Guest Post by Ron Unz
I’m not sure whether Donald Trump has ever heard of Eugene Debs, the austerely incorruptible early leader of America’s Socialist Party. But I think there’s a growing likelihood that their two names will soon be paired in many news stories as we move towards the 2024 election.
Although almost forgotten today, Debs was a very prominent political figure a century ago, and he usually received brief mention in my introductory history textbooks, which occasionally noted the five times he had run for the Presidency on the Socialist Party ticket. His high-water mark came in the 1912 election when he pulled a remarkable 6% of the national vote, possibly even influencing the outcome of the bitter three-way race between incumbent President Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt, and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson, which was won by the latter. Historian James Chace, former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, told that story in an interesting 2004 book.
The horrific First World War broke out the year after Wilson was inaugurated, and Debs, a strong anti-militarist, sat out the 1916 race as Wilson won a very narrow reelection victory partly on the strength of the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.” But America’s industrial giants had sold enormous quantities of munitions to the Allies, much of it on credit, and without an Allied victory, those loans could never be repaid. So once the votes were counted and after a failed attempt to negotiate peace, Wilson soon reversed himself and took America into the stalemated European conflict.
Armies of many millions had already spent several years clashing on the Western Front, and only an enormous American force could tip the balance, so Wilson enacted a military draft, the first and only such measure in our national history except for the Civil War fought more than two generations earlier. Forcing millions of Americans to fight and die thousands of miles from home in a foreign war proved extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, and harsh sedition laws were soon passed, threatening long prison sentences for anyone who challenged those controversial government policies.
At a 1918 political rally, Debs made some disparaging remarks about his government’s actions and the military draft, and he was quickly prosecuted and convicted despite his free speech defense, receiving a ten-year sentence in federal prison. That exemplary punishment hardly deterred him or his committed supporters, so the Socialist Party nominated him as its candidate in the 1920 Presidential race. Despite campaigning from his prison cell, he still won nearly a million votes—3.4% of the total. That achievement probably became the most memorable incident of his long career, and was almost always worth a sentence in history textbooks written many decades later.
That bizarre story of a candidate running for the Presidency while serving time in federal prison has surely brought a smile to the faces of generations of high school and college students, an amusing historical tidbit that leavened the otherwise dull profusion of obscure names and dates from a century ago. But today the sheer political insanity of America’s Democratic Party establishment has now brought our unfortunate country to a far stranger situation. Depending upon the speed of the judicial process, we face the very real prospect of former President Donald J. Trump running—and winning—the Presidency while sitting on his cot in state or federal prison.
Media is the oxygen of political campaigns, and Trump’s totally unexpected primary and general election victories in 2016 were driven by the massive attention he received for his sometimes outrageous public statements, coverage greatly amplified by the unprecedented number of Twitter followers he had quickly amassed on social media. His bitter political enemies recognized the enormous, unfiltered power of that latter communication tool, and after he reached the White House, they exerted enormous pressure upon Twitter to begin censoring him. The notion of an American tech company restricting the political speech of a sitting American President seemed like something out of a Monty Python sketch, but it actually happened. Meanwhile, many of his leading activist supporters and pundit allies were completely purged from that platform, blows that greatly hindered his reelection campaign. Then after his November defeat and Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Trump himself suffered the same fate, with his Twitter account permanently suspended.
With Trump banned from Twitter in early 2021, his political standing soon ebbed away as more and more of his low-information political base gradually forgot about him. This led many observers to conclude that his time had passed and some rival would likely capture the Republican nomination in the 2024 primaries.
However, that decline was quickly reversed when Trump’s bitterly self-destructive Democratic Party enemies launched a series of prosecutions against him on a variety of different charges, ranging from mishandling secret documents to paying hush money to a former girlfriend to election fraud, all rather dubious charges. With such exciting new topics, the endless Trump Political Reality show had suddenly returned as popular entertainment, regaining the very high ratings it had previously enjoyed. Trump once again became the great hero of his populist Republican supporters, with recent polls showing he was drawing far more support in the 2024 primaries than all his Republican rivals combined.
Indeed, some cynical observers even suggested that this outcome might have been intentional. Perhaps the Democrats regarded Trump as the weakest Republican candidate they might face in 2024, and sought to ensure his renomination. Such a deeply Machiavellian strategy might be possible, but all of these various prosecutions and trials will surely keep Trump at the top of the news cycle from now until November 2024, whether Election Day finds him still on trial or already serving time behind bars. It’s easy to imagine that the same tidal wave of backlash sentiment now propelling Trump to a landslide victory in the forthcoming primaries might also carry over into November, returning him to the Presidency, whether from the courtroom or the jail house.
We should consider that even a couple of months ago when Trump’s legal problems were only just beginning, he already began attracting strongly sympathetic remarks from unexpected ideological quarters.
Columnist Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert friendly towards Iran, and in May he published a short item that opened by characterizing Trump as “an odious figure…A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel.” But his piece was entitled “Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump,” and he explained that the totally unhinged campaign of vilification by our entire political and media establishment against the obnoxious former President had largely shifted him in that direction. He also cited the analysis of a popular progressive podcaster:
Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?
Around the same time, other influential progressive journalists such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate similarly ridiculed Trump’s indictment on hush-money charges by an NYC prosecutor.
As of a week ago, Trump had already been facing 71 separate state and federal felony indictments. Then he was struck by the weightiest federal charge of all, accusing him of organizing a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results. These days American society is deeply polarized and most of the charges against Trump will be tried in venues such as DC, Manhattan, and Atlanta where the jury-pools are sure to be heavily larded with Trump-haters. Add to that the uniformly hostile media coverage, and Trump’s prospects of acquittal seem as dim as those faced by Debs in the wartime atmosphere of 1918. With so many dozens of serious charges against him, our 45th President seems likely to end up behind bars.
These latest indictments finally moved longtime progressive columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall into that same camp of outright Trump sympathizers. On Friday he published a column entitled “Hail to the Jailbird President,” arguing that Trump might very well regain the Presidency on the strength of the unrelenting judicial and media campaign against him. According to Rall, the legal and political establishment fails to understand “that we, the people, hate their guts much more than we look down on…someone like Trump.”
Although Trump’s legion of enemies in the political and media firmament would probably regard Rall’s reaction as incomprehensible, the point he is making is a very simple one. In recent years, enormous numbers of Americans, possibly even a considerable majority, have come to regard our country’s ruling elite establishment as their deepest, sworn enemy. The massive vilification of Trump in such quarters indicates that those elites fear Trump as their most dangerous foe, so many voters may eventually conclude that the enemy of their enemy is at least worth a casual vote on the November ballot.
Although Trump’s previous legal troubles had received a great deal of media attention, the coverage of the latest charges—that he had illegally conspired to subvert American democracy by challenging the results of the 2020 election and remaining in office—was vastly greater.
Only a fraction of New York Times subscribers still receive the national print edition, but it usefully provides a congealed record of those issues most important to the editors, and on both Thursday and Friday the upper section of each front page—nearly two-thirds of the available space—was filled with multiple stories describing Trump’s federal indictment on election conspiracy charges.
I only very lightly skimmed the arguments and they’re mostly a jumble in my mind, but apparently the blowhard Trump felt he’d actually won the 2020 election and spoke with his leading supporters about challenging the official results, which they all believed were heavily tainted with fraud. But although countless American candidates throughout our history have bitterly complained about stolen elections and sometimes contested the outcomes, our rabidly partisan Democratic prosecutors have now decided to treat that behavior as a crime, apparently hoping to destroy their Trumpian nemesis using the power of the courts.
This judicial innovation may be unique in the developed world and seems extremely rare even outside it. Trump’s crude insults about “Mexican rapists” had hardly endeared him to the citizens of our Southern neighbor, but by all accounts Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—AMLO—seemed quite supportive and sympathetic towards Trump during his reelection campaign, and was also one of the last major world leaders to accept Biden’s victory and acknowledge that Trump had lost.
Probably one of the factors behind this surprising political twist was that the populist AMLO had himself been bitterly opposed by the united political establishment of his own country when he’d run for the presidency in 2006 and 2012, and twice claimed that he had been cheated of victory by government fraud. His extremely narrow loss in 2006 had been particularly suspicious, and after his apparent election-night victory had suddenly been transmuted into defeat, he and his outraged supporters began a massive protest campaign that disrupted life in the capital city, with his sympathizers even publicly swearing him in as “the Legitimate President of Mexico.”
Yet while many Americans—Trumpists most of all—regularly disparage and insult Mexico as a Third World “shithole country,” the Mexican political elites tolerated AMLO’s protests with good grace. Rather than being prosecuted and imprisoned, AMLO eventually gave up on his unofficial presidency and after creating a new party as his vehicle, ran for president a third time in 2018, winning in a huge landslide despite any election fraud. So while Trump faces time in prison for complaining about a stolen election, his Mexican counterpart who had earlier done much the same thing is completing his very successful six-year term, ranked as one of the world’s most popular leaders and having a good chance that his hand-picked candidate will succeed him.
Fortunately for AMLO, his protests of a stolen election had occurred in 2006, long before Trump entered the scene, so any attempt by his own government to prosecute and imprison him would have surely been denounced and ridiculed by the American establishment as an outrageous violation of basic democratic principles. But these days, the globally-dominant and Trump-hating American media plays a very different tune, so the precedent of prosecuting a losing candidate for protesting alleged election fraud may soon spread worldwide.
In Brazil, the conservative establishment had used a somewhat doubtful corruption conviction to block former President Lula from seeking to regain the presidency, but once it was overturned by the courts, he successfully did so, and his own courts then used the excuse of election protests to prohibit his defeated rightwing opponent President Bolsonaro from trying to do the same in four years time.
In India, the ultra-rightwing Modi government is overwhelmingly popular, but still decided to take no chances. The parliamentary opposition is led by Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of past Prime Ministers, but the government prosecuted him for making a public statement seeming to imply that Modi was crooked, successfully banning him from politics as a consequence, though on Friday a court overturned the verdict. But just a day later, former Prime Minister Imran Khan of neighboring Pakistan was sent to prison for three years, thereby preventing him from contesting the forthcoming elections; the massive public protests Khan had led against his sudden removal from office last year had deeply outraged the country’s powerful military.
I fear that all too many democratic or semi-democratic governments around the world will now eagerly seize upon the innovative electoral strategy pioneered by our own Democratic Party and henceforth use judicial means to eliminate their political rivals.
Moreover, while the ferociously anti-Trumpist media would never admit the possibility, the Donald and his angry supporters actually have a very strong case in their bitter complaints of a stolen 2020 election. I explained those simple facts back in January 2021.
Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was extraordinarily close.
All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier, the actual votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary outcome. According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and also won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes. But control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies, and these told a very different story.
Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.
Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960 had been a byword for close results, but Biden’s margin of victory was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in order to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.
If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.
Furthermore, not only was the 2020 Presidential election remarkably close, but any objective examination of the facts clearly proves that outcome was stolen from Trump. This easily explains the widespread protests by his supporters in DC on January 6th, as I discussed a few days later.
I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?
In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the candidate’s defeat.
Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.
Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once the story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.
Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.
The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.
Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true when all of America’s most powerful corporations and ruling elites unite to essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-worshiped by many tens of millions of Americans. And when despite all that blatant unfairness and theft, the final margin of defeat is just one vote in 7,000, an explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.
Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of thousands of grass-roots Trump supporters traveled to our nation’s capital to protest against what they regarded as a stolen election, and then peacefully assembled to listen to their hero’s speech.
Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast multitude of angry individuals—perhaps less than one in a thousand—barged their way into the strangely-undefended Capitol building of Congress, took souvenir selfies, livesteamed their antics, and generally played the role of tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they so despised as corrupt mostly fled or hid. These Trumpists and some of their colorful costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the late 1960s.
The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots, arson, and looting across some 200 American cities, which our entirely corrupt and dishonest media had generally characterized as “mostly peaceful protests.” In previous years, angry mobs of organized Democratic activists had repeatedly invaded and occupied the Wisconsin Legislature, sometimes winning praise from the media. But when unarmed Trump supporters now did something similar for a few hours in Washington, they were quickly branded “domestic terrorists” seeking to overthrow our democracy.
A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot dead by a security guard as she tried to climb through a window, an incident not dissimilar to the famous Kent State shootings of a 1960s campus protest, but hardly treated by the media in a similar manner.
- American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words
The total tech and media suppression of the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop probably cost Trump an easy or even overwhelming reelection victory. Highly-regarded former longtime CIA Analyst Ray McGovern, certainly no Trump supporter, noted that it has now come out that current Secretary of State Antony Blinken—then a top Biden aide—had helped orchestrate the public declaration by 51 former Intelligence officers that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop should be disregarded as likely “Russian disinformation.”
Others have come to similar conclusions regarding the media cover-up of massive Biden corruption. Jonathan Turley, a leading establishmentarian figure holds the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. As his 5,000 word Wikipedia entry describes, he has spent decades as one of our most prolific and influential media commentators on legal matters, publishing numerous pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post while being a regular guest on our broadcast networks.
The Hill is one of DC’s leading political newspapers and a couple of months ago, Turley published an outraged column, expressing his amazement at the total unwillingness of our media to report the plain facts of the evidence of massive financial corruption engulfing the Biden family.
This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.
The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”
For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.
The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop was authentic.
But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.” Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw influence peddling in foreign countries.
When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails, the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely ignored the obvious corruption itself.
Now that the House has released corroboration in actual money transfers linking many in the Biden family, the media is insisting that this is no scandal because there is no direct proof of payments to Joe Biden.
Putting aside that this is only the fourth month of an investigation, the media’s demand of a direct payment to President Biden is laughably absurd. The payments were going to his family, but he was the object of the influence peddling.
The House has shown millions of dollars going to at least nine Bidens like dividends from a family business. As a long-time critic of influence peddling among both Republicans and Democrats, I have never seen the equal of the Bidens.
The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his or her spouse or children.
Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10 percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.
Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything that he is raking in.
- American Pravda: The Limits of Media Corruption
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 22, 2023 • 3,400 Words
The leftist Moon of Alabama blogger recently emphasized that there seems to be a striking correspondence between the timing of emerging revelations of the Biden corruption scandal and the criminal indictments made against Trump.
After considering the latest public disclosures regarding Biden family business activities, Kim Dotcom suggested that we may have only seen the tip of the corruption iceberg, and his analysis was viewed more than 600,000 times.
As Adam Smith once observed, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” but our own country may be rapidly approaching its limit. Nearly 70% of Republicans believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and only voting fraud put Joseph Biden in the White House, but Trump now faces a lengthy prison sentence for taking that same position.
As a recent New York Times article emphasized, the notion of a jailed former President running for the White House is an absolutely extraordinary event and our country would be entering “uncharted territory.” But there is also a very real possibility that Trump would win and none of the legal experts consulted by the Times had any idea of what that would entail: “No one knows.”
America’s political system is facing an enormous crisis of legitimacy, perhaps just as serious and potentially fatal as the one that brought down the old USSR in the early 1990s. Our horrendous budget and trade deficits seem permanent but clearly unsustainable, we recently suffered the highest inflation in four decades, and three years ago we experienced the worst urban rioting since the 1960s, as well as the largest spike in the national homicide rate since record-keeping began. We have spent the last eighteen months fighting a losing proxy-war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border, astonishingly reckless behavior that would have been unimaginable at the height of the old Cold War. The Covid epidemic took more than a million American lives and last year I argued that the calamity was closely analogous to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster that played such a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later.
- A Thousand Times Greater Than the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 11, 2022 • 2,300 Words
As a longstanding political regime loses legitimacy, more and more individuals begin to question the fundamental narrative that it had promoted, wondering which of those beliefs are merely falsehoods endlessly repeated by a dishonest media. Over the last five years, my own American Pravda series has heavily explored these sorts of issues, and last week I discussed these topics with Michael Rectenwald, a former NYU professor.
As of today, there is a serious possibility that Donald Trump will win the Presidency while campaigning from a prison cell. That astonishing prospect perfectly symbolizes the current state of the American political system.
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The ‘normies’ are waking up slowly. The elite can’t let too many get off the mental plantation. If a major ‘shibboleth’ like fair elections in America falls, they might all start being questioned and then its off to the races!
I’m starting to think the whole country might not be on the up and up.
Your uncertainty is understandable. We were all born into this shit storm. It hard finding the asshole responsible when you’ve been blinded by bullshit your entire life.