(Anti)Fascism Tuesday

Federal immigration agents detained three people and deployed chemical agents at multiple locations around E. 34th Street and Park Avenue in Minneapolis’ Powderhorn neighborhood Tuesday morning. At least two were observers and not the target of immigration enforcement operations.

Around 9:40 a.m., community response networks began sending alerts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) door-knocking at E. 34th Street and Park Avenue. By 10 a.m., a crowd of over 100 observers had gathered, confronting agents at multiple intersections.

Among the detainees was a woman who was forcibly removed from her vehicle after agents smashed her passenger-side window.

In a video taken by Sahan Journal, the woman can be seen arguing with agents prior to being grabbed by multiple agents and carried to agents’ vehicle. The woman can be heard shouting that she is disabled and on her way to a doctor’s appointment that ICE was obstructing. Prior to the detention agents had instructed her to drive away.

After being pulled out of a car, a women screams as she’s being arrested by immigrations agents at 34th and Park in Minneapolis on Jan 13, 2026. Credit: Chris Juhn for Sahan Journal

Shortly after, another observer on site was tackled and forcibly put in agents’ vehicle as well. According to state Rep. Aisha Gomez, DFL-Minneapolis, who was present at the scene, agents pushed the man’s head into the concrete prior to carrying him away. Gomez also said that agents were physical with her as well.

“These officers have obviously not had the basic law enforcement training,” Gomez said. “I was shoved with no verbal communication whatsoever.”

Andy Larson, a south Minneapolis resident who was out observing ICE activity Tuesday, told Sahan Journal that one protester kicked out the taillight of an ICE vehicle and was tackled to the ground up the road on Park Avenue and E. 36th Street.

“It was a really good kick,” Larson said.

The protester managed to escape ICE agents, Larson said. ICE deployed chemical irritants and shot pepper balls into the crowd and fled the scene.

According to Sahan Journal photojournalist Chris Juhn, a Hispanic man was also visible in the back of one vehicle. It is unclear whether the man was an observer or target of federal operations. ICE did not respond to Sahan’s request for comment on the operations.

At multiple points during the operation, agents deployed chemical agents at observers. Agents fired pepper balls at observers’ feet and threw canisters of tear gas at the corner of 34th Street and both Park and Oakland avenues prior to leaving the scene. Eyewitness Moses Wolf said there was no singular precipitating event that led to tear gas being deployed on Park Avenue.

“There was a crowd confronting each other telling ICE to get out,” Wolf said. “I didn’t really see any physical altercation happening.” He said it appeared to be a tactic by ICE agents to exit the scene.

Wolf said the confrontation prior to the deployment of tear gas had not escalated beyond what had already been happening.

“It wasn’t anything crazy,” Wolf said. “I turned around for one second and there was this whole entire cloud of it, and pepper spray came with that.”

Eyewitness Neph Sudduth said at Oakland Avenue agents used tear gas as they were leaving.

“They were finally leaving, it was the last car of the convoy,” Sudduth said. “They just threw two or three canisters out at us as they left.”

Both Sudduth and Wolf said they witnessed agents using pepper spray out of the windows of their vehicles as they drove off.

“They just wanted to hurt us cause we told them how we felt, and they didn’t like it,” Sudduth said.

The operation in Powderhorn is part of a flood of federal immigration activity in Minnesota. As many as 2,000 federal agents are present in the state according to reporting from the New York Times, with an additional 1,000 set to be deployed.

For Gomez, the clash with ICE is the new reality of life in the Twin Cities with federal agents present.

“This is what our streets are like,” Gomez said. “We have these masked, unaccountable unknown to us federal agents, and it’s like they’re the secret police.”

Despite the difficulties, Gomez believes observers should and will continue to show up to meet federal agents in the streets.

“Our community is undeterred,” she said. “We’re not going to just lay down. You can gas us and mace us all you want, we’re not going to just lay down.”

Sahan Journal reporter Andrew Hazzard contributed to this story.

Source: Nicolas Scibelli, “Crowd of 100 confronts immigration agents door-knocking in south Minneapolis,” Sahan Journal, 13 January 2024

1. Numbers

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised to deport every illegal immigrant who was a rapist, murderer, or thief. He also promised to deport 20 million immigrants. Some voters believed the first promise; other voters believed the second.

Because people are stupid, that first group of voters believed that there were 20 million undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies. This is not possible. The total number of people in jail in America today—this includes federal, state, local, and tribal land prisons—is just under 2 million. The number of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes cannot be 10x the entire prison population of the United States. If it were, then daily life in America would look like Escape from New York.

So some Trump voters were duped owing to their general ignorance and/or innumeracy.

But others were not. Others signed up for Trump because of his second promise (the 20 million deportations) and viewed the first promise (about deporting only criminals) as the pap necessary to get the suckers onboard.

There are two crucial questions about these two groups. The first is:

What is their relative size? What percentage of Republican voters were tricked into voting for Trump’s immigration policies versus what percentage are getting exactly what they wanted?

Would you like to guess? Go ahead. I promise that whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t dark enough.

Here’s a survey tracking Republican approval of Trump’s immigration policies (the top line, in red) over most of 2025:

That’s a consistent level of support around 80 percent. Now here is the first poll conducted after the killing of Renee Good:

Even after the killing of an unarmed American citizen, a total of 80 percent of Republicans approve of what ICE is doing and 53 percent of Republicans strongly approve.

It seems pretty clear that, at best, one in five Trump voters were duped. The majority of them are getting exactly what they wanted.

Now if Trump were to lose the support of 20 percent of Republicans voters—or even 14 percent—it would be meaningful for Republican electoral prospects. Which is nice.

The problem is that having 80 percent of Republican voters actively supporting a fascist race war is meaningful for our societal prospects.

Which brings us to the second question: How are these groups distributed through the elite positions of power in government? And here it seems that many of the Republicans most invested in a race war have a great deal of power. Like, for instance, Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

At the elite levels, even the idea of 20 million deportations is too little. Here’s a tweet from the Department of Homeland Security on New Year’s Eve:

100 million deportations?

There are 43 million foreign-born Americans. Most of them are legal immigrants. In order to perform 100 million deportations, DHS would have to round up every immigrant of any status—even naturalized citizens—and then also snatch 57 million American who are citizens by birth and deport them, too.

Want to guess who those other 57 million Americans might be?

This week the Department of Labor published this:

Of course, the slogan sounds better in the original German.

Oh, and don’t forget the Department of Labor’s heroic propaganda posters depicting the American worker in a very specific way.

On the one hand, it feels weird to say that the U.S. government is attempting some low-key ethnic cleansing.

On the other hand, the reality is that we have a masked secret police force going door-to-door attempting to kidnap brown people; one government agency publicly daydreaming about deporting 100 million people; and another government agency saying that the ideal worker is a 20-year-old white guy.

2. Demographics

Another tell: This administration is obsessed with America’s falling fertility rate. From the NYT:

Vice President JD Vance last week called falling marriage rates “a big problem.” The deputy secretary of Health and Human Services in December urged his agency to “make America fertile again.” And at a recent conference for young conservatives, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, doubled down on the importance of marriage and children, holding out his nine kids as a model for others to follow.

Full disclosure: I am also obsessed with America’s falling fertility rate. Enough that I wrote a book about it.

The problem here is that nearly all of the declines in total fertility rate (TFR) over the last decade have been the result of declining Hispanic fertility.

Here’s the deal: The TFR—the total number of kids the average woman has over the course of her life—has been below the replacement level, but relatively stable, among white and black Americans for the last generation or so. But America’s TFR kept declining anyway. Why?

Because Hispanic Americans—many of whom were recent immigrants—had TFR’s higher than the U.S. average. And their baby-making propped up the nationwide number. The problem is that, as recent immigrants spent time in America, their reproductive behavior began regressing to the mean. The shift has been dramatic:

If you were concerned about the fertility rate in America, would you be trying to (a) halt all immigration—since immigrants usually bring with them fertility rates higher than native-born Americans—and (b) deport 100 million people from the ethnic group that has the highest fertility rate?

No.

The only reasonable conclusion is that the concern of people in the Trump administration isn’t about the total fertility rate. It’s about the white fertility rate.

I don’t know how much clearer the regime could be.

So tell me: What does the pie chart look like on Republican voters and race war? What is the percentage of Trump voters in each of these categories:

Group A: Sees and understands the administration’s intent and supports it.
Group B: Sees and understands, but oppose it.
Group C: Do not understand that the regime views its program as part of a race war and thinks it’s all business as usual?

And follow-up question: How big can Group A be for us to retain a functional, liberal society?

I look forward to your discussion.

Source: Jonathan V. Last, “The Nazi Slogans Are Not an Accident,” The Bulwark, 13 January 2026. I subscribe to the Bulwark, and so I have shared this article here as a service to my own readers. ||||| TRR

Forbes Breaking News, “BREAKING NEWS: Robin Kelly Introduces Articles Of Impeachment Against Kristi Noem,” 13 Jan. 2026

[. . .]

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to announce I will be impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem,” announced Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois.

“Secretary Noem has violated the Constitution and she needs to be held accountable for terrorizing our communities. Operation Midway Blitz has torn apart the Chicagoland area. President Trump declared war on Chicago and then he brought violence and destruction to our city and our suburbs in the form of immigration enforcement.”

Rep. Kelly then broke down some of the outrageous violence that ICE has visited upon her district.

“In my district, federal agents repelled down from Black Hawk helicopters and burst into an apartment building in the South Shore area. They dragged US citizens and non-citizens alike out of their beds in the middle of the night. They claimed the apartment was infiltrated by members of a Venezuelan gang. I don’t understand this president’s obsession with Venezuela, but they did not arrest a single member from that gang.”

“I visited that apartment building and saw firsthand the destruction those agents left. Doors to people’s homes or apartments were kicked down. Belongings, including little kids’ toys, were strewn about in the hallway. That raid and so many others shook our community, not just immigrants, but everyone. Now, Secretary Noem has brought her reign of terror to Minneapolis after she left Charlotte and Raleigh. We have all seen what happened.”

“ICE officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. Without knowing any of the facts or an investigation, Secretary Noem lied about what happened. She called [a] beloved 37-year-old mom a domestic terrorist. Secretary Noem and her rogue agents are the ones terrorizing our communities, and she is breaking the law to do so. I will hold her accountable.”

“I’m filing three articles of impeachment against Secretary Noem. Number one, obstruction of Congress. Secretary Noem has denied me and other members of Congress oversight of ICE detention facilities. It is our constitutional duty to find out what’s happening in these centers where people are reportedly being treated like less than animals. Two, violation of public trust.”

“Secretary Noem directed ICE agents to arrest people without warrants, use tear gas against citizens, and ignore due process. She claims she’s taken murderers and rapists off our streets, but none of the 614 people arrested during Operation Midway Blitz has been charged or convicted of murder or rape.”

“Three, self-dealing. Secretary Noem has abused her power for personal benefit. She steered a federal contract to a new firm run by a friend, her friend. Her propaganda campaign to recruit ICE agents cost taxpayers $200 million. She made a video that turned the South Shore raid into something that looked more like a movie trailer. But make no mistake, this is not a movie. This is real life and real people are being hurt and killed. I really have to wonder who are the people behind the mask. These DHS agents have no identifying factor.”

“From all their botched raids and officer-involved shootings, I have to ask, what is their training like? What is the vetting? Is Secretary Noem recruiting January 6th insurrectionists? I was one of the last members of Congress to escape the House Gallery on January 6th. I remember hiding on my hands and knees and running through the hallways to a safe room. Insurrectionists are not fit to serve as law enforcement. I realize that impeachment of Secretary Noem does not bring Renee back.”

“True justice would be Renee alive today at home with her family. Impeachment doesn’t bring back the four other people killed by immigration officers this year, including a man in Chicago. We could not bring them back to their loved ones. What we can do, though, is impeach Secretary Noem. Hold her accountable. Let her know the public is watching. In this country, we do not kill people in cold blood without consequences. These are not policy disagreements.”

“These are violations of her oath of office and she must answer for her impeachable actions.”

[. . .]

Source: Occupy Democrats (Facebook), 13 January 2026

Audience members at the all-ages Minneapolis rock venue Pilllar Forum tussled with ICE agents on the street outside the club on Sunday — prompting that night’s show to be canceled.

The owner of Pilllar Forum, Corey Bracken, said several of his customers and musicians were pepper-sprayed by ICE agents and at least two were hit with batons on the street outside the venue, at 2300 Central Av. NE., where other ICE detainments and community protests have happened in recent days.

“My staff doesn’t feel safe after this, and our artists and customers don’t feel safe,” said Bracken, a dad who expanded his skateboarding store into a music venue and coffee shop in 2023 to bring more live music and art to underage fans.

He is leaving it up to his staff and the bands themselves to decide whether to proceed with upcoming concerts, including several more scheduled this week.

The ruckus started shortly after the 6:30 p.m. showtime for a four-band bill headlined by Pilllar Forum regular Anita Velveeta, a popular trans/queer punk act. Audience members saw ICE agents pull up and detain two individuals outside the neighboring Supermercado Latino market, prompting the club’s young music fans to quickly exit onto the street and protest the agents’ actions.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a Star Tribune request for comment. An employee at Supermercado Latino also declined to comment on the incident.

Antonio Carvale, singer/guitarist in one of Sunday’s opening bands, BlueDriver, said he was one of five people at the venue who had to be treated with water and saline solution after being hit with pepper spray. He said agents fired the spray after they pushed a protester who pushed back.

“Honestly, the pain felt brutal, but fortunately the community was prepared and helped treat our eyes,” Carvale said, but he commiserated with a bandmate who was also struck by a baton and “banged up pretty bad.”

The band was disappointed Sunday’s gig then was canceled, but he added, “It would’ve been hard to play when I couldn’t even see the frets.”

One of the audience members who was pepper-sprayed, Jess Roberts of Minneapolis, said she had to go to an urgent care clinic because she was sprayed in the ear, which led to an infection.

The run-in with ICE followed a viral Instagram post by Pilllar Forum that went up Friday and landed 25,000 likes. It showed a peaceful but loud crowd of protesters shouting down ICE agents on Central Avenue, with the message, “And that is how you get it done.”

Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne and the new Minnesota state senator representing northeast Minneapolis, Doron Clark, joined Bracken in another social media video posted late Sunday denouncing the incident. Clark called Pilllar Forum “an institution here on Central.”

Payne urged residents, “Stay safe and stay vigilant.”

Twin Cities musicians and music fans offered online support for Pilllar Forum after Sunday’s mayhem.

“Thank you for supporting the community!” veteran rocker Tim Ritter of the band Muun Bato wrote on the venue’s Facebook page.

Bracken did offer refunds to paid attendees of Sunday’s canceled show, proceeds of which were to be donated to families affected by ICE detainments, per headliner Anita Velveeta’s request.

“So far, I haven’t heard from anyone who wants their money back,” Bracken said.

Source: Chris Riemenschneider, “Music fans scuffle with ICE outside all-ages Minneapolis rock venue,” Minnesota Star Tribune, 12 January 2026. I subscribe to the online edition of this newspaper (which I grew up reading as a kid), and so I am just as happy to share its contents here when appropriate. ||||| TRR

The Putin Party

Randy Newman, “Putin” (2016)

[…]

Dark Matter contained a re-recorded version of his Emmy award-winning song ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, which was used as the theme song for the television series Monk. The album tells countless humorous tales. However, one of its most memorable cuts is the track ‘Putin’, which sees Newman sarcastically attack the Russian president.

The song pokes fun at Putin’s efforts to appear macho, with Newman singing, “And when he takes his shirt off/ He drives the ladies crazy/ When he takes his shirt off/ Makes me wanna be a lady.” A chorus of ‘Putin Girls’ chime in to sing, “Putin if you put it/ Will you put it next to me?”

To accompany the scathing lyrics, Newman uses chaotic instrumentation that sounds like the perfect theme for a cartoon villain. The musician explained that he wrote the song when “all those pictures were appearing of him with his shirt off, and I couldn’t understand why. What did he want?”

He continued: “I think it was just personal vanity of some kind, like he wanted to be Tom Cruise. It wasn’t enough to be the richest and most powerful. He wanted to be the most handsome and a superhero, throwing young people around and wrestling.”

Newman claims that he originally wrote a much harsher version but had to tone down the insults. In 2018, the song won the singer his seventh Grammy, this time for the relatively obscure category of Best Arrangement, Instrumentals and Vocals.

Source: Aimee Ferrier, “Remembering Randy Newman’s satirical warning about Vladimir Putin,” Far Out, 14 October 2022

“RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA HAS MADE ITS WAY into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” That acknowledgement from Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was echoed a few days later by Michael Turner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “It is absolutely true, we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” Among the falsehoods that GOP members of Congress are repeating is the notion that the Ukraine war is actually a battle between NATO and Russia. “Of course it is not,” Turner told CNN. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle.”

What makes it even more difficult to see reality plainly is the presence in the GOP of dunderheads like Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who gushed to an Alabama radio show that “Putin is on top of his game,” while scorning U.S. media accounts of Russian behavior. “The propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.” Tuberville may be the dimmest Putin booster on the Hill, but he is hardly lonely.

It has been two months since the Senate passed, in a 70–29 vote (including 22 Republican yes votes), a $95 billion foreign aid bill that included $60 billion for Ukraine. The Republican-controlled House, by contrast, has been paralyzed. Stories leak out that Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently influenced by high-level briefings he’s received since capturing the gavel, has changed his posture and wants to approve the aid. But Johnson leads, or is at least is the titular congressional chief, of a party that contains a passionate “Putin wing,” and so he dithers. This week, Volodomyr Zelensky has warned that Ukraine will lose the war if the aid is not approved. Yet Johnson is heading not to Kyiv but to Mar-a-Lago.

Pause on that for a moment. The Republican party is now poised to let a brave, democratic ally be defeated by the power that the last GOP presidential nominee save one called “without question, our number one greatest geopolitical foe.” One member of Congress has sworn to introduce a resolution to vacate the speaker’s chair if Johnson puts aid for Ukraine on the floor. And the entertainment wing of conservatism—most egregiously Tucker Carlson—has gone into full truckling mode toward the ex-KGB colonel in the Kremlin.

It’s worth exploring how the Republican party, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” became the party that now credulously traffics in blatant Russian disinformation while it flirts with betraying an important ally—along with all of its principles.

To some degree, people’s foreign policy inclinations are reflections of their domestic views. During the later years of the Cold War, large numbers of liberals and Democrats were more sympathetic to leftist regimes like Cuba (see Bernie Sanders) and Nicaragua (see Michael Harrington) than were conservatives and Republicans. I wrote a book about liberal softness toward left-wing authoritarianism and, though I haven’t yet read it, I gather that Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book does some similar spelunking about conservatives’ tolerance for right-wing dictators. Certainly some conservatives were more inclined than any liberal to go easy on South Africa because it was perceived to be a Cold War ally. On the other hand, Republican administrations did push allies to clean up their act on corruption, democratic elections, and other matters where they could (as for example in El Salvador).

Trump’s particular preferences and ego needs play a starring role in the GOP’s devolution. Cast your minds back to 2016 and the revelation that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee. To rebut this damaging development, Fox News conjurers got busy inventing a tale about CrowdStrike, the company that documented the hack, alleging that the servers had been mysteriously moved to Ukraine so that the FBI could not examine them. In his infamous phone call with Zelensky, Trump fished out this debunked nugget and asked Ukraine’s president, who was then already fighting Russia in the Donbas, to do him a favor before he released the weapons Congress had approved:

I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. . . . I guess you have one of your wealthy people. . . . The server, they say, Ukraine has it. I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.

This was bonkers. As the Mueller report made clear, the FBI did get all the data regarding the DNC hack. There was never a shred of evidence that the servers were moved to Ukraine, and in any case physical control of the servers was unnecessary. But what was Zelensky supposed to say? He promised to look into it just as a courtier to a mad king will say, “Yes, your majesty, we will look into why your slippers are turning into marshmallows when the sun goes down.”

As Fiona Hill told me, Tom Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security advisor, tried “a million times” to disabuse Trump of this Ukraine myth, as did CIA Director Gina Haspel, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, and many others, to no avail. It was, Hill notes, “a too-convenient fiction.”

Because Trump regarded any implication that he had received assistance from Russia as impugning his victory, he latched onto the idea (perhaps whispered by Putin himself in one of their many private conversations) that, yes, there had indeed been foreign interference in the election, but it was Ukraine boosting Hillary Clinton, not Russia aiding Trump. Now, it’s true that Ukraine’s friends reached out to Clinton, but why wouldn’t they? Trump’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort, a paid agent of Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Putin Ukrainian leader.

Trump nurtured his misplaced grudge for years. Recall that when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s initial response was that it was a “genius” move.

I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word “independent” and “we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.

A non-sociopath would say it was raw aggression of the worst kind. A normal Republican of the pre-Trump mold would have been outraged at the attempted rape of a peaceful, democratic neighbor.

Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.

Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov—who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma—was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.

Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”

Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.

Source: Mona Charen, “The GOP is the Party of Putin,” The Bulwark, 11 April 2024. Thanks to Mark Teeter for the heads-up.

Putin recommends reviving ‘Come On, Girls!’ contest, following Uralvagonzavod’s example

Following his visit to the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions, President Vladimir Putin instructed regional heads to explore the initiative.

This isn’t the winner of the Come On, Girls! contest in Nizhny Tagil, but a stock image that Rabota.ru figured was good enough.

The list of the head of state’s mandates includes holding corporate Come On, Girls! contests, as is already being done at Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, where Putin met with the event’s winner.

Top officials have until November to submit a report detailing how they have implemented the mandate.

Come On, Girls! was a televised Soviet competition that aired from 1970 to 1987. Members of particular professions competed both for the title of best specialist and in creative contests.

During the same visit to Uralvagonzavod, it was suggested to Putin that excursions by schoolchildren to industrial enterprises be made mandatory. For the time being, authorities are drafting labor education lessons for pupils modeled on the Soviet system.

Source: Andrei Gorelikov, “Putin recommends reviving ‘Come On, Girls!’ contest,” Rabota.ru, 9 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Traitor(s)

Traitor by Dennis Potter. Source: Internet Archive

Traitor

First broadcast in 1981, this Hidden Treasure play by Dennis Potter stars Denholm Elliott as Harris and Ian Ogilvy as James. It has not been heard for over 40 years.

In a dingy flat in Moscow, he sits alone — a traitor to his family, his friends, his colleagues. Then the international press descend upon him and he gives his first interview — an interview which brings forth terrible, haunting memories.

Adapted for radio and directed by Derek Hoddinott
A BBC World Service Drama production

With thanks to Keith Wickham, Dr Steve Arnold, Ruby Churchill, Louisa Britton, Alison Hindell, Matthew Dodd, Claire Coss, Carl Davies, Helen Toland, Richard Culver, Andrew Jupp, James Peak, BBC Archives and the Radio Circle.

Remastering by Essential Radio.

Source: BBC

On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Turner was being questioned about an interview in which Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Russia specialist Julia Ioffe that “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul blamed right-wing media. When asked which Republicans he was talking about, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”

Catherine Belton and Joseph Menn reviewed more than 100 internal Kremlin documents from 2022 and 2023 obtained by a European intelligence service and reported in the Washington Post today that the Russian government is running “an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment.” Kremlin-backed trolls write fake “news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions” while claiming that “Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”

Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly warning that Russian propaganda has fouled their party. Blake notes that Russia specialist Fiona Hill publicly told Republicans during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump that they were repeating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” but Republicans angrily objected.

Now Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Cornyn (R-TX) and a top aide to Senator Todd Young (R-IN), as well as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and even Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, have warned about the party’s ties to Russia. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the Republican Party now has “a Putin wing.”

Trump has hinted that he has a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post on the details of that plan: he would accept Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the Donbas region. He refuses to say how he would negotiate with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that Ukraine will not give up its territory to an invader, or Russia president Vladmir Putin, who has claimed all of Ukraine, but after meeting with Trump last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Trump told him he would accomplish “peace” by cutting off funds to Ukraine.

Trump’s team said Orbán’s comment was false, but it is worth noting that this plan echoes the one acknowledged by Trump’s 2016 campaign director Paul Manafort as the goal of Russian aid to Trump’s campaign.

Fiona Hill told the Washington Post reporters that Trump’s team “is thinking…that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing…rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order.”

Trump’s MAGA loyalists in the House of Representatives have held up funding for Ukraine for six months. Although a national security supplemental bill that would fund Ukraine has passed the Senate and would pass the House if it were brought to the floor, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. The House returns to work tomorrow after a two-week recess but is so backed up on work that Johnson is not expected to bring up the Ukraine measure this week.

Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told the Washington Post’s Belton and Menn: “The impact of the Russian program over the last decade…is seen in the U.S. congressional debate over Ukraine aid…. They have had an impact in a strategic aggregate way.”

[…]

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 8 April 2024

The Spirals of Silence in Wartime Russian Society and the US Republican Party

Popular opinion polls show that the majority of Russians support the military action in Ukraine. Researchers, however, continue to argue that society’s support for the war is much lower than these figures suggest. In their new study “Perception of the conflict with Ukraine among Russians: testing the spiral of silence hypothesis,” V.B. Zvonovsky and A.V. Khodykin, drawing on Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence” model, argue that many opponents of the war are not willing to voice their opinion, believing that it is unpopular and fearing social disapproval.

Noelle-Neumann argues that before people with a “limited interest in politics” decide to voice their opinion on a politically significant matter, they assess the risk of being condemned by others. The spiral of silence “twists” as follows: people who are afraid of being isolated due to the unpopularity of their opinion refrain from voicing it → this opinion is thus heard less and less often in society → people thus increasingly think that their own opinion is not popular → they are thus even less likely to be willing to voicing it.

Zvonovsky and Khodykin discovered that the spiral of silence actually does have a great impact on discussion of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Russian society. They were able to verify this by doing a nationwide telephone survey (N = 1977) using Noelle-Neumann’s “train test.” The “train test” measures the willingness of “adherents of a particular stance on a socially significant matter to openly voice it by discussing it on a train with a random fellow passenger.” Supporters of the more popular stance, in their opinion, are more likely to openly voice it, believing that they are “in a stronger camp and less at risk of being judged by others.” Sometimes, their opponents are also encouraged to side with the “stronger” position.

Applying the “train test” to the Russian context showed that the topic of the war is highly sensitive both to its supporters and opponents, and that the spiral of silence affects both sides of the discussion. However, its impact on opponents of the war has proved to be much stronger than on its supporters. Thus, people who oppose the special military operation in Ukraine are less willing to discuss the Russian-Ukrainian conflict with those who support it.

Another important finding made by the researchers is the fact that a person’s willingness to speak out about the war is influenced most by the distribution of opinions about it in their immediate circle of acquaintances. So, the more people in the orbit of respondents who had shared a similar opinion with them, the more the respondents were willing to discuss the war, and vice versa. It can be assumed that the need to maintain social ties is stronger for Russians than the need to defend and disseminate their political views, as we noted in our analytical report “The war near and far.” Zvonovsky and Khodykin suggest another explanation, however: the “bad experience” of political discussions, which often end in conflict and frustration, also has an impact, since the opinions of interlocutors are not changed, and the desire to talk about the war with one’s political opponents thus simply disappears.

The last interesting finding of the authors about which we want to tell you is the following. If the environment of the respondents is divided approximately equally (~50% “for” the war and ~50% “against”), then the probability that those oppose the special military operation will discuss it does not decrease—unlike supporters of the war, who are much less likely under the same circumstances to discuss the military operation with strangers of opposite views. Thus, the opponents of the military conflict “have learned to resist the spiral of silence better than their opponents.” This means that if the distribution of opinions in Russia changes, “opponents of the military conflict will have greater opportunities than [their] opponents to promote their own narrative about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.”

Source: PS Lab (Telegraph), “The spiral of silence and the war in Ukraine: review of a new sociological study,” 14 December 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. Image, above, courtesy of Businesstopia

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Anti-Donald Trump Republicans know they are in the middle of a critical moment to stop the former president’s political comeback. But for some, the steep cost of voicing resistance to Trump often renders them silent.

“If you go against Trump, like — you’re over,” said Kyle Clare, 20, a member of the University of Iowa’s College Republicans.

“I don’t talk about Donald Trump a lot because I’m afraid of the backlash,” said Jody Sears, 66, a registered Republican from Grimes, Iowa.

“If you would say something negative about Trump, we had one person that would just go bang for your throat,” said Barbra Spencer, 83, a former Trump voter describing her experience living in senior apartments in Spillville, Iowa.

Trump still enjoys broad popularity in the Republican Party, and that’s driving his polling leads among Republicans in Iowa, New Hampshire and every other state ahead of the 2024 primaries. But he has also used that popularity to enforce unity. And the same impulse that has led Republican officeholders to avoid criticizing Trump because of potential threats to their safety and their jobs is also holding back rank-and-file voters from opposing the former president in public with the full strength of their personal convictions.

NBC News spoke to more than a half-dozen Iowa voters turned off by Trump — but some were anxious about talking on the record out of fear of being shunned by friends or family. One Iowan said they plan on saying they caucused for Trump when asked by members of their community but will actually caucus for Vivek Ramaswamy.

That adds up to signs going unplaced on front lawns, conversations with friends and family about other candidates avoided — and fewer opportunities for opposition to Trump to take hold in different Republican communities.

NBC News first spoke with Clare in a University of Iowa auditorium Aug. 23, the night of the first GOP presidential debate. Fellow College Republicans were reacting to the debate and voicing steadfast support for the GOP candidate who wasn’t on the stage: Trump.

Clare chose to wait until the end of the night, after the rest of his classmates left the auditorium, to share his thoughts.

“I’m just so scared of doing this right now,” he said, fighting back tears. “I want to be able to have my opinions on our politicians, and I want to be able to speak freely about them and people still understand I’m a conservative.”

Clare criticized Trump, particularly for his actions Jan. 6, 2021, saying, “The end of his administration was un-American.” He also said Trump’s supporters are in denial about losing the 2020 election.

“They don’t want to believe he lost the election. It’s hard to swallow. Losing is hard to swallow. But it’s important that when we lose, we recognize that we lost and we think, ‘What can we do better next time to win over Americans?’” Clare said.

Clare was right to expect backlash from speaking out on Trump. After NBC News published the interview with him on a “Meet The Press” social media account, hateful and homophobic comments poured in. Clare said later that a student came up to him at a university event, shoved a phone in his face with the video on it, and asked him why he’s “scared of Trump and not scared of getting AIDS from having gay sex.”

“Say something they disagree with, and they go after your sexuality,” said Clare, who added that he doesn’t regret doing the interview with NBC News. Many of the comments questioned if Clare — who holds a leadership role at the University of Iowa’s College Republican organization, interned for a Republican on Capitol Hill, and is heavily involved in the Johnson County, Iowa, GOP — was truly a Republican.

“I think it shouldn’t be a bad thing for me to say I am conservative and that I think there are other options, and I don’t think that this person is good for our country,” Clare said. But he’s worried those opinions will stunt his own long-term political ambitions.

“If people as powerful and as prominent as members of Congress can be taken down because of their criticisms of one man, what’s stopping that from happening to me?” Clare noted, referring to the Republicans ousted from Congress after voting to impeach Trump.

Trump’s criticism forced several senators and House members into retirement or primary defeat during his first years in office. Later, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to bring impeachment charges against Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, four retired before facing voters in 2022 and another four lost their next primaries. Only two remain in the House.

In the Senate, three of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump have since retired or resigned, and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is retiring next year.

Romney recounted to biographer McKay Coppins that Republican members of Congress confided to him they wanted Trump impeached and convicted but would vote against the charges because they were worried about threats to their families.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the Republicans who lost a 2022 primary after voting to impeach Trump, detailed similar conversations in her new memoir.

Cheney wrote about one colleague that she “absolutely understood his fear” about what would happen if he voted to impeach Trump. But, she continued, “I also thought, ‘Perhaps you need to be in another job.’”

‘It was easier to be quiet about it’

Rank-and-file voters are less prominent and thus less likely to be harassed or threatened, but some of the same worries and experiences remain. Sears, the Republican from Grimes, Iowa, feels Trump doesn’t reflect her values. But that’s an opinion she kept to herself until recently, because of the fear of being cast off by family and friends.

“Family and people I work with are Trump supporters,” said Sears, describing her hesitancy to speak out about her beliefs.

“I think Trump supporters tried to coerce or bully people into also being Trump supporters. And so it was easier to be quiet about it,” she said.

Spencer, a retiree now living in a nursing home in Decorah, Iowa, says Trump supporters at her previous retirement community created a toxic environment that stopped her and her friends from voicing opinions.

“We were afraid of arguments,” she said. “When you live with that many old people, sometimes they have very strange but very firm thoughts and you better think the way they do,” she said, explaining her silence.

Clare, Sears and Spencer are not the only people who feel this way.

And as Cheney and Romney’s stories demonstrate, social ostracization isn’t limited to just voters who speak out against Trump. Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican who represented a slice of Virginia from 2019 to 2021, says his mother texted him, “I’m sorry you were ever elected,” after he came out against Trump.

“It was so soul-crushing to have a family member choose Donald Trump over you,” Riggleman continued. He said evangelical Trump supporters in his life saw Trump as being blessed by God. “I was going directly against religious beliefs. And that’s a losing battle.”

It’s now been almost six months since a member of Congress endorsed a non-Trump candidate in the 2024 GOP primary, according to NBC News’ endorsement tracking.

The trend has popped up elsewhere on the 2024 campaign trail, too. When Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds endorsed Ron DeSantis in November, the Florida governor mentioned in an interview with NBC News that he “had people come to me and say they endorsed [Trump] because of the threats and everything like that” during the campaign.

Trump quickly went after Reynolds after news of her DeSantis endorsement broke, posting on social media that it would “be the end of her political career.”

‘Vortex of controversy and vilification’

Charlie Sykes was a conservative radio show host in Wisconsin for more than 20 years before Trump burst onto the political scene. Sykes was skeptical and critical of Trump, eventually confronting him in a heated interview about insults Trump hurled at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife in 2016. But for Sykes, it began to become clear that there was no room anymore for anti-Trump conservatives on talk radio.

“The audience of conservative talk radio began to think that loyalty was required. They wanted conservative media to be a safe space for them,” Sykes said, describing how his role became untenable.

After leaving radio, Sykes didn’t let up on his Trump criticism, which he says got him booted from a think tank and led him to lose friends and become a self-described political orphan. He says his criticism was met with bullying — and he understands why people who don’t work in the public eye might be hesitant to voice their true feelings about Trump.

“I do understand why people in their normal lives don’t want to be caught up in this vortex of controversy and vilification — why they would step back from all of this,” Sykes said.

Another longtime Wisconsin Republican recently detailed one of the results of that pressure.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan recently spoke on video at an event for Teneo, a global consulting firm where he serves as vice-chair. Ryan said the impulse to avoid getting on the wrong side of angry Trump supporters pushed former colleagues to vote against impeachment even though they wanted Trump gone — and now he thinks there are many who regret those votes.

“They figured, ‘I’m not gonna take this heat and I’m going to vote against this impeachment because he’s gone anyway,’” Ryan said. “But what’s happened is that he’s been resurrected.”

Source: Alex Tabet, “Trump’s secret weapon consolidating the GOP: fear,” NBC News, 15 December 2023

Letters from Two Americans

Today President Zelens’kyi is in Washington to ask Congress for support.

It is right to stand by Ukraine in this war. It is a situation of unusual moral simplicity.

Ukraine was attacked in violation of international law, and is defending itself.

Russian occupiers in Ukraine commit war crimes, which cease only when territory is liberated.

Russian propagandists say the goal [is] the elimination of the Ukrainian nation as such.

And America has done well by supporting Ukraine. It is a situation of unusual strategic gain.

Ukrainians are fulfilling the entire NATO mission by themselves, absorbing and halting a full-scale Russian attack.

Ukrainians are deterring a Chinese offensive in the Pacific by demonstrating how difficult such an operation would be.

Ukrainians are defending the notion of an international order with rules, making war elsewhere less likely.

And there is an important way that doing right and doing well come together.

Ukraine was attacked as a democracy, and is defending itself as a democracy. It is historically unusual for a dictatorship to try to destroy a democracy by force.

That Putin’s Russia is trying to do so reminds us that we are [at] a historical turning point. On one side of the scale are Russia’s ruthlessness and resources. On the other side are Ukrainians’ sacrifice and our support. Their sacrifice will be enough, if our assistance will be enough.

Historians will look back at these two years of war and marvel at how much the Ukrainians did for their allies. I expect they will describe this turning point for what it was, including in its moral dimension.

What I can’t predict is which way matters will turn, since that depends upon us, and what we do in the next few days. We have an unusual chance to do well by doing right. Will we take it?

Source: Timothy Snyder, “Doing well by doing right: American support for Ukraine,” Thinking about…, 12 December 2023

Source: Screenshot of Wordnik “Word of the Day” email newsletter, 12 December 2023

As is sometimes the case in American politics, a bill that many people are likely not paying a great deal of attention to is likely to have enormous impact on the nation’s future.

That $110.5 billion national security supplemental package was designed to provide additional funding for Ukraine in its war to fight off Russia’s invasion; security assistance to Israel, primarily for missile defense systems; humanitarian assistance to citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine, and elsewhere; funding to replenish U.S. weapon stockpiles; assistance to regional partners in the Indo-Pacific; investments in efforts to stop illegal fentanyl from coming into the U.S. and to dismantle international drug cartels; and investment in U.S. Customs and Border Protection to enhance border security and speed up migrant processing.

President Joe Biden asked for the supplemental funding in late October. Such a package is broadly popular among lawmakers of both parties who like that Ukraine is holding back Russian expansion that would threaten countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). If Russia attacks a NATO country, all NATO members, including the U.S., are required to respond.

Since supplying Ukraine with weapons to maintain its fight essentially means sending Ukraine outdated weapons while paying U.S. workers to build new ones, creating jobs largely in Republican-dominated states, and since Ukraine is weakening Russia for about 5% of the U.S. defense budget, it would seem to be a program both parties would want to maintain. Today, even Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “If Ukraine loses, the cost to America will be far greater than the aid we have given Ukraine. The least costly way to move forward is to provide Ukraine with the weapons needed to win and end the war.”

But now that former president Trump has made immigration a leading part of his campaign and a Trump loyalist, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is House speaker, Republican extremists are demanding their own immigration policies be added to the package.

Those demands amount to a so-called poison pill for the measure. The House Republicans’ own immigration bill significantly narrows the right to apply for asylum in the U.S.—which is a right recognized in both domestic and international law—and prevents the federal government from permitting blanket asylum in emergency cases, such as for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees. It ends the asylum program that permits people to enter the U.S. with a sponsor, a program that has reduced illegal entry by up to 95%.

It requires the government to build Trump’s wall and allows the seizure of private land to do it.

When the House passed its immigration measure in May 2023, the administration responded that it “strongly supports productive efforts to reform the Nation’s immigration system” but opposed this measure, “which makes elements of our immigration system worse.”

And yet House Republicans are so determined to force the country to accept their extreme anti-immigration policies, they are willing to kill the aid to Ukraine that even their own lawmakers want, leaving that country undersupplied as it goes into the winter.

When he brought the supplemental bill up last week, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promised the Republicans that he would let them make whatever immigration amendments they wanted to the bill to be voted on, if only they would let the bill get to the floor. But all Senate Republicans refused, essentially threatening to use the filibuster to keep the measure from the floor until it includes the House Republicans’ demands.

This unwillingness to fund a crucial partner in its fight against Russia has resurrected concerns that the Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans are working not for the United States but for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who badly needs the U.S. to abandon Ukraine in order to help him win his war.

Media outlets in Moscow reinforced this sense when they celebrated the Senate vote, gloating that Ukraine is now in “agony” and that it was “difficult to imagine a bigger humiliation.” One analyst said: “The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone!” Another: “Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us.”

Today, allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán were in Washington, D.C., where they are participating in an effort to derail further military support for Ukraine (an effort that in itself suggests Putin is concerned about how the war is going). Flora Garamvolgyi and David Smith of The Guardian explained that the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, which leads Project 2025—the far-right blueprint for a MAGA administration—and which strongly opposes aid to Ukraine, is hosting a two-day event about the war and about “transatlantic culture wars.”

This conference appears explicitly to tie the themes of the far right to an attack on Ukraine aid. Orbán has dismantled democracy in his own country, charging that the equality before the law established in democracies weakens a nation both by allowing immigration and by accepting that women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people should have the same rights as heterosexual white men, principles that he maintains undermine Christianity. In Hungary, Orbán has cracked down on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s rights while gathering power into his own hands.

In the U.S. the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and its allies—including former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson and Arizona representative Paul Gosar—openly admire Orbán’s Hungary as a model for the U.S. Indeed, some of the anti-LGBTQ+ laws Florida governor Ron DeSantis has pushed through the Florida legislature appear to have been patterned directly on Hungarian laws.

Orbán—a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who embraces the same “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” Orbán does—is currently working to stop the European Union from funding Ukraine. Now Orbán’s allies are openly urging their right-wing counterparts in the U.S. to join him in backing Putin. A diplomatic source close to the Hungarian embassy told Garamvolgyi and Smith: “Orbán is confident that the Ukraine aid will not pass in Congress. That is why he is trying to block assistance from the EU as well.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul today noted that even the delay in funding has hurt the U.S. “Delaying a vote on aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan will do great damage to America’s reputation as a reliable global leader in a very dangerous world. Delay is a gift to Putin, Xi, and the mullahs in Iran,” he wrote. “The stakes are very high.”

Republican determination to push their own immigration plan seems in part to be an attempt to come up with an issue to compete with abortion as the central concern of the 2024 election. As soon as he took office, Biden asked for funding to increase border security and process asylum seekers, and he has repeatedly said he wants to modernize the immigration system. To pass the national security supplemental appropriation, he has emphasized that he is willing to compromise on immigration, but the Republicans are insisting instead on a policy that echoes Trump’s extreme policies.

Immigration, on which Orbán rose to power, has the potential to outweigh abortion, which is hurting Republicans quite badly.

We’ll see. The story out of Texas, where 31-year-old Kate Cox has been unable to get an abortion despite the fact that the fetus she is carrying has a fatal condition and the pregnancy is endangering her health and her ability to carry another child in the future, illuminates just how dangerous the Republicans’ abortion bans are. Under Texas’s abortion ban, doctors would not perform an abortion, so Cox went to a state court for permission to obtain one.

The state court ruled in Cox’s favor, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton immediately threatened any doctor who performed the abortion, and appealed to the Texas Supreme Court to block the lower court’s order, saying that allowing Cox to obtain an abortion would irreparably harm the people of Texas. All nine of the justices on the state supreme court are Republicans.

Late Friday night the Texas Supreme Court blocked the lower court’s order, pending review, and today, Cox’s lawyers said she had left the state to obtain urgently needed health care. This evening the Texas Supreme Court ruled against Cox, saying she was not entitled to a medical exception from the state’s abortion ban.

The image of a woman forced by the state to carry a fetus with a fatal condition at the risk of her own health and future fertility until finally she has to flee her state for medical care is one that will not be erased easily.

Meanwhile, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has disappeared. His lawyer says he was told Navalny was “no longer listed” in the files of the prison where he was being held, and Navalny’s associates have not been able to contact him for six days.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 11 December 2023

PSA (It’s Time to Start the Deprogramming)

Everything that the irresponsible Russian “Americanists” who have been producing prodigious amounts of utter verbal rubbish in their “analyses” of the events of January 6 on social networks have proven incapable of understanding is laid out in this nine-minute video.

Thanks to Mark Teeter for the link. || TRR

**Wake up, Russian intelligentsia, before it’s too late!**

A Putin-Trump Bot and Shill for Lyndon Larouche Has Something to Say to You

This is what I look like in real life. Photo by Jonathan Ernst. Courtesy of Reuters and Business Insider Deutschland

Throughout the last presidential election campaign, I was verbally abused by a young art historian who was so determined to see Hillary Clinton win the race he attacked everyone who expressed the slightest uncertainties about her sterling character, political record, etc.

He did this to me on countless occasions, despite the fact I had already said I would vote for Clinton to prevent Trump from becoming president.

My ex-art historian friend pursued this social media campaign of abuse right up until election day. Although I tried several times to persuade him that verbally abusing people is not a very good way of making them do anything, he persisted in his vicious attacks on specific doubters like me and people who weren’t crazy about Clinton in general.

I’m not sure where he got his marching orders or whether he got them at all. Our political culture is suffused with violence, abuse, aggression, and stupidity, so it’s possible he set out on his perilous and, ultimately, futile course without any explicit prompting from the obnoxious Clinton campaign and the even more obnoxious Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Whatever the case, I’m already seeing signs the DNC faithful have started abusing doubters well in advance of the primaries, the convention, and the election.

Just today, in fact, one such fanatic labeled me a “Putin-Trump bot” and a “shill for Lyndon Larouche.”

Why did he attack me in this way? Only because I suggested—plausibly, I think—that there is no guarantee that if a Democrat grabbed the White House in January 2021, she or he would move to prosecute Trump.

I think it is likely that, instead, the new president would pardon Trump and only Trump in order to smooth the transition and also receive carte blanche to go after everyone else in Trump’s administration.

Two tenured professors who know for a fact I am neither a “Putin-Trump bot” and “Larouche shill” let this abusive comment stand without comment.

So, if that is how it’s going to be, I am going to make a promise to all of you.

I will not vote for the US Democratic Party in the 2020 US presidential election. They have broken their promises to working-class people, minorities, people of color, and pretty much their entire so-called base for as long as I have been following politics.

What our country needs is not a Democrat in the White House but a lot more democracy. It is clear the two “legal” parties have very odd ideas about democracy. One party has abandoned its conservative and liberal roots in pursuit of fascism. The other party does almost nothing to stop them while rapping the knuckles of the inspiring congresswomen of color who were elected in 2018 and are willing and able to take on a bully like Trump.

In short, if the Democratic Party could run an Ocasio-Cortez/Omar ticket in the 2020 presidential election, I would consider voting for it (and I’m sure millions of other people would, too), but the DNC would never let such a ticket make it onto the ballots even if Rep. Ocasio-Cortez were not too young to run, and Rep. Omar had not been born in another country.

What our country really needs, as an interim step toward real democracy, is a multi-party parliamentary republic without a president. I would argue this form of governance would make the nightmare of the last two and a half years a lot less feasible by diffusing power among parties more narrowly defined by class, ideological, and regional interests.

I don’t encourage anyone else to follow my example. After all, I have it on good authority that I am a Larouchian shill and a Trump-Putin bot.

I would, however, encourage you not to succumb to the “unity at any cost” campaign the DNC will unleash on the nation, using its millions of dupes around the country to viciously attack anyone who wavers from the party line.

When you’re verbally abused by a DNC fanatic, as I was today, explain as calmly as you can that this style of campaigning turns people off and encourages them to stay home rather than vote.

The latest issue of the Economist (July 6, 2019) had an interesting piece summarizing some research done by the newspaper itself. It claimed that, if everyone had voted in 2016, Clinton would have won.

In other words, if the US had mandatory voting like Australia has, for example, passive Clinton supporters would have been more or less forced to vote for her and she would have easily beaten Trump.

The Economist also argued Republicans would have to soften their hardline fascist message to appeal to fence-sitters, who also have a tendency not to vote.

What the article failed to point out is that the real Australia recently returned the governing Liberal-National coalition to power despite the fact all of the polls had predicted victory for the Australian Labor Party.

This means Scott Morrison was returned to his job as the country’s PM, despite the fact he presided belligerently over Australia’s own asylum-seeker concentration camps on Manus Island and Nauru before mounting a leadership challenge and taking over as the Liberal Party chair and, hence, the PM.

Scott Morrison is only slightly less odious than Donald Trump, by the way.

So, mandatory voting is no guarantee of happiness and sunshine in Australia, America or anywhere else.

The DNC is even less inclined to produce happiness and sunshine for ordinary Americans than the Australian Labor Party or even the Australian Liberal Party, not all of whose members are fascist pigs.

Don’t take the DNC’s abuse. I understand the desire to get rid of Trump, but it can’t happen at any price. If the price is Joe Biden, I would place a bet in any establishment willing to take it that he would pardon Trump the day after the inauguration.

If you must vote, then, a) don’t vote for a “compromise” ticket, and b) don’t take abuse from the DNC-inspired unity-at-all-costers.

When someone is willing to rain such mendacious filth on the head of a person he has never met and knows nothing about, this alleged unity is worthless.

All of you are smart and strong enough not to buckle under such pressure.

Who knows? If millions of you made pledges like the one I am making now it might make the DNC sit up and listen. {PUTIN-TRUMP BOT}

Mac’n’Cheese

Sign on the front of Daily Delicatessen, a restaurant on Liteiny Prospect, in downtown Petersburg, that purports to serve “autherican american [sic] cuisine.” Photo by the Russian Reader

A Democratic majority will not bring back the eleven Jewish people in Pittsburgh, massacred while they prayed. Or the two Black people gunned down days before at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky. It won’t fully stop the relentless attacks against immigrants in America.

But on Sunday evening, Pittsburgh mourners—angry and broken-hearted like us—chanted “Vote! Vote! Vote!” They understand the magnitude of the midterm election six days from today: that it affords us the chance to forge a powerful bulwark against Donald Trump’s hate and hold accountable the Republicans who have been complicit in every step of his toxic, self-serving, and destructive agenda. We must offer a path out of the darkness.
—Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, excerpted from a Moveon.org campaign email

The path that the avowed democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez offers out of the darkness is a “Democratic majority.” The sad thing is that, given the sluggish staying of the stagnant course and unchange the DNC and, thus, the Democratic Party have represented my entire life (I was born in 1967, one year before the disastrous 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago), I think we would be fools to trust them to hold anyone accountable for anything, much less Don Trump and the Falangists.

They certainly don’t ever hold themselves accountable for anything.

In any case, it’s been clear for two decades, at least, that most Americans don’t want either the now full-blown fascism of the former Republican Party or the so-called centrism of the Democratic Party, whatever face you put on it, even the handsome face of the otherwise utterly likable Barack Obama, a former community organizer who should have know better than to do half the things he did while in the White House, and who should have done many things he didn’t even contemplate doing.

What we need is actual democratic socialism, as fought for by an actual socialist party.

We also need an actual labor party, whose agenda is driven by progressive trade unions and their members.

And a party for small-c conservatives, not fascists.

And a green party that is not run by people who think it’s okay to fly to Moscow and have dinner with Putin.

And a libertarian party whose leaders and rank-and-file are true to actual libertarian principles, instead of being eager to make alliances with the falangists.

And a centrist party for people whose cup of tea is Obama and Hillary Clinton, warts and all.

We could also use a few regional parties, for folks who think the South, the Midwest, etc., are essences in themselves and need special representation in Congress.

And an agricultural party, to protect our farmers all over our great land.

In short, we need a parliamentary democracy. To that end, we need a presidency whose powers are much reduced, and a president who is elected by a straightline popular vote, not by an electoral college.

This would be an actual path out of the darkness, because a multi-party democracy and a weakened presidency would make it nearly impossible for what we have been witnessing lately—a lying, vicious clown, who is probably a Kremlin stooge, smashing our country to bits on behalf of his sponsors and a increasingly rabid white nationalist minority—to happen again.

So, go and vote a straight Democratic ticket on Tuesday. It won’t save us from the darkness, because with our absurdly outmoded political system, rigged to protect the tiny ruling class and its interests, our faith in leaderism and lesser evilism, our nearly perennial committment to racism, savagery, and barbarism at home and abroad, and our preference for policing over politics, we are the darkness.

P.S. We also need to ditch the Supreme Court in its present untenable form: political appointees disguised as nine wise mandarins of justice, seated for life, making a mockery of the law. In a real democracy, we would elect Supreme Court justices to one-time eight-year terms by popular vote, and the vetting they would get before being put on the ballot—conducted by a panel of lawyers, journalists, and ordinary citizens, and broadcast live on TV and the internet—would ensure we actually knew what they stood for before we voted them up or down, end of story. {TRR}