Leftists for Trump

Yes, there were some… among them friends and former colleagues of mine. Some still might have Trump’s back — I don’t know because I haven’t canvassed them all. (Maybe I don’t want to know.) Yes, Adam Walinsky — the former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy — caused a big public uproar back in 2016 by declaring he would vote for Trump out of understandable disgust with the Democratic Party embrace of the permanent war state. Yes, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was asked by President-elect Trump to join his anti-vax campaign and last summer he spoke at an anti-shutdown rally in Berlin that included white nationalist extremists. (But Bobby Jr. also denounced Trump as a “bully” during the 2020 presidential race and made clear he was going to vote Democratic.) Glenn Greenwald, who came to prominence as a columnist for Salon (the independent online publication I founded in 1995), announced he was forced out of The Intercept last year for his critical coverage of Hunter Biden and became a favorite guest of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Oliver Stone, while denouncing Trump as a raging narcissist, has also embraced Vladimir Putin and the Trumpian attack on “cancel culture.” Longtime critics of the deep state like Peter Dale Scott — a mentor as well as a friend — welcomed Trump’s skeptical view of the military-industrial complex (which the president hypocritically further enriched and empowered), his withdrawal of troops from the Middle East, and his refusal to be badgered by the national security state and the mainstream media into another Cold War with Russia.

People (especially thoughtful, open-minded people) aren’t just one thing. We should allow for complexity — yes, even when it comes to opinions of tyrants like Trump who are “clear and present” dangers to democracy (at least for a few more days). And just because we sided with the likes of David Frum and John Brennan in our furious resistance against Trump, doesn’t prevent us from resuming our attacks on these men as the former apparatchiks of — and continuing apologists for — U.S. terror.

The American Left has been politically marginalized for so long that sometimes our leaders and intellectuals lose their balance and join arms with sketchy characters or populist movements. We should criticize these people when they lose their way, but we should also remember that in most respects they are still our friends and allies. I trust these left-wing mavericks more than Liz Cheney or Bill Kristol or any of the other neocon warmongers that CNN and MSNBC now embrace.

WTF Is Going On?

All the pundits and scholars are trying to figure out these holy-shit times. The New York Times checks in with historians like Jay Winik and Timothy Snyder. CNN and MSNBC regularly check with Doris Kearns Goodwin (lose the bad wig!), Michael Beschloss (lose the shoe-polish hair dye!) and Douglas Brinkley. These historians all say we’re living through, um, “historic” times. Thanks for your insight! For the deepest insights, I read actual history books — or literature.

Last night I finished “Red Pill,” the latest novel by Indian-British writer Hari Kunzru, who now lives with his wife and two young children in Brooklyn. The novel is a timely, disturbing evocation of the growing political and psychological menace of our times. The protagonist of the novel, a New York writer with a febrile sense of the billowing danger around him, comes undone while attending a scholarly retreat in Berlin — in a historically haunted mansion on the shores of Lake Wannsee, near where the Final Solution was devised by the demonic visionaries of the Third Reich. Our narrator meets the mind-fucking creator of a popular TV show that glorifies the purging violence of rogue cops; he witnesses the refugee lives that await millions of us as the world’s social and environmental order collapses; he feels targeted by the billowing technological authoritarianism of our day. He stares into the abyss, and he loses it.

Near the end of “Red Pill,” our narrator is back in New York with his deeply worried wife and their young daughter, being pieced together by anti-psychotic drugs and a baby boomer-era shrink who doesn’t get it. He “thinks too much” — life is not so labyrinthine, the psychiatrist in “a long heavy skirt and silver Indian jewelry” blithely tells him. He tries to resist. “I told her that what she said might once have been true, but the internet had changed things. There were underground currents, new modes of propagation. It wasn’t even a question of ideas, not straight-forwardly, but feelings, atmospheres, yearnings, threats. What kind of threats, she wanted to know. Well, I said. A lot of people quibbled about terms, but essentially I was talking about Fascism… I saw that I had no hope of persuading her. She was too old, too insulated by her degrees and her shelves of books. I was being, she told me blandly, rather melodramatic about what was essentially a marginal set of ideas. We weren’t living in Weimar Germany.”

“Red Pill” concludes with a 20016 presidential election party where the liberal New Yorkers begin the evening quaffing Champagne and donning ironic party hats, but by the end have descended into a horror show. Late that night, as Trump slouches toward his Electoral College victory, the narrator lies awake in bed, clutching his wife and young daughter. It’s a stormy night in New York. “Outside the wide world is howling and scratching at the window. Tomorrow morning we have no choice but to let it in.”

And now, over four years later, the nightmare is finally over. Or is it? The “carnage” that Trump ferociously declared had taken over America really now is consuming us as his reign spits and crackles to its smoking end. Over 4,000 American a day still dying from the plague that he made worse; National Guardsmen with automatic weapons crowded into the marble grandeur of the Capitol; barking mad Congress members like Lauren Boebert of Colorado, yelling shrilly that “I call bull crap on Democrats” during yesterday’s impeachment “debate,” like some emotionally distraught high schooler.

Let’s stick with Boebert for a moment — because no matter what now happens to Trump, political leaders like Boebert and the Americans they represent aren’t going anywhere. Before winning her upset Congressional victory, Boebert ran a restaurant in rural Colorado where she encouraged her waiters to openly carry guns. Just because. She has expressed sympathies for the bizarre beliefs of the QAnon cult. While Capitol security anxiously rushed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to a secure location during the January 6 violent invasion, Boebert tweeted news of her escape. “Today is 1776,” Boebert crowed on the bloody day in Washington. Instead of hiding away Boebert during the impeachment proceedings yesterday — perhaps with her legal team to prepare her own defense against sedition and incitement charges — the Republican leadership in the House gave her an on-camera platform to air her ravings.

So, yes, I’m afraid the carnage will not end on January 20. I will celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden and that of Kamala Harris. But we all have to sleep lightly these nights. The wind is still howling and scratching at our window.

Postscript: You needn’t bother with Kunzru’s meandering, confusing essay about our fraught times in the current Harper’s. His fiction gets much deeper into the American malaise than his journalism.

The Speaker Has Spoken

Nancy Pelosi is my Congressional representative. I’ve not always been happy with her. Sometimes she struck me as more of a bag woman for Democratic coffers than a tribune of San Francisco values. I even voted against her one or two times during the Democratic primary, as a protest against her endless reign. But I’ve never been prouder of my Congresswoman than during the last week.

Democracy, as I’ve written many times, is a fragile eggshell in the tumult of history. And American history has seldom been as tumultuous as it’s been in recent months and days. During these times, we need strong leadership — power that recognizes it’s founded in the majority will of the people. Fortunately for our beleaguered, bleeding country, we have leadership like that now. In representatives like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jerry Nadler of New York.

Opening the impeachment debate today on the House floor, Speaker Pelosi solemnly declared that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our country” and “feeling his power slip away,” she declared, he unleashed a mob on the sanctity of the Capitol to terminate “nearly two and a half centuries of democracy” in “a fiery clash.”

Pelosi was firm in her constitutional certainty, but also in a state of mourning for what America has become. She wore, appropriately, a dark blue suit that was nearly funereal. And she invoked the hallowed words of assassinated martyrs Lincoln and Kennedy.

We now know how dark a day that January 6 was. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the primary targets of the bloodthirsty insurrectionists, just declared she feared for her life, adding she was unable to provide further details for security reasons. The aim of some militants was clearly to decapitate not only the leaders of the Democratic Party, but any Republicans they deemed traitors to Trump’s cause.

So when Nancy Pelosi tells Pentagon officials to man up and approve the carrying of weapons by the National Guard troops now protecting the Capitol building in advance of next week’s presidential inauguration, I’m all for it. I’m also for increased security in state capitals around the country — especially in Lansing, Michigan where goons planned to kidnap the governor and where the statehouse was invaded by apes with long guns to protest coronavirus public health mandates. The ire of these unhinged militia types is often directed against women in office, with the Capitol mob chanting last week to get “that bitch” and “cunt” Pelosi. Misogyny and fascism often go hand in hand.

But yes, we also have to guard against 9/11 fervor and block any legislative hysteria aimed at rolling back the rights of peaceful protesters. Trying to exploit public horror over January 6, some state legislatures — unsurprisingly in Mississippi and Indiana, and elsewhere — are trying now to penalize BLM activists. https://theintercept.com/2021/01/12/capitol-riot-anti-protest-blm-laws/

So yes — let’s get armored to defend democracy. But never forget the values that we’re defending.

The Devil and Mr. McConnell

For years he made a profitable deal with the Devil. In return for his loyal, even blind support, he got his judges, his tax cuts for the super rich, his wife in the Cabinet, his pork for Kentucky. But after making good use of the Great Satan in the White House, Mitch McConnell is now ready to “purge” his Republican Party of Donald Trump, according to this evening’s New York Times. The Senate Majority Leader (for a few more days) reportedly “hates” Trump for inciting a mob to trash the Capitol — which McConnell thinks of as HIS house. And his rumpus with Georgia Republicans also cost McConnell his Senate throne. So it’s little wonder that, according to the Times, McConnell is now ready to vote for Trump’s impeachment — along with other major Capitol Hill Republicans like Rep. Liz Cheney, her party’s number three official in the House.

So are McConnell and Cheney and the other rats scurrying from the sinking ship now heroes? Well, I’ll let out one big cheer for them — because Trump might be walking dead, but he’s still a dangerous zombie. And he needs several stakes driven through where his heart should be. There are still many thousands of Trump fanatics who are willing to throw themselves against the enhanced security of the nation’s capital — as well as numerous state capitols — on Inauguration Day. And there are still Congressional crazies like Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama and Paul Gosar of Arizona, who urged on the Trump barbarians last week and are STILL unrepentant seditionists. So yes, one cheer today for Mitch McConnell… and a bigger one if he really does vote for impeachment.

But let’s not forget that McConnell was Trump’s biggest enabler in Washington for four years. It took him fearing for his life — a fear that his black constituents must feel every time they cross paths with the police or confront the white militants who proudly displayed the Confederate and Trump flags last week in McConnell’s “sacred” Capitol building.

Yes, McConnell himself was a Satanist until Satan does what he does and went a little too far.

The Smiling Policeman

His son Marcus remembers his “indomitable smile. No matter what came at him, he had that smile.” And a LOT came at Prentice Earl Sanders during his nearly four decades as a San Francisco homicide detective, a career capped by his stint in the 1990s as the city’s first African American police chief. Along the way, Sanders — who died on Monday at 83 — had to fight his way for respect, even in liberal SF. Here’s how I quoted Sanders , who was born in Jim Crow-era Texas, in my book “Season of the Witch”:

“There wasn’t some scowling cracker on the other end of the whip. In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile. Like they were doing you a favor when they told you they didn’t have any jobs open after you’d seen half a dozen white guys fill out applications, or you couldn’t buy a house, when they’d just sold one to a white guy who made less money.”

During his storied career as an SFPD homicide cop, during which he was paired with other legends like Rotea Gilford and Napoleon Hendrix, Sanders had to fight for justice within the department and on the streets. In my chapter about the Zebra serial murder case in the 1970s, during which a small Nation of Islam death cult targeted white victims and pushed the city of tolerance to the brink, I tell how Sanders kept his cool throughout the powder-keg times. As he and his partner Gilford pursued the Zebra killers, they could feel the racial tension building all around them, sensing “the whole place could go up in smoke.” During the city’s disastrous experiment with a “stop and frisk” policy aimed at black men, Sanders even had to intervene to stop a confrontation between Gilford and brutal white cops from exploding in gunfire.

I was gratified to read in the SF Chronicle obit that Earl Sanders often had a book in his hands. His grandson Prentice, whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, has a similar love of books. Prentice — who is a friend of my son Joe, costarred in his short film “American Paradise,” and helped develop the feature “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” — often was reading a book while he was visiting or crashing at our house. As soon as I recommended a book to Prentice from our library, he would devour it and engage me in conversation about it.

Earl Sanders belongs to a legendary time in San Francisco history — and as these lions disappear, the city seems smaller. But I’m counting on the younger ones like Prentice and Joe to keep the city’s flame burning.

“The coup is still rolling”

That was Beto O’Rourke, talking to Lawrence O’Donnell tonight on MSNBC. O’Rourke has joined the growing chorus for the resignation of seditionist Senators Cruz and Hawley, the impeachment and expulsion of Trump, and a more robust U.S. democracy. All well and good. But in the meantime, the new Confederates are unrepentant (except coup clowns like the one who posed with a shit-eating grin carrying off Speaker Pelosi’s office sign, who has expensively lawyered up — thanks to his doctor wife — and is now pleading for mercy. Some brave freedom fighter.) There are plans for pro-Trump uprisings across America on Inauguration Day. And you have to forgive combat veterans like Rep. Jason Crow (D-Co.) for not having complete faith in capital security on Jan. 20. Crow had to hunker down in the House gallery during the mob riot, reassuring terrified fellow House members and wondering urgently if he needed to take a gun off one of the nervous Capitol officers and get ready to start shooting.

And so it’s come to this, America. To weaponized rebellion against U.S. democracy and the rule of law. The liberal class is understandably outraged, as are most Americans. CNN’s Chris Cuomo. Don Lemon and Jake Tapper, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Atlantic all demand a swift and devastating justice for the Trump cabal and the army of right-wing extremists. But their demands are late in coming. Meanwhile, Time magazine (which is still a bastion of conventional thought under tech mogul owner Marc Benioff, but now features deeply-reported features) includes a very disturbing article about the Azov Battalion, a white supremacist militia in Ukraine which has used Facebook to recruit thousands of Americans and other foreigners into its military-training programs.

After 9/11, the media and the national security state became violently incensed about Al Qaeda and other militant Islamists, focusing their wrath on their financing, training and political support systems. Only now is this wrath finally being directed at white nationalist terrorism — a much bigger threat to domestic tranquility than angry Islamists — and their political enablers.

I welcome the rising anger within the media and the Democratic Party about the combatants who consider them enemies of the people. The danger to democracy is real and it’s growing.

But Trumpism did not fall from the sky. It has burst from its chrysalis after decades of contempt and neglect by the liberal elites. Will these special media reports and Congressional investigations also examine the many ways that the liberal establishment sold out the nation’s “deplorables” and made then fight and die in calamitous wars, from the phony Gulf of Tonkin to the phony WMD of Saddam Hussein.

It’s important to note that a number of those at the “spear tip” of the Capitol invasion were military veterans, including Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed while trying to be the first one through a shattered Congressional chamber window. How much of a breeding ground for neofascism has our military culture become, with its endless wars for senseless reasons?

We need a reckoning in this country, alright — but one much deeper than the New York Times or Chuck Schumer has in mind.

Welcome to the Show

I’m going to tell you all about the David Talbot Show… but let me preface this welcome with a few spontaneous remarks. I’m nearing 70 and the world we dreamed about when we were young seems further away than ever. We’re locked down, we’re struggling to make ends meet, we know people who got sick, we know people who died, most of today’s political passion seems to belong to people who want to tear down democracy to make America great again, and meanwhile the rich get richer while we get… well, you know what we get.

But we have each other. We have this campfire. And we don’t need Facebook or Twitter or any other tech giant to bring us together in its glow.

So, let’s learn together and give us each other strength and inspiration. And tell each other about books and music and films and TV shows and podcasts that have changed our lives. Let’s get outraged about what America has become, but let’s also discuss ways to change it for the better. And let’s now and then make each other laugh.

 And now, what to expect from the Show…

The David Talbot Show is a radical break from journalism as usual. Independent commentators and reporters are keeping the free press alive, as the media juggernauts of the right and center-left keep most of the public in their corporate grip. The David Talbot Show rejects the lockstep thinking of Fox News and their far-right competitors, as well as the liberal conformity of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and the other bullhorns for the U.S. establishment and national security state.

It's not that these liberal newspapers and news channels are bastions of fake news. They employ many fine reporters – some of whom worked for me at Salon years ago – and publish important stories on a daily basis. But their journalism – especially about Washington power – often needs to be interpreted, or “dissected” as the late, great Danny Schecter, “The News Dissector,” put it.

The David Talbot Show will present people and ideas that challenge conventional wisdom. And it’s not just a site for hot air. Our bracing viewpoints will be backed by research and facts, and will often be rooted in historical analysis.

American democracy is broken, after years of assaults and betrayals from within by powerful elites. The David Talbot Show will expose this treachery and light the path toward a national renewal.

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