Counterpunch 2.5.21 If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. -Noam Chomsky, 1990. Of Course Trump Should Be Convicted Donald Trump ought to be convicted by the U.S. Senate, of course: he instigated a mass proto-fascist physical assault on Congress in a last-ditch effort to stop it from [...]
Counterpunch 1.29.21 “Leftists” I know have had their undies tied up in a nasty knot bunch over other leftists’ use of the F-word – fascism – to describe Trump and his backers. Fascism, seriously? Yes, absolutely, provided we have a reasonable definition. In his incisive 2009 book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, [...]
Counterpunch 1.22.21 It’s hard to get overly excited about Joe Biden on the Left. The main reason to welcome his ascendance is no small matter but betrays an extremely low bar: he’s not a malignant fascist sociopath like Donald Trump, the single biggest asshole in American history. Biden has a long and disturbing corporate, imperial, white-supremacist, [...]
Counterpunch 1.20.21 On January 5, 2021, one day before Trump sparked his fascist Attack on the Capitol, the liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called for Americans “to defend democracy” by “investigating” Trump and wrote these words: “True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, [...]
Counterpunch+ 1.10.21 It is possible to be simultaneously unsurprised and jolted by an event. It was one thing to know that the wannabe dictator Donald Trump and his shrinking band were going to pull some demented stunt in a last-ditch attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. It was another thing to [...]
Counterpunch 1.15.21 “Indeed a Fascist” Last Friday’s New York Times included Paul Krugman’s elementarily accurate editorial observation that “Donald Trump…is indeed a fascist – an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals. So are many of his supporters. If you had any doubts,” Krugman rightly argued, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol [...]
Counterpunch, 1.6.21 Let history record that at least half the Republican Party is calling for the overthrow of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Fully 140 U.S. House Representatives and at least 10 U.S. Senators are backing their Dear Leader Donald Trump’s absurdly false, openly Orwellian claim to have been cheated out of his rightful claim [...]
Counterpunch 1 1 2021 Few things nauseate quite so much as “liberal” professional class pining for “normalcy” – a return to the supposedly good way things were – after Trump and COVID-19. Look at last Sunday’s New York Times’ Sunday Review section. It begins by asking readers what they would give to be standing at a bar [...]
Counterpunch, 12 18 2020 The Covid-19 pandemic as it has played out in its favorite country the United States (home to a fifth of the world’s Covid-19 deaths but just over a twentieth of the world’s population) is a tragedy that will soon have claimed the lives of 1 in every 1000 Americans. It is [...]
Counterpunch 12 16 2020 To admit the truth about Trump and authoritarianism then means they have to do something about it. Many people do not want to take that leap. * Ruth Ben-Ghiat, July 23, 2020 We have a Nazi problem in this country…They don’t, for the most part, wave swastikas and salute Hitler, but [...]