Kamalamania!

The Enthusiasm Is Infectious, but Can It Last Until November 5?

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Boy, did I get it wrong when I publicly predicted on this blog that the political pressure on President Joe Biden to withdraw from his 2024 re-election campaign would sink the Democratic Party’s already slim chances of retaining the Presidency in the November 5, 2024 election.

I thought that the public pressure from various Congressional Democrats on Biden to give up his campaign would fatally destroy his odds of beating Donald Trump in 2024 as he beat him in 2020. Instead, once Biden actually withdrew in a letter (two letters, actually, one announcing his own step-down and a later missive endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement) on July 21, nearly a month after his bizarre and woefully weak performance in a televised debate with Trump, Biden’s withdrawal seemed to release a torrent of energy and support among grass-roots Democrats.

I had expected a fratricidal civil war within the party as various candidates jockeyed to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. I also worried about Kamala Harris’s five big weaknesses as a Presidential candidate: she’s a woman (and we all know what happened the last time Trump ran against a woman), she’s part-Black, she’s part-Asian, her 2020 Presidential campaign flamed out quickly, and through most of Biden’s term her favorability/unfavorability ratings have been even worse than his. Instead the party quickly coalesced behind Harris and she’s closed the so-called “excitement gap” that was previously favoring Trump.

She’s closed more than that. The New York Times/Siena College poll has Harris leading Trump by four points in three of the key “battleground states” that will decide the 2024 election – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – though other polls have the races closer than that. She’s invigorated the Democratic Party and convinced many skeptical Democrats that they now have a chance not only to keep the White House but to preserve their Senate majority (important because if the Republicans control the Senate, it’s unlikely that any Democratic appointees will be confirmed to anything) and win back the House of Representatives.

I’m writing this on Saturday, August 17, two days before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin in Chicago. At this time, the convention is essentially going to give President Biden his gold watch and send him off into retirement – even though he’s still going to be President for five more months. Then it will be time to celebrate new nominee Kamala Harris and her anointed running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who’s everything Harris isn’t: a white guy, affable and nonthreatening, who looks like he just stepped out of the world of Leave It to Beaver; a 24-year National Guard veteran; a high-school teacher and football coach.

Walz seems to have got the vice-presidential nomination ahead of the two previous favorites, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. While Minnesota isn’t considered a “battleground state” – the last time a Republican Presidential candidate carried it was 1972 – the way Pennsylvania and Arizona are, Walz’s affable middle-class values are expected to help Harris win over skeptical Midwesterners. Walz also got the nod after Shapiro’s hard-line stance for Israel in the genocidal war in Gaza, and against college students who protested it, alienated Arab-Americans and other voters crucial to Biden’s 2020 win, especially in Michigan.

Also, Harris asked Walz point-blank if he ever wanted to be President, and Walz answered, “No” – just what Harris wanted to hear, given Shapiro’s naked ambition and record of throwing his political allies under the bus to advance his own career. (For more on this read Chris Lehmann’s commentary in the August 2 The Nation at https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/josh-shapiro-vp-kamala-harris-wrong/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%208.2.2024&utm_term=daily). But one of the biggest things that got Walz the nod to be Harris’s running mate is the word “weird.” He’d been posting on the Internet about Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance (who for some reason likes to refer to himself as “JD Vance”), and their “weird” ideas about the country’s future, especially about how it should treat women. The word “weird” stuck and became an Internet meme.

And both Trump and Vance seem perversely to work hard to live up to the “weird” name. Trump’s odd perorations at his rallies about electric boats and sharks, his seemingly approving mentions of Hannibal Lecter (which as far as I can tell are part of his argument that other countries are flooding the U.S. with mental patients; he seems to be saying that at least some of these immigrants are cannibals), his ongoing insistence that windmills slaughter birds and his invocation of Sarah Palin’s old slogan “Drill, baby, drill” as his solution to virtually every problem certainly sound “weird,” especially to people not locked into the Right-wing media bubble.

Vance, in turn, is on record as saying the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies” and that people with children should have more votes in elections than people without. He’s on record as calling for a nationwide ban on abortion – which even Trump, who boasts about having packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Right-wing justices who reversed Roe v. Wade, realizes is a political loser – and said the only reason for post-menopausal women to exist is to help raise and take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother, whom he called by the oddly infantilizing name “Mamaw” – pronounced “Ma’am-awe.”)

“Project 2025”: The Right’s Apocalyptic Blueprint for America’s Future

It also doesn’t help that, while Trump is trying to distance himself from “Project 2025,” a 900-plus page white paper the ultra-Right Heritage Foundation prepared as a guidebook for the next Republican Presidency (much the way they wrote a similar document in the late 1970’s that was largely adopted as a playbook by Ronald Reagan when he took office in 1981), its executive director, Kevin Roberts, wrote a book about it called Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The original subtitle was Burning Down Washington to Save America. Dawn’s Early Light was scheduled to be published on September 24, but it’s been put off until after the November 5 election. As much as Trump tries to edge away from Project 2025, at least 200 people who worked on it were former members of the Trump administration – and the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light was written by J. D. Vance.

The full Project 2025 report – called Mandate for Leadership, the same title the Heritage Foundation used for the set of recommendations they gave Reagan in 1981 – is available online at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. It begins with a preface that explicitly links it to the Reagan agenda: “Today, America and the conservative [sic] movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970’s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of Transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

“Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values and people – all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat,” the preface continues. “Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970’s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’ [No actual Leftist or liberal I know calls it that. - M.G.C.] And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming at all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”

Among the most alarming parts of Project 2025 are its calls for the legal redefinition of the American family to include only traditional heterosexual families: a married man and woman, and their children. “The next conservative [sic] President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Project 2025 reads. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document then goes on to attack pornography. “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of Transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” the report reads. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection.” It calls for revival of the 19th century Comstock Act, which has not been used for decades but is still on the books, not only to ban pornography but to abolish medication abortion altogether through its clause forbidding the mailing of any substance or device usable for abortion or contraception. Project 2025 also calls for abolishing the Department of Education and replacing the Department of Homeland Security with an agency more single-mindedly focused on securing the border.

One key part of the Project 2025 agenda – the blandly named “Schedule F” – was already enacted by President Donald Trump in an executive order in October 2020. This called for the removal of civil service protection for 50,000 top-level federal government employees and their reclassification as “at-will” employees whom the President could fire at any time. Trump and the architects of Project 2025 that served in his administration were frequently stymied by career bureaucrats in the federal government who were loyal to the country and the ideals of good government, not to Trump personally. (Richard Nixon had much the same problem during Watergate.) Trump’s solution was to unilaterally abolish civil-service protection for 50,000 federal workers, returning us to the so-called “spoils system” by which administrations were filled with people who owed their jobs to the party in power, and knew it.

The “spoils system” lasted until the 1880’s, when President James A. Garfield was assassinated by a man who had volunteered for his campaign in hopes of getting a job out of it, then turned bitter and angry when he didn’t. In 1883, two years after Garfield’s assassination, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service act, which according to Google “required government jobs to be awarded to individuals based upon merit and not political affiliation.” Because he was busy first campaigning for re-election and then, after he lost, plotting illegal means to stay in power regardless of his defeat, Trump never had the chance to implement “Schedule F,” and on January 22, 2021, two days after he took office, President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order. But turning the apolitical federal bureaucracy into an instrument of his political will has remained a major priority of Donald Trump’s – and we can expect him to do just that if and when he returns to the White House.

Harris, Walz and “The Politics of Joy”

When Vice-President Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate, she said at a joint campaign rally in Philadelphia, “We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down. Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

And Walz added, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”

By contrast, Trump recently told a rally audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, “We are a nation in decline, we are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.” And on his social-media site, Truth Social, he posted this screed against Governor Walz: “TIM WALZ WILL UNLEASH HELL ON EARTH! He’s already pulling in MILLIONS to WIPE MAGA OUT.”

Ordinarily, Americans like candidates who feed them a message of hope and optimism. In 1980 and especially in 1984, when he won a landslide victory and carried 49 states, Ronald Reagan’s campaign proclaimed “Morning in America” and managed to make Right-wing politics seem cool. Taking office in the middle of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

But, according to CNN political analyst Stephen Collinson on August 7 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/07/politics/harris-walz-happy-warriors-analysis/index.html), “Running a campaign rooted in hopefulness and good cheer at a time when many Americans feel demoralized and tired could backfire. After all, years of decaying economic security exacerbated by high inflation and elevated grocery prices during the Biden administration created the kind of conditions in which Trump’s populist demagoguery can prosper. If the vice president misjudges the national mood, her campaign could come across as oblivious to the concerns of many voters. It was noticeable, for instance, that while Harris pledged to bring down prices and fight for the middle class, her speech on Tuesday [August 6] was light on details of exactly how she would alleviate the economic stress that many people are feeling.”

That’s exactly what happened to the Democrats in 1968, the last time an incumbent Democratic President withdrew from his re-election campaign and installed his vice-president as the party’s new nominee. After a galvanic year marked by the assassinations of civil-rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, and a convention in Chicago (also where it’s going to be this year) that literally turned into a bloodbath in the streets, Hubert Humphrey emerged from the convention and proclaimed the “Politics of Joy.” Later he realized how out of touch that sounded and changed it to the “Politics of Hope,” but he lost anyway as Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them got 57 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 43 percent (a dramatic reversal from Lyndon Johnson’s liberal landslide just four years earlier) and set the stage for a Right-wing political and economic ascendancy that has continued, with only minor interruptions, ever since.

So I’m torn about Kamala Harris, not in terms of whether to vote for her – I’ve already voted for her in every election in which I could (for California Attorney General and U.S. Senator) – but in terms of whether she can win. My heart is with her, while my head thinks it’s preposterous to believe that a part-Black, part-Asian woman who bombed badly in her first Presidential campaign (though, then again, Biden bombed in his first two) and has been generally less popular than Biden can get elected President could actually get elected President in 2024. It’s comparable to believing in Santa Claus.

So far the Right in general and Donald Trump and J. D. Vance in particular have not been able to settle on a strategy to attack Harris. Trump made a big to-do when he addressed the National Association of Black Journalists and acted – or pretended to be – surprised that Harris is now identifying as African-American. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

For once, Trump had said something with which I could identify. I certainly knew Kamala Harris was [East] Indian-American – that first name alone gave it away – but I didn’t realize she was Black as well until she said so in an early debate in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary campaign. At the same time I think it’s preposterous that Donald Trump is saying, “Is she Indian or is she Black?,” without considering the possibility that she could be both. I even posted on my Facebook page, “How can Kamala Harris be both Black and Indian? The same way Donald Trump can be both German and Scottish.”

But the attacks on both Harris and Walz are surely coming. Already J. D. Vance has criticized Walz for retiring from the Minnesota National Guard months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz served 24 years in the National Guard and Vance served six months in the Marines, though neither of them saw combat. Walz was stationed in Italy and trained soldiers to use weapons of war, including AR-15 style rifles, while Vance did his tour of duty in a comfortable, air-conditioned office in Baghdad’s Green Zone (the ultra-exclusive American enclave which Iraqis were not allowed to enter) writing press releases.

It’s not surprising that Trump’s campaign resorted to attacking Walz’s service record given that one of his campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, was behind the heinous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” effort in 2004 that tarnished John Kerry’s service record in the Viet Nam war and made it at best useless and at worst counterproductive. They even trotted out the old military insult, “stolen valor,” to denounce Walz. It’s also not surprising that Walz didn’t make Kerry’s mistake of waiting three weeks to respond. Instead he was on it almost immediately, saying it was wrong for either himself or Vance to attack the other’s service record and thanking Vance “for your service and your sacrifice.”

More to the point are the attacks coming from the Trump camp against Harris for having once advocated for a single-payer “Medicare for All” health care system and a ban on fracking during her 2020 Presidential campaign. Trump’s people have claimed that these “radical” stands prove that Harris is a closet Leftist who will destroy American values and undermine our aspirations for energy independence. Only in the topsy-turvy world of American politics could supporting a guarantee of health care for all Americans (something every other advanced industrial country in the world does for its citizens) and stopping a uniquely environmentally destructive means of fossil-fuel production when we should be moving away from fossil fuels be considered negatives.

But the attacks on Harris from the Trump campaign serve a double purpose for Trump and the Republicans. At once they make her seem like a dangerous stealth radical to large numbers of Americans who have been conditioned to believe national health insurance is “socialism” and a fracking ban is a dangerous sellout to environmental extremists, and a hypocrite to progressive voters (like me) who supported her old positions and resent how she’s pulled back from them.

We can expect a nasty campaign from Donald Trump, just like the ones we got in 2016 and 2020. The more Republicans like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy; Brendan Buck, former aide to two previous Republican Speakers (John Boehner and Paul Ryan); Republican pollster Frank Luntz; and his own former aide, Kellyanne Conway, try to tell Trump that he can win on the issues of the economy, immigration and crime, the more he launches personal insults. So far he’s questioned her racial identity, denounced her laugh as “insane,” claimed that footage of a Harris rally at a Detroit airport showing 12,000 people was faked with artificial intelligence while his own rallies are drawing the biggest crowds anybody’s ever seen (they aren’t), and even proclaimed himself “better looking” than Harris.

Antics like this, which remind many voters of why they voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, led The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser to dub Trump Harris’s most effective campaign surrogate, “Donald Trump talks about Joe Biden constantly,” Glasser said August 16 on the PBS-TV show Washington Week. “He is also almost frenetic with the shifting of the media's attention and the public's attention, the excitement and crowds that Kamala Harris has generated. He has demanded, basically, pull the spotlight back to me, me, me. And, of course, when Donald Trump then talks and talks and talks, as he did just yesterday, he gave another press conference at his home in Bedminster, and, you know, this is the opposite of a disciplined, focused message about Harris. He's making the campaign about himself in a way that is very likely to benefit the Democrats.”

Some Things to Look Forward to About Harris

From my point of view it will be really nice to see Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, take the oath of office as President of the United States on January 20, 2025. After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 (a race I called correctly, largely on the basis that thanks to three decades of Republican propaganda attacks on her, Hillary Clinton was one of the most hated women in America) I didn’t think there’d be a serious chance of a woman getting elected President in my lifetime. Now there is. It’s also nice that Kamala Harris is a decade younger than I am. I thought I’d reached a generational milestone when Obama got elected – the first President who was younger than me (I was born in 1953, Obama in 1961) – but since then Trump (born 1946) broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest elected President and Biden (born 1942) broke Trump’s.

It will also be nice to see a genuinely liberal President from California, the state where I’ve lived all my life. So far the only California-born or California-resident Presidents have been Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan: not exactly a record to be proud of. And it’ll be nice to see a part-Asian, part-Black woman be the one who denies Trump his long-hoped-for second term. In fact, Kamala Harris unwittingly personifies everything about the new, struggling-to-be-born America that Donald Trump loathes: a mixed-race woman who’s professionally competent, and who can legitimately proclaim that she once prosecuted criminals while Trump is one.

In fact, one of the things I love about what’s happening to Trump is that the charge to hold him accountable is being led largely by strong, capable, powerful Black women. New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a case against his business, the Trump Organization, and won a judgment that the entire company was a fraud. Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is heading a prosecution against him for leading a “racketeer influenced and corrupt organization” in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Washington, D.C. district court judge Tanya Chutkan is presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for interfering with the 2020 election results nationwide. And now Kamala Harris has emerged as his principal opponent in the 2024 Presidential election.

In 1927 Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a member of the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan and got arrested at one of their rallies. Donald has never let us forget that he is the son of a Klansman both literally and spiritually. I love the karmic debt Donald Trump is currently having to pay for his decades of racism, sexism, moral rot, narcissism and corruption. There’s always a chance that he’ll be able to weasel out of it once again, as he’s done so many times before, aided by a large slice of the American voting population that has virtually accepted him as a new Messiah. (After the attempted assassination on July 13, both Trump himself and a lot of Republican supporters claim he had been spared literally by divine intervention.)

But for now, it’s Harris who’s riding high, gaining in the polls and looking more and more like a winner. And that’s a good thing, too, because while Trump looks to take America backwards (his slogan remains “Make America Great Again,” or “MAGA” for short, which led Hillary Clinton in 2016 to ask rhetorically, “Just when Donald Trump think America was ‘great’ and when does he want to return us to?”), Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to take America forward to a multi-racial, multi-cultural, environmentally responsible, economically healthy future in which every American has a shot at the dream. And isn’t that what America is supposed to be about?

Myth-Busting 2021 Documentary on Queer Activism in Los Angeles Airs on PBS

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 31) my husband Charles and I watched “Protests and Parades,” the second half of the two-part 2021 PBS program L.A.: A Queer History. Charles and I had already seen the first half, “Culture and Criminalization,” over the week we were staying with his mother Edi in Martinez, California. She’d recorded it on her digital video recorder (a piece of technology I’ve avoided because it would only add to our already astronomical cable bill) and we watched the first half there, then streamed the second half on our own computer last night. L.A.: A Queer History was at least an indirect challenge to what’s become the “print the legend” version of the history of U.S. Queer activism, which that it all began overnight when New York police raided an unlicensed dive bar called the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 and, instead of meekly submitting to police abuse, fought back. Only this wasn’t the first time Queers had fought back against a police raid on a Gay bar; it had happened in Los Angeles at the Black Cat on Sunset Boulevard on New Year’s 1966/1967.

One of my pet peeves over the years has been the way in which New York City has arrogantly and entirely falsely proclaimed itself as the epicenter of the Queer rights movement, when as I once testily pointed out in a leaflet, virtually every milestone in American Queer history happened in California. California was the site of the first ongoing Gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay and four others (including Dale Jennings and future fashion designer Rudi Gernreich) in L.A. in 1950. California was the site of the first ongoing Lesblan organization as well: the Daughters of Bilitis, founded by Lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco in 1955. California was the founding ground for the first ongoing Gay publication, One (which won a key court case in 1954 against the U.S. Post Office, which had banned the publication as “obscene” because it presented Gay life and culture positively), and the first ongoing Lesbian publication, The Ladder. And something I hadn’t known about until I watched this program was that the use of the word “PRIDE” in connection with Queer activism in the U.S. was also from California. “PRIDE” was originally an acronym for “Personal Rights In Defense and Education,” a Queer resistance organization founded in L.A. in 1966, which came into its own as a support group for the Black Cat rioters when they were prosecuted by the police. Even before that, California could claim some other major “firsts” in the history of American Queer activism, including the first openly Queer candidate for elective office in U.S. history. His name was José Saria, and in 1963 he was a drag performer and MC at a Gay bar in San Francisco that, like its L.A. namesake, was called the Black Cat. When the Black Cat was targeted for police raids, Saria not only organized his patrons to fight back, he announced his candidacy for the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco’s equivalent to a city council) and somehow got enough people to sign his petition to be on the ballot, despite the fact that merely signing your name and address would get you targeted for enforcement and potential arrest by the police. Saria lost, but along the way he founded the Imperial Court (a sort of Gay equivalent of a charitable lodge) and made his mark on the history of Queer activism.

Indeed, I would argue that virtually all the most important historical milestones for Queer community activism in American history came from California. The only ones that didn’t were the very first Gay rights organization in U.S. history, the Society for Human Rights, founded in Chicago in 1924 by German immigrant Henry Gerber; Frank Kameny’s pickets against the federal government for anti-Queer discrimination starting in 1965 in Washington, D.C.; and the Stonewall riots themselves. San Francisco also saw the first pickets against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination when my late friend and associate Leo Laurence and his friend (not his partner, though that was widely reported then) Gale Whittington, organized protests against the States Steamship Lines when they fired Whittington for appearing with Laurence in a photo illustrating an article about Gay militancy. The analysis of Gay history presented in L.A.: A Queer History, directed by Gregorio Davila, argues that a number of factors combined to make L.A. a Gay hotbed in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Among them were the prominence of the movie industry, which attracted many more or less openly Gay men including costume designers Gilbert Adrian and Orry-Kelly; and the U.S. involvement in World War II, which pulled a lot of young Gay men out of their repressive small towns and plunged them into a big city where there were plenty of available partners for Gay sex. Starting in 1943, the U.S. government, deciding that the war was pretty much won, gradually became less tolerant of Gays in the ranks, and after the war there was a full-blown campaign of repression against not only “Communists” (defined as anyone markedly Left in their politics, whether they had any use for the Communists’ insane levels of discipline or not) but Queers. Articles about the “Lavender Menace” began to appear, and thousands of Gay men were dishonorably discharged from the military and thereby given “bad papers” that made it harder for them to find civilian jobs as well.

By far the most important and influential Gay leader that emerged from this period was Harry Hay, one of my personal heroes (when I launched my own Queer paper, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, in 1994 Harry Hay was my first cover boy). He was the son of a mining engineer who’d spent a lot of his boyhood with his father in Chile, and in the late 1940’s he joined the Henry Wallace Presidential campaign (Wallace was an independent candidate who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s designated successor, but he turned against the Democratic Party over the Cold War and ran for President, ostensibly as the candidate of the Progressive Party but with a lot of support from the Communists). Hay organized a support committee called “Bachelors for Wallace” and ultimately got kicked out of the Communist Party for being Gay. (At the time the Communists regarded homosexuality as a form of “bourgeois social decadence” that would automatically disappear when the Communists won the world revolution.) In 1950 Hay and four others organized the Mattachine Society, named after a sect of medieval court jesters whom Hay believed had been Gay, only three years later he was thrown out of the group by more conservative members because, in order to protect the group against law-enforcement infiltration, he’d adopted the secretive organizational structure of the Communist Party. For the rest of his life – he lived until 2002 – Hay hung around on the outskirts of the Queer movement, at times resurfacing, as he did in the late 1980’s (when I first met him). Reacting to the way Pride organizations were barring the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from marching in Pride parades, Hay started showing up at parades carrying triangle-shaped signs saying, “I march with NAMBLA.”

If San Francisco Gay politician and martyr Harvey Milk was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Queer movement, Hay was its Frederick Douglass. It was Hay who first conceived of the idea of Gays and Lesbians as an oppressed minority, at a time when most Queer activists bought into the idea that being Queer was “a sickness” and tried to frame the movement as comparable to the one to counter discrimination against people with disabilities. It was also the early Mattachine Society which organized the first successful resistance to a police arrest of one of its founding members, Dale Jennings (extensively interviewed in this film), for “lewd conduct.” Hay and others were able to fundraise to hire him an attorney, who caught the arresting officer in a lie on the witness stand and led the judge to dismiss the case, calling it the worst-presented case on anything he’d ever heard. The second half of L.A.: A Queer History tells a more familiar part of the story, including an extensive set of interviews and profiles with Rev. Troy Perry. After he was excommunicated from the Baptist Church as a minister for being Gay, he decided to start his own, the Metropolitan Community Church, as an outreach for people who identified both as Christian and Gay and wanted a space to worship where they would not be shunned for being Queer. Rev. Perry was also instrumental in planning the first Christopher Street West parade – whose organizers named it after the Greenwich Village location of the Stonewall Inn and thus helped perpetuate the myth that the Queer movement had started in New York City – and making sure it was a parade rather than a protest march. He and the other organizers had the predictable trouble getting permits for the event after Ed Davis, then the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, denounced them and their plans for a parade before the L.A. City Council. (Two decades later, as an elected official in California, Davis did an abrupt about-face on the issue and became one of the few Queer-friendly politicians in the Republican Party.)

The show also zips through controversies that emerged as the movement grew and matured in the 1970’s, including the insistence of women activists on being called “Lesbian” instead of “Gay” (which ignores the fact that a number of women at the time actually disliked the term “Lesbian” and preferred to be called “Gay women”); the racism that afflicted prime Gay bars and discos against people of color, including the requirement that Gay men who looked Black or Latino show two or three ID’s while white-presenting Gay men could get in with just one; and the galvanic shock of the advent of AIDS in 1981. Suddenly huge numbers of Gay and Bisexual men were coming down with unusual cancers and other diseases and rapidly dying from them. Rev. Perry recalled that the number of funerals he was officiating at swelled from one a week to one a day to tens a day, and the obituaries in Gay papers grew until they covered several pages in each issue. Ironically, one effect of AIDS on the Queer community was it broke down the institutionalized sexism that had hampered Lesbians within the movement; all of a sudden organizations began hiring women for key leadership positions because they were likely to be around quite a while longer than their male counterparts. L.A.: A Queer History ends with the formation of ACT UP (the “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power”) in 1987 and the quickly dashed hopes of many Queer activists that the replacement of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush with Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 would end federal hostility against Queers and promote an aggressive response to the AIDS epidemic. Instead, as more than one interviewee on this program pointed out, it was Clinton who signed the two most openly anti-Queer laws ever passed by Congress, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” “compromise” restricting Queers in the military in 1993 and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” of 1996 which defined marriage, for purposes of federal law, as only between one man and one woman. Though there’s a certain “print the legend” aspect to L.A.: A Queer History (including its use of the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” interchangeably), for the most part it’s not only a necessary correction to the “Stonewall” myth that the Queer movement started in New York City in 1969 but a compelling history in its own right.

Trump's Nuremberg Rally: The 2024 Republican National Convention

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I started writing this at 9:15 p.m. Pacific time on Thursday, July 18, just a few minutes after Donald Trump gave his closing speech at the end of the 2024 Republican convention. It was an unusual speech only in its sheer length – about 93 minutes – and in the shameless manner with which he began it by milking the audience for sympathy over his narrow survival of the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.

Trump began the speech with a tear-filled recitation of how he would have been killed if he hadn’t opportunely turned his head away from the crowd to look at a giant chart he was displaying that purported to prove the Biden administration had unsealed the U.S.-Mexico border and let in 18 million undocumented immigrants. Like other speakers on the convention’s closing night, including his son Eric and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, Trump literally attributed his survival to divine intervention.

He even had the Jumbotron screens in the hallway broadcast still photos of his head after the bullet grazed him, showing the blood dripping down his ears, while he explained that his doctors had told him the ears bleed more than any other part of the body. The message came through loud and clear that GOD ALMIGHTY WANTS DONALD TRUMP TO BE PRESIDENT AGAIN, and if God Himself wants him to be in the White House once more, who are we mere voters to stand in his way?

Another ominous point about how the 2024 Republican Convention dealt with the attempted assassination of Trump just two days before it started was the way in which they hinted that Biden and the Democrats had had something to do with it. They didn’t come right out and make the accusation, but they blamed the Democrats’ rhetoric calling Trump’s re-election “a threat to democracy” and said that had probably inspired Trump’s would-be assassin.

Trump also brought out a mannequin with the helmet and field jacket of Buffalo firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed at his Butler rally trying to shield his family, and in a weird move he hugged and kissed it before returning to the podium for the rest of his speech. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of the rally a few years ago in which Trump similarly hugged and kissed an American flag on the stage.

Otherwise it was a pretty standard recitation of Trump’s Greatest Hits. Time and time again he described something – both good and bad – as the greatest/biggest/worst thing anyone in the world had ever seen before. He spoke in front of a moving platform that arose and ascended from the stage – for a moment I thought they’d have Trump himself ascend from an elevator, but they stopped short of that one – in front of a huge display of lights spelling the name “TRUMP” reminiscent of the way entertainers used to perform on TV with their names literally in lights behind them. (Judy Garland was famous for doing this in virtually all her TV appearances. She was also a lifelong liberal who caught hell from the Right-wingers of her time for daring to campaign for Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.)

Trump stayed resolutely on message in blaming “illegals” for virtually all of America’s problems. As he’s been doing since he first entered electoral politics nine years ago, he denounced them as murderers, rapists, cannibals (a relatively new wrinkle in his rhetoric, which he explained was what his reference to Hannibal Lecter at a rally a few months ago was about), gangsters and mental patients. In my review of the June 27, 2024 debate between him and Joe Biden – whose name he uttered only twice that night, as if it were some sort of swear word – I said that immigrants are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler. He said it again on July 18, characterizing the alleged influx of immigrants as “an invasion” and pledging a massive deportation operation. Trump cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s notorious “Operation Wetback” of 1953-54 – in which immigration agents swept up just about anyone who looked Latino, including American citizens, many of them U.S.-born – as a precedent.

According to Trump, other countries’ leaders are bringing down their own crime rates by sending all their criminals to the United States and dumping them on us. In one of the most fascinating rhetorical tics of his speech, again and again he boasted that he’d been able to get the leaders of other countries to bend to his will essentially by blackmailing them. Trump said again and again that various countries – most of which he didn’t name – had stopped doing bad things to the U.S. when he threatened to cut off their aid money.

One thing Trump didn’t say in 2024 that he famously said in 2016 was that the country’s problems were such that “only I can fix it.” He didn’t say that this year because he didn’t have to; he’s speaking to an audience of Republican faithful who already believe him to be a Messiah. The reverence with which he was greeted on July 18 included a speech and benediction from Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son and (unlike his dad) a hard-core Christian nationalist who’s signed on whole hog to the Republican agenda.

Trump in turn spoke reverentially of the Grahams, saying that his father, Fred Trump, had taken him to see Billy Graham’s big evangelical rallies in Yankee Stadium. It was one of the few moments in Trump’s speech that sounded even slightly genuine emotionally. Trump’s whole political appeal is to return America to what it was in the 1950’s, when Blacks were in the back of the bus, women were in the kitchen, Queers were in the closet and it was just routinely accepted that white men with money were supposed to rule the world. (I was watching the speech on PBS and their cameras scanned the crowd in vain looking for a Black face. They finally found one.)

Trump also followed through on his well-known admiration for dictators. He paid tribute to Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s no-nonsense leader, who had actually paid Trump what amounted to a state visit two weeks ago while he, as the leader of a NATO member country, was ostensibly in D.C. for a NATO meeting hosted by the U.S. and President Biden. Trump also said he looked forward to renewing his fabled friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un – of whom he said during his Presidency, “We fell in love,” even though Kim murdered people, including several members of his own family, to achieve power – and justified it by saying that when you have a potential adversary with nuclear weapons, you’d better be nice to them.

One of Trump’s many boasts was that during his Presidency he literally kept America out of war. He said that Russia would have never dared to attack Ukraine if he’d remained in the White House after the 2020 election. Trump said that the sheer force of his will would keep other nations from attacking us, and he offered us bullying and bluster as his key strategy for keeping the nation at peace. He even accused Biden of blundering the world onto the brink of World War III.

Trump also claimed that by essentially bankrupting Iran and threatening other countries to cut off all American trade if they did business with Iran, he’d kept Iran’s proxy Hamas from attacking Israel. Then, Trump said, Biden lifted the Iran sanctions and thus gave the Iranians millions of dollars with which to underwrite Hamas’s attacks on Israel and allowed Iran to develop a nuclear bomb. The fact that Barack Obama negotiated a deal to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of it was, of course, unmentioned.

To the extent that Trump’s speech mentioned actual policies – which it barely did; the overall message was that the sheer force and power of Trump’s personality would overnight end inflation, make homes and groceries affordable, and usher in the New American Millennium – they were predictably ghastly. He didn’t mention abortion in his speech at all, and as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) rightly pointed out on Stephen Colbert’s show afterwards, Trump’s promises to “drill, baby, drill” starting on day one and end the electric-car mandate imposed by Biden will just speed the self-annihilation of the human race through uncontrolled climate change.

The instant coverage of Trump’s speech from the Associated Press (https://apnews.com/article/trump-republican-national-convention-nomination-assassination-attempt-5f1f337ac39477e9d1c53d3e027edda3) and the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post (https://nypost.com/2024/07/18/us-news/donald-trump-delivers-heartfelt-and-harrowing-rnc-address-calling-for-unity/?utm_medium=browser_notifications&utm_source=pushly&utm_content=All%20Push%20Subscribers&utm_campaign=5082243) emphasized Trump’s pro forma calls for “unity.” But it was clear from the overall context of the speech, and even clearer from his Truth Social messages calling on “Democrat prosecutors” to drop all the other charges against him in the wake of Florida District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the classified documents case, that the only “unity” Trump is interested in is one in which 100 percent of all Americans follow his orders without question.

Watching Trump’s July 18 convention acceptance speech was like watching one of Adolf Hitler’s notorious party rallies at Nuremberg. The mindless adulation of the crowd and even the similarities in the ways his audience members dressed (I found myself wondering if every man had been required to wear one of Trump’s red bib-like ties and every woman a red dress) gave the whole event a Nazi-like air. So did Trump’s stated determination never to allow himself to be voted out of office again. The cult of Trump is so powerful that here, as throughout his political career, he was able to get away with things that would have been the kiss of death for other, lesser politicians – as when he appeared to be wrapping up his speech with what he promised would be a “strong closing,” then droned on for half an hour after that.

Democrats’ Fratricidal War Only Helps Trump

And where were the Democrats when all of this B.S. (to use an abbreviation for a word Trump told his audience he’s not going to use anymore because Franklin Graham told him not to) was going on? Engaging in a useless, counterproductive and destructive fratricidal war over Joe Biden’s political future and whether he still has one. If it had been Donald Trump who’d turned in a wretched performance on the June 27, 2024 debate and Joe Biden who made sense, the Republicans would have all rallied around Trump and defended him to the death.

Instead, since Biden’s awful debate performance there has been a drumbeat of prominent Democrats, including elected officials in Washington, D.C., who have demanded that Biden actually abandon his campaign for re-election. They claim that not only can Biden not win re-election, he will do so badly he will drag the rest of the Democratic Party down with him, the Republicans will win back the Senate and keep the House, and Trump will have the “trifecta” and be able to do absolutely everything he wants.

Maybe they have some private polls that show that Biden can’t win, but that’s not what the public polls say. They show Biden losing the nationwide popular vote to Trump by one percentage point, while if Vice-President Kamala Harris takes over the nomination – as many, though not all, of the Democratic never-Bideners are suggesting – she’d lead Trump by two points. Both of those are within the polls’ margin of error, and neither result suggests either that Biden is doomed or that Harris would have a clear shot.

Of course, as any American who lived through 2016 (and 2000 before it) will recall, a nationwide popular vote is not how Americans elect their President. Much of the Democrats’ concern over Biden is based on the idea that he will do so badly he’ll not only lose to Trump in the so-called “battleground” states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia) but put must-win states for the Democrats like Minnesota (which hasn’t voted for a Republican for President since 1972), New Mexico and Virginia in play.

Dumping Joe Biden from the Democratic ticket at this late stage will just doom the Democrats to defeat. The party leadership spent the last 3 ½ years telling the U.S. that Biden, despite his 81 years (just three years longer on the planet than Trump!), was still fit physically and mentally and perfectly capable both of running a re-election campaign and running the country for the next four years (which are not necessarily the same thing). Now after a single bad debate performance, they’re running for the hills screaming doom and demanding a new, younger, fresher candidate.

Sorry, guys and gals. The time to have had the debate over whether Biden is too old either to campaign or serve as President was last January or before. There were enough polls early in 2024 showing doubts about Biden’s age and indicating that many voters thought Republicans could do a better job both on issues (like the economy, immigration and crime) and on overall fitness that last February I wrote a Zenger’s blog post called, “Is a Second Donald Trump Presidency Inevitable?” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2024/02/is-second-donald-trump-presidency.html)

My current prediction is that Donald Trump will win the 2024 election, and will win it fair and square, no matter what the Democrats do. If his opponent is Joe Biden, already fatally weakened by the inexplicable Democratic attacks on him, Trump will win by a substantial margin. If his opponent is Kamala Harris – who’s got some major strikes against her (she’s a woman, she’s part-Black, she’s part-Asian, her 2020 Presidential campaign collapsed quickly, and during most of her vice-presidency her approval ratings have been even worse than Biden’s) and whose record will be prime fodder for Republican attack propagandists – Trump will win by an even bigger margin than the one by which he’d defeat Biden.

And if the Democrats do what an unnamed donor suggested and have an “open convention” at which someone other than Biden or Harris is nominated, that person will lose by an even bigger margin than Harris would. That would be an especially grim outcome given that the 2024 Democratic Convention is scheduled to take place in Chicago – and the last time the Democrats convened in Chicago, in 1968, it was not only figuratively but literally a bloodbath in the streets. Rightly or wrongly, today’s American voters regard a party’s ability to manage their convention smoothly as an indication of how well they’ll be able to run the country – and the Republicans performed flawlessly on that score this year. The Democrats, by contrast, are scrambling.

And the people running the Democratic Party have only themselves to blame. Shortly after the June 27 debate disaster, MS-NBC interviewed Julián Castro, former Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration. He claimed that the Democratic National Committee had threatened to blacklist any party campaign manager, consultant or company who took on a potential primary challenger to Biden and make sure that person or company could never work for the Democratic Party or any of its candidates again. The way he said it, it sounded like Castro had considered mounting a primary challenge to Biden himself – and had given up on the idea for precisely that reason. Their logic was understandable – the historical record shows that every time an incumbent U.S. president has been faced with a primary challenge, whether or not the challenge was successful, that party has always lost the general election – but the Democratic Establishment has saddled itself with a candidate they’re now frantically trying to throw overboard because they’re convinced he can’t win.

Biden’s critics within the Democratic Party have a point. Though Bernie Sanders on Stephen Colbert’s program called Biden “the most progressive President in my lifetime,” he’s either muffed or missed altogether golden opportunities to skewer Donald Trump. In the June 27 debate, when Trump boasted that thanks to his three Supreme Court appointees reversing Roe v. Wade, abortion policy had been returned to the states where he said it belonged, Biden should have said, “So, if Congress sends you a nationwide abortion ban, will you pledge to veto it?” And after July 13, Biden should have challenged Trump, “So, now that you’ve been shot and nearly killed by a man with an AR-15, will you join me in getting these deadly weapons of war off our streets?” (The ironies became even weirder when Jason Aldean, the country singer who headlined the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas concert which ended in a mass shooting that killed over 60 people, starred in a Trump benefit concert on July 18, 2024.)

But such blazing attacks on a political rival’s hypocrisy are just not Joe Biden’s style as a politician. Ever since 1972, when he became one of the youngest U.S. Senators in history (an ironic contrast to his status as our oldest-ever President!), where he served until Barack Obama tapped him as his vice-president in 2008, he’s been “a creature of the Senate” in more ways than one. Biden’s entire career has been carried out within the norms of civility that used to obtain in American politics (with some exceptions; 19th century Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was famously beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor by a cane-wielding pro-slavery Congressmember) but have been smashed to smithereens by Donald Trump and today’s Republicans.

Trump’s Amazing Political Comeback

Say what you will about Donald Trump – and I’ve hated, loathed, detested and despised him since the first time I heard of him in 1987 – you have to give him credit for one of the most extraordinary political comebacks of anyone in history, anywhere. After the riots on January 6, 2021 by a mob Trump openly egged on, his political stock seemed more worthless than a degree from Trump University. Both Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy denounced him on the floors of their respective houses and said Trump was to blame for the violence. McConnell even said that the Senate needn’t vote to convict Trump on an impeachment – which would have barred him from ever running for office again – because the criminal justice system would take care of him.

Instead, to appropriate a Trumpian phrase, he’s mounted a political comeback the likes of which the United States, and possibly the entire world, has never seen before. For someone who’s been criticized for having a low attention span and being easily distracted, he’s industriously built up a cult of personality around himself that has completely taken over one of America’s two major political parties and bent it into an implacable instrument of his will. He has repeated lie after lie after lie, and millions of Americans believe his every word. He’s also accumulated an unorganized but implacable gang of thugs whom he’s so totally brainwashed that every time Trump calls out an individual by name, whether a federal judge or a lowly election worker, that person receives death threats the police find credible.

Trump has been impeached twice, indicted four times, criminally convicted once and been adjudged in civil courts to be guilty of fraud (in several instances) and sexual assault. He’s also gotten away with describing himself as a “populist” even though his record is diametrically opposed to everything the original Populists stood for, particularly curbing the influence of the super-rich over American politics. And he’s pledged, among other things, to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels and eliminate Biden’s hard-won gains for energy efficiency and a transition to electric cars. If Trump gets back in the White House (and, quite frankly, that’s looking more like “when” than “if”), the Earth itself and its ability to sustain human life will be the ultimate victim.

In his drive not only to regain the Presidency but to wield absolute power, Trump has had plenty of enablers, most notably the three hard-core Right-wing revolutionaries he put on the U.S. Supreme Court. Just four days after the June 27 debate with Biden which seems, at this writing, to have abruptly and ignominiously ended Biden’s political career, the Supreme Court reversed its decision in U.S. v. Nixon 50 years ago and declared that, for all intents and purposes, Presidents are above the law. The shocking statement Richard Nixon made to David Frost in 1977 – “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal” – is now the constitutional law of the land. While the court conceded that a President could still be prosecuted for “non-official acts,” they made that so hard to prove that in practice Presidents are now immune from prosecution for virtually anything, from accepting bribes to appoint an ambassador to ordering the murder of a political opponent.

So the increasingly likely outcome of the November 5, 2024 election is not only that Donald Trump will return to the White House, he will return with the full powers of an American dictator. He’s already said he’d be “a dictator on day one,” and the joke after he said that was he’d use that power to declare that “day one” will last for four years. He’s likely to come in with majorities in both houses of Congress, and whoever replaces Mitch McConnell as the Republican Senate leader will almost certainly get rid of the filibuster so Senate Republicans can pass whatever legislation Trump wants with just a simple majority vote – while the shrunken number of Senate Democrats look on helplessly in despair. Trump will also probably declare January 6 as a national holiday the way Adolf Hitler did with November 9, the anniversary of his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The 2024 Republican convention was filled with speakers who had once rightly criticized Donald Trump and who were now being put through the ritual humiliation he demands. Among his former critics turned diehard supporters were Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and his new running mate, J. D. Vance. Meanwhile, the trophy room at Mar-a-Lago is filled with the heads of principled Republicans who dared to defy Trump, including Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Justin Amash, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the last of whom Trump has threatened to have tried for treason by a military tribunal for having dared to serve on the House committee that investigated January 6, 2021. (That’s an ironic bit of karma given that it was Cheney’s dad, Dick Cheney, who as George W. Bush’s Vice-President came up with the idea of military tribunals in the first place.)

Trump’s trophy room includes Democrats, too, most notably Hillary Clinton. There’s a space waiting for Joe Biden as Trump, with the surprising connivance of the Democratic Establishment that once went out of its way to ensure Biden wouldn’t have a primary challenger in 2024 and now can’t wait to get rid of him because “he can’t win,” gets ready for Biden’s (and Kamala Harris’s, or whoever the Democrats nominate if and when Biden goes) scalp. But the ultimate trophy on Trump’s wall will be the very idea of America as a representative democracy. Just as Julius Caesar’s ascension to power (interrupted by his assassination but resumed by his grand-nephew Octavian, who became Emperor Augustus) killed ancient Rome’s 500-year-old experiment with republican government, so will Trump’s return to power kill the 250-year-old American Republic and inaugurate the American Empire.

Trump Aces Biden in First Presidential Debate June 27

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

If anyone out there cares about the future of American democracy and believes that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will be the death blow against it, the first debate between former President Trump and incumbent president Joe Biden in Georgia, as telecast on CNN June 27, 2024, was a disaster. Especially in the first 10 minutes – which usually in these face-offs are what everyone remembers and on which they base their opinions – Trump wiped the floor with Biden.

A lot of Democrats were no doubt hoping that Trump would get lost in his own petty grievances and fatally embarrass himself with the sorts of bizarre stories about electric boats and sharks he’s been telling at his rallies lately. No such luck. Trump came out strong, disciplined and determined. His unquestioned skills as a salesman and promoter were on full display as he glibly told lie after lie with an air of utter sincerity. Trump gave a virtuoso performance as a con artist at the top of his game.

As for Biden, his fabled stutter – which I don’t remember being this much in evidence during the two previous debates with Trump in 2020 – undermined him and lent credence to the Republican argument that Biden is too infirm, too incoherent and simply too old to be President. Though Trump is just three years younger than Biden, he projected an air of vigor and strength, while Biden by comparison looked like a decrepit old man waiting for his pudding cup at the nursing home.

To his credit, Biden’s performance did get stronger – at least at times – as the evening progressed. But all too much of the debate was a case of he-said, he-said as Trump and Biden called each other liars and threw out un-fact-checkable statistics. Both appealed to real or fictional supporters and each called the other the worst President in American history. At one point Biden quoted Trump as saying people who joined the U.S. military were “suckers” and “losers” – and Trump said there were 19 other people with him at the event that could say he never said it. Biden said there was at least one person, a four-star general, who said he did say it, and Trump said he’d fired the man for making up that story about him.

If there’s one group that decisively lost in this so-called “debate,” it’s the voters pollsters have rather oddly labeled the “double haters” – the people who strongly disapprove of both Biden and Trump and deeply resent that those are the choices America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system has given them. Nothing either Trump or Biden said at the June 27 debate is going to give the “double haters” any reason at all for preferring one over the other. Their performances will just reinforce many Americans’ disgust over the sorry choice they’ve been given for who our next national leader will be.

This year’s election is not the first time a current President and a former President have run against each other. That happened not only in 1892, when former President Grover Cleveland ran against the man who’d unseated him in the Electoral College, Benjamin Harrison, and won. It also happened in 1912, when former President Theodore Roosevelt tried to regain the Republican nomination against his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and when he failed he started his own Progressive Party. Both lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Taft’s term was such a disaster that in his re-election bid, in a country that since the Civil War has had just two major parties, he placed third.

But the June 27 debate was historically unique in other ways. It’s the first time a major-party Presidential candidates’ debate has occurred before either party has had its nominating convention. It’s also the first time in which both candidates have been affected by felony convictions – his own in Trump’s case, his son Hunter in Biden’s – and of course both Trump and Biden tried to use that against each other and hinted at darker, deeper crimes that have so far gone unpunished and unadjudicated.

The most impressive part of Trump’s performance was how relentlessly he stayed “on message” in blaming virtually all of America’s problems on immigrants. Trump repeated over and over and over again that Biden had opened America’s borders and let in 18 million or more “illegals,” many of them murderers and rapists. What’s more, he also said over and over that these “illegals” are destroying Social Security and Medicare, as well as taking jobs away from American citizens, including people of color.

Trump boasted throughout the evening that he’s doing far better among Black and Latino voters than any Republican since the two big parties switched their positions on civil rights in the 1960’s – which is true. He said that’s because U.S.-born Blacks and Latinos resent having to compete for jobs with immigrants – a warning I got from a Mexican-American friend of mine in 2016. He told me there were a lot of Latinos who were going to vote for Trump because they thought “illegal” immigrants were a threat to their jobs – and Trump has been playing those fears like a great violinist plays a Stradivarius.

“Lying is second nature to him,” Tony Schwartz, the actual author of Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal, told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer in an interview published July 18, 2016 – when the possibility that Trump could be President still seemed little more than a fantasy. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” One of Trump’s many political superpowers is that he’s not only able to convince himself that his stories are true, he’s able to convince tens of millions of American voters that his stories are true.

When I read that article, I immediately thought of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and in particular his concept of doublethink. It’s impossible, I think, to understand both the sheer scale, scope and audacity of Trump’s lying and the reason he’s been so successful at it without understanding Orwell’s idea of doublethink, which he explained as follows:

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. …

“[T]he essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

Donald Trump is, as Orwell would have said, a doubleplusgood doublethinker. In a contest with someone who lies so shamelessly – who, as I’ve previously said about Trump, is supremely uninterested in whether anything he says is “true” in the sense of objective reality, but who uses words merely as tools to accomplish whatever he wants at any given moment – someone like Joe Biden, with all his old-fashioned (oldthinkful, as Orwell would have called them) notions that there is such a thing as objective reality and a political leader has an obligation to base his or her decisions on it, is a sitting duck.

A lot of nonsense has been spilled over whether or not Donald Trump actually believes in his heart of hearts that he really won the 2020 Presidential election and it was “stolen” from him. It matters in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump is ever put on trial for fomenting the attempts of his supporters to block Congress from certifying the election results on January 6, 2021, but because Trump is such a doubleplusgood doublethinker, he believes both that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he lost fair and square.

This question remains a minefield for him; when CNN co-moderator Dana Bash asked both candidates whether they would accept the results of the 2024 election, win or lose, Trump hedged and said, “If it’s a free and fair election,” when he’s spent a good part of the last four years claiming that 2020 wasn’t “free and fair.” Indeed, he made his refusal to accept defeat even clearer in 2016, when he debated Hillary Clinton and was asked if he’d accept the election results. “If I win,” he said.

MS-NBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is fond of quoting his former boss, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), as saying, “Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, but not to their own set of facts.” That couldn’t be more wrong, especially in today’s political and media landscape. Just as America has two major political parties, a far-Right Republican Party and a center-Right Democratic Party, it also has two media parties. One is the party of the legacy media and broadcast networks, while the other is the party of Fox News and the myriad of ultra-Right-wing Web sites like Newsmax and One America News for people who think Fox is “too liberal” for them.

Both the inventor of the “Big Lie,” Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany), and its principal theorist, George Orwell, thought it could only work in a nation ruled on dictatorial or authoritarian principles. They assumed that in order to get away with telling big lies, the government had actively to suppress competing sources of information. Today, by contrast, just about every American self-selects their own media sources to reinforce their own perceptions about reality and learn only those “facts” – real or not – that support it.

That’s the real reason behind the virtually unshakable support for Donald Trump among almost half of the American electorate. Trump’s core base of support has heard so often about the “Biden crime family” that they believe Biden is the most corrupt President in American history and Trump will be their savior from Biden’s corruption. They’ve also heard his lies about immigrants so often they really believe that America’s very integrity as a country is at stake. Asked on June 27 just how he would carry out the mass deportations of millions of undocumented American immigrants he has promised, Trump dodged the question and instead spewed out more hate propaganda about them. Trump made it clear he feels about immigrants the way Adolf Hitler felt about Jews.

Throughout the June 27 debate, Trump made claim after claim that is defied by reality. He said that Biden’s weakness has led the rest of the world to disrespect America. Whenever actual foreign leaders speak to the media about Trump, it’s to say they fear his return to power and their respect for America actually declined during his Presidency. Trump claimed, as he has all along, that both the criminal and civil cases against him were a deliberate attempt to “weaponize” the justice system against him masterminded by Biden, who knows he can’t beat Trump in a fair fight (even though he already did in 2020!) and is therefore mobilizing the full resources of the federal government to destroy him. Trump also boasted – and he’s totally correct about this one – that the criminal and civil prosecutions against him have only mobilized his base and increased his odds of winning in 2024.

Trump is also a master of what psychologists call “projection” – condemning others for doing the things he’s actually doing or planning to do. He promised on June 27 to prosecute the members of the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 riot and hinted he’d go after both Hunter Biden and Joe Biden himself if he returns to the White House. One of the most remarkable interviews Trump gave during his first term as President was one he did with radical-Right talk show host Larry O’Connor on WMAL-FM November 2, 2017 in which he lamented that he couldn’t weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies:

“[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”

After watching the June 27 debate – and starting to write this immediately after it ended, rather than let the cable-news talking heads tell me what I’d just seen – I’m more scared than ever that Donald Trump is going to return to the White House on January 20, 2025 after winning a free and fair election. Though Biden got in a few good licks, and the two candidates got into a bizarre argument over (of all things!) their golf games, for the most part it was Trump’s show. And it was Trump’s show partly because he maintained his discipline, but mainly because he projected utter sincerity even while he was lying his head off. Trump seemed fully in command of himself and his presentation, while Biden stuttered in more ways than one.

PBS "Frontline" Documentary Tries to Be Even-Handed on Netanyahu and Gaza, but Netanyahu's Genocidal Intentions Come Out Anyway

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The PBS Frontline series of TV documentaries ran on May 28 the rather awkwardly titled episode “Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza.” It’s the latest in their ongoing coverage of the continued hostility between Israel and Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and the show – directed by James Jacoby, co-written by him and Anya Bourg, and narrated by Will Lyman in his usual quiet but authoritative tone – attempts to be even-handed to both sides in this highly fraught issue. This particular program was first run on December 19, 2023, 2 ½ months since Hamas, the part political party and part terrorist organization that runs Gaza, launched their horrific attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 and triggered Israel’s all-out campaign for revenge. I’ve long been convinced that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seized on Hamas’s attacks as a pretext for an all-out genocidal campaign to wipe out the Palestinian population once and for all, despite the efforts of U.S. President Joe Biden and others to embrace him publicly but try to restrain him privately. I’ve even posted to my Facebook page calling Netanyahu “the Jewish Hitler” and comparing his tactics in Gaza to the Nazis’ attempt at a “final solution to the Jewish problem.”

Like previous Frontline programs on Israel, Gaza and Hamas, this one began with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton brokering a deal between then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then-Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in 1993. The agreement was called the “Oslo Accord” after the Norwegian capital where most of the negotiations took place – though the final signing ceremony was held at the White House and, at Clinton’s insistence, Rabin and Arafat publicly shook hands. The ultimate objective was to create a new state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza that would peacefully coexist with Israel – only the Israeli hard-Right immediately opposed the deal on the ground that the Palestinians remained committed to the total destruction of Israel and they would use their state, if they got one, as a base to achieve that goal. Netanyahu emerged as the principal political figure of the Israeli Right and made it his goal, even before he first became Prime Minister of Israel in 1996, to make sure that the Palestinians never got a state of their own. Along the way, a Jewish religious fanatic assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, and his successor, Shimon Peres, lost his re-election bid. This program didn’t mention why, but a previous Frontline episode on the ultimate failure of the Oslo Accords did; instead of voting for Peres, Israel’s Arab citizens decided to boycott the election altogether, and this provided Netanyahu with the margin he needed for a slim victory.

It’s a mistake Arab-Americans are about to make themselves; in threatening to withhold their support for Biden and either sit out the 2024 Presidential election or vote for minor-party candidates, which in America’s political system amounts to the same thing, they risk defeating Biden and handing the Presidency back to Donald Trump, who during his first term fulfilled the whole wish list of the Jewish Right. Trump reversed decades of American support for the two-state solution, approved Israel building more settlements in the West Bank on land that was supposed to be part of the Palestinian state, and moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby endorsing Netanyahu’s insistence that Jerusalem will remain Israeli territory forever and the Palestinians can forget about ever having it as their capital. Ultimately Netanyahu was voted out of office, but he came back in 2006 and has been there ever since except for a brief interregnum when he momentarily lost his party’s majority in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature. Netanyahu, like Trump, also faced serious criminal charges; in fact, three corruption trials against him were already in progress in Israel’s judicial system until October 7, 2023. Netanyahu decided to “reform” Israel’s judiciary to, among other things, end the prosecutions against him, and the result was huge protests in the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities denouncing him as anti-democratic.

I’ve also long suspected that Netanyahu had advance knowledge of the October 7 attacks and allowed them to happen because, following Shakespeare’s advice to troubled leaders to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” he realized that an horrific attack on the Israeli population would unite the country behind him and in one stroke end his political problems. Even if he didn’t, Hamas’s attacks perfectly fit into Netanyahu’s strategy; by pledging an all-out campaign to defeat Hamas once and for all – even if that meant the utter destruction of Gaza and its 2 million people, which is what it has meant in practice – he was able to present himself as Israel’s savior. Netanyahu also has had plenty of experience dealing with U.S. Presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, and his negotiations with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama (whom he hated instantly, pointing out that Obama’s middle name was “Hussein” and embracing Trump’s conspiratorial allegation that Obama was really an African-born Muslim) and Joe Biden convinced him that, as much as Democratic Presidents might privately oppose him, they’d be totally in solidarity with him in public and he could “roll” them into continuing to provide Israel with military aid. I remember I once read a Foreign Affairs article on North Korea which said that no superpower ever let a client state push it around as much as China does with North Korea, and I thought, “Are you kidding? What about the U.S. and Israel?”

More recently, Biden’s decision to suspend one shipment of military aid to Israel – so-called “bunker-buster” bombs that have no purpose other than the utter destruction of entire buildings – aroused opposition among 26 House Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottenheimer (D-NJ). Gottenheimer’s letter read, “[W]ithholding weapons shipments to Israel … only emboldens our mutual enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other Iranian-backed proxies. … Seven months after October 7, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust, Iranian-backed terrorist proxies continue to fire rockets and mortars into Israel and at Americans from all directions. At the same time, anti-Semitism is spreading globally like wildfire.” It’s not like the Palestinians and their proxies are totally blameless – in fact, in one of my Zenger’s Newsmagazine editorials I coined the phrase “the terrorists’ veto,” an offtake of “the hecklers’ veto,” to describe the way extremists on both sides of a conflict can unilaterally block a peaceful resolution by committing some heinous act that brings potential negotiations to a screeching halt. Netanyahu came to power in 1996 in the first place after Hamas blew up at least two #18 buses in Tel Aviv, killing hundreds of Israelis, while Rabin’s assassination was an example of “the terrorists’ veto” on the other side.

Perhaps the most heart-rending missed opportunity mentioned on the Frontline documentary was told by Dennis Ross, former national security advisor to President Clinton, who recalled the last-ditch attempts Clinton made to revive Oslo in January 2001, just as Clinton was scheduled to leave office. According to Ross, the Israelis and Palestinians reached a tentative deal which Yasir Arafat rejected without seriously considering it. A Palestinian negotiator told Ross, “We in the delegation all wanted to accept it, and Arafat just sort of blew us away. Can you imagine where we would be today if we had said yes?” It’s also occurred to me that Israelis and Palestinians have two competing victim narratives, and that’s one of the reasons why this conflict is so intractable. Israelis justify their occupation of Palestine as their due following 5,000 years of exile from their historic Jewish homeland. In effect they’re saying they had the right to drive the Palestinian Arabs from that land by gunpoint because their ancestors drove the Philistines and Canaanites out of it by spearpoint five millenia earlier. They also claim that because the rest of the world failed to stop the Nazi Holocaust while it was still going on, the world owes the Jewish people a state. Palestinians in turn demand a reversal of the Nakba (literally “catastrophe”) by which the occupying Israelis drove them from their land in 1948.

The attempts on both sides to rewrite history for their own ideological purposes reached a bizarre level when Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech declaring that the real villain of the Holocaust was not Adolf Hitler, but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestine’s principal Muslim cleric in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had merely wanted to resettle the European Jews in Madagascar, and the Grand Mufti had talked him into killing them all instead. A lot of Israelis who had personally survived the Holocaust knew better and called Netanyahu out on it, but once again, like Donald Trump, Netanyahu was able to ride out the controversy and remain in power. My personal belief is that the creation of the state of Israel on stolen Arab land in response to the Holocaust was a world-historical mistake – the classic example of the second wrong that doesn’t make a right – and I would want to see a South African-style one-state solution that would create a unified Palestine under Arab leadership with ironclad guarantees of the rights of the Jewish minority. But even before the current conflict, the chances of anything like that actually happening were pretty infinitesimal, and the combination of Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s genocidal response has blown them to smithereens along with killing tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and reducing Gaza to a wasteland of destruction, starvation and want.

"The Riot Report": PBS Documentary Shows What Happened When a U.S. Government Commission Came to Grips with Racism in America

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, May 21) I watched an oddly compelling documentary on PBS called “The Riot Report,” an American Experience episode on the Kerner Commission, charged by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to study the race riots that took place throughout major U.S. cities that summer and analyze why they’d happened and what could be done to keep them from happening again. The commission, officially named the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was chaired by Kerner, who was then the Governor of Illinois, with New York Mayor John Lindsay (a moderate Republican who later switched parties and ran unsuccessfully for President as a Democrat in 1972) as vice-chair. The Commission had 11 members, eight of whom were white men. One was a white woman (Katherine Graham Peden, commissioner of commerce in Kentucky), and two were African-American: U.S. Senator Edward Brooke (the second Black person to serve as a Senator, and like the first – Hiram Revels of Mississippi, elected during Reconstruction – he was a Republican) and NAACP head Roy Jenkins. The commission’s charge, as expressed by President Johnson in the statement he made announcing it, was to answer three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?”

The main source for the PBS documentary on the actual inner workings of the Commission was one of its few surviving members, U.S. Senator Fred Harris (D-Oklahoma, and the fact that a Democrat could be elected as a Senator from Oklahoma is in itself a major index of how much American politics and society have changed). Between them, Harris and Lindsay formed a “liberal axis” on the Commission that took on the relatively Right-wing politics of some of the other members, notably Charles “Tex” Thornton, founder of the defense contractor Litton Industries. According to historian Steven Gillon, it was apparent from the first day of the Commission’s meetings that “John Lindsay and Fred Harris wanted to push the committee into dealing with the root causes of racial unrest, which they believed was poverty and a sense of powerlessness. Tex Thornton sees the commission's purpose solely to help law enforcement to crush future uprisings. And in every debate, just about those two on opposite sides.” One big division within the Commission was over the racial makeup of law enforcement in general and the National Guard, the agency generally called in to restore order during or immediately after a riot, in particular. Commission members quickly concluded that, by being almost all white, the local police and National Guard appeared to Black ghetto residents more like an occupying force than a group there “to protect and serve” the local community.

According to Gillon, “African Americans made up less than 2% of National Guard members. Lindsay and Harris both thought that it was important to make that statement. Tex Thornton doesn't want to do it. This is the first big battle. And Tex Thornton argues vehemently against the Commission making any kind of a statement.” Another unusual tactic the Commission adopted was to hold field hearings instead of just talking to Washington, D.C. insiders like long-time Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was the Commission’s first witness, and he predictably told them that the riots were part of a gigantic conspiracy organized by the Communist Party, U.S.A. to bring down the U.S. government and replace it with a Communist system. Later, when the Commission members started holding hearings in Black areas of major cities and meeting with ordinary people, their points of view changed. For him, as Senator Harris recalled, meeting with actual Black people “really put faces on these problems. And I know that it had the same effect on other members of the commission. Tex Thornton said himself, ‘[A]fter going out to riot cities and talking to people there, I have moved about 90 degrees to the Left.’”

Unfortunately, the Kerner Commission’s deliberations came about at a time when American politics were moving decisively to the Right. Lyndon Johnson’s great legislative successes on racial issues – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – had come about thanks to Johnson’s accession to the Presidency following the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Johnson had pledged himself to carry forward Kennedy’s agenda – in Kennedy’s inaugural address he had said, “Let us begin,” and in Johnson’s first speech as President he said, “Let us continue.” As a Southerner himself, he was determined to break the stranglehold on civil-rights legislation held by the long-serving Southern Democrats, the so-called “Dixiecrats,” who had successfully either blocked altogether or watered down previous civil-rights bills, including one Johnson had sponsored himself in 1957. A master at legislative tactics, including intimidation, he was able to push through the Civil Rights Act; Richard Russell (D-Georgia), the Senator who led the opposition, said afterwards, “We could have stopped John Kennedy. We could never stop Lyndon.” Johnson had won an overwhelming victory in the 1964 election against hard-Right Republican Barry Goldwater, and in the wake of that victory he was able to push through the Voting Rights Act, largely due to public revulsion at the way nonviolent civil-rights protesters in Selma, Alabama and other Southern cities had been beaten, sprayed with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs while the TV cameras showed it all to the American people.

But Goldwater’s nomination was a warning signal for the future; he would break the Democratic Party’s Southern monopoly, carrying five Southern states (as well as narrowly winning his home state, Arizona). Goldwater made the Republican Party acceptable to Southern voters by voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and on the campaign trail he said things like, “While the President of the United States speaks of the Great Society, our cities and suburbs are turning into the lawless society. … Nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.” In August 1965, three days of rioting sweep through the streets of Watts, Los Angeles’s Black ghetto, and according to New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb, President Johnson took the riots as a personal insult. “This is just days after he's cashed in all of his political chips to shepherd the Voting Rights Act through Congress,” Cobb said. “It's kind of indignation, almost a sense of being slapped in the face.” At the same time Johnson was also pushing forward America’s inexplicable commitment to the Viet Nam War, which he regarded as a personal priority. In appointing the members of the Kerner Commission, he’d insisted that no one on it be opposed to, or even publicly skeptical about, the Viet Nam War. Johnson and the Democrats lost big in the 1966 midterm elections – though they maintained Congressional majorities until Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate in 1980 and the House of Representatives in 1994 – and even before those elections, in the wake of Watts Congress unanimously passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965. This made huge amounts of federal government funding available to local police departments, including military-grade hardware and technology. This facilitated what libertarian writer Radley Balko would call, in his 2013 book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad described first-hand what the police were doing with this new money: “Setting up virtual checkpoints on the borders of these communities, doing hostile drives through Black neighborhoods, as a show of force for Black people to so-called stay in their place. They're policing the boundaries of Black life.” Another historian, David C. Carter, said the riots marked “a fundamental transition where media simply can't resist the spectacle of urban disorder. The camera simply cannot look away. And as much as it unsettles white viewers, there's also this sort of fixation. In some ways it's confirming their darkest prejudices about Black Americans. Now they're seeing a more menacing face of Black America, and they emphatically do not like what they're seeing.” So when the Kerner Commission came out with a broad program of recommendations, including a guaranteed annual income and major investments in jobs and housing in the African-American ghettoes, much of white America responded with vehement opposition. Senator Fred Harris recalled that his own father gave him hell about the report: “The way he heard the Kerner Report was, ‘Mr. Harris, out of the goodness of your heart, you ought to pay more taxes to help poor Black people who are rioting in Detroit.’ He said this to me, he said, the hell with that. I’m having a hard enough time myself. I’m already paying too much tax, and not getting anything for it. And that, that was true.”

Millions of Americans came to the same conclusion as Harris, Sr. had: enacting all these expensive programs to help Black people would essentially be rewarding them for rioting. President Johnson himself was a savvy enough politician that he responded to the Kerner report basically by ignoring it – and he was typically blunt as to why: the cost of implementing the commission’s recommendations was $2 billion per month. While that was about what America was spending on the Viet Nam War, Johnson complained that the Commission had made all these expensive proposals and hadn’t given him any way to fund them. Johnson’s own popularity was in free fall by then; his Presidential approval rating was down to 36 percent (about where President Biden’s rating is today), and within a month of the Kerner Commission report’s release he announced that he was withdrawing from his re-election campaign. Though a few of the Kerner Commission recommendations were actually implemented, albeit in weakened form – in 1968 Congress passed a bill against racial discrimination in housing (which Donald Trump’s father, former Ku Klux Klan member Fred Trump, would be prosecuted for violating and he agreed to a negotiated settlement), and both police departments and media organizations began hiring more African-Americans and other people of color – for the most part the Kerner Commission and its recommendations got swept into the dustbin of history. At least among white Americans; journalists covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King, recalled that Blacks interviewed after the riots frequently invoked the name “Kerner” as a kind of talisman, a souvenir of a long-lost time when at least one mostly white government entity acknowledged the longevity of American racism and the deep-seated harm it had done to Black Americans.

The immediate result of the riots – including the ones in April 1968 after the murder of Black America’s great apostle of nonviolence, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – was a near-total reversal in American politics. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson had been elected with 61 percent of the vote to 39 percent for his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater; in 1968 Right-wing candidates Richard Nixon (Republican) and George Wallace (American Independent) got 57 percent of the vote between them to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. That gave rise to the Right-wing coalition that essentially, with a few partial exceptions, has dominated American politics since. At least four of the six Republicans who have served as President since Lyndon Johnson – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump – have run with the explicit aim of dismantling the changes of the 1960’s in civil rights and social culture, and each one has pursued this agenda more aggressively and explicitly than the last. Though at the moment there is a Democratic President and Senate, the Republicans utterly dominate the current U. S. Supreme Court – whose justices are bent on using their power to impose a radical Right-wing revolution on American society. They also are in control of the House of Representatives, and current polls suggest that this November 5 they will retake both the Presidency and the Senate. And Donald Trump’s increasingly fascistic, authoritarian rhetoric says that what they will do with that united power if and when they get it is, among other things, end all this “nonsense” from the 1960’s about civil rights and racial equality.

Is Donald Trump the Next Julius Caesar? The PBS/BBC Documentary "Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator" Says So

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

In November and December 2023, America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) co-produced a three-part miniseries on the life and political career of Julius Caesar. Called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, it was re-run in April 2024. I’m convinced that the filmmakers, including producer/director Emma Frank, at least partially intended audiences to see a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Though Frank and her writers avoided using Trump’s name, they obviously intended us to see Caesar and Trump as comparable. Both were leaders who used populist appeals to destroy a long-established republic and set themselves up as absolute dictators – though in Trump’s case his rise was short-circuited and won’t be completed unless and until he wins back the Presidency on November 5, 2024.

•••••

On Tuesday, April 2 I watched a couple of quite interesting shows on PBS, though I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t put on the next episode of the fascinating documentary mini-series The Invisible Shield about public health in America. Instead they aired the first in a three-part mini-series about the life of Julius Caesar (Andonis Anthony) called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m beginning to wonder if PBS has started showing only the first episodes of mini-series like this on air as a loss leader to get us to pay for their “Passport” streaming subscription service, which we’ll need to watch the rest of the episodes. (I also find it ironic that three of the four big network streaming services all have names beginning with “P”: NBC’s “Peacock,” CBS’s “Paramount Plus” and PBS’s “Passport.” The only one that doesn’t is ABC, since they’re owned by the Walt Disney Company and so their streaming service is “Disney Plus.”) The creators of “High Priest,” the first episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator (the show’s directors are Emma Frank and Richard Pearson but no writers are credited on imdb.com), don’t go overboard on the obvious parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they’re unmistakably there. Both were men who went out of their way to destroy an existing republic to further their own personal and political ambitions. Both did so by appeals to “the people”; Caesar by embracing the causes of commoners who weren’t sharing in the riches the Roman Republic was acquiring, and in particular the veterans who were fighting Rome’s wars and weren’t getting jack for it in compensation.

One of Caesar’s big strategies in winning popular favor was putting on the biggest round of gladiatorial contests Rome had ever seen, and bolstering the appeal of his games by offering huge banquet tables filled with food. Since admission to the games was free (the ancient Roman formula for keeping the people happy and content with their lot was “Panem et circenses” – “bread and circuses”), the food was also free, and Caesar of course made sure to publicize his involvement in providing it big-time so the people would remember just who had fed them so generously and they’d vote for him in upcoming elections. The show begins with Caesar determined to win the title of Pontifex Maximus, the head of Rome’s official religion, who was elected by popular vote, even though he was only 37 when the title fell vacant and the other two candidates were both older. To fund his games and his Pontifex Maximus candidacy he’d borrowed money from Crassus (Carlo Spano), then the richest man in Rome and a notorious creditor from hell who wasn’t above sending goon squads to assault physically people who owed him money and fell behind on their payments. Caesar had at least one determined opponent in the Roman Senate: Cato (Orlando Brooke), a traditionalist defender of the Roman Republic and its constitution against Caesar’s power grabs. After an attempted coup d’état led by Catiline collapsed in 62 B.C., Caesar called for the permanent imprisonment of the conspirators instead of their execution, but as this documentary points out Rome didn’t have a prison system at the time and the only punishment for crime short of execution was house arrest. Cato opposed this, called for the execution of Catiline’s men and hinted that Caesar had been part of the plot.

When Caesar allied himself with the Roman general Pompey (Antony Gabriel) and supported Pompey’s call to give his principal soldiers land grants, Cato regarded this as a violation of the Roman constitution and mounted an early version of the filibuster, speaking for hours against the bill so it could not be voted on. Caesar was eventually elected consul, the head of state under the Roman Republic, but he didn’t serve alone: there were actually two consuls, each supposedly there to check the power of the other, and Caesar’s running mate for the other consulship, Lucius Lucceius, lost to one of Caesar’s bitterest political enemies, Marcus Calpurnius Biblius. When Biblius joined Cato in opposing Pompey’s bill to grant land to his veterans, Caesar had thugs beat him up on the Senate floor and drag him away. Caesar next announced that he and two other men, Pompey and Crassus, would rule Rome as a so-called “Triumvirate,” effectively blocking his opposition by including two men who were known to hate each other. He also solidified his position by arranging a marriage between Pompey and Caesar’s daughter Julia. Then he was appointed to command a Roman army intent on the conquest of Gaul (modern-day France), and that’s where this episode ended. Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is one of those tacky half-documentaries, half-dramatizations the History Channel is big on: we see actors playing the various characters of ancient Rome but don’t actually hear them. Instead we hear from various British talking heads, including historians Tom Holland, Shashama Malik, Andrew Frederic Wallace-Hadrill and Federico Santangelo, as well as former British Member of Parliament Rory Stewart, who seems to be there mainly to talk about Caesar as a politician and compare him to modern-day leaders.

What most Americans don’t realize is that the Framers of the Constitution never intended for the United States to be a democracy; they created a republic and consciously modeled it on the Roman Republic. James Madison made the distinction clear in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp), in which he wrote, “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” As Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator makes clear, this was a debate carried out in ancient Rome as well: the Roman government in Caesar’s time was divided between the Populares, who sought to reach past the official organs of government (particularly the Roman Senate) and appeal directly to the people for support; and the Optimates, who believed in a hierarchy of elites and particularly in a Senate that, in Madison’s words, would “refine and enlarge the public views” and serve as the “medium” that would keep political conflict within legitimate bounds and limit the power of the people.

•••••

On Tuesday, April 9 I watched the second episodes of two PBS mini-series that at first I had feared they wouldn’t show over the air but just make you subscribe to their streaming service, “Passport,” to be able to watch. One was “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” the second show in the three-part miniseries on the life and political and military career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m not sure how much the original producers (Evih Efue, Emma Frank, Helen Hunt, Alexander Leith and Adam Turner), directors (Emma Frank and Richard Pearson) and writers of this show were motivated by the parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they are clear and unmistakable. Both Caesar and Trump were utterly unscrupulous, both were motivated by political ambition and greed, both were secular and highly licentious individuals who cloaked themselves in the guise of religiosity (before he was elected Consul, one of the two executives at the head of the Roman Republic, Caesar first ran for and won the office of Pontifex Maximus, essentially the pope of Rome’s multitheistic religion), and both systematically upended and ultimately destroyed republics that had lasted for centuries. In Rome’s case the Republic had lasted for 500 years – twice as long as America’s experiment in representative government – until Caesar came along to wreck it. Part one of this series, “High Priest,” ended with Caesar’s first term as Consul (the Consulship lasted only one year and there were two of them, ostensibly to check each other’s power; the framers of the U.S. Constitution copied much of it from the Roman Republic but decided to make the President just one person and give him a four-year term; Alexander Hamilton wanted the President elected for life, but that was the biggest battle he lost at the Constitutional Convention because George Washington, who was obviously going to be the first President, wanted a periodic chance to decide whether he still wanted the gig) and his appointment as governor of Gaul (modern-day France).

Part two was called “Veni, Vidi, Vici” after the famous message Caesar sent to the Roman Senate at the conclusion of his conquest of Gaul – it meant, “I came, I saw, I conquered” – and his successful resistance to the efforts of members of the Senate in general and his main political enemy, Cato, in particular. One point Frank, Pearson and whoever wrote the narration for the show made was that both as consul and as a provincial governor, Caesar was immune for prosecution for any crimes he might commit in those offices – he essentially had what Trump is currently seeking from the U.S. Supreme Court – and so the only way his enemies in the Senate could stop him was if they could first strip him of his Gallic command. That posed a problem for them because Caesar was regularly sending letters to Rome detailing how well his war was going. Later he collected these into a book called Commentary on the Gallic Wars (the bane of Latin students ever since) in which he wrote about himself in the third person so people hearing the tales (remember this was not only before the age of printing but before most people could read, so they relied on town criers to tell them what was in the book: essentially the audio books of their time) would forget that the portrait of the great hero Julius Caesar had been created by Caesar himself. Caesar’s conquests in Gaul made him one of the most popular political figures in Rome, and he aligned himself with the Populares, the faction in Rome’s government which sought to undercut the authority of the Senate by presenting as many issues as possible directly to the people by vote. Caesar also aligned himself with another Roman general, Pompey, and his principal financial backer, Crassus, to form what became known as the First Triumvirate.

Each of the three got themselves appointed to govern a Roman province: Caesar got Gaul, Pompey got Spain (though he ruled it by remote control and stayed in Rome, which seems to me would have been a lot more difficult then than it is now) and Crassus got Parthia (ancient Mesopotamia and modern-day Iran). Unfortunately for Crassus, while Caesar was sweeping to victory in Gaul (albeit by committing war crimes; one of the things his enemies in the Senate wanted to remove him for was breaking a treaty with one of the Gallic tribes and massacring 400,000 of them), Crassus got his ass kicked by the Parthians. They literally beheaded him, and though Caesar had got Pompey and Crassus elected as co-consuls to succeed him, Crassus’s death unraveled Caesar’s political position in Rome. As the only surviving consul, Pompey decided his political future lay in allying himself with the anti-Caesar faction in the Senate. Pompey had previously married Caesar’s daughter Julia to cement the alliance between them, but Julia got pregnant, had a miscarriage and not only died herself but took the baby with her. Caesar tried to keep Pompey on board with their alliance by offering him his grand-niece as a second wife, but Pompey essentially said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode ends with Caesar about to break one of the main laws of the Roman Republic: the ban on taking one’s own private army into Rome. Things get complicated when one of Caesar’s agents, Clodius – one of the 10 “Tribunes of the People,” an office created during an earlier period of instability in the Roman Republic to ensure that the people had a voice in their government in case the consuls and the Senate got too powerful and flouted the popular will – decides to strike out on his own.

Historian Tom Holland said in the show, “Clodius, for years, had served as Caesar's agent, enforcing Caesar's interests in Rome, and Clodius learnt from Caesar that power can come directly from the people. Clodius elevates this to a whole new level. Political order in the streets of the capital rapidly starts to collapse.” When Clodius is assassinated brutally by a lynch mob, his widow Fulvia decides to stage his funeral in front of the Senate. She builds a pyre and burns his body, and the fire spreads to the Senate building, destroying it. Caesar is able to stop the Senate’s latest attempt to end his provincial governorship of Gaul by bribing another tribune to block it; or, failing that, to pass a bill stripping both Caesar and Pompey of their armies. The show ends with Caesar literally at the Rubicon River, which marked the boundary between Gaul and Rome. Already his enemies in the Senate had essentially declared him a political exile and threatened to prosecute him if he marched his army into Rome, but he did anyway, kicking off a new civil war that would ultimately lead to Caesar’s appointment as a permanent dictator (Dictator perpetuo) in 45 B.C. and his assassination a year later. The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a grim and all too timely warning of how fragile a republic can be in the face of an authoritarian – a Caesar, a Hitler, a Putin, a Trump – determined to destroy it and with enough popular support to be able to pull it off.

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On Tuesday, April 16 PBS showed “Ides of March,” the last in a three-part mini-series on the life and career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’ve long suspected the producers of this show (the BBC in association with PBS and various other companies) were deliberately out to make a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Both Caesar and Trump essentially slammed their way into absolute political power and overthrew long-established republics (500 years in Caesar’s case, 250 years in Trump’s) by total unscrupulousness and utter indifference to social norms, as well as direct appeals to “the people” against the “elites” who were supposedly ham-stringing the political system so it could not deliver what “the people” really wanted. Of course, Caesar’s playbook has been used time and time again by both Right-wing and Left-wing demagogues in various countries ever since: in France by Robespierre and later Napoleon, in Germany by the Kaiser (whose title, like “Czar,” derives from “Caesar”) and then by Hitler, in Russia by Lenin, Stalin and eventually Putin, along with other modern-day tyrants like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (until he lost power seeking re-election and, like Trump, claimed that the election had been “stolen” from him and staged a coup to try to retain power), Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy (representing a party that’s the lineal descendant of the first Fascists led by Benito Mussolini in 1922) and others around the world. The PBS.org home page for “Ides of March,” https://www.pbs.org/video/ides-of-march-xkgyxs/, describes it thusly: “As Caesar takes control of Rome and consolidates his grip over the Republic, his ambition turns to tyranny. A handful of senators plot to end his rule in the only way they can: by taking his life. But will it be enough to save the Republic?”

The first two episodes, “High Priest” and “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” his slogan upon winning the war in Gaul – modern-day France – that cemented his position as the most powerful man in Rome), told a story of how a man with no particular sense of morality made and then broke alliances with others to pursue his own path to power. I remember a history book I studied from in grade school which presented Caesar as an altogether positive figure – it had chapter headings reading “The Sickness of Rome” and “The Physician: Julius Caesar” – but that’s decidedly not how this show, produced and directed by Emma Frank, sees him. The ancient Roman constitution (which, like the current British constitution, was unwritten and relied mostly on an agreed-upon set of political and social norms which Caesar deliberately upended) provided for an office called Dictator in which the Roman Senate could appoint someone and give them absolute power. But it was only supposed to be for a limited time, at most six months. The Dictator was only appointed in case of a national emergency – usually an attack from an enemy – and was supposed to relinquish power and hand it back to the elected officials as soon as the emergency was over. Not for Caesar: he first demanded an appointment as Dictator for ten years – which the Senate reluctantly gave him with the proviso that it would have to come up for renewal every year – and then he demanded to be made Dictator for life. Caesar also demanded that he sit at the head of the Senate, between the two elected Consuls that were the Roman heads of state – essentially declaring himself above the law and the ultimate authority over Rome. Among the powers he took for himself was the ability to appoint the magistrates, who served under the consuls and essentially ran the Senate, instead of allowing them to be elected directly. Caesar also had made for himself a gold version of the laurel wreath Roman consuls traditionally wore around their heads as a symbol of their authority, and to many observers it looked like a crown.

This was an especially sore point among many Romans because originally Rome had been ruled by kings, only the seventh and last one, Tyrannus Superbus (whose name has entered the language as the word “tyrant,” meaning an unscrupulous and evil absolute ruler) was deposed in a coup led by a direct ancestor of Brutus, who in 44 B.C. had wormed his way into Caesar’s inner circle. “It's a quite extraordinary thing, a really, really explicit contravention of Roman customary practice,” says retired history professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on the program about Caesar’s demand to be made dictator for life. “The entire idea of the non-monarchical state is that no one has power in perpetuity.” Another historian interviewed for the program, Tom Holland, says, “Caesar's preponderance has made the traditional function of the Senate, the role of the helmsman guiding the ship of state, essentially irrelevant. Caesar is too impatient, too unsubtle not to let his fellow senators know that he knows this.” Holland mentions Brutus’s role in the plot to kill Caesar. The Roman Senators who want to get rid of him know they have to do that by March 15 – the so-called “Ides of March” holiday – because right after that Caesar is scheduled to leave on another military campaign against the Parthian empire (mostly in modern-day Iran, though at its height it stretched from Turkey to Afghanistan and Pakistan and encompassed the so-called “Fertile Crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq as well). Caesar, says Holland, “sees Brutus as if he's a son who he's looked after, cherished, and promoted. Now, Caesar promises Brutus fantastic things. He's gonna get a key appointment this year, and this will all put him on track for a consulship in the future as well. It’s a really bittersweet moment for Brutus. On the one hand, he is climbing that ladder of offices. The consulship is in reach. But at the same time, he doesn't like the fact that Caesar is centralizing all of this power around himself. But in the end, he's able to shrug it off because at the moment, he's benefiting from the system.”

Caesar tests the waters of whether the Roman people are ready to accept him as, essentially, a king by staging an elaborate ceremony in which his loyal and trusted assistant, Mark Antony, will offer him a diadem – essentially a crown – instead of the gold replica of a laurel wreath he’s been wearing. But when he notices that the audience reacts negatively at the sight of Caesar being offered a crown, he gets the message and pushes the damned thing away. Caesar gets at least two warnings of his impending assassination, one from a priest named Spurinna and one from his wife, Calpurnia, who’s had a dream about him being assassinated in the Senate and pleads with him not to go. But one of the conspirators against him, Decimus – a long-standing ally of Caesar but one who, like Brutus and fellow conspirators Cassius and Cicero, has got disillusioned with him – goes to Caesar to convince him to attend the latest session of the Senate after all. “Decimus says to Caesar, ‘This is behavior unbecoming of you,’” Holland explains. “‘What – what am I supposed to go and tell the Senate? That you're scared of shadows, that you're obedient to a woman's importunities? This is not behavior appropriate to Caesar.’” So Caesar goes to the Senate and gets knifed to death by 20 to 30 people, each of whom decided to take a role in the assassination so it could not be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, the death of Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic; after yet another Roman civil war Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian takes absolute power and declares himself Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. The Roman Empire, like the Republic, lasts for 500 years in the West (and another 1,000 in the East as the Byzantine Empire, which splits off from its parent and holds out until 1453, when it’s conquered by the Ottoman Turks), and Rome becomes the paradigmatic historical example of a self-governing society that collapsed through the greed and hunger for power of a single determined individual.

The historians interviewed for the “Ides of March” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator make this point explicitly in the closing minutes of the documentary. Tom Holland says, “I think the tragedy of the Roman Republic is that its greatest man, the man who in so many ways exemplified all its qualities to an absolute pitch of achievement, those achievements brought the Roman Republic crashing down into rubble.” Classics professor Jeffrey Tatum says, “When Julius Caesar commenced his political career, he could never have imagined that the Roman Republic would come to an end, and he certainly couldn't have imagined that he would be the agent that brought that about. And yet, that's what happened in a very short time. What are the lessons for modern representational systems that are not nearly so old? Could modern democracy collapse? Perhaps we simply take our political norms for granted.” Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet member, says, “There was a moment where the Roman Republic seemed the most perfect political state on earth. Then it had got itself into trouble. And this reminds us a bit of our own period. From about 1989, democracy was on the rise. The number of democracies in the world doubled, and then a period of deep, deep uncertainty began, including the rise of populism. And it's in that environment authoritarianism thrives, that strong men come forward to challenge democracy.” British constitutional lawyer and scholar Shami Chakrabarti says, “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call. Democracy has to be constantly fought for. If we take it for granted, a new Caesar will come.” And it seems quite likely, given his ability to overcome obstacles that would have sunk the political careers of lesser men and the almost god-like adulation he receives from millions of Americans, that the new Caesar has indeed arrived and his name is Donald Trump.