Author: Nancy LeTourneau

When Rupert Murdoch created Fox News in 1996, it was Roger Ailes who came up with the tag line “Fair and Balanced.” His intent was not only to “own the libs,” but to make the claim that establishment news networks had a liberal bias, and Fox News was needed for balance.

The scheme worked. Establishment news began to bend over backwards to provide “balanced coverage” of liberals and conservatives. Here is how Mark Jacob, former editor at Chicago Tribune and Sun Times described it:

When I edited political stories, I went so far as to count the quotes from Republicans and Democrats, thinking an equal number would make us fairer. I didn’t think I was helping either party. I thought I was helping the readers. I was wrong. 3/9

— Pro-Democracy (@ProDemocracyRTs) September 27, 2021

He’s right. Not only was it lazy journalism, it served to mainstream Republican positions that became more and more extreme.

In 2017, Fox News dropped the slogan “Fair and Balanced,” presumably as a way to distance the network from Roger Ailes and his serial sexual harassment. But the news site RealClearPolitics has picked up the mantra. A fundraising piece written by President David DesRosiers is titled, “Bring RealClear Balance to America’s Media.” His main example of balance is a data base the site has created that purports to demonstrate an equivalence between the violence of protests following the murder of George Floyd and the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

While the claim is to simply provide the data, the lack of context is an attempt to make the George Floyd protests appear more violent than the January 6 insurrection. For example, they point to over 16,000 arrests during the former and only 570 in the latter. Here’s a bit of context on the George Floyd protests from the Washington Post.

The Post’s analysis found the overwhelming majority arrested in those 15 cities — 2,059 of the 2,652 — were accused of nonviolent misdemeanors, most on charges of violating curfew or emergency orders…

Nationwide, the large number of arrests in those first two weeks occurred because police policies and training were inadequate to deal with widespread demonstrations at such a tense moment in the nation’s history, experts said.

“When it comes to civil disorder, officers are trained to handle riots,” said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminal justice at Arizona State University, who has helped craft federal guidelines on community policing amid social unrest. “They’re not trained to handle peaceful demonstrations or even mostly peaceful protests. They often show up to crowd control events that are not yet riots and handle them as if they were riots.”

We also know that “Four people who identify with the far-right extremist “boogaloo” movement are among those facing the most serious federal charges.” None of that information made it into the so-called “balanced” database at RCP.

DesRossiers provided some other examples of the publication’s balance. There is the attempt to smear fact-checkers, a “1776 Series” designed as an assault on the NYT “1619 Project,” material on the theme of “trustworthy elections” as a cover for lies about voter fraud, and – of course – attacks on critical race theory. That is what RCP is referring to when they talk about balance.

But it gets even worse. In addition to the fact that one of RCP’s main investigative reporters previously worked for the right wing site WorldNetDaily (which they fail to mention in his bio), the Daily Beast reported this about the site’s parent company.

The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned.

Called “Conservative Country,” the Facebook page was founded in 2014 and now boasts nearly 800,000 followers for its mix of Donald Trump hagiography and ultra-conservative memes. One recent post showed a man training two assault rifles at a closed door with the caption “Just sitting here waiting on Beto.” Others wink at right-wing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s “ties to Islam” or the Clintons having their enemies killed, or portray Muslim members of Congress as terrorist infiltrators. The page is effusive with praise for Vladimir Putin, and one post portrays Russia as the last bastion of freedom in Europe.

One of the main reasons people visit RCP is that they aggregate news stories daily. But for every piece from a major news outlet, they link to an opposing view from right wing media. Their favorite so-called “liberal” journalists are people like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté – whose main reason for being these days is to criticize Democrats. That is also what passes for balance at RCP.

RCP is one of the main reasons our news environment is so toxic. At least with sites like Brietbart and WorldNetDaily, everyone knows what they’re getting. RCP is deceitful. Under the guise of balance, they are promoting the same lies and disinformation we see from other right wing sites. But they are treated as legitimate. If you doubt that, take a look at where AllSides places RCP on their media bias chart.

RCP lands right in the middle, along with NPR, Reuters and the BBC.

It is unlikely that we will be able to stop the threat the Republican Party currently poses to our democracy as long as their extremism is mainstreamed.

When the media started obsessing over the drop in Biden’s approval rating – practically declaring him a lame duck president – I thought it would be interesting to look at what happened to the approval ratings of past presidents during their first nine months in office. I found exactly what I expected.

According to the aggregate of polls at FiveThirtyEight, Biden began with an approval rating of 53% and has dropped 8 points to 45%. Here’s how it looks for previous presidents during their first 233 days in office:

• Trump went from 45.4% to 38.8%, a drop of 6.6
• Obama went from 68% to 51.1%, a drop of 16.9
• Clinton went from 54% to 44.2%, a drop of 9.8

George W. Bush’s approval rating doesn’t provide a good comparison because it skyrocketed about this time after the 9/11 terrorist attack.

What this data shows is that there is nothing unusual about a drop in presidential approval ratings once they stop campaigning and start governing.

But while I was looking at those numbers, I noted something else. When George W. Bush left office, his approval rating was historically low at 27.8. Of the previous 12 presidents, the only one who even comes close is Richard Nixon, whose approval rating was 24.8 when he resigned over the whole Watergate scandal. Even Trump ended his one term at 38.7. For the other two-term presidents, Obama left office with a 54.8 approval rating, Clinton was at 63.2 and Reagan was at 63.1.

Even most Republicans disapproved of Bush’s performance at the end of his second term. But that’s hardly surprising – given the debacle of Katrina, the war in Iraq, and the collapse of the economy. On every front imaginable, GOP policies had been an abysmal failure.

It was in that context that we elected this country’s first African American president – who exuded not only hope, but competence. He had gained notoriety for his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he said things like this:

We are all grieving the loss of life that resulted from the terrorist attack by ISIS-K in Afghanistan on Thursday. But while Republicans scream about President Biden having “blood on his hands,” let’s take a step back and ponder the viewpoint of those who are putting their lives at risk.

https://twitter.com/M_Breen/status/1431062103893311488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431062103893311488%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F

Those serving in Afghanistan are in the business of saving lives – fully aware that it might cost them their own. That strikes me as the most noble venture a human being can undertake. But even AFTER the bombing, when warnings continued about credible threats, they didn’t let up. On Friday, another 6,800 people were evacuated, bringing the total to 111,900. As Breen said, “that is honor.”

Take a look at what one of the civilians involved in transporting refugees from Germany to the U.S., Delta Airlines pilot Alexander Kahn, had to say about his involvement.

As the son of a Holocaust survivor, Delta Airlines pilot Alexander Kahn says helping Afghans evacuate was "special."

"I was able to put myself in their position," he said. "This is going to be a frightening experience … But it has the potential to be an excellent experience." pic.twitter.com/IXwJdqYYY5

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) August 27, 2021

When those refugees reach Dulles airport, Chef José Andrés is there to meet them with a hot meal.

What’s happening in Afghanistan breaks my heart…but the outpouring of support from people across America helps glue it back ❤️‍🩹 Our @WCKitchen team at Dulles Airport saw even more refugees today….They had to go bring hundreds of extra meals & are still serving! #ChefsForAfghans pic.twitter.com/hpRJmAYhl6

— Chef José Andrés 🕊️🥘🍳 (@chefjoseandres) August 27, 2021

Some of the refugees will have family or friends, who have been terrified about their fate, waiting to greet them.

https://twitter.com/Smartypants60/status/1431316059873701890?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431316059873701890%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F

While so many in the media are obsessed with the narrative about chaos and calamity and right wingers politicize the entire operation, let’s not forget what this is all about. Members of the U.S. military are risking their lives to evacuate people from Afghanistan while other Americans are stepping up to support them in that journey. Don’t let the haters rob us of the stories about these heroes.

I abruptly stopped writing about politics two months ago. For those who wondered what was up, I apologize. But I couldn’t explain what was happening because I didn’t know myself. All I knew was that the effort to research topics to write about felt pointless. As has often happened in my life, I figured that eventually an explanation would emerge…if I followed my instincts and listened.

A piece by Ibram X. Kendi, one of those recently maligned “critical race theorists,” finally pulled it all together for me. His point is that the Republican operatives who are fear mongering about critical race theory are arguing with themselves.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.

The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

Kendi goes on to give several examples of people discussing his work in a way that is at odds with anything he’s ever said or written. As he says, they’re conjuring up an imagined monster. So what’s the point of engaging.

What we write doesn’t matter to the people arguing with themselves. It doesn’t matter that I consistently challenge Manichaean racial visions of inherently good or evil people or policy making. It doesn’t matter that I don’t write about policy making being good or evil, or that I write about the equitable or inequitable outcome of policies. It doesn’t matter that I’ve urged us toward relative equity, and not toward perfect equity…

How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies?…Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

And yet, silence comes with a price. As Kendi writes, “democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.”

While Kendi’s piece is focused on the fear mongering about critical race theory, it is also true of all of the lies being told by right wingers about Democrats more generally. As just one example, this week they’re freaking out over something HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said recently. The editorial staff at the Washington Examiner wrote about it in a piece titled, “The wretched Xavier Becerra wants to control your life.”

“We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said last week.

Asked on CNN whether it’s “the government’s business knowing who has or hasn’t been vaccinated,” the cultural warrior turned Biden proxy replied, “Perhaps we should point out that the federal government has spent trillions of dollars to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So it is absolutely the government’s business. It is taxpayers’ business if we have to continue to spend money to try to keep people from contracting COVID and helping reopen the economy.”…

The answer was both stupid and clarifying.

…It was clarifying because it revealed one of the Left’s motivations in expanding federal spending: It wants more control over your life.

Every time Democrats say they want the government to pay for something, they mean they want the government to control that part of your life.

Becerra revealed that he and his ilk want the government to be your health insurer so that the government can micromanage your diet, your exercise, and probably your family size.

They want the federal government to fund education from pre-K through college so they can dictate the curriculum.

They want to pay the piper so that they can call the tune. Big government is the Trojan horse for an all-out culture war.

How to you engage in dialogue with people who go from money spent on vaccinating people during a pandemic to “micromanaging your diet, your exercise, and probably your family life?” It would be possible to do so if you were engaging people who sincerely wanted to listen in order to truly understand your position. But we all know that’s not the case. At this point, even facts and evidence are irrelevant because they are dismissed as nothing more than partisan lies.

In some ways, this kind of distortion has always been part of politics. What’s new is the way that social media and right wing news outlets have not only propagated conspiracy theories, but have inoculated their followers against ever having their perceptions challenged. Last year Julian Sanchez explained that his concept of epistemic closure goes far beyond merely being an echo chamber.

The idea of “epistemic closure” was that you WOULD hear new and contrary information, but you have mechanisms in your belief system that reject anything that might force you to update your beliefs…

I bring this up now, because the Trump ecosystem has developed a pretty sophisticated set of epistemic closure mechanisms that work to reject new information that might otherwise pose a problem.

The closure mechanisms the right has installed in order to inoculate their followers include references to things like the deep state, fake news, and the swamp. Once people buy into those, they can reject any information that comes from those sources. Recently Trump said that painting the news media as corrupt will go down as one of his greatest achievements. That is precisely how he inoculates his followers against reality.

But it doesn’t end there. As Sanchez explains, they “effectively judo-flip [contradictory information] into confirmation of the preexisting narrative, rather than new contradictory data.” In doing so, the right actually turns those who challenge them into targets that reinforce their delusional lies.So—like Kendi—I’m wondering what’s the point.

Beyond all of the specific issues, policies, and politics that are on the table these days, this is the most important meta issue we are facing. For democracy to survive, we’re going to have to figure this one out. But as far as I can see, no one has an answer to this one. I don’t either…which is why I went silent.

One of the biggest stories of Trump’s first 100 days in office was that many of his nominees to fill Cabinet positions had spent their previous careers attempting to undermine the work of the department they would go on to lead. That was designed to accomplish the goal Steve Bannon identified during his speech at CPAC: a deconstruction of the administrative state. Between positions left open and those filled by incompetent partisans, those Cabinet nominees did tremendous damage to the functioning of the federal government. For Republicans, that was a feature, not a bug.

That is why, even though Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice during the 2020 primaries, I came to realize that his familiarity with what a functioning federal government should look like and the contacts he had developed over the years with competent, experienced people might be exactly what was needed to clean up the mess left by Trump. A functioning federal government might not be something that political pundits like to talk about, but it is critical to building support for a liberal agenda.

As part of their messaging for Biden’s first 100 days in office, the White House released a fact sheet demonstrating that Biden is doing exactly what I hoped he would do.

The Biden-Harris Administration put in place its Statutory Cabinet faster than any other Administration since President Reagan. President Biden has also announced his intent to nominate 233 individuals to serve in Senate-confirmed leadership roles across the Executive Branch – more nominees than any past administration has announced by the 100-day mark.

You might remember that, following the 2020 election, the Trump administration attempted to delay and obstruct the Biden transition team. That makes the accomplishment described above even more impressive.

Of course, Biden is doing all of that while assembling the most diverse cabinet in presidential history. As the White House documented, that is also true of the positions that don’t require Senate confirmation.

[T]he White House Office of Presidential Personnel has hired nearly 1,500 presidential appointees to serve in key agency positions that do not require Senate confirmation – double the number of appointees hired by any prior administration by the 100-day mark. And, consistent with President Biden’s commitment to leveraging the talent, creativity, and expertise of the American people to build an Administration that looks like America, more than half of all Biden appointees are women, and half identify as non-white – numbers that set a new bar for future Administrations.

Of the approximately 1,500 agency appointees hired by President Biden so far:

58% are women
18% identify as Black or African American
15% identify as Latino or Hispanic
15% identify as Asian American or Pacific Islander
3% identify as Middle Eastern or North African
2% identify as American Indian or Alaska Native
14% identify as LGBTQ+
4% are veterans
3% identify as disabled or having a disability
15% were the first in their families to go to college
32% are naturalized citizens or the children of immigrants

We can see the results of those efforts at the Department of Justice. Not only has the Civil Rights division opened pattern or practice investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, they plan to ask a grand jury to indict Chauvin and the other three ex-officers involved in George Floyd’s killing on charges of civil rights violations. On Wednesday, they also announced that the three Georgia men who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery have been charged with federal hate crimes and attempted kidnapping. In other words, we now have a Justice Department that is operational when it comes to prosecuting civil rights violations.

Of course, in addition to his knowledge of how the federal government is supposed to work, Biden knows Congress better than just about any politician on the scene today. And as Ed Kilgore explains, it’s showing.

For all their political gifts, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who, lest we forget, both had a much more firmly Democratic Senate and House the first two years of their presidencies — couldn’t come close to the mastery of Congress Biden has exhibited up until now…While Republicans fret about Trump and rage about “cancel culture,” Biden is eating their lunch.

There are plenty of political pundits on the left who assume that it is their job to tell Biden what he should be doing. But while I’m sure that the president will make some mistakes, I will mostly maintain a posture that allows me to watch and report what I see. As I did with a similar posture during Obama’s presidency, I suspect that I’ll learn a lot.

In the third season of David Simon’s “The Wire,” Police Major “Bunny” Colvin reaches a breaking point when one of his officers is shot while trying to buy three small vials of cocaine during an undercover operation. He launched what came to be known as “Hamsterdam” with this speech.

Colvin cordoned off a section of his district where “corner boys” could sell drugs and prostitutes could sell sex without getting arrested. Eventually, they brought in public health specialists to work with the buyers to limit the spread of diseases.

In that fictional world, the result was that violent crime and robberies were reduced significantly in Colvin’s district as his officers focused on “real police work.” But he kept his methods a secret. Once word got out about what he was doing, the city shut Hamsterdam down.

The reason I’m recalling those episodes of “The Wire” is that State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby initiated a city-wide replication of Hamsterdam at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. She announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus. Much like the fictional account, Mosby brought in behavioral health services as an alternative to law enforcement. The results were astounding.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketedin most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison was completely on board with Mosby’s effort.

“The officers told me they did not agree with that paradigm shift,” Harrison said. He said he had to “socialize” both officers and citizens to this new approach. Harrison expected crime to rise. “It did not,” the chief said. “It continued to go down through 2020. As a practitioner, as an academic, I can say there’s a correlation between the fact that we stopped making these arrests and crime did not go up.”

What we can say right now is that there is a “correlation” between these efforts and a reduction in crime because there is no proof of causation. But it is still possible that the data can be developed. On Friday, Mosby announced that she would make her temporary initiative permanent.

“A year ago, we underwent an experiment in Baltimore,” Mosby said in an interview, describing steps she took after consulting with public health and state officials to reduce the public’s exposure to the coronavirus, including not prosecuting nonviolent offenses. “What we learned in that year, and it’s so incredibly exciting, is there’s no public safety value in prosecuting these low-level offenses. These low-level offenses were being, and have been, discriminately enforced against Black and Brown people.

“The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said. “We have to rebuild the community’s trust in the criminal justice system and that’s what we will do, so we can focus on violent crime.” In a city that still struggles with a high homicide rate and gun violence, even with the decline in crime, she said the policy shift will enable more prosecutors to be assigned to homicides and other major cases instead of misdemeanor court.

Take a bow David Simon…you were right all along.

Republicans, who are struggling to come up with a way to demonize Biden, assume that they’ve landed on a gold mine in suggesting that the President’s immigration policies have led to a surge of undocumented migrants crossing our southern border. For the most part, major media outlets are playing right along.

But as I’ve been suggesting for a while now, in order to understand what’s happening, we need to start with the facts. So I decided to share a few of those with you.

It is always helpful to pay attention to an organization that has specialized in accurate reporting on this topic: Pew Research. A report from John Gramlich published on Monday included this graph of monthly apprehensions on our southern border.

Apprehensions peaked in May 2019, dropped precipitously by April 2020, and have been on the rise ever since.

One thing to keep in mind about all of this is that there is a seasonal nature to migration. Border apprehensions have typically peaked in the spring – most often in March – before declining during the hot summer months, when migration journeys become more perilous. That pattern changed in 2013, about the same time that new arrivals from the Norther Triangle—predominantly families and unaccompanied children—doubled and migrants from Mexico began to decline.

All of that is important because, according to Pew Research, those patterns are starting to reverse.

• Mexican migrants are accounting for a greater share of apprehensions than in the recent past, while Central Americans represent a smaller proportion.
• The number and share of single adults being apprehended at the border has also increased dramatically.

It isn’t clear yet how those reversals will play out. But it is very possible that the February spike in apprehensions could also be a return to the seasonal nature of migration. Only time will tell.

Republicans would have you believe that the current state of border apprehensions is entirely a result of changes Biden has made, expecting us to completely ignore everything else that might be impacting the situation. So perhaps it would be helpful to outline what, exactly, Biden has changed. On Tuesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released a statement providing the facts about what the Biden administration has done. Here are the highlights:

• The majority of those apprehended at the southwest border are single adults who, pursuant to Title 42, are currently being expelled under the CDC’s authority to manage the public health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Families apprehended at the southwest border are also currently being expelled under the CDC’s Title 42 authority.
• While the Trump administration also expelled unaccompanied children, the are now being brought to a Border Patrol facility and processed for transfer to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) while they await placement with a sponsor. The children go through immigration proceedings where they are able to present a claim for relief under the law.
• DHS and HHS terminated a 2018 agreement that basically used child migrants as bait. It required that information about the sponsor of a child migrant, and anyone living with the sponsor, be shared with ICE, which officials said created a “chilling effect” for families who did not have legal status and feared deportation.

As Gramlich documented, single adults made up 71 percent of those apprehended at the border in February, with families making up about 20 percent and unaccompanied children 10 percent. What that means is that when Republicans and the media throw around scary numbers about a surge of more than  100,000 “illegal crossings” in February, what they’re not telling you is that approximately 90,000 migrants (single adults and families) were apprehended and expelled. The big change is in how the Biden administration is responding to unaccompanied child migrants—which explains why that is the group that is overwhelming the current shelter capacity.

As both Biden and Mayorkas have made clear, all of this is still a work in progress as they attempt to rebuild a humane asylum system that had been completely dismantled by the Trump administration. Anyone who critiques what is happening now should be pressed to identify which change Biden has implemented that caused the problem and explain why it should be reversed. But, of course, they won’t do that. It is much easier to simply claim that Biden is implementing an “open border” policy…which is complete nonsense.

I went to bed with a heavy heart last night after learning that Sister Dianna Ortiz died on Friday from cancer at the age of 62. Her story is one that every American should know.

In 1987, at the age of 29, Ortiz went to a remote village in the Guatemalan highlands to teach Mayan children to read. Two years later, she was abducted by police officers who took her to a secret prison at a police academy in Guatemala City where she was repeatedly gang-raped and brutally tortured. You can read Ortiz’s account of what happened here, but be warned, it is more horrific than you can imagine.

Unlike the thousands of Guatemalans that “disappeared” back then, Ortiz lived to tell her story.

As a U.S. citizen, I had another advantage: I could, in relative safety, reveal afterwards the details of what happened to me in those twenty-four hours. One of those details: an American was in charge of my torturers.

I remember the moment he removed my blindfold. I asked him, “Are you an American?” In poor Spanish and with a heavy American accent, he answered me with a question: “Why do you want to know?” Moments before, after the torturers had blindfolded me again and were getting ready to rape me again, they had called out in Spanish: “Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!”

And a voice had responded “Shit!” in perfect American English with no trace of an accent. It was the voice of the tall, fair-skinned man beside me. After swearing, he’d switched to a halting Spanish. “Idiots!” he said. “She’s a North American nun.” He added that my disappearance had been made public, and he ran them out of the room.

Ortiz was never able to prove that the man in charge of her torturers was an American. But from what we know about U.S. history in Guatemala, her story is plausible.

We have to go back to 1951, when Jacobo Arbenz became the second democratically elected president of Guatemala. He initiated land reforms which granted property to landless peasants. That didn’t sit well with the United Fruit Company, which had close ties to Eisenhower’s White House. Under the guise of fighting communism, the United States planned and funded a coup, installing Carlos Castillo Armas as the military dictator. He was followed by a series of right-wing military dictators backed by the U.S., setting up a civil war in Guatemala that lasted from 1960 to 1996. The results were horrific.

With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end – in the same place it had begun – making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined.

One of those dictators was Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. In 2013, a Guatemalan court found him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. Here is how Corey Robin described what was going on in 1982.

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

That is why, when I read that Rep. Jamie Raskin was giving speeches to denounce Reagan’s involvement in Latin America while he was a student at Harvard, I knew that his roots as a progressive ran deep. But Reagan wasn’t just slapping Montt on the back and calling him a good guy, he was sending millions of dollars to Guatemala to support the military that was committing these atrocities. But thanks to Sister Dianna Ortiz, we know it was much worse than that. Here’s how she describes part of her ongoing search for justice.

In 1996, I held a five-week vigil before the White House, asking for the declassification of all U.S. government documents related to human rights abuses in Guatemala since 1954, including documents on my own case. A few days into my vigil, I was granted a meeting with First Lady Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton admitted what no other U.S. government official had dared to concede during my seven-year search for the truth behind my abduction and torture in Guatemala: she said it was possible that the American in charge of my Guatemalan torturers was a “past or present employee of a U.S. agency.”

One of the most significant, but unheralded accomplishments of the Clinton administration was the declassification of thousands of documents related to the involvement of the CIA and military intelligence in Latin America during the Cold War. Here’s some of what we learned:

U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train Latin American military officers at an Army school from 1982 to 1991 advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion against insurgents, Pentagon documents released yesterday show.

Used in courses at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use “fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum,” according to a secret Defense Department summary of the manuals compiled during a 1992 investigation of the instructional material and also released yesterday.

The Army School of the Americas, long located in Panama by moved in 1984 to Fort Benning, Ga., has trained nearly 60,000 military and police officers from Latin America and the United States since 1946.

Its graduates have included some of the region’s most notorious human rights abusers, among them Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads; 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests; Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the deposed Panamanian strongman; six Peruvian officers linked to killings of students and a professor; and Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan officer implicated in the death of an American innkeeper living in Guatemala and to the death of a leftist guerrilla married to an American lawyer.

Years later it was Yale history professor Greg Grandin who connected the dots between George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and these activities in Latin America.

In fact, it was in Latin America that the CIA and U.S. military intelligence agents, working closely with local allies, first helped put into place the unholy trinity of government-sponsored terrorism now on display in Iraq and elsewhere: death squads, disappearances and torture.

It’s also worth noting that the torture of Sister Ortiz happened on George H.W. Bush’s watch, the president who had previously served as CIA director. Here’s how she described the response of the U.S. embassy in Guatemala at the time.

Only one week after my abduction, before any true investigation had been conducted, the U.S. ambassador suggested that I was a political strategist and had staged my own kidnapping to secure a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Guatemala.

Two months later, after a U.S. doctor had counted 111 cigarette burns on my back alone, the story changed. In January 1990, the Guatemalan defense minister publicly announced that I was a lesbian and had staged my abduction to cover up a tryst. The minister of the interior echoed this statement and then said he had heard it first from the U.S. embassy. According to a congressional aide, the political affairs officer at the U.S. embassy, Lew Anselem, was indeed spreading the same rumor.

In the presence of Ambassador Thomas Stroock, this same human rights officer told a delegation of religious men and women concerned about my case that he was “tired of these lesbian nuns coming down to Guatemala.” The story would undergo other permutations. According to the Guatemalan press, the ambassador came up with another version: he told the Guatemalan defense minister that I was not abducted and tortured but simply “had problems with [my] nerves.”

Ortiz spent the rest of her life not only seeking justice, but working with other victims of torture to find a modicum of healing. I’ve watched a few videos of her telling this story and her pain in relating these events years later remained absolutely palpable.

That is why I love the picture of her up above. Looking at it I can imagine that, perhaps in her death, Sister Dianna might have finally found some peace. At least…that is my hope.

I hadn’t heard of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) until he and his wife wrote a heart-wrenching editorial about their son who committed suicide. Eight days later, Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Raskin to be the lead impeachment manager for the Senate trial of Donald Trump.

We all watched Raskin and his associates do a magnificent job of documenting why the former president should be found guilty of inciting the riot that took place on January 6. As a result, a lot of us are learning about a man who is one of the most progressive Democrats in the House.

Raskin comes from a long line of progressive Democrats. His grandfather, Samuel Bellman, was Minnesota’s first Jewish state legislator, elected in 1935. His father, Marcus Raskin, was a young aide in the John F. Kennedy White House, but left to form the Institute for Policy Studies over his objections to the war in Vietnam. In 1971, Marcus Raskin received the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg and put him in touch with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

Bill McKibben writes that the first time he met Jamie Raskin was when the two of them were students at Harvard. Raskin had just given a rousing speech against the Reagan Administration’s involvement in Central America. Today’s liberals have all but forgotten that, under the cover of fighting the so-called “Cold War,” the U.S. engaged in both committing and supporting atrocities all over Central and South America. Fighting against that was a central focus for progressives back in those days.

As many of us have learned during the Senate impeachment trial, Raskin taught constitutional law at  American University Washington College of Law for over 25 years. One of his students was Stacey Plaskett, who did an outstanding job as one of the House managers of the impeachment trial.

In 2006, Raskin was elected to the Maryland state senate, where he fought to repeal the death penalty, sponsored the first bill in the country for the National Popular Vote, championed efforts to reform marijuana laws, and helped lead the fight to legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland. During a committee hearing on marriage equality, Raskin responded to an opposing lawmaker with one of his most famous quotes: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

Raskin was diagnosed and treated for colon cancer in 2010. He said that the experience taught him the difference between misfortune and injustice.

“Any of us could be assigned such a verdict on any particular day,” he said. “If you experience such a misfortune and you get such a diagnosis and you can’t get health care, because you love the wrong person or you lost your job or you’re not working or you’re too poor, that’s not a misfortune, that’s an injustice because we can do something about that.”

In 2016, Raskin was elected to represent Maryland’s 9th congressional district. Here is an example of the platform he proposed.

A longtime resident of ultra-progressive Takoma Park, Raskin has proposed a national commission to develop legislation “to liberate the American underclass from the interlocking problems of inadequate education and bad health care, environmental racism, unemployment, economic exploitation, and mass incarceration.”

Once elected to Congress, Raskin joined three other Democrats (Jared Huffman, Jerry McNerney, and Dan Kildee) to form the Freethought Caucus, with the goal of “pushing public policy formed on the basis of reason, science, and moral values,” promoting the “separation of church and state.”

During a 2018 interview with the Guardian, Raskin explained why he wasn’t interested in moving to the center in order to advance his political career.

It’s not my ambition to be in the political centre, which blows around with the wind. It’s my ambition to be in the moral centre and that’s why I call myself a progressive because I think our job is to find what’s right, the best that we can, and then bring the political centre to us and that’s what makes politics interesting and meaningful.

Obviously, Raskin walks his talk:

Sen. James Brochin of Baltimore County, one of the Maryland Senate’s most right-leaning Democrats, said Raskin’s “gentle and persistent” advocacy got him to change his position on same-sex marriage.

“He spent two years working on me,” Brochin said. “He’s got an incredible amount of decency.”

I am not particularly fond of political labels, but nevertheless, tend to refer to myself as a pragmatic progressive. For me, that has always meant grounding policy proposals in reason, science, and morality—or doing what’s right, the best we can.

When we talk about progressives these days, it is often in reference to elected officials like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But behind the scenes are people like Jamie Raskin, who don’t typically garner as much media attention. That’s why I’d like to send out a special “thank you” to Speaker Nancy Pelosi for choosing him to be the lead House impeachment manager—giving us the opportunity to learn more about one of the outstanding members of the Democratic Party. Raskin’s moral clarity is at the center of what it means to be progressive.

We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about…We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

As Ron Brownstein noted, this is the kind of apocalyptic message Republicans have been using for at least the last decade.

When each election is presented as life-and-death for the country, it may not be surprising that more and more Republican voters and leaders want to maintain power by any means necessary. The claim that any Democratic victory will irrevocably reconfigure the nation taps into a deep fear among key components of the Republican coalition: that they will be eclipsed by the demographic and cultural changes that have made white people—especially white Christians—a steadily shrinking share of the population.

Brownstein goes on to point out that, in a poll conducted last year by Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels, more than half of Republican voters strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

I was reminded of the first piece I wrote at the Washington Monthly back in November 2014 titled, “Understanding the Threat of a Confederate Insurgency.” I had been struck by an article in which Doug Muder compared tea partiers to confederates. Even though the South lost the Civil War, they mounted an insurgency that “used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States.”

Six years later, the tea partiers have morphed into Trumpists, but Muder’s comparison is even more starkly real than it was back then. Here’s the glue that binds:

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries…

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

Notice how that aligns with the view embraced by half of Republicans who are willing to consider the use of force to save “the traditional American way of life.”

Christian nationalist are very comfortable with that kind of apocalyptic message, as it has always been part of their tradition. So it should come as no surprise that, alongside white supremacy militia groups, Christian nationalists were an integral part of the insurrection on January 6.

Thomas Edsall talked to Samuel L. Perry who, along with Andrew Whitehead, wrote the book Taking America Back for God, about the role of Christian nationalists in the insurgency. Perry stated that their involvement: