Republicans illegally protecting a guilty Donald Trump with stupid civil disobedience

Republicans are quick to label civil disobedience but made the wrong decision to respond to herd mentality~ published in The New Yorker by Jelani Cobb

Republicans are always ready to stereotype civil disobedience with ugly labels like "extremists" or "leftists" and worse.  Nevertheless, when Republicans have been forced to accept the truth as a tool to demonstrate how they have been supporting the failed leadership of Donald Trump, a band of hurd mentality white male partisans decided to create their own extremist response. They stormed into a security protected hearing to protest the testimony of American citizens who were giving evidence about how Donald Trump has practiced "high crimes and misdemeanors" by requesting a quid pro quo from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky until he agreed to lie about finding political dirt about former Vice-President of the United State Joe Biden.

A Clarifying, Upending Week in the Impeachment Inquiry
Republicans can protest all they want, but the facts increasingly indicate that the President committed impeachable violations.
By traditional civil-disobedience standards, the apparel of the protesters in the Capitol basement last Wednesday fell on the bespoke side. During the civil-rights movement, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee favored overalls, in solidarity with the humble citizens whose rights were being denied. In 2017, women protesting the Inauguration of the nation’s most prominent misogynist were identifiable by the pink “pussy hats” they wore. By contrast, the thirty-some House Republicans—all of them white and all but a few male—who stormed a secure hearing room appeared less “We Shall Overcome” than “We Are Overcompensated.”

The plan was to disrupt the deposition of Laura Cooper, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and an expert on Russia and Ukraine, who was to address a bipartisan group comprising members of the committees handling the inquiry into the impeachment of Donald Trump. The protesters decried what they considered the Soviet-style secrecy of the process. Some carried their cell phones into the room—a breach of security—tweeted about their antics, and ordered pizza. In effect, they were trying to stop a hearing that was in compliance with rules set in 2015 by the House—which at the time had a Republican majority—and which a number of them, as members of the committees involved, were already free to attend. In essence, the stunt was a high-profile display of fealty to Trump, who measures loyalty by a willingness to commit acts of self-abasement on his behalf.

After the recent explosive developments in the impeachment inquiry, such a display was almost to be predicted. (~hypocrites~ the Senate, Lindsey Graham simultaneously prepared a resolution, co-sponsored by the Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, to condemn the inquiry as “illegitimate”; forty-six Republicans signed it.) Here, too, Republicans were following the President’s lead.

On the eve of the 2016 election, Trump railed against a “rigged” political system that was conspiring to produce a victory for Hillary Clinton. Observers pointed to the recklessness of his words and to the ways in which delegitimatizing the system might eventually culminate in unrest. He has gone considerably farther down that road. Last week, he called Republicans who do not support him “human scum,” and referred to the impeaching process as a “lynching.” According to the N.A.A.C.P., between 1882 and 1968 nearly five thousand people were lynched in the United States, three-quarters of them African-Americans. None of them had a former U.S. Attorney and mayor of New York City acting as their personal lawyer, or an entire political party defending them.

The current situation has arisen not as a result of Democratic overreach but because the facts increasingly indicate that the President has committed impeachable violations. The G.O.P. protest came after closed-door testimony from William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, who, in a fifteen-page opening statement, described an explicit quid pro quo, in which Trump withheld military aid in the hope of pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election and into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Taylor’s statement is stunning in its allegations of self-interest guiding foreign policy toward a country fighting Russian aggression. Foreign policy is always a matter of balancing competing national interests, but the interests weighed here are not national, or at least not American—they are Russian and Trumpian.

The circumstances are so bizarre as to make the former national-security adviser John Bolton seem like a voice of restraint. Taylor reports that Bolton abruptly ended a meeting with Ukrainian officials at which Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, brought up the investigations, and later referred to the scheme as a “drug deal.” Taylor’s statement is notable not only for the details it provides but because it recounts his reactions to events as they unfolded. He was “embarrassed,” “uncomfortable,” “troubled,” “alarmed,” and “very concerned.” Those same words describe how much of the country has felt for the past three years.

The week’s developments both clarified and upended ideas about the potential impeachment of Trump. There really can no longer be substantial doubt of a quid pro quo. Taylor’s statement and those of other diplomats, along with the whistle-blower’s complaint and the record of Trump’s telephone conversation with Zelensky—not to mention the here-today-gone-later-today admission by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, during a press briefing—have surely resolved the question.

A cornerstone of the comparisons between Watergate and the present national predicament has been the way that congressional hearings drove public opinion toward impeaching Richard Nixon. Support for impeaching Trump surged a few weeks ago, after the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced the inquiry. Taylor’s testimony appears to have raised the volume of the conversation about whether Trump’s actions warrant his removal from office. More testimony—in closed and open hearings—and additional facts, the argument presumes, will further move the public to support impeachment.

Such presumptions should not rest so easily. Trumpism is hostile to facts. The consequence may be more reactions like the one we saw last week. The House may deliver articles of impeachment before the end of the year. The findings that result may point to even more damning conclusions than have already been established. Trump, though, has been the lifelong beneficiary of a system in which his race, his wealth, and his lineage have allowed him to operate above the law. Both his personal attorney and Attorney General William Barr are attempting to institutionalize this kind of immunity as a perquisite of the Presidency. (On Thursday, the Times reported that the Justice Department has turned its review of the Russia investigation into a criminal inquiry.)

All of which suggests that Trump is partly correct about the situation resembling a lynching. The history of that act is replete with examples of men who operated outside the law, and believed that their offenses should carry no penalty. In that, the comparison brings to mind not the victims of lynchings but those who committed them. 

By Jelani Cobb

Donald Trump - unstable and racist: inescapable evidence

Echo opinion by Jelani Cobb published in The New Yorker

"No going back...." 

We have known since the earliest moments of Donald Trump’s political life that the epidermal lottery into which we are all cast is, to him, more than happenstance. Pigment is something foundational—a navigational star in the night sky of his world view. When a man introduces himself to the American electorate by lying about the origins of the first black President, and then proceeds to baselessly refer to Mexicans in the United States as rapists, nothing he does after that can be considered surprising.

In that regard, Trump’s eruption last week, in which he attacked (but did not name) Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Representative Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, tweeting that they should “go back” to where they came from, and later accused them of hating America, could not be called unexpected. It was alarming, though, and it raised the question, once again, of whether Trump had finally gone too far. For the past two years, observers have been divided about whether Trump’s tweets are calculated trolling, designed to keep his opponents off balance, or the sincere expressions of an unbalanced psyche. 

The current outburst indicates that the answer is both.

Before Trump intervened, the story in the media was about the roiling conflict between the congresswomen—the so-called Squad—and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this time over border policy. Trump, in suggesting that the four U.S. citizens self-deport, prompted the Speaker to stop sniping at them and to fire back at him. Trump’s real agenda, she said, is about “making America white again.” Last Tuesday, Republicans in the House of Representatives were forced to go on the record about the incident, when that chamber voted on a resolution condemning the tweets, which Pelosi termed “racist.” Her comment was, technically, a violation of House rules and it was “taken down,” but she did not apologize. Only four Republicans supported the resolution.

Most likely, Trump never considered what consequences his attack would have on Capitol Hill. He seems to think that his outré rage at the four women—They are not white, they are radicals, and only I can save you from what they will bring—will play well to his base, and that’s all that matters. He revealed as much when he told reporters that he is “enjoying” the fight and thinks that he is “winning it by a lot.” A majority of people polled found Trump’s tweets offensive and “un-American,” but his approval ratings rose among Republicans.

With his habitual grandiosity, Trump has previously declared himself “the least racist person anybody is going to meet.” (Last Tuesday, he tweeted, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”) By way of evidence, he repeatedly commits the defensive racist’s primary tell: listing the names of all the black people he knows, like a roster of character witnesses in a criminal trial. This most recent incident highlights a theme of Trump’s pronouncements as they pertain to people of color. He presents the citizenship of black and brown Americans as a kind of probation that can be revoked for the most minor infractions of protocol.

Ilhan Omar is a Somali-born refugee who became a naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of seventeen. She is American enough to serve in Congress but not enough for Trump, who has shown an increasing disregard for the very principle of asylum. 

Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit, to immigrant parents. Ayanna Pressley was born, to African-American parents, in Cincinnati. Her family has been here longer than Trump’s, and, as African-Americans, they are part of a population that was forcibly brought to this country to do its labor. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx, to parents of Puerto Rican descent, which means that, even if she did go back to where her ancestors came from, she would still be in America.

The idea of selective citizenship is not uncommon in American history. The nation’s first immigration law, passed in 1790, allowed for the naturalization of white immigrants only. It took the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868, to establish that birthright citizenship also applies to blacks. As Jill Lepore notes, in her book “This America,” another thirty years passed before the Supreme Court found, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that birthright citizenship applies to a person of Asian descent, and it was another quarter century before the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared that all indigenous people born in the United States are citizens. Trump isn’t just attacking four women of color; he is reanimating ideas whose prevalence wreaked havoc in the nation’s past.

We were reminded, last week, of something that we have known all along about the President: he will say anything that he thinks will serve his ends, regardless of the risk it may pose to his fellow-Americans. According to the F.B.I., hate crimes rose by seventeen per cent during his first year in office.

Last year, a man who described his attachment to Trump’s rallies as a kind of addiction, mailed explosive devices (which did not detonate) to various media outlets and politicians whom he considered to be the Donald Trump's enemies.

The worry is that Trump’s most recent fulminations will find their way to other vulnerable and dangerous observers.
His behavior carries another significant implication. The conflict between Pelosi and the Squad centered on votes for a border-funding bill, but it has at its root a more fundamental conflict: progressive legislators want to launch an impeachment inquiry, while Pelosi fears that it would only help Trump win reëlection. After the Mueller report was released, Tlaib recirculated a resolution, which she had previously introduced, to launch such an inquiry; the other members of the Squad signed on to it. More than eighty House Democrats have now called for an inquiry. Last Wednesday, the House voted to table the latest impeachment resolution from Representative Al Green (his third), but ninety-five Democrats voted to keep it on the floor. Pelosi reportedly told senior House Democrats last month that she would rather see Trump in prison than impeached. His ineptitude may yet spur the two factions toward a productive rapprochement. 

Robert Mueller’s testimony before two House committees will clarify the resolution. Robert Mueller told Rep. Nadler - The Special Counsel report did not exonerate Donald Trump. 

"Rep. Nadler: In fact, you are actually unable to conclude the President did not commit obstruction of justice, is that correct?" 

Has Trump finally gone too far? A few hours after the House vote, he addressed a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, in which he renewed his attacks on the congresswomen, and said that Democrats were set on “the destruction of our country,” as his followers chanted, “Send her back!” The next day, he claimed that he was “not happy” with the chants, and tried to stop them, but he did not. The evidence of Trump’s unfitness for the Presidency—whether it is calculated or simply deranged—is inescapable. ♦

Cult fanaticism of white-nationalist persuasion- an echo mourning for Christchurch

"The significance of what happened in Christchurch cannot be understood outside the context of a growing transnational movement of white-nationalist fanaticism", Jelani Cobb.

Each slaughter of innocents creates higher numbers of deaths and morbidity. "Most of the men who committed these recent acts of terror - mass murders - composed manifestos, like self-decreed heroes setting down their own origin stories. A sense of history turning on the fulcrum of a single man’s actions is a theme within them."

Yet all gun violence is preventable. Nevertheless, fanatics are expressing their ludicrous rage with weapons that they have no business owning.

This opinion is an echo from Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for The New Yorker.

The New Zealand Shooting and the Great-Man Theory of Misery

The macabre harvest of innocents, this time claiming fifty lives in two mosques, in Christchurch, New Zealand, is a double-edged form of madness. It is both the product of an absence of human empathy and a drain on the reserves of those who possess it: decency these days requires the ability to stare barbarism in the face, repeatedly, randomly, intensely, without ever becoming inured to the ugliness of its features. Terrorism hopes to inspire fear and confusion, but its most pernicious impact begins the moment that people no longer feel either of those things but, rather, simply a grudging acknowledgment that this is the way we now live.

We have seen so many of these atrocities that they can be put into subcategories. The attack in Christchurch exists in the company of other attacks on houses of worship: the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012; the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, in Charleston, in 2015; the Islamic Cultural Center, in Quebec City, in 2017; the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh. Live like this for long enough and you end up with a sample size sufficient to discern patterns among the antagonists: the circular reasoning of their rationales and the shared sense of themselves as vectors of great change.

In 1840, Thomas Carlyle declared that the course of history was set by humanity’s great men, and, for a great while, that view of the past held sway. But, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, the influence of Marxism and other strands of social history inverted that narrative: it was the mass of people and their collective interests, not the whims of a small number of extraordinary individuals, which drove history. Still, recent years have seen something of a resurgence of the belief in the supreme role of great men—of heroes—and it seems to have taken a particular, perverse hold among zealots, notably those of the white-nationalist persuasion. 

Most of the men who committed these recent acts of terror composed manifestos, like self-decreed heroes setting down their own origin stories. A sense of history turning on the fulcrum of a single man’s actions is a theme within them. The authors also rely on the distortion of facts to support their homicidal crusades. Brenton Tarrant, the twenty-eight-year-old Australian who is accused of the killings in Christchurch, reportedly travelled to New Zealand to attack an immigrant population he described as “invaders.” He cited as inspirations Dylann Roof, the then twenty-one-year-old South Carolinian who killed nine African-Americans in the basement of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and Anders Breivik, who, in 2011, murdered seventy-seven people in Norway, many of them members of the governing Labour Party’s youth wing, because he thought that they were encouraging a “Muslim invasion.” Tarrant wrote that he hoped that his actions would incite violence and retaliation in a cycle of conflict that would stoke division between white Europeans and immigrants.

On a blog titled “The Last Rhodesian,” Roof lamented that there were not enough proactively violent white people in the world. He raged at the thought of imperilled whites in suburbs, hiding from the growing black populace of the cities. He wrote that he chose to attack Charleston because the city “at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country.” Robert Bowers, who is accused of murdering eleven people in the Tree of Life synagogue last October (he has pleaded not guilty), posted a message on the social-media network Gab, saying, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” He, too, rued the unwillingness of white people to act. He purportedly attacked the synagogue as a means of intimidating Jewish charities involved in refugee-resettlement efforts, and indulged the widely disseminated but utterly false claim that white Americans are being murdered wholesale by immigrants.

Tarrant fulminated about hordes at the gate from Australia, where white settlers first established a colony in 1788, and, over the next century, proceeded to murder, kidnap, and subjugate the Aboriginal population. He apparently felt compelled to go to New Zealand in order to protect whites there from the actual fate that had befallen the Maori when white Europeans arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. Roof fretted about being outnumbered by the descendants of people who had been brought to the United States against their will. The ratio of blacks to whites in Charleston was the product not of black invasion but of the colonial greed of white slave traders.

This skewed sense of history is not unrelated to a fixation with reproduction. Like earlier versions of white nationalism, the current strain is obsessed with fertility and birth rates—and the so-called replacement theory—a tendency that, as the Times reported, provides a segue to the anti-feminism that is prominent in far-right circles. There are no plans afoot to “replace” white people—an undertaking as absurd as it is impossible—but that fact has not interfered with the hysteria raging in white-nationalist circles. Tarrant began his screed with the words “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.” Roof suggested that white women who have children with black men are “victims.” As Adam Serwer has written, such concerns about population have often reinforced other forms of prejudice. The assorted racists who gathered in Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, wed their demographic anxieties to anti-Semitism, chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” even though Jews represent only a small part of the U.S. population and, of course, many of their forebears came here specifically to escape persecution and murder at the hands of white Europeans.

The demographic paranoia is simply another form of projection that is starkly at odds with actual history. Indeed, it’s not as much paranoia as a fear of a specific kind of historical karma—one that sees in immigration a mechanism by which what has been sown now will be reaped. Aboriginals constitute just three per cent of Australia’s population. The Maori are just fifteen per cent of the population of New Zealand. (The Charlottesville marchers might have taken a moment to consider the American equivalents: native Hawaiians account for just six per cent of Hawaii’s population; Native Americans represent just two per cent of the United States’.)

The supposed defense of white people in New Zealand—or in Pittsburgh or in Charleston—highlights another presumption of the white nationalists: the right of whites to exist in safety anywhere in the world and the simultaneous belief that no nonwhite group should have that same right. The nationalist convulsions in France, Germany, and elsewhere embrace the same contradiction, and a steadfast refusal to recognize that Europe’s current diversity is, in some measure, a product of its centuries of colonial rule around the globe.

The significance of what happened in Christchurch cannot be understood outside the context of a growing transnational movement of epidermal fanaticism. It is the kind of fury that was foreshadowed two years ago, when a man who made racist statements and was lauded by white nationalists was elected President of the United States. It is the validation of the alarms that sounded for those who looked at Charlottesville, where esprit de corps grew among zealots led by charlatans, and recognized that they would be further emboldened. 

It is difficult to overestimate the threat that this poses. The individual does not drive history, but the actions of individuals have consequences for the rest of us—sometimes devastating ones. Rather than share the world, the extremists would content themselves with the lion’s share of its ashes.