of teen patients without parental consent and they were able to buy contraceptives at a greatly reduced rate. In the funding carnage of 2011, the clinic lost all of these funds and the legal and purchasing protections of Title X.

“We’ve been scrambling to raise money so that we don’t turn patients away or bill them,” says Neaval, who admits to feeling frustrated and drained. In addition to reducing hours and forcing shutdowns, family planning budget cuts also drove up the cost of subsidized birth control and, in some cases, made confidential care for minors illegal. “There is some sadness as well, that now we can’t get a teen who has already had one pregnancy a long lasting, reversible form of birth control or the confidential care she needs.”

Patients are feeling the same anxieties. “When I think about losing my health insurance or what will happen if my IUD slips, or if I get sick,” says Elizabeth, “I just don’t know. I don’t know…what I’m going to do.”

Legislators who gutted the state’s family planning networks have an idea of what she should do: Seek select medical care from an overtly religious crisis pregnancy center (CPC) that specializes in talking pregnant women out of abortions.

Marketing itself as Houston’s first “life affirming pregnancy medical clinic,” The Source for Women Spring Branch held its big opening bash in mid-September. Like countless other CPCs around the country, The Source locations were founded for the express purpose of persuading “abortion-vulnerable” girls and women to continue unintended pregnancies using Bible study, “therapeutic counseling,” “reproductive health counseling,” and classes in marriage, parenting, adoption, cooking.

But now that Texas is rolling out Gov. Perry’s fully state-funded, anti-choice version of WHP, The Source has repositioned itself as a healthcare provider that offers traditional family planning services. Think of it as Planned Parenthood, plus Jesus.

In a late September email, The Source spokesperson Tiffany Pardue told me that the spanking new Spring branch, which aims to be a WHP provider by the program’s Nov. 1 relaunch, will offer its clients STI testing and treatment; breast, pelvic and anal exams; Pap smears; referrals for mammograms, and something the organization calls “a verbal review of your gynecologic system.”

Conspicuously absent from The Source’s current menu of expanded services? Birth control. It’s a confusing omission given the original intent of WHP—to reduce the number of Medicaid-funded births in Texas by preventing unintended pregnancies.

According to Pardue, the “life-affirming” nonprofit’s board hasn’t yet decided which contraceptives it will offer. “Our medical team is considering each medical service and prescription that we will provide to serve the women of Houston,” she wrote. “A full list will be made available upon determination.”

The Source’s lack of specificity about contraception didn’t deter Gov. Perry from participating in the Spring Branch ribbon cutting. In his official remarks he hailed it as a model WHP provider.

“The Source gives women with unexpected pregnancies the information and the support they need to make the right choice, the choice of life,” Perry said. “We’ve banned the use of your tax dollars for abortion procedures in Texas, and expanded that ban to include those affiliated with abortion providers in the case of our Women’s Health Program. … The Source for Women clinics, in fact, will be part of Texas’ own Women’s Health Program, and Planned Parenthood will not be.”

As Goes Texas…?

About three months after our first interview, Chenoa Elizabeth sends me a shocking email. In it, she details how she was sexually assaulted for a second time this past March. “This attack has been much more difficult for me to process,” she wrote. “There was a man who approached me in a coffee shop posing as a business owner and offered me a job. … I thought this was the financial breakthrough that I had been waiting for, but instead I waltzed right into a trap.”

To avoid the trauma—and the expense—of an ER exam, Elizabeth didn’t report the assault to police or seek emergency care. When we last spoke, she hadn’t been tested for STIs, either. “Yes, I could use WHP with a different provider,” she acknowledged. “But I don’t want to have to sacrifice receiving compassionate and specialized care because I’m low-income.”

Elizabeth’s experience speaks to one of the least acknowledged consequences of the war on women’s reproductive health care. All women—hell, all people—should be able to get the medical attention they need in an environment that makes them feel as safe as possible. By turning something as personal as gynecological care into a political battleground, Texas provides us with a blueprint for what doesn’t work.

In the run-up to the presidential election and the full implementation of Obamacare, anti-choice Republicans have taken umbrage at the “war on women” metaphor, but they have not changed course. Red state governments, along with religiously affiliated hospital networks and universities have filed court challenges to repeal health reform or gut its birth control coverage requirements. In these cases, state officials have used the rhetoric of religious freedom to deny women birth control and abortion coverage in the private insurance policies for which they pay premiums. Similarly about 15 states have signaled that they will reject Medicaid expansion, a core component of the plan. Fourteen have outlawed abortion coverage in their insurance exchanges. It’s likely that the next wave of anti-choice sabotage will be centered on insurance coverage.

Only time will tell if the new Texas Women’s Health Program will provide a seamless transition for the hundreds of thousands of women enrolled in it. The overall impact of family planning clinic closures on the health of poor Texas women is also a big question mark.

What’s clear is that politicizing health care is a dangerous, crazy-making game. Hopefully Texas will serve as an example of what not to do, instead of an inspiration for anti-choice crusaders who seem all too willing to sacrifice the reproductive health of poor women to say they have won.