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What’s Behind Noam Chomsky’s Obituary-Marring Epstein Friendship?
New Republic • 2 weeks ago

What’s Behind Noam Chomsky’s Obituary-Marring Epstein Friendship?

Jacobin’s top story on Noam Chomsky is from 2024: “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Giant.” Following Chomsky’s star turn in the recently released files of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, this headline in America’s leading socialist magazine hasn’t, as they say, aged well.Elsewhere, the left is not so sanguine about Chomsky’s communications with Epstein. “I am heartsick,” wrote Vijay Prashad, Chomsky’s friend and co-author, in Counterpunch. Having himself suffered sexual violence as a child, Prashad continues: “There is no defense for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.” Even more direct was a leftist YouTube channel last week: “WTF Was Chomsky THINKING?”Especially bothersome to followers of Chomsky, the lifelong critic of elites, is an email in which he sympathizes with Epstein, as if the child rapist were not a plunderer of the underclass—the mostly working-class girls upon whom Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell preyed—but a martyr in the crosshairs of lying bitches and hysterical feminists. That was 2019. Julie K. Brown in the Miami Herald had recently tracked down more than 60 women who said they were abused by Epstein. Bemoaning “the horrible way you’ve been treated by the press and the public,” Chomsky, in the email, advised Epstein to “ignore it.” He continued: “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”To extenuate these revelations, Valeria Chomsky, Noam’s wife and late-life caregiver, published a letter citing “Noam’s overly trust[ing] nature” and “severe poor judgment” in letting Epstein “ensnare” him. This explanation is unlikely to put the matter to rest. At a moment when a deposed prince and a former ambassador have both been arrested following revelations in the Epstein files, Chomsky’s tête-à-têtes with Epstein seem worse than naïve. They’re obituary-marring. Chomsky may still be an intellectual giant, but his moral giantism is no longer a done deal. And Chomsky, incapacitated at 97 after a massive 2023 stroke, has little time left for his crew to buff out the stain on his legacy before his epitaph is written.So, is it a break from Chomsky’s values that he advised Epstein on how to show contempt (“ignore it”) for the underclass survivors of Epstein’s predation? Or is Chomsky’s appearance in the files somehow continuous with his long and legendary career as critic of bloodthirsty elites just like Epstein?Chris Knight, author of the 2016 biography Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, has squared the Chomsky circle by claiming there are two Noam Chomskys. There is, he wrote earlier this month, “one working for the U.S. military, in his research job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the other working tirelessly against that same military.” Indeed, Chomsky got his start in the 1950s at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, which was funded largely by the Pentagon. In the early ’60s, he also worked for the private MITRE Corporation, where he helped develop command-and-control systems for the Air Force. All the while, he taught linguistics, conducted nonmilitary research, and engaged in direct political action as a self-styled “anarcho-syndicalist.” In 1981, Chomsky was asked to reconcile this internal duality: “What do [your two sides] say to each other when they meet?”“There is no connection,” Chomsky replied, “apart from some very tenuous relations at an abstract level.” A decade later, Chomsky explained his internal division by citing an “odd talent” that set him apart from his colleagues. “I’ve got sort of buffers in the brain that allow me to shift back and forth from one project to the other.”This might be garden-variety hypocrisy, but twentieth-century American scientists—notably Einstein—also have a history of sinking their talent into the war machine, only to emerge as staunch critics of it. Among Chomsky’s American fans, however, he’s famous less for his pacifism than for his exposure of propaganda and the conniving high hats who churn it out. In blockbusters like Manufacturing Consent, The Myth of American Idealism, Necessary Illusions, Understanding Power, and How the World Works, Chomsky seems to speak from the ivory tower to show exactly how much contempt elites have for the public, and how they gas us up with lies.Perhaps this rambunctious outsider-insider status—rather than the “two Chomskys” theory—explains how Chomsky and Epstein and others in their circle, including Steve Bannon, are connected. They’re all deeply embedded in elite institutions, from Harvard to MIT, Goldman Sachs to the Pentagon. And yet they’re also deeply cynical about their own cohort. To take just one extraordinary example: In one email exchange, Epstein drew out Chomsky on the Iran nuclear deal, only to forward Chomsky’s anti-Israel thoughts to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak with a note: “Thought you might find amusing.”Chomsky, for his part, especially loved to hate what he called the “imperial command” for holding themselves out as liberal exemplars while condescending to the rest of us. His villains were first depicted as WASPs, and later often as effete or feminized. (Recently in this role: Hillary Clinton.) Earlier in his career, Chomsky especially lit into Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential WASP theologian. While promoting his 1989 book Necessary Illusions, Chomsky used some of Niebuhr’s phrases and even assumed his voice: “Us smart guys—it’s our task to impose ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ to keep these poor simpletons on course.”When I’ve quoted this before, Chomsky fans hasten to point out that he is not speaking for himself; he’s speaking as Niebuhr and his ilk. Fair point. But Chomsky’s slip into first person is significant. The reason Chomsky (Harvard, MIT) is credible as a critic of elites is the same reason Steve Bannon (Harvard, Goldman Sachs) is: They have the résumé for it. They are “us smart guys” and can thus tell us exactly how the evil world works.And it was this move that explains Chomsky’s appeal to a certain kind of young nonidealist: He made them feel uniquely privy to the evil workings of elites. There is no better way to feel undeceived than to join the circle of the deceivers.And so Chomsky found himself at home in Epstein’s circle. Having often said that liberals are worse than reactionaries because at least the right is “honest” about its warmongering, Chomsky may also have appreciated how nakedly violent, hawkish, and of course pro-Israel the Epstein class could be.Then there’s Chomsky’s unsteady feminism. Women in Chomsky’s schema are not welcome among the “smart guys,” but nor are they part of the volk, the working-class men who might—in Chomsky’s accounting—feel feminism has deprived them of patriarchal control. “Maybe the one thing that the white working man can hang onto is that he runs his home?” Chomsky mused in Salon in 2013. With this in mind, it becomes possible for Chomsky to see even traumatized young girls as handmaidens to a feminist elite, who probably put them up to it to destroy downtrodden white men like himself and Epstein.Chomsky’s story about American power was alluring for decades. But there’s a great deal of water under the bridge now, and mainline Protestant theologians, whose heyday was the 1930s, don’t command much moral authority anymore. The Epstein oligarchy took power from the Niebuhr pulpit. Insidiously, the oligarchy consolidated that power across sectors, and then crushed dissent, notably by direct survivors of Epstein’s cruelty. The fact that Chomsky missed this changing of the guard and found himself on the side of exploitation only proves how right he was about how power consumes its opposition.

Vigdis Hjorth Keeps Going Back
New Republic • 2 weeks ago

Vigdis Hjorth Keeps Going Back

“To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question” for a woman who wants to make art, “as Virginia Woolf also thought,” the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth writes in her novel A House in Norway. The fictional narrator of Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” receives an inheritance of £500 a year from an aunt, giving her enough financial independence to write. Woolf, too, inherited £500 a year from her own aunt.Questions of inheritance animate much of Hjorth’s work. Often, the inheritance is literal: The central character of A House in Norway (2014), the first of Hjorth’s novels to be translated into English, is an artist who makes her living by renting out an apartment in the house she purchased with inherited money, and her best known novel, Will and Testament (2016), is framed by a family dispute about who of four siblings should inherit a set of holiday cabins after their father’s death.But these inheritances unfold into intangible questions about legacy and duty—A House in Norway probes the uneasy intimacy of landlord and tenant, asking what we owe to others and particularly to immigrants, and examining the struggle to see ourselves clearly through comforting national and personal myths. Will and Testament revolves around the revelation that one of the siblings, the narrator, was sexually abused by her father as a young girl, what this has done to her life and relationships, and how this trauma changes the network of debts and obligations among the members of the family. These are questions, for Hjorth, about the persistence of the past in the present, inheritance as a way of folding time back on itself.The persistence of the past in the present is a classic Freudian preoccupation. In his essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Freud wrote of the compulsive repetitions of people who have repressed memories, their continual turns back to the past. He wrote that the patient experiences these repetitions “as something real and contemporary,” but therapeutic work involves “tracing it back to the past.” This works, too, as a description of Hjorth’s writing style; her narrators are endlessly reflexive, and she structures her novels so that past and present often blur, creating what could be called a psychoanalytic rather than a linear sense of time.Her latest book, fittingly, is called Repetition, translated into English by Charlotte Barslund (who has also translated five of Hjorth’s other works since 2017). In it, an older woman, a novelist who speaks on panels about “the relationship between the novel and real life,” attends a musical performance. There, seated next to a teenage girl who seems uncomfortable attending the event with her parents, the narrator is thrown back, like a patient on an analyst’s couch, into her own past. In Barslund’s translation, Hjorth’s prose is elegantly, claustrophobically interior; her books have a breathless quality, poised between a headlong plunge and a pressured pause, like having the wind knocked out of you by a blow to the chest. Barslund also carefully preserves a network of repetitions that spread across and between Hjorth’s books—phrases reappear nearly verbatim a handful of pages after they are first written; scenes repeat from one book to the next, ceramics are always being smashed. In Repetition, the relationship between repetition, memory, and writing becomes Hjorth’s explicit theme.The book opens with what could be a description of the psychoanalytic method:Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again ... you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something.This, too, is a kind of inheritance. “Generations will follow the course of generations,” Hjorth writes, “and we are tied to our family from our first breath to our last.” What unfolds from there will be familiar to readers of Hjorth’s work (not least because Will and Testament describes a sequence of events identical to the plot in Repetition), but that is exactly her point.Hjorth’s narrator recalls the November when she was 16 years old, living with her domineering father and anxious mother. As the girl grows, so does her mother’s anxiety; her fear is disproportionate to the girl’s behavior, somehow unnatural. In part to escape this stifling environment, the girl comes up with excuses to leave the house, attending parties with friends, and there, she meets a boy. She plans to lose her virginity to this boy, eagerly anticipating “the event you will never forget because no one ever forgets their first time.” She writes about it in her diary. So far, so conventional, as plots go, but the proximity of horror and normality is a preoccupying concern for Hjorth.“When you’re sixteen and you have a boyfriend, then you do it,” Hjorth’s narrator explains, her desire more for that sense of normalcy than desire as such. And so, she goes to her boyfriend’s house, to another party, and follows him upstairs. What happens next is like a set piece out of a sex comedy—Hjorth is funnier than she’s often given credit for, perhaps because of the darkness of her subject matter. They undress and get into bed, and he gets on top of her and begins moving his hips. But she realizes something is wrong. “He moved his hips as men do during sex, except this wasn’t intercourse because he wasn’t inside me, I didn’t know much, but that much I did know. I whispered to him that he wasn’t inside me. Finn, you’re not inside me, but he didn’t seem to hear.” She whispers again and again but he doesn’t hear her and eventually he’s done, seemingly satisfied with his effort. Back downstairs, he puts an arm around her on the couch. Her narrator reports that he “whispered in my ear: Now I’ve made a woman of you.” “And” she writes, deadpan, “that’s how I became a woman.”Jokes can, however, be a way of repressing terrible truths. Hjorth’s narrator was so looking forward to this event that “no one ever forgets” because she’s forgotten something. “Back then, of course, I didn’t know,” the narrator notes, “that I was living in a crime scene.” When Hjorth’s narrator gets home, she starts sobbing and, “as often when I couldn’t understand myself and I felt pain whose origin I couldn’t fathom because its strength was out of proportion to the situation I was in, I took out my diary to write.” Unable to bear the blankly expectant pages of the diary she’d written her hopes in only hours earlier, she begins to invent pages and pages about sleeping with Finn. “My first fiction,” the narrator calls it—here, Hjorth gives us the psychoanalytic method as a kind of Künstlerroman in reverse.This first fiction, the narrator writes, “taught me a life lesson: fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful,” an observation characteristic of Hjorth’s work and similar to a point she often makes directly in interviews. The narrator’s fiction does in fact have a remarkable impact when her parents read what she’s written, and her father, horrified, takes off and is stumbling drunk when he returns late at night. The next morning, he asks the narrator whether she bled when she had sex. It’s a disturbing question, and it “planted a seed in me, it pointed me in the direction of my real trauma,” though it takes her years, still, to recover the memory of what happened to her when she was younger, the final revelation occasioned by another act of writing.Her mother, in turn, “watered a seed which had already been planted” with her seemingly inexplicable anxiety—her mother’s own fictions. “I was unable to reassure her of my innocence, present and future,” the narrator writes, “she wanted to get under my clothes and under my skin and into my head in order to read my mind to learn what triggered her unbearable fear, but as that was impossible, she invented her own version of me instead. Her fear created me because fear and imagination go together.” Her mother’s fear is half fear that her daughter will confirm something she already suspects, half fear that she will reveal to the world the unspeakable truth of this family. The mother’s invention of a fictional version of her daughter ultimately points the narrator toward the place where secrets have been buried and repressed.It is hard to write about Hjorth without writing about Freud. She writes about him herself, repeatedly; Will and Testament contains a careful reading of Civilization and Its Discontents. And the story that book tells is a perfect psychoanalytic case study: a repressed childhood memory, a family romance, dreams calling out for analysis. Bergljot, the narrator, has always had a sense that something was wrong with her and with her family, and, as she grows older, she becomes increasingly alienated from her distant, tyrannical father and her anxious, jealous mother; but the exact nature of the problem is unclear to her until she begins having a series of “strange, painful attacks” while writing a one-act play. After one of these episodes, she goes back to look at what she’s written and finds it all there, her past comes back to her on the page: “He touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father.” She quickly gets herself into four-times-a-week psychoanalysis. When she learns that her father wants to will the family’s two holiday cabins to her younger sisters, leaving out her and her brother—the two siblings who acknowledge a darkness in the family—she decides it is time for an accounting. Literally: She reads a speech about her father’s abuse at a meeting with the family’s accountant.Hjorth, 66, is a prolific writer with some 20 books to her name, and she writes primarily in two modes. She is alternately a novelist of social problems, as in A House in Norway and Long Live the Post Horn! (2012), in which a depressed PR rep finds meaning through working for Norway’s postal union, and a writer of what Norwegians call “reality literature” and we call autofiction, as in Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead (2020), If Only (2001), and, most recently, Repetition. In her autofiction, her protagonists are writers or artists. They often live, like Hjorth, in Oslo, raised, like Hjorth, in respectable Norwegian families. They, like Hjorth, have strained familial relationships, and are often, like Hjorth, divorced, having realized that, contrary to familial expectations, they did not want to be “a middle-class, bourgeois woman, married to a middle-class, bourgeois man,” as Hjorth said of her own first marriage. They tend to leave these relationships for a more bohemian, more cultured partner, often a married professor, sometimes echoing the mother character’s own affair.The distance between Hjorth’s two modes is smaller than it seems. Alma, in A House in Norway, observes that “violence features most frequently in two types of societies: the small, close-knit and local, and the distant and loosely connected.” Hjorth is concerned, always, with power and violence and intimacy, and relationships in which all three tangle, whether between a landlord and their tenant, a nation and the countries it has colonized and oppressed, or a daughter and the father who abused her (“he was,” Bergljot says in one of the most devastating lines of Will and Testament, “just as much my dad as the others’.”).Hjorth has called Will and Testament her most political novel; she has said it was inspired by her work with refugees, and it is shot through with discussion of global conflict, a double analysis of local and distant violence. The book caused a scandal in Norway—while Hjorth insisted that, despite its many parallels to her own life and family, it was a novel, her family responded to it as an accusation. They argued both that the novel was untrue and that it used familial communication verbatim, without permission. Like the family in the novel, they closed ranks against the force of Hjorth’s words. They argued, in public, that the novel borrowed too much from their lives; they threatened lawsuits. Her sister even wrote her own novel in response (Hjorth has called it a “revenge novel”) about the sister of a woman who makes fraudulent incest accusations. Their insistence on seeing themselves in the book, it must be said, somewhat deflates their own denials of its truth. In the books that have followed, Hjorth has often returned to the themes of the novel and those occasioned by its public reception; she continues to write about the inescapable traumas of childhood, familial estrangement and duty, the dynamics of memory, and the relationship between truth and fiction.Her subsequent novel, Is Mother Dead, follows an artist named Johanna as she obsessively stalks her mother and harasses her sister, Ruth. Her family cut off contact with her after a series of perceived slights, including displaying pieces called Child and Mother I and II, which they take to be autobiographical, and failing to attend her father’s funeral. It is an achingly lonely, longing account of familial estrangement and derangement and a Freudian exegesis on the enduring influence of childhood (“If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would ever dare have children,” Johanna writes). It could be called a revenge novel of its own, with its pointed insistence that “the relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting, the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial.”Just as the mother in Repetition invents her own version of her daughter, Johanna’s family is populated by projections. “I invent Ruth, that’s what’s so frightening,” Johanna observes in Is Mother Dead, “and Ruth invents me, and we both invent Mum.” For Hjorth, this is at the crux of the relationship between the novel and real life. Her novels might use real emails and text messages and the real program from her real father’s funeral (as one Norwegian newspaper demonstrated she did in Will and Testament). But we are all fictions, unknowable to one another and to ourselves; her characters are always trying to understand themselves and those around them and perennially revising their assessments. A novel can’t contain reality, because reality is never finished; it can’t even contain itself.Instead, her work is unstintingly focused on what novels might offer instead. She is interested in how to live—with other people, with the weight of the past, with what you’ve done and what’s been done to you. It is one of the most remarkable, disquieting strengths of her work that she grants the abusive fathers and acquiescent mothers a deep humanity. “Poor Dad,” and “Poor Mum,” she calls them by turns, reflecting, with empathy they did not earn, on the moral wreckage of their lives.It is a strength, too, that they are no less monstrous for their humanity. “It isn’t easy being human,” the father of Repetition’s narrator sobs, drunk and despairing after reading his daughter’s first fiction, exactly as Bergljot’s father says in Will and Testament. “The words my father spoke that November night in 1975 are perfectly true and the most beautiful I ever heard him say,” the narrator of Repetition says. It might well be an artist’s statement for Hjorth, another unsettling inheritance.For regular Hjorth readers, the revelation of abuse in Repetition does not shock in the way it does in Will and Testament—and readers of many of Hjorth’s books may easily have guessed what has happened before the narrator reveals it (Is Mother Dead never quite reveals it, though there are references for those who already know). But shock isn’t the point; it isn’t necessary for Hjorth’s writing to feel revelatory. “Will you never let it go?” her narrator asks, rhetorically, toward the end of the novel—and this book does feel, at times, like a pointed rebuke to any critic who might complain about her returns to the same subject. “No,” she says, “I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process.”   

Did Mike Huckabee Just Green-Light Israel to Invade Half the Levant?
New Republic • 2 weeks ago

Did Mike Huckabee Just Green-Light Israel to Invade Half the Levant?

When Mike Huckabee, the former Republican governor and evangelical minister, was named as President Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, it set a tone for the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship under the second Trump administration. Huckabee, who has said there is no such thing as Palestinians and who believes the Occupied Palestinian West Bank should be called Judea and Samaria, represented a certain evangelical constituency in the United States that has been at the foundation of support for Israel among Republicans.But Huckabee’s latest interview with Tucker Carlson, and the statements he made during it, are roiling the region and making it clear to regional players that their very low expectations for the Trump administration were not quite low enough. The row also comes at the intersection of two important contemporary currents: an American military buildup in the region putting it on a collision course with Iran, as well as a growing divide in the American right over support for Israel. Carlson, the former Fox News host who was fired from the network in 2023 and began his own independent network that routinely features interviews on various topics of interest to the MAGA-verse, has a massive following. He also maintains close relations with Trump and others in his inner circle and is, along with other right-wing podcasters, thought to offer a crucial connection to a vital part of the electorate that delivered the White House to Trump. Israel, and American support for it, has become a major topic of contention among this very constituency. This is partly fueled by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but more importantly it is driven by the perception that far too much American blood and treasure is spent defending Israeli interests and that criticism of this American policy is often sternly policed through pro-Israel influence in American policymaking and cultural spaces where accusations of antisemitism are the latest manifestation of the “wokevirus.” For this reason, each time Carlson is called an antisemite by those who disagree with his Israel views, deserved or not, it only seems to validate him with his audience. Carlson has also been making an argument around Israel within a faith-based frame that contrasts with the fundamentalist views that have shaped U.S. support for Israel on the American right. God, in the latter’s view, is effectively a real estate agent who has given a divine right to Zionist Jews to take the land of Palestine. Other Christians, who interpret the Bible’s commands in a figurative sense that applies to the Christian Church, and not a modern political movement, see this quite differently. To them, the modern state of Israel is merely a recent political entity and not the inheritor of God’s blessing from Old Testament Scripture. Instead, that blessing is inherited by the church through the ultimate sacrifice of Christ. For these reasons, as the many heads of the Christian churches in Jerusalem recently proclaimed, traditional Christians may look at Christian Zionism as a politicized perversion of Christianity.That brewing divide on the right has boiled over in recent months, and thus the interview between Carlson and Huckabee put two representatives of these conflicting views in conversation. Carlson sought to pin Huckabee down on his rationale for Israel’s “right” to exist; was it biblically ordained, morally necessary, or a result of international law? It was during Huckabee’s vacillating between these arguments that some of his most damaging remarks were made. Carlson asked Huckabee if the land Israel had a right to was the land God had promised Abraham in the Bible; that is, the land between the Nile and the Euphrates. This territory today includes large chunks of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and of course Palestine. This is when Huckabee said: “It would be fine if [Israel] took it all.” Now it is important to remember that Huckabee is not merely some kooky minister with a program on the Christian Broadcasting Network (though perhaps he should be). He is the U.S. ambassador to Israel, a man who is supposed to speak for the president of the United States and represent U.S. policy. This also comes at a crucial moment. A week earlier, Trump had gathered leaders from around the world, and many from the Middle East, to unveil his Board of Peace, which is supposed to shepherd the reconstruction of Gaza. It also comes at a time when American allies in the region are expressing deep concern and alarm about U.S. belligerence toward Iran as war seems imminent. The reaction from regional capitals to Huckabee’s comments were swift and condemnatory. Multiple countries issued joint statements blasting Huckabee’s comments. This also comes at a time when Israel exercises unprecedented hegemony and power projection throughout the region. It has bombed a record number of regional nation-states in the last two years, taken more territory in Syria and Lebanon, and carried out attacks in Iran and Yemen, all while routinely boasting about its deep infiltration into many of these nations. Huckabee’s comments are dangerous not just because they amount to the U.S. government giving the green light to massive Israeli expansionism but also because they come at a moment when Israel seems more willing and capable than ever to take such steps. The reaction from the White House has largely been to try to sweep this issue under the rug and hope it goes away, instead of issuing a clear denunciation or separation from Huckabee’s views. At worst, that signals to the region and the world that Washington actually shares Huckabee’s vision for a Middle East where Israel takes over several more countries; at best, it signals that Washington’s foreign policy in the region is completely dysfunctional. It is hard to imagine a worse way to precede what may be the most consequential American policy decision in the region since the Iraq War. Domestically, however, this moment will have its implications, as well. Carlson is very clearly a partisan in the inter-MAGA fight over Israel policy, and his interview lays down a clear marker ahead of a crucial moment with Iran. If the United States makes the disastrous, self-destructive decision to launch an open-ended war with Iran, it will be because one MAGA faction pushed Trump over that line with help from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. With polls showing the vast majority of Americans oppose such a strike, Carlson is likely making the safest bet by sounding the alarm over Christian Zionism, its unhinged proponents, and their desire to spread violence and destruction across the entire Middle East.

Pathetic: Maryland Democrats Have Surrendered on Gerrymandering
New Republic • 2 weeks ago

Pathetic: Maryland Democrats Have Surrendered on Gerrymandering

Maryland Governor Wes Moore has spent months pleading with Democrats in Maryland’s state Senate to adopt a redistricting plan that would likely result in Democrats winning all eight of the state’s U.S House seats, instead of their current seven. National Democratic groups and congressional Democrats such as Jamie Raskin have been making the same case. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries even went to Annapolis last week to urge state Senate President Bill Ferguson to at least hold a vote on the new congressional maps and give each state senator a chance to weigh in. They have all been ignored. Maryland’s Senate refused to hold a vote on redistricting, and Ferguson has declared the discussion over. The filing deadline for congressional candidates in Maryland was Tuesday, so any change in district lines will be even more complicated to carry out now. It’s fairly unlikely that Democrats win exactly 217 U.S. House seats in November, falling a single seat short and thereby leaving the House in the hands of a Republican majority that is content to let President Trump ignore the Constitution and govern as a dictator. But if Democrats do end up just one seat short, everyone should point their fingers at Ferguson and the other 33 Maryland Senate Democrats (there are 13 Republicans). And even if that nightmare scenario doesn’t come to pass, Maryland’s lawmakers exemplify a problem that dogs the Democratic Party and therefore the country 10 years into the Trump era: Many Democratic politicians still refuse to acknowledge and act on the reality that they are in a civil war against the Republicans and that winning this war will require breaking with traditional norms and niceties and even some generally solid democratic practices. Let me be clear: I absolutely hate gerrymandering. It results in elections where the results are predetermined. While both parties have gerrymandered in the past, over the last two decades Republicans have gone way overboard, rigging district maps to ensure huge GOP state legislative majorities in places like North Carolina where the two parties are roughly at parity. Right now, though, Democrats have to gerrymander. Have to. With Trump’s poll numbers plunging and the GOP on a clear path to lose the House, Trump last summer demanded that Republican-controlled states start redrawing their districts to ensure a continued GOP majority. Redrawing district lines to avoid democratic accountability is literally in the authoritarian playbook: such a common tactic that scholars Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explicitly discussed it in their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. Texas quickly followed the president’s edict, and eventually so did Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina. Republicans, who currently have a four-seat House majority, would have gained around nine seats if they gerrymandered and Democrats didn’t respond. But Democrats in other states did respond—moving heaven and earth to do so. California Democrats had to get a ballot initiative passed. Virginia Democrats have had to hold two separate votes in the legislature and still must get a measure approved by voters. But Democrats could pick up nine seats from those two states alone. Democrats don’t have that much to gain in Maryland—only a single seat. But Republicans in North Carolina and Missouri went through with redistricting to flip one seat. After all, the House is more closely divided than ever these days. A single seat could matter. And Florida and other GOP states could still change their districts, so a 9–9 gerrymandering split is far from guaranteed. So what’s up with Ferguson? He has given a few rationales for his moves. He claims that the redistricting plan is far short of the votes it needs to pass. He should prove that by holding a vote. Whatever they say in private, I suspect some Maryland state senators might not actually be willing to go through with a vote that would be cast as helping Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson. Ferguson claims Maryland judges might rule the new maps a violation of state law. Fine. Make the judges issue those rulings. He claims that Democrats in Maryland might end up with fewer than their seven current seats, particularly if judges mandate new maps. I am more confident in the electoral judgment of Jeffries, Raskin, Moore, and the 99 Maryland House Democrats (out of 100) who voted for this redistricting than I am in Bill Ferguson. Why the bullshit? My guess is that Ferguson and other state Senate Democrats don’t like the idea of being pushed by national Democrats and Governor Moore (a relative newcomer to Maryland politics, who is positioning himself for a presidential bid) to do anything, never mind a hyperpartisan action like gerrymandering. Politicians love to think of themselves as leaders and statesmen. Gerrymandering on the orders of party bosses is neither. Maryland Democrats aren’t alone in being wary of gerrymandering. Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate recently refused Trump’s demand to gerrymander the state’s two Democratic U.S. House seats out of existence. Liberals like me cheered Indiana Republicans’ move. Shouldn’t we be consistent and praise Maryland Democrats too?No. Consistency is an important value. Drawing fair districts is a good democratic practice. But stopping an authoritarian leader from keeping and consolidating power is the highest priority in a country that wants to maintain democracy and freedom. It’s more important than good values and practices. Why is this so hard for Democratic officials to understand? Bipartisanship is theoretically good. But it was stupid for Joe Biden to spend his first two years as president constantly praising Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans who had acquitted Trump after his treasonous acts on January 6, 2021. Refraining from using the legal system to punish your political rivals is in theory the correct practice. But Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Justice Department taking essentially as long as possible to file charges against Trump was a huge mistake. Maryland Democrats not gerrymandering a House seat obviously doesn’t rise to the level of the Democratic blunders that allowed Trump to run for and win a second term. But it’s February 2026. So many average Americans have spent the last 10 years doing whatever they can to defend America from Trump, from donating to candidates across the country to marching and protesting dozens of times. But we constantly have to watch as Democratic Party politicians, who have far more power and influence than regular citizens, do the bare minimum. Maryland Senate Democrats not only won’t redraw their state’s House districts, they won’t even hold a vote on the idea. Spineless. Pathetic. If Trump, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP succeed in turning America into an autocracy, they could not have done so without a lot of Democrats like Bill Ferguson.

Randy Fine Spreads More Hate
Scheer Post • 2 weeks ago

Randy Fine Spreads More Hate

On 15 February, Fine declared, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

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