Like America, I'm Feeling Broken

Posted By Rude One

A dear friend has a brother with Down Syndrome. This year, he voted for the first time, and he couldn't have been more excited to push a button for Hillary Clinton. After Clinton lost, my friend, his sister, asked him how he was feeling. He said, "We're having meatloaf for dinner tonight."

Goddamn, I want to have that response.

I've gotta be honest here, and feel free to call me a "pussy" or whatever you need, but very early last Wednesday morning, around 1 a.m., when I knew that it was really, truly over (although we all pretty much knew by 11 p.m.), something broke in me, to the point that I don't know how to react. In case you haven't noticed, the last week around this joint, it's been pretty messy and morose.

I have barely been able to watch any of the complicit news networks as they recalibrate to the reality of a Donald Trump presidency. And when I do, I hear things, as I did on Saturday, like a Trump supporter on a CNN panel decrying the protests because they are chanting and marching about "old news." That's right. The campaign wasn't 5 days over, but, as far as this sycophantic slug was concerned, it may as well have been years ago. "We need to look to the future," he explained.

So I watch briefly and I get pissed and then I just feel broken again. Hell, it's better than the nausea I get, triggered by Trump's voice. I'm guessing that it comes from the helplessness of the situation, the feeling that we can't change this, along with the feeling that we did this to ourselves. I knew the nation was racist and dumb. I just didn't know how racist and how dumb. Now I do.

I have thought about how ridiculously wrong so many of us had been, we who blog and pontificate and punditize, rudely or cleanly. And I was especially angry at myself for not listening to an especially wise person. That'd be me back in 2008, when I said one reason that I was supporting Barack Obama over Clinton was because "somewhere in some cellar in some Little Rock or DC mansion, there's a machine that's been whirring its gears on low for the last seven years that's getting greased up and ready to kick into full speed once more, and it's aching to chew up Clinton, ready to get sticky with her blood and bones, for once it's really chugging, that fucker needs to be fed, ready to spew once again to willing, slavering media dogs who lap up that anti-Clinton vomit like it's kibble from Walter Cronkite's ass." I knew exactly what would happen. But I let myself think that it wouldn't. And I don't blame Clinton. I blame pretty much everyone except her.

Things are gonna be bad. I believe with the fervent faith of a crazed minister awaiting the Rapture. A fight is coming. A big fucking fight, possibly the worst in my lifetime, and I've faced down Operation Rescue, angry cops in riot gear at anti-Iraq War protests, and a raging George H.W. Bush supporter. I want to be part of that fight. But if I'm going to be in fighting shape, I gotta tap out for a little while. I gotta get my head straight and my voice and fists ready.

I'm not gonna do that spending the next couple of months writing constantly, "Boy, Donald Trump sure is gonna suck" or "Boy, that cabinet choice sure is gonna dick us all over." Because, really, we don't know how bad it'll be and what he's gonna do until his tiny moisturized, manicured orange hands are holding the reins of power. I know that it's the privilege of whiteness and maleness that allows me to pretend I can ignore the rise of the Trump-tatorship. But I want to be the best ally to others that I can be.

So, after over 13 years of almost continuous daily blogging, I'm taking a leave of absence for a while.
I'm not going cold turkey. I will probably post every now and then if something insane happens (although, c'mon, "insane" is relative at this point) or if the mood strikes.

I'll definitely still be on Twitter. And I'll be piping up on Facebook, too.

Also, if someone would like me to write for their publication (c'mon, Guardian, you know you want me), I'll pop up there.

Oh, and as long as I'm pimping myself, I've got what I think is a kick-ass new play, political and feminist as hell, if any professional theatre or group is interested in checking it out. When there are public readings, I'll let you know.

Before checking out and switching to a much lighter political diet, lemme leave you with a few thoughts:

1. I believe that the most patriotic thing that President Obama could do would be to bypass the Senate and appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

2. The members of the Electoral College have a constitutional duty to save us from someone like Trump. They would be derelict in that duty if they let him take office.

3. If Clinton had won, the next 4-8 years would have been a nightmare of impeachment hearings and endless investigations, all emails, all the time. So that's one small blessing amid the conflagration.

4. Donald Trump is in this to enrich himself and his family. Whether or not that's what he intended, it's what he will do because it's the only thing he knows how to do: make himself richer on the backs of others.

5. Trump will do everything that he condemned Hillary Clinton for and worse. And Republicans will give him a pass. This will be the most enraging part of the next couple of months.

6. You should give money to organizations like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and others. You should make sure you donate to local groups that are helping undocumented immigrants, the homeless, the dis-empowered all around. And you should subscribe to things like Mother Jones and give money to Talking Points Memo. They are the good guys. They'll need all the support they can get.

That's it. I may come running back here after a short hiatus. It's entirely possible. Addition is like that. If not, I'll be back by Inauguration Day in 2017, after this shit year has ended. We've got a nation to save but, as they always tell you, you have to put your own oxygen mask on before you can help others do the same.

I need to go wander in the desert for a while. I need to down peyote and go on a spirit journey. I need to wantonly fuck wayward bikers and lonely bartenders and rough waitresses and howl at the moon as we orgasm in the dust.

And then I will come back, righteous rage restored, pieces back together, ready to face down the motherfuckers who would break us all again and again.

Note To President Obama: Blow The GOP's Shit Up

Posted By Rude One

One of the things I have always faulted President Obama for is that, when it comes to his domestic political enemies, he has sought to give them the benefit of the doubt. Even when they greeted his outstretched hand by waving their dicks at him, Barack Obama has told us for most of his presidency that Republicans were honorable, rarely ever raking them over the coals, rarely impugning their motives, rarely calling out the motherfuckers for fucking their mothers. It has always been to his detriment that he has tried so hard not to demonize demons.

Even now, as Donald Trump bumblefucks his way through a bullshit transition into a sad, disastrous presidency (that he will inevitably get richer from), Obama has avoided confrontation. Now, you could say that Obama is such a decent man that he can sit with the orange prick who provoked some of the most racist responses to him and his family and try to teach that orange prick how to not blow the joint up. And you can look at Trump's gracious response to Obama and desperately seek some comfort in it, hoping that it indicates that Trump is taking his new job seriously.

But you're being a fool. And so is President Obama in this case.

What we know about Donald Trump is that he will lie and lie and lie. He will fart in your face and tell you it was a ghost. Breitbart will report it as real. And his idiot hordes will insist that they saw that flatulent specter. We also know that Trump will say whatever he thinks his audience at the time wants to hear. He said almost exactly that at some of his rallies, where the red hats replaced the brown shirts, testing something on a crowd and when they didn't respond, trying something else that got applause and cheers. That's his method: say whatever the fuck people want to hear, agree to just about anything that isn't legally binding (or that can't be overwhelmed by dickish lawsuits), and then do whatever the fuck he wants, fuck you if you don't like it. It's what he's doing right now by refilling the DC swamp with sewer water instead of draining it. Take that, rubes. And they will.

Trump is playing Obama. As much as you think Obama is flattering Trump's ego by respecting his election, Trump is using Obama's innate decency to legitimize his ascendance. It's frustrating as hell because Obama ought to be smarter than this.

Oh, sure, yeah, you can say that this is Obama's patented 11 dimensional chess game, that he's hoping all this attention will educate Trump and that, as a result, Trump won't gut the Affordable Care Act and other accomplishments of the last 8 years. Yeah, that ain't Trump. And any hope that Republicans will stand up to Trump is pure fantasy. Think of the most assholish thing they can do. Now multiply it by control of the entire government.

What Obama can do in his last couple of months in office is push Republicans into a confrontation.

The easiest one is the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court under the idea that the Senate's failure to act is a kind of consent, a "we don't fuckin' care, do what you want." It's like when a president refuses to act on a bill within ten days while Congress is in session. It becomes a law, no? Presentment clause, motherfuckers. Let's take it to the Supreme Court for a decision.

Your Prankster Joe Biden memes are hilarious. But blowing up the GOP's naked hijacking of the Supreme Court would be the ultimate joke to play on these America-hating bastards. 

What should Democrats in Congress — and Barack Obama, and you — do now?

By Jonathan Chait

When he took office in 2001, George W. Bush inherited a healthy Republican Party roughly at parity with its opposition. When he left office eight years later, Bush had degraded his party’s image and taught a generation of Americans to loathe the GOP, and members of that generation have clung to their disgust through every election cycle since (though their enthusiasm for showing up at the ballot box has waxed and waned). 

Bush was such a comprehensive political fiasco that his only saving grace, in terms of the brand management of the Republican Party, was handing his successor a financial crisis so deep it allowed Republicans in Congress to run against his successor’s attempts to recover from it. The Bush administration cratered because it was filled with hacks, ideologues, and business cronies and led by a mental lightweight. Many people believed that for the Republican Party to recover, it would have to develop a governing class that grasped science and evidence.

It is safe to say that this has not exactly transpired. The Trump administration will make the last failed Republican presidency look like an age of reason. The United States has never elected a president so openly contemptuous of democratic norms. There’s no So You’ve Elected a Bullying, Racist, Authoritarian Swindler As President pamphlet within easy reach. The loyal opposition faces an unusual paradox. What will almost certainly be a catastrophe for the Republican Party in the long run will also be a catastrophe for the United States much sooner. The threat posed by Trump requires a massive counter-mobilization of people and resources with the dual tasks of safeguarding the large-D Democratic Party and small-D democracy.

A letter to Trump from a first-grade student at Woodland School, Portola Valley, California.Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

The immediate theater of action will be in Washington, where the key political dynamic has been identified by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” he told The Atlantic in 2011, referring generally to the agenda of Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.” 

Democrats in Congress have to understand this. Most people, and especially low-information voters who decide elections, pay little attention to legislative details. Bipartisanship tells them things are going well. Partisan conflict tells them things are going badly. McConnell filibustered the first bill that come up in 2009, a conservation measure with broad bipartisan appeal that ultimately passed with 77 votes.

The second element of this dynamic is equally crucial: It is the governing party that will be held accountable by the voters. Bipartisanship suggests high presidential approval, which leads to more success for the governing party in Congress and for the president’s reelection. Helping the majority govern means helping the majority maintain power. As McConnell said in 2010, “The reward for playing team ball this year was the reversal of the political environment and the possibility that we will have a bigger team next year.” The conventional wisdom of the pre-Obama years, that the minority would pay a price for obstruction, was precisely backward. The minority party pays a price for bipartisanship.

This does not mean Democrats should ape destructive tactics like shutting down the government or threatening default (which, in any case, they have no opportunity to do without the majority in either chamber of Congress). It does not even mean they should rule out all cooperation. It means they should carefully weigh every policy concession they can win, assuming that any present themselves, against the enormous political price they will pay by getting it. A few policy goals could meet this test. If Trump is somehow willing to abandon his catastrophic plan to destroy the international climate accords and unleash irreversible planetary catastrophe, or perhaps rethink his party’s plan to deny access to medical care to millions of Americans too poor or sick to afford it, the political sacrifice of offering bipartisan cover to Trumpian moderation would be worthwhile.

In the short run, this calculation is almost entirely theoretical. Trump’s allies in Congress are prepared to collect on their devil’s bargain. House Speaker Paul Ryan described the election as a “mandate” — a curious term for an election in which his party will finish second in the national vote — and Republicans will move with maximal haste on plans to cut taxes for the rich, deregulate the financial industry, and cut social spending for the poor. There is no other conceivable course of action: The Republican Party in Washington has been organized over the last three decades as a machine to redistribute resources upward. It has no other ideas and automatically rejects any proposals with any other effect. The political cost of waging class war for the rich will not deter them because it is their reason for existing. Trump managed to pass himself off to many hard-pressed voters as an enemy of concentrated wealth, but concentrated wealth mostly knew better, which is why stock of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase swelled on the news of the incoming friendly administration. Democrats in Congress must make it their task to expose the contradiction Trump has heretofore concealed.

So should anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton. The day after the election, protesters swarmed the streets of major cities shouting that Trump was “not my president.” Good for them. They were not expressing the traditional postelection decorum, but then again, many were simply describing reality: Trump has almost explicitly promised not to be the president of large swaths of this country. His campaign was rooted in his belief that Mexican-Americans and Muslim immigrants cannot become real Americans. There can be purpose beyond catharsis to theatrical expressions of alienation and anger. Just look at the tea party.

Trump’s loyal opposition has a duty to respect the law. More than that — for all those who are wondering, everyone must hope he can avoid the worst. It might help Democrats regain power if Trump throws 20 million Americans off their insurance, dissolves NATO, or prosecutes Hillary Clinton, but that is not an agenda to root for. Less horrible is better. At the same time, Americans who did not support Trump have no obligation to normalize his behavior. To the contrary: Upholding the dignity and value of the presidency means refusing to treat the ascendancy of a Trump into the office as normal. Trump is counting on a combination of media weariness and Republican partisan solidarity to allow him to grind governing norms to dust. Two days after the election, his attorney reaffirmed his intention to have his children run his business even while he serves as president — an arrangement creating limitless opportunity for corruption, as his use of the presidency enriches his brand and foreign leaders strike deals that curry personal favor.

Whatever signs of normality he has given since Tuesday’s triumph are, thus far, purely superficial. To submit to a world where we say the words President Trump without anger or laughter is to surrender our idea of what the office means.

A broader and even more vital mission, one that should attract support far beyond the Democratic Party, is to safeguard and expand space for political dissent. American politics has regularly been stalked by authoritarian figures, from Charles Coughlin to Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace. 

None of them has ever had command of a party with full control of government. It is now within the realm of imagining that the United States will come to resemble some sort of illiberal democracy or quasi-democracy — Berlusconi’s Italy or, eventually, even Putin’s Russia.

This is no mere Trumpian personal idiosyncrasy. The GOP is absorbing the ideological tendencies of other far-right nationalist parties. The Nevada Republican Party chair raged at evening early-voting in Las Vegas: “Last night, in Clark County, they kept a poll open till ten o’clock at night so a certain group could vote … Yeah, you feel free right now? Think this is a free or easy election?” Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, Trump’s closest Senate ally, has railed against “a global intellect — elites with their big money” and “George Soros and his globalist crowd.” Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, who spoke at the Cleveland convention and has been touted as a potential Homeland Security secretary, tweeted that anti-Trump protests “must be quelled.” A recent Pew survey asked whether certain characteristics are important to maintaining a strong democracy. Fewer than half of the Trump supporters surveyed agreed with the statements “Those who lose elections recognize the legitimacy of the winners” and “News organizations are free to criticize political leaders.” Traditional Republicans in Washington will go along with all this, provided Trump signs Paul Ryan’s fiscal agenda into law.

American small-D democrats need to treat the election of Trump’s party in a way not unlike how we respond to authoritarianism overseas. The nonprofit sector has a long tradition of subsidizing institutions to safeguard open discourse, human rights, labor rights, and ballot access. (Not coincidentally, Soros has made enemies in the Putinsphere by doing precisely this.) Trump’s government will probably set itself the task of grinding down all these rights, from union organizing to civil-rights enforcement to freedom from torture. Philanthropists should subsidize legal defenses for journalists threatened by the tactic, embraced by Trump and his ally Peter Thiel, of bankrupting critics through exorbitant legal action. America already has a nonprofit infrastructure devoted to safeguarding domestic civil, human, and political rights, but it will have to scale up radically to meet the threat of a Trumpist party in full command of the federal government. Democracy will not disappear overnight, but it can be eroded over time. The fight to defend it must be joined in full.

There is one glimmer of — dare I say it — hope. Opposition parties tend to suffer from a lack of charismatic, high-profile leaders. American liberals enjoy the unusual good fortune of having the most popular politician in America on their side in Barack Obama. Obama has floated plans to devote his postpresidency to mentoring young black men. This is both a worthy endeavor and no longer the most high-leverage use of his time.

Obama very properly offered his deference to the validity of Trump’s election (proving himself a more committed democrat than the president-­elect, who refused beforehand to bind himself to the outcome and who, in 2012, took to Twitter on Election Night to call for revolution when it momentarily seemed that Obama would win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote). But the political-cultural norm of former presidents’ steering clear of politics is not rooted in any particular public interest. All recent living ex-presidents left office either infirm, unpopular, or in some way disgraced. (A pardon scandal in his final days, compounded by his sexual dalliance, created an especially noxious odor around Bill Clinton.) There is no example of a young, popular former president facing a successor committed to destroying all of his work.

And so the man who thought he was through with politics has, it turns out, one more essential role left: Beginning next year, Obama needs to rally the opposition, to community-organize his coalition, and to exploit his celebrity to make the case for saving his legacy. His visibility alone would serve a vital function. Trump’s election has sent a statement to Americans and the world about the country’s identity. It has been received viscerally, by bullies abusing minorities as well as by fearful allies overseas. Obama is a powerful symbol of rationalism, thoughtfulness, and pluralism — the ultimate anti-Trump, both ideologically and symbolically. Women, religious minorities, immigrants and prospective immigrants, transgender people, young Africans with iPhones, the beat-down opposition in places like Russia and China, and the people who bully all the preceding groups and more — the whole planet, really — need reminding that Obama’s version of America has prevailed before and will prevail again.

The night after the election.Photo: Andres Kudacki

And prevail we can. The aftermath of every election plunges the losers into despair and launches the victors into giddiness, and Trump’s shocking victory has had an unusually distorting effect. American progressives are burdened with a habit, stretching back decades, of handling political success badly — taking power for granted, bemoaning compromised progress, and collapsing into sectarian cannibalism. 

Hillary Clinton suffered from the same liberal ennui that bedeviled Al Gore in 2000, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Harry Truman in 1948. She suffered additionally from the self-inflicted wounds of bad decisions regarding hired speeches and her private email server, months of bruising attacks on her ethics from Bernie Sanders, and a widespread sexism that made her ordinary shortcomings seem sinister. Add to that a press corps that obsessed over her email lapse and twin attacks by Russian intelligence and rogue, right-wing FBI agents. It all culminated with the director of the FBI’s breaking all precedent to float new insinuations of wrongdoing against her ten days before the election, sealing her image as an untrustworthy and even criminal figure. Polls taken at the end of the campaign demonstrated that voters, astonishingly, believed that she was less honest and trustworthy than her opponent — a man who is literally facing trial for fraud.

Trump will solve the Democrats’ voter-complacency problem for them. He may also help them solve another problem: massive Republican gerrymandering. The House map is redrawn every ten years, and Republicans had the good fortune that the last redrawing followed their 2010 anti-Obama midterm wave, allowing them to lock into place a map of districts designed to virtually guarantee Republican control throughout the decade. Should Democrats generate an effective response to Trump, an anti-incumbent wave could allow the party to capture governorships in 2018 and legislatures that year and in 2020. They would then be in a position to create district maps that are more fair and democratic — and which, more often then not, would turn more Democratic.

Remember: When Trump showed the first signs of seriously challenging for the nomination, the panicked Republican Establishment identified him as a political calamity — a candidate who appealed to the party’s shrinking white, non-college-educated base and alienated the minorities and educated voters whose share of the electorate was growing. Its calculations were off, but only to a degree. Trump drew every ounce out of a shrinking coalition.

The party Establishment was on track to wipe its hands of the foul nominee after his expected defeat, clearing the way for fresh-faced, conventionally right-wing figures like Ryan and Marco Rubio to rebuild their party’s standing. The flip side of a president who will sign Ryan’s agenda into law is that there will be no more oh-so-­earnest Ryan speeches apologizing from the bottom of his heart for the nominee’s transgressions. Instead, a man who embodies hateful, misogynistic bluster will define the party’s imprint in a lasting way. Tens of millions of young voters, and children too young to vote, will grow up associating the Republican Party with a man who embodies reactionary hate against them.

The Trump stink will not wash away easily.

Notwithstanding his ability to appear reasonable from time to time, Trump has character traits that are consistent and long-standing. The postelection hope that his lifelong childlike attention span, monumental ego, obsession with dominance and vengeance, and greed verging on outright criminality will abate in his eighth decade is fanciful. More so the notion that the experience of enjoying electoral vindication against his critics, then ascending to the most powerful position in the world, will curtail these tendencies.

Trump’s election is one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worth recalling, however, that history is punctuated with disasters, yet the country is in a better place now than it was a half-century ago, and a better place than a half-century before that, and so on. Despair is a counterproductive response. So is denial — an easy temptation in the wake of the inevitable postelection pleasantries and displays of respect needed to maintain the peaceful transfer of power. 

The proper response is steely resolve to wage the fight of our lives.

*This article appears in the November 14, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.

NPR Begins Its Whitewashing Of Breitbart's Racism

Trumpites all use the same technique; trot out blame the victim reverse racism.

 

By Kali Holloway

If you are curious about how racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and organizations dedicated to propagating the same are able to slip into the mainstream, do yourself a favor and listen to NPR's Wednesday morning interview with Breitbart senior-editor-at-large Joel Pollak.

NPR apparently felt the need to invite on a Breitbart mouthpiece to put in a good word for Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s newly announced senior policy adviser.

Bannon previously led Breitbart, a publication beloved by the so-called alt-right, a loose coalition of white nationalists, “identitarians,” neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, racists, and misogynists who were ecstatic over Bannon’s appointment.

Pollak’s segment was a master class in obfuscation and a primer on how to flip the script and turn totally justified accusations of bigotry, misogyny and anti-Semitism into “reverse racism.”

“Let’s hear a defense of Steve Bannon,” NPR host Steve Inskeep began, offering a view of exactly what direction this interview would take. Pollak started by launching into a gushing assessment of Bannon, calling him “a national hero,” and talking about how it’s so great we’ll have someone “so calm under pressure in the White House.” (Maybe this is true, though it contradicts accusations against Bannon of domestic abuse, sexual harassment and being a “verbally abus[ive]” “bully” “who is prone to a lot of tirades” by former staffers.)

When Inskeep interjected to ask about Bannon’s tireless work to turn Breitbart into the alt-right outlet of choice, Pollak attempted to distance the site from the movement it has nurtured on a steady diet of xenophobia, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism.

“The only alt-right content we have is a single article out of tens of thousands of articles, which is a journalistic article about the alt-right by Milo Yiannopoulos, and Allum Bokhari, which basically went into this movement, and tried to figure out what it was all about,” Pollak said. “That’s not racist; that’s journalism.”

And just like that, Bannon’s site was suddenly unaffiliated with the alt-right movement—though Bannon himself boasted in August that Breitbart is the "platform of the alt-right.” Inskeep didn’t push Pollak on this point, though Bannon’s own words suggest that he either disagreed with his spokesperson or fabricated the link in order to be seen as the voice of the alt-right.

Either way, aren’t both of these things problematic—that Bannon is either with the racists or wants to be? Isn’t it worth questioning why Bannon would seek to tie his publication to a movement whose founders have been unequivocal in their racism and anti-Semitism? (Prominent white supremacist Jared Taylor has said that while there are “areas of disagreement” among alt-righties, “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.” Richard Spencer, who coined the term alt-right, has talked about the "Jewish question,” called for forced sterilization of racial minorities and advanced the idea of “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”)

What does this tell us about the morals of both Bannon and Breitbart? How scary is it that this man is advising a volatile, inexperienced president-elect who found out only two days ago what a president does? We won’t know, at least not from this interview, because Pollak’s response went basically unchallenged.

Inskeep followed up by asking Pollak about a Breitbart article headlined, “Hoist it High and Proud,” published just two weeks after the Charleston massacre of nine black churchgoers, which is a very tactful, classy move. The piece encouraged its alt-right readers to proudly wave the Confederate flag (as Dylann Roof is seen doing in countless photos). It included this passage:

“While your supporters are trashing the monuments and reputations of the forefathers of so many Americans, Barack, you might just want to remind us again which state of the Union, north or south, your ancestors resided in during the traumatic years 1861-1865? Or did Kenya not have a dog in that fight? The Confederacy was not a callous conspiracy to enforce slavery, but a patriotic and idealistic cause for which 490,000 men were killed, wounded or taken captive.”

Pollak defended all this as part of a debate about the Confederate flag and history and heritage, which is fine if you think we should fly the flags of slaveholders and traitors to the United States, while going on and on about nationalism. I’ll give him that’s an arguable point; racists certainly argue it all the time. Inskeep gave a passive rebuttal to the piece, noting that “Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, declared the cause was slavery.” Here's when Pollak seized on the opportunity to pull out the most overused tool in the racist and racist-apologist’s arsenal: the reverse-racism card.

“NPR is taxpayer-funded, and has an entire section of its programming, a regular feature, called Code Switch, which from my perspective is a racist program,” Pollak said, continuing:

“I’m looking here at the latest article, which aired on NPR, calling the election results 'nostalgia for a whiter America.' So NPR has racial and racist programming that I am required to pay for as a taxpayer. So, you know, you can read Breitbart, you can read something else—I don’t think that’s racist, to talk about the history of the Confederate flag. There are people who disagree with that, as a symbol, but you’re picking on one opinion article. Breitbart is a 24-hour news website that provides coverage from within a conservative worldview.”

For starters, Trump ran on promises to get rid of Muslims and lawless Mexicans, tweeted erroneous facts about black criminality (just one of his many retweets from white nationalists) and built a coalition among people who, studies show, had negative views of blacks and Muslims. The tagline for Trump’s campaign was “Make America Great Again.” America has been getting browner, but Trump’s folks voted for a previous America that was whiter and thus, in their estimation, "better." There’s little Inskeep could have done here, since I get that there’s zero chance of winning an argument with a racist who is paid to deny racism, but there you go.

I could get into all the ways that Code Switch, which is dedicated to discussions of “race and identity,” isn’t racist. Talking about issues of race isn’t racism, but people like Pollak use this argument when it benefits them and trash it when it doesn’t. Never mind how badly he contradicted himself while absolving Bannon of any responsibility for the actual racist content that ran on his site, but pulled out an article from Code Switch and held it up as an affront to the taxpaying populace, who he probably imagines are all white. In the topsy-turvy world of Breitbart and racist denial in general, there is no racism — not in headlines bemoaning diversity, or Bannon's on-the-record complaints about there being too many Asian tech CEO's — except on websites dedicated to issues facing people of color.

Bannon has spent four years ensuring that Breitbart contains all the red meat the alt-right can feast on, from an entire section tagged “black crime” to frequent contributions from Jason Richwine, whom the Daily Beast notes “resigned from the conservative Heritage Foundation when news broke that his Harvard dissertation argued in part that Hispanics have lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites.”

That, Pollak should be told, is actual racism. Textbook.

But I really want to get to this, the moment just after Inskeep pointed to a 2011 quote from Bannon in which he labeled feminists “a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools." In response, Pollak went into a whole spiel about Bannon’s hiring of gay writer Milo Yiannopoulos—the same Yiannopoulos he referred to earlier as the author of “the only alt-right content” on Breitbart, while failing to note that Yiannopoulos is a celebrated champion of the alt-right. (Yiannopoulos previously called Richard Spencer “dangerously bright” and was kicked off Twitter for racially terrorizing Leslie Jones, which only upped his alt-right standing.)

But here’s the nugget from Pollak:

“There is a political correctness in this country that would say that if you said that once [called feminists "dykes"] on a radio show that you should be drummed out of public life. I would defy you to find a person in the LGBTQ community who has not used that term, either in an endearing sense or in a flippant, jovial, colloquial sense. I don't think you can judge Steve Bannon's views.”

This is rife with the same lame things white racists love to repeat. They fault “political correctness” for every despicable view they hold, pretending that not being able to utter racist and xenophobic rants makes them victims; oppressed martyrs marching for free speech and the ability to publicly call black people the names their daddies did. It’s maybe the biggest lie ever told, not least of all because it isn’t even true: Breitbart’s entire catalog of articles is proof. Racists still say whatever they want, and they are currently shouting it out loud, in ways both verbally and physically violent. They aren’t opposed to political correctness, they’re opposed to the consequences of being vile. And they’re feeling pretty good right now, because two of the worst examples of their ilk are now in the highest echelons of government.

At the very least, Inskeep could have pointed out that political correctness hasn’t seemed to hinder Bannon at all, that this is a man who now will skulk the halls of the White House and have the president-elect's ear. As long as media keep letting these people create an alternate reality where they aren’t challenged, where it is okay to rant about “dykes,” where it's no biggie to tailor a publishing empire to avowed racists, where false equivalencies convert discussions of racism into manufactured reverse racism, we’ll stay here.

Pollak, who says he’s an Orthodox Jew according to Jezebel (and therefore a perfect spokesperson to trot out at times like this), is on a press jaunt that will likely last for a while, so we'll probably see lots more of this. For the record, here’s how the conversation ended:

INSKEEP: I want to invite a yes/no question, because we’ve just got a few seconds here. This is a question that’s just on a lot of people’s minds. Is Steve Bannon—and by extension, Donald Trump—winking at racists? Not quite embracing their views, but trying to get their support and their votes?

Yes or no?

POLLAK: Absolutely not.

INSKEEP: Not at all?

POLLAK: Not at all.

INSKEEP: OK. Joel Pollak, thank you very much, really appreciate the time.

No, thank you, NPR, for giving this guy a chance to come on and defend hate as no big deal, and for contributing to the ongoing effort to normalize all this stuff.

I’m sure it’s very appreciated by the 300 people—and counting!—who've been attacked, harassed and harmed by those inspired by Bannon and Trump.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

The Cliff

President Pussygrabber

By George R.R. Martin

There are really no words for how I feel this morning.

America has spoken. I really thought we were better than this. Guess not.

Trump was the least qualified candidate ever nominated by a major party for the presidency. Come January, he will become the worst president in American history, and a dangerously unstable player on the world stage.

And the decimated Democrats, a minority in both House and Senate, do not have the power to hinder him.

Over the next four years, our problems are going to get much, much worse.

Winter is coming. I told you so.

 

George Raymond Richard Martin, often referred to as GRRM, is an American novelist and short-story writer in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres, a screenwriter, and television producer. He is best known for his international bestselling series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, which was later adapted into the HBO dramatic series Game of Thrones.

7 Things We Must Do As Trump Prepares For The White House

Michael Moore: 7 Things We Must Do as Trump Prepares for the White House

1. Must quickly and decisively form an opposition movement, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1960s. I will do my part to help lead this as I'm sure many others (Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, MoveOn, the hip-hop community, DFA, etc.) will, too. The core of this opposition force will be fueled by young people…

White Supremacy wins—for now.

By Denise Oliver Velez

Time to wake up, you white people of good faith.
Look in the mirror.
See Amerikkka for what it is without the gloss.
See something black folks have been trying to tell you.
It’s not “populism” or “economic anxiety.”
Call it by name — White Supremacy.
I thought the black and brown firewall, with a little help from our white friends would hold back the tide.
I was wrong. My bad.
Thanksgiving is coming.  A time many of you gather with friends and family.
Killing racism starts at home.
Maybe it’s time for you to start speaking up and fighting back.
Lord knows we black folks have been doin’ it for centuries.
My people survived slavery and Jim Crow.
We’ll survive Donald Trump too — though I’m sure there will be deaths — there always are.
America has a white supremacy problem.
You are either part of the problem, or part of the solution.
Choose.
P.S. I ain’t leaving. The bones of my enslaved ancestors are buried here. They helped build this place with blood, sweat, tears, and laughter.  I’ll fight on.  In their name.

We oppose everything

By Kos

The battlefield, every single day.

When President Barack Obama was first elected, Republicans made no bones about their desire to obstruct absolutely everything on his agenda. They didn’t even care if it was their own agenda. As soon as Obama adopted it, it was the second coming of communism—from the Heritage-created, Mitt-Romney implemented Obamacare, to Republican James Comey’s nomination to the FBI, to traditionally bipartisan transportation spending, to the Senate’s Gang of 8 immigration reform effort.

Their obstruction became so blatant, they even refused to perform their Constitutional duty to advise and consent to Barack Obama’s final Supreme Court justice pick. And did they suffer anything for it? Of course not. They won big in 2010, and again in 2014. And they won big last night.

Not only did obstruction help hamper Obama’s agenda, but just as importantly, it sent a message to base Republicans that their party actually gave a shit. It let them know that their party would fight for them, even if everyone else thought they were being assholes. It didn’t matter. That singular focus on obstructing Obama and the Democrats said they cared.

If Trump wants to pass a new Voting Rights Act, or renominate Merrick Garland, then we can work with him. Anything else, he can go fuck himself. Infrastructure spending? Let him get the votes from his own caucus. Anything else he might propose, even if we might agree with it? Let him get the votes from his own caucus while we hurl metaphorical Molotov cocktails from the sideline.

They broke it, they own it.

Show our people we are fighting for them, and they’ll fight back for us in return. We are the fierce opposition. And as such, we need to oppose. Full stop. From Day One.

How To Rig An Election

By Paul Krugman

It’s almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror? Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton. Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election.

The election was rigged by state governments that did all they could to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting: The spirit of Jim Crow is very much alive — or maybe translate that to Diego Cuervo, now that Latinos have joined African-Americans as targets. Voter ID laws, rationalized by demonstrably fake concerns about election fraud, were used to disenfranchise thousands; others were discouraged by a systematic effort to make voting hard, by closing polling places in areas with large minority populations.

The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning.

The election was rigged by James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. His job is to police crime — but instead he used his position to spread innuendo and influence the election. Was he deliberately putting a thumb on the electoral scales, or was he simply bullied by Republican operatives? It doesn’t matter: He abused his office, shamefully.

The election was also rigged by people within the F.B.I. — people who clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences. In the final days of the campaign, pro-Trump agents have clearly been talking nonstop to Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and right-wing media, putting claims and allegations that may or may not have anything to do with reality into the air. The agency clearly needs a major housecleaning: Having an important part of our national security apparatus trying to subvert an election is deeply scary. Unfortunately, Mr. Comey is just the man not to do it.

The election was rigged by partisan media, especially Fox News, which trumpeted falsehoods, then retracted them, if at all, so quietly that almost nobody heard. For days Fox blared the supposed news that the F.B.I. was preparing an indictment of the Clinton Foundation. When it finally admitted that the story was false, Donald Trump’s campaign manager smugly remarked, “The damage is done to Hillary Clinton.”

The election was rigged by mainstream news organizations, many of which simply refused to report on policy issues, a refusal that clearly favored the candidate who lies about these issues all the time, and has no coherent proposals to offer. Take the nightly network news broadcasts: In 2016 all three combined devoted a total of 32 minutes to coverage of issues — all issues. Climate change, the most important issue we face, received no coverage at all.

The election was rigged by the media obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails. She shouldn’t have used her own server, but there is no evidence at all that she did anything unethical, let alone illegal. The whole thing is orders of magnitude less important than multiple scandals involving her opponent — remember, Donald Trump never released his tax returns. Yet those networks that found only 32 minutes for all policy issues combined found 100 minutes to talk about Clinton emails.

It’s a disgraceful record. Yet Mrs. Clinton still seems likely to win.

If she does, you know what will happen. Republicans will, of course, deny her legitimacy from day one, just as they did for the last two Democratic presidents. But there will also — you can count on it — be a lot of deprecation and sneering from mainstream pundits and many in the media, lots of denial that she has a “mandate” (whatever that means), because some other Republican would supposedly have beaten her, she should have won by more, or something.

So in the days ahead it will be important to remember two things. First, Mrs. Clinton has actually run a remarkable campaign, demonstrating her tenacity in the face of unfair treatment and remaining cool under pressure that would have broken most of us. Second, and much more important, if she wins it will be thanks to Americans who stood up for our nation’s principles — who waited for hours on voting lines contrived to discourage them, who paid attention to the true stakes in this election rather than letting themselves be distracted by fake scandals and media noise.

Those citizens deserve to be honored, not disparaged, for doing their best to save the nation from the effects of badly broken institutions. Many people have behaved shamefully this year — but tens of millions of voters kept their faith in the values that truly make America great.

Read my blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and follow me on Twitter, @PaulKrugman. 

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 7, 2016, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Rig an Election. Today's Paper|Subscribe

Race, gender discrimination persist with Uber, Lyft—and cities need to know

Researchers warn that private rides can’t substitute for public transportation.

By Megan Geuss  

How many minutes depends on your race, study says.

Lyft

A study conducted by transportation research labs at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Washington has shown that Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers continue to discriminate based on the ride requester’s race, with black customers waiting significantly longer for a ride and facing more trip cancellations than white customers. The study took place in Seattle and Boston and required research assistants to request trips pre-selected by the researchers to include a variety of neighborhoods.

The numbers

The study found that black male customers using UberX experience three times more cancellations than white male customers in Boston. In Seattle, black customers experienced wait times from 16 to 28 percent longer than white customers on both UberX and Lyft services.

The researchers weren’t able to study how cancellations affected Lyft riders, because the two services offer different information about the rider to the drivers. “A Lyft driver sees both the name and a photo of the passenger prior to accepting or denying a ride, while UberX drivers see this information only after accepting a request,” the researchers wrote. “We find no effect on cancellations for African-American riders of Lyft because, we surmise, that given that names and photos are visible to the driver prior to acceptance, any discrimination occurs prior to accepting the initial request.”

While Uber drivers can get penalized for canceling too many requests, researcher Don MacKenzie wrote on his blog that “in some cases, drivers would not officially cancel the trip, but would make no attempt to actually pick up the traveler using a ‘black’ name, or would even drive in the opposite direction for 20 minutes or more, until the research assistant canceled the trip.”

The researchers also found that female customers were treated differently than men and were “taken on significantly longer routes than males for the same origin and destination,” according to MacKenzie. He added that women in such situations experience “higher fares, wasted time, and perhaps personal unpleasantness with overly ‘chatty’ drivers.”

Still, the researchers were clear that Uber and Lyft weren’t distinctly worse than taxis. They asked their research assistants (RAs) to hail taxis in certain taxi-heavy parts of Seattle and Boston and count how many available taxis passed them by before one stopped. “The first taxi stopped nearly 60 percent of the time for white RAs, but less than 20 percent of the time for African-American RAs.

The white RAs never had more than four taxis pass them before one stopped, but the African-American RAs watched six or seven taxis pass them by in 20 percent of cases.”

There’s a little bit of evidence that UberX has improved wait times for riders over taxi services—the researchers’ paper points out that a 2015 study funded by Uber showed that UberX offered shorter wait times than taxis for customers requesting rides in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles. A second study in 2016 looking at neighborhoods in Seattle came up with similar results.

Build a better ride-sourcing app

The researchers admit that “solving” discrimination within Uber and Lyft is difficult. The ride sourcing companies could omit personal information about riders completely, but Stephen Zoepf of Stanford’s Center for Automated Research suggests that this might lead to discrimination manifesting in other ways, such as prejudiced drivers giving lower ratings to black riders after picking them up and skewing how those riders' ratings appear to other, non-prejudiced drivers.

Also, the researchers strained to offer solutions to discrimination based on drivers refusing to drive into certain neighborhoods.

MacKenzie also suggested that ride-sourcing services like Uber and Lyft could offer pre-set fares for given rides in an attempt to keep drivers from taking riders on indirect routes to increase their fares. This is something Uber began rolling out earlier this summer.

Zoepf also warns that Uber and Lyft can’t yet be considered a replacement for public transportation, in spite of what some cities are saying. In Centennial, Colorado, for example, city authorities teamed up with Lyft to offer free rides to and from a light rail station. At that point, Zoepf argues, municipal governments run the risk of violating the Civil Rights Act. “If, on average, a black Uber passenger waits 15 seconds longer for a ride than a white passenger, does that constitute discrimination? What about 30 seconds? Two minutes? At what point do we say that a dis-aggregated system is inadequate to provide service to our collective communities?”

In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Uber head of North American Operations Rachel Holt stated, “Discrimination has no place in society, and no place on Uber. We believe Uber is helping reduce transportation inequities across the board, but studies like this one are helpful in thinking about how we can do even more.”

Lyft did not respond immediately to Ars’ request for comment.

Zoepf noted that a first step toward smoothing out car hailing iniquities would be for private companies like Uber and Lyft to make their data available to qualified academic institutions. He wrote that this project initiated 1,500 rides and cost $100,000 to complete. “With the collaboration of transportation providers, we could have focused our efforts on analysis rather than data gathering, and our results would have been undoubtedly more revealing and compelling.”

Results of the study were reported in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Here's What The FBI Found In The Emails On Anthony Weiner's Laptop

http://www.newsweek.com/what-fbi-found-emails-anthony-weiner-laptop-517652


 

Documentary on the endangered art of hollerin'

By Cory Doctorow


"The Hollerin' Contest at Spivey's Corner" - Trailer from Brian Gersten on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Brian Gersten writes, "'The Hollerin' Contest at Spivey's Corner' is a documentary short about the history, characters, and sounds of the National Hollerin' Contest.

Hollerin' itself is considered by some to be the earliest form of communication between humans, and the competition has been held annually in the small town of Spivey's Corner, NC since 1969. The film follows the stories of three former champions as they attempt to reclaim their titles, and keep the oft-forgotten tradition of hollerin' alive."

"This past summer it was announced that the hollerin' contest would be ending after 47 years. Former hollerin' champions Robby Goodman and Iris Turner have decided to carry on the tradition and launch their own 'World Wide Hollerin' Festival.'

To honor the tradition of hollerin' and to celebrate the inaugural Hollerin' Festival, we've decided to release our documentary on vimeo."

A Transit Strike In Philly Could Lower Turnout, Especially Among Black And Poor Voters

By Dan Hopkins

Workers picket across from the Callowhill SEPTA Depot on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Jacqueline Larma / AP

While commentators digest the latest announcement from FBI Director James Comey, a story with the potential to have more of an impact on the election is playing out with little notice in Philadelphia. Last Tuesday workers for the city division of the regional transportation authority, SEPTA, began a strike over a new contract. The strike has shut down the city’s buses, subways and trolleys, and snarled the city’s roads since then.

Last Friday, a Philadelphia judge declined to issue an injunction ending or suspending the strike, but she scheduled a hearing for 9:30 a.m. Monday to take up the strike’s potential impact on the election.

The evidence on the effects of prior transit strikes is limited, but given what we know about Election Day in Philadelphia, the people who rely on the city’s public transit network, and about voting in general, the potential impact on residents’ ability to vote could be substantial. And that impact is likely to be concentrated on residents of color, as well as on Philadelphia’s poorer residents.

The nation’s fifth-largest city, Philadelphia is the largest city in any swing state. There is also no city as populous as Philadelphia with a larger share of residents in poverty. It is not surprising, then, that Philadelphia relies heavily on its public transit network. As it is elsewhere, that reliance is particularly heavy in poorer communities and communities of color.

Below, for instance, data from the 2014 American Community Survey shows the relationship between the share of census tract residents who are black and who ride public transit to work in Philadelphia. The relationship is substantial: If we go from a census tract with no black residents to one that is entirely black, we should expect the share of people using public transit to get to work to rise by 27 percentage points.

Or consider how the percent riding public transit correlates with a census tract’s median household income (the panel on the right). Here, the correlation is strongly negative: As census tracts become wealthier, they become less dependent on public transit. Imagine moving from Philadelphia’s first-quartile census tract (with a median household income of $25,600) to its third-quartile Census tract (where median household income is $52,270) — public transit ridership should drop by 9.6 percentage points. This relationship is likely to make sense to people familiar with the city’s demographics, as some of the wealthiest neighborhoods are in and around the city’s commercial center. The effects of any Election Day disruption to transportation are likely to be felt disproportionately in the city’s outlying neighborhoods.

The impacts of the strike are predictable: Without the buses, subways and trolleys — yes, there are really trolleys — people commuting into Center City get up earlier to drive, bike or walk to work.

But that strategy also has the potential to mean that many voters on Tuesday will face an unenviable choice: Vote when the polls open at 7 a.m. or get a jump on the trip downtown. They’ll also know that lots of other people are facing the same choice, a fact likely to produce lines at many polling places. Will that, in turn, dampen voter turnout?

That’s certainly the fear of city officials. On Sunday night, the city filed suit to suspend the strike and voiced the concern that an “Election Day strike will make it practically impossible for many Philadelphians to participate in this election.”

Extensive research on voter turnout suggests that the city is right, and that voters are more likely to vote when it is more convenient to do so. Voting is to some extent a habitual behavior, so people are less likely to vote when their habits are disrupted. When Los Angeles County consolidated its polling places for the 2003 gubernatorial recall election, for example, in-person voting dropped by a sizable 3.03 percentage points in precincts that were relocated compared to those that were not. That decline was partially offset by increased absentee voting, but Pennsylvania has no early voting, and the deadline for absentee ballot applications has come and gone.

Philadelphia has actually had a strike during an election before, in 2009. At the time, voters were choosing a district attorney and controller, as well as several judicial posts. In 2009, some 122,946 voters cast ballots for district attorney, a number that was actually up from the 120,424 voters who cast ballots for district attorney in 2005. But both were paltry turnouts for low-profile elections, and turnout dynamics in more prominent elections can be very different, as Temple University professors Kevin Arceneaux and David Nickerson have demonstrated. For every one Philadelphia voter in 2009, there were 5.6 in the 2012 presidential cycle, and absent a strike, we might expect a similar number this Tuesday. The 2009 election is accordingly a poor guide to the would-be impacts of the current strike.

When voting gets easier, turnout increases disproportionately among people who don’t always vote, as evidence from all-mail elections demonstrates. On the flip side, when voting gets harder, those who aren’t habitual voters are more likely to stay home. Poorer voters are less habitual voters. So a disruption as significant as an ongoing public transit strike poses a real threat to turnout on Tuesday.

Dan Hopkins is an associate professor of government at the University of Pennsylvania, and his research focuses on American elections and public opinion.

A Veteran Spy Has Given The FBI Information Alleging A Russian Operation To Cultivate Donald Trump

Has the bureau investigated this material?

By David Corn

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey set off a political blast when he informed congressional leaders that the bureau had stumbled across emails that might be pertinent to its completed inquiry into Hillary Clinton's handling of emails when she was secretary of state. The Clinton campaign and others criticized Comey for intervening in a presidential campaign by breaking with Justice Department tradition and revealing information about an investigation—information that was vague and perhaps ultimately irrelevant—so close to Election Day. 

On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid upped the ante. He sent Comey a fiery letter saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a potentially greater controversy: "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information."

Reid's missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the "connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign," and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow.

Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials. (Page has called accusations against him "garbage.") On Monday, NBC News reported that the FBI has mounted a preliminary inquiry into the foreign business ties of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chief. But Reid's recent note hinted at more than the Page or Manafort affairs. And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.

"This is something of huge significance, way above party politics," the former intelligence officer says. "I think [Trump's] own party should be aware of this stuff as well."

 

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, "Normally, we don't talk about whether we are investigating anything." But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.

In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump's dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.)

"It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."

This was, the former spy remarks, "an extraordinary situation." He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was "sufficiently serious" to share with the FBI.

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer's conversations with Russian sources, noted, "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance." It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him." It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on "bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls."

The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was "shock and horror." The FBI, after receiving the first memo, did not immediately request additional material, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates. Yet in August, they say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of which referred to members of Trump's inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI. "It's quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on," he says.

"This is something of huge significance, way above party politics," the former intelligence officer comments. "I think [Trump's] own party should be aware of this stuff as well."

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding the memos. In the past, Trump has declared, "I have nothing to do with Russia."

The FBI is certainly investigating the hacks attributed to Russia that have hit American political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's presidential campaign. But there have been few public signs of whether that probe extends to examining possible contacts between the Russian government and Trump. (In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous online reports that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slate investigation detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, "We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation." In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, "The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.")

According to several national security experts, there is widespread concern in the US intelligence community that Russian intelligence, via hacks, is aiming to undermine the presidential election—to embarrass the United States and delegitimize its democratic elections. And the hacks appear to have been designed to benefit Trump. In August, Democratic members of the House committee on oversight wrote Comey to ask the FBI to investigate "whether connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian interests may have contributed to these [cyber] attacks in order to interfere with the US. presidential election."

In September, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrats on, respectively, the Senate and House intelligence committees, issued a joint statement accusing Russia of underhanded meddling: "Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election. At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election." The Obama White House has declared Russia the culprit in the hacking capers, expressed outrage, and promised a "proportional" response.

There's no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy's memos. But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.

In the letter Reid sent to Comey on Sunday, he pointed out that months ago he had asked the FBI director to release information on Trump's possible Russia ties. Since then, according to a Reid spokesman, Reid has been briefed several times. The spokesman adds, "He is confident that he knows enough to be extremely alarmed."