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McConnell, McCarthy, Cruz, Paul, Graham and other Republican leaders denying Biden’s victory all know that the election won’t actually be overturned. Barr knows that his egregious move of bringing the DOJ in to investigate voter fraud won’t overturn it either. This isn’t a coup attempt. Probably the only person who thinks Trump can still win

Nearly thirty years ago in the fall of 1991 two friends and I traveled around the US and Canada on a three-month tour giving presentations at colleges, activist hubs and community centers on radical social and ecological politics. Two days before Halloween, we began the southern leg of our “Liberating the Ecology Movement” tour by

Hi Folks, I have a new piece in the Washington Post on the history of the Republican Party and the far right, and what it means today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/16/gop-far-right-trump/ In case you hit a paywall, here’s the text: “I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to

The first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention featured Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple famous for pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protestors in front of their mansion in St. Louis. The next night, armed right-wing vigilantes confronted Black Lives Matter protestors in Kenosha, WI, where two people were shot to death and

What is the risk that Trump negates the results of the election in November and stays in office? It isn’t likely that he could simply refuse to leave office if he lost. The other branches of national government – Congress and the Supreme Court would likely stand against him out of basic commitments to bourgeois

As recently as yesterday, William Barr insisted in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that a federal presence was necessary to protect against “violent rioters and anarchists“ who “had hijacked legitimate protests” in Portland, a “mob” that would surely burn the Hatfield Federal Courthouse to the ground in short order were they to leave. Fearing

Trump’s deployment of federal agents to the streets of Portland, and his announced plans to do the same in Chicago, Albuquerque, and other US cities has been widely disparaged as a tactic to reverse his plunging approval ratings and shore up a flagging campaign. Trump himself was quite clear about the partisan stakes involved. “I’m

The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the US launched the largest protest movement in the country’s history, growing to encompass an ever-larger confrontation with the institutions and symbols of white supremacy. The movement soon went global, with demonstrations from Senegal to Sweden, Brazil to South Korea. The largest protests after the US

When Trump threatened governors and mayors last month in a Rose Garden speech before using federal officers to attack demonstrators in Lafayette Park, it wasn’t merely a disturbing moment of fascist spectacle. It announced a nationwide campaign of state violence and repression. Acting as a kind of Praetorian Guard (or perhaps Schutzstaffel), Department of Homeland