Jonathan P. Baird

Another football season is drawing to a close and I think there has been less mention of CTE – chronic traumatic encephalopathy – this season. CTE is the neurodegenerative condition affecting football players who have suffered from too many head hits.

In 2021, there were two stories which illustrate the continuing nature of the CTE tragedy. Vincent Jackson and Philip Adams, both former NFL players, killed themselves. Both were in their thirties, Jackson was 38 and Adams was 32. After their deaths, both received diagnoses of stage 2 CTE, a supposedly milder form of the disorder.

Jackson died alone in a hotel room. It appeared he drank himself to death. The coroner found alcoholic cardiomyopathy, a heart disease caused by alcohol abuse. As for Adams, he murdered six people before he shot himself. Their stories are a stark reminder of the dark side of football that receives insufficient scrutiny.

Jackson was a three-time Pro Bowler and he had six years where he gained over 1,000 yards as a wide receiver. He had a twelve year career, earning the nickname “Invincible”. He was a supremely talented athlete and widely considered a great guy, an NFL role model.

Along with his wife Lindsey, Jackson planned to co-write children’s book. He was the devoted father of four kids. He also went into business and had a thriving portfolio of investments. His wife said,

“His whole plan in the NFL was to set himself up to not have these struggles.”

She reported that around the time his career ended in 2016, Vincent started forgetting conversations. He started showing symptoms of depression. His attention span had diminished. By 2018, she said Vincent was becoming paranoid and he started shutting the blinds when he was at home. He described his brain as becoming “fuzzy”. He turned to alcohol as he felt it cleared his thinking.

Jackson was aware of CTE. In 2015, he saw the movie Concussion about the doctor who first diagnosed the condition among NFL players. He refused to allow any of his children to play tackle football until they reached high school. Jackson minimized any concerns of brain injury as he never received a concussion diagnosis. He tried to hide both his declining cognitive health and his alcoholism.

Dr. Ann McKee, an expert on CTE, based at Boston University School of Medicine, studied Jackson’’s brain after his death and diagnosed CTE. She said the brain had “mild frontal lobe atrophy” and a “split in the internal membrane” with multiple lesions in the frontal cortex.

The New York Times reports that according to the CTE Center at Boston University 20% of players found to have CTE never had a diagnosed concussion. The CTE Center does not see concussions as a reliable indicator of CTE. They would argue that a more direct association are the thousands of smaller subconcussive hits Jackson sustained during his football career.

Jackson’s alcohol use was a destructive coping mechanism for his cognitive decline. He drank to feel better but he could not stop.

Philip Adams did not have Vincent Jackson’s superstar career. He was a defensive back who played for six different teams during his NFL career from 2010-2015. His career was closer to the NFL norm for players who were in the journeyman category. He played in 78 games.

Before he murdered six people, Adams’ family said he had complained of excruciating pain, memory loss and difficulty sleeping. Adams’ sister told USA Today that her brother’s “mental health degraded fast and terribly bad”.

Dr. McKee also studied Adams’ brain after his death. She found severe frontal lobe damage, similar to the brain damage of Aaron Hernandez. Adams’ behavior had shifted dramatically near the end of his life. His temper had escalated and he had neglected personal hygiene. Dr. McKee did not think Adams simply snapped. She said his behavioral and cognitive issues “appeared to be a cumulative progressive impairment”.

The Adams family released a statement that said, in part,

“After going through medical records from his football career, we do know that he was desperately seeking help from the NFL but was denied all claims due to his inability to remember things and to handle seemingly simple tasks, such as traveling hours away to see doctors and going through extensive evaluations.”

Adams died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. It is not clear why he murdered six people before he shot himself. The investigating sheriff found multiple guns, ammunition and writings which he deemed “incoherent” at Adams’ residence.

A few observations are in order. The deeper problem that has been increasingly identified in football is the cumulative effect of repetitive head hits – not just concussions. Both the examples of Jackson and Adams speak to that.

In the realm of risk reduction, pro football could do much more to protect the players’ health. The NFL could shorten the season and get rid of Thursday and Monday night games. It could build in more bye weeks. It is no secret that many players hate not having enough time to recover from games. All the scheduling is about maximizing profit at the players’ expense.

Playing less does not rule out brain injury but it might lessen harm.

Then there is improving football helmet technology. There is a genuine dispute about whether helmet design can be improved. Dr. David Camarillo of Stanford, a nationally respected bioengineer, believes he could design a helmet that could reduce concussions by 75%. On the other hands, opposing experts point out that more sophisticated helmets do not do much about the accumulation of subconcussive hits. They argue that safety should mean no head hits.

Science could help these issues if CTE could be diagnosed while players are living. Now CTE can only be diagnosed through an autopsy. However, in December, scientists at Boston University produced a study that shows MRIs may soon be able to detect CTE while people are alive. That would be a huge breakthrough for early detection.

Finally there are more radical reform idea like moving from tackle football to flag football. Maybe football needs to be reimagined in a less lethal design.

The profit system is a meat grinder. Even with the NFL concussion settlement, the NFL still tries to minimize responsibility. More attention must be paid to the well-being of players after football. Too often, permanently impaired ex-players are left on their own to fend. Ex-players should not be treated like cars with an expired warranty.

I am a Sarah Silverman fan. I have watched her comedy, read her memoir, The Bedwetter, and I regularly listen to her podcast. As readers may know, Sarah is a New Hampshire native, born in Bedford, and she grew up in the southern tier of our state.

She and Seth Rogen recently did voices in a new animated comedy series, Santa Inc., that is streaming on HBO Max. It is made for adults – not children. Rogen plays the voice of Santa Claus and Sarah plays an elf who wants to become the first female and Jewish Santa. It is dirty and funny and I would describe it as in the Bad Santa tradition of Billy Bob Thornton. It will offend many.

Still, when the Santa Inc. trailer uploaded in November what was shocking was not the comedy. Santa Inc. received a torrent of ugly and creepy reactions from Jew-haters and Holocaust deniers. YouTube disabled the dislikes when the count went over 25,000 comments. Many seemed to dislike the idea of two Jews doing a movie about Santa.

The haters coordinated a troll campaign, brigading Santa Inc.. The response made me think about the origins of anti-semitism in the United States and why this is happening now. Is the antisemitism reflected in incidents like the reaction to Santa Inc. something qualitatively new or is it a continuation of longer-term history?

The United States has largely been a welcoming place for Jews since the beginning. When the Jews of Newport Rhode Island wrote George Washington a letter of congratulations on being elected President, Washington responded:

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy, a policy worthy of imitation.”

Of course, early on, Jews made up an infinitesimally small percentage of the American population. In 1776, there were about 1,000 Jews in America; by 1840, 15,000; and by 1880, 250,000, which was one-half of one percent of the population. Unlike in Europe, Jews benefited from our constitution that had a First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom.

After 1880, things changed dramatically for American Jews. Between 1880-1920, two million Jews fled Eastern Europe and Russia to escape pogroms and state-sponsored terror. And Jews were certainly not the only immigrants. Many millions came to the U.S..

The immigration influx ran headlong into American xenophobia and racism. In 1894, the Immigration Restriction League was founded out of a belief that Anglo-Saxon tradition was being drowned by a flood of racially inferior people from southern and eastern Europe.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, WASP upper class elites looked down on Jews as a greedy, cunning and dishonest people. Protestant and Catholic religious leaders promoted stereotypes of Jews as Christ-killers. This was the heyday of Christian antisemitism before the Christian churches started recognizing their responsibility for acquiescing in the promotion of hate.

Although there was an American tradition of tolerance, antisemitism became more entrenched in all sectors of American society.

In this era, scientific racism and eugenics were used to justify immigration restrictions. A group of intellectual influencers, close to ruling circles, that included Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Edward Ripley, argued against interracial mixing and against immigration. They argued that immigrants brought crime, illiteracy and political and labor radicalism. Jews, particularly, were associated with labor militancy.

Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge all spoke favorably of Grant.

Grant believed Anglo-Saxons were being displaced by highly undesirable immigrants, particularly Jews, whom he saw as worthless. In his very influential book, The Passing of the Great Race, he outlined the intellectual justification for the 1924 Immigration Act which greatly limited Jewish immigration to America. It was this restrictive law which precluded more European Jews from being able to obtain asylum during the Holocaust.

The gist of the book was that swarms of Jews and other racially inferior people were the cause of the passing of the great white race. Grant’s book was a favorite of Hitler’s. Hitler considered the book his bible.

In the 1930’s and early 1940’s, prominent Americans like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin all contributed to an antisemitic upsurge. In his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, Ford published a long-running series The International Jew, claiming there was a vast Jewish conspiracy seeking world domination.

Groups like the German-American Bund sold virulently antisemitic newspapers in cities around the country. In Boston, Irish-Catholic gangs organized “Jew hunts” where a half a dozen young men would drive to a Jewish neighborhood, pile out of a car, beat up Jews and split. Boston had a reputation as the most antisemitic city in the country.

While the oppression was much milder than what African Americans experienced, antisemitism was, to some extent, institutionalized. There were limits for how many Jews would be accepted at upper echelon colleges and universities. There were also restrictions blocking Jews from getting into law firms, medical practices, private clubs, and exclusive residential areas.

Public opinion polls from the 1940’s present an unflattering picture of American antisemitism. A public opinion survey found that 63% of Americans believed that Jews as a group had “objectionable traits”; a majority believed German Jews were wholly or partly to blame for the Nazis’ persecution of them: and a third to a half of the American public would have sympathized with or actively supported an antisemitic campaign. No more than 30% would have opposed it.

After World War II, I do think awareness of the Holocaust changed the thinking of many Americans and moved antisemitism to the sidelines. The Holocaust was such an enormous atrocity that it discredited Jew haters and shrank their visibility and presence.

Over the last fifty years, I would mention the novel, The Turner Diaries, written in 1978, by William Pierce. It has been like scripture to U.S. white nationalists and antisemites. The Anti-Defamation League identified it as “probably the most widely-read book among far right extremists”. It is the most popular antisemitic read since Mein Kampf.

The novel argues that Jews use people of color to conceal their plans for domination. Pierce deemed blacks as not fully human and incapable of action on their own. He saw Jews as the puppet masters.

The Turner Diaries was the forerunner of the Great Replacement theory currently espoused by the far right in America and Europe. The Great Replacement theory is not simply a crazy ideological construct. It has led to attacks on Jews. When the neo-nazis in Charlottesville were chanting “Jews will not replace us”, that was no accident.

I do see antisemitism as getting worse in America and according to public opinion surveys, 82% of American Jews would agree with that assessment. The historical background I described creates context where antisemitic ideas have been insufficiently repudiated. Rather than confronting and rejecting antisemitism, Americans seem to prefer pretending it is not happening.

There are some indicators I would mention. According to the FBI, American Jews are subject to the most hate crimes of any religious group, despite making up only 2% of the U.S. population. Since 2016, there has been a significant increase both in antisemitic incidents and hate crimes more generally.

Among Jews, there is evidence that many have changed behavior out of fear. According to a new report from the American Jewish Committee, 39% of American Jews avoid posting content online that would reveal their Jewish identity. 23% refrain from publicly wearing, carrying or displaying items that might enable others to identify them as Jewish. Synagogues and other Jewish-identified institutions have increased security.

I think former President Trump kick-started the hate. Hate crimes spiked in the days after his election in 2016 and have conspicuously continued. For me though, Charlottesvile was the watershed. Trump’s refusal to clearly and unambiguously condemn the white supremacists and neo-nazis who made up part of his base boosted the racists and Jew-haters. The antisemites saw that as a win.

Kenneth Stern of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate has said:

“Antisemitism thrives best historically when people are given ammunition to act on an impulse to see an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.”

That was the Trump presidency. Trump ran against “the other”, especially immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter and Antifa. He gave license to nutty conspiracy theories like QAnon which draw on antisemitic themes like the blood libel.

One other factor that must be mentioned in the worsening of antisemitism is the role of the internet and social media. Online communities connect haters from far and wide. Tomer Persico from Haaretz writes:

“The web connects oddballs and fundamentalists, and it gives extremists the feeling that they are part of a broad movement. A rising, seething wave of toxicity is being ridden by unscrupulous politicians who are aggrandizing the feeling of white victimhood.”

The reaction to Santa Inc. is a sad testament to the increase of Jew-hatred. Americans of all political stripes and persuasions need to publicly stand up against the hate and oppose it. Part of protecting our multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy is protecting all citizens from emboldened haters.

So much of the discussion of Trump’s failed coup attempt against democracy is about learning its many details. It is like putting together all the pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. Understanding is very important but I think less attention has been paid to what the coup attempt means for the future.

On TV, I saw the historian Timothy Snyder explain that a failed coup is practice for a successful coup. The coup plotters and the Republican Party have been studying why the coup in 2020 failed. They are taking steps now to insure the next coup in 2024 will be successful.

The Democrats appear asleep at the switch. They are not recognizing or responding to the magnitude of the anti-democratic threat. In their desire to normalize and be bi-partisan, they want to believe both sides play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

The autocratic threat has multiple dimensions and tracks. I would mention the role of state legislatures, intimidation of poll watchers and state election officials through threats and physical pressure, replacing state election officials or stripping them of their powers and destroying faith in democracy. All these dimensions are in play.

Although Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin of over seven million votes, the currency Republicans are more concerned about is electors. In 2020, Trump needed 38 electors to reverse Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. Much of the Trump team’s efforts between November 2020-January 2021 was directed at inducing Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to switch and appoint Trump electors. The vote in the Electoral College was 306-232 in Biden’s favor.

Under our constitution, states appoint electors. States have always respected and deferred to the will of the voters. Electors have reflected majority vote. What the Republican partisans are engineering is a plan to fire the voters and replace them with Trump acolytes in key state legislatures they control. That way even if the Republicans lose the popular vote, a state legislature can appoint electors they desire.

The theoretical underpinning to justify the legal argument is the independent state legislature doctrine, a favorite construct of far right lawyers and jurists. The U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the sole authority to set all election rules. What if state legislatures believe they can throw out electors and de-certify election results?

In his article in the Atlantic, “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”, Barton Gellman looks at strategies state legislatures are already pursuing to politicize, criminalize, and interfere in election administration. In a broad way, this is about putting in places of power and decision-making proponents of the Big Lie of election fraud so that next time ballots will not decide elections.

Gellman cites examples from Georgia, Michigan and Arizona. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State, found no fraud and was censured by the Republican Party and is being primaried by Jody Hice, a U.S. Congress member, promoted by Trump. The Georgia legislature stripped Raffensperger of power as chief election officer. Raffensperger famously would not “find” 11,780 votes for Trump.

Trump also pushed former Senator David Perdue to primary the Georgia sitting governor, Brian Kemp. Trump had urged Kemp to use nonexistent emergency powers to overturn Biden’s Georgia win. Kemp refused and Trump found him insufficiently loyal.

In Michigan, the Republican Party removed Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican, from the Board of State Canvassers because he rejected false and unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. Van Langevelde’s crime was that he voted to certify Biden’s win.

In Arizona, Trump endorsed Kari Lake for governor over the current Republican Governor, Doug Ducey, because Ducey also certified Biden’s win. Without evidence and after multiple recounts, Lake, a former TV anchor, called the 2020 election “shady, shoddy, and corrupt”. She earned the Trump nod by saying she would not have certified Biden’s win. The Arizona legislature is currently debating a bill to strip the Democratic Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, of her ability to defend election lawsuits.

Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have terrified U.S. election workers. There are many examples. One Republican City Commissioner on the Philadelphia Board of Elections, Al Schmidt, received this threat,

“Tell the truth or your three kids will be fatally shot”, along with names of his children, his address and a photo of his home.

Schmidt received other messages: “Cops can’t help you”, “Heads on spikes” and “perhaps cuts and bullets will soon arrive at (his address)”. Schmidt had defended the vote-counting process in the face of unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Philadelphia by Trump.

Rick Barron, the director of voting and elections in Fulton County, Georgia has been subject to a barrage of threats including a voicemail: “you will be served lead”.

Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of Milwaukee’s election commission has received email threats saying she deserved to go before a firing squad and she was called “treasonous”. Woodhall-Vogg left the state for ten days and put in extra security at her home.

According to an April 2021 survey by the Brennan Center nearly one in three election officials feel unsafe in their job. Many non-partisan election officials are choosing to leave the profession, creating openings for the inexperienced. These code red level threats are a new 2020 phenomena attributable to pro-Trump fanatics.

Law enforcement has largely failed to respond to the threats. A Reuters investigation in September found 102 threats of violence or death against election officials in key battleground states. Reuters could only document four instances in which someone was charged. In August, John Keller, a senior attorney in the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section told a meeting of secretaries of state, “The response has been inadequate”.

Instead of responding to the threats, Republican legislators have created new laws that impose tough penalties for election officials who violate rules. In Iowa and Texas, election officials who commit “technical infractions” can suffer big financial penalties.

One of the worst harassment episodes was Trump’s baseless attacks on two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea Moss. Trump and Rudy Giuliani falsely and repeatedly accused them of pulling false ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center. Trump slanderously called Freeman “a professional vote scammer” and “a hustler”.

The two African-American women received hundreds of death threats and racist taunts. Harassing strangers showed up at Freeman’s house. Even though local and state officials definitively disproved the fraud allegations, Freeman had to go into hiding. Trump-aligned social media demonized the two women. The most recent bizarre revelation was about how Kanye West’s publicist pressed Freeman to confess to Trump’s voter fraud allegations. Freeman was told she would go to jail if she did not confess.

Make no mistake: 2020 saw a deliberate effort to overturn a fair and free election. The Republican Party has degenerated into believing, without evidence, that Biden cheated. Even worse, in key battleground states, they have put into important positions proponents of the Big Lie while purging non-believers in the fantasy. They have gotten zealous buy-in from tens of millions. The coup almost succeeded in installing Trump as a dictator.

The Trump forces are destroying public faith in democracy. In their world, if fraud won, then democracy is already dead and it doesn’t matter what you do to win.

Gellman says the next coup will rely on subversion, not violence. If state legislatures can override voters, a far right Supreme Court can put the seal of legality on that.

I wish I saw the Democrats as up to the challenge but they are failing. To say their response has been muted is generous. President Biden has not used his bully pulpit to fight aggressively and consistently for voting rights and the Democratic Party remains divided, without clarity of focus or message. They passively watch the fascist advance. Maybe there will be a voting rights bill but who knows.

At the same time, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have showed little inclination to go after big fish in the criminal coup. That is a failure of leadership that will come back to bite all people who support democracy.

Gellman says there is a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024. The urgent response required is not happening.

My son Josh sings and I wanted to post his cover of Hiss Golden Messenger’s song “Cracked Windshield “.
https://soundcloud.com/joshsbaird/cracked-windshield-rough?si=9961414a211c4602bc2906538898c932

It has now been over five years since I last wrote about the Leonard Peltier case. Back then in 2016, Peltier had hoped President Obama would grant him clemency. That did not happen.

Now, Peltier is 77 years old, residing in a federal penitentiary in Florida. He is not in good health. He suffers from diabetes and an aortic abdominal aneurysm that could rupture. He has served 46 years behind bars and he is hoping President Joe Biden will grant clemency. Peltier is the longest serving political prisoner in America.

The Department of Justice issued a national response to the COVID-19 pandemic authorizing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to release elderly inmates and those with underlying health conditions from federal prison. Peltier’s sentence was life, with parole. He deserves this consideration.

For those who are unfamiliar with the case, Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement or AIM on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. In 1975 there was a shoot-out on the reservation and three men died, two FBI agents and a Native American man.

Peltier was one of the three men charged in the murders of the FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Peltier’s co-defendants were acquitted on grounds of self-defense. No one was ever charged for the murder of the Native American man, Joseph Stuntz. Stuntz was also an AIM member.

The FBI was desperate for a conviction since there were two dead agents. They needed a fall guy. Peltier played that role.

Obviously, at this late date, any recital of the facts can legitimately be considered partial but there have been some new developments on the case since I last wrote about it. The U.S. Attorney, James Reynolds, who played a prominent role in prosecuting Peltier sent President Biden a letter in July.

“I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man who I helped put behind bars. With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I have realized that the prosecution and continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is unjust. We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge reservation.”

Reynolds had previously said, “he (Peltier) didn’t go out there with the intention to kill anybody. He was just trying to protect his people”.

Just to reiterate, the prosecutor has admitted there is no proof Peltier killed the two FBI agents. The government had to drop the murder charges because they had withheld exculpatory evidence, a ballistics test that showed the murder weapon was not Peltier’s gun.

All that has been established is that Peltier was at the scene, shooting along with forty other Native Americans. He was charged with “aiding and abetting” but it was not proved whom he “aided and abetted” and you cannot aid and abet yourself.

The fact that a powerful institution like the FBI wanted to pin the blame on someone should not obscure the proof problem. Being in the vicinity of the shooting proves nothing but it has been enough to put Peltier away for 46 years. The FBI was hellbent on that result.

The trial was riddled with misconduct by the prosecution. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals later wrote about it:

“Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge reservation and in the prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed. “

Even though Peltier’s co-defendants were tried separately and were acquitted based on self-defense, the trial judge, Paul Benson, did not allow Peltier a self-defense argument. Also, one of the jurors acknowledged she was biased against Native Americans. In a decision that is difficult to understand, she was allowed to sit on the jury (and she voted for conviction).

Peltier now has a new lawyer, Kevin Sharp, who was previously a Federal District Court judge. Willie Nelson’s ex-wife, Connie Wilson, who is a Peltier supporter, reached out to Sharp to ask him to take the case.

Via Freedom of Information Act requests, Sharp has uncovered FBI internal memos that showed U.S. Attorneys were directed to put all resources into convicting Peltier. The FBI had a broader strategy to suppress AIM. Sharp has said that the agency plan was to “continually harass and arrest and charge” AIM members to keep them tied up in court.

This fits in with the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (called COINTELPRO) which was directed, in part, against AIM. COINTELPRO was designed to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy a wide range of activist groups. In this period, virtually every known AIM leader in the United States was incarcerated in either state or federal prison. 69 AIM members and supporters were murdered on the Pine Ridge reservation in the period between 1973-1976. 350 others suffered serious physical assaults.

The prosecution of Peltier needs to be seen in the context of COINTELPRO and broader Native American history. AIM was in the forefront of the struggle to realize the rights of treaty-guaranteed national sovereignty on behalf of Native Americans. As Sharp has said:

“Part of what’s going on is an extermination policy. We’re taking your land, your minerals. We’re going to get rid of you altogether…That’s what started it. That’s what the counter-intelligence was running.”

The FBI was still infected by the J.Edgar Hoover racist virus. They pursued Peltier and they continue to fight his clemency petition to this day. It does not seem to matter that all the agents from that era are long gone from the Bureau. The FBI’s pursuit of Peltier was in the racist tradition that defined so much of Hoover’s disgraceful tenure as FBI Director.

In his letter to President Biden, former prosecutor Reynolds also wrote:

“ Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration is a testament to a time and a system of justice that no longer has a place in our society…I urge you to chart a different path in the history of the government’s relationship with its Native people through a show of mercy rather than continued indifference. I urge you to take a step towards healing a wound that I had a part of making. I urge you to commute Leonard Peltier’s sentence and grant him executive clemency.”

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont just became the most senior U.S. government official to support Peltier’s release. Before she became Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet Secretary, also advocated Peltier’s release. On October 8, eleven members of Congress including Rep. Raul Grijalva, Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal requested Peltier’s expedited release and granting of clemency.

Please, President Biden: it is time to turn the historical page. Do the right thing and grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

Up until very recently I had never heard the name Varian Fry. I think that hardly makes me unusual. Yet, Varian Fry was one of our most important Holocaust rescuers. He was the American Oskar Schindler.

How is it that almost no one knows his story? I did not know about Fry until I read the novelist Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews. Horn has a lengthy biographical essay that discusses Fry’s life and also raises many good questions.

Fry was born in New York City in 1907 to a Protestant family and he grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey. His grandfather was an important person in his early life. He was active in the Children’s Aid Society in New York. That organization placed homeless children with foster families in the American West. Fry often accompanied his grandfather on trips. It is hard to know how much this experience influenced his later life choices.

Fry went to Harvard, graduated in 1931, and after college he became a magazine editor in Manhattan. He worked for a foreign affairs magazine called The Living Age. In May 1935, he took a business trip to Berlin, Germany that changed his life. While there, he witnessed an anti-Jewish riot with Jews being kicked, beaten mercilessly and spat upon. Crowds in a festive mood chanted, “The best Jew is a dead Jew”.

Fry was in a downtown cafe and he saw two Nazi youth approach a man who was quietly drinking a beer. Fry thought the man might be Jewish. When the man put out his hand to pick up his mug, one of the Nazis pulled out a dagger and with it he nailed the man’s hand to the table. The experience floored Fry.

When the Nazis took France in 1940, Fry was moved to action. He helped to found the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of activists who opposed the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely restricted immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, particularly Jews and Italians. Many people who had fled Germany were living in the south of France along with anti-Nazi activists and escaping Jews. The Nazis only occupied northern France at the time. Southern France was something of a refuge.

Although the Vichy government in southern France collaborated with the Nazis and had agreed to surrender on demand anyone the Nazis wanted captured, there was not the level of control the Nazis enforced in areas where they were in physical control. The Nazis were after anti-Nazi activists, leftists, Jews, and artists they considered “degenerate”.

Fry wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to argue there was a need to get Jews, artists and intellectuals out of France. He suggested there was a need for rescuers to go to France to save people from the Gestapo. When no one else stepped up, Fry volunteered to go to southern France himself to begin a covert rescue operation. He strapped $3000 to his leg, took 200 visas he wrangled from the government and left New York.

Initially Fry intended to bike around Provence for four weeks, distributing travel documents and visas to a handpicked list of artists and intellectuals. He ended up staying thirteen months rescuing hundreds of Jews, artists, activists, writers, musicians, composers, philosophers and their families.

Among those rescued were some very famous people including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Serge and Andre Breton. Here I am barely scratching the surface of the list of luminaries rescued. It was an All-Star team of the European intelligentsia of that era. Victor Serge wrote:

“Our mob of fugitives includes first-rate brains of all types who now count for nothing through the mere fact of daring to say No! (most of them rather quietly) to totalitarian oppression…If it had not been for Varian Fry’s American Rescue Committee, a goodly number of refugees would have had no reasonable course open to them but to jump into the sea from the height of the transporter bridge, a certain enough method.”

After Fry arrived in France, he quickly assembled an underground team that assisted with the creation of false forged passports, provided money and physical transport across the Pyrenee mountains from France to Spain. The cover story of the group was that they were on a humanitarian mission to provide refugees money while they waited for legal visas. One participant in Fry’s group, Miriam Davenport, described the team:

“We were misfits. We didn’t fit the pattern of human behavior, of staying out of trouble and keeping your mouth shut.”

Fry placed himself in extreme danger. The Nazis were closing the window of escape. Fry was in a race against time to rescue as many people as possible. He anguished because he saw the need for rescue greatly surpassed his limited circumstances.

You might think the U.S. government would have supported Fry’s mission. If you believed that, you would be wrong. The State Department turned against Fry’s mission. Even though Fry and his organization had rescued an estimated 2000 people, the State Department arranged for Fry’s arrest and expulsion from France by the Vichy government in 1941.

When Fry returned to America, he tried to promote public awareness of the Nazi barbarism but he was ignored. In late 1942, he wrote a cover story for the New Republic titled, “The Massacre of the Jews”. In his story he provided hard evidence of the murder of over two million Jews in Europe. Horn writes:

“He pleaded for the one thing he knew would have saved the Jews of Europe: offering them asylum in the United States. His plea was roundly ignored, to the tune of four million more murdered.”

When we tell the story of World War II, the story we like to tell is the heroic narrative of the Allied powers triumphing over the fascists. That is a good story but the darker subterranean story of U.S. complicity with the Holocaust remains untold. As the filmmaker Pierre Sauvage has written:

“We live on two myths – that we didn’t know and that we couldn’t do anything even if we did know. This is the religion and it isn’t true. We knew plenty and could have done a lot. Varian Fry was a hero but he was also a maverick who flew in the face of American policy.”

After the war, Fry became a nobody. His story remained unknown. He never successfully re-adjusted to life in America. He became a Latin teacher at a high school in Connecticut. In 1967, he died at age 59 of a heart attack.

Thirty years after he died, in 1997, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum honored Fry as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations”.

I will offer an opinion why the Fry story was ignored. The story of American inaction in the face of the Holocaust is rooted in American anti-semitism. Our Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted Jewish immigration reflected the racism and xenophobia of the time. America strongly opposed more Jewish immigration and the law stood behind that.

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, anti-semitism played a big role in American life and culture. Partly this was because of the influence of far right movements in America but the hate went much farther. Influential people like Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin publicly disparaged Jews as greedy and dishonest people who were out to control the world.

The popular McClure’s Magazine featured articles on “The Jewish invasion of America”, describing Jews as “unassimilable aliens” who were taking control of New York City businesses, real estate and city government.

Jews were excluded from law firms, medical practices, universities, private schools, country clubs, hotels and from living in certain residential communities. Restrictive covenants targeting Jews were common.

Anti-semitism was the primary reason the American government did not do more to save the millions of Jewish lives lost at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. The government did not publicize the mass death, did nothing to relax immigration quotas, and did not take doable actions like bombing the Nazi machinery of death at the extermination camps.

Back then, most Americans retreated into their personal lives, kept their heads down or looked away. A small number cheered the Nazis. It is a shameful story and many prefer to bury it.

Fry was not only unappreciated (even by many he saved) but he went unnoticed.

There is a parallel now between the treatment of Jews in Europe and the treatment of those fleeing the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. While it is certainly nothing on the scale of the Holocaust, very compelling reasons have led to the Central America exodus. Again, due to racism, America is closing the door. As Fry showed, we are capable of doing so much better.

January 6 is a story that keeps unspooling. There are layers and layers and we keep finding out more. Jonathan Karl’s new book, Betrayal, is a treasure trove of revealing details.

Our former president was obsessed with staying in power. As Karl shows, his coup attempt went deeper than has been recognized. Much planning, especially by lawyers, went into the coup effort.

We recently learned that not only Trump lawyer John Eastman had a blueprint for a coup but so did Jenna Ellis, a promoter of biblical law and another member of the Trump legal team. Ellis’s memo was very much like Eastman’s.

Ellis saw Vice-President Mike Pence as potentially the key January 6 actor. Ellis believes that the Vice-President has unilateral power as President of the Senate to decline to count electors sent to Congress by the states. She wanted Pence on January 6 to reject electoral votes from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Her notion was very outside the traditional view that the constitutionally prescribed role of Vice Presidents is ceremonial during the electoral vote count. Ellis’s memo argued that Pence should halt the Electoral College vote count on January 6 and give until January 15 for states to send a new set of votes. If no new votes arrived by January 15, Ellis argued those states’ votes would not be counted.

At that point, with no candidate having 270 electoral votes, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives pursuant to the 12th Amendment. Because each state gets one vote and because the Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations, Ellis argued that throwing the election to Congress would result in a Trump victory. She conveniently overlooked the fact that Joe Biden won the six battleground states she cited.

On New Years Eve last year, Mark Meadows, Trump’s last Chief of Staff, emailed Ellis’s memo to Vice President Pence. Trump’s plan was to ratchet up the pressure on Pence. Trump also had his baggage handler turned head of Presidential Personnel, Johnny McEntee, write a historically inaccurate memo to Pence entitled “Jefferson used his position as Vice President to win” . McEntee passed this memo along to Marc Short, Pence’s Chief of Staff, on January 1.

At the rally on January 6, Trump told supporters:

“If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.”

I also should mention the scheme engineered by lawyer Jeffrey Clark that preceded January 6. Clark was head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division and he was in cahoots with Trump. On January 3, Clark told Jeffrey Rosen, the Acting Attorney General, that Trump was planning on installing him in place of Rosen. Clark wanted the Department of Justice to send a letter to state legislatures suggesting they convene special sessions and appoint new electors due to alleged election improprieties.

Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General, Richard Donaghue nixed Clark’s proposal. Donaghue told Clark that the Justice Department leadership would resign en masse if Trump appointed Clark. According to Donaghue, White House counsel Pat Cipollone referred to Clark’s proposal as a “murder-sucide pact”.

The actions of Eastman, Ellis and Clark are in a different realm than simply offering crackpot advice. They were furthering a criminal scheme to use pseudo-legal theories to overturn the will of the people. Trump was attempting to stay in power despite losing. To try and achieve their goals, Trump’s lawyers consistently pushed the Big Lie of election fraud. Over 60 court decisions later, no court supported any allegation of voter fraud.

Lawyer misconduct usually is about mundane things like stealing client money, routine incompetence, conflict of interest and failing to advise clients in their cases. Lawyers sometimes get fined, suspended from practicing or disbarred.

There seems to be a problem though when the lawyer crimes are bigger. It is almost like we lack the words to describe the crimes because the crimes are supersized. Professional conduct committees that oversee lawyer conduct are unfamiliar with cases where lawyers lie to advance seditious conspiracies designed to obstruct Congressional proceedings like the Electoral College.

I would suggest that lawyers like Eastman, Ellis and Clark are not engaged in offering “legal” advice. Professional lying to advance the fascist overthrow of a constitutional republic is something else. It is entirely predictable that these lawyers will claim executive and attorney-client privilege but privilege does not extend to communications by lawyers who are participating in a crime.

One federal judge who has had the courage to call out what is going on is Judge Linda Parker of Michigan. She ordered Trump lawyers, Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell and Linn “Q’Anon” Wood, to pay legal costs of state and local officials in Michigan who had to respond to the phony voter fraud allegations. In her opinion, Judge Parker wrote:

“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process. It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American public into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”

Judge Parker lambasted lawyers Powell and Wood for building a case on “fantastical claims and conspiracy theories”. She ordered them to complete twelve hours of legal election on litigation and election law. She also ordered that copies of her opinion be sent to authorities where Powell and Wood are licensed to investigate attorney misconduct. Judge Parker found Powell and Wood violated their obligation to the Court and the ethical rules they are bound to follow as licensed attorneys.

Broadly speaking, the response by the American Bar and Judiciary to the authoritarian threat posed by the coup-engaged lawyers has been weak, almost somnolent. The best response I have seen was a December 2020 letter signed by over 1500 lawyers and two former American Bar Association presidents who called for an ethical probe of lawyers making false claims of election fraud.

After January 6, the American Bar Association President, Patricia Lee Refo, released a statement condemning the assault on the Capitol and supporting the peaceful transition of power. Since then, from what I can see, the response from the legal community has mostly been silence. You have to ask: where is the outrage?

Normalizing the behavior of the Trump lawyers who routinely file frivolous claims and make false statements only guarantees more of the same. History shows that the best cover for the advance of authoritarianism is the appearance of legality.

The constellation of Trump lawyers has run the gamut from conventional Republican establishment (Cleta Mitchell), publicity-seeking (Rudy Giuliani), deranged (Powell), conspiracist (Wood) to far right ideological (Eastman and Ellis). Karl reported that no less than William Barr, Trump’s previous Attorney General, told Trump his legal team was a “clown show”.

To one degree or another, all violated their ethical duty of candor to the tribunal by spreading a false narrative on behalf of Trump. Some like Eastman and Ellis furthered a conspiracy to interfere with the electoral vote count. In California, the States United Democracy Center, a non-partisan organization advancing free, fair and secure elections, has requested an investigation of whether Eastman violated California’s Rules of Professional Conduct. I am unaware of any proceedings against Ellis or Clark.

The Trump lawyers, especially those most involved in the coup attempt should face discipline up to and including disbarment. Being a hired gun should not mean you get a pass on conspiring to kill democracy.

In recognizing and acknowledging heroes of the modern-day civil rights movement, a number of male names come immediately to mind but not so many female names. I would like to elevate and highlight Fannie Lou Hamer for her under-recognized contributions to the civil rights movement. Her story is not well-known.

Born in 1917, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children. Her parents were Mississippi sharecroppers, engaged in a constant struggle for survival of their family. Starting when she was six, she had to pick cotton. By the age of thirteen, she was picking 200-300 pounds of cotton daily. Considering that she suffered from polio and had a gait problem with a limp, that is impressive.

Her family was often hungry. Her mother fed her children greens with flour gravy. Hamer did not own shoes. She tied rags to her feet in the winter.

Hamer only got six years of schooling and had to drop out of school at age twelve to work full-time picking cotton on a plantation. She went to school after harvest as the limited education that was available was organized around work production needs.

Because of her literacy, the plantation owner selected Hamer as the time and record keeper at the plantation. She worked there for eighteen years and that is where she met her future husband. Her parents had unsuccessfully tried to escape the plantation by renting a farm, buying mules and tools for farming. However, a white neighbor poisoned their mules. This set the family back into debt peonage.

This was a time when blacks were absolutely expected to be subservient to white people. Whites controlled where black people could live and where they could work. Any transgressions in how black people acted would be met with devastating consequences. When she was eight, Hamer experienced the lynching of a black man who had spoken up when he was not paid for his work.

In 1961, Hamer went to the doctor for what she believed was a uterine surgery for a tumor. Without her knowledge or consent, she was sterilized by a white doctor. Hamer coined the phrase “Mississippi appendectomy” to refer to such hysterectomies. Involuntary medical procedures were part of Mississippi’s plans to reduce the number of impoverished blacks in the state. White supremacists deemed blacks unfit to reproduce.

By the early 1960’s, only five percent of Mississippi’s black people were registered to vote. Blacks were entirely shut out of the political process. In spite of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, mob violence, grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests were all part of a comprehensive scheme to deny the franchise to black citizens.

Until 1962 Hamer never knew that black people could register and vote. On August 23, 1962, she went to hear Rev. James Bevel of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or SNCC speak. That was a night that changed the trajectory of her life. After learning of her constitutional rights, Hamer volunteered for SNCC to register people to vote.

Possibly readers will remember the movie Mississippi Burning. Or the Nina Simone song Mississippi Goddam. Registering black voters in Mississippi in the early 1960’s was genuinely life threatening. Think Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

When Hamer went to register to vote in Indianola, Mississippi she was met by a wall of armed guards at the door of the courthouse. You might have thought she and her activist friends were breaking into a bank.

In her biography of Hamer, Until I am Free, the historian Keisha N. Blain described the scene. As part of registering to vote, Hamer and other activists were forced to take literacy tests. The registrar produced a section of the Mississippi constitution about de facto laws and asked her to interpret its meaning. Hamer said, “I knowed about as much about a de facto law as a horse knows about New Year’s.” She went on:

“By the time the eighteen of us going in two by two had finished taking the literacy test – now there’s people, mind you, there that day with guns, dogs and rifles. Some of them looking exactly like Jed Clampett with the Beverly Hillbillies, only they wasn’t kidding.”

On the way home from the failed attempt to register, the police stopped the old school bus in which they were traveling. The police charged the driver for driving a bus that was “too yellow” and forced the bus to return to the courthouse. The passengers had to pay an expensive fine to resolve the matter but they made it home safely.

That night the plantation owner where Hamer worked came by and told her that she had to leave the plantation unless she withdrew her voter registration. Hamer left the plantation but refused to withdraw her voter registration. Several nights later, white supremacists sprayed her house with bullets.

In 1963, after attending a voter workshop in South Carolina, the police in Winona, Mississippi dragged Hamer to jail after she had stopped to get a bite to eat. The owners of the cafe where she stopped would not serve black people. The police viciously assaulted Hamer physically and sexually. She was hit with a blackjack. She suffered permanent damage to her kidney and a blood clot in her left eye that hurt her vision. It took a month to recover from the assault.

Hamer had to take the literacy test to vote three times before she passed. Such tests were ultimately outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hamer’s persistence made me think of a James Baldwin quote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

In that time, the Mississippi Democratic Party barred black participation. When Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the summer of 1964 she became a prominent national figure. She and other activists protested the all white delegation at the Democratic National Convention held in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Hamer argued that her delegation should be the official delegation from Mississippi to the convention. She spoke to the Credentials Committee. President Lyndon Johnson was so freaked out that he gave an emergency press conference to pre-empt and distract from her speech. Johnson wanted to prevent her testimony from getting a wide audience since he feared losing the Southern white vote. Johnson’s ploy did not work.

Hamer’s speech was aired later over the three networks. It vividly recounted Mississippi realities. Hamer had a gift for public speaking. The civil rights activist Eleanor Holmes Norton described Hamer as “an unbelievably brilliant orator and conceptualizer…You’ve never heard a room flying like one Fannie Lou set afire”.

Johnson’s Vice-President Hubert Humphrey tried to persuade Hamer and the other Mississippi freedom activists to accept a compromise that would allow token representation of two non-voting representatives. Hamer refused. Hamer lost in 1964 but her actions did lead to change in 1968. The Democrats required equality of representation at their conventions after that.

Hamer remained active in the civil rights movement until her death in 1977 at age 59. She was a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus which was started to recruit more women of all races to run for office. Hamer helped thousands of African Americans to become registered voters.

Historian Blain correctly notes how Hamer speaks directly to our time with voting rights again under attack. This time it is the Republican Party that has organized nationally, passing laws to make it harder to vote. The Republicans are today’s Jim Crow Party dedicated to white supremacy. Their voter suppression efforts must be vigorously opposed.

Those who may be discouraged or frightened by the voter suppression going on now can obtain strength from Hamer’s example. She successfully fought under far more trying circumstances than currently exist. To quote her:

“We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone. But you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free. Because no man is an island to himself. And until I’m free in Mississippi, you are not free in Washington; you are not free in New York.”

Unlike many nations, America, for generations, has had a two party political system. That has long been the normal. Sometimes Democrats would win and sometime Republicans would prevail. That old normal may soon disappear because one party, the Republicans, have degenerated into an anti-democratic cabal. They want to eliminate the possibility that Democrats could ever win a national election.

The process of degeneration has been multi-faceted. Our former president turned his party into a cult of personality devoted to his Big Lie of election fraud. If you are a Republican who does not agree with the Big Lie, you are likely to have been ostracized, threatened or punished. You will be primaried or forced to retire. Witness Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez and Adam Kinzinger. You must pledge loyalty to the Big Lie.

The party, which used to be conservative, is now supportive of whatever Trump wants, no matter how ridiculous. Republican leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene called Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill “traitors”.

Republican silence around Trump’s failed coup on January 6 is telling. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu is a good example. He maintains a cowardly silence about Trump since he is afraid to alienate the Trump base. That Is typical of many Republicans who privately despise Trump. No one will ever be writing a book about Sununu titled “Profiles in Courage”.

The Republicans have been taken over by extremists and Q’Anon conspiracists who had planned to keep Trump president indefinitely. In 2020, they came close to succeeding.

Their focus is now on gerrymandering, changing voting laws and election personnel to put into place their loyalists. The former Executive Director of the Michigan GOP, Jeff Timmer, summarized:

“It’s kind of scary looking ahead because the Republicans are making no secret about their plans to create chaos and throw a monkey wrench in the gears of the next election trying to put people in place who will go beyond what the law allows and to do things in the next election that they didn’t feel they had people in place to do in the last one.”

There are many things to say about how the Republicans are killing democracy. They weaken elections by making it harder to vote. In swing states like Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, they hope to replace state Secretaries of State with Big Lie partisans. You have to wonder about bias if such people are overseeing and administering elections.

Additionally, Republicans target and demonize outsiders like immigrants. They weaponize fear and embrace violence as in January 6, threats to other Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill, and Rep. Paul Gosar’s social media. They attempt to rewrite American history by erasing white supremacy and racism using the utterly false excuse of critical race theory. They use racism to divide and conquer.

Sadly, the Democratic response to the increasing authoritarianism is less than impressive. Not recognizing the urgency of the threat, the Democrats bicker among themselves, increasing the chance of Republican victory in 2022 and 2024. Most people don’t care about Senators Manchin and Sinema and excuses for failing to deliver. If you promise a lot, you must deliver.

Along with the lack of urgency among the Democrats is the weak response by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the authoritarian threat. So far, Attorney General Merrick Garland has done little to hold Trump and his circle accountable for their crimes. Insufficient pressure has been exerted to punish Trump and his January 6 co-conspirators. Apparently, the DOJ only goes after little fish.

Time is of the essence as Trump is playing a delay game. I expect he is hoping to use court appeals to run out the clock in the hopes Republican wins in 2022 will squash investigations of his crimes. Delay has always been a key tool in his bag of tricks.

In surveying the big picture, I would suggest a relevant historical example from American history about how to counter rising authoritarianism. During the Great Depression roughly 90 years ago, America faced a homegrown fascist threat from the German-American Bund, America Firsters, Silver Legion and followers of Father Charles Coughlin. These were the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters of their day.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt effectively sidelined the fascist threat with his New Deal. Just to recall the time: tens of millions of Americans were desperate, thrown into unemployment and abject poverty. Many looked to Germany as an example for America to follow. This was before things in Germany seriously devolved into mass concentration camps and worse.

President Roosevelt led a radical program of massive government investment and intervention into the economy. The New Deal employed millions of jobless people. Roosevelt invested heavily in public infrastructure. He subjected Wall Street speculators and Big Business to strict regulation.

Roosevelt blamed economic royalists who had managed to gain economic power through what he called “concentration of control”. He warned that fascism was the result of democratic governments failing to enact bold agendas while protecting an economic status quo that enriched small elites at the expense of the masses.

While he can be legitimately criticized for failing to tackle racism, Roosevelt became a beloved figure to millions of Americans because he boldly addressed the economic inequality of his day. He went big and the American people re-elected him four times.

There is a lesson here for Democrats and progressives. We need to follow the FDR example. We need a visionary politics that opposes a corporatist state that concentrates power in the hands of the super-rich at the expense of the many. We cannot go backwards on the progressive agenda whether it is climate change, racism, women’s reproductive rights or economic inequality.

The Democrats and moderates who are saying we should just not be Trump are wrong. That agenda will lead to the return of Trump or a Trump surrogate. It doesn’t provide enough reason to vote.

To defeat the authoritarians, we must invest in our working class to restore faith in democratic government. Democrats are underestimating how much of a disaster it will be if they jettison their most popular initiatives in subservience to corporate donors.

For example, 82% of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare. 72% favor allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. 70% support paid family and medical leave. Polling by Priorities USA, a Biden-aligned firm, also found that raising taxes on the rich was the most popular economic proposal.

To the extent the Democrats fail to pass, water down or abandon their most popular initiatives, they will be shooting themselves in the foot. It is not unnoticed that the Democrats keep whittling down social spending on the Build Back Better plan. Nor that it is at the behest of corporate donors.

Corporations do vote-buying as they have done with Manchin and Sinema. It is a form of legalized bribery to buy their desired public policy.Whether it is Republican or Democratic, it is both corrupt and sickeningly familiar.

The best bet for saving our democracy is passage of the strongest, most far-reaching Build Back Better social spending plan. That will motivate a broad array of voters and give citizens solid reasons to turn out and vote.

Beyond that we need to create what the British writer Paul Mason has called “an anti-fascist ethos”. We need an alliance of all people of whatever political stripe who oppose fascism and authoritarianism. Trump created a boogeyman mythology around Antifa that is totally misleading.

To be anti-fascist is to be part of an honorable tradition. In World War II, almost 300,000 Americans fought and died, opposing fascism. In 2021, we need to resurrect anti-fascism so democracy can survive.

Since the Afghan War has ended, I have been surprised about how little reflection there has been about that war. There has been the usual blame game of the Republicans blaming Biden and the Democrats blaming Trump but there has been relatively little commentary about the war.

It was amazing to watch Afghanistan fall in like a week or two in spite of the huge investment made by the United States in dollars and lives over a period of 20 years. I would suggest that we need a more profound analysis of what went wrong if we are going to avoid repetition of this type of experience.

Americans were so far removed from the battlefield that we had little sense of the war. We heard about the use of drone technology but we have neglected grappling with the ethical issues around it. Drones were central to the War on Terror. They were our way of eliminating mortal risk on one side of the equation.

They allowed 24-hour surveillance of people-of-interest in combat zones including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Supposedly it was a way we could keep track of bad guys and at the same time minimize American casualties. Back during the Obama presidency, we started hearing about the use of kill lists. Targeted killings by drones became normalized.

The United States has carried out thousands of these drone strikes. They typically happen in remote areas far away from any media camera.

Right at the time the United States forces were leaving Afghanistan we did hear about a Kabul drone strike where American officials claimed they destroyed a car packed with multiple suicide bombers who were members of the Islamic State. It turned out a hellfire missile killed ten members of a family including several children. One of the dead was a former Afghan military officer who had served as a contractor for the U.S. forces.

When the true circumstances were revealed, official denials turned into a suggestion of possible investigation followed by mouthing of regret. In the Kabul incident, the military said that no discipline would be taken against anyone who was part of the attack that killed the family of ten.

That is the norm. This is a killing program conducted under tight secrecy with virtually no transparency or accountability.

Investigative journalists have tried to piece together a picture of the drone casualties. The U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated the total number of deaths from drone and other covert killing operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia as between 8,858 and 16,901 since drone strikes began in 2004. Of those killed, as many as 2,200 are believed to have been civilians.

Drone strikes have hit wedding parties, families traveling in cars, hospitals filled with patients and groups of farmers working in fields. The false promise was that drone strikes would demand absolute precision without harm to civilians.

The little-known case of Daniel Hale spotlights the use of assassination by drone. Hale served in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013 and he arrived in Afghanistan in 2012. From Bagram Air Force Base it was Hale’s job as a signals intelligence analyst to watch screens and direct drones to the location of a cell phone number in which the military had interest.

When Hale successfully located the number, he would adjust settings and lock on the target. Then he would communicate by chat to a co-worker who focused the camera. An imagery analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator would take over, using the information Hale provided.

Hale has written that partly this effort was about documenting the day-to-day life of suspected militants. Sometimes this could lead to an attempt at capture or other times, a decision to kill.

Watching and participating in the drone attacks proved traumatic and filled Hale with unease. He wrote:

“Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions…how could it be considered honorable for me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time.”

Months into his deployment in Afghanistan, Hale had a harrowing experience. He had been tracking the movements of a ring of car bomb manufacturers living around Jalalabad. One of the suspects took off, driving at a high rate of speed. Hale’s superiors thought he might be escaping to Pakistan. A drone strike was ordered though it was a cloudy and windy day and visibility was poor through the clouds.

It appeared the single payload MQ-1 barely failed to hit the target but the vehicle was damaged although still drivable. Surprisingly, the passenger in the front seat turned out to be a woman.

A few days later, Hale attended a briefing by his commanding officer. It provided more details. In the attacked car was the suspect’s wife with their two young daughters, ages 5 and 3. Afghan soldiers were sent to investigate where the car had been seen to stop. They found the two girls placed in a dumpster nearby. The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. The younger sister was still alive but levelly dehydrated. About that experience, Hale wrote:

“..whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.”

After Hale left the Air Force in 2013, he went to work for a defense contractor where he retained a security clearance and access to top-secret information. Hale took classified information about the drone program and gave it to journalist Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept. Hale believed the public had a right to understand the process by which people were placed on kill lists and assassinated on orders from high up in the government.

The information Hale provided led to a series of articles in the Intercept on the drone program. The articles showed how often in Afghanistan those killed were not the intended target.

The Trump Administration ultimately prosecuted Hale under the Espionage Act, seeking a 14 year sentence. The Judge, Liam O’Grady, surprised many by sentencing Hale to 45 months. Hale had pled guilty to one count without any promise of a plea bargain. In his sentencing remarks Judge O’Grady noted that many people believed Hale was courageous as a whistleblower. He recommended that Hale be sent to a low security prison where he could get counseling for his post traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Instead the Bureau of Prisons sent Hale to the notorious Communications Management Unit at U.S. Penitentiary at Marion Illinois, a maximum security prison. Hale has been suicidal. He gets two showers per week and one phone call per month but only to his attorney. He is allowed to exercise two or three times a week. He is led into a six by ten foot outdoor cage where he can walk in circles for an hour.

You might think an Espionage Act would be about spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments. This is a situation where a whistleblower who suffered a crisis of conscience shared information of great public interest with the public. I think it is very much like Daniel Ellsberg’s situation with the Pentagon Papers.

The drone assassination program has been hidden from the public. Both Democratic and Republican administrations maintained the secrecy. Hiding the truth about drones is just part of the package of lies the American people have been told for 20 years about our wars. Reckless and mistaken killings by drones are one reason the American side was hated by masses of people in Afghanistan and contributed to the war’s outcome.

In a letter Hale wrote to Judge O’Grady he quoted U.S. Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque:

“We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away…Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no remorse…and then we come home in triumph.”

Drone assassinations are an example of runaway technology trumping ethics. It is a travesty that a person of conscience like Daniel Hale is behind bars.