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As the nation observes the 246th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we will often hear mention of patriots and patriotism. But, just what does it mean to be a patriot?

The dictionary defines the term as a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors. That definition clearly fits many people who Americans hold dear in their hearts.

Some of Americas very first patriots were those who put their signatures to that revered Declaration. We swell with pride for this country when hearing these stirring words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Those words were followed by a long list of grievances against King George, many of which would have condemned the signers to prison or death, as they well knew. They concluded the Declaration, saying, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. All of those precious things were truly at risk.

Those who fought in the Revolutionary War and all who have fought in our countrys wars since, save and except those who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, are American patriots. Many who have labored tirelessly to support and safeguard American ideals fit the definition. Abraham Lincoln, who led the fight to preserve the Union and abolish the stain of slavery, was one of our greatest patriots.

There have been patriots worthy of mention in just the last few years people who have put their safety and security at risk to protect the American form of government. Although Ive had little regard for the man in the past, recent revelations put former Vice President Mike Pence in the patriot category. He literally risked his life resisting extreme pressure to overturn the results of a fair and honest election.

Two Trump appointees at the U.S. Department of Justice, acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, kept our government from careening into chaos in a heated White House meeting on Jan. 3, 2021. When the former president asked them what they would do if he replaced them with a sycophant whod agreed to cooperate in trying to overturn the presidential election, they were prepared. They informed Trump that the top leadership in the Justice Department would resign en masse, which stopped the plot in its tracks. Rosen and Donoghue are true American patriots for putting themselves at risk to protect the country.

U.S. Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are rare examples of federal elected officials willing to risk their positions and even their lives by standing up for America. They have certainly earned patriot status.

The interesting thing about patriots is that they rarely give themselves that title. Beware of those who do proclaim themselves to be patriots (apparently because nobody else will). Numerous of the unconscionable insurrectionists who defiled the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, falsely claimed to be patriots. Nothing could be further from the truth they were common criminals, at best.

Here in Idaho, we have seen a number of instances of people self-describing themselves as patriots. The Panhandle Patriots Riding Club threatened to disrupt a peaceful gathering in a Coeur dAlene park on June 11, hardly the conduct you would expect of real patriots. The day of the gathering, 31 misfits, who called themselves the Patriot Front, were caught in a U-Haul truck before they could wreak havoc at the park. Certainly not the stuff of patriots.

As we enjoy our Fourth of July weekend, lets give thanks for the real patriots who have labored, sacrificed and all-too-often died to establish and maintain this country and our marvelous form of government. We certainly have our problems, but if each one of us shoulders some of the patriotic burden, there is nothing we cant overcome in unison. After all, we are the United States of America.

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As we celebrate the Fourth of July, just what is an American patriot? - Idaho Capital Sun

Since June 9, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has built a case against former President Donald Trump, members of his administration and Trump allies. The Committee will hold additional hearings this month, keeping the spotlight on a very real, growing and dangerous fascist movement.

This movement did not appear from out of nowhere on Jan. 6, 2021; the election of an openly racist and xenophobic president in 2016 encouraged it. Events like the 2017 Unite the Right mobilization in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one anti-racist was murdered and many were injured, laid the foundation for the attack on the Capitol.

Discussions of the hearings are currently focused on the bombshell testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide and assistant to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during Trumps administration. She described in detail the former presidents eagerness to join the white-supremacist mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Hutchinson testified that both Meadows and Trump knew in advance that the armed fascists would attempt to enter the Capitol and that she was told by a Secret Service agent that Trump went so far as to assault that agent, while he was attempting to drive the president back to the White House.

But what will be done with all this damning information? (Besides providing material for comedians and late-night talk show hosts!)

For the Democratic Party, both the awful Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and the Select Committees evidence against Trump serve a similar purpose. That is to convince the masses that the way to bar further encroachments on basic democratic rights is to vote blue in Novembers midterm elections. The message pushed at more moderate mass demonstrations against the SCOTUS ruling was the need to elect pro-choice candidates.

But how many pregnant people will die because they fail to obtain a safe abortion between now and November? How many Jayland Walkers and Patrick Lyoyas will be gunned down by racist, trigger-happy cops between now and November? How many trans youth will be bullied to the point of suicide between now and November? How many more migrants will die trying to come to the U.S., due to inhumane immigration policies?

And even after November, SCOTUS will still have a right-wing majority for some time.

Limits of electoral strategies

Voting is not enough. Why cant the Democrats and their backers in organized labor call for a mass mobilization against the ultraright, right now?

The Democrats do not want to see the fascists gain ground. Even moderate Republicans like House Rep. Liz Cheney are alarmed by Trumps extremism. An extremist mob chanted in unison: Hang Mike Pence yes, they were attacking Mike Pence, even though he is anti-reproductive justice and anti-LGBTQ+. The fascist mob would be unkind to all those opposing Trump.

But what the Democrats really favor is a kindler, gentler and by comparison more democratic brand of capitalist exploitation. Even democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is not for abolishing capitalism, much less so mainstream Democrats like President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. On the international arena, both the Democratic and Republican parties have been loyal agents of U.S. imperialist interests, serving the bankers, arms manufacturers and billionaires of all types.

The risk for the Democrats in calling out the masses is that the masses might take the struggle against fascism too far; i.e., they might not settle for just defeating the Trump wing of the ruling class. The masses in motion can have a tendency to stay in motion, which could mean taking the struggle further to one against capitalism as a whole and not just its most oppressive, most repressive, chemically pure form manifested as fascism.

A fascist state is only one form of the capitalist state. A state, as Marxists understand it, is an instrument of class rule. This was true of enslaver states and feudal states in earlier epochs, and it is true of capitalist states, including imperialist so-called democracies in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Regardless of its form the capitalist state serves to keep the working class of the world exploited, so profits keep flowing into the pockets of the ruling class. The capitalists use a combination of the carrot (concessions to the workers and oppressed) and the stick (taking rights and benefits away, brute force). Traditionally Democrats have offered more carrots, and Republicans wielded a bigger stick.

But their aim is the same, and in this late stage of capitalism, the tendency is toward the stick. Fascism is that tendencys ultimate expression in fact the word fascism comes from the Italian word for the binding of a bundle of sticks used as a club. Its goal is to crush every organization and every expression of resistance of the workers and oppressed.

Working class must organize independently

Over 2,000 people protest Proud Boys, Nov. 17, 2018. WW Photo

The facts that Trump-endorsed candidates have won a number of Republican primaries and some could be elected in November do not, of course, signal the triumph of fascism but it is cause for alarm. Terrorist groups like the Proud Boys and individual white supremacists are committing murder and threatening activists. This includes the thwarted plot to attack Pride in Idaho and reports of armed Proud Boys near the Akron protests over the police killing of Jayland Walker.

The Democratic Party will use the hearings to expose the Trumpites, but it has a mushy spine. Only the workers and oppressed can defeat the far right and that is who has the most at stake. The fascist threat calls for an organized working class response.

Unfortunately most of the leadership in organized labor is tied to the Democratic Party. But our class is developing its organizing skills, evidenced by a string of union wins at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, REI and elsewhere. Millions of working-class youth of all nationalities were part of the Black Lives Matter upsurge following the police lynching of George Floyd.

The line from the old union standard Solidarity Forever still rings true. In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold or their mighty clubs. We produce everything in society, and we can bring everything to a halt. We can organize a mass movement in the name of the working class that fights on every front.

That, and that alone, can push back the danger posed by fascism.

Originally posted here:
January 6 hearings and the fascist threat - Workers World

Jack Colwell| Tribune Columnist

When Donald Trump threw his lunch at the wall in dining space off the Oval Office, the ketchup-smearing, plate-shattering came in anger over his attorney general publicly acknowledging that he lost the election.

Was Trumps anger because he didnt want Bill Barr to tell the truth or because he really thought his loyal attorney general was hiding the truth?

For decades to come, historians, political analysts and psychologists will debate whether Trump knew he lost or whether he actually was convinced that he won.

Could be both.

Some Trump critics call him stupid, dumb enough to believe all the crazy conspiracy theories about election rigging. Trump isnt stupid. He has problems, for sure, but stupidity isnt one of them.

He surely knew he lost. Not on election night. No network was yet proclaiming a winner.

Then key states one after another were proclaimed. Results were confirmed by recounts. His campaign team, his White House lawyers and his attorney general told him he lost. Even daughter Ivanka was persuaded by the attorney general. None of 60 court challenges to election results were successful. Some filings, after he turned to nutty outside attorneys, were laughed out of court.

He had to know. Of course, unless you believe he is really, really stupid. Too stupid ever to reach the White House?

Trump does have a problem with accepting any loss. His ego wont let him.

His niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist who has written of the family-ingrained disdain for ever admitting losing, has said its impossible for him to believe he lost. When losing before in his career, she says, he always found a way, by hook or by crook, to end up claiming a win.

Sois it possible that Trump, though knowing he lost, convinced himself that his claim of a stolen election is the truth? Or at least a way to make it true that he didnt lose the presidency?

We know more about his plot to retain the presidency because of the dramatic testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, the young woman who was top aide to the White House chief of staff. Her office was just steps from the Oval Office, where she often attended the highest-level meetings.

Clearly, Trump wanted his claims of election fraud to be believed by angry supporters he brought to Washington and riled to storm the Capitol and fight like hell to prevent certification of election results and enable him to remain in the White House.

Did Trump want harm to Mike Pence, his long-loyal vice president who wouldnt go along with illegally scuttling certification?

Hutchinson, who was there, testified that Trump was angry that many supporters were kept from swelling the crowd for his Ellipse speech because they had weapons knives, guns, bear spray, flagpoles turned into spears and couldnt pass through magnetometers.

She heard Trump, arguing to let everybody in, say, I dont f-ing care that they have weapons. Theyre not here to hurt me. Take the mags away.

Did he care if they were there to hurt others police, members of Congress, Pence?

They chanted, Hang Mike Pence! Hutchinson testified that her boss, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, said Trumps reaction was, He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesnt think theyre doing anything wrong.

As Pence hid and rioters roamed, Trump made his vice president more of a target, tweeting: Mike Pence didnt have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.

That was a final disillusionment for Hutchinson. It was unpatriotic, she said. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol Building get defaced over a lie.

She helped to clean the ketchup off the wall. She would not clean up details of the attempt to turn defeat into a blood-on-the-walls re-election win.

Jack Colwell is a columnist for The Tribune. Write to him in care of The Tribune or by email atjcolwell@comcast.net.

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Hutchinson made it clear Trump knew he lost. - South Bend Tribune

Killer Mike has a history of defending gun ownership as self-protection is something important to him.

In a new interview with The Guardian, the Run The Jewels rapper said hes a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, mainly because of Americas history of racism.

I will never be against the second amendment, he told the publication. Theres no way that someone who represents a community that are only 60-odd years out of an apartheid should be willing to give a weapon back to the government, as the police choke you to death in the street and people just watch and film.

Mike is also the son of a policeman, so he says he has sympathy for law enforcement but also says that his father discouraged him and his five sisters to not follow in his footsteps because the job was too dangerous. Additionally, he says police reform is very necessary.

I have not seen a will to get rid of police as much as Ive seen a want for police to be from the communities theyre policing and to be fair, rather than abusers of power, he said to The Guardian. We should be supporting the Police Athletic Leagues that deal with our young boys in particular before any trouble happens, more than we should be giving the police more rifles and bulletproof vests. The connection with the community is key.

No Killer Mike interview is complete though without talking music. Interestingly, he was asked about his Hip Hop beginnings, which started when OutKast member Big Boi spotted him rapping while he studied at Morehouse College.

Even though I won a Grammy, my grandma still complained that I didnt bring her a degree, Mike said of his collaboration with the Atlanta duo for their 2000 Grammy-winning album Stankonia. Dropping out is one of my biggest regrets, but Ive been given everything Ive ever wanted in terms of being able to have a rap career, so I need to make it better for the people around me and the people that come after me.

Read the full interview here.

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Killer Mike On Gun Control: 'I Will Never Be Against The Second Amendment' - BET

The Supreme Court just upended "the most fiercely polarizing issues in American life: abortion and guns," The Associated Press reports. On one day last month, the court's conservative majority expanded the Second Amendment to guarantee the individual right to carry concealed handguns, and the next day, they removed the constitutional right to abortion enshrined for 50 years in Roe v. Wade.

Among the many practical and political questions left in the wake of these two "momentous decisions," AP says, is "whether the court's conservative justices are being faithful and consistent to history and the Constitution or citing them to justify political preferences." In other words, is there some intellectual constancy in allowing states to ban abortion but forbidding them from regulating guns, or is the court's emboldened 6-3 conservative majority just flexing its newfound ideological might?

The conservative justices say they are consistently following a legal philosophy that relies on interpreting the text and original intent of the Constitution's authors to decide today's cases. When it comes to guns and abortion, "I understand how it might look hypocritical, but from the perspective of the conservative majority on the court, it's a consistent approach to both cases," University of Texas law professor Richard Albert tells AP. "I'm not saying it's correct, by the way, but from their perspective, it is completely consistent and coherent."

"We can debate about the meaning of the Second Amendment, but the Second Amendment does explicitly talk about the right to keep and bear arms, whereas the right to abortion access is not explicitly in the Constitution," adds Jonathan Entin, a law professor emeritus at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. "If that's where you are going to go, then maybe these decisions are not in such tension after all."

Sure, "in overruling Roe v. Wade, and with it nearly 50 years of American law, and expanding the reach of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, which is a jurisprudential innovation of more recent vintage, the Supreme Court wants the public to accept that history rules the present" and the Constitution enshrines "rules set in stone that no judge should dare disturb," Cristian Farias writes at GQ. But the truth is that "the high court's ultraconservative majority" made these changes "because they could."

"Even for a constitutional textualist," both of these "rights to possess a gun in public and to end a pregnancy in private have some basis in the Constitution," Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz writes at The Hill. "And both would seem to allow for some degree of state regulation. The reality is that these decisions, both of which fly in the face of long precedents, are solely a function of numbers," and the conservative justices have them.

And it's important to remember that "the current conservative majority is anything but conservative," Dershowitz adds. "It is a judicially activist majority comprised of justices with agendas.They decide cases more broadly than necessary, and they render decisions depriving the other branches of government of their legitimate powers."

There's no ideological or practical contradictions in the guns and abortions ruling, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told Sky News. "Protecting our gun rights give Americans the right to defend themselves, and that protects life, and ending abortion also protects the life of the unborn who can't protect themselves, either."

"There's a twisted irony in watching a court with a supposedly pro-life majority hand down a ruling that will almost certainly lead to death," Paige Masten writes at The Charlotte Observer. The handgun ruling "will only put more guns on the streets, and make it harder for states to enact the gun safety measures we truly need." A new study by researchers at Stanford Law School and Duke University found that concealed carry laws boost gun crimes by between 29 percent and 32 percent.

Dobbs, the abortion ruling, will also increase the number of women forced to carry a pregnancy to term, and "more pregnancy means more likelihood of deaths," Rachel Hardeman at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health tells The Guardian. The states with abortion bans already have some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S., which has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country.

"If you think about why people get abortions, it's often because it's not safe for them to stay pregnant," Amanda Jean Stevenson at the University of Colorado Boulder tells The Guardian. "The people who are currently having abortions are very likely to actually have higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths and maternal mortality than the people who are currently giving birth." Having an abortion is "much, much, much safer than staying pregnant," she adds, "way, way more than 14 times more deadly to stay pregnant."

Well, "you've got to hand it to the conservatives," at least "when it comes to sticking to their beliefs," Richard Wolf writes at USA Today. "Unlike the lawmakers who inhabit the other two branches, the justices weren't influenced by politics." And neither of "these absolutist decisions," Dershowitz writes at The Hill, will "be popular with a majority of Americans who support both reasonable gun control and reasonable access to abortion."

"The makeup of the court has historically been healthier when it more closely reflects the makeup and views of the American people," Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Carolyn Shapiro tells Reuters. "The court is doing things that I think are dangerous for the country, dangerous for the right of individuals, dangerous for democracy, and dangerous for its continued legitimacy."

"Up until a couple years ago, it used to be the case that where the court fell was well within the lines of the average Americans' positions," Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, tells The Washington Post. "Now we are estimating that the court falls more squarely in line with the average Republican, not the average American."

A final through-line in the guns and abortion decisions are that they highlight the limits of bans. "If banning abortion 'stops abortions,' let's ban guns and stop gun violence," Democratic campaign veteran Jon Cooper tweeted. But few if any abortion opponents believe bans will stop women from terminating their pregnancies, and, as David Freddoso argues at The Washington Examiner,"gun-control laws are big over-promisers."

The American Union of Swing Voters argues that "abortion bans are futile" and "gun bans are futile in an age of 3D printers."

David Frum compares the Supreme Court's abortion decision to Prohibition, both of which,he wrties in The Atlantic, "were and are projects that seek to impose the values of a cohesive and well-organized cultural minority upon a diverse and less-organized cultural majority." And like Prohibition, he argues, abortion bans "can work for a time, but only for a time. In a country with a representative voting system even a system as distorted in favor of the rural and conservative as the American system was in the 1920s and is again today the cultural majority is bound to prevail sooner or later."

"Abortion politics is about to transition from being the conservative ideologue's proof of purity to the Republican politician's most vexed and intractable quagmire," From writes. "We may all be surprised at how rapidly the politicians start looking for some escape."

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Questioning the intellectual consistency of SCOTUS - The Week