CounterPunch+/originally published for subscribers on 10/10/2021 Nationally focused progressive intellectuals and activists might be more willing to confront the fact the United States is being overtaken by a creeping, homegrown Amerikaner fascism if they paid more attention to state-level politics, the soft underbelly of what’s left of bourgeois democracy in the not-so United States. The [...]
Counterpunch, 11.12.2021 Some of those willing to look may have noticed that dark clouds of fascism are forming over the United States like never before. How so? Let me count the ways – 21 to be exact: +1. The Fascist Beast is Uncaged and Chomping at the Bit for Vengeance For details on the distinct likelihood [...]
Counterpunch, 11.1o.2021 The Orange Beast Runs Free, Dreaming of Vengeance Two seemingly separate news stories are darkly and intimately related to each other in ways that you will not see intelligently discussed on “Meet the Press” or “Washington Week.” The first story is the fascist ogre Donald Trump continuing to run free and menace the [...]
Counterpunch, 11.5.2021 Carol Anderson, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021) Get it right: in Amerika, guns, self-defense, and political violence are for white Whiskey Rebels, racist white mobs, racist white cops, George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the January 6th marauders, NOT Denmark Vesey, Black sharecroppers, Black Panthers, Milton Hall, Philando Castille, Brionna [...]
Counterpunch, 10.29.2021 “Most People Don’t Pay Attention to What’s Going On” Speaking to Salon’s Chauncy de Vega about how the United States is mired in a crisis of democracy that shows parallels with Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s, Norman Ornstein recently noted that “Most people don’t pay close attention, day to day, to what’s going on” in [...]
Counterpunch, 10.27.2021 From My Lai to WMD Lie In dominant capitalist-imperialist media, America’s imperial crimes are airbrushed out of historical memory, like they never took place. Thus it is that CNN can without the slightest hint of irony show a clip of the late Colin Powell saying this last year: “the one word I have to [...]
Counterpunch, 10.15.2021 Recently Norman Ornstein told Salon’s Chauncy de Vega that the United States is mired in a crisis of democracy that shows parallels with Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s. Ornstein is right to worry about the nation’s ongoing lethal rightward drift beyond “normal” bourgeois democracy. That is how the United States’ political life is shaping [...]
Counterpunch, 10.8.2021 “No Change” Joe: “That Patience Has Been Rewarded for More Than 240 Years” Who can ever forget the brilliant oratory of Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden two nights after Election Day last November? “Democracy is sometimes messy,” Joe “No Empathy, Give Me a Break” Biden said two months before Donald Trump’s wild-eyed marauders would descend [...]
Counterpunch, 10.6.2021 Last August I witnessed an effort to disrupt women’s right to an abortion outside a Planned Parenthood clinic on the Near North Side of Chicago. The action was conducted by some outwardly friendly women-haters with the demented Christian Right organization Operation Rescue (OR). It was very instructive regarding a topic I had not [...]
Counterpunch, 10.1.2021 Political physical violence and the threat and capacity to use such violence, enforce ruling class power and other and related forms of domination and oppression. Ideological indoctrination and informational bias to “manufacture consent” matter a great deal of course, but we should not forget the significant role of force. Manufacturing Consent with Rifles, [...]