David Horowitz’s Hate Group, Civil War and the White House

 by JONAH RASKIN 

“People are scared and frightened. The country is on the verge of a war between people of color and law enforcement, and the White House seems to be spurring it on.”

– Greg Sarris, Chairman the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria

Last month, I wrote an article about the 1970s clandestine organization, the Weather Underground, which appeared in Tablet magazine, and that prompted an irrational and uncivil response from Daniel Greenfield, published in FrontPage, a right-wing political website, edited by David Horowitz, from the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Greenfield libeled and targeted me, too, as “a stooge for a communist terror group that murdered Americans.” Thanks, Dan. I appreciate the compliment. “Stooge” is a word I haven’t heard for a long time. In fact, it doesn’t belong in our current political vocabulary. Your boss, Mr. Horowitz would be proud of you. For decades, he has specialized in targeting American lefties, including teachers and writers, he dislikes.

In his narcissistic autobiography, Radical Son: a Generational Odyssey, Horowitz heaps scorn on Jessica Mitford, Warren Hinckle, I.F. Stone, Bob Sheer, Eve Pell and Todd Gitlin. In his autobiography, Horowitz also attacks the Black Panthers. He claims that there was a Panther “killing ground” in the mountains above Santa Cruz that was “littered with the charred bones of comrades they had murdered for stepping out of line.” Pure bullshit.

Horowitz is still sell bullshit. Now, he has Daniel Greenfield to help him sell it. Greenfield’s article shows me that you don’t have to be an African-American, a Latino, a Latina, or gay to be the target of a right-wing hate group. If you speak your mind and tell the truth you, too, can be a target. Indeed, members of the radical right are calling for a civil war, a bloodbath, and, in the case of Mr. Greenfield, “a reckoning.”

At the end of his rant about me and article for Tablet, Greenfield writes that “A reckoning will come, not in academic papers or reviews, but in the crimes that have never been repented, and will therefore come again, until the tide of lies, blood and treachery bring down the same system that covered up the crimes of the Weathermen, and brings a revolution against the revolution.”

Greenfield lives in a fantasy world of lies, blood, treachery and crimes.” He sounds like the sort of person that Congresswoman Barbara Lee had in mind when she recently noted that, “There are a lot of people who are living on the edge, who have mental disorders, who are stressed.” She added, “All you need is a trigger. And this president is that trigger for people who are unstable.”

While Greenfield calls for a “revolution against the revolution,” Horowitz’s organization—which describes itself a “battle tank”— says it is gearing up to “fight a war.”  The David Horowitz Freedom Center website adds that “the political left has declared war on America and its constitutional system, and is willing to collaborate with America’s enemies abroad and criminals at home to bring America down.”

Horowitz has it all wrong. It isn’t the left, but rather Donald Trump and the members of his Republican Party, who have declared war on the U.S. Constitution and are collaborated with the enemies of democracy at home and abroad. All of which makes the 2020 presidential election especially important, as all of the Democratic Party candidates understand.

I have always thought of Marianne Williamson, who is one of those candidates, as a person who didn’t minimize the dangers to democracy, but she did just that recently when she said that “a low-level emotional civil war” was being waged in the U.S. The bodies that piled up in Dayton, El Paso and Gilroy tell a different story. Our embryonic civil war is a lot more than low-level and way beyond merely emotional. It’s high-level and it’s being fought with bullets as well as with words and over-heated rhetoric.

On Townhall.com, a Trump supporter published an article with a title that read, “Why Democrats Would Lose the Second Civil War.” The fact is that no one would win a second civil war. Everyone would lose. Civil Wars are devastating to everyone. Ours was and so has every civil war that has been fought ever since then.

Jon Soltz understands the truth about civil wars. The chairman of VoteVets, a veterans advocacy group whose members fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, he urges Americans “Do NOT buy guns (or any weapons) to use against your fellow Americans.” Soltz added, “We are NOT in civil war.”

In the radical right his words are falling on deaf ears. Those who don’t already have guns are buying them and using them against people of color. No wonder that Greg Sarris, the chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria in California, noted in July, “People are scared and frightened. The country is on the verge of a war between people of color and law enforcement, and the White House seems to be spurring it on.”

As Barbara Lee pointed out, Trump is the trigger.

I’m with the nineteenth-century American writer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote a poem titled “The Warning” in 1842. Longfellow predicted the coming of the Civil War and a time when “the vast temple of our liberties” would be “a shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish.” Horowitz, Greenfield, the folks at Fox and the president himself, feed the hate and the anger of those who want a civil war. Our own liberties, which are fast eroding, might become a mass of wreck and rubbish. The warning signs are nearly everywhere.

Jonah Raskin is the author of For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation.

America's shameful history of border cruelty

by Shikha Dalmia

The US could indeed be called a racist state as is evident by the mistreatment of the black Afro-American citizens that was preceded by the genocide of the native Amerindians, and now the quixotic call of its president for building a wall on the southern border with Mexico in order to thwart any attempts by the Hispanics to seek better opportunities in the north – an inhuman measure that has led to deaths, especially of children, in segregated internment camps.

The following is an article that appeared in this regard on “The Week” website by Shikha Dalmia, titled: “America's Shameful History of Border Cruelty”.

President Donald Trump has taken to calling the situation at the border with Mexico not just a security "crisis" but also a "humanitarian" one. He should know because he created it.

But even before Trump's zero-tolerance enforcement policy unleashed new horrors, inhumanity at the border was part and parcel of America's immigration enforcement. The silver lining, however, is that Trump's open embrace of such policies is inviting a level of scrutiny — and generating a level of disgust — that might pave the way for reform.

Hardly a day goes by when some shocking story doesn't break about this administration's treatment of immigrants — or suspected immigrants. Recently a 27-year-old decorated Marine veteran with mental health issues who is an American citizen, was detained by the US security forces.

Why? Because he is Hispanic so it likely assumed he was here illegally.

It is also becoming apparent that the administration separated far more than "just" 2,700 migrant kids from Central American parents seeking asylum as originally thought. Indeed, we are finding out now that separations started as soon as President Trump entered the Oval Office and before former Attorney General Jeff Sessions even formally embraced the policy. Worse, the administration failed to keep proper records when taking away the kids and, therefore, we can't be sure it'll ever be able to reunite all of them.

As if all this is not bad enough, it implemented its policy of mass detaining children and parents without proper preparations. Hence, it is housing many of them in constantly lit, freezing-cold holding pens meant for drug dealers. The migrants reportedly sleep wrapped in thin blankets on mats or aluminum foil on cement floors with poor food and scarce running water to shower or brush their teeth.

Toddlers were being herded in hastily constructed "tender-age shelters" or equally horrible facilities. Abuse is reportedly rampant. A state review of a Virginia detention facility found that immigration authorities used restraining techniques on children that included shackling and strapping them to chairs and placing mesh bags over their heads and sometimes even sending them into solitary confinement if they allegedly misbehaved.

Videos of an Arizona facility show staffers shoving kids and dragging them across rooms by their hair.

The sad part, however, is that the Trump administration isn't the first to use such tactics; it has merely scaled them up. Every US president over the last century and a half has allowed similar abuse.

The US administration’s reign of terror on the southern border has its genesis in 1924 when Congress passed its first major piece of restrictionist legislation that ended what until then had been the unfettered movement of people back and forth from Mexico. This law made it a crime to enter the country from anywhere except designated ports. And to enforce this provision, Greg Grandin points out in The Intercept, the border patrol relied on recruits from the resurgent racist Ku Klux Klan white supremacists who "beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity" along the Texas and California border.

President Dwight Eisenhower's notorious Operation Wetback in 1954 took matters to a whole new level. A former general, Eisenhower hired military brass to use military tactics not just at the border but in the interior — inaugurating the wretched policy of interior enforcement — rounding up and mass deporting over 800,000 unauthorized Mexicans in one fell swoop.

But Eisenhower, to his credit, also attempted to address the undocumented problem at its root by expanding the bracero — guest worker — program to allow more Mexicans to legally work in the United States. That helped reduce abuse — until President Lyndon Johnson, the self-styled paragon of progressive virtue, scrapped the program in 1965, setting the stage for future crackdowns and renewed abuse that provides an important backdrop to the horrors we are witnessing today.

Much before the Trump administration embraced child separation as official policy, border patrol was already using it unofficially in the 1970s, Grandin notes by pointing to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative series from the early 1980s. When agents encountered a family at the border, they reportedly nabbed the youngest member first because that would induce the whole family to turn itself in rather than try to flee. They threatened to take kids away from moms "forever" if moms didn't confess that they were trying to enter illegally — and when they did, they'd take the kids anyway, placing them in foster homes or deporting them or letting them languish in jails.

Beatings and rape of girls as young as 12 by US security personnel were reportedly common. Border patrol even traded young Mexican women they caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams for season tickets.

Between 1982 and 1990, Mexico City sent 24 protests to the State Department on behalf of Mexicans injured and murdered by border patrol.

But instead of addressing these complaints, President Bill Clinton criminalized immigration further when he pushed — and signed — the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that made it easier to deport ever more immigrants for ever more minor infractions.

Immigration enforcement agencies went to town after this law was passed. Another Intercept investigation based on the account of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) whistleblower who worked for the agency between 2009 and 2011 paints a truly horrific picture. The whistleblower claimed that he witnessed agents shoot an unarmed woman and threaten to rape children. One agent allegedly chided him for offering water to a severely dehydrated 4-year-old and his migrant mom whom they picked up during a patrol. The agent reportedly took the bottle away from the child before he could take a sip saying "no amnesty here."

In the name of zero tolerance, the Trump administration has started using anti-harboring laws to prosecute humanitarian workers like Scott Warren who leave drinking water tanks for migrants crossing the harsh Arizona desert. But the whistleblower noted, even before Trump arrived, CBP agents would reportedly vandalize water tanks that folks like Warren left in the desert in the face of an alarming spike in dehydration deaths among border crossers. Worse, the agents would dump even migrants' own water and food and leave them stranded in the desert.

An investigation last summer by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed shocking neglect and abuse of children between 5 and 17 by Customs and Border Protection between 2009 and 2014 when Barack Obama was president. A quarter of the children interviewed reported physical, including sexual, abuse and half reported verbal abuse like death threats. Stun guns and worse were reportedly routinely used to restrain kids.

But Obama's dulcet tones lulled watchdog agencies into complacency even as he deported record numbers of immigrants. Trump's harsh talk and open contempt for immigrants, on the other hand, is mobilizing them into action.

The ACLUs and Intercepts of the world have doubled down on investigating the dark underbelly of immigration enforcement under Trump, publishing several exposes over the last year. Progressives who were content to look the other way when enforcement excesses were taking place under Obama are now suddenly woke and spearheading a call to abolish ICE or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the kind of thing that used to be confined to "wacko" libertarian circles.

And it is not just the posture of activists that is shifting — public opinion is too. Americans are becoming more protective of immigrants since the anti-immigration Trump entered the Oval Office. Gallup polls show that a record high of 75 percent agree that immigration is a "good thing" for the country — up four points in the last two years.

All of this might finally cue up the country for a top-to-bottom cleanup of border enforcement once Trump leaves the Oval Office. His malice toward immigrants might achieve what good intentions can't.