Illiberalism
Gilead
Donald Trump
Coup attempt
Fig. 1. Donald Trump still has his fans. Photograph along Washington Road in Upper Saint Clair, Pennsylvania, by author, April 28, 2024.
As I look at coverage such as this in Raw Story, I worry that it is not only right-wing sources that fall into the trap of valorizing the folks on “our” side and vilifying the folks on “their” side.[1] Here, it is implied that the valiant Jack Smith cunningly laid a trap for the vilified Aileen Cannon to get her off the case.[2] Smith is our valiant hero. Cannon is our evil villain. Right must prevail, therefore Cannon will be vanquished.
When we think that righteousness must and will prevail, we succumb to a moral ideology. “Our” side is “righteous.” “Their” side is “evil.” And while I accept that Cannon is evil, I am not so sure that Smith is a hero, and I am not sure that the conflict between them should be reduced to a chess game. The journalism here is a little too cheap—cheerleading even—even if it does prove correct in the end.
David McAfee, “‘This is serious’: Ex-prosecutor says Judge Cannon is about to fall into removal trap,” Raw Story, June 24, 2024, https://www.rawstory.com/trump-removal-trap-judge-cannon-litman/
C. Ryan Barber, “As Trump’s Documents Case Crawls Along, Questions About Judge Abound,” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2024, https://apple.news/A2YQSWOXwTbm53Gjqh8x38A
Roman Catholic Church
Fig. 2. Catholic temple, El Señor de Tila, Balancan, Tabasco, Mexico. Photograph by Carlos Valenzuela, August 29, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Francis was elected to renew the Catholic Church,” said Thomas Söding, the vice president of the Central Committee for German Catholics, the group that descended on the German capital in November. But the pope’s failure to bring about any meaningful change has left the Church archaic and unfixed, he said, forcing the Germans to try and beat their own path.[3]
I have lived my entire life absolutely convinced that the Roman Catholic Church could not continue as it has. There are a lot of stubborn—really stubborn—folks there and I have been surprised, frankly, that the Church’s doctrinal suppression of the sensual has lasted. Catholics in the U.S. often disregard the doctrine from the Catholic hierarchy regarding sex precisely because that doctrine is so far out of step.
But a conference in Germany is the first I’ve heard—apparently, I haven’t been paying close enough attention—of a move to push the Church to lighten up. It’s being framed as a challenge to the entire idea of an authoritarian Roman Catholic hierarchy, which indeed hearkens back to the Protestant Reformation,[4] which itself asserted a direct relationship between humans and God rather than one mediated by Church hierarchy.[5] We’ll see if it amounts to anything.
Ben Munster, “Pope Francis has lost control of his liberal revolution,” Politico, June 24, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-rome-vatican-city-germany-catholics-liberal-revolution/
Imperialism
United States
Fig. 3. “American Progress,” painting by John Gast, 1872, digital version 2006, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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In case you’ve forgotten what this very long-running saga was about:
[Julian Assange] burst into the American public consciousness in the 2010s, when WikiLeaks began publishing a series of bombshell disclosures. They included hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. military documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables that included candid and sometimes unflattering assessments by U.S. diplomats of counterparts overseas — including foreign heads of state whose help was needed to counter terrorism.
He famously in 2016 published emails that Russian government hackers had stolen from Democratic Party servers and that U.S. authorities assessed were leaked by Moscow in an effort to disrupt the presidential election. He was not charged in connection with those documents.[6]
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were both disasters, the product of neoconservative hubris, guaranteed to further inflame relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world. It was already bad with Iran, so that can’t really be blamed for that, although the origins of that problem also originate partly in hubris. Anything leaked about these wars was bound to be embarrassing; the quoted account omits mention of infamous videos documenting aerial killings of innocent civilians.[7]
Let’s be clear: Assange is not the hill I’d want to die for. Early on in the saga, Sweden was pursuing him on rape charges, and his conduct toward the women was at least that of an asshole. But there was an inconsistency in that Sweden rarely pursued rapists like they did Assange, and so it was widely suspected that this was really about the U.S. wanting Assange arrested on any pretense necessary and then extradited.[8] But it’s also the case that the material Chelsea (at the time, Bradley) Manning leaked to Wikileaks exposed war crimes, which of course were never prosecuted in U.S. or international courts; the classification of those materials, whether or not otherwise warranted, was a means of covering up those crimes.
Apart from his appalling treatment of women, Assange deserves considerable credit for and there was a legitimate public interest in publishing the leaked material he did, both with regard to George W. Bush’s wars, and to Hillary Clinton. I hope this saga is indeed at an end.
Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett, and Rachel Weiner, “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange expected to plead guilty to felony charge,” Washington Post, June 24, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/24/assange-wikileaks-plea-deal-guilty/
Neoliberalism
Academic repression
Student loans
Fig. 4. Unattributed and undated image via James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal,[9] fair use.
Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, “Courts grant injunctions against Biden’s student loan repayment plan,” Washington Post, June 24, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/06/24/student-loan-repayment-plan-lawsuits/
- [1]David Benfell, “The morality of polarization,” Not Housebroken, January 4, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2018/09/21/the-morality-of-polarization/↩
- [2]David McAfee, “‘This is serious’: Ex-prosecutor says Judge Cannon is about to fall into removal trap,” Raw Story, June 24, 2024, https://www.rawstory.com/trump-removal-trap-judge-cannon-litman/↩
- [3]Ben Munster, “Pope Francis has lost control of his liberal revolution,” Politico, June 24, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-rome-vatican-city-germany-catholics-liberal-revolution/↩
- [4]Ben Munster, “Pope Francis has lost control of his liberal revolution,” Politico, June 24, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-rome-vatican-city-germany-catholics-liberal-revolution/↩
- [5]Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony, 1991), 6.↩
- [6]Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett, and Rachel Weiner, “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange expected to plead guilty to felony charge,” Washington Post, June 24, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/24/assange-wikileaks-plea-deal-guilty/↩
- [7]Kim Zetter and Kevin Poulsen, “U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe,” Wired, June 6, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/leak/↩
- [8]David Benfell, “The Great Feminist Smackdown: Rape Allegations against Julian Assange,” Not Housebroken, December 21, 2010, https://disunitedstates.org/2010/12/21/the-great-feminist-smackdown-rape-allegations-against-julian-assange/↩
- [9]Richard K. Vedder, “Eliminate or Radically Restructure Federal Student Loans,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, September 16, 2020, https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/09/eliminate-or-radically-restructure-federal-student-loans/↩