Standing Up to Bullies in Power

Something happened in a Florida federal court a few weeks ago that showed what it takes to standup to bullies, and not just any bullies, but bullies who wield power.

U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks sanctioned former President Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba, ordering them to pay nearly $1 million in fines for filing what he deemed a frivolous lawsuit. Trump claimed that his political opponent in the 2016 presidential campaign, Hilary Clinton, as well as others involved in the Russian investigation, conspired to damage his reputation.

Middlebrooks said Trump was a sophisticated litigant who made it a practice to use the courts to seek revenge against his political opponents and called the former Republican president’s lawsuit against Clinton a “political manifesto.”

"He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions," Middlebrooks wrote in his opinion. "As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba."

The judged ordered Trump and Habba, who as a member of the bar clearly knew the frivolity of her and her client’s actions, to pay 18 defendants $938,000. Of course, they vowed to appeal, but that seems doubtful.

Indeed, the very next day, Trump dropped another one of his “revenge lawsuits,” this one against New York Attorney General Letitia James whose fraud investigation into the Trump family seeks records from his private trust.

Last month, the same Judge Middlebrooks denied Trump’s lawsuit against James and called Trump’s claims of harm “quintessentially speculative.”

In sanctioning Trump and his lawyer for the Clinton lawsuit, Middlebrooks made clear, unequivocally, to Trump that he would not tolerate the dishonest bullying tactics Trump has employed most of his life, using lawyers and friendly courts to hide his misdeeds and attack those who legitimately question those misdeeds and seek accountability.

Unlike his colleague in the Southern District of Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon, Middlebrooks rendered a decision without fear or favor. Cannon – who Trump appointed despite her apparent lack of necessary qualifications to sit on the bench – granted Trump’s request last year to effectively delay the Department of Justice’s investigation into his mishandling classified documents. But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Cannon’s ruling that appeared to return a favor to the former president for appointing her.

“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in its ruling. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

In regard to the lawsuit Trump filed against Clinton, Middlebrooks wrote, “This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

Trump’s complaint that the Russian investigation tarnished his reputation is yet another bullying tactic. Despite what he and his minions including former US Attorney General Bob Barr say, the Mueller Report clearly demonstrated Russia interfered and influenced the 2016 campaign in favor of Donald Trump.

And for Trump, all roads lead to Russia. For the last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stood against an international bully, Vladimir Putin, a Trump ally.

Remember, Trump asked Zelenskyy in 2019 for a “favor” in return for releasing a $400 million congressionally mandated military aid package then-President Trump blocked. The quid pro quo that he sought, which lead to his first impeachment, was for Ukraine to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden.

This incident is seen in new light with the Russian dictator’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, which Trump cheered, and which hundreds of thousands have died since the war began last February.

But Putin’s invasion is failing, spectacularly, and largely because the Russian military is neither well equipped nor properly skilled. Many Russian soldiers sent mercilessly into battle appear to lack motivation for carrying out orders of a would-be czar who wants to re-build a Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.

Despite the world’s fears leading up to Putin’s aggression against his supposedly weaker neighbor, the Ukrainians stood, undaunted (and with immense help from the West led by the US), and bloodied the bully’s nose, month after month as missiles rain down on their country.

Late last year, following one Russian defeat after another, Putin, who vowed never to negotiate, signaled, then called for negotiations. But Zelenskyy knew Putin was stalling for time to build an army for a winter offensive. Ignoring Western pleas to negotiate, Zelenskyy demanded Putin first return all territory taken since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and restore Ukraine to its 1991 border.

As Russian exiles Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, co-founders of the pro-democracy Russian Action Committee, wrote this month in Foreign Affairs, Ukraine is on the verge of victory and Putin defeat, militarily and politically because of Zelenskyy’s fearless refusal to back down from a bully.

“This is a make-or-break moment for Ukraine,” the authors said.

However, Kasparov – chair of the Human Rights Foundation and a former world chess champion, and Khodorkvosky, a businessman and former political prisoner – advise that the West, and in particular President Joe Biden, must not fear the bully’s threat of nuclear war or that Putin’s fall from power would mean something worse in Russia.

“Biden can turn the tide in Kyiv’s favor by backing up his declarations of support with the delivery of tanks and long-range weaponry,” the authors said. “He can also hasten the demise of Putin’s regime, opening up the possibility of a democratic future for Russia and demonstrating to the world the folly of military aggression. The United States cannot let its fears stand in the way of Ukraine’s hopes.”

If we let them, bullies will intimidate and brutalize us. Stand up to them, and you will see how weak they truly are. At this point in human history, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

It Has Happened Here

Fascism can slither into a democracy unnoticed until a moment of social dysfunction, then it strikes hard, its poison seeping into the psyche of the nation as its political leaders struggle for constitutional coherence.

Despite his decisive election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump refused to relinquish power, and waged a deadly insurrection with an army of supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 to take control of the United States government before Biden was inaugurated.

This is fascism in 21st century America, where Trump, once considered a billionaire buffoon until he won the presidency in 2016, directed thousands of loyalists, many armed or ready to retrieve an arms cache nearby, to attack the U.S. Capitol and stop certification of the 2020 election.

Hundreds were injured, five people died and one woman was killed in the melee before the mob was turned back.Yet, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate still voted to overturn the election in favor of Trump, even after his loyalists destroyed property, beat police officers, and voted to hang Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence.

Gallows for Pence on Jan. 2, 2021.

Credit: Tyler Merbler

Meanwhile, a presidential hopeful for 2024, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, signs laws by a complicit Sunshine State legislature that dictate what school children and high schoolers should learn. Are checks and balances, one of democracy’s pillars, no longer valid there?

In Pennsylvania, Trump-endorsed Republican Doug Mastriano, a conservative Christian and ex-army officer, vows to disenfranchise voters if he becomes governor and doesn’t like the outcome of statewide elections. Mastriano was among those who marched on the Capitol Jan. 6.

Not since Huey Long of Louisiana has there been governors or candidates for governor willing to tear apart democracy to keep or get power. Long was a beloved populist with a fascist fist. As the Democratic and demagogic governor (and later U.S. senator), he ruled the Bayou State from 1928 to 1935 when he was assassinated at the state’s capitol.

The iron-fisted Long.

Credit: Library of Congress

The conservative wing of the Republican Party, having long desired to dictate social mores from the pulpit of government, finally succeeded after jerry-rigging the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided recently that women have no rights under the Constitution.

Five conservative justices took away a fundamental right of privacy under Roe v. Wade, thus effectively banning abortion. They also struck down a gun-safety law in New York and several other states that restricted gun owners from openly carrying weapons.

Justice Clarence Thomas who delivered the opinion on guns appears to have no problem with Trump’s armed insurrection, which his wife, Ginny, supported, if not helped organize.

Thomas said the court is now considering stripping more rights including same sex marriage. In the history of the United States, the Supreme Court has never taken away a constitutional right, but this court is only getting started. Thomas wants to nullify years of gun-safety laws.

This fall, fascist forces could succeed in controlling Congress. If Republicans win one or both houses, they have threatened to impeach Biden for no other reason than to impeach him. If that occurs, the coup Trump started on Jan. 6 becomes a fait accompli.

No matter who wins the presidential election in 2024, a conservative-controlled Supreme Court and a Republican Congress dominated by conservatives will maneuver to decide the winner.

In 1935, during the rise of fascism in Europe, writer Sinclair Lewis penned a novel about a fascist leader taking power in the United States, “It Could Happen Here.”

Since that period, fascist forces have banged at America’s door, and conservative politicians and religious-right leaders have tried to let them in, eager to serve their own self-interests and thirsts for power. Their wish appears on the verge of coming true. It has now happened here.

Some of the leading forces of fascism in this country have largely been conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians. From the anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin, who embraced fascism on his Detroit radio programs in the 1930s, to today’s Supreme Court Justices like Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch (now Episcopalian), Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts.

Perhaps fascism’s absolutism resembles the dogma of religions like Catholicism and evangelical Christianity and that’s why churchgoers find appeal in both.

The three largest countries in Europe that turned to fascism in the 1930s were Catholic: Italy, led by Benito Mussolini; Germany, led by Adolf Hitler; and Spain, led by Francisco Franco.

While Mussolini and Hitler were raised Catholic neither man believed in their faith. They led the most brutal war in world history. Franco was a devout Catholic who, with Hitler’s help, waged a brutal Civil War (he stayed out of World War II), and then led an evil dictatorship for 39 years.

The five conservative justices who took away the right of a woman to choose her own health care based their ruling not on constitutional or even science-backed constitutional law. They based it on their religious beliefs. Could we be headed to a sort of Franco-theocratic rule?

If conservative Republicans manage to succeed in their fascist quest, their next task is re-writing the Constitution. They will surely take away more rights and eliminate the Establishment Clause that, at this tenuous moment, prevents the government from making religious-based laws.

Since 2014, 19 state legislatures – everyone one of them Republican controlled – have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional convention. Four – Wisconsin, Nebraska, West Virginia, South Carolina – did so this year. The effort is led by wealthy business conservatives such as Charles Koch.

Conservative Republicans claim they want to re-write the Constitution to reign in federal spending and limit government. That is devious. A convention will allow them to throw out our current Constitution for a document that could create an authoritarian government and restrict rights for everyone by heterosexual Christian whites.

Legal scholars have long warned of the dangers of a convention, particularly in an era so politically polarized as today.

As one former Supreme Court chief justice, Warren Burger, explained during his tenure on the court from 1969 to 1986, “there is no way to effectively limit or muzzle the actions of a Constitutional Convention. The Convention could make its own rules and set its own agenda.  Congress might try to limit the convention to one amendment or one issue, but there is no way to assure that the Convention would obey.”

Conservative Associate Justice Antonin Scalia (yet another Catholic), who died in 2016, was even more succinct in his opinion: “I certainly would not want a constitutional convention. Whoa! Who knows what would come out of it?”

Trump's March on the Capitol

From the June 28 House hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided details on former President Donald Trump’s insistence on joining his supporters as they left his rally outside the White House and marched on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump knew they were armed and told his aides he was not worried about getting injured by the mob, where five people were killed and hundreds injured that day. The Secret Service overruled the president and whisked him from the rally and back to the West Wing.

“’I’m the ‘effing’ president, take me to the Capitol,’” an infuriated Trump told one Secret Service, according to Hutchinson. She said Trump tried to attack the agent assigned to protect him.

So, the question: Why was Trump so insistent on joining the march that what we’ve now learned was part of the coup plot by the former president and his inner circle?

Perhaps the answer is found in the history of Italian and German fascism.

On Oct. 24, 1922, Benito Mussolini called at a rally of 60,000 fascist militants in Naples to march on Rome.

“Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy,” the soon-to-be fascist leader told the crowd.

Four days late, about 30,000 Black Shirts marched on Rome. Mussolini did not march with them, but made sure he got photographed with the marchers before they headed to the Capitol, where they planned to take power through an armed insurrection.

However, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing a civil war, capitulated to the marchers and handed power to Mussolini to avoid violence.

Mussolini and his Black Shirt marchers.

One year later, inspired by Mussolini’s march, Adolf Hitler and the nascent Nazi Party staged a coup attempt in Munich against Germany’s government, the Weimar Republic.

Unlike Mussolini, though, Hitler joined the 2,000 marchers in their infamous “Beer Hall Putsch,” which the police stopped after killing 16 Nazi Party members. Hitler escaped, but was caught two later, charged with treason.

Widely publicized, the trial gave Hitler a platform in which to spout nationalist sentiments, but he was found guilty and sent to prison for five years. He served nine months, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf.

Hitler in "prison" with his fellow insurrectionists.

Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz

Afterward, he returned to politics and within 10 years, thanks largely to a weak and ineffective Weimar government, Hitler was essentially handed the chancellorship after conservative leaders persuaded the ailing President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint him in 1933.

Once Mussolini and Hitler assumed power, fascism consumed every level of society and politics and the two leaders effectively extinguished any opposition to their rule through murder and terror.

An admirer of history’s authoritarian leaders, Trump may have considered these moments in history as he plotted his coup.

However, from what we watched in real time on Jan. 6 and what we’ve learned from the hearings – including Trump’s plotting with Congressman Scott Perry (R-Pa) to enter the House chamber (which could have been with armed insurrectionists) – his motive may have been darker.

The Sorrow

Among the endless news on the gun-front is that of a 10-year-old girl who shot and killed a woman because the woman was arguing with her mother. This occurred more than a week after the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and two weeks after the massacre of 10 African American grocery shoppers in Buffalo, New York by a white supremacist armed with the gun owners’ weapon of choice, the AR-15.

More horrific statistics about our nation that decades ago chose unbridled access to guns over the safety of its children. No other nation on Earth allows gun violence to go so unchecked.

Whatever legislative solutions Congress passes and the President signs won’t stop the violence. The gun industry, its subsidiaries and their customers will make sure of it. No one is safe from gun violence anymore, which is what the gun industry wanted—because more people will buy guns in fear of their safety, a safety that is not secured by gun ownership. Guns haven’t saved anyone from gun violence and Uvalde is yet another example.

Rampant gun deaths in the United States, now the leading cause of death in school children, is the fruit of a decision long supported by gun owners. For decades now, I have written about the need for gun control, to limit weapons used to “assault” (a word gun owners get angry when used) and kill large numbers of people. Initially, I blamed the National Rifle Association; the Gun Owners of America; and lawmakers, governors, and presidents (some too afraid or too bought by these group) for the slowly escalating violence.

And gun violence has been slowly escalating as states and Congress passed more and more promiscuous gun laws – conceal carry, open carry, “permitless” carry, eliminating assault weapon bans – while gun manufacturers not only sold more guns, but more powerful weapons. It’s like a frog in a pot of cold water on a stovetop burner, ignoring the danger as the water gradually heats to boiling. The nation is awash in guns, all kinds of guns, corresponding exactly with the gun violence that, with 250 mass shootings in the last month, has the nation boiling in death.

Government officials at federal, state and local levels, the NRA, and the GOA are certainly to blame, but so are the law-abiding gun owners (NRA, GOA members and non-members alike), as well as the media treating each mass shooting as an individual event instead of what they collective are—a narrative of denial and madness; religious leaders who are more interested in condemning people for their sexuality rather than their support of weapons of mass murder; the education system’s failure to muster the will to demand gun control; gun retailers and their failure to take background checks seriously, and voters who quickly lose interest.

In fact, there’s a lot of blame to go around, so much blame that no one individual and no one group can or will assume responsibility for the carnage. Until we all accept responsibility, until we all acknowledge there is no exception, no middle road, no two sides to the argument, that roiling cauldron will get hotter; more and more bodies of children, the elderly, anyone, will float to the top.

We all are in the line of fir—including citizens packing a weapon to protect themselves and those toxic personalities who like to threaten that if anyone takes their gun it will be from their “cold dead hands.” The years have seen a lot of cold dead hands. Their statistic is just as grim and is another contradiction to the “good guy with a gun” lie, particularly since there are many cases of “good guys” killing “good guys” with their legally acquired weapon. Or “good guys” killing or threatening their partner in domestic violence.

Like a deadly virus, no one knows what goes on in the minds and lives of all these “good guys.” They could perhaps angrily overreact (and who doesn’t do that?) and use their weapon in a burst of anger, something they may not normally do. They could experience a life event that stressed them to a breaking point and they begin firing. In fact, that’s exactly what some of the statistics show. Unfortunately, “good guys” with guns are just not, well, perfect, and ensuring a society safe from gun violence requires near perfection.

Guns are a disease in this country, the vaccine is gun control that would reduce the nearly 400 million guns infecting our society with violence and death. Gun control also needs to start the long-overdue process of changing mindsets through an honest reckoning with ourselves.

We have allowed 50 years of sloganeering about guns and distortions about the actual intent and purpose of the Second Amendment, which has poisoned thinking to a level where the nation’s view of life is callous and inhumane. Gun violence is a daily occurrence. We just shrug.

That is the sorrow of our age.

Legalized Slaughter

Until the moment the shooters, armed for mass killing, entered the schools at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Robb Elementary in Uvalde, they had broken no laws.

For the last three decades, Republican-led legislatures and governors along with Republican-led Congresses and Presidents have passed and signed the most non-restrictive gun laws or blocked federal research into gun violence.

The result: gun-violence today is the leading cause of death in children; mass shooting deaths occur weekly, sometimes daily, and gun deaths, intentional or accidental are daily on average.

The National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America along with Republican and Democratic legislators at the state and federal levels have ensured the country is awash in guns, high-capacity weaponry built and designed to slaughter schools, classrooms, churches, grocery stores, parks, etc. Pick any place and it is a designated kill zone.

While the aforementioned are responsible for this carnage, there is another group that has so far escaped any scrutiny: the average gun owner.

And not just the gun owner who equates their manhood (or womanhood) with toting open and concealed handguns, hunting rifles and assault-style weapons such as the AR-15 that don’t care how many children are slaughtered by guns because they are confident in their ignorance about the Second amendment.

No, it is the gun owners who like to say they support common sense gun regulation, but never do anything about it other than to vote Republican (or Democrat, if the NRA approves).

We’ve seen mothers march and students march in support of reducing gun violence through such measures as eliminating high-capacity magazines and automatic and semi-automatic weapons; we’ve seen them march for universal background checks.

We’ve never seen gun owners for common-sense gun regulation march or give up their AR-15s, even though countless children and adults have given up their lives as bullets rip their flesh apart.

At this point, after the latest massacre of 19 children and two teachers by an 18-year-old with an AR-15, we can only believe that talk cheap for gun owners and so is life. Year after year, polls show an overwhelming majority of voters wants these and other gun reforms, yet nothing ever happens.

After all these years, and all these senseless gun deaths, gun owners have been getting away with murder by not accepting responsibility for their indirect, but supportive role in gun violence. Legislatures and Congresses have gone out of their way to protect them with one law after another that ensures they have amble weapons and ammunition with little fear of restrictions or law enforcement interference.

Not just politicians, judges and juries, too. Just one of the more recent examples is then 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse who intentionally shot three men, murdering two, but who a Wisconsin jury with the judge’s blessing, acquitted of all charges, despite overwhelming evidence.

For years, the NRA’s popular refrain against gun regulations was “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but now neither guns nor people kill because the laws of the land says so. America has legalized gun slaughter because gun owners love their guns more than their children.

Fear and Self-Loathing

Until America reckons with slavery white supremacists will continue killing people of color and conservative Republicans will continue adopting laws and policies that block the actual history of this country.

As a middle-aged white male afforded opportunity and privilege in a white dominated society, I believe that reckoning is coming, and I believe that all white people know it, too. While some of us, or, as I like to believe, many of us, welcome that moment, other whites fear it.

It is a fear passed on since the end of the war that broke one chain of that abominable institution, a fear that has promulgated the other chains of slavery: Jim Crow, systemic racism, white supremacy and the violent ignorance it breeds.

It is a fear both political parties have exploited to gain power, to divide their opponents and thus the state, and to inflict harm on non-whites. For Democrats, it was in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly those in the South who eventually became Dixiecrats when their party embraced Civil Rights. When voting rights legislation passed in the 1960s, they joined Republican conservatives.

The fear is familiar to everyone—an emotion that swirls deep, a nudging uncomfortable truth that we choose not to address to avoid the great responsibility of knowing, understanding, and acknowledging. It’s like looking in the mirror and realizing you’ve grown older, but not wiser; it’s the first-time hearing your recorded voice and realizing you don’t sound like you think you do.

Whites need to accept that racism exists like a virulent strain in this country, that it did not end with the election of President Barack Obama to the White House. In fact, Obama’s election stoked white fears about losing privilege (in the coming plurality I hope it’s shared among all races and tribes) and having to answer for America’s slave-holding past with reparations.

Indeed, on the eve of Obama’s election in 2008, a Republican conservative white woman of European background with whom I worked was in an absolute panic about soon having to pay reparations even though her family did not come to this country until the early 20th century.

Only someone privileged because she is a member of a racial majority would worry about that.

I’m sure that some whites worry about these things, which is why a concept called critical race theory, about this nation’s systemic racism discussed in some universities, was recently banned in the public schools of some GOP-controlled Southern states, even though it was never taught.

Curiously, those same states have not rushed to ban the teaching of the great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Republicans espouse.

What these whites fear most about a reckoning is the truth about how this nation was built—with the sweat, toil, ideas and visions of enslaved Black people; with the exploitation of other minorities of color. Their contributions were (and are) significant in making this country great.

The truth they fear is that whites today are the beneficiaries of slavery. They enjoy this benefit by largely by not accepting the truth that this country was born of slave-holding, which became an institution enshrined by the white men who founded it.

If the nation had reckoned with slavery in 1865, by building on the Emancipation Proclamation and re-building the South with equality for all, we might not feel the need to own guns today and thus not have mass shootings and mass deaths. Instead, our politics allowed hate to fester.

Within the core of the conservative movement there is self-loathing expressed through myraid policies and laws that are intended to harm Americans, from allowing more than 400 million weapons into the streets to voter suppression to banning abortion. Democracies are not about codifying grievances.

None of these laws help people or address an individual’s dignity or human rights. Despite that many of them were slave holders, the Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to address human dignity, not provide a how-to-guide for living in a democracy; they left that up to future generations to determine.

Slavery is the greatest indignity that one human can do to another; forcing women to have children is another indignity. Both are violence against individuals.

Until the reckoning, we will suffer death and indignity.

World at War

One week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launching the largest military conflict in Europe since 1945, the world is again at war; and it appears the man who decided to wage aggression against his neighbor was not prepared for the response.

Yet, that is how conflicts of the 20th and 21st century typically begin, from World War I to World War II to the America-led invasion of Iraq to Vladimir Putin’s invasion today—never well thought out by the people eager to war, they dismiss evidence disputing their reasoning.

Consider Adolf Hitler’s grievances for invading his neighbors, his claim of protecting German minorities in Czechoslovakia and staging an “attack” by Polish soldiers; Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident to fight North Vietnam; elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and Putin’s bogus claim, among many, of de-Nazifying Ukraine whose president is Jewish.

None of those reasons are true or accurate, but it led, as it’s leading Putin today, into devastating wars that produced more harm than good, particularly for the aggressors. History has shown that no one escape war unscathed; whether its lives, property or psyche, the damage is lasting.