David K. Shipler's Blog

 

By David K. Shipler 

            A paragraphdenouncing slavery, written by a slaveowner, was deleted from the final versionof the Declaration of Independence. Yet the remaining language contained asoaring promise that abolitionists put to instant use in their cause. Thereinlies the great contradiction of the United States, a nation inspired by idealsand twisted by practice.           

            There is noway to cleanse American history, not honestly. It is torn between morality andreality, a place where fine myths and base cruelty coexist. We see that everyday as the country becomes unwelcoming to outsiders, more hostile toward itspoor, and willfully blind to racial injustice.

Myths are useful, though; they sethigh standards and can drive self-correction if—a big if—the problematic pastis faced squarely and not sanitized as the Trump Republicans are attempting.Societies that rely on fictions rarely do well.

            The UnitedStates has endured a multiple personality for all of its 250 years, beginningwith its origin story of liberty alongside the enslavement of Black Africansand the slaughters of Native Americans. Both are elements of national character.And both shaped the Declaration of Independence, so erasing one side of thestory or the other falsifies patriotism. Genuine American patriotism lies in whatis precious about America: the freedom to embrace disturbing truths, a love forthe din of competing ideas.

In the fall of 1775 and the springof 1776, five men formed a drafting committee to compose the ringing documentwe Americans now celebrate.

One of those, Benjamin Franklin, ownedseveral enslaved workers and had profitedfrom advertisements in his newspaper by slaveowners seeking to sell their“property” or to capture runaways. He later became an avid abolitionist.Another, Robert Livingston, used slave laboron his New York estate.

 Slavery was opposed by two members of thecommittee, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and John Adams of Massachusetts. Butthe fifth, Thomas Jefferson, embodied the cross-currents of his society,holding transcendent ideas larger than he was. He owned hundreds in bondage atMonticello, his Virginia plantation, but excoriated slavery in the draft of theDeclaration:

  He [King George III]has waged a cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacredrights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who neveroffended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in anotherhemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. Thispiratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfareof the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market whereMEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressingevery legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.

Jefferson’s paragraph was to occupya prominent place in the Declaration’s litany of indictments against the King.Yet the drafters ran into trouble as they sought unanimity in the 56-memberContinental Congress, about one-third of whom were slaveowners. Slavery wasstill legal in all 13 colonies. The paragraph did not survive, much to thechagrin of Jefferson, who continued to include it in copies he sent withcorrespondence.

What survived, as is well known, isthe famous sentence, with an anti-slavery nuance insisted upon by Adams: “Wehold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that theyare endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among theseare Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Life, liberty and property had beenlisted as natural rights back in 1689 by the English philosopher John Locke. ButAdams rejected “property” as connoting an acceptance of slavery, according tohistorian Danielle Allen, and “happiness” was substituted. “Pushing the word ‘property’out, replacing it with ‘happiness,’ was an abolitionist moment in the Declaration,”she said. “Indeed,the abolitionists used it immediately, in Boston, to submit a petition usingthat language for an end of slavery in Massachusetts.” (Before the end of theRevolutionary War, Adams wrote the abolition of slavery into the Massachusetts stateconstitution. Franklin got slavery outlawed in Pennsylvania.)

The Declaration’s soaring promisefeatured in a stirring1776 sermon by Lemuel Haynes, the first ordained Black minister in the US,who argued that the natural rights applied to all, that “an African, or, inother terms, that a Negro . . . has an undeniable right to his Liberty:Consequently, the practise of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Landis illicit.”

He continued: “Those privilegesthat are granted to us By the Divine Being, no one has the Least right to takethem from us without our consen[t]; and there is Not the Least precept, orpractise, in the Sacred Scriptures, that constitutes a Black man a Slave, anymore than a white one.

“Therefore is it not hygh time toundo these heavy Burdens, and Let the Oppressed go free? And while you manifestsuch a noble and magnanimous Spirit, to maintain inviobly your own Naturalrights, and militate so much against Despotism, as it hath respect untoyourselves, you do not assume the Same usurpations, and are no Less tyrannic.Pray let there be a congruity amidst you Conduct, Least you fall amongst thatClass the inspir’d pen-man Speaks of. Rom. 2.21 and on. thou thereforewhich teacheth another, teachest thou not thy Self?”

Slavery did not end with the Declaration’sfine sentiments, obviously. It actually spread and deepened its economic roots.And the strands of our varied histories are still entangled. According to myfamily lore, which is partially documented, three of my ancestors fought in theRevolution, one on my father’s side at Bunker Hill, and two on my mother’s sidein Pennsylvania. But I have also wondered whether any of my ancestors wereslaveowners. Some lived in Maryland and Virginia before the Civil War, soperhaps. I am not sure.

            Jeffersononce called slavery America’s “one fatal stain.” A stain cannot be blithelywashed away.

            “Weroutinely return to Jefferson and his era in order to discover the glory ofAmerica,” wrotea Jefferson scholar, the late Charles A. Miller, in 1992. “We should also bewilling to return in order to find early evidence of our distress. . . . Ibelieve that Jefferson was firmly—centrally and emblematically—in the stream ofAmerican anguish over slavery and race, and he knew it. I also believe that thepresent, in altered form, is like Jefferson.”

 

By David K. Shipler 

            The ShiplerReport has obtained a confidential memo from the Republican National Committee toall senior officials, excluding President Trump, recommending a war plan forfuture major military assaults. Here is the text: 

PRIVILEGED ANDCONFIDENTIAL

EYES ONLY, EXPOTUS 

            To: VP, SecWar,SecState, DNI, DNSA, DDIA, DCIA, JCOS, DNSC, COS--EXPOTUS

            From: RNC WorkingGroup on Imagery (WGI)

            Re: MAD(Mutually Assured Deception) 

Under no circumstances is this memorandum to be shownto the greatest president in the 250-year history of the United States ofAmerica. He must be an innocent and unwitting collaborator in this project. 

1.      Inconsultation with numerous MAGA activists, RNC-contracted pollsters, and voterfocus groups, the ongoing WGI project on MAD has developed a war plan for the nextmilitary “expedition” that will eliminate risk and maximize (appeared) victory.

2.      Inlight of the steep costs of the Iran war and the President’s mercurial shiftsin rhetorical goals, empty threats, and unrealistic objectives, we suggest amethod to be known as Paired Fantasies (PF).

3.      Thepurpose of PF in the next so-called war is to balance the President’s fantasiesabout victory, as against Iran, with equally potent fantasies about a waritself.

4.      Towit: Rather than actually sending the US military into combat, the Presidentwould simply announce that attacks were being done. Stock video andAI-generated battle and bombing scenes would be distributed to the patrioticnews organizations compliant enough to be allowed to cover the Pentagon.

5.      Togive this PF scenario verisimilitude, the President should truly think that thewar is happening, that he is actually commanding a military venture, therebyfooling himself and the gullible segment of the American public. (We know whothey are.)

6.      Therewould be little chance of the President’s discovering the fictional nature ofhis “war,” even if the professional military and intelligence leaders let itslip. Since he gets most of his information from Fox, which would be fed thevideos, and tends to doze off during briefings, the occasional truthful remarkis likely to pass right by him—and if not, he would filter it out to hold hisconfirmation bias.

7.      Incontrast to the war in Iran, this “war” would not result in a single Americancasualty, of course, and would stir no international outrage or demand for warreparations.

8.      ThePF plan coincides with the Iran war at the conclusion, when the Presidentdeclares a false victory. However, we strongly recommend departing from the Irancase by having the President end his fictitious war with a fictitious peaceagreement that awards the U.S. substantial fictitious benefits. We do not wanthim to pretend, or to do what he usually does, to pretend that he is notpretending. 

Please contact the RepublicanNational Committee’s Working Group on Imagery’s project on Mutually AssuredDeception, with any questions or comments. 

This is satire. It’s all made up,a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which preventslots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            The majorwars raging in the Middle East and Europe are teaching a lesson, which willprobably go unlearned. Two of the world’s strongest military forces are unableto defeat smaller countries that use asymmetrical warfare—that is, weapons andtactics less advanced than the arsenals they face. The United States and Russiaare bogged down by Iran and Ukraine, respectively, whose governments’ continuedexistence is tantamount to a loss for Washington and Moscow.

            This is aninterim assessment to be sure, for wars are judged by their outcomes, which arerarely visible in the short term. Today’s still photograph doesn’t necessarilypredict the future. But so far, in failing to realize their ambitions, bothRussia and the United States have displayed surprising vulnerabilities. Their armedforces seemed most formidable before they fired the first shot. Once the warsbegan, their destructive power turned out to be inadequate. The Iranian andUkrainian governments, facing obliteration, had everything to lose unless theyfound inventive ways to fight back and survive, which they have done.

The parallel is not a moral one, obviously,for the world would be better without the Iranian regime and worse without afree Ukraine. But war is rarely virtuous, no matter the righteous pleadings of theperpetrators. Nor is the worthiness of a cause a guarantee of success.

            The currentcases are especially instructive, because they are the product of two mainerrors made by both Russia and the US: unrealistic objectives and autocraticdecision-making.

The ambitious goal for VladimirPutin of Russia was to annihilate Ukraine’s national independence and distinctiveculture. He spelled out his rationale in a long essay in July 2021, sevenmonths before he invaded, when he wrote that Russia andUkraine were not separate but occupied “one historical and spiritual space.” Asa dictator, he had insulated himself from dissent by creating a bubble of sycophantsin the Kremlin. Nor did he consult his citizens about going to war.

The ambitious goal for Donald Trump(and his Israeli partners) was to demolish Iran’s military and replace itsIslamic government with one amenable to foregoing nuclear weapons. Among hisshifting demands, after the war grew frustrating, came his threat of genocide ashe declaredlast April that unless Iran capitulated, “a whole civilization will dietonight, never to be brought back again.” As an aspiring dictator, he had also insulatedhimself from dissent by creating a bubble of sycophants—in the White House. Nordid he consult his citizens—or even Congress, as the Constitution requires—aboutgoing to war.

It goes without saying that Iran isa serious menace and, with nuclear weapons, would be as untouchable as NorthKorea. Its ideological zealotry and projection of destruction through proxiesin the Middle East would be virtually unchecked. But the US-Israeli onslaughthas been a two-edged sword. While severely damaging Iran’s military and armsindustry, it has also demonstrated to Tehran how easily global trade can bedisrupted by drones, speedboats, and other small-scale threats to internationalshipping.

Those relatively simple tools arelikely to remain in Iran’s hands indefinitely. They cannot be completely eliminatedby the sophisticated, high-tech aerial assaults that the US employs. Nor can Iran’snuclear aspirations be destroyed permanently from the air, which cannot reacheither the country’s technical know-how or the enriched uranium stockpiledunderground. Cyber attacks, assassinations of scientists, and bombings by Israeland the US have slowed the nuclear program, but only Iranian leaders canabandon it. That requires either the regime’s replacement (as Israel and the USexpected), diplomacy with the current government, or a wholesale invasion andoccupation.

Iran is well-schooled in themethods of asymmetrical warfare, which are used by state and non-state actors.The key is leveraging inferior weaponry into attacks on the pressure points ofthe larger enemy. Here, as we’ve seen, the pressure point is the Strait ofHormuz, “Iran’s new weapon of mass disruption,” Tom Friedman callsit, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil is shipped. As the pricesof gas, fertilizer, and other commodities soar in the West and Asia, the powerof Iran’s smaller arms capability is magnified.

Another key to a lesser force’s survivalis the risk aversion of the larger force. Because Trump has not been willing tosend ground troops, especially in the face of substantial public opposition tothe war, casualties have been low; thirteenAmericans have come back from this war in body bags to date. The dangerousdepletion of US missile and ammunition stockpiles also imposes restraint, whichtakes the form of Trump’s embrace of the current on-and-off ceasefire.

The cost for Americans could be increasedif Iran managed (or chose) to attack inside the US, either by terrorism or cybersabotage. But that might not be necessary, for the most pervasive anti-war campaignin America is at the local gas station, with those big numbers staring you inthe face every time you take a drive.

Ukraine has also discovered how tohit some of Russia’s pressure points. Just as Iran has developed drones (andhas helped Russia build a drone factory east of Moscow), Ukraine’s advancementsin drone technology now enable strikes deep inside Russian territory. Oilinstallations on the Baltic coast have been hit, and last week Ukraine struckan oil terminal near St. Petersburg, sending a tower of pitch-black smoke tostain the background scenery of Putin’s annual showcase, his InternationalEconomic Forum.   

On Ukrainian territory, Russia haslost its formidable reputation as the resistance has raised immense costs. Moscow’svaunted armored units were virtually decimated and proven ineffectual. Russian resolvedomestically is reportedly being eaten away by the use of non-Russian ethnicminority draftees and ex-convicts as cannon-fodder; the diversion ofmanufacturing to weaponry; and the worsening economy, with inflation and gasshortages. Putin has predicted an end to the war, and pro-Kremlin talkers arelaying the groundwork for an ersatz claim of victory.

The stakes are high. Ukraine, abulwark against Russian expansionism in Europe, is an essential line ofdefense. The greater the cost of the war to Russia’s invasion, the less likelyit is to be repeated elsewhere—so goes the calculation.

Unfortunately, Trump is a miscreantin both wars. His halt of military aid to Ukraine, his attacks on NATO, and hisincoherent negotiating tactics have given the impression that Putin need merelyplay the long game and wait for the irresolution of the West. The US has weakeneditself by losing the trust of its allies. Only Ukraine and the Europeans canhold the line, which they are doing so far.

In Iran, Trump’s impulsive lack ofstrategic thinking and empathy—and his contempt for experts—have disabled himand his advisors from the capacity to anticipate Iran’s moves. His impatiencefor a negotiated agreement, his flustered, empty threats, are obviously beingread in Tehran as the flailing of a helpless giant.

Trump is so eager to get away fromIran that he has conducted a public dispute with Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s continued assaults on Hezbollah, Iran’s proxyin Lebanon. Iran has made a true cease-fire and serious negotiations contingenton a halt to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Therefore, in that labyrinth ofentanglements, Iran has gained leverage over Israel via the US. It’s an amazingdynamic, all above Trump’s head.

This is hardly the first time for agreat power to be defeated by an adversary weaker in conventional weapons butstronger in resolve: the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the United States inVietnam.

In the 1960s and 70s, US officials thoughtthat bombs, defoliants, artillery, and massive infantry could overwhelm the lessadvanced weaponry of North Vietnam and the Vietcong. Twenty-two years after thewar, at a 1997 conference of former American and North Vietnamese officials inHanoi, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara kept asking the Vietnamese howmany of their people would have had to die before they gave up fighting andnegotiated.

The Vietnamese, calloused by yearsof battle, kept answering that they were fighting an anti-colonialist war tounify their country in complete independence, and that no amount of sufferingwould have brought them to their knees.

McNamara couldn’t grasp this, andduring a break, he gave some of us his conclusion: that Vietnamese cared lessabout human life than Americans did. That was a classic slander thatpractically every combatant visits upon the enemy, as I told him. Never true,but always believed.

Lessons on the limitation ofmilitary strength usually go unlearned, especially by the next generation ofleaders. It must be so tempting to hold your finger on that trigger of immense power,and to imagine that once you pull it, destruction will bring just thereordering that you desire.  

 

By David K. Shipler

 

            TheShipler Report has obtained an internal memo from Susie Wiles, PresidentTrump’s chief of staff, announcing a significant exception to a standing order.The reversal pertains to statements on religion.

Previously, and in multiplereminders, Wiles had warned staff and Cabinet secretaries against upstaging thepresident. Now, she wants them to do just that. She is known as the most candidof Trump’s inner circle, hence her direct language.

On January 21, 2025, the day afterTrump’s second inauguration, she wrote: “You must not publicize yourself, takecredit for successful actions, or hint that major policy initiativesoriginated anywhere other than the President’s fertile imagination—otherwiseknown as his mind. You may not make public statements more outlandish than the President’s,or that provoke either more applause or more outrage than whatever thePresident has ignited. He is the Force, and no one of you must ever portrayyourself as more inspiring, more energizing, or more appalling than him.”

            Then, inearly March of this year, Wiles issued this terse message to the Cabinet: “KristiNoem didn’t get the memo.” Days later, Noem was fired as Secretary of HomelandSecurity after spending $220 million on TV ads that featured herself, deckedout in a cowboy hat, riding a horse in rugged terrain like a marshal come tobring order to a turbulent land.

            Last week, afterTrump trash-talked Pope Leo XIV (“WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,”)Wiles sent this urgent memo:

 

MEMORANDUM TO CABINETMEMBERS

            April 13, 2026

 

TO: CABINET SECRETARIES

FROM: SUSIE WILES, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF

SUBJECT: RELIGIOUS EXCEPTION TO MEMORANDA OF JAN. 21, 2025,MARCH 30, 2025, JULY 4, 2025, AND MARCH 3, 2026

 

            The WhiteHouse, noting the President’s recent condemnation of the Holy Father, herebyreverses its previous order that staff and Cabinet Secretaries refrain fromstatements more excessive or inflammatory than the President’s. On the matterof religion, and on that topic only, Secretaries are instructed to fashion remarksthat are actually more extreme, more outrageous, and more arrogant than thePresident’s. We acknowledge that this could present a challenge. But it isvital in maintaining the President’s (self-) image as a stable genius.Everything is relative, as we know. The Vice President, who cannot becommanded, much to the President’s dismay, is nevertheless encouraged to speakin this vein as well.

I.                   For example, it is recommended that the VicePresident lecture the Holy Father on theology, notwithstanding Mr. Vance’s conversionto Catholicism just seven years ago and his lack of formal theologicaleducation. Most voters will not know this, and they will not know that Pope Leowas educated at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and studied Canon Lawat the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. [Vance, followingthe advice, thensaid, “I think it is very, very important for the Pope to be careful whenhe talks about theology.”]

II.                Secretary of War (and Expeditions) Pete Hegsethis instructed to continue his fashioning of the Iran conflict as a holy war.His analogizing the pilot rescue on Easter to Christ rising is just the kind ofstatement that is valued as a way to cast the President, by comparison, in amore reasonable light—grounded, shall we say. Praying at the Secretary’s Pentagonpress conferences, citing God’s blessing on our troops, and declaring His lackof mercy on the enemy are off-the-wall statements endorsed by the White House. Itwould also be helpful to call the Iranian Muslims “enemy infidels who are destinedfor hell”—again, to help the President to be seen as moderate. Or to quote a fakeBible verse from a movie. [Hegseth took the advice. Hequoted a mostly made-up passage from the film Pulp Fiction as if it were fromEzekiel. And he likenedhimself, his troops, and the administration to a healing force, with “Trump-hating”reporters as Pharisees, an ancient Jewish sect, who were “only looking for thenegative” when they witnessed Jesus heal the sick. “Our press are just likethese Pharisees,” Hegseth declared.]

III.             President Trump’s posting of an image of himselflike Jesus, healing the sick, will be difficult to top, but it might inspiresome of you to come up with another outrageous AI concoction. The purpose,again, is to make the President seem rational and cogent by comparison. Awarning, however: Do not portray yourselves as God. Remember, the Presidentdoes not like being relegated to inferior status, and you would undoubtedlydepart soon thereafter to the Cabinet afterlife, wherever that might be.

        Good luck negotiating these treacherouswaters. Please contact the office of the Chief of Staff with any questions. 

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for the quotesfrom Trump, Vance, and Hegseth), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdityof current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the differencebetween truth and fiction.         

                

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Israel’sgovernment under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given President Trump plentyof bad advice about Iran. But the rising belief that Israel is to blame for Trump’swar of choice deflects responsibility from the White House, where it obviously belongs.Trump failed to weigh Israel’s interests against those of his own country. He reportedlyignored his advisers’ doubts about Israel’s assessments and predictions.

            As the wardamages the global economy and security, Israel is being teed up as a scapegoat.A most aggressive effort has come from Tucker Carlson, once a Trumpcheerleader, whose recent rant againstthe war includes a malevolent portrait of a president at the mercy of Israel.

“The Israeli government has astoried history of blackmailing US presidents,” he writes absurdly in his MorningNote. “America’s ‘special ally’ is willing to play very dirty to achieveits goals. Dark-money campaign contributions, extortion, physical threats andeven assassination. In their anti-Christian worldview, the ends always justifythe means. They have no issue destroying lives.” (Carlson doesn’t mention “Jews,”but those with an antisemitic bent will surely read it that way.)

Americans’ longstanding support forIsrael has weakened severely. Unfavorable opinions were driven up by Israel’swidespread bombing and brutal blockade of Gaza Palestinians following theOctober 7, 2023 atrocities by Hamas, and have risen further since thecoordinated Israeli and American war on Iran was launched February 28. A PewResearch Center poll taken in March 23-29 found that 60 percent of Americanadults hold a negative view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year and 33 percent in 2022. This could get worse if the conflict is not resolved beneficiallyto American interests. It’s not truly over, of course, and the eventual outcomewill render judgment.

Netanyahu lobbied hard for this war,particularly on February 11, when he gained a rare invitation to ahighly-classified meeting in the White House Situation Room. His pitch to Trumpcame in a period of terrible coincidence, a perfect storm of anxiety andextremism. Gripped by a heightened sense of vulnerability, Israel is led by themost radical, right-wing government in its history. The result is an anti-Araband anti-Muslim strategy driven by religious absolutism and ethnic bigotry.

After the October 7 attack, a waveof existential fear swept through Israel. Hamas fighters, many on motorcycles, hadmanaged to breach Israel’s high-tech defenses around Gaza, shredding confidencein the intelligence and military establishments. Iran then attacked mainly throughits proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, forcing Israelis to leave their homes near theborder. Others, evacuated from near Gaza in the south, added to anunprecedented population of internal refugees. Israel felt nearly encircled by Iran’sdetermination to annihilate the Jewish state.

It’s doubtful that Israel’sexistence was truly at risk; it still had the Middle East’s most formidablemilitary. But a muffled drumbeat of fear has always run through Israelisociety, a legacy of the Holocaust reinforced by the perpetual conflict withthe Palestinian Arabs. For most of its history, Israel’s counterpoint to fearhas been aggressive defiance, which the Netanyahu government has translatedinto military onslaughts.

Israel demolished most of Iran’sair defenses and decimated both Hamas and Hezbollah. Last June, the US andIsrael coordinated air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The streets filledwith huge numbers of Iranian citizens, hostile to the Islamic Revolution and sufferingeconomically; many were gunned down, but Iran’s government looked weakened. Thetime for action seemed as ripe as it had ever been.

According to remarkable reportingby Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in TheNew York Times, Netanyahu and the head of Mossad, Israel’s version ofthe CIA, argued that regime change would be triggered by a joint US-Israeliattack. The Israelis even played a video—imagery, not words, seem the majorinput to Trump’s brain—showing individuals who could take leadership.

“Mossad’s intelligence indicatedthat street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus ofthe Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intensebombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition tooverthrow the regime,” wrote Swan and Haberman. “The Israelis also raised theprospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open aground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces andaccelerating its collapse.”

To anyone who knew anything aboutIsrael’s record in predicting or manipulating the politics of its enemies, thisconfidence should have raised a red flag. It did among several participants,according to the reporters. In all the efforts to remake the politics of thePalestinians and Lebanese over the years, not a single example of success comesto mind. Israel’s intelligence agencies are good at locating targets forassassination and disrupting technology, but terrible at understanding thepolitical and social dynamics of their adversaries.

The Israelis were also wrong aboutthe military results, at least in the short term, according to the Timesreporters: “Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed aspointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could bedestroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could notchoke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blowsagainst U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.”

Trump seemed nearly persuaded byIsrael’s optimistic predictions. Having cushioned himself with sycophants and purgedIran experts from the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council,he had forfeited the opportunity for informed debate. Nevertheless, a fewvoices of skepticism were raised in subsequent meetings.

The CIA director, John Ratcliffe,called Netanyahu’s regime-change scenarios “farcical,” the reporters wrote. “Atthat point, Mr. [Marco] Rubio [Secretary of State] cut in. ‘In other words,it’s bullshit,’” he said.

When Trump asked General Dan Cainefor his views, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff answered: “Sir, thisis, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. Theyoversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they needus, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”

Since those meetings were attendedby only a small circle of high-level officials, somebody inside clearly wantedthe discussions documented publicly. The writers did the reporting for their forthcomingbook, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Their account suggests that indeciding to go to war, Trump filtered out cautionary information that did notharmonize with his gut desires. Like millions of his fellow Americans who choosenews sources the confirm their biases, he absorbs only what he agrees with. Andlike authoritarian personalities throughout history, he cows his subordinates.Swan and Haberman note that in the end, despite some reservations, his deferentaides did not argue vigorously against the mission.

Years before, Netanyahu had opposedthe multinational agreement with Iran, negotiated under President Obama tocurtail its nuclear weapons program. It left Iran’s ballistic missile developmentuntouched and placed no limits on its proxies, which threatened Israel. Yet evenwith its flaws, the agreement froze Iran’s nuclear development for a period and—whatshould be most telling for a president—bolstered US national security interests.Trump, who hates everything Obama did, took Netanyahu’s advice and committed theblunder of scuttling the accord, releasing Iran to renew its advance towardnuclearization.

Bad advice doesn’t have to betaken.

Today, while Israel can be blamedfor misreading Iran militarily and politically, it need not be blamed for thewar. The fault is Trump’s. The fault is the collaborators’ he has installedaround him. The fault is the millions of Americans’ who put him back in theWhite House even after seeing his anti-constitutional moves to overturndemocracy.

Even if he were not asemi-dictator, Trump would put the country in danger from his startling lack ofanalytical skills and obvious cognitive impairment. His decline intoimpulsiveness is rapidly advancing, perhaps a symptom common to aging narcissists.Barely any checks on his power are imposed by any branch of government. He rulesby feelings, not facts, limited only by his “own morality,” as he told TheTimes in a January interview.

What a comfort. His own morality.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            One of themost enlightening summations of Donald Trump came from his longtime associateand now chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He has an “alcoholic’s personality,” shesaid in aninterview with Vanity Fair, which means he “operates [with] a view thatthere’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” She should know. AlthoughTrump claims not to drink alcohol, Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father, thefootball player and sportscaster Pat Summerall.

            Trump’sfantasy of omnipotence helps explain why he swaggers across parts of the globeand tramples his own country’s democratic norms. But his illusion of boundlesspower is now running into the reality of Iran. So is Israel’s imagined abilityto manipulate the politics of its enemies, a practice it has pursued fordecades with absolutely zero success.

Trump has been riding anintoxicating high of adventurism since he found little resistance from earliertargets, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, blowing up speedboats inthe Caribbean, capturing President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela in January,and now cutting off Cuba’s oil supplies. He said of Cuba, “I can do anything Iwant with it.” On Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf states, Trump declared, “Nobodyexpected that. We were shocked.”

 An educable president who took advice fromexperts would have anticipated the ruthless resilience of Iran’s odious regime.That is not the president Americans elected. Instead, he has rid government of specialistswho know Iran. He has made the White House into an echo chamber of zealots andsycophants. He has let his incompetent “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, purge thesenior officer corps of many seasoned professionals essential to complex combat.

Furthermore, Trump carries the flawof every dictator. He thinks policy is personified in a single figure, as inhis own administration: hence his misplaced belief that decapitating agovernment will bring it down, as in the seizure of Maduro and theassassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

Taking a still picture of a war inprogress can be misleading, for the final judgment usually rests on itsoutcome. So far, the Israel-American onslaught from the air has killed much ofthe leadership, including potentially moderate figures, and obliterated much ofIran’s military.

The regime remains, however, fightingfor its life using asymmetrical warfare against massive Israeli and Americanair power: mostly drones and rockets aimed at the pressure points of the globaloil economy. The US is burning through its arsenal of expensive defensivemissiles, which it’s using to down the relative cheap Iranian drones. Thatlimits Ukraine’s ability to get them to hold off Russia, which poses a much graverthreat than Iran.

Nor is there any sign yet of thepower vacuum that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuanticipated could somehow be filled by an unarmed and unorganized opposition. “Thehour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump toldIranians on February 28, the day he began the war. “Stay sheltered, don’t leaveyour home….When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours totake.”

Perhaps Trump had been persuaded byNetanyahu, the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders who have tried andfailed to realign Arab and Muslim politics.

            In theearly 1980s, to dilute the Palestine Liberation Organization’s influence in theoccupied West Bank, Israel appointed Menachem Milson, a professor of Arabicliterature at Hebrew University, as architect of a set of rural “villageleagues” composed of moderate, compliant Palestinians. They were seen by thePLO as Israeli collaborators, Jordan threatened to prosecute them for treason, moderatePalestinian mayors denounced their complicity, one member was shot and wounded whenhis son was killed, and others resigned. Milson impressedArabs as arrogant and ignorant of their culture, I was told at the time, breakingpromises and wielding crude political patronage to no avail.

            Similarlyin that period, Israel’s army in occupied Gaza was giving money to the MuslimBrotherhood, a precursor of Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmedto me in 1981 by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor for Gaza,who explained that he was instructed to build the Brotherhood as a counterpointto the PLO and the Communists, whose goal of Palestinian statehood was seen asmore threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

            TheBrotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfareservices for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemedbenign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood theByzantium of Gaza’s politics.

A year later, Israelis made thesame mistake in Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLObut fail dramatically at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.Their favored leader, Bashir Gemayel, a Maronite Christian who had led fighterson Israel’s behalf, was assassinated by a pro-Syrian operative shortly afterbeing elected president.

More recently, Netanyahugovernments bolstered Hamas to divide Palestinians and cripple their movementfor statehood. Years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Israel allowedQatar to send suitcasesfull of cash for Hamas through checkpoints into Gaza.

Devoted to Israel’s ultimatedestruction, Hamas seemed useful to Netanyahu, because it undermined thePalestinian Authority, which descended from the PLO, favored a two-statesolution, and governed parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords. The self-destructiveresult of this bumbling attempt at manipulation came on October 7, 2023, whenHamas fighters caught Israeli intelligence and armed forces off-guard, breachedthe defenses around Gaza, slaughtered some 1,200 people, took 251 hostages, andtriggered Israel’s massive bombing of the territory. In its brutal vengeanceduring that war, Israel forfeited its moral authority.

Under Trump, the United States isalso forfeiting its moral authority. That is an unmeasurable commodity. Itcannot be quantified in numbers of missiles, dollars per barrel, or the balanceof trade. But its depletion, with allies and adversaries alike, leaves Americahandicapped in the real world, which even Trump’s megalomania cannot tame.   

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            In thespring of 1982, just over three years after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, I wasinvited by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to his sheep ranch in theNegev Desert to hear his surprising arguments about Iran. As we sat in hisspacious house, he made a strong case that Washington should work to repairrelations with Tehran—in the strategic interests of both the United States andIsrael.

            This wasnot a complete break from decades of Israeli policy toward Iran, which hadtraded oil for weapons. Yet at that moment, Sharon was voicing a bold andcounterintuitive position for his country, which was the target of anti-Zionisthatred from the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And the timing wasoff, for it came when American emotions remained high, little more than a yearafter the release of American diplomatic personnel who had been held for 444days after the US Embassy was overrun.

Sharon wanted his controversialidea in The New York Times, but only “on background,” not with his nameattached. This is a trade-off journalists accept to give the public significantinformation that would not be available otherwise. So, in a broadpiece about American, Israeli, and Soviet stakes in Iran, I called him “awell-placed Israeli official,” a disguise unnecessary now, a dozen years after hisdeath.

A former general infamous forruthlessness toward Arabs, Sharon was more opportunist than ideologue. His lenswas military, not religious. He saw Iran—Muslim but not Arab—as a counterweightagainst the well-armed Arab countries. At the time, only Egypt had signed apeace treaty with Israel. Iraq, Syria, and—to a lesser extent, Jordan—remainedin the Arab order of battle.

Sharon worried about Moscow’sgains. He began his pitch by assessing Iran as the region’s most criticalMuslim country, which deserved cultivation by Washington. “In spite of all Iranhas done to the United States,” he insisted, “the United States cannot affordto permit Iran to be totally and unreservedly anti-American and leave the fieldopen to Soviet penetration.”

Furthermore, he noted that about40,000 Jews lived in Iran. “Under a regime like this one, you can consider themas hostages,” he said, making Israel responsive to Iranian requests for militaryequipment and spare parts for weapons.

In fact, Israel continued toprovide military supplies to Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (250 tiresfor F-4 fighter jets in 1980, for example, ammunition and parts for tanks); itsuspended the sales under US pressure until the hostages were released in 1981,then resumed shipments for awhile. “No matter how intense their zeal againstZionism,” Sharon told me, “we don't have to fuel this fire.”

It’s safe to say that Sharon wouldnot have advocated support once Iran embarked on its  nuclearweapons program, which could ignite a nuclear arms race in a region where Israelalone has a nuclear arsenal. It’s reasonable to think that he would endorsetoday’s war against Iran. But the countries’ prior history, documentedby declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry memos and reports, offers aninstructive picture of a largely secret alignment that Israel might want to renewif a moderate government came to power there, as unlikely as that seems today.

Analyzing the official papers in2019, an Israeli human rights lawyer, Eitay Mack, described anextensive, mutually beneficial relationship from 1953 to 1979, during thedictatorial rule by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. He had come to power afterBritish intelligence, aided by the CIA, helpedoverthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized British oilholdings. (The scheme is well-documented in an investigative film, Coup 53.)

Under the Shah, Iran delivered oilto the Israeli port of Eilat, according to the files, from which it passed bypipeline to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean. In addition, “private andstate-owned Israeli companies, ranging from textiles, agriculture, electricalappliances, water, fertilizers, construction, aviation, shipping, gas, tiresand even dentures, had been operating extensively in Iran,” Mack wrote. “Insome years, Iran was one of the main destinations for Israeli exports.”

The papers that Mack analyzed show close Israelirelations with the Shah’s feared security police, the SAVAK, which imprisonedand tortured political opponents. According to one Foreign Ministry memo, theIranian prime minister asked in 1967 for Israel to train his chief bodyguard. Whetheror not it was done is not spelled out. But Iranian police went to Israel fortraining by the company Motorola in using communications equipment. Anddocuments show Israeli officials as keenly interested in the SAVAK’s ability tocontain pro-communist or other opposition to the Shah.

Intelligence and militarycooperation were extensive. Iran paid Israel to renovate Iranian air force andcivilian aircraft. Purchases of Israeli tanker airplanes and other weaponrywere reported. “Between 1968 and 1972,” according to Mack’s summary of thedeclassified documents, “IMI Systems [a major weapons manufacturer then ownedby the Israeli government] sold $20.9 million worth of equipment to Iran;Israel Aerospace Industries sold $1.3 million; Soltam sold $16.9 million inmortars; Motorola sold $12 million; Tadiran sold $11.3 million and set up aradio equipment factory in Iran; and Israel’s Defense Ministry sold $700,000worth of equipment.”

High-level contacts weremaintained. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion visited Iran in 1961. PrimeMinister Golda Meir met the Shah in 1972, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin metthe head of Iran’s security services on Dec. 8, 1974. For years, Israel andIran had offices and representatives in each other’s countries, sometimesclandestinely, and Israeli military attaches were in frequent contact withIranian officers.

A 1967 memo from Israel’sambassador in Tehran, Zvi Dorel, put it this way: “We have established a close,friendly, and practical partnership between the IDF and the security servicesand their Iranian counterparts, with joint execution of programs and missionsof national importance, with continuous mutual visits by the heads of the armedforces and their senior officials. … The Iranian army views the IDF and thesecurity services as allies and those involved in making contact andprofessional issues.”

An Israeli Finance Ministryofficial reported in 1973: “The spectrum of activity is broad, ranging from thesupply of military products and electronics manufactured by factories inIsrael, to the export of systems for creating and assembling them on the spot,training, surveys, construction, assembling and maintenance of facilities onthe ground through contractors.”

During the Iran-Iraq war of the1980s, Israel saw its interest in a weakened Iraq, so provided military supportto Iran. In 1981, Sharon publicly berated the US for allegedly providing Iraq,an arch-enemy of Israel, with artillery and ammunition. “The fact that they aresupplying these dangerous weapons to the Arab world, sophisticated weapons,puts us in a very difficult situation,” Sharon complained.

To the extent that Israel’sextensive, past relations in Iran have been translated into ongoing spynetworks, they might have complemented the sophisticated digital surveillancethat has evidently given Israel precise inside intelligence, which hasfacilitated identifying and targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and other keyfigures.

Although nationalist hatred andreligious zealotry in the Middle East can look immutable, the rise and fall ofthe Israel-Iran collaboration exemplifies fluidity. Sharon’s plea in 1982 was ayearning to recover somewhat from the virtual collapse of the relationshipafter the fall of the Shah in 1979.

Significantly, as early as 1976, Israel’sambassador in Tehran, Uri Lubrani, began to predict the Shah’s demise. “Thefeeling of many in Iran today is that the status of the Shah has begun to bequickly undermined,” he cabled to the Foreign Ministry, “a process that cannotbe reversed and will eventually lead to his defeat and a drastic change in theform of government in Iran. It is very difficult to give a time estimate and mypersonal assessment, which is not based on any objective data, is that thiswill take place more or less in the next five years.” It took three.

Israeli officials hoped for amilitary government that would maintain the relationship, but Lubrani was farfrom sanguine. “It is reasonable to assume that the monarchy will end and that,at least in the first stage, the military officers will take its place,” hewrote. “The big question is who will lead them and what direction he will take.. . . The implications of a new situation for Israel-Iran relations should theShah’s rule be undermined are grave, and the current regime of the Shah will beseen as the most positive one for Israel in Iran. Any change in thisgovernment will, to the best of our assessment, be to the detriment of ourrelations with this country.”

About a year before the end, onSept. 28, 1978, Lubrani met with the Shah and reported, “He is not the man wewere familiar with, he was distant and sometimes stares. . . He is full ofterror and uncertain of the future. The most worrisome aspect is the sense thathe seems to have made peace with his fate, without having found any strongdesire to take matters into his own hands and change it.”

After that, Iran muscled up itsmilitary, funded and armed proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthisin Yemen—and posed the greatest threat to Israel, while some Arab countries,also threatened by Iran, moved toward accommodation with the Jewish state.

Those proxies and Iran’s ownmilitary have been severely damaged in repeated attacks. Despite a pro-Westernrestiveness among some of Iran’s 90 million people, demonstrated by the pre-waranti-government protests that were put down with slaughter, experts on thecountry doubt that this Israeli-American war will completely overturn theradical regime that has ruled since the Shah.

        The moment has a wayof seeming permanent. Nevertheless, the Middle East is like a kaleidoscopewhose future patterns of alliances and allegiances only fools and prophetswould dare predict. The only certainty is that the kaleidoscope is being givenanother shake.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            America’smarch toward autocracy is now trying out the tools of a possible police state.Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as a national force aimednot merely at deporting undocumented immigrants but at surveilling Americansand violently suppressing constitutionally protected dissent. The effect—and theevident purpose—is to sow widespread fear.

The agents, masked and camouflagedin combat gear, are accountable to nobody except the strongman at the top, DonaldTrump. His key aide, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reassuredthem: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conductof your duties.” As these “law enforcement” officers violate the law withimpunity, they are taking the country into phase four of its rising authoritarianism:the embryonic stage of a system whose brute force overcomes the rule of law andthe liberties of the citizens.

The First, Fourth, Fifth, and TenthAmendments in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are being shredded by militarizedpolicing and the beatings and murders of peaceful demonstrators (FirstAmendment); the warrantless break-ins and searches of homes (Fourth Amendment);the seizures of pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or due process (Fourthand Fifth Amendments), and the bulldozing of states’ rights (Tenth Amendment). Allthat is being done in service to President Trump’s semi-dictatorial powers.

How far it will go is an openquestion. The murders of two American citizens during Minneapolis protests havesparked condemnation from much of the population, even from a few Republicanswho have belatedly found their spines. Yet the Trumpists’ longterm design looksclear enough: the recruitment and creation of a centralized apparatus above localcontrol.

This is in the playbook of everydictatorship: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Soviet Union’s KGB, Venezuela’sBolivarian National Guard. In the US, the Trump government’s totalitarianaspirations to spread a radical right ideology into broad areas of America’scivil society require enforcement mechanisms that stand outside the normalstructure of constitutional democracy. They include aggressive policing, politicalprosecutions, a cowed and self-censored press, physical threats, selectivetaxation, enticements to bribe under the guise of “donations,” and financial punishment.

An element of secrecy usuallyaccompanies police-state practices, with anonymous agents out of uniform. Suchis the case with federal agents, both in ICE and Customs and Border Protection.Although they operate openly, they hide their faces, display no badges ornametags, and are barely distinguishable from gang members. A photograph of theAmerican nurse, Alex Pretti, being shot in the back while on his knees inMinneapolis could easily be mistaken for an execution by Hamas in the streetsof Gaza.

What’s more, ICE and its parentagency, the Department of Homeland Security, are conducting clandestine,high-tech monitoring of both immigrants and US citizens. Shortly before TheWashington Post lost one-third of its journalists to layoffs, it reportedon details of “intrusive technologies” that have given ICE, the mostextensively funded federal policing agency, “new surveillance powers.” Theyinclude drones, facial recognition used by agents when approaching motorists andpedestrians, license plate readers to trace people’s vehicles with fixed camerasalong streets, and trucks carrying phone trackers that “masquerade as celltowers and trick nearby cellphones to connect.” Locked phones and computersthat are seized can be hacked and decrypted by plugging them into a box withsoftware made by various private firms.

The Post alsoreported on DHS’s targeting of a 67-year-old retiree named Jon, inPennsylvania, who wrote a moderately-worded email to a federal prosecutor pleadingfor mercy for an Afghan he had readabout in the Post, who was facing deportation to his home country,where he feared that the Taliban would kill him. Five hours after Jon sent theemail, Google notified him of receiving an administrative subpoena for “informationrelated to your Google account.” Similar demands had been made to “Meta toidentify the people behind a Facebook and Instagram account that tracked ICEraids in Montgomery County [PA],” the paper found.

A couple of weeks later, twoHomeland Security agents and a local police officer knocked on Jon’s door. Anagent showed him a printout of his email, asked how he knew the prosecutor’saddress (through a Google search, Jon confessed!), put a few more questions tohim, and then left. He dared to tell his story with just his first name; he fearedfor his family’s safety.

One wonders whether the Post’sowner, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, will allow his paper such hard-hitting coverage ofthe Trumpists’ continuing abuses. Bezos has business interests involvingfederal regulation, and he has tried to curry favor with the president, mostrecently with an absurd $40 million fee for a vapid film celebrating MelaniaTrump. Some speculate that Bezos’s decimation of the news staff is another effortto mollify the bully in the White House.

It fits with a pattern among thecountry’s elites, who have never experienced dictatorship; otherwise, theywould know that the more you give in, the weaker you look, and the more powerthe autocrat wields over you. Europe repelled Trump’s appetite to own Greenland,not by wooing and flattering him but by pushing back. Instead, many US corporations,law firms, universities, news organizations, and others have pursued deals topreserve their narrow self-interests. They have failed to stand united indefiance of the coming autocracy.   

A police state’s methods are designedas force-multipliers, encouraging preemptive capitulation. A few threateningincidents are enough to quiet most of the population, who can live their liveswithout hitting the limits of freedom. It is rarely the great mass that risesup. Rather, preserving or restoring liberty usually relies on a small minority whoare courageous enough to take risks.

The US, which regards itself as exceptional,looks sadly typical so far. Several months ago, I was told by a journalist of aRussian friend who compared the first months of Trump with the first years ofPutin by observing: You Americans caved faster than we Russians did.

I suppose that’s because Russiansknew what was coming; they had lived it before. 

See essays on Phases 1 and 2 hereand Phase 3 here.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In theunlikely event that I ever have a chance for a conversation with an agent afterhe has dragged a half-dressed middle-aged citizen from his own house, wrencheda husband from his weeping wife and children, taken a five-year-old boy into custody,or shot into the innocent face of a mother of three, here is what I would ask: 

1.      Doyou realize that the person’s face will haunt you for the rest of your life?(A former NKVD secret police agent under Stalin, writing in a letter to theSoviet magazine Ogonyok decades later, described his torment: “Now thepeople in the cases I investigated visit me at night, and instead of fear intheir eyes I see that they despise me. How can I tell these people I tortured,how can I explain that my damned life was a tragedy, too?”)

2.      Whenyour children and grandchildren ask what you were doing during the assault on America’sdemocracy, how will you answer? (Many young Germans, coming of age afterWorld War II, questioned their elders closely about what they had done during theNazi era; searing conversations often followed.)

3.      Whatdid your parents do to you? (A line from a Seinfeld episode.)

 

By David K. Shipler 

            My earliestpolitical memory is watching television film of Southern segregationistsscreaming epithets at Black children as they integrated schools in the 1950s,and police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with truncheons, dogs,and fire hoses. I remember not only my own revulsion but my grandmother’s. 

            Shehad been raised in rural Maryland and had her streak of racial prejudice. Butas she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, she seethed with indignationat the crude inhumanity unfolding on the screen. Her disgust became my firstlesson in the power of decency to honor nonviolence against violence, and togenerate reform.

The scenes eventually mobilized theconscience of much of white America. A question is whether it can happen again.

This year’s holiday marking thebirthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of nonviolence in theCivil Rights Movement, is a fitting moment to wonder if the furious episodes ofmasked ICE agents shooting and brutalizing protesting Americans can activate—broadlyenough—whatever conscience has not been snuffed out by President Trump and hiscollaborators.

 We saw a moral uprising after a long history ofpolice killings of unarmed Blacks culminated in the videoed 2020 suffocation ofGeorge Floyd in Minneapolis. That and other murders propelled demonstrationsacross the country by millions of Americans—most of them white, significantly. Andsince Trump’s inauguration a year ago, citizens not vulnerable to deportationhave rallied against the inhumane practices by ICE agents, especially inMinneapolis, once again the center of conflict after an agent wantonly shot andkilled Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three; she posed no threat, videosshow, contrary to slanderous assertions by Trump and his subordinates.

In a current CBS poll,61 percent of those surveyed said that ICE was being “too tough,” up from 56percent in November. Among independents, 65 percent thought that protesterswere either doing things “about right” (33 percent) or had not gone far enough (32percent). The remaining 35 percent blamed demonstrators for going “too far.” Asone might expect, Republicans and Democrats were heavily skewed in oppositedirections, but overall, 52 percent said that ICE was making their communities “lesssafe.”

The numbers appear to show agathering storm of resentment. But how that might translate into the kind of moralmobilization that produced the civil rights laws is a question. The parallels withtoday are far from precise.

Civil rights demonstrators were trainedin the discipline of nonviolence, never fighting back when attacked as they marchedpeacefully, illegally rode segregated buses, helped Blacks register to vote, orsat in at segregated lunch counters. King, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, calledthis the “love ethic.” He and others bet correctly that the Southern powerstructure, through white thugs and cops, would play its role in the pageant,revealing a cruelty that did, in the end, galvanize onlookers across thecountry.

Anti-ICE protesters have no suchcoherent training and no resonant voice of leadership, and while most arepeaceful, clashes with agents draw the most vivid videos. Those taken anddoctored by right-wing activists circulate on social media, which did not existsixty years ago, and influence policy-making in the White House, which had notbeen captured back then by an authoritarian ideology of white supremacy.

Before the internet and cable news,television was dominated by the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, whichgenerally kept opinion out of their reporting. Today’s opinionated newscoverage, particularly on the right, has distorted much of the public’sperceptions of reality. A side effect has been the erosion of public trust innews organizations that strive for fairness and accuracy, including The NewYork Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Opinion,it seems, is alluring enough to attract people who want their views upheld—confirmationbias, it’s called.

Right-wing “news” outlets have unquestioninglyconveyed Trump’s effort to discredit protesters as being paid by nefarious domesticenemies, a smear from the top. In the fifties and sixties, that rhetoric came largelyfrom the bottom as local and state officials dismissed civil rightsdemonstrators as “outsider agitators.”

The dynamic today has beeninverted, with Washington the enemy of peaceful protest and some state andlocal governments defending that right, which is enshrined in the FirstAmendment.

In 1957, for example, after ArkansasGovernor Orval Faubus calledout the state national guard to prevent nine Black students from entering LittleRock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted. He pressedFaubus to use the guard to assure peaceful integration, as the Supreme Courthad ordered in Brown v. Board of Education three years earlier. But whenFaubus withdrew the guard instead and rioting erupted, Eisenhower federalizedthe guard and sent 101st Airborne troops to restore order andprotect the students.

Today, it is the federal governmentthat is trying to crush demonstrators and the state and local governments inMinnesota that are trying to protect them. It is the White House that issuppressing an investigation into the Minneapolis shooting and the state thatwants to hold the agent accountable.

The inversion of righteousness istelling. America is a different country now. The threshold at which outrage istriggered has risen very high as Trump and company have numbed us to violationsof ethics, laws, social norms, democratic processes, racial respect, and other featuresof a pluralistic and orderly culture. He has created, in ICE, a national, paramilitaryforce unlike anything seen before in the United States, unaccountable to thelaw or to the norms of decency.

Seared in my memory is thephotograph, from Little Rock, of a white girl’s face twisted in hatred as she screamedat a Black girl seeking to go to Central High. The country came to see itself inthis mirror.

My grandmother did not become aflaming liberal, but she loved Eisenhower, and I think his actions affected herviews on race. She did not object on principle when my mother and I went to the1963 March on Washington, where King declared, “I have a dream.” She was worriedfor us, because violence was ridiculously predicted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBIdirector. But in the end, the crowd was a sweep of massive friendliness anduplifting harmony, a tribute to the conscience of America.