Pushing Back on Propaganda

"People tell us, 'oh, my top issue is the economy.' The temperature-taking approach is 'guess we gotta talk to them about the economy.'  But the job of a good message isn't to say what is popular; it is to make popular what we need said. And so what we need to understand - and the Right already does - is not 'where are people at?' but 'where are they capable of going?'"

- Anat Shenker-Osorio on the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast

Maybe two weeks ago, maybe three, it struck me: I don't know the most effective ways to push back against propaganda. I have spent decades writing about political subjects, but I could not rattle off "the five most effective ways to counter a narrative," or "two things to avoid when trying to take down your opponent."  Those seem like things we all need to know right about now, so let's get fucking empowered.

Don't repeat their words

To begin, here's Jonathan Day from an article about smear campaigns:

First, never repeat your opponent’s smear. This is true even if you want . . . to refute the smear, and it’s for a very good reason: repetition cements the most emotive words in your audience’s mind. For example, let’s say . . . the government calls you a 'foreign agent who is a traitor to the country.' If you reply by saying, 'I’m not a foreign agent and I’m not a traitor to the country, I’m just defending the rights of freedoms of everyone' . . . the words many people will remember are 'foreign agent' and 'traitor.' You end up doing more harm than good.

This makes immediate sense to me, as I hope it does to you. Over the next couple of days, however, listen to members of the media. You'll hear experienced journalists doing this way more than they should. 

While covering for Lawrence O'Donnell on Friday, March 21, 2025, for example, the very experienced Ali Velshi repeatedly referred to the Right's claim that people showing up at town halls are paid protesters sent by George Soros - and Velshi used those exact words, more than once, giving oxygen to an anti-Semitic dog whistle.

Honey, Let's Make Sandwiches

Instead of taking that approach, Day advises building a message as a “truth sandwich.” He explains:

You begin your response by underlining what you stand for – the causes you are promoting. Second, allude to (but don’t repeat) your opponent’s attack and explain why they are attacking you – exposing their malign motives helps discredit them. Finally, offer a solution and ask people to support you. (Emphasis added)

To make this as clear as possible, I will number the parts and paraphrase the substance:

1. Underscore your position, the point you want to make.
2. Nod to the attack from your opposition and expose their "malign motives" (I love that phrase!)
3. Propose a better way.

Political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio, whom I quote in the headnote above, agrees with the sandwich model, adding this important element: The layers should be positive, negative, positive. And the final layer of the sandwich should point us to the way things could be, a brighter future that seems doable and possible. 

Following this combined advice, here's the message I created:

1. We see from town halls springing up all over the country that Americans reject DOGE. 2. Republicans who claim these town halls are not authentic clearly  haven't been to one. People are really scared and really angry. They don't want Elon Musk blowing up the federal government like one of his test rockets. They don't want to lose their health care or travel 75 miles to a Social Security office so that Republicans can give more tax breaks to the ultra-rich 3. The people want government that works - not for some, but for all.

In my third layer, I tucked in something I think is really important: People want government.  We want an organized body of people looking out for us and facilitating things like healthcare for veterans, Social Security payments for our elders, and Medicaid for those living in poverty.  Republicans representatives need to hear that message.

Don't accept their framing

I often find myself frustrated with the American media, and by frustrated I mean cutting myself off mid-scream. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the Left must be considered extreme while the Right is considered reasonable.

We have a moral obligation to push back on that, but not on the Right's terms.

The Right is currently hawking the narrative that the federal government is rife with "fraud, waste, and abuse."  Over and over, I hear Democrats begin by saying, "Of course we should address waste and fraud. No one objects to that, but." Or "Obviously we should eliminate waste when we see it. That's just common sense, but."

Stop right there, please. Don't start off by agreeing with your opponent's sales pitch.  And don't accept or reinforce this idea that Republicans are reasonable. For fuck's sake, their favorite quote about government is "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  I know I'm not alone in being disturbed by that, but WOW have I always been disturbed by that.

For Republicans, government is the villain, not because of the centuries of racist violence at home and abroad, not because of Dred Scott or Andrew Johnson or Tuskegee, not redlining, forced sterilization, the abduction of Native children, union busting, the Lavender Scare, McCarthy, Vietnam, Kent State, and Reagan's refusal to help Americans with HIV/AIDS. Not any of that.  

For Republicans - for Grover Norquist and his bathtub fantasies - government is the villain because it taxes the rich to benefit the people, and the rich don't want to do that. Of course they can't say that, so Republicans say other things instead. For example. They say programs that benefit the American people must be restricted because they are rife with fraud.

That is not our cue to start debating how much fraud there is. That accepts their framing and puts us into an unproductive battle where we lob statistics at them, and they lob statistics at us, and we don't gain any ground, largely because "fraud" and "abuse" are dog whistles in the first place. The existence of "fraud" and "abuse" requires there to be fraudsters and abusers, low-down, no-good people receiving benefits they haven't earned and don't deserve. As we know from Reagan's grotesque, racist "Welfare Queen," the fraudsters are racialized. From that implication - from the implication that some (Black / immigrant) people might be - defrauding the (somehow always white) taxpayer - the program becomes an appropriate target for reduction, restriction, and added humiliation.  

"A few people are cheating maybe! Let's punish everyone!"  Are we a fourth grade classroom or are we a free and prosperous nation?

Americans across the country are struggling in deeply serious ways with poverty and food insecurity.  They need elected representatives ready and willing to have serious conversations about wage stagnation, hunger, and maybe the food deserts created by the government's refusal to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act, which once allowed local grocers to compete comfortably with large nationwide retailers. 

Under President Biden, the simple act of giving people money during COVID reduced child poverty by 50%. 

What's more important for America as a society, giving more money to rich people because they want it, or giving assistance to children in poverty because they need it?

That's the kind of conversation we can have when we use our own words.

Love is Love: Engaging the base

Let's turn back to Anat Shenker-Osorio. On her Substack, she describes herself as the host of Words to Win By, "a podcast about progressive victories around the world and how we achieved them." I first heard her being interviewed on the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast and was dazzled.

One of her many excellent insights - quoted on the front page of her company's web site and mentioned in the interview - is "Engage the base, persuade the middle." On the podcast, this is how she puts it: "You have to have a message that the base doesn't just agree with and find kind of inoffensive or palatable; you have to have a message that they actually want to repeat."

What the base wants to repeat is something energizing, something real and uplifting, like "Love is love" (her example). Speaking of "Love is love," I would add that we don't just  "repeat" a message with our mouths. Stickers, patches, buttons, posters, t-shirts, memes - all of these are repetitions. When messages are good, we want to speak and display them, wear them, share them however we can.  Good messages put us on our front foot instead of our back foot. We feel confident. We believe we can gain ground. 

Hate is hate: Losing our way

At the risk of turning suddenly dark, I would add that in the absence of good messaging, we can lose ground very quickly.  In the absence of lines we want to repeat, sometimes the base will fall largely silent. That's how the Right gets traction for their ridiculous white supremacist narratives about things like CRT and trans athletes. First, (white) people are so gobsmacked by the factual falsity of the propaganda that we act like it's going to short-circuit on its own absurdity. (As in, CRT is graduate-level content taught in law schools.  Kindergarten teachers are not using CRT to indoctrinate five year olds. It is laughable that anyone thinks this.)

ALL propaganda is untrue, though, and it rarely turns out funny in the end.

Second, we benefit from good messaging in the same way that hikers benefit from trails.  Sure, we could probably maneuver over sticks and big rocks and dead leaves, depending on the wheelchair we're using or the kinds of shoes we're wearing, but we don't know what's under there. Snakes? Poison oak?  A decomposing frog? We're quicker and more confident on a path. We don't hesitate because we see how it moves forward.

Under Biden's administration, to use an example from this exact moment in time, the government did some good things to enshrine the rights of trans Americans. The right wing, unhappy with this progress, began to invest more and more time in anti-trans fearmongering, ultimately spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads to make pronouns and trans athletes some of the defining issues of the campaign. In response, Democrats didn't so much drop the ball as quietly set it down in the corner behind the bleachers where they hoped no one would look at it. Most of them didn't want to talk about the subject on the Right's terrible terms - which, good call, except they hadn't developed messaging of their own, leading them to do the classic (and extremely obvious) pivot to another subject, one that pollsters had told them "really mattered" to the American people. 

Leadership did not "engage the base, persuade the middle" for trans Americans, and they largely accepted the Right's framing of immigration, leaving two vulnerable groups of humans hanging all alone in the wind. Both are now being aggressively scapegoated, targeted, and harmed by this administration.

You know what, though?  This is go-time, and we don't require leaders to know that we can't leave anyone behind. Maybe we can't travel to El Salvador and break people out of prison, but we can sure as hell put our heads together at the local level to develop good messages for our own communities. We can make sandwiches!

Making your mark

People move through a variety of family and community spaces: Churches, dinners, block parties, book clubs.  You can message to a community, if for example you want to engage fellow church members, or you can brainstorm with a community, if you and your neighbors want to speak to your county, region, or state.  

If you are in a rural area or can't easily leave your home, gather people virtually on Teams or Zoom.  

If you feel un-creative and need help picking a topic or words:

• Go to a town hall or watch a good recording online. People will knock your socks off with their sincerity and their eloquence.  
• Peruse the signs at a local protest or online. If you want to be super-ethical, ask their creators if you can post the signs to social media.
• Go back to a book or essay that's been speaking to you. Is there a dynamite quote in there that sparks something for you?
• Host a guerilla messaging potluck. Have people bring messages they hear and struggle to refute. Workshop a couple of messages and create one-sheet explainers to display and distribute.  As a bonus, enjoy the good feelings that come from working together.

Once you have done your brainstorming work: 

• There are loads of places online to make affordable stickers and buttons. Ask 10 friends for $10 bucks and spread them around.
• Make 8x10 signs to put up around your neighborhood or downtown.  (As many have advised online, use wheat paste or something else that dissolves to adhere them to posts.)
• Distribute one-sheet explainers at protests and other gatherings. (I am very much indebted to Mariame Kaba for this excellent idea.)
• Have a sign-making party. People can take their creations back to their neighborhoods or trade them.

These are just small ideas, but they can go big places and help real people.  Who knows - you might even dream up the next big thing!

Appendix: Sample Brainstorm on Cuts to Medicaid

I am including this sample for those who would feel better with another example of how to break down propaganda.  My recent piece on trans athletes, by the way, is a longer-form version of breaking down propaganda, and I appreciate the positive feedback from those who have read it.

If you don't need another example, hie thee hence! Start texting friends!

The propaganda (quoted from an AP article):

"Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has floated the idea of tying work to Medicaid.

'It’s common sense,' Johnson said. 'Little things like that make a big difference not only in the budgeting process but in the morale of the people. You know, work is good for you. You find dignity in work.'"

 

Break it down

Write everything you think of. You can pick and choose after you brainstorm.

What kinds of assumptions are packed into these comments?

• Some number of people receiving Medicaid can work but are choosing not to (ties back to fraud / waste)
• Work requirements are an effective means of getting people to seek and hold jobs (nope - Googled it)
• It's easy to be poor and use Medicaid to access care, which is why someone would deliberately choose that "lifestyle" over employment
• Don't people in poverty actually have shorter lives?  MIT study
• People deserve healthcare only if they labor (an idea already implicit in our system of tying healthcare to employment)
• People who don't / won't work have no dignity
• People who don't / won't work have low morale, which in turn is bad for them / their health
• If they worked, their health would improve on its own
• Being lazy / not laboring is making them sick(er)

Now you can talk it over (or think it over) and decide which of these points will be most effective. You can even set up a poll online.

Avoid the temptation to use their words / framing

• You will want to argue about work in ways that could easily get you into a battle of statistics
• If you feel like the work message will be powerful in your community, keep it general and unassailably accurate - e.g. the majority of people on Medicaid who can work already do

Honey, let's make a sandwich

1. Sixty years ago, we created Medicaid so that Americans living in poverty could go and see a doctor.
2. Now, Republicans want to cut taxes for the ultra rich, and they want to pay for that by taking Medicaid from the poor. Living in poverty is so difficult that poor people live have a shorter life expectancy. Republicans want to make that experience even harder so that being rich can get even easier? I don't think so. 
3. Elected representative should protect and defend their constituents by supporting and even expanding access to healthcare.

Will you stand up?

Today, Americans who did not yet know the name Jerce Reyes Barrios learned about his fate as we learned about our own.  Mr. Reyes Barrios is a Venezuelan soccer player who sought protection from the United States government after being tortured by the government of Venezuela.  He has that right, the right to seek out safety and to be free from torture.  Instead of getting to make his case, however, Mr. Reyes Barrios was abducted, put on a plane to El Salvador, and put into a prison built to house terrorists. 

The American government sent an asylum seeker to a prison for terrorists where men are caged for all but 30 minutes a day, where they wash themselves from a bucket and sleep under bright lights without a mattress, pillow, or sheets. 

Why is this happening?

Why did we put this man on that plane? The honest answer is that we have no idea. We have no idea because he wasn't charged with a crime, put on trial, and allowed to defend himself from the State's accusation that he is a member of a Venezuelan gang. 

We have no idea because the Trump administration is in such a hurry to engage in "mass deportation" of "criminals" that it can't be bothered to utilize any of the existing frameworks we have put in place to decide upon the facts of things. 

We have no idea because the government won't say.

Someone, somewhere decided to say this man was a gang member, so the American government disappeared him into a notorious prison in a faraway place where anything could happen.  No fewer than 261 people died in El Salvadoran prisons between 2022 and 2024, "four of them children."  America's prisons are terrible places, but at least here, organizations like the ACLU can file lawsuits based on violations of people's Eighth Amendment rights.  In El Salvador?  In El Salvador, they declared a state of emergency and suspended their constitution for 30 days. In 2022. They have renewed the 30-day window 36 times.  I guess it must be a pretty big emergency, since they have arrested more than 1% of their own population.

Fascism by any other name (still smells like hell)

Fascists, authoritarians, tyrants, dictators - they don't start with the popular kids.  They start with the unpopular ones. And if the people Dear Leader doesn't like seem a little too sympathetic, don't worry. That's what propaganda is for.  

Have you noticed who the propaganda is aimed at here lately?  

It's immigrants and trans people, first and foremost. 

Have you noticed who the propaganda has been aimed at historically?

Black Americans, gay Americans, gender non-conforming Americans, and every single wave of immigrants who have ever rolled in.

If you've been on the fence, historically, about how you feel or what you think about  undocumented immigrants or trans people, it is long past time to knock that shit off.  Human beings don't need anyone else's personal blessing in order to have rights, dignities, histories, and worth.

Will you stand up?

This the time, friends.  Not next year. Not next month.  Right now.

Right now, the government is putting men on planes without explanation and sending them to places where journalists can't interview them, constitutions don't exist for them, and family can't speak with them.

Right now, almost 1 in 100 Americans is already incarcerated. As a percentage of population, we're not on pace with El Salvador yet, but Trump hasn't put us in a state of emergency yet.

Yet.

Unfortunately, many of us aren't used to standing up, even when things are dire. White Americans in particular have been participating in the dehumanization of the people all around us since we got to this country.  And we have a history and a habit of abducting people born in other nations and relocating them to places where constitutions don't exist for them and family can't speak with them. We fought a war about it, and after we botched the Reconstruction, we almost lost the country to the KKK.  After just a few decades of rising equality, Republicans want to drag us back into unapologetic inequality, quashing not only voting rights but also memories, histories, vocabularies, words.  We're not to speak about Black history, Black artistry and innovation, Black Lives that Matter. 

Which means we must speak of all of it. Right now.

Right now, cisgender Americans must speak of trans dignity, must demand that our government stop targeting and abusing trans folks, who are being actively defamed and dehumanized by federal and state governments, offensive executive orders, and your gross friend.  Are you calling out your gross friend?  Your respectable pastor who demonizes trans athletes? Your brother who thinks the left should abandon trans rights?

This is happening. If you are scared, it's okay. People can do great things, even when they are afraid.

Practice calling out your friend. Practice being in respectful but uncomfortable dialogue with others. Practice making yourself do things that scare you, like singing or speaking in public. Feel yourself surviving the fear.

As someone much wiser than I said recently on BlueSky, practice breaking rules.  Last week, when I was at Kroger, I took three gift cards and hid them behind a box of food because they fund an establishment that embraces hate. It scared me. It was good to practice that tiny act.

We have to do this. We don't get to choose.

It's game time.

Translating the Discourse: Republicans and Women's Sports

If you enter the phrase "protect women" on just about any search engine right now, you'll stumble face first into a fog of bigotry.  That's because in very literal ways, conservative politicians conjure the figure of a White woman in danger to demonize groups of people they don't like.  And sadly, it works. White Americans get a little triggered, and that makes us a little more receptive to those politicians' regressive agendas.

Benevolent sexism

Although we could look to the past to see how this pattern has played out historically, we shouldn't assume this is a rusty, dusty old phenomenon languishing in the barn out back.  It's happening now. In a 2023 article called "Protecting Our (White) Daughters: U.S. Immigration and Benevolent Sexism," Rachel Smilan-Goldstein  observes that "conservative U.S. politicians" interested in promoting what she describes as "restrictive immigration policies" have "advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity."  

Specifically, Smilan-Goldstein argues that White Americans respond to this narrative with "benevolent sexism," which "invokes warm, protective feelings toward women who embody traditional feminine virtues of morality, purity, and chastity."  To be very clear, this virtuous, chaste woman is and must be White; in Smilan-Goldstein's experiments, "a Latina or Black woman victim of immigrant crime does not activate benevolent sexism among White Americans of any party affiliation." 

The names we know

As a catchphrase for anti-trans organizers, "protect women" seems like a similar appeal to benevolent sexism.  After South African runner Castor Semenya won a 2009 race - finishing in "less time than it takes . . . to microwave a Hot Pocket," as one writer put it - the sixth-place runner from Italy, Elisa Cusma, said, "These kind of people should not run with us . . . . For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man.”

As it happens, Castor Semenya was not then and is not now a man; however, her body produced higher levels of testosterone than a typical woman.  She was thereafter classified as "a non-woman" (!) and barred from competing unless she agreed to lower her testosterone with medication or surgery.

As many others have noted, testosterone levels are not capped in male athletes.  According to Jaime Schulz, "In fact, male athletes with low testosterone can apply for a 'Therapeutic Use Exemption'" in order to take exogenous testosterone without breaking the rules.  Meanwhile, elevated endogenous or "natural" testosterone levels have been used to disqualify Francine Niyonsaba, Margaret Wambui, Christine Mboma, Dutee Chand, and Beatrice Masilingi,and more. It probably won't shock you to learn that none of these women are White. 

I have no idea how many White woman have been excluded, by the way - and as Rachel Maddow would say, neither do you.  Schultz writes:

The results of the tests are supposed to be confidential, so we don’t know exactly how many women have been drummed out of sport as a result. Researchers estimate that between 1972 and 1990, sex-testing procedures disqualified approximately one in 504 elite athletes. An untold number of women competing at the lower levels of sport met a similar fate, or else abandoned competition altogether based on fears that they might not meet the standards for femaleness.

The point, in any case, is not simply that a Black or brown athlete might win any given race; it's that a Black or brown athlete might beat a White woman who worked really, really, really hard. And then the White woman might feel sad about losing. And might appear sad to onlookers. And so it is that White Americans get wrapped up in benevolent sexism and start carrying on about the need to protect women - but only the proper kind of women: The white kind, the chaste kind, the kind that's definitely pure.

Trans women

The differences between trans women, on the one hand, and cis women with elevated testosterone, on the other, seem all but irrelevant to the discourse.  People who purport to care vey much about whether someone was born with a vagina do not in fact care at all if someone was born with a vagina, as demonstrated in the summer of 2024 when cisgender boxer Imane Khalif did what boxers do and popped her opponent in the nose.  (But oh, the crying. That poor girl. Protect women.)

The claims about what trans athletes are doing to cis athletes by competing with them are pretty astounding.  Did you know trans women are "severely undermining women's rights"?  Here I thought rights involved things like having bodily autonomy, in which case, it's far more accurate to say that trans women are having their rights undermined, aggressively and unconstitutionally, all over the country.  Trans women are also being actively demonized and dehumanized on the news, in ads, and in state legislatures, but there is a shocking silence from the public around the unfairness of those efforts.

And that's because of women's sports.

That's because conservatives got tired of being told that trans folks weren't hurting anyone, including and especially in public bathrooms.  They got tired of losing in court, including the Supreme Court. So they decided to use the same tactic they have deployed against CRT (protect White children!) and immigration (protect White women!). Conservatives have produced "victims" of trans-inclusive policies.

Cisgender swimmer Riley Gaines, 

who tied with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas

for fifth place in 2022.

The idea here is to make you angry, at best, or at worst, confused. Men are stronger, faster, and better at sports. Everyone knows that.  It's not fair for women to work hard when it's inevitable they will lose.

Except, as you might notice from the words in italics above, Lia Thomas (a woman) and Riley Gaines (a woman) were both defeated by the same four cisgender swimmers (also women). Loss is not inevitable, even though in the broadest sense, it is. There is no athlete anywhere in the world who has never lost. Athletes are not and cannot be paired up with competitors who are physiologically and psychologically identical, and who therefore have no advantages.  Sports are inherently pretty unfair.  

Again, as Schultz writes:

Researchers associate physical performance with over 200 different genetic variations. More than 20 of those variants relate to elite athleticism. These performance-enhancing polymorphisms – PEPs – can affect height, blood flow, metabolic efficiency, muscle mass, muscle fibers, bone structure, pain threshold, fatigue resistance, power, speed, endurance, susceptibility to injury, psychological aptitude, and respiratory and cardiac functions, to name just a few.  We don’t disqualify athletes with these types of predispositions.

To get worked up about testosterone and not fatigue resistance or psychological aptitude or muscle fibers is ideological. It's benevolent sexism, which politicians are deliberately activating to piss (White) people off and get them to support regressive policies.  

Why so mad?

The gender binary that underpins our White supremacist patriarchy cannot work if women won't play their role - their weakness to a man's strength, their softness to his roughness, their inferiority to his superiority. Trans women problematize that binary in ways Republicans clearly do not want to be tolerated. By anyone.

As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, "They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants."

See these tactics for what they are. Protect the rights of women. All of us.

To be clear

Mariame Kaba is an activist, a thinker, and a writer I have long admired, and she has been giving exceptionally great advice lately on Blue Sky, including this, which I will paraphrase: 

For a whole range of reasons, people are not well-informed about what is taking place right now in America. To address that problem, create a one-sheet explainer that can be printed and distributed at in-person protests or other events, as well as online.

Now mind you, she gave this advice weeks ago, and all that while, I have been sitting with it, possibly on it, sometimes beside it. Because who am I to explain things?!  I am not an economist. I am not an attorney. I am not a historian or a sociologist or an ex-KGB agent with a closet full of cocktail gowns and trench coats.

After reading the comments on a friend's Facebook post about Ukraine, however, I decided that it does not matter. It does not matter that I am not an expert; it matters that I am as intellectually honest as I know how to be and that I know how to do research.  

To that end, here is a one-sheet explainer on Putin and Ukraine. 

Please use it as it best serves you - to improve your own understanding, to hand out at a protest or other event, to send to your Uncle Marvin who is retired.  It is intended to be shared. It is intended to be helpful. 

My name is not on it. I created a gmail address so that people can give feedback, ask questions, make corrections, or scream at me. I therefore introduce . . . To Be Clear.

 

Go forth, little one-page explainer!

Bad Tyrant?

Donald Trump is good at a very limited number of things. A month into his second term, I'm not sure being a successful authoritarian is one of them.

Since I am definitely not an expert on authoritarian rule, however, let's turn to historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat to find out some of the things strongmen typically do, starting with the original Fascist, Benito Mussolini: "Strongmen probe the sore spots of the nation, stimulating feelings of humiliation and anxiety and offering their own leadership as a salve" (Strongmen 70). Ben-Ghiat goes on to explain of Mussolini that he stoked feelings of humiliation and anxiety tied to Italy's recent history - and having even the most cursory understanding of that history turns out to be informative. Ready for a very breezy overview?  Grab a blanket.

As you surely know, during the 19th century, European nations began claiming parts of Africa for themselves.  In 1884, European men representing more than a dozen nations gathered at the Berlin Conference to "negotiate questions and end confusion over the control of Africa." As the illustration below suggests, and as Elias Wondimu makes explicit, this was done "without any African representation" or respect for its sovereignty, let alone "existing African political or cultural boundaries."

Before the Conference, Italy had not kept pace with the invasive, empire-building projects of other nations in Europe, and this was reflected in the relatively small quantity and size of the lands they "controlled" when the Conference ended.  From their position in Somalia, Italy had designs on neighboring Ethiopia (or Abyssinia on this map), and war broke out.  In 1896, at the Battle of Adwa, Ethiopia won. Ethiopians still celebrate this victory as a national holiday. (I doubt that Italians do anything now, but at the time, according to Wikipedia, they rioted.)

Thirty years later, these matters were still very much front of mind.  In 1927,  Ruth Ben-Ghiat says, Mussolini told Fascist politicians, "If we shrink, gentlemen, we won't make the Empire, we'll become a colony!" (Strongmen 70). To be a colony, of course, was to be placed in the conquered and feminized position, but in the white supremacist imagination, it was still worse: It was to become Black, lost in a sea of Black fecundity. 

To save "[t]he white race, the Western race," Mussolini sought to boost the white birth rate.  Thus, as Ben-Ghiat says, he "banned abortion and contraception" (Strongmen 71). He promoted marriage and "imposed an additional tax on bachelors" 26 and over.. He "encouraged the right kinds of Italians to multiply."  He practiced eugenics. And predictably, he tried to make Italy great again: "Mussolini promised to restore the glory of ancient Rome while also modernizing Italy, correcting stereotypes about the country's backwardness." He invested in Italy's infrastructure, which in turn created jobs. In 1935, he also turned his sights back to Ethiopia, conducting an invasion both to avenge Italy's defeat and to showcase "Fascism's remarking of Italy and Italians" as strong, white, European makers of Empire. Ben-Ghiat notes, "His May 1936 announcement of victory [over Ethiopia] and the establishment of the Italian East African Empire marked the peak of his popularity."

All these years and decades later, as the demographics in the United States have changed, Donald Trump remains quite good at playing on white supremacist anxieties among certain (many? most?) Americans. He also worries about members of "the white race" disappearing, both individually, from every visible position of power, and en masse, as the numerical majority.  That's why he and his entire administration keep attacking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, as a pretext for the violent reassertion of white supremacist, patriarchal employment standards in our government. 

His anxieties about America's whiteness also help to explain his otherwise incomprehensible desire to "make Canada the 51st state." As he worries that America is becoming brown and Black, he worries, like Mussolini did, that it will become a metaphorical colony, effeminized, shrinking, and weak.  And Donald Trump is not about to be a member of a feminized minority.  He will be masculine, a colonizer who simply takes from each land what he wants: Rare earth minerals from Ukraine, location from Greenland, and from Canada, an instant bounty of what he is sure are white people.

For Trump, however, the problem is that he wants these things, but the American people, not so much. We have no Battle of Adwa that we need Donald Trump to avenge. He believed somehow that January 6th counted, but happily, it did not. Opposite. Very few people want to make a national hero out of Enrique Tarrio, and even fewer want to invade freaking Canada. Tragically, he can feed his base with attacks on trans athletes and "DEI hires" - but they won't feel full unless the price of eggs is also falling. And it isn't. Trump isn't investing in infrastructure or creating jobs; in fact, he's destroying them - or letting the richest man in the world and his little minions destroy them, while meanwhile giving every appearance of stealing our persona data.  Destroying Biden's progress with respect to insulin?  That's not popular.  Neither is gutting Medicaid to extend a tax break to the rich.

Trump doesn't want to create anything; he only wants to rage and destroy. That might be an effective short-term strategy for winning an election, but it's not a long-term strategy for controlling a country, let alone running one (something I'm not sure particularly interests him - another reason, perhaps, that he seems more interested in international acquisitions than domestic improvements).  

Trump's power right now lies in speed, lies, Republican fealty, and not much else.  The courts are catching up to him, and the Republicans are getting yelled at - in their voice mails, in town halls, and I hope on the sidewalks.  The American people are pissed. Literally no one elected this man to stop us from finding the cure to Alzheimer's. No American wants their private data seized.  No American wants to be abandoned by the federal government when their area is devastated by hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.  Trump is making massive withdrawals from the national bank of good will without putting anything back in, and if things continue apace, I believe we'll soon see him floundering.

BLost and Found

This morning, I got an email from an old friend about an old art blog, one where I have not posted in perhaps seven years. She sent screen caps of her comments, friendly little greetings and remarks that she's been making this entire time, which is sweet and funny and hurts my heart. In between my omg and my oh no and my wait, do I even remember the password for that blog, I found this blog, which - wait. What?! I forgot about this blog. How in the Coke-Pepsi wars did I forget about this entire blog?!  Writing is one of the ways I mend my boat - plug holes, seal cracks, protect the wood. If I don't write, I don't float.

(And then I remember.  Alzheimer's. The pandemic. Cancer. My father, dying. My body, erupting with chronic pain. I've not been floating anywhere; I've been half-drowning, slowly, over years. There are probably a number of people who could blog that, eloquently and in real time. I, as it turns out, was not one of them.)   

It is a deeply different world now than when the first COVID case hit America. Donald Trump is back in office for the second time now, his administration operating like a racist tennis ball machine, pelting us with ICE raids; crashing planes; nominees so unqualified for their posts that they are actively dangerous to the country; South African billionaires who want to see the US government pulled apart like pizza bread; unconstitutional funding freezes; unconstitutional executive orders, anti-trans horrors, bizarre fantasies of taking control of Canada, Greenland, and Gaza, and the most zealously racist and irrational attacks on DEI, where "DEI" clearly just means Black Americans, and where "attacks" means writing with the big font that everyone who is not a white man is by definition less than. Less qualified. Less intelligent. Less competent. Less human.

Every single tennis balls hits painfully. Every one is violent. The relentlessness of them, the unstopping, uncaring, unfeeling barrage of them, is almost impossible to bear. And as hundreds if not thousands of people have observed, that, of course, is by design. Indiana's Jim Banks - one of my Senators - told CBS before Trump's inauguration that it would be "shock and awe," which really drives home the degree to which Trump is waging a war:

He's making it very clear that Republicans in the Senate and the House, we have a short window of time to get the things done that we need to get done. That's a different attitude than 2017. There were a lotta things that President Trump wanted to accomplish in those first two years that we never got around to. He's not gonna miss the moment this time.

The rush, Banks goes on to say, is the upcoming midterms.  Not everyone agrees that we will continue to have elections, but I am hoping we will retain a strong enough memory of ordinary democracy to insist upon midterms, which are less than two years away. I guess we'll see.

Republican Senators and representatives, meanwhile, are not really getting anything done except confirming Trump's appalling slate of nominees.  They certainly have little to say about Trump seizing their powers for himself, in violation of the law and the US constitution, even as Elon Musk is killing programs and people at the same time, even as the vice president is all but foaming at the mouth to have a true constitutional crisis, where the Supreme Court rules and the the president extends his middle finger.  

There are many organizers out there posting about the actions that we can take - that we must take - to mitigate the harm he is doing and to protect all those being targeted. I seek that wisdom every single day.  To participate in actions, however, we need our boats to stay in good order.  And that means we have to keep mending, plugging, sealing, charting a course, scanning the horizon, and checking the weather while also hydrating, getting enough sleep, working a job or two, making a meal or three, and keeping life going.  How are we meant to manage all of it at once? 

I read an essay last night by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg called "Fortify Inside: Why Spiritual Practice Matters During the Rising Authoritarian Tide." (I also literally just realized, looking back at her essay, that she is the one who pushed Jim Banks's "shock and awe" quote back to the forefront of my mind.) 

I appreciated at the deepest level the Rabbi's phrasing of this sentiment: "They are deliberately attempting to trigger a trauma response so that we are less able to respond from our whole selves and more likely to just go along with whatever's happening." I am grateful to her for this clear naming of what is happening to me and to millions of others. I am traumatized. I am out of my boat and down in the water, which I know must be deathly cold because my teeth have been chattering - not in the metaphor, but in reality. My teeth are chattering, rattling against my will or calling, for minutes at a time, sheerly from stress or anxiety. It's incredibly unnerving. I'm not of any use in that state.  I need back in my boat. 

I need a piece of her advice, too, which is to plug into a "big" source of energy - God, the universe, love, creativity, journaling, yoga - and engage in spiritual practice, whether by that name or by another, so that we can develop real resilience. (Read her essay for more on that.)  For me, this definitely means writing, and it means creating. I am finishing a crocheted blanket for my family, and I need to prioritize that over playing Tears of the Kingdom, which is more like spiritual Novocaine than spiritual practice, more like shutting down than charging up.

All of the things we need to do are active, including rest and self-care. Make. Build. Meditate. Stretch. Read. Brew tea.  Don't shut down. Charge up. 

We need you.  

   

Trump's Speech, Variously Fact Checked

When I talk about serious matters like Trump's January 8, 2019 prime-time speech on immigration, I usually crack a couple of jokes in my introductory paragraphs so that we can all fill our lungs with air before plunging into the dark water.  Notably, however, the chicken crossed the road on joking about Trump's immigration policies before Trump even announced that he was running.  Chickens want no part of his racist, xenophobic bullshit.

In the cacophony of fonts below, I excerpt Trump's speech and several fact checking sources.  I refused to watch, but obviously, I want to stay informed.

I don't know why the fonts are all drunk and rampaging in the streets. I assume it's in protest.

***

TRUMP (Transcript posted by NPR)

My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.

Every day, Customs and Border Patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country. We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.


CNN:

This is overstated. Available Customs and Border Protection data shows a total of 396,579 people were apprehended by the US Border Patrol for fiscal year 2018 at the southwest border, which would mean an average of 1,087 each day -- hardly the "thousands" that Trump purports. The numbers differ each month. The highest number of apprehensions was in September, with a daily average of nearly 1,400.

Apprehensions are still well below historic highs. In the early 2000s, for example, annual apprehensions routinely topped 1 million. 

Politico:

The number of people caught crossing at the border (the standard metric for determining the volume of illegal crossings generally) remains below annual levels under President Barack Obama and far below the high levels of the 1990s and early 2000s. Border Patrol arrested 396,579 people at the U.S. Mexico border in fiscal year 2018. The agency arrested an average of 400,751 people per year over the previous decade.

Washington Post:

The key word here is “humanitarian.” Border crossings are way off their peak in the 2000s, and they are relatively steady over the last several years.

There has been an increase, though, in border crossings by families, which have been at record levels, and that has tested the government’s ability to deal with their situations. For a time, they tried detaining all family members, which required separating families.

New York Times

This is misleading.

In November, the agency, which is actually named Customs and Border Protection (and which oversees the Border Patrol), apprehended 51,856 people trying to cross the border illegally. That’s about 1,700 per day.

The agency also deemed another 10,600 “inadmissible,” which refers to people who seek lawful entry into the United States but are barred from doing so. Together, that would be over 2,000, but “inadmissible” is not the same thing as illegal entry.

***

Trump:

America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation. But all Americans are hurt by uncontrolled, illegal migration. It strains public resources and drives down jobs and wages. Among those hardest hit are African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

CNN:

It's very difficult to know exactly how much or little undocumented immigrants cost the United States. Many experts contest the notion that undocumented immigrants are a strain on the economy. A 2017 analysis noted that undocumented immigrants "make considerable tax contributions," for example.

New York Times:

This needs context.

Some economists argue that immigrants drive down available jobs and wages for Americans only if they are competing for the same jobs as the domestic work force. In many cases, immigrants — legal or illegal — are seeking jobs that American citizens do not want to do.

Kevin Hassett, the White House’s top economist, argued before joining the Trump administration that immigration spurs economic growth and that the United States should double its intake of immigrants.

Vox:

This article was not written directly in response to this speech, but it does respond to similar rhetoric from a year ago in which Trump tries to pit minority groups against one another.  

***

TRUMP:

Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border. More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.

CNN:

Some 58,220 Americans died as a result of the Vietnam War. In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the number of total drug overdose deaths was 70,327.

However, the President's assertion is misleading, conflating the drugs coming across the US-Mexico border with total drug deaths in the US.

CNN:

While Trump's statistics on heroin deaths are true, it's unclear what a border wall would do to reduce the amount of heroin coming across the border.

The CDC reported that in 2017 more than 15,482 people died from drug overdoses involving heroin in the US. That averages out to about 297 individuals each week. In addition, DEA's Heroin Signature Program, which analyzes heroin samples to determine where they were manufactured, determined that heroin from Mexico made up 86% of the samples analyzed in 2016.

However, the majority of heroin that comes across the southern border is smuggled in privately-owned vehicles and tractor-trailers at legal ports of entry, where the drug is co-mingled with legal goods, according to the DEA's 2018 annual drug threat assessment.

POLITCO:

Misleading. Most fentanyl comes from China. Although most heroin enters the U.S. through the border with Mexico, most of that is intercepted at legal ports of entry, according to a 2018 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration. "A small percentage of all heroin seized by CBP along the land border was between Ports of Entry,” the report reads. A separate DEA report published three years earlier said Mexican cartels move “the bulk of their drugs” over the border using passenger vehicles or tractor trailers. “The drugs are typically secreted in hidden compartments when transported in passenger vehicles or comingled with legitimate goods when transported in tractor trailers,” the report reads.

***

TRUMP:

In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings. Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don't act right now.

Washington Post:

What Trump doesn’t say here: which years. PolitiFact fact-checked this during the 2016 campaign, when Trump made the same claim, and found that it was probably true as long as you include enough years, but that even then it was difficult to prove:

“‘Without time or geographic parameters, the statement is just as accurate as saying, 'Thousands of Americans have been killed by men,”’ said Charis E. Kubrin, a criminology professor at University of California at Irvine.

“The challenge in finding concrete numbers is due to a shortfall of data. There is no national database or study tracking how many people have been killed by undocumented immigrants or the nationality of the victims.”

Politico:

That distorts the truth. Several studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. A June 2018report by the libertarian Cato Institute found that legal immigrants were roughly one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans. Undocumented immigrants were half as likely to be incarcerated, according to the report, which drew on 2016 data from the American Community Survey. Do undocumented immigrants commit crimes? Of course — but at lower rates than their native-born counterparts.

***

Trump:

Last month, 20,000 migrant children were illegally brought into the United States — a dramatic increase. These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs. One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico. Women and children are the biggest victims, by far, of our broken system.

CNN:

Indeed, the trek to the US-Mexico border has been reported to be violent. According to data from Doctors Without Borders, 68.3% of migrants and refugees "entering Mexico reported being victims of violence during their transit toward the United States," and nearly one-third of women said they'd been sexually abused. But this very violence is also why women have chosen to travel in caravans.

Me: 

Obviously, Trump does not care even a tiny bit about women and children.  See also his family separation policy and his years of misogyny and racism.

*** I skipped a few paragraphs here ***

Trump:

Finally, as part of an overall approach to border security, law enforcement professionals have requested $5.7 billion for a physical barrier. At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall. This barrier is absolutely critical to border security. It's also what our professionals at the border want and need. This is just common sense.

CNN:

Democrats have long strenuously opposed Trump's campaign promise that he would build a concrete wall on the US-Mexico border. But they did not propose a steel barrier as an alternative. Rather, Democrats have continued to oppose the construction of any new steel or concrete barrier on the southern border. They have only kept the door open to funding a border barrier as part of a broader immigration deal.

Politico:

Congressional Democrats did not ask that the wall be made of steel rather than concrete. When Trump first said he was making that concession, Democratic party leaders said they didn't care. “There’s no requirement that this government be shut down while we deliberate the future of any barrier, whether it’s a fence or a wall,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

***

Trump:

The border wall would very quickly pay for itself. The cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year — vastly more than the $5.7 billion we have requested from Congress. The wall will also be paid for, indirectly, by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico.

New York Times:

False.

First, the revised North American Free Trade Agreement, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, has yet to pass in Congress. Any economic benefits from the agreement, if it passes, will most likely come in the form of lower tariffs for American companies or higher wages for American workers.

This is different from Mr. Trump’s campaign promise that Mexico would finance the wall.

Washington Post:

2h

1) Again, a border wall wouldn’t stop all the drugs; in fact, it would only stop a small proportion of heroin from Mexico, according to Trump’s own DEA.

2) Trump’s estimate of the cost of illegal drugs has fluctuated and is suspect.

3) Even if it saved money by stopped some drugs, there is also the matter of lost economic productivity. As The Post’s Christopher Ingraham has written, that could cost an estimated $4 billion per year.

In other words, the idea that the wall would “quickly pay for itself” is highly speculative, at best.

CNN:

"The wall will also be paid for indirectly by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico."

The President has made this false claim before.

Trump long ago abandoned his 2016 campaign promise that Mexico would pay to build a wall. Instead, he now makes the case that Mexico will "indirectly" pay for the barrier, thanks to the potential increase in tax revenue generated by his replacement for the North America Free Trade Agreement.

But the new deal hasn't yet been ratified by Congress, where Democrats have expressed opposition. And even if the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement ends up raising tax revenue, there's nothing earmarking that money for a wall. Income and corporate taxes are general revenue that would have to be appropriated by Congress.

Another way trade could bring money into the Treasury is through tariffs -- which are paid by American importers when they buy foreign goods. But like the original NAFTA, the new deal aims to keep trade between the three countries largely tariff-free.

***

I don't know about you, but that's about as much as I can stomach, especially since Trump spends a good chunk of the speech implying that undocumented immigrants are bloodthirsty murderers.