So there might be a temptation to cheer the latest crisis at the International Criminal Court, which throughout its short existence has been the prime locus of “internationalist” legal folly. Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, was expelled from office July 24, following a two-year saga shrouded in convoluted bureaucratic mystery. Ostensibly centered on allegations of sexual impropriety, they were always really more like allegations of allegations: the nature of what was even being alleged is still a morass of murk, at least insofar as any scattered details have been publicly disclosed.

The drama has been made all the more inscrutable by the “ad hoc” bureaucratic rigmarole set up to adjudicate these “allegations,” with oversight opaquely passing back and forth between an internal ICC disciplinary unit, an enigmatic ICC administrative body, a hazily affiliated division of the United Nations, an improvised secret judicial panel, back to some non-specific ICC limbo, and then finally to the “Assembly of States Parties” — thought to be the ICC’s supreme governing authority, which proceeded to terminate Khan, albeit based on authorities that hardly anyone could seem to quite ascertain, not least Khan himself.

As his day of preordained reckoning drew near, Khan remarked that “in terms of the procedure” put forth to eradicate his career and reputation, even he was being kept assiduously “in the dark … I mean, it’s amazing.” So here was one of the foremost expositors of “international law” — who had just earned rapturous applause from “international-law” enthusiasts the world over for orchestrating a series of “arrest warrants” against the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin — marveling that even he had no clue what ad hoc methods had been devised to exact punishment on him for offenses he steadfastly denied, and which had only been the most faintly articulated. Khan was only able to learn of the latest developments, he said, “from the media,” and from “speculation.”

The ultimate claimed basis for Khan’s removal? Certainly not any somber acknowledgment of the failures of “international law,” following a sustained period of careful self-examination. Instead, of course, it was some multi-dimensional sexually implicative “adult-grooming” scandal — the core offending conduct of which remains almost indecipherable to the untrained eye, and only made putatively scandalous by the very same blinkered pathologies that have come to pervade liberal-Left NGO culture. 

While Khan’s alleged wrongdoing has been widely referred to in media reports as centering on accusations of “sexual misconduct” or even “sexual assault,” a recent lengthy CNN interview with the central accuser — a putative lawyer in her late 30s named Sarah Hishan — failed to elucidate with any tangibility what, in fact, she was even accusing Khan of doing wrong, beyond transgressing the latest nebulous frontiers of “consent” and “power imbalance” theory — the bleeding edge of which one would expect to find marinating in workforce environments such as the ICC. 

Khan objected, reasonably enough, to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of the proceedings that were initiated against him, starting in April 2024, when they were supposedly prompted by the 39-year-old’s unveilment of her sexual-grievance story. One might even say there’s an element of karmic justice in his banishment, as “international law” is nothing if not a thoroughly make-it-up-as-you-go-along enterprise. But with Khan’s ensuing downfall, the tactics brought to bear against him have received an outsized boost of validation — which could mean similar tactics may well soon be coming to an institution near you.

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It’s nearly impossible to circumnavigate the organizational, political, and personal factors that seemingly gave rise to this two-plus year debacle, but one factor that’s been less examined might simply be the most bog-standard of factional workplace resentments, which, as they are increasingly wont to do circa 2026, always find a way to inevitably escalate into vague imputations of sex crime. 

Media leaks in an earlier phase of the saga tried to contextualize the genesis of the “accusations” by reference to Khan’s underlings declaring him “an unpopular boss,” who “ran the office [of the prosecutor] as a top-down operation,” and who imposed what some of them apparently saw as “controversial policies” — such as the “requirement that staff working on a particular case be based in the field.” That is, a requirement that ICC employees charged with investigating “international law” violations in far-flung places like Mali or the Philippines have to actually go and work in those places, rather than “Zooming” in remotely from their comfy work-at-home stations in Bezuidenhout or wherever. That this was apparently so “controversial” to the rising generation of “international law” advocates may speak to the general empirical soundness of “international law” fact-finding, or lack thereof. 

One strangely open question — which, in a way, crystallizes the entire affair — is to what degree the main accuser, Sarah Hishan, can even be correctly described as a “lawyer,” as the CNN headline accompanying her July 16 interview labels her, as have innumerable other media reports. Inasmuch as the word “lawyer” connotes a person professionally accredited to practice law in a particular jurisdiction, there is scant evidence to indicate this label should properly apply to Hishan, who has conspicuously demanded anonymity for her media interviews, which the journalists conducting them have invariably granted without any real explanation.

While an online bio attributed to her states that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales,” Hishan does not appear on the Barrister’s Register or Solicitors Register maintained by the Bar of England and Wales. Her LinkedIn page — which she seems to have recently amended to partially anonymize herself — suggests she was enrolled more than a decade ago in something called a “Bar Professional Training Course,” administered by something called “The University of Law” — a for-profit educational venture located in Britain. 

Other than this, there is no sign she has “completed” any conventional lawyering licensure. An email sent to the ICC public-affairs office, requesting clarification as to whether Sarah Hishan is currently admitted to practice law — in either Britain, Malaysia (her country of origin), the Netherlands (her country of residence as an ICC employee), or any other country — has not been returned. (That she has seemingly drawn a full ICC salary from April 2024 to present, ever since she ignited the ICC’s slow-rolling immolation, only adds another layer of self-defeating irony to the whole ordeal.)   

Hishan does claim various other professional certifications — including a two-day “e-learning” course on “genocide” in 2022, another two-day 2022 “e-learning” course pertaining to “international law and the conflict in Ukraine,” and yet another two-day “workshop,” this one seemingly in-person, held by the Interagency Diversity and Inclusion Network in 2020, from which she was duly certified as completing a “training of trainers,” which thenceforth empowered her to become somebody who could purport to deliver “Gender, Diversity and Inclusion trainings to staff members working for international organizations in The Hague” — with an emphasis on concepts such as “disabilities” and “mental health.” This novel certification, perhaps more than anything else, provides the most clarifying window into her professional background, and her stem-winding odyssey in the field of “international law.”

Some skeptical observers have been keen to emphasize the presumed role of Israeli sabotage in engineering Khan’s defenestration, and there is no doubt the ICC arrest warrants he announced in May 2024 against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant provoked intense animus from Israel’s impassioned supporter network, which was then happy to seize on any perceived Khan vulnerability that may surface. But if there was a “conspiracy” afoot, it lies in plain sight. With or without any Israeli involvement, organs of “international law” such as the ICC, not unlike culturally harmonious organizations such as the Democratic Party, are more than sufficiently susceptible all on their own to these spiraling cycles of shambolic collapse the moment some sexual impropriety can be conjured or alleged, no matter how abstruse the core “allegations.”

Of course, it is true that the Jewish state, at least in the person of Netanyahu, would exploit any “allegation” that could be contrived to cast doubt on the credibility of a prosecutor who had generated enormous worldwide publicity by charging top Israeli officials with crimes — as would any defendant charged with crimes, should their prosecutor have liabilities emerge. So it’s no surprise career Israel backers and Netanyahu emissaries like the late Sen. Lindsey Graham went around whipping up whatever “accusation” whispers they could to undermine the ICC’s prosecution process. Newly released audio and video footage from an unfinished documentary, as reported in The New York Times, reveal Graham strategizing by phone with Netanyahu just before the 2024 presidential election as to how they could best amplify the “sexual-misconduct” rumors, as if Graham and Bibi were deeply concerned for the welfare of Hishan.

Netanyahu even indulged in some strategically inflammatory sex talk himself, telling the website Breitbart in August 2025 that a then-anonymous woman in Khan’s office had accused him of “raping her and sexually assaulting her for over a year.” This turned out to be a total load of hogwash, as the woman herself eventually explained to CNN that she has expressly declined to “put a label” on the conduct she was allegedly victimized by, including when someone once asked her directly if she had been raped — an episode chronicled by UN investigators who took charge of the Khan inquisition in November 2024, and eventually leaked to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The woman’s reasoning, she told Amanpour, was that “I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession” — and so “It’s not my place to label anything.” 

No one has to propose any sprawling clandestine “conspiracy” to note the obvious exploitability of the “ad hoc” adjudicative process concocted to determine Khan’s fate, which rested with a quasi-legislative “international-law” assembly convening in a nondescript chamber in New York City. For one thing, the final expulsion vote was conducted by secret ballot, thanks to an inexplicable provision of the original Rome Statute that established the ICC. 

If the end-result of the cockamamie “international-law” tribunal was influenced by a desire among certain ICC member states to placate their American hosts in the Trump administration, this would only be surprising as cold political reality, whatever the egalitarian-flattening pretensions of the high-minded “international-law” theorists who drafted the ICC’s founding documents. US primacy has certainly remained in full force since the ICC started operations in 2002, as evidenced in miniature by the ICC governing body continuing to be physically housed in the United States, despite steadfast US refusal to join the ICC, and dare surrender any of its sovereignty to “international law.”

Perhaps the current Trump administration’s attitude on the Khan question was a political variable that these “Assembly” members, operating in an expressly political capacity, might have foreseeably taken into account as they pondered the proper recourse for Sarah Hishan’s weighty “allegations.” Khan had already invited a simmering fury for his breach of bipartisan understandings — which he had carefully cultivated with the Biden administration, and even Senate Republicans — with the allegedly “rushed” May 2024 application for arrest warrants he brought against the top Israeli officials. (Three senior Hamas officials were also charged on the same occasion, reflecting Khan’s attunement to political sensitivities, but this had no material effect in terms of dampening the fallout.) 

Then soon came an incoming Republican administration already primed for baseline ideological hostility against the ICC, and which had been given all the more reason to go scorched earth. As he barreled in for his second term, Trump wasted no time imposing maximum reprisals on the ICC and Khan individually, sanctioning him by name as one of his first orders of business on Feb. 6, 2025. Among other things, this sanction appears to have barred Khan from physically attending any of the disciplinary proceedings related to him in New York, not to mention cutting him off from the US-controlled international financial system — “international law” be damned. Bank accounts frozen, no more credit cards, and travel overall severely limited. Other ICC officials were then hit by Trump-backed sanctions several months later. 

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Given this fraught political situation, one could easily see the faction of ICC member-states in the US-supplicating orbit — say, the EU-NATO bloc — having an interest to retain whatever favorable standing they could with the mercurial Trump. As such, these countries could have been particularly peeved with Khan for the wholesale US assault on the ICC his actions seemed to have precipitated — an especially wrenching turn for the countries that had optimistically watched a growing US-ICC truce. 

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Washington had been turning toward a gradual but non-trivial embrace of the ICC, after decades of scathing antagonism. Suddenly, the US and ICC found themselves happy to set aside old differences and collaborate on going hard after Russia. Even eminent Republican congressional figures such as Graham — who previously would’ve been known as among the ICC’s most boisterous haters — were glad-handing with Karim Khan during the Biden years, a detente clearly stemming in part from the concerted effort undertaken by Khan himself to smooth relations with both Republicans and leery Democrats. 

These efforts had seemingly paid off, as bipartisan 2022 legislation authorized US officials to “render assistance” to the ICC in an anticipated prosecution of Putin, by placing him in the same category of unique evildoers as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Slobodan Milošević, whereby America would allow an exception to the standard prohibition against any US collaboration with the ICC. Long gone were the days when Graham & co. had championed an infamous law that could theoretically authorize a US military invasion of the Netherlands, in the event that any American servicemen were ever scooped up and brought to The Hague.

But in this new Ukraine-heady period, the US presidential administration was being led by reverential devotees of Rules-Based International Order. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken had already seen to it that executive order(s) from Trump’s first term, which even then had slapped the ICC with retributive sanctions, were revoked almost a year before Putin aroused the flames of liberal-internationalist fervor all the more epically by invading Ukraine.

Bolstered by this period of glorious bipartisan unity against Russia, and thus an improbable upsurge in official US-ICC tolerance under Karim Khan’s tutelage, Biden and the Democrats did all they reasonably could to keep the momentum going. In April 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland even dispatched a DOJ prosecutor to The Hague to provide the ICC with “significant resources,” courtesy of the US taxpayer, for use in a multitude of “ad hoc” efforts aimed at activating otherwise-flaccid EU-based instruments of international law which might be utilized to “hold accountable” the war-making Russians, up to and including Putin himself. The prior default flaccidity of these mechanisms suddenly stiffened like magic, thanks to a virile overnight infusion of US hegemonic zeal.

But this moment of glory was soon squandered … and capped off by an “adult grooming” fiasco. 

One theory goes that as the first murmurs of “accusations” emerged against Khan in April 2024, he suddenly switched tactics from steady US-ameliorating to willful US-antagonizing. No question Khan was politically astute enough to know that dropping a Netanyahu arrest bombshell would promptly upend whatever collaborative trajectory might have been in progress with his American partners — even under a Democratic administration, at least one helmed by self-proclaimed Zionists such as Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken. He must also have anticipated the tentative new cohort of ICC-curious Republicans, personified by Graham, would erupt into instant vindictive frenzy. And that the reverberations were destined to extend to the faction of ICC member states that maintain allegiance to Israel, namely the EU-NATO bloc of Germany, Britain, and France (kind of) — which also happen to be outsized contributors to the ICC’s operational budget — as well as miscellaneous others like Poland (kind of), Hungary, the Baltics, etc.

So much for that brief, shining moment of Ukraine-inspired harmony! 

One thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, it’s July 13, 2026 — 11 days before the scheduled vote to oust Khan — and there’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, striding forth on behalf of the Trump administration to announce a “sweeping campaign to dismantle” what he declared was the “intolerable threat” the ICC posed to American sovereignty. (As if all those gender-diverse folx on temporary Dutch visas were getting ready to storm down Pennsylvania Avenue.) Rubio vowed “no diplomatic option will be off-limits” in this invigorated anti-ICC campaign. Meaning, it would presumably not be “off-limits” to politely encourage the ICC member states and their New York-based diplomatic reps to please consider voting to remove Karim Khan the following week. For added laughs, they could even tearfully act like they were doing it to honor “grooming” survivors.

And so, right on cue, here come the “accusations.”

What are these “accusations”? Good question. “Accusations” would seem to overstate the case, because it’s exceedingly unclear what Platner is even being accused of doing. But since the non-accusatory accusations have been dramatically unveiled by the The New York Times, all keen political watchers must now hold their breath and brace for the fallout. 

The Times’s Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer boast that they “spent months” doggedly reporting on the “complicated history of Platner’s relationships with women.” OK, then — after months of this intrepid investigative journalism, what did the journalists come up with? Reputedly that Platner’s relationship with various ex-girlfriends has at times been “emotionally wrenching.” The dynamic of these relationships, dating back to his 20s, is said to have been “volatile” and even “toxic.” And his behavior? “Unsettling.” 

These are the fruits of a New York Times enterprise project to canvass Platner’s ex-girlfriends, already a creepy enough initiative in its own right — and the worst they could uncover is that a handful of ex-girlfriends use vaguely unflattering adjectives to describe their subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner, stemming from consensual adult romantic activity a decade or more ago. 

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One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that Platner grabbed her roughly and, in one instance, “yanked her out of a cab” in the course of “altercations.” Fifield happens to be a long-time Republican operative, having served in multiple GOP political action committees and currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank. Her affiliations are alluded to by the Times, which notes that the paper “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account.”

If this is what we’re really doing now, why doesn’t somebody go and canvass the ex-boyfriends of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer? They evidently deem it newsworthy that former love interests of Platner claim to have endured “emotionally wrenching” relationship travails. Given the prominent perches Glueck and Lerer enjoy at the New York Times, certainly they rank high enough on the all-important “power dynamic” pyramid that the public would be similarly entitled to know if anything “emotionally wrenching” or “volatile” might have occurred in their own private lives when they were in their 20s. 

Robust reportorial resources should thus be devoted to explore this harrowing possibility, with any resulting material reframed and reinterpreted many years after the fact to comport with whatever news-cycle imperatives might arise on a given week. New York Times readers have every right to evaluate whether their own unreported romantic histories might be exerting undue influence on their 2026 midterm election coverage. 

God forbid either journalist be alleged by some disgruntled ex to have exhibited behavior that could be retroactively characterized as “toxic.” And if Glueck or Lerer wishes to dispute that characterization, perhaps for a lack of context or any other mitigating factors they may wish to cite, they’re plain out of luck, because everyone knows it’s a lose-lose situation to be rehashing dirty relationship laundry in the pages of The New York Times. The more you talk, the worse you look, regardless of what the truth happens to be.

If by any chance either female journalist has ever had an “off-and-on long-distance relationship” with old boyfriends who may have less than flattering memories of the experience, this is now to be considered straightforwardly reportable information, given the new Platner standard they’ve opted to set forth. Any relevant anecdotes would need to be fleshed out with ambiguously motivated remembrances of the journalists’ past emotional traits, since this is the kind of psychobabble that litters the Platner exposé. (For reference, Katie graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 and Lisa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, so those are some decent leads to start with for any shoeleather reporters out there looking to better inform the public about contemporary power dynamics in America.)

Fifield, the flagship “accuser” in this Times story, doesn’t appear to be accusing Platner of anything in particular (though she has since taken to the X app, formerly Twitter, wielding the A word, “abuse”). Lacking anything more tangible to report, the Times is reduced to relaying Fifield’s assessment that Platner is “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions” — whatever the hell that means — which Fifield has extrapolated based on having sporadically dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. 

Seeing his recently discovered archive of Reddit posts, she claims, has “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” Left unexplained is why she apparently dated someone who “hated women” for two years. Or why, after the relationship apparently broke off by 2016, friends sent texts encouraging her to “move on,” implying that she was disinclined to “move on.” Nor do the Times sleuths probe whether her apparent knowledge that Platner was simultaneously seeing other women during their relationship might have been a key factor in generating her negative feelings toward him. Or what she precisely meant in a post-breakup diary entry, purportedly shown to the reporters, in which she wrote that Platner was “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” 

How did Platner destroy her life, exactly? What is the definition of “toxic” in this context? (That word can seem to be quite malleable.) What kind of alleged “abuse” is she talking about here — emotional, physical, or something else? And by any chance, are there additional sentences or paragraphs surrounding the curiously truncated excerpt that might shed additional light on her psychological state at the time, or further elucidate what Platner is even accused of doing wrong, which again remains exceedingly unclear, despite months of intensive investigation by a team of seasoned reporters? 

According to one of her friends in the DC-conservative-blackslapping network, the podcaster and opinion columnist Bethany Mandel, Fifield had already spent the past “many months” on a political mission to inflict maximum political damage against Platner — first by calling attention to his purported “Nazi Tattoo,” which had apparently never alarmed her enough to cease dating him. Then, when that proved insufficient to sink Platner, Fifield went in for the kill with a standard slate of “accusations” pertaining to nebulous intimate-partner improprieties. 

Though, again, to even call these “accusations” wouldn’t be exactly accurate; Platner is accused by no woman in the Times story of doing anything self-evidently illicit. Instead, the article assembles an impressionistic collage of what the Times theorizes is a pattern of “unsettling” behavior. Surely, a stronger adjective would’ve been used for the headline, should any reportorial finding have supported it. Perhaps most bizarre is that Glueck and Lerer, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel at this point, deem it journalistically crucial to grant anonymity to yet another ex-girlfriend, whom they “asked to sum up how he treated her.” This source said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.” What does this mean? Sounds quite rueful and poetic, sure, but whatever “accusation” it’s supposed to correspond with is shrouded in mystery.

Speaking of the supposed “Nazi tattoo” that is now said to be a singularly defining mark of Platner’s allegedly foul character, it seems rather doubtful that a great many of his fellow Marines circa 2007 — when Platner says he got the tattoo while on leave in Croatia — would have been steeped enough in esoteric pagan iconography to identify the symbol as intrinsically linked with National Socialism. Because to the naked eye, it could easily just appear like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that a certain type of military guy in his early 20s would probably think looks cool. Perhaps going forward, all US service personnel should be required to consult the Anti-Defamation League’s “hate-symbols” database before they ink themselves with anything improper. Better yet, they can fax their proposed tat design to Susan Collins for pre-approval.

Earlier this week, a crew of doofuses affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee thought it would be hilarious to gallivant shirtless around Washington, DC, wearing nothing but a white bath towel. This was done to heckle Platner for the supposedly incriminating mirror selfie of his that recently surfaced, in which, yes, the Democratic candidate is pictured shirtless and with a towel around his waist. If that was the extent of the GOP stooges’ stunt, it might’ve been loutish and lame, but forgettably harmless. In the current political climate, however, they of course had to ratchet things up to the most rabid extreme, and wave signage proclaiming Platner a “pedo” — based on absolutely nothing other than that he had apparently maintained a personal account on an app called Kik, which is thought to be inherently disreputable, given the purported connotations of what the app is typically used for. 

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It’s of course possible that Platner has done disreputable things on this app — his wife did report to his campaign operatives that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with at least six women earlier in their marriage — but that’s preposterously far removed from Platner doing anything that could be remotely labeled “pedophilic,” besides some vague supposition that the app is populated with minors who circumvent age-verification protocols. There is zero evidence of Platner engaging in any conduct that could conceivably make him a “pedophile.” If the only criteria for earning such a sick designation these days is using a social-media app on which minors might be present, there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t also apply to X, on which much of the recent hectoring of Platner has taken place. 

More broadly, it seems to have been collectively decided that in 2026, flippantly declaring one’s political foes to be pedos, or pedo-adjacent, or pedo-complicit, is just standard procedure, with any evidentiary requirement a relic of the past. In addition, certain Republicans have clearly been laboring with pent-up frustration at how Democrats gamely operationalized the Jeffrey Epstein saga against President Trump, who now also gets routinely taunted as a pedophile, despite a similar dearth of credible evidence. 

As such, vengeful has-beens like Ari Fleisher have proposed an inventive new angle of attack for their all-hands-on-deck offensive to preserve a slim Republican Senate majority: “Platner is Epstein without the island,” the former George W. Bush press secretary proclaimed. Why? Because, again, a selfie has emerged of Platner wearing a bath towel, and the selfie appeared on an app that Fleisher and others claim is “targeted to teens,” though they cite no empirical basis for this inference — much less any basis for assuming that Platner himself has “targeted” anything untoward at any teen. 

But it doesn’t matter anymore. American political conflict is now a rolling cacophony of everyone and their mother calling each other a pedophile. Republicans, cruising for a midterm bruising, should at least be thankful that Platner’s improbable ascent has enabled them to savor a moment of temporary catharsis, as they pretend to be enthusiastic about re-electing Susan Collins to a sixth dreary term.

Nobody’s Girl is generating global headlines and is, at the time of this writing, the No. 4-ranked book across Amazon. The allegations in the book are being taken as fact, with profound consequences — particularly in Britain due to the claims involving Prince Andrew. This week, The New Statesman, Britain’s leading center-Left weekly, published a cover essay calling for the abolition of the Monarchy in part over the allegations against the prince set forth in the book. Yet oddly, the full-volume media coverage blaring across multiple countries has failed to examine the existence of the earlier memoir, or its relation to the new one.

Giuffre, who died in April, was by far Epstein’s most consequential accuser. While others had already accused him of illicit sexual activity, it was she who first introduced the notion that Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child-sex-trafficking operation. And the civil litigation she initiated would ultimately produce an extensive documentary record that prosecutors seized upon in their case against Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Her chronology shifted over time, but Giuffre generally claimed she was lured into Epstein’s employ in her teens — in about the year 2000, when she was 17 — with a promise of work as a massage therapist. She claimed she was subsequently forced into the sex trade. After finally escaping Epstein’s clutches, she’d go on to become an activist-crusader in the cause of empowering sex-trafficking victims.

To question Giuffre’s testimony is not to exonerate Jeffrey Epstein. But it is also the responsibility of journalists to look forensically at the evidence, even if the findings may be unpopular.

Giuffre’s latest memoir is presented to the public as a work of nonfiction. She likewise originally presented the 2011 memoir as nonfictional — as confirmed by literary agents who were originally pitched the book. It was to be an exposé on the sordid crimes of some of the world’s most prominent politicians, academics, and business people, pitched as “a human interest story that could appeal to the Oprah/female set as well as the Wall Streeters who follow Epstein.” However, when the draft manuscript was eventually excavated over the course of litigation Giuffre had initiated against Maxwell, a multitude of claims it contained became untenable to defend.

Her lawyers were thus compelled to concede that the manuscript had represented a “fictionalized account” of her purported experiences. In court documents, the lawyers granted that “Ms. Giuffre began to draft a fictionalized account of what happened to her. It was against this backdrop of her trauma being unearthed, her steps to seek psychological counseling for it, that she drafted this manuscript. Doing so was an act of empowerment and a way of reframing and taking control over the narrative of her past abuse that haunts her.”

In the new memoir, Wallace makes brief mention of the earlier fictionalized draft, but explains that Giuffre chose to fictionalize in order to protect herself from retaliation by the powerful men she was accusing of sex crimes. Wallace has, however, copy-and-pasted entire passages from the earlier draft, with a few minor cosmetic adjustments.

For instance, in the 2011 memoir, Giuffre told of being dispatched to Epstein’s compound on the US Virgin Islands to accompany “a quirky little man with white hair,” whom she identified as a Harvard professor named Stephen, for an implied sexual liaison. In the 2025 memoir, this person becomes “a quirky little man with a balding pate of white hair,” and is a generic “psychology professor.” In the original memoir, Giuffre recounted that the man “asked if he could receive one of the delightful massages he has been hearing about from Jeffrey.” In the new memoir, this loose paraphrase morphs into a direct quote, with the unnamed professor purportedly asking Giuffre if he could have “one of your famous massages that Jeffrey has told me so much about.”

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Giuffre has intercourse with the man in both memoirs. In the first rendering, though, she offers the man a second sexual opportunity, which he politely declines: “That night after dinner and my mixed cocktail of Xanax and red wine,” Giuffre wrote in 2011, “I asked if he’d like another massage before I went to bed. He just wanted to stay up watching movies in Jeffrey’s theater room. As peculiar as that request was to me I didn’t argue [with] it, I just hoped I hadn’t disappointed him. I showed him how to use the remote and turn off the TV when he was finished before going to bed.”

In the new version, however, Giuffre’s description of herself as the initiator is removed — but much of the rest is simply reproduced from the old version: “We only had sex once, though,” writes Giuffre/Wallace. “The next night, the man told me he wanted to watch movies instead. I showed him how to use the remote control on Epstein’s largest TV and how to turn it off when he was done, and I went to bed. I was glad for the night off, but I remember feeling worried that I’d somehow disappointed the professor in a way that he’d share with Epstein.”

Nor is any mention made in the 2025 memoir of the fact that when Giuffre was later questioned about this encounter in a formal legal deposition, she explicitly retracted the whole story. Asked by a deposing lawyer, “Did you ever have sex with [this person]?,” Giuffre replied, “No.”

Revelations in the book relating to Prince Andrew have filled the British press in particular with wall-to-wall outcries of vitriolic censure; one esteemed royal biographer was even moved to proclaim that Andrew’s alleged trail of depravities, and likely criminal exposure, has saddled the Monarchy with its most damaging crisis since the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936. Evidently, few see any issue with making such grand proclamations on the basis of this vaguely “fictionalized” material.

“He was adorning my young body, particularly my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches,” Giuffre wrote in Memoir One, of the time she says she was trafficked to Andrew in London. “That was definitely a first for me and I couldn’t help but laugh, I hoped he didn’t expect the same treatment back.” She now writes in Memoir Two: “He was particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches. That was a first for me, and it tickled. I was nervous he would want me to do the same to him.”

When ordinary people read such an account in a memoir, they assume that it took place. And it’s considered ethically defensible to reflexively ascribe truth to sexual assault claims (“believe the victim”). But while Andrew has approximately zero defenders on any continent, no hard evidence has been presented to substantiate that he ever had sexual contact with Giuffre. The main piece of evidence is a photo of disputed provenance, from March 2001, which shows him with his arm around the waist of a smiling Giuffre. Yet because the Royal Family chose to settle with Giuffre instead of fight her claims in court, and despite that the settlement included no admission of culpability, Andrew is widely believed to be guilty of sex crimes.

Furthermore, the Daily Mail, which first reported an encounter between Giuffre and Prince Andrew, paid Giuffre $160,000 for the story in 2011, plus serialization revenue. The journalist who produced that story also wrote for The Daily Telegraph in Australia that Giuffre “said there was never any sexual relationship between the Prince and herself.”

Representatives for Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Giuffre’s publisher, provided me with a statement, claiming that “the book was fact-checked and legally vetted.” A spokesperson told me that, “the book is a memoir, and it is nonfiction.”

Another curiosity: anyone who has spent any length of time following the endless Epstein saga will be surprised that the name Alan Dershowitz makes only the most fleeting appearance in the book. For nearly a decade, Giuffre made sensational accusations against the Harvard Law professor, claiming that he sexually abused her as a minor on at least six separate occasions, and describing each session in granular detail. However, in 2022, Giuffre’s lawyers drafted a statement confessing that she “may have made a mistake.”

Giuffre, for her part, claims that any memory-lapses or discrepancies in the public record are immaterial. “When you’re abused, you know your abuser. I might not have the dates or times right, and the places might not even be right, but I know their faces, and I know what they’ve done to me,” she writes.

Given the context of her repeated “mistakes,” other of Giuffre’s recollections may also warrant skepticism. In the early sections of the new memoir, she claims she was raped, enslaved, and trafficked by a large number of people — even before she ever met Jeffrey Epstein. First, she describes how she was raped by two teenage boys in the back of a car; charges against them were later dropped, owing to what police said was her “lack of credibility.” Court filings document another, separate claim that a different 17-year-old raped her; those charges were also dropped.

Later, she recounts how she was walking down the street one day when a white van pulled up beside her and the driver asked if she “needed a lift.” She got in, and was thereafter brutally raped, she says, with the muzzle of a gun stuck into her mouth. She was then repeatedly trafficked and raped by the owner of modeling agency in Miami; the owner of a horse farm in Ocala, Fla.; and the owner of a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale. She also introduces for the first time that she was continuously raped by her father, as well as her father’s friend.

Once she met Epstein, she contends, she was raped and trafficked by so many men (and women) that the true total can hardly be quantified. This includes an unidentified “Prime Minister” whom she claims savagely raped and beat her. She does not name this person, or give any other identifying details because, she explains, she is afraid he will “hurt” her if she does so. Even though she has freely named a huge assortment of other well-connected people over the years, implicating them in sex crimes.

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Rounding out the list of men Giuffre claims she was abused by is her husband, Robert Giuffre, an Australian whom she lauds throughout the book as her “protector” and “savior.” But in early 2025, she began accusing the husband of abusing her as well, claiming he was jealous of her professional success as a trafficking-awareness activist. Robert countered that Virginia had become increasingly violent and unstable. Australian child-welfare authorities appear to have sided with him: they stripped custody of the couple’s children from Virginia.

No reasonable assessment of this combination of events could conclude that Giuffre is a reliable narrator, yet her claims have been mindlessly transmitted to a mass audience.

She was a self-confessed author of fiction, whose stories became ever-more elaborate as time went on — an evolution that earned her a great deal of money, not least through book advances. Since her death in April, Giuffre’s brother and half-brother have been engaged in a protracted court battle with her estranged husband over the lucrative estate. They insisted that her recent claims of abuse against the husband be added to the book in a foreword, according to The New York Times. Nowhere does the book disclose that these siblings are embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute with Robert Giuffre, with millions of dollars at stake.

The unwavering credulity with which this book has been received by journalists, editors, publishers, and politicians is a testament to how the most basic standards of information-gathering and knowledge-production can be summarily discarded, in service of a narrative that people want to believe. For those of us who prefer to remain anchored in some semblance of sanity and reality: Virginia Roberts Giuffre was undoubtedly a disturbed individual, who may well have suffered grave misfortunes. But that her tales could be unquestioningly broadcast throughout the international media — and be allowed to stoke unrelenting political turmoil, even with talk of a constitutional crisis — is irresponsible in the extreme.

It would be difficult to realistically dispute that contention, then or now. Though the “information disseminators” who populated the precincts of mainstream thought 30 years ago were perhaps less overtly activist-minded in their orientation than they are today, the basic proposition still holds.

Limbaugh’s fantastically successful show (reportedly 20 million daily listeners at its peak) mostly consisted of his uninterrupted extemporaneous riffs on the news of the day — with an impishly comedic tinge. His main source material was lightly-organised newspaper clippings and faxes. He seldom did interviews and took relatively few phone callers. In theory, he wasn’t doing anything particularly revolutionary — but simply by synthesising American politics through a vastly different lens from anything else which had been on offer for a mass commercial audience, he became one of the most important US political and media figures of all time.

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Ronald Reagan wrote a reverential note to Limbaugh in late 1992 that illustrates why nearly the whole of the American Right is in extreme mourning upon Limbaugh’s death from lung cancer. Though Reagan’s mental acuity was in stark decline at that point, he got it together sufficiently to credit Limbaugh for having “become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country” — supplanting Reagan’s own vice president, George HW Bush, who had just lost re-election to Bill Clinton. Earlier that year, Limbaugh had stayed in the coveted Lincoln Bedroom of the White House at the invitation of Bush — who even carried Limbaugh’s overnight bag for him, as he would later gleefully recall on-air.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of the self-identified conservatives I met growing up in the 2000s — the kind who would go out of their way to inform you that they were proud no-nonsense conservatives — attributed their political identity specifically to Limbaugh. Usually, the origin story was because he was the only midday in-car entertainment option for a motorist who wanted something other than music or sports. But it later developed into a full-scale, self-directed, ideological adventure, with Rush always there to serve as a trusted guide. A sprawling industry of liberal commentators likewise fashioned their own political identities in direct opposition to Limbaugh, alongside the legions of imitators he also spawned.

There will always be a market for media offerings which pride themselves on being unbound by the cloying primacy of liberal cultural hegemonic values. Especially as those values become ever-more monolithic in corporate America, enforced through the imperious dictates of Human Resources regimes. The excesses of oblivious dingbat celebrities and “woke” activists will provide endless fodder, if that’s what you are into.

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But the demise of Limbaugh raises the question of whether that broad anti-hegemonic sensibility necessarily begets any intrinsic attachment to the Republican Party. Limbaugh was so revered by elite DC conservatives — many of whom did not exactly care for his brash personality traits — because of his ability to connect the cultural dislocation of ordinary radio listeners with the imperatives of institutional movement conservatism.

Annoyed by the sanctimony of liberal Hollywood? That annoyance must also somehow translate into steadfast support for the lowering of corporate tax rates, per the formulations of Limbaugh. Tired of being lectured by obnoxious elites in New York and LA who think they know better than you how to run your own life? You are also somehow obliged to back whatever foreign military escapade Washington cooks up. And of course, always ultimately vote GOP in November, lest the nation crumble into irreversible decadence.

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Much of the coverage of Limbaugh’s death has focused on his lavishly affectionate relationship with Donald Trump, who awarded Limbaugh a presidential medal of freedom in the middle of the State of the Union address in 2020; Trump made his first post-presidency media appearance Wednesday in homage to his dearly departed golf buddy. As did Mike Pence, the former Vice President — a one time talk radio host himself, who earlier in his career beamed on the floor of the House of Representatives that it was the “literal truth… to say that I am in Congress today because of Rush Limbaugh”.

But more instructive perhaps as to the whole of the Limbaugh legacy was his equally voracious support for George W. Bush, who released a statement fondly remembering his “friend” Rush, and extolling how helpful he had been during his presidency.

Switch on the radio at any point in the early-to mid 2000s, and you’d hear extended Limbaugh soliloquies on the virtues of the Iraq War and the rock-solid trustworthiness of Bush’s leadership. Shortly before the invasion, Limbaugh heralded the profundity of Bush’s “monumental vision” in the arena of foreign policy, and praised Bush as having exactly the right temperament for the job because he ignored critics of his Iraq strategy. After all, opponents of the war were little more than delusional freaks who fundamentally hated America. On his way out of office in January 2009, Bush regaled Limbaugh at the White House for a private luncheon in honor of Limbaugh’s birthday, presenting him with a “little chocolate microphone”.

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The bitter feud which subsequently broke out between Trump and the Bush family dynasty would, on the surface, seem to have been a quandary for Rush. In one of the most astounding moments of the entire 2016 presidential cycle, Trump stood up at a Republican primary debate in South Carolina and accused George W. of lying the country into war. It was exactly the kind of rhetoric that Limbaugh would have spent probably three shows in a row mercilessly lambasting as emblematic of un-American left-wing zealotry.

Much has been made of the ideological meaning of the Bush-to-Trump evolution of the Republican Party, and there’s no doubt that segments of the coalition did genuinely undergo a transformation in thinking after the disaster of Iraq. But the seamless transition figures such as Limbaugh made from one to the other shows that there was always a market for commercialised partisan entertainment in support of whoever the Republican standard-bearer happened to be. Limbaugh was always candid that his primary motives were ultimately financial — and the money kept rolling in thanks to his service as the agitprop frontman of a movement conservative apparatus which brought him into the fold.

However, resisting the obnoxious encroachments of liberal pieties doesn’t necessarily require hardcore, partisan fidelity to the Republican Party, which Limbaugh exemplified for virtually his entire tenure in the public domain. Given the technological advancements since Limbaugh began syndicating his radio show, audiences have become more diffuse. There is plenty of appetite for a kind of counter-hegemonic synthesis that doesn’t ineluctably flow into unflinching partisan support for one of the two major political parties. This was clear long before Limbaugh’s death — but perhaps this week will hasten the realisation for Republicans that the constructs they’ve clung to since the Nineties can only last so long.

But this operation, which reportedly consisted of 25,000 military personnel — not including the innumerable federal, state, and local law enforcement officials on the ground — was another thing altogether. Downtown DC had been transformed into a brazenly fortified, militarised zone unlike anything in living memory. Roads were blocked off by oversized armoured vehicles which had been stationed for maximum visibility. The boarding-up of endless storefronts — a result of both the Covid-related economic downturn and prolonged riot-induced anxiety — added to the sense of dystopia.

Soldiers patrolled with large rifles slung around their shoulders, directing traffic and checking the “papers” of motorists. One Guardsman from Pennsylvania told me that “legitimate business” was the standard by which they were to adjudicate whether cars would be allowed to pass through.

The rifles brandished by many of the troops were conspicuously without a magazine loaded. This is not uncommon for a peacetime mission. The aim was evidently not to subdue any kind of imminent, actionable threat that would require live ammunition, as many politicians and journalists had frantically warned was the case, but to simply act as a gigantic deterrent.

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That objective was apparently accomplished. I did not see a single protester anywhere in the city on Inauguration Day, much less any “insurrectionists” or “armed rebels” trawling around, as had been so gravely forecast. The FBI (then still technically under the jurisdiction of Donald Trump) had warned that all 50 state Capitols were at severe risk, and therefore also needed to fortify their defences with military deployments and obtrusive fencing and barriers. Then the day came and went, and… nothing. In both Albany, NY, and Sacramento, CA a total of one Trump hat-wearing man showed up at each.

And so Joe Biden was sworn in without incident, appealing for “unity”, while the city surrounding him was essentially under full-scale military occupation. The night before, I saw multiple platoons marching the streets in two-by-two formation — en route to who knows where. The general public couldn’t get anywhere close to the Inauguration site, the interior of which had been cordoned off with barbed wire. The few stragglers who hopelessly tried to enter the outskirts of the National Mall — mostly foreign media desperate for a story — were fooled by the Secret Service into standing in a line-to-nowhere that never moved.

It was the refusal of American media to question the necessity of these extraordinary measures that will be one of the longest-lasting consequences of the entire bizarre affair. It confirmed that journalists will uncritically accept extravagant shows of intrusive state force, so long as the political incentives are correctly aligned. During the riots in the summer, the US media generally reacted with horror to the prospect of the American military being deployed to allay “civil unrest,” with many claiming that it would be tantamount to white supremacy for soldiers to deter arson attacks against small minority-owned businesses and private residences.

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But place DC under complete military occupation as a final rebuke to Trump and his shameful supporters, and the show of state force is to be celebrated rather than adversarially probed. Particularly with Democrats now controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency, the wisdom of this occupation is probably never going to be examined in any meaningful way. Will we ever learn how much it cost taxpayers? Doubtful.

The rationale for the occupation was made all the more questionable by the feckless behaviour of Trump, who, after the goofball mob intrusion at the Capitol, essentially retreated from public view: the opposite of what you’d expect from a tyrannical ruler desperate to cling to power. He admitted defeat, denounced those rioters who’d been under the illusion that he was some kind of Messiah, and actively discouraged any further action that could be remotely described as “insurrectionary”.

Perhaps his Twitter ban has shattered his world more than we thought. As he slunk away to Florida on Wednesday morning in humiliation and disrepute — the first former president to not attend his successor’s inauguration since the also-impeached Andrew Johnson in 1869 — the hysterical fantasies of him leading some bonafide “coup” attempt dissipated into confirmed absurdity.

Ultimately, Trump was a master at commercialising and, later, politicising a mass market audience — it is, after all, the skillset he cultivated over 12 years on primetime reality TV. He was never a political visionary of any sort, and so the bold image ascribed to him, by both his most diehard boosters and detractors, was always bound to crumble into tragicomical nothingness.

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He issued a series of pardons in the dead of night just before leaving office that typified the personality quirks that defined his spasmodic approach to governance. Rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black received clemency, as well as corrupt former Congressmen and assorted others whose representatives successfully gamed the process with the flattery required to get him to do anything. Meanwhile, the cross-ideological lobbying push for pardons for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange — each genuine antagonists of the “Deep State” that Trump always claimed to despise — failed.

The idea that Trump’s ideological emptiness was ever going to result in a genuine “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the government, or could ever challenge the full weight of the American national security state, was a total farce. And although it has now congealed into unassailable mythology, the further idea that what occurred at the Capitol on 6 January amounted to anything more than a temporary self-defeating mob outburst should be put permanently to rest.

But what is not a myth is that such an event can be quickly seized upon to institute all manner of reactive authoritarian measures. Imagine if Trump had deployed that kind of force to suppress protest and imagined “threats” ahead of his second inauguration. There would have been a meltdown of epic proportions, and rightfully so. But because this was done to bookend Trump’s rule and usher him into ignominious retirement, everyone seems content to just move on.

Either way, he’s gone. The Left-liberal establishment has successfully restored itself to power after five years of all-consuming mania, which has probably inflicted irreparable damage to the collective psyche of the body politic. “Fascism,” in other words, was defeated — with a gargantuan military crackdown. Whether the irony will ever be noted remains to be seen.

Likewise, if you deign to raise concerns about the implications of this sudden impeachment sequel — or any of the other extraordinary actions taken in the past week, such as an ongoing corporate censorship purge of unprecedented proportions — you can expect to be accused of defending or supporting the “domestic terrorists” who carried out the mob attack on the Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, rationalised rushing through Wednesday’s impeachment resolution at spell-binding speed — by far the fastest impeachment process ever — on the grounds that Trump posed a “clear and present danger” to the country, and needed to be removed immediately. “Imminent threats” of various stripes also have a long history of being cited to justify sweeping emergency action, such as the invasion of Iraq. Often upon further inspection, the purported “threat” turns out to have been not so “imminent”, or in fact to have never existed at all.

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But as rushed as the impeachment was, if the purported emergency conditions were truly so dire as Pelosi maintained, she could have theoretically summoned the House to convene the day after the mob attack and impeach Trump right away. Congress convened the very next day after the attack on Pearl Harbor to declare war on Japan, for example. Instead, Pelosi waited a full week, and gave everyone the weekend off in the interim. Trump, alleged to be in the process of orchestrating a violent “coup”, was allowed to remain in office unimpeded with access to the nuclear codes for seven days.

Nonetheless, with a total of two hours of perfunctory debate — and no hearings, fact-finding or meditation on the relevant Constitutional Law considerations — Trump was impeached for the second time. As such, the text of the impeachment article will now be permanently embedded in the fabric of American governance.

One wonders who even had a chance to actually sit down and read it. The article, which charges Trump with “incitement of insurrection”, is far-reaching in its potential implications. “Incitement” is an extremely narrowly circumscribed doctrine in US law, and for good reason: anyone who engages in inflammatory but protected political speech could theoretically be said to have engaged in criminally punishable “incitement” without the shield of the First Amendment. If someone who hears your speech chooses on their volition to engage in violent or criminal conduct, you in almost all circumstances cannot be prosecuted.

This new impeachment changes that equilibrium. The one quote cited from Trump in the article to demonstrate his alleged “inciting” speech was: ‘‘If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’’ That line — which could have been uttered by Trump in about a thousand different contexts over the past five years — is alleged to have “foreseeably resulted in… lawless action”.

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I witnessed countless instances of political speech expressed by activists, journalists, and others during last summer’s protests and riots which under the same standard could have been deemed to have “foreseeably resulted” in “lawless action”, such as attacks on police or destruction of property. But there was always a presumption that the speech was nonetheless protected under the First Amendment. The new “Trump standard” codified by this impeachment could have drastic implications for the the future, should it be applied more widely throughout US jurisprudence. Impeachable “incitement” is also unlikely ever to include statements by a president “encouraging” violence by way of, say, military force.

Still, Trump’s statements on 6 January  — just like a seemingly infinite number of others over the past five-plus years — could surely be worthy of political rebuke or censure. Indeed, Trump has already been rebuked. He’s been roundly condemned by his own party and administration. His main communications platform, Twitter, has banished him. His high-profile supporters are being systematically nuked from social media writ large. He’s been made to issue several humiliating statements conceding defeat and “disavowing” the MAGA mob which marched in his name. The bozo rioters at the Capitol were undoubtedly inflamed by a barrage of lies and conspiratorial delusions that Trump churned out on an almost hourly basis since losing the election — that’s beyond dispute.

But it was still clear pretty soon after the mob intrusion began last week that the most significant consequences from what occurred would arise not from the intrusion itself, which was dispersed by agents of the state in a matter of hours. Rather, the real consequences would stem from the predictably rash over-reaction. The more extreme the characterisation of last Wednesday’s events, the more emotional ammunition that lawmakers have to demand whatever extreme remedial action they had been ideologically committed to pursuing anyway. This goes well beyond the expedited impeachment, and into the corporate censorship purge which has now radically altered the principles undergirding the open internet.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most high-profile member of the Left-wing Congressional “#squad”, has claimed that she narrowly escaped assassination at the Capitol and has thus been “traumatised”. Evidently she will be publicly working through this “trauma” on Instagram. It is also her contention that half of the House of Representatives (over 200 people) had been on the verge of mass execution. This style of political rhetoric has already been marshalled by “AOC” and others to demand corporate censorship on a vast scale, and successfully so; last week she tweeted pressure on Apple and Google to expel the alternative social media platform Parler from their app stores, and the corporations quickly obliged.

Amazon, falling like a domino, then completely terminated Parler from its web hosting service — effectively killing the site. As perhaps the country’s most influential Democrat by online following, AOC is someone who these tech corporations have an interest in appeasing, especially as Democrats enter full control of the federal government on 20 January. Her exceedingly dramatic recounting of what transpired during the mob intrusion is a powerful tool in her arsenal.

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Curiously, the most putatively “progressive” members of Congress seem to be the most exercised about resurrecting concepts that sound like Woodrow Wilson suppressing dissidents in wartime. Mondaire Jones, a highly touted “progressive” incoming freshman Congressman, took to fulminating on the House floor during the impeachment proceeding about “treason and sedition”.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney further declared from the floor of the House that Trump had “wilfully incited an armed insurrection”. Which is again another curious characterisation, because while a Capitol Police officer was in fact killed in the melee, the only person against whom armed, deadly force was used against was Ashli Babbitt, a Trump-supporting Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran who was shot dead at point-blank range by an officer.

Any rational observer who has the capacity to detach from the temporary passions of the moment should be able to recognise that the United States government was never at risk of being “overthrown” by the chaotic band of yahoos who stormed the Capitol. All they accomplished was to delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory by a few hours. They also humiliated the man they apparently thought they were valiantly coming to the defence of; even Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, took to the floor during the impeachment session to declare that “Antifa” was not to blame for the chaos which unfolded, and blamed Trump as bearing responsibility for the events. Indeed, the full force of state and federal law enforcement power is now being deployed against the intruders, and many — perhaps hundreds — will be going to prison.

Reminiscent of the post 9/11 period, the “crisis” of the past week has been seized upon to execute a pre-existing agenda. Impeachment, purges, the militarisation and lockdown of the Capitol — it’s only the beginning, and it’s all happening with hardly even a peep of criticism or moment for reflection. Given this historical continuity with the events of 2001, it was therefore fitting when Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Majority Leader in the House, went out of his way Wednesday afternoon to herald the valour of Liz Cheney — daughter of the architect of US policy after 9/11, Dick — who was one of the ten Republicans to vote along with Democrats to impeach.

Two months after a presidential election widely declared to have been the most important in all of American history, the Georgia run-offs were coincidentally also declared the most important Senate elections ever. Yes: which party maintains a majority in the Senate makes a substantial difference. Republicans will control no branch of government now. But if the events in Georgia demonstrate anything about the US political system, it’s that to varying degrees both parties are stuck in a spiral of semi-permanently campaigning on how their opponents are the embodiment of civilisation-destroying apocalyptic terror — rather than putting forth any kind of tangible, positive agenda of their own.

During the campaign, the two incumbent senators from a once-decisively Republican state chose to spend their time warning incessantly that the United States would devolve into socialist tyranny if their Democratic opponents, Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, prevailed. Such claims were backed by Donald Trump who, rallying in Georgia on Monday night, repeated his contention that full-blown communism was right around the corner should Democrats gain a one-vote majority in the Senate. Allegedly this nightmare would be ushered in by Joe Biden — certainly everyone’s idea of an aspiring communist despot.

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In these peculiar political circumstances, all that Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler could have really offered by way of a positive agenda was some combination of the following arguments: 1) that the Georgia election system fraudulently deprived Trump of victory in November, just as he’s repeatedly alleged for two months straight, and statewide Republican officials must be punished for their guilt in the scheme, or 2) that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, must retain control of the Senate so he and his caucus can continue depriving Americans of $2,000 cash relief cheques, which McConnell has been dogged in blocking, despite demands for the cheques from Trump. For obvious reasons, neither would have been particularly inspirational stump speech material.

Parties that become hyper-reliant on a never ending cascade of wildly inflammatory and reality-detached rhetoric are often masking their own insecurities and weaknesses. Compare the final Democratic messaging of the campaign: Warnock and Ossoff stressed that among their first actions would be to approve the $2,000 Covid relief payments, and Biden travelled to Georgia on Monday to underscore his own support for this initiative. Perdue and Loeffler, conversely, couldn’t exactly tout a triumphant pledge to keep McConnell in power so he can carry on witholding withhold cash payments from Americans during a pandemic and protracted economic contraction.

So instead, they resorted to the same trite playbook that failed Trump in the general election — bellowing endlessly about the imminent onslaught of radical Leftism. Warnock and Ossoff are more “progressive” than the traditional Georgia Democrat, it’s true. But a skin-of-their-teeth Democratic majority in the Senate is highly unlikely to usher in anything particularly radical. And the attack rings even hollower when what the supposed “radical Leftists” are advocating is to give people cash based on a proposal that Trump himself loudly supports. In addition, if Loeffler — the wife of the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange who bought her way into an appointment to the Senate seat she unimpressively occupied — really represents the last bulwark against socialist tyranny, then she makes socialist tyranny seem somewhat preferable.

The stultification of Republican electoral strategy stems fundamentally from the fact that there has been no substantial intra-party public debate about the reasons for Trump’s loss. Even now, more than two months later, to merely state that Trump lost provokes profound rage among a large segment of the party’s voters. You can be mercilessly attacked online and threatened with career-ending repudiation for doing so; Purdue and Loeffler couldn’t deviate from this line, for fear of alienating fraud-believing Trump supporters in Georgia. But Republican turnout dipped anyway, most probably because conservative media had been completely inundated with accusations that the Republican-led state government of Georgia was complicit in a conspiracy to oust Trump. It turns out “fraud-pilling” one’s own voters might not be the most reliable path to victory.

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The manic Trump-induced obsession with purported fraud thereby delayed any thoroughgoing public discussion of how Congressional Republicans over-performed in November, across many metrics, even as Trump went down to defeat. So instead of capitalising on those gains, Republicans jettisoned them.

As for McConnell, it was one of the more astounding moves in recent political history to sacrifice his own Senate majority, which most of his professional life has been structured around preserving at all costs, because he was dead-set against sending out the $2,000 cheques. A figure which in the grand scheme of things, as Trump would say, is “peanuts”.

But even with the majority vanquished, McConnell will maintain a fair amount of power as minority leader. As of 20 January the Senate will stand as split 50-50 with future Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. The possibility of a few Democratic defections here and there means McConnell will have plenty of opportunities to exert legislative influence. And he can rest easy knowing that he successfully used Trump as a vehicle to achieve the generations-long dream of the conservative donor class — a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, as well as some corporate tax cuts.

The coming trajectory of the Republican Party depends on whether its elected officials, donors, and allied media figures will ever be permitted to conduct a candid public assessment of what transpired in the 2020 election — not all of which bodes poorly for their future — without the encumbering distraction of Trump’s wild fraud claims. Even in losing, Trump made conventional wisdom-defying gains among nonwhite groups in November, and the nature of the party coalition has genuinely trended toward a more working-class orientation. But the implications of this shift have yet to be really reckoned with because, again, to even state that he lost the election brings forth a torrent of wrath from Trump supporters, in addition to Trump himself. The mob which stormed the Capitol yesterday may have been the most extreme physical manifestation of this fury, but it’s astoundingly widespread across the Republican electorate.

Once the fog clears, if it ever does, the contours of a potential power struggle for influence in the party will emerge. One dividing line for Republican officials will be whether they’ll revisit the negative character traits they once identified in Trump and cite them as a contributing factor to the GOP’s electoral losses. The fiasco at the Capitol will probably make it easier for Trump-weary conservatives to do this. Like virtually every other Republican member who had once been resolutely against him five years ago, figures such Sen. Ted Cruz — who once described Trump as a “pathological liar” and massive narcissist — later got on board due to the exigencies of party polarisation, and then enthusiastically welcomed Trump’s help when he was up for re-election in 2018 in Texas.

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But as Cruz prophesied, Trump’s unrelenting self-centredness almost certainly did cost the GOP candidates critical votes in Georgia. At the rally on Monday, ostensibly intended to get out the vote for Loeffler and Perdue but functionally another classic Trump airing of grievances, the first words out of his mouth were: “Hello Georgia. By the way, there’s no way we lost Georgia. There’s no way. That was a rigged election.”

Should Trump revert to some kind of “shadow president” posture after he leaves office, Cruz may end up returning to the critique of the former president’s character he expounded in 2016. Obviously this would have to be coupled with a steadfast recognition of the policy achievements of the Trump presidency, but if Trump is determined to see that his egotism consumes the party’s consciousness for the next several years, there will be a number of Republicans who eventually get fed up. Their differing plans for managing that conundrum will be of note.

Probable presidential candidates like Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley may try to capture some of Trump’s supporters, given their efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College on Wednesday during a joint-session of Congress. This was always going to be a purely theatrical and ultimately inconsequential plot — as they were well aware, both being Ivy League lawyers. But it was a gesture that they likely calculated was going to give them the symbolic leverage to say they “fought” for Trump, even as they move to distance themselves from him.

With the mob chaos ruining the effort, though, their calculations appear to have backfired in spectacular fashion. Still, there will be many opportunities for symbolistic “fighting” in the years ahead — and it will be substantially easier to pull off when they’re in the minority and have fewer governing responsibilities.

An aggrieved post-presidency Trump, denouncing on the way out everyone from his own Supreme Court appointees, to his former Attorney General, to the leadership of the Senate Republican caucus, to his own Vice President, will likely remain in perpetual denunciation-mode for some time after he leaves office. This will go a long way in forestalling any kind of ideological self-evaluation in the Republican Party which could explain why in a span of four years, they went from full control of the House of Representatives, Senate, and presidency to no control of all three. The delay will be even longer if there are more riotous mobs to quell. Ambitious party leaders will have to figure out how to navigate this exceedingly unpleasant dynamic.

In any event, all states have now ratified their results without serious incident, and the hucksterish post-election litigation efforts undertaken by Trump’s various sundry representatives have predictably gone nowhere. Yesterday, Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell even declared Biden the “president-elect” and now the Democrat is faithfully filling his forthcoming administration with a cast of characters drawn directly from the pits of the Washington, DC Democratic Party professional class — the same people whom he openly campaigned on rehabilitating and restoring to power.

The election is well and truly over, whatever toothless protestations may continue to arise.

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How hysterical punditry failed America

By Michael Tracey

What’s far from over, however, is the political influence of Trump. No one can say with total certainty what he’ll do when he eventually leaves office; no one can even say exactly on what terms he’s going to leave. But in just over a month now, we may face a scenario that would be a first in modern US history: an aggrieved former president making a competing claim to the presidency and refusing in perpetuity to acknowledge the reality of his defeat. In other words, a “shadow” president.

Trump’s lack of compunction about doing something like this would seem to solidify his position as the most thoroughgoing “post-exceptionalist” president since at least World War II. That is, he is entirely unmoved by the kind of bipartisan “American exceptionalism” dogma that had previously bound together the elite US political class, across partisan lines. It’s the dogma which holds that, in short, the US possesses a singular uniqueness that sets it apart in all of world history. Often blended together with notions of Christian providence, it ascribes the very foundations of the US Constitutional order with a kind of divine import.

But over the last four years, Trump has thrown these old assumptions into doubt. For one thing, the Constitution certainly makes no provision for a “shadow” president. How could a country with a mystically-endowed “exceptional” nature — the “shining city on a hill,” Ronald Reagan once proclaimed — be said to retain its “exceptional” status if its elections are, as Trump vigorously maintains, structurally and systematically fraudulent?

“The whole world is watching, and the whole world is laughing at our electoral process,” Trump recently charged, during the same rant in which he also condemned Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State as “an enemy of the people”. He’s also taken to referring to the US as a “third world country” on similar grounds. A president for whom the doctrine of American exceptionalism was a genuinely animating principle would be less inclined to encourage the impression that America’s system of choosing its elected leaders is so hopelessly corrupt that it deserves to be the object of international ridicule.

That Trump has harped on this theme with negligible public opposition from conservatives and Republicans suggests an ongoing reformulation in how the US Right conceptualises the very notion of “American exceptionalism”. It’s the culmination of a longstanding trend in terms of how conservatives have processed the experience of Trump; nationalism has been disentangled from reverence for institutions like the FBI and CIA which have been among the most frequent targets of Trump opprobrium. Even his popularisation of the term “Deep State” cuts against traditional American exceptionalist theology — America was never supposed to be the type of country that could even have a “Deep State” in the first place.

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Given that Trump is so profuse in his proclamations of nationalistic fervour, this element of his underlying worldview has often been obscured. But it’s not as though he’s really tried to hide it: shortly before launching his candidacy in 2016, he went on an extended soliloquy explaining how he “never liked” the term “American Exceptionalism” in the first place, and accused US politicians of “insulting the world” when they use it.

Nor did the prestige of office meaningfully change Trump’s attitude on the matter. During a pregame Superbowl interview shortly after he took power in 2017, he was asked by interviewer Bill O’Reilly about Russia. Drawing a kind of off-handed moral equivalence that would have once been unthinkable for a sitting president to propose, Trump replied: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” This dark — but again, not-entirely-wrong — view of everything from the US intelligence services, to the principles undergirding US foreign policy, to the motives of workaday state and local election officials, always set him rhetorically apart from his more guarded predecessors.

And as is typical with Trump, the grievances he wildly purveys usually have at least a kernel of truth to them. He will have a reasonable argument in his post-presidency, for instance, that his tenure was “rigged” from before it started due to the depredations of select CIA/FBI malefactors who colluded against him. In December 2016, when the first official accusation that he’d been sinisterly aided by “Russian interference” was leaked via unnamed members of the “intelligence community,” he instructed his press department to retort: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It was a justifiable statement. But then, a few weeks later, Trump would liken the CIA and FBI to the Third Reich. Again — not the rhetorical style of your typical “American exceptionalist”.

It’s in that context that both Trump and his supporters feel they have more than ample justification to claim, possibly for decades to come, that he was defrauded rather than defeated in this election. The issue is not even so much that they believe the election was literally fraudulent — although they do. But more elementally, what they believe is that the opposition to Trump was the culmination of a “rigged” process in a sense that far transcends the administrative mechanics of absentee ballot distribution in Wisconsin.

These grievances will persist whether or not Trump wields state power. But there are plenty of informal powers that a newly-christened “shadow president” could conceivably wield. Having garnered 74.2 million votes — more than anyone in history, except Joe Biden — he’ll have a limitless range of options to continue exerting political influence. The first thing virtually any ambitious Republican who wants to win a competitive primary election will seek is his endorsement. We can likely expect a steady stream of flamboyantly-orchestrated pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago.

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Stop crying foul over fascism

By Michael Tracey

President Manuel López Obrador of Mexico — a Left-wing populist who developed an idiosyncratic bond with Trump — potentially provides something of a precedent for the Trump to emulate. After Obrador’s loss in the 2006 Mexico presidential election, the candidate openly rejected the outcome on the basis of what he said was widespread fraud. He even went so far as to participate in his own counter-inauguration event, attended by huge numbers of supporters, and declared himself head of a “parallel government.” It took another twelve years, but Obrador eventually won the official presidency on his own terms.

Trump probably lacks the concentration of mind to replicate Obrador’s feat; governing always seemed to be his least favourite part of the job, anyway. More probably, he will be permitted to once again inhabit his most natural state, which is that of pundit-in-chief. However should he choose to forge this new, yet-to-be defined role as a “shadow president”, he’ll have hastened the reversion of the US to a country with a manifestly less “exceptional” stature — and it would be perfectly in keeping with his long-expressed worldview.

In a way, this isn’t an entirely bad thing — it could bring a much-needed dose of humility to those whose livelihoods have long been predicated on fictionalised “American Exceptionalism” fantasies — especially to the DC think-tank class whose foreign policy obsessions usually entail imposing Americanised democratic customs on other countries by force. That will be far harder to rationalise when a former president dedicates his life to insisting that American democratic customs are… a farce.

First, you had to rely on the local newspaper to tell you where the event was even located. The report was based on sources who “spoke on the condition of anonymity” — as though the venue of a public presidential campaign rally was some sort of state secret. In trying to gain entry to the event that afternoon, I encountered a police officer who informed me that “pre-registration” had been required to attend, even though there was no publicly-available information as to how to “pre-register.” Finally, a Biden volunteer spilled the beans: the event was really open only to “party officials and donors.”

Now, this can supposedly be attributed to the Biden campaign’s hyper-cautious approach to the Covid pandemic. And there’s probably some validity — both political and epidemiological — to that rationale. But it’s still peculiar, and one might say disturbing, that public campaign events during the final phase of a presidential election have been effectively privatised under the auspices of virus control, as though that were the only option to ensure social distancing. If the price of mitigating virus spread is giving in-the-know elites another tier of special access to engage in the electoral process, that’s quite a bleak (and self-interested) tradeoff.

And there are more cynical interpretations of the Biden campaign’s tack here, because it’s an open question as to whether the general public would be interested in showing up to his events in the first place. Donald Trump, for his part, is still holding rip-roaring rallies several times a day like nothing’s changed since 2016. In Luzerne County that Saturday afternoon, Trump supporters far outnumbered Biden’s as they gathered en masse on the outskirts of Biden’s own event, with the goal — successfully accomplished — of shouting loudly at Biden’s motorcade as it entered the high school where the “drive in” event was taking place. They also drowned out the small cohort of Biden supporters who did manage to gather on the perimeter, shouting additional pleasantries at them like “Pedo Joe” and “Where’s Hunter?”

Granted, Luzerne County saw some of the biggest shifts to Trump anywhere in the country in 2016, helping him win Pennsylvania overall in a jarring upset, so you’d expect there to be an “enthusiasm” disparity there. The county was perhaps the national epicenter of electoral trends in de-industrialised, heavily white, economically adrift areas of the US that delivered an upset victory to Trump — he received a full 35% more raw votes there than the previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney did in 2012, which was an astonishing shift over just four years, even as raw population in the county steadily declines. And much of that support remains fully in tact. But still, the scene that day was so weighted against Biden — again, at his own event — as to be comical.

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By Ian Birrell

If nothing else, the 2020 campaign will test the theory that on-the-ground, observable, in-person enthusiasm is any kind of significant determinant to a national election outcome. And in fairness to whoever’s calling the shots in Biden-land, there’s already some tentative reason to believe Biden’s unprecedentedly hands-off approach may work. Even pre-Covid, during the Democratic primaries, the scant attendance at Biden’s campaign events and his paucity of paid campaign staff became a recurring object of ridicule. But then he ended up winning states he’d never set foot in by wide margins, blowing out candidates who’d raised and spent far more money.

Conversely, Trump’s swashbuckling rallies across the country in 2016 were routinely sneered at by journalists as self-indulgent wastes of time, but these rallies likely did have an appreciable pro-Trump impact in electorally crucial areas such as Northeastern Pennsylvania. Home to outsized proportions of white people with less educational attainment — the percentage of residents who possess a college degree in Luzerne County (23%) is well below the national average — voters there had an observably specific cultural affinity with Trump. And while that affinity remains — they have no qualms about displaying it with huge TRUMP flags attached to huge pickup trucks barrelling down the road — the question is whether this continued enthusiasm will be overridden by other segments of the electorate newly energised in opposition to Trump.

Either way, some humility on the “enthusiasm” issue is warranted, especially given the country’s mass transition to entirely new methods of election administration, whereby huge percentages of ballots are being cast well before Election Day. A member of the “Bikers for Trump” group which bombarded the Biden event, when asked who he foresaw winning Pennsylvania, replied: “If it was just regular votes, Trump. With this mail-in bull crap who knows.” (The man declined to provide his name.)

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I also spent some time in nearby Scranton, PA where Biden was born, a fact he mentions constantly, and which provides an easy, cliched backdrop for a tedious number of journalistic inquiries into the state of the race in Pennsylvania. Though the city and surrounding county still lean Democratic, Trump also made enormous inroads there in 2016. Directly adjacent to the Biden campaign office in downtown — at which you can mosey in and pick up a slightly drab-looking “BIDEN” logo face mask — sits a shoe repair shop owned by Barry Lawrence. The interior of the shop is in partial disarray, and posted depressingly to its door is an eviction notice signed by a county magistrate.

Lawrence told me he was unable to operate his shop for approximately four months in the initial stage of the pandemic, and his landlord refused to cut him a break on rent. This was made all the more harmful because he said he didn’t know how to apply for one of the so-called “PPP” loans made available by the CARES Act, which was passed in March to support shuttered small businesses. But even as he’s now able to open his store back up, it’s barely made a dent. He’ll have to vacate just two days after the election.

“Business is dead,” Lawrence said. “People are still thinking about the pandemic. Nobody wanna be out.” He accepted a Biden/Harris campaign placard to put in his storefront window, though when asked about his candidate preference expressed no particular pro-Biden enthusiasm. “We need something better than what we have,” he said, almost mournfully.

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By Michael Tracey

Whether Trump himself can rightfully be blamed for Lawrence’s inability to get the loan is debatable, but one can’t deny that prolonged Covid-induced dread isn’t very helpful for the incumbent. Especially for voters who’ve made every effort to abide by mitigation protocols in their own lives, while Trump has a somewhat spotty track record in that regard. For the record, face masks were required for entry to a “Trump Victory” campaign office in Montgomery County as of Sunday, October 25, which apparently is not the case in the White House — site to at least one known “super-spreader” event. Montgomery County, a diversifying Philadelphia suburb, is among the few places in the state that actually trended Democratic in 2016, and that’s where Biden’s campaign is banking on boosting turnout to overcome Trump’s likely sky-high margins in rural areas — areas where, it should be said, mask-wearing is considerably less embraced.

Luckily for Biden, volunteers hardly even have to make an affirmative case on his behalf, when the “negative” case (against Trump) is so all-consumingly dominant in the minds of Trump’s opponents. Jeanne Boland, a Biden campaign volunteer from Scranton, said she hadn’t bothered getting involved in the 2016 election but now was going all-out after four year of being inflicted with what she clearly felt was a non-stop series of Trump-related horrors. “Honestly, I thought Hillary was a lock,” she recalled of this time last cycle.

And out of what she said were hundreds of interactions she’d made over the preceding several days, Boland “only talked to one voter who actually said that they haven’t made up their minds yet.” This is borne out in polling data, and also makes the “final stretch” of this election (to use another pundit cliche) seem altogether different from 2016, when there was a palpable sense of fluidity in the waning days of the race. Now, you either want Trump in, or you want him out. A binary question. Biden is almost a side-story. Voters seldom mention him — it’s all Trump, all the time.

An older woman exiting an early-voting polling place in a largely black area of Northeast Philadelphia on Monday, having just checked the box for Biden, was asked to rate the candidate’s performance over the course of the campaign. “Sufficient,” she said. This is amusing for anyone who can remember the rapturous enthusiasm engendered by Barack Obama in 2008, and even to large extent in 2012 — particularly (but by no means exclusively) in black neighbourhoods. Hillary Clinton’s failure to rouse comparable enthusiasm was a significant contributor to her loss four years ago. This time, though, Trump appears to have provided all the enthusiasm — pro and con — that anyone needs. And if being merely “sufficient” is enough to win a national election in 2020, as it may well be, then the country has really lowered its collective expectations.

“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” blared a five-alarm-fire warning in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank, who may want to consider a title change from “columnist” to “in-house hysteric”. Not to be outdone, establishment weather-vane Thomas Friedman joined the fray in the New York Times with an equally shocking exhortation: “I can’t say this any more clearly,” he hyperventilated. “Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis […]”.

If these fevered prognostications even bore the faintest resemblance to political conditions in the United States, it might seem a bit odd that the pundits in question have since moved on to other subjects. Or to put it this way: if they really believed their own fantastical rhetoric, shouldn’t they have spent the past few weeks taking action more tangible than rattling off a few throwaway columns and browsing Twitter? Not that any “resistance” brigade composed of pallid middle-aged journalists would be especially formidable on the battlefield, but the point is that their conduct doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the incredible alarmism of their words.

More destruction could be in store next month than was wrought in World War II, the most devastating global military conflict in human history? All of civilisation was nearly wiped out in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we’re supposed to believe that whatever harm is brought about by the election aftermath will exceed that? If so, why aren’t these people stockpiling canned food and training for hand-to-hand combat?

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Joe Biden is no radical

By Michael Tracey

They’re not doing anything of the sort because this latest round of histrionics is just a continuation of a theme that has characterised the Trump era: political and cultural elites, whose psyches have been profoundly damaged, will churn out nonstop waves of hysteria rarely noting afterwards if their frenzied forecasts ever panned out. As a largely accountability-free profession, there is no penalty in the opinion-making world if the catastrophising ultimately proves to be just a bizarre projection of their own angst.

The logic of these latest prophecies, to the extent that any can be discerned amid the haze of paranoia, is that Trump will refuse to abide a “peaceful transition of power” after the election. Instead, he’ll throw the country into some sort of protracted armed insurgency by calling upon white supremacist militias to do his genocidal bidding in the streets. Hugely viral tweets, including one by a credentialed member of the White House press corps, helped foster this belief by alleging (without caveat) that Trump had explicitly incited a Civil War.

This is the most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked. I’ve interviewed convicted killers with more empathy. @realDonaldTrump is advocating Civil War. https://t.co/8eMY9Csuhp

— Brian J. Karem (@BrianKarem) September 23, 2020

Of course, the basis for the allegation was a typically garbled comment by Trump at a press conference. But there had already been an atmosphere of unfounded dread in the air, thanks in part to long disquisitions in The Atlantic — the leading clearinghouse for the neurotic elite speculation — playing out with utmost seriousness various as-yet-fictitious scenarios whereby Trump refuses to concede the election and the American constitutional order summarily crumbles.

Once you accept that this doomsaying is less about Trump himself, and more about an elite media class that has overdosed on five years of Trump-related dopamine rush, a darkly comical aspect emerges. The foot soldiers of Trump’s supposed post-election coup were declared to be the “Proud Boys,” a group of glorified performance artists and trolls who’d barely even register as a political force were it not for all the manufactured coverage intended to elevate them as frightening foils. If it truly falls on them to wage Trump’s Civil War, then this will be the goofiest and least daunting Civil War on record.

And as for the “peaceful transition of power”, it’s possible that Trump will dispute the election results in some fashion. The lawyers are gearing up in both parties, given the country’s wide-scale transition to mail-in-voting.

Irony must be lost on these prophesiers, however, because while Trump did not encounter any overtly violent coup upon assuming office in January 2017, his own transition to power was anything but ordinary. The country’s security state apparatus had launched an unprecedented brazen intervention into electoral politics, and hobbled his administration in a morass of investigation and quasi-scandal before it even began. Trump’s erratic communications style might in some sense violate customary “norms” of American political comity, but the behaviour of the FBI and CIA in 2016-2017 will have a far more long-lasting impact on what’s regarded as “normal” power-transfers.

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By Douglas Murray

One wonders how these media organs could ever hope to adapt to post-Trump life, with all the painful withdrawals and lingering psychological damage that will undoubtedly entail. One option is to simply keep going back over and over again for a fix, even with Trump out of office. Chris Hayes of MSNBC recently suggested one potential option: “Some kind of truth and reconciliation commission.” Interesting thought, because if this theoretical “commission” is tasked with uncovering the reasons for Trump’s rise to power, it will find that perhaps the chief culprit is NBC Universal, which provided Trump with a 14-year perch as one of the country’s most well-known network TV personalities.

Either way, the elite-peddled angst about some forthcoming Civil War is made all the more absurd because it almost gives Trump more credit than it deserves. His re-election campaign is flailing, and it has nothing to do with white supremacist militias readying for armed conflict. Compared to his successful 2016 campaign messaging, the current iteration is a hopeless wreck. Much of Trump’s time is spent impotently fuming about the “radical Left”, and he repeatedly brought up the phrase during the depressing first “debate” with Joe Biden.

Review the transcripts from his debate encounters with Hillary Clinton four years ago, however, and you’ll see not one instance of Trump making reference to anything like the “radical Left,” or any of the other heavily-ideologised attack lines that his advisors and handlers this time around have so relentlessly imparted on him to emphasise. Trump’s downfall, should it arrive next month, will be explicable by a variety of factors, ineffectual and incoherent pandemic response paramount among them. But they’ll all be far more banal, and therefore less emotionally satisfying, than those currently engrossing the elite commentariat.

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Of course, one can always easily find examples of comparably grandiose doomsaying among pro-Trump partisans scattered throughout the Right-wing media ecosystem. But when the “youth activist” Charlie Kirk pronounced in an address at the Republican convention that Trump is nothing less than the “the bodyguard of Western Civilisation,” this was understood to represent a foolish, deluded Right-wing sensibility. Yet when similarly ridiculous claims are made by respectable elite outlets, the expectation is that all right-minded, well-educated citizens will nod in solemn, knowing agreement.

All of these insane proclamations have to be understood as fulfilling some depraved psychological purpose. This purpose is to elevate combatants in America’s pantomimed Culture War to the status of world-historic combatants, on whose shoulders the fate of the country rests. Many of the purveyors are pure cynical charlatans, but others probably have come to believe their own preposterous rhetoric, which is an indication of how deep the delusion runs.

Among the prophesiers, there is clearly a kind of perverse psychic need for the Trump saga to end with a salaciously climatic conclusion. If you are so inclined — that is, if you are so blinkered by four years of mostly self-inflicted psychological turmoil — then Trump is always going to provide a daily deluge of material that could justify your angst. But a tempered and public-spirited media would have developed strategies by now, five years into the theatrical trolling, to avoid withering into a shrieking stupor every time Trump makes a purposefully-provocative offhand remark. If anything, this emotional fragility has only burnished Trump with an unearned mystique. Because by now, what he’s working with is mostly just schtick.

If Trump goes down to the defeat, it will be largely because of his own incompetence, and one manifestation of that incompetence is that his (admittedly unorthodox) communications style has been only that: a communications style. PR. And for the US intelligentsia to have been so addled and demented by a PR shtick couldn’t be a better demonstration of how vapid and untrustworthy they are.

Maybe there is some hypothetical revolutionary Left-wing candidate out there who could theoretically seek to carry out such a frightening agenda. But the candidate fielded by the Democratic Party in 2020 is not some wild-eyed Robespierre reincarnate. It’s Joe Biden. And the apocalyptic scenario prophesied by Republicans about a potential Biden presidency can only be seen as comical in the context of his actually-existing political record.

Unlike in 2016, when the personage of Hillary Clinton provided a boundless source of intense consternation, Donald Trump and the Republicans seem far less inclined to run against Biden as such. Instead, they’ve taken to portraying him as a walking corpse with severely limited cognition — and therefore it won’t be him pulling the strings once he’s wheeled into office, they contend, but a variety of other nefarious radical forces working behind the scenes. Fliers that declare “The Radical Left Has Taken Over Joe Biden” have been hitting mailboxes across the country, featuring grim images of Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez interposed domineeringly over a confused and oblivious Biden.

On the one hand, party coalitions are always going to have a role in setting the president’s agenda; Trump, for one, more-or-less outsourced his own legislative priorities to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for the first half of his tenure. And to the extent that Omar, Sanders, and “AOC” constitute a coherent ideological faction, certainly they would jockey for influence under a Biden administration.

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By Michael Tracey

But the casual castigation of Biden as a mere Trojan Horse for the “radical left” totally disregards the significance of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, which if nothing else were a direct repudiation of the “radical left” — insofar as such a thing exists within the constraints of US electoral politics. Biden’s victory resoundingly blunted the ascendance of left-wing activists who tried and failed to seize the reins of the Democratic Party, mainly by way of the five-year Bernie Sanders campaign. As Biden reminded an interviewer in Wisconsin this week: “I beat the socialist… That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”

It’s impossible to ever know what exactly a general election featuring Democratic nominee Sanders would have looked like, but a few things seem plausible. First, it wouldn’t have been necessary to “tie” Sanders to the activist Left, as they would have been the proud, unhidden core of his campaign operation. Figures like Shaun King, whom the Sanders campaign elevated as a top surrogate (King was even selected to introduce Sanders at his 2020 kickoff event) doubtless would have been the gift that kept on giving for Republicans. (Google him if you must.) And a fair number of the most ideologically adventurous twentysomething protesters who have run rampant for the past several months surely would also have been active Sanders supporters. Perhaps it’s possible that Sanders could have animated new segments of the general electorate and won against Trump regardless. But the project of “tying” him to the more excitable elements of the activist Left would not have been complicated. It just would have been a fact.

To use the same playbook with Biden as might have been used with Sanders, however, suggests a lack of imagination on the part of Trump and Republicans.

Even Sanders, despite being a professed socialist, never advocated for the mass appropriation of private property or full-scale nationalisation of industry. As president, he likely would have pursued relatively modest redistributive policies — modest compared with the welfare state policies that characterise other modern-day left of centre governments. But at least the inevitable “socialist” attack would have had the benefit of reflecting a term with which Sanders actually describes himself. Over nearly five decades in government, Biden has never touched “socialism” with a ten-foot pole.

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By Justin Webb

Nothing about the mad rush to saddle Biden with socialist baggage is particularly new. In the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of conniving to implement socialism, with the charge having stemmed from an incident that in hindsight seems remarkably quaint. At a campaign stop in Ohio, Obama expressed his belief to a man dubbed “Joe the Plumber” that “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain, whose electoral fortunes had crashed that autumn alongside the global financial system, saw this as a last-ditch opportunity to warn American voters about the possibly Mao-like designs that Obama had in store.

But with eight years of an Obama/Biden presidency in the bank, to call what was enacted during that period any kind of triumph for “socialism” would be laughable. And if the idea with Biden is that he’s so cognitively inept that he’d inevitably capitulate to the forces of radicalism which surround him — well, few would doubt that Biden’s sharpness has conspicuously diminished in his latter years. But he did exhibit the mental acuity required to get himself through a historically large Democratic primary field, and then go on to successfully “unite” the Democratic Party to a greater extent than was the case at this time in 2016.

Where the “Radical Left on the march” argument does have something at least approaching a point, is that the Democratic Party’s professional class has evolved sharply on questions of race and identity in the past several years — and especially since the onset of the nationwide protest movement this summer — with emphasis on diversity and representation now having reached a dogmatic fixation. However, it would be inaccurate to characterise this professional class shift as an embrace of “socialism” or even “radicalism”. More accurately, it’s a re-orientation of elite attitudes and signalling patterns, without any attendant shift in underlying power dynamics.

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Bernie's failure is a lesson for the Left

By James Bloodworth

One pronounced feature of the Trump era is that those who have adopted the most histrionic rhetorical postures are just the same old banal careerists resorting to emotional theatrics. A recent example is professional left-wing activist Max Berger, who declared on Twitter that a fascist coup was underway. Berger previously worked on the campaign of Elizabeth Warren. It will be these types who gain additional institutional power in the context of a Biden presidency, and they will no doubt be inordinately fixated on matters of race, gender and sexual orientation. But are they “radicals”? Not really. They’ve just adopted the patina of rhetorical radicalism to justify their remarkably conventional life choices.

Even for avowed “democratic socialists” like AOC, the Republican PR strategy depends on exaggerating their influence within the overall Democratic party coalition. However much the party’s Congressional delegation has inched marginally leftward, for instance, the most powerful and catered-to faction are still members representing affluent suburban districts whose victories in 2018 enabled the Democrats to secure a majority. Names like Elissa Slotkin, Dean Phillips, and Cindy Axne aren’t nearly as well known as those who loudly place themselves at the centre of social media attention such as “AOC”, but the electoral formula which propelled them to oust Republican incumbents in states critical to the Electoral College (Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa respectively) is the formula now being most closely followed by Biden on a national scale.

And if Biden wins in November, it will owe heavily to these very kinds of voters — his most significant polling advantage is currently among white women with a college degree — not leftist radicals. Will Biden at least give Bernie & co a nominal “seat at the table”? Sure, that’s likely. Biden is running more as a traditional coalition-manager than any kind of insurgent seeking to overturn the consensus of the party he leads. But the Republican histrionics intentionally misportray which forces within that coalition would wield the leverage in the event of a Biden presidency. (“AOC” once suggested that in a more sensibly-apportioned parliamentary system, she and Biden would not even belong to the same party.)

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By Michael Tracey

Those who predict a revolutionary socialist upheaval under Biden might want to spend some time asking actual socialists what they think about Biden. Because the mood they exhibit isn’t particularly celebratory. A group of erstwhile Sanders activists have contented themselves with declaring “Not Him, Us” in their attempt to hector any remaining left-wing holdouts to suck it up and vote for Biden. These as-yet-anonymous manifesto writers decree that “Defeating fascism is priority #1” and as such, mobilising a ‘popular front’ against Trump is of urgent necessity. “The 1930s taught us one lesson we can never forget: we must unite — even with neoliberal opponents — to defeat fascism,” the group concludes.

Leaving aside the analytical accuracy of drawing a parallel between the present-day United States and 1930s Germany — let’s say the comparison seems a tad off — the increasing prevalence of this logic within left-wing activist circles means Biden has less need to appeal to them directly. It’s already been deemed morally obligatory for these activist types to join with the dreaded “neoliberals” in order to blunt the rise of global fascism, as personified domestically by Trump. And so whatever leverage they might have wielded in a Biden term has been forfeited from the outset.

In an alternate timeline, Republicans might take solace in Biden as a buffer against an invigorated activist Left which — it’s true — has made strides in recent years, both organisationally and within the popular culture. And the professional class Dems will probably agitate for bizarre racial and gender identity policies if given entry-points into the Executive Branch. But most of it will be superficial posturing — a speciality of those kinds of operators. And Biden himself is most eagerly courting endorsements from people like John McCain’s widow Cindy for a reason. He’s had going on 78 years to display the radicalism now being attributed to him, and there’s little sign of it yet.

The former Vice-President is not exactly the type you would imagine clad in all-black combat-style street apparel, hurling commercial-grade fireworks at police officers. Rather, he drafted the infamous 1994 omnibus crime bill in concert with the National Association of Police Organizations. He is even known to venerate the arcane institutionalist ethos of the US Senate — whereas to insurrectionary anarchists, such institutions could only be tools of oppression.

But the Trump Era has an odd way of bringing about unexpected ideological convergences. In the announcement video that formally kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden paid homage to what he called the “courageous group of Americans” who descended upon Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 to confront an assembly of Right-wing rally-goers. Among that “courageous group” were Left-wing activist factions broadly classified under the banner of “antifa”.

For Biden, what transpired in Charlottesville was a “defining moment,” and formed the basis for his decision to launch a third campaign for the presidency at age 76. While Biden did herald generic American idealism in that announcement video — which would be anathema to most insurrectionary anarchists — in the gravity he assigned to the Charlottesville episode, he also affirmed a core tenet of the “antifa” worldview: the notion that a uniquely pressing fascistic threat has gripped the country, and crushing this threat is a matter of unparalleled world-historic urgency.

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Certainly, if you picked any “antifa” member at random, there’d be an almost 0% chance that they would express any kind of personal enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But there’d be a virtually 100% chance that they’d express a great deal of enthusiasm for the theory that “fascism” is an accurate characterisation of America’s current state of governance. Biden would be similarly enthused to present a variation of this analysis, albeit from a slightly different ideological angle. He typically intones things like, “This is not who we are”, rather than “All Cops Are Bastards”.

Still, where Biden is united with “antifa” is in assigning such outsized importance to the role of small-time “fascist” agitators like the ones who gathered that weekend three years ago in Charlottesville (despite ultimately being outnumbered by Left-wing activists) on account of the validation they are purported to have received from Donald Trump. For both Biden and “antifa,” this dynamic constitutes the chief prism through which contemporary American political affairs must be viewed.

And for both Biden and “antifa,” this mode of analysis has been hugely successful. “Antifa” has succeeded in stoking nationwide insurrectionary fervour on a scale unseen in decades. Given their opposition to Trump as the alleged fascist-in-chief, as well as their appropriation of the “Black Lives Matter” protest mantle, they’ve received an extraordinary amount of mainstream liberal legitimation.

Democratic Party operatives have even gone so far as to exalt “antifa” activists as the modern-day equivalents of US soldiers fighting in World War II — while apparently exhibiting no embarrassment for invoking this comparison.

Another clear beneficiary of the “fascism” panic, somewhat paradoxically, has been Biden. A supreme irony of the outsized role that “anti-fascism” has played in post-2016 US political discourse — as popularised by both liberals and leftists, who often claim to be at odds with each other but nonetheless overwhelmingly agree on the underlying “fascism” prognosis — is that it has ultimately limited the possibility of actual Left-wing policy reform.

Democratic presidential primary voters had been traumatised by the non-stop barrage of Trump-related hysteria churned out each and every day by profit-driven corporate media outlets, and laboured under the sincere belief that Trump’s America bears some bonafide relation to Weimar Germany. As such, a plurality were understandably uninterested in foundational reform to the Democratic Party.

That was bad news for socialist Bernie Sanders, who ended up losing handily in the 2020 primaries to a former Vice President whose entire campaign was predicated on little more than restoring the pre-2016 Democratic Party to power.

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And in a way, you can’t particularly blame those Biden voters. Because if your main sources of information tell you for years on end that the reins of state have been seized by an out-and-out fascist, who is fuelling a siege of “Nazi” street agitators, whatever deficiencies the Democratic Party might have at the moment are of little or no concern. Now even Sanders himself has called for a “united front” against Trump ahead of the election, seeming to suggest that the precedent of Francisco Franco is historically apt. Wasn’t the whole problem with Franco that he couldn’t be voted out?

Never mind that Trump would have to be quite a feckless fascist to allow himself to be constantly maligned in the country’s major media, plotted against by his own administration underlings, and impeached. The decidedly unsexy reality is that Trump has been a fairly weak executive, at least relative to his predecessors in the postwar era.

But his radically unorthodox communications style belies any dispassionate assessment of this record, thus the fascism-mongering persists more-or-less unabated. And for all the warnings of a Reichstag Fire moment always supposedly being around the corner, the past six months of Covid and riots were a missed opportunity for any genuine fascist seeking to consolidate power. Trump appears largely content with issuing inflammatory tweets.

So as riots continue around the country, and corporate news networks describe post-protest scenes with raging infernos as “mostly peaceful”, the temptation can be to write this off as mere partisan side-taking. Certainly there’s an element of that — most journalists desperately don’t want to see Trump win in November.

But thanks to the prevailing “fascism” framework, their opposition to Trump isn’t just a matter of ordinary election-year preference. It’s imbued with existential, civilisation-altering significance. How could anyone in their right mind not do everything within their capacity to ensure the defeat of fascism? Once you accept the premise that fascism does in fact accurately describe the current state of American governance, all bets are off — journalistically and otherwise.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

So even if the “anti-fascists” in the equation are burning down cities, they will still never exist on the same moral plane as the actual “fascists” whose champion occupies the White House. Hence, riots which result in the destruction of huge swaths of Kenosha, WI magically become a “mostly peaceful” affair according to CNN and the New York Times.

Yes, journalists also presumptively ascribe a certain virtue to any protests that occur with the imprimatur of “Black Lives Matter”. But racial disparities have been a fact of American life since the dawn of the republic. The unavoidable explanation for why they’ve taken on such frantic energy in the past several months is the alleged spectre of fascism, namely Trump. With a Democratic President, even one as vanilla as Biden, there will doubtless be future race-based controversies. But they won’t have the cosmic weight as those that occur when a “fascist” president also looms.

Adding to the growing list of ironies, Trump’s primary conception of the presidency has less been Fuhrer, than “Pundit-in-Chief”, whereby he proudly brandishes the role of world’s loudest media critic — with media criticism having been one of his life-long passions. Given that experience, Trump knows how to expertly pry at tensions in how pundit narratives get constructed, and the “peaceful protest” cliché provides all the material that could ever be desired in that respect. Kayleigh McEnany, in tweeting a photo of a recent Trump air hanger rally in Pennsylvania, described the attendees (only half-jokingly) as “peaceful protesters”.

The reason she did this is because if one follows the recent patterns of media nomenclature, any and all “peaceful protesters” should be painstakingly accommodated, even if their gatherings produce widespread arson attacks or increase the Covid-19 infection rate. There is no impartial explanation for why the “peaceful protests” of this past summer deserved praise, adulation, and rousing defences from the standpoint of pandemic mitigation. Again, only does this make sense when inserted into the blinkered fascism vs. anti-fascism context.

One wonders if these protesters and rioters have ever paused to consider why it is that so many establishment media outlets are so consistently eager to advocate on their behalf, with the phrase “largely peaceful” having been stretched well past the point of absurdity. And one also wonders why so many powerful forces are so willing to join in affirming their “anti-fascism” worldview — up to and including, in his own way, Joe Biden. For all the talk about dismantling systems of oppression, those who actually wield power in 2020 America seem to view the “fascism vs. antifascism” dichotomy as awfully convenient to their own self-preserving interests.

It makes for a bizarre dynamic, as Democratic Party pundits and politicians routinely describe avowed insurrectionists as nothing more than benign “peaceful protesters”. And since the protests came to be arrayed against the federal forces dispatched to Portland by Donald Trump, more conventional elements of the Left/liberal “Resistance” have made common cause with these revolutionary anarchists who regard the very essence of the US political system — not just Trump — as innately fascist and “white supremacist”. On a recent evening, for instance, an older white couple in a pair of matching “Resistance”-branded T-shirts could be spotted in attendance among the radical activists, as well as a man sporting the slogan “Ridin’ with Biden”.

To characterise what’s gone on in Portland as a traditional “protest” is a misnomer, however. Pay a visit to the area around the Federal Courthouse in Downtown after midnight and you are greeted by brigades of black-clad “Antifa” foot soldiers — geared up in full body armour, complete with industrial-grade gas masks, shields and even customised radio systems. Being overwhelmingly white, they are strategic about public presentation: the speakers appointed to address the nightly “rallies” are almost exclusively black, as “amplifying black voices” to whom whites must dutifully “listen” is a central tenet of the Summer 2020 protest ethos.

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By Michael Tracey

If there is any foundational idea operative in Portland, it’s to keep a frenetic confrontation with the state going for as long as possible, so as to maximise the chances that an incendiary incident might occur and catalyse a larger insurrectionary uproar — similar to the killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked nationwide riots. One fateful tear gas canister fired into the temple of a “protester” could reverberate rapidly across the country; “Portland solidarity” actions have already sprouted up as far away as Richmond, Virginia. This is by design: a former occupant of the so-called “CHAZ,” the former anarchist commune that took over a portion of Seattle in June, told me a number of people who previously set up shop there had headed south to Portland.

As I milled around one night livestreaming on my phone, a “protester” wielding a heavy-duty shield emblazoned with the anarchist “A” symbol demanded that I cease recording. When I declined to obey this command, I was confronted by several additional “protesters” — all white, of course — one of whom snatched the phone out of my hands. It was only returned after I agreed to recite the phrase “Black Lives Matter” with sufficient vigour. This friendly fellow subsequently threatened to “fucking stomp me out,” and then ejected me from the protest zone — forcing me to run, not walk, away — as another associate hurled a projectile at me. Certainly not behaviour I’ve encountered at any other “protest”.

The pandemic is far from the minds of participants — in contrast with most working-class Americans. One night, I tried to put a question to Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, about the advisability of mass protest gatherings as Covid cases spike in the state of Oregon. Wheeler had ventured out in a show of support for the protesters, and was even permitted to address the rally, despite being widely loathed. “Fuck you, Ted Wheeler,” his detractors shouted, unimpressed by his pleading. Still determined to demonstrate his solidarity, however, he subjected himself to a choreographed tear-gassing from federal forces (a New York Times reporter was right next to him at the time, surely by sheer coincidence.)

“The most important thing right now is the Black Lives Matter movement,” Wheeler replied to me, at which protesters in the vicinity became enraged, accusing me of engaging in “white supremacy” and “silencing” blacks for posing a question they (the whites) deemed “inappropriate” to an elected official. “That is a premise that doesn’t concern this movement at all,” one protester said of the pandemic, as others demanded that I “get the fuck out of here”.

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Wheeler’s fallacy is imagining that any incrementalist policy reforms will satisfy the ideological core of these protesters, whose goal is abolition of the country’s entire criminal justice apparatus in addition to general insurrection. But as expected, even getting tear-gassed wasn’t enough to placate Wheeler’s critics. The following day, Jo Ann Hardesty, a Portland City Commissioner, dismissed Wheeler as “a privileged white man”. (Having received a sizable helping of tear-gas myself, I can confirm that it was highly unpleasant.)

The source of the animosity toward Wheeler is the conduct of the municipal Portland police, which a number of residents (and even officers) find genuinely baffling. “We are probably one of the most progressive law enforcement agencies I’ve ever had the opportunity to be around,” one veteran Portland Police Bureau officer told me as he monitored the protest action from afar one night, semi-hidden in an unmarked vehicle parked on a side street, with the massive booms of the “mortar”-style fireworks being fired at the Federal Courthouse crackling in the background. “And it’s just sad to me that we’re getting shoved back into this stigma of these jackbooted thugs again. All the outreach we’ve done — all the gang outreach we’ve been a part of — it’s all been taken away from us.”

Indeed, take a look at the official Portland Police Twitter account and you will find a banner image of an officer happily wearing a LGBT Pride Flag-coloured facemask. A left-wing political activist in Portland who asked to remain nameless for fear of retribution attested to having a friend in the Bureau who is a black lesbian woman with several children. “She’s one of the most thoughtful, intelligent people that I know,” the activist said, “who went into becoming a police officer because she wanted to see more people like her on the force in her community.”

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They added: “We have a lot of people running this protest who have never been outside of this Portland bubble. And the Portland bubble is very comfortable. They don’t understand what real suffering is like.”

That black lesbian woman would presumably be implicated in one of the chants that has become a staple of the protests: “A – C – A – B… ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS” — which is unlikely to be a notion dispelled by marginal policy changes of the kind politely suggested, for example, by Wheeler. Nor would the withdrawal of federal forces from the area satisfy their insurrectionist demands. When protesters chant “NO GOOD COPS IN A RACIST SYSTEM,” the “system” to which they are referring is the foundational system of governance of the United States — again, deemed inherently “fascist” and “white supremacist”, and therefore impossible to reform. As one sign wielded by a protester declared: “The Revolution will not come by asking or voting,” with the customary anarchist “A” symbol scrawled onto the cardboard. Other protest phrases visible around Portland include “Die Piggies” and “Dead Cops,” as well as calls for the assassination of Trump.

Outside the core of the Downtown protest zone, the same mass-produced “Black Lives Matter” posters which have become ubiquitous across so many other American metropolitan areas dot the front porches and storefront windows of Portland establishments. (It’s certainly more culturally fashionable than “Joe Biden 2020” insignia, although the electoral implications are roughly similar). But a trip around the city also reveals hand-made yard signs posing questions such as, “DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO END WHITE SUPREMACY?”

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One potential answer to this question might be: “elect a black head of state,” as the overwhelmingly white Multnomah County, Oregon — home to Portland — did by a whopping 56-point margin in 2008 and 55-point in 2012. But a strange feature of this protest movement is that one would barely know Barack Obama, a black man elected president in a majority white nation, ever existed. Not that Obama’s mere election was supposed to have eradicated every last trace of racial inequities in the United States: of course it wasn’t. But you’d think it would at least inform popular conceptions of the role of race within the nation’s elite power structure. Instead, Obama seems to have been simply “erased” — the significance of his tenure not even worth mentioning. Are we to believe that a country so intractably defined by “white supremacy” — a totally uncontested truism among protesters and their media allies — nonetheless elected a black man not once, but twice? Apparently.

Like so many other cities across the US, much of Portland remains boarded up as a result of riots that initially broke out in early June after the George Floyd killing — compounded by decreased economic activity brought on by the pandemic. (Again, the virus is evidently not a “premise” of “concern” to protesters.) Even VooDoo Doughnut, a popular independent Portland shop featuring items like Vegan Maple Cream, was boarded up as of July 26, after one of its windows was smashed by “BLM protesters”, according to a security guard. “We had some threats,” he said. Overtly left-wing food carts — the mere existence of which is already something of a conundrum — also report being “damaged during the protests” and indefinitely closed.

While “The Feds” have reduced their visibility in recent days, that doesn’t mean the rancour will subside any time soon. Notwithstanding talk of a “peaceful transition,” one Department of Homeland Security agent told me: “There may be some unrealistic expectations. There’s never going to be a 100% withdrawal of federal officers from the federal building.” And one of the “voices” appointed to address a nightly rally last month explicitly likened Portland’s action to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s, which lasted for 381 days.

Apart from highlighting the elevated historical terms in which these protesters see themselves, it’s an indication that Feds or no Feds, the Portland anarchists have every incentive to keep the chaos going in perpetuity. And why wouldn’t they? Clearly, their strategy is paying off.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?

In perhaps the surest sign of their newfound primacy, they have been not just authorised, but encouraged to participate in the ongoing protest actions. To clarify: these journalists haven’t merely been given the green-light to attend the gatherings as sympathetic observers, or even to frame their coverage in a positive light. Rather, they have been offered explicit institutional support to actively participate as protesters. (Some of these authorisations have been made public, while others have not.)

This represents quite a revolution in the prevailing mindset of mainstream media culture. Though it has exploded recently, its origins can be traced to 2016, when the rise of Donald Trump caused much of the political and media class to abandon a whole slew of reporting “norms” which had previously guided their conduct. Angered and traumatised by Trump, they adopted a radically new set of principles that would have been completely unrecognisable across the profession just a few years earlier.

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Whereas in the past, journalists who challenged the establishment media’s hoary allegiance to outmoded notions of “objectivity” were in the beleaguered minority, today they are fully in the mainstream, and conventional ideas about “objectivity” are being jettisoned Left and Right. This trend is especially pronounced among the rising generation of journalists in their twenties and thirties, although older colleagues are also increasingly susceptible.

This is not altogether a bad thing: pure “objectivity” was never a viable standard in the first place, often leading to skewed editorial choices, misplaced reporting priorities, phony “false equivalence”, and poor writing. However, since 2016 there has clearly been a dramatic overcorrection: what’s also being jettisoned is any remaining fidelity to what one might call impartiality. The lack of impartiality among journalists today helps explain why the media ecosystem they inhabit has been so integral in spawning the successive waves of moral panic that have engulfed US politics and culture over the past four years.

Just because something is a moral panic doesn’t mean its proximate causes are wholly fictitious. Take several instances that have arisen since the election of Trump, all with different features, and affecting different sectors of society, but all part of the same hysterical trajectory: #MeToo, “Nazi” alarmism and Russiagate. Sexual harassment and violence obviously exist, and sometimes go unreported; there really were a small band of “alt-right” instigators who gathered online and in person, inspired at least in part by Trump’s political success; and it is true that “Russian bots” probably do exist on social media to some negligible degree.

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Even so, all three of these phenomena took on straightforward qualities of moral panic, namely: wildly exaggerated claims with little or no connection to the facts at hand, prophecies of terrifying apocalyptic threats, public shaming rituals, thinly-veiled political and interpersonal score-settling, relentless policing of private beliefs and attitudes, and an all-encompassing, irrational, accusatory frenzy.

Likewise, it’s certainly true that black Americans are often subject to overzealous law enforcement practices, and in some cases wrongfully killed by the police — with the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis being the latest egregious example. But the subsequent quest by hypermoralising journalists and activists to impose their will on media institutions, often by employing the tactics of what one might call “emotional terrorism”, has nothing to do with George Floyd. Rather, it has everything to do with their desire for power. It just so happens that invoking the rhetoric of racial and ideological grievance is an especially effective strategy for bludgeoning liberal-Left media institutions into submission.

With the concept of “journalism” having been expanded beyond recognition to include all forms of “content-producing” activity on the internet, the sentiments of younger “journalists” have fused almost totally with the sentiments of pop cultural and corporate activists in the same peer group. Among this cohort, there is widespread adherence to the principle expounded by the actor Rachel Zegler — who while herself not technically in “media,” might as well be, given her online content-production style: “RACISM ISN’T A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT,” she recently proclaimed. (Needless to say, there are certainly “differences of opinion” around the definition of “racism”.)

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Zegler’s attitude was distilled more crisply into a media context by E. Alex Jung, a senior writer at New York magazine, who declared: “The entire journalistic frame of ‘objectivity’ and political neutrality is structured around white supremacy.” Adhering to this mindset allows these journalists, and increasingly their employers, to deny that engaging in outright public protest activity is “political”, thus giving them licence to do essentially whatever they please without it being seen as an ethical breach.

As the panic rages, one media institution after another has capitulated to the demands of the more aggressive of these activists/journalists, who tend to be younger and inordinately effusive on social media. Indeed, a life suffused by social media — which incentivises elaborate public expressions of personal identity — is all they’ve ever known. (Many also seem to have gone stir-crazy from the still-ongoing lockdowns in the cities they tend to populate — such as New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.)

We are now left with an ascendant class of media activists who earnestly espouse the view, for example, that newspaper op-eds constitute literal “violence” — putting them and their loved ones in “danger”. Even avowedly progressive media outlets are currently being accused of “institutional racism” — as though the editors are plantation owners and prison wardens, as opposed to extremely sensitive, accommodating (and, frankly, paranoid) Left-liberals.

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If one delves into the background of this rising class of journalists, one frequently finds a CV replete with elite credentials and prestige. An instructive example is the Intercept journalist Akela Lacy, who attended the Baldwin School, one of the most prestigious private schools in the Philadelphia area, followed by an undergraduate tenure at the College of William and Mary, one of the most renowned higher education institutions in the entire country. But even with this impressive elite preparation, Lacy was reduced to sheer emotional exhaustion earlier this month after a disagreement with a colleague. “I’m so fucking tired,” she proclaimed in a dramatic Twitter tirade.

The reason Lacy was so very “tired” was because fellow Intercept staff member Lee Fang, one of the most accomplished journalists in online Left-wing media, had the audacity to interview some non-white people in communities afflicted by the recent riots, who offered observations that did not align with the prevailing liberal-Left activist media consensus on the subject. For this, Lacy condemned Fang as a “racist”.

Apart from their shared institutional affiliation, Lacy in practice has little to do with Fang; they work on opposite sides of the country. Yet a colleague propounding viewpoints and reportage that she finds disagreeable is apparently sufficient to affect her on such a visceral level that it would prompt a sensational online outburst. Compounding the pathetic nature of the incident, it was Fang who was ultimately coerced into apologising to Lacy, with his job hanging in the balance. And his Intercept colleagues, petrified of drawing “racism” accusations themselves, refused to come to his public defence.

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Having travelled to several of the cities that were afflicted with riots, I can confirm that black Americans on the sidewalk or stoop commonly express roughly the same sentiments as those who were interviewed by Fang — opposition to rioting and qualified concerns about the logic of the protests. That Lacy emerged as the victor in the confrontation shows just how warped the dynamics of US media culture have become. The power of those who use such tactics is being is being entrenched, and they are displacing those who exhibit even the most mild scepticism of their identity-centric activist worldview. In all likelihood, there is no turning back.

The new class of emotionally unstable journalists will dictate the culture and direction of the institutions for which they work. Self-censorship will accelerate, as those who fear for their job security will simply opt to say nothing rather than incur the risk of deviating ever-so-slightly from this new ideological consensus.

Whether you like it or not (I, for one, do not) those who occupy prominent media positions comprise a significant portion of the taste-making class of the US. Their influence on culture and politics is substantial. Hence, this isn’t just a “media story” — it’s a story about the epistemological rupture in the US polity that was provoked by the events of 2016, and ever since has grown more extreme. In isolation, these moral panics and collective mental breakdowns can be difficult to make sense of. But when you see them through the prism of America’s current status as a rapidly declining hegemonic power, it all becomes much more intelligible.

Far from settling the issue, though, Mueller’s findings merely represented the culmination of just one phase in the interminable Russiagate journey. Now, Trump has apparently endeavoured to rebrand the “scandal” instead as “Obamagate” — so as to almost invert its contours, and depict the true “scandal” as always having been principally about shameful malfeasance on the part of Obama-era security state officials.

The hope, presumably, is that this will tarnish the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by association. Whether or not the tactic is actually in Trump’s best political interests is questionable, as it seems doubtful that anyone but the most plugged-in partisans and hobbyists are invested enough in the intricate, often confusing details to even know what he’s talking about. Nonetheless, Trump’s complaints — while characteristically over-simplified and bombastic — do have some substantive merit.

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To understand why, one must turn back the clock a bit. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, huge portions of the left-liberal US political and media class collectively decided that the executive branch of the federal government — soon to be headed by someone they regarded as unthinkably grotesque — had lost all legitimacy.

In desperation, they vested their hopes in unelected members of the executive branch, namely the national security bureaucracy, to constrain or even overthrow Trump — because they saw him not just as a demented fascist madman, but as an active conspirator with a hostile foreign nation in Russia. Josh Marshall, the publisher of the liberal blog Talking Points Memo, encapsulated this mentality when he wrote in November 2016: “Let’s hope there’s a deep state, and if there is that they have their shit together.”

It was in this frenzied climate that the upper echelons of the security state apparatus, buoyed by the eager assent and even conscious participation of the elite media, seized the power to launch unprecedented encroachments into domestic political affairs. By now, many of these astonishing encroachments have been well-documented.

One of the most egregious is the spellbinding saga of Carter Page, a middling “adviser” with only the most tangential connection to Trump, who nonetheless found himself subjected to massively invasive state surveillance on the basis of the so-called “Steele Dossier” — the infamous collection of preposterous rumours and gossip alleging vast conspiratorial collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

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Page’s ordeal is just one example of many. As progressively more information trickles out about how these absurd security state machinations took shape in the hysterical days of 2016 and 2017, by way of newly revealed court filings and Congressional transcripts, Trump is being granted more ammunition to batter his Democratic opponents with, simply because those machinations were so patently ill-founded. Hence the logic of the “Obamagate” rebranding effort.

Armed with the fact that no conspiracy took place, Trump can justifiably claim to have been targeted for unwarranted punishment by members of the previous administration. And the latest developments bolstering Trump’s case involve new information relating to his beleaguered former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, who was forced out of office in February 2017.

Flynn’s great crime was to take part in phone conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition period in December 2016, and urge him not to overreact to punitive measures imposed by the outgoing Obama administration. That’s it. That’s the affront that impelled high-ranking FBI officials to conduct an entrapment-style interview with Flynn in the White House, which resulted in him telling them a purported “lie” about his innocuous conversations with Kislyak, which then created enough political pressure for Trump to capitulate and fire Flynn. That this should be the action that resulted in his firing is doubly ironic, given Flynn’s predilections toward extreme hawkishness in other foreign policy domains. Because in this rare instance, he was actually seeking to ameliorate tensions — with a nuclear-armed power, no less.

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Eventually Flynn pleaded guilty to “making a false statement” to the FBI, even though just-released documents show that the FBI officials who conducted his interview “had the impression at the time that he was not lying”. While there is still some ambiguity as to the exact chronology around if and when these security state officials had caused Flynn’s identity to be “unmasked” — a concept heavily promoted by Trump and the Republican commentariat — there is no doubt that Flynn became the object of bizarrely vigorous federal law enforcement attention during late 2016 / early 2017, on grounds that increasingly appear fraudulent. Underscoring the absurdity of the affair, FBI officials even eagerly conjured up a half-baked theory that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act — a comically obsolete statute enacted in 1799 under the administration of President John Adams — in order to justify their wild goose chase.

Flynn’s eventual sacking as a result of this FBI-manufactured controversy — aided by strategic leaks to the Washington Post — marked a turning point in the development of the early portion of the “Russian collusion” narrative that would subsequently engulf Trump’s first several years in office. Now there was tangible proof that such manufactured controversies could tangibly impede Trump’s ability to govern. Trump himself was evidently oblivious to this dynamic, as an anecdote relayed in Volume II of the Mueller Report illustrates:

On February 14, 2017, the day after Flynn’s resignation, the President had lunch at the White House with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. According to Christie, at one point during the lunch the President said, “Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.” Christie laughed and responded, “No way.”

The anecdote portrays Trump as clueless that Flynn’s forced departure had signalled only the beginning of the unfurling political hysteria caused by the “Russia issue” (its exact contours seldom well-defined in the press, Congress, or really by anyone.) Indeed, the “issue” escalated dramatically over the next several months, with the Special Counsel investigation headed by Mueller initiated in May 2017.

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Trump’s seemingly blasé attitude at the time was informed by his belief that there was no Russia conspiracy to be uncovered, therefore there was nothing for him to worry about. He did not sufficiently appreciate the extent to which security state officials (as well as the opposition party and much of the media) would pull out all the stops to generate the impression of a conspiracy, by furiously hyping every incremental “bombshell” development, none of which actually pointed to a conspiracy but did create a general sense of sinister wrongdoing — accompanied by breathless speculation that the next domino was ready to fall at any moment.

But as we now all know, and as should have been obvious all along, there were no more dominoes. Over a year after Mueller’s final Report, though, there still has been no serious reckoning with what really happened. Recognising that Trump’s recurrent complaints about the matter are correct has long been essentially impossible for most Democrats, liberals, and leftists. Conceding that Trump could be right about anything, or even that his grievances contain the smallest kernel of truth, is widely seen in these quarters as tantamount to endorsing fascism, Nazism, the Kremlin, or some terrifying combination thereof. “Obamagate” is Trump’s attempt to force just such a reckoning — one that is indeed long overdue.

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However, Trump does not necessarily aid the process of coming to an accurate collective understanding of “Russiagate” by describing it as “Obamagate”. This imputes an excessively partisan motivation to the security state officials who manufactured the drama.

Figures such as the former Director of the FBI, James Comey, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and the former Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein — all of whom connived to one degree or another against Trump — could not be reasonably said to have acted on the basis of pure partisan animus. Comey and Brennan, for instance, were initially appointed to high-profile positions by George W. Bush. Rosenstein, a Republican, was himself appointed by Trump. What united them was not partisanship per se, but their immersion in the peculiarly bipartisan ideology of the American national security state.

Trump wasn’t viewed with such frantic alarmism by these figures simply because he was a Republican. Rather, they viewed Trump — incorrectly, for the most part — as an agent of subversion. And so the term “Obamagate”, with its tedious invocation of the legacy of Watergate, obscures the real culprit of this fiasco: the myopic and irrational pathologies of the American security state, which continue under Trump unabated.