Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2018

• Mystery Outage
• Mis-Attributed
• Fire Anniversary
• Quizzy
• Oktoberfest
• Little Dog
• Soccer Rumors
• Coach Retires
• Test Scores
• Skunkweed
• Immigrants
• More Padilla
• Republican Lord
• Tax Dodgers
• Albion Bridge
• Parent 911
• County Enforcement
• Cannabis Community
• Yesterday's Catch
• Swamp Creatures
• Johnny No-nuts
• Updated Edition
• Comments
• Craig Awaits
• Consent
• Education
• Access Program
• Fascist State

JUST IN. All of Boonville went dark last night about 8pm for approximately ten minutes. No explanation yet for the brief outage.

Mike Kalantarian (Rancho Navarro) adds: Same thing happened here, but we also got a call from PG&E telling us only 17 customers were affected and power would be restored by midnight.

A READER WRITES: “In this week's Fort Bragg Advocate and Beacon about the October 1st Mendocino Coast District Hospital candidates forum, editor Chris Calder made a serious error in attributing the quote, “We need a new CEO, and I don’t say that lightly,” to Amy McColley when Rex Gressett actually made the statement. Ms. McColley, in answering a question about how MCDH Board members should deal with the CEO, had just finished her answer about how to hold CEOs accountable when the same question went to Rex. His first words were the aforementioned quote. Readers and voters expect careful attention to detail from our news sources. This error should be corrected immediately online, along with apologies to both Ms. McColley and Mr. Gressett. Next week's coast papers should contain a front page correction and apology to these two candidates, not a retraction tucked in the corner of an inside page of the Advocate and Beacon.”

MENDOCINO COUNTY REDWOOD COMPLEX FIRE ANNIVERSARY

THE BOONVILLE QUIZ returns Thursday, Oct. 11, the Second Thursday of the month: Guest quizmasters. Meanwhile I urge you to keep calm and carry on. — Cheers, Steve Sparks, The Quiz Master.

OKTOBERFEST, Saturday, Oct. 20, 5pm. Live Oak Building, Boonville. Be there!

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “Columbus Day. I'll tell you two-footers something. Late at night the original people visit this place. Sometimes as many as a hundred of them appear to have a look at the place they lived for thousands of years and left almost exactly as they found it except for a few arrowheads we still find around here. And they were good to their dogs, too. Not to put down your Columbus Day, but Boonville was better before he those Spaniards got here.”

SUSSING out the truth of prevalent rumors is seldom easy, but the one that says boys’ soccer at the high school has folded is untrue. High school principal Jim Snyder put it this way: “I can't comment on any personnel issues, but I can tell you that Adrian Maldonado is still our soccer coach, and no soccer player has approached me about throwing in the towel for the season. If anything changes I will let you know.”

MR. MALDONADO apparently hasn’t pursued a full teaching credential per his agreement upon hiring on with AV Unified, but this alleged oversight, or whatever it is, doesn’t affect his coaching position.

WE WISH it weren’t true that Luis Espinoza has stepped down as high school basketball coach. A detective with the Mendo Sheriff’s Department, Espinoza said, when I saw him last week, that he couldn’t give the coaching position the time it needed, what with full time work chasing down scofflaws and raising a family of his own. A truly gifted coach, Espinoza always managed to put a competitive team on the floor, often without a single consistent scorer. He’s going to be very hard to replace.

WHILE WE’RE visiting the local schools, the just released state test scores reveal that 49.88 percent of California students met or exceeded English-language standards, while only 38.65 percent met or exceeded math standards. Anderson Valley’s scores were close to the statewide average in English, but math scores were lower than the state’s failed average.

ESSENCE of skunk weed prevalent throughout downtown Boonville, prices down to around $400 a pound.

IN THE BEGINING there was Sam, Sam Prather. For many years four parcels of land drew water from springs on Sam Prather's Indian Creek Road ranch property. Sam watered his sheep from the modest stream diversion, it was Lynn Archambault's sole source for her one acre; and it provided water for the Edwards family’s two acres, supplementing the Edwards’ productive well. And Sam’s water provided John and Linda Hulbert with their water, Linda being a cousin of Sam’s.

EVERYONE was fine with this arrangement all the way back to the early days of the twentieth century. Then the Edwards place sold to a San Jose pot farmer and talented iron worker named Brian Wade Padilla who proceeded to build a Class K 2600 square-foot "storage/ag" building with an attached greenhouse right up against Sam Prather's property line.

THE NEWCOMER from San Jose soon found himself in a dispute with Lynn Archambault, a highly regarded, long-time Valley musician and teacher and not at all a disputatious personality. Ms. Archambault lost the dispute, causing her to spend many thousands of dollars to dig her own well.

BY HELPING HIMSELF to the water from a point "outside of the easement," damming the stream to do so and leaving Sam, Ms. Archambault and the Hulberts to catch as catch can, Padilla was subsequently found by Fish and Wildlife to be in violation of a variety of state laws.

PADILLA, no dummy, hired connected Willits attorney Chris Neary and counter-sued both Fish and Wildlife and Sam Prather. It should be emphasized that Sam’s dismantling of Padilla’s diversion occurred with both Fish and Wildlife’s sanction and the physical presence and assistance of Fish and Wildlife’s Warden White. In other words, Sam, standing on his own property, had the full approval of state government to destroy Padilla’s illegal diversion. But DA David Eyster, claiming "insufficient evidence” in the face of game warden White’s meticulously and irrefutable assessment of Padilla’s violations, dropped the charges against Padilla. (Padilla's attorney Chris Neary was Eyster's campaign manager, which is what is meant by “connected” in the context of Neary-Padilla.)

FAST FORWARD, Padilla managed to get $50,001 in cash from Sam’s insurance carrier and a fantastic “Boundary Line Adjustment” that Sam was told would be about three acres of his land in merely a minor theft of Sam’s ranch. But when the property was finally surveyed it turned out to be that 7.6 acres of Sam’s land now belonged to Padilla, that 7.6 acres being a big chunk of Sam’s best lower pasture. Sam, paying mightily for legal representation that steadily screwed him, challenged this swindle in court, rightly claiming there was no meeting of minds over the acreage amount. And lost.

UPSHOT: Padilla installs an illegal creek diversion, Fish and Wildlife charge him with four violations, but he takes all of the water for Sam's sheep and his neighbors and gets a half million dollars worth of property and $50,000 cash into the bargain! And now Padilla and Neary are suing deep pockets Fish and Wildlife for citing Padilla in the first place! If their jive case is heard in Mendocino County the San Jose pot magnate and his Willits attorney will certainly win another big chunk of cash, this time taxpayer cash.

IT'S ALWAYS REPORTED LIKE THIS: "There’s a new bazillionaire at the top of the Forbes 400 for the first time since 1994. Amazon founder CEO Jeff Bezos has unseated Bill Gates from the spot after a 24-year run—and became the first person to appear in the ranks with a fortune of more than $100 billion. The Bezos fortune jumped by an incredible $78.5 billion since last year. Gates is in second position, ahead of Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg. Much further down the list, Donald Trump has dropped 11 places to No. 259, as his net worth remained the same from last year at $3.1 billion. Investor George Soros lost the most money over the year with his net worth falling to $8.3 billion from $23 billion—because he shifted $18 billion of his fortune to his charitable Open Society Foundations."

AND NEVER followed by the question, Why are these people allowed to accumulate powerful fortunes like this in the first place? Surely half a bil would satisfy most of us. Tax the sumbitches til they scream, I say. Foundations being one more tax dodge, tax hell outta them, too.

THREATENED ALBION BRIDGE

This photo shows what will be potentially lost:

(Photo by Rachel Ganapoler)

* * *

JUST IN: "Caltrans is busy dealing with the Salmon Creek Bridge geotechnical investigation for 2-3 more days. It could be that they start with the Albion Bridge Thursday or Friday." Annemarie Weibel

OH, COME ON - CALL 911 FOR THIS?

MSP heard a dispatch @ 8:17 am from a Ukiah mother who said her daughter was refusing to leave her car and go to school. She wanted a unit to be dispatched to have her get out of the car. And one was dispatched — the unit reported, "this is an ongoing issue between the two about the daughter not wanting to go to school. They were counseled."

(MendocinoSportsPlus)

HAND & GLOVE MUST FIT

by Jim Shields

Appears I somewhat influenced the county into somewhat enforcing its cannabis ordinance.

At the Sept 11 BOS meeting, Planning and Building Dept. staff delivered a report on enforcement. Highlights from the report noted that:

• 50 percent of all complaints P&B received are for cannabis-related activities.
• 223 cannabis complaints to-date from 177 locations.
• 64 complaints “in the permit process” from 44 locations.
• 159 complaints for 133 locations not in the permit process. primarily in the north county area that are referred to law enforcement.

P&B code enforcement eradicated 14,000 plants not in the permit process, some violations have occurred even after abating plants.

• Law enforcement eradicated 17.000 plants from 11 locations on referral from P&B code enforcement
• 17 administrative citations have been issued pursuant to 29 complaints

According to an emailer, Supervisor John McCowen “made a point after the presentation to request that the report be made public perhaps after the first of the year, because people are accusing the county of not doing any enforcement.”

This week, evidently spurred by McCowen’s request to be more transparent on enforcement activities, the CEO’s office issued the following announcement:

Beginning Oct. 1, 2018, the Mendocino County Code Enforcement Division will now be publishing news releases on code enforcement activities to the Code Enforcement News webpage on a regular basis.

News releases will be published regularly under the following three categories:

1. Individual significant enforcement actions as they occur
2. Statistical information for periods of time throughout the calendar year
3. Data related to Cannabis Abatement

The Code Enforcement Division of Planning and Building Services receives all Cannabis and General Code Violation complaints in the unincorporated areas of the County. Complaints can be made in person at the Planning and Building Services Department or by visiting www.mendocinocounty.org/codeenforcement. Cannabis specific complaints can also be filed by calling the Cannabis Complaint Hotline at: (844) 421-WEED(9333).

To sign up for Code Enforcement News e-notifications, please visit www.mendocinocounty.org/community/enotification.

At this week’s BOS meeting, the Supes were informed by P&B staff that currently 1,031 individuals had applied for cannabis permits, which represents approximately 10 percent of the conservatively estimated 10,000 cultivators in the county. That, of course, means that 90 percent of cultivators are not in compliance with the ordinance.

I also found it amazing that after nearly 18 months of the cannabis ordinance being in effect, only 189 permits have been “issued” — whatever that means, and only 44 permits have actually been “approved” — whatever that means.

P&B staff also reported that 710 applications were “under review,” while 10 were “in queue” and 51 applications had been withdrawn.

While it’s encouraging that county officials are ostensibly taking some steps to enforce the cannabis ordinance, they clearly have a long ways to go before reaching the goal of full compliance.

Clearly, unless the county accelerates action on enforcing its own ordinance, and the sooner the better — the small family pot farmer’s existence is at peril because they won’t be able to survive in a marketplace dominated by non-compliant growers. Pot prices are at all-time lows because the market is over-loaded with product.

As I’ve said many times before, there are only two basic components to any regulatory framework. There is a cohesive system of regulations and the means to enforce them. They fit like hand and glove. You can’t have one without the other. Yet, that has been the very situation this county has been in since the cannabis ordinance was enacted almost a year ago and a half ago. The hand and the glove have never fit. That has to change if the people who built this industry — the moms and pops — are going to be around to benefit from legalization.

(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, and is also the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)

THE CANNABIS COMMUNITY AND THE FOG OF WAR

by John Hardin

I was reminded recently of a peculiar event that took place at the Mateel Community Center a couple of years ago called the “Community Values Conference.” A group of cannabis entrepreneurs wanted to use the term “SoHum Community Values” as a marketing tool to promote and distinguish their fine cannabis products. I attended to remind them that, while they still had a great concert hall, SoHum offers very little in terms of community services.

We had, and have, an extreme housing shortage in SoHum, but we have no shelter or services for people without housing. At the time, we had a rash of brutal assaults, mostly against defenseless elderly disabled men who had nowhere to go, and local social media sites dripped with hatred and vitriol aimed at our unhoused population. I wanted to see what kind of values statement the people whose kids beat a helpless old man into a coma and left him lying on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood could come up with.

Besides that, we have several homicides every year, where young people come here to work, but instead someone kills them and buries them in the woods. Those bodies are rarely found. Arrests and convictions are much rarer still, but law enforcement continues to find egregious environmental destruction at grow sites all over SoHum. People around here don’t bat an eyelash about any of it. If not human life and the natural environment, one has to wonder, what do these people actually value?

At the event, we worked through a series of exercises where we pulled a bunch of positive sounding platitudes out of our asses and reassembled them, according to their popularity, into statements of incomprehensible happy-talk. I can’t recall any of these statements, but I do remember that they seemed quite unmemorable at the time. Still, I think I recognize what the organizers of this event hoped to highlight about their community, and why they might think it would be good for business.

I say “their” community, because of the difference between SoHum’s cannabis growers’ community and the SoHum community at large. SoHum, as a whole, remains as alienated and fractured as any rural American community, and we’re not likely to agree on much, including values. However, one segment of our community enjoys a rare degree of acceptance and comradery. For cannabis growers, SoHum is a very special place.

In most of the country, cannabis growers tend to live very isolated lives. Because of the stiff criminal penalties for commercial cannabis cultivation, growers have to be very careful about who they allow into their lives. If you grow weed in Kansas, you might not know another grower. They don’t have highly specialized garden supply stores in Ohio, at least not in my town, and you couldn’t just drive across town to pick up a tray of rooted clones. If you grow pot almost anywhere else in the country, you do it all yourself, and you do it all alone, and the more you grow, the more isolating it becomes.

I didn’t know anyone else who grew their own weed until I started working with Mass Cann, where I met a number of other, also very isolated, growers. We compared product and talked about cannabis incessantly. It felt great to meet kindred spirits and I learned a lot about growing weed that way. When I got here, my background and interest in cannabis helped me make friends and find employment. That doesn’t really happen anywhere else — at least it didn’t back then. Here in SoHum, cannabis unites us and brings us together, and that’s a rare and powerful thing.

Over time however, this cannabis-centric culture developed its own character, but it also developed a mythology about itself. During the War on Drugs, it was important to portray growers sympathetically, in order to garner public support for their cause. We cultivated the myth of “mom and pop,” the original humble hippie growers, but in reality, secrecy shrouded the whole industry, and we ignored, and accepted, a lot of bad behavior in our own community. We learned to turn a blind eye and keep our mouths shut about the dark side of the industry and what happens here.

Also, people began to conflate the value of cannabis to society with the price of cannabis on the black market. People started to believe that growing cannabis didn’t just pay better than other kinds of work, but that it was worth more. In reality, the value of cannabis to society depends on it being cheap for the consumer. Paradoxically, the more cannabis costs, the less valuable it is, and the less benefit people derive from it. Of course, the quality of our cannabis here in SoHum is so legendary that no one could possible exaggerate it further, but we will continue to try. All of this tends to inflate, in our own minds, the value of what we do here.

In this way, our shared passion for cannabis, coupled with the industry’s culture of secrecy and our own need for acceptance, skewed our perception of reality. We learned to ignore what was really happening around here, and started to believe our own bullshit propaganda. We also forgot that the community of cannabis growers is not the community of SoHum, and that the community of SoHum is not society at large. We’ve lived in this bubble of unreality for a long time, because cannabis growers had real money, and anyone who wanted any of it had to suck up to them and tell them what they want to hear.

Today however, Google Earth deprives growers of their secrecy while legalization slashes their income. Growers can no longer afford their own reality, and the people around them are less likely to afford it to them. The bubble of unreality is collapsing. There is certainly a value to community, and it is something to celebrate, but an insulated community can lose touch with reality, and money is the best insulation in that regard. I think it’s really tragic that cannabis culture here in SoHum has been so warped by the dynamics of the War on Drugs. You could call it the “fog of war.” The cannabis community remains reluctant to face reality here in SoHum, and because of that we will likely endure a very difficult transition to legalization.

(Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)

CATCH OF THE DAY, October 8, 2018

FEDIL BARRALES, Ukiah. DUI-drugs&alcohol.

WILLIAM BARRY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

JARED BROWN, Forestville/Fort Bragg. Concealed dirk-dagger, evasion.

MATTHEW FAUST, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting. (Frequent flyer.)

NICHOLAS HALVORSEN, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer)

PATRICK HANOVER, Covelo. Protective order violation. (Frequent flyer)

JUDITH JAMISON, Covelo. DUI causing bodily injury, felony hit&run resulting in death or injury.

RAYMUNDO MADUENO-AYON, Ukiah. DUI, divided highway.

VIOLET MCALISTER, Ukiah. Burglary.

CHARLES NICKERMAN, Fort Bragg. DUI, suspended license (for DUI)

EVERARDO OLVERA, Albion. Domestic battery, false imprisonment.

ROGER PETERS, Covelo. Assault with firearm, domestic abuse, criminal threats, false imprisonment, receiving stolen property, felon with firearm, ammo possession by prohibited person, protective order violation.

AMICA WETZLER, Ukiah. Burglary.

AFTERMATH AS PROLOGUE

by James Kunstler

“I believe her!”

Really? Why should anyone believe her?

Senator Collins of Maine said she believed that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford experienced something traumatic, just not at the hands of Mr. Kavanaugh. I believe Senator Collins said that to placate the #Metoo mob, not because she actually believed it. I believe Christine Blasey Ford was lying, through and through, in her injured little girl voice, like a bad imitation of Truman Capote.

I believe that the Christine Blasey Ford gambit was an extension of the sinister activities underway since early 2016 in the Department of Justice and the FBI to un-do the last presidential election, and that the real and truthful story about these seditious monkeyshines is going to blow wide open.

It turns out that the Deep State is a small world. Did you know that the lawyer sitting next to Dr. Ford in the Senate hearings, one Michael Bromwich, is also an attorney for Andrew McCabe, the former FBI Deputy Director fired for lying to investigators from his own agency and currently singing to a grand jury? What a coincidence. Out of all the lawyers in the most lawyer-infested corner of the USA, she just happened to hook up with him.

It’s a matter of record that Dr. Ford traveled to Rehobeth Beach Delaware on July 26, where her Best Friend Forever and former room-mate, Monica McLean, lives, and that she spent the next four days there before sending a letter July 30 to Senator Diane Feinstein that kicked off the “sexual assault” circus. Did you know that Monica McClean was a retired FBI special agent, and that she worked in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York under Preet Bharara, who had earlier worked for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer?

Could Monica McLean have spent those four days in July helping Christine Blasey Ford compose her letter to Mrs. Feinstein? Did you know that Monica McClean’s lawyer, one David Laufman is a former DOJ top lawyer who assisted former FBI counter-intel chief Peter Strozk on both the Clinton and Russia investigations before resigning in February this year — in fact, he sat in on the notorious “unsworn” interview with Hillary in 2016. Wow! What a really small swamp Washington is!

Did you know that Ms. Leland Keyser, Dr. Ford’s previous BFF from back in the Holton Arms prep school, told the final round of FBI investigators in the Kavanaugh hearing last week — as reported by The Wall Street Journal — that she “felt pressured” by Monica McLean and her representatives to change her story — that she knew nothing about the alleged sexual assault, or the alleged party where it allegedly happened, or that she ever knew Mr. Kavanaugh. I think that’s called suborning perjury.

None of this is trivial and the matter can’t possibly rest there. Too much of it has been unraveled by what remains of the news media. And meanwhile, of course, there is at least one grand jury listening to testimony from the whole cast-of-characters behind the botched Hillary investigation and Robert Mueller’s ever more dubious-looking Russian collusion inquiry: the aforementioned Strozk, Lisa Page, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, et. al. I have a feeling that these matters are now approaching critical mass with the parallel unraveling of the Christine Blasey Ford “story.”

The Democratic Party has its fingerprints all over this, as it does with the shenanigans over the Russia investigation. Not only do I not believe Dr. Ford’s story; I also don’t believe she acted on her own in this shady business. What’s happening with all these FBI and DOJ associated lawyers is an obvious circling of the wagons. They’ve generated too much animus in the process and they’re going to get nailed. These matters are far from over and a major battle is looming in the countdown to the midterm elections. In fact, op-ed writer Charles M. Blow sounded the trumpet Monday morning in his idiotic column titled: Liberals, This is War. Like I’ve been saying: Civil War Two.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page.)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

This is the oft discussed deline/collapse in action. In this case I believe Ford. I think she went to the house and was assaulted by two entitled little twits who can’t hold their booze. I also think that even if she had gone to the police the same night, nothing would have happened. The class and connection fix was in…..in from birth. Kavanaugh was destined for this position and every step taken in life propelled him to this result. Unfortunately, he was one of those little bad drunks who should have just had the crapo kicked out of him by Ford’s brother.

I was wrong, I thought he would barely lose the nomination. Does it matter? It’s still just a messy little crackup waiting for the debt implosion.

I grew up in a tough logging town on Vancouver Island. In same town there was a taxi driver called ‘Johnny no-nuts’. He had this bad habit of taking native female fares for a little diversion when they booked a ride home after a night at the bar or party. The story says the brothers of his last diversion used a beer bottle on him. What Ford really needed that night was a brother or some good friends. Like K said, “What comes around goes around”. He is just a tool of his class and of the right. Have a nice life and enjoy your security detail Justice K, forever. Is power worth it?

I wouldn’t trade 5 minutes of his life with mine. K, a Loser nancy boy with mommy still pulling his strings and making him dance for what they call Justice; just another racket for the insiders to rig the game. My God, he had to do Trump to get through. He publicly played an angry trumpet. SAD.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

(1) Kavanaugh apparently threw ice at a guy in a bar in New Haven in 1985. No injuries, no arrests, no casualties. But it was important enough to make the news cycle today. The Day of the Hyena is truly upon us.

(2) The increase in technology allows for a corresponding increase in complexity, however when things get really complicated, everything has to work perfectly. All it takes is for one part of the whole to collapse, and everything begins to tumble down. Recovery will come slowly, because most people haven’t lived a lifestyle that translates into a skill set useful for the great reckoning. It’s hard to hurt someone who lives in a mud hut, and beats his clothes on a rock in the river, however, we don’t live at that level, and have no experience in how to live in reduced circumstances. I guess it depends on how great the fall, and how far it drops. My guess is that if you don’t already live close to a simpler lifestyle, whatever that may be, the tougher it will be when the hammer comes down.

(3) The bigger legal grows are worse for the neighborhoods than the illegal ones in the past. Back in the day the illegal growers knew not to piss off their neighbors, to at least pretend to care and try to avoid detection. This new group of “legals” is greedy greedy greedy. They hide behind their “legal” label to pirate away whole neighborhoods. Disrespect is their right by virtue of having a permit. The uglification of our county. Mendocino County has no real enforcement of their ordinance and the “legals” pride themselves in taking advantage of us all. No participation in the community, or true care of the environment. They know more about LLCs and funneling money into banks undetected than they do about farming. Creative book keeping their primary skill. Shameful. The higher they climb the further they fall. Look forward to watching. Greed one of the seven deadly sins.

(4) Yup! My legal neighbors yell, ride quads up and down, they have grow lights for porch lights so they can work at night, plus the uncovered lights on the hoops, plus the traffic, the big loads, the heavy equipment, the generators, and they tie up dogs at their gardens that bark all night. In the old days we had to be low key, not now. Here is the question; should I “watch their back” or complain to the county? Would that make me a “snitch”?

OTHERWISE

Warm spiritual greetings from Honolulu,

Am continuing to pay week to week at roughly $50 per night (includes air conditioning for the room). My offer to leave here and form with others a spiritual working group is firm! If anybody is interested in making a commitment to that, please contact me. Otherwise am relaxed, with money, in paradise. ;-)))

Craig Louis Stehr, Email: craiglouisstehr@protonmail.com

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

by Mitch Clogg

I'm supposed to be considerate, generous, compassionate, inclusive, supportive and I don't know what-all. Republicans, as a rule, are not like that.

Consider Reagan's welfare Cadillacs and queens, a rich president's direct attack on have-nots in America, George H.W. Bush's direct attack on Panama, killing 3,000 civilians by fire, arresting veteran CIA spy Manuel Noriega (because he knew too much) and covering up the whole thing, the plunging of a tiny country into catastrophe by the world's biggest bully--us.

Consider Nixon, if you can stand to. Ford granted him an unconditional pardon. Bush2 profited from 9/11 by creating endless war in the middle east. War, in developed countries, is the most efficient funnel ever conceived for transferring the substance of entire populations to the few who serve the insanely expensive military-industrial complex. W's bit of piracy dwarfs any other in human history. He pauperized us, reducing living standards for everybody everywhere except the already-wealthiest and advancing the Project for the New American Century, which justified any crimes in the name of American Exceptionalism.

You know these stories. They go on and on, and they illustrate this paradox: If I choose to be nice, how can I expect to prevail in a world where force is the deciding factor, always.

During the dark Kavanaugh circus, my email inbox had an invitation to join Californians everywhere on October 3 in a vigil to stop his nomination.

What?

Can you imagine the hilarity this produces in such eminences as Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Karl Rove, Donald Trump and scores of other Republicans?

(Let me insert right here that saying all Republicans are bad and mean is ignorant. Lots of people hold to a belief that they, and not me, are entitled to what they work for and that the Democratic Party wants to tax and spend their hard earnings. That's just as simplistic and mistaken, but there's enough validity embedded in these positions to guarantee their continuance.)

So: What if ruthlessness, corruption, murder, lies and indifference to morals, ethics and human welfare will always prevail over the supposed Judeo-Christian virtues (and they will!) of decency and kindness?

When I was at Cal, my awareness of reggae music started, driven forward by the tireless, then dead, Bob Marley. It was all protest music, denouncing the evil that feeds off living flesh in Haiti, Jamaica and so many other once-heavenly places. I liked reggae music, its cheekiness and sense of purpose. Years went by. The Tonton Macoutes, created in a mighty flash of inspiration by a prince of evil, Haiti's Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, upped the price of resisting a deadly government to watching your females and infants penetrated by rape and bayonets, then yourself being collared by a burning tire.

While I was enjoying reggae, I was criticizing psychologist-philosopher B.F. Skinner, then teaching at Berkeley, joining the chorus that called him a fascist. I still put a premium on individualism, but I'm not sure my preference is right and Skinner's wrong. China is Skinnerian.

I came to hate reggae, still do, and the fruitless acts of vigil and protest that soothe our senses of helplessness, cowardice, incompetence, immaturity and--you can finish this paragraph, too. Wastes of time for the purpose of comforting our intimidated selves.

So, what do I propose and what chance would any proposition by me have of fulfillment?

I don't know and damn little.

There's this: Psychopathy is not Homo sapiens default condition. All in all, we're nicer than we are evil, but if Good does not assert itself successfully over Evil, which wins? Duh! And if evil is usually better paid than good, how can I expect a world different from this one?

Religion won't do it, not ever. Religion usually ends up bringing more evil down on us. Wicked priests and priesthoods are in every belief-system. Religion uses fear, violence and extravagant wealth (Google "Roman Catholic Church wealth") to suppress inquiry, dissent and poor people. Forget religion.

Democracy guarantees nothing, absolutely nothing. Democracy still exists in the realm of "good idea" (and I'm not perfectly convinced it is--look at us!). I've always been a fan of the democracy fantasy, but, in truth, it doesn't much matter what governing system you have. If you have enough food, security and leisure, what's the difference who governs or how--as long as they do it right, maximizing the prospects for the greatest number? (Note that this would require elimination of the Republican Party. It vehemently does not advocate the most for the most.)

As I see it, the only means to peace & prosperity is (choose your word): indoctrination, training, acculturation, internalization of humanistic values (lovely!), or--wait for it--EDUCATION--free and full, compulsory and rigorous, no exceptions. Goodness is not inherent. It has to be taught and reinforced, constantly and forever, cradle to grave, and it can't be sugar-coated. Education is hard. Goodness, like citizenship, requires work. Have we become a nation of layabouts? If so, we'll lose our station in this hungry world.

If there's another way, folks, somebody please tell me. In the meantime, won't it be nice when schools have all the funding they can use and the defense industry has to hold a bake sale?

THE ACCESS PROGRAM ON KMEC 10:30 AM > 11:30

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AMERICA IS ON THE ROAD TO BECOMING A FASCIST STATE

Robert Scheer interviews Jason Stanley

Robert Scheer: Hi, I’m Robert Scheer, and this is another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Jason Stanley, who has written a book called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, published by Random House. And you teach at Yale, right? And you’ve written a number of interesting book about propaganda, and this fits in. The basic hook here is Trump, and people being frightened about the echoes of fascism, not only in this country but throughout the world. And your book attempts to examine the architecture of fascism, its origins and so forth.

Jason Stanley: Though I would say that though the hook is Trump I agree with President Obama that Trump is a symptom and not a cause.

RS: The interesting thing about your book is you really talk about society in disarray. There’s an emotional feeling behind this, that what happens when societies fall apart, and when authoritarian figures hold up a notion of law and order, and the proper nationalism. And basically what we’re talking about is mythology, and that’s the Trump connection; they develop a mythology about the past, and about when Germany was great; now we have when America was great. And they use that as a springboard for basically developing an us-them philosophy. Is that not the basic architecture?

JS: That’s the basic architecture. In How Fascism Works, however, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to sort of draw attention to the fact that there are familiar aspects of fascist politics that have always been here, and to which our country has always been vulnerable. One thing about coming from my Holocaust background–my parents are both survivors, were refugees; they weren’t in camps, but they were refugees–they were always attendant to these details. And even more so because my mother was a court stenographer in Manhattan district court, in criminal court, so she could see some of these features up front. And she would often note the similarities between what was happening with racism in the United States, and what faced Jewish people in Poland, which she experienced as a young child. She would note, you know, they’re targeting black Americans here. James Baldwin has a classic piece called “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” And in it he says, You think—addressing Jewish-Americans like myself—You think that you’re closer to us because of our shared history of oppression. But our shared history of oppression makes us dislike you more, because we know you’re glad not to be us. We know you understand what we face, and you’re glad not to be us.

Our history of racism makes us especially vulnerable to certain elemental features of fascist politics. For example, fake news. I mean, fake news has always been directed against black Americans, from what Angela Davis calls “the myth of the black rapist,” the mad conspiracy theory underlying the horrors of lynching, that there was some epidemic of rape of white women by black men, to superpredator theory in the mid-1990s, which was promulgated at a time when violent crime was rapidly dropping, yet these theorists such as John DiIulio were saying that violent crime was going to rise because young black Americans were superpredators. So when you have this history of fake news, when you have political parties trafficking in coded racist messages, then you have an especially ripe background. People say oh, well, we’re not Germany; well, in some respects, we’re even better set up for this kind of politics. So when structures break down; when you have an Iraq War and a financial crisis; when, you know, you can legitimately blame the quote unquote elite for failures of democratic governance and to adhering to proper norms, when you have those failures and you have our past that in fact deeply influenced Nazi Germany, then you have real worry.

RS: Let’s begin with that, we are not Germany. Because we are. We are actually the society that is closest to what Germany was, and people forget that. But the fact is, they were the people most like us, and people like Henry Ford, as you point out in your book, and others, had great admiration for Germany. It was the best educated, most scientific, highest level of music, big economy, and then it all started to fall apart. And the people that were most like us became the most evil barbarians in modern history. And it was very confusing to Americans, and you capture that in your book, that ambiguity about it.

JS: That’s right, because we have these two traditions. On the one hand, we do have a glorious tradition of liberal democracy that I cherish and venerate, and that is used—the Civil Rights Movement used it, black intellectual leaders all the way back at least to Frederick Douglass, but even David Walker and Martin Delaney would appeal to our tradition of liberty and equality, to point out hypocrisies in American life. And Frederick Douglass used that, for example, in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” his speech, to say look, you venerate liberty? Well, you know—so we have these ideals, but we also have a long history of incredible hypocrisy among these ideals. And we have a long history of, in addition to anti-black racism and the genocide of Native Americans, both of which deeply affected Hitler, the anti-immigrant laws and sentiment. Mein Kampf—My Struggle, Hitler’s main book—is about a call to create a national state, to tear down the state and replace it by a national state based around national ethnic identity, and not democratic norms, not citizenry that is multiethnic, but around the nation. And his model there is the United States. As he writes, “I know that this is unwelcome to hear, but anything crazier and less thought-out than our present laws of state citizenship is hardly possible to conceive.”

So he rails against Germany’s immigration laws. Very familiar vocabulary to us. “But there is at least one state in which feeble attempts to conceive a better arrangement are apparent. I of course do not mean our German republic, but rather the United States of America, where they are trying, partially at any rate, to include common sense in their councils. They refuse to allow immigration of elements which are bad from the health point of view, and absolutely forbid naturalization of certain defined races, and thus are making a modest start in the direction of something not unlike the conception of the national state.” So there, Hitler is praising the United States, and in particular the 1924 Immigration Act, which Jeff Sessions praised in October 2015, called for a return to; he praises it as a basis, he praises the United States anti-immigration act of 1924, and the United States, as a model for what he wants to create in Germany. Now, I think Hitler was wrong about our country; I think that subsequent history of our country showed that he was wrong. But we need to bear that in mind, that there are enough elements in our country that Hitler did take it, in Mein Kampf, as something of a model.

RS: Well, in your book, you make it pretty clear that we have–I mean, let’s not gloss over these similarities. You quote liberally from our tradition, in which the other was persecuted viciously. It wasn’t Donald Trump who is reminding–oh, we have to be great by excluding people, which is basically Hitler’s message, trying to find some mythic, pure German. We did that with the Chinese Exclusion Act; we rounded up the Japanese; before all that, we had killed the Native Americans. And I want to bring up, you know, we can talk all we want about our liberal tradition, but the thing that comes through in reading your book–and I highly recommend it; I’m talking to Jason Stanley, and it’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them–“them” of immigrant-bashing, or incarceration of black people, which you have a whole chapter on. I mean, I was amazed at a statistic I haven’t seen, but then I did the math, and you’re absolutely right: black people, male and female, represent 13 percent of the American population; they’re well over 50 percent of the imprisoned population that is now two and a half million people. But they represent, as you mention in your book, nine percent of imprisoned population of the entire world.

JS: If their representation in the world prison population reflected their world population, then the nation of black America should be the third largest nation on earth, behind China and India.

RS: I want to pick on one word in particular, patriotism. And in your architecture of fascism, patriotism, the pure German, make Germany great again–those exact words weren’t used in your book, but I mean, the fact of the matter is, Hitler’s message–and he was as odd a figure as Trump. Trump with his orange hair; well, there was Hitler with his funny little moustache, obviously was an unattractive, cartoonish figure, very much like Trump. But yet he invoked some idea of the perfect Aryan, blonde German, and a mythical history, and he’s doing this in a Germany that’s falling apart. The echo that I found there was this patriotism. You even mention people taking the knee at football games and so forth as a way of legitimately objecting to a kind of false patriotism. And patriotism was really the key to the whole fascist message, wasn’t it?

JS: I would say it’s ultranationalism. So a certain form of patriotism. Because my American patriotism takes the form of veneration of liberty and equality, which are two values which are abstract. And they’re not connected to a particular mountain range, they’re not connected to a particular past; they’re abstract, they’re liberal democracy. My venerate–you know, I’m patriotic about that.

RS: What does that mean? I mean, it goes back to the French, it goes back to the Greeks? I mean, we didn’t invent it. You raise a big challenge in this book. Where does the ultimate madness come from? And if you’re going to talk about Trump as a fascistic figure, he didn’t invent himself; he’s a product–yes, his father was from Germany, and so forth. But the fact of the matter is, Trump is a familiar figure in American life.

JS: That’s right. And I don’t want to deny the toxicity that certain forms of patriotism can take. It’s just that, as our own history teaches–for example, the Civil Rights Movement, which did not take place in Vermont; it took place in Alabama in the early 1960s, a terrifying place to hold it. That happened here, and those were Americans who did it. And so I want to honor their legacy and what they did to struggle for advances that, although sometimes it’s hard to see those advances in the face of mass incarceration and the various forms of anti-black racism and oppression of all of us that occurred after the Civil Rights Movement.

But we have things in our past that are worth celebrating, and they’re worth celebrating because they’re connected to certain virtuous ideals. On the other hand, when patriotism takes the form that we’re seeing it now–a nostalgia for a white past, a white Christian past–what fascism does, when fascist politics–what you do is you create a sense of aggrieved, intense victimization by the dominant group. Whenever you see the dominant group feeling, yearning for a past that never was, where they got the appreciation they deserved, and feeling that this was yanked away from them–that’s what fascism tries to do. It creates this mythic past so that the dominant group feels like they’re the world’s greatest victims. When you see white Christians in the United States saying they’re the most discriminated group, then you know that fascist politics has taken hold, that fascist politics is working the way it does.

That’s what Hitler did in Germany. He constantly railed against–Germans were the greatest victims of world history. He had Versailles to use, of course, but he blamed Versailles, bizarrely, on Jews. And he said, the Germans are the greatest victims. So when you see the dominant group being made to feel like they’re victims, that they’re terrible victims, in the face of all the facts, that’s when you know that fascist politics is taking grip. That’s what the function of this sort of bizarre, fake view of the past is supposed to be. It’s supposed to create this model, like, we once were victorious, we once ruled, and then foreigners, and foreigners came, and liberals made us share our power with foreign forces. Liberalism and cultural Marxism destroyed our supremacy and destroyed this wonderful past where we ruled and our cultural traditions were the ones that dominated. And then it militarizes the feeling of nostalgia. All the anxiety and loss that people feel in their lives, say from the loss of their healthcare, the loss of their pensions, the loss of their stability, then gets rerouted into a sense that the real enemy is liberalism, which led to the loss of this mythic past.

RS: Yeah, I get that. But I want to push back a little bit on patriotism. Because it’s this glorification of your nation’s history. And so when Trump said he wanted to make America great, Hillary Clinton one-upped him and said, we’ve always been great. So saying we’ve always been great means we were great when we enslaved people, we were great when we committed genocide against Native Americans, we were great when we treated the Chinese population as near slaves, and no fundamental human rights, and we were great when we rounded up innocent Japanese and put them in concentration camps. And I could go down the list; we were great when we had slavery and we were great when we had segregation. It’s an absurd notion, and you know, it was George Washington in his farewell address who warned us about the impostures of pretended patriotism.

This patriotic appeal is a menace. And the fact is, even reasonable people are afraid to say that. You know, we look at Hitler and we say, oh, they had issues; they got a bad deal after World War I, they could say we have foreign enemies, they had serious economic problems, right, of the kind that we have been experiencing. And patriotism becomes blaming the other, becomes scapegoating the other. And it’s interesting; in Germany, by the way, Hitler didn’t scapegoat BMW and Mercedes and the big German financiers and so forth. He scapegoated unions, he scapegoated people resisting, he scapegoated the Jews and handicapped people and homosexuals. He didn’t go after the big-shots. And in this country, that’s what Trump does. You know, blaming everybody except Wall Street for our problems.

JS: Right. Because the idea in fascism is to destroy economic politics. Because you want people to connect along racial lines, along ethnic lines. So that’s why you go after trade unions. You don’t mention the sort of actual economic forces, because you want to create a fictitious bond, both between you and your followers and between the followers along non-economic lines. Fascist movements always work in tandem with corporatists, and we’re seeing that here now with the connections between, for example, the Koch brothers and attendant interests, and the nationalist wing of the Republicans.

The nationalist wing of the Republicans is delivering the corporatist wing everything they’re ever desired; they’ve delivered them right-to-work laws in the Janus decision; they’re delivering them an endless string of federalist-society-approved judges. And this, history tells us, is always what happens; that the corporatists side with politicians who use fascist tactics because they’re trying to divert people’s attention from the real forces that cause the genuine anxiety they feel.

RS: Yes, and what happened in Germany is that the reasonable, responsible, even the best of people, many of them went over to Hitler.

JS: Absolutely. Because what you do in fascist politics is you paint the ordinary Democratic Party, the ordinary center-left party, as communists. And you create terror about that. Goebbels writes, in one essay or speech: The less Bolshevism threatens, the less Marxism threatens, the less the ordinary citizen cares about us. So what Goebbels is saying, and he says it at greater length in this piece called “The Radicalization of Socialism,” where he says what you want to do is you want to paint the center-left party as Marxists and as socialists, and that will drive–he says, you know: The middle class sees in Marxism not so much the subverter of national will, but mainly the thief of its property, the uncomfortable disturber of peace and quiet.

So in fascist politics, you paint the center-left as socialists, as communists, and then you say they’re coming for your property. And then you send all the property owners into your arms, because you create this false fear and panic by painting the ordinary center-left party as socialists. And then you promise the corporatists, you say, we’re against labor unions, we’re going to break their power. We’re against any mass movement that challenges our power.

And then, of course, as Arendt warned us, there’s the temptations of one-party rule. Arendt talks about “party over parties.” She says, it’s a great danger when politicians start to feel loyalty for their political party rather than multi-party democracy. And we are already in a phase of party over parties, we’re already facing the threat of one-party states. A minority of Americans voted for this president, a minority of Americans voted for the Senate, and it looks like we’re going to have not just a right-wing Supreme Court, but a hard-right Supreme Court for generations to come.

RS: On that depressing note, it’s time for a break, and we’ll be back in a moment with Scheer Intelligence and our guest Jason Stanley, the author of the provocative, but–and unfortunately, highly relevant book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House. [omission for station break] So let’s talk a little bit about how fascism works, not just in Nazi Germany, but how it may be working here. And clearly, Trump is a very frightening figure, and your book makes that clear; the rhetoric, the style, it’s all an echo of the us-them, scapegoat immigrants, scapegoat minorities, scapegoat labor unions, scapegoat anybody gets in the way. But I must say, I want to push back a little bit. I think you’re a little too kind on the people you call liberal democrats. And I just want to give you two quotes from your book. You say, “A liberal democrat does not pick makers against takers.” That’s a reference to Ryan and others, right?

JS: Yes. And Romney.

RS: “A generous social welfare state unites a community in mutual bonds of care.” That’s what liberals believe, in your view, OK. But it was all–

JS: Liberals ought to believe.

RS: Well, OK, thank you.

JS: [Laughs]

RS: Because reading your book, I thought wait a second! It was Bill Clinton who said he would end welfare as we know it, and he did.

JS: What philosophers call liberal democracy, not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, Bill Clinton–you are absolutely right. Bill Clinton engaged in the most heinous and problematic racially coded messages. He took over the republican strategy, the republican Southern strategy, with his 1992 campaign to end welfare as we know it, thereby race-baiting with that vocabulary. So, yeah, I mean liberal democracy in the philosophical sense. What happened in the United States is both political parties–and I hold both political parties to blame–kept racism alive with these coded messages. And when you do that, you open yourself up to a politician who’s going to come and decode the messages. And by decoding the messages, by being explicitly racist, that politician is going to seem like a breath of fresh air. They’re going to seem non-hypocritical. They’re going to be welcomed–finally, someone telling it like it is, rather than ending welfare as we know it.

RS: Well, but Clinton did end the federal anti-poverty program, the main one. Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Thirty percent were mothers, and 70 percent were their children, and he ended it, and he turned it over to the tender mercies of the state. And when he was running Arkansas, that was not a great place to be poor, and certainly not to be black and poor. But the reason I’m pushing on that is, and it goes to a statement you made earlier, that President Obama made, that Trump is a symptom. And he’s building on a lot of hysteria, often about non-problems; we didn’t have an immigration problem, we had more people going back, you know, on the southern border than were coming over, because of the recession and so forth. It’s all largely, as was the Jewish problem in Germany, an invented–

JS: Absolutely, yeah, I was about to say, they’re all invented, yeah, they’re invented.

RS: Yeah, they’re all invented, and your book is very clear on that. But let’s be clear, also, that the democrats helped invent it. And I want to get back to this–I found your book quite powerful in talking about how we’ve treated the other in this country. Because people think, well, we’re not Germany–oh, come on, we have a horrible record of treating the others.

JS: Horrible.

RS: But yet your figures in that one chapter you have on black people was startling to me, both–first of all, economically; you have a figure that for every hundred dollars of accumulated wealth that whites have, blacks have only five dollars. You talk about the Great Recession–I mean, after all, one reason why Trump is viable to voters is that they’re hurting economically. White workers are hurting economically; the white middle-class is being eroded. But the black and brown college graduates, Federal Reserve study of St. Louis said they lost 60, 70 percent of their wealth, accumulated family wealth, college graduates who are black and brown. And then when you get to the prison population, which I referred to before–you have a statistic in your book, you say if you’re a black male–if you’re a white male, you have a one in 17 chance ending up in the prison system. But if you’re a black male, you have a one in three chance.

JS: And our prison system is mind-boggling. Just a note on the whole white economic anxiety, it’s worth mentioning that although the Great Recession absolutely hammered black and brown populations, much more so than white populations, they didn’t turn to fascism. So the whole economic anxiety argument, that that’s behind Trump, is a little dubious. Because, you know, it’s not like black Americans moved en masse to a strong-man authoritarian to embrace after, despite their greater economic anxiety.

RS: No, but they did move to people who have a more progressive, populist message, as opposed to Hillary Clinton celebrate–talk about fake news and everything. Hillary Clinton, in those speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs and other bankers, she has not one sentence mentioning the crimes of these people, the damage they did to black, brown, and white people. But the fact is, in her speeches she said, I need you–we need you to come down to Washington and fix this problem. These are the people who created the problem.

JS: The financial crisis opened up our democratic system, which is flawed in the best of its moments, to charges of corruption. And I’m shocked by what was allowed to happen to us unpunished. Not that I’m for strict punishment, but that all this titanic wealth was given back to the very people who created the jobs–I’m furious about it. And what that did is it opened us up to a figure like Trump. Because what fascist politics does is it represents the system as corrupt, and when you represent the system as corrupt, then you can run against the system even if you are incredibly corrupt. Because you can, for example, say: Look, the fact that I’m corrupt makes me a good champion of the people, because I know how this corrupt system works. That’s why when Trump says “I didn’t pay any taxes, that means I’m smart.”

So there’s some good research out of MIT, a paper called “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue,” that shows that when people can be brought to believe that a system is corrupt, then they’ll think that the person who is lying when playing the game that they think is corrupt, is the more authentic person. So what our leaders, including Hillary Clinton, did is they opened up the system to legitimate charges of corruption and then allowed somebody to come and say: That whole system is corrupt, I’ll be a strong-man, I’ll come in and bash it and tear it down, and I’ll run it from now on.

RS: I want to get into this fake news. Because you’re an expert on propaganda. By your definition, and you have an actually brilliant analysis of propaganda, usually based on evoking a foreign enemy that’s attacking the virtues of a mythically beautiful German society going back thousands of years, et cetera, et cetera. And you have an idea of shared reality. Shared reality–that’s the basis of enlightened, rational society. And you defend mainstream media in that regard, that Trump attacks–we know, we accept certain logic, certain facts–well, we accepted an idea of the Cold War, that there was an international communist conspiracy with a timetable for the takeover of the world. And there was never an international communist movement. And this was a reality known to what David Halberstam called “the best and the brightest.” And they acted as if, you know, they told the Americans quite the opposite.

JS: I couldn’t agree more that our history, especially the military-industrial complex–the whole concept of empire is based on fake news. All of colonization is based on fake news. I mean, really? You know, we’re invading other people and killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in order to free them? You don’t kill people by freeing them. The whole idea that we have the right to invade other countries, because we’re better, is based on mythology and based on–I mean, colonization doesn’t work unless you have this myth of being better. So whenever you find the massive military incursions justify, that clearly do terrible harm to other countries, you have done under the banner of, oh, we’re spreading democracy or spreading civilization or spreading Christianity, you’re going to have myth, you’re going to have fake news.

But I also want to emphasize in my work that, no, America has never been great. But the idea of America can be great. It’s a future thing, our greatness, not a past thing. The past is something we’re trying to overcome, and we’re trying to realize our greatness with certain ideals. But of course, our past is replete with fake news; we are an empire, we’re a military empire. Whenever you find a military empire, it’s going to justify its invasions on the basis of fake news. Think of the European invasion of the United States that resulted in the genocide of our native population. That was based on complete fakery, that the Native American population was somehow uncivilized, and the barbarian savages who were slaughtering them were civilized. When you have mass violence, it’s going to be based–because humans need this in order to justify mass violence–it’s going to be based on these deep myths and fake news. And so since we’re an empire, we have this long history of fake news.

And a particularly dangerous moment is when the empire starts to lose its status; when it starts to lose its status, then the myths are no longer so comforting, and a fascist leader can come and say, look how we used to be great, we used to be happy with our myths. So, that’s how the structure works. The structure wouldn’t work if you didn’t have an empire that was based on fake news. We had this past. And sometimes Trump shows his hand; so he said, you know, we’re not so great; look at the Iraq War. So he was very explicit about that. What you have happening with some of these figures is they want to say, well, let’s go back and not fake it; let’s just say we’ll invade people and take their oil, let’s not pretend. And so that’s seen as more authentic. Like any military empire, we’ve had a titanic amount of fake news. And what I’m hoping is that people can now recognize how dangerous that is. Because the danger is that then someone can come and say, the mainstream media? Really? Look at the Iraq War, look at all the lying we’ve done in the past. So insofar as elites care about even the simulacrum of democracy that we’ve had in the United States, even the sort of vague shadow of democracy that we’ve had in the United States, even keeping up the pretenses–they shouldn’t lie anymore.

RS: That summary was a very good point on which to end this. That’s it for “Scheer Intelligence,” and I want to thank my guest Jason Stanley. The book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House. The producers for “Scheer Intelligence” are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And we want to thank Yale University Studios for bringing Jason Stanley to us. See you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at Truthdig.

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