Barry’s Blog # 430: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Twelve

Part Twelve – Mid-October

Why must we save our sanity, who said we ought to stay sane, how is it even decent to remain sane in this world we are so recklessly and callously deranging?…It is a kind of madness to always hear the keening of the dead, this hurt canticle. It is a madness not to hear. – Anna Badkhen

In Congress, the inmates took over the asylum. As MAGA Republicans battled for control of the position of Speaker of the House, no government news got done. Some might consider that good news, as Biden’s latest request for more military aid for Ukraine was tabled. But that didn’t prevent him from sending not one but two aircraft carrier fleets to the Mediterranean.

Aside from making an attempt to play the adult in the room and announcing (mostly minimum wage) job increases, Biden had plenty of bad news. His disapproval rating hit the highest mark of his presidency (56%). Invoking the ghost of Richard Nixon, former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern, regarding the ongoing investigations, wrote:

The Joe Biden-friendly Establishment media has mounted a full-court press to “prove” that Biden is, well, not a crook…But time is about to run out, and pre-emptive propaganda is unlikely to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. IF the facts do come out and IF they are reported, Biden’s presidential hopes may suffer a mortal blow.

Kennedy, still denied Secret Service protection, despite the agency’s determination that he is at an elevated “risk for adverse attention,” and despite the fact that an armed man impersonating a U.S. Marshal had been arrested at a Kennedy event, finally gave up on the Democrats and declared himself an independent candidate. His campaign announced that within six hours of the announcement it took in over $11,000,000 in contributions (over $28 million in the past year). Later that week, however, Kucinich quit as his campaign manager. Kennedy replaced him with his daughter-in-law, who, reported the NYT, “is best known for a memoir about her tenure in the C.I.A.”

How does the news of Kennedy becoming an independent impact the race? David Talbot writes:

Worried Democratic donors were convened on Zoom…to discuss how the party’s wealthy sponsors can stop challenges like the Kennedy campaign. “People are very focused on this threat,” corporate activist Matt Bennett… told Politico. Kennedy’s Democratic Party opponents are strategizing how to keep his name off state ballots and how to keep spreading disinformation about him.

Polls, notoriously inaccurate, especially this early, do indicate trends. One appears to show that Kennedy is the highest-polling independent or 3rd party candidate to enter a presidential election in the modern era, entering at 19% with Biden and Trump at 38% each. Another interpreter explains, “While trust (in the federal government) has hovered near historic lows for the better part of the last 20 years, today it stands among the lowest levels dating back nearly seven decades.”

Although Alternet ran its first hit piece since July, the Democrats, terrified of his candidacy within the party, can relax for a while now that he has left. One poll shows that 48% of Republicans have a favorable view of Kennedy (more than of most Republican contenders), while only 14% of Democrats do. This is partly due to the media demonization and partly to his regular appearances on conservative media, a result of course of the MSM refusing to interview him).

It means that he could pull more support from Trumpus than from Biden. And it explains why (writes Talbot)

Trump allies have also admitted Kennedy makes them “anxious,” with one Trump advisor telling Semafor, “We’re gonna be dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views, dating back to 2012. We have a lot of stuff on him.”

Newsweek dropped its demonization of Kennedy long enough to note, “Republicans Start to Panic About Trump’s Chances Against RFK Jr.” ABC News agreed: “RFK Jr.’s switch to independent campaign draws criticism from Republicans — not Democrats”. MSNBC reported “MAGA Republicans’ top political tool has betrayed them. And they’re furious”.

Prediction: If polls continue to show him taking more votes from Trumpus, we’ll quickly see that Secret Service protection.

Then Palestine / Israel erupted yet again. Mainstream media went into overdrive, repeating lurid claims that Hamas fighters had killed and beheaded 40 Israeli babies. Just as with the bogus line on Ukraine, “analysts” tripped over each other repeating the one word: “unprovoked”. Biden quickly maintained his pathological support for genocide and stated (outright lie or advancing senility?) “I’ve been doing this a long time. I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children…” His handlers retracted the statement when the source of the claim – a right-wing settler – was quickly revealed. But the administration ignored 55 Congressional progressives (after 2,200 Palestinians including over 700 children were already dead), who made the mild request that the attack on Gaza “must be carried out according to international law and take all due measures to limit harm to innocent civilians”. Too extreme for mainstream democrats.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky

But Biden did have good news during this insane week. Who would claim the mantel of primary “PEP” (progressive except for Palestine)? Kennedy also doubled down on his unqualified support for Israel:

This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I’ll make sure that our policy is unambiguous…I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need. However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action…

Kennedy could not have engineered a more arrogant, shameless and ignorant denunciation of any claim to being a progressive – or any appeal to progressive support – than if he’d had Steve Bannon as his speechwriter (perhaps he did). This is probably why Kucinich quit the campaign. By contrast, Cornell West, an actual progressive, said: “The escalation of the barbaric violence in the Middle East must stop. The vicious Israeli occupation and the ugly Palestinian retaliation results in the killing of precious innocent people on both sides. We must have a lasting peace based on justice!”

With Kennedy shooting himself in the foot, Biden no longer needs to worry about him siphoning off progressive support, in either the primaries or the general election. But he can’t deny the low ratings. Still, the DNC gives every indication that they are willing to go down with him.

But just in case they can no longer make excuses for the dementia or the Congressional investigation gains media traction, Gavin Newsome has been vetoing every piece of progressive legislation that reaches his desk (such as allowing striking workers to collect unemployment benefits), rather obviously and shamelessly attempting to appear more conservative. Should he succeed in overthrowing Biden, however, here’s another prediction: the Republicans will portray him as a flaming socialist anyway, and his attempts to play moderate will merely alienate the left just when he’ll need it.

Read Part Thirteen Here.

Barry’s Blog # 429: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Eleven

Mid-September

The war was never meant to be won; it was meant to be continuous. — George Orwell, 1984

Orwell succinctly predicted American strategy in Ukraine. Begin by provoking the invasion (NATO now openly admits this), then give Ukraine just enough lethal aid (spent on American arms) to keep the Russians in a quagmire, but not enough to win. Meanwhile, following Elizabeth Warren and Lindsay Graham, another Senator, Richard Blumenthal returned from Kyiv and bragged that the U.S. is getting its “money’s worth” in Ukraine because Russia is taking losses and few Americans have been killed.

RFK Jr (regardless of whom you may vote for) explains in one sentence why liberals still support this war: “Today, the CIA is the biggest funder of journalism in the world”.  Patrick Lawrence writes:

We can no longer read The New York Times, and by extension the rest of the corporate press, to learn of events, to know what happened. We read the Times to know what we are supposed to think happened. Then we go in search of accurate accounts of what happened.

On August 30th, Mitch McConnell, who enjoys the most privileged access to classified information of anyone in Congress, had a senior moment, freezing up for over 30 seconds during a public appearance before being escorted away. It was the second such incident in six weeks. You know that because the event was covered by the NYT, MSN, ABC, NBC, PBS, CBS, the BBC, etc, and these are the news sources that liberals trust. You also may have heard that on the same day, Trumpus posted 31 videos ranting at political opponents in five hours, because the story was also well-covered.

What you probably don’t know is that the day before, Biden, after meeting with the president of Costa Rica at the White House, sat at a table for over 20 seconds, ignoring reporters’ questions and staring blankly into space, also apparently not for the first time. You don’t know it, because even though the MSM covered the event, only right-wing media, for their own purposes, showed the video. Matt Taibbi observes that “Algorithmic blanketing of independent media is reaching levels unimaginable even a year ago”.

Now it is certainly possible that some right-wing nerd used AI to fake the Biden video, but the fact that it doesn’t surprise us is enough. Are these old men exceptions? Three weeks later, 83-year-old Nancy Pelosi announced that she’d be running for re-election. Google searches for “Gerontocracy” (rule by the aged) have surged. You know we have a problem when even the military starts worrying. Ken Klippenstein writes:

…dementia impacting U.S. officials poses a threat to national security…as the authors of the RAND report note, there does not appear to be any vetting for age-related cognitive decline. In fact, the director of national intelligence’s directive on continuous evaluation contains no mention of age or cognitive decline…The U.S.’s current leadership is not only the oldest in history, but also the number of older people in Congress has grown dramatically in recent years. In 1981, only 4% of Congress was over the age of 70. By 2022, that number had spiked to 23%…In 2017, Vox reported that a pharmacist had filled Alzheimer’s prescriptions for multiple members of Congress. With little incentive…to disclose such an illness, it is difficult to know just how pervasive the problem is. (Dianne) Feinstein’s…staffers have for years sought to conceal her decline, having established a system to prevent her from walking the halls of Congress alone and risk having an unsupervised interaction with a reporter.

We’ve seen this before. CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl described a 1986 meeting with Ronald Reagan, who

…didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly…Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. (Then, as Reagan regained his alertness) I had come that close to reporting that Reagan was senile.

In 2011 Reagan’s son acknowledged that his father had Alzheimer’s while president. By that time, the public was used to seeing nothing other than Holy Fools – or Con Men – in the White House. Sometimes it really is hard to tell the difference. In September 2023, in the same speech in which Trumpus bragged about beating Obama in 2024 polling, he predicted that the cognitively impaired Biden would lead America into World War Two.

Caitlin Johnstone reminds us that 80-year-old McConnell is the 14th-oldest member of Congress and then goes on the kind of rant we really do need to hear:

Capitol Hill is where warmongers…go to die. It’s an assisted living facility for psychopaths, a nursing home where people who receive sexual gratification from dropping military explosives on foreigners go to wait for their decomposition. The whole place smells like night terrors and urine…a gerontocratic command center where miserable octogenarians in wheelchairs and adult diapers keep pulling the levers of ecocide and nuclear brinkmanship like retirees at a Vegas slot machine as a final fuck you to younger generations…

…Biden called McConnell his good friend, and of course they are good friends; they are the same kind of monster. The same variety of spent, half-dead Beltway flotsam made of corporate logos and plastic donor class dinner parties held together by nothing but Aricept and wood glue who’ve been pushing war, militarism, austerity and authoritarianism since the instant they were able to claw their way into elected office.

A bit strong, yes, and yet, as Harry Truman said, any story worth saying is worth exaggerating. I’m no basher of seniors for bashing’s sake — hell, I’m one of them — but these people are destroying my grandchildren’s future. And they are both embodying and enacting what I have called the most fundamental myth of Western civilization, the sacrifice of the children (Chapter Six of my book expands on this idea). As far back as 1971, Philip Slater, in The Pursuit of Loneliness, surveyed the increasingly ingenious methods Americans had invented to slaughter Asian peasants and asked:

This transfer of killing from a means to an end in itself constitutes a practical definition of genocide…Do Americans hate life? Has there ever been a people who have destroyed so many living things?”

Has there ever been a people that deserved this “good cop / bad cop” treatment? Trumpus knocks the suspect (us) around, then Uncle Joe enters the interrogation room to reassure us that the police have only our best interests in mind. But they work for the same police department.

Another aspect of American myth is that the mainstream media long ago replaced religious spokesmen as the gatekeepers of acceptable moral and intellectual discourse. So this blog series is as much a window into the media as it is into politicians. This may not be significant, but I’ve noticed that among even the progressive media, we may be seeing something of a shift. After at least 23 hit pieces between them in June and July, both Alternet and Who What Why abruptly stopped attacking Kennedy. What’s up with that? Indeed, he got his first indication of mainstream support when Forbes Magazine chortled that Kennedy’s ideas

…are rooted in private enterprise. He rejects various forms of collectivism as well as corporatism. He repeatedly attacks what he sees as collaborations between big government and big corporations to stifle market competition.

Is it possible that Trumpus haters are finally paying attention? The Hill reported: “77% of Voters Say Biden Is ‘TOO OLD’ For Four More Years, Including 69% Of DEMOCRATS”, while a USA Today poll showed that 80% of Democrats, including 72% of Biden supporters, want primary debates. CNN found that 67% of Democrats (up from 54% in March) don’t want Biden as their nominee, and 46% of all voters now say that any Republican would be better than Biden, while only 32% say that he’d be better than any Republican. A final stunner: a Reuters poll in July found that “18% of Black Americans would pick Trump over Biden…compared to 46% who favored Biden, including about one in four Black men…up from the 12% of Black Americans who voted for Trump in 2020”.

Meanwhile, the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the DNC proposed new rules that would punish candidates who campaign in New Hampshire (by law it must schedule its primary before any other state) or Iowa, two states where Biden did badly in 2020, and replace them with South Carolina, which Biden won. They also plan to appoint more unelected delegates (“Superdelegates”) to assure Biden the votes to win regardless of the outcome in the primaries. Even CBS found this newsworthy: New Hampshire risks losing delegates over presidential primary date fight with DNC.

If we combine voter anger, gerontocratic control, Biden’s deep unpopularity and media collusion, how can we argue with Kennedy’s lament:

I think that the DNC and Democratic establishment would probably rather have Trump as president than have me as the Democratic nominee.

Read Part Twelve here.

Barry’s Blog # 428: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Ten

The Situation in Late August

In September 2019, Donald (“I’m not Biden”) Trumpus had these poll numbers: Strongly Disapprove, 48%. Strongly Approve, 28%. Four years later, Joe (“I’m not Trumpus”) Bidenhas these numbers: Strongly Disapprove, 42%. Strongly Approve, 15%.

Biden has made it clear that he will not debate RFK Jr., allowing his surrogates, the NYT in the middle and Alternet on the left, to bludgeon Kennedy until his poll numbers shrink to the point where the DNC can justify no debates, all the while mongering the fear that Biden might be weakened if Kennedy were allowed any MSM coverage.

Following the predictable media circus on the day of his surrender by motorcade, Trumpus took the usual softball questions from Tucker Carlson instead of debating his Republican rivals (almost all of whom self-branded as “I’m not Trumpus but I support his policies, and I’d support him if nominated, even if indicted”), and continuing to fearmonger his base over the usual minorities and drag queens. Despite a well-documented, 40-year association with mob figures, Trumpus has lost no popularity (indeed, his supporters trust him even more than their own family and friends) and now profits from sales of his mug shot. Meanwhile, Biden attempts to deflect the growing accusations that as vice president he and his son made millions by soaking Ukrainian politicians.

But the differences, you insist! Trumpus continues to claim that climate change is a hoax, while Biden’s Justice Department attempts to block a landmark climate lawsuit by declaring that “there is no constitutional right to a stable climate system” and backs a court case designed to accelerate the construction of a massive fossil gas pipeline. Matt Taibbi writes:

Prosecutors keep applying new charges to him (Trumpus) like leeches on a medieval convalescent, and…The man facing death in prison is in the strongest position of the major candidates…As dire as Trump’s legal situation may be, the political panic on the blue side is as striking…no one expected a multiple-indicted Trump to be competitive in polls with Biden this late in the game…The cognoscenti never figured out or accepted that the support for protest candidates like Trump or Bernie Sanders even is rooted in wide generalized rage directed their way…If you drop 76 charges on a candidate and he goes up in polls, you might want to consider that you might be part of the problem…the standard-bearer is a half-sentient, influence-peddling version of Donovan’s Brain, with no one behind him but Kamala Harris — (with) her own historically low approval rating. Absent a big switch, our future is either Donald Trump, who by next year will be in more restraints than Hannibal Lecter on the tarmac, or this DNC dog’s breakfast.

Biden’s State Department and military show no signs of wavering from their warmongering strategy in Ukraine. So if both of these old fools make it through the primary season next year without being arrested (or in Biden’s case, impeached), we will be faced with a situation in which Trumpus will run against the war (even though absolutely no one will believe him, including Vladimir Putin) and Biden will be forced to defend it (even as 55% of the public now oppose any further funding for it).

Seeing that Biden is in the war for the long run, Trumpus staked out his position as early as February:

…for decades, we’ve had the very same people, such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO, not to mention the State Department support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like in the case in Iraq and other parts of the world and now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren and Lindsay Graham (!) teamed up to visit Ukraine and lobby for more funding.

In the worst case scenario, which we seem to be approaching, Biden will be forced to escalate the war in the time-honored tradition of attacking somebody, anybody to deflect attention from a president’s domestic problems. Nixon did it. Both Bushes did it. Clinton did it. As Patrick Lawrence writes:

… in 1998, he sent a cruise missile into the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan to get people to stop thinking about his pleasures with Monica Lewinsky.

Nothing on this front has changed (except that total casualties are approaching 500,000) since Dennis Kucinich predicted in May that Biden, like Bush

…in the Iraq War, will seek to burnish his Commander in Chief status as a war-time president, beginning in the later part of 2023. Going into 2024, the American people will be told not to change presidents in the middle of a manufactured war.

Pick one because the other is: Old? Senile? Corrupt? Racist? A war criminal? A destroyer of youth? A threat to humanity? Laughably unpopular with over half of the voters? Patrick Lawrence writes:

…in what looks like one of the great political miscalculations in my lifetime, the Democrats are determined to stand a candidate in 2024 whose senility has been publicly on display for the past two years…(while) Biden is on the very brink of a Nixonian, I-am-not-a-crook moment in his corruption messes.

In another post, Lawrence observes signs that the DNC

…intends to address the problem of Joe Biden’s worsening-by-the-day mental incompetence by pushing (Kamala) Harris out front effectively to stand in for the president on the campaign trail…Harris is now cast as “something of a one-woman rapid-response operation,” as the NYT put it. She will do the public campaigning, in other words, while voters are invited to re-elect a president they will rarely see but for more of those staged videos…

Not everyone among the DNC leadership would appear to be willing to support Captain Biden as he goes down with (or sinks) his ship. Gavin Newsom’s plans to debate Ron DeSantis certainly have less to do with supporting the Old Guy and much more to do with boosting his own cred if Biden really collapses.

Can it get any weirder? This hasn’t even gotten started. Kennedy, now rising to 24% approval in South Carolina and 31% in New Hampshire, hosted a discussion on the problem of online censorship due to institutional corruption, explaining when and how Democratic politicians began accepting money from the pharmaceutical industry. Four days later, YouTube censored and removed it.

Read Part Eleven here.

 

 

 

Barry’s Blog # 427: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Nine

Biden has no conventional threat from the left within the Democratic Party, nor from the middle, but he does have one from what I’ll have to call the “left-right”.

In Part Seven of this series, in mid-June, I listed a rapid flow of DNC-inspired hit pieces on RFK Jr. Six weeks later (it’s the end of July), that flow has become a 100-year flood. I’m not suggesting you read all of them, or any of them, but you may not get a sense of the media-wide effort to silence this man, or to make him look like a narcissistic, right-wing fool, unless you at least get a sense of the sheer numbers. Here are some recent articles from the usual hacks of the mainstream media,

NYT: You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Campaign Is About You

NYT: Pro-Vaccine Views Are Winning. Don’t Fear the Skeptics

NYT: The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me

NYT: 5 Noteworthy Falsehoods Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has Promoted

NYT: Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Storied Political Family

NYT: What Alex Jones, Woody Allen and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Share

NYT: Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Delivers His Fringe Views: Not on the Trail

NYT: The Real Danger in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Independent Run

New Republic: Don’t Debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

New Republic: RFK Jr. Isn’t Just Wooing Republicans. He’s Hiring Them

Bloomberg: If Joe Rogan Asks You to Debate, Be Suspicious

Vox: Joe Rogan wants a “debate” on vaccine science. Don’t give it to him.

USA Today: Sorry RFK Jr.: COVID vaccines work. What is there to debate?

Forbes: Why Peter Hotez Should Not Debate RFK Jr. On The Joe Rogan Experience

Newsweek: RFK Jr. Blasted for Suggesting COVID ‘Ethnically Targeted’ to Spare Jews

NBC: “Longshot Democratic presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked to NBC News …”

WAPO: RFK Jr.’s politics of conspiracy 

WAPO: RFK’s very bad argument for relevancy

Newsweek: Trump’s Praise Made RFK Jr. ‘Proud’ (The actual quote: “So, I’m proud that President Trump likes me, even though I don’t agree with him on most of these issues,”

Raw Story: A Trump-RFK Jr. ticket is the ultimate MAGA Trojan horse — and it’s being built in New Hampshire

Rolling Stone: RFK Jr.’s Super PAC Got More Than 50% of Its Funding From Trump Megadonor

Fact Check: RFK Jr.’s COVID-19 Deceptions

Politico: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Real Motive

Politico: Biden administration vs. the anti-vax movement

PBS News Hour: RFK Jr. appears before Congress as his comments spreading misinformation draw scrutiny

NPR: RFK Jr. is building a presidential campaign around conspiracy theories

New York: RFK Jr. Executes Rare Double Flip-Flop on Abortion (“…he has a lot more fans in the Republican Party than in his own Democratic Party”)

Daily Beast: RFK Jr. Flip Flops Wildly on Abortion Ban Comments

Daily Beast: RFK Jr. Thanks ‘Very Generous’ Fox News for Giving Him TV Time

Daily Beast: Meet the Misfits Working to Elect RFK Jr.

Daily Beast: Anti-Vaxxer Held on $35K Bail After RFK Jr. Rally Arrest

Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Independent Run Has One Big Problem

Salon: Progressives: Don’t follow RFK Jr. down the rabbit hole — he’s just not that into you

Vanity Fair: How RFK Jr.’s Media Paranoia Shapes His Worldview 

San Francisco Chronicle: RFK Jr.’s ’24 Bid a Climate Disaster

CNN / Peter Bergen: “Kennedy’s portrayal of the mainstream media as propagandists in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies is nonsensical.” (In the first 15 minutes of this show there were seven pharmaceutical advertisements.)

The New Yorker:  “The purveyor of nutty conspiracy theories…”  

CBS / Stephen Colbert: Kennedy Jr’s Siblings Opposing His ‘Dangerous’ Bid For President

Common Dreams: RFK Jr. Is No Friend to Progressives

Media Matters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. credits Fox News with keeping his campaign afloat

Media Matters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his group have promoted and partnered with numerous QAnon conspiracy theorists

The Atlantic: The First MAGA Democrat — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is feeding Americans’ appetite for conspiracies.

The Independent: Woody Harrelson appears to endorse conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr in bid to unseat Biden

MSNBC: RFK Jr. courts Black conspiracy theorists on hip-hop podcast

Boston Globe: RFK Jr. hiring Republicans in N.H. for his Democratic presidential campaign

New York Review of Books: …spreading lies about the risks of vaccines…played on anxieties about purity and pollution.

Vox: RFK Jr.’s Republican-friendly Democratic presidential campaign, explained

NBC News: RFK Jr. ‘knows what he is doing and he’s being used’ by conservatives, says Newsom

Huffington Post: RFK Jr. Getting Republican Support For His Democratic Primary Bid To Unseat Biden

…and, curiously, from more progressive sources:

Popular Information: GOP donors fuel RFK Jr’s presidential campaign

Robert Reich: The younger RFK can best be described as a right-wing nut case.

Naomi Klein: “…all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers. RFK Jr now leads the pack.”

FrameLab: Why it’s silly to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Joe Rogan about vaccines

Who What Why: RFK Jr.: Bannon Chaos Candidate Born on Third Base and Now Playing Left Field

Daily Kos: Neo-Nazis are giddy over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s antisemitic COVID-19 conspiracy theory

Russ Baker: RFK Jr.’s Panel of Health Hoaxers, Hucksters & Hustlers

Russ Baker: If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Were President, How Safe Would We Be?

Paul Krugman: The paranoid style in American plutocrats

Mother Jones: RFK Jr. Aided by GOP and Trump PAC Donors

Then we have the bizarre case of Alternet.org, which has gone on an anti-RFK crusade that we haven’t even seen from the NYT:

Alternet: ‘Roiling with conspiracy theories’: RFK Jr.’s ‘madness’ abounds in New Yorker interview

Alternet: Scientists debunk RFK Jr.’s ‘completely unfounded’ claim that chemicals can make children gay

Alternet: Jim Jordan taps RFK Jr. to testify at ‘weaponization’ committee hearing on alleged government censorship

Alternet: ‘Bannon’s meat puppet’: RFK Jr. lambasted after blaming America for Ukrainian youth deaths

Alternet: RFK Jr: Reporters are trying to ‘discredit me as a crank’ by twisting my rant about COVID and Jews

Alternet: ‘Technique used by Hitler’: House Dems urge McCarthy to revoke RFK Jr. invitation to testify before Congress

Alternet: ‘Dangerous denials of reality’: ex-NYT editor regrets taking RFK Jr. call

Alternet: ‘He vaccinated all his children’: House Democrat blows a hole in RFK Jr.’s anti-vax arguments

Alternet: Voters’ distaste for ‘dangerous,’ ‘nutjob’ RFK Jr. is growing

Alternet: RFK Jr. while speaking in televised public congressional hearing claims ‘I am being censored here’

Alternet: ‘Denies he said things he said’: CNN destroys RFK Jr.’s congressional testimony

Alternet: Fox host mocks Jewish congresswoman who accused RFK Jr. of antisemitism

Alternet: ‘Disinformation can kill’: How RFK Jr. ‘had everything to do with’ a measles outbreak in American Samoa

Alternet: RFK Jr. Is Running on the Kennedy Name. What Does That Mean for the Family’s Legacy

Alternet: ‘Clown show’: Pelosi torches Republicans over Hunter Biden and RFK Jr.’s ‘ridiculous presentation’

Alternet: ‘I would definitely not vote for me’: RFK Jr. understands why racist remarks turn people off

Alternet: ‘Delusions of grandeur’: Why people run for president despite having no chance of winning

Alternet: DeSantis has ‘hopelessly lost the plot’ by promoting RFK Jr.

Alternet: RFK can’t resist the adulation of his real base — online cranks

Alternet: A neuroscientist explains why RFK Jr. has cast a spell upon millions

Do the editors — or more likely, the funders — of this website feel that strongly about this guy? Or are they simply voicing the fears of the Democratic establishment? OK, that’s politics. But why on Earth would anyone run this headline:

Alternet: RFK blasts President Biden administration for ignoring his Secret Service ‘request’

That makes at least 23 hit pieces by Alternet as of August first. This progressive website, with its one million viewers, put quotes around the word “request” by the son and nephew of two assassinated politicians and mocked his complaint (“After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign…”).

Let’s look a little closer at this issue, because it tells us some really ugly truths. Russ Baker correctly points out that the Secret Service protects “major presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses within 120 days of a general presidential election”. But he fails to note that over the years the Service has used a wide amount of discretion. In 1972, Ted Kennedy received protection before he even announced his candidacy. In 1979 he received it 400 days prior to the election. And candidate Barack Obama received it 551 days before the election. And Baker really didn’t need to use this headline: RFK Jr. Tries to Get the Secret Service Involved in His Clown Show.

In late July, Kennedy posted a tweet on the subject that was seen over 30 million times and drew 18,000 comments. Then, shortly after the FBI had killed a man who’d threatened Biden and a presidential candidate had been assassinated in Ecuador, Kucinich publicly called on Biden to order the protection.

It seems that twenty years of the War on Terror, eight years of Trumpus, three-plus years of covid and lifetimes of false equivalencies by the MSM have conditioned us all to hunker down in the comfortable, predictable spaces of confirmation bias and oppositional, black-and-white thinking. But these Alternet and Baker articles represent a new sport of gratuitous left-wing cruelty that nearly rivals the vitriol that Trumpus spews out his piehole. The only difference is that Biden’s handlers have (so far) not trusted him to do it personally, but have only allowed progressives, whom we might expect to uphold standards of human decency, to do so.

What are they so afraid of? Why are liberals now in the forefront of the movement to censor free speech? Why, as I wrote earlier, do liberals approve of the C.I.A. more than conservatives? Why, as Johnstone asks, are “many people who opposed Bush’s warmongering now cheerleaders for the US proxy warriors orchestrating conflicts with Russia and China”? Why do 31% of eligible voters — including 47% of those aged 18-26 — support sending American troops to Ukraine (the answer of course is seven years of unrelenting anti-Russia propaganda)?

In any event, the unprecedented flood / tsunami / firestorm / avalanche (pick one) of demonization has had its predicted effect on likely Democratic voters. Kennedy’s poll numbers have dropped from the initial 20% in April to about 14% in late July. And almost the entire press ranging from liberal to progressive is celebrating.

The sad fact is that very few commentators on the left are looking at the big picture. Patrick Lawrence (“Anything Anything Anything To Avoid Debating R.F.K. Jr.”) is one:

Words Kennedy never uttered will be put into his mouth. Words he uttered will be twisted or otherwise misrepresented…If Kennedy articulates truths that cannot be denied, these will be distorted or airbrushed out of all the news reports, never to be mentioned…under no imaginable circumstance will the DNC let Kennedy stand on a debating stage opposite President Biden. Impossible. Can you picture Biden, who cannot remember even where his regime is waging wars and which ones are over, facing a challenger with Kennedy’s chapter-and-verse approach to every topic he takes up?…This brings us to the last and biggest reason R.F.K. Jr. so profoundly provokes the Democratic elite’s ire. He stands explicitly against the American empire — a term he has no hesitation using…Kennedy attacks the corporatization of the American political economy, the censorship regime it sponsors, the wars of adventure, the institutional corruption in Washington…On Day 1, he promises, he will drop all charges against Julian Assange…the need for an open debate between two candidates diametrically opposed on issues of war and peace and the fundamental direction of this nation could hardly be greater. What kind of people would deprive voters of this pressing occasion?

Anis Shivani asks, Should the Left Give RFK, Jr. a Chance?

…recent national progressive campaigns have left the biggest elephant in the room — namely, empire — mostly out of the discussion. It always seemed ridiculous to me to imagine that we could attain Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free higher education…while leaving the machinery of empire alone. It never computed to me that you could have surveillance, censorship, a uniparty system agreed on fighting new forever wars — in short, the whole apparatus of empire struggling to keep up with emerging challengers — and have the domestic goodies at the same time…To the extent that liberals have bought into the compulsions of the national security state in recent years with unquestioning obedience, because populist nationalism on the right is presented as an existential threat by the organs of the same national security state, liberals in fact create the conditions for a resistance to empire, mostly on the right, that takes distorted forms (my italics)…RFK Jr.’s is the voice of rationality…able to connect the immediate anguish to the larger factors that set us up to accept our assaulted state and do nothing about it.

Ralph Nader responded to a radio listener’s query, suggesting that while Kennedy is “a great environmental lawyer”, he “has a tendency to confuse correlation with causation”. And he does make statements so provocative that they seem intentional. But I must repeat what I wrote earlier:

…the subtext of all their (MSM) arguments is that RFK would be worse than Biden, or that, at the very least, support for him might weaken Biden enough to throw the election to Trumpus…In either case, they are taking the old, tired position of settling for the lesser of two evils…None of these esteemed thinkers seem willing to consider that Kennedy’s popularity might well be the result of 55 years of Democrats telling liberals to shun progressives and support unpopular men (and one woman) primarily because they were less repulsive than the Republican opponent. In other words, mainstream Democrats have been just as guilty of fear mongering as the Republicans.

What is the DNC power structure so afraid of? Why is their campaign against RFK so much more intense than the two they pushed against Bernie Sanders? Perhaps because there is an enormous demographic out there — remember, 50% of Americans are so nauseated by the process and the decades of betrayals that they never vote — who quite correctly perceive that neither party is interested in their well being. I wrote about some of them in my analysis of the QAnon movement — remember them? Plenty of these people were not necessarily conservative but found no national personality who spoke to their anger and alienation besides Trumpus. That is still the case if we do not include Kennedy.

(And we haven’t even begun to discuss the increasingly persuasive allegations of Biden’s corruption and influence peddling during the 2014 Ukrainian coup and afterwards. The Republicans certainly will, once the campaign gets going in force. Imagine what we’ll be having to listen to: not one doddering, narcissistic and extremely corrupt old fool, but two of them. Imagine if no one shows up to vote.)

The Democrats, quite correctly, understand that RFK, given a level playing field (an objective press), would motivate millions of these people to get involved. And they want to keep them right there, angry but disengaged. It’s easy to redirect anger.

Read Part Ten Here.

Barry’s Blog # 426: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Eight

The Situation in Late July

 The Republicans are acutely aware that their only chance of winning at the national level is to rely on (1) massive voter suppression and fraud, and (2) doubling down on anti-Woke craziness to shore up and inspire their MAGA base. On the other hand, they know, due both to the outdated Electoral College system and the unwillingness of the Democrats to offer any progressive legislation, that they are guaranteed to retain at least 45% of the “vote” and enough Congressional seats to maintain a logjam on domestic legislation. George Lakoff explains why they will almost certainly coalesce around Trumpus, and why both financial and popular support for the execrable Ron DeSantis has plummeted:

…DeSantis broke a major rule of authoritarian politics…He betrayed Trump. This violated a central tenet of the moral system underlying Republican politics…the leader is like a strict father who sets the rules and doles out discipline and exerts total control over the family. To question his authority, or to make an effort to displace him, is to fundamentally violate the sacred order of the conservative moral system…Remember: Trump is not a politician. Trump is a super salesman who has successfully sold the Republican base on his status as a “strict father” authoritarian leader. As such, this nomination contest will not center on policy or strategy differences…For the Republican base, there is only one element that matters: Trump – his voice, his personality, his cruelty, his authority. Those under his spell have accepted his dominance as permanent (and) also view his criminal cases as a kind of martyrdom that only increases their quasi-religious veneration of him…So DeSantis committed an act of heresy…He violated the central myth of the party…Trump’s lies about the election are crucial because they uphold his authority…When the facts don’t fit the frame, they bounce right off…The Republican infighting is great for the Biden campaign, but…If Trump’s popularity continues to surge in proportion to the number of indictments against him, the party will unite to rally around their strict father figure — and no one will sing his praises more loudly than Ron DeSantis.

I differ with this analysis only on one small point. I think it’s been quite clear for at least two generations that there is no longer any real difference between politicians and entertainers. That is, their basic function now — as storytellers of the myth of American Innocence — is to reinforce opinions that their followers already have, while watering down any party policies that may be interpreted as too extreme when they address swing voters. Politics 101 is now: Preach fire to the converted but tell the undecided “We really don’t mean that”.

This reality, combined with the fact that almost all progressives in Congress continue to support the proxy war in Ukraine, means that Biden and the DNC probably feel almost totally immunized from criticism from his left.

Therefore, he is free to spend all his time and political capital attacking the Republicans for their obvious lunacy — but also in provoking Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and any other nation that refuses to accept American world hegemony. He is free to continue pretending to care about the climate emergency, while hosting an unending parade of authoritarians such as India’s Narendra Modi and sending cluster bomb munitions to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to justify this long tradition by instructing its liberal readers that Biden is “compelled, against his will”, to support regimes that engaging in ethnic cleansing. Adam Johnson writes:

It’s simply taken for granted that US officials’ default position is identical to that of a scrappy, well-meaning humanitarian organization, unless circumstances “force” them to take a different position…that the US sincerely cares about “human rights” but simply Has No Choice but to look the other way in this instance…That the US would back a country because it is autocratic, as opposed to backing a country despite this fact, never crosses (the Times’ writers) minds.

That list of human rights violators, of course, includes Israel. In mid-July, shortly after the House voted 412-9 to affirm the laughably/lamentably preposterous notion that Israel “is not a racist or apartheid state”, Biden invited the child-murderer Benjamin Netanyahu  to visit once again. This sorry state persists even as Time Magazine admits, “The American public’s views on Israel are undergoing a profound shift. Washington hasn’t caught up”. Indeed,

A recent Gallup survey found that Democrats’ sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis by a margin of 49% to 38%…sympathy toward Palestinians among U.S. adults is at a new high of 31%, while the proportion not favoring either side is at a new low of 15%…in the absence of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, three-quarters of Americans would choose a democratic Israel that is no longer Jewish over a Jewish Israel that denies full citizenship and equality to non-Jews…Americans are also increasingly less likely to describe Israel as a democracy.

But with progressives tied up in knots over Ukraine, the Democrats — just like the Republicans — seem perfectly willing to occupy this ideological space (and 26 others, as I noted in Part Five of this series) where they are to the right of the general population. However, thanks on the one hand to the joker Trumpus and on the other, to the fool Putin (fool because he took the con man Biden’s bait in Ukraine), Biden doesn’t have to worry about them. It’s an imperial wet dream: as jokers, fools and con men control the conversation, the entire political spectrum of elected officials shifts further to the right.

The risk for the Democrats, as always, is that no one will show up to vote. This is increasingly the case among Latinos, who, thanks to Biden’s almost deliberate refusal to court them, are telling pollsters that more of them (32%) think that neither party cares more about them than that Democrats (30%) do.

So Biden has no threat from the left, nor from the middle. But he still has one from what I’ll have to call the “left-right”.

Read Part Nine here: https://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2023/07/29/barrys-blog-427-a-mythologist-looks-at-the-election-of-2024-part-nine/ 

 

Barry’s Blog # 425: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Seven

The perfect is the enemy of the good — Voltaire

The assassination was 60 years ago. What national security secrets could possibly be at risk? What are they hiding? — RFK Jr.

People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible. — RFK Jr.

 Political philosophers invoke the old phrase to criticize ideological purists whose refusal to compromise with so-called practical centrists can result in nothing getting done — or worse, as the Democrats tell us every four years — in conservatives getting elected. But this year we may also use it to describe progressives who have forgotten how Big Business is snookering them. I prefer Jim Hightower’s phrase:

There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

After Biden announced his re-election bid — via video, not in person — Patrick Lawrence summed up the situation:

Get ready, readers. We are in for 19 months of relentless, insultingly transparent spin, propaganda, and lies of omission, by way of which a senile, patently incompetent man will be offered to us as the president for another four years.

Is Biden senile? A more important question to the DNC is: does it matter? Clearly, his handlers (like those of Dianne Feinstein) are intent on minimizing the possibilities of his further embarrassing himself in public. This includes not allowing him to debate his primary challengers.

No elected president has been denied his party’s nomination for a second term since Franklin Pierce in 1856. The last time one even faced a serious primary opponent was 1992, when Republican Pat Buchanan challenged George H.W. Bush. The last time it happened among Democrats was when Ted Kennedy opposed Jimmy Carter in 1980. And no president has been willing to debate a challenger within his own party since 1948. But, on the other hand, no incumbent has been so roundly unpopular, either.

What are they so afraid of? The DNC easily marginalized Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 with the combination of a compliant press and outright corruption. This time around, however, even as Trumpus gets indicted, Biden faces a more formidable opponent in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In March Kennedy, who had been banned from some social media platforms for allegedly spreading misinformation (Instagram reinstated him in June), stated that he was considering a run for president. YouTube took down a video of the speech, citing medical misinformation. Even before his official announcement in April, one could argue that the fix was in. What are they so afraid of? For one thing, Time noted Kennedy’s cross-party popularity, admitting:

…RFK Jr. enjoying a 48% favorability rating overall and 49% among Republicans; it doesn’t stretch the imagination to assume the Kennedy brand and nostalgia are doing a lot of the work there [whereas] Biden stands at 47% in that poll overall but lagging with anemic 16% favorability among Republicans.

Some right-wingers have speculated that Kennedy could become Trumpus’ running mate. CBS News heated things up, reporting that Steve Bannon “had been encouraging Kennedy to run for months”, believing he could serve as a “useful chaos agent”. Kennedy has denied any involvement with Bannon and referred to the accusation as a “baseless lie”. His actual opinion of Trumpus:

The easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our anger and our bigotry and hatred…and all the lower angels, the darker angels of our character…There are people who are angry, and they deserve to be angry, and either Trump is going to sign them up, Donald Trump, for a ride into the darkness, or we can try to capture that energy and turn it into something positive for our country…(our) governing philosophies could not be further apart.

The WAPO, however, insists:

The similarities have little to do with policy, though there is some overlap there. Rather, what makes Kennedy profoundly Trumpian is a dark strand of populism mixed with self-grandeur and self-created reality…During the rambling, nearly two-hour, Trump-like monologue in which he launched his campaign…(my italics)

How best to marginalize a Democratic candidate than by comparing him to Trumpus? And why? In previous elections, the occasional centrist (such as John Anderson in 1980) has run as a compromise candidate. But this is not the case in 2023. Kennedy is a threat to both the GOP and the DNC because for years he has articulated highly popular policies (see below) that both parties, as well as their stooges in the MSM, have either ignored or ridiculed.

Before we go there, let’s see just how scared the DNC is:

NYT: “Kennedy Jr., With Musk, Pushes Right-Wing Ideas”

WAPO: Kennedy “tests the conspiratorial appetite of Democrats”

WAPO: His name is Kennedy. His campaign is pure Trump.

CNN: Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launches 2024 presidential bid

Forbes: RFK Jr…Here Are All The Conspiracies He Promotes 

Reuters: Musk hosts Twitter event for anti-vaxx Democratic candidate RFK Jr. 

Rolling Stone: “Vaccine conspiracy theorist and Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes his uncle was assassinated by the CIA”.

Daily Kos: Nazi cavorting anti-vaxxer, and now candidate for president, RFK Jr…

Slate: RFK Jr.’s Conspiracy Theories Go Way Beyond Vaccines

Slate: What the Powerful Men Boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Really Want

L.A. Times: RFK Jr. is a reactionary crackpot — and that’s why the tech elite love him

I find it more interesting to see the demonization that is coming from more progressive platforms:

Alternet: Robert F. Kennedy Jr: “I have a lot of conversations with dead people”

Alternet: Tucker Carlson rewrites history with claim Big Pharma ‘PR campaign’ silenced RFK Jr.’s anti-vax lies

Russ Baker: “… the last thing we need is a purported “reform” candidate who contributes to the mess.”

Russ Baker: If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Were President, How Safe Would We Be?

Popular Information: Fox News’ favorite Democratic presidential candidate

Popular Information: The pernicious elite obsession with RFK Jr.

Robert Reich: The younger RFK can best be described as a right-wing nut case.

Naomi Klein: “…all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers. RFK Jr now leads the pack.”

FrameLab: Why it’s silly to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Joe Rogan about vaccines

Who What Why: RFK Jr.: Bannon Chaos Candidate Born on Third Base and Now Playing Left Field

These are people that I respect, and I’m not saying that they are wrong.

However, the subtext of all their arguments is that RFK would be worse than Biden, or that, at the very least, support for him might weaken Biden enough to throw the election to Trumpus or some other crazy. In either case, they are taking the old, tired position of settling for the lesser of two evils. With that observation in mind, we all ought to ask why aren’t these progressive writers aren’t even trying to push Biden to the left? From his and the DNC’s point of view, if he has few big-name progressive voices doing any of that pushing (OAC has already endorsed him), why should he risk alienating conservative Democrats by proposing anything that might inspire people to get active and vote?

None of these esteemed thinkers seem willing to consider that Kennedy’s popularity might well be the result of 55 years of Democrats telling liberals to shun progressives and support unpopular men (and one woman) primarily because they were less repulsive than the Republican opponent. In other words, the mainstream Democrats have been just as guilty of fear mongering as the Republicans

By the way, Marianne Williamson and Cornell West are receiving similar treatment:

Alternet: ‘Self-help guru who won’t get help’: ​Marianne Williamson’s ex-staffers reveal ‘demeaning’ treatment

Alternet: Marianne Williamson’s new campaign manager was once ‘accused of financial fraud’

The Nation: Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President

On the other hand, the conservative National Review, which would love to see Kennedy create a rift among Democrats and shore up Trumpus’ chances, gives RFK much praise. And it also appears that wealthy, self-described (and utterly hypocritical) “libertarian” donors such as David Sacks are hosting fundraisers for both Kennedy and Ron DeSantis. These mega-wealthy types are aware that 70% of Americans believe Biden shouldn’t run for re-election, and 60% say Trumpus shouldn’t run.

The common opinion among liberals is that Kennedy was one of them before he went off the rails and, for no real reason other than self-aggrandizement, began promulgating conspiracy theories. For sure, he has the habit of making unnecessarily provocative comments. After Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, RFK defended him as “breathtakingly courageous” for stating his opinion about the vaccine dispute. This gets us to the core of liberal disdain for him.

By this time, we all have our opinions, and I’m not going to try to change yours, especially about vaccines. But you really ought to know that RFK is not an “anti-vaxxer” (a term that people who are justifiably skeptical about Big Pharma never use to describe themselves). All his children (and my grandchildren, if you need to know) have received their mandatory vaccines. This is the real issue: Kennedy, who, prior to the Covid controversies, was possibly the nations’ best-known environmental litigator, is deeply opposed — as you should be — to the profound corruption at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry. And the longer that liberals refuse to question its authority, the more influential its critics, from left or right, become. This is one source of his popularity (21% by one poll), and why it crosses party lines. As I have written here,

…please ask yourself if, in our quickening slide toward American Fascism, you are condoning yet another loss of freedom in yet another dispute where almost all of the money is on one side of the issue. Cui bono?

Let me repeat that: almost all of the money is on one side of the issue…Consider the significant issues in our lifetimes. Every single time – with the sole exception of the fight to unionize – the vast majority of money spent has been by the military-industrial complex, the churches, the lobbyists, the corporations, the AMA, the NRA, Big Agriculture, Big Lumber, Big Mining, Big Chemical, Big Tobacco, Big Banks, Big Auto, Big Cancer Research, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Coal, Big Soda, Big Voter Suppression, Big Internet, Private Prisons, the anti-immigration industry. Even the “family values” debates: it was and remains the ultra-rich who have subsidized the segregationists, the Tea Party, the anti-union, anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-medical cannabis and anti-gay marriage movements.

All except for the vaccination dispute, which has a consumer protection movement begun by aggrieved parents and some libertarians on one side (joined of course by self-serving right-wing politicians), and a trillion-dollar industry on the other hand, one that spends $150 million/year lobbying Congress and $5 billion/year on advertising, one that generates so much profit that it can annually absorb billion-dollar fines for corruption and bad science without scaring its stockholders.

Why, when Kennedy has made every effort to state his case that he is not against all vaccines, do liberals and many progressives insist on labeling him with the anti-vaxxer label?

Well, politics is the art of the possible. It’s always more complicated than we’d like it to be. Do you prefer a President who agrees with you on the pro-vax orthodoxy but also threatens nuclear war with Russia and China, eliminates food subsidies and awards oil pipelines to Joe Manchin?

Or would you prefer an “anti-vaxxer” who, like Kennedy, has

— accused the Environmental Protection Agency of being run by the “oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry”;

— claimed that the financial industry and the military–industrial complex are funded at the expense of the American middle class;

— would impose an annual tax of 2% on every dollar of a household’s net worth (not income) over $50 million and a tax of 6% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion;

— opposed military coups and interventions from Chile to Syria to Pakistan;

— criticized the invasion of Iraq and opposed George Bush’s use of torture;

— criticized the Ukraine war as “an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons…in a proxy war in a geopolitical dispute between two big powers.”

— claims that Biden “has always been in favor of very bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive foreign policy…”

— described the current society and economy as unsustainable and based on a “longtime deadly addiction to coal and oil” and contended that the current economic system rewards pollutors;

— claimed that GOP operatives stole the 2004 presidential election;

— wrote the introduction and a chapter in Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, Greg Palast’s 2012 book on election hacking;

— supports abortion rights (although he is a Catholic);

— accused the Koch brothers of subverting democracy and for “making themselves billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us”.

— supports Green New Deal legislation and opposes nuclear energy;

— supports reinvestigating the assassinations of his uncle and father (even as CNN mocks him for his view that the CIA killed JFK is “way out there.”

Except for the vaccination and Ukraine War controversies, clear majorities of Americans (as I showed above) are well to the left of the Democrats on all these issues. So, to call him a “right-wing nutcase” is inaccurate at best and sleazy at worst. To be fair, some writers, such as Ben Burgis, see him as surprisingly conventional, since he appears to be lukewarm on subjects such as Medicare for All and Palestine. Indeed, the more his profile gains attention, the more his support for Israel seems to be hardening. This seems to be the one crack in his progressive veneer, and there’s no way to get around this one. Chris Hedges calls him “the Israel lobby’s useful idiot” who

…regurgitates every lie, every racist trope, every distortion of history and every demeaning comment about the backwardness of the Palestinian people peddled by the most retrograde and far-right elements…This alone discredits him as a progressive candidate. It calls into question his judgment and sincerity. It makes him another Democratic Party hack who dances to the macabre tune the Israeli government plays…Kennedy has vowed to make “the moral case for Israel,” which is the equivalent of making the moral case for apartheid South Africa…bereft of a moral compass and a belief system rooted in verifiable fact, has not only failed the Palestinians, he has failed us.

Charles Eisenstein, an RFK advisor, responds:

My disagreement with RfK Jr. on the Palestine issue is profound. Why would I advise someone who has such troubling views?…But tell me — do you refuse to associate with people who don’t agree with your every opinion? Does association mean endorsement? Is this how we are to change the world — to divide into opinion tribes that demand complete conformity on pain of expulsion?…I remain an adviser to the campaign not because I’m willing to swallow the Palestine disagreement for a greater cause, but because of certain personal qualities I have seen in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that give me confidence that he will change his mind.

May it be so. But the man is popular, and not simply because of his last name. Despite the Israel question, his national campaign manager is Dennis Kucinich, probably the most progressive nationally-known politician (retired or otherwise) since Henry Wallace. Whatever we may think of his book (he has written, co-written or edited at least 13 books) The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, we have to acknowledge that it has sold over a million copies even without being reviewed in the MSM.

I don’t mind you calling him a hypocrite or a nutcase. But you’d be wrong to describe him as right-wing. He has made some nutty statements — but who hasn’t? Biden, who would fight a nuclear war over Taiwan or about who controls the Crimea? True, Kennedy has gone on right-wing media (as have Glenn Greenwald and other investigative journalists), where the hosts are not stupid. They know very well that their viewers appreciate his views. And how do you tell who’s a “right-winger” anymore? If we were to theoretically factor out the racism, misogyny and hatred of immigrants, it actually gets a bit difficult, unless we fall back on the old notion about porn: I know it when I see it.

The talk show hosts know, as Carlson does, that we no longer have a simple, left-right division in this country (and many others) but more of a top-down, rich vs everyone else division (even if his real aim may be to take full advantage of it). Someone whom we may identify as reactionary by his racial animosity may well agree with us on many subjects. It’s a situation in which anti-immigration, pro-gun, Christians can support gay marriage and Medicare for All, while civil libertarians mandate vaccinations, free-market farmers and oilmen demand price supports and subsidies, gun-control advocates support proxy wars and anti-imperialists still make exceptions for Israeli apartheid. We’re all a piece of work. Maybe we should call it a blissfully happy vs angry and fearful division, or a division between those who inhabit the center and those who perceive themselves as living on the margins, or perhaps a woke vs innocent division.

This is where American mythology comes into the discussion. We’re not talking about just any candidate with popular ideas that transcend political allegiances. Kennedy’s entrance into the race brings with it significant themes that live just below the surface of our political discussions. As I wrote in my essay John F. Kennedy and America’s Obsession with Innocence, the subject of the Kennedys (any of them) evokes, above all, the mythological idea of the new start:

This new image (of JFK) represented youth, romance, vigor, virility, health, enthusiasm, promise and a revival of the nation’s ideals…His rhetoric of a “New Frontier” evoked the nation of boundless possibilities…JFK represented “an opening-up of desire.”

The new start is closely related to another archetype. Americans in the age of the cult of celebrity have searched for public figures who can hold our projections of nobility:

…this is the shadow side of a society that claims democratic values and refuses to admit the fact (obvious to poor people) that it is not classless. Usually these ideal figures have been movie stars, singers and athletes, the stock characters of our cult of celebrity…But actual royals carry an extra attraction…(JFK) was, wrote one writer, “the subject of endless reverie about his capacity to renew the world.” This capacity to stand at the center of the realm and ritually proclaim the annual renewal of the world, the crops (and the psyche) is one of the characteristics of the archetype of the King…The King is the central archetype of the collective unconscious. He represents order, fertility, stability and blessing. He is a focal point for communal desire and selfless service devoted to a higher order of existence.

What connects new start and royalty is our universal longing for the return of the King, as told in the myth of Odysseus, the Hebrew expectation of the Messiah (rendered in the Septuagint translation as the Greek Khristos) and significantly, Arthur of Camelot. This is a universal mythic theme, but it has particular meaning for us, because as Michael Meade has pointed out, American myth confuses the King with another archetype, the Warrior, whose immature form is the Hero.

For my extended meditation on the subject of the Hero (and his mirror-image, the Villain), and why myth requires that he die for us, read here. His primary narrative theme is that once he saves the innocent American community, he leaves that community. Our Hero-Kings have all moved on, westward, toward the setting sun and the Other World, and we long for the imagined times and places where they once peacefully ruled over us and our service to them gave our lives meaning.

If we restate that last sentence — service to a great, transpersonal cause, embodied in a human image, gives our lives meaning — we can begin to grasp why soldiers, missionaries, proselytizers and even gang members can sacrifice themselves to such a cause. And we can also grasp the attraction of someone who speaks the truth (as our souls — or our traumatized egos — understand it):

That longing for a savior figure grows along with our dissatisfaction with our sense of the nation. It is so strong that in the age of Trumpus, it allows us to overlook a fascist strongman’s obvious human frailties, at least for a while. Many Trumpus voters are old enough to have voted for Kennedy in 1960, and, curiously, polls tell us that many of them voted for Obama 48 years later…Where has the King gone? Indeed, where is Camelot? These are the kind of questions that evoke the power of mythic images. In British myth, the original Camelot had no specific location. Thus, writes Arthurian scholar Norris Lacy, “Camelot, located nowhere in particular, can be anywhere.”

What would Jesus do? What would JFK do? What would the Deep State do?

In 2023 what should any activist do? Accept that the mainstream media will ignore progressive critics (as they always do — when was the last time you saw the NYT mention Noam Chomsky?) and only highlight positions or quotes that can be easily mocked? Accept that the best thing you can hope for is to preach to the choir on Pacifica Radio? Or take advantage of any platform, especially a popular one, to make one’s case to the people, many of whom might really resonate with your alternative views?

Well, we all know what happened to RFK’s uncle and father. I’m not getting hyperbolic, and certainly not predictive here — or at least so long as he is considered a “long shot” (interesting metaphor), so long as corporate centrists and progressive gatekeepers team up to marginalize him and bolster the corporate flunkey Biden.

Read Part Eight here soon.

Barry’s Blog # 424: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Six

Part Six — What the Debt Ceiling Compromise tells us about American Myth

Watch what we do, not what we say — John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s Attorney General

The Debt Ceiling bill is a Republican wet dream in four main ways, each with its own implications for the myth of American Innocence, and most Democratic members of congress voted for it:

1 — By cutting everything in the budget except for the military and aid to Ukraine (which Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal described as “…one of the most pressing defense challenges we have right now”), it reinforces the old idea of good intentions and the old story of how America only goes to war to fight aggression and spread democracy. This narrative has filtered down to the local level, where cities across the country are cutting everything in their budgets except for the police. It reinforces one of our most curious yet common and crazy-making mythic contradictions: that the innocent community is endangered, under constant assault by the forces of evil — and, mysteriously — that we are utterly invincible and always prevail. Finally, by repeating the warmongers’ message that conflict can only be resolved through violence, it supports the fantasies of every traumatized individual who has ever contemplated taking his AR-15 and annihilating toddlers at the local school. For anyone to believe that a stance in the world in which this nation has bombed 33 countries since the end of World War Two (most of them populated by people of color) has no relation to the 202 mass shootings in 2023 as of May 8th is the height of denial.

2 — In giving critical handouts to Joe Manchin (the top recipient of fossil fuel industry contributions in the Senate), including expedited approval process and the elimination of judicial review for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, this betrayal of the climate activists who supported Biden on the ground  reveals that the real business of American capitalism is inseparable from domination and willful destruction of nature.

3 — In not raising taxes on the rich, it reinforces the absurd notion that since billionaires accumulate their wealth (and create jobs!) only through hard work and enterprise, not through white privilege, family inheritance, elite education, military conquest and decades of tax breaks, then government certainly shouldn’t punish them. The deeper mythic implications are the worship of radical individualism, the story that we all begin with equal opportunities from the same starting point and the equally absurd idea that only exceptional people — or an exceptional nation — are the engines of progress, rather than people who cooperate and collaborate for the common good. Only in America do we still believe that to be a hero or a winner results entirely from one’s own initiative. Only in America do we still believe that each of us is an isolated individual in perpetual revolt against family, community and government. Only in America do straight-faced politicians proclaim their horror of big government while raking in subsidies for the local gentry and calling for further restrictions on abortion rights.

4 — In imposing new work requirements for food stamps on childless older adults, requiring them to work eighty hours/month, it attacks the poor for being poor. The change could result in almost 750,000 adults losing their federal food assistance. Since the maximum monthly SNAP benefit for an individual is $281, this makes the work program route effectively the same as a job that pays $3.51 per hour, or less than half the federal minimum wage. This shadow side of radical individualism is a window into the heritage of Calvinist predestination thinking that lies below America’s brutal contempt for the poor, the young, the disabled and the unemployed. Only in America do we still believe that to be a loser or a victim is to be one’s own fault. Only in America do we punish babies with malnutrition because their parents can’t find work. Only in America can an influential newspaper (The Wall Street Journal) celebrate making it harder for poor people to access food.

With this view in mind, we can see why the Democrats are setting themselves up to fail. David Sirota explains:

The Democratic Party’s political class has developed a rote formula over the last decade: ignore rather than channel discontent among the party’s rank-and-file voters, prevent competitive primaries where those voters can act on their dissatisfaction, and then hope to eke out general election victories on a wave of voter disgust with the Republican Party’s freakshow nominees.

(In 2020) Trump’s horrific first term allowed Biden to eke out a win…Now Democrats seem intent on using The Formula again — only this time, it’s even more risky because this is not a race against a sitting Republican president. In 2024, Biden is the incumbent playing defense, and…CNN’s polling shows that right now, just one third of Americans believe Biden deserves to be reelected — (a lower number) than where Trump was at around this stage of his first term…a Fox News survey shows 28 percent of Democrats already saying they will vote against Biden in a primary…

Elizabeth Vos adds:

However, a lack of popular support matters little to Biden or the DNC because the big-money donors who Biden infamously reassured during his 2020 campaign that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his leadership, support him, and so does the party…Or worse: as in 2016, they would rather lose to Trump than allow a progressive to win and threaten the interests of wealthy Democrats who control the party.

Yes, I know…people like me have the luxury of commenting from the sidelines. Granted, we clearly don’t know what it’s like to bargain with criminals and madmen who would hold the entire nation captive to their extremist fantasies. And I have great respect for those who are willing to do so. Yes, many Democrats who support this monstrosity probably felt that they had no choice even if they hated it.

But along with that luxury comes a responsibility to look at events from alternative views such as mythology. Myth is not interested in psychology or motivation. Myth tells a story; it describes what happens, not why. From this perspective, it’s very simple. Biden’s crowd has joined McCarthy’s mob to risk nuclear war, feed the rich and bash the poor. From this perspective, we don’t care why Biden is so deeply unpopular. From this perspective, we only note that with the same choice as four years ago, fewer people will bother to vote, and that (along with voter repression and computer fraud) spells trouble.

Read Part Seven here.

Barry’s Blog # 423: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Five

The People and the Press

There is a madman inside of you who is always running for office. Why vote him in – for he never keeps the accounts straight? — Hafiz

In just two lines, the medieval Persian poet distills the connection between the inner world and the outer, between our individual yet shared madness, our need to project it out onto celebrities and the inevitable result that a mad culture vomits onto its national stage the most wounded and narcissistic players.

In the spring of 2023 the craziness kicked into a higher gear. This new version of the old story includes five main characters: We are familiar with the first three: the MAGA Republicans, the centrist Democrats and the media (see below).

The fourth is technology itself. I’ve already made a strong case for how manipulation of electronic voting machines has been a decisive factor in every presidential election going at least as far back as 2004. By 2016, we all began to hear how algorithms had moved from social media advertising to manipulation of voting preferences. We’ve already reached the point where we can no longer verify if a photograph has not been doctored. Think about that: for nearly 200 years, photographs have been the gold standard of the truth; if you saw a picture of something, you knew that it had happened. That is no longer so. This year, with AI entering the fray, we may already be at the point where we can’t prove that anything is true, something that those who would like us all to give up voting out of sheer despair will certainly appreciate. You really don’t even know if I’m writing these words.

The fifth factor is the people and the source of our anger. Regardless of how we label ourselves, when polled on specific issues, we remain much farther to the left on most major issues than either of the two major parties, and we feel increasingly frustrated and unrepresented:

1 — Medicare for All: 69% in favor

2 — Abortion rights in most cases: 64% in favor, always legal in first trimester: 69%

3 — Do more to reduce the effects of climate change: 67% in favor

4 — Prioritize alternative energy over fossil fuels: 79% in favor

5 — Reduce military spending: 56% in favor

6 — Increase spending on child welfare: 68% in favor

7 — Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour: 62% in favor

8 — Support gay marriage: 71% in favor

9 — Increase regulation of banks: 56% in favor

10 — Increase regulation of major technology companies: 56% in favor

11 — Ensure that chemicals used in consumer products are safe: 92% in favor

12 — Oppose reducing the size of Social Security benefits: 79% in favor

13 — Increase taxes on the super-rich: 64% in favor

14 — More important to control gun violence than to protect gun rights: 59% in favor

15 — Support minimum corporate tax: 52% in favor

16 — Add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution: 78% in favor

17 — Support criminal justice reform: 91% agree

18 — Support asylum for immigrants fleeing persecution: 55% agree

19 — People are rich because of their life advantages, not because they work harder: 65% agree

20 — Minorities are denied equal treatment in criminal justice: 69% agree

21 — Incarceration for long periods is counterproductive to public safety: 71% agree

One problem with citing statistics like these is that pollsters typically question “likely voters”. Since half the population doesn’t vote and that half tends to be darker-skinned and poor, we can safely assume that these stats would trend much farther to the left if pollsters interviewed a real sample of Americans. Another problem is that most people who support progressive policies tend to be congregated in coastal states that are already safely Democratic. Or are they?

22 — Legalize cannabis: 68% of Republicans in favor

23 — Raise taxes on the mega-rich: 51% of Republicans in favor

24 — Know someone who has had an abortion: 55% of Republicans

25 — Support Medicare for All: 46% of Republicans

26 — Disapprove of Roe v. Wade reversal: 61%, including one-third of Republicans

27 — Legalize psychedelics for therapeutic use: 61% agree, including 45% of Republicans

28 — Support the 2023 autoworkers’ strike: 62%, including 48% of Republicans.

29 — End the Electoral College vote for President: 65% agree, including 47% of Republicans.

30 — Age limits for federal employees: 79% agree, including 82% of Republicans.

31 — Age limits for Supreme Court Justices: 74% agree, including 68% of Republicans.

32 — The CIA killed JFK: 62% agree (as 0f 2013).

33 — Age limits for Supreme Court Justices: 74% agree, including 68% of Republicans.

34 — The CIA killed JFK: 62% agree (as of 2013).

35 – Call for cease-fire in Gaza (10/19/23): 66% agree, including 56% of Republicans.

36 – End military funding for Ukraine (8/4/23): 55% agree, including 71% of Republicans.

37 – Push Ukraine toward a negotiated peace with Russia as soon as possible (3/1/24): 70% agree.

38 – Support fully decriminalizing sex work: 61% of Democrats and 37% of Republicans agree.

Read # 24-37 again. Theoretically, if the racism and immigrant-bashing were factored out, a Republican could run for Congress on Medicare for All, peace in Ukraine, legalized pot, taxing the rich and supporting abortion rights!

These stats tell us something else: we are complicated, often hypocritical. Consider “libertarians” such as Rand Paul who would ban abortion, or the 74% of “liberal Democrats” who support additional funding for Ukraine. But it also means that your grumpy Trumper uncle who whines about immigrants might agree with you on many other issues, including his distrust of the government. This will get very interesting when we get to discussing the popularity of Robert F. Kennedy Jr and the deep fear he evokes in centrist Democrats.

I would imagine that you are unfamiliar with most of these stats, because you probably don’t see them in the New York Times, CNN or the Washington Post. The media’s intention (yes, we can use the singular here) is to keep all discourse well within acceptable boundaries, using methods such as false equivalencies and to marginalize all alternative voices, whether they be candidates or serious investigative journalists. Beyond that function, its purpose is to sell you to their advertizers.

While liberals celebrated Trumpus’ legal woes, he raised $34 million through mid-April, with a spike in donations after the indictment. The man may be worried, but the con-man is laughing, once again, all the way to the bank. His account was swollen considerably by CNN’s decision to give him two hours of free publicity in broadcasting his primetime “town hall” performance of the usual lies in front of a cheering audience.

In August of 2022, Chris Licht, CNN’s CEO, had canceled Brian Stelter’s commercially successful show, “Reliable Sources,” which had criticized right-wing media. Robert Reich writes that Licht had also told CNN staff they should stop referring to Donald Trump’s “big lie”.

Why? Follow the money. CNN’s new corporate overseer is Warner Bros…(whose) leading shareholder…is John Malone, a multibillionaire cable magnate…In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.

Follow the money, indeed. Cui bono? As the pandemic created many billionaires from the ranks of Big Pharma, this election cycle will further centralize wealth and power. We recall the notorious 2016 assessment of Trumpus by Les Moonves, CEO of CBS: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”. Licht, who was certainly well aware of that statement, chose to up the ante. No longer perceiving any need to distinguish between the public interest and corporate profits, he told his staff the morning after the town hall: “America was served very well by what we did last night.” Two weeks later, he scheduled another town hall for early June, starring Mike Pence.

In June it was clear, in Klaus Marre’s words, that The Media Hasn’t Learned a Damn Thing About Covering Trump:

Americans watched as an event unfolded that could decide not only the Republican nomination but also the 2024 presidential election. No, we’re not talking about a former president being indicted for violating the Espionage Act — but rather how the media covered it. As soon as the three big networks interrupted their regular programming to show overhead footage of Donald Trump’s motorcade, it became obvious that the media is going to blow this again…Trump must have loved those shots of highways being blocked off to allow his motorcade to make its way to the courthouse unimpeded. It looked presidential, and that’s exactly the image he wants to portray…In other words, it was just like 2016 again, when the media gifted Trump billions of dollars (between $2 billion and $6 billion, depending on whom you ask) in free coverage.

Trumpus is a proven winner — for the media and their investors, at least. For at least eight years, they have had regular opportunities to (at first) ignore him, and (later) to thoroughly denounce his hatemongering. Instead, they have and will continue to normalize him, as I wrote here, as well as all the Republican thugs who will attempt to out-hate him during the campaign.

Liberals, of course, will continue to demonize him because it’s far less painful to see him as an aberration rather than as someone who has embodied all that is wrong with all of us. Caitlin Johnstone writes that he

…spent four years proving to everyone that he wasn’t bad because he was similar to Hitler, he was bad because he was similar to Obama. He wasn’t terrible because of the ways he differed from other presidents, but because of the ways he was the same.

Johnstone also reminds us:

If people really understood just how much suffering and destruction is unleashed by U.S. foreign policy, they’d stop making such a big deal about the minor differences between two political parties who always come together to support the most destructive US foreign policy decisions…The ways they are the same are vastly more significant than the ways in which they differ.

So the first thing to acknowledge about this election is that the media will be an equal participant, along with the same two doddering old fools who are likely to be nominated. And all three will be manipulating technology for their own purposes, not ours. This will not be pretty.

Read Part Six here.

Barry’s Blog # 422: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Four

In May 2023, a blogger expressed a common liberal complaint, writing that that under Biden the economy has been adding over 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months. Then he listed many recent MSM articles that expressed “relentlessly dour economic coverage” and seemed to be consistently ignoring the good economic news:

The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and “entertaining” for the press to cover?

These are legitimate questions that we’ll try to keep track of. But for now, we need to address a much larger issue, beyond the strictly economic one. Even if the media do want to build Trump up (and Biden down) to make for a more exciting and profitable campaign (see Part Five), why is the President so unpopular? I suggest a few possibilities:

1 — Cognitive dissonance. White Republicans in their echo-chambers simply don’t hear any “news” that might portray Biden in a positive light. And when they do, they have been conditioned for decades to re-interpret what they hear to fit with what they believe. That makes a quarter of us (half of the half who vote).

2 — Generational perception. Young potential voters (especially the POC who are the primary Democratic activists) see nothing but a doddering old fool and want him replaced by someone responsive to their concerns, someone who might legitimately hold their “King” projections. And people of my (older) generation are sick of being asked our entire lives to support the lesser of two evils.

3 — Innate, moral intelligence. Despite enduring an educational system deliberately designed to dumb us down, a carceral state intent on keeping millions of us from voting at all and a legacy news media that is no longer indistinguishable from outright propaganda, people may be ignorant, but they are not stupid. A surprisingly large number of us are perfectly aware that we are being lied to on a daily basis by representatives of most of our basic institutions. The only people who still wonder why so many are attracted to right-wing demagogues are liberals who prefer innocence to acknowledging the madness.

So it’s curious: if the media (for their own mendacious reasons) are not featuring positive economic news, they may actually, in a twisted sense, be reflecting the popular will.

In the midterm election of 2022, the Dems retained the Senate (while losing the House) almost exclusively due to a national revulsion with the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. Large numbers of women, very many of them women of color, had organized to repulse the MAGA crowd. But the Dems offered them almost nothing beyond support for abortion rights. As I had predicted, Joe Manchin and his sidekick Kirsten Sinema, with their constant threats to not support any legislation to the left of Darth Vader, were the most powerful people in Washington.

And what had liberals and progressives received?

Biden vastly increased the war budget over Trumpus’ own record numbers and was devoting much of his time and the nation’s dwindling money to demonizing Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua and Iran with the same old, tired (but still mythically effective) rhetorical combination of American good intentions and fear-mongering. U.S. Navy divers almost certainly sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline (releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases, by the way), and he continued to lie about it.  Dennis Kucinich writes:

The U.S. has successfully muzzled its energy-starved allies in Europe from even objecting to, let alone investigating the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. Europe is stuck with the skyrocketing cost of U.S. supplied replacement fuel…The Biden Administration has done everything it could to incite a hot war directly between the U.S. and Russia, sacrificing Ukrainian youth and the majesty of Ukrainian cities…(and) His intent is to bait China, to try to make Taiwan the next Ukraine. Remember, the U.S. has 800 military bases abroad and China has zero.

At least 313 of those military installations are in East Asia. Like all of his predecessors, Biden regularly lies about U.S. intentions regarding China, whose leaders continually complain and warn him. Johnstone writes:

…only a drooling idiot would believe the world’s most powerful empire is militarily surrounding its top geopolitical rival as an act of defense. So Biden isn’t trying to fool the Chinese government with his “We’re not trying to surround you” schtick — he’s trying to fool you.

Is the media against Biden? The NYT has used the word “unprovoked” 26 times in editorials about Ukraine. The (Gray) Lady doth protest too much, methinks. During an interview last year  Noam Chomsky argued

Right now if…you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine”…It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used …Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked.

This business of warmongering vastly overwhelms any good economic news. People see it, and they’re not stupid, although plenty will succumb to fear. But this prediction by Kucinich really is scary:

Biden, like…Bush in the Iraq War, will seek to burnish his Commander in Chief status as a war-time president, beginning in the later part of 2023. Going into 2024, the American people will be told not to change presidents in the middle of a manufactured war.

He sent 113 billion dollars (by 5/23) to prolong the Ukraine proxy war (even though by August, most voters opposed additional aid) and was pressuring Germany and Japan to re-arm (what could go wrong with that?), without exhibiting anything but a mild intention to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for any of these nuclear-charged risks. His CIA instigated military coups in Peru and Pakistan. His military spending in Somalia alone exceeded the country’s annual tax revenue. He secured a deal to return U.S. forces to the Philippines and complete an arc around China. He offered to give Taiwan $500 million worth of military hardware, further provoking China to more extreme language. In June Secretary of State Blinken explicitly dismissed calls for a ceasefire. In June he made a classic Freudian slip, referring to Putin’s war in “Iraq”, a year after George W. Bush made the same gaffe. In July, he agreed to send cluster bombs (banned by over 120 nations) to Ukraine. In August he requested $24 billion more.

The military is planning to hold joint war games with Israel in late 2023, including one that would simulate an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Did I say “nuclear”? For the first time in decades, the mass media were openly discussing nuclear war and the generals were talking about “winning” one. You can’t make this stuff up. Indeed, Biden ignored (or implicitly approved of) an Air Force general who told his troops to prepare for war with China in two years. He increased the budget of Trumpus’ ridiculous “Space Force” to $24.5 billion and announced that the U.S. would deploy nukes to South Korea and F-16s to Ukraine.

Where was the summit held? In Hiroshima. You can’t make this stuff up.

Human rights? Can anyone forget that after promising that the U.S. would no longer sell weapons to the Saudis, he fist-bumped with the execrable murderer Mohammad Bin Salman and then cut a a $582 million arms deal with them?  Can anyone forget that he hosted the Indian authoritarian Narendra Modi and the war criminal Netanyahu, removed the Jewish Defense League from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and assured the Yemenis, Egyptians and countless other authoritarian states of continued military support. His State Department caved in to Israeli pressure and removed its nomination of an independent expert to serve on a human rights commission. Then the administration quietly backed Israel’s May, 2023 assault on Gaza (seen now as a minor blip in comparison to the October genocide).

In May of 2023, the administration launched what it billed as the “first-ever U.S. national strategy” to counter anti-Semitism, a high-level attempt to further ostracize and censor support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israel’s ethno-religious supremacy, occupation and apartheid. He bombed Syria (despite a massive earthquake) after U.S. troops (in the country for several years without Syria’s permission) were attacked. He drastically increased tensions in the Persian Gulf by ordering the Navy to illegally confiscate Iranian oil on the high seas. He has not reversed Trumpus’ trashing of the Iran nuclear deal (indeed, Iran states emphatically that Biden has retained Trumpus’ “maximum pressure” sanctions — discouraging even legal, humanitarian trade), nor has he reversed his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. A year after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, the Biden administration said it would not return any of the $7 billion in Afghan central bank assets that it had commandeered upon leaving. It also extended the travel ban on North Korea, preventing tens of thousands of Korean Americans from visiting relatives.

The Cuban people are suffering unprecedented food shortages. Their government has announced that the Biden administration, “…of all those that the Cuban Revolution has known, is the one that has most aggressively and effectively applied the economic blockade.”

Remember the prison at Guantánamo? It still holds 30 men, many of whom have never been charged with a crime, and the little transparency that had once existed for media coverage has dwindled to no access at all. Remember the War on Terror? You can be excused if you don’t, since the empire shifted seamlessly seven years ago to a focus on the new Cold War. Regardless, Biden quietly extended the 9/11 state of emergency in September 2023.

While criticizing the arrest of an American journalist in Russia, he continues to demand the extradition of Julian Assange for the crime of publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes. The White House disinvited a Muslim city mayor who has never been accused of any wrongdoing from its annual Eid al-Fitr celebration because his name is on the federal terrorism watchlist, which has grown to over 1.5 million names, over 98% of which are Muslim. Biden continued, like his predecessors, to ignore the 1986 International Court of Justice verdict requiring the U.S. to pay war reparations to Nicaragua. He nominated the corrupt war criminal and perjurer Elliott Abrams, who had most recently overseen Trumpus’ sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, to another government post. Then he promoted Victoria Nuland, (who, under Obama, had been the primary architect of the 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine, which paved the way to the current war), to acting deputy secretary of state.

Sanctions kill children. The U.N. defines sanctions as collective punishment. This is a war crime. American sanctions were blocking aid to Syria as thousands were dying. Biden promised to maintain the State Department’s authority over firearms exports but neglected to reverse a Trumpus order that had weakened it. Of 84 countries codified as autocracies, the U.S. sold weapons to at least 48, or 57%, of them, in two years.

In October 2023 he rejected the opportunity to look like a statesman. Instead, he doubled down on his unequivocal support for Israel’s war crimes and mass slaughter in Gaza, promising like Obama to reinforce – after one day of bombardment — the sixth largest army in the world. Armaments manufacturers were gleeful.

In October 2023 he rejected the opportunity to look like a statesman. Instead, he doubled down on his unequivocal support for Israel’s war crimes and mass slaughter in Gaza, promising like Obama to reinforce – after one day of bombardment — the sixth largest army in the world. Armaments manufacturers were gleeful.

Immigration? His immigration stance mirrored a Trump policy that the courts had already blocked. Deportation of children increased by 30%. During his four-year term, Trumpus had used Title 42 to remove 500,000 asylum seekers. In under a year, Biden deported almost 700,000. The U.S. rejected over 90% of Afghans seeking to immigrate, including relatives of those who had aided the occupation of their country. Two years later, thousands of Afghans were in processing sites in the Middle East and the Balkans under American control, yet the administration refused to disclose basic information about their status. It accepted 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, while deporting thousands of Haitians. In one nine-day period, the administration expelled 4,000 of them, including hundreds of families with children, without allowing them to seek asylum. Altogether, Biden deported 20,000 Haitians in his first year, nearly as many as were deported during the previous 20 years. He criticized Texas and Florida for sending thousands of migrants to northern states as his administration prepared to finish building the border wall. In October 2023, Homeland Security waived over two dozen laws to expedite construction. The Border Patrol is a flouting a federal court order mandating the humane treatment of migrants. It is legally obligated to provide anyone in custody for more than 48 hours with a bed and blanket, showers, adequate food, potable water and medical assessments. Instead, it has been keeping dozens of them in outdoor concrete pens in both extreme cold and extreme heat. Biden implicitly insulted Muslim Americans by admitting Israel into the U.S. visa waiver program, allowing Israelis to enter the country without visas.

Racial justice? He wanted another $37 billion for police. He asked the Supreme Court to leave the racist Insular cases intact, thus ensuring that millions of dark-skinned island citizens would be unable to vote. The Justice Department accused Black liberation organizers of being Russian agents. The number of federal prisoners held in solitary confinement increased significantly. Biden doubled down on the failed war on drugs and refused to veto a Republican bill to block criminal justice reform in Washington D.C.

Public health? In 2022, Biden announced a $6 billion government bailout to “rescue” nuclear power plants at risk of closing. His pick for the director of the NIH has deep ties to Big Pharma. In the ongoing farce of the “debt ceiling” debate, he proposed deep budget cuts — not of course to the military, but to the usual domestic programs, and with the usual Calvinist hatred of the poor. Margaret Kimberley writes:

He said that he would accept republican demands that Medicaid and SNAP benefit recipients be required to work at least 20 hours per week. According to the Congressional Budget Office some 600,000 people would lose health coverage and 275,000 people would lose SNAP benefits every month if these rules go into effect.

Global warming? Biden approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than Trumpus had in his first two years, after having promised “no new drilling, period” as a presidential candidate. U.S. crude oil production is expected to reach a new record in 2023. He threatened to call for a windfall profits tax on record oil company profits but did nothing. He approved a mining project that will obliterate a sacred Apache religious site, while corporate prosecutions hit a new low. His Agriculture Department is forcing Mexico to accept American GMO corn. His EPA awarded $1.2 billion for two unproven carbon capture projects, a key focus of oil and gas lobbyists. In September of 2023, research group Oil Change International warned:

…planned oil and gas expansion in the U.S.— the largest historical contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions — accounts for more than a third of prospective global oil and gas expansion through 2050. Much of the U.S. expansion is tied to fracking.

The report blamed the Biden administration for “pledging climate leadership” while simultaneously facilitating “the continued expansion of fossil fuel production…”

Finance? Socialism for the rich? He bailed out the risky deposits of two failing banks, one of which had given huge bonuses to its executives hours before it collapsed. He angered organized labor by stopping the railroad worker strike. Then, a week after a train derailment and environmental disaster in Ohio, his Justice Department was backing the responsible corporation in a Supreme Court case that would make it easier to block pending and future lawsuits. He approved a massive oil drilling project In Alaska. His new Chief of Staff had previously helped oversee two health care companies embroiled in Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations, which they had paid tens of millions to settle.

He kept Trumpus’ repeal of net neutrality in place. He allowed Medicare Advantage plans to continue overbilling the government in the short term after insurance companies lobbied aggressively against proposed rule changes. He insulted progressives by elevating long-time Bernie Sanders basher Neera Tanden to domestic policy advisor.

Prison reform? Over 90% of people held by Customs Enforcement in July were locked up in for-profit facilities, despite an executive order from Biden to phase out federal private prison contracts for immigrant detention.

Corporate Crime? Trumpus had prosecuted the fewest white-collar crimes of any president (94 in 2020, down from a peak of 296 in 2000). But under Biden, just 90 corporations either pleaded guilty or were found guilty of federal crimes in 2021.

Perhaps most importantly (though certainly no surprise), despite the constant threat of Republican intransigence and blockage of even mild climate or policing legislation, he showed no interest in pursuing any systemic changes that might encourage a real Democratic majority, from statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to ending the Insular laws and the Senate filibuster to increasing the size of the Supreme Court.

When I say “he”, of course, I mean the royal “He”. For his entire adult life, Biden the man has been a servant of, or at best a spokesperson — a press secretary — for much more powerful forces (and perhaps, as Patrick Lawrence argues, as the deeply corrupt head of a crime family that extorted “tens of millions of dollars” from Ukrainian politicians in 2016). Biden has also followed Trumpus in delaying the legally mandated full release of the JFK assassination records.

Call them the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex, or simply capitalism. From this perspective, his policies for addressing the four most pressing issues for the whole planet — climate change, population displacement, the centralization of wealth and the threat of nuclear war — are essentially no different from those of any of his predecessors of the past half century, including Trumpus. Most Democrats knew this; at the time of the State of the Union address, 58% of them wanted someone else to run for President in 2024. When even the most innocent of us temporarily climb out of our denial, we tend to agree with Noam Chomsky:

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

As Tony Soprano used to say, Whatahya gonna do? For some, the alternative to despair is to plunge (back) into the world of activism, to support progressive causes and candidates (at least local ones), to make the beloved community. Some will go further into spiritual work, knowing that the peace we seek out there must first be found within. Others, such as this writer, choose to walk the fine line between revealing the darkness around us and creating images of the light we have not yet allowed ourselves to see.

Read Part Five here.

Barry’s Blog # 421: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Three

Before we begin to look at 2024 let’s consider three concluding questions about 2020, because like any repressed and unaddressed themes, they will threaten to bite the Dems in the butt this time around as well.

First Question: Why was Joe Biden nominated?

Long before the primaries it was clear that Biden had no charisma, no base of voters, and no chance of beating Trumpus. But as I argued, the corporate Democrats feared their own left wing (even as the public favored it) more than it feared any Republicans. They feared the insurance companies more than the 69% of the public who supported Medicare For All; they feared the warmongers more than the peacemakers; and they feared the petrochemical industry more than they cared for the future of their own children. 

Second Question: Why did Biden win (really: why did Trumpus lose)?

1 – With the most profoundly unpopular and deeply reviled president in American history, it still took a pandemic with 300,000 dead (by the time of the election) and an economic depression with forty million out of work to elect such an uninspiring warmonger as Biden. I’d like to find a way to factor in the impact of voter suppression and computer fraud. But all we have are (quite reliable, in my view) allegations, rather than actual numbers; so we’re left with the “facts” that political scientists have gathered. In that innocent universe, it seems that with no pandemic, Trumpus would be in his second term, as this study suggests. Biden’s most persuasive argument, once again, will be simply that he is not Trumpus.

2 – A second major factor is the work of people like Mike Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO, who concluded that the chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. As early as March, he organized a national campaign to counter most of the Republican efforts to suppress the vote. In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them. The result was that 108 million people voted early, nearly 70% of all votes cast. Those early ballots (and millions of other votes cast in voting booths on election day in some states) were all paper ballots that could not be compromised or flipped by corrupted machines (as they certainly were in many states).

However, despite Biden’s popular vote margin of seven million votes and his 306 to 232 Electoral College victory, this was a real squeaker. He won three critical states by a combined margin of 43,560 votes – Arizona (10,457 votes), Georgia (12,636) and Wisconsin (20,467). Those three states account for 37 electoral votes. If Trumpus had won those states, the election would have ended in a tie, 269 to 269. If so, the House would have determined the winner, with each state delegation getting one vote, and Trumpus would have won.

Certainly, an astonishingly large number of people still preferred Trumpus. But he did not receive 74 million votes. His official numbers were greatly swelled (and Biden’s greatly reduced) by those same corrupted machines in the 26 states ruled by Republicans. We will never know the actual figures, but it’s clear that Biden won by even more than the official numbers. However, this leads to a deeper question:

Third Question: Why did the Democrats perform so badly in the House and Senate?

Why didn’t the biggest turnout in history sweep the Republicans away? Why didn’t the Democrats clobber this buffoon and his allies in massive landslides at every level? What happened to the expected “blue wave”? Why (once again) were the polls so wrong? Why did millions of people apparently split their ballots, rejecting Trumpus but re-electing Republicans who supported his policies?

Despite the heroic efforts of Stacey Abrams and countless others, voter suppression was the deal-clincher. The biggest turnout in history was still much smaller than the numbers of people who actually wanted to vote or thought that their votes had been counted. We know for example that over 300,000 ballots were checked into the mail system but not checked out of it. As Greg Palast reminds us, 22% of all mail-in votes never get counted.

And there were other factors.

1 – Old-fashioned fraud and deceit: Can any reasonable person believe that over a million Floridians voted for raising the minimum wage but also supported Trumpus over Biden? In Kentucky, as I showed here, Mitch McConnell had under 40% approval on election day, but beat Amy McGrath (who received more votes than Biden in in 119 of 120 counties) by 19 points. And, we were told, McConnell won by landslides in heavily Democratic areas, most of them using the easily hackable ES&S machines, not Dominion machines. In South Carolina, Lindsay Graham won in the same dubious manner. The pattern was repeated in Maine, Texas, Iowa and Florida, and probably in other states.

In 2007, by the way, California sued ES&S, alleging the company had sold 972 machines to five counties with hardware changes that the state had never authorized. Two years later, ES&S paid a $3.25 million settlement. Chump change, of course, compared to Fox News’ 2023 payment to Dominion for $787.5 million. But it does provide background. Those Secretaries of State certainly knew where to shop for voting machines.

Does ES&S stand for “Every slime-ball in the State”?

I suggest that election commissioners in most of those 26 Republican-controlled states gamed the electronic voting machines to flip five percent of the votes — not enough to get the media’s attention, but more than enough to win elections in many close races and more than enough to win the House. If we were to subtract 5% of Trumpus’ national totals – perhaps four million – and add them back into the other column we might have a clearer idea of Biden’s victory. And we’d have a clearer sense of what happened in the Senate and House.

Going forward, there have been two unanticipated results of Trumpus’ constant predictions – and then claims – of voter fraud. One is that millions of right wingers (mostly residing in the old Confederate states) have been confirmed in their sense of victimhood. Rather than retreating back into apathy, they received a new “Lost Cause” to organize around. The second is that once again, liberals find themselves on the defensive and have been forced to insist that there was no computer fraud, thus repressing, once again, the issue of the massive electronic crimes that actually did occur and will certainly occur next year.

2 – Apathy and voters’ distaste for moderate Dems. About 67% of eligible voters cast ballots, but that still means a third – eighty million adults – did not. A majority of these non-voters believe it makes no difference who is elected president and that things will go on just as they did before. They also, as I wrote throughout the campaign, tend to be Latino. Only 52% of Latinos surveyed said they were registered to vote, compared to 80% of whites and 78% of Blacks.

A strong endorsement of Medicare For All and the Green New Deal would have made a major difference. Why? Because progressives won almost all their races, while many of the Dem losses were by moderates and freshman congresspeople in essentially blue districts. And there was much vote-splitting, in which people voted against Trumpus (rather than for Biden) and left the rest of their ballots empty. Susan Collins, for example, won by 55,000 votes in Maine. But 50,000 voters who voted for the top of the ticket failed to cast a vote in Maine’s Senate race. Early in the Georgia (pre-runoff) count, Jon Ossoff trailed David Perdue by 90,000 votes. But 98,000 people who voted for President failed to vote in that Senate race.

3 – Ignorance: The government had provided enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks (with  no taxes to pay for them) to millions of households. Partially as a result, 40% of polled voters thought they were better off financially than they were four years ago and apparently saw little reason to vote for change.

4 – Fear: The Dems allowed the Repubs to reframe the Black Lives Matter protests and the “defund the police” issue into the old standby of “law and order.”  As a result, Trumpus won a higher percentage of white women than he did in 2016. And although 55% of registered young voters turned out, a much higher number – 65% – of elderly people responded to the fearmongering and supported policies that might protect their investments and privileges but would deprive their own grandchildren of a future. Once again, we find ourselves in the realm of mythology – the killing of the children.

The Inauguration: The King is Dead? Long Live the King?

So where does this whole election cycle – and the $14 billion that was spent on it – fit into our understanding of myth? The narrative at the base of the American story is that of the killing of the children. What lies on top of that within our psyches is our story of American innocence. So I refer back to the questions I ask in interviews and book talks: When did you lose your innocence? – and – When did you lose it again?

When innocence is the foundation of a belief system, when a culture refuses to offer its young people the initiatory rituals that affirm their unique gifts and permanently erase their childhood innocence, people have little choice but to live lives of perpetual childishness, with a child’s attachment to simplistic ideas, mind-altering substances and vicarious violence.

When the inevitable tears in the fabric of the myth of innocence appear, they quickly close back up. So each new disillusionment, no matter how old we are or how often it happens, feels like the first time. Only the most naïve among us should be surprised to see that Nancy Pelosi’s initial statement about the Capitol insurrection was: We’ve really lost our innocence.

After five years of non-stop lies, insults, boasts, threats, buffoonery, immigrant bashing, misogyny, racist provocation and gratuitous cruelty, Trumpus had so alienated so many of us that exhaustion, massive anxiety and a collective PTSD had set in even before Covid and long before January 6^th. Brand Trumpus was so toxic to all but his cult followers and those scared white, suburban women that it actually had the effect of building up Brand Biden. By inauguration day, liberal America had convinced itself that it now had a kindly, religious, poetry-spouting, emotionally accessible, purposeful leader.

The sentiment was authentic because we were so desperate to believe. Watching the inauguration, we breathed a collective sigh of relief, even as we noticed (if we were paying attention) that one of the invited guests on the podium listening to Biden denounce fascist violence was Carlos Vecchio, who had fled to the United States to escape incitement of violence charges in Venezuela and then posed in the Oval Office with Trumpus.

So what did Biden do in his first two years as President? We’ll see in Part Four. (Hint: no surprises here).