The Clear and Present Danger of Trump's Deeply Fraudulent and Openly White Supremacist Immigration Policy in Realtime, Right now

• Politics
• Immigration Policy
• Racism and Discrimination

https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-hate-speech-violence-against-immigrants

 

Networks That Air Trump’s Address Are Endangering Immigrants—And The Country

‘Fact-checking’ the president’s hate is not a sufficient fix

by George Zornick
January 8, 2019
The Nation

Donald Trump speaking at the final session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. (Brian Snyder / Reuters)

President Trump will address the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday evening, after every American broadcast news organization granted him the rare presidential privilege of uninterrupted air time on their networks. This privilege was denied to President Obama in 2014, when he wanted to address the nation about comprehensive immigration reform, and the networks’ decision to give Trump the green light came only hours after he declared via tweet that “The Fake News Media in our Country is the real Opposition Party. It is truly the Enemy of the People!”

There has been a fair amount of hand-wringing from the mainstream press about granting Trump an unfiltered platform to tell lies, as everyone universally expects him to do. CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, tweeted the address will “hopefully (be) surrounded by fact-checking.” Anderson Cooper defended his network’s decision by saying “It’s not our job to argue for or against walls…What is our job is to point out when official are making their case disingenuously or dishonestly, when they’re making stuff up essentially.”

But Trump’s address is far more serious than a case of misleading people about basic policy facts, like the net migration flows at the border or the efficacy of physical border barriers. Tonight, Trump will bend the facts in service of a years-long racist and demagogic campaign against Latin American immigrants; he will assuredly dehumanize them as terrorists, criminals, and carriers of disease, as he has from the very first day of his campaign in 2015. This kind of rhetoric has led to violence from both vigilantes and the state, and meekly fact-checking his numbers is an insufficient remedy to airing Trump’s Fifteen Minute Hate.

News executives need only to look a few months into the past to see why this is dangerous. As the midterms approached, Trump’s lies and distortions about immigration spiked: in late October, Trump was advancing over 30 falsehoods per day about immigration, according to data compiled by the Washington Post’s fact-checking team. Many of these lies advanced the ludicrous idea that there was a caravan of dangerous people heading towards the US-Mexico border; according to Trump’s tweets, the “onslaught” of migrants “INCLUD(ED) MANY CRIMINALS.” That was not true.

But many people believed it. And some people acted. Robert Bowers, who shot eleven people to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27, posted obsessively online about the caravan in the weeks leading up to the shooting. His specific belief that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was aiding the caravan in order to foment violence in the United States appears to have directly precipitated his decision to shoot up the Tree of Life synagogue; “Screw your optics, I’m going in,” he wrote online hours before the killings. (Trump also repeatedly suggested the migrants were being assisted by George Soros.)

Then there was the case of the three men in Kansas who were arrested in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election for a plot to kill Somali immigrants in their homes, in order to “wake people up” about the immigrant threat. At sentencing this year, lawyers for one of the men asked for leniency because his client had been so whipped up by the national discourse on immigration. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” they wrote in a sentencing memo.

The immigration reform group America’s Voice also tracked hate incidents by Trump supporters and staffers throughout the last presidential campaign, ranging from shouted slurs to actual violence.

Whether or not Trump directly incited many of these violent acts can always be debated; maybe these were people who in some cases would have lashed out anyway. But there is no question that Trump is creating an atmosphere of racial hatred and xenophobia, and as it always has throughout history, violence follows.

Moreover, state violence is an unmistakable consequence of Trump’s rhetoric. His lies have provided a rationale and political support for a wave of mass deportations that has ripped law-abiding families apart, while confining thousands of children to cages. Some of these children may never be reunited with their families, while some have died.

“It’s killing people. These policies are killing people,” said Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who specializes in civil rights and has studied online hate speech. “They’re leading to a level of racialized violence targeting people of color and religious minorities. This is a decision to basically broadcast a racist, hateful speech.”

We know that Trump will continue these outlandish lies tonight; the entire point of his address is to create the impression of a “National Security crisis on our Southern Border” that does not exist. His administration has been advancing the obvious lie that 4,000 terrorists have been apprehended at the US-Mexico border in recent days, and even Fox News demonstrated this was false on Sunday, when host Chris Wallace completely embarrassed White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders by presenting the actual facts. CNBC later found that only six people were apprehended at the southern border for being on the terrorist database, and even that doesn’t mean they were actually terrorists, given the historical unreliability of that list.

Administration officials have at least been shamed into taking a small half-step back—Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen now says “the exact number is sensitive”—but it’s doubtful Trump will feel any such shame tonight—he will almost definitely make the same false claim.

And that gets to another problem with airing Trump’s remarks: it’s not just that he practices garden-variety political lying, but rather disciplined disinformation, as the Post’s Greg Sargent has relentlessly pointed out. The key difference is that disinformation campaigns repeat falsehoods long after they have been debunked, even by friendly outlets like Fox News. Fact-checking is powerless in the face of shameless demagoguery.

The networks’ decision to air Trump’s remarks on Tuesday with a few tart chyrons or on-air fact-checks is just not enough to offset the damage. Trump is unworthy of the airtime.

“We’re now at the point where if you don’t understand that the government is out of control, and is aggressively attacking the fundamental values and institutions of this country, then you’re not paying attention,” said Fernandez. “I think (the news executives) understand that. I simply think they have not figured out that the ways in which human rights violations occur is not just that there are evil-doers, but that there are institutions—and particularly in a democracy—whose job it is in times of crisis to stand up, and stand for something. They have not figured out that they are in this unique moment, where history will look back and say ‘What side were you on?’”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

George Zornick is The Nation's Washington editor.

Henry A. Giroux on the Nexus of White Supremacy and Neoliberalism As Fascist Doctrine and Practice in Trump's America

https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-racist-language-of-pollution-drives-his-neoliberal-fascism/

Op-Ed

Politics & Elections

Trump’s Racist Language of Pollution Drives His Neoliberal Fascism

by Henry A. Giroux

January 7, 2019

Truthout

President Trump speaks to the media after a meeting with congressional leaders about ending the partial government shutdown, in the Rose Garden at the White House on January 4, 2019, in Washington, DC.Mark Wilson / Getty Images

[Part of the Truthout Series: The Public Intellectual]

The ruthless ideologies and policies of a fascist past are with us once again, and the warning signs can be seen in the emergence of the normalizing discourses of pollution and disposability. As a central element of neoliberalism, the discourse of disposability signals a society in which certain people are viewed as throwaways. Meanwhile the discourse of pollution suggests a mode of dehumanization that enables policies in which people are relegated outside the boundaries of justice and become the driving force for policies of terminal exclusion. These terms represent a merging of neoliberalism and fascist politics.

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are disappearing in the United States. The viciousness of the Trump administration and the cruelty imposed by neoliberalism mutually inform each other. Trump’s policies range from stripping food stamps and health care from poor children and caging immigrant children in some god-forsaken prison in Texas to allowing thousands of Puerto Ricans to live for more than a year without electricity, safe water and decent shelter. Such policies are matched by an ongoing, if not relentless, discourse of dehumanization and objectification aimed at those considered disposable.

The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing production of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of color and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random and in some cases trivialized through the monotony of repetition, it also has become the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalized in a new political formation that I have called neoliberal fascism. This new historical conjuncture emerges through a fusion of discredited eugenicist discourses (e.g., Trump’s notion that you have to be born with the right genes) and a rebooted melange of mythic notions of meritocracy (objective measures of individual quality), scientific racism (pseudo-science that supports racial hierarchies), Horatio Alger fables (anyone can work hard and become rich and successful), and a sheer contempt for the “losers” who are viewed as alien to a white public sphere supported by Trump and his minions.

The dual logics of pollution and disposability have become central to a punishing state that both legitimates the denigration of human life and too often unleashes state violence upon immigrants, people of color, poor people, and anyone else considered a threat to the belief that the public sphere is exclusively for whites. Under the Trump administration, the discourse of pollution is increasingly visible when applied to undocumented immigrants or those marginalized by ethnicity and race, who those in power place in the same categories as contaminants and toxins. At the same time, those individuals considered disposable often meet a more violent end. This is clearly visible in the ongoing criminalization of immigrant children on the southern border who are forcibly separated from their parents and deposited in child migrant detention centers largely run by for-profit businesses that are making close to a billion dollars in profits. Some children have died while in these internment centres. The logic of disposability also fuels throughout the United States the modelling of public schools after armed camps, and the targeting of poor Black and Brown youth as objects of control and harassment by the criminal justice system, particularly though the expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Obsessed with race, Donald Trump has weaponized and racialized the culture wars by using racially charged language to legitimate white supremacist ideologies and pit his supporters against protesting Black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants, dark-skinned immigrants, and other people of color whom he routinely insults and punishes through race-based policies. Trump has claimed that “laziness is a trait in blacks,” according to one of his former employees, and he has called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Meanwhile he stated in December 2015 that a judge hearing a case about Trump University was “biased” because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.” These comments are a small sampling of Trump’s racist remarks.

Racism runs deep not only in Trump’s base but also in a Republican Party that as Paul Krugman points out engages in extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter purges, “deliberate restriction of minority access to the polls” and the ongoing subversion of state legislatures. Frank Rich has gone further and argued, “The Republican Party has proudly and uninhibitedly come out of the closet as the standard-bearer for white supremacy in the Trump era.” George Packer adds to this signalling the emerging fascist politics that now engulfs the Republican Party. He argues that simply smug ideological fundamentalists and political purists such as Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich no longer define the Republican Party. He writes that the GOP has become “more grotesque than ever”:

"… conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes."

What we are witnessing at the current moment is not only the emergence of dangerous, illiberal, anti-democratic ideologies that mimic the legacy of white nationalism but also the resurgence of a powerful affective and educational culture nurtured by false promises, anger, feelings of repulsion, hatred and the spectacularization of violence. What is alarming about this culture of intolerance, bigotry and violence is its alignment with the Nazi obsession with notions of cultural and biological pollution and their systemic efforts to purge society of those deemed contaminated. This language is not unlike Trump’s characterization of asylum seekers as vermin who will bring “large-scale crime and disease” to the United States.

Unmasking Language of Disposability and Pollution

 

Rather than being a historical relic of a horrible past, the language of pollution and disposability has remerged under the Trump administration to an unusual extent. This is a language rooted in what Thomas Mann once called “the archaic shudder,” one that opens the door to the rhetoric of racial purity, social cleansing and the glorification of violence. This merging of white nationalism and policies aimed at racial cleansing are buttressed by the cruel architecture of neoliberalism, which creates landscapes of unabashed misery, violence and terror. Neoliberalism offers little hope for economic and social justice while claiming ironically that it is not only a moral beacon and force for the good but also perniciously that there is no realistic alternative to it.

This toxic ideology is further solidified in the assumption that the connective social bonds that make a democracy possible should be viewed with disdain and replaced with a notion of individualism in which all problems and the means to address them should be placed solely at the feet of individuals. Under such circumstances, fear and economic anxiety produced by massive inequality, the dismantling of the welfare state, precarious employment, eroding white privilege, demographic changes and the collapse of the social contract are redirected to those human beings considered “losers,” “outsiders” and “excess.”

The merging of neoliberalism and elements of a fascist playbook are now anchored firmly in the language of disposability and pollution. This rhetoric is part of a representational crisis marked by the increasing attraction of and growth of architectures of meaning and proliferating digital platforms and cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of modes of desire, identifications and values that fuel right-wing extremists and an apocalyptic populism. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a new era of politics and way of thinking about place, community, rootlessness and identity. The once dominant narratives about critical agency, truth, justice and democracy are collapsing. Fascist terror is no longer fixed in the past or ephemeral to the 21^st century. Under the Trump administration, malice, lies and unrelenting cruelty have become official policy and fraught with dangerous risks. Fascist politics avoids reason, maligns the truth and appeals to a pathological nationalism. In doing so it creates a mythic past that either denigrates or excludes those considered at odds with its notions of white supremacy and racial purity. What emerges is a celebration of the brutality of 1930s, which becomes a signpost for imagining a present under what Trump’s nostalgically codes in the slogans “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Culture now becomes integral to a politics deeply rooted in an anti-democratic ethos. 

Under neoliberalism, a new political formation has developed in which a racialist worldview merges with the economic dictates of a poisonous form of casino capitalism. Echoes of the past can be heard in Trump’s and his associates’ repeated use of a language boiling over with terms such as “vermin,” “animals,” “stupid” and “losers,” to name only a few of the toxic expressions crucial to a politics of social cleansing, racial purity and violent forms of exclusion. The current language of disposability and pollution carries with it powerful affective overtones that “transform the noble concept of a common humanity into a disdainful sneer,” as Richard A. Etlin points out in his introduction to Art, Culture, and Media Under The Third Reich. 

The language of pollution is used to treat some groups as not simply inferior but also as a threat to the body politic, and is closely aligned with the language of camps and extermination. More than an ostentatious display of power on the part of the Trump administration, the language of pollution and disposability functions as a performative language designed to dramatize and re-enact national identity, one that defines itself in white nationalist assumptions. Assigned to the dumping ground of social and political abandonment, those individuals or families considered noxious and superfluous are now associated with a rootlessness that bears a close resemblance to the Nazi notion of blood and soil. Looking back at the Nazi era, the dangers of the language of disposability and pollution become terrifying given how they were deployed in the interest of unimaginable horrors. Etlin provides a glimpse of the logic and effects of the discourse of pollution and its morphing into policies of disposability and eradication. He writes:

From propaganda posters to problems in mathematics text­books for schoolchildren, Germans were repeatedly asked, once the Nazis had come to power, to ponder the economic costs of maintaining the lives of the handicapped and mentally ill.Forced sterilization of people considered “hereditarily ill” had been decreed in July 1933; compulsory abortions, in 1935. The legalized secret killing of [physically and cognitively disabled] children began in 1939, as did plans for the murder of Germany’s adult mental patients, both programs “planned and administered by medical professionals” involving “some of Germany’s oldest and most highly re­spected hospitals.” The utilitarian calculation of the cost of sustaining life for these so-called unproductive members of German society does not account for the full reasoning behind such measures. Rather, one must look to an altered moral outlook best represented by the notion of the “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,” that is, the “destruction” or “exter­mination,” of “lives not worth living.”

The politics of disposability now exists at the highest levels of the US government and is central to the creation of a death-saturated age.

The politics of disposability is no longer a discourse limited to the historical memory of totalitarian governments, internment camps and extermination policies. As both a state-legitimated ideology and established policy, it now exists at the highest levels of the US government and is central to the creation of a death-saturated age. Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This dystopian mindset is marked by hollow words and lethal actions; similarly, its dreamscape is pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain.


In this worldview, the present creates nightmares parading as dreams in which the future is imagined “by way of a detour through a mythic past,” in the words of AK Thompson. There is more at stake here than shrinking political horizons and the aligning of the existing moment with echoes of a bygone fascist era. What we are witnessing is a mode of governing fueled by fantasies of exclusion accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, thoughtful reasoning and collective resistance rooted in democratic forms of struggles. We are also witnessing an unprecedented assault on the mainstream media and the fundamental necessity in a democracy for an independent, critical journalism.

Trump’s threat to use “libel laws,” his labeling critical news outlets as “fake news,” and his notion of the media as the “enemy of the American people”—a term linked to authoritarian regimes—are key warning signs of a fascist politics, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have shown in their book How Democracies Die. Trump has degraded the office of the president and has elevated the ethos of political corruption, hyper-masculinity and lying to a level that leaves many people numb and exhausted. He has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible. Pollution in its biological, ecological and material forms has become the centerpiece of Trump’s endorsement of a fascist politics that is at the heart of a growing right-wing populism across the globe and is bolstered by his support.

Trump has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible. 

Trump has also expanded the discourse of pollution and disposability to enact a full-fledged attack on the environment. As the editorial board of the New York Times put it, “Trump imperils the planet” with his corporate-friendly retrograde policies. Not only has he appointed cabinet members who harbor a deep disdain for environmental regulations to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and other agencies whose purpose is to serve the public good, he has also enacted policies utterly destructive to the environment and human life.


For example, the Trump administration is lifting federal protections for thousands of waterways and wetlands, compromising the safety of water for millions of Americans. The Department of Interior will allow oil drilling on millions of previously protected acres including the establishment of oil and gas production wells in federally controlled waters of the US Arctic. The Environmental Protection Agency will lift restrictions on carbon emissions from new coal plants and has proposed weakening greenhouse gas emissions and fuel standards for light duty vehicles. The Trump administration has weakened the Endangered Species Act and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement as part of what Eliot Weinberger describes as “Trump administration’s ‘energy dominancy’ agenda, to eliminate safety rules for offshore oil and natural gas drilling platforms.” Responding to a government report that predicted dire consequences to the US from climate change, Trump stated, “I don’t believe it.”


Trump’s astonishingly irrational response is not simply about his own ignorance regarding scientific studies or the validity of science itself; it is primarily about pandering to the major corporations who make big profits in plundering the environment. Wealth extraction, exploitative low wages, employment contingency, manufactured inequality, brutal forms of labor discipline and engineered suffering are the defining characteristics of the neoliberal capitalism now driving Trump’s policies. Ted Steinberg is right in arguing, “Flirtation with disaster is in a sense the essence of neoliberal capitalism, a hyperactive form of [an] exploitative economic order that seems to know no limits.”

It is important to note that Trump’s environmental rollbacks do more than increase the profits of plundering corporations; they also endanger the lives of millions. For instance, a Harvard University study by professors David Cutler and Francesca Dominici calculated that repealing the Clean Power Plan Rule would “lead to an estimated 36,000 deaths each decade and nearly 630,000 cases of respiratory infection in children alone.” Moreover, the authors estimate that the repeal of emission requirements for heavy trucks alone “could lead to as many as 41,000 premature deaths per decade and 900,000 cases of respiratory tract symptoms.” They conclude with this sobering warning:

Overall, an extremely conservative estimate is that the Trump environmental agenda is likely to cost the lives of over 80,000 US residents per decade and lead to respiratory problems for many more than 1 million people. This sobering statistic captures only a small fraction of the cumulative public health damages associated with the full range of rollbacks and systemic actions proposed by the Trump administration.

In pursuing policies such as these, Trump is abetting the inhumane and ethically irresponsible ethos and pragmatism at the heart of a sordid capitalism that thrives on economic shock doctrines.

In pursuing policies such as these, Trump is abetting the inhumane and ethically irresponsible ethos and pragmatism at the heart of a sordid capitalism that thrives on economic shock doctrines. In doing so, he refuses to acknowledge that the emerging disasters overtaking the planet call into question the very foundations of a predatory global capitalism, which divorces economic activity from social costs, and embraces a death-dealing notion of progress at any price. Neoliberal fascism is on the march and has produced a wide-ranging shift in the economy, ideology, power, culture and politics. Ways of imagining society through the lens of democratic ideals, values and social relations have given way to narratives that substitute cruelty for compassion, greed for generosity, and pollution for social bonds rooted in human rights. Pollution has become not only the new mantra for an assault on human rights but also a warning and unapologetic forecast of the horrors of state power and its turn to a politics of social and racial cleansing, along with its embrace of authoritarianism. 

We face in the current era a major challenge to education, reason and informed judgment and their relationship to democracy. The formative cultures necessary to ensure the production of informed and critical citizens necessary for a democracy are collapsing under the weight of the powers of the financial elite and big corporations. At the same time, as Anthony DiMaggio has argued, fascism is on the table and “has become a permanent feature of American politics.”


Such a threat in terms of its historical genesis and its contemporary modes of expression can no longer be ignored. The stakes are much too high. 

Note: I want to thank my friend, Oz Zambrano, for his editorial help with this essay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018) and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018). 

Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.

The Despicable Shutdown of the Federal Government by Donald Trump, the Typically Enabling Antics of the Republican Party and the Feeble, Inept Response of Democratic Party Leadership...(Thus Far)

https://truthout.org/articles/five-things-the-shutdown-shows-us-about-2019/

Op-Ed

Politics and Elections

Five Things the Shutdown Shows Us About 2019

by the Editors

Socialist Worker

January 6, 2019

Truthout

 

Tourists walk past trash laying on the ground of the National Mall as the partial shutdown of the US government goes into the 12th day, on January 2, 2019, in Washington, D. C.   Mark Wilson / Getty Images

The era of divided government began with the continuation of a ridiculous and destructive government shutdown caused by a president who seemingly cares only about impressing a hateful right-wing minority obsessed with the symbolism of building a literal wall on the southern border to keep out brown-skinned immigrants.

Happy New Year.

To this point, Democrats have been flexing their new leverage as holders of the House majority by refusing to agree to Trump’s wall. It feels a little better that at least one part of one branch of government is controlled by someone other than the gutless Republicans who have catered to Trump’s every destructive whim.

But what hasn’t changed is that, with the exception of a few left-wing Democrats, the Democratic Party as a whole continues to stand for nothing beyond opposing Trump — certainly not for the refugee families in Tijuana who were teargassed on New Year’s Day as they approached a border wall that very much already exists.

Regardless of who ends up blinking first in this latest Trumpian theater of the absurd, the shutdown has revealed some of the key political dynamics that socialists can expect over the coming two years.

Number One: Trump Will Be Even More Off the Rails

It can’t be stated often enough: The most powerful office in the world is occupied by a myopic egomaniac who wouldn’t be trusted by anyone who knows him to take care of a pet or a houseplant.

Trump led an erratic and dysfunctional government when his party controlled all parts of the federal government. When the Democrats won control of the House in the midterm elections, Trump dialed his instability up to 11.

Mattis and Kelly gone; tweets announcing a full withdrawal from Syria; threats to dismiss the Federal Reserve chair — all these moves will rattle the billionaires and power brokers who either supported or at least tolerated Trump, even when he pandered to Charlottesville Nazis and built border concentration camps for refugee children.

Now, House Democrats have the power to vote down legislation and launch long-delayed investigations into the White House’s tangled web of corruption. And with the Mueller investigation moving closer to Trump and his inner circle, the Republican rats have to start thinking about when to jump ship.

Trump’s last-minute decision to reject a spending bill if it didn’t contain funding for his racist border wall, thus leading to a government shutdown, surprised and frustrated most Senate Republicans, who don’t see the logic to an unpopular government shutdown because of an unpopular border wall.

But Trump governs not by logic but by crisis. The shutdown shows that the more obstacles he faces in the coming months — whether it be from Mueller, Democratic hearings or a sinking economy — the more destructive he is going to be.

Number Two: It’s the People Who End Up Paying for Trump’s “Populist” Stunts

Some 800,000 federal workers have been impacted by the shutdown — half of them “nonessential” workers furloughed for the duration and half of them forced to work without pay.

In other words, the president who boasted (falsely) about saving 1,000 jobs at an Indiana manufacturing plant on the campaign trail is now boasting that he’s proud to steal paychecks from 800 times that number of people, in the name of his racist campaign against migrants.

Then there’s the impact on the services those workers provide, and not just at national parks and museums, as the media like to point out.

Case in point: food and drug inspections. That’s right, just weeks after a horrific outbreak of E. Coli in lettuce — capping a year considered the worst for food safety in recent memory — we’re all now in even greater danger of another deadly outbreak, all because Trump claims he’s keeping us safe from mythical diseases carried by immigrants.

But the most outrageous impact of the shutdown is probably the cutoff of funds for Indigenous nations whose treaties called for federal money for education, health care and other services, in exchange for vast territorial concessions.

“We prepaid [for the services] with millions of acres of land,” said Chippewa leader Aaron Payment told the New York Times. “We don’t have the right to take back that land, so we expect the federal government to fulfill its treaty and trust responsibility.”

Among the many services considered “nonessential” by the government is snow removal in rural areas. As a result, Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye told the Times that many people on the reservation are trapped in their homes, unable to drive the dozens of miles to the nearest grocery store or pharmacy.

Number Three: The Democrats Remain the Party of the Status Quo

Last year, polls showed that two-thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s family separation policy at the border, and a full 75 percent think immigration is “a good thing” for the country — the highest number since 2001.

But Democrats aren’t using this national spotlight on immigration policy to do anything other than scold Trump for shutting down the government and continuing with the status quo.

House Democrats led by new Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to position themselves as the party trying first and foremost to end the shutdown. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t also use this moment of national crisis to expose ICE raids, for-profit prisons, family separation and the other horrors of U.S. immigration policy.

Instead here’s the new head of the House Democratic Caucus, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: “We do have a broken immigration system that needs to be fixed in a sustainable and bipartisan way. However, it’s impossible to have a mature conversation about comprehensive immigration reform in the midst of a reckless Trump shutdown sparked by his desire to build a medieval border wall.”

By countering Trump with proposals to maintain “border security” funding at current levels, Pelosi engaged in the classic Democratic strategy of starting negotiations with a concession that can only lead to further retreats toward the Republicans’ maximalist position.

Her proposal also captures exactly what her party stands for: continuing the status quo, which in this case includes children dying in detention centers and being teargassed by Border Patrol thugs.

But Pelosi didn’t just “play it safe” when it comes to border politics. She also included in her proposal to reopen the government a “pay-as-you-go” provision that requires new spending to be offset with equivalent savings. This austerity measure beloved of conservatives would make it virtually impossible to pass ambitious reforms like Medicare for All or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for Green New Deal.

Pelosi’s stance during the shutdown follows the conservative agenda that she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have already laid out for the coming two years.

Though rejection by the Senate or a Trump veto is probably assured, the Democrats could push measures that lay out an agenda of bold popular redistributive reforms, like taxing the rich to pay for universal medical care and college tuition.

Instead, Democrats plan to think small — for example, proposals to tinker with the Affordable Care Act or enact campaign finance reform measures that are unobjectionable to their billionaire funders.

Party leaders are hoping they can reap the benefits of the “energy” brought in by left-wing newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez — even as they bury her proposal in a neutered climate change committee that won’t get behind the New Green Deal.

Number Four: Immigration Politics Needs a “Medicare for All”

On New Year’s Day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump would reject Pelosi’s proposal to end the shutdown because it “fails to secure the border and puts the needs of other countries above the needs of our own citizens.”

As always, jingoistic nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Trump’s wall may not be popular, but this underlying “America First” argument has a broader appeal — made relevant by the fact that neither party has lifted a finger in many decades to help the majority on the wrong end of increasing inequality.

That’s why immigrant-bashing is Trump’s go-to issue when he needs to whip up his base — and it’s why the longer Democrats counter it with nothing more than procedural scolding, the more of a chance it has to take root.

The emergence of a new left both inside and outside the Democratic Party has been marked by demands like Medicare for All, free college and now the Green New Deal that have articulated the politics of working class solidarity.

The emergence of the demand to #AbolishICE last summer was an important step toward breaking the left from the exploitative corporate scheme of “comprehensive immigration reform.” But we have yet develop a concrete set of demands that tie the fight against migrant oppression to labor demands that will benefit workers, regardless of legal status and nationality.

With Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham floating ideas for ending the standoff with an even weaker version of comprehensive immigration reform, this is an urgent task.

Number Five: The Key Question for the Left Will be Unity vs. Independence

We now have two political parties, but three identifiable broad political bases: right-wing nationalists, neoliberal centrists and social democrats crossed with New Deal Democrats.

It’s a trend that’s been developing for years, but it accelerated as Trump brought the Republican Party under the control of its extreme right wing, boosting the longtime Democratic strategy of becoming the party of choice for U.S. capital and well-off suburban voters.

Schumer was widely mocked for his 2016 prediction that Democrats would pick up two suburban moderate votes for every blue-collar worker they lost, but in the midterms, the strategy worked pretty well. The House majority contains democratic socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, but also a lot of incoming moderates.

But this isn’t just a question of math. For decades, the project of the Democratic Party has been to subordinate its left flank behind a centrist project. Schumer’s formula isn’t mathematical, but political: There are far more workers than well-heeled suburbanites, but the latter correspond more to the interests of capital that the Democrats are actually interested in serving.

One key debate in the coming period will be whether left should work toward independence from the Democratic Party — or make a priority out of “unity” with the centrists to keep right-wing nationalists out of power.

The question won’t be mainly about elections in the short term, but about demands like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — and it’s important for everyone to understand that fear of independence is behind the Democratic complaints that they are “too radical” or jeopardize pushing the right wing out of power.

If movements reject the Democrats’ limitations, these political battles can contribute to establishing the left practically in organization and in struggle on the scale that the new socialist movement has projected itself ideologically.

Some of the new left-wing Democrats in the House are off to a promising start, from the Green New Deal, to Rashida Tlaib’s rejection of the traditional Israel junket for new members of Congress, to the rejection by Ocasio-Cortez and others of Pelosi’s pay-as-you-go provision.

But just as it was telling that the challenge to Pelosi’s speakership came not from the party’s left wing, but from its right, it’s also telling how few Democrats joined the challenge to her austerity plan — much less did other things like encouraging federal workers to take job action against the shutdown or bringing delegations of Indigenous leaders to the Capitol to protest.

That’s a reflection of the pressure on party members to stay united in the shutdown fight. The shutdown will end eventually, but this Trump-created crisis and the standoff that ensued give us an early indication of how little the Democratic Party as a whole has changed.

PseudoScience and the Real Roots of White Supremacy as Doctrine and Practice in the World Today

All,

What is and has always been the fundamental cause of the heinous doctrine and practice of white supremacy and its savagely criminal defense and justification of slavery, genocide, colonization, and mass murder generally in the so-called "modern world" since the 15th century?

The blatantly obvious answer as always can be found in the following article below of course and the continued relentless assertion, support, and rationalization of PSEUDO SCIENCE or what is better known and clearly understood as LIES. The BIG LIE in the so-called "scientific world" is precisely what moral and intellectual cretins like Joseph Goebbels and Dr. James Watson and their many colleagues have always shared in common with their millions of acolytes and fellow LIARS who continue their murderous legacy today. Stay tuned because as fascism continues to spread exponetially across this society and the rest of the globe these white supremacist assertions and the endless articles and the ongoing flood of high profile reports and investigative journalism about them will become even more apparent than they already are...

Kofi 

https://www.nytimes.com/…/sc…/watson-dna-genetics-race.html…

James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race

The Nobel-winning biologist has drawn global criticism with unfounded pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. He still thinks he’s right, a new documentary finds.

by Amy Harmon
January 1, 2019
New York Times

 

"Decoding Watson," a new film about Dr. James D. Watson explores the gulf between his scientific brilliance and his views on race.CreditCreditMark Mannucci/Room 608 Inc.

It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.

In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”

Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there.

He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made public.

Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income from having been designated a “nonperson.’’

But his remarks have lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media.

Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, elicited an outcry last spring with a toast he made to Dr. Watson’s involvement in the early days of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Lander quickly apologized.

“I reject his views as despicable,” Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists. “They have no place in science, which must welcome everyone. I was wrong to toast, and I’m sorry.’’

And yet, offered the chance recently to recast a tarnished legacy, Dr. Watson has chosen to reaffirm it, this time on camera. In a new documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson,’’ to be broadcast on P.B.S. on Wednesday night, he is asked whether his views about the relationship between race and intelligence have changed.

“No,’’ Dr. Watson said. “Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.’’

Dr. Watson adds that he takes no pleasure in “the difference between blacks and whites’’ and wishes it didn’t exist. “It’s awful, just like it’s awful for schizophrenics,’’ he says. (His son Rufus was diagnosed in his teens with schizophrenia.) Dr. Watson continues: “If the difference exists, we have to ask ourselves, how can we try and make it better?”

Dr. Watson’s remarks may well ignite another firestorm of criticism. At the very least, they will pose a challenge for historians when they take the measure of the man: How should such fundamentally unsound views be weighed against his extraordinary scientific contributions?

In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”

Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate’’ statement would be based.

“It is disappointing that someone who made such groundbreaking contributions to science,’’ Dr. Collins added, “is perpetuating such scientifically unsupported and hurtful beliefs.’’

PHOTO: Dr. Watson, right, and the co-discoverer of the double-helix, Francis Crick, in 1953.CreditA. Barrington Brown, Gonville and Caius College/Science Photo Library
Image

PHOTO:  Dr. Watson, right, and the co-discoverer of the double-helix, Francis Crick, in 1953.CreditA. Barrington Brown, Gonville and Caius College/Science Photo Library

PHOTO: Dr. Watson is unable to respond, according to family members. He made his latest remarks last June, during the last of six interviews with Mark Mannucci, the film’s producer and director.

But in October Dr. Watson was hospitalized following a car accident, and he has not been able to leave medical care.

Some scientists said that Dr. Watson’s recent remarks are noteworthy less because they are his than because they signify misconceptions that may be on the rise, even among scientists, as ingrained racial biases collide with powerful advances in genetics that are enabling researchers to better explore the genetic underpinnings of behavior and cognition.

“It’s not an old story of an old guy with old views,’’ said Andrea Morris, the director of career development at Rockefeller University, who served as a scientific consultant for the film. Dr. Morris said that, as an African-American scientist, “I would like to think that he has the minority view on who can do science and what a scientist should look like. But to me, it feels very current.’’

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, has argued that new techniques for studying DNA show that some human populations were geographically separated for long enough that they plausibly could have evolved average genetic differences in cognition and behavior.

But in his recent book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,’’ he explicitly repudiates Dr. Watson’s presumption that such differences would “correspond to longstanding popular stereotypes’’ as “essentially guaranteed to be wrong.’’

Even Robert Plomin, a prominent behavioral geneticist who argues that nature decisively trumps nurture when it comes to individuals, rejects speculation about average racial differences.

“There are powerful methods for studying the genetic and environmental origins of individual differences, but not for studying the causes of average differences between groups,” Dr. Plomin writes in an afterword to be published this spring in the paperback edition of his book, “Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.”

Whether Dr. Watson was aware of any of this science is unclear. In the film, he appears to have grown increasingly isolated. He mentions missing Francis Crick, his collaborator in the race to decipher the structure of DNA.

“We liked each other,’’ Dr. Watson says of Dr. Crick. “I couldn’t get enough of him.’’

As history now knows, the duo was able to solve the puzzle in 1953, with their hallmark models of cardboard and metal only with the help of another scientist, Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photograph of the DNA molecule was shown to Dr. Watson without her permission.

The tools of molecular biology unlocked by their discovery have since been used to trace humanity’s prehistory, devise lifesaving therapies, and develop Crispr, a gene-editing technology that was used recently, and unethically, to alter the DNA of twin human embryos.

And Dr. Watson became perhaps the most influential biologist of the second half of the 20th century. His textbook, “Molecular Biology of the Gene,’’ helped define the new field. First in a laboratory at Harvard and then at Cold Spring Harbor, he trained a new generation of molecular biologists and used his star power to champion such projects as the first sequencing of the human genome.

“You knew when you heard him that you were at the start of a revolution in understanding,’’ Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied with Dr. Watson in the 1960s, says in “Decoding Watson.’’

“You felt as if you were part of this tiny group of people who had seen the light.’’

Mr. Mannucci, the director and producer, was drawn to his subject by a certain similarity to “the King Lear story’,’ he said — “that this man was at the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws, was brought down.” The film highlights Dr. Watson’s penchant for provocation, exemplified by his candid 1968 memoir, “The Double Helix,” of the race to decipher DNA’s structure.

In later years, even before his 2007 comments, Dr. Watson began making offensive statements about groups of people, suggesting, among other things, that exposure to sunlight in equatorial regions increases sexual urges and that fat people are less ambitious than others.

“He was a semiprofessional loose cannon,’’ said Nathaniel Comfort, a science historian at Johns Hopkins University. “We become prisoners of our own personas.” In the film, Dr. Comfort also suggests that Dr. Watson’s views on race are the result of the genetic filter he applies to the world: “There’s a risk to thinking about genes all the time.”

But Mary-Claire King, a leading geneticist at the University of Washington who knows Dr. Watson well and is not in the film, suggested that the racially homogeneous culture of science also played a role in shaping Dr. Watson’s misconceptions.

“If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.

If that is the case, it may not bode well for combating prejudice in biomedical research, where African-Americans represent just 1.5 percent of grant applications to the N.I.H. Biases in hiring by medical school science departments are well documented.

“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m not Watson,’’’ said Kenneth Gibbs, a researcher at the N.I.H. who studies racial disparities in science. “But one should really be asking himself or herself, ‘What am I doing to ensure our campus environments are supporting scientists from backgrounds that are not there?’’’

“Decoding Watson’’ marks the first time Dr. Watson and his wife, Liz, have spoken publicly at length about finding out that Rufus, their older son, has schizophrenia. Rufus and his brother, Duncan, also appear in the film, but Mr. Mannucci said that other people close to Dr. Watson declined to participate.

In interviews with The Times, some said they believed that Dr. Watson was ill served by speaking publicly at this point in his life.

Still, Mr. Mannucci said that he had asked Dr. Watson about race and intelligence several times over the course of making the film in order to ascertain his real views. “I didn’t want to feel that it was a product of age or having caught him in a moment, trying to get a rise out of someone,’’ he said.

In the film, Dr. Watson sometimes seems to be grasping for explanations for his own views on race and intelligence. He mentions that he is a “product of the Roosevelt era,’’ and that he has always believed genes are important.

“To the extent that I’ve hurt people,’’ he said, “of course I regret it.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Amy Harmon is a national correspondent, covering the intersection of science and society. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for her series “The DNA Age”, and as part of a team for the series “How Race Is Lived in America.”

@amy_harmon • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 31, 2018, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: For James Watson, the Price Was Exile. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper