If you talk to a Republican these days, chances he’s going to talk about “Antifa.” In fact, he’s probably not going to talk about anything else. For the typical Trump supporter, the anti-police brutality uprisings of the Spring of 2020 are the result of gangs of “antifa” organized by George Soros (dogwhistle for “the Jews”) for the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Never mind the fact that there were anti-police-brutality protests in the Summer of 2014 when Barack Obama was President, or how social unrest is the very last thing the Democrats, who are counting on a fragile alliance of southern blacks and upper-middle-class professionals, want in 2020, or even that “antifa” is just the latest synonym for “anarchist” or “black bloc.” It doesn’t matter. No amount of evidence is going to convince a Trump supporter that there are structural problems in American society dating all the way back to the New Deal and even Reconstruction that have locked white people under 30, and all black people out of the economic mainstream. In fact, the typical Trump supporter won’t even try to make an argument. He’ll simply repeat the word “antifa.” Antifa. Antifa. Fake news. Fake news. Triggered much liberal?

If you talk to a liberal these days, chances are she’s going to talk about “Russians.” In fact, she’s probably not going to talk about anything else. For the typical Clinton supporter, the anti-police brutality uprisings of 2020 are the result of gangs of “Russian trolls” organized by Vladimir Putin himself for the benefit of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Never mind that there were anti-police-brutality protests in the Summer of 2014, when Barack Obama was President, and in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson was President, or how property destruction and social unrest is the very last thing that Republicans, who are counting on the idea that Trump is handling the Covid-19 crisis better than George W. Bush handled Katrina, want. Never mind that “Russians” is just the latest dogwhistle for “Asiatic Jewish Bolsheviks,” it doesn’t matter. No amount of evidence is going to convince a Clinton supporter that there are structural problems in American society dating all the way back to the New Deal and even Reconstruction that have locked white people under 30, and all black people out of the economic mainstream. In fact, the typical Clinton supporter won’t even try to make an argument. She’ll just tell you to “go back to Soviet Slovenia” (where Melania Trump was born).

There are of course differences.

The typical Trump supporter is dumb, and stupidly rebellious. Everything that happens is part of a conspiracy to take his guns. Climate scientists aren’t sincere professionals warning of us the dire results of global warming, they’re liberal know it alls who want to take your SUVs (and your guns). All news is “fake news,” except of course for the reports that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That was true. Bill Gates is trying to “depopulate” the earth and is the reason your ugly son can’t get laid. The typical Trump supporter is easy to hoodwink by fake populism. He doesn’t have a class analysis or an understanding of history. All you have to do, in his mind, to be part of the working class, is drive an overpriced pickup truck, own a gun collection, be rude to liberals, and hate women and black people, something every right wing politician, however well off, does anyway.

The typical Clinton supporter is well-educated, but stupidly deferential to authority. She’s gone to the best Ivy League Schools and has a law degree (which she’s quick to tell you all about on social media). She’s actually read the Mueller Report and is convinced that somewhere on page 123 or 149 there’s proof that the pee tape actually exists. She closely follows a long list of “intelligence experts” (grifters who know they’ll never starve repeating “Russia Russia Russia” on MSNBC) in Washington DC, and is convinced that in the brutally cold Winter of 2019, Putin was planning to take down the power grid in the Midwest and kill homeless people in Chicago. She never questions anything that an expert with the right credentials says, and if you do, she’ll probably call you a racist and a sexist.

But there’s one thing they have in common.

The Trump supporter and the Clinton supporter, both of whom are probably over 30 and well off financially, have one important thing in common. They see the world through the lens of a conspiracy theories, not conspiracy theories invented by crackpots and misfits that have bubble up from the bottom, but conspiracy theories carefully disseminated through the corporate media by the ruling class for the express purpose of keeping us all stupid. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to confront an uncomfortable reality. Neoliberal capitalism is broken. For the past 20 years, the American ruling class has lost so much of its legitimacy in the rest of the world that it has tried to destroy any country out of its control (Venezuela, Iran, and now Russia and China) through sanctions and dirty tricks. Now it’s all come home. While there are of course agents provocateurs and destructive opportunists among the largely young protesters of the Spring of 2020, it’s a movement that’s been organized from the bottom up, through social media, affinity groups, grassroots political organization, rank and file Democrats who were pushed out of the Presidential primary in 2020, and above all by ordinary black people sick of being killed by undemocratic, unaccountable, racist militarized police departments in all of our big cities. Our ruling class can’t accept the fact that their time is over. So they’re going to take as many of the rest of us down with them as they can shoot, gas, gaslight, or throw in prison.

Welcome to the age of trickle down conspiracy theories.

Bing Liu: I didn’t kill myself.

Epstein: Neither did I.

Bartender: OK gentlemen. You’re both cut off. I run a respectable establishment. No conspiracy theories. Please don’t make me have the bouncer show you the door.

A University of Pittsburgh researcher “on the verge” of a breakthrough in understanding the coronavirus was found shot dead in his home, according to a report.

Bing Liu, 37, was allegedly killed inside his Pittsburgh-area townhouse Saturday by a man who then went outside to his car and shot himself, WTAE, a local ABC affiliate, reported.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-researcher-killed-in-suspected-murder-suicide/?utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=SocialFlow

As a fifth-generation New Jerseyan, I have always been aware of the bad reputation of my state. Pollution, corrupt, mob-dominated politics, the Rutgers football team, New Jersey doesn’t exactly have a good reputation in the rest of the country. In the 1990s, when I lived off and on in Seattle and Southeast Alaska, the biggest compliment people thought they could pay me went something like this. “You’re from New Jersey? Well, at least you don’t have that accent.” Actually, I do have “that accent.” I sound a lot like Ray Liotta, who’s from my mother’s hometown of Union, did in Goodfellas. You cannot grow up as a Polish American in the great state of New Jersey without acquiring a sense of humor. Cynicism is part of the local culture, and that’s a good thing. At times it’s even poetic. Almost every song Bruce Springsteen writes is more or less about one thing: Getting the fuck out of New Jersey.

For the most part, while it’s often hilariously funny,  the stereotype of the typical New Jerseyan as a loud, ignorant, right-wing knuckle dragger, doesn’t stand up to the test of reality. New Jersey is by far one of the best-educated, most liberal states in America. There’s a reason we don’t have mass shootings. We’re smart enough to have gun-control. New Jersey hasn’t voted for a Republican President since it went for George H.W. Bush in 1988. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got 55 percent of the vote to Donald Trump’s 41 percent. Most of the state’s big cities are “sanctuary cities” that forbid local police from cooperating with ICE. The Rutgers football team might be the worst team in the history of the Big 10 Conference, but Rutgers also has top 20 programs in English, history, and math, and top 10 programs in philosophy, women’s studies and library science.

Unfortunately, New Jersey also has a savage divide between its wealthy suburbs and its working class cities. If Donald Trump has no chance of winning the state in 2020 that’s about Newark and Elizabeth, not Westfield or Mountain Lakes. It’s probably more accurate to say that while blacks and Hispanics in New Jersey are liberal, white suburbanites are as reactionary as they are anyplace else in the country. The typical white man in New Jersey over 40 is a racist Republican who could probably pass for a Mississippi Klansman if it weren’t for “that accent.” What’s more, in spite of the fact that Barack Obama won the state easily in 2008, New Jersey also became an early center of “tea party” reaction. In 2009, Chris Christie became governor. In 2010, Koch Brothers funded goons regularly disrupted Congressional town hall meetings on Obamacare. And then there’s the comments section at nj.com

There’s a joke going around that “the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 51 racist hate groups in New Jersey, but it’s actually 52 if you count the comments section at nj.com.” If anything it’s an understatement. Even before the Koch Brothers started pumping money into the local media — in 2010 you couldn’t read an article about the weather without running into 500 comments by global warming deniers — the comments section at nj.com was a place for middle-aged, white men from the suburbs and the rural areas to complain about the “liberal” cities. After awhile, even I had trouble keeping track of all the dog whistle, and I speak fluent, passive aggressive WASP. It went far beyond “those low income housing applicants are going to ruin our good schools” or “crime in the city of Newark is inevitable in such a diverse city.” It went far beyond changing the name of Bruce Springsteen, one of the most explicitly Catholic rock stars in American history, to Bruce Springstein, and attributing his support of Barack Obama to his Jewish ethnicity. At some point in the late 2010s, the racist comments at nj.com became almost indistinguishable from Stormfront. The comments from the global warming deniers were even worse, often degenerating into conspiracy theories about chem trails, and incomprehensible spam. Finally, the management at Advance Media, which owns nj.com, decided they couldn’t go on funneling traffic to what had essentially become a hate site.

I agree with Advance Media’s decision to pull the comments at nj.com, but I’m not naive enough to believe it was about any real objection to platforming racists. While the comments have gotten stupider and more incoherent, they’ve been viciously racist ever since the Bush years. I also vehemently disagree in the strongest possible terms with their decision to delete their archives. The white supremacist comments at nj.com are part of a historical document that should be studied by future generations of social media analysts. How exactly did the users’ forum at a mainstream media outlet in a “blue” state get taken over by white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Why couldn’t Advance Media simply hire moderators like the New York Times. The first amendment applies to government, not private business, but a private media company is certainly not obligated to choose from two bad extremes, unmoderated comments overrun by white supremacists, or no comments at all. How much exactly would it cost to hire a few interns to make sure the comments stayed on topic, avoided open expressions of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia, and at least made some kind of logical argument? The truth is Advance Media has nothing against racism. They’re just fucking cheap. They also want to destroy the evidence of just how complicit they’ve been in poisoning political discourse in the great state of New Jersey. My guess is the Koch Brothers money just ran out.

On the 40th anniversary of their shocking victory over the Soviet Union in one of the greatest upsets in sports history, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team was back in the spotlight this weekend — but in the eyes of some observers, it was more for political than patriotic reasons.

Members of the gold medal-winning “Miracle on Ice” squad, including team captain Mike Eruzione, appeared on stage at a Las Vegas rally Friday night for President Donald Trump wearing red hats emblazoned with Trump’s “Keep America Great” slogan.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2020/02/23/1980-miracle-ice-team-defends-appearance-trump-rally-vegas/4850510002/

The first time I ever heard the moronic “USA USA USA” chant was in 1980.

All through the 1970s, the American media had presented the Soviet Olympic hockey team as an unbeatable team of supermen, a gang of Ivan Dragos on ice. What’s more, very few of the best NHL players back then were Americans. Most were Canadians. I used to be a big fan of New York Rangers center Phil Esposito. The fact that he had a name that sounded like any New Jersey Italian only added to the appeal. We didn’t have the Internet back then. You couldn’t just Google. So when my uncle remarked that Esposito wasn’t from New Jersey and that he wasn’t even an American I refused to believe it. “No way Uncle Charlie. I go to school with 5 or 6 guys named Esposito. He’s got to be from New Jersey.” Later, in the small bookstore they used to have at the Two Guys department store on Route 22 in Union, when I looked up Esposito’s name in The Encyclopedia of Hockey, I realized the horrible truth. He was Canadian, born in some place I couldn’t even pronounce, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

You can imagine my joy, therefore, When I turned 15, and the American hockey team made its run for the gold medal in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Neal Broten, Ken Morrow, Mike Ramsey, Dave Christian, Mark Pavelich, none of them were Russians or dirty Canadians. Each and every one of them was a one hundred percent, red, white and blue American from the Midwest, a place I had never been to but was convinced was more truly American than New Jersey. When they beat the Russians, it felt like we had won the Cold War. While the “USA USA USA” chant had been ubiquitous in the media, I had refrained from joining in myself, but when NHL great Ken Dryden — alas another Canadian — started his famous count down in the last few seconds of the final game, I couldn’t help myself. “USA USA USA,” I shouted, “USA USA USA.” My father, who was zonked out on the couch in the next room, was having none of it, former United States Marine though he was. “Shut the hell up,” he shouted. “I’m trying to sleep.”

I even brought my patriotic fervor to school. To understand what that meant, you have to understand that I went to an urban high school just outside of Newark, New Jersey where being a leftist was not only socially acceptable. Thirteen years after the Newark Riot and five years after the last American helicopter took off from that roof in Saigon, it was almost socially required. Millennials, you cannot imagine what the world was like before 9/11. In spite of the fact that Ronald Reagan had just been elected President, most people hated the United States military. In fact, Reagan was never quite as popular as the corporate media would have you believe. He won mostly because of the incompetence of the increasingly neoliberal Democrats. Remember when Walter Mondale promised to raise taxes during his run for the Presidency? You don’t but I do. In any event, I sometimes have trouble understanding all of the outrage over Colin Kaepernick. In my high school, nobody was required to say the Pledge of Allegiance. They simply read it over the loudspeaker during homeroom and you could stand if you wanted. Nobody did. In fact, standing for the Flag Salute was considered the mark of an asskissing stooge, and doing it put you at the risk of having your ass kicked in the parking lot. But that February I didn’t care. I not only stood for the flag salute, when it was all over I kept standing.

“USA USA USA,” I chanted. “USA USA USA.”

“Oh sit the fuck down you dumb Polack,” one of my classmates said. “You’re being a fucking retard.”

“Fuck you,” I shouted back. “USA USA USA. And nuke the fucking Iranians.”

At that moment, our homeroom teacher — I forget his name but I do remember he was friends with the guy who wrote the novel The Exorcist — told us both to take our seats.

“Mr. Holmes,” he said to my antagonist. “Ethnic slurs and profanity will not be tolerated in my homeroom. And Mr. Rogouski,” he added, “neither will calls for genocide.”

“Genocide” I said. “What’s that?”

I sometimes wonder what I would have been like if Carter had won in 1980 and the United States had not gone down such a right wing path. I wasn’t really a super patriot back then. In fact, the next year I became an atheist after I finally saw Life of Brian by Monty Python on cable TV. I had been too young to see it in the theater. The ticket clerks, mostly older high school kids, had insisted on seeing my driver’s license to prove I was 18 and old enough to go unaccompanied into an R rated movie. They wouldn’t give me a break. Monty Python, not Karl Marx, turned me into a leftist. In any event, I wasn’t a genuine super patriot when I was 15. I had simply gotten it into my head that everybody else in the world was a dirty Vietcong worshipping hippie who hated their country and didn’t care that the Iranians were humiliating us each and every day. Being a super patriot was a way to be a rebel. Being a pot smoking leftist who listened to too much heavy metal would have meant being a miserable conformist. The American Olympic Hockey team of 1980 wasn’t the “dream team” that dominated the basketball court 12 years later. They were underdogs who seemingly had no chance of winning.

Now it’s the opposite. In spite of the rise of Bernie Sanders, we still have a racist, right-wing President and every white man in New Jersey over the age of 40 seems like some sort of Republican or “libertarian.” At best, they’re “economically conservative and socially liberal.” And the American hockey team of 1980? To nobody’s surprise they’re attending Trump rallies. Too bad they’re not Canadians. At least they’d have better healthcare.

Back in the 1980s, when Elizabeth Warren was still a Republican and Reagan Administration officials were making AIDS jokes at press conferences, the United States government was fighting a dirty war against leftists in Central America. While the history of CIA death squads in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador still profoundly affects American politics — most of the Central American refugees at the southern border are fleeing the violent society that was the inevitable result of the Cold War — I doubt one American in a hundred would recognize the name “Raymond Bonner.” For all of the talk on social media about “privilege” I can’t think of a better example than this. Not only do people in the United States get to forget atrocities carried out by allies of the American government. We don’t even have to. Most of us never hear about them in the first place.

Early in January of 1982, a Marine Corps veteran and New York Times staff writer named Raymond Bonner was invited by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front to visit the village of El Mozote in the Morazán Department or Northeastern El Salvador. While Bonner would later be smeared by the Reagan Administration for traveling with the leftist rebels, it’s clear that the FMLN had nothing to hide. Quite the contrary, they wanted the New York Times, and the entire western media, to understand what had happened the previous month,  an atrocity at least twice the size of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.

On December 10, 1981, units of the Atlacatl Battalion, led by officers trained in the United States at Fort Benning, Georgia, entered the village of El Mozote looking for suspected leftist rebels. In the kind of counterinsurgency campaign that very few people in the United States have experienced, or have even tried to imagine, the soldiers began rounding up in the villagers in the town square. They separated the men, women, and children, and preceded to get to work torturing the men, raping the women and girls, and, and conducting summary executions. Over the next two days, over 1000 people were dead. To give some sense of perspective, in 1943, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis killed 340 people in Lidice, a small town in Czechoslovakia most of us are probably (well hopefully) familiar with from high school history.

After Raymond Bonner filed his story about the massacre on January 27, 1982 with the New York Times, he was subjected to a ferocious right-wing backlash led by none other than Elliot Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration and currently Donald Trump’s “Special Representative for Venezuela.” Bonner was not only labeled an “activist journalist,” he was accused of collaborating with the rebels to inflate the casualty list. The United States embassy in San Salvador argued, for example, that “no more than 300 people lived in El Mozote.” William A. Henry III of Time Magazine revived an old Vietnam-era talking point. “An even more crucial if common oversight,” he wrote, “is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active participants in guerrilla war.” Eventually pressure from the Reagan Administration pushed the New York Times to reassign Bonner to the financial desk in New York City. As New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis later wrote, the New York Times and other major newspapers got the message, and immediately toned down their criticism of Reagan’s counterinsurgency campaign in Central America.

Over the next few decades, after it was too late to matter, the press began a detailed investigation into what happened at El Mozote, eventually proving that Raymond Bonner had been right all along. In the early 1990s, a United Nations Truth Commission traveled to the site and dug up hundreds of skeletons, the size of many of which indicated they had belonged to small children. A detailed article in the New Yorker by Mark Danner described the efforts of 4 forensic scientists from Argentina, who also confirmed the original reporting by Raymond Bonner. The New York Times, denying that pressure from the Reagan Administration had ever had any affect on their coverage of the Civil War in El Salvador, declared Bonner “completely vindicated.” In 2011, the Salvadoran government issued a formal apology.

Finally, three days ago, the Salvadoran general to whom most of the officers commanding the Atlacatl Battalion reported, at long last came out and admitted it. “Yeah. We did it.”

According to a United Nations report, soldiers tortured and executed nearly 1,000 residents of El Mozote and surrounding hamlets in the Morazan department, 180 kilometres (112 miles) northeast of San Salvador, as they searched for rebel fighters in December 1981.

At a court hearing in the eastern town of San Francisco Gotera in Morazan, Bustillo testified he had had no part in the operation which he said was conducted at the behest of Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the feared Atlacatl Battalion.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/el-salvador-general-admits-army-carried-el-mozote-massacre-200125155053149.html

Elliot Abrams, of course, faced no consequences for his attacks on Raymond Bonner and remains a part of the Trump Administration.

While it is still too early to determine whether or not Elizabeth Warren’s well-organized campaign to paint Bernie Sanders as a sexist has diminished his chances of winning the Democratic nomination for President, we can already be certain of one thing. It has significantly enhanced his brand. After watching their candidate repeatedly attacked at by CNN’s moderators during the January 14th debate, his supporters on the Internet got mad. Then they got out their credit cards.

Even by the standards of Bernie Sanders’ fundraising juggernaut, Tuesday was a big day: He raised $1.7 million from more than 100,000 small-dollar donors, his biggest debate-day haul of the 2020 campaign.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/15/warren-sanders-dispute-2020-099467

Neoliberal economists like Frederick Von Hayek and Milton Friedman have argued that while the state is inherently oppressive, the market is open and democratic. Business models for Silicon Valley companies like Uber extend the libertarian ideal into the market itself, aiming to “disrupt” older, more traditional corporations by the use of the Internet, mobile and digital technology. Similarly, privately owned charter schools target top heavy public schools and teachers unions.

As odd as it my sound, it is the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders who mostly closely embodies the libertarian ideal. While Sanders eventually hopes to roll back the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and restore the social democratic ideals of the New Deal, it is unlikely that he will get anywhere near the White House. The Democratic Party establishment, the corporate media, and big, top town unions like SEIU have placed formidable obstacles in his path. The sheer number of candidates remaining in the race and Joe Biden’s dominant position among older, southern, African American voters make it unlikely that Sanders will get the nomination on the first ballot, which will kick the decision up to the super delegates on the second ballot. 2020 is likely to be the most traditional Democratic National Convention since 1968, where fat ward healers in smoke filled rooms grabbed the nomination away from the young anti-war activists galvanized into politics by the recently murdered Robert Kennedy.

Like Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, Bernie Sanders has galvanized the next generation of progressives into electoral politics. He has met with some hostility on the far left, who accuse him of “sheepdogging” people into the hide bound Democratic Party, but it is in the Democratic Party itself where he has met with the most hostility. Older, more affluent Democratic Party activists, feminists, union leaders, and the African American elite led by figures like John Lewis don’t quite know what to make of Sanders himself, with whom they often agree on the issues. But they are unanimous in their dislike of his followers, who they label “Bernie Bros” or “social media bullies.” Like a middle-aged divorcee who spent his youth going to fraternity parties and suddenly finds himself face to face with Tinder, older liberal Democrats are experiencing culture shock. Suddenly they feel irrelevant, shunted aside by a horde of aggressive, new activists in their 20s. Unwilling to give up their institutional power, they have waged a scorched earth campaign against Sanders and his movement, determined to drive the Senator from Vermont, and millions of new voters away from the political party they see as their birthright, desperately hoping we will all “give up purity politics” and “vote blue no matter who” in spite of their obvious hostility.

The results are likely to be disastrous. Unlike younger left and liberal activists in Chicago in 1968, Sander’s followers are unlikely to riot when the corrupt old Democratic establishment steals the nomination from their man for Joe Biden. The Millennials of 2020 are not the hippies of 1968. The typical Bernie Bro is far more comfortable with an iPad or a cell phone than he is with a Molotov Cocktail. They will however continue to undermine the Democratic Party institutions they rightfully see as blocking their path to political power, and progressive reform. What’s more, the rank and file of the Sanders movement, like the rank and file of Occupy Wall Street, is likely to fade away in pessimism and disillusionment. Bernie Sanders is a 78 year old New Deal Democrat, an old fashioned big government liberal who has survived into the age of neoliberalism. The leadership of his movement however, the organizers and social media gurus who have built his campaign into a fundraising juggernaut will, like George McGovern’s supporters in 1972 — among who were Gary Hart and Bill Clinton — are going onto lucrative careers in politics. Will they hang onto the social democratic politics of their candidate once he retires? In spite of younger, prominent social democratic politics like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it does not seem very probable. More likely, they will adopt the neoliberal identity politics of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren, and simply replace the Baby Boomers among Democratic Party power brokers.

Who will be the Gary Hart and Bill Clinton of the Bernie Bro Generation? The only thing that’s certain is that there will be a fight about the color, gender and ethnicity of the new elite, about who gets to control all the money raised by the Sanders campaign from people who got mad on the Internet. Political opinions will be expressed more and more online, and with a credit card, and less and less in the voting booth and in the streets. Raising money for healthcare will continue to be about Go Fund Me accounts, and not about Medicare for All. Conservative dominance in the political arena is likely to continue through my lifetime. The market, however, will be up for grabs.