#the nation

[ahaura]

Title & subtitle:

[Nov. 21] The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza: The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here.

Article text:

On Saturday, the board of the Harvard Law Review voted not to publish “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” a piece by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. The vote followed what an editor at the law reviewdescribed in an e-mail to Eghbariah as “an unprecedented decision” by the leadership of the Harvard Law Review to prevent the piece’s publication.

Eghbariah told The Nation that the piece, which was intended for the HLR Blog, had been solicited by two of the journal’s online editors. It would have been the first piece written by a Palestinian scholar for the law review. The piece went through several rounds of edits, but before it was set to be published, the president stepped in. “The discussion did not involve any substantive or technical aspects of your piece,” online editor Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, wrote Eghbariah in an e-mail shared with The Nation. “Rather, the discussion revolved around concerns about editors who might oppose or be offended by the piece, as well as concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox, or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff, and HLR leadership.”

On Saturday, following several days of debate and a nearly six-hour meeting, the Harvard Law Review’s full editorial body came together to vote on whether to publish the article. Sixty-three percent voted against publication. In an e-mail to Egbariah, HLR President Apsara Iyer wrote, “While this decision may reflect several factors specific to individual editors, it was not brd on your identity or viewpoint.”

In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “

When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.”

Today, The Nation is sharing the piece that the Harvard Law Review refused to run.

enocide is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal academia, especially in the United States, has been chilling. Clearly, it is much easier to dissect the case law rather than navigate the reality of death. It is much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.

Some may claim that the invocation of genocide, especially in Gaza, is fraught. But does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy that undergirds Western epistemological approaches, one which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice. If the international community takes its crimes seriously, then the discussion about the unfolding genocide in Gaza is not a matter of mere semantics.

The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of a protected group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirm their intentions. There is a forming consensus among leading scholars in the field of genocide studies that “these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent,” as Omer Bartov, an authority in the field, writes. More importantly, genocide is the material reality of Palestinians in Gaza: an entrapped, displaced, starved, water-deprived population of 2.3 million facing massive bombardments and a carnage in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over 11,000 people have already been killed. That is one person out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations Secretary General said that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children,” but a cessation of the carnage—a ceasefire—remains elusive. Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this?

The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a thorough, 44-page, factual and legal analysis, asserting that “there is a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies, calls the situation in Gaza “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” The inaugural chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, notes that “Just the blockade of Gaza—just that—could be genocide under Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, meaning they are creating conditions to destroy a group.” A group of over 800 academics and practitioners, including leading scholars in the fields of international law and genocide studies, warn of “a serious risk of genocide being committed in the Gaza Strip.” A group of seven UN Special Rapporteurs has alerted to the “risk of genocide against the Palestinian people” and reiterated that they “remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.” Thirty-six UN experts now call the situation in Gaza “a genocide in the making.” How many other authorities should I cite? How many hyperlinks are enough?

And yet, leading law schools and legal scholars in the United States still fashion their silence as impartiality and their denial as nuance. Is genocide really the crime of all crimes if it is committed by Western allies against non-Western people?

This is the most important question that Palestine continues to pose to the international legal order. Palestine brings to legal analysis an unmasking force: It unveils and reminds us of the ongoing colonial condition that underpins Western legal institutions. In Palestine, there are two categories: mournable civilians and savage human-animals. Palestine helps us rediscover that these categories remain racialized along colonial lines in the 21st century: the first is reserved for Israelis, the latter for Palestinians. As Isaac Herzog, Israel’s supposed liberal President, asserts: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”

Palestinians simply cannot be innocent. They are innately guilty; potential “terrorists” to be “neutralized” or, at best, “human shields” obliterated as “collateral damage”. There is no number of Palestinian bodies that can move Western governments and institutions to “unequivocally condemn” Israel, let alone act in the present tense. When contrasted with Jewish-Israeli life—the ultimate victims of European genocidal ideologies—Palestinians stand no chance at humanization. Palestinians are rendered the contemporary “savages” of the international legal order, and Palestine becomes the frontier where the West redraws its discourse of civility and strips its domination in the most material way. Palestine is where genocide can be performed as a fight of “the civilized world” against the “enemies of civilization itself.” Indeed, a fight between the “children of light” versus the “children of darkness.”

The genocidal war waged against the people of Gaza since Hamas’s excruciating October 7th attacks against Israelis—attacks which amount to war crimes—has been the deadliest manifestation of Israeli colonial policies against Palestinians in decades. Some have long ago analyzed Israeli policies in Palestine through the lens of genocide. While the term genocide may have its own limitations to describe the Palestinian past, the Palestinian present was clearly preceded by a “politicide”: the extermination of the Palestinian body politic in Palestine, namely, the systematic eradication of the Palestinian ability to maintain an organized political community as a group.

This process of erasure has spanned over a hundred years through a combination of massacres, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and the fragmentation of the remaining Palestinians into distinctive legal tiers with diverging material interests. Despite the partial success of this politicide—and the continued prevention of a political body that represents all Palestinians—the Palestinian political identity has endured. Across the besieged Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel’s 1948 territories, refugee camps, and diasporic communities, Palestinian nationalism lives.

What do we call this condition? How do we name this collective existence under a system of forced fragmentation and cruel domination? The human rights community has largely adopted a combination of occupation and apartheid to understand the situation in Palestine. Apartheid is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is committed in Palestine. And even though there is a consensus among the human rights community that Israel is perpetrating apartheid, the refusal of Western governments to come to terms with this material reality of Palestinians is revealing.

Once again, Palestine brings a special uncovering force to the discourse. It reveals how otherwise credible institutions, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, are no longer to be trusted. It shows how facts become disputable in a Trumpist fashion by liberals such as President Biden. Palestine allows us to see the line that bifurcates the binaries (e.g. trusted/untrusted) as much as it underscores the collapse of dichotomies (e.g. democrat/republican or fact/claim). It is in this liminal space that Palestine exists and continues to defy the distinction itself. It is the exception that reveals the rule and the subtext that is, in fact, the text: Palestine is the most vivid manifestation of the colonial condition upheld in the 21st century.

hat do you call this ongoing colonial condition? Just as the Holocaust introduced the term “Genocide” into the global and legal consciousness, the South African experience brought “Apartheid” into the global and legal lexicon. It is due to the work and sacrifice of far too many lives that genocide and apartheid have globalized, transcending these historical calamities. These terms became legal frameworks, crimes enshrined in international law, with the hope that their recognition will prevent their repetition. But in the process of abstraction, globalization, and readaptation, something was lost. Is it the affinity between the particular experience and the universalized abstraction of the crime that makes Palestine resistant to existing definitions?

Scholars have increasingly turned to settler-colonialism as the lens through which we assess Palestine. Settler-colonialism is a structure of erasure where the settler displaces and replaces the native. And while settler-colonialism, genocide, and apartheid are clearly not mutually exclusive, their ability to capture the material reality of Palestinians remains elusive. South Africa is a particular case of settler-colonialism. So are Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada, Algeria, and more. The framework of settler colonialism is both useful and insufficient. It does not provide meaningful ways to understand the nuance between these different historical processes and does not necessitate a particular outcome. Some settler colonial cases have been incredibly normalized at the expense of a completed genocide. Others have led to radically different end solutions. Palestine both fulfills and defies the settler-colonial condition.

We must consider Palestine through the iterations of Palestinians. If the Holocaust is the paradigmatic case for the crime of genocide and South Africa for that of apartheid, then the crime against the Palestinian people must be called the Nakba.

The term Nakba, meaning “Catastrophe,” is often used to refer to the making of the State of Israel in Palestine, a process that entailed the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and destroying 531 Palestinian villages between 1947 to 1949. But the Nakba has never ceased; it is a structure not an event. Put shortly, the Nakba is ongoing.

In its most abstract form, the Nakba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materializing their right to self-determination. In its most material form, the Nakba is each Palestinian killed or injured, each Palestinian imprisoned or otherwise subjugated, and each Palestinian dispossessed or exiled.

The Nakba is both the material reality and the epistemic framework to understand the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. And these crimes—encapsulated in the framework of Nakba—are the result of the political ideology of Zionism, an ideology that originated in late nineteenth century Europe in response to the notions of nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism.

As Edward Said reminds us, Zionism must be assessed from the standpoint of its victims, not its beneficiaries. Zionism can be simultaneously understood as a national movement for some Jews and a colonial project for Palestinians. The making of Israel in Palestine took the form of consolidating Jewish national life at the expense of shattering a Palestinian one. For those displaced, misplaced, bombed, and dispossessed, Zionism is never a story of Jewish emancipation; it is a story of Palestinian subjugation.

What is distinctive about the Nakba is that it has extended through the turn of the 21st century and evolved into a sophisticated system of domination that has fragmented and reorganized Palestinians into different legal categories, with each category subject to a distinctive type of violence. Fragmentation thus became the legal technology underlying the ongoing Nakba. The Nakba has encompassed both apartheid and genocidal violence in a way that makes it fulfill these legal definitions at various points in time while still evading their particular historical frames.

Palestinians have named and theorized the Nakba even in the face of persecution, erasure, and denial. This work has to continue in the legal domain. Gaza has reminded us that the Nakba is now. There are recurringthreats by Israeli politicians and other public figures to commit the crime of the Nakba, again. If Israeli politicians are admitting the Nakba in order to perpetuate it, the time has come for the world to also reckon with the Palestinian experience. The Nakba must globalize for it to end.

We must imagine that one day there will be a recognized crime of committing a Nakba, and a disapprobation of Zionism as an ideology brd on racial elimination. The road to get there remains long and challenging, but we do not have the privilege to relinquish any legal tools available to name the crimes against the Palestinian people in the present and attempt to stop them. The denial of the genocide in Gaza is rooted in the denial of the Nakba. And both must end, now.

[shivroy]

hearts roy, roman's daughter, cousin of tom and shiv's son hibs, a tiny woman with adult braces, overplucked eyebrows, masochistic body piercings, her single father's veins, her lonely father's eyes, her rootless father's mouth - pictured IF she had survived past her infancy, which in this hypothetical universe she did not.

hearts, from shiv's perspective, in the "canon universe" of this fic with the mencken presidency having further destroyed america, in which hearts does not live:

[aunti-christ-ine]

[eretzyisrael]

by Edwin Carlson

Vice President Kamala Harris defended anti-Israel campus agitators, telling the Nation in an exclusive interview she "understands the emotion behind it."

"They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza," the vice president said in an excerpt of the interview released Monday. "There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it."

Those protesters have wreaked havoc on college campuses for months, calling for the elimination of Israel, defending Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, and assaulting Jewish students.

In April, pro-Palestinian protesters at Yale stabbed a Jewish student in the eye. Agitators at UCLA spewed death threats at Jewish students and a campus rabbi in June. And Columbia University has been rife with anti-Semitic vitriol for months, with students chanting, "There is only one solution, intifada revolution." The widespread violence and anti-Semitic rhetoric has led to a congressional investigation of multiple universities.

In early June, Harris mourned the "tragic" loss of "innocent" Gazans killed in a June 8 IDF raid that rescued four Israeli hostages taken on Oct. 7. Harris has slammed Israel for what she considers insufficient humanitarian efforts and "unnecessary restrictions" on aid delivery in Gaza. Harris called for an "immediate ceasefire" in March.

The Nation report spotlights Harris as a potential presidential candidate as Democrats scramble to find a backup for President Joe Biden after his disastrous debate performance and poor polling results.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Nichols at The Nation:

Donald Trump has made no secret of his determination to govern as a “dictator” if he regains the presidency, and that’s got his critics warning that his reelection would spell the end of democracy. But Trump and his allies are too smart to go full Kim Jong Un. Rather, the former president’s enthusiasm for the authoritarian regimes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdoğan, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán suggests the models he would build on: managing elections to benefit himself and his Republican allies; gutting public broadcasting and constraining press freedom; and undermining civil society. Trump, who famously demanded that the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential voting be “recalculated” to give him a win, wants the trappings of democracy without the reality of electoral consequences. That’s what propaganda experts Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead once described as “demonstration elections,” in which, instead of actual contests, wins are assured for the authoritarians who control the machinery of democracy. The outline for such a scenario emerges from a thorough reading of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which specifically proposes a Trump-friendly recalculation of the systems that sustain American democracy. The strategy for establishing an American version of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” is not spelled out in any particular chapter of Mandate. Rather, it is woven throughout the whole of the document, with key elements appearing in the chapters on reworking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In the section on the DHS, for instance, there’s a plan to eliminate the ability of the agency that monitors election security to prevent the spread of disinformation about voting and vote counting.

How serious a threat to democracy would that pose? Think back to November 2020, when Trump was developing his Big Lie about the election he’d just lost. Trump’s false assertion that the election had been characterized by “massive improprieties and fraud” was tripped up by Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the DHS. The Republican appointee and his team had established a 24/7 “war room” to work with officials across the country to monitor threats to the security and integrity of the election. The operation was so meticulous that Krebs could boldly announce after the voting was finished: “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too.” At the same time, his coordinating team declared, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” This infuriated Trump, who immediately fired the nation’s top election security official.

In Mandate’s chapter on the DHS, Ken Cuccinelli writes, “Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth.” Cuccinelli previously complained that CISA “is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections.” As for the team that worked so successfully with Krebs to secure the 2020 election, the Project 2025 document declares that “the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.” The potential impact? “It’s a way of emasculating the agency—that is, it prevents it from doing its job,” says Herb Lin, a cyber-policy and security scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

This is just one way that Project 2025’s cabal of “experts” is scheming to thwart honest discourse about elections and democracy. A chapter on public broadcasting proposes to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a larger plan to upend NPR, PBS, and “other public broadcasters that benefit from CPB funding, including the even-further-to-the Left Pacifica Radio and American Public Media.” More destabilizing than the total funding cut that Project 2025 entertains is a parallel plan to end the status of NPR and Pacifica radio stations as “noncommercial education stations.” That could deny them their current channel numbers at the low end of the radio spectrum (88 to 92 FM)—a move that would open prime territory on the dial for the sort of religious programming that already claims roughly 42 percent of the airwaves that the FCC reserves for noncommercial broadcasting. And don’t imagine that the FCC would be in a position to write new rules that guard against the surrender of those airwaves to the Trump-aligned religious right.

[...]

While project 2025 seeks to rewire the FCC to favor Trump’s allies, it also wants to lock in dysfunction at the Federal Election Commission, the agency that is supposed to govern campaign spending and fundraising. Established 50 years ago, the FEC has six members—three Republicans and three Democrats—who are charged with overseeing the integrity of federal election campaigns. In recent years, however, this even partisan divide has robbed the FEC of its ability to act because, as a group of former FEC employees working with the Campaign Legal Center explained, “three Commissioners of the same party, acting in concert, can leave the agency in a state of deadlock.” As the spending by outside groups on elections “has exponentially increased, foreign nationals and governments have willfully manipulated our elections, and coordination between super PACs and candidates has become commonplace,” the former employees noted. Yet “the FEC [has] deadlocked on enforcement matters more often than not, frequently refusing to even investigate alleged violations despite overwhelming publicly available information supporting them.”

John Nichols wrote in The Nation about how Project 2025’s radical right-wing wishlist of items contains plans to wreck and subvert what is left of America’s democracy.

See Also:

The Nation: June 2024 Issue

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Above the Law

+

Amy Siskind 

I know many are feeling down right now. That the news is bad and getting worse.

I want to remind us all that our country dislikes extremes. When things go too far, they tend back in the other direction. We see this again and again in past decades and even centuries.

Americans do not like hubris. They do not like unfair. They do not like mean, and kicking others when they are down. They do not like pile on. The Supreme Court rulings - including the one today - may indeed have the inverse effect like overturning Roe of raising the public ire, and then desire to rebalance things to what is just.

I do not have a crystal ball for what will happen in the comings weeks, and honestly, we will only know when we know. There will be all sorts of reporting on all sorts of innuendo and its anxiety-ridden media stories, but ultimately none of it will matter. It will be up to President Biden to decide what to do, and what is best for our country. I have faith he will be clear-eyed about this herculean decision.

And whatever he decides, we are hardly powerless. Hello! We won the elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022 (remember the red wave that crashed). Whatever the way forward, we will come together and prevail. We know how to do this. We know how to win.

For now, give yourself some grace, and be kind and gentle to yourself. You are not alone. You are in the mighty majority. When the path is clear, we will come together and fight for our country.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by JEROME M. MARCUS

Riotous marchers on college campuses are demanding the creation of a country called “Palestine” on all the territory of the U.N.-recognized State of Israel, entirely free of Jews. The presidents of three prestigious universities can’t say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates their codes of conduct. Harvard Chabad is told it can’t leave its Chanukah menorah up for eight days because the university doesn’t want to be embarrassed by a photo of a vandalized menorah in Harvard Yard. Jewish students are barricaded behind locked doors or offered an attic to hide in due to threats from racist fellow students.

Given all this, it is not surprising that The New York Times is deeply concerned about the alleged suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on American campuses.

The Times offers the example of The Harvard Law Review’s rejection of a blog post written by Rabea Eghbariah—now completing a doctorate at Harvard Law School—that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The Times heavily implies the antisemitic libel that the post offended too many powerful Jewish and Israeli interests. It’s Rep. Ilhan Omar’s “Benjamins” again.

The left-wing magazine The Nation printed the “suppressed” post, revealing that the piece was a shoddy, poorly argued rant containing no supporting evidence and bereft of the serious legal analysis that any law review article requires.

As lawyers know, all legal arguments must be composed of two parts: the facts and the law. Eghbariah’s rant contains neither.

First, the post nowhere acknowledges that Gaza is in a state of war with Israel, declared by Hamas with the explicitly stated goal of eliminating the Jewish state. Now, one could argue that Israel’s military operation, though justified, is disproportionate. But Eghbariah makes no such argument. Indeed, he does not even attempt to assess or disprove any conceivable justification for any military action by Israel in Gaza.

International law is clear that, in order to prove genocide, evidence of the defendant’s “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the national, ethnical, religious or linguistic group to which victims of the alleged wrongful acts belonged” is necessary.

In one of only two citations of any legal authority in the entire post—a glaring dearth of sources for a piece supposed to be published in a law review—Eghbariah cites this standard. He then claims, “Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirm their intentions.” This sentence contains two links. That is the total extent of Eghbariah’s evidence.

[uwmspeccoll]

Publishers' Binding Thursday

Happy Fourth of July! Fourth of July happens to fall on Publishers' Binding Thursday this year and we're sharing a red(dish orange) and blue book to celebrate. This book is titled Seeds of Revolt and was written by American journalist, editor, and author Moritz A. Hallgren. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1933 and is "a study of American life and the temper of the American people during the depression."

Hallgren was a communist and opponent of fascism who supported those loyal to the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. He was a frequent contributor to progressive magazine The Nation in the early-mid 1930s and later wrote for The Baltimore Sun. Seeds of Revolt includes many relevant sections including "The Class War Raises Its Head," "A Wage-Cutting Racket," "The Offensive Against Democracy," "President or Puppet?," and "The Thin Edge of Fascism."

Seeds of Revolt is cautionary and on Fourth of July we should make sure not to take our liberties for granted.

View more Fourth of July posts.

View more Publishers' Binding Thursday posts.

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[kosmik-signals]

“ Reservation Dogs repeatedly underscores the ordinariness of its characters as a way to challenge the othering gaze. Elders in the community like Brownie (Gary Farmer) or Bucky (Wes Studi) are portrayed as flawed men with their own histories of selfishness instead of as wise old-timers. Similarly, traditional healers like Old Man Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman) and Daniel’s mother Hokti (Lily Gladstone), who’s serving time in prison for undisclosed reasons, are neither especially righteous nor mystical. Instead, these spiritual leaders are merely everyday people dedicated to helping their community. “

Vikram Murthi, “How Reservation Dogs Changed the TV Landscape,” The Nation, November 21, 2023.

(via How “Reservation Dogs” Changed the TV Landscape | The Nation)

[cerealbastard]

[alt text: But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me).

The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of "divide and rule" and for Europe's guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

- James Baldwin

The Nation, 1979

graphic and photo provided by the James Baldwin Archive in instagram

[philosophybitmaps]

[shivroy]

what if the tomshiv baby wasn't aborted and turned out to be just like a weird cunt. this is my unadulterated vision

[o-the-mts]

(via Black History, All Year | The Nation)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chris Lehmann at The Nation:

The first pages of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership invoke the Beltway axiom that “personnel is policy.” If that’s the case, readers should pay especially close attention to the handiwork of Russell Vought. Vought served as Donald Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the critical nexus of policy execution and agency performance in the executive branch. He has also served, by some accounts, as the lead administrator of the Project 2025 initiative, overseeing 1,000 employees in 30 separate task groups under its aegis. He also contributed a central chapter to Project 2025’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, bearing the deceptively anodyne title “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, Vought lays out the case for unleashing untrammeled executive power from the maw of a “sprawling federal bureaucracy” that, contrary to the intent of the Constitution, “is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

Vought proposes to curb the excesses of this dangerous administrative elite by expanding the prerogatives of presidential authority in every facet of the federal government’s operations. Right-wing power-mongers have long expounded the theory of a “unitary executive” as the most durable, efficient, and potent way to achieve a policy agenda that remains deeply unpopular with the American electorate, yet Vought seeks to transform that theory into a comic book plot arc, with a S.H.I.E.L.D.–style rescue mission to redeem a republic besieged by sinister bureaucratic scheming and administrative power grabs at every turn. “The overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair,” he writes. “Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.”

In this dark vision of a looming administrative coup, the president becomes the Nick Fury savior figure: a master accruer of power devoted at the same time to its wide dispersion among the satellite communities of superheroes practicing an elevated MAGA-sanctioned lifestyle in conditions of stoic watchfulness. The president must be a figure of unparalleled ingenuity to carry out this ambitious agenda of national deliverance: “Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” (If you think, as Vought clearly does, that Donald Trump is the duly anointed avatar of this brand of benevolent spiritualized federalism, then I have a warehouse full of MAGA-branded Bibles to sell you.) Since at least the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the American right has been steeped in the strongman vision of the presidency as a maximum lawgiver of patriotic virtue. [...]

For adherents of actual democratic self-governance, Vought’s administrative theory of maximum executive power is plenty unnerving on its own. But an even fuller picture of the sort of substantive policy agendas that it would serve emerges in the theocratic mission of the think tank Vought launched after his tour at the OMB, the Center for Renewing America. This group is a partner in Project 2025, but it’s also a policy shop positioned firmly in the vanguard of the Christian nationalist movement, fiercely dedicated to shoring up a militant right-wing culture-war agenda and based on the lie that the United States was founded as an exclusionary, Christian nation. “Our mission is to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending…where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities,” the CRA’s website announces.

If you’re curious to learn more about what the CRA’s vision of “healthy communities” might be, you can toggle over to a series of policy “primers” on the subject that advance a wide range of righteous crusades for a unitary executive to undertake. “Palestinian Culture is Prohibitive for Assimilation,” one such entry boldly asserts. “Yes, America’s Institutions Are Grooming Your Children,” another QAnon-adjacent offering proclaims. If that doesn’t have you sufficiently alarmed, check out “School Systems Are Corrupting Children with Pornography” or “Biden’s Woke War on Police.” There’s a rich mosaic of election-denial content under the deeply misleading heading of “Election Integrity,” while the designations “Medical Tyranny” and “Woke and Weaponized” speak—or rather shout—quite unmistakably for themselves. The overarching mood is less that of a colloquy of policy wonks than Steve Bannon podcasting on a meth binge.

Project 2025 is a blueprint for theocracy and Christian nationalism, and Russ Vought is there to see it become fruition if Trump is elected again.

See Also:

The Nation: June 2024 Issue