THE SLAYING OF CHARLIE KIRK

 Last Wednesday, a sniper’s bullet silenced a prominent young far-right activist, Charlie Kirk. While not everyone will mourn Kirk’s passing, the fact that he was apparently murdered, not over some personal grudge, but as a means of silencing the ideas he disseminated, dictates that every true democrat should be outraged by this tragedy. Whether you agree with Charlie Kirk’s viewpoints or not, in a democracy, he had a right to voice them. Only in authoritarianism are ideas, no matter how seemingly pernicious, silenced by murdering the disseminator. And this is a time when we clearly need more democracy, not ever-less.

Charlie Kirk

The killing was a heinous and cowardly crime carried out by someone who, by commission of the act, demonstrated his utter contempt for the basic tenets on which the United States was founded, including respect for human and civil rights, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and the rule of law. As such, it was, as President Donald Trump said in his comments from the Oval Office following the killing, an attack not just on Kirk, but on the country as a whole. As has every other targeted attack carried out against political leaders in recent memory and throughout the country’s often bloody history as a whole.  

That said, at a moment in which everyone should have spent some time ordering their thoughts while holding their tongues for a change, deep divisions in an ever more polarized America were immediately in evidence.  Apart from partisan finger-pointing, which ran rampant even before the killer was identified, there was, for instance—inconsequentially and apropos of nothing—a great deal of fatuous nitpicking regarding the legal terminology being employed by the different political sectors to describe what had happened. While MAGA and the GOP wanted to ensure that it was being called “a political assassination”, others were positing that this was a misnomer, since Kirk wasn’t an office-holder as such, but merely an activist (if a very major one). It should be called, these other “opinionologists” claimed, a “murder for political motives” or a “targeted killing”.

Clearly, it was a moment in which what the killing was called was the least significant issue on the table. Much more important was what it signified, not only at the moment, but for the immediate and long-term future. It is correctly being termed by many as a turning point and/or a watershed moment on the country’s political scene. That, of course, begs the question of why the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband didn’t already previously mark that watershed moment.

The answer seems simple to me. It is a matter of political affiliation, and of who is occupying the White House at present.

For the record, however, political assassination is most often defined as: The murder of a public figure. The term typically refers to the killing of government leaders and other prominent persons for political purposes. As such, Charlie Kirk’s slaying fits the definition. He was, indeed, a so-called “public person”, even if he didn’t hold an official office.

First indications are that the alleged assassin, twenty-two-year-old Tyler Robinson, had pigeonholed Kirk as a totalitarian who was spreading hatred through his views, and as such, a symbolic target for assassination. Investigators indicated that a bullet casing left at the scene was inscribed with the words,  “Hey fascist! CATCH!” This would seem to indicate that the alleged killer saw himself as some sort of anti-fascist avenger. It has also come to light that Robinson had a relationship with his roommate, a man who is in the process of transitioning to female.

Tyler Robinson

Any connection made between this last fact and Kirk’s slaying is mere conjecture for the moment, since Robinson is not cooperating with investigators, and his motive for the murder remains unclear. What is undeniable, however, is that, among other extremist views Kirk espoused were radically hostile stances against homosexuals and transgender people. For instance, be called transgender identity a mental disease, that required “brain treatment.” He refused to employ people’s correct pronouns, arguing, “I will not call a man a woman.” Kirk also called for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming health care, and quoted passages from the Bible identifying homosexuality as an “abomination” deserving of death.

But while alleged assassin Tyler Robinson may have fancied himself an anti-fascist avenger, he chose a totalitarian means to his end, since his “solution” for someone he didn’t agree with—indeed, with whom he, like a lot of other people, very likely violently disagreed—was precisely the one a true fascist would have chosen. That is, if you don’t like what someone is saying, attack them physically, not on the debate stage,

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump seems to be engaging in thinking that is only slightly (if any) different from that of the young man charged with the killing. Within hours of Kirk’s death, the president and his closest collaborators were already making it about his own political rivals, ranting publicly and online about what he calls the “far-left” and its responsibility due to the supposedly incendiary language it employs. This immediately raised the political temperature, and, as a result, placed the lives and safety of liberals as a whole in increasing peril. The president of the United States, as we saw during the January Sixth Insurrection, only needs words as a means of inflicting violence on his perceived enemies.

At a time when a genuinely presidential leader would have been seeking to dampen the situation and to call for unity, Trump—not at all surprisingly—chose to hurl gasoline, rather than water, onto the flames. And he did all of this before investigators even had a clue as to the shooter’s identity or motive.

While the less combative of Trump apologists put down the president’s angry words and suggestions that the death of this strategic ally of the administration would be avenged to his being “angry and in mourning for a good friend,” that argument surely won’t fly among political analysts, or among presidential historians.  Presidents, once in office, should become the office, and often, for the good of the nation, and of the people as a whole, leave their personal feelings, emotions and prejudices aside. But in the years that we have come to know him, it is apparent that this simply is not Donald Trump. He is bereft of empathy, prudence or equanimity. He is a self-serving hothead with no compunction about using the power entrusted to him by the people to wreak havoc. Indeed, he thrives on being a bull in a china shop.

Trump vows vengeance

A good example of proper presidential behavior in situations such as these  has been quoted repeatedly over the course of the last few days. It is that of former President George W. Bush following the devastating Nine-Eleven attack on the Twin Towers, which killed more than three thousand Americans. In the face of nationwide outrage toward the kind of radical-Islamist terrorists who perpetrated the attack, Bush became the voice of calm, reminding Americans as a whole that “We are not at war with Islam.” He was making the point that American and resident Muslims were not to blame for the deeds or ideology of radicalized terrorist fanatics, and that this was a time to be strong and united in the face of an existential threat.

Trump, on the other hand, takes every opportunity afforded him by completely unrelated events to deepen the divisions in America, and to polarize the political scene to the point that it becomes an ever-more dangerous minefield of partisan hostility and violence. The president’s calls for the toning down of leftist political rhetoric rang hollow and hypocritical coming from him, since he has been known since 2016 for injecting rage, vengeance and vitriol into the language of everyday politics. He has, in fact, done this so consistently that it has been turning into the new normal across the political spectrum for nearly a decade now.

Trump argues—based, as usual, on his gut, rather than on facts, which remain sketchy at best—that the killer was radicalized by reckless left-wing language that describes people like Kirk (and like the president himself) as nazis and fascists. But long before his consistently authoritarian designs in policy and government gave rise to that kind of language, he was already referring to the Democratic Party in its entirety as “the radical left”, “leftist scum”, “left-wing lunatics”, and numerous other dehumanizing terms. After his election defeat in 2020, his own inflammatory rhetoric spurred the MAGA uprising that culminated in the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021, when hundreds of his most violent followers briefly took over the Capitol, in rioting in which one policeman and one demonstrator were killed, and one hundred forty police officers were injured, a number of them critically.

If the country has become a place where civil dialogue is next to impossible and where the middle-politic gets drowned out by the two violent extremes, it didn’t start with “the left”, but with the president and MAGA themselves, in what has become the language of the Era of Trump. Nothing if not consistent in his one-sided view of the political scene, for anyone who was listening, during his Oval Office speech following Kirk’s murder, Trump made it clear that he is the president of MAGA, not of the American people. Lashing out at liberals, he said:

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. 

My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

Speaker Pelosi and husband Paul

Conveniently absent from his list of mayhem were all of the Democratic victims of political violence. There was no mention, for instance, of Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was the victim of a home invasion by a MAGA radical who split Pelosi’s skull with a hammer, while holed-up awaiting the return home of the Speaker herself, whom he admitted planning to kidnap and torture. Nor did he make any mention of the foiled plot by far-right radicals to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Or the fire-bombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home. Or a shooting incident at the campaign offices of Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg. Or the murder of a police officer when a gunman opened fire at the CDC headquarters and Emory University in Atlanta (a case that involved misinformation spread by MAGA about the COVID vaccine). Or the high-profile slaying of  Democratic Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and the shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, both of whom, thankfully, survived. The shooter in that case was disguised as a police officer and was carrying a list of other Democrats he planned to attack.

Slain Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman

So, Trump’s Oval Office speech contained a not-so-subliminal message that the only victims that matter are the ones on the right. It follows then, in the MAGA mindset, that liberal victims aren’t worth mentioning—and probably got what they deserved. In a truly despicable development, following the Kirk slaying, Fox News personality and frequent Trump  surrogate Brian Kilmeade sought to shift blame for the Minnesota slayings from the right to that state’s governor and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. Kilmeade claimed the assassination of Representative Hortman and the shooting of Senator Hoffman happened because “they didn’t like something Governor Tim Walz was doing.” Kilmeade wasn’t alone in this insane claim. He was preceded in spreading that conspiracy theory by none other than Charlie Kirk.

This is, by the way, the same Brian Kilmeade who—after criticizing

Shooting victims Sen. John Hoffman and wife

“violent rhetoric on the left,” suggested that if homeless people didn’t want to submit to programs designed to get them off the street, the only other option should be “lethal injection.” In other words, Kilmeade seemed to think impoverished people who ended up living on the street should be treated like stray animals and be euthanized if a home cannot be found for them. The next day Fox apparently pressured him to apologize, which he did on the air. But they weren’t words easily taken back. And many were asking themselves, in what sort of warped mind can that kind of violent thought even formulate? Never mind the apology after the fact.

Brian Kilmeade

The short answer is, the sort of mind that is a daily disseminator of MAGA dogma and a surrogate of the Trump White House. This is clear from the fact that, following Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump immediately did an interview on the morning show Fox and Friends at Fox News. There, among friends, including Kilmeade, Trump imbued the audience with the idea that the only sort of extremism in America is leftist extremism. (Apparently, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are Eagle Scouts and the KKK is just a bunch of good ol’ boys out for a little harmless fun, not to mention the neo-Nazis who are “some very good people” on that other side).

Specifically, the president said: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”

Less than a day later, he told a gaggle of reporters,  “We have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” (An obvious clarion call to his most extreme supporters—perhaps among them, some of the fifteen hundred convicted January Sixth insurrectionists to whom he gave a blanket pardon and get-out-of-jail-free card). On that same day (Tuesday, September 9), Trump stated that "most of the violence is on the left."

But a Cato Institute study quoted by Time Magazine belies that notion entirely. In the past five years, more than eighty people have died in acts of political violence in the United States. Right-wing terrorists carried out fifty-four percent of those killings. Radicals Islamist terrorists were responsible for another twenty-one percent, while extreme left violence killed twenty-two percent of the victims.

But the Cato study doesn’t stop there. It investigates terrorist crime all the way back to 1975. According to the study, in that time, Islamist terrorism has accounted for eighty-seven percent of the deaths recorded, mainly due to Nine-Eleven, which cost the lives of  more than three thousand people. But the report goes on to take Nine-Eleven out of the equation and breaks down the other political killings that have taken place. Its conclusion: Since 1975, non-Nine-Eleven Islamist terrorism has accounted for one hundred forty-three killings, leftist extremism has accounted for sixty-five murders, while right-wing domestic terrorism has cost the lives of three hundred ninety-one people. The data doesn’t lie. The extreme right is clearly, at least for now, exceedingly more violent than the left, and we’ve got the body bags to prove it.

But neither Trump nor his MAGA ideologues are willing to admit that. In fact, they seek to suppress it. There are reports that, even as we speak, the administration has people combing government reports and documents to find and suppress data that show right-wing nationalist terrorism to be the most imminent extremist threat facing the country today.

A good example of Republican lawmakers living in denial was provided by South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace. In an interview with CNN’s Kate Bolduan, Mace talked about congressional moves to better protect politicians, adding that she was from an open-carry state and was now packing whenever she was out in public. She blamed the threats to lawmakers entirely on left-wing violence, and stressed her belief that “Democrats own” Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Rep. Nancy Mace

Over the course of the brief interview, Bolduan provided Mace with repeated opportunities to admit that there was violence on both sides of the political spectrum, but not once did she acquiesce. She insisted that all violence came from the left, and sought to picture Republicans and the right as hapless victims of a clearly one-sided political trend.    

Both Trump and his GOP hand-puppets are seeking to cast Charlie Kirk as a martyr for the cause of civil debate and free expression, a young man with a kumbaya attitude toward the world at large, and as a crusader who sought to draw college-aged conservatives into the big tent of “conservative” ideas. But while Kirk had the same constitutional right as every other American to express his views publicly and to organize authorized political rallies, the fact is that many of his ideas were highly controversial and steeped in far-right, white-supremacist ideology. They were far from humanitarian, and lacked even basic empathy for anyone who didn’t agree with him. But he, oddly enough, preached non-violence in politics and felt that the way to spread his far-right views was through contact and debate. As Voltaire once wisely suggested, I may be in complete and utter disagreement with most of Charlie Kirk’s notions, but I would defend to the death his right to express them.

That, after all, is what liberal democracy is all about—the sanctity of individual rights and freedoms and the system (today much battered and deteriorated) of checks and balances to ensure their protection. But while Charlie Kirk’s rights might be just as sacred to me as my own—because if a single person’s rights are violated, everyone’s rights are endangered—those were not the principles Charlie Kirk supported. Nor are they supported by the Trump administration.

Case in point: Right while Trump, MAGA and the GOP as a whole were on a rant about how everyone, like Charlie Kirk, should be able to express their ideas without fear of suppression or violence, the president’s deputy chief of staff (and the shadowy Rasputin behind some of Trump’s most repressive policies) Stephen Miller engaged in an almost hysterical rant on Fox News, following the Kirk shooting, in which he vowed to use law enforcement to “dismantle the left.”

Clearly, he wasn’t simply referring to terrorist organizations, but to anyone opposed to the Trump agenda. Among other things, Miller ranted: “The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven (was) that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.” He went on to say, “I don’t care how. It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

Stephen Miller

In a vow that sounded a lot more like vengeance than the rule of law, Miller then said, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” Doubling down in no uncertain terms, the deputy chief of staff went on to say, “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law to take away your freedom.”

This last was telling, and chilling. It suggested that opponents of the administration would become the targets of a witch hunt aimed at stripping them of everything. and, only then, “if you’ve broken the law…take away your freedom.” The deeper meaning being that even opponents, US citizens who haven’t broken the law, would be targeted, and even exiled! This is troubling, or should be for every large and small-d democrat within the context of an earlier statement that he made, also on Fox News, at the end of last month, in which he claimed that the Democratic Party was not really a party, but “a domestic terror organization.”

If some far-right nut job in a barbershop says something like that while waiting to have his head shaved, you might be able to laugh it off. But when it comes from the deputy chief of staff of the presidency, no matter how insane it might be, it is policy. Which brings me to another point: If the Trump administration wants people to stop calling them fascists, perhaps it would be a good idea to stop talking and acting like fascists, and start embracing the sacred principles of a two-and-a-half-century-old liberal democracy.

As I said earlier, I fully and unequivocally condemn Charlie Kirk’s slaying as a senseless tragedy triggered by a wrong-minded sociopath. But that is all it was. Not some leftist conspiracy for launching an internal terror attack on the US. Not part of a larger plan to wipe out MAGA cheerleaders. Not any sort of incident linked to anything bigger. It was simply one disturbed and/or violent individual who decided to kill the messenger. And it is also important to see clearly what Kirk’s  ideology was, and to understand that controversial opinions always elicit strong reactions.

In that, I have something in common with Charlie Kirk. From statements he made in interviews I’ve seen, it’s clear to me that the far-right activist took in stride the fact that his ideas would necessarily paint a target on him. Controversial ideas are always triggers for agents of opposing extremes. When asked about the multiple threats that he continuously received, he was philosophical about their simply being par for the course for any activist.

That was my own attitude toward the activism in which I was engaged during my youth. I was part of a team working with one of the world’s most courageous journalists, Robert Cox, editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, in the nineteen-seventies. Our newspaper was, literally, the only local news medium that, during the dark days of Argentina’s bloody military regime, daily and publicly renewed its commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and civil and human rights. And our staunch and open opposition to the regime painted targets on our backs as well. But Cox’s philosophy, which proved contagious among those of us who seconded him, was that if you were a professional who was committed to truth and to the morally and ethically acceptable, there was simply no choice but to do your job, report what was happening, and clearly state the facts, or, failing that, to go off and do something else with your life.

My beliefs and Kirk’s couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to one another. But we both saw the risks we took to state our views as simply the price you pay for forging headlong into controversy. A matter of put up or shut up, in which you lay your life on the line for your beliefs. The fact that I find most of the things Kirk espoused morally and democratically repugnant is, for the purposes of this particular aspect, beside the point. During my own years of activism, the threats to which we were subject were so frequent that I wasn’t at all sure that I would ever reach old age. And, like Kirk, I took every precaution I could to mitigate those risks. But in the end, I was lucky. Charlie Kirk was not.

That said,  Charlie Kirk wasn’t your average amateur college activist, even if university campuses were his beat and right-wing youth his target. He was a professional activist, and a highly successful one. It wasn’t as if he became an overnight billionaire or anything of the sort, but he indeed made a small fortune with his  activism. And certainly profited far more than the vast majority of his counterparts on both sides of the political spectrum, especially after Donald Trump appeared on the political scene.

The golden boy of the GOP, he was credited with almost singlehandedly delivering a large swath of the youth vote to Donald Trump in the 2024 election. And his MAGA activism since Trump’s first term proved to be a highly profitable activity.

Kirk founded his political organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, when  he was just eighteen. Already by the following year, Turning Point was reporting a net worth of nearly twenty-seven thousand dollars and revenues of more than seventy-eight thousand. Kirk’s own compensation as the group’s CEO rose little by little, so that, by 2016, his annual salary was twenty-seven thousand dollars. But from 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected for his first term, until 2021, the year he was replaced in office by President Joe Biden, Kirk’s income rose exponentially, reportedly totaling four hundred thousand dollars that year. And by the time of his death, aged thirty-one, Kirk’s net worth was estimated by multiple sources to be approximately twelve million dollars—not in the league with the ultra-wealthy elite that resides in the Trump cabinet and MAGA leadership, but certainly financially well-off, especially for a college-campus political activist.

Undoubtedly, Kirk’s views raised hackles in a very broad swath of American society. For instance,  he said gun deaths are “unfortunately worth it” to preserve the Second Amendment. As I mentioned earlier, he described transgender identity as a mental disease, and suggested that homosexuals deserved to be put to death. He called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “myth” and said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake”. He promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that liberal politicians are deliberately seeking to expand black and brown populations and make whites a minority, rather than accepting the fact that, in a melting pot like the US, populations and ethnicities evolve in keeping with demographic development. He spread COVID-19 misinformation, and likened mask and vaccine mandates to “medical apartheid.” He suggested mass incarceration as a solution to the housing crisis. He, shockingly, advocated public, televised executions, saying even children should watch them, as a deterrent to crime. He dismissed out of hand the competence of African Americans and considered it reverse discrimination whenever blacks and white competed for the same job and the black candidate got it. Furthermore, he made demeaning statements about African American women in general, and claimed Michelle Obama and other supporters of affirmative action “lacked the brain processing power” to understand arguments on those policies. He also had a beef with black airline pilots, once saying, “If I see a black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

And those are just some of his most outrageous and often racist opinions. It’s little wonder, then that he also said he hated the word “empathy”, which he called a “made-up New Age term.” Clearly, he had none for those who were unlike him. As for his much-touted belief in debate, it is easy to invite debate when you do it from a position of self-righteousness and self-entitled superiority. 

Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone

Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer, who was nearly beaten to death by far-right MAGA extremists who took over Congress by force on January 6^th, 2021, has very succinctly summarized not only his feelings about Charlie Kirk’s slaying, but also my own, and, I suspect, those of millions of democratic-minded patriots all over the US. Fanone writes:

“Charlie Kirk is dead. Shot in the middle of a speech at Utah Valley University.
I am not going to sugarcoat it: I have nothing but contempt for Charlie Kirk’s politics. He made a career out of poisoning young minds with grievance, conspiracy, and hate. He profited off division. He defended the indefensible. He celebrated cruelty. I don’t grieve for his ideas, and I won’t sanitize what he represented.

“But here’s the thing: violence has no place in American politics. None.

“I know what it’s like to be on the business end of political violence.
I felt fists, flagpoles, and tasers on January 6^th. I heard men scream that they were going to kill me in the name of Donald Trump.

“That day taught me something too many of us are still trying to ignore: Once political violence becomes acceptable—once you decide that your enemy isn’t just wrong but expendable—you don’t control where it leads.

“If you cheered this shooting because you hated Kirk, you’re no better than the mob that chanted for Mike Pence’s hanging. If you shrug it off because it happened to the other side, you’re part of the same sickness that’s rotting this country.

“The truth is, we’re running out of safe spaces for disagreement. Universities, statehouses, even the Capitol itself—each one has been marked by the threat of blood.

“Democracy doesn’t survive in that environment. Free speech doesn’t survive. We don’t survive…”

Last Saturday, conservative commentator Michael Smerconish, on his CNN show, Smerconish, posed a question to his cable audience:

Does the Charlie Kirk killing signal the end of something bad or the beginning of something worse.

At the end of the show, with thousands of votes cast, only eight percent of his viewers believed that it was the end. Ninety-two percent indicated that it was only the beginning.

I’d like to catch the contagious optimism of the eight percent, but I’m afraid the pessimists are the realists.

 

THE SINISTER SIDE OF THE GENIUS ACT

While most folks were trying to forget the horrific news it seems we are being spoon-fed daily and enjoy their summer, Congress and the Executive were busy legislating, once again, in favor of oligarchic interests, and, in the long-run, against the better interests of the majority of common everyday citizens. The legislation in question is at the heart of one of the more obscure goals that Donald Trump set out for his administration from the start of his second term in office. In the early days after his election triumph, Trump made fleeting mention of his objective of launching the US into the crypto era. That’s what the law in question is about. 

Little has been made of this point. In fact, mention of it has been pretty much negligible compared with stunning daily news of heavy-handed immigration enforcement, or of the president’s personal war on anybody who ever said an unkind word about him, or of Trump’s connection to child sex-trafficking monster Jeffrey Epstein, or of his disemboweling of, almost literally, every government office that ever provided assistance to the least fortunate sectors of the population. But it is something that affects us all, whether we realize it yet or not.

If information about this new law has been scant, it is probably because it has been little analyzed by the mainstream media, which have plenty of sensational headlines and shocking new revelations with which to flesh out their daily news schedules. And for many common ordinary people, it seems all too technical and obscure to attract their interest. But this is major news and it has happened, fait accompli, right under our noses.

I am referring here to the so-called Genius Act, which, with little fanfare, passed in the Senate by 68 to 30 on June 17, and, after grueling marathon debate, passed in the House 308 to 122 a month later. Donald Trump, with unaccustomed low-key publicity, signed it into law on July 18, a day after it passed in the House. In both houses of Congress it had obvious support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, despite having the Trump GOP’s fingerprints all over it. But seen from a critical viewpoint, this cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a law with bi-party support based on its clear-cut benefit to everyone. In all honesty, this is a law that provides yet another leg up to tech giants and the wealthy, as if this administration were not already doing their bidding to an enormous degree. And I’m going to attempt to explain why it is so dangerous, in terms that everyone can understand.

Known as the Genius Act, the actual name of the law is The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act. The original bill was introduced in the Senate by Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee. The ostensible aim of the law is to provide a regulatory framework for so-called “stablecoins”. Stablecoins are basically a cryptocurrency supposedly backed by “reliable assets”, such as commodities or strong currency.

Stablecoins are typically used as a vehicle for transfers between other types of cryptocurrency. The core idea of the Genius Act is to ensure that US stablecoins are backed by dollars on a one-to-one ratio, or by “other low-risk assets.” Prior to the Genius Act’s  passage into law, stablecoins weren’t subject to rules regarding one-to-one backing by “low-risk assets”.

That all sounds pretty straight-forward and positive. But one of the first red flags raised to its passage came from a major nonprofit consumer group, Consumer Reports. According to their study of the law, its provisions not only fail to provide sufficient consumer protection, but also hand a blank check to Big Tech to engage in activities that compete with commercial  banking, but which are not subject to the stringent standards or practices to which banks must adhere.

This would be alarming enough, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. While the alleged aims of the Genius Act include the fostering of innovation and decentralization, it will, in effect, promote shifting control over the monetary system from public to private hands, but often in collusion with the short-term political goals of individual administrations.

How so?

First, the Act clears the way for “further study” of digital dollar frameworks—basically meaning government-backed cryptocurrencies. The problem with that is that this opens the path to the complete replacement of traditional cash with digital coins that the Treasury or Federal Reserve would presumably issue. But here the role of Big Tech firms as government partners and contractors is as yet unclear.

Additionally, the law calls for “modernization of the monetary system,” making use of accounting technologies that would provide for real-time tracking, surveillance and management of all digital transactions. These are aspects that are completely absent from current cash transactions. And if cash is phased out, digital will be the only sort of transactions available.

Further complicating matters is that, while stringent government control over digital transactions is the apparent aim, the law nevertheless calls for public-private partnerships to develop crypto tools. What this means in practical terms is that Big Tech firms will have a key to national monetary policy and infrastructure.

At a grassroots level—how the law affects you, the individual—in  the absence of cash money, every single transaction you make will be subject to oversight, presumably not only by the government, but also by its crypto business partners. In short, everyone would end up being subject to a surveillance-based financial system in which any presumed right to privacy would go right out the window.

Another consequence would be the marginalization of unbanked and underbanked populations. No one would have the freedom to remove credit card type activity from their life, or to merely have a savings account and operate on a day to day basis with hard cash. You may think no one does this either intentionally or because of their particular social situation any longer. But in fact, government statistics show that the unbanked and underbanked population in the US totals nearly six million households.

These are mostly people who are, in some sense, already marginalized to a greater or lesser degree. These people are, for instance, the elderly, low-income wage-earners, rural residents, and undocumented immigrants working in a variety of American sectors—farming, hotels, packing, etc. Already vulnerable, these people would simply be written off by an all-digital system, since they rely on cash for their daily needs, and the Genius Act does little or nothing to protect them and their way of life.

The law also does little to mitigate the risk of government overreach. On the contrary, it opens a door to it. And in an autocratic climate like the current one, and in an era in which the Executive has ever greater power in detriment to the other branches of government, this feels like a major vulnerability. Suffice it to say that, in any “politically sensitive” context, government policy could very well program spending restrictions in accordance with political goals, a restriction that is impossible when cash is freely available and usable.

Nor does the Genius Act provide, within the context of eventual cash restrictions, for the preservation of tools such as ATMs, cash-handling services (PayPal etc.), or even cash-acceptance mandates for businesses. Clearly, this has the makings of a catalyst for banks and retailers to accelerate the removal of cash operations, permitting them to cite “modernization mandates” espoused by the Genius Act.

Also of no little concern are cybersecurity and stability issues. If all money is rendered “electronic,” the entire monetary system would become vulnerable to such threats as algorithmic errors, power outages and hackers of all sorts. Unlike cash, which is undeterred by war, natural disasters, blackouts, etc., solely digital systems are eminently vulnerable to any and all of these contingencies.

In short, a crypto-based financial and monetary system promises to further undermine civil liberties, exacerbate state control over people’s personal finances, and vastly increase inequality. And, bottom line, whoever manages to gain control over the monetary system will also have control over the distribution of wealth, in a world where some people are already clearly “more equal” than others.

 

A DAY OF MOURNING FOR PARADISE LOST

Today is the Fourth of July. There is no more American holiday.  It is a day of which I have fond memories from my childhood, which, even back then, filled me with both the festive air of a summer holiday, and a patriotic pride at its deeper meaning. That day when American patriots rebelled against the oppression of colonialism and began spilling their blood for the initiation of a bold new experiment in democracy, justice and the rights of the individual.

Today on my FB feed, I published a picture of a marble slab on which the fate of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence is recounted. So strong was their belief in the new nation that they were founding through bloody revolution that they pledged everything they were and everything they had to the defense of their cause.

And, indeed, it was not an idle vow. Nine died in the ensuing Revolutionary War. Five were captured and imprisoned. The wives and children of some of them were abused, killed, or left penniless and destitute. A dozen of these first patriots had their homes burned to the ground. Seventeen lost everything they owned. But not one of them defected from their pledge to fight for and build a new, free, and democratic nation.

It is a devastating fact that not a single Republican member of Congress, cabinet member or conservative majority Supreme Court justice is willing to stand up for those founding values and stop the headlong fall into tyranny that the United States of America is experiencing as we speak. It is even more shameful that they excuse, embrace, or fail to recognize their responsibility for delivering the nation into the hands of a clearly recognizable authoritarian, who is lawless, cruel and unrelenting. 

I would like to be able to rediscover that swelling feeling of my youth, those times when I, like most other Americans, believed that, despite its flaws and human errors, ours was an unshakable system of laws and guarantees that, because of our carefully preserved regimen of checks and balances, was immune to tyrants and opposed to fascism, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism in all of their forms. Indeed, our own fathers had fought, and bled, and died on foreign soil to defend that principle, to not only enjoy our democratic system at home, but also to defend other democracies that fascism had placed at imminent risk.

We had so much to be proud of back then, even despite the darker chapters in our history. We were, after all, truly, the land of the free and the home of the brave. We were a nation of people born into a legacy of freedom and democracy that was the greatest of its kind in world history, and for the preservation of which, so many before us had fought, made supreme and sacred sacrifices, and often died in the process.

What our elected representatives are not only allowing to happen, but are actively supporting and defending, spits on the graves of those patriots, dishonors the sacrifices of our own fathers and grandfathers for the cause of freedom and democracy, and makes a grotesque mockery of American patriotism, and of the celebration of this most sacred of all American holidays.

Yes, I would like nothing better than to feel moved, to feel the swelling pride of being an American in my breast once more, and to celebrate this day with true joy in my heart and pride in that heritage.

But I cannot. I am in mourning today, and feel sad, exhausted and angry. I have a knot in my throat and bitter rage in my heart.

And it is made worse because these are no longer my times. I am nearing the end of the trail, and all I can do is issue warnings daily on what I’m seeing and what my long professional experience with authoritarian regimes has taught me about them. All I can do is issue these daily admonishments, and hope that even a handful of people will be inspired to shrug off the general lethargy that I now observe every day, and, perhaps, be moved to stand up and fight. Because the legacy that is being allowed to dwindle away is worth fighting for. Nothing should hold more value in the hearts of true American patriots.

 

POTENTIAL RESULTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF US AIRSTRIKES ON IRAN

President Donald Trump’s unilateral preemptive strikes—codenamed Midnight Hammer—on Iran’s nuclear facilities this past weekend have been met with both praise and criticism, but by far more of the latter. Polling in the aftermath of the strikes, which made use of weapons never before deployed on the battlefield, demonstrates that a sound majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the action against Iran.

Along party lines, and as per usual, Republicans and Democrats are pretty evenly divided between yays and nays at about eighty-odd percent of Republicans “for”, and eighty-odd percent of Democrats against. But where the rubber meets the road is in the middle of majority sentiments. Independents smash the two-party tie with a full sixty percent opposed. In total, fifty-six percent of Americans apparently disapprove of Trump’s actions. Worse still for the MAGA camp, only thirty-eight percent of Independents trust Trump to make appropriate decisions in dealing with Iran in the future.

That said, there are both clearly plausible logic and firmly based facts on either side of the argument. The first, in favor of Trump’s clearly uncounseled action, is that nobody with any sense wants to see Iran, under its current leadership, get its hands on nuclear weapons. It is a radical theocracy known as the world’s greatest supporter and exponent of international terrorism. At the core of its radicalism is the idea that “infidels” are free game and that Western democracy is an axis of evil that should be destroyed.

In that sense, there is a great deal of logic in taking steps to dismantle and/or destroy the current Iranian regime’s nuclear capabilities. But before we cheer for President Trump, it is worth pointing out that diplomacy had already gone a long way toward not only curtailing the advancement of Iran toward becoming a nuclear threat, but also toward becoming a less hostile and more integrated member of the concert of nations. President Barack Obama and America’s Western allies successfully negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran that went a long way toward ensuring that it became trustworthy in terms of making only peaceful use of its nuclear capabilities.

With one fell swoop of his Sharpie, Trump, in 2018, arbitrarily trashed the aptly named Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—e.g., the Iran nuclear deal— in a reckless move that not only left US allies stunned and confounded, but that also caused Iran to immediately go back on the promises it made in that accord and to start intensifying, even more than before, its development of a path to nuclear weaponry. In other words, it is largely the fault of Trump’s actions during his first term in office that we have reached this juncture with Iran in the first place. This is typical of Trump’s ham-handed approach to diplomacy, such as it is, which relies more on threats, insults, bullying and humiliation than it does negotiation and compromise. This seems ironic, since Trump has long considered himself a consummate negotiator and deal-maker. Truth be told, at least in his governance techniques, there is precious little evidence of this alleged skill.

But putting that aside, there are factual reasons on  which supporters of last weekend’s airstrike can hang their argument. Some of these include the following:

Ø Experts seem to agree that the airstrikes have substantially delayed—though not definitively detained—Iranian nuclear development. It is worthwhile noting that Iran’s original efforts toward obtaining a military nuclear device were largely in response to Israel’s nuclear arms development, which extensively predates Iran’s program. Israel began nuclear weapons development already in the 1950s, shortly after becoming a country, and it is thought to have had a deliverable nuclear device already in 1966 or 1967, while Iran still does not have a nuclear arsenal.

Ø  For better or for worse, Trump’s move, in concert with the bombing raids already being carried out by Israel, sends an unequivocal message that the current US administration is willing to use military force in order to curtail nuclear arms proliferation, be it Iran or any other nation entertaining the idea of becoming a nuclear power—something very likely making other bad actors like North Korea sit up and take notice.

Ø The preemptive move against Iran’s nuclear arms program could strengthen US ties with allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States that have been watching Iran’s nuclear development with understandable concern. None of them wants a nuclear-armed Iran.

Ø The at least temporary destruction of its nuclear arms program is bound to limit Iran’s regional influence and to undermine its leverage in any future diplomatic negotiations.

Ø The airstrikes may have a broader effect on Iran’s military-industrial capabilities as a whole, making it less of an aggressive, belligerent presence throughout the region.

Ø Principally, the strikes will undoubtedly put hobbles on Iran’s ability to produce weapons-grade fissile materials. Those strikes have thus achieved the non-proliferation goals of the US, at least in the short term. According to David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, whether the mission was a complete success in wiping out Iran’s ability to reach its nuclear arms goals is debatable. But its facilities sustained at least very significant damage. Albright calculates that if indeed Iran manages somehow to recover from the strikes, it will take it “at least a year or two” to retool and reinitiate its nuclear arms development.

But while all of that may be well and good seen from the viewpoint of hawks, who always tend to prefer might over diplomacy, there are other very real and very negative factors to be taken into account. These include the following:

Ø As Albright indicates, backed up by prior US intelligence community assessments and reports, the airstrikes will, in all likelihood, only manage to delay, not halt, Iran’s advancement toward its nuclear arms goals. This is especially true considering that intelligence reports suggest that the Iranian government managed to load up at least part of its already substantially enriched uranium supplies and to move them to an unknown location. That means that if Iran can manage to quickly rebuild its nuclear infrastructure, in some more secretive or hardened location, it could continue the enrichment process from an already advanced stage. It could, therefore, have a nuclear device within a relatively short time span. And the US bombings, in support of Israel, with weapons never before used in war, could give the Iranian regime a very real incentive to do so.

Ø The unprecedently aggressive move by the Trump administration provides Iran with the incentive to further deepen its ties with,  and to seek the cooperation of other potential US enemies. The two that stand out, while not the only ones, are North Korea and Russia. Iran and North Korea maintain strategic ties, characterized by a history of cooperation in areas like arms deals and missile technology, and they are united by a shared opposition to US influence in their regions and the world. The US has designated both nations to be sponsors of international terrorism, a fact that aligns them philosophically and materially against US foreign policies. Russia, meanwhile, is indebted to both the Iranian and North Korean regimes. Both have provided substantial military aid to Vladimir Putin in his war of aggression on Ukraine, and, in the case of Iran, in its other war of aggression against the people of Syria, and in favor of the bloody regime of former pro-Russian dictator Bashar al-Assad that oppressed them. Russia and North Korea are both technically and politically capable of providing Iran with help in reaching its aggressive nuclear goals sooner rather than later.

Ø Finally, there is the inherent threat of direct Iranian retaliation. Indeed, Iran has made it clear that it plans to take revenge. Considering that the current Iranian regime is one of the world’s most dangerous purveyors of anti-American and anti-Western terrorism, since the bombings the US has potentially become a considerably more dangerous place, as has international travel and residence for Americans in certain parts of the world. Furthermore, US military and embassy personnel in the region surrounding Iran and within reach of its missiles and drones have been placed at considerably higher risk than before the airstrikes were carried out. There is also greater incentive for Iran to heighten its backing for international terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. All of these things create more fertile terrain for expanding instability in the Middle East, and for the eventual need for US boots on the ground. Trump’s aggressive action has singlehandedly created those conditions, despite the fact that Americans as a whole, and even a core of MAGA Republicans have no appetite for another protracted war in the Middle East. There is also concern that any retaliatory action by Iran to hamper shipping in the Strat of Hormuz could send oil (and thus fuel) prices skyrocketing, a factor which would have a significantly negative effect on both the US and global economies.

Beyond all of these considerations, there are domestic and, as usual under Trump’s governance, constitutional issues that are of no small concern. Trump has once again placed at risk the system of checks and balances that protects and upholds US representative democracy.  To begin with, under the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8), only Congress has the power to declare war. Unilateral military action without congressional approval circumvents this constitutional check.

Trump’s move also is in apparent violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Although this piece of legislation provides presidents with a sixty-day window in which to take limited military actions without congressional intervention, that authorization is necessarily subject to prior notification of Congress at least forty-eight hours in advance of any such action.

Trump apparently provided an informal heads-up to legislators from his own party—a message that at least one Republican described as “cryptic”—but failed to give any notification at all to Democratic members of Congress. Under these conditions, last weekend’s preemptive strikes were in apparent violation of this legal constraint intended to maintain the balance of power between co-equal branches of government.

The unilateral and un-consulted way in which the president ordered the strikes has further advanced Trump’s attack on co-equal governance and bolstered his campaign to vastly expand authoritarian executive power, by effectively weakening Congress’s constitutional ability to oversee executive actions and its influence on foreign policy and the employment of the country’s armed forces.

His action has also undermined principles of co-governance with the third branch of government by completely bypassing judicial review. If the courts are unable—or unwilling, due to pressure from a Department of Justice that, under Trump, has lost all independence—to review such actions because of executive invocation of the so-called “political question” doctrine or of “national security privilege”, this then limits the judiciary’s role in checking unconstitutional or otherwise illegal uses of force.

In short, conducting such military strikes without full transparency or consultation reduces interbranch deliberation and public accountability, while centralizing all authority in the executive. This is behavior typical of authoritarian regimes and has no place in US representative democracy.

All things considered, we are witnessing a disproportionate shift of power to the Executive Branch, one that significantly weakens the Constitution’s intended purpose of creating a system of inviolable checks and balances. Unfortunately, by handing the president congressional and judicial powers on a silver platter, the Republican majority in Congress is complicit in the relative success that Donald Trump is having in his bid to turn the US into an oligarchic authoritarian regime.