09 January 21
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08 January 21
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Daniel Ellsberg | Donald Trump's Parting Gift to the World? Signs Suggest It May Be War With Iran
Daniel Ellsberg, Guardian UK
Ellsberg writes: "I will always regret that I did not do more to stop war with Vietnam. Now, I am calling on whistleblowers to step up and expose Trump's plans."
resident Trump’s incitement of criminal mob violence and occupation of the Capitol makes clear there is no limitation whatever on the abuse of power he may commit in the next two weeks he remains in office. Outrageous as his incendiary performance was on Wednesday, I fear he may incite something far more dangerous in the next few days: his long-desired war with Iran.
Could he possibly be so delusional as to imagine that such a war would be in the interests of the nation or region or even his own short-term interests? His behavior and evident state of mind this week and over the last two months answers that question.
The dispatch this week of B-52’s nonstop round-trip from North Dakota to the Iranian coast – the fourth such flight in seven weeks, one at year’s end – along with his build-up of US forces in the area, is a warning not only to Iran but to us.
In mid-November, as these flights began, the president had to be dissuaded at the highest levels from directing an unprovoked attack on Iran nuclear facilities. But an attack “provoked” by Iran (or by militias in Iraq aligned with Iran) was not ruled out.
US military and intelligence agencies have frequently, as in Vietnam and Iraq, provided presidents with false information that offered pretexts to attack our perceived adversaries. Or they’ve suggested covert actions that could provoke the adversaries to some response that justifies a US “retaliation”.
The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, in November was probably intended to be such a provocation. If so, it has failed so far, as did the assassination exactly a year ago of General Suleimani.
But time is now short to generate an exchange of violent actions and reactions that will serve to block resumption of the Iran nuclear deal by the incoming Biden administration: a pre-eminent goal not only of Donald Trump but of the allies he has helped bring together in recent months, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Evidently it would take more than individual murders to induce Iran to risk responses justifying a large-scale air attack before Trump leaves office. But US military and covert planning staffs are up to the task of attempting to meet that challenge, on schedule.
I was a participant-observer of such planning myself, with respect to Vietnam half a century ago. On 3 September 1964 – just a month after I had become special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John T McNaughton – a memo came across my desk in the Pentagon written by my boss. He was recommending actions “likely at some point to provoke a military DRV [North Vietnam] response … likely to provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished”.
Such actions “that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction” (sic), as spelled out five days later by McNaughton’s counterpart at the state department, the assistant secretary of state William Bundy, might include “running US naval patrols increasingly close to the North Vietnamese coast” – ie running them within the 12-mile coastal waters the North Vietnamese claimed: as close to the beach as necessary, to get a response that might justify what McNaughton called “a full-fledged squeeze on North Vietnam [a progressively all-out bombing campaign]”, which would follow “especially if a US ship were sunk”.
I have little doubt that such contingency planning, directed by the Oval Office, for provoking, if necessary, an excuse for attacking Iran while this administration is still in office exists right now, in safes and computers in the Pentagon, CIA and the White House. That means there are officials in those agencies – perhaps one sitting at my old desk in the Pentagon – who have seen on their secure computer screens highly classified recommendations exactly like the McNaughton and Bundy memos that came across my desk in September 1964.
I will always regret that I did not copy and convey those memos – along with many other files in the top-secret safe in my office at that time, all giving the lie to the president’s false campaign promises that same fall that “we seek no wider war” – to Senator Fulbright’s foreign relations committee in September 1964 rather than five years later in 1969, or to the press in 1971. A war’s worth of lives might have been saved.
Current documents or digital files that contemplate provoking or “retaliating to” Iranian actions covertly provoked by us should not remain secret another moment from the US Congress and the American public, lest we be presented with a disastrous fait accompli before January 20, instigating a war potentially worse than Vietnam plus all the wars of the Middle East combined. It is neither too late for such plans to be carried out by this deranged president nor for an informed public and Congress to block him from doing so.
I am urging courageous whistleblowing today, this week, not months or years from now, after bombs have begun falling. It could be the most patriotic act of a lifetime.
'If the president does not leave office imminently and willingly, the Congress will proceed with our action,' Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter on Friday. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)
ALSO SEE: Pelosi Asks Joint Chiefs About Preventing Trump
From Launching Nukes
Pelosi Threatens Impeachment if Trump Doesn't Resign 'Immediately'
The New York Times
Excerpt: "The House could vote on impeachment next week."
President Trump will not attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. With less than two weeks left of Mr. Trump’s presidency, a wave of resignations hits his cabinet.
peaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Friday that the House would move to impeach President Trump over his role in inciting a violent mob attack on the Capitol if he did not resign “immediately,” appealing to Republicans to join the push to force him from office.
In a letter to members of the House, the speaker invoked the resignation of Richard M. Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, when Republicans prevailed upon the president to resign and avoid the ignominy of an impeachment, calling Mr. Trump’s actions a “horrific assault on our democracy.”
“Today, following the president’s dangerous and seditious acts, Republicans in Congress need to follow that example and call on Trump to depart his office — immediately,” she wrote. “If the president does not leave office imminently and willingly, the Congress will proceed with our action.”
Trump's Facebook page. (photo: iStock)
Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump
Sam Biddle, The Intercept
Biddle writes: "The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech's attempt to pantomime principles."
he swirling of the last dregs of the Trump administration around the drain has given some prominent Americans one last chance to prostrate themselves before the outgoing president. Facebook and Twitter’s decision to place the president in a temporary internet timeout following his incitement of a violent mob that trashed the U.S. Capitol is the perfect capstone to four years of appeasement and corporate cowardice.
The advertising industry is generally acknowledged as one of the most risk-averse and craven industries on the planet, with decision-making guided largely by attempting to be as inoffensive as possible to as many people as possible, taking a position on an issue only in the weakest, safest, most carefully hedged terms available. Though companies like Facebook and Twitter hold the unfathomable power to control the distribution of information to billions of people around the world and like to think of themselves as helping bring humankind to some next level of consciousness, they are still very much in the advertising business.
As advertising companies, cowardice runs deep in the souls of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, companies that have spent the past four years looking the other way, equivocating, and contorting themselves into pretzels in an attempt to justify Trump’s unfettered access to the most powerful information distribution system in world history. Despite perennial speculation in the press as to what might psychologically or ideologically explain Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s total unwillingness to meaningfully act, there is just one factor: money. Twitter and Facebook are only worth anything as businesses if they can boast to advertisers of their access to an enormous swath of the American market, across political and ideological lines, and fear of a right-wing backlash has been enough to keep Peter Thiel on Facebook’s board and Trump’s voter suppression dispatches on Twitter’s servers.
According to a Facebook moderator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation, watching the company drag its feet, yesterday in particular, has been excruciating. According to internal communications reviewed by The Intercept, the Capitol break-in is now considered, for purposes of Facebook’s willy-nilly application of the rules, “a violating event,” and any “praise,” “support,” or even friendly “representation” is banned on the basis of the company’s “Dangerous Organizations” policies, which this moderator explained is typically applied to posts celebrating terrorist attacks, drug cartel murders, and Aryan street gangs. The policy update was relayed to moderators, this source said, around 4:30 p.m. in Washington, by which point the Capitol had already been violently occupied for hours and a woman shot dead. Just today, as the broken glass is being swept up in the Capitol, Facebook blasted out another moderator update, informing them that the company was “internally designating” the entire United States as a “temporary high risk location,” which adds heightened restrictions to posts inciting violence, backdated to yesterday and effective through the end of Thursday.
As some Facebook observers have pointed out, had the company cared to look, it could have easily found that its platform was being used to plan an event it would eventually categorize alongside the Lockerbie bombing. Instead, fearful of Trump even on his shameful way out, Facebook did the bare minimum when it was too late to mean much. “Facebook treated this event correctly but Facebook is also complicit in this event,” the moderator said. “It’s all so blatantly obvious.”
The president’s past half-decade of incitement against the perceived ethnic enemies of his base have been met with nothing more than risible warning labels and worthless “fact checks,” as have his more recent efforts to dupe his already deeply confused supporters about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. There’s no reason to believe these barely-there penalties did anything at all to chasten Trump or deter his message; their utility existed only to the companies themselves, who could no longer be accused of doing literally nothing. Just as Facebook put off acknowledging its role in the genocide in Myanmar until it was too late to matter, and just as the company built an election interference “war room” and quickly disbanded it after some photo ops, the recent decisions to mildly inconvenience the world’s most powerful living person when he has 13 days left in power is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles, halfheartedly pointing to the void where a conscience would be.
“Slightly more than literally nothing” has been the unifying theme of big tech’s response to years of public concern that Trump would eventually use the platforms to get people killed, and yesterday, as his most rabid supporters puttered around the Capitol aimlessly pushing over chairs and reading House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s mail, represented the appeasement strategy’s ultimate failure: Four people are dead following a mob that Trump incited and directed. Hours after it would have made any difference, Facebook and Twitter, his two favorite platforms, did what they were previously unwilling to do: risk upsetting the president by temporarily restricting his ability to broadcast.
In a stirring gesture of corporate bravery, Twitter put Trump in the penalty box for 12 whole hours, suggesting that if perhaps 8 people had been killed in the Capitol melee, or if he’d encouraged the mob to brawl its way into a second federal landmark, he may have gotten a whole day’s suspension. Facebook, also true to form, has banned Trump from posting “indefinitely,” a word that means absolutely nothing and will give the company the freedom to change its mind at any point in the future, in accordance with the shifting tides of governmental power and public opinion.
Pro-Trump protesters gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. On social media sites both fringe and mainstream, right-wing extremists made plans for violence on Jan. 6. (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Internet Detectives Are Identifying Pro-Trump Rioters.
Some Have Already Been Fired.
On Far-Right Websites, Plans to Storm Capitol Were Made in Plain Sight
Laurel Wamsley, NPR
Wamsley writes: "The mob violence that descended on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was the culmination of weeks of incendiary rhetoric and increasingly feverish planning - much of which took place openly on websites popular with far-right conspiracy theorists."
Jared Holt spends a lot of time on those websites. He's a visiting research fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, where he has been focused on extremist online activity.
Since November's election, Holt has seen websites like Parler, Gab, TheDonald, and MeWe fill with torrents of "conspiracy theories, disinformation and outright lies about the results of the election," he says. "And those lies often came from the top arbiters of power in the Republican Party, notably President Donald Trump himself."
The events of Jan. 6 brought unprecedented traffic to some niche sites. The CEO of Gab, Andrew Torba, said that the site's traffic was up 40% on Wednesday.
More than 80% of the top posts on TheDonald on Wednesday about the Electoral College certification featured calls for violence in the top five responses, according to research from Advance Democracy, an independent, nonpartisan organization.
And it wasn't just fringe websites. On Twitter, Advance Democracy found more than 1,480 posts from QAnon-related accounts about Jan. 6 that contained terms of violence since Jan. 1. On TikTok, videos promoting violence garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
On sites both fringe and mainstream, plans for violence
Trump's claims have fueled increasingly heated rhetoric since the election, Holt says – spiking in the last couple of weeks as Trump doubled down on conspiracy theories like the false and unfounded notion that a company that makes electronic voting systems had deleted votes for Trump.
"Then it really, really went nuts," Holt says. After Trump promoted a Jan. 6 protest in D.C., "a lot of his extremist supporters interpreted this as a call to action for them."
Holt and his colleagues saw fringe social media sites fill with messages organizing logistics for that date, as well as activation of anti-government extremists like militia groups, conspiracy theorists and white nationalist activists "on a scale and volume that we haven't seen at any other point during the electoral process this cycle."
As it became clear over the last week that Vice President Pence was unlikely to try to overturn the results of the election, Holt says the discussion on the right-wing extremist sites turned to taking matters into their own hands.
On forum boards like TheDonald and antigovernment and militia movement group chats, those conversations included plans to surround the Capitol on all sides, alongside maps of the U.S. Capitol complex marked with locations of tunnels and entry points. "And there was discussion specifically of overwhelming police with large crowds and doing that in order to violate laws against carrying weapons and against entering federal buildings," Holt says.
There wasn't a specific time or a formal plan, "but the discussions to do exactly what we saw [Wednesday] ... this was an idea that was fomenting and spreading and shared approvingly between users in these extremist communities that we've been watching."
There was also much discussion on such forums about ways to find and attack Black Lives Matter and antifascist protesters, Holt says. But on Wednesday, those groups largely stayed home. That may have shifted Trump supporters' focus to its eventual target, Holt suggests: "Perhaps the lack of a counterprotest to receive the violence that all these supporters were so ready to unleash meant that that energy instead was directed at the federal government."
"Maybe it'll happen — probably not. And then it all happened"
Holt says that even though he was closely monitoring the conversations happening on fringe right-wing sites, he was still taken aback when the overheated rhetoric turned into violent reality.
"I was surprised," he says. "One of the challenges of doing the line of work that I do is these are extremist communities and the rhetoric is extreme just all the time. It got really, really intense running up to the protest, but oftentimes the ratio of extreme rhetoric to extreme action — there is a little bit of difference there."
But this time, that rhetoric translated into violent action.
Holt says that in the preceding days, he had spoken with others about what he was seeing being planned on these extremist sites. "I was like, 'Well, they're talking about doing X, Y, Z. And, you know, maybe it'll happen — probably not.' And then it all happened."
So what was different this time — why did the bluster turn into a violent attack?
Holt believes the key factor was the remarks from President Trump and his allies when they addressed the rally on Wednesday.
When Trump told his supporters to head to the Capitol, Holt says, "I think the levee just broke."
"If Trump had not told people to go to the Capitol, I don't know that it would have happened. Because people on the ground were engaged in some pretty extreme rhetoric about coming back with guns if things don't go their way, and stuff like that. But there wasn't any real sort of significant action happening on the ground until Trump finished his speech."
A conspiracy narrative, fomented for years
Whitney Phillips researches misinformation and disinformation at Syracuse University. On Wednesday, "I saw what I have been expecting to see for the last several months, even several years," she says.
In the march toward the 2020 election, "at every turn Trump and his enablers in Congress and in the media ecosystem were parroting some version of the 'deep state' narrative," she says.
Trump avoided using the term for years even as he promoted its ideas, laying the groundwork for what is happening now, Phillips says — and when he lost the election, he then used that narrative "as a bludgeon against the American people."
Those who have believed in QAnon or "deep state" theories have had those ideas reinforced for years by the conspiracy-driven media they consume, as well as by elected officials who repeat them.
The result is that now, amid election results contested by Trump, "this is a well-established narrative way of being in the world. It's not even a conspiracy theory — it is an identity," Phillips says.
"So what happened in the Capitol is really the culmination of months and in some cases years of belief in the sort of paradigmatic world in which you have a very clear set of bad guys who are out to get Trump, and you have a very clear set of good guys who are fighting that battle."
A reckoning
In the coming weeks, the niche platforms that have provided safe haven for extremist movements will come under increased scrutiny, Holt predicts. "And these companies, which don't have the same legal defenses or resources or infrastructure that a major site like Facebook or Twitter has, may falter under that pressure. But that remains to be seen."
Holt says Wednesday's events show that the current approach to combating disinformation and extremism online isn't working. That approach is often reactive, rather than proactive.
"Oftentimes, by the time a Facebook or a Twitter cracks down on certain pieces of misinformation, it is far too late to halt its spread," he says. "I think as a society and as a nation, we are beyond the point of overdue for a serious comprehensive examination and discussion about how we're going to fix this problem. Because if we don't, the next time could be worse."
And Phillips says that reckoning must not only concern platform moderation, or only Trump and his enablers – but also recognize these events as the culmination of decades-old forces and beliefs.
"What we need to reckon with is not what happened yesterday, but everything that led us to yesterday," she says. "And until we're really willing and able to look back that far and take inventory of what's happened, then we're only ever going to be slapping Band-Aids on grotesquely broken arms."
Former Tennessee Titan Colin Allred looks like he could still fuck dudes up. (photo: Getty)
Former Titan Colin Allred Is the Last Person You Want to Mess With on the House Floor
Jesse Spector, Deadspin
Spector writes: "If you could pick any of the 435 members of the House of Representatives to throw hands with, Colin Allred would be at the very bottom of the list."
Allred, the second-term Democrat who represents the Dallas area in Texas’ 32nd Congressional District, is a lawyer who worked in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of General Counsel. But before going to law school and entering government, Allred was a 6-1, 238-pound linebacker who played four seasons with the Tennessee Titans. He’s only 37 years old and still looks quite fit.
On Wednesday afternoon, Allred was shaken by the mob occupation of the Capitol, texting his wife, “Whatever happens, I love you,” as the rioters approached the House chamber. He detailed the horror of the situation in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, and also reflected on what an upside-down scenario the entire coup attempt was.
“I can’t really stress enough how inviolable the House floor is supposed to be,” Allred said. “It’s a place of debate. It’s a place of democracy. It’s a place where, yes, we have disagreements. It’s not a place of violence.”
Yet, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, as Congress slogged toward finalizing the electoral vote count, Grace Segers of CBS News reported that Allred nearly was involved in some more violence on the House floor.
Fighting Allred would have been a very bad idea for Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, a 63-year-old former Navy doctor. Not to demean Navy doctors, but mixing it up with a guy who was in the NFL just a decade ago would have meant that the doctor would have needed to see another physician, quickly.
But, as it turns out, the report was inaccurate. Allred was trying to serve as a peacemaker while Harris screamed about being (correctly) called a liar by Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) in his floor speech.
You can hear Allred, at the 5:05 mark of the C-SPAN video, saying, “Are you serious?” and “haven’t you had enough violence today?” He was imploring Harris and another member of the House to stand down. In fact, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared, “The gentlemen will clear this chamber,” Allred can be seen returning to his seat.
So, who was the gentleman that nearly came to blows with Harris? That would be… another Congressman whom it would be a bad idea to fight, Rep. Al Lawson of Florida, as reported by Alex Daugherty of the Miami Herald, and confirmed by Deadspin.
Lawson isn’t a former NFL player. He’s a former college basketball player at Florida A&M whose name is now on the arena where the Rattlers play. He’s also 72 years old, not 37 like Allred, so maybe that would have been a fairer fight, but Lawson is still a 6-7 former elite athlete who’s in pretty good shape.
“Nothing physical ever happened, or was going to happen,” Harris said in a statement released on Thursday. “Mr. Allred stepped in only to ease tensions at the end of a difficult day.”
While he spent plenty of time lying about election fraud, which he screamed about being called on, leading to Lawson confronting him, Harris was truthful about this. Getting physical with Lawson or Allred would have gone as badly for him as every vote the House took about those Trumpian claims of a stolen election.
Pro-Trump supporters and far-right forces flooded Washington, D.C. to protest Trump's election loss. Hundreds breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (photo: Getty)
We Underestimate the Far Right at Our Own Peril
Benjamin L. McKean, Jacobin
McKean writes: "Yesterday's riot of Trump supporters at the US Capitol will likely be a radicalizing event for the far right. We shouldn't underestimate their ability to cause more death and destruction in the aftermath."
hat happened yesterday? In one sense, it’s easy to say. Trump supporters, many of them armed, stormed the Capitol Building and forced Congress to recess, delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president for several hours. It was a startling spectacle, but there was never any real likelihood that they would enable Trump to remain president. It’s not clear they even had a plan for keeping Trump in office. C-SPAN footage of the Trump supporters who made their way into the Capitol’s Statuary Hall showed them wandering around like tourists, seemingly as surprised to be there as anyone else was to see them there.
The thought seemed to be that their presence would be enough to bring about “the Storm,” QAnon’s version of the millennium, triggering a secret plan by Trump that would miraculously make things right. By the time the Senate reconvened at 8 PM, many leaders of both parties seemed to want to get back to normal as soon as possible, delivering the same speeches that they’d expected to deliver that afternoon.
But even as the Biden inaugural will go on as scheduled, this day won’t go away. The mob of Trump supporters storming the US Capitol building will likely be a radicalizing event for the far right. However symbolic, they were literally able to occupy the halls of power. Now they can imagine doing it again. The photos of extravagantly dressed rioters behind the dais of the Senate or climbing the walls of the Capitol will become iconic, fueling far-right recruiting and mobilizing for years.
Yesterday was always going to be a spectacle, as Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley planned to raise theatrical objections to Biden’s electoral votes as a way to woo Trump supporters, while Trump himself rallied them outside the White House. But the spectacle took a turn once Trump directed his supporters to the Capitol, where the Capitol police unevenly resisted their intrusion — shooting a woman who died hours later — before giving way and allowing the mob access to the Capitol. Even as elected officials and reporters huddled in fear and the Capitol’s service workers continued to do their jobs as best they could, the police fraternized with the buffoonish invaders, taking selfies and gently guiding them down the steps out of the building once the fun was over.
Cable news anchors and pundits found the spectacle embarrassing and vulgar, describing their presence as a kind of desecration of the sacred space of constitutional democracy. For the radical right, however, it was a spectacle of empowerment, showing that they can throw their weight around with little resistance. They pushed the limits and found they could break the law with impunity as the entire world watched.
While early polling suggests that at least a significant minority and perhaps even a plurality of Republican voters support the invasion of the Capitol, the tableau of a mob of Trump supporters looting congressional offices may well accelerate the departure of educated, affluent voters from the Republican Party, making it harder for them to win elections. Certainly the Republican leadership is alive to this possibility. Even Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tried to defuse the mob, tweeting, “This is not MAGA” Within hours, Fox News and Trumpist Republicans like Matt Gaetz were already blaming antifa for the riot. The claim is ludicrous — Trump had explicitly been calling for this for months — but it is meant to provide permission to voters uncomfortable with reactionary violence to continue supporting Trump and backing further repression of left movements. Meanwhile, far-right figures like Baked Alaska and Nick Fuentes proudly streamed video of themselves in Nancy Pelosi’s office.
This kind of dance between the far right and the electoral right is nothing new. Right-wing political parties can deplore right-wing street violence while using the disorder caused by reactionary mobs as another occasion for extending power, justified by the need to restore order. The Capitol police oscillating between swinging batons at the Trump mob and letting them have their way is an apt symbol of this dynamic. (Indigenous scholars like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz have documented a more vicious historical version of this phenomenon, where authorities would alternate between restraining settlers and taking advantage of their genocidal violence to expand their territory.)
While Trump supporters apparently planted pipe bombs at both the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters, the coalition between the radical right and the institutional right will continue. Institutional Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell may deplore yesterday’s actions, but it’s clear they too would have contested the election results and denied Biden the presidency if the margin was closer. As it stands, two-thirds of House Republicans voted to support rejecting Pennsylvania’s electoral votes based on the same conspiracy theories espoused by the rioters who ejected them from their chamber.
And while Trump may be leaving office, he is obviously not leaving the scene. People often suggest Trump is scary because he shows how much damage a more competent authoritarian could do. This misses how singular a figure Trump is. A long-time reality TV star, Trump is adept at spectacle with years of experience telling people what they want to hear and national celebrity that long predates his entry into politics. All this makes him particularly able to reach and motivate marginal and nonvoters — skills that credentialed and “competent” authoritarians like Cruz and Hawley palpably lack. Some local elected officials participated in the riot, but their relatively marginal status suggests that Trumpist energy may not be easily transferred to other national candidates.
That should not be much of a comfort. As yesterday made vivid, voting is very far from the only way of affecting the exercise of state power. We will see much more violence from the radical right in the years to come, even (maybe especially) if yesterday’s “insurrection” drives some voters away from the Republican Party. A reactionary right that believes they cannot reliably prevail in electoral politics will readily turn to other forms of action. Having Trump in office inspired multiple mass shooters, and his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of his successor’s election could inspire more. Violent confrontations between far-right extremists and the government, like the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, will proliferate under the Biden administration, and the chances of terrorist attacks like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing have risen.
The generalized precarity brought on by decades of neoliberalism and intensified by the pandemic also increases the risk from the far right. Yesterday’s spectacle coincided with the deadliest day of the pandemic and came after a week that saw around a million people file for unemployment. The far right is both a partner of the institutional right that supports this status quo and feeds off the instability and misery that this status quo creates.
So what should the Left do? For starters, we should recognize the danger of yesterday’s riot without painting all unruly direct action against official representatives — particularly nonviolent action — as out of bounds. More concretely, we need to mobilize a broad, antiauthoritarian coalition that can truly grapple with the factors that enabled the far right to stage yesterday’s spectacle in the first place.
Fundamentally, the threat of the far right is not taken seriously because white supremacy and American exceptionalism obscure their power. The repeated claims by news anchors that they couldn’t believe what they were seeing, that it seemed like something from a “Third World country,” is a testament to this effect. So too was the bafflement at the Capitol police’s failure to contain the mob after a year of oppressive policing of Black Lives Matter protests.
This shock and disbelief can be an organizing opportunity. Building a movement to fight the far right requires recognizing not only that far-right politics can flourish here, but that they already have — in the United States’ long history of racial oppression, genocide, and brutal repression of the Left. Absent that understanding, it is all too easy to write off the far right as kooks and deviations from a liberal democratic consensus rather than as a dangerous force with access to the halls of power.
Artist depiction of Pliocene. (photo: Getty)
Climate Change Could Take Weather Patterns Back to the Pliocene
Nathanael Johnson, Grist
Johnson writes: "The West Coast drinks from the wind. When westerly gales carry humid air from the Pacific Ocean into the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade mountain ranges, the West turns green, orchards blossom, and reservoirs swell."
When those westerlies deflect to the north, hills turn brown, cities ban sprinklers, and forest fires flare.
There are consistent bands of westerly winds at about 40 degrees latitude in both hemispheres — near San Francisco in the northern hemisphere, and near Concepción, Chile, in the south. Over the past few decades scientists have seen these westerlies creeping toward the poles. If this shift is a result of climate change and continues, it could have profound implications: Over the next century, Seattle might become as dry as Los Angeles, and California could settle into an era of unending drought.
So are the westerlies going to keep drifting away from the equator? Well, if you want to know how the climate-changed future will unfold, look at the past: In the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5 million years ago, carbon dioxide levels were about what they are today but with warmer temperatures. And a new paper, just published in the journal Nature, provides evidence that back then the westerlies were closer to the poles.
The scientists didn’t intend to chart the paths of ancient winds. They started off by studying the dust blown off the steppes of Asia that has swirled down for millenia to form the muddy bottom of the Pacific Ocean. While examining the layers of sediment on the ocean floor, they realized they were able to spot a change in the prehistoric winds.
“As we are looking at these dust records, we saw that the dust goes up a lot 2.7 million years ago,” as the Pliocene climate was cooling, said Jordan Abell, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral candidate in earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Back then, the climate took a cold turn. As temperatures cooled and ice-caps grew over the north pole, the winds began dumping a lot more dust into a previously windless site closer to the equator.
This makes some intuitive sense. Weather tends to happen in the spots where warm air meets cold. “The weather is more intense where the temperature gradient is steep,” Abell said. “When you have ice over your poles it’s going to cool the air and move that gradient toward the equator.”
Now we may be witnessing the phenomenon in reverse: As ice caps dwindle, prevailing winds could slide away from the equator. That doesn’t guarantee it’s going to happen in the near future. This paper isn’t about how the weather patterns will shift in the next generation, it’s about how things are likely to change over the next century. In the long term, the trajectory is not back to the future, but forward toward the Pliocene.
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