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      Weak, small and reckless: how Ron DeSantis, Republican Napoleon, met his Waterloo

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      Ron DeSantis has revealed the next phase of his plan to win the Republican presidential nomination by firing 30% of his campaign staff. He has also dismissed a staffer, Nate Hochman, a prominent conservative writer, for creating a video that features a notorious Nazi symbol. A pro-DeSantis political action committee has used artificial intelligence to generate a video in which Trump’s voice trashes the Republican governor of Iowa. A recent poll showed Trump ahead of DeSantis in Iowa by 27 points.After his campaign declared he was entering his “insurgent” stage as “the underdog”, DeSantis disappeared on a donor-provided private jet, his usual mode of travel. Several billionaire donors, however, previously enamored of DeSantis’s “electability”, gave notice that they are jumping overboard without the lifeboat of another candidate. Rupert Murdoch withdrew his mandate of heaven, not so privately dubbing DeSantis a “loser”. Two DeSantis fundraisers in the exclusive Hamptons were scrapped for lack of interest and a third was poorly attended.To steady his wobbly backers, DeSantis issued a dramatic statement, his first announcement of a potential appointment to indicate the kind of administration he would form as president. His choice, another unsteady presidential aspirant, the anti-vaxxer Democrat Robert F Kennedy Jr, to “sic” on the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Members of RFK Jr’s revered family have vehemently denounced him for propounding the antisemitic canard that Jews possess some sort of genetic immunity to Covid, unlike “Caucasians and Black people”, and for suggesting that the disease was “ethnically targeted”. By floating Kennedy’s name, DeSantis had shown that his idea of national unity begins with a government of all conspiracy theorists, regardless of party label.DeSantis capped his reset with a historic declaration, making him the first presidential candidate since before the civil war explicitly to defend the supposed benefits of slavery. (This includes Strom Thurmond, the senator who ran as a pro-segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948.) Florida’s new academic standards for the teaching of Black history include the claim slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”, a line some critics have likened to John C Calhoun’s description of slavery, in the years immediately before the civil war, as “a positive good”.DeSantis waded into the controversy with his trademark flat spottiness, remarking, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Say what you will about human bondage; at least the enslaved could leverage slavery’s benefits down the line. The closest any political figures, much less any presidential candidates, have come in this century to DeSantis’s strained justification for slavery was the refusal of eight Republican senators in 2005 to sign a formal apology for the Senate’s long “failure to enact anti-lynching legislation”.In the immediate aftermath of DeSantis’s latest antics, Trump led him in various polls by margins ranging from 24% to 43%.“What’s going on?” asked the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “There was a lot of optimism about you running for president early in the year … What happened?”DeSantis nervously laughed.“These are narratives,” he explained. “The media does not want me to be the nominee.”“Narratives” is among DeSantis’s favorite words to assert, without further explanation, how “the corporate media” and “the woke” control politics. The “narratives” are a looming phantom enemy. It would be unfair to accuse DeSantis of grasping Foucault’s post-structuralist ideas about the expression of power through discourse. His clotted and fractured political language is related to abstruse theory the way his rudimentary distortions of history are related to history. But his understanding of political dynamics is even dimmer and more self-defeating.DeSantis’s slot as the No 2 in a Republican field of implausible bit players settles his fate as the chief non-challenger. He is inevitable, so long as his utility lasts, as the guarantor of Trump’s nomination. He is the non-viable alternative, a void who occupies unmovable political space. His function is to stymie every other non-contender, none of whom can dislodge Trump themselves. DeSantis blots out the rest. If Trump is the sun, he’s the lunar eclipse.DeSantis has vaulted into second place at least partly because the only other two notable candidates are despised within their party. The former vice-president Mike Pence will almost certainly be the decisive witness in Trump’s trial on January 6 offenses, testifying in the courtroom, facing Trump sitting at the defendant’s table. Pence has no wiggle room politically, despite his state of denial of how it will end. “Hang Mike Pence!” But, imagining himself as president, Pence did manage to criticize DeSantis for his ideological swerve.“To be clear,” he said, “pro-abortion Democrats like RFK Jr would not even make the list” of his potential appointees.The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, unlike Pence, is utterly without illusions. Christie has an intimate, gritty knowledge of New York, at the nexus of greasy real estate, the mafia and Roy Cohn – the underworld from which Trump emerged. Christie is a former top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. His aunt’s husband’s brother was a ranking member of the Genovese crime family.“He’s never run against somebody from New Jersey who understands what the New York thing is and what he’s all about,” Christie says about Trump.Christie has what the wise-guys would call “motive”, for it was Christie who put Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House chief adviser, in prison.He explained: “If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”In turn, Kushner has waged an unrelenting vendetta. In his own turn, Christie now questions the basis of Kushner’s post-Trump administration fortune.“Jared Kushner, six months after he leaves the White House, gets two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. What was Jared Kushner doing in the Middle East? … He was put there to make those relationships and then he cashed in on those relationship when he left the office.”Kushner’s aunt and uncle, who have a poisonous relationship with Jared and Charles, have maxed out contributions to Christie’s campaign. Unlike DeSantis, Christie does not want to edge out Trump in order to be Trump. He wants to prosecute him, as “a liar and a coward”. The fundamental difference between DeSantis and Christie is between the clueless and the clued-in. Among Republicans, though, Christie is polling at 3%.DeSantis is the only actual contender against Trump, and he’s not a contender. He’s trapped in a hopeless conundrum. Circumstances may be beyond his control, but whatever the circumstances he handles them poorly. Every time DeSantis turns the spotlight on himself, the play goes haywire. Whenever he gets the cue, he always hits the wrong note. Playing himself, he’s playing someone trying to imitate another character. While he can never be more like Trump than Trump, he doesn’t really know who Trump is. Only Christie is willing to make the case that Trump is a criminal sociopath. When Trump received his target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating the January 6 coup, DeSantis repeated standard Republican talking points, calculated to support Trump, that the US justice department is “weaponized” and “criminalizing political differences”. Joining the chorus, DeSantis faded into the indistinguishable background, in an exercise of the party closing ranks. His mealy-mouthed words showed him to be the weak disciple.If he were to echo Christie about Trump as a gangster, DeSantis would stand apart from the partisan pack. But then he would be a copy of Christie and earn the enmity of most of the party. Instead, in his crabbed understanding, he conceives of Trump as solely a mean-spirited rightwinger who can be gotten around by being meaner and more reactionary. The more he tries to move to Trump’s right, however, the more he exposes himself as a literal-minded copycat incapable of arousing the depth of emotional devotion that Trump enjoys.DeSantis diminished himself from the start by chasing Trump’s shadow. There is no rightful succession to a cult of personality, and certainly not with the absence of personality. Being a messiah is a one-at-a-time business. The false messiah who turns out not to be the second coming typically winds up being castigated as a fraudulent betrayer and burned at the stake. Christie presents the only true alternative model, which is to purge both the cult and the personality, to deal with crime and punishment. That herculean task would require expunging most of the Republican party. DeSantis owes his career to the Trump party, not the old defunct Republican party. He has sought to become Trump after Trump, only to have to confront the existence of Trump being Trump. So, DeSantis has reduced himself to a troll.Trolling is not merely one of DeSantis’s characteristics; it’s become his principal one. DeSantis struggles to establish an identity through his culture war on identity politics. Yet he lacks both culture and a distinct identity. His battles are stunts, a series of negative projections, at best an accumulation of fears that do not add up. Suing Disney over its acknowledgment of gay people, banning books, gutting universities, prohibiting abortion, shipping unsuspecting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, and slipping into the curriculum a good word for slavery have only prompted DeSantis to try out another personality larger than himself as a summing up.“We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations,” he has declared. “We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”It is also where its governor stages an unselfconscious satire of Winston Churchill’s defiant speech against the Nazis in which the performer does not recognize his comic absurdity.DeSantis’s inconsistency is his one constancy. On issues, he has an extensive and recurring history of flip-flopping on federal disaster relief, privatizing social security and Medicare, aid to Ukraine, and so forth. But his deeper problem is his failure to connect, which pressures him to flounder and spiral in a never-ending search for a convincing image. His behavior demonstrates a pattern of impatience, anxiety over things not happening exactly as he wishes, his frustration building, insistent that people do as he says, obliviousness to their signals, angering easily, and an impulsive inability to cope with criticism. On a campaign stop in New Hampshire in June, when a reporter asked if he intended to take questions from the audience, he snapped: “What are you talking about? Are you blind? Are you blind?” But it was not the reporter who was tone-deaf.DeSantis’s wife, Casey, a former Jacksonville TV host, is his producer. His first defining ad, in 2018, in his first campaign for governor, depicted him as a good father following the guidance of the great father-figure: Donald Trump. It began with Casey.“Ron loves playing with the kids,” she said. DeSantis played with blocks with his infant son and said, “Build the Wall!” “He reads stories,” said Casey. “Then,” said DeSantis, holding Trump’s The Art of the Deal and his baby on his lap, “Mr Trump said, “You’re fired! I love that part.” “People say Ron is all Trump,” Casey chimed in, “but he is so much more.” DeSantis leant over the crib to see his baby lying in a jumper stenciled, “Make America Great Again.” “Big league, so good,” Ron said.DeSantis was a little-known backbencher and member of the House Freedom Caucus, lagging in the polls, running behind the establishment candidate, the agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam. Suddenly, Trump leaped in to endorse him as a “special person who has done an incredible job”.“My opponent’s running on an endorsement,” Putnam said. “No plan, no vision, no agenda – just an endorsement. Just hanging on to the coattails.”Putnam was correct – and DeSantis won the primary by about 20 points. He barely squeaked by in the general election, defeating his Democratic opponent by 0.4%, a razor-thin margin, but Trump’s endorsement again made the difference. Running on the image of the dutiful Maga dad, DeSantis owed his elevation to his worship of Big Daddy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter DeSantis’s landslide re-election in 2022, preparing his run for the Republican presidential nomination, his wife cast him in a new TV ad as a Tom Cruise-a-like knock-off from the movie Top Gun: Maverick, donning the leather bomber jacket and the Ray-Ban sunglasses to teach the “Top Gov” class.“This is your governor speaking,” he said, to invisible students. “Today’s training exercise, dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”Cut. He walked to a fighter jet marked “Top Gov”.“Don’t accept their narrative … I’ve just disabused you of their narrative.”The whoosh of a jet taking off.In his identity cosplay, DeSantis is the heroic pilot willing and able to take on the enemy. Every element of his alibi for his subsequent nosediving campaign can be found in this video: “Corporate media … their narrative …” His latest excuses imitate his previous, empty scripted self. He’s replicating his facsimiles.A few months later, his wife oversaw production of yet another TV ad in which God was now Ron’s co-pilot. She tweeted it out, under the cover line, “I love you, Ron.” Fortunately, so does God, essentially DeSantis’s executive producer, who was mentioned 10 times within 90 seconds in the black-and-white video.While morning light and rolling waves showed the finger of God, Casey DeSantis’s photograph appeared four times. “And on the eighth day,” the deep voiceover explained, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.” DeSantis stood before an American flag. “God said, ‘I need someone to be strong,’” who can “advocate truth in the midst of hysteria” against “the conventional wisdom” and take “the arrows”.“God said: ‘I need a family man, a man who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his daughter says she wants to do what Dad does.’ So God made a fighter.”In this narrative, DeSantis is more than divinely inspired. He is the chosen one. The will of God is revealed. The Almighty has cast his vote. But the basso profundo voice expressing God’s anointment and the narration itself duplicate in precise tone – and partly word for word – an old routine of the long-ago conservative radio broadcaster and huckster Paul Harvey, a chum of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the FBI director J Edgar Hoover.Harvey’s masterpiece of kitsch, “God Made A Farmer,” ends with a riff.“God said, ‘I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs … who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life ‘doing what Dad does.’ So God made a farmer.”The DeSantis ad is a divine revelation of a reproduction of old-time corn. Plagiarizing the identity from Harvey’s spiel, the salt of the earth is transformed into the holy warrior.DeSantis’s opening act of his campaign was to establish his image as a strongman to displace Trump. His strategy was to belittle and hurt the helpless – Black people, migrants, women, gay people, trans people, academics – targets he wraps up as “the woke”. His antipathy seemed to come naturally. His chief adviser in his Florida kulturkampf has been a prolific conservative activist and would-be scholar, Christopher Rufo, who claimed to have a master’s degree from Harvard. In fact, he attended Harvard Extension School, a separate, “open enrollment” branch. Rufo was another case of an overextended identity. After Rufo advised DeSantis to trash the New College of Florida, a public institution, for its “focus on social justice”, DeSantis installed him as a trustee.DeSantis’s victorious crusades over his vulnerable woke foes led him to lay siege to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The little Napoleon’s attack in Orlando, however, began his downfall. As a ploy, taking on Disney less resembled misleading a bunch of migrants to board a flight to Martha’s Vineyard than marching through the Russian winter. DeSantis had thoughtlessly miscalculated, out of false bravado.The aspiring authoritarian tries to seize absolute authority through contempt for civil authority. But once he stumbled into his quagmire with Disney, one of the largest employers in Florida, DeSantis’s theatrics did not seem so clever in beating the woke and owning the libs. His imitation of Trump’s defiant exploitation for political and personal advantage hit a snag. Against Disney, DeSantis trapped himself into a conflict with a more popular and powerful adversary. His stalling upset his image-building to inflate himself above Trump. He made himself appear weak, small and reckless.When his stunts ceased working to make him seem big, DeSantis’s stature fell to earth. His obvious ploys are increasingly seen, even by his erstwhile donors, as his vain effort to define his identity. His battles with “the woke” are insignificant in comparison with the Deep State Trump conjures to fight. DeSantis is too insubstantial to be attacked at the same level. Trump’s high and low crimes are integral to who he is. DeSantis’s carnival acts are contrived sideshows. Trump has been consistently malicious, malignant, deceptive, cruel, vengeful and selfish. This is the character his followers adore. DeSantis is both cruel and a bad mime of cruelty. His gestures at viciousness in the light of Trump’s vast villainy cast him as a follower seeking to be the leader.Trump knows no limits in committing any offense, personal or legal, while DeSantis is bound and driven by his stringent limitations. He’s a static figure. He launches spectacles of abuse in compensation for his drab and detached personality. They are his substitute to generate an interest he does not have intrinsically. He is seemingly incapable of operating apart from his stunts because of his deficit of being. He fills his vacuum with barbs, insults and cruelties to prove his strength in a strained effort to draw attention away from his nullity. He tries to manufacture authenticity through these forced gestures that rebound to illustrate his artificiality and highlight the inescapability of the all-too real Trump.Trump has sniffed out DeSantis’s weakness, his “no personality”, as Trump has put it. Searching for a demeaning nickname, he tried out “Meatball Ron” before settling on “Ron DeSanctimonious”, inspired by the “God made a fighter” ad. He doesn’t take him seriously as a contender. The trait that rankles him is disloyalty.Trump lifted DeSantis from the dregs of the House Freedom Caucus to be his Florida Man. It was not for any special qualities that DeSantis displayed, other than slavish devotion to Trump. Trump never saw him as a successor. Trump never thinks of successors. Narcissists don’t have successors. They don’t groom anybody to follow in their footsteps. DeSantis attempted to groom himself as if he were groomed by Trump, in order to surpass Trump without disturbing Trump. He was acting out a unique Oedipus simplex. It did not work.“And, now Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games,” Trump tweeted, right after the 2022 midterm elections. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.” Trump recounted in detail how he saved the hapless DeSantis from oblivion during the Republican primary of 2018. “I said, listen Ron, you’re so dead that if Abraham Lincoln and George Washington came back from the dead, and if they put their hands and hearts together and prayed … nothing is going to change. Ron, you are gone.” Trump now refers to him as “very disloyal”.DeSantis’s failed attempts to outflank Trump ideologically on the woke front moved him to a new phase, launching a contest to defeat Trump as a sexual emblem of superior virility. In response, Trump collected gossip, rumors and innuendo. On 20 March, Trump tweeted a photo of DeSantis when he was a high school teacher, at a party with teenaged girls. “Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!)”.DeSantis answered with an ad accusing Trump as “the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate” LGBTQ+ Pride month and felt comfortable around trans people – in contrast to DeSantis, who touted his “draconian” record to “threaten trans existence”. The ad was weirdly filled with fleeting images of young male actors from American Psycho, Troy, Peaky Blinders and The Wolf of Wall Street – as if a glancing view of Brad Pitt proved Trump was weak on woke. Interspersed between shots of Pitt as Achilles in a Greek war helmet were rerun images of “Top Gov” DeSantis in his bomber jacket, playing at being Tom Cruise in Top Gun.But DeSantis’s bizarre effort to nail Trump as a dangerous sexual hypocrite only created puzzlement. Of course Trump is a hypocrite. Trump is also the living embodiment of toxic masculinity, however decayed it may be. He remains the Maga-mega male idol. He has been, after all, found liable for sexual assault, and a judge stated he is a rapist. Trump proclaimed his credo in the infamous Access Hollywood tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” DeSantis neither does “anything” – nor is he a star.Nor is DeSantis in peril from the law, another deficit. With each indictment, Trump’s support rises and solidifies. The indictments prove to true believers he is the true enemy of their enemies. Unindicted, DeSantis cannot out-Trump Trump. DeSantis’s pledge to “Make America Florida” is only a promise that he can transcend being a provincial would-be dictator. Trump has and will always beat him to the subversion of American institutions – and on a far larger scale.In his ad swiping at Trump for being responsible for the gay movement, DeSantis claimed his bona fides by flashing leftwing denunciations of himself. “DeSantis is public enemy No 1”. “DeSantis is evil”. Showing he is hated more than Trump, he hopes, might be the ultimate stunt, the one that makes Trump No 2.DeSantis’s cruelty may be genuine, but he’s a minor fiend, not Satan himself. Abandon all hope. More

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      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

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      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      ‘A deranged ploy’: how Republicans are fueling the disinformation wars

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      A federal judge in Louisiana ruled last week that a wide range of Biden administration officials could not communicate with social media companies about content moderation issues, and in a lengthy opinion described the White House’s outreach to platforms as “almost dystopian” and reminiscent of “an Orwellian ministry of truth”.The ruling, which was delivered by the Trump-appointed judge Terry Doughty, was a significant milestone in a case that Republicans have pushed as proof that the Biden administration is attempting to silence conservative voices. It is also the latest in a wider rightwing campaign to weaken attempts at stopping false information and conspiracy theories from proliferating online, one that has included framing disinformation researchers and their efforts as part of a wide-reaching censorship regime.Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana have sued Biden administration officials, the GOP-controlled House judiciary committee has demanded extensive documents from researchers studying disinformation, and rightwing media has attacked academics and officials who monitor social media platforms. Many of the researchers involved have faced significant harassment, leading to fears of a chilling effect on speaking out against disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election.The Republican pushback against anti-disinformation campaigns has existed for years, alleging that content moderation on major platforms has unfairly targeted conservative voices. Many tech platforms have instituted policies against misinformation or hateful speech that have resulted in content such as election denial, anti-vaccine falsehoods and far-right conspiracy theories being removed – all which tend to skew Republican. But research has found that allegations of anti-conservative bias at social media companies have little empirical evidence, with a 2021 New York University study showing that these platforms’ algorithms instead often work to amplify rightwing content.The rightwing narrative of tech platform censorship persisted, however, intensifying as companies prohibited medical misinformation about Covid-19. It gained additional momentum last year after the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a disinformation governance board aimed at researching ways to stop malicious online influence campaigns and harmful misinformation. Republican politicians and rightwing media immediately seized on the board as proof of a leftist authoritarian plot.Fox News hosts specifically singled out researcher Nina Jankowicz, who was tapped to be the board’s executive director, and ran numerous segments viciously mocking her. A year-long harassment campaign followed, leading to Jankowicz receiving death threats, having deepfake pornography made of her and seeing her personal information released online against her will.The disinformation governance board suspended its operations only a month after its debut, in what Jankowicz told the Guardian earlier this week was the start of a larger rightwing campaign aimed at rolling back checks on disinformation. “They got a win in shutting us down, so why would they stop there?” said Jankowicz, who was originally named in the Louisiana lawsuit but removed on account of no longer being a government official.The GOP takes aim at researchersIn addition to the lawsuit in Louisiana, Republicans have put pressure on researchers through a House select subcommittee investigation that launched in January and claims it will look into the “weaponization of the federal government”. The House judiciary committee chair, Jim Jordan, earlier this year issued a wide-ranging request for information and documents to multiple universities with programs aimed at researching disinformation, and has so far sent dozens of subpoenas.Among the institutions and officials that Jordan requested emails and documents from were the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the non-profit Election Integrity Partnership. Jordan last month threatened Stanford University with legal action if it did not turn over additional records. (Stanford released communications with government officials but did not send some internal records, including ones that involved students, the university told the Washington Post.)The Stanford Internet Observatory, the Center for an Informed Public and the Election Integrity Partnership did not return requests for comment.Democratic representatives decried the committee’s activities as an attempt to harangue researchers and institutions that its members viewed as political enemies, likening it to McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.“This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the Maga extremists who have hijacked the Republican party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense,” Jim McGovern, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, said during the formation of the committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe committee has struggled to be seen as legitimate, with a Washington Post-ABC News poll released in February showing that a majority of Americans view it as a partisan attempt to score political points. But it has nonetheless put pressure on academic institutions and emboldened attacks against researchers, including the University of Washington disinformation expert Kate Starbird, who told the Washington Post that she has faced political intimidation and cut back on public engagement.Starbird and other researchers are directly named in the Louisiana lawsuit for their role as advisers to a now-disbanded Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency subcommittee on disinformation. Starbird, who did not return a request for comment, has previously stated that the Republican-led lawsuit egregiously misrepresents her work.The Louisiana lawsuitRepublicans filed the lawsuit against Biden last year, and were joined by other plaintiffs that included the conspiracy site the Gateway Pundit and a Louisiana group opposed to vaccine mandates.The case was notably filed in a Louisiana district court where Judge Terry Doughty presides. Doughty, who was appointed by Trump and previously ruled against Biden administration mask and vaccine mandates, is a jurist Republicans specifically seek out when shopping for a favorable forum. He has overseen more multi-state challenges to the Biden administration than any other judge, Bloomberg Law reported, despite previously being a little-known justice based in a small city of less than 50,000 people.Legal experts questioned Doughty’s injunction against the Biden administration this week, the Associated Press reported, saying that the wide scope of the ruling meant that public health officials could be prevented from sharing their expertise. Meanwhile, disinformation researchers have stated that Republican efforts to push back against content moderation and safeguards against misinformation threaten to open the floodgates for conspiracy theories and falsehoods ahead of the 2024 presidential election.Amid the rightwing campaign against content moderation and disinformation researchers, numerous social media platforms have also been peeling back restrictions. Twitter under Elon Musk, who last year engineered the release of some internal communications between Twitter and government officials, has hollowed out its content moderation teams. Meanwhile, YouTube has reversed a policy banning election denialism and Instagram allowed the prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr back on the platform.The Biden administration stated this week that it objected to Doughty’s injunction in the Louisiana case, and would be considering its options. The justice department is seeking to appeal the ruling. More

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      The Age of Insurrection review: how the far right rose – and found Trump

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      Rightwing extremism has always been a feature of American life, from the diehard supporters of slavery in the 19th century to the 20,000 fascists who filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 and the violent opponents of integration who beat and killed civil rights workers and leaders throughout the 1960s.Today, this ugly tradition of hatred is perpetuated by dozens of vile groups, from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to the Family Research Council and a slew of Christian nationalist organizations.But as the investigative reporter David Neiwert argues in his terrifying new book, there is one terrible difference: the relentless mainstreaming of such disgusting ideas. The white nationalist ideology which inspired Payton Gendron to travel 200 miles to massacre 10 people in a Black Buffalo neighborhood is becoming as American as cherry pie.Neiwert shows such extremism has been “widely adopted” from “the highest reaches of the Republican party” to broadcasts by Tucker Carlson, “the most popular cable talk show host” until Fox News fired him.The surge in rightwing extremism inspired by the election of the US’s first Black president was reflected in an explosion in militia groups during Barack Obama’s first year in office. Then came Donald Trump, the first modern president to celebrate white supremacists. He praised “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia, where in August 2017 neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters, and he embraced the Proud Boys in 2020, telling them to “stand back and stand by”.The collaboration between such a president and the high-speed locomotive of social media has had disastrous consequences. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have brought American wackos together faster than any previous medium.Neiwert is a former senior writer for Daily Kos, the admirable progressive website founded by Markos Moulitsas 21 years ago. But Neiwert’s work goes back further. When he started out, he saw rightwing extremism as “an excellent bet” to propel a career in journalism, “an endless wellspring of human misery, social disruption and frightening violence – the kind of behavior that always makes news”.When Timothy McVeigh killed 168 by blowing up a truck outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, it became clear to Neiwert that the far right was “an existential threat not just to innocent people in its vicinity, but to democracy itself … What was striking … was how frequently their rhetoric waded into open sedition.” What Neiwert has learned over decades is one of the essentials lessons of his book: “They never ever give up … They are relentless in finding new ways to insinuate their toxic beliefs within the mainstream of American politics.”Neiwert offers some of the most detailed descriptions I have read of the movement’s biggest moments, including Charlottesville and the January 6 Capitol attack. His rigorous reporting produces many details new to me, including the fact that when a Swat team evacuated congressmen from a balcony on January 6, the officers drew guns on insurgents “outside the balcony doors” and forced them to “lie prone” as the legislators escaped.After Charlottesville, as a correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Neiwert covered events that advanced the right’s strategy for “simultaneously intimidating the general public while generating a phony narrative blaming leftists … for the brutality they themselves inflicted”. Now, he documents how so many far-right conspiracies have made their way into the mainstream, especially the great replacement theory, which says progressives want to flood the country with immigrants, to undermine white citizens.How successful has this effort been? In 2020, the Republican party refused to withdraw support from of any of the “64 GOP candidates … with QAnon connections”. In 2022, a poll found that nearly 70% of Republicans believed in the great replacement theory. Last week, the Washington Post reported the adoption of the great replacement theory as far away as Tunisia, where President Kais Saied sparked “evictions, firings, arrests and brutal assaults” of Black Africans, causing a surge in their efforts to escape to Europe.When Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, said that any opponent of the Florida governor’s “don’t say gay bill” was “probably a groomer or a least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children”, she used language “directly inspired by the hysterical QAnon conspiracy cult … in no time at all, Pushaw’s tweets made ‘grooming’ a mainstream rightwing talking point”.Neiwert’s book is full of reminders of how social media promote rightwing lies. When a veteran of the Tea Party movement teamed up with two ex-writers for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News to start a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group in November 2020, it got 300,000 followers in 24 hours. Facebook took the page down but Bannon started his own page the same day, then changed its name to “Own Your Vote”. The associated groups “amassed 2.5 million followers. YouTube, another giant purveyor of hatred and lies, hosted Stop the Steal videos which attracted 21m views and 863,151 likes.”No one has been more important to the mainstreaming of extreme rightwing views than Trump. Neiwert says the 45th president has “perfected a three-step tango with the radical right – a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat.”The book ends with a horrifying description of how the the movement has metastasized since the January 6 attack. By fall 2021, Proud Boys and “patriots” were everywhere, harassing “LGBTQ+-friendly teens at libraries, mask-promoting school board members and mall shops that required masks”. In Trump-loving rural areas, daily life “had become filled with foreboding, intimidation, threats and ugliness, all emanating from authoritarian rightwingers directing their aggression at anyone who failed to follow their dictates”.America’s only hope lies in the power of important books like this one to inspire decent citizens to redouble their efforts to defeat these vile scourges of freedom and democracy.
      The Age of Insurrection is published in the US by Melville House More

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      in Elections

      Armed man wanted for role in Capitol attack arrested near Obama’s house

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      A man armed with explosive materials and weapons, and wanted for crimes related to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, was arrested late on Thursday in the Washington DC neighborhood where the former US president Barack Obama lives, law enforcement officials said.Taylor Taranto, 37, was spotted by law enforcement officials a few blocks from the former president’s home and fled, though he was chased by Secret Service agents. Taranto has an open warrant on charges related to the insurrection, two law enforcement officials said. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing case and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.They said Taranto also had made social media threats against a public figure. He was found with weapons and materials to create an explosive device, though one had not been built, one of the officials said.No one was injured. It was not clear whether the Obamas were at their home at the time of the arrest.Washington’s Metropolitan police department arrested Taranto on charges of being a fugitive from justice. The explosives team swept Taranto’s van and said there were no threats to the public.Taranto was a US navy veteran and a webmaster for the Republican party in Franklin county, in Washington state, according to the Tri-City Herald newspaper. He told the newspaper in an interview last year that he was volunteering for the Republican party.It was not clear what, exactly, Taranto is accused of doing in the 2021 riot, where supporters of then president Donald Trump smashed their way into the Capitol, beat police officers and pursued leading politicians, while also invading a congressional chamber in a vain effort to overturn Trump’s defeat at the 2020 presidential election before Joe Biden’s victory being certified by Congress.More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol attack. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty, while approximately 100 others have been convicted after trials decided by judges or juries. More than 550 riot defendants have been sentenced, with over half imprisoned. More

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      Philadelphia museum faces backlash for hosting group with ‘oppressive views’

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      Historians, civil rights organizations and lawmakers are denouncing the Museum of the American Revolution for hosting an upcoming event with Moms for Liberty, a controversial campaign organization that has been called an extremist group by critics.Moms for Liberty (M4L), which the anti-hate watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center labeled as an extremist, anti-government group, will hold a summit in Philadelphia this weekend featuring several Republican presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. In a decision that has generated widespread backlash, the Museum of the American Revolution has agreed to host a welcome event for the organization on Thursday.Despite M4L purporting to champion parental rights in education, numerous civil rights organizations have condemned the group for its “oppressive views”, and its attempts to ban books as well as restrict classroom conversations on race, sexual orientation and gender identity.Earlier this week, the American Historical Association (AHA) sent a letter to the Museum of the American Revolution’s president, R Scott Stephenson, voicing its opposition to the museum’s decision to host the group and urging him to reconsider.“Moms for Liberty is an organization that has vigorously advocated censorship and harassment of history teachers, banning history books from libraries and classrooms, and legislation that renders it impossible for historians to teach with professional integrity without risking job loss and other penalties,” the letter said.“For the AHA, this isn’t about politics or different understandings of our nation’s past; it’s about an organization whose mission is to obstruct the professional responsibilities of historians,” the AHA added.The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History echoed similar sentiments in a statement, saying: “The Committee on LGBT History condemns the decision made by the Museum of the American Revolution to rent event space to Moms for Liberty … This organization consistently spreads harmful, hateful rhetoric about the LGBTQIA+ community, including popularizing the use of the term ‘groomer’ to refer to queer people and attacking the mere existence of trans youth. Giving Moms for Liberty a space to share their extremist, anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric is irresponsible and dangerous.”“It is shocking that an organization dedicated to documenting and preserving American history would enter into any relationship with an organization that is so intent upon distorting the American experience,” it added.In an op-ed published in Philadelphia Gay News, Naiymah Sanchez, the senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Pennsylvania branch, wrote: “My suggestion for this group: DON’T COME TO PHILLY.”“Banning books and outlawing trans people does not make schools safer or society any better. And such hateful policies are a far cry from fighting for ‘liberty’,” Sanchez added.Several lawmakers denounced the museum, with six Democratic senators penning a letter to Stephenson, asking him to cancel the upcoming event.“Moms for Liberty, put plainly, is a hate group … It is essential for cultural institutions, like the Museum of the American Revolution, to carefully consider the impact and implications of the organizations they choose to host,” they wrote.A handful of museum employees have also voiced their opposition to the museum’s decision.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, despite Stephenson telling employees that they were not required to work that night if they did not feel safe, assistant curator Trish Norman said: “I don’t feel appreciated nor safe anymore.”“I don’t feel the museum necessarily has my back,” Norman, who is non-binary, added.Bee Reed, another museum employee who identifies as an LGBTQ+ community member, told Philadelphia Gay News: “I have very mixed feelings. I’ve been working for the museum for four or five years now, and I’ve always been grateful to work someplace that has been so supportive of me as a queer person. But with this – I feel a great sense of betrayal.”Comments criticizing the museum’s decision have also flooded the museum’s Instagram page.The museum defended its decision in a statement, saying: “The Museum of the American Revolution strives to create an inclusive and accessible museum experience for visitors with a wide range of viewpoints and beliefs … Because fostering understanding within a democratic society is so central to our mission, rejecting visitors on the basis of ideology would in fact be antithetical to our purpose.”This is not the first time Moms for Liberty sparked controversy. Last week, an Indiana chapter of the group prompted swift backlash after it published a quote from Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. More

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      in US Politics

      After Roe’s overturn, Republicans target trans rights using extremist rhetoric

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      Americans are “frustrated and anxious”, lamented former vice-president Mike Pence. The country is “in a precarious position” assessed North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson. And Glenn Jacobs, a former professional wrestling star and current mayor of Knox county, Tennessee, declared that “these are hard times”.What could be the cause of such hardship? To the Republican presidential candidates who spoke in Washington DC on Friday at a major gathering of the religious right, the culprit was American society’s acceptance of transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community.The language and imagery is extreme and full of conspiracy theories.“We are facing the greatest challenge this country has ever seen, certainly in my lifetime,” the Missouri senator Josh Hawley said to the crowd of hundreds gathered for the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Policy Conference.He described the challenge as “a new Marxism that is rising in this country”, one that tells Americans, among other things: “That there’s no such thing as male and female, that there are not two genders. There’s 2,000 genders and it tells our children that the way God made them is wrong.“These new Marxists want to give America a new religion. They want to impose on us the religion of woke. It is the religion of transgenderism, critical race theory and open borders multiculturalism, and they are shoving it down our throats,” Hawley said.Held in the hotel where Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt, the audience of hundreds seated in its ballroom heard from several major Republican presidential candidates, including, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott, and the ex-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson.Their appearances came at an inflection point for cultural conservatives. A year ago, they had seen their long-held dream of overturning Roe v Wade become reality when the supreme court struck down the precedent after 49 years, allowing states to ban abortion. But in the realm of LGBTQ+ rights, the movement recently appeared to be on the back foot, with congressional Republicans in 2022 helping to pass a law that protected same-sex marriage nationwide, building on the supreme court’s establishment of the right in 2015.In response, groups opposed to rights for the gay, lesbian and transgender communities have orchestrated a well-funded backlash to the expansion of rights – one that is being fostered by extremists, has seen the erosion of gay rights in many states across the US and includes a growing threat of violence.“God hates pride. He hates pride in January, February, March, April, May and in the month of June,” conservative preacher John Amanchukwu proclaimed early in the event, in a reference to the LGBTQ+ Pride month that drew laughs and cheers from the crowd in Washington.The fallout has hit the trans community in America particularly hard. This year so far, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) says that 15 bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth have been passed into law, as have seven bills allowing or requiring the misgendering of transgender students, along with a handful of other measures targeting drag performances or school curriculum. All told, more anti-gay bills have been introduced in statehouses in 2023 than in the past five years, according to HRC.“The purpose of these laws is to facilitate a rise in political extremism by alienating and isolating LGBTQ+ Americans, and the impact of these laws is alarming,” said Kelley Robinson, president of HRC, in a recent statement, calling it a “state of emergency”.“In every county you represent, in every county your colleagues represent, you will find parents and children, teachers and nurses, community leaders and small business owners who are afraid that the rise in legislative assaults and political extremism has put a target on their backs.”Earlier this month, the pollster Gallup reported a drop in public support for same-sex relations, driven mostly by Republicans. The issue’s approval now stands at 64%, compared with 71% last year, with only 41% of Republicans approving – a decline of 15 percentage points from last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, rights groups Glaad and the Anti-Defamation League found that at least 356 incidences of hate directed at LGBTQ+ Americans occurred between June 2022 and the past April, including a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that left five people dead.At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference, speaker after speaker made clear their resolve to continue the campaign against trans Americans.“We will end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18,” said Pence.As governor of Florida, DeSantis has overseen a campaign against what he calls “woke ideology”, including a bill he signed earlier this year that bans gender-affirming care for minors, restricts its access for adults and allows the state to temporarily remove trans children from their parents.Polls show DeSantis in a distant second place to Donald Trump, who has maintained his lead in the Republican primary field by offering voters a familiar mix of conspiracies, charisma and promises to continue the policies he pursued during his first term as president.DeSantis stayed away from attacking the Republican frontrunner in his speech, instead promising the Faith & Freedom Coalition audience that as president, he would implement his policies in Florida across the United States.“We will fight the woke in the schools, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of government. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs,” DeSantis said. More

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      Dictatorship? How Hitler, Stalin and Trump show it’s easier than you think

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      Three zombies lurching your way is scary enough. Now imagine they’re Lenin, Stalin and Putin. This scene isn’t from a Kremlin-themed horror film, but rather a new graphic novel, Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa.Through their day job, as co-hosts of the Gaslit Nation podcast, the authors have long warned about the dangers of authoritarianism, whether discussing January 6 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now they are releasing a book, illustrated by the Polish artist Kasia Babic.It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at dictatorship, a how-to manual with lessons from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Putin, Kim Jong-un and many others whose stories offer time-tested tips on how to seize and consolidate power.“We wanted to do a book on the dictator playbook to show people how unoriginal dictators are,” Chalupa says, “so they can better predict the next moves of an aspiring authoritarian.”Some such moves, such as stigmatizing minority groups or employing propaganda, are well-known from history class. Others may seem counterintuitive. According to Chalupa and Kendzior, dictators are fond of both elections and constitutions. It helps, of course, if they win the popular vote by an overwhelming margin and if constitutional rights are guaranteed on paper but not in real life.On the page, these tips and more are shared by an omniscient narrator who Chalupa says has Cary Grant’s looks and verve, Stephen Colbert’s snark and the devil’s ability to tempt.One relatively new development for dictators is the increasing usefulness of technology when it comes to keeping civilians under surveillance. Chalupa notes that when her Ukrainian grandfather was in one of Stalin’s prison camps, inmates were allowed to speak to each other relatively freely. Today, China uses technology to keep a constant eye on Uyghurs in its own camps. Chalupa and Kendzior fault companies like Apple, Facebook and Google for doing business with China.“When you have innovations in AI driven by companies in the west, it’s going to be used for authoritarian control,” Chalupa says.“It’s only a matter of time before it starts spreading everywhere. You think you live in a democracy? Every single democracy is vulnerable. Nobody is immune to the authoritarian virus. If all the surveillance technology tools go unregulated, if there’s no vocal outcry against them from the public or elected officials in the EU, North America and elsewhere, if there’s no pushback against them, it’s going to be game over.”When Chalupa and Kendzior conceived their book, they outlined it as if it were an infomercial, wondering what a Trump University course on dictatorship would look like, and proceeded accordingly. They also thought about Oscars-style awards for despots.In one sequence, the narrator becomes an Academy Awards host. He dons a tuxedo, strolls the red carpet and presents the Oscar for Best Purge to Kim Il-sung, founder of the dynasty that rules North Korea. According to the book, nowadays Kim Jong-un not only continues the tradition of purges, he has extended it to canine pets of the ruling class.As Chalupa points out, dictators can’t achieve power on their own. They require the help of “useful idiots”.“In terms of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, all the sort of people we highlight throughout the project, the larger theme of the book is useful idiots. People helped Hitler have power. Why? What did they get out of it, or think they were getting out of it?”The book looks at a Weimar Republic media baron, Alfred Hugenberg, who thought he could control Hitler and limit his danger to Germany: a fateful miscalculation. Meanwhile, Stalin’s brutality was whitewashed in the west thanks to figures including the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw and the New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, whose fawning coverage won a Pulitzer prize. One of Duranty’s contemporaries, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who sought to expose Stalin’s atrocities, was the subject of Chalupa’s 2019 feature film, Mr Jones. Another voice of conscience spotlighted in Chalupa and Kendzior’s book is George Orwell, for his courageous opposition to Stalin and to authoritarianism in general.“I think Orwell wasn’t alone,” Chalupa says. “He had a community working with him side-by-side” including “his wife Eileen, a remarkable poet in her own right”.The rogues’ gallery wouldn’t be complete without Donald Trump. Recently indicted a second time, the 45th president plays a prominent role in the book. One aspect the authors emphasize is Trump’s dictatorial skill when it comes to inflaming supporters.They highlight his tweets on the campaign trail in 2016: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”Another sequence depicts Trump supporters drinking conspiracist Kool-Aid on January 6. A man wearing a red Maga cap downs a shot which makes his muscles expand and brain shrink. “Stop the steal!” he exclaims. Others, similarly addled, start threatening Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Egged on by Trump, the mob attacks the Capitol. With the seat of government burning, Trump feigns innocence.The book also examines US support for dictatorships abroad. In the 1970s, such support often came about through the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Whether it was the coup against Salvador Allende that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile or coziness toward dirty war dictators in Argentina, Kissinger was key to the embrace of despots worldwide.“He was like a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ during our research,” Chalupa recalls, noting “all the times he kept popping up – ‘there’s Kissinger again.’”With so much material to work with, the authors had to make decisions about what to include. Their treatment of Hitler spotlights Mein Kampf and his brief alliance with Stalin, but there is not much mention of his antisemitism and the Holocaust.“We sort of focused on the dictators themselves versus their atrocities,” says Chalupa, whose next project is a Holocaust-themed work about the American second world war reporter Dorothy Thompson. “It’s sort of like the Hitchcock method.”She adds that “the focus is so much on useful idiots. It’s really the theme of the book. We’re not trying to minimize any atrocities” or “eclipse the victims”.Chalupa noted that the book is geared toward younger readers, aiming to encourage them to learn more. Sadly, with things the way they are, it seems there will be no shortage of material should a sequel ever be planned. But Chalupa maintains a sense of hope.“We’ve got to keep fighting,” she says. “We have no choice. Every single one of us, wherever [we are], should not check out, should not say, ‘OK, it’s out of my hands.’ It’s not up to you alone to fix it, but what we have the power to do, the bandwidth to do, is incredibly powerful.”
      Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! is published in the US by First Second More