(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

It was quite obvious that Trump was grossly guilty of incitement of violent insurrection before this Senate trial, but the Democrats’ impeachment managers have done an amazing job of showing how Trump’s culpability, responsibility, and level of involvement in what happened on January 6 are dramatically worse than it previously seemed.

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  February 13, 2021

SILVER SPRING—After the last three days of Trump’s Senate impeachment trial (the first full day had, absurdly, dealt mainly with the constitutionality of the trial itself apart from a powerful opening argument), in some ways the takeaways are surprisingly profound.

In my time as a journalist, I have passionately advocated the importance of analytical journalism: telling a story to readers not by necessarily adding, highlighting, or focusing primarily on new information, but by putting together and explaining all the component parts of complex and/or massive stories, tying together the information from many articles over a period of time and presenting their sum total in a single piece or a few.  Such articles tend to be quite long, which is a major strike in journalism. Another strike is that such work, wherever it will be published, will have to synthesize many articles from many sources other than the publishing outlet, and outlets tend to be rather tribal in not wanting to highlight the work of other outlets so heavily.  And a third strike is that, in general but especially in the ultracompetitive and struggling crisis era of current journalism, the emphasis is, by far, to be the first to present something new rather than to pause and take stock of the current body of information (why is it “either/or,” why can there not be plenty of room for both?).  These three strikes combine to make such deep-dive analytical pieces quite rare, and I have certainly encountered a lot of opposition (sometimes even hostility) from editors and journalists both to anything that does not offer up some juicy new nugget of information and to analytical journalism in general.

As I have noted before, such a rejectionist approach to analytical journalism is deeply myopic while also contributing to the degree to which the public is confused and unable to weight the importance of so many catchy, endless headlines, and there has been no better example in recent years than the Trump-Russia saga, which I have also taken pains to note (and which is the subject of some of my best deep-dive analytical work).

For many of the journalistic powers that be, “original” reporting is only reporting that contain new scoops, not original analysis no matter how significant that analysis is.  In fact, presenting old facts in a new light, new context, and juxtaposed can sometimes be the among the most valuable information and analysis, just as any intelligence agency staff or criminal investigator would tell you.  They would note that, especially when it comes to reading intent—which is often the most elusive information and yet is always among the valuable—it is this type of analysis that is often the most useful: figuring how and why each piece fits together is itself revelatory, and intent is best able to be discerned by putting everything together.

And that is what I feel happened during the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentation of the case against Trump, perhaps the single most important example of this type of big-picture analysis on a main stage in America in years.

I also feel somewhat traumatized by the experience of both reliving the Capitol assault and seeing how the whole picture of it comes together.  It is a bit like being in a battle and remembering your own experience while also being given the full battle report for how your experiences and impressions fit into the wider truth for the first time; many on social media echoed this sentiment, and most of us can only imagine how much worse this is for any of the people traumatized by actually being in or near the Capitol on January 6. 

The day of the Capitol insurrection was obviously traumatizing and terrible enough for most of the wider public watching it on TV and following it on social media, but most of the worst footage and facts would not come out until days, even weeks later (and I am not even getting to the new footage from the Democrats’ impeachment managers).  I did not expected anything to seriously alter my views from this trial that I already have regarded as an open-and-shut case, but the Democrats’ presentation on February 10-11 did just that and did so in ways that shocked me.

In seeing so much context added and all the clips I had seen earlier and then some put together to show when and where the insurrectionists were on the Capitol grounds in relation to members of Congress and Vice President Pence, and showing what Trump said and tweeted and when before and during the insurrection, a far more sinister picture has emerged.

And very much as a result of the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentations, it is now clear that Trump acted throughout the day not only to knowingly foment and incite a mob-driven intimidation campaign with more than a few hints of violence against Congress and his vice president at the hour they were tallying the Electoral College votes, but that he reacted to the violence at the Capitol by supporting, leveraging, and excusing it in a way that he fully integrated the insurrectionists and their actions into his long campaign to overturn the election results, overthrow our government and republic.

Indeed, they embraced Trump and he embraced them throughout.  Many members of his mob cited Trump’s calls that they march on the Capitol as they were storming it and while arguing and fighting with Capitol police, and while running amok on the Capitol grounds they closely followed and even read allowed his tweets issued while he was watching them storm the Capitol, tweets that encouraged and energized them.

Trump willfully misrepresented the mob, said it was “full of patriots” and that it was “peaceful” even when it was obviously not and he had known his own vice president had to be evacuated within the Capitol because his life was in danger.

During all this, besides following the attack on television, Trump’s main concerns were to reiterate the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, to criticize Pence for not trying to overturn the election results, and to try to call one Republican Senator, Tommy Tuberville—hiding in the Capitol from the Trumpian mob—and use the situation to pressure the senator to carry out Trump’s plan to overturn the election results. 

Hours into the attack on the Capitol, Congress, and Pence, Trump was still expressing support for the insurrection, and when he finally did call his people off—nearly three-and-a-half hours after the insurrection began, plenty of time for his intended targets to be hurt or even killed when he refused requests to call them off or send in reinforcements, even from members of his own staff and Cabinet (a significant number of whom resigned expressly because of Trump’s role in fomenting the insurrection), even from the Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—he still, in the very same message, justified their actions and reiterated his Big Lie.

At no time that day did he condemn the insurrection or its attack.  This is a man who often tweets back at TV news personalities within minutes of them criticizing him.  Trump was never shy or dilatory about condemning violence (real or falsely claimed) perceived (accurately or inaccurately) to come from members of the left.  Yet when he was within walking distance from an insurrection at the Capitol carried out by his supporters whom he had just addressed in person, there was no effort to condemn their violence.

Both in their own social media posts and, for those now arrested, in the government’s charging documents, it is clear that these insurrectionists were there because Trump called for them to be there, were acting directly in response to his exhortations, and believed their insurrection was exactly what Trump wanted of them, that they were carrying it out because of and for him at his instruction. 

And in all of this, both his “actions and inactions,” to quote Democratic Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin, speak loudly.  From his rallies to his supporters’ storming of the Michigan State Capitol and, separately, attempting to kidnap and possibly execute Michigan’s governor to the near-running off of a highway of a Biden campaign bus by a Trump pickup truck caravan, Trump has repeatedly not only failed to condemn violence and physical intimidation on the part of his acolytes, he has repeatedly praised them for such acts, which literally led into and fed each other.  Even in the run-up to the rally, it seems Trump was involved in changing both the date of the rally to coincide with the Electoral College counting at the Capitol and to allow the option for attendees to access the Capitol grounds.  The rally itself, date, time, location, themes, and, apparently, freedom to approach the Capitol were all dependent upon or tied intimately to Trump himself.

This is not just lighting a match and walking away.  It is jumping into an explosives warehouse while using a flamethrower.

To understand this, a few clips are not enough: you need to watch the whole presentation, especially on that of February 10 (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4) but also February 11 (part 1 and part 2).

Before I saw nearly all of this in its entirety, I had still thought it was quite clear that Trump had intended the protest to go to the Capitol, had sought to stir up the crowd and cause them to disrupt the proceedings there, and felt that he more or less just embraced somewhat passively what unfolded after that.  This, of course, for a sitting president is enough for him to be grossly guilty of incitement both from a political impeachment perspective and a legal criminal perspective (two different things, in spite of Trump’s defense attorneys’ attempts to muddy the waters).  But after I saw the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentation, it became clear to me that Trump was no passive observer of what transpired once his crowd left his rally, that Trump deliberately timed his talk to begin just before and last through the beginning of the constitutional proceedings at the Capitol, and that he actively followed and used the insurrection to further his plot to overthrow our republic’s constitutional order and peaceful transition of power, which we had in this country at the presidential from 1789-2017 until Trump’s insurrection, 2021 being the first non-peaceful transfer of presidential power in 232 years.

Even as a passive careless fool, he would be intensely culpable for the insurrection carrying the weight of his office as president, but, as was the case with the circumstances leading to his first impeachment, he knew what he was doing and it was an active campaign in which he was calling the shots and deeply involved to maintain power through nearly any means necessary, no matter how illegal or wrong.  And demonstrating this to be the case with the Capitol insurrection, the case made by the Democratic impeachment managers in Trump’s Senate trial is devastating for Trump and anyone who would defend his actions or claim he does not bear extreme and primary responsibility for the appalling events of January 6, 2021.

Correction appended and updated April 10, 2021 to correct the timeline of events and to add sources related to that timeline.

Also see Brian’s related Jerusalem Report article, Trump Capitol insurrection: The history behind the violence, his related article here, Trump’s Impeachment Trial Exceedingly Simple: No Excuse Not to Convict, his related interview on The Jist Chatter Podcast, and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 16, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 16th, 2016

Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

AMMAN — As much as the horror show of the second Clinton-Trump debate should bother us, on some levels the Pence-Kaine vice-presidential debate is more worrisome. I say this because that one has been acknowledged to be the more “normal” debate, and should remind us all of how dysfunctional our system is even without Trump and his candidacy. But, because of that, it is also one of the more instructive moments of this campaign season, even though the debate happened almost two weeks ago; in fact, its lessons’ importance do not dim with the passage of time, but only increase, and will be relevant for the foreseeable future.

See, the thing about the now-generally-spineless Republican Party elected officials is that we can see the next episode, should Trump lose, with breathtaking clarity: “WE REPUBLICANS LOST BECAUSE OF TRUMP. BLAME HIM. WE ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE WE ARE 100% FREE FROM ALL BLAME AND 100% OF THE BLAME IS ON TRUMP,” they will spout piously. But the largely uninspiring Pence-Kaine debate easily disproves that; it shows what is wrong with the Republican Party, it shows much of what’s wrong with our political system in general, and it even reminds us how thin the Democratic Party’s bench is.

What the VP Debate Told Us About Democrats

Now, a brief note on the issues with the Democrats before getting into the meatier awfulness of the other two topics. 

First, don’t get me wrong: I like Tim Kaine, and though I was at first disheartened by the pick of another white male, I knew Elizabeth Warren would have been a disaster in repelling centrist voters and in making it an all-female ticket (nothing wrong with that for me but America is still a backwards country), and I was really hot for Julián Castro and would also have been excited by Corey Booker, but after I watched Kaine speak once he was picked and learned more about him, I chided myself for wanting to be “excited” and realized that Clinton was right to pick Kaine, who had far more experience and who could credibly be said to be ready to be president more than most (and certainly far more than the younger and inexperienced Castro and Booker, give them time for goodness sakes! Patience!!); I realized my expectations as a liberal should not outweigh an ability to appeal to swing voters who are not as liberal as I am and to be ready to be Commander-in-Chief should disaster strike.  

In the debate, Kaine deserves some credit for acting like a kamikaze pilot aimed right at Trump: at the expense of his own favorability, he kept the focus on Trump throughout the debate even though it meant a “loss” to the man with whom he shared the stage, Mike Pence: suicide mission accomplished, Sen; Kaine. But on other levels, Kaine was lacking: he stumbled over his words more than a few times, his delivery was off, his attempts at humor fell flat. More than anything else, Kaine’s very presence was a reminder how thin the Democratic bench is, even if the Republican Bench is unquestionably weaker, especially in terms of substance. I remember thinking when Ted Kennedy died—the Last Lion of the Senate—there was no one else even close to him except perhaps for Biden, now aging and in the twilight of his political career. The Lionesses of the senate—Barbara Mikulski and Barbara Boxer—are both retiring this year, with only Dianne Feinstein left in their class, though Claire McCaskill can be said to be a good person to soon be of similar stature.  And Warren, whom I also like, is admittedly mostly talk and to the left of most Americans and is therefore not a viable national candidate for the same reasons Bernie Sanders is not. In the House, Nancy Pelosi, John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, Jim Clyburn, and other elder statesman will continue to serve well there, but that’s pretty much it for them as far as their career, and for the House. Booker and Castro are exciting, but that is a list of two people.

What the VP Debate Told Us About Republicans

Bench

As for the Republican bench, it was eviscerated by the one-two combination of Donald Trump and actual Republican voters this primary season. Newer, supposedly up-and-coming stars like Sens. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio performed abysmally. Tom Cotton (who didn’t run) may have an appealing veteran background, but he, like many other GOP newcomers, is also an irrational extremist who will narrowly appeal to white male voters and few others in terms of demographics or gender, which, in the future, will not be a winning formula even if Trump shocked us all with how many legs this formula can still stand upon in 2016 with what at least convincingly seems like a Picket’s Charge last-gasp of American white ethno-nationalism.

GOP: Party of Fantasy

Now, as to the most serious problem… Especially on the Republican side, people were pining about possibly having the guy in the VP slot switch positions with the candidate on the top of the ticket. While that would spare us the possibility of a Trump cataclysm, it would, sadly, do nothing to alleviate the myriad problems facing our political system before Trump announced his candidacy. 

In fact, the Kaine-Pence debate reminded me of the Bush-Gore, Bush-Kerry debates from years past, minus all the personality and excitement; yes, these two came off blander than we thought was possible, but the recent debate was worse in so many ways. Back then, it seemed the two parties lived in alternate realities on many issues and couldn’t agree on basic facts about the state of the world they cohabited. Today, those divisions are only more pronounced and cover even more issues than before, making the partisanship of the Bush and early Obama years seem almost quaint in comparison.

During the W. Bush years, no mainstream Democrat argued that Bush was responsible for or created al-Qaeda. Sure, there was fair criticism that Bush’s policies were counterproductive and incited and enabled more terrorism—an objectively true claim, as even Bush realized this when he replaced Rumsfeld with Gates and had Gen. Petraeus totally reorient our strategy in Iraq to be (more effectively) population/civilian-centric—but no mainstream Democrat suggested Bush wasn’t actually trying to win the war, that he was the main reason for the rise of al-Qaeda, or, even worse, that he sympathized with al-Qaeda and Muslim terrorists. Now? Even Trump, the Republican nominee for the presidency, has implied or said such things about Obama and terrorists and ISIS, has even clearly said he believes Obama “founded” ISIS even when given chances to clarify, and he is hardly alone in making such statements or holding such beliefs, which have existed since even before Obama took office as president (a Quinnipiac poll from this summer found that over half of Republicans—and nearly one-third of all Americans—agreed with Trump that Obama “may sympathize” with terrorists!). And most Republicans think that it’s mainly Obama’s fault that ISIS has risen as far as it has, which flies in the face of logic and history.

Compared to the W. Bush years, there is even more about basic reality on which the two parties cannot agree, and, as usual, it’s the Republicans who have fantastically constructed an alternative false reality. Republicans today doubt the seriousness of climate change or even its existence and also doubt the validity of evolutionary science and other scientific consensuses, as they did back then; many still believe in the demonstrably false claims of trickle-down Reaganomics; today it is clear that Republicans also and/or increasingly believe in a fantasy of the state of and effects of illegal immigration, that there is not a racial disparity in law enforcement and the criminal justice system when there clearly is, that Obamacare is a total disaster even though it is not (even with its poorly understood problems it has made tremendous improvements), that Syrian refugees as being admitted currently to the U.S. pose a grave national security threat when they do not, that having a minimum wage or raising one is bad even though there is no evidence for the former and little that evidence the latter is true (as long as the raise is not stupidly high), that racism is an equal or larger problem for white people compared to African-Americans when this is flat-out absurd, that there is no discrimination against Muslims in America when there clearly is, that America is not on a steady if slow but also historic economic recovery when it clearly is, that the South was not exactly wrong during the Civil War and that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation (wrong and wrong), that voter fraud is a pressing issue of major concern when it is virtually non-existent, and, on top of all of this, Republicans trash the quality of the U.S. military when it is still by far the most powerful military in the world and is still being upgraded robustly.

Many of these gaps in reality were on full display in the debate between Pence and Kaine. In fact, throughout the campaigns, including the VP debate, the candidates on opposing sides have sounded like they are talking about two completely different countries when they describe America. On top of all that, Pence was in full-denial-mode when it came to Trump’s many verifiable insanities; either that, or Pence didn’t even attempt to actually defend or address some of Trump’s atrocious behavior.

VP Debate an Awful Look Into Our Political System’s Pre-Trump Deficiencies

So, in what would supposedly be something of a “dream” scenario for Republican elites (the same Republican elites that had unwittingly laid the groundwork for Trump’s hostile takeover), a debate where Pence, not Trump, would be the presidential nominee for their party—a nominee who would still be in denial of basic reality on things like climate change and racial discrimination and immigration and the state of the economy and would also deny the basic reality of much of the ugliness underpinning the Republican party—would be considered ideal.

So even taking Trump out of the equation, we find that we are lacking in key components necessary for a serious, substantive debate about our future and that one of our two parties is willing to perpetually deny reality and its own strong ties to dark forces like racism and anti-intellectualism and militarism and plutocracy. Without Trump, it is still impossible to have a fact-based, reality-situated discussion about our country’s policies and its future. Without Trump, we are still in trouble, and in very deep trouble. Without Trump, it is quite possible that Ted Cruz would be the nominee as he by far had the most delegates compared with any other Republican candidate (well over three times as many) besides Trump. Yes, defeating Trump’s historically awful candidacy is a necessary step, but if victory in that cause is achieved, the real work is only beginning and it will be oh-so-very-hard; the American political system was in dire straits even before he announced his candidacy, and nobody should forget that. Anyone who does, just watch the VP debate and that is all the reminder of this sad truth that anyone should need. 

And I would hope that without Trump lowering the bar to unprecedented depths that this problem would be something we would be discussing intensely; under Trump’s looming, groping shadow, I fear that discussion has been lost, failing to materialize as we try to put out an orange Trump fire all while missing the erosion threatening to send our house divided tumbling down a cliff over a longer period of time in a sinking collapse that would not be as sudden but would be as real a threat as Trump’s more dramatic and more immediate inferno of inanity.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 3, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 3rd, 2016

Pool/Getty Images

AMMAN — These debates worry and perplex me because I never know how the American public and the media will react. I know how rational people who aren’t blind ideologues will react. And at this point, all rational people and non-ideologues are backing Clinton. The almost 6 in 10 Americans that are irrational and/or ideologues constantly seem to prefer and encourage the atrocious. What horrifies normal, decent, civil, thoughtful people delights these “deplorables” to the tunes of shrieks and howls of delight, often with more than just a thin veneer of racism, misogyny, or some other form of bigotry and hate. So when by any objective measure Clinton easily won the debate and Trump more or less imploded, that is little comfort in trying to gauge the reaction of the mob and the can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees media.

Getting Inside Voter’s Minds

For the first two minutes, Trump seemed the most articulate I’ve ever seen him. For the first half-hour, he managed to not look terrible talking about trade and the economy. And then he demonstrated he had the attention span of an ADHD Millennial in giving us an hour of unfocused, incoherent rants in which he demonstrated no ability to exercise self-control as he was successfully baited every time Clinton tried to bait him to talk about unflattering and off-topic items. He acted unpresidential, demonstrated a solid lack of both understanding and information on pretty much everything, and was unable to fill his time without repeating himself over and over again and without parroting the same anecdotes he’s been peddling for over a year (we heard about Carrier, but I’m surprised he didn’t bring up Komatsu and Caterpillar as well…). Clinton was careful not to appear too aggressive and stayed calm, composed, seemed to be enjoying herself, and demonstrated a mastery facts and issues that has come to be a hallmark of her as a public servant.

Regardless of with whom you agreed more on this issues, this is what happened. And regardless of your thoughts on various issues and your party affiliation, it is clear that Donald Trump has a dangerous temperament, lack of self-control and focus, and a stunning ignorance that makes him unfit to be president and Commander-in-Chief. 

Any rational person can and did see and understand this.

And that is what frightens me, because I fear we rational people are outnumbered in this country. Along with irrational people who can’t see these obvious truths and hateful, childish, spiteful, narcissistic ideologues who either don’t care about the effects of their vote or are willfully blind to them (and I am convinced there are far more of the former than the latter), they may for a majority of voters. And they may not. We will see.

In the end, this debate and the ones to come, much like the election itself, are simply about math.

To Consider Impact of Debate(s), Divide Voters Into Parts of an Equation

In fact, it’s something of a long equation with various parts. Two parts of the equation are immutable: those who are definitely voting Trump and Clinton. Let’s call them Td and Cd. The there are those who are leaning but not certain, and who can be divided by how strongly they lean—high (Tlh and Clh), medium (Tlm and Clm) and low (Tll and Cll). The same thing can more-or-less be done for Johnson and Stein. Then we would have undecideds (U). 

I will cherry pick Ann Selzer’s outfit’s latest poll conducted before the first debate, as she is regarded by FiveThirtyEight as the “best pollster in politics,” to set the landscape: 43% of voters said they will vote Trump, 41% Clinton, 8% Gary Johnson, 4% Jill Stein, 3% were not sure, 2% “don’t want to tell” (I suspect these people are almost all Trump supporters), and 1% said they were not voting for a presidential candidate (if you prefer, feel free to do this exercise with the Real Clear Politics current average, which is very similar but with Trump’s and Clinton’s numbers switched and Stein significantly less than 4%, but I would venture that Selzer’s Bloomberg poll is likely more accurate). 

Now, the first main question is, whose minds can be changed and whose mind are past that point of being able to be changed?

Trump & Clinton supporters 

At this point I’d say a strong majority of Trump and Clinton supporters are going to stick with their candidate through hell and high water. I would say that all of Td and Tlh are going to turn out for him, and the same with Clinton’s Td and Tlh. That leaves medium leaners, light leaners, and the undecideds (I’d include those saying they won’t vote for president in this category) that I’d consider as people whose minds could possibly change. I think clear, overwhelming majorities—let’s say including 2/3-of the medium leaners—are going to definitely stick with their candidates in the cases of Trump and Clinton. That leaves roughly 1/3 of the medium Clm and 1/3 of the medium Tlm to be combined with the light leaners (Cll and Tll) for each to form the body of persuadable voters.

As I indicated in my last article, while there is an enthusiasm gap in favor of Trump meaning in theory that there is more possibility of Clinton’s people switching, I think that this is less likely because Clinton’s people are so anti-Trump and relatively practical that weak enthusiasm for Clinton does not meant there is a good chance that they will support Trump or someone else. If Johnson was performing better I would think he’d have a better chance of picking off unenthusiastic Trump supporters, but with the climate of fear in America intensifying, I think that effect will be mitigated. If anything, Clinton has a chance to pick up Republicans who are both rational and worried about Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy, but I am not sure many of those people exist. So I’m sticking with only 1/3 of medium leaners being up for grabs for both candidates, in addition to all light leaners. 

As far as quantifying these, I would think that by far most Trump and Clinton voters are not light leaners, and I would think that she has more medium leaners than he does and that he has more high leaners, but I would say that the vast majority of supporters of both Clinton and Trump are definites. Including heavy leaners that I think have pretty much zero chance of leaning anywhere else, I don’t think all leaners combined for either candidate exceed 20% of their support and may be as low as 15%. I would with 100% confidence say that the 1/3 of the medium and light leaners who could actually change their minds together would not be as high as 10% and could be lower than even 5%; for simplicity’s sake let’s say it’s 5% of their support for each.

Stein & Johnson people

I think most Stein people are fanatics at this point, and selfishly care more about “feeling good” about their vote than whether or not Trump destroys many mores of democratic custom and does gods know what in terms of foreign policy. I also tend to think of Stein people as liberals who are either super into her or really just disgusted by Clinton and seek an alternative candidate, without many people in the middle, so, in other words, there aren’t a lot of Stein medium-leaners (Slm), so we’ll divide her support into Sd Slh and Sll, and I’d think her Sd and Slh to be about 2/3 of her support, with only 1/3 Sll.  Plus, Stein’s Green Party (as well as Johnson’s Libertarian Party) are drawing a lot of brand new support from people who have never voted third-party, so there is little party-loyalty and those voters disenchanted with Democrats flirting with Stein (and others disenchanted and flirting with Johnson) may, after a brief love affair, also become disenchanted with their new lover(s) the more they are exposed to her (or him); in fact, this is likely.

Johnson is more complicated than stein, though: he is attracting roughly half his support from people who would otherwise vote Clinton (I discussed this in my previous article), which is counterintuitive because as the Libertarian Party candidate he is far to the right on my issues, but is deceptively alluring because he is a pretty cool/fun guy, is very straightforward, and is cool on things Millennials really care about like weed and gay rights and is also stridently anti-foreign-interventionist. I would imagine most of his liberal support, other than misogynistic Bernie Bros, is actually up for grabs, and I think a good portion of his conservative support that doesn’t come from actual libertarians is also up for grabs because he has demonstrated himself to be atrociously and lazily uninformed and unengaged on issues of foreign policy. He will keep the conservatives whose biggest concerns are the size and scope of government, regulation, the debt, the Fed, etc., but conservatives who care a lot about foreign policy and are not isolationist may find themselves slowly moving to Clinton’s camp, especially after Johnson’s “What is Aleppo?” debacle when he demonstrated that had no idea about or had even heard of the Syrian city of Aleppo, site of some of the worst fighting of the ongoing civil war there, and his more recent seeming inability to name a single foreign leader he liked, despite being given many chances to do so and then mocking this himself as “having another Aleppo moment.” So, for Johnson, I think between 2/3 and 3/4 of his liberal support is up for grabs and about but I would think that 2/3 of his conservative support are solid libertarians or Republicans focused on libertarian issues, and since polling inferences show a strong likelihood that his support is split in half between liberals and conservatives, I’d say this means about half of his support is up for grabs, maybe even slightly more. Basically, the Jlh aren’t up for grabs with Johnson either, which I’d say with Jd are about half his support. Jlm, on the other hand, as with Stein, are virtually nonexistent so I would say about half his are weak Jll who I would bet are not only possible switchers but likely ones.

So at this point, for Trump’s “definite” support, I’d have an equation saying that = Td + Tlh + 2/3Tlm, and for Clinton, Cd + Clh + 2/3Clm.

For Stein, it would be Sd + Slh, and Johnson Jd + Jlh

Up for grabs, we have 1/3Tlm +Tll +1/3Clm +Cll + Sll + Jll

Now, before I continue, I will just point out that these following numbers are wholly non-scientific, and that this is more an exercise in thought and deductive reasoning. Now, going back to the Selzer poll, this means (again roughly) that Trump, with 43%, has 40.85% that is rock-solid; for Clinton, with 41%, 38.95% is rock-solid; for Stein, with 4%, 2.66% is rock-solid; and with Johnson, with 8%, 4.0% is rock-solid. Clearly, Johnson has the most potential to lose support, for the reasons I discussed, while it would seem Stein would have the most loyal supporters. I have a pretty high confidence on this admittedly rough analysis as being close to numbers that will resemble the outcome in November. This very roughly quantifies to [1/3Tlm + Tll2.15%] + [1/3Clm + Cll2.05%] + [Sll1.33%] + [Jll4.0%] = 9.53% that could change candidates plus another 4% equaling the undecideds/won’t vote people. Of those 2% who did not want to share, let’s give 1.0% to Trump as definite Td and 0.5% as Tll, and we’ll increase to 5.5% the number of persuadable leaners for Trump since they were reluctant to declare their support; we will imagine that the other 0.5% of this 2% could be for anyone and would also be up for grabs, though I suspect many of them are Trump people; to be more cautious that 0.5% will be added to undecideds for the sake of simplicity. 

A Loosely Instructive Equation

So, the full revised equations would look like this:

Adjusted Selzer #s: Trump T=44.5% Clinton C=41% Johnson J=8% Stein S=4% undecided U=4.5%

[Definites T + C + S + J]           + [Persuadables T + C + S + J + U]         = 100%

[Td +Tlh+2/3Tlm + Cd+Clh+2/3Clm + Sd+Slh + Jd+Jlh] + [1/3Tlm+Tll +1/3Clm+Cll + Sll + Jll + U] = 100%

[42.05%T + 39.95%C +2.66%S +4.0%J] + [2.45%T + 2.05%C + 1.33%S + 4.0%J + 4.5%U]  = 100%

85.67%                                                 + 14.33%                                         = 100%

Now, I realize this may come off as stupid and artificial and possibly pointless. Maybe that’s even fair. And I did mention that this is rough. However, I do think this does actually gives a logical and roughly-relatively-precise idea of what’s going on here. Basically, close to 86% of the electorate will not be changing their minds under any non-wild-card circumstances, and the remaining 14ish% are up for grabs, on a spectrum ranging from medium-leaners to those saying they will vote but not vote for president. I don’t think all these 14%+ people will change their leanings. In fact, at this point, if I had to guess, some of the medium-leaners (many in Clinton’s case) won’t be changing unless something dramatic happens, like a major terrorist attack on American soil or some sort of serious proof of sexual abuse or rape by Trump, etc., etc.. Let’s say that the 1/3 of the moderate leaners represent 1/3 overall of the persuadables for both Trump and Clinton; that would leave 2/3 of their persuadables with a moderate-to-high chance of being persuadable. The question is: where would they go?

Potential for Change Among Candidate’s Current Supporters

CLINTON

How Clinton could lose support

I think it highly unlikely any Clinton people would go to Trump or Johnson or Stein; she’s too cautious a candidate to do something that would cause people leaning her way to move to such dramatically different candidates; unless there is a major terrorist attack that would drive the weakest supporters of Clinton to Trump’s tent out of fear, I can’t see any of her people switching sides at this point except for maybe a tiny fraction of Millennials out of peer pressure, and I mean a tiny fraction because Millennials are so strongly supporting Stein and Johnson anyway. So I’d say at most 0.15% go combined to Johnson or Stein, probably evenly, but if this does happen it will like be less than 0.1% if it happens at all. Yes, there is the possibility of more Assange Wikileaks releases that could hurt Clinton, but the people who are likely to be animated enough by that to switch candidates away from Clinton are probably all already saying now that they are voting for that someone else.  

Likely Clinton losses: none

How Clinton could gain support

Where could she steal support? I think a tiny number of Republicans might finally realize that Trump is truly awful and does not have the temperament to command the world’s largest military and nuclear arsenal or to conduct negotiations that are going to be far trickier than any business deals he’s been part of, but not many people overall. Sill, with people like the very well-respected WWII and Korea veteran, former Republican Sen. Of Virginia, and former secretary of the Navy John Warner publicly endorsing Clinton, and with former President George H. W. Bush privately choosing Clinton, there could still be some Trump voters that might switch in these final weeks not just to Johnson or abstaining, but to Clinton if they are more conscientious of the bigger picture.  I also think that people who wanted to support Johnson but actually give a big damn about foreign policy will move to Clinton, and my hope is that some of the liberal Millennial support for him will also go to Clinton, but that remains to be seen. I do think she can pick off some of the persuadable Johnson and (particularly) Stein people, especially since most of their supporters are newcomers, as I discussed before.

Likely Clinton Gains: +1.33% from Stein, +1.5-3% from Johnson (+2.25% average), +0.25-0.75% from Trump (+0.5% average)

Likely Net Clinton: +4.08% average up to 45.08%

TRUMP

How Trump could lose support

Unlike Clinton, I think there is much higher chance of Trump losing not only his light leaners but also the medium leaners. I would think that the light leaners are looking for any reason to bolt that they can, while the moderate leaners are looking and hoping he will improve. But throughout this campaign, even when it seems like he is improving, he always seems to stumble again in ways that suggests he is incapable of consistently applying or internalizing any lessons over time in any kind of deep way. Thus, I think there is a high likelihood that Trump will lose most or all of his persuadable voters, at least if he has more performances that resemble his self-destructive first debate performance and continues to do things like tweet at 5:30 AM about a supposed sex tape of Miss Universe 1996, Alicia Machado, whom Trump weight-shamed repeatedly and who has come out supporting Clinton, something Trump did three days ago. It’s hard to imagine any of Trump’s people bolting to Stein, meaning they will divide between Clinton and Johnson and just not voting for president out of disgust.. I think the more they listen to him, read about him, and see him, the more not only the light persuadables but also medium leaners will be turned off and lose hope that Trump can be an adequate candidate.

Likely Trump losses: -0.25-0.75% to Clinton (-0.5% average), -0.75-1.25% to Johnson (-1.0% average), -0.5-1% to no-vote (-0.75% average)

-2.25% overall average loss

How Trump could gain support

Wild-cards like terrorist attacks, racial unrest, and an economic downturn could all help Trump and hurt other candidates, though to what degree would be hard to predict. But leaving wild-cards aside, Trump is likely to gain some support from Johnson as some conservatives become disillusioned with Johnson and begin to worry about the effects of a Clinton presidency on the conservative movement. I think this will offset the Johnson people who leave Trump for Johnson.

+0.75-1.25% from Johnson (+1.0% average)

Net average loss of -1.25% down to 43.25%

JOHNSON

How Johnson could lose support

At this point, with his major foreign affairs gaffes and just plain goofiness, I don’t think it’s a question of if Johnson loses support, but how much support he loses. I think him only losing 2% and keeping 6% might be middle-of-the-road estimate, given that about half of his support is liberal and/or would go to Clinton in a two-way race. I think he loses between 3-4% more from his liberal wing of support, but with some Johnson people breaking late who are particularly concerned about the Supreme Court and would be terrified by Clinton’s judicial picks, thus pushing them to vote for Trump, he will lose some of his current conservative base as well; as mentioned, though, these will likely be offset by people hoping Trump will improve as a candidate who will leave him when he doesn’t.

Likely losses: -1.75-2.75% to Clinton (-2.25% average), -0.75%-1.25% to Trump (-1% average)

-3.25% average overall loss

How Johnson could gain support

Johnson is proving himself an inept candidate, but, as with the beginning of his candidacy, even as he will likely lose support in it its twilight, the best thing to happen to his poll numbers and support levels is Donald Trump. Anecdotally, a number of conservative intellectuals are saying that since they (and if you) don’t live in a swing state, they will (and you should) vote Johnson. The message is more muddled from those and to those who live in swing states. Still, a lot of the conservatives that will lose hope in Trump if does not improve his performance may switch to Johnson on “conscience” votes, but this group will be largely offset by people leaving Johnson.

Likely Johnson Gains +0.75-1.25% from Trump (+1% average)

Net -2.25% average loss down to 5.75%

STEIN

How Stein could lose support

Stein’s core of support is a group of fanatics blind to reality. But some of her newer supporters who were seeking something better than Clinton will find the reality that Stein is anything but: a bunch of empty talk with no actual plans to move them forward and with positions so far to the left she makes Bernie Sanders look like a Republican (or, perhaps more accurately, a moderate Democrat). Thus, after exposure to her, it is hard to see any non-extremist Democrats sticking with her, so you can expect her persuadables to abandon her en masse as they realize that Clinton and Trump are so close that they will realize what the consequences of voting for Stein will actually be, and will return to Clinton as unenthusiastic Clinton voters. It’s also hard to see any of Stein’s people switching to Trump or even Johnson.

Likely Stein losses: -1.33% to Clinton

How Stein could gain support

Perhaps there is a slight chance that liberal Johnson voters will realize how conservative Johnson actually is on many issues and switch to Johnson as a second Clinton alternative, but I am skeptical of this, as any liberal supporting Johnson are not particularly aware or informed people to begin with, and the Bernie Bros won’t likely support a woman over a man.

Likely Stein gains: none

Net -1.33% loss down to 2.66%

Likely final scenario after persuadables settle: so base levels of support if things continue as they have been will probably boil down to a poll showing about 45% Clinton, 43% Trump, 6% Johnson, and 2-3% Stein: a slight edge for Clinton over Trump and diminished support for third party candidates that benefits Clinton. 

The real question will be how the undecideds will break…

Conclusion: Those Pesky Undecideds Could Decide the Election

You may have noticed that I avoided discussing the undecideds. That’s because as to undecideds, damned if I know. If Trump’s year of outrages aren’t enough to make him a clear non-choice to the remaining 4.5% or so of undecideds, I do not pretend to understand the psychology of such a person who looks at both Trump and Clinton and finds that a difficult choice to make. They could split evenly or go 2/3-1/3 or go almost all to one candidate or another. Perhaps some are torn between Stein and Clinton and Trump and Johnson, and I would think that fear of the other side (liberal/vs conservative) would drive those people towards the two major party candidates. Maybe some conservatives in particular who hate Trump so much but don’t like Clinton either will stay with Johnson. The Republican I-hate-Trump-but-not-enough-to-vote-Clinton-vote is a lock for Johnson, and that group is likely larger than the Democratic I-hate-Clinton-but-not-enough-to-vote-Trump that will be Stein’s core. This is not difficult to comprehend, even as it is also not too difficult to condemn.

But I honestly cannot fathom the mentality or even the existence of people who are unable to choose between Trump and Clinton. I can easily picture the ignorance—willful or otherwise—and/or hate that motivates people to vote for Trump because I have encountered that hate and ignorance far too often in human, corporeal form, and I can easily picture the idealistic pragmatism that animates the most passionate of Clinton supporters because in that, I am talking about myself; likewise, I can picture the liberals who dislike or even hate Clinton but who are voting for her anyway, because they care about still advancing a liberal agenda and because Trump; I can picture the moderate Republican veteran who sees Trump as wholly unfit to be Commander in Chief voting Clinton; I can picture conservatives obsessed with the size of government and young Bernie Bros voting Johnson, and I can picture the far-lefties voting Stein; I can’t for the life of me picture the person who is undecided between Trump and Clinton. And I make no predictions regarding how they will break, and I can’t make any predictions about if the undecideds are torn between Clinton and Trump or one of them and a third party candidate; it’s just one big giant mystery.

And an even bigger mystery is how they will view, and react to, the debates.

One thing I will say is that if my analysis is even close, Trump will have to win significantly more undecideds to beat Clinton and can’t afford to split them. And again, this analysis depends on a trajectory that continues as is without any big surprises in the homestretch.

Blue Nation Review

And if we’re trying to gauge what could be game changers for any voters, that’s where the debates come in. They’re pretty much the only things left aside from wild-cards that have the potential to change anyone’s votes. The VP debate will probably give Trump’s ticket a slight bump because Mike Pence is like every president in every B movie you can think of: bland, boring, but projecting strength; Kaine will almost certainly make better arguments, but his warm-fuzzy goofiness and sensitivity are not going to look presidential at all next to Pence or reassure undecideds. Though Kaine is brilliant and will no doubt perform very well, it is hard to see him win the optics battle next to a guy straight out of B-movie casting for the role of president. But then we can expect to see Trump continue to disappoint in the following debates, negating that bump. And we will still be stuck with trying to guess how very strange, indecisive people who seem to have to really mentally wrestle with whether to vote Clinton or Trump despite both candidate’s ubiquitous presence on any and all forms of media for month after month after month. With it almost impossible to guess how these undecideds will vote, the election is still up for grabs, though we can give Clinton an edge.

Between Brexit and the defeat of the Colombian/FARC peace deal at the hands of Colombian voters, we must make sure we who actually know what’s at stake get out and vote and to annoy our less mature friends to do the right thing. Democracy can be unpredictable, and can also be a scary thing, too; let’s make sure it isn’t this November.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Since Trump has never held public office, the best indicator we have of what he would be like as president and how a Trump Administration would perform is this week’s Republican National Convention.  And everyone should be paying attention now because it ain’t pretty.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 21, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 21st, 2016

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

AMMAN — If you can’t admit that what the Republican National Convention being held in Cleveland, Ohio, tells us about Donald Trump and how he would perform as president is not at all reassuring, you’re simply in denial.  From beginning to end, even for some genuinely great and powerful moments, the RNC was a comedy of unforced errors and conflicting chaos.

How to Judge…

If you read me, you know I’m a proud Democrat, but don’t take my word for it as to the Trump campaign’s handling of its convention; a good number of Republican commentators have also echoed what I am about to explain below.

Republicans often make the assumption that business competence translates directly into campaign competence and governance competence.  For now, we will leave the robust, ongoing debate about Donald Trump’s business management competence aside, and simply deal with the premise of the above assumption, regardless of its veracity…

The thing about Donald Trump, as I have noted before, is that he is the only candidate for a major political party in American history who has never held public office (including military experience) with the exception of Wendell Willkie, the businessman who challenged FDR in 1940.  So with Trump, we have no political or government experience to look at to judge him on other than his campaign management, and so far, nothing is more important for his campaign than this week of the Republican National Convention.

Overall, the Convention has been an unprecedented, disorganized mess; the speaker order and schedule is often: counterproductive, illogical, and counterintuitive, with key speeches being delivered late, at off-times, with speakers often speaking to an emptying or unfilled arena.  Furthermore, the Trump campaign’s typical lack of discipline has meant that they have ceded control of the narrative through their own incompetence.

MIA in CLE

More specifically, to begin with, most of the major speakers from the first two nights, including the two senior Republicans in Congress—Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—barely seemed to even want to mention Trump by name, and preferred to talk about the Republican Party in general, attack the Democratic Party, or attack Hillary Clinton specifically.  Only his children and friends among the major highlighted speakers seemed willing to enthusiastically speak at length about Donald Trump (all his kids who spoke, even recent college graduate Tiffany, were admittedly impressive), performances in part echoes at best from an array of B-list celebrities and no-names and others whose appearance on stage was not only questionable in and of itself, but indicated just how hard a time the Trump campaign was having pulling in quality speakers in significant numbers.

In fact, so many prominent Republicans did not attend—including every living Republican president and presidential nominee with the surprising exception of 1996’s Bob Dole—in addition to many sitting senators and congressmen, that the lack of party unity on display even before the convention began was remarkable; many of Trump’s Republican primary rivals also did not attend, including Ohio’s popular governor, John Kasich (more on that in a bit).

Schedule of Screw-Up: Day 1

Work of author

The first day’s advertised theme was “Make America Safe Again,” although “BE AFRAID!  FEAR!! FEAAARRR!!” would have more accurately described a significant portion of the evening, which was at least as much about bashing Hillary Clinton.  The keynote speaker of the evening was Trump’s wife, Melania, who did a good job delivering an impressive speech for her national debut.

The problem with the speech was that the aide most closely helping her craft it, after hearing how much Melania was inspired by Michelle Obama, simply copied almost-word-for-word, position-for-position, multiple sections from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention speech (the aide’s position in the Trump Organization also raises the possibility that there is some activity going on that is illegal in terms of campaign finance law, which prohibits corporate employees from using those positions to do campaign work, compounding this unforced error).  This is a mind-numbingly stupid move and It truly begs the question: how the hell was someone who would make such a decision so involved in such an important, momentous speech, the most important speech given on the opening night of a presidential candidate’s party’s national convention?

Now, though this is incredibly embarrassing, it was a relatively simple problem to solve: admit what was obvious plagiarism, discipline or even fire the aide, apologize to Michelle Obama, and move on.

Instead of putting out the fire, though, Team Trump poured gasoline onto it, flat-out denying there was any plagiarism (it was obvious there was), with even Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager, repeatedly denying it, quibbling that it wasn’t that many words, among other horrible explanations.  Suddenly, denying that obvious plagiarism was actually becoming its own story, with even many Republicans shocked it was not quickly admitted to, and therefore swept under the rug.  The new controversy distracted attention from the GOP’s and Trump’s campaign’s messages from the previous day.  In addition, open displays of disunity on the first day of the campaign also dominated the coverage during the second day, adding further distractions as the convention began its proceedings on day 2.

Day 2

Day 2 was supposed to be “Make America Work Again” day.  This sounds like important stuff, near and dear to the hearts of many economically distressed Americans.  It would be a tragedy for the plagiarism scandal to distract from this important theme…

Except almost no discussion of jobs or the economy ensued, so there was not much to be distracted from.  The second night ended up being a collection of jumbled speeches that were either unfocused, or focused on criticizing Hillary Clinton.  In fact, the only major common thread through the first two days was a spirit of “F&*K HILLARY!” as the below word cloud shows.

FiveThirtyEight

So, rather than have a night focused on a positive message about jobs and the economy, and rather than have that be the discussion as the third day of the convention began, instead, there was no discernible message on the economy, and talk was dominated by a new scandal of the campaign and its senior staff lying/denying when it came to the plagiarism issue.  If this wasn’t bad enough, a new New York Times Magazine report that Kasich was offered the Vice President slot by one of Trump’s sons—apparently even offered the power to run both domestic and foreign policy (denied by the Trump team)—escalated an already existing feud between Trump and Kasich (Kasich was called a “sore loser” at one point).  So you’d think the Trump people would want to put the plagiarism thing behind them, but they continued to double down on lying and denial, until much later that day a statement was released by a relatively-inexperienced-in-speechwriting-aide took responsibility for the plagiarism, in which she wrote that she offered her resignation, which Mr. Trump refused.

Day 3

Still, own goal on Team Trump, which prolonged a story that broke late Monday night that could have been quickly quashed but which lasted until well into Wednesday, causing much anxiety among Republicans for the unnecessary drama created.  And much airtime and inkspace was devoted to this drama, on the third day that was supposed to belong to Mike Pence and his prime-time, extended debut at the end of the convention proceedings for the third night.

That night‘s theme was supposed to be “Make America First Again.” Instead, there was a collection of speeches that discussed so many different topics there was no discernible theme.  One female astronaut spoke about the space program, and then omitted (apparently deliberately) a passage endorsing Trump that had been included in the prepared statement she had provided.  Then we heard from three of Trump’s former rival.  First was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (the one with the terrible record) who did give Trump a solid endorsement on stage.  Marco Rubio, who really got into it with Trump during the campaign, where Trump kept calling him “Little Marco” and Rubio questioned Trump’s penis size jokingly, came next: he delivered a passionless, tepid, taped address that was sent in that did not directly endorse Trump, and this was embarrassingly delivered in prime time; the audience seemed to barely react to the video.

But following the video, and also during prime-time, second-place-Republican-primary-finisher Sen. Ted Cruz stepped onto the stage.  The fight between him and Trump had gotten very ugly before Cruz finally dropped out, and his prepared text, it was reported, had not endorsed Trump.  Still, a decent minority of the delegates in the arena when he stepped onto the stage were Cruz supporters, and he was warmly received overall.  He gave a speech that skillfully marketed how many Republicans would describe the values of their party, and was interrupted many times for applause (which, sadly, was notably more muted on most things that paid attention to issues of concern to non-white communities). 

His speech went on and on, as Cruz has habit of pausing for dramatic effect over and over throughout his addresses.  As his speech went on, he paused at times where people could be tempted to think he might be about to endorse Trump; but the endorsement didn’t come and the most of the crowd began to grow restless and impatient.  Some in the crowd (possibly with encouragement from Trump campaign staff, who had already previewed Cruz’s speech and knew the prepared text, at least, did not contain an endorsement) started calling on Cruz to endorse Trump; chants of “Trump!” and “Endorse Trump!” echoed and built up from the floor.  Cruz looked at those chanting repeatedly, smiled repeatedly, and kept delivering his speech, with quite the twinkle in his eye; he even seemed to feed off the anxiety and negativity of the crowd, much like a Sith Lord. As he droned on, taking his sweet time, the crowd began to grow even more restless, and boos began to rise from it.  When Cruz told people to vote their conscience—code word for the #NeverTrump movement and other non-Trump supporters, not at all lost on the delegates on the floor and a deliberate provocation on the part of Cruz, whatever lies he has subsequently utters/ed (such a skilled liar is Cruz that he can technically claim he didn’t mean anything by it to the general public)—the booing cascaded into a roar.

John Moore/Getty Images

Cruz kept going and the scene turned ugly, and as the booing got louder and louder (even, apparently, from many pro-Cruz delegates!), Trump left his family box, where he and his family had been watching unamused, and made his way to the floor, when all attention turned to him and people began to cheer Trump while Cruz was delivering the final words of his speech; cameras didn’t even catch Cruz as he scurried off stage.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Such a scene was pretty unprecedented: an actual nominee coming to the floor to steal the show from his main defeated rival as that rival was being booed by the crowd for not endorsing the nominee.  It was all anyone was talking about that night, or even for most of the next day. Furthermore, this might have helped Trump more or less unite the Convention floor behind him, but it might have created a larger split in the Party nationwide.

Oh, and shortly after that, Mike Pence delivered an excellent political speech, demonstrating a surprising ease, affability, and poise for someone who is so reserved and one that got the crowd solidly behind him.  THAT was supposed to be the highlight of the night: Pence’s extended introduction to America. 

But it sure wasn’t after Cruz.

Poor Pence: he got upstaged by Trump during the public event introducing Pence as Trump’s VP selection when Trump rambled for about half an hour and barely said a word about Pence; he got upstaged and interrupted by Trump during their first joint-interview for 60 Minutes; and he got upstaged by Cruz and by Trump again in the sense that his team allowed Cruz to pull his stunt by giving him the time slot & opportunity to speak that day and shortly before Pence’s speech, which started late.

Day 4

Finally, on the final and fourth day, we are supposed to take seriously the notion that one of the most divisive political conventions in American history is somehow going to focus on unifying Americans, that Trump—who has throughout the whole election season has been a Divider in Chief—will somehow magically transition to a Unifier in Chief.  The first two speakers of the night—the official theme of which was dubbed “Make America One Again”—were Jerry Falwell, Jr. who gave a divisive speech much in the vein of his late yet appalling father, whom he quotes as saying that if interviewed by Chelsea Clinton, Hillary’s daughter, he would tell her that the three greatest threats to America were “Osama, Obama, and yo momma.”  He was followed by Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, famous for making incendiary remarks about immigrants and for implementing racial profiling policies for which his office is being sued in a major class action lawsuit and in which he has been rebuked. 

So right out the of the gate, once again the nominal theme was destroyed and discarded by the speakers, like every other night, so unbelievably miserable were the coordination and organization of this convention.  Yes, Peter Thiel spoke later and movingly spoke for acceptance of the LGBT community, but his view is a minority in the party and his words don’t cancel out so much hate spewed from so many others.

In fact, in general, the level of hate and vitriol directed at Hillary Clinton is something I haven’t seen before at a forum like this.  Yes, downright nasty political speech is as old as America itself, as the musical Hamilton can show any of us.  Still, chants of “LOCK HER UP!”, at least one call to execute her from a floor delegate, and other abuse are a dark turn not seen before in at least my lifetime. Disturbingly, some Israelis say this reminds them of the hate that was directed at Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, shortly before he was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist.

Trump’s impressive, warm, and talented daughter introducing him was a bright spot, and she was eloquent like his other children. 

But we are not voting for her, or her siblings, and in the end, Trump will be judged on Trump, not his wife, not his children.  And Donald Trump is still horrifying, as his speech tonight showed us, which was just a rehash of the same nonsense he constantly spews, just more polished and organized and delivered with more focus, yet still full of fear, misinformation, division, and facile platitudes.

Even on the day Trump accepted his nomination, he/his campaign still managed to be fighting with fellow Republicans and inflicting self-inflicted wounds.  The newest wound?  Two nights ago, he gave an interview to The New York Times that came out today, an interview in which he contradicted some of Mike Pence’s points on foreign policy made just the previous night, in which Trump questions the core principles of the NATO alliance.  Yes, Trump managed to upstage Pence even one more time.

See, the week of a convention, a candidate is supposed to lay low until the last night of it and control the narrative; giving an interview to a major paper without coordinating policy with his VP pick and allowing that paper to inject a major addition to the narrative the day that nominee is supposed accept the nomination and then present his narrative to the whole countryis a violation of basic convention competence. 

All throughout the RNC, the Trump campaign allowed their own actions and mistakes to create a jumble of contradictory narratives.  There is no rational explanation for this, period, let alone an excuse.

Conclusion

This convention by all traditional metrics has been at best a borderline disaster, and a historically bad one, certainly the worst since the late 1960s/early 1970s.

That is not to say that there have not been specific moments of high quality.  So far, all of Trump’s children who spoke were incredibly impressive: poised, sharp, at ease, presenting a practical narrative that avoids the ideological-bent, division, and extremism that is so pervasive in the Party today; we would only be far too fortunate if they represented the future of the Republican Party.  Mike Pence was more impressive and at ease than I expected; and I felt myself personally very moved both by former Gov. Rick Perry’s address and ex-Navy S.E.A.L. Marcus Luttrell’s address, who was introduced by Perry and who veered away from partisanship and attacking people and focused, instead, on service and veterans.

But in general?  We can learn that, outside the business world at least, Trump’s management skills, and those of the people he chooses to surround himself with, are so pitiful as to be a joke.  He is still great at manipulating the media and the mob and bullying opponents, but that is not a way to govern a democracy.

And ALL of this should matter to the voters.  And they SHOULD judge him on it.  But will it matter?  Will they?  That is up to us.  If it doesn’t matter, if we don’t judge, to quote the comedian Lewis Black after he began watching the RNC: “Democracy’s great, but it’s just not working.”

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 29, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) December 29th, 2017; republished by IR.net on March 23rd, 2018, and updated March 27th, 2018, to reflect Putin’s abstemious nature

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

AMMAN — Those wishing for impeachment might get more than they wished for, and either way, America may be irreparably damaged.

Disclaimer: this is a fictional, hypothetical situation

Sometime in April of 2019…

The House vote to impeach President Donald Trump set off a firestorm in American politics not seen since at least the 1960s and perhaps even the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into all things Trump-Russia ended on August 10th, 2018. In the process, nearly two-dozen Trump associates—from lower “unofficial” campaign officials to senior Administration officials—had been charged with various crimes, from lying to federal investigators to money laundering, some resulting in stiff prison sentences. Mueller uncovered enough information that made it clear people very close to Trump had attempted to collude with Russia, then lied about it and attempted to obstruct justice. While specific evidence making it clear that Trump had himself colluded did not emerge, clear evidence that he had attempted to obstruct justice did.

And yet, this information only came out in and drabs leaked to the press, as the Republicans in Congress who received the report decided to sit on its details and not release them to the public, ignoring the recommendation of charges by the Special Counsel and signed off on by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Just a few months before the midterms, the actions of the Congressional Republicans, combined with the juicy leaks to the press about some of what they were hiding, set off an uproar that allowed a November Democratic sweep of all House Republicans on the West Coast—alone accounting for nearly 20 seats—as well the flipping a number of seats in East Coast liberal areas, including suburban districts in places like Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and even a few rural districts in places like Maine and Maryland. A few of the key Republicans who deliberately kept Mueller’s findings from the public were voted out of office, too, the so-called “Resistance” pouring inordinate amounts of resources into their races, and Republicans overall—facing many more tight races than expected across the country and with the donor class demoralized—were unable to match the intensity of their rivals in those marquee races.

Even allowing for all this, the Democrats were unable to take back the House, but they had eroded the GOP House advantage to just a handful of seats and managed to score a 50-50 tie in the Senate.

The public had spoken, a voting coalition that included conservatives in many liberal states who had united with “the Resistance” to stand against the blatant Republican obstructionism in the Trump-Russia investigation, sending send a clear message as the 116th Congress took power in 2019. It was obvious that the GOP would find it much more difficult to get away with its blatant obstructionism, and the House Judiciary Committee with only a few GOP defections was able to pass a vote allowing the contents of the Special Counsel’s detailed findings to be made public late in January, though with some redactions. 

Then in mid-February, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan reluctantly agreed to allow the House Judiciary Committee to take up discussion of impeachment articles that had been introduced by Democrats months ago.

The evidence was clear and overwhelming, and the committee—with just a few Republican defections—was able to vote in March to recommended several articles of impeachment for President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

A right-wing media assault led by former Trump advisor (and still confidante) Steve Bannon from his perch at Breitbart News had already begun once Speaker Ryan had allowed impeachment to be taken up by the Judiciary Committee, but it went into overdrive once the House debate on impeachment began. The vast majority of the well over 200 GOP House members stayed loyal to the President, but all that was required to reach a majority were a handful of Republican defectors—some of the few remaining Republicans from states like New York and New Jersey, ironically, Trump’s backyard—and the House voted to impeach both Trump and Pence on April 9th, 2019, in a vote that featured two fistfights on the House floor.

The vote’s symbolism—154 years after General Lee’s surrender of “Confederate” rebel forces at Appomattox in Virginia—was not lost on Trump’s supporters, who used it as a galvanizing call. The day of the vote, hundreds of protests and counter-protests all over the country were held, violence breaking out in many; a good number of the protests against impeachment were organized by alt-right groups as armed open carry protests, and were often men by Antifa folks ready for a fight. Dozens of protesters, counter-protesters, and even some law-enforcement officials were wounded and, all told, there were 14 fatalities, the worst political violence in America since the 1992 Los Angeles riots and, before that, since the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s.

That same day, Russia launched offensives (with soldiers in unmarked uniforms) in Moldova and in Ukraine, taking the capitals of each and removing what Putin, in a speech televised live nationally in Russia, called “criminal regimes installed by the West.” Russian jets also buzzed U.S. planes in Syria, the Black Sea, and over the Baltic states, where aggressive Russian activities resulted in several air defense missiles being fired in Latvian airspace at Russian jets that nevertheless maneuvered safely back to Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave. 

North Korean forces fired several test missiles into Japanese waters but also shot down a U.S. spy plane with newly equipped anti-air missiles purchased from Russia, taking the American pilot prisoner. 

Iran—reacting to the U.S. decision nearly a year earlier to ignore the nuclear deal reached under the Obama Administration and to unilaterally reimpose sanctions, as well as fearing war from a bellicose American government—conducted the first nuclear test in that nation’s history in the middle of the night, even catching Israel’s Mossad by surprise. 

ISIS also conducted attacks on several American embassies in the Middle East, killing dozens (though mostly local bystanders and local military), and al-Qaeda even managed several attacks in Afghanistan and against the U.S. embassy in Pakistan, though no Americans were killed in either attack.

The next day, Mike Pence resigned as Vice President, and Congress made it clear that it would not vote on anyone Trump would nominate as a successor until (at least) the Senate had decided its verdict.

Even before the Senate began its proceedings, cries among rightists that the country was being stolen from them, that liberals and the “Deep State” were conspiring to thwart the will of the voters and to illegally overturn a valid presidential election, had been mounting. Vigilantes in Texas and Arizona assaulted migrant workers, seriously injuring a dozen, claiming that liberals were trying to get them to illegally vote after Trump tweeted concerns about illegal voting helping change the balance of power in the new Congress amid an unprecedented Twitter storm the day of his impeachment.

In one day, several apparently spontaneous assaults on congressmen and senators in town halls being held across the country before the Senate’s trial resulted three failed assaults but also in two dead congressmen, one seriously wounded senator, and one slightly wounded senator (the seriously wounded senator the result of an attack by an Antifa extremist, the lone leftist among the assaulters). All town halls were subsequently canceled and Congress began to operate amid unprecedented security, with the special election to replace the murdered congressmen operating in a state of fear and rage.

Meanwhile, many alt-right groups were organizing a combined armed march on Washington, to begin in Northern Virginia the day the Senate trial of Trump—who was showing no signs of backing down and had ordered military units to protect him in the White House—was to begin. They had weeks to organize, and well over 100,000 arms-bearing Trump supporters—including some full militia groups—gathered during the days before the Senate trial was to start. Since it was illegal for armed protests to happen in when the groups tried to march across the Potomac over several bridges into Washington, they were blocked by authorities; rather than cooler heads prevailing, gunshots rang out and pitched battles occurred on the bridges. The shots could be heard from the Senate floor as the trial commenced. When Sec. of Defense Jim Mattis acted to deploy units to restore order, Trump abruptly removed him from office that day, and the militia groups and civilian law enforcement, each sustaining wounded and dead, settled into a stalemate as Washington went on lockdown. Protesters protesting the march were also shot, and of protesters, inspired by a defiantly unhinged Trump and the first wave of protesters who refused to back down, began to organize. Throughout the country, federal government installations were attacked by militias, which in some cases took over smaller facilities and took hostages. More deaths occurred during these developments, and protesters of all stripes took to the streets that evening, with scuffles and deaths reported in a wide range of locations. 

Many governors reacted to the shocking events by imposing state-wide curfews and calling in the National Guard. In many instances, the National Guard had to use force to restore order after overwhelmed local law enforcement officials were unable to do so.

By the next morning, from the Memorial Bridge connecting Arlington and Washington to Austin’s Texas State Capitol and many other locations, over 200 Americans were dead, more wounded. The fighting in the U.S. had sent world markets into their worst plunges since the 2008 financial crises, and many governments halted trading. Governors in West Virginia, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, North and South Dakota, and Kentucky called for secession, as did dozens of state lawmakers elsewhere.

By this time, Israel had already carried out military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, and Iran had retaliated by firing missiles that hit Tel Aviv and had killed several hundred Israelis, while Hezbollah missiles from Lebanon had killed scored of Israelis and Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Lebanon and in Syria against Hezbollah-stationed units there killed over 1,000 people. Israeli jets had ended up in dogfights with Russian jets while American planes just looked on, though the Russian and Israeli leaders were said to be reducing tensions, all this occurring without any mediation 

On the Korean Peninsula, several border incidents resulted in several dozen U.S., South Korean, and North Korean dead, with fears of war gripping East Asia and Kim Jong-un threatening nuclear attacks on Seoul, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Los Angeles. 

When the UN convened the Security Council, none of the other representatives knew if America’s ambassador spoke for the U.S. Government anymore (even more so than before).

The Senate, fearing what a prolonged trial would lead to and with some surprising defections from Republicans who were taken aback by the national violence, got exactly 66 votes to remove Trump from office.

The President, suffering from a mental breakdown, then said that he refused to acknowledge the result and called on his supporters to “fight to take the country back.” With Mattis gone, chaos reigned at the Pentagon as individual local unit commanders took it upon themselves to assist local law enforcement officials in beating back the armed pro-Trump militias converging on Washington; fatalities crossed the 1,000 mark and continued to rise rapidly in this second day of increasing violence, and members of the Secret Service, as well as the military units that had been ordered to the White House by Trump, felt torn. 

With violence erupting across the country and law and order breaking down in some areas (even though most Americans remained safe), with the Senate having convicted a President of High Crimes and Misdemeanors for the first time in American history (one who was still defiantly occupying the White House), and with several million angry Trump supporters—many armed—converging on Washington, the U.S. was faced with a constitutional crisis that went far beyond Nixon and even the Civil War. Whatever would happen in the coming hours, days, weeks, and months, there was serious doubt that such a polarized and wounded nation could come back to “normal order” anytime soon. It seemed clear that Trump would be gone soon, and Paul Ryan in as president, but how could he govern? And how could the violent fury that had been unleashed and the calls for secession be contained?

Vladimir Putin sat in in bed in his presidential palace, breaking his usual abstemiousness by sipping vodka with one of his mistresses lying naked on top of him, and gleefully watched the Breitbart News Network (BNN) coverage of the fighting on the Memorial Bridge. “You Americans were so arrogant thinking you had ‘won’ the Cold War,” he said aloud, his mistress chuckling. “Who is winning now?” he asked and downed the entire rest of his glass before turning his attention to his mistress, gunshots in America providing the mood music for his date night.

CTK/AP

*****

It is impossible to know if or when Donald Trump will be impeached. But if he were, none of the events described above are so far out of the realm of possibility that they can be regarded as mere fantasy. Whatever events do transpire, it is far more likely that impeachment would only further divide the nation rather than bring it together, the same as the prospects for a continued Trump presidency. It seems, then, that for the foreseeable future, we are the Divided—not United—States of America.

With or without Trump in office for a full term, Putin has already won. 

Disclaimer: the author does not hope for, nor does he encourage, any of the violent acts depicted in these hypothetical scenarios

September 21st, 2019 note: I absolutely think as a matter of principle, Trump should be impeached. But in practical terms, it’s not so simple, and bad timing or moving without enough support could hurt Democrats, empower Trump, and even help Trump go after his political enemies. So I’m with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, I trust her judgment and if it can work she’ll know the time to strike if it presents itself or if it will be better to hold off. After all, there are a lot of possible side-effects to consider…

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here!

See author’s Amazon eBooks here!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 17, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) February 17th, 2017; a condensed, edited version of this article is featured on War Is Boring, and a Kindle edition, a Nook edition, an Apple iTunes iBook edition, and an EPUB edition are available with previously unpublished content. 

5.) Why Democratic Fascism Is Not a Label Too Far For Trump & His Movement

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.” — Henry A. Wallace, 1944 , Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

AMMAN — By the standards discussed in Part I, Donald Trump is clearly a democratic fascist and the Trump Administration is moving America into democratic fascist territory, with the Republican Party, by and large, following Trump on a leash, as has mostly been the case since even before the Republican National Convention; the consequences of this will be disastrous and far worse than even the considerable damage the George W. Bush Administration was able to inflict upon America and the world. Trump and a core of his team have created a kind of cult around Trump as Leader and campaigned and are now governing on much of the traditional fascist political platform—demonization of immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and other minority “others;” a promise to “return” to the glorious past; vacuous promises to “destroy” ”enemies;” creating an atmosphere of permanent conflict; cultivating a sense of national victimhood, hatred of elites, contempt for diplomacy and the modern international system; corporatism; a disaffected populism—and style—bullying, bellicosity, fantasy, the dramatic and theatrical, exaggeration of threats, dumbing-down of language, serial lying, conspiracy-theory believing, anti-intellectualism, shutdown of any debate, an emphasis on action over discussion, misogyny, an obsession with weapons, treating the government as if it is Trump’s personal plaything—and each of these to an intense degree so that the overall resemblance to fascist movements of the past in far too many ways is indisputable, with the differences accounted for by the new, at least outwardly milder and far less violent democratic iteration of what we had hoped were the long-exiled ghosts of fascism.

The New Yorker’s Gopnik, writing in May of 2016, would approve of my term democratic fascism to describe Trump’s campaign and presidency:

There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist [quoting George Packer’s description of Trump as “a celebrity proto-fascist with no impulse control”], or American-variety fascist—one of that kind, all the same.

For some experts, the term fascism can’t fit movements that are not overtly anti-democratic (although one should consider the very real possibility of a difference between stated aims and actual aims) or violent, but that is why I like discussing fascism’s evolution and reincarnation into today’s democratic fascism. Writing two months later, Gopnik correctly notes that it is myopic to argue that Trump is not fascist because of one or a few major differences between historical fascism and Trump’s democratic fascism:

…to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s. 

Stefan Zweig, a globally celebrated Austrian liberal intellectual of the interwar years of the twentieth century, furiously penned in the summer of 1941 in exile in the United States a memoir he aptly titled The World of Yesterday, much of it an analysis of what enabled Hitler to rise and how so few saw his rise coming; many of the dynamics he discussed—namely the failure of traditional democratic elites and the ensuing desire of the masses to punish and replace them, that intellectuals ridiculed the leaders of these fascists as boorish and unwashed while failing to give proper weight to their programs, of the essential role that mass propaganda and sensationalism had in destroying the line between fact fiction and desensitizing the public, respectively, of the diminishing power of “the word” and journalism and intellectual discourse and writers to counter fascism, of the role serial lying had in propelling fascists to power, of the belief that such a powerful and liberal and sophisticated society could never fall under the sway of illiberal goons, of the faith that a society built on the rule of law would be strong enough to resist those who would destroy it, of how the extremism of fascists enables even the slightest recalibration to appear to opponents as a hopeful sign of moderation, of the fascists’ gradual and strategic introduction of their most extreme portions of their program to test public reaction and desensitize the public over time, and that one seismic ill event once such people were in power could be the point “[w]hen it’s too late to stop fascism”—are so painfully obviously present in America with Trump that to read the New Yorker article discussing Zweig is more than enough to send shivers down one’s spine (as for Zweig, he and his wife committed suicide only months after he penned his memoir).

Scholars of a mid-twentieth century German-originated school of thought known as the Frankfurt School noticed the power of American mass media that stifled diversity of thought (something Tocqueville noted long ago when he observed the power of the American press to influence American public opinion but also its subservience to public opinion, how that affected American public life, and recognized the overall oppressive lack of diversity of thought in America) to combine with an authoritarian leader and “large numbers of people…susceptible to…psychological manipulation” who were also “potentially fascistic individuals” as a recipe for disaster; reacting to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, these academics predicted the rise of fascism in America in their own time, and while their predictions were then premature, the dynamics they predicted would lead to fascism in America are in many ways far more present today; like others mentioned earlier, they saw a particular danger in the mass blurring of fact and fiction.

To quote Andrew Sullivan (who was also a friend of the late Hitchens and a fellow admirer of Orwell) in a seminal piece written last spring that was his return to writing after a long hiatus:

…[Trump’s] movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

Sullivan continues:

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

and then quotes from Sinclair Lewis’s aforementioned It Can’t Happen Here. His nightmare having come true, writing the night of the election in a piece titled “The Republic Repeals Itself,” Sullivan remarks that “This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media,” just what a successful democratic fascist needs to have done to set his democratic fascism up to “succeed,” as much as that word can be applied to a movement of this nature.

He further elaborates that

…the now openly revanchist right — far more radical than the Tory government in Britain — [will have] total control over the levers of power. They will not let those levers go easily. They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart — and generate pseudo-stories and big lies that, absent any authoritative or trusted media, will dominate the new centers of information, Facebook or its successors. We will be in a new political and media universe in which an authoritarian cult will thrive. This is how fascists tend to govern.

The generally spot-on William Saletan, writing for Slate, noted in October, 2016, how, without equating the two, Trump was even thematically and stylistically “sound[ing] more and more like Hitler,” albeit approaching the younger Hitler of the early 1920s. And just this month, in case people might think that only Trump at the top is the source of all the fascist-y stuff, Saletan explained how Trump’s far more well-regarded Vice President, Mike Pence, “is the chief enabler of the president’s fascist ways;” on top of that, let’s not forget the Republican Party as a whole, which seems far more partner than hostage to Trump and that just put out a survey that seems deliberately crafted to advance what we’ve described as democratic fascism, harping especially on “illegal immigration,” “radical Islamic terrorism,” and “the mainstream media” and clearly trying to hurt the reality-based media’s coverage of the first two issues in favor or more hysterical views (Question 13: “Do you believe that political correctness has created biased news coverage on both illegal immigration and radical Islamic terrorism?” and Question 24: “Do you agree with President Trump’s media strategy to cut through the media’s noise and deliver our message straight to the people?”); yes, the GOP is doing its part, some enthusiastically, some reluctantly, some in between, some unwittingly, and with only a minuscule resistance, even if it is larger than commonly found in a relatively monolithic and extremely monochrome Republican Party (all new GOP congressman from the 2016 election were white and out of 293 senators and representatives, only 14, or less than 4.8%, were non-white; in contrast, Democrats had 89 non-white members representing about 37% of their Members of Congress), a resistance whose voices generally come from a tiny group of out-of-power elites with something of a megaphone who are far less representative of the Party’s rank-and-file or current elected officeholders. So, lest we forget, Trump has plenty of help.

Michael Kinsley, writing in The Washington Post, focuses on Trump’s corporatist tendencies that resemble fascism’s past corporatism, that “Donald Trump is a fascist,” and while “[i]t’s ridiculous to compare any living person to Hitler or Mussolini…I mean ‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.” For Kinsley, Trump’s

seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.

The realization that Trump is something of a fascist hardly comes from the left or the media class alone; renown counterterrorism expert Peter Bergen also labeled Trump a “proto-fascist,” while conservative academic Max Boot tweeted all the way back in late 2015 that “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it” (he has also referred to Trump as a “fascist demagogue”). One of Boot’s fellow conservative academic travelers, Robert Kagan, wrote in May 2016 that Donald Trump

…is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.

And they are not alone on the right (Sullivan is something of a conservative), with even the fairly restrained Ross Douthat noting, all the way back in December, 2015, that, “[w]hether or not we want to call Trump a fascist outright, then, it seems fair to say that he’s closer to the ‘proto-fascist’ zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative or his recent predecessors in right-wing populism,” and that “Trump may indeed be a little fascistic;” later, in May, 2016, when it was long clear to all but those bingeing on denial (not that there was a shortage of prominent conservatives fitting this description) that Trump would be the nominee, he referred to Trump as “a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control.”

I remember when some liberals called George W. Bush a fascist or a Nazi; they were very few, and never anyone of particular importance or who was widely-respected as an intellectual, a journalist, a politician (and no, Dick Durbin’s ill-phrased Guantánamo criticism can in no way honestly be represented as an attempt to call Bush or his Administration fascist in their overall nature, and that is the closest thing that comes to mind), but, rather, were often fringe rabble-rousers or small numbers of individual protesters, which was ridiculous (and I am not fan of Bush or his disastrous presidency), and I was happy to call out anyone calling Bush a fascist or a Nazi.

Well, this is different; across the political spectrum, a number of widely respectable, mainstream, serious, non-hyperbolic, measured, thoughtful people—some of whom were very critical of Bush and yet were hardly labeling his Administration “fascist”—who have been generally prescient and correct in their commentary are writing pieces unlike any they have written before, sounding the alarm that democracy and Western civilization is in peril; when I wrote my own similar call to arms—ahead of much of the crowd—it was more a call to arms that, while discussing a theoretical possibility of Clinton not winning, was meant more to play out the severe challenges a (second) Clinton Administration would face; I was extremely confident in a Clinton win at that point, but it turned out the far worse hypothetical would be our current nightmare of a reality. Sage people I’ve never known to be hysterical are using the words “fascist” and Trump in the same sentence, though this is generally an elite print media crowd and the reality of our new democratic fascism is not widely seeping through the television news crowd and the population as a whole, and that even allows for a huge portion of Americans who know this is very bad, very unprecedented, and yet still don’t know how bad it is. Today, more and more people do seem to be catching on because there is a sharp rise in the public consumption of dystopian, Orwellian fiction.  If the reader will indulge me in a bit of speculation, I think there are some very wise political leaders—senators, congressmen, governors, etc., of both parties (though clearly far fewer on the Republican side) who see that this is a form of fascism but avoid using the term so as not to turn away voters who would see such a term as “unfair” or “partisan,” a non-use aimed at laying the groundwork for bringing in even some of the reluctant Trump voters to help oppose him at some point in the future; this approach makes sense, and just throwing around the word “fascist” is both unproductive and counterproductive (more on that in a bit); I submit democratic fascism used consistently instead of just plain fascism is a remedy for some of the concerns that crowd might have, and I do hope they will begin to bring the term into the current lexicon.

Another point that must be made: these respectable commentators calling Trump out for his fascistic tendencies are not lunging towards the far left, and are not part of some intelligentsia that has suddenly already found itself there (though, if the “Sandernista” Bernie Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party and the far left in general has its way, the left and the Party may yet radicalize in the future, and that process may already be underway); no, it is not a symptom of the problems of the left that fascist is being applied as a label for Trump and his agenda; it is simply a product of the man and that agenda and where the right now finds itself, and while it is not common to use the label fascism or some sort of prefixed-fascism (as I am doing), to call him out, those doing so are not members of an extremist minority who have lost their moorings but are a minority of the most prescient, bravest, sharpest voices, whose their records back up their description as such.

And that is why this moment is, these moments are, are so terrifying.

Hell, even the U.S. Holocaust Museum has a poster “Early Warning Signs of Fascism” that reads almost entirely like this election’s Republican Party Platform or the Trump White House to-do-list:

@RaRaVibes

While Trump is clearly a democratic fascist, then, it important, here again, to make the point that being such, Trump is all the way on one end of a fascist spectrum, an end that overlaps slightly with democracy, while Hitler is all the way on the other end of that fascist spectrum. Despite important similarities between the two, it is crucial to note that Hitler was in most respects much more intense and went much further than Trump and that Hitler embraced genocidal mass killing, which Trump does not; thus, those who would correctly call Trump out for his democratic fascism must take care not to equate or appear to equate Trump with Hitler or his movement with Nazism or even come close to this, for doing so only plays into Trump’s hands and diminishes the chances both of those calling out Trump for what he is to be taken seriously and, in turn, that he and his movement can be stopped; in this effort, the prefixing of democratic before fascism is eminently useful.

Yes, Trump, is a very serious threat that could very well destroy American democracy, Western democracy, the West, and the international order as we know it and we can ill-afford minimized his menace, but we must also not exaggerate his threat, as awful as it is, as it seems he would not do these things through genocidal mass killing and world war or generally use violence the way the twentieth-century fascists did; obviously, this brings little comfort, but if Western civilization is to remain intact, we must defeat Trump by being fastidious in our distinctions and accusations and make those distinctions, however nuanced, clear, because Trump’s war on civilized values is also a war on truth; those opposing him by making facile, lazy, even just somewhat inaccurate comparisons and accusations weaken our best weapon against him: the truth. For if those fighting democratic fascism embrace a twisting of the truth to try to beat Trump, they will be trying to use a tactic that their opponent has already mastered; Republicans who tried to out-insult Trump in the primary failed miserably, and others wishing to out-Trump Trump in other ways will also fail spectacularly. In the end, sacrificing the truth to win short-term attention and political points will lessen the distinctions between the democratic fascists and those opposing them; this is not politics as normal, and the opposition can’t afford to turn more of the people more likely to oppose Trump away from politics by creating more apathy and cynicism in behaving more like him. So we in the opposition must not only not call Trump Hitler or a Nazi or his movement fascism or Nazism, we must call out those who do.

That is why democratic fascism is such a useful term: it helps to make those important distinctions away from Hitler, Nazis and other historical fascists that are so necessary, and yet still communicates the serious and insidiousness of Trump and his movement.

6.) Democratic Fascism: A Global Problem

In Sullivan’s election-night piece, he began by quoting Orwell:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” George Orwell famously observed. So what is it that we have just seen?

We are witnessing the power of a massive populist movement that has now upended the two most stable democracies in the world — and thrown both countries into a completely unknown future. In Britain, where the polls did not pick up the latent support for withdrawal from the European Union, a new prime minister is now navigating a new social contract with the indigenous middle and working classes forged by fear of immigration and globalization. In the U.S., the movement — built on anti-political politics, economic disruption, and anti-immigration fears — had something else, far more lethal, in its bag of tricks: a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric. Britain is reeling toward a slow economic slide. America has now jumped off a constitutional cliff. It will never be the same country again. Like Brexit, this changes the core nature of this country permanently. 

Sullivan places Trump squarely in a broader global movement. And that movement is one set out to destroy Western democracy as we know it, one that is far larger and far more organized than most people in the West have realized thus far.

If America was seeing the rise of a leader like Trump, the most extreme version of the Republican Party ever to exist, and pervasive extremist news outlets, that would be catastrophic enough; but when one takes into account similar trends all over Europe, in Russia, Turkey, in Israel, in India, and in the Philippines, to name the most salient examples, there is a worldwide trend in important democratic centers of charismatic leaders of right-wing parties/coalitions playing on hatred, fear, and division and pushing agendas that go against core democratic, liberal values, all while being backed by a megaphone of sympathetic extremist media that often either blend fact and fiction or ignore facts altogether. And America’s counterparts in this movement are arguably as dangerous because these leaders are dressed up in more of the proprietary graces and trappings of conventional politicians and are thus better able to mask tendencies that Trump could not hide even if he tried, making then sneakier, their threat less obvious, their appeal more infectious.

Though to varying degrees, one of the strongest common threads in this reactionary political movement is that the right wing parties and voters that are either rising in power or have come to power care little, or even not at all, about minority rights and about their leaders’ and parties’ publicly expressed willingness, either in words or in actions, to apply one standard of the law and enforcement to themselves and their supporters and to use a looser standard on political opponents and minorities (ethnic, religious, or otherwise, e.g., immigrants) who are not in line with the ruling parties and groups; if anything, they and their supporters embrace such double standards. 

In a Europe already seriously weakened by Brexit, these rising or newly empowered rightist democratic fascist parties that are enjoying successes across the continent exhibit a hostility and unequal application of the system that applies mainly to immigrants, in particular but not limited to Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; recent polls now show anti-EU, anti-immigrant far-right populist parties in the lead in the Netherlands, Italy, and, perhaps most alarmingly, in France, while Germany’s election, perhaps the most important test for Europe’s future, remains fluid and uncertain, even if, for now, prospects seem much better for saner heads to prevail there than in the Netherlands, Italy, and France. To add to the growing concern, in a just-released survey of over 10,000 Europeans in 10 EU countries, 55% agree on having a Trumpian travel ban that would stop all migration from Muslim-majority countries; only 2 of 10 countries did not have a majority approve, and the disapproval rate in none of the 10 countries exceeded 38%; Poland had the highest approval at 71%, and France, Germany, and Italy all had majorities that also approved, all of this boding ill for centrist, pro-EU, pro-tolerance candidates. Meanwhile, the Slovakian Prime Minister recently directly called the far right party that is his country’s fifth-largest and is on the rise fascist; “[s]ome people say that fascism is creeping here in Slovakia. It’s not creeping here, it’s present here,” he said. And rather presciently, at the end of 2015, The Economist worriedly noted the progress of these movements, with the title of the relevant article saying it all: “The march of Europe’s little Trumps.”

In Russia, this hostility, sometimes lethal, is directed towards ethnic minorities that try to assert their rights or protest their treatment and any sort of organized political or media opposition to Putin and his party, especially those speaking out against Russian actions in Ukraine; but the lack of protections hardly stops there: a bill with apparently robust public support partly decriminalizing wife-beating and child-beating easily passed the Russian Duma (the lower house of parliament) and was signed into law by Putin this month; additionally, the only politician who had any kind of serious chance of beating Putin in the next presidential election—Alexey Navalny—was just convicted of (likely trumped-up) fraud and barred from running against Putin (Navalny vowed to fight the conviction; let’s see how that goes…). The Russian people aren’t helping, either: a just-released survey found out 46% of them think positively of Stalin, the highest level in 16 years; only 21% had negative views and 22% responded with neutral feelings; that means Russians like Stalin by a margin of over two-to-one compared with those who don’t like him (and none of this even touches on the energetic activities Russia is doing to advance democratic fascism outside of its own borders; more on that soon).

In Turkey, this hostility has broadened not only to Kurds, the main Kurdish political party, and political opposition, but to purging journalists and news outlets and entire swaths of civil society and thousands in the government bureaucracy that Erdogan and his AKP party feel they cannot control or will not be loyal or silent in their opposition, even as Erdogan seems poised to transform the country’s constitution to give himself dramatic, sweeping new powers with an upcoming referendum. At the same time, both Turkey’s government and media feed their public with outlandish conspiracy theories centered on the the idea of America undermining Turkey at every step of the way and as the root of all Turkey’s present ills, drawing attention away from the both the government’s and media’s slide to one-party authoritarianism.

In Israel, the hostility is generally against Arabs but includes other groups, too. While Benjamin Netanyahu certainly deserves credit for not being authoritarian in the mold of Putin, Erdogan, or even Trump, the trendlines under his extensive watch are clear and the direction in which they are moving is shared by the others in this unfortunate list (we will elaborate a bit more here because, at least in the U.S., there is more doubt when asserting Israel is part of this trend than, say, Turkey or Russia). Netanyahu is a huge part of the problem himself, with a penchant for playing fast and loose with facts and an aptitude for even weaponizing history, perhaps most notably when he claimed a Palestinian had inspired the Holocaust, resulting in strong condemnation even from Israeli and German historians and a subsequent retraction; he is a huge champion of (adding) settlements—illegal in the eyes of the entire rest of the world—and their expansion, among the most extreme parts of Israeli policy and those bearing the most resemblance to fascism; and he continually engages in demagoguery designed to incite ethnic and religious division that empower him and his Likud Party. Yet Netanyahu is hardly alone, and is often pressured to move even further to the right by other politicians and public opinion, for not only many politicians, but many Israelis themselves—more and more of them—are embracing racism and illiberal undemocratic values; even mob violence inside Israel, not just settler-instigated violence in the Palestinian territories, is not rare enough, and punishment of Jews who commit violence is comparatively mild when compared to punishment of Arabs who commit violence, just one of the most salient qualities demonstrating how unequal Israel is as a society. Israel’s rightist government is also cracking down on liberal NGOs and has a racist migrant/immigration policy. And while Israeli courts, to their credit, have pushed back against the legitimization and establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that were illegal even under Israeli law—with some of them being established on land owned by Palestinians who can prove their ownership—Israel just adopted a law that basically negates the court rulings, making those settlements legal, though the courts may yet overturn this law; yes, Israel basically just passed a law that allows the government to take land belonging to Palestinians because they are Palestinians and give it to Israelis because they are Jewish, something that squarely fits in the fascist tradition. And let’s not forget how much admiration Netanyahu and Trump have expressed for each other.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling right-wing Hindu populist BJP party (both fans of Hindu religious nationalist rhetoric), since coming to power over two years ago, have sought to curb free speech, encourage and/or turn a blind eye both to police abuse and to sometimes violent religious nationalism on the part of right-wing Hindus who target minorities, and are cracking down on civil society groups critical of the government and its human rights record. 

In the Philippines, anyone involved in illegal drugs have essentially lost the protections of due process and equal application of the law, with President Duterte himself bragging about killing criminals when he was mayor as his extremely controversial drug war that has killed thousands of Filipinos in the less-than-a-year he has been in office continues in full force. As far as accountability, a Filipino senator who criticized the drug war was even removed from her investigative committee role, part of an increasing trend of the government using its power to limit criticism of Duterte and his government; experts fear the longstanding Filipino democracy, one of Asia’s oldest, may be in trouble.

And in the United States, we have now (mostly) sworn in a government that at the very least seems unenthusiastic about or unwilling to protect minority rights and may even be downright hostile both to preserving these rights and to minorities asserting their rights, whether African-Americans who are grossly mistreated by police and the criminal justice system, members of the LGBT community worried about losing their newly won rights, Muslims who saw anti-Muslim hate groups rise from 34 to more than 100 last year, or women worried about losing both access to contraception and their ability to decide on pregnancy without government interference. Basically, like the people backing right-wing populism in other countries, Trump voters see the America in which they reside as “theirs” to the exclusion of others and resent those other groups asserting equality (“when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”), seeing this assertion as a loss of their own prerogatives and politics as a zero-sum game in which they can only benefit in denying benefits to others and keeping those benefits, or the degree to which they are enjoyed, to themselves. These people don’t care if such sentiments and their end results directly violate the spirit of and/or laws of their very nations; in fact, they seek to remake their nations into illiberal systems that favor themselves and discriminate against certain others officially, longing both to recreate past discriminations and hierarchies, if perhaps more subtly, and part of this is to recreate a false mythological image of the past in present reality in which their ethnic, racial, religious, or other forms of superiority existed unquestioned and unchallenged (even in America, where slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution—though only reluctantly and initially—opposition to slavery was still exhibited during the colonial era and the subsequent constitutional conventions in which the Constitution itself was drafted and ratified). Real or not, on this weaponization of history perhaps no one here is more succinctly instructive than Orwell in 1984: “…if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

7.) Putin Leads an Assault on Western Democracy and Reality

And right now, the Russian government is by far the most skilled and prolific weaponizer of information—of spreading fake news, false history, and false facts—in the world, and this is where things get even scarier.

I wrote about a year ago that Western democracy was on trial, more than any time since WWII, that internal problems and forces growing in the West were posing a threat to the survival of the Western liberal democratic order that was greater than any Soviet armies or nuclear arsenals of the past; little did I know that the Soviet Union’s successor in Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, would lead a brilliant campaign—including the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—to exacerbate, further, and accelerate these trends, and effort that, so far, has been enough to ensure that the West is largely failing these tests, most notably in the oldest continuing and most powerful democracy in the world, the United states of America. And with the very latest revelations that multiple Trump campaign officials were in constant contact with Russian intelligence operatives, there is even less of an excuse not to realize that Putin and his people acted to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s campaign with the aim of helping Trump secure the White House, in addition to their also being a much higher possibility that there was collusion of some sort between (some staff on) the Trump campaign and this Russian effort.

In a Foreign Policy piece published just after Trump’s election by Yascha Mounk titled “Donald Trump Is the End of Global Politics as We Know It” and with a subheading of “What it means to live without a leader of the free world,” what is described is Vladimir Putin’s dream come true, and it makes you think about how much was at stake in this election and how the consequences of a world devoid of American leadership or with an American leadership that is cartoonishly incompetent, damaging to its own bedrock alliances and its own society, and blithely self-defeating were exactly the results Russia’s campaign against the United States was designed to bring about. By the time Trump is out of office, it’s entirely possible that there is no more EU and no more NATO, and it is likely that even in the realistic best-case scenario they are substantially weakened; how could things be worse? Just imagine Russian troops and Russian bases in various European NATO deserters, hardly an impossibility.

Putin is certainly imagining this possibility and acting to make this possibility a reality. “We’re on the verge of a new global order,” to quote one spokesperson for a movement within Putin’s own Russian United political party that is trying to help France’s far-right, anti-EU, very pro-Russia candidate triumph in the upcoming French election.

As I pointed out not long ago, Russia has a history of actively meddling in elections and votes in other countries; in a few cases where the final tallies were very close (the UK with Brexit and the U.S. with Trump), the burden of proof is on people asserting Russia made no difference, so large were Russia’s efforts, be they hacking, disinformation, or both. In other places like Bulgaria and Moldova the meddling has been longstanding and finally paid off with the victories of new pro-Russian leaders over the last few months; in other cases like Sweden and the Baltic States, there is a constant effort as well that has made an impact, though these countries are still very much on the alert and seem very unlikely to shift to overall favor Russia in their politics anytime soon; with other cases like Italy’s recent election, it’s hard to argue that Russian meddling made the difference, even though it seems Russia was still quite active in trying to hurt pro-EU centrist parties with fake news; with elections early last year in Germany, it seems Russian propaganda efforts did hurt the ruling party in regional elections. 

Some support and cooperation has been far more overt and public, though, than the shadowy hacking, fake news dissemination, and covert funding programs: all over the continent, from the UK to Italy to Austria (where fake news was rampant during its recent presidential election but that as yet has not specifically been tied to Russia) to France and beyond, Putin, his government, and Russian-government-dominated media has offered praise—sometimes even formal audiences in Moscow or political alliances with Putin’s own ruling party, United Russia—to right-wing populist and anti-EU parties along with criticism of pro-EU rivals of these parties; sometimes, this has even extended to financial support from Russian-government affiliated financial institutions, most notably in Le Pen and her party’s case in France; these parties often respond by adopting pro-Russian policies (for example, being against Western sanctions against Russia) and expressing enthusiastic public support for Putin and his program. Coupled with the massive disinformation campaign, Russia is clearly trying to manipulate public opinion and offer direct support to specific parties in Europe in an effort to change the politics of the whole continent. And even when these democratic fascist movements do not succeed in winning, they are still increasing their support and representation in parliaments; thus, all over Europe, they are on the rise and on the march with a purpose, a purpose that very much serves Putin’s goals of weakening Europe so that the EU and NATO will crumble and Russia will be able to extend and intensify its spheres of influence.

Putin’s efforts here are not a random or haphazard one; after years of exerting influence, he has sympathy and supporters spread over one-quarter of the European Parliament, and Russia’s efforts are, as before, pinpointing countries with upcoming elections, with the Netherlands, France, and Germany (and possibly Italy) the big tests for 2017; there are questions about whether these votes may lead to more exits from the EU, say, a Nexit or a Frexit (with a Grexit perpetually in the realm of possibility, too).

The Dutch vote in less than a month, and officials are nervous enough about hacking and interference that they are going to be counting all ballots by hand amid increased Russian cyberactivity targeting Dutch entities and suspicions Russians might have been involved in swaying an eventual Dutch “no” vote in a referendum on a free-trade pact between the EU and Ukraine last April, likely derailing the whole agreement. The party of the man called “the Dutch Donald Trump”—Geert Wilders—is leading in the polls and there are serious worries he may win, especially with so many Dutch voters still undecided (as was the case in America) and the rise of so many new, tiny parties that make the way a coalition will be formed much more unpredictable. One thing is quite predictable, though: he wants to hold a referendum on the Netherlands leaving the EU and very clearly wants to leave it, and some of Wilders’ policies are even more extreme than Trump’s: “[h]e wants to ban the Quran, shut down mosques and…cut all foreign aid,” and some of his tactics are quite Trumpish (he recently caused an uproar when he tweeted a fake photo of a rival with a “Shariah for the Netherlands” sign). If his party does well and especially if he becomes Prime Minister, that could increase enthusiasm for like-minded parties and voters in other European elections on the horizon, just as Brexit and Trump’s win might already be doing that.

France votes in two rounds in late April and early May. So far, France’s race has been incredibly tumultuous of late; the last few weeks, various revelations have upended the race. First, starting late in January, a French newspaper published a series of damning revelations that conservative and moderately pro-Russian candidate François Fillon had used his position in France’s National Assembly (it’s lower legislative house) to pay nearly $1 million in public funds to his wife and children for “bogus” positions, which seems now to have knocked him from the lead to on track to miss the runoff (only the top two advance but he is not a distant third); this seemed to make France’s independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron the favorite; but now it seems Russia is trying to hack his campaign much like it did Hillary Clinton’s, and Russian-controlled media like RT and Sputnik are slamming him (going so far as to spread rumors that he is gay); while praising his rival, far-right, very pro-Russian, and Putin’s favorite candidate: Marine Le Pen. 

Le Pen is similar to Trump: she is extremely anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and is pledging to remove France from the euro currency, even NATO, and possibly the EU entirely. Also like Trump, Le Pen has a globally-spread army of internet trolls engaging in shadowy tactics to boost her and hurt her rivals, and she has the highest internet engagement numbers of any of her rivals. She is furthermore like Trump in that she has not disclosed her campaign fundraising or spending, though her rivals have; this is a particular issue because she had been funded back in 2014 to the tune of a €9 million loan by a Russian bank with strong ties to the Russian government (the deal was even brokered by a member of Russia’s Duma and was suspiciously close in timing to her announcement that she believed Russia’s annexation of Crimea was legal, with incriminating evidence that she received financial support at Russia’s direction in return for her adopting this position); at the same time this happened, a €2 million loan was given to a political fund named Cotelec run by her father from a mysterious Cyprus-based company run by ex-K.G.B. agent Yuri Kudimov who is known to run “the financing arm of the Kremlin,” and from there it went to Le Pen’s party for its 2015 regional elections; this past December she just received a €6 million loan from her father’s Cotelec, and after her 2014 Russian lender was shuttered by the Central Bank of Russia (possibly because of a possible embezzlement scandal) and as she is being shunned by other mainstream lenders, she may be may be seeking another loan from a Russian entity to cover a €20 million shortfall in her campaign war chest.*

*(As an aside, if you are familiar with my work and this reeks of the familiar, your nose is not deceiving you; this is remarkably similar to the gigantic Eurasian gas scheme I wrote about— including some exclusive revelations—just before Trump won, a scheme involving billions of dollars in shady gas deals and the profits from them being laundered by the Russian mafia to buy Ukrainian politicians and corrupt the Ukrainian government so that Putin could dominate Ukraine; Paul Manafort—Trump’s future Campaign Chairman for some of the most crucial months of the Republican primaries when he clinched the GOP nomination and through the Republican National Convention—was one of the major players in this massive scam, and Rick Gates was definitely involved as was possibly Carter Page, both future Trump campaign advisors; in many ways this gas scheme led to the current war in Ukraine, and this modus operandi of “diplomacy” is more the vehicle of Putin’s foreign policy than the Russian Foreign Ministry).

While Le Pen is leading and has for a while now in the first-round polling, conventional wisdom holds that she won’t be able to get enough support to triumph in the second-round-runoff… And yet, conventional wisdom said Donald Trump had no chance of beating Hillary Clinton; the thing is, once a candidate starts winning—be it Trump in the primaries or possibly Le Pen in the first round of voting—that has a way of changing how people think and vote, and with scandals and propaganda efforts embroiling her rivals, the confidence that Macron should triumph in the second-round of voting against Le Pen is weakening, with at least one just-released credible big-data analysis from an investment firm predicting she will pull off a Trumpian upset and the French bond market already showing negative effect from its worries about the possible outcome of a Le Pen victory that seems less remote now than before. 

France’s foreign intelligence chief expects Russian internet bots to make millions of posts to help her candidacy and also fears that there will be releases of hacked private e-mails of her rivals; government officials are worried that the Russians will be working actively to alter the outcome of the French election, and there is also concern that Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks—Russia’s stooges, be they unwitting or witting—will have an impact, as they are already teasing thousands of documents related to the candidates, with indications that it will be trying to help Le Pen and hurt her rivals. And WikiLeaks overnight just released what it said was a CIA document showing orders for the U.S. to spy on the French elections of 2012; while such actions are routine even among allies, it is clear that WikiLeaks is selectively releasing this now with the intent of drumming up anti-American sentiment, which will, in turn, harm centrist candidates that support the current global order; this echoes previous recent efforts by WikiLeaks to discredit Merkel’s government for cooperating with a U.S. NSA intelligence-gathering program.

Speaking of Germany, it’s up next, having elections this fall. De facto leader after Trump’s win of the Western liberal international order and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (and her party) have already been a target of Russian fake news and WikiLeaks. While the far right Alternative for Deutschland party has gained in polls overall in recent months, for now, it seems safely behind both Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc and the party of her rival coalition partner, leader of the German Social Democrats party Martin Schulz, who are neck and neck in the latest polls. Still, an EU task force has noted in the past few weeks that Merkel is a specific target of Russian fake news, and German government officials, like their French and Dutch counterparts, are worried about Russian attempts to alter the outcome of their election. And as we saw with Hillary Clinton, there is plenty of time for Russia’s efforts, and the damage they may do, to fundamentally alter public opinion in Germany.

And if Italy holds an election? Who knows…

The Czech Republic, we may add, was also recently hacked by what its officials suspected was a foreign power, and few countries would have more incentive to hack the Czechs than Russia; the EU is generally trying to improve and prioritize its efforts to fight back against Russia’s hacking, disinformation, and electoral interference, but it remains to be seen if such efforts will be successful. What is certain is that, with precision, Russia and WikiLeaks are targeting the opponents of the far-right in Europe and proponents of centrism and the EU, including its NATO military alliance formed to check the USSR during the Cold War. According to one expert quoted all the way back in April, 2016, “Russia is starting to weaponize electoral processes in Europe,” and today, we can remove the word “starting” from that quote. Right now, fear of Russia is spreading among officials all over Europe as it seeks to advance the cause of democratic fascism.

And it’s not just Putin and Russia seeking to support these democratic fascist movements and undermine the EU: Trump’s master strategist, right-wing nationalist, and disinformation master Steven Bannon wants to link up and partner with these movements, too, as well as see his former fake news factory Breitbart expand into Europe, in particular, France and Germany, even as Trump criticizes NATO and reaches out to Putin. The EU President Donald Tusk recent wrote a letter to all 27 EU national leaders stating that the Trump Administration was a “threat” to the EU, one of the most dangerous it has ever confronted, along with Russia; on top of this, another top EU official flat-out said that Trump and Bannon were existential threats to the EU—which he said they were seeking to break up—along with two other such threats: Putin and “radicalized political Islam.” In fact, applying the analytical framework outlined in NATO’s recent Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, Donald Trump is doing the Russians’ work for them, for:

As the  Handbook emphasizes, Russian information warfare thinking anticipates that trolls and bots not under Kremlin control will amplify the messages and effects of Russia’s own information operations. However, having a U.S. president, his administration, and his own networks of disinformation playing these roles is probably beyond the wildest dreams of Russian strategists and tacticians of information warfare. Putin will not squander this opportunity.

This point is echoed by Saletan and, in fact, some European allies are so nervous about Trump’s relationship with Putin that they are spying on Team Trump’s communications.

Lastly, Putin is not only cultivating and using the far right; he is also weaponizing the far left as his “useful idiots;” while generally not taking the bait on the Kremlin’s pro-Trump propaganda, far-lefties in America were all too eager to gobble up its anti-Clinton efforts, and we’re not only talking about supporters of Jill Stein and the extreme-far-left in America, but also supporters of (relatively-to-Stein-&-Co. moderate) Bernie Sanders; these far leftists were often blithely retweeting RT articles about Hillary and echoed their distorted talking points. When it comes to stein, Putin even invited her to a gala in Moscow honoring RT propaganda station, where the now scandal-ridden Gen. Michael Flynn was also a guest of honor, and Stein is a regular on the channel. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here: the far left has no chance electorally in the way the far right does, so Putin can throw support at it knowing he is safe from its agenda but happy to see it weaken the center and take votes away from credible parties that can help stop his far-right darlings; in this way, the far left helps the far-right come to power through their myopia, narcissism, and willful blindness, as clearly happened in the U.S. election, particularly with liberal Millennials. By constantly attacking “the system” and the center and the mainstream reality-based media, it also generates specific mistrust of crucial institutions and general apathy and cynicism among those on the left, apathy, cynicism, and mistrust that also worked handily in favor of Trump over Clinton. This has even succeeded to the degree of compromising respectable leftist publications like The Nation into putting out apologias for Russian behavior, and it goes beyond propaganda and is happening, and has been happening for some time, all over Europe to the degree that Russian efforts help to explain the less-often-discussed rise in the success of far left parties in Europe; there is apparently evidence of clandestine funding of far-left parties and groups by the Kremlin, in addition to its more salient efforts to covertly fund the far-right. And besides Russian propaganda, “WikiLeaks is clearly the online epicenter of the 21st-century’s red-brown convergence”: Trump couldn’t stop talking about WikiLeaks, and neither could Bernie Sanders supporters.

Yes, Russia under Putin now is succeeding in projecting its power and influence in ways way few Soviet or Czarist leaders could ever realistically envision, not with troops and tanks, but with a brilliant master strategy that plays on and exploits the flaws and vulnerabilities in Western democracy and the very worst in human nature, with the media and cyberwarfare as its main weapons of war, all fueled by the aforementioned* massive oil-and-natural-gas-scheme of epic proportions (and in which some of Trump’s associates—including one very senior one, Paul Manafort—were involved). Yes, we are at war for the survival of our very way of life, and we still don’t even realize it yet. Perhaps the damage and worry Donald Trump is generating not even one full month into his presidency is a good example of how much more we should be alarmed when we look at it in conjunction with this global campaign as a whole and what is happening in Europe and other bastions of democracy.

8.) Conclusion: Democratic Fascism is on Track to Destroy the West As We Know It, Or, Time to Break the Glass, This Is an Emergency

Again, in light of my old piece published about a year ago, I write with a sad and terrified heart now: I never imagined so much damage would be done in so short a period of time; at the time, I saw the threat, but thought it more distant and thought we’d be beating it back more successfully at this point; instead, we—the West, Western democracy, liberals who believe in liberal values and multiethnic democracy—are losing, and losing badly.

Revolutions tend to have far-flung roots and can spread in unpredictable ways, but the beginning of this wave of massive populist discontent on the right was the Tea Party protests that began early in 2009 (or, if you want to really go far back, the religious conservatives’ global return to public life in the 1980s); if 2009 can be thought of as the global democratic right’s 1789 French Revolution Bastille-storming moment, we are now in something of the beginning of a political Reign of Terror, much as the initial French people’s uprising of 1789 gave way to a far more extreme (and the original) (Jacobin) Reign of Terror in 1793 (in the words of Trotsky, “Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism”). More polite, less bloody efforts directed at limiting or rolling back the power of the governments in Washington and Brussels, over taxation and regulation, have now exploded into outright culture wars in which aggrieved dominant group on both sides of the Atlantic felt like other groups gaining rights and increased diversity were assaults on their status and responded increasingly ferociously towards these groups, often embracing racism and xenophobia to these ends; “Kick them out!” no longer applied to mainly the current politicians in power, but to whole groups of people: Hispanics, Muslims, even other European immigrants; a similar spirit in the U.S. was directed at kicking disadvantaged minorities off of government assistance, even as their economic plight had worsened relative to those wanting to deny them assistance. Angry white people were… angry, and they were going to punish not only the political elites, but people who looked and dressed and prayed and spoke differently than they did, denying them either a physical space in their country or resources from the government, even if they were, at times, fellow citizens (that seemed to not matter too much). The political systems which governed America arguably since the Founding but at least clearly since the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act are now to be overthrown in America, just as the post-WWII EU-centered systems in Europe are also to be overthrown if Trump and his Bannon-led crew—and their allies in Europe—succeed in their endeavors.

If we think Western civilization is not capable of some sudden collapse, then we are deluding ourselves. As Adam Gopnik noted in July, 2016:

Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against [fascism]…fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

And seize power he did; I have a hard time believing many Democrats really switched from Obama to Trump, and the evidence is that Trump’s popular-vote-losing, historically very narrow Electoral College victory (narrow despite Trump’s outlandish characterizations to the contrary) came largely at the hands of white rural conservatives who voted in larger-than-usual numbers and white centrists and white liberals (and Millennials of all stripes) staying home or voting third party. Because of that, there may only be one way to stop the collapse and self-destruction of Western civilization and Western democracy as we know it: the left as a whole uniting behind the center-left faction with the broadest support, whatever qualms the far-left may have with this compromise towards the center; if we—and yes, I include myself—do not unite, if too many on the left who claim to care about liberal causes and values and other human beings don’t step up and actually do what is necessary to prevent democratic fascism from becoming the new modus operandi of the West, if many leftists—Bernie Sanders supporters included—embrace myopia, impatience, and narcissism as their approaches to politics, then we won’t need jackboots marching down the Champs-Élysées or Pennsylvania Avenue to know that democracy is losing or defeated. Worst of all, the defeat will have come at the hands of our own stupidity, because if Trump and his ilk aren’t enough to make the liberals of the world unite under whichever factions get the most votes in their elections, then perhaps we don’t deserve the democracy we inherited, and perhaps we deserve democratic fascism instead. Perhaps we need to suffer to appreciate how amazing the post-WWII international system—pejoratively and inaccurately labeled “neoliberal,” as if Reaganism and Thatcherism still reigned supreme and dramatic improvements and changes have not happened globally since the end of WWII and especially in the decades since the end of the Cold War—actually is, no matter what ludicrous anarchist, libertarian, Marxist, or fascist-oriented schools of thought claim to the contrary.

In the 2016 American election, African-American and Hispanic voters, especially those old enough or with enough education to understand how much has improved even while understanding how much work still needs to be done, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton both against Sanders and against Trump (and Hispanics almost certainly voted for Clinton in much higher numbers than the exit polls suggest as indicated by data from special surveys that capture the notoriously-difficult-to-measure Latino vote much more accurately than normal exit polls); these wise (the wisest!) voters, these voters of color were practical all the way through because that is the only way they know their people have seen gains over time. For Hispanics, many of them came from places that did not offer them anywhere near as much opportunity, safety, or social justice; they had suffered enough to appreciate the Western system, warts and all. For African-Americans, there was a deep understanding of how much effort and blood had been spilled for them to earn the rights that many younger people today take for granted; from slavery through Reconstruction and segregation and beyond, mature black voters have been and are only too painfully aware that allowing one’s emotions to overtake reason and practicality by putting one’s hopes behind candidates that overpromise and offer easy fixes, that don’t have a plan, that seem too good to be true, that this all too often turns into bitter failure and disappointment, even catastrophe, and with dire consequences that are not overcome by speeches and wishful thinking; they know all too well that progress is a hard struggle and a long-march that is gradual and always leaves more to be desired.  That’s not to wholly reject idealism: idealism is beautiful and necessary, but it must be channeled practically “to hard thinking about means and ends,” to quote Krugman, or it is self-defeating, as history shows only too clearly to those who study it and study it well. 

But if millions of voters in a two-party system voted for someone other than Clinton or stayed home when they knew Trump was worse than her, if the impassioned entreaties of their favorite pop stars and pro-athletes and movie stars and their parents and sensible friends and mentors and a president they voted for twice and civil rights legends (sorry, Cornell West has nothing on John Lewis) weren’t enough to convince them to do their duty to stop a madman from taking over the most powerful office on the planet, then maybe those people need to suffer in a way that makes them realize this is not a game, this is not simply an exercise in abstract self-expression, this is not simply about them, that voting carries real world consequences that affect other people, sometimes a neighbor, sometimes someone living half a world away. Because if the left can’t unite—not with a minority of it screaming at majority to undemocratically accept their minority wishes, program, and leadership when they were unable to convince a whopping majority of their fellow liberals to accept their program or their candidate—then, it seems, we will have one-party rule in a democratic fascist state, not just for a few years, but for a long time to come. The same can be said of Europe: if too many liberals there selfishly and childishly vote for tiny parties that don’t even pass the threshold required to get seats in parliament, just like third party voters in the U.S., all they will succeed in doing is diluting the liberal vote away from parties that can actually compete with Democratic fascism; you must vote strategically with an eye to the relative support of different parties and the likelihood they can win and have an actual impact on the outcome in favor of advancing your espoused values, not simply drawing away votes from other competitive parties by voting in a way that only leaves a snowball’s chance in hell of your vote actually helping to advance that values you so loudly proclaim but are apparently unable to think through with enough effort to understand how to help, not hurt, them.

Perhaps some pain is required then, in order for enough of the left to mature and become more practical for us to actually start winning elections when we don’t have a candidate with once-in-a-generation charisma, because if the does not mature and mature fast, pain will surely come, and almost surely come in the form democratic fascism and the destruction our societies, democracy, the West, and the international system as we know it. Democratic fascism, in its possible triumph, may actually do some good, then: it may finally teach the most naïve of us with objectively good intentions and who say we believe in human rights, social justice, and equality that a vote is never something to wastefully throw away, and that its effects often go far beyond ourselves, let alone our sense of personal satisfaction.

The Economist

*****

Even as I write this, I am watching Trump talk to a crowd in South Carolina at a Boeing facility to talk about Boeing military-industrial-complex products and ordering billions in new weapons systems; yes, a day after the worst and most unintentionally farcical press conference in American history and after his new choice for National Security Advisor declined the job offer after the previous one had to resign amid an exploding scandal after less than a month on job, Trump is going to his base to offer platitudes and fetishize the idea of American greatness by appealing to militarism and weapon fetishism; “God bless Boeing,” he finishes his speech, and yes, that came after “God bless America,” with a CNN panel of generally solid pundits playing right into his game by saying it’s a great speech compared to his press conference, giving him compliments for improvement after he set the rhetorical bar lower than any president since 1789 (including, yes, Andrew Johnson’s infamous drunk VP-swearing-in speech); yes, Democratic fascism is here: the question is, what do we, what can we, do now?

The choice is clear and, sorry kids, limited: liberals can stand united against democratic fascism and halt its progress before it’s too late or stand divided in the face of its systemic, Putin-backed onslaught and empower fascism in spite of their unwitting selves and professed values. That is your choice, and as a citizen and a voter and one who professes to subscribe to liberal values, in the end, if you choose that second option history will judge despicably and judge you totally independent of whatever linguistic or intellectual contortions in which you engage to frame your action as something else other than empowering this democratic fascism, and history’s harsh judgment will matter far more than how you personally judge yourself or how often your like-minded peers in a social media echo chamber give you self-serving likes and comments, retweets, or any other number of shallow accolades; democratic fascism, though it thrives on social media, is a result far deeper and more lasting that any tweet or like. 

And this democratic fascism is approaching faster and with more momentum than just about any but the most prescient of us, even at this late hour, can see; the time for debate is limited, the time to fall in line is soon, and unless we face “hard truths” about our present realities, what is possible and not possible now in these upcoming elections, idealistic dreams will remain fantasies and we will all be living in a nightmare in which the best we can dream of in the foreseeable future will be a fantastical ability to again make use of the chances to make a true difference that we already blew back when we had that chance to actually do so, before it became too late, back when we were living in a flawed but still historically magnificent system that still gave us the power actually make a difference in a democracy of liberal democratic values, before democratic fascism and we, through our own stupidity, destroyed that precious system like Shakespeare’s Othello when he “threw a pearl away (5.2).”

*****

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!