v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Young vs. Old

 

From How Things Work:

But here is what many professional commentators have chosen to spend their time and energy drawing our attention to instead: The annoying things that young people are saying and doing. Many people who hold prestigious and well-paid media jobs, and who control an influential megaphone at a time when that is of incredible importance, squander their time and ours with wheedling complaints about bullshit. Bret Stephens spends his column grinding familiar axes about campus protests and local DSA rallies; Pamela Paul complains about how stuff is being debated on campus at Stanford; Ross Douthat takes this opportunity to unleash some zingers against “woke-speak” among student groups about decolonization; even Michelle Goldberg, who is supposed to represent the left, focuses her column on… campus protests and local DSA rallies and how the angry kids on the left are not protesting in the proper way. These are the voices that dominate the opinion section of the most influential news organization in the English-speaking world. You will never find a more pathetic failure to rise to the occasion than this collection of navel-gazing cranks, the journalistic equivalent of suburbanites complaining about the annoying smell of smoke ruining their weekend dinner party as the city burns down around them.

Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.

Young people have a voice, but no power. Old people have a bigger voice, and all of the power. Guess which group has a greater responsibility not to waste the current moment moaning about petty bullshit? An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.

Yesterday, I was in Times Square for a rally in support of the endangered citizens of Palestine. Most of the people there were young. But there were also quite a few elderly people, some hobbling on canes, who had painfully dragged themselves out to stand and be a part off the supportive crowd. Because they knew it was important. Because they understood what is at stake. They were not there to compete with the young, to mutter snide takedowns of the speakers, to talk about why the rally should have been framed differently in order to attract the support of more moderate figures in Washington. They were there because people are dying. They had perspective. They had wisdom. I hope that we can all get there, one day.

One day a house is yours, one day it is not

From Dr. Hala Hayan in the NYT:

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.

If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts?” When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?

It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.

_____________________

Here is the truth of the diasporic Palestinians: They are not magically diasporic. Their diaspora-ness is a direct result of often violent, intentional and illegal dispossession. One day a house is yours; one day it is not. One day a neighborhood is yours; one day it is not. One day a territory is yours; one day it is not. This same sort of dispossession is grounded in the same mind-set and international complicity that is playing out in Gaza.

Enough!

From The Atlantic again! It's alarming that no one is calling this out in a forceful way:

Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.

That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump.

And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.

Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.

Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. If a mob boss were to say, “In times gone by, people like you would have had their legs broken,” nobody would mistake that for a historical observation. The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country.

Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism. An influential figure with a large following demonizes a person or a group of people. The likelihood is strong that some small number of followers will take those words literally—when Trump implies that Milley deserves to be put to death, some of his disciples might take it as a marching order. The number of those who take action does not have to be large for the result to be horrific.

Already, one of Trump’s minions in Congress has echoed the incitement to violence. The Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote—in his taxpayer-funded newsletter, no less—that “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The meaning is not ambiguous: Gosar is explicitly saying that killing Milley would be desirable.

Trump is Responsible

 

From Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:

If you cannot get an abortion, if you fear leaving your state to get an abortion, if you are afraid to text your loved ones or type abortion into a search bar, if you are scared to ask a friend or loved one to help you get an abortion, if you know someone coerced into remaining in an abusive relationship because they fear prosecution, if you cannot find an obstetrician in your state, if you have a relative who was left at the edge of death by doctors afraid to risk prosecution by violating an abortion ban—you have Donald Trump to thank.

And yet, if you skim the headlines, you might come away with the impression that Trump is a moderate on abortion. In an interview Sunday, Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he thought a Republican-primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had made a “terrible mistake” by signing a law that bans abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant. His rambling remarks also suggested support for a federal ban on abortion: “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months. You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy … I would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”

A federal ban, of course, would make the current encroachments of the abortion surveillance state even worse, by committing the resources of the federal government to controlling women’s reproductive choices. Federalism currently limits the power of Republican-run states to impose themselves on people’s private lives. The federal government has fewer such limitations.

Trump’s remarks provoked headlines that suggested—with caveats and debunkings coming only lower down—that he was somehow moderating on the issue of abortion. Some articles left out the crucial fact that DeSantis’s six-week ban was only possible because of Trump himself. The justices he chose reversed decades of legal precedents that had established standards—few restrictions before the third trimester, few exceptions after—that were roughly consistent with public opinion, more so than those that followed Roe’s demise.

During the 2022 midterms, Trump urged Republicans to “talk differently” about abortion. Not govern differently, but talk differently. That is all he is doing here: If Trump now wants to give the impression that he opposes abortion bans, it is because he senses that in a world where such bans are no longer hypothetical but a threat to fundamental civil liberties, this is a way to earn positive headlines. But he has an actual record to be judged on. This is not 2016, when a Trump administration was an abstraction and no one had any idea what he would do in office.

Trump appointed the justices who overturned Roe. He appointed the right-wing apparatchiks to the federal bench who are rewriting the law out of whole cloth to conform to right-wing preferences. He made it possible for red-state governors like DeSantis to ban abortion and then use that as an excuse to thrust the power of the state into the private lives of Americans and control what they say and do, and even where they move. This is Donald Trump’s legacy.

Lock Him Up

From The Atlantic:

For a free society wishing to preserve its governmental system, the prosecutions of Donald Trump for trying to overturn our democracy and willfully mishandling national secrets is not optional. They are the essential step that must be taken if America’s rule of law is going to survive, and be worthy of the trust that is essential to that survival. More hopefully, they offer the nation its single best chance of escaping from the appalling thrall of Trump’s lies and insults since he came down that escalator eight years ago.

One cannot imagine a more serious set of offenses by a sitting president against the nation than working deliberately to overturn the result of a democratic election—one that he clearly knew from his closest advisers he had lost—or illegally squirreling away and refusing to return some of the country’s most sensitive secrets. The seriousness is greatly magnified in the first instance by the extent and persistence of the conduct at issue, spanning many months and transcending multiple states and means used to change the electoral outcome. In the documents case, again, the amount of classified material and the persistence of evasive efforts to avoid returning the materials is breathtaking.

The extent and quality of the evidence of wrongdoing in both cases, including audio and video tapes, is also extraordinary, and reveals in countless ways that Trump was the primary driving force behind virtually all of the key misdeeds in both cases. In any situation where so much evidence exists, there will be complexities associated with prosecuting. And yes, a jury could nevertheless acquit or hang. But that risk is present in every criminal case, and is no reason to decline to prosecute.

To do so in these cases—featuring truly egregious wrongs personally committed by someone in a position of the highest trust—would be a failure of our vaunted system of equal justice at the most fundamental level. The planners and perpetrators of the January 6 events that Trump inspired and refused to stop are now receiving sentences of roughly 20 years; giving a pass to the person who unquestionably caused it all by violating his most sacred obligations to the nation would be unthinkable.But it is not just an abstract commitment to justice—and to the idea that no person should be above the law—that urgently necessitates prosecution here. It is also the need to deter the worst forms of conduct that Trump has persisted in as we look forward to future elections, including those happening next fall. Although he failed to achieve his goal by illegal means in the election of 2020, he and many of his Republican allies are working hard not only to delegitimize the last election, but to see that the next election will go his way regardless of the votes actually cast. If very strong evidence of such wrongdoing does not merit criminal enforcement, what is to deter Trump or anyone from trying to steal elections in the future?

Mr. Prolific Corruption

From The Atlantic, another strike against DeSantis:

By this stage in the presidential campaign, much has been made of the severely conservative politics of Ron DeSantis. Voters have also become well acquainted with what a clumsy campaigner he is. But those two facts have perhaps eclipsed a third essential characteristic of the Florida governor: the astonishing sweep of his (apparently legal) corruption. DeSantis has demonstrated a prolific ability to use the power of government to raise money and reap other perks while working to shield that behavior from public view.

“I could sell golf for $50k this morning,” one DeSantis aide wrote to others in 2019, in an email obtained by The Washington Post and published over the weekend. It was part of a broader strategy: Once DeSantis took office, his aides made a list of 40 lobbyists with a goal of raising millions for the governor’s political-action committee and other funds. For the golf scheme, the idea was to get a lobbyist to shell out, using his client’s cash, to play a round with DeSantis and his wife, Casey. Experts told the Post that the arrangement was legal under Florida law. DeSantis was aware of the plan and updated on its progress.

“It’s about getting your phone calls returned and having the ability to make asks,” one lobbyist told the Post. “You want to engender access and goodwill with the governor.” A DeSantis campaign spokesperson, meanwhile, told the paper that “donors never have and never will dictate policy for Ron DeSantis—just ask Disney.”

But everyone already understood that most big donations are about buying access, even if it’s admirably blunt for one of the participants to say so on the record, albeit anonymously. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Donald Trump was even more transparent, explaining his past donations to Democrats including Hillary Clinton. “Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding,” he said at one debate. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.” This frankness gave Trump credibility with some voters when he promised to “drain the swamp” of unethical behavior in Washington, though it should really have served as a warning about how he would operate in office.

DeSantis has promised to be a president like Trump but without the drama, and he has apparently learned from the former president how to use his office for personal benefit. As NBC News uncovered this spring, some members of the state administration hit up lobbyists for donations to DeSantis’s presidential campaign. Once again, this is probably legal—as long as the staffers weren’t using state resources or time on the clock to make the requests. Yet it’s also extremely sketchy. As one lobbyist pointed out, DeSantis will remain governor even if he doesn’t become president, so lobbyists have to maintain their access, especially because DeSantis has proved he’s willing to punish any perceived disloyalty.

More

Bad Man

From The Atlantic:

Earlier today, Donald Trump was indicted for a third time, on the charge that he attempted to subvert the 2020 presidential election. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accuses Trump of a conspiracy to defraud the United States by “using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit”; a conspiracy to “corruptly obstruct and impede” an official proceeding of the U.S. government and for actually partaking in that obstruction; and a conspiracy “against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

“Each of these conspiracies—which built on the widespread mistrust the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud—targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election,” the indictment said.

The indictment is the latest entry in a remarkable tally of criminal and civil charges against the former president. In June, Trump was indicted by Smith on 37 felony counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, obstructing justice, and making false statements. (A superseding indictment last month added three additional felony counts against Trump.)

In May, Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. One month earlier, Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on 34 felony charges connected to his role in paying hush money to a porn star. And at the end of last year, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes.

But that’s not all. Georgia prosecutors investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state are preparing a “sprawling racketeering indictment,” according to press reports. If they move ahead, charges might come as early as this month.

There was a time when even a fraction of Donald Trump’s record of lawlessness and depravity would have shattered a person’s political career, rendered his party ashamed of its association with him, and left him humiliated and seeking forgiveness. But that day is long gone, at least if you’re a Republican.

The GOP made its Faustian bargain years ago. Early in Trump’s presidency there was a transmutation; his brutal style of politics, his lies and conspiracy theories, and his corruption, which were once tolerated, became celebrated.

The base of the Republican Party fell in love with the Trump Show—with his “owning the libs” and willingness to validate conservatives’ grievances and resentments, his chaos-creating ways, and his capacity to shatter norms and channel hatreds. To his supporters, Trump is entertaining and cathartic, a “fighter,” a middle finger to an establishment they revile. Every criticism of him, every legal action taken against him, provides them with one more reason to rally around him. The stronger the evidence against him, the deeper their devotion to him and the more intense their rage at those who call him out. (After Trump was found liable for sexual assault, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said that the verdict “makes me want to vote for him twice.”)

More

Finally but Too Slow

 

  From The Atlantic, finally:

More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.

This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him. Although other charges allege serious misconduct, this indictment cuts to the gravest act he committed: his lengthy, concerted effort to subvert American democracy.

The grand jury handed up the indictment this afternoon, charging Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

The indictment, obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith of the Department of Justice, doesn’t break open new storylines, though it does add detail. But the 45-page document brings together every aspect of the paperwork coup, from the origins of Trump’s attempt to stay in power just after the election up to the desperate last efforts on January 6.

Trump, aided by six specific co-conspirators, used several avenues, Smith alleges. They tried to get state governments to subvert the election results. They encouraged the creation and submission of fraudulent slates of electors. They attempted to weaponize the power of the Justice Department by standing up sham investigations. And they unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to exceed his powers and throw the certification of the election into turmoil. Although the charges don’t accuse Trump of criminal misconduct in inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol, they do say that he “exploit[ed] the violence and chaos.”

Trump acknowledged the indictment in a statement, calling the charges “fake” and “election interference,” though without explicitly denying any of the them. “These un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House,” the statement said.

In the days after the election, Smith writes, Trump “spread lies” about the election being tainted by fraud. “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment adds. Like any American, Smith notes, Trump had a right to spread these lies. But since none of them changed the outcome, Trump soon turned to steps that were not legal. Starting on November 13, 2020, “the Defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function.”Trump has suggested in recent days that he was relying on what he believed was good advice as he contested the election, but the indictment goes into detail to rebut that idea. Practically every aide in a position to know told Trump that the fraud claims were bunk and wouldn’t fly in court. He himself allegedly acknowledged in private that they sounded “crazy.”

More

The Mafia Don

From NYT's most conservative critic comes this:

For many years, but especially the past three, conservatives have warned of the dangers of a criminal justice system that is overly reluctant to put and keep dangerous people in prison. The law is the law. Violations of it should be prosecuted. We are, and must remain, the land of equal justice, not social justice dictated by the ideological fixations of angry Americans.

These same conservatives should try being consistent when it comes to the federal indictment of Donald Trump.

It is stunning to read the grand jury’s 37-count indictment, with its depictions of a former president treating the law with the contemptuous disdain of a mafia don — but with none of a don’s concern for covering his tracks. It is even more stunning to hear what some of those in the legal community who have been defenders of Trump have to say about it.

Alan Dershowitz: “It is the kind of evidence every defense lawyer dreads and every prosecutor dreams about,” the retired Harvard law professor wrote of Trump’s recorded admission of unlawfully possessing highly classified documents.

Jonathan Turley: “Some of the evidence is coming from his former counsel, and these are very damaging statements made against him,” the Fox News legal analyst said, referring to notes made by one of Trump’s lawyers, in which the former president plots to obstruct a government subpoena. “All the government has to do is stick the landing on one count, and he could have a terminal sentence.”

Bill Barr: “It’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning,” Trump’s former attorney general told “Fox News Sunday.” As for the suggestion that Trump is the victim of a witch hunt, Barr noted that the Justice Department had “acted in a very patient way” in trying to obtain documents from Trump, only to be met with “very egregious obstruction.”

Barr added that Trump held on to and possibly shared vital national secrets — including, reportedly, the Pentagon’s planning documents for an attack on Iran — in a way that “anyone who really cares about national security, your stomach would churn at.”

None of this will sway Trump’s base because nothing will sway them. It doesn’t matter that they were the ones most outraged in 2016 by Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. Or the most disgusted by the conclusion by the then-F.B.I. director, James Comey, that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against her. Or the most lustily cheering “Lock her up” at that summer’s Republican convention.

 

But what about more mainstream conservatives who know the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, that Jan. 6 was a disgrace for the ages, that Trump is a one-time-lucky serial loser whose bottomless narcissism keeps costing Republicans winnable Senate and gubernatorial races, that his entire presidency was a drunken joyride with a reckless driver careening around hairpin turns at high speed, that his renomination as the G.O.P. candidate would give President Biden his best shot at re-election and that another Trump presidency would be an orgy of petty political retribution and reckless policymaking that would make his first term seem, by comparison, responsible and tame?

They are, with few exceptions, supine.

Their excuses for Trump have run the gamut. There were legally inaccurate claims about the Presidential Records Act, which does not give Trump whatever time he wants to return documents to the archivist of the United States. There was the idea that Trump held on to the documents because he was a hoarder or that he had little idea what was in them or that any secrets they contained were not serious. The counts of the indictment powerfully indicate otherwise.

There’s also the whataboutism regarding Clinton’s emails and the documents found in Biden’s offices and garage. But the people who argue that Comey’s recommendation was a travesty of justice cannot now argue that Trump should be let off on far more serious charges. As for Biden, his case has its own special counsel: Let him come to his conclusions based on the facts.

Which leaves the argument that our democracy will be gravely damaged if the administration of an incumbent president sets the precedent of criminally prosecuting a political opponent. That’s essentially what Trump threatened to do against Clinton. That’s exactly what he sought to do against Biden by trying to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine — the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. I don’t recall many conservatives taking a bold stand then against that attempt at using the formidable powers of the presidency to criminalize an opponent.

It remains true that the federal prosecution of Trump, along with his potential conviction and incarceration, will be a fateful moment in American history. Far more fateful would have been the failure to prosecute. If Trump can be above the law, in a case of this kind, then we will have lost the rule of law.

More

Why Democracies Fail

 

From The Intercept:

The Spanish observers included members of the left-leaning Podemos party; EH Bildu, a Basque nationalist coalition; and a senator from Esquerra Republicana, a Catalonian leftist party. The observers were in the Kurdish-majority city of Siirt when they were arrested and taken to a police station on Sunday, the day of the election. Officers then went to the hotel where the observers were staying and arrested the remaining members of the delegation, who joined their comrades in detention at the police station. They were held until Monday morning and released on the condition they leave the country, escorted to the airport and flown back to Spain on Monday and Tuesday. 

Ismael Cortés, a national congressional deputy with Podemos, and Miriam Ojeda, a representative of the International Secretariat of Podemos, were among those detained. Spain and Turkey are both members of NATO.

“The situation of the retention and expulsion as a delegation that we have experienced is just one example of the greater context of repression and persecution of the opposition that has been experienced for years in Turkey and that has the Kurdish people as a special objective,” said Cortés. “We are concerned about the situation of the members and supporters of the YSP and HDP party and the respect for their fundamental, civil, and political rights.”

The observers also said in a statement to The Intercept that several members of the Kurdish YSP party were also arrested. Their fate is not known, and the Erdogan government did not respond to requests for comment. “This new and intolerable example of repression demonstrates the authoritarian drift of the regime of Erdogan, which undermines the democratic principles and fundamental rights of the Turkish citizenry and, especially, of the peoples present in this territory, such as the Kurdish,” the observers said in the statement.