Death at Your Door: Knock-and-Talk Police Tactics Rip a Hole in the Constitution

by JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

“It’s 4 in the morning, there’s headlights that are shining into your house; there’s a number of different officers that are now on the premises; they’re wearing tactical gear; they have weapons; and they approach your front door. Do you think that the ordinary citizen in that situation feels that they have an obligation to comply?”— Michigan Supreme Court Justice Richard Bernstein

It’s 1:30 a.m., a time when most people are asleep.

Your neighborhood is in darkness, except for a few street lamps. Someone—he doesn’t identify himself and the voice isn’t familiar—is pounding on your front door, demanding that you open up. Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you. You fear that it’s an intruder or worse. You not only fear for your life, but the lives of your loved ones.

The aggressive pounding continues, becoming more jarring with every passing second. Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat awaits on the other side of that door, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need. You brace for the confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon, and approach the door cautiously. The pounding continues.

You open the door to find a shadowy figure aiming a gun in your direction. Immediately, you back up and retreat further into your apartment. At the same time, the intruder opens fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction. Three of the bullets make contact. You die without ever raising your weapon or firing your gun in self-defense. In your final moments, you get a good look at your assailant: it’s the police.

This is what passes for “knock-and-talk” policing in the American police state.

“Knock-and-shoot” policing might be more accurate, however.

Whatever you call it, this aggressive, excessive police tactic has become a thinly veiled, warrantless exercise by which citizens are coerced and intimidated into “talking” with heavily armed police who “knock” on their doors in the middle of the night.

Poor Andrew Scott didn’t even get a chance to say no to such a heavy-handed request before he was gunned down by police.

It was late on a Saturday night—so late that it was technically Sunday morning—and 26-year-old Scott was at home with his girlfriend playing video games when police, in pursuit of a speeding motorcyclist, arrived at Scott’s apartment complex, because a motorcycle had been spotted at the complex and police believed it might belong to their suspect.

At 1:30 a.m., four sheriff’s deputies began knocking on doors close to where a motorcycle was parked. The deputies started their knock-and-talk with Apartment 114 because there was a light on inside. The occupants of the apartment were Andrew Scott and Amy Young, who were playing video games.

First, the police assumed tactical positions surrounding the door to Apartment 114, guns drawn and ready to shoot.

Then, without announcing that he was a police officer, deputy Richard Sylvester banged loudly and repeatedly on the door of Apartment 114. The racket caused a neighbor to open his door. When questioned by a deputy, the neighbor explained that the motorcycle’s owner did not live in Apartment 114.

This information was not relayed to the police officer stationed at the door.

Understandably alarmed by the aggressive pounding on his door at such a late hour, Andrew Scott retrieved his handgun before opening the door. Upon opening the door, Scott saw a shadowy figure holding a gun outside his door.

Still police failed to identify themselves.

Unnerved by the sight of the gunman, Scott retreated into his apartment only to have Sylvester immediately open fire. Sylvester fired six shots, three of which hit and killed Scott, who had no connection to the motorcycle or any illegal activity.

So who was at fault here?

Was it Andrew Scott, who was prepared to defend himself and his girlfriend against a possible late-night intruder?

Was it the police officers who banged on the wrong door in the middle of the night, failed to identify themselves, and then—without asking any questions or attempting to de-escalate the situation—shot and killed an innocent man?

Was it the courts, which not only ruled that the police had qualified immunity against being sued for Scott’s murder but also concluded that Andrew Scott provoked the confrontation by retrieving a lawfully-owned handgun before opening the door?

Or was it the whole crooked system that’s to blame? I’m referring to the courts that continue to march in lockstep with the police state, the police unions that continue to strong-arm politicians into letting the police agencies literally get away with murder, the legislators who care more about getting re-elected than about protecting the rights of the citizenry, the police who are being trained to view their fellow citizens as enemy combatants on a battlefield, and the citizenry who fail to be alarmed and outraged every time the police state shoots another hole in the Constitution.

What happened to Andrew Scott was not an isolated incident.

As Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch recognized in a dissent in U.S. v. Carloss: “The ‘knock and talk’ has won a prominent place in today’s legal lexicon… published cases approving knock and talks have grown legion.”

In fact, the Michigan Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case in which seven armed police officers, dressed in tactical gear and with their police lights on, carried out a knock-and-talk search on four of their former colleagues’ homes early in the morning, while their families (including children) were asleep. The police insist that there’s nothing coercive about such a scenario.

Whether police are knocking on your door at 2 am or 2:30 pm, as long as you’re being “asked” to talk to a police officer who is armed to the teeth and inclined to kill at the least provocation, you don’t really have much room to resist, not if you value your life.

Mind you, these knock-and-talk searches are little more than police fishing expeditions carried out without a warrant.

The goal is intimidation and coercion.

Unfortunately, with police departments increasingly shifting towards pre-crime policing and relying on dubious threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state, we’re going to see more of these warrantless knock-and-talk police tactics by which police attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

We’ve already seen a dramatic rise in the number of home invasions by battle-ready SWAT teams and police who have been transformed into extensions of the military. Indeed, with every passing week, we hear more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals.

Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent.

Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which civilians (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of civilians is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons).

In fact, the privacy of civilians is negligible in the face of the government’s various missions, and the homes of civilians are no longer the refuge from government intrusion that they once were.

It wasn’t always this way, however.

There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary where he and his family could be safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of writs of assistance. These writs were nothing less than open-ended royal documents which British soldiers used as a justification for barging into the homes of colonists and rifling through their belongings.

James Otis, a renowned colonial attorney, “condemned writs of assistance because they were perpetual, universal (addressed to every officer and subject in the realm), and allowed anyone to conduct a search in violation of the essential principle of English liberty that a peaceable man’s house is his castle.” As Otis noted:

Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we may be worse off today than our colonial ancestors when one considers the extent to which courts have sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (occurring at a rate of 70,000 to 80,000 a year and growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing; and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause, the latter of which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.

Winston Churchill once declared that “democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.”

Clearly, we don’t live in a democracy.

No, in the American police state, when you find yourself woken in the early hours by someone pounding on your door, smashing through your door, terrorizing your family, killing your pets, and shooting you if you dare to resist in any way, you don’t need to worry that it might be burglars out to rob and kill you: it’s just the police.

ADDENDUM

See this material, too:
Florida deputies kill innocent man after knocking on wrong door
http://www.inquisitr.com/277997/andrew-scott-florida-deputies-kill-innocent-man-after-knocking-on-the-wrong-door/

MAIN IMAGE: Andrew Scott, pizza delivery man, killed by police in a tragic (but all too common) case of police over-reach.

John W. Whitehead is the president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People.

EDITOR’S NOTE: No material by this author or any other author published on this site should be read as a defense of Donald trump and his policies. For us Trump, the GOP and the Democrats are all part of the same malignant threat to Democracy, world peace, truth and honesty in fiscal affairs afflicting the US and the rest of the world, and emanating from the irrepressible dynamics of global capitalism, whose main citadel is currently in the United States.

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“Waking Up to the Stench of American Fascism”

A Book Review by Mike Kuhlenbeck for The Greanville Post

Jackals: The Stench of American Fascism by Alex Constantine

Published by TrineDay (March 2016)

Before Adolf Hitler’s election in 1933, the staff of The Munich Post first condemned the Nazi Party by publishing an editorial against the “corrupt leader of the German fascists” in August 1920. The Post continued publishing denouncements of Hitler and his jackal pack, especially in the newspaper’s final years before its printing presses were shut down by the new regime. Its reporters and editors were subsequently arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Writing at a time before fascist billionaire Donald Trump took the reins of the Oval Office, journalist Alex Constantine explains his motivation for authoring Jackals: The Stench of American Fascism: Anti-fascist warnings are still coming nearly a century after the emergence of Hitler. The humanitarian spirit that drove the editors of the Munich Post to oppose the senseless political violence propagated by the ruling class of Germany survives in this book to oppose the senseless political violence propagated by the ruling class of America’s blighted democracy. (Pg. 307)[/su_panel]

Constantine has authored one of the most important (and overlooked) books of 2016 with Jackals, published by TrineDay last March. An investigative polemic delivered in the courageous tradition of anti-fascist reporter George Seldes and radio researcher Mae Brussell, Jackals is a revised edition of an e-book previously made available at the website The Constantine Report (an invaluable journalism resource) titled: Terror on the Right. Constantine’s latest work explores the alarming ties between the “domestic intelligence underground and the far-right political establishment and the media.”

There is nothing new about the working relationship between the Neoconservatives (Neo-Cons) and the Alt-Right (“Alternative Right”) or earlier movements such as the “Tea Party” receiving corporate funding despite its perceived “grassroots” orientation. Americans tend to forget (not that they were properly informed in the first place) that fascist regimes were elevated into power by broad nationalist movements based on militant reaction, made possible by the financial and institutional support from the ruling class of each nation in question. History professor F L. Carsten notes the differences, and more importantly the similarities, between the reactionary groups of Europe in his book The Rise of Fascism (1967):

Although these movements differed widely from country to country, there were certain features which they had in common. They were violently nationalist-—a nationalism very different from that of nineteenth-century conservative or liberal groups, so much so that the term ‘the new Right’ has been coined to describe them. They were also, in most cases, strongly anti-Semitic, using the Jews as a convenient scapegoat for the ills of capitalist society. Finally, they were appealing not only to the middle and lower middles classes, but also to the lower classes, attempting to wean them from the ideals of socialism and internationalism, and to provide a popular basis for the new movements. (Pgs. 10-11)

“Corporate influence on American foreign policy escalated in the dawn of the twentieth century, and depended on right-wing autocrats to maintain stability,” Constantine writes, occasionally referring to them as “the Lords of Industry,” an apt phrase culled from the Seldes lexicon. Once Fascist leader Benito Mussolini seized power, other movements followed and were warmly greeted by prominent members of the US ruling class (like those of their European counterparts; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were widely regarded as Nazi symps, along with a hefty share of the UK’s nobility) view movements such as his as their best line of defense against organized labor and other social justice movements. “The rise of labor unions and social movements threatened to usurp the power, wealth and privilege of the ruling class,” Constantine writes. Along with gaining public support in the streets, fascist groups were supported by the land-owning elite and business executives whose only political allegiance was to the Dollar.

“During the war, some 2,000 corporations in the U.S. collaborated with the Nazis to enhance their bottom lines.” Corroborating this figure in an email correspondence with the author, the “2,000” figure is correct when considering “major corporations (Ford, GE, GM, Kodak, the corporate predecessor of American Home Products, Standard Oil, Monsanto, etc.) who collaborated and profited from the draw on slave labor. Then along came numerous subsidiaries, directly or indirectly involved. Before the war, the Nazis put together a vast web of contractual marketing and patent agreements that ran the number up considerably.”

After the war, the US Government did not invest the time or resources to investigating Nazis and their enablers from other countries. As if the world’s rulers were incapable of unleashing more evil after fascism and another world war, nuclear weapons were introduced to an already devastated planet. As the governments of the US, Great Britain and their allies were about to close one chapter of their history, they were already plotting global hegemony and territorial expansion. To secure this vision, an “Iron Curtain” had to be provoked and drawn and new enemies forged in “The Cold War,” the product of one of the most successful ongoing propaganda campaigns on record in support of the “military-industrial complex.” The latest threat of a boogeyman armed with a nuclear warhead clenched between its beastly fangs (in this case the Soviet Union) provided the ultimate banner for the general public to rally behind.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y spoon-feeding the people a poisonous daily diet of nightmare scenarios, many people started forgetting the horrors uncovered during The Nuremberg Trials. Thanks to these psychological operations (PSY-OPS), many Americans started ignoring the real monsters, ones with human faces who hide behind the scenes, who manipulate political discussion to suit their own agendas. An excellent summary by U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials Abraham Pomerantz describes an unsettling trend he noticed developing in his homeland:

We have absorbed into our own legal system the German tyranny that we fought and inveighed against. The approach, copied from the Nazis, works this way: The press and radio first lay down a terrific barrage against the Red Menace. [Or the enemy du jour.] Headlines without a shred of evidence shriek of atom bomb spies or plots to overthrow the government, of espionage, of high treason, and of other bloodcurdling crimes. We are now ready for the second stage: the pinning of the label ‘Red’ indiscriminately on all opposition. (As cited in Jackals, Pg. 167)

US Senator Joseph McCarthy, the fake paranoid rotgut fascist from Wisconsin who helped lead the political witch-hunts of the 1950s, “never read books” according to his campaign manager and friend Urban Van Susteren, father of future Fox News talking head Greta Van Susteren. There was one notable exception: Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which McCarthy used as a political strategy guide. Both McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had cheerleaders in the American Nazi Party (founded by former US Naval Commander George Lincoln Rockwell), with members displaying home-made signs reading, “Nazis Support The House Committee of Un-American Activities,” and other slogans outside the hearings.

McCarthy, like Trump, is another mascot whose shameful legacy demonstrates how the lessons of the Second World War were recorded but not taken to heart by the American people. The manufactured threats of Witchcraft, Communism and now Terrorism, are shaped by a ruling class dependent upon the public’s ignorance in order to prevent them from challenging the social order. Just as hallucinations of “demonic forces” suffered by the children of Salem Village led to mob rule, public executions and the confiscation of property by the wealthier members of the community, modern decrees dictated and enforced in the name of “National Security” and “Law and Order” also increase the financial gains and secure the social status of the ruling class.

Journalist Peter Schrag penned the revelatory article “America’s Other Radicals” when working for Harper’s Magazine in 1971. Describing the so-called Far-Right of American politics, Schrag observes that “despite their struggles” and “quarrels over tactics,” these rightward fellow-travelers have common targets: “the Communist Conspiracy, the welfare state, the poverty program, civil rights, foreign aid, and, more recently, the peace movement, education, student activism, and black militancy.” Any semblance of democratic action is a threat to the parasitic elite, who cling to their status with the help of “law and order.” Constantine dedicates an entire chapter to one of the most influential of these groups, the John Birch Society (JBS).

The JBS was founded in 1959 by wealthy former Republican activist Robert Welch as a nationalist front harboring stuff-shirted, pseudo-intellectual crackpots whose collective paranoia helped to create the toxic swamp serving as a breeding ground for media mutants like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and Mark Dice just to name a few. Named after an American missionary, the JBS (of which Birch had no role in founding) preached the cartoonish paranoia where every “red, white and blue-blooded American” should sleep with a gun under their pillow in case a “Red Commie” is sleeping under the bed, getting ready to assault Lady Liberty once she falls asleep.

JB Society leaders often present themselves as folksy populists who display a pocket-sized edition of the US Constitution in one hand, and the Holy Bible (written in English) in the other, when questioned about their motives behind the rhetoric. The Warfare State (1962) author Fred J. Cook paints a more disturbing picture when portraying the early JBS “as secret as the Ku Klux Klan” and as “unbalanced as the Nazi Party of Hitler, with many of whose ideas and methods it would itself find quite compatible.” (As cited in Jackals, Pg. 169)

Groups like JBS helped undermine “any attempt to trespass on the self-serving authority of the country’s military-industrial plutocrats.” From its inception, the JBS “had a corporate foundation” chiefly comprised of oil companies and military contractors. The roster of former JBS members includes: Fred Koch (founder of Koch Industries and father to the Koch brothers), Howard Buffett (investment broker and father to billionaire Warren Buffett), Ezra Taft Benson (former Secretary of Agriculture under President Dwight Eisenhower), General Edwin A. Walker (US Army) and a slew of other corporate and military profiteers.

“The JBS waged its grassroots, populist approach to psychological warfare with bullets of scapegoating literature,” according to Constantine.

JBS pamphleteers howled about the “Communist Conspiracy,” promoting their twisted ideas in a slew of publications, some of which still exist in different incarnations. Among JBS’s “oiliest of propagandists” is Gary Allen (whose 1971 book None Dare Call it Conspiracy is one of the primary screeds on which many of today’s prevalent right-wing internet myths are rooted) promoted the idea that American taxpayers pay “the lion’s share of expenses for the United Nations” which was “dominated by a gaggle of Marxist dictatorships and third-world totalitarians.” Robert W. Lee, author of The United Nations Conspiracy (1982) said Americans were being led down “the garden path toward a Marxist World Government” courtesy of the UN. Larry Abraham (Allen’s co-author for None Dare Call It Conspiracy), stated in his uniquely titled work Call it Conspiracy (1985) ludicrously oversimplified the writings of Communist philosopher Karl Marx as a “codified” version of the “Illuminati” conspiracy.

The talk of “the Illuminati” and “Insiders” is rooted not so much in the idea of a privileged few (“the One Percent”), but in the ideological soil of the so-called “Jewish Conspiracy” as described by the still-quoted (but long-discredited) anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originally published in Tsarist Russia and later found its way to Europe and a renewed anti-Semitic plague spread from there. Hitler and the American automobile industrialist Henry Ford fashioned their own take on the lies perpetrated by this text, which already helped lay the foundation for fascist movements to exploit economic crises and scapegoat different segments of the population in order to build their envisioned oligarchic dystopia. Before the Hungarian government embraced Nazi rule, Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös called the “the socialism of Marxism” a “destructive heresy foisted on simple workers by self-serving international Jews.”

“Psychologically, we are conditioned by every intimation and nerve impulse of the military-industrial culture to accept the fascist extreme,” according to Constantine, “and fear a Red Dawn fantasy.”

The JBS often finds itself nesting under the sheets in the same political bed with groups like the KKK, which unlike the JBS openly espoused anti-Semitic and racist views. The Civil Rights movement was seen as integral to the “Communist Conspiracy” by the Birchers so they bitterly opposed integration. Allen served as a speechwriter for Alabama Governor and American Independent Party candidate for President George Wallace, who infamously belched “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The National Youth Alliance was founded by the late Holocaust-denier Willis Carto, evolving (using the term loosely) from the anti-Semitic wing of Youth for Wallace (YW). When writing in the revised edition of Religion and the Racist Right, (1997) scholar Michael Barkun stated that Carto was “one of the best funded and most indefatigable right-wing organizers.”

For a group that rails against “Big Government,” Birchers often partake in activities that one would fear could undermined democratic principles and personal liberty. For example, the Birchers had their own “intelligence branch” known as the Western Goals organization, the purpose of which was to collect information on what they perceived as threats to the “American Way,” as previously described by Schrag in Harper’s. While cloaking themselves in the American flag, Birchers (or those of a similar social-political persuasion) spied on fellow citizens, particularly those deemed as “subversives” and reported them to local and federal authorities. They were, for all intents in purposes, acting like “Good Americans” in the same sense Nazi supporters were acting like “Good Germans.”

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the FBI’s series of counter-intelligence programs COINTELPRO, as well as the CIA’s “Operation CHAOS” which monitored left-leaning individuals travelling abroad. Political analyst Michael Parenti writes in his book Democracy for the Few about how the FBI and the police “have given a free hand to or have actually assisted right-wing extremists” by providing “information and encouragement to organizations like the Minutemen and the John Birch Society.” Once COINTELPRO and other programs were exposed in the 1970’s, they were dissolved but survived in various incarnations since that time, allowing the government’s under-the-table support for reactionary violence to continue.

Jackals was published the same year as the 37^th anniversary of “The Greensboro Massacre,” where five members of the Marxist-Leninist group the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) were assassinated by racist thugs in Greensboro, North Carolina, during an anti-Klan protest on the morning of November 3, 1979. CWP members and supporters gathered at the Morningside Homes neighborhood for a peaceful demonstration that turned bloody when a nine-car caravan filled with members of the Ku Klux Klan and National Socialist Party of America arrived at the scene. According to researcher Tiffany George Butler Quaye Ph.D., they “unloaded eighty-eight shots of gunfire” into the crowd, killing CWP members César Cauce, Michael Nathan, William Sampson, Sandra Smith and James Michael Waller, and injuring at least ten other people.

Allegations made by CWP organizers that the assassins were tipped-off by law enforcement about the rally’s location is consistent with the US Government’s repression of working-class movements. Confirming these suspicions, it was later revealed that an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) had joined one of the hate groups involved in the shootings.

Investigative journalist Jim Redden writes in his book Snitch Nation (2000) “In the mid-1970’s, a BATF agent named Bernard Butkovich infiltrated the American Nazi Party unit in Forsyth County, North Carolina,” encouraging the other members “to commit a variety of illegal acts, offering to procure hand grenades and teach bomb-making classes.” Preparing for the Nov. 3 rally, Butkovich encouraged them to bring weapons, saying, “I wouldn’t go without a gun.” Butkovich’s role in the North Carolina murders was revealed during a subsequent trial. 16 Klansmen and neo-Nazis arrested and charged with murder. Though never convicted, they were named in a civil suit brought by survivors.

“In the end, jurors found two police officers, a police informer and four Klansmen liable for compensatory damage,” according to Intelligence Report magazine published by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Jackals, by its physical appearance and number of pages, is a bit off-putting considering its vast scope of espionage, geopolitical intrigue, the assassination of political leaders, terror plots and other acts against the human conscience committed by the Deep State. Constantine delivers an important, eye-opening glimpse of a history hidden in plain sight, exposing what amounts to ongoing psychological warfare against the American people and the motives behind the mass deception. The author’s observation on how “Americans, like the Germans, have been living with the stench of fascism since the early ‘20s” is deadly accurate.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

MIKE KUHLENBECK
Special Correspondent, Distinguished Colaborator
Mike Kuhlenbeck is a journalist, photographer, researcher and media critic based in Des Moines, Iowa. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Writers Union UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO.

Kuhlenbeck works as a reporter for Iowa Free Press and as a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in publications such as The Des Moines Register, The Humanist, Z Magazine, Foreign Policy Journal, Eurasia Review, People’s World, The Palestine Chronicle, Paste, Little Village, Industrial Worker, Earth First! Journal, Intrepid Report and the National Writers Union newsletter.

[bg_collapse view="button-orange" color="#4a4949" expand_text="MORE ON THIS AUTHOR" collapse_text="Show Less" ]His extensive and wide-ranging reportage has covered a myriad of subjects including news, politics, social issues, entertainment and local events. His work has been published nationally and internationally, and has been translated into numerous languages. His work has been cited by the Social Justice Journal, CopBlock.org, Axis of Logic, If Americans Knew, The Constantine Report, OMNI Center for Peace, Justice & Ecology, Isocracy.org, Zero Books, Global-Politics.eu and Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. He has been working in the journalism field since 2006 as a writer, reporter, researcher and photographer. He has also worked for The Challenger, The Urban Vibe and The Grand Views, reaching thousands of readers during his tenure. His skills evolved when he enrolled at Grand View University, where he graduated with a BA in Journalism in 2011. During that time he worked in various capacities for the Grand Views and the literary journal Bifrost.[/bg_collapse]

REMEMBER: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

Congress Passes Measure Opposing Speech and Media Freedoms

Dispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN

F irst Amendment rights are America’s most precious. Without them, all others are endangered. Post-9/11, police state laws destroyed fundamental US constitutional rights, remaining ones eroding toward elimination altogether.

Fascism operates this way. Americans are fooled by government and media propaganda, claiming compromised freedoms provide greater security, not realizing they’re losing both. On December 8, a bipartisan measure proposed by Senators Rob Portman (R. OH) and Chris Murphy (D. CT) was overwhelmingly passed as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The so-called Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act (CDPA) hides its sinister intent – a body blow against vital First Amendment freedoms, an unconstitutional measure. House members overwhelmingly passed it, Obama certain to sign it into law, another disgraceful black mark on his legacy (no pun intended), a record of shame, disgrace and lawlessness.

According to Portman, CDPA “will improve the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.” False! It’s intent is suppressing truth-telling, crucial in all free societies, state-friendly sanitized content alone considered acceptable.

“The passage of this bill in the Senate today takes us one critical step closer to effectively confronting the extensive, and destabilizing, foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us,” Portman added. “While the propaganda and disinformation threat has grown, the US government has been asleep at the wheel. Today we are finally signaling that enough is enough; the United States will no longer sit on the sidelines.”

The Obamas basking in liberaloid adulation at the Kennedy Center, 2016. The imbecility of centrist liberals, many marching under the Democrat label, is simply unquantifiable. Obama should respond for his crimes against humanity before a Nuremberg-type tribunal.

“We are going to confront this threat head-on. With the help of this bipartisan bill, the disinformation and propaganda used against our allies and our interests will fail.” According to Murphy, “Congress has taken a big step in fighting back against fake news and propaganda from countries like Russia. When the president signs this bill into law, the United States will finally have a dedicated set of tools and resources to confront our adversaries’ widespread efforts to spread false narratives that undermine democratic institutions and compromise America’s foreign policy goals.”

The State Department has responsibility for implementing the measure. Russia, China and Iran sympathizers are potentially endangered. At this point, it’s unclear what “developing a whole-of-government strategy” will entail. Should writers like myself fear FBI agents arriving at our homes with an arrest warrant for truth-telling, exposing government war crimes and other wrongdoing?

Is full-blown tyranny the new law of the land with few people realizing it? Does America more than ever resemble Nazi Germany? Will truth-telling on vital issues henceforth be criminalized, especially geopolitical ones? Obama governs under a police state apparatus. He institutionalized Big Brother spying on everyone. He’s waged greater war on whistleblowers than all his predecessors combined.

He made America resemble Guatemala. Called “the deporter-in-chief,” he’s waged white supremacist war on immigrants of color throughout his tenure – mocking notions of welcoming tired, poor, wretched masses yearning to breathe free.

The late Helen Thomas (1920 – 2013) blasted his attempted control of the press, calling it “shocking…They’re supposed to stay out of our business…Press control is worse than ever before…It’s blatant,” she explained. With truth-telling equated with “fake news” and “Russian propaganda,” things appearing heading to become much worse.

With Russia wrongfully accused of interfering in America’s election process to benefit Trump over Hillary, will he abandon notions of normalizing ties and cooperating with Putin in combating terrorism – fearing otherwise he’ll be called a Kremlin agent, making him vulnerable to impeachment? Is the worst of what Orwell envisioned now reality in America and other Western societies, following in US footsteps?

APPENDIX/ By the author

War Criminal John Kerry Awarded France’s Legion of Honor for Peacemaking

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]aybe next year’s Nobel Peace Prize will follow. Western societies honor war criminals like Henry Kissinger, Obama, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, John Kerry and many others. Peace champions are vilified, persecuted or shunned. On Saturday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault presented Kerry with France’s Legion of Honor – established by Napoleon in 1802, its highest award for notable military and civil service. One war criminal honored another, Ayrault shamefully saying Kerry earned the award for “his indefatigable efforts in favor of peace.”

KERRY: The best we can say about this man is that he does not represent a single decent or knowledgeable American. Only the indifferent and terminally ignorant.

Supporting all US wars of aggression, Kerry ludicrously said he “understand(s) the cost of war, and the need for all of us to keep fighting for peace, always.” Days earlier, Obama boasted about being the only US wartime president throughout his tenure. He’s indeed the most belligerent by bombing seven countries and waging naked aggression in multiple theaters still raging. All other US presidents since George Washington waged war throughout their tenures at home and/or abroad. Obama’s only “distinction” is the immense body count on his watch – millions perishing from war, related violence, preventable diseases, starvation and overall deprivation.

Just societies would have prosecuted, convicted, sentenced and imprisoned him long ago – Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and others in his administration along with him. No nation represents greater pure evil than America. None more megalomaniacally seek global conquest, no matter the human cost. None more threatens humanity’s survival.

Kerry should be arrested and detained the moment he arrives on foreign soil. On Saturday, speaking from Paris with his French, German and Qatari counterparts (partners in aggression on Syria), Kerry lied, saying “(w)e assembled here to talk with urgency about…end(ing) the bloodshed, to stop the carnage, the horrific war that is taking place in Syria.”

Fact: Syria is Obama’s war, orchestrated by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state – naked aggression against a nonbelligerent country threatening no one, using ISIS, al-Nusra and other terrorist fighters as imperial foot soldiers, groups America created to serve its interests.

Fact: Kerry doesn’t want cessation of hostilities and conflict resolution. He supports continued mass slaughter and destruction for regime change.

Kerry: “One interest that is universal is…the determination to defeat Daesh/ISIL.

Fact: America, NATO, Israel and other regional rogue states arm, fund, train and direct ISIS and other terrorist death squad fighters, including on use of chemical and other banned weapons.

Kerry: “(W)e have made enormous progress (toward defeating ISIS).”

Fact: Utter rubbish!

Kerry: “The indiscriminate bombing by (Syria) which violates international rules of law, of war, in many cases crimes against humanity and war crimes, needs to stop.”

“And those who support it, those in Moscow and elsewhere who have supported it, should do their utmost to bring it to a close. A meaningful ceasefire needs to be reached…”

Fact: Syria was invaded. Its forces and allies, notably Russia, are courageously combating US-supported terrorists. They deserve universal support. There’s nothing “indiscriminate” about fighting to eliminate a scourge threatening the country’s sovereign independence.

Kerry and his rogue allies want cessation of hostilities in Aleppo so terrorists fighters they support have breathing time to hold on longer. They’re already defeated, small pockets of diehards alone remaining, Kerry desperate to save Obama and himself from greater shame and embarrassment. Syria and allied ground forces, together with Russian air power, are defeating their imperial ambitions in Syria.

In January, Obama will leave office on a sour note – mass slaughter, destruction and human misery on an incalculable scale his most “notable” achievement, exceeding the worst of George Bush.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • CONTINUE THE DEBATE ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE. CLICK HERE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Praying for Freedom: Why Is Israel Silencing the Call for Prayer in Jerusalem?

Ramzy Baroud, PhD
Politics for the People

Editor's Note

In reading Ramzy Baroud's essay, I cannot help but have the suppression of religion enacted on the First Peoples of the United States. Then there was an outright ban on religious ceremonies, and this was doubly suppressed in the "boarding schools" run by various Christian denominations in support of government policy. One might look at it as suppression, but the reality is that this is a form of cultural genocide. The similarity of a practice that is repeated time and time again reflects a well worn strategy to colonize and demoralize.

As I was growing up, I was always reassured by the sound of the ‘Muadhin’ making the call for prayer in our refugee camp’s main mosque in Gaza. Whenever I heard the call very early in the morning, announcing in a melodic voice that the time for the ‘Fajr’ (dawn) prayer was upon us, I knew it was safe to go to sleep.

Of course, the call for prayer in Islam, like the sound of church bells ringing, carries a deep religious and spiritual meaning, as it has, five times a day, for the last 15 centuries, uninterrupted. But, in Palestine, such religious traditions also carry a deep, symbolic meaning.

For the refugees in my camp, the dawn prayer meant that the Israeli army had departed the camp, ending their terrifying and violent nightly raids, leaving the refugees behind, either mourning their dead, wounded or detained, and freeing the ‘Muadhin’ to open the mosque’s old, rusty doors, and announce to the faithful that a new day had arrived.

It was almost impossible to go to sleep during those days of the First Palestinian Uprising, when collective punishment of Palestinian communities throughout the Occupied Territories crossed every tolerable line.

That was before the mosque in our camp – the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in central Gaza Strip – was raided, along with other mosques, and the Imam was arrested. When the mosque’s doors were sealed shut by orders from the army, ordinary people climbed to the roofs of their homes during the military curfew and announced the call for prayer, anyway.

Even our ‘communist’ neighbor did – a man, we were told, who had never stepped foot inside a mosque all of his life!

It was no longer just a religious matter but an act of collective defiance, proving that even orders from the army would not silence the voice of the people.

The call for prayer meant continuity; survival; rebirth; hope and layer-upon-layer of meanings that was never truly understood, but always feared by the Israeli army.

Farouk mosque of an-Nuseirat Refugee Camp bombed in 2014

The onslaught on the mosques never ended.

According to government and media reports, a third of Gaza’s mosques were destroyed in the 2014 Israeli war on the Strip. 73 mosques were entirely destroyed by missiles and bombs and 205 were partially demolished. This includes Al-Omari Mosque in Gaza, which dates back to 649 AD.

It also includes the main mosque of Nuseirat, where the call for prayer throughout my childhood gave me enough peace and calm to go to sleep.

Now, Israel is trying to ban the call for prayer in various Palestinian communities, starting in Occupied East Jerusalem.

The ban came only a few weeks after the United Nations culture and education organization, UNESCO, had passed two resolutions condemning Israel’s illegal practices in the occupied Arab city.

UNESCO demanded that Israel ceases such practices, which violate international law and attempt to alter the status quo of a city that is central to all monotheistic religions.

After staging an unsuccessful campaign to counter the UN’s effort, going as far as accusing the international institution of anti-Semitism, Israeli officials are now carrying out punitive measures: collectively punishing the non-Jewish residents of Jerusalem for UNESCO’s verdicts.

This includes the construction of yet more illegal Jewish homes, the threat to demolish thousands of Arab homes, and, as of late, restricting the call for prayer in various mosques.

It all began on November 3, when a small crowd of settlers from the illegal settlement of Pisgat Zeev gathered in front of the home of Israeli Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barakat. They demanded that the government ends the ‘noise pollution’, emanating from the city’s mosques.

The ‘noise pollution’- referred to as such by mostly European settlers who arrived in Palestine only recently – are the calls for prayer that have been made in that city since 637 AD, when Caliph Umar entered the city and ordered the respect of all of its inhabitants, regardless of their religious beliefs.

The Israeli mayor readily and immediately obliged. Wasting no time, Israeli soldiers began raiding mosques, including al-Rahman, al-Taybeh and al-Jamia Mosques in the Jerusalem town of Abu Dis.

“Military officials arrived before dawn to inform the muezzins, the men responsible for the call to prayer through the mosques’ public announcement speakers, of the ban and barred local Muslims from reaching the places of worship,” reported International Business Times, citing Ma’an and other media.

Praying five times a day is the second of the five main pillar in Islam, and the call for prayer is the summoning of Muslims to fulfill such a duty. It is also an essential part of Jerusalem’s intrinsic identity where church bells and mosques’ call to prayer often interweave into a harmonic reminder that coexistence is a real possibility.

But no such coexistence is possible with the Israeli army, government and mayor of the city treating Occupied Jerusalem as a platform for political vengeance and collective punishment.

Banning the call for prayer is merely a reminder of Israel’s domination over the wounded Holy City, and a message that Israel’s control exceeds that of tangible existence, into every other sphere.

Israel’s version of settler colonialism is almost unprecedented. It does not simply seek control, but complete supremacy.

When the mosque in my former refugee camp was destroyed, and soon after a few bodies were pulled out from underneath the wreckage to be buried, the camp’s residents prayed atop and around the rubble. This practice was replicated elsewhere in Gaza, not just during the last war, but the previous ones as well.

In Jerusalem, when Palestinians are prevented from reaching their holy places, they often amass behind Israeli army checkpoints and pray. That, too, has been a practice witnessed for nearly fifty years, since Jerusalem fell to the Israeli army.

No amount of coercion and court orders is likely to ever reverse this.

While Israel has the power to detain imams, demolish mosques and prevent calls for prayer, Palestinian faith has displayed far more impressive strength, for, somehow, Jerusalem never ceased calling upon its faithful, and the latter never ceased praying. For freedom, and for peace.

[Initial Photo: Checkpoint at Ramalah]

Ramzy Baroud, PhD

Has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Unthinkable Politics and the Dead Bodies of Children

[Hands Up installation by Basil Kincaid in Ferguson. heartacheandpaint.com]

Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

Editor's Note

The institutions that drive and reinforce capitalism at its most direct and base level are not even considered by politicians - Hillary Clinton included - as needing dismantling in order to save children. Those institutions are (domestically) the so called "criminal justice" and "juvenile justice" systems, and (internationally) the military, mercenaries, and paid international forces that are hired to carry out US international policy where children are often collateral damage, and sometimes direct targets. The U.S. also uses poor children of all races, but disproportionately children of color, as front line expendable military troops.

As the distinction between the truth and lies fades in public life, politics appears to be increasingly emptied of any substance. As Lucy Marcus has observed, “Nowadays, facts and truth are becoming [more] difficult to uphold in politics (and in business and even sports).” Certainly, in the age of Trump there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the appeal to reason, informed judgment and facts is at odds with the current political culture. That is, truth and evidence have gone the way of the electric typewriter, or so it seems.

Americans seem to have a growing fondness for ignorance, an attitude that reinforces the downsizing of the civic function of language. Falsehoods and deceptions no longer appear marginal to political debate but now seem to shape much of what is said by the presidential candidates. This is shockingly true for Trump, who has organized much of his campaign around endless fabrications, sending fact checkers into a frenzy of activity. When Trump is caught in a falsehood, he simply ignores the facts and just keeps on lying. His followers could care less about whether he deceives them or not.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has earned a reputation as a chameleon, willing to say almost anything to promote her political career, regardless of whether she sacrifices the truth in order to do so. Her email scandal is largely read as symptomatic of a more pronounced and deeper level of dishonesty. Consequently, she is viewed mostly by the general public as untrustworthy. In response, she has managed her truth deficit by invoking her lifelong defense of families and children. For instance, during the second debate she claimed she wanted “America to be for our children” and attempted to bolster her concern for the welfare of children by pointing to her early work with the Children’s Defense Fund. In the third presidential debate, she argued against Trump’s call for exporting 11 million immigrants by stating that she was against his deportation policies because she “didn’t want to rip families apart [and was against] sending parents away from children.” In her political television ads, she points to supporting policies that “will invest in schools and colleges [and will work to] develop an economy where every young American can find a job and start a family of their own.”

Unfortunately, Clinton only focuses on managing some of the problems that young people face, rather than doing anything to change the conditions that produce them. For instance, she says nothing about what education should accomplish in a democracy when educational policies are driven by a neoliberal economy that she supports. And while she talks about providing jobs for young people, she has little to say about transforming rather than adjusting an economy marked by wide gaps in inequality, wealth and power.

Matters of power, state violence, extreme poverty, institutional racism, a broken criminal justice system, the school to prison pipeline and the existence of the mass incarceration state, among other important matters, rarely if ever enter her discourse and yet these are major issues negatively affecting the lives of millions of children in the United States. And her alleged regard for children falls apart in light of her hawkish policies on global regime change, drone attacks and cyber-warfare, and her unqualified support for the warfare state. Her alleged support for children abroad does not capture the larger reality they face from when their countries are invaded, attacked by drones and subject to contemporary forms of indiscriminate violence. Rather than critique the US as a powerful engine of violence, Clinton expands its imperialist role around the globe. This is a key point in light of her defense of the rights of children, because her warmongering ideology puts children in the path of lethal violence.

At the same time, Clinton’s promise to address the problems many children face in the United States reeks of a disingenuousness made visible by her history of siding with and supporting policies that were injurious to children. Not only did she once disparagingly call young people super-predators, but as the First Lady she strongly backed her husband’s campaign to “end welfare as we know it.” President Clinton’s welfare policies did great harm to poor children. They eliminated the Aid to Families with Dependent Children federal assistance program and infuriated Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, to the degree that she ended her working relationship with Hillary Clinton. According to Edelman, the bill represented a frontal assault on the well-being of poor children and families. Yet as late as 2008, Hillary was still touting this pernicious welfare bill as a success. She also supported Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies, which, according to Michelle Alexander, “resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history” — which has a devastating effect on the families and children of color. Finally, Clinton supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.

Occupying the right wing of the Democratic Party, Clinton has aligned herself with a war culture that supports drone warfare and continues to support military policies that result in the needless deaths of millions of children in the Middle East, Yemen, Somalia, and other places that bear the brunt of America’s foreign policy. It is difficult to imagine, given Clinton’s coziness with the financial elite, big corporations, the military-industrial complex and the reigning war culture, that she will do anything that will lessen the violence to which children, both at home and around the globe, will face under her potential reign as President of the United States. Clinton has nothing to say about the need for a collective struggle for economic and political justice. Given her past history, Clinton’s disingenuousness becomes even starker next to the images of war and violence that mark the bodies of youth both in the United States and abroad. Her commitments to war and security have been built on the misery, mutilation and deaths of young people and her recent alleged support for the welfare of children does little to cover up the many ways capitalism, militarism, state violence and racism are killing poor Black and Brown youth.

Rethinking the Horrors of War

The horrors of war became painfully visible when the image circulated of the lifeless body of Aylan (Alan) Kurdi, a three-year-old who washed up on a beach face-downin the coastal town of Bodrum, Turkey, on September 2, 2015, while traveling with other refugees toward the Greek island of Kos. A second haunting image appeared on August 17, 2016, showing five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, bloodied and covered with dust, sitting silently in an ambulance after an airstrike on Aleppo, a city in northern Syria.

Ordinarily, such images of children dead, injured and suffering motivate public outrage and also incite people to act. Omran’s image was widely circulated by mainstream news organizations and in the social media. The image provoked so much international outrage that the governments of Syria, China and Russia claimed it was pure propaganda and was staged.

One of the most powerful images in history to provoke moral outrage and public anger was the image that circulated in 1955 of the grossly mutilated body of Emmett Till. That depiction of the effects of brutal racist violence helped to galvanize the civil rights movement.

Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” via E-rea.

Another image that changed the course of history was on display in 1972 when an anguished and terrified young girl was photographed running naked after a Napalm bomb burned and disfigured her body. The iconic picture played a significant role in mobilizing protests that helped stop the Vietnam War.

Reactions to such horrible images still exist, but the brutal and unthinkable acts of violence they portray now seem to produce short-lived outrage and blend into the all-encompassing spectacle of violence and the fog of war. What is crucial to acknowledge is that the war has come home and has trapped many young people in its spiral of accelerated violence, which has become a new form of domestic terrorism and the primary force promoting a machinery of literal and social death for many youths. Domestic terrorism is now exemplified every day in media stories focusing on the killing of unarmed young people by the police and in the gun violence that is turning poor urban cities into war zones. Violence has become a habitual response by the state to every social problem. This has become more and more evident as the application of militarized police power produces on a daily basis a growing number of images of dead bodies which increasingly find their way onto the screen cultures of the social media. In the US, according to Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund column, “Seventy-eight children under 5 died by guns in 2015 — 30 more than the 48 law enforcement officers killed by guns in the line of duty.” In other words, Edelman writes, “guns killed more preschoolers in one year than they did law-enforcement officers.” In Chicago alone, in the first eight months of 2016, 12 people were shot daily. According to a Carnegie-Knight News21 investigation:

For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America. More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten. Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car. Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. A News21 investigation of child and youth deaths in America between 2002 and 2012 found that at least 28,000 children and teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America.

Gary Younge observes that every day in the United States “seven kids and teens are shot dead” which adds up to 2,500 dead children a year. What is clear is that neither mainstream political party nor their respective political leaders, including Hillary Clinton, “has a thoroughgoing plan for dealing with America’s gun culture, [one] that goes well beyond background checks,” he adds. This level of violence has deep roots in systemic structures of racism, inequality and poverty that make visible a broken democracy. Rather than being viewed as a social investment, poor youth of color are now seen as excess, threatening, suspect and undeserving of either a society in which they are protected or a future in which they are treated with respect. Instead of educating them, America spends large sums of money to imprison them; instead of building schools, we invest more and more in prisons; instead of providing quality health care, jobs and housing for them, we consign them to dilapidated schools, push them into the underground economy, and criminalize their behaviors. There are few safe spaces left for poor youth of color — rather our society offers them the promise of immiseration and a jail cell. This suggests not only a politics that has turned into a pathology, but also a dystopian logic that is as cruel as it is morally indifferent.

Children and the Politics of Disappearance

The killing of children in America and by US forces abroad has become part of a politics of willful disappearance in which a culture of cruelty, immediacy and forgetting works in tandem to eliminate any trace of the factors behind the production of violence in the service of the unthinkable — a society willing to sacrifice its own children to the industries that trade and profit in the massive production and distribution of guns. Such extreme violence no longer appears to have a threshold that would make it intolerable. In part, this is because the business of violence has become standardized as part of the culture of business. Or, as Phil Wolfson puts it, “the business of violence has become a far too accepted part of the fabric of contemporary life in the United States.”

Tamir Rice remembrance / protest march.

War culture becomes visible in the extreme violence captured in videos of the police killing of children, such as 12-year-old Tamir Rice and adults, such as Walter Scott, who was shot in the back as he was running away from his car by Michael Slager, a white North Charleston, South Carolina policeman.

The scope and visibility of such actions often promote policies further wedded to military solutions, such as suspending civil liberties, accelerating the militarization of society and employing counter-terrorism tactics that rely heavily on military force. As violence becomes both normalized and spectacularized in the media, a war machine and culture becomes so deeply embedded in American society that, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, “war has become … a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.”

Yet, war machines do more than produce extreme forms of violence; they also fix whole categories of people as disposable enemies and force them into conditions of extreme precarity, if not danger. This is especially true of undocumented immigrants, poor Black youth, Muslims and those young people who now inhabit a neoliberal social order that has substituted precariousness for social and economic protections. Young people today are told they are on their own and not to expect much from a society that offers them poor health care, a terrain of uncertainty and insecurity, a crushing burden of debt, no hope for the future, and a market-based value system that tells them that their security and survival is no longer a social responsibility but personal responsibility. If the future looks bleak for many young people, it is not because of their own doing. Yet, the ruling elite and mainstream media journalists continually label them as losers, suggesting that their failure is a character flaw rather than the outcome of wider structural and systemic forces over which they have no control. In this instance, intolerable violence is masked by a state that has been taken over by the financial elite and that has abandoned its social functions while emptying out politics for an entire generation of youth. Indifferent to their own criminal acts, financial elites unapologetically “give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values,” in the words of William Greider, and in doing so, inhabit the dark side of politics.

Youth in a Suspect Society

Young people, especially those considered the most suspect, provide a startling and eye-opening referent for analyzing not only how violence is represented and experienced, but also how it is distributed across a variety of interrelated sites. The daily violence experienced by youths, especially the most defenseless, does not often make news, because it exposes the harsh brutalizing reality that many youth face in a racist, homophobic, carceral and market-driven society. Such indifference is all the more tragic since one of the most unspoken acts of collective violence in the United States resides in its treatment of its children.

What I call the war on youth is alarming given that the fate of a society’s democracy is tied to the condition of its children. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian, once argued that the ultimate test of morality, if not democracy, is how a society treats its children. If we take this principle seriously, the US has failed its children, particularly those who are already underserved. Many face a bleak future filled with low-paying jobs, the effects of the collapse of the welfare state, the threat of a lifetime of unemployment, the paralyzing burden of high levels of debt and a political landscape that prioritized exchange relations over relationships built on trust, dignity and compassion. All of these factors make the future look bleak for young people, but there are also other more brutalizing forces at work that now bear down on many young people — forces that suggest that a distinctive type of hardness and culture of cruelty is now shaping American society and its view of young people.

In this instance, young people marginalized by class, race and ethnicity are treated as disposable in a society in which the American dream has been turned into an American nightmare. Young people now inhabit a landscape of permanent uncertainty and crisis: one in which they are spied on, incarcerated, criminalized and written out of the discourse of democracy. No longer seen as a social investment, the most vulnerable youth have become a liability, subject to the harsh dictates of the neoliberal state and a symbolic reminder of a social order that offers youth no promise of an alternative and democratic future. The dictates of precarity and austerity have become repackaged and weaponized under neoliberalism and the ongoing morphology of violence normalized as the only possible mode of life. Under the reign of a war culture, America has arrived at a historical moment in which the war on children suggests that, as Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin have argued, “the very notion of a future seems to have been cancelled.” But the war on youth does more: it also reveals the raw reality of power politics and its willingness to crush early on all forms of resistance among young people.

The Challenge Ahead for Progressives

The current presidential race and the debates it has provided make clear that the Republican Party wants to eliminate whatever social provisions and public goods are available for young people while the allegedly more progressive Democratic Party puts forward reforms that do little to address the underlying economic, social and ethical conditions that produce them. Trump goes further and wants to accelerate the war on young people through a law and order campaign that expands the punishing state. Clinton points to some of the problems youth face, but in doing so fails to address a number of important issues, such as the high incarceration rates of poor Black youth, the neoliberal logic of financialization, the rise of the warfare state, massive poverty, systemic racism, the surveillance state, segregation, the militarization of the police, the destruction of the planet and a culture of institutional and symbolic violence that surges through society like an electric current.

If children matter, as Clinton has argued, then it is crucial to recognize that her concerns are highly disingenuous because she refuses to dismantle capitalism as it exists and fight for a social order that is no longer ruled by the commanding institutions that serve the financial elite and the dictates of global neoliberalism. If young people are to be viewed as a crucial measure of a substantive democracy, it is important to take seriously what it means to create a society that addresses their needs and opens up a better future than the one the established political and financial elites have created for them. This is not a matter of reform; it is a matter of radical economic and political justice. Such a challenge must address the current struggles faced by young people by going to the roots of the problem. This will not happen by adopting the language of reform, which has no way of addressing why the plight of young people has dissolved into a domestication of the unimaginable.

The real challenge for progressives is to build a broad-based movement and create a set of alternate educational public spheres to take on the task of transforming (rather than reforming) the existing capitalist social order and its poisonous relations of power and injustice. Children matter because they remind us of the need not only to create a more democratic future, but also to take seriously the collective struggle and modes of resistance that can make it happen.

Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor

Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: American at War with Itself, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.