Iran

The Eternal Election Season

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Make It Stop, Already!

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 8
 

“Jesus Is Coming,” the sign said. “Hopefully Before the Election.”

The sign was under two stained glass windows in an old brick church in central Missouri. I was driving back from visiting a spring said to possess magical healing powers, so I was in a believing kind of mood.

Believing in a miracle: Election Season will end.

We have been in Election Season for a decade. The season has no predictable pattern other than its steady series of disasters. It is like climate change, with each catastrophe first denied and then weaponized. We know the roots of the crises, but no one is held accountable. We know how to mitigate the damage, but the powerful insist it is ordinary people’s fault.

“You should have voted the hurricane out,” they scold. “It’s your job to evacuate before fascism arrives!”

Maybe I got that backwards. It’s hard to keep messaging straight in Election Season, when authority holds no sincerity and time loses all meaning.

There are no sweet summers or crisp autumns or cool winters or lush springs in Election Season. There is only the memory of a bygone era when things changed, instead of dragging on and on.

Once there were four seasons and now there is one: climate chaos. Once there were rotating four-year presidencies and now there is one endless campaign, a pale horse race whose rider is Death, and Hell follows him. Hell follows you too, on social media, and demands you follow Hell back. Hell follows your phone and your car and your right to privacy and asks you for a donation.

I don’t know whether the small-town church was rooting for the end of the world or a better one. I don’t know for whom its congregants vote, and I don’t care. I arrived pre-converted. That sign preached to the choir in my mind.

Jesus, make it stop already! the voices cry. Make Election Season end!

So sure, I’ll take the literal version. Come on down, Jesus. Get ready for folks to bitch you out too.

*          *          *

The church is in Piedmont, the UFO Capital of Missouri. Piedmont’s status was made official in a decree from the state legislature in 2023. It was the only useful thing they did all year.

I am of the mind that the Missouri legislature should confine themselves to such activities, like proclaiming a dog to have psychic powers or designating Provel the state cheese, since the rest of their actions rape our rights.

In 2022, the Republican state legislature signed away my bodily autonomy. That means if extraterrestrials return to Piedmont and abduct me, they will only get a semi-person, by legal standards. I don’t know if aliens care about legal standards, but I don’t think the government does either.

Piedmont has embraced its UFO Capital identity. In 1973, residents spotted strange objects in the sky. In 2023, Piedmont commemorated the 50th anniversary by building a park decorated with plastic extraterrestrials and a pagoda shaped like a flying saucer.

Businesses flaunt the UFO theme. At the gun shop, an alien grins in camouflage. On a tavern mural, a little green man drinks beer. Pet stores and garbage companies add flying saucer decals to their signs for no reason. Life is just more interesting that way.

There was not a soul to be seen in Piedmont the day my husband and I arrived. Maybe they got lucky, and the UFOs took them. Maybe Jesus came early.

Maybe we were too late.

*          *          *

Technically there is less than a month until Election Season ends, but that’s a lie. It will stretch beyond November 5 because there is no longer a firm winner, only contestation and violence and profiteering, swirling like storm water in a sewer.

The 2024 campaign discourse was a rerun in which pundits gave the same warnings about Trump’s autocratic aims that I gave in 2016 but ignored that he has since held office and carried many of them out, including sedition, yet was unpunished and allowed to run for president again.

That is the real story of the 2024 election: sanctioned illegality. Impunity countenanced by all sides. No one in power takes the sovereignty of the US seriously and now they don’t even bother pretending.

My worry about the election is surpassed by my worry about war with Iran. War will likely happen regardless of whether Harris or Trump wins, even though Americans don’t want it. The will of the people is no longer an important part of US elections.

The Trump administration was packed with Iran hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner. Harris touts her alliances with the Cheney family and other Bush neocons along with her desire to have the world’s “most lethal” military (not the smartest, not the bravest, only the most lethal). Both candidates have vowed unconditional support for Israel’s violence, which they call “self-defense.”

Whatever words of condemnation Democrats occasionally have for the country that massacred at least 16,000 Palestinian children are negated by the billions in military aid they sent the murderers. There are no red lines other than blood. The invasion that began in Gaza under the pretense of “rescuing hostages” has expanded to Lebanon.

But Iran is the prize. It has been since I was born.

*          *          *

Much as I can remember no time before Trump, even though he’s a career criminal who should have been banished decades ago, I can remember no time before US officials sought war with Iran. The warmongering ebbed and flowed, back when there used to be seasons.

But now it is everywhere, all the time.

I am terrified of this war. I have dreaded it my whole life, like the inverse of war criminals like Elliott Abrams — employed by the Reagan and Bush and Trump and Biden administrations — who spent 45 years salivating over it. He is in a cohort of bloodlust ready to realize their nightmare dream. An Iran War fits Armageddon fantasies as well as American revenge plots guised as realpolitik.

Do not be fooled by claims of self-defense: the only politics at play are necropolitics.

In Iran there is a site called Naqsh-e Rostam. It was the necropolis of the Achaemenid dynasty from around 500 BC. A necropolis is a city of the dead, comprised of elaborate tombs. Naqsh-e Rostam is one of many historic marvels in Iran, a country full of ancient ruins of diverse empires and feats of Islamic architecture.

I worry it will be destroyed, like the ancient churches and mosques of Gaza. I worry Iran will become a necrostate.

I worry most that Iranian civilians, people who did nothing wrong, will be murdered, like the Palestinians. I worry because when Israel is doing the murdering, the US does nothing but abet and obey — and now may join full throttle.

During my junior year of college, I studied in Vienna. I visited the neighboring former Warsaw Pact countries, amazed that what would have been an impossible trip for my parents’ generation was easy for mine. It was 1998. The USSR had collapsed, South Africa was free of apartheid, 9/11 had not yet happened. Pundits proclaimed world peace was inevitable, and people believed them.

I imagined having a son who could study in a free Iran, like I was doing in countries once labeled off-limits. I pictured the two of us as tourists in Naqsh-e Rostam. I would explain that when I was his age, Americans visiting Iran for fun was unthinkable, and we would laugh in relief at how times had changed.

Now I have a teenage son, and I worry his generation will go to Iran — for war. The 1990s dream of peace died long ago. My worry is for the people who die with it.

*          *          *

In the Ozarks, I kept seeing four horses. They were wild, so I consoled myself that this was not Revelation. We still have time before the riders arrive, I thought, dipping my hands in the magical springs. We have a month of anxiety before bedlam begins.

A hurricane is bearing down as I write this, and I only want it to stop. A war is being plotted, and I only want it to stop. A genocide is raging, and I want it to stop so badly that my heart pounds until it breaks.

But none of it stops.

Israel and its partners never intended to stop at Gaza. Nor do they intend to stop at Lebanon or even at Iran. I watch their maneuvers not only in sympathy for the victims of those lands, but for the selfish reason of wanting to protect my country, my sacred sites, my son.

In Missouri, Election Season coincides with hunting season. It used to be limited to the months between the vote and the inauguration. But when Election Season never ends, hunting season doesn’t either — not when people are the prey.

So yes, Jesus, come on down, the price is right, and I know because I’ve paid it. You too, UFOs. I will meet you in Piedmont or wherever you want to go. I know an underwater boulder that flips canoes, but we can wink and call it a baptism. I know a field so remote you can see the Milky Way under the moon, but no one will notice a flying saucer, not in this crazy weather.

Abduct me before Election Day, UFOs, for I’ll take living in light years over enduring seasons of sorrow. Raise me up, Jesus, for Judgement Day is here, only I’m doing the judging and no one cares. I hold the perpetrators in contempt — inherent contempt, like the kind the courts have that they never impose on criminals with money — but they keep criming our lives away.

You can’t vote out Election Season.

I’m left doing what candidates do: thinking about running. Running away, running out of time. But also running to time, to where the clocks don’t strike thirteen, to where there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the sadistic philosophy of my government. Where there is more earth, more air, more chances.

I miss the seasons, and how they would change.

*          *          *

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Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and especially in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 2 2024

When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.”

Vance lied throughout the debate and has lied throughout this campaign, and in that, he is following the MAGA Republicans and Trump, who has become entirely untethered from reality. Aaron Rupar, who watches Trump’s rallies, and Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Trump’s growing mental incapacity was obvious yesterday, as in two rallies he made a “wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.” He “seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego,” Rupar and Berlatsky wrote, “He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.” 

Vance’s post-truth world did not dominate last night’s debate. A Politico/Focaldata snap poll afterward showed that while party voters overwhelmingly declared their party’s nominee the winner, 58% of Independents backed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. 

Before the debate, political consultant Stuart Stevens posted: “If you want to know what the campaigns think of their VP candidates debate, just watch how they schedule the candidates post-debate. After Cheney VP debates, Lieberman and Edwards basically disappeared, banished to tiny markets. If Trump world believes America wants more Vance, they can put him in big markets in big states. I’m doubting that will happen. I suspect that [the] Harris campaign gets Walz in front of more voters after debate. He wears well.” 

Today, Stevens noted that the campaign is ramping up Walz’s schedule, sending him through Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and adding more media, including “two national TV interviews, a podcast and a late-night TV appearance,” and that Trump said he was “satisfied with Vance’s ‘fantastic’ performance.”

But Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and nowhere more than in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance has repeatedly said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence would not: go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging the states to approve “alternative” slates of electors than the ones that accurately reflected the choice voters made at the polls. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded, “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Vance’s stance was poorly timed. This afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan released the government’s motion for immunity determinations, special counsel Jack Smith’s legal filing laying out the government’s case against Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing pulls from previously unreleased interviews, calls, and messages to paint a damning picture of Trump’s behavior as he tried to steal the presidency. Names in it are redacted, but journalists have already figured them out. 

The filing is coming now because Trump and then the Supreme Court repeatedly delayed the case. After the Supreme Court decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of a president’s official acts, the court had to take on what constituted an official act. In today’s filing, Smith argued that where Trump “was acting ‘as office-seeker, not office-holder,’ no immunity attaches.” The government asks that “the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.” 

The facts of the case begin with a damning statement: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.” 

Fundamental to those crimes was disinformation. The entire plan for keeping Trump in office depended on Trump and his loyalists lying to the American people, convincing them of a completely false story that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.  

That effort started long before the actual election when it became clear to the Trump team that he was unlikely to win. They knew, though, that since Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use mail-in ballots, there would be an initial period when his numbers were higher than Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s. 

In that case, Trump told advisor Roger Stone, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short, he would simply declare before all the ballots had been counted that he had won. In the meantime, he planted the idea that the election would be stolen from him, publicly saying, for example, that he would “have to see” whether he would accept the election results and saying that the only way he could lose would be if the election was rigged. 

On October 31, advisor Steve Bannon, whose specialty was disinformation, told a group of supporters that Trump was simply “going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner…that’s our strategy.” 

That’s exactly what Trump did. He claimed there had been fraud in the election and that he had won. Then, as states continued to count votes, Trump’s operatives tried to create chaos at the polling places. When the vote count in Detroit swung toward Biden, for example, operative Michael Roman told a colleague there to “give me options to file litigation… even if itbis [sic],” apparently meaning “even if it is BS.” Smith noted that “[w]hen a colleague suggested there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election”—a riot in which Roger Stone had participated—Roman responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”

Even as Trump publicly claimed victory, his campaign staff told him his chances of prevailing were slim. To win, they told him, he must carry Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. When the campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona on November 13, it effectively admitted Trump had lost the election. As soon as his lawyers conceded in Arizona, Trump sidelined his campaign staff and turned to Giuliani and lawyers who would back the Big Lie. 

To overturn the election results, Trump and his loyalists turned to pressuring Republicans in the states he had lost, especially Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that used certain voting machines, to say the election had been fraudulent. When officials demanded proof of their claims, Trump and Giuliani threatened them, then accused them of betrayal and spread their names to angry supporters, who harassed them. Again and again, Republican officials told Trump his numbers were wrong and that he had lost the election. They begged him to stop spreading lies. 

As for the idea that voting machines had been compromised, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly posted that claims of election fraud through voting machines “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” When Trump tried to get then–Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a report that claimed machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had affected the vote, McDaniel declined, saying she had already discussed the report with Michigan’s speaker of the house, who had told her the report was “f*cking nuts.”  

By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes. 

Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”

But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”

Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C. 

Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail. Then, after Trump spoke with Bannon and lawyer John Eastman, who had come up with the legal argument for Pence’s power to affect the count, he simply lied on social media that Pence agreed the vice president could change the election results, then posted: “Do it, Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

When Pence continued to refuse, on January 6, Trump told his supporters at the Ellipse that Pence had let him down and then continued to lie that the election had been stolen, assuring them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” Then he sent the crowd to obstruct the proceedings. 

Trump sat in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching the Fox News Channel and scrolling through Twitter as the crowd broke into the Capitol. At 2:24, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” A rioter read the tweet through a bullhorn for the crowd. A minute later, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence to a secure location. When told of Pence’s danger, Trump answered: “So what?”

When Congress came back after the riot, Trump and Giuliani tried to delay further, calling senators and one representative to slow the process down. It didn’t work. On January 7, at 3:41 in the morning, Pence announced that Biden’s election had been certified. 

It was all a lie. 

One hundred and forty police officers assaulted, close to $3 million in damage, close to 1,200 people charged, more than 450 serving prison sentences, a poisonous political movement taking root, and voter suppression laws…all because Trump couldn’t bear to have lost an election. 

“Post-truth politics” has real-world repercussions.  

Last night, when a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked him if trusted the electoral process this time around, Trump answered: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”

Dock workers strike would cost the U.S. economy $5 billion a day. Trump again insults injured vets: “They had a headache”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 1, 2024

More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen’s Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.

Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.

Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.  

In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.

When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”

Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned. 

The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.

Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there. 

The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.”

Vance responded: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.”

There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S. 

Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.” 

Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don’t care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”

It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.

It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!” 

Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83.

GasLit Nation: Kanye. Elon. Trump

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Oct 19, 2022

GASLIT NATION WITH ANDREA CHALUPA AND SARAH KENDZIOR

Imagine: the year is 2005. The Apprentice dominates the airwaves, Kanye West dominates the charts, and you are told that in seventeen years, you will be comparing the antisemitic rants of former presidential candidate West to the antisemitic rants of former president Trump as you analyze the descent of the United States into full-fledged authoritarian kleptocracy. Where is a Tesla time machine when you need one?! Surely transporting us back to an era in which we could alter our current timeline this would be a better endeavor for shit-talker Elon Musk than taking over Twitter while bonding with the extremist right.