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      This is what happens when the War on Terror is turned inward, on America | Hamilton Nolan

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      A strange and necessary ingredient of America’s descent towards fascism is that it will have little impact on the majority of people. As militarized federal agents are deployed into major cities to snatch protesters and charge them with harsh federal crimes for daring to deface the ruling party’s monuments, most Americans will continue living their normal lives with no discernible changes, at least for the time being. People wake up and eat breakfast and spend their days doing mundane tasks in fascist countries, too.If there was ever a tipping point, we are past it. Trying to stare hard at the daily news to determine the exact point at which we slip into fascism is like staring at a baby to see when it turns into an adult. By the time you perceive it, it’s already happened. It is important to understand that the crackdown phase that we are now in – the unaccountable government forces, the riot police, the teargas, the targeted political prosecutions that will come next – are not something new, but something old. This isn’t about Donald Trump. This is about America, baby. This is what we do.Trying to determine when we slip into fascism is like staring at a baby to see when it turns into an adult. Once you perceive it, it’s already happenedTrump, a fool ruled by impulse rather than strategy, did not build the fearsome machine of government oppression that is now being aimed at his political opponents. This machine was systematically assembled and lovingly tended to by generations of presidents before him – Democratic, Republican, Whig. Trump is only broadening its aperture. All of these tools have been sharpened on the bones of Native Americans and Black people and immigrants and Muslims overseas. America has always needed someone to oppress. Mostly so that we could steal their stuff, but also so that the rest of us didn’t turn against one another. This country has managed to avoid a class war by giving poor white people an array of minorities to abuse, a trick that has benefited rich white people for centuries. We have used injustice not just as a way to get ahead, but as a release valve. Our leaders have long calculated that it is safer to subjugate and mistreat a minority of the population than to risk dissatisfaction in the majority. In doing so, the government has become very adept at creating enemies and wielding power against them in flagrant shows of force.These are trivial observations, basic facts that will only be disputed by those who are destined to land on the side of fascism anyhow. The question is what they mean for our present moment, which is distinguished not by the existence of government oppression but by its direction. We are finding out what happens when the war on terror is turned inward on ourselves. In addition to the federal agents already in Portland, more are coming to Chicago, Albuquerque, and Kansas City; that may well be just the beginning of a national rollout. “Protecting federal property” and “maintaining law and order” are twin fig leaves wafting in a cloud of teargas. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a White House-controlled paramilitary and domestic surveillance service unaccountable to anyone except Trump and his loyalists. (If we’re being honest, this moment has been inevitable since DHS was panic-created in the days after the September 11 attacks. If there is any more fascist word than “homeland”, I haven’t heard it.)The basic logic behind gun control is that if there are a bunch of guns lying around, sooner or later someone will get shot. The same holds true for the security state. If you build it, it will eventually come for you. Cloaked in the banality of federal bureaucracy, we have tolerated the creation of a terrifying set of powers that now rest in the small hands of a man who has been waiting his entire life to take revenge on each and every enemy who has slighted him. Barack Obama sat in the White House for eight years and did nothing to dismantle this bureaucracy of soldier-cops. He was too busy using it in foreign drone wars. It’s too seductive to have that power, when you are the one who controls it. Now a worse president has it, and it will be turned, at last, against a bigger chunk of us than ever before.The trick now is convincing that tranquil majority that their interests are more aligned with the protesters than with the cops in fatiguesEvery new outrage is a test of what we will tolerate. If the government can roll out troops to a large swath of major cities and shoot the eyes out of protesters with rubber bullets all under the guise of stopping some kids from spray-painting some courthouse, it is a fairly good indicator that the spirit of the broader American public will not rouse itself to stand in the way of fascism’s tightening grip. In a nation this big, you can make 100 million people official Enemies of the State and still leave a comfortable majority blissfully unaffected. The trick now is convincing that tranquil, all-American majority that their interests are actually more aligned with the protesters wielding spray-paint outside the courthouse than with the militarized cops in fatigues.That shouldn’t be an impossible task. When there is actual justice being done inside the courthouses, the protesters and the storm troopers will both disappear. More

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      Chad Wolf: who is the Trump official leading the crackdown in Portland?

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      Chad Wolf wasn’t Donald Trump’s first pick for homeland security secretary – he wasn’t even his fifth or sixth.But now he is the figurehead for the federal government’s intervention in Portland, where his department’s militarized agents have been recorded pushing protesters into unmarked vehicles.When criticism of the government’s tactics flared late last week, Wolf tweeted: “Our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch.”The tweet has since been deleted – probably because the embedded photo was unauthorized – but it focused attention on Wolf, a former lobbyist who has ignored calls from local government officials in Oregon to remove federal agents from the city.The state’s governor, Kate Brown, said last week that in a phone call, Wolf’s “response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes”.Such an allegation tracks with how Donald Trump has used the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has become more politicized because of its role in enforcing the president’s hardline immigration policies.The department was founded in 2002 in response to 9/11. Its 240,000 staff are also charged with overseeing natural disaster response, anti-terrorism efforts and cybersecurity.Since becoming acting DHS secretary in November 2019, Wolf has denied there is a problem with systemic racism in US law enforcement and downplayed the threat of Covid-19. He has also overseen the implementation of extreme immigration restrictions the White House claimed would stem the spread of coronavirus.Wolf is the fifth person to serve in the role under Trump in an acting or confirmed capacity, while George W Bush and Barack Obama each had three people in the job over the course of their two presidential terms. Wolf was named to the post only after two of the president’s preferred candidates were ruled ineligible to take up the job.The Plano, Texas, native moved to Washington DC after graduating from Southern Methodist University. He was an architect of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and left DHS in 2005 to become a lobbyist.After more than a decade lobbying, Wolf returned to the department to work for the Trump administration, where he has held multiple roles. The most glaring item on his resume, until Portland, was his central role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy while working as the chief of staff for then DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.At a June 2019 hearing, Wolf testified that he learned about family separation in April 2018, just before it was publicly announced.“My job was not to determine whether it was the right or wrong policy,” Wolf testified. “My job at the time was to ensure that the secretary had all the information that [Nielsen] needed.”Months later, NBC News revealed that Wolf included family separation on a list of 16 policy recommendations he drafted for senior department figures in December 2017.Wolf’s name is on the list, and Trump approved the policy, but it was Nielsen who was the face of family separation. Her dismissal last year was emblematic of the Trump administration’s chaotic rule over the agency.Nielsen was pushed out of the job in April 2019, during a purge of senior homeland security officials orchestrated by the White House adviser Stephen Miller.Miller, who has white supremacist views, has an outsized role in the agency and has filled it with allies comfortable supporting his anti-immigration agenda. He is known to call and meet with junior staff to gather information or circumvent their managers.Miller, like Trump, is also a proponent of leaving “acting” in a senior official’s title instead of getting department leaders, such as Wolf, confirmed by the Senate. Trump has said doing so gives him “more flexibility”. Research has shown cabinet secretaries in temporary positions have less stature in the department and are less able to implement their own agendas.Skipping the confirmation process also allows Miller and Trump to insert their favored individuals into senior roles, without intervention from Congress.One of two people deemed ineligible to be DHS secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, is now acting deputy secretary of the agency and is performing the duties of director of US Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS), the agency which handles immigration administration.In the past decade, Cuccinelli has said homosexuality is “intrinsically wrong”, been tied to anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ+ campaigners and was criticized for a comment that seemed to compare rats to immigrants.On Monday, Cuccinelli said the use of unmarked vehicles to pick protesters off the streets was “so common it’s barely worth discussion”.Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote to Trump in November warning that DHS vacancies threatened government accountability and national security.Similar fears are now being shared by DHS staff and former senior officials because of the government’s deployment in Portland.Tom Ridge, the first homeland security secretary, said DHS was not created to be “the president’s personal militia” in an interview with SiriusXM on Tuesday. Ridge said: “It would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention into one of my cities.” More

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      Trump says he aims to cancel Republican convention in Jacksonville, Florida – live

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      President says it is ‘not the right time’ for big event in city
      US coronavirus cases surpass 4 million
      Federal agents’ actions draw Portland into national debate
      AOC condemns culture of accepting violence against women
      Trump ties climbing Covid-19 cases to protests
      Trump announces ‘surge’ of officers into cities
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      Trump is unleashing authoritarianism on US cities – just in time for the election | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      The essence of fascism, and authoritarianism more generally, is violent spectacle. This is why uniformed security forces and the violence they unleash are venerated in authoritarian regimes. They represent the unity, strength and virility of the nation – not least when they are suppressing dissenters and undesirables who they believe threaten these attributes.Perhaps luckily – it might give him ideas – Donald Trump knows precious little history. But he understands this dynamic on a gut level. He saw through all of modern conservatism’s cant about rights and liberties and saw that its beating heart is authoritarian. Rights and liberties exist for people like them, not outsiders and dissenters. The slightest hint that the state might come for their liberties and they’ll cry bloody murder. But provide them with the spectacle of uniformed officers purging the nation of undesirables, and they’ll cheer along. They might even help out.Only the thirst for violent spectacle can explain the president’s decision in recent days to send federal security forces – including paramilitary teams from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – to Portland and elsewhere. Clad in the same woodland camouflage that American troops wear into combat, this is precisely how they are supposed to be understood: as soldiers suppressing America’s enemies.This theater is not being staged for the benefit of people who live in the affected areas. Democratic-run, minority-populated cities which can be portrayed as plagued by anarchy and lawlessness are a much more useful political foil for Trump than peaceful, prosperous metropolises. And predictably enough, the appearance of paramilitary federal security forces – who have reportedly violated the rights of protesters and shot one in the head with a riot munition – has inflamed rather than calmed the situation.The real audience is to be found on one of the few things Donald Trump truly understands: television. As other authoritarian leaders have understood, television is the perfect medium both for knitting a country together and for tearing it apart. Simplistic in its framing and visceral in its impact, it recreates far-away events right in our living room.This can be positive, such as during the civil rights movement, when images of bloody beatings and fire hoses made plain to those outside the south just how far America had strayed from its promise. But it can also be used to blow out of proportion, to try to convince Americans who couldn’t find Portland on a map that events there pose an existential threat to their country. Replayed endlessly on screen, protests and violence which are mostly limited to a few blocks of a city far away become a symptom of a country “under siege” from “far-left fascism”.This is simply the latest example of Trump’s attempt to benefit from authoritarian spectacle. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he ordered a surge of US military forces to the southern border in order to protect it from “invasion” by “caravans” of asylum seekers traveling from Central America. Prohibited by law from making arrests, the soldiers busied themselves ferrying CBP agents around in helicopters and laying barbed wire. Trump got the television images he craved, creating the sense among sections of the electorate that they were under existential threat from hordes of brown outsiders, and that Trump was their brave protector. Once the election was over, he scarcely ever uttered the word “caravan” again.Watching the same pattern unfold in American cities themselves is deeply concerning. It also demonstrates the links that exist between the treatment of outsiders and the treatment of those deemed internal enemies. Just as the military support CBP at the southern border, now the border patrol itself appears in the heartland to suppress dissent and unrest, while its officials condemn fellow Americans as “anarchists” and “terrorists”. What this drives home is not just the interchangeability of America’s security forces, but also of their targets.For the purposes of the spectacle, this interchangeability is central. Heroic soldiers are a staple of authoritarian imagery because they seem to embody the nation, united under a strong leader. To oppose either the soldier or the leader is hence to oppose the nation itself. Trump – who spent years trying to organize a military parade in Washington DC in order to encourage just such an association – understands this. Sending the same camouflage-clad forces to battle both America’s external enemies and its internal dissenters is supposed to send the message that ultimately, the latter are just as dangerous to the nation as the former.As Trump has already revealed, this message is central to his case for re-election. Between now and November, he can be expected to use and abuse his power over America’s paramilitary security forces to try to bolster this case. It is clear that many conservative politicians and voters who claim to believe in individual rights and to fear abuses of federal power are now too deeply invested in authoritarianism, too convinced of the depravity of their opponents, to restrain him. Once their power is taken away peacefully at the ballot box, reforms to the behemoth which America’s security apparatus has become will be vital. Without them, there is no telling how far a future president might take the spectacle of violence. More

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      Portland mayor teargassed by federal agents at protest

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      Portland

      Democrat Ted Wheeler gives backing to protesters against ‘Trump’s occupation of this city’

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      Portland mayor teargassed by federal agents during protest – video

      Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has accused Donald Trump of conducting “urban warfare” after he was caught up in the teargassing of protesters by federal forces sent to quell Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city.
      But Wheeler, who was left gasping for air by the teargas, was himself the target of anger and mockery from activists who accused him of sending the city police to attack other protests.
      “I’m not going to lie. It stings. It’s hard to breathe, and I can tell you with 100% honesty I saw nothing that provoked this response,” Wheeler said as he stood with protesters outside the federal courthouse that has become the focus of confrontation.
      “This is flat-out urban warfare, and it’s being brought on the people of this country by the president of the United States, and it’s got to stop now.”
      Protests into the early hours of Thursday morning were more contained than in previous nights after the authorities were finally able to erect a fence around the courthouse that could withstand attack by demonstrators.
      Protesters quickly tore down barriers on other nights but the stronger fortification kept them from reaching the front of the courthouse which meant members of the Department of Homeland Security taskforce sent by Trump largely remained behind the fence firing teargas over it.
      But the standoff showed how far the federal forces have fallen short of the president’s pledge to restore order in Portland, a liberal city with a long history of street protest.
      The DHS taskforce is largely trapped inside the courthouse grounds with the protesters generally controlling the streets outside.
      Earlier in the evening, Wheeler, who as mayor is also Portland’s police commissioner, attempted to reassure protesters at a large and peaceful demonstration that he was committed to police reform. But he was met with jeers and forced to admit that change had not come quick enough.
      “Obviously we have a long way to go,” Wheeler told the crowd.
      Large numbers of people at the demonstration remained sceptical of the man derided in graffiti as “Ded Wheeler” and “Fed Wheeler”.
      “He’s two-faced,” said Jennifer Bradley, a grandmother who joined the Wall of Moms formed to act as a shield between the protesters and the police. “Wheeler’s been on the side of the police when it was attacking Black Lives Matters before the feds arrived. I don’t think he’s done anything to support this movement.”
      A daily ritual has evolved in which thousands of protesters rally to the Black Lives Matter cause toward sundown in front of Portland’s justice center which holds the police department and county jail. More