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    From Kremlin leak to sperm counts: our readers’ favourite stories of 2021

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    From Kremlin leak to sperm counts: our readers’ favourite stories of 2021 Here are 20 articles that may have helped convince people to support the Guardian’s journalismThe Guardian benefited from hundreds of thousands of acts of support from digital readers in 2021 – almost one for every minute of the year. Here we look at the articles from 2021 that had a big hand in convincing readers to support our open, independent journalism.Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House – Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan SabbaghExclusive leak reveals Moscow’s deliberations on how it might help Donald Trump win 2016 US presidential race‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’ – Arundhati RoyThe author and activist plumbs the depths of India’s Covid catastrophe and finds much to reproach the prime minister, Narendra Modi, for‘I’m facing a prison sentence’: US Capitol rioters plead with Trump for pardons – Oliver MilmanThe past very quickly catches up with those who ransacked the seat of US democracyClimate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse – Damian CarringtonA shutdown of the Atlantic current circulation system would have catastrophic consequences around the worldAn Afghan woman in Kabul: ‘Now I have to burn everything I achieved’ – A Kabul residentAs the Taliban take the Afghan capital, one woman describes being “a victim of a war that men started”.Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity – Erin BrockovichA warning from the environmental advocate and author about the damage being wrought by toxic chemicalsPandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful – Guardian investigations teamMillions of documents reveal deals and assets of more than 100 billionaires, 30 world leaders and 300 public officialsThe Hill We Climb: the poem that stole the inauguration show – Amanda GormanShe spoke, and millions listened, at Joe Biden’s inaugurationRates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding. A common chemical may be to blame – Adrienne MateiIs an epidemic on the horizon? And is an unpronounceable chemical compound to blame?Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction – George MonbiotThe Guardian columnist at his most incandescent‘Take it easy, nothing matters in the end’: William Shatner at 90, on love, loss and Leonard Nimoy – Hadley FreemanThe actor discusses longevity, tragedy, friendship, success and his Star Trek co-star‘Our biggest challenge? Lack of imagination’: the scientists turning the desert green – Steve RoseIn China, scientists have turned vast swathes of arid land into a lush oasis. Now a team of maverick engineers want to do the same to the SinaiOff-road, off-grid: the modern nomads wandering America’s back country – Stevie TrujilloAcross US public lands thousands of people are taking to van lifeThe greatest danger for the US isn’t China. It’s much closer to home – Robert ReichThe columnist and former secretary of labour warns of enemies withinThe rice of the sea: how a tiny grain could change the way humanity eats – Ashifa KassamCelebrated chef discovered something in the seagrass that could transform our understanding of the sea itself – as a vast gardenRevealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon – Guardian staffThe Guardian teams up with 16 media organisations around the world to investigate hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO GroupBeware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth – James LovelockLegendary environmentalist argues that Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the planet to protect itself, and that next time it may try harder with something even nastierThe Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth? – Hadley FreemanEthel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for being Soviet spies, but their sons have spent decades trying to clear their mother’s name. Are they close to a breakthrough?Out of thin air: the mystery of the man who fell from the sky – Sirin KaleWho was the stowaway who fell from the wheel well of a Boeing plane into a south London garden in the summer of 2019?The life and tragic death of John Eyers – a fitness fanatic who refused the vaccine – Sirin KaleThe 42-year-old did triathlons, bodybuilding and mountain climbing and became sceptical of the Covid jab. Then he contracted the virusIf these pieces move you to support our independent journalism into 2022, you can do so here:
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      in World Politics

      A Woke Reading of a Politician’s Mittens

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      A high school teacher in California has earned her half-hour of fame by stepping up to expose an act of flagrant hypocrisy that took place in broad daylight during US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi was the first to notice the duplicity. After boldly raising the awareness of the students in her class, she captured the attention of the surrounding community when the San Francisco Chronicle published her op-ed.

      Seyer-Ochi exposed what the rest of the population failed to notice, even though the event had been broadcast to the nation. She acuity alone penetrated through the veneer to identify the shameful act perpetrated by a well-known politician. The foul deed occurred on Capitol Hill a mere two weeks after a rabid mob, whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump, notoriously occupied the Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives to protest a stolen election.

      What was the shameless deception her probing eyes had unveiled? Who was the guilty party? And how did this person get away with such a vile act?

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

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      The answer to those questions surprised most of the readers of her op-ed. Seyer-Ochi exposed a dangerous adept of the now well-known sin of privilege, not just of white but also male privilege. The guilty party was none other than Senator Bernie Sanders. The former presidential primary candidate, according to the teacher’s reading, had set up the scene to dupe the masses, gullible enough to fall for his brazen attempt to cultivate an image of the folksy elder of the traditional American family. 

      By covering his hands with the archaic symbol of hand-knitted woolen mittens in a homage to traditional craftsmanship (if not craftswomanship or perhaps craftspersonship), Sanders’ attire signified his identification with the dominant white, wealthy elite that has consistently stoked endemic racism for the past 400 years. Sanders was also guilty of dressing too casually and failing to respect the solemnity of the historical enthronement of the first female vice-president of black and South Asian descent.

      Yahoo editor David Knowles described this significant teaching moment in these terms: “Seyer-Ochi’s objection was to the “privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege.” The teacher “addressed the topic with her students, who she said were also upset by what they saw as the implicit message being delivered by Sanders’s choice of outerwear.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Outerware:

      The visible clothing people wear not to keep warm or protect them from the elements but to advertise which class or caste they belong to

      Contextual Note

      The new woke culture in the US, specializes in the art of canceling people who fail to live up to its real or quite as often imaginary standards. It relies on the ability of its practitioners to detect “implicit messages.” These woke academics believe (utterly mistakenly) that they are applying the insights of continental philosophers like Michel Foucault, or what is called “French Theory.” But woke theorists owe more to the great American puritanical tradition that, since the 17th century, has tasked its adepts with the office of exposing the moral failings of other members of the community.

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      One of the reasons Foucault and other French thinkers would never have approved of this application of theory is that the practice of délation (denunciation to the authorities) during the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World War is to this day vilified as one of the most heinous acts people can engage in. It was a behavior encouraged by the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime that encouraged good Frenchmen to denounce Jews and members of the Résistance.

      But beyond that, Foucault simply saw no interest in condemning individuals or ostracizing specific behaviors. His intellectual art consisted of teasing out relationships between different sets of ideas and cultural practices in particular societies and relating them to the institutions that constitute their power structure. Foucault described what amount to symbiotic relationships. To some extent, he admired their coherence, even when they manifested themselves in ways that were clearly at odds with his own personal values. Foucault, the radical, gay, atheistic questioner of Western institutions, for example, declared his deep sympathy for Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran.

      Historical Note

      What is now commonly referred to as wokeness or even “wokeism” is a recent trend of academic behavior. It traditionally pledges allegiance to French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, but it unconsciously applies an approach opposite to theirs. Instead of teasing out subtle relationships, in the quest to understand how complex elements coexist and support one another within a society at a certain moment of its history, the wokeist methodology focuses on unearthing anecdotal evidence of isolated acts serving to expose what they deem to be a suspect power relationship. That is precisely what Ingrid Seyer-Ochi has done to impress her students and get an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

      Having absorbed the lessons of structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévy-Strauss), Foucault explored what he called “L’archéologie du savoir” (the archeology of knowledge), an approach that seeks to discover how cultures are constructed and the play of forces that hold them together. It seeks out phenomena that explain historical continuity and discontinuity. In the process, it may reveal sources of injustice, but its aim is to layer knowledge and understanding rather than exercise moral judgment. 

      This divergence of approach tells us something about how intellectual tools produced by one culture — in this case, French intellectuals — may be distorted by a different culture (US academics) that borrows them for a totally different purpose. In recent decades, woke analysts and activists have neglected the job of understanding complexity and increasingly focused on rooting out acts that they can demonize as instances of “cultural appropriation.” Woke critics take particular pleasure in playing the role of inquisitors whose powers of observation and careful detective work allow them to accuse an individual or a group of insensitively using for illicit purposes cultural attributes considered the inalienable property of another group of people. One typical outcome of this vital research is the engaging and deeply instructive practice of critiquing celebrities’ choice of Halloween costumes.

      If they had been infected by the same obsession with the injustice of cultural appropriation, the French theorists of the 20th century might have ended up accusing their woke followers in the English-speaking academic world precisely of that sin. They might equally have pointed out that the very idea of cultural appropriation can only exist in societies in which the notion of private property as the foundation of social life is considered axiomatic. Anthropologists and cultural historians have long understood that the elevation of private property to the status of a fundamental human right is a modern Western invention. It belongs to a specific time and place in human history.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This phenomenon helps to illustrate a fundamental difference between the cultures of Europe and North America. When Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung traveled to New York in 1909 to introduce psychoanalysis to Americans, Freud remarked to Jung, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.” 

      But it was Freud who failed to realize that the Americans, always ready to exploit someone else’s asset, found a highly productive use for Freud’s plague. Instead of undermining what Freud deemed the uncultivated superficiality of US culture, the Viennese doctor’s intellectual heritage led to the consolidation and accelerated development of the consumer society. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, played an important role in that operation. Instead of showing concern about the destructive impulses of their id, Americans ended up employing Freud’s insights productively, by harnessing the dark energy of the unconscious for profit. Freud’s plague produced both Madison Avenue and the atomic bomb.

      Freud saw his mission as one of unveiling the disturbing truth about how our minds work: how the unconscious betrays our conscious intentions. Appropriated by Americans, Freud’s doctrines were used not to illuminate people’s understanding of how their minds work, but to orientate them toward types of behavior useful to the propertied elite and the barons of industry. The age of propaganda was already underway. Propaganda became the foundation of the hyperreality in which people have now accepted to be enclosed.

      Postscript: A practitioner of theory should have noticed a likely correlation between Seyer-Ochi’s attack on Bernie Sanders and the establishment Democrats’ permanent campaign to brand the senator a male supremacist because he dared to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      America Is Not Done Yet

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      Some of us have known for a long time that eventually the rest of the world would catch up with the lies at the core of America’s notion of itself. That we would be found out, exposed. Well, here we are. After decades of selling “democracy” at the point of a gun in other people’s lands, America’s capital city was secured by those same guns in order to ensure the “peaceful” transfer of power. All those guns were likely made in America.

      For a moment, watching Trump skulk out of the presidency to the tune of a 21-gun salute that he ordered for himself was too poetic not to enjoy. Then, it fell quickly to the new president, Joe Biden, to pick up the pieces of a nation in turmoil. Every commentator and pundit, including me, has a long list of what is wrong and a shorter list of how to make it right. So much was wrong before Trump, and four years of Trump and his cabal have made so much that was wrong so much worse.

      Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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      President Biden has one big immediate advantage going forward — he is not Trump. And for a nation watching its soul die a little more each day amid the pandemic, just having a national leader with a heart that beats and a moral compass that projects empathy and understanding will lift the nation on its own for a little while. To sustain the advantage, Biden will have to prove that he and his administration can deliver a national plan for confronting the pandemic.

      The sad truth is that Americans, lots of them, have done their part to make the nation what it looks like today. I cannot help but remember all those unmasked boobs who shouted about their freedom as they took away mine, all those callous young people who thought “their” party would be just fine and then went home to spread disease and death to loved ones and anyone else who got in their way, and all the people who still don’t want to pay those “essential” workers a living wage after seeing what they did for us every time we made it to the grocery store or put out the trash.

      America Is Not Done

      The nation is not done with its turmoil, not by a long shot. The allure of “normal” can be a prescription for a return to normal. However, what was normal to the fortunate can never again be allowed to overwhelm the reality for so many for whom “normal” is defined by poverty, racism, poor education, substandard housing and limited access to limited health care. If you are comfortable with that normal for so many, you are likely to continue to be unmoved by the image of hungry children on your next journey to the spa, country club or suburban church.

      It was easy to be hopeful for a day as a beautifully choreographed presidential inauguration unfolded. On January 20, President Biden gave a galvanizing inauguration address and then immediately set to work undoing the symbols of as much of Trump as he could touch with the stroke of a pen. But, amid the pomp and celebration, here we are again, where we have been so many times before — seeking unity, seeking a moral response and seeking justice.

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      Every “renewal,” almost every protest march, and almost every Martin Luther King Day, someone reminds the nation that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Now, yet one more time, America is beginning the long journey with that first single step. How come we have to do this over and over again? What about the steps that follow if the journey is ever to be completed? It remains so disheartening that Americans need to take that first step again in the fight for a nation that is finally unchained from the fundamental lies that stain its collective soul.

      Some of these lies are old lies, some are as new as yesterday. America is a shining beacon on some hill to some because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. America is the world’s last best hope to some but only because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. And Americans have always been ready to indiscriminately kill others for our nation’s honor or cause, without ever making the connection between them and us.

      While this discussion needs to be about more than systemic racism and racial justice, the homegrown lies about race in America are so profound and so undermine any moral high ground that those lies have to be collectively addressed before addressing any of the other lies will be taken seriously by those who understand the pernicious impact of the lies. When all is said and done, white Americans can only be freed from the burden of the lies by moving far beyond their continued repetition.

      Racial Reckoning

      Much will be said in the months ahead about “reckonings” in both the racial context and the accountability context. Racial reckoning has long been a subject of fierce debate in America, and now, with pandemic negligence, corruption and insurrection leading a parade of official misconduct, accountability will need to be reckoned with as well. Centuries of failed racial reckoning can serve as a guide to the difficulty of national reckoning in any context. Lies have been allowed to overshadow history when repeated over and over again, when believing them seems so much easier than confronting them.

      While it is hard to define a formula for success, reckoning is not a process — it is an end result. The journey to reckoning is the hard part, with racial reckoning and accountability among the most difficult journeys to complete. While neither may require the full journey of a thousand miles to be achieved, neither will ever be achieved after only one step and a few more to follow.

      To escape the past, Americans have to seize the present moment and finally take something more than those first steps on the long journey forward. It would be a good start to simply commit ourselves to the truth.

      *[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      How to make Bernie Sanders’ inauguration mittens

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      Feel the Bern, not the cold, with your own pair of winter-proof hand warmers – here’s how to stitch them at homeWhile it was Michelle Obama’s hair that brought the glamour to Joe Biden’s inauguration day, it was Bernie Sanders’ mittens that delivered the memes. Sitting at the event in a winter coat and mittens, arms and legs crossed, he was the yin to the rest of the Capitol’s sharp-suited yang – and promptly Photoshopped into Edward Hopper paintings, scenes from Glee and the vice-presidential debate, replacing the fly atop Mike Pence’s head. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      Sanders hopes nation smitten by his mittens will back food charity push

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      Bernie Sanders is turning a meme based on the mittens he wore to Joe Biden’s inauguration into a money-making opportunity – to benefit programmes like Meals on Wheels in a time of spiralling food insecurity.At the US Capitol on Wednesday, the independent senator from Vermont was pictured wearing chunky knitted mittens, sitting cross-legged on a folding chair, socially distanced from other guests, hunched against the cold.The image was soon spliced into a billion social media pictures and videos, the be-mittened democratic socialist appearing from Yalta to the ranks of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the famous potters’ wheel scene in Ghost. In Wisconsin, one man even adapted a snow sculpture of the Lincoln Memorial, a pillar of American democracy, to depict Sanders and his mittens instead.The Vermont second-grade teacher who made the mittens out of an old sweater and recycled plastic bottles and offered them on Etsy soon announced she had sold out.“There’s no possible way I could make 6,000 pairs of mittens,” Jen Ellis told Jewish Insider, “and every time I go into my email, another several hundred people have emailed me. I hate to disappoint people, but the mittens, they’re one of a kind and they’re unique and, sometimes in this world, you just can’t get everything you want.”On Sunday, a chuckling Sanders welcomed his mittens’ notoriety and described how he wanted to put it to work.“Not only are we having fun,” the 79-year-old told CNN’s State of the Union, “what we’re doing here in Vermont, is we’re going to be selling around the country sweatshirts and T-shirts and all of the money that’s going to be raised, which I expect will be a couple of million dollars, will be going to programs like Meals on Wheels that feed low-income senior citizens.”Food insecurity under the coronavirus pandemic has become a serious problem, among Biden’s targets in his first days as president.“So,” Sanders added, “it turns out actually it’s a good thing, not only fun.”On the senator’s website on Sunday morning, a $45 “Chairman Sanders” crewneck sweatshirt featuring the inauguration image was itself sold out. More

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      in Elections

      Amanda Gorman at Biden's inauguration reminded me: politics needs poetry

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      Obama-endorsed and wearing gold-clipped braids and Oprah-gifted earrings, 22-year old poet Amanada Gorman and her poem The Hill We Climb have been the talking point of Biden’s inauguration. Her five-minute poem, which started with the question “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”, explored grief, redemption and recovery, and wowed the world. Imperfect but fervent, it reminded us of something important: politics needs poetry.Gorman, born in 1998 in Los Angeles and raised by a mother who works as a teacher, graduated from Harvard university in 2020. She was the first US national youth poet laureate and its youngest ever inaugural poet. Owing to a speech impediment, she couldn’t pronounce the letter R until two years ago. She has described spoken word as “my own type of pathology”. Praise has overflowed for the young poet and many have celebrated her passion, beauty and poise in this historic moment that closes the door on Trump. “I honor you, @TheAmandaGorman. Thank you,” wrote the daughter of Dr Martin Luther King Junior, Bernice King on Twitter.The clips circulating on the internet of Gorman, glowing and optimistic, stand in utter contrast to scenes of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, grotesque and desperate. She wrote the remainder of the piece after the events of 6 January , staying up late to watch the storming the Capitol. The line: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” speaks directly to the attempted derailment of democracy.On Instagram, Gorman describes herself as a dreamer, and the line: “Our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful” shows her faith – a young woman dreaming aloud before millions of people in the form of spoken word. The moment has gone viral. Spoken word is a craft and a powerful art form, from the cadence to the delivery, to the subtle choreography. The moment, as internationally syndicated as it was, belongs to America. I don’t necessarily desire to see a version of it reproduced should Keir Starmer ever be elected prime minister (nor for the poet to find inspiration in Winston Churchill speeches).American politics’ relationship to poetry has a deep legacy in its fight for justice. In 1861, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and lecturer, wrote To the Union Savers of Cleveland, a poem about Sara Lucy Bagby, a woman who had escaped enslavement and was arrested and returned to her “owner” under the Fugitive Slave Act. Harper published the poem in abolitionist newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and addressed it fervently to the white people of Ohio, writing “And your guilty, sin-cursed Union/ Shall be shaken to its base/ Till ye learn that simple justice/ Is the right of every race.” Poetry has long been the platform for opposing the current condition. As Matt Sandler writes in The Black Romantic Revolution: “Harper and her contemporaries borrowed and transformed the techniques and theories of Romanticism in an effort to bring about the end of slavery.”Poets are vendors of aspiration and are always fashioning together depictions of a better tomorrow, but it’s fair to ask if they are ever truly listened to in political spaces.Maya Angelou read her poem On the Pulse of Morning in 1993, at the inauguration of Bill Clinton. She says: “Lift up your hearts/ Each new hour holds new chances/ For a new beginning./ Do not be wedded forever/ To fear, yoked eternally/ To brutishness./ The horizon leans forward,/ Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Clinton would later go on to instigate the war on drugs and enact the 1994 Crime Bill that would destroy many lives and accelerate the incarceration of African Americans.I have wished many times to see more poets in positions of power, though writing poetry hasn’t made presidents any less barbaric or kinder – as one might think a writer of similes would be. Obama published poems at 19 in a literary review, published in 1982 by Occidental College. Jimmy Carter was the first US president to write a book of poetry, Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems, in 1995. Neither of these men has clean hands.For now, it’s paramount that young poets be given the space, funding and opportunities to be the voices of their communities. They are often spokespeople for those who look and live like them. Don’t wait until a black poet is on the world stage to be inspired by them – often they are not invited, and often they don’t want to endorse state activities by engaging in such ceremonies.Those poems, performed on neighbourhood stages, sitting in anthologies and self-published books, showcased at slams and open mics, have the answers too. There are many young poets like Gorman, who have glistening ideas for tomorrow and deserve to be recognised and propelled into superstardom, or at least just read. Buy their books too.Gorman was an alumnus of empowering youth projects such as Youth Speaks and Urban Word. If you fell in love with Gorman’s inaugural poem, support your local equivalent too. More

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      in Elections

      The inauguration was full of exquisite moments: but what was the best bit? | Emma Brockes

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      Apart from Joe Biden we had Kamala, Lady Gaga, Bernie’s mittens – and Trump suddenly seeming an irrelevanceIt started on Tuesday with nerves in the playground: why weren’t they holding it indoors? No one with sense, we agreed, had an appetite for spectacle, and our systems couldn’t take any more. Donald Trump was going, good riddance, but let’s not tempt fate; besides, on Wednesday morning we all had things to do. After a year of rolling crises, even New Yorkers were feeling meek and defeated. Let’s get this thing over with and try to move on.The most surprising thing about the inauguration this week – apart from the reminder that, when it comes to its national ceremonies, America is if anything even more camp than Britain – was the sheer, irrepressible joy of it. From the first minute to the last there was no containing this thing and nothing – not pragmatism, superstition, trauma fatigue or work – would get in the way of the feeling. “Bye bye Trump, that dummy,” said one of my daughters on Wednesday morning. And so it began. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for Trump | Jason Wilson

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      Now that Donald Trump has gone, what will his ride-or-die supporters in Australian media do? How will they “own the libs” when the libs have their hand at the tiller? Whose ideas will they crib as US conservatism falls deeper into a post-Trump fugue?
      The recent output of high-profile Australian Trumpists suggests that the solution will be to gradually back away from Trump himself, even as they double down on aspects of the Trumpist movement.
      That’s necessary because, even for the diehards and the know-nothings, since the 6th of January, Trump the man has revealed himself to be a spectacularly toxic liability.
      He departed, according to Gallup’s numbers, as the least popular US president in the history of opinion polling: he had the lowest average approval rating over the life of his presidency and, unlike every other president since Roosevelt, he never enjoyed majority approval.
      Most of his lame duck period was spent trying to overturn the election he lost, culminating in his incitement of a mob that stormed the Capitol building in DC. More than 100 people are facing federal charges, with prosecutors alleging some intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials”.
      Canny as ever, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell conceded, a day before Trump left the White House, that that crowd was “fed lies” and “provoked” by Trump.
      Trump spent the balance of his time since the election indulging in, on the one hand, an execution spree in federal prisons and, on the other, handing out pardons to cronies or mercenaries who wantonly murdered Iraqi citizens.
      It seems likely that state attorneys general and federal prosecutors alike will be jostling each other to serve him subpoenas and summonses.
      And a defanged, de-platformed Trump can’t even prosecute his case in the court of public opinion.
      So what’s a branch office culture warrior to do? Defending Trump directly would not only telegraph their moral bankruptcy but demand the kind of ingenuity that subsidised rightwing media neither demands nor rewards. If defending Trump is beyond the powers of a McConnell, it’s surely beyond the likes of a Sky News host?
      Some Australian conservatives simply sprinted from the blast area following the Capitol assault. Former US ambassador and treasurer Joe Hockey, who golfed with Trump through the Muslim ban, Charlottesville, the separation of children from parents, and the Covid-19 disaster, did well enough in his appointed role to earn a reputation as a “Trump whisperer”. But the riot, apparently, was too much to stomach. Hockey was, now, “appalled at the behaviour and incitement” of Trump, his family and his camp followers.
      Hockey followed up with an op-ed in the Nine newspapers which opined that “Biden’s calm but firm response to the attack on the Capitol is the leadership that most Americans want.”
      Perhaps the Capitol violence brought about an authentic change of heart for Hockey. Or perhaps he’s concerned about who will now be buttering his bread. His DC lobbying firm, Bondi Partners – staffed with cherry-picked Australian diplomatic talent – can no longer pitch the possibility of Hockey buttonholing Trump on the links.
      In the less rarefied air of Holt Street, Greg Sheridan also rapidly turned on Trump. Throughout last year’s election campaign, Sheridan held out the prospect of a Trump victory, claiming on 1 November that the “genuine authoritarian threat” came from Biden supporters, since his campaign was backed with the threat of “a plague of violent riots all through the big cities from people who won’t accept democracy if it yields Trump.”
      As late as 14 November, Sheridan was arguing that Trump offered a series of important lessons to conservatives around the world, including that “nationalism and patriotism are powerful forces that galvanise voters in a positive direction”.
      When nationalism and patriotism galvanised voters in the direction of sacking a federal building in order to overturn the election result, Sheridan dropped them like so many hot yams. Suddenly, the deplorables he had previously celebrated as “Trump’s liberty-loving base” were depicted as “clowns, thugs and street-fighting fascists”.
      For those who over-indexed on the president and his movement, and who cannot cut him loose quite so cleanly, it makes some sense to imagine the possibility of Trumpism without Trump. Enter James Morrow, whose work is difficult to talk about without courting paradox: its signature tone can only be described as low-energy histrionics.
      Morrow has shamelessly barracked for Trump both on Sky News and in the Daily Telegraph, and like all such rightwing Trumpists in Australia, he has done so safe in the knowledge that Trump’s failures, such as his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic, will never have any effect on him.
      As the quick spread of coronavirus among White House staff and cronies in October amply showed, those who spruiked for Trump in the United States at least had skin in the game.
      A week ago, in a column addressing the fallout from the Capitol riots, Morrow wrote that “while it is a long bow to say Trump incited the incident (he in fact tried to calm protesters down), it is also true that his conduct since the election will forever mar his achievements from Middle East peace to wage growth.”
      This dead-ender nonsense might be worth a chuckle if it didn’t erase the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands, and the way that Trump and his enablers bequeathed so many domestic and foreign policy nightmares to Biden.
      In the Middle East, Trump simply gave carte blanche to longstanding US clients like Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He approved – and even boasted of – a series of massive arms deal with the kingdom, raking in another half a billion dollars’ worth of blood money in the dying days of his administration.
      Saudi Arabia will use some of these weapons in their ongoing war on their neighbours in Yemen, where 13 million people are at imminent risk of starvation.
      In another parting blow on 10 January, Mike Pompeo declared the kingdom’s enemies, the Houthis, a terrorist group, which will make it even harder to provide them with aid. The Financial Times editorial board – hardly a den of communists – described this as “a cynical effort to scupper Mr Biden’s ability to ease Middle East crises and reset US policy”.
      And whatever wage growth there may have been has been wiped out by the cratering of employment, in an economy whose destruction was hastened by Trump’s fecklessness and lies (remember when he told people to inject bleach?)
      On Thursday Morrow offered a piece of whataboutism that laid much responsibility for what Biden calls America’s “uncivil war” not on conservative media outlets and United States senators who encourage the baseless belief that the November election was stolen, but on “radical campus politics … violent demonstrations in American cities that were often dismissed as ‘mostly peaceful protests’ [and] social media platforms doing everything they can to silence conservative voices”.
      Having read that, it was diverting to see Morrow in the same article criticising the prose style of Biden’s inauguration speech.
      It’s embarrassing, of course, that this kind of commentary occupies such a prominent place in Australia’s national political discussion. But it’s just one example of the kind of thing that would have no home, and no constituency, without the active subsidy of News Corporation. That company’s role, over decades, in bringing us the disaster of Trumpism cannot be overstated.
      From my place in the US, which I have not been able to safely leave for a year due to an unchecked pandemic, I can say unambiguously that the Trump administration was incompetent, racist and corrupt from the moment it was sworn in, as many predicted it would be. We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for a disastrous presidency until the second that it became inconvenient to be seen to do so.
      We shouldn’t let them forget, either. More

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      in Elections

      How Amanda Gorman became the voice of a new American era

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      On Wednesday in Washington DC, a striking young woman stood at a podium on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by the country’s leaders, who were masked against the pandemic. She was unmasked, at a safe distance, so she could speak with resonance and force, spreading her enthusiastic vision without danger. She radiated joy, conviction and purpose as she declaimed the poem she had written to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th president of the US: The Hill We Climb. Tears sprang from the eyes of many listeners, those weary and wary from four years of domestic discord, whether they sat on folding chairs at the Capitol, or on easy chairs in their homes. Hearing her words, they felt hope for the future.That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman. She is America’s first national youth poet laureate and, at 22, she also is the youngest poet accorded the honour of delivering the presidential inaugural poem. But despite her youth, Gorman’s assurance and bearing made her seem to stand outside time. Erect as a statue, her skin gleaming as if burnished, her hair cornrowed, banded with gold and drawn tightly back into a red satin Prada headband, worn high like a tiara, she evoked what poet Kae Tempest calls the “Brand New Ancients”: the divinity that walks among us in the present day. According to Greek mythology, nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, inspire creative endeavour, with five devoted to different kinds of poetry – epic, romantic, lyric, comic or pastoral and sacred. Gorman suggested a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.Gorman told the New York Times that she had not wanted to dwell on the rancour, racism and division of America’s four years under the Trump administration: she wanted to “use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal”. That way would require action, her poem declares: “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.”Gorman knows the importance of taking action to make the change you want to see. Raised in Los Angeles by a single mother, Joan Wicks, a middle-school English teacher, Gorman overcame daunting obstacles to forge her path. Amanda and her twin sister Gabrielle, an activist and filmmaker, were born prematurely. In kindergarten, the future poet was diagnosed with an auditory disorder that gave her a speech impediment. When she was in third grade, a teacher introduced her to poetry, and it was through writing and reciting poetry that she found her voice. She found a role model in the poet Maya Angelou, whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings reminded her of her own life, she remarked in one interview: “[Angelou] overcame years of not speaking up for herself, all for the love of poetry.”Gorman has presidential plans. ‘I am working on hashtags,’ she told the Harvard Gazette. ‘Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar’As Gorman struggled to improve her spoken fluency, she also strove for social justice. For her, it was clear from the start that expression was to be both poetic and political. In 2014, at the age of 16, she founded a non-profit organisation to support poetry workshops and youth advocacy leadership skills, called One Pen One Page. The following year, she published her first poetry book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, and went to Harvard to study sociology. (She graduated in 2020.) Her clarity of expression received a turbo boost from musical theatre while she was in college, with the arrival of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, whose lyrics she memorised and recited (the song Aaron Burr, Sir helped her pronounce her “R”s, she has said).In the spring of her sophomore year in 2017, she was named America’s first national youth poet laureate, an honour that took her and her poetry to public events across the country. At one of these, held at the Library of Congress, Dr Jill Biden heard her read a poem she had written in the wake of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, titled In This Place (An American Lyric). Three years later, Biden, as first lady-elect, suggested the young poet for the inaugural honour.In the first week of January, Gorman was halfway through writing The Hill We Climb when a mob of angry Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in an attempt to violently overturn the election result. She finished the poem in the hours after the melee, undeterred, with that jarring tumult as backdrop.On inauguration day, Gorman wore a ring depicting a caged bird, a gift from Oprah Winfrey that attests to the link the young poet represents between the past and the future. It not only summoned thoughts of the poet’s first inspiration, Angelou; it reminded anyone looking for portents that Angelou, as the US poet laureate, had also recited a poem to a new president on the Capitol steps: Bill Clinton, in 1993. One day, Gorman may be the audience, not the author, of such a poem: she has presidential plans. “I am working on hashtags,” she told the Harvard Gazette. “Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar.” The last lines of The Hill We Climb, containing an intended echo of Miranda’s Hamilton, constitute a poetic battle cry: “We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”Her words not only electrified Washington, they have prompted a surge of admiration in the public at large. That same day, her two forthcoming books were Amazon’s top two bestsellers. Instagram feeds flash continuously with images of her triumphal stand at the Capitol; op-eds across the country have called for poetry education programmes in schools, and television news broadcast highlights of her performance hour after hour – lyric adrenaline bursts to reanimate democracy.Gorman has appeared on many of these news programmes. On one, Good Morning America on ABC, Miranda made a surprise appearance to congratulate her. “The right words in the right order can change the world; and you proved that yesterday,” he told her. “Keep changing the world, one word at a time.”As if anyone could stop her. As she writes in her forthcoming book, Change Sings:
      I can hear change hummingIn its loudest, proudest song.I don’t fear change coming,And so I sing along. More