Innehållsförteckning för February 08/15, 2021 från The Nation

THE CHAOTIC AND CRIMINAL FINAL WEEKS OF DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY GAVE many of his accomplices a chance to recast themselves as heroes. A spate of last-minute resignations allowed administration officials like former attorney general Bill Barr to whitewash their long history of complicity and present themselves as brave truth-speakers. Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent four years shielding Trump from congressional oversight, basked in positive press for finally voicing some criticism when the outgoing president incited his followers to storm the US Capitol. These newly minted anti-Trumpers are all, to borrow a phrase from the writer Anand Giridharadas, arsonists trying to rebrand themselves as firefighters. Among these fake heroes are the social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and Twitch, which have all banned Trump and his campaign…

THEY ARE STILL DECIDING WHAT TO CALL THE events of January 6. Riot? Insurrection? Coup? From the Wilkes mob and the Gordon mob in 18th century London to our own Seattle and Portland mobs, hyperbole and euphemism have fought a close contest in this area. Consider two stock phrases that look synonymous but have come to mean very different things. “Law and order” may convey the preconditions of a free society, but the use of that slogan—by Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968 and its successors in 1988 and 2016—gave the words a dubious odor. Repression of speech and assembly and ordinary freedom of action could be hidden under the seemingly harmless phrase. Yet no such opprobrium has ever attached to the instruction to abide by “the rule of law.” Why…

40% Percentage increase in the number of guns purchased in 2020, compared with 2019 3.9M Number of guns sold in June 2020, the height of the Black Lives Matter protests—the highest monthly figure in 22 years 58% Percentage increase in the number of guns purchased by Black Americans in 2020, compared with 2019 40% Share of 2020 gun buyers who were first-time owners 995 Number of people in the US shot and killed by the police in 2020 $5.8M Amount spent by the National Rifle Association on the January 6 Senate runoffs in Georgia 11 Chapter of the US Bankruptcy Code under which the NRA filed for protection on January 15—María Jesús Mora…

WHEN DONALD TRUMP TOOK OFFICE IN 2017, HE INSTALLED A number of pro-business appointees to lead federal agencies tasked with protecting workers’ rights. But for the first two years of his administration, things continued more or less as normal at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the country’s sole workplace civil rights watchdog. Ami Sanghvi, now a lawyer at the Marek Law Firm, started as a trial attorney at the EEOC just after Barack Obama became president. Yet even during Trump’s first two years, she said, the agency was able “to do pretty great work.” Then, in May 2019, corporate lawyer Janet Dhillon was sworn in as Trump’s choice for the EEOC’s chair, and Sanghvi soon found the kinds of cases she could pursue restricted. It’s part of why she decided…

We are trapped in traffic beneath the overpass,and the man in his story trembles on the edge of an overpass eight hundred miles west of here. Here,I have not tried to die for some years now. The point of his story is the callsomeone makes to nearby truck drivers. Together, they gather beneath the man to form a net of big rigsand wait for as long as it takes for a person to reconsider the impossibility of tomorrow. I’ve knownthe mangled shape the mouth makes begging someone not to die. Which is different from begging her to live.My husband’s mouth, I think, makes this shape now. All my life I thought I was hard to love.…

No Hope or Change Re “Biden’s Picks: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” by Robert L. Borosage [Dec. 28, 2020/Jan. 4, 2021]: Joe Biden made it clear from the very beginning of his campaign that his intent was to return the country to its pre-Trump status quo, not move the needle forward one iota. Of course, the pandemic has forced him to make some alterations to his program, but no one should be so naive as to expect any substantive or fundamental change to the root causes of the problems baked into our capitalist system—problems that Trump et al. simply exploited, as the article points out so well. LIN KAATZ CHARY An Open Question I very much enjoyed Peter E. Gordon’s article about Theodor Adorno, “The Scars of Democracy”…

AFTER THE STORMING OF THE US CAPITOL BY A right-wing mob on January 6, lawmakers and pundits are pushing again to expand the War on Terrorism. The day after the siege, The Wall Street Journal reported that, as president, Joe Biden would “make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism,” noting that “he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists.” In the Senate, Dick Durbin plans to reintroduce a version of the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act that he put forward in 2019. With deadly right-wing violence looming ever larger, new domestic terrorism statutes are likely just around the corner. But this is a terrible idea. To understand why, we must first contend with the reasons this issue exists…

NO ONE IN THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN TREATED WITH more unearned grace and deference over these past four years than Donald Trump’s supporters. Their anger is always justified, their failures someone else’s, and their accountability for their own actions nonexistent. However horrific the crimes and cruelties they commit, it’s the rest of us who are guilty—of not offering them enough empathy and compassion. And even as their conspiracy-fueled paranoia and racial fascism have festered, they’ve been coddled via narratives that paint them as good, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth patriots. But patriotism, to modify a phrase, is the first refuge of white supremacist terrorists. And the portrayal of Trump supporters as a monolith of uneducated, small-town rubes duped into “voting against their interests,” as the saying goes, is a classist projection of…

AT LEAST FOUR MEN ARMED WITH MACHETES AND CLUBS BROKE INTO Anne Johnson’s home. They forced her husband and 11-year-old son into the bedroom and kept Anne and her teenage daughters in a separate room. To this day, she doesn’t know for certain if the men who raped her, her husband, and her daughters were her coworkers. “They spoke the local language,” Anne testified, but “they blindfolded us so we could not see who they were.” By 2007, when the attack took place, Anne and her husband, Makori (their names are pseudonyms to protect the family from retaliation), had lived and worked for more than a decade on a Kenyan tea plantation owned by Unilever, the London-based household-goods giant known for such brands as Lipton Tea, Dove, Axe, Knorr, and…

OMELAS, THE UTOPIAN SETTING OF URSULA K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” is built on deception. Le Guin introduces the city on a day of celebration, dwelling on its merry crowds, gorgeous architecture, and picturesque proximity to a bay and snow-capped mountains. As the narrator roves through this vista, describing the sights with pride and wonder, the admiration grows defensive. “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?” the narrator asks. “Then let me describe one more thing.” The deception ends, and we’re taken to an emaciated and abused child incarcerated in a dirt cellar. The child is barred from leaving this prison, but everyone ignores its misery; they believe its suffering is necessary for Omelas to thrive. Those…

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional law professor who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, knew immediately that Donald Trump’s incitement to insurrection on January 6 necessitated a second impeachment. That clarity led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to name him as the lead manager for impeachment in the expected Senate trial. Raskin, who is grieving the December 31 suicide of his 25-year-old son, Tommy, and had family members with him at the Capitol when it was attacked, has been a profile in courage and grace in the first jarring days of 2021. We spoke on the day the House of Representatives voted, 232-197, to impeach Trump. —John Nichols JN: Why, in your view, did the January 6 attack on the Capitol necessitate a second impeachment? JR: We came dangerously close…

THE WHITE SUPREMACIST ATTACK ON THE US Capitol on January 6 temporarily obscured the titanic achievement of Georgia Democrats the night before: defeating right-wing Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the state’s runoff elections, electing the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and giving Democrats control of the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris poised to break any 50-50 tie. (Take that, racists.) Progressives had no time to celebrate, though, and it was almost as if that were the point. Of course, the hard-won result in Georgia did not inspire the deadly and seditious riot; we know the violence had been planned in plain sight for weeks, if not months, on social media and elsewhere. But certainly the victories, by a Black preacher and a Jewish documentary filmmaker, helped…

IN THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11, PRESIDENT George W. Bush established the Department of Homeland Security, the largest federal law enforcement organization and the third-largest federal employer in the country. The DHS boasts more than 200,000 employees—in addition to over 60,000 law enforcement officers—and encompasses agencies like the Secret Service and the Federal Protective Service. How did this sprawling national security apparatus fail to prevent a crisis that represents the closest we’ve come to a violent occupation of the Capitol since the War of 1812? Law enforcement documents obtained exclusively by The Nation through open-records requests provide some clues. Last year, I undertook a tortuous back-and-forth with law enforcement agencies all over the country. (In one case, I even had to file suit against the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in…

Dear Family, Friends, Colleagues, Fellow Scribblers, Brothers & Sisters, Comrades: We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton. Feel free to contact us with any questions as you may have. In solidarity, Carol & Steve Carol Blue-Hitchens, Executor of the Estate of Christopher Hitchens Steve Wasserman, Literary Agent WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THIS? As I have never met, at least as far as I can recall, any of the principals involved—neither the deceased,…

Join the conversation, every Thursday, on the Start Making Sense podcast. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE O’DONNELL LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE…