Music: Wolfgang Haffner — ‘Shapes’
America is having another Anita Hill moment
Dahlia Lithwick writes: This past Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of Anita Hill’s devastating Senate testimony accusing then–Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of workplace sexual harassment. In light of the most recent accusations against Donald Trump, it’s hard to miss the almost perfect synchronicity between these two October explosions of gender awareness. In a deeply personal and visceral way, America is having another Anita Hill moment.
In one sense it’s depressing: It’s been 25 years, and yet here we are, still talking about whether a man who allegedly treats women like lifelong party favors, should perhaps be disqualified from our highest governmental positions. But to despair that it’s gender Groundhog Day in America is to fundamentally miss the point: A lot has changed since October 1991, and American women are reaping the benefits of having gone through this looking glass once before. The nearly universal and instantaneous outrage at Trump’s comments and behavior — from the press, from GOP leaders, from really everyone outside of the Breitbart bubble? We have Anita Hill to thank for that.
It’s almost impossible for women like me, who came of age during the Thomas Senate battle, to miss the parallels between the two episodes. In both cases, powerful men allegedly mistreated and shamed women with less power than they had. In both cases these victims came forth reluctantly, and sometimes years later. In both instances, supporters of the man accused of misconduct argued that it was “just words,” or that it was all “years ago,” or that he was merely joking, or that it never happened at all. They argue that if the subordinate was soooo offended, why did she wait to complain? [Continue reading…]
A shrinking Trump mocks his accusers to shrinking crowds
Joan Walsh writes: At 2 pm on Friday, as Donald J. Trump was supposed to take the stage, his surreal rally soundtrack struck up Elton John’s “Funeral For a Friend” — for the second time in about 20 minutes. Apparently his team plays it before every rally, but here it seemed a portent.
The White Oak Amphitheatre, which President Obama packed to excess of its 7,700 person limit Tuesday night, leaving another 1,500 supporters stranded outside, wasn’t even half full on Friday. A listless crowd occasionally chanted “Trump, Trump, Trump,” but it never got momentum. As we sat waiting, yet another woman came forward, this time to The Washington Post, and claimed that Trump forced his hand up her skirt and “touched my vagina through my underwear.” A former Apprentice contestant also made abuse allegations against Trump within hours. As I predicted on Thursday, Trump is on track to provide every major news outlet with its own victim of his reported sexual abuse. Or maybe more than one.
About a half-hour behind schedule, a swaggering Trump took the stage, and continued his crusade to demonize and deride the women who’ve accused him of sexual abuse this week, with the audience egging him on. The embattled GOP nominee seemed to notice the smallish crowd. “Lots of room!” he remarked, as though that’s a good thing at a political rally. But he plowed ahead with his defiant campaign, with a little less dark talk about “international” cabals and “bankers” than on Thursday and more talk about the “corrupt media” and the “failing New York Times” — and many more insults toward his accusers.
Trump’s argument appeared to be that the stories couldn’t be true because the women weren’t sufficiently attractive to merit his abuse. [Continue reading…]
How the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
Sarah Smarsh writes: Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty – a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty – wanted to vote.
So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth she’s had since her late 20s – both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man she’d fled after he broke her jaw.
Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, it’s hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath “whose mouth overloads his ass”.
No one loathes Trump – who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility – more than she.
Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?
Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.
According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”
Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.
These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue. [Continue reading…]
The strange sympathy of the Far Left for Putin
Gershom Gorenberg writes: Jeremy Corbyn, the grim, controversial, and recently re-elected leader of Britain’s Labour Party, rejects the idea of protesting outside Russia’s embassy in London against that country’s brutal bombing of Syria. “The focus on Russian atrocities or Syrian army atrocities,” said a Corbyn aide this week, distracts attention from “very large scale civilian casualties as a result of the U.S.-led coalition bombing.”
In case this is a bit obtuse, let’s go over to Britain’s Stop the War coalition, which Corbyn chaired before he was elected Labour leader. In a radio interview, current vice-chairman Chris Nineham said that protesting Russian atrocities would increase “hysteria and jingoism.” The way to end the Syria conflict, he said, was to “oppose the West.”
In another words, when we say we’re against war, we don’t mean Vladimir Putin’s war. We mean war waged by Western imperialists.
To fill in some dots: The idea of protesting outside Russian embassies, not just in London but around the world, reportedly came from Labour MP Ann Clwyd. It’s true that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson endorsed the proposal. But ignoring Russian war crimes because Johnson opposes them is a bit like ignoring Donald Trump’s misogyny because some Republicans also object to it.
As for the equation of Russian and coalition actions, The Guardian did a fact-check with the monitoring group Airwars. The civilian death rate from Russian attacks, said the group’s director, “probably outpaces the coalition by a rate of eight to one.” The coalition tries to limit civilian deaths; the Russians deliberately target civilians, he said.
Predictably, lots of people in the riven Labour Party are outraged by Corbyn’s stance. It’s only the latest instance of Corbyn’s fossilized and one-dimensional anti-imperialism being an embarrassment for the left. In the United States, Putin’s most prominent fan is the embarrassment of the right.
Still, Corbyn has his American counterparts — starting with Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Until a few days ago, Stein had a statement on her website saying that the United States should end any military role in Syria, impose an arms embargo, and work “with Syria, Russia, and Iran to restore all of Syria to control by the government.” The “anti-war” candidate’s stance, in other words, was to let the war crimes continue until the Assad regime and its patrons massacre their way to victory. [Continue reading…]
If they really wanted to Stop the War in Syria, they’d target Russia
Jonathan Freedland writes: Pity the luckless children of Aleppo. If only the bombs raining down on them, killing their parents, maiming their friends, destroying their hospitals – if only those bombs were British or, better still, American.
Then the streets of London would be jammed with protestors demanding an end to their agony. Trafalgar Square would ring loud with speeches from Tariq Ali, Ken Loach and Monsignor Bruce Kent. Whitehall would be a sea of placards, insisting that war crimes were being committed and that these crimes were Not in Our Name. Grosvenor Square would be packed with noisy protestors outside the US embassy, urging that Barack Obama be put on trial in The Hague. The protestors would wear Theresa May masks and paint their hands red. And they would be doing it all because, they’d say, they could not bear to see another child killed in Aleppo.
But that is not the good fortune of the luckless children of that benighted city. Their fate is to be terrorised by the wrong kind of bombs, the ones dropped by Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. As such, they do not qualify for the activist sympathy of the movement that calls itself the Stop the War Coalition. Indeed, it’s deputy chair, Chris Nineham, told the Today programme that his organisation would not be organising or joining any protests outside the Russian embassy because that would merely fuel the “hysteria and the jingoism” currently being whipped up against Moscow. Stop the War would instead, explained Nineham in a moment of refreshing candour, be devoting its energies to its prime goal – “opposing the west”. [Continue reading…]
Three Kansas men calling themselves ‘Crusaders’ charged in terror plot targeting Muslim immigrants
The Washington Post reports: Three Kansas men were accused of plotting a bomb attack targeting an apartment complex home to a mosque and many Muslim immigrants from Somalia, authorities said Friday.
Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright and Patrick Eugene Stein face federal charges of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, the Department of Justice announced Friday.
“These charges are based on eight months of investigation by the FBI that is alleged to have taken the investigators deep into a hidden culture of hatred and violence,” Acting U.S. Attorney Tom Beall said in a statement. “Many Kansans may find it as startling as I do that such things could happen here.”
According to the complaint, the investigation was prompted by a paid confidential informant who had attended meetings with a group of individuals calling themselves “the Crusaders,” and heard plans discussed plots to attack Muslims, whom they called “cockroaches.” [Continue reading…]
CIA prepping for possible cyber attack against Russia
NBC News reports: The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging “clandestine” cyber operation designed to harass and “embarrass” the Kremlin leadership.
The sources did not elaborate on the exact measures the CIA was considering, but said the agency had already begun opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation. Former intelligence officers told NBC News that the agency had gathered reams of documents that could expose unsavory tactics by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Vice President Joe Biden told “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd on Friday that “we’re sending a message” to Putin and that “it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact.”
When asked if the American public will know a message was sent, the vice president replied, “Hope not.”
Retired Admiral James Stavridis told NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden that the U.S. should attack Russia’s ability to censor its internal internet traffic and expose the financial dealings of Putin and his associates. [Continue reading…]
And what better way to expose such information than by providing it to Wikileaks. Julian Assange can then demonstrate that he’s not a puppet of Putin’s — or risk being outed if it turns out his organization chooses not to release such material.
Wouldn’t that turn Wikileaks into a puppet of the U.S. government? Kind of — except Assange’s position is that it’s not his job to pass judgment on the motives of his sources. His commitment is to protect his sources and publish secrets.
Entire U.S. political system ‘under attack’ by Russian hacking, experts warn
Geof Wheelwright writes: It could have been a cold war drama. The world watched this week as accusations and counter-accusations were thrown by the American and Russian governments about documents stolen during a hack of the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.
The notion that public figures have any right to privacy appears to have been lost in the furore surrounding the story, stolen correspondence being bandied around in attempts to influence the outcome of one of the nastiest, most vitriolic US presidential campaigns in history.
Some have argued that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s emails were fair game for hacking because had they not been held on a private server, they would have been subject to freedom of information requests and available to the general public.
There may be some truth to that, but it doesn’t change the fact that correspondence between public figures has allegedly been hacked by those acting under the direction of a foreign government and released for everyone to peruse, with little opportunity for the authors to offer context or even confirm that the contents of the leaks are accurate.
The hacks have created a dilemma for American voters, according to Rob Guidry, CEO of social media analytics company Sc2 and a former special adviser to US Central Command. He says voters seem to want the information that has been leaked by the hackers but don’t feel entirely comfortable with the hacks that have brought the information to light. [Continue reading…]
Enough is enough: The 2016 election is now a referendum on male entitlement
Leslie Bennetts writes: Lashing out at his accusers this afternoon, Donald Trump attacked all the women who say he has groped, kissed or inspected them naked without their consent. He called them “horrible, horrible liars” and vowed to sue the New York Times for reporting their accounts.
Minutes before the Florida rally where Trump declared war on women and the media, Michelle Obama offered a diametrically opposite view of reality and morality at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. Condemning Trump’s conduct as “intolerable”, she forcefully argued that no woman deserves to be treated this way. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been more dramatic.
“This is not about politics. It’s about basic human decency,” the first lady said, urging her listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton. “It’s about right and wrong. Now is the time for all of us to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough’.”
Her words echoed the thoughts of millions of women who watched last Sunday’s presidential debate and heard Trump deny he’s ever sexually assaulted women, even though he himself has publicly described having habitually done just that. What Trump didn’t realize was how many of his listeners were thinking about all the times that men had done such things to them.
By midweek, even before Michelle Obama voiced that thought, the floodgates had opened as a rapidly expanding array of women described various forms of sexual assault they said Trump had inflicted on them – and told their stories, on the record, to the Guardian, the New York Times, Buzzfeed, People magazine, and the Palm Beach Post, among a growing list of publications. [Continue reading…]
New York Times scoffs at Trump’s libel threat — says he suffers from a reputation of his own making
In response to the threat of a lawsuit coming from Donald Trump’s legal team, the New York Times VP and Assistant General Counsel David McCraw explained why the newspaper has no intention of retracting its recent report, Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately:
Dear Mr. Kasowitz:
I write in response to your letter of October 12, 2016 to Dean Baquet concerning your client Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President of the United States. You write concerning our article “Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately” and label the article as “libel per se.” You ask that we “remove it from [our] website, and issue a full and immediate retraction and apology.” We decline to do so.
The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation. Mr. Trump has bragged about this non-consensual sexual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio host’s request to discuss Mr. Trump’s own daughter as a “piece of ass.” Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump’s unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has had the slights effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.
But there is a larger and much more important point here. The women quoted in our story spoke out on an issue of national importance – indeed, as an issue that Mr. Trump himself discussed with the whole nation watching during Sunday night’s presidential debate. Our reporters diligently worked to confirm the women’s accounts. They provided readers with Mr. Trump’s response, including his forceful denial of the women’s reports. It would have been a disservice not just to our readers but to democracy itself to silence their voices. We did what the law allows: We published newsworthy information about a subject of deep public concern. If Mr. Trump disagrees, if he believes that American citizens had no right to hear what these women had to say and that the law of this country forces us and those who would dare to criticize him to stand silent or be punished, we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.
Sincerely,
David E. McCraw
Cut ties to Donald Trump, big donors urge RNC
The New York Times reports: Several of the Republican Party’s most generous donors called on the Republican National Committee on Thursday to disavow Donald J. Trump, saying that allegations by multiple women that Mr. Trump had groped or made inappropriate sexual advances toward them threatened to inflict lasting damage on the party’s image.
To an elite group of Republican contributors who have donated millions of dollars to the party’s candidates and committees in recent years, the cascade of revelations related to Mr. Trump’s sexual conduct is grounds for the committee to cut ties with the party’s beleaguered standard-bearer, finally and fully.
“At some point, you have to look in the mirror and recognize that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children — especially your daughters,” said David Humphreys, a Missouri business executive who contributed more than $2.5 million to Republicans from the 2012 campaign cycle through this spring.
Bruce Kovner, a New York investor and philanthropist who with his wife has given $2.7 million to Republicans over the same period, was just as blunt. “He is a dangerous demagogue completely unsuited to the responsibilities of a United States president,” Mr. Kovner wrote in an email, referring to Mr. Trump.
“Even for loyalists, there is a line beyond which the obvious moral failings of a candidate are impossible to disregard,” he wrote. “That line has been clearly breached.” [Continue reading…]
From liberal beacon to a prop for Trump: What has happened to WikiLeaks?
The Guardian reports: How did WikiLeaks go from darling of the liberal left and scourge of American imperialism to apparent tool of Donald Trump’s divisive, incendiary presidential campaign?
Thursday brought another WikiLeaks dump of nearly 2,000 emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign, allegedly by Russians. As usual, they were inside-the-beltway gossip rather than game-changing: the campaign tried to push back the Illinois primary, believing it would make life harder for moderate Republicans.
That has not stopped Trump trying to make hay from the leaked emails and deflect attention from allegations of sexual harassment against him. “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “So dishonest! Rigged system!”
Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street banks were apparently revealed in an email dump last Friday, just minutes after the release of a video in which Trump was caught boasting about groping women – timing that many felt was more than just chance. This follows a hack in July designed to embarrass Clinton on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.
Robert Mackey of The Intercept website wrote in August: “The WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.”
The seeming alliance between Trump and WikiLeaks is an astonishing role reversal. [Continue reading…]
Berlin, 1945; Grozny, 2000; Aleppo, 2016
Michael Kimmelman writes: The destruction is so complete that it obliterates even a sense of time. At a glance, the video could show Berlin in 1945 or Grozny, 2000. Mass death erases all distinctions.
The place is Aleppo, Syria, the al-Mashhad district, or what remains of it after recent attacks by Syrian government forces and their Russian allies. Toppled rooftop satellite dishes, choked by plaster dust, resemble wilted flowers. Figures move through the pulverized rubble but are hard to make out.
“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” Harry Lime asked on the Ferris wheel in “The Third Man,” the classic noir film set in postwar Vienna. This is drone footage, after all, shot from the same detached, superior perspective of the bombers who committed this atrocity in the name of fighting non-jihadist rebels. The video was made to document the devastation and bear witness, but it inevitably reduces people on the streets to Lime’s dots. [Continue reading…]
Aleppo must be ‘cleaned,’ declares Assad, amid outcry over bloody siege
The Guardian reports: Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has spoken of “cleaning” the besieged city of Aleppo, where a quarter of a million people are caught under heavy bombardment by his government’s forces, and using it as a “springboard” for winning the country’s war.
With Britain leading international outcry over the regime’s campaign against rebels in Aleppo and Russia’s backing for it, Assad declared that victory in the strategic city would allow the Syrian army to liberate other areas of the country from “terrorists”.
Speaking to Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, Assad said Aleppo was effectively no longer Syria’s industrial capital but taking back the city would provide important political and strategic gains for his regime.
“It’s going to be the springboard, as a big city, to move to other areas, to liberate other areas from the terrorists. This is the importance of Aleppo now,” Assad said.
“You have to keep cleaning this area and to push the terrorists to Turkey to go back to where they come from, or to kill them. There’s no other option. But Aleppo is going to be a very important springboard to do this move.” [Continue reading…]
Ground down by savagery — the agony of Aleppo
Martin Chulov reports: In the distance, Aleppo briefly emerged from the smoke and dust of war, a low grey skyline on a brown summer plain. A heat haze shimmered over the road ahead, shrouding first an abandoned army barracks, then ransacked, smouldering factories, an empty crossroads, and finally, the city itself.
Even then, days after the eastern half of the city had been seized by armed Syrians opposed to the rule of Bashar al-Assad, many of Aleppo’s people had fled. Shops were shuttered. Twisted tanks and toppled buses blocked intersections and the few residents on its empty streets scurried past with their heads down.
These were the first days of August 2012, a momentous time in a civil war that had just seen half of Syria’s second city – and industrial heart – fall to an insurrection hatched by the working-class men of its hinterland. It was my first visit to the city, after several earlier trips to nearby towns where the rebel push for northern Syria had been gathering steam. It paved the way for the Guardian’s subsequent reporting on a conflict with no apparent end.
In more than 10 journeys to Aleppo, from that first visit in 2012 until my last in December 2014, I have chronicled the decline of one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities as it has been ground down by savagery. Modern warfare has done what uprising and invasion have failed to do throughout the ages, transforming half the city into a shell of its prewar self, and imperilling an ancient core that has weathered centuries of conflict and even a devastating earthquake.
Along the way, those who remained and fought for its destiny offered windows into a war that has ramifications far beyond the borders of Syria. Long a crossroads of trade and transport, and a hub of empire, Aleppo is again central to the fate of the region, even under the assault of Russian bombers, which have made much of the east uninhabitable over the past year.
The rebel-held east was the focus of all my visits; west Aleppo has remained off-limits, functioning with little disruption and firmly under the control of the Syrian regime, which refuses visa requests. [Continue reading…]
U.S. mulls over Syria policy — further military intervention is unlikely
The Guardian reports: The Obama administration is conducting a final review of its Syria policy as it enters its last hundred days, but the rethink is not expected to lead to any radical changes or significant military interventions that could bring US and Russian forces into head-on confrontation.
The secretary of state, John Kerry, will travel to Lausanne in Switzerland on Saturday to meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and their counterparts from the Middle East. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are expected to attend. Iran’s participation is in doubt, possibly as a result of the dire state of its relations with Saudi Arabia.
Kerry will brief the UK, French and German governments in London on Sunday, on his way back from Switzerland.
The ministers go into the Lausanne meeting with low expectations, diplomats said. The best of the likely outcomes would be a humanitarian pause in the bombing of eastern Aleppo for two or three days to allow some basic humanitarian supplies to reach the embattled rebel-held districts, home to 275,000 people. [Continue reading…]
A French recruit tells ‘why I left ISIS’
Michael Weiss reports: “As-salāmu ʿalaykum. Je m’appelle Abu Omar al-Firansi.”
Our new age of sacred terror is multilingual, and yet I was still surprised to click on the video showing a young man covered with a mustard-colored scarf, only his eyes and forehead visible, delivering his confession. “I advise you not to come here,” he concludes after a lengthy disquisition. “Never in my entire life have I experienced such humiliation, injustice, and segregation as I have had to endure here.” Abu Omar al-Firansi, a French national, has just deserted from the so-called Islamic State.
His recounting of his time as an ISIS jihadist was apparently filmed in northern Aleppo around six weeks ago in a safe house belonging to an unnamed smuggler he paid to transport him out of Syria and into Turkey. The footage, which apart from al-Firansi’s shrouded face features only a nondescript tile wall background, was shared exclusively and for the first time with The Daily Beast and was shot by a member of Ibn Awa, a new and as-yet-unpublicized anti-ISIS activist collective, with what appears to be a broad network in the Syrian eastern provinces of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. [Continue reading…]