Questions I hope Trump will be asked Please join us for a watchalong right here, starting 5:45 PT/8:45 ET, and all zones between ROBERT REICH AND HEATHER LOFTHOUSE JUN 27 Click above to visit our debate livestream. Friends, As many as 100 million Americans will watch the first presidential debate of this election year in just a few short hours. This may well be the single most important opportunity for the candidates to define themselves — and each other — to the American people before the election. Most Americans have no idea how radically destructive Trump’s plan for “governing” in a second term, known as “Project 2025,” actually is. Project 2025 is dangerous not the least because it dovetails perfectly with Trump’s own totalitarian vision for himself. It calls for deportation camps for up to 7 million immigrants — Trump’s version of ethnic cleansing — to be carried out by his own white Christian nationalist government, which, in one short-lived Truth Social post, Trump called his “Unified Reich.” The plan calls for weaponizing the Department of Justice to wreak vengeance on Trump’s enemies, and using the military to put down campus protests. It would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Commission on Civil Rights, and countless other protections for consumers and marginalized groups. We must get the truth out about Project 2025 and Trump’s actual plans for commencing his dictatorship on “Day One.” Trump’s plans for education are alarmingly regressive, including abolishing the Department of Education and implementing universal school vouchers, which would funnel millions of public dollars into private schools. Many of these schools teach religious faith as if it were established fact, and aren’t obligated to teach actual science in science classes or actual history in history classes. Under Project 2025, book bans will be expanded even beyond the more than 3,000 books banned in 2023. The books prohibited by the far-right censors focus mainly on the experiences of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Project 2025 also seeks to eliminate all programs that foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in schools and universities. I hope tonight’s moderators ask Trump questions that highlight the proposals in Project 2025 and Trump’s plans for governing in each of these areas. For example: — Under your administration, will you abolish the Department of Education as outlined in Project 2025? — Do you support Project 2025’s call to expand book bans and defund schools that don’t comply at the local, state, and federal levels?   — Moms for Liberty, an anti-government extremist group that has quoted Hitler in its literature and threatened violence against teachers, librarians, and school boards, supports Project 2025. Will you disavow their support for your campaign? We need the debates to clarify for all viewers that a second term for Trump would be far more destructive than his first. A second term would involve the methodical dismantling of the institutions that support and protect our democracy. *** SPECIAL INVITATION: Please join Heather and me right here on this page for tonight’s presidential debate. We’ll provide commentary, opinion, reactions, and, hopefully, some fun — all in real time as we watch it along with you. We will go live at 5:45 p.m. PT / 8:45 p.m. ET. Hope to see you.

Trump’s attempt at Planeticide was Worse than Hush Money Sex Pay-Off YOU SHOULD BE OUTRAGED!

 

CLIMATE CRISIS

Trump’s attempt at Planeticide was Worse than Hush Money Sex Pay-Off

JUAN COLE05/31/2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It is great good news, of course, that Trump was finally held accountable for his hush money pay off to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their hook-up so as to win the 2016 presidential election. Had she gone public in October, 2016 in the wake of the release of the Hollywood Access tape about grabbing genitalia, he may well have lost. That he is now a felon invalidates his entire presidency. It does not erase all the harm he did, in reshaping the Supreme Court as a tool of white nationalist Christian patriarchy, and it won’t bring back the hundreds of thousands of people who died of COVID because of his wrongheaded public health policies. But it is some form of minor justice.

The conviction, however, underlines that American law and politics is still primarily about property rather than about the value of human life. Both Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump went down over Lockean crimes. Nixon ordered a third rate burglary (twice!). Trump arranged for a pay-off to a porn star. Both committed their crimes in furtherance of their political careers. Nixon had the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C. burgled. Trump had a catch and kill scheme implemented for Stormy Daniels’ memoirs. Ironically, likely neither needed to commit those crimes to win.

It is a little frustrating, however, that our priorities as a society are still so parochial and twentieth-century in character, and that we are not more outraged at the truly massive damage Trump did to our planet. He should have been tried and convicted of attempted planeticide.

1. Trump took the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord in November, 2020, trashing all the pledges the country had made to reduce its massive carbon footprint. The US, with 4.2% of the world’s population, produces nearly 14% of the world’s carbon dioxide, putting out twice as much CO2 as the 27 nations of the European Union. By leaving the Paris agreement, Trump encouraged other countries to slack off on their climate commitments, endangering the whole world.

2. Trump scrapped President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his attempt to regulate CO2 emissions, and Trump’s rules would have put an extra half a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over a decade. When we’re trying to cut CO2 to zero by 2050, that was a step in completely the wrong direction.

MSNBC: “‘Quid pro quo:’ Trump vowed to gut climate laws in exchange for $1B from oil bosses”

3. Trump also lowered auto emissions standards, helping the big car companies avoid going electric longer and adding another 450 million tons of CO2. Now that China has more advanced electric car technology than the US and can make EVs more cheaply for the world market, it becomes clear that Trump may have knee-capped the US preeminence in the global auto-manufacturing sector, for good. Since it is increasingly clear that auto emissions cause Alzheimers, Trump also damaged our brains to be more like his own.

4. Trump actively promoted the production of the very dangerous atmospheric heating agent, methane, a greenhouse gas that prevents the heat caused by the sun’s rays from radiating back out into space at the old eighteenth-century rate. He removed government regulations requiring Big Oil to limit methane emissions from drilling.

5. Trump put a 30% tariff on solar panels, vastly slowing the expansion of solar power in the US and costing the country some 62,000 jobs in the solar industry. Since solar replaces coal and fossil gas for electricity generation, this is another way Trump promoted carbon dioxide emissions.

6. Trump’s corrupt Interior Department subsidized coal and fossil gas, but raised the rents for wind turbines on federal lands. Trump, fuelled by an irrational hatred of wind turbines, such that he falsely asserts that they cause cancer, was a constant worry tot he industry all the time he was in office.

7. The sum total of all Trump’s anti-climate regulations would have added 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere had they not largely been reversed by the subsequent Biden administration. This one man tried to engineer an extra tonnage of CO2 emissions equal to the annual output of all of Russia.

I have suggested that we could get a better sense of how disgusting carbon dioxide and methane emissions are if we called them farts instead of using a fancy word like “emissions.” How many tons of CO2 did America fart out last year?

Trump, who spent much of his trial farting and dozing, tried to have us fart out an extra 1.8 billion tons of CO2.

Some small percentage of all the damage human-made climate change will do to the United States in the coming years will have been caused by one man. And if he can get into office again he will try to doom the planet.

Now that is an indictment.


INFORMED COMMENT

But seriously, is Trump now openly embracing fascism? It may be the ideological heart of his campaign. ROBERT REICH MAY 22 Friends, As I’ve noted, on Monday evening Trump posted a 30-second video on his Truth Social site featuring images of hypothetical newspaper articles celebrating his 2024 victory and referring to “the creation of a unified Reich” under the headline “What’s next for America?” References to “the creation of a unified Reich” appear three times in the short video, including “German industrial strength significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” One hypothetical article asserts that Trump deported 15 million migrants in a second term, while text onscreen lists the start and end days of World War I. Another headline says he rejected “globalists.” There have been indications of Trump’s fascination with fascism before this. Consider his uses of fascist language — calling immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood” of America — and his repeated fascistic claims that “I am your voice. I alone can fix it.” Besides, the white Christian nationalism that Trump touts bears a remarkably close resemblance to Nazism. During his time in office, Trump reportedly claimed that Adolf Hitler “did some good things.” Trump berated his generals with insults like, “you f—king generals, why can’t you be like the German generals … in World War II?” according to the account of former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. More generally, see this. But this Third Reich video is the first time Trump has explicitly embraced Nazi fascism. The “Third Reich” was the official Nazi designation for its regime from January 1933 to May 1945, as the presumed successor to the medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire of 800 to 1806 (which the Nazis designated the First Reich) and the German Empire of 1871 to 1918 (which they called the Second Reich). Hitler stoked resentment against the loss of the German Empire and against Jews, whom the Nazis often referred to as globalists. The Trump campaign has distanced itself from the video. A campaign spokesman claimed it was “not an [official] campaign video” and was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word.” Yet it remained posted on Truth Social for 19 hours before finally being taken down yesterday. In July 2015, during Trump’s first bid for the White House, his campaign’s official Twitter account posted — and then quickly deleted — an image featuring Nazi soldiers superimposed between the stripes of an American flag. At the time, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — a fellow named Michael Cohen — blamed the post on a “young intern” who apparently “did not see very faded figures within the flag.” Trump’s defenders argue that there’s no valid comparison between Trumpism and Nazism, yet Trump and his campaign continue to invite the comparison. I don’t believe the Monday post was a mistake. I believe Trump is now moving to openly signal his embrace of fascism. What do you think?

Weirdo Kenneth Copeland TELLS INSANE LIES to Justify His White Christian Nationalist Worldview!!!

 

Jesse talks about a bizarre and ahistorical set of lies that Kenneth Copeland told on a Daystar TV program to a group of women on a panel that served to rely on false information to back up the White Christian nationalist worldview of the grifter near-billionaire. Subscribe to my weekly podcast, "I Doubt It," on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or at https://www.dollemore.com. #DollemoreDaily #KennethCopeland #History Support: YouTube Channel Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUSy... PayPal: https://www.dollemore.com/paypal Merch: https://www.dollemore.info. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/idoubtitpodcast Connect: Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/dollemore TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dollemore Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dollemore Explore the Team: Brittany Page on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@brittanyepage Brittany Page on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/brittanyepage Brittany Page on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanyepage Brittany Page on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brittanyepage Brittany Page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IDoubtItPodcast

Informed Comment

 

Frankenstein’s Monster of a Climate Emergency: Dangerous Global September Heat Spike Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The data from scientific institutions around the world is pouring in here in the beginning of October, regarding September, 2023, and the consensus is that it was freakishly hot, unprecedentedly torrid, off-the-charts sweltering. It was the Frankenstein’s monster of months. Much of the extra heat came from human-caused climate change, […]

Trump’s Anti-War Stance is a Sham; But his real War is on America ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – It’s possible that he’ll be in prison. Or perhaps, because of poll numbers that fall as trial dates approach, the Republican Party won’t end up nominating the current frontrunner as their presidential candidate in 2024. And, of course, in the general election, despite its lukewarm attitude toward Joe Biden, […]

The Death of the Armenian Dream in Nagorno-Karabakh was Predictable but not Inevitable By Ronald Suny, University of Michigan | – (The Conversation) – Thirty-five years ago, more than 100,000 Armenian protesters took to the streets to convince Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that Nagorno-Karabakh – an ethnically Armenian enclave stuck geographically in the neighboring republic of Soviet Azerbaijan – ought to be joined to Armenia. In recent days, […]

AI Goes to War: Will the Pentagon’s Techno-Fantasies Pave the Way for War with China? ( Tomdispatch.com) – On August 28th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry’s biggest trade group, to announce the “Replicator Initiative.” Among other things, it would involve producing “swarms of drones” that could hit thousands of targets in […]

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True patriotism is the opposite of Trump’s White Christian Nationalism Thoughts on July 4th ROBERT REICH JUL 4 Friends, On Saturday, Donald Trump conducted the second formal rally of his campaign — in Pickens, South Carolina, where an estimated 50,000 turned up under the scorching sun to hear him. There, he advanced his version of patriotism based on White Christian Nationalism. He began by celebrating the town’s namesake, Francis Pickens, who was governor of South Carolina when it was the first to secede from the Union on the eve of the Civil War. Trump assured the crowd he wouldn’t let “them” change the town’s name. He commended the Supreme Court for rejecting affirmative action “so someone who has not worked as hard will not take your place.” He saluted the court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade so “radical left Democrats will not kill babies.” He promised to stop “men competing in women’s sports” and prevent classroom teachers from teaching the “wrong” lessons about sexuality or history. He condemned foreign governments that “send” over the border “people in jails and insane asylums” and promised to deny entry to “all communists and Marxists.” And he declared America’s most dangerous opponents not to be Russia, China, or North Korea but “enemies within” America. Rubbish. The true meaning of patriotism is the opposite of Trump’s exclusionary White Christian Nationalism. America's moral mission has been toward greater inclusion — providing equal rights to women, Black people, immigrants, Native Americans, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, and agnostic. True patriots don't fuel racist, religious, or ethnic divisions. Patriots aren't homophobic or sexist. Nor are patriots blind to social injustices — whether ongoing or embedded in American history. They don’t ban books or prevent teaching about the sins of the nation’s past. True patriots are not uncritically devoted to America. They are devoted instead to the ideals of America — the rule of law, equal justice, voting rights and civil rights, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from fear, and democracy. True patriots don’t have to express patriotism in symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem and waving the American flag. They express patriotism in taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going — sacrificing for the common good. This means paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes or seeking tax loopholes or squirreling away money abroad. It means refraining from making large political contributions that corrupt American democracy. It means blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one's job. And volunteering time and energy to improving one’s community and country. Nor is patriotism found in baseless claims that millions of people vote fraudulently. Or in pushing for laws that make it harder for people to vote based on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Patriotism lies instead in strengthening democracy — defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard. Patriots understand that when they serve the public, their responsibility is to maintain and build public trust in the institutions of democracy.   They don’t put loyalty to their political party above their love of America. They don’t support an attempted coup. They don’t try to hold onto power after voters have chosen not to reelect them. They don’t make money off their offices. When serving on the Supreme Court, they recuse themselves from cases where they may appear to have a conflict of interest. They don’t disregard precedent to impose their own ideology. America’s problem is not as described by Trump and his White Christian Nationalism — that the nation is losing its whiteness or dominant religion, that too many foreigners are crossing its borders, that men are competing in women’s sports or teachers are not celebrating the nation’s history. America’s problem is that too many Americans — including its lawmakers — are failing to understand what patriotism requires.

 

The five elements of fascism And how Trump and much of today's Republican Party embraces them ROBERT REICH JUN 15 Friends, The Washington Post calls Trump’s vision for a second term “authoritarian.” That vision includes mandatory stop-and-frisk. Deploying the military to fight street crime, break up gangs and deport immigrants. Purging the federal workforce and charging leakers. “In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” How do we describe what Trump wants for America? “Authoritarianism” isn’t adequate. It is “fascism.” Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from — and more dangerous than — authoritarianism. To fight those ideas, it’s necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together. Borrowing from cultural theorist Umberto Eco, historians Emilio Gentile and Ian Kershaw, political scientist Roger Griffin, and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, I offer five elements that distinguish fascism from authoritarianism. 1. The rejection of democracy, the rule of law, and equal rights under the law in favor of a strongman who interprets the popular will. “The election was stolen.” (Trump, 2020). “I am your justice. … I am your retribution.” (2023). Authoritarians believe society needs strong leaders to maintain stability. They vest in a dictator the power to maintain social order through the use of force (armies, police, militia) and bureaucracy. By contrast, fascists view strong leaders as the means of discovering what society needs. They regard the leader as the embodiment of society, the voice of the people. 2. The galvanizing of popular rage against cultural elites. “Your enemies” are “media elites,” … “the elites who led us from one financial and foreign policy disaster to another.” (Trump, 2015, 2016). Authoritarians do not stir people up against establishment elites. They use or co-opt those elites in order to gain and maintain power. By contrast, fascists galvanize public rage at presumed (or imaginary) cultural elites and use mass rage to gain and maintain power. They stir up grievances against those elites for supposedly displacing average people and seek revenge. In so doing, they create mass parties. They often encourage violence. 3. Nationalism based on a dominant “superior” race and historic bloodlines. “Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border … The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world.” (Trump, 2015) “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” (2019) “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival … If we allow the Marxists and Communists and Socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.” (Trump, 2022) Authoritarians see nationalism as a means of asserting the power of the state. They glorify the state. They want it to dominate other nations. They seek to protect or expand its geographic boundaries. They worry about foreign enemies encroaching on its territory. By contrast, fascists see a nation as embodying what they consider a “superior” group — based on race, religion, and historic bloodlines. Nationalism is a means of asserting that superiority. They worry about disloyalty and sabotage from groups within the nation that don’t share the same race or bloodlines. These “others” are scapegoated, excluded or expelled, sometimes even killed. Fascists believe schools and universities must teach values that extol the dominant race, religion, and bloodline. Schools should not teach inconvenient truths (such as America’s history of genocide and racism). 4. Extolling brute strength and heroic warriors. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong. (January 6, 2021). “I am your warrior.” (2023). The goal of authoritarianism is to gain and maintain state power. For authoritarians, “strength” comes in the form of large armies and munitions. By contrast, the ostensible goal of fascism is to strengthen society. Fascism’s method of accomplishing this is to reward those who win economically and physically and to denigrate or exterminate those who lose. Fascism depends on organized bullying — a form of social Darwinism. For the fascist, war and violence are means of strengthening society by culling the weak and extolling heroic warriors.  5. Disdain of women and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” (Trump, 2005) “You have to treat ‘em like shit.” (Trump, 1992) I will “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and celebrating, rather than erasing, the things that make men and women different.” (Trump, 2023) Authoritarianism imposes hierarchies; authoritarianism seeks order. By contrast, fascism is organized around the particular hierarchy of male dominance. The fascist heroic warrior is male. Women are relegated to subservient roles. In fascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. Fascism seeks to eliminate homosexuals, transgender, and queer people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior. *** These five elements of fascism reinforce each other. Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage. Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity. That superior race or ethnicity is justified by a social Darwinist idea of strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors. Strength, violence, and the heroic warrior are centered on male power. These five elements also find exact expression in Donald Trump and the White Christian National movement he is encouraging. It is also the direction most of the Republican Party is now heading. These are not the elements of authoritarianism. They are the essential elements of fascism. America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about Trump’s authoritarianism. In describing what he is seeking to impose on ]America, the media should be using the term “fascism.”