Long before the first shots were fired in the Civil War, beginning early in the 19th century, Americans had been fighting a protracted war of words over slavery.

On one side, Southern planters and slavery apologists portrayed the practice of human bondage as sanctioned by God and beneficial even to enslaved people.

On the other side, opponents of slavery painted a picture of violence, injustice and the hypocrisy of professed Christians defending the sin of slavery.

But to the abolitionists, it became crucial to transcend mere rhetoric. They wanted to show Americans uncomfortable truths about the practice of slavery – a strategy that is happening again as activists and citizens fight modern-day attempts at historical whitewashing.

As a media scholar who has studied the history of abolitionist journalism, I hear echoes of that two-century-old narrative battle in President Donald Trump’s effort to purge public memorials and markers honoring the suffering and heroism of the enslaved as well as those who championed their freedom.

Celebration vs. reality

Among the materials reportedly flagged for removal from history museums, national parks, and other government facilities is a disturbing but powerful photograph known as “The Scourged Back.”

The 1863 image depicts a formerly enslaved man, his back horrifically scarred by whipping. It’s certainly hard to look at, yet to look away or try to forget it means to ignore what it has to say about the complicated and often brutal history of the nation.

In Trump’s view, these memorials are “revisionist” and “driven by ideology rather than truth.” In an executive order named Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Trump said public materials should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

Essentially, the president appears to want a history that celebrates American achievement rather than being forced to look at “The Scourged Back” and other historical realities that document aspects of the American story that don’t warrant celebration.

Combating ignorance of slavery’s horrors

Thinking back to the decades leading up to the Civil War, facts were the weapon abolitionists wielded in their fight against the distortions of pro-slavery forces. It was an uphill battle in the face of indifference by many in the North. After a visit to Massachusetts in 1830, abolitionist writer William Lloyd Garrison blamed such attitudes on “exceeding ignorance of the horrors of slavery.”

It is not surprising that in the early 19th century many Americans would have had limited knowledge of slavery. Travel was arduous, time-consuming and expensive, and most Northerners had little firsthand exposure to slave societies. Abolitionists argued that those who did visit the South were often shielded from the harsher realities of slavery. This extended to the media ecosystem, which lacked any real national news organizations.

Moreover, Southern plantation owners carried out a robust propaganda effort to extol the beneficence of their economic system. In letters, pamphlets and books, they argued that slavery was beneficial to all and that the enslaved were happy and well-treated. They also attacked their opponents as evil and dishonest.

As abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote in 1838: “The apologists of Southern slavery are accustomed to brand every picture of slavery and its fruits as exaggeration or calumny.”

Don’t look away

Thus, the challenge for abolitionists was to show slavery as it really was – and to compel people to look. An emphasis on hard evidence took firm hold in the wave of abolitionism in the 1830s.

Activists didn’t yet have photography, so they relied on accounts from eyewitnesses and formerly enslaved people, official reports and even some plantation owners’ own words in Southern newspaper advertisements seeking the return of runaways.

“Until the pictures of the slave’s sufferings were drawn up and held up to public gaze, no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system,” abolitionist Angelina Grimké wrote in her famous “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” in 1836.

“It never entered their minds that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican America; they never suspected that many of the gentlemen and ladies who came from the South to spend the summer months in travelling among them, were petty tyrants at home,” Grimké wrote.

In pamphlets and newspapers, Grimké and others laid down a documentary record of the abuses of slavery, naming names and emphasizing legal evidence of their claims. In my research, I have argued that while abolitionists didn’t invent the journalistic exposé, they did develop the first fully articulated methodology for confronting abuses of power through carefully documented facts – laying the groundwork for later generations of investigative reporters and fact-checkers.

Most critically, what they did is point a finger at injustice and demand that America not look away. In its first issue, in 1835, the newspaper Human Rights emphasized “the importance of first settling what slavery really is.” Inside, it included a series of advertisements documenting slave sales and rewards for runaways reprinted from Southern newspapers.

The headline: “ ”

Tried and acquitted

One of the most remarkable efforts in this abolitionist campaign was a 233-page pamphlet called “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.” Published in 1839 by Theodore Dwight Weld along with his wife, Angelina Grimké, and her sister, it was an exhaustively documented exposé of floggings, torture, killings, overwork and undernourishment.

One example involved a wealthy tobacconist who whipped a 15-year-old girl to death: “While he was whipping her, his wife heated a smoothing iron, put it on her body in various places, and burned her severely. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest was, ‘Died of excessive whipping.’ He was tried in Richmond and acquitted.”

It is difficult reading, to be sure, and certainly the kind of material that might foster “a national sense of shame,” as Trump’s executive order claims. But getting rid of the evils of slavery meant first acknowledging them. And the second part – critical to avoiding the mistakes of the past – is remembering them.

‘Consciences shocked’

So how effective was this abolitionist campaign to lay bare the terrible facts about slavery?

At least some readers of “” had their consciences shocked. : “We thought we knew something of the horrid character of slavery before, but upon looking over the pages of this book, we find that we had no adequate idea of the number and enormity of the cruelties which are constantly being perpetrated under this system of all abominations.”

And one famous reader was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who drew on the book as inspiration for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published more than a decade later.

The 1830s reflected the height of the abolitionist movement in books, pamphlets and newspapers. While the activism continued in the 1840s and 1850s, ultimately it took secession and civil war to finally end slavery. But, of course, it didn’t take long for the country to fall into a prolonged period of formal and informal segregation in both the North and the South, many vestiges of which remain.

That reality of a history that doesn’t proceed along a straight path to justice underscores the importance of preserving, remembering and teaching difficult parts of the past such as “The Scourged Back.”

On the title page of “American Slavery As It Is,” Weld and the Grimkés printed a quote from the biblical book of Ezekiel: “Behold the wicked abominations that they do.” It was a command to the nation to look without flinching at what it was, and it is as pertinent today as it was then.

--30--

Written by Gerry Lanosga, Associate Professor of Journalism, Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The address was in West Erlsley – they often were – in a maze of rundown tenements and concrete walkways that stank of piss and the charred extinction of small conjuring fires.  Pathetic remnants of bone and fur and feathers in sheltered corners, where the meagre sacrifices had been made.  Huldu runes scrawled across the stone in charcoal or daubed in blood.  As far as Duncan could tell, most of it was gibberish.  Certainly, there was nothing you’d call a functional spell anywhere on these walls.  Here and there, he even spotted the odd piece of mathematical notation in the mix, though his math was not good enough to work out if it had any more coherence than the Huldu symbols it co-existed among.

None of which surprised him in the least.  

In the trenches, he’d seen men cling to all and any systems of faith they could muster; some even distilling their own homegrown superstition, ritual, prayer, whatever – anything at all to give the illusion of control over the vast impersonal forces that brought them death on a daily basis.  One soldier under his command in early 1915,  private Greaves, had carried with him a set of intricately whittled wooden figures.  He would take them out whenever he had leisure, set them up in some configuration that evidently had meaning to him – though the configuration often changed – and would then crouch and whisper softly to them under his breath, like a mother soothing small children to sleep.

Greaves had taken some sour ribbing for this early on, but Duncan had ordered it staunched, and after that the other men left him alone.  Later, when Greaves had proved remarkably long lived, given the action they’d all seen, a couple of the other soldiers from the company even started to gather round and join in with the ritual.  They’d stand and watch diffidently while Greaves set out the whittled figures, wait until he gestured them closer, and then crouch with him, and begin.  Their pooled murmuring would softly rise and fall in the lamp-glow and gloom of whatever bivouac they’d lucked into.  It managed to be both eerie and strangely comforting at one and the same time.

Now that he thought back, Duncan realised that there might have been something of Huldu slenderness and poise in those carved wooden figures.  And he wondered belatedly what home Greaves had come from, what part of Britain, where such things might already have had currency, even back then.  It wasn’t something he’d ever find out now – Greaves died in the mud at Ypres, along with almost everyone else under Duncan’s command at the time.  The way he heard it later, a tank whose driver was addled on carbon monoxide fumes lost control nosing around a machine gun nest revetment.  The tank veered, clipped and toppled three men, Greaves among them, then crushed them into the ground as it churned desperately in reverse.  Duncan supposed the slender, whittled wooden figures met a similar fate.

Wake up, Duncan.

Stir of other figures now, blunt and hunched against the cold as they spilled across the concrete walkway ahead; clink as a boot caught an empty bottle and sent it skittering.  The sound yanked him back to present concerns.  He slowed a little, assessed the spread.  It didn’t look like much – local toughs, three of them, pinched pale faces under rain damp hoods, bulky workman’s jackets that made them look bigger than they were. Booted feet, stumbling a little with the booze or maybe just with sitting too long in the cold.  Long necked brown beer bottles, too loosely held to be weapons.  WAR DEBT MALAISE, blared the headlines, ECONOMY STALLED, NO SOLUTION IN SIGHT FOR FOREST CRISIS.  Fear, panic, exhaustion, unemployment spiralling steadily upward, and well, here’s your result.

Duncan eased to a halt.

“Gentlemen,” he said warily.

“Fucking Otherkin,” one of them spat, uncertainly.

Duncan couldn’t really blame him.  It was in the cut and weave of the hooded jacket he wore, the boots with their intricate tooled leather.  For clients, he dressed to broadcast his trade, to sell how well he belonged in the Forest, and that look wasn’t a million miles from all the cute and cheap and practised signifiers the dress-up brigade pulled to ape the Huldu they’d mostly only ever met in the pages of novels and maybe the sepia-tone projector slides of a Russell Maynard Dalton lecture.  To the young toughs’ boozed up eyes, Duncan looked the part.  Wannabe fae fuck pretender at large.  Dilettante.  An easy mark.  

If they’d seen Duncan’s eyes and expression and stance more clearly, they would have understood their mistake.

But it was a gloomy autumn afternoon in West Erlsley, glowering black rain clouds hung low and soaking up what little decent light was left in the sky.  And these angry, idle young men were neither close enough nor sober enough to pick up on the details of the mess they were about to make.

“I’m looking for Umber Cottages,” he pre-empted them.  “This the right way?”

It stalled whatever they’d had in mind.  They looked at each other, unsure.  The biggest of the three swigged exaggeratedly at his beer.  He lowered the bottle, wiped his mouth.  Belched loudly.  Gestured broadly.

“It’s this way, yeah.  But, uh….” swaggering closer, visibly gathering courage.  “You gotta pay a toll, like.”

Duncan looked at him.  “No, I don’t.”

The moment stretched, twanged and snapped.  The tough looked away.

“You’ll want to let me pass,” Duncan suggested.

Confused looks between the other two.  They hadn’t seen what the first man had, but they weren’t too drunk to sense the shift.  The lead tough stood reluctantly aside.  Duncan moved past them with every appearance of casual amiability.  He grinned at them, nodded.  Later, sobering up, they would try to piece it together and fail, and bicker and blame each other.  But Duncan’s eyes would linger in all their memories, and each would privately understand that this was not a scuffle they could have won.

Meanwhile, Duncan made his way along the concrete walkway, undecided if he was happy to have avoided the fight or not.  As ever, his rage simmered close to the surface. But something, some remnant of shame and regret for the mess with Ellie Furlough last Spring, was enough to hold it down.

Just enough.

He  took a couple of turns in the concrete warren, following the directions he’d been given, and shortly after that, he stumbled on Umber Cottages.  It was one of the worst misnomers he’d ever seen – a short, ugly terraced row of two storey worker housing in cheaply finished grey  stone.  Raw concrete steps led up to wooden front doors with peeling black paint.  Pokey little windows sat high up, like eyes peering myopically into a future printed too fine to read.  The facades were modern – probably put up in the early days of Re-clearance, when it was still thought the advance of the Forest could be stopped, and thousands were drafted in for the work – but already the stonework looked stained and tired.  

Duncan found number sixteen and knocked.  A wan-looking woman of about fifty opened for him, looked him up and down with narrow suspicion.

“We don’t want none o’ that,” she snapped, in accents from somewhere a long way south of Erlsley.  “She’s to be left alone.  G’ahn, or I’ll call the bottles on yer.”

“Duncan Silver,” he explained.  “For Irene Rush.  I’m expected.”

From within the dimly lit spaces behind the door, something shrieked like a howitzer shell descending.  

The noise froze the woman where she stood.  Duncan nodded.

“Perhaps you’d better let me in.”

She stood aside, wordless.  Duncan ducked his head and stepped through into the hall space.  The shriek came again, intensified.  He tracked it to a side room, door solidly closed.  He moved past into the living room.  No gas in these premises, certainly no electric – what light there was came from hurricane lamps stood on the sideboard and main table, wicks cranked up, and a struggling fire in the grate.  Shadows capered on the walls.

“Are you him?”

She sat coiled and wrapped in a shawl and nightgown in an armchair at the sole window in the room, staring out at what must have been the backyards of the row.  Legs drawn up under her, one naked foot trailing from the under the hem of the gown.  Hard to tell in the dim light, but she seemed young.  Pale skin. Long dark hair, left down and uncombed, he reckoned, for quite a while.  There was a livid mark on one cheek where someone had struck her hard enough to break the skin.  Glimmer of recent tear tracks she’d left unwiped.

“Aye, I’m Silver.”  He said it as gently as he could.  “Like the pirate.”

“Like the pirate,”  she repeated mechanically.  

Speaking seemed to stir something in her.  She turned in her chair to look at him fully, and it dawned on him abruptly that she was an attractive woman.  The pale face framed in all that hair reminded him of someone – one of the actresses he’d had postcards of as a boy, perhaps.  Ethel Warwick, tits out for Whistler, or maybe that American one he’d liked, Marie Doro.  Fey, young, silk-draped things, all big beckoning eyes, leaves and flowers strewn through their hair.

“They say you’ll go to the Forest, Mr Silver?” Her voice was a dredged whisper, a husk.  “They say you’re not afraid?”

“A lot of men will go to the Forest, Mrs Rush.  Especially for the money you promise.  Especially in these times.”

She nodded, moved again in the chair.  Both feet touched down on the floor, revealed long, shapely calves above.  He saw that the gown was pricey – sheer silk, out of place in the stark tenement surroundings.  Irene Rush had fallen on hard times, and maybe not that long ago.  

She sniffed and cleared her throat, wiped the back of her hand over each cheek in turn to clear the tracks of her tears.

“Yes, I – I suppose you have seen service?  You have passed through the fire?”

He tried not to grimace at the phrase.  It was overly popular that year, much delivered from pulpits and lecterns and the benches of Parliament – passed through the flames; baptism of fire; passage through the flaming rites of the War to end all wars.  So forth.

“I was in France, yes.  And Flanders, for a while.”

“Then you are not afraid.”

“Mrs Rush, a man who goes to the Forest and is not afraid is a man who will not be coming out again.  Try not to believe too much of what you read in the pulps.”

The hard-faced older woman came and stood in the room with her back to the window.  Arms folded, watchful, touching distance to her ward.  He saw in her face that she didn’t trust him any more now than she had when they had their misunderstanding at the door.  He wondered how many like him they’d already seen, how much of their obviously dwindling funds they’d seen wasted with no result, how many shysters calling and slipping away with an easy grin.  Demonologists, Theosophicals, Sword-and-Orbsters, all the sub-Blavatsky types and splinters, Woodsmen-who-weren’t, fly-by-night witch and warlock fakes, Otherkin flimflam artists, the whole sad circus erupting into their lives one tawdry act after another….   

Once again, through the wall from the room next door, the awful, downward hurtling shriek.  The older woman’s eyes moistened.  He saw how Mrs Rush flinched, how her hand rose trembling towards the livid mark on her cheek.  Her gaze fell away into whatever place had stolen the strength from her voice.

“It won’t stop,” she husked, to him or to herself, it wasn’t clear.  “It just……won’t stop.”

He nodded.  “In all likelihood, it has the Sight.  It will know I’m here.”

She looked at him again, then, as if for the first time.  As if the whole thing had only now become real in her mind.  It was a common enough moment amongst afflicted parents.  Duncan took the snuff box from his pocket, crouched beside her to make himself less alarming.

“Look – Mrs Rush, let me be honest.  At this moment, I cannot be sure that your child has been removed to the Forest, or that what’s in the next room is a changeling.  But it certainly sounds that way.  And there is an easy test.  Here.”  He held out the snuff box.  “Open this.”

She took the box, struggled a moment with the ornate catch, then lifted the lid and peered inside.

“Iron filings,” he told her.  “Perfectly harmless.  Touch them.  You too, please, madam.”

The older woman looked at him mistrustfully a moment, then leaned in and put a finger into the box.

“Take a small pinch, please, both of you.  Rub it onto your skin.” He watched them obey him like sleepwalkers.  “You’ll agree it does no harm?”

They both nodded, like mechanical toys.  He straightened up. “Good. Now, will I bring Miriam in?  Or would you prefer…”

Mrs Rush looked up at the older woman.  The retainer pursed her lips and left the room.

“It’s Mimi,” Mrs Rush said brokenly.  “No-one ever calls her Miriam.”  

Out in the corridor, Duncan heard a key in a lock, a door opened.  The shrieking began in earnest.  The woman came back, dragging a thrashing, flailing, diminutive rag-clad figure by one thin arm.  It resembled nothing so much as a three or four year old girl with similar features to Mrs Rush herself, and it was clearly terrified of everyone and everything in the room.

“Mama, mama, no, don’t let them,” it wailed.  “Don’t let them burn me!”

Mrs Rush dissolved in tears, buried her face in her hands.

“Mama, please, I’ll be good, I didn’t mean it, please mama, please, I won’t-“

Duncan hissed a word of command in skogurtal, and the creature blinked, then shut up as if its jaw were a sprung trap.  

It was all the evidence he needed.  Nothing human could be compelled in the Forest speech that way.  But, of course, it would not do for the mother, and Duncan felt a tiny prickling sensation in his throat at that tenacity, an unquantified blend of joy and rage and loss that threatened to prick out tears in his eyes. even now  He swallowed hard.  Cleared his throat.

“Let me hold her,” he said, very gently.  

And rapidly, before anyone could react, he stepped across and took the child by both thin wrists from behind, held the skinny arms apart.  The older woman let go, startled.  Duncan lifted the creature forward so it stood right in front of the mother.  He felt how its muscles tensed and writhed, fighting his grip.  He widened his arms, pulled seeming-Mimi into something resembling a crucifixion.  Tears flooded the child’s eyes, flooded down its face.  It moaned and writhed.

But it no longer spoke.

“Mrs Rush,” Duncan, urgently now – this had to be done fast, while her fortitude lasted.  “For your own peace of mind, I would like you to take some of the iron filings and gently rub them on this child’s arm.”

She stared at him, long moments in which he saw the truth finally breach the walls she’d built in her mind, erupt to the conscious level, where it could no longer be denied.  She made a noise, a convulsive sob that wracked her whole body.  But when she met his eyes again, he saw the change, the new determination to go with the knowledge she now would not deny.

She pressed her lips together, tears still welling up, still spilling down her cheeks.

But she did it.

She pinched up the iron filings in her fingers, reached out for the thing that looked like her daughter.  The creature’s muscles cabled against Duncan’s grip.  It kicked out, twisted and thrashed.  Duncan grimaced, tightened his hold and nodded urgently at Irene Rush.

“I’m sorry,” she wept.

But she pressed the iron filings onto one thin arm near the elbow.  

Duncan averted his eyes.

Flash-flare, magnesium bright, blinding in the dimly lit room.  

The mother screamed, but it was lost in the high, ululating howl that broke from the child, and put every hair on Duncan’s body erect.  It was all he could do to maintain his grip, haul back and prevent the creature from kicking Mrs Rush in the face.

A sudden reek of scorching stormed the room, made the two women gag.  

Then acrid smoke, ribboning up off a wound that glowed moss green in the blotched and blunted vision the flare had left them.

Duncan wrestled the thrashing sprite back, away from the mother it had fooled.

“Your daughter is in the Forest,” he said. 

The post Client appeared first on Richard K. Morgan.

How does a country burst? To answer this questions, it helps to see matters as do the president and the vice-president: from inside a grift bubble.

As I traveled around the United States these last few weeks -- Columbus, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, DC, Boston, Chicago -- , I tried to explain that I worry more about the disintegration of the United States than about a regime change in which Donald Trump exercises autocratic power from coast to coast.

The effort to create authoritarianism is more likely to lead to a breakup of the state than to a total regime change.

This end of the United States is possible, in part, because our president and vice-president think that it is impossible. Because they are inside a grift bubble, they push for authoritarianism in their own interest, without reckoning with the possibility that their actions can wreck the country. For them, America is a limitless passive resource.

Your perspective is probably different than theirs. To help us understand this risk, it helps to try to see the world from inside a grift bubble.

Imagine that you are a first-rate grifter: the president of the United States, say. Your grift is that you pretend to be a successful businessman, and use that supposed expertise to make your case for the presidency, which office you then use to make money. Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire.

Given that these are their shticks, and that they have worked, you can see how Trump and Vance might conclude that Americans are gullible and that all things are possible.

The initial claim, the wild lie, is like the air the gets a balloon started: Trump is a rich person; Vance cares about the poor people. The big lies work! And then there is more lying, more hot air, a growing space, a sense of comfort, a safe space for fascist oligarchy.

You grift on and you grift on, and the bubble just gets bigger. It seems like you know everything that you need to know, and that the grift, the graft, and the gruffety-gruff can go on forever. When you have lived for a long time inside a grift bubble, you think you have seen it all, but this is not the case. From inside a grift bubble, you do not see the outside.

You do not grasp that your grift actually depends upon something larger, something better, which it is sapping, weakening, bringing to ruin.

You have fooled the world, and so you think that you understand it. Indeed, as a grifter, you become contemptuous of how other people make their living and live their lives. And yet your knowledge is actually limited. You know things that those outside the grift bubble do not know; but they also know things that you do not know.

You can take away what belongs to people without knowing how they achieved or attained it. The guy who cheats the farmer at the county fair does not know how to farm. The guy who profits from curated crypto scams does not understand the world economy.

Trump and Vance imagine, because it has worked thus far, that they can grift endlessly. They do not understand that their grift depends upon what I will unashamedly call the honest labor and decent convictions of millions of Americans. Were there not Americans who actually worked and cared and tried to live right, there would be nothing and no one to grift.

In an instructive article that he wrote in 1990, the American novelist David Foster Wallace said that cynicism is a form of naïveté. When you dismiss everything, you feel like you can do anything; but then you don’t believe in some things that are real: like love, or law, or patriotism. For you, such things are just tools of the trade, manipulable handles, just the way to enlarge the grift. That they have some other sense, that they are the building blocks of some other reality -- this you do not see. And in that way you are naïve.

Trump and Vance are indeed naïve, in the precise way that corresponds to their cynicism. They think that the United States will continue to exist, for their sake, no matter what they do. From inside the grift bubble, they see only grift, and think they see the whole country. As the bubble grows bigger, they confuse their own profit with the well-being of the whole.

The fact that Trump and Vance do not believe in real things such as love and law and patriotism makes them strong in one way; it makes them weak in another. They cannot foresee the larger consequences, because they do not understand how the world works or how a country is constructed. And as they break things, their naïveté prevents them from seeing what is happening, and indeed forces them to snarl harder -- I suspect that this is why, in some social media thing somewhere, the vice-president lashed out at me on this very point.

And so here we are. The bigger the grift bubble grows, the less healthy material remains beyond it. It sucks away what it productive. As personal connections become the basis of business, the economy slows. It sucks away what is ethical. As corruption comes to seem normal, citizens lose trust in one another. As basic institutions are scorned and destroyed, people cease to believe in the law. The material which builds a nation -- moral, institutional, economic -- starts to give way.

I am worried about the disintegration of the republic for other reasons, of course.

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The goal of this administration seems to be to show that government does not work. The appointment of utter incompetents to positions of high authority, the firings of qualified civil servants, and the elimination of crucial agencies -- all this will likely bring epidemics and terror attacks and other disasters. At some point amidst the federal dysfunction the states will have to take on more responsibilities. But why then should their citizens pay taxes to a useless -- but oppressive -- federal government? ICE provoke people who live in cities; that does not mean that cities will concede. The threat to use soldiers against cities will likely create rifts inside the armed forces and the federal government more broadly. We are not so far away, I fear, from some branches of the federal government turning against other branches of the federal government.

Trump also seems to be contemplating a war against Venezuela (or whomever) to distract attention from his activities inside the grift bubble. But any land war, which is what it would take to generate such a distraction, will be difficult and unpredictable. He and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are unfathomably ignorant about modern warfare. Such a move could lead not just to a lot of pointless death but to unpredictable chaos.

All of these factors are connected with the grift bubble. Indeed, they prove its existence. Some of these actions, like the destruction of government agencies, are meant to make grifting easier. Others are designed to generate cover for profiteering and corruption. None of these policies, not one, was made with an eye to something outside the grift bubble. Such actions only make sense to people who are inside the grift and confuse their own position with reality.

The president and vice-president do not know the history of people like themselves, or that of other republics that were needlessly brought down by men of their particular sort. They think that the magic of words will always save them, that there will always be a next grift, that no crisis is so great that it cannot be turned to personal profit. This is true right up until the moment when it is not.

The republic can break, but it need not. Those who work against the grifters, who reinforce the reality beyond the bubble, are doing right. They are not only holding back authoritarianism, but giving the republic a chance. They may be acting from love, or from law, because they know that these things are real. And so they should also know, in acting thus, that they are the patriots.

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On resistance see On Tyranny

For positive solutions see On Freedom

I try to race on weekends, to make sure that I get a “fast” run in. For long, slow runs I have less need of inducement.

But what makes a run a race?

A week ago, here in Toronto, I had occasion to wonder.

Wherever I am, I rarely have trouble finding an organized race. There is someone about with a good cause and the willingness to do the work. A few clicks, an entrance fee, and a journey to the site: such are the runner’s minor undertakings. Aside from the running itself, of course!

Last Saturday was different.

My daughter and I made our way to Mimico Creek, a starting point familiar to me from long runs. There was a crowd of runners waiting already -- but no organizers to be seen. Mystification hung in the air with the frozen breath: this sort of thing hadn’t happened to anyone before.

Generally organizers are present hours before the race itself: their absence twenty minutes before the start should have been conclusive evidence that something was wrong. But I was confused myself until someone else said the word: “scam.”

Looking at my phone with my sharp-eyed child, we noticed some hints that something was wrong: there was only an Event-Brite page and no proper race web page; there were Americanisms in the race description; the start time was later than one might have expected; the kids’ race was after the main event rather than before...

Gloom began set in. It was below freezing. The snow was coming down harder and harder. Just standing around made us cold. No official was there providing the encouraging structures: the starting line; the turnaround point (it was an out-and-back); the finish line; the numbers. There would be no cheering volunteers along the way, no medals hung on necks at the end.

At about 8:50am, one local guy raised his voice and summarized the position. A scam had brought us together. But we could run the 5k anyway. He knew where a good turnaround point would be. People made a circle as we listened; we saw one another’s faces. We started across the Mimico Street Bridge at about 9am, the notional starting time.

There were no chips and no timers, and so the element of competition was gone. And yet we ran.

I had planned to go “fast” and let my daughter run at her own pace; now, with no volunteers and low visibility, I wanted to stay together. She was wearing my earbuds (one of them, anyway) under a big hat, and had strapped a wallet with a phone under layers of clothing; we got a slow start as we struggled to with all the gear.

Indeed, we were just starting to pick up the pace on our way out when we crossed paths with the first runner coming back!

It is quite beautiful to run northeast along Lake Ontario towards downtown Toronto from Humber Bay. There was no view of the skyline that morning; but as heart rates increased, the white of the snow and the greys of the skies and nearby buildings were color enough. We got warm: I ended up carrying my daughter’s winter coat in my left hand.

It feels better to run than not to run. We reached the turnaround point, put in a bit more distance to be sure, and headed back.

It is possible that we passed a couple of people... who had decided to walk... It is also possible that they passed us later... In any event, we were not especially close to the head of the pack as we approached the bridge that was serving as start and finish line.

The first guy, the one with whom we had crossed paths, must have finished twenty minutes earlier. I had a feeling, though, that he and others would still be hanging around, and I told my daughter that it was time to kick to the finish: down a hill, up a hill, across the bridge. And she did.

Sure enough: there he was, on the far side of the bridge, at the head of a friendly gauntlet. Every runner who had finished had waited, forming two lines, one on each side of the path, to offer congratulations as finishers passed between. My daughter joked that she had won her age group. Which, maybe, she had.

Was it a race? What happened?

What did we make happen?

We were all fooled by a digital scam that played to our better angels and took our money. The scammers claimed to be helping veterans on Canada’s Remembrance Day. And we fell for it. And then we gathered ourselves up, organized ourselves as much as we needed to be organized, did the thing, and felt better. The smile on the face of the first finisher as he high-fived my daughter made my day.

We fell for it. And then we went for it.

A small true story, perhaps gathering itself up somewhere near the turnaround point, picking up the pace, and striving to cross the line to become a little parable. I leave its energy with you as your Saturday begins.

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How can France break out of its political deadlock? First, by accepting the idea that democracy requires clear and accepted transfers of power to function properly. Always keeping the same people in office is not the way to resolve the current crisis of democracy. The left-right bipolarization, so long as it can renew itself and its content quickly enough to keep pace with global changes, has the virtue of enabling such transitions. That model is what allowed democracy to be consolidated in the 20^th century, and we must move in this direction today to prevent it from disintegrating.

In this respect, the fact that the Rassemblement National (RN, far-right) voted unanimously, together with the rest of the right, against creating a 2% minimum wealth tax on households with more than €100 million in assets, was a major event, and one which could help clarify the political landscape. By voting to save the ultra-rich, when they had previously abstained, the RN has clearly positioned itself as the party of billionaires, as a right-wing party on every level: nationalist, anti-immigrant, extractivist and hyper-capitalist – much like Donald Trump’s Republican Party, in the United States.

This choice may have come as a surprise to those who remember the populist and social veneer that Marine Le Pen’s party long tried to cultivate. Yet it is entirely logical. First, because the RN’s potential allies, those it would need to form a parliamentary majority, unmistakably hold a classic right-wing, anti-tax and anti-public spending line. This is true of Eric Ciotti’s Union des Droites pour la République (UDR), which officially allied with the RN in 2024, as well as of the rest of the right (Les Républicains, LR).

It is also the case for the most right-leaning figures among Macron’s supporters, who, in recent years, have also shown that they are willing to ally with the RN to pass major pieces of legislation, such as the December 2023 immigration law (which included an overhaul of the nationality code and a profound challenge to birthright citizenship that was ultimately not implemented for technical reasons), or the « anti-tenant law » (purportedly « anti-squatter ») in December 2022.

The RN’s commitment to supporting the ultra-wealthy is also consistent with the party’s broader ideology, which is based on a profoundly hierarchical worldview. The RN, just like Trump’s followers, sees inequality as something that is everywhere and, above all, inevitable: inequality between nationals and foreigners, Christians and Muslims, law-abiding citizens and criminals, those who work hard and those who live off welfare.

As they see it, in the face of this tough reality, it is better to exalt national identity and strength, order and respect for hierarchies, and above all, to avoid naïve talk of social justice and universal harmony – in their eyes, hypocritical fairytales spread by left-wing ideologues to ease their consciences and fool gullible people. This right-wing rhetoric has massive weaknesses, but also has its strengths and, in any case, it now plays a central role in public debate.

In the face of this new united right, the left has a historic responsibility. Much like Zohran Mamdani did in New York, it must first focus on social and universal policies (about the cost of living, housing, transport, health care, schools etc.) and show that taxing the rich is the only way to fund all that. The left must also draw on the lessons of history. Faced with the public debt, which has returned to historic highs, only an extraordinary contribution from those with the largest private fortunes will allow the country to start moving forward again.

The national solidarity tax, which was established in France in 1945, had a scale that went as high as a 20% levy on the largest fortunes and up to 100% on the most significant gains. It could be paid in securities, and did not include any exemptions for « professional assets » or so-called « family and innovative businesses. » In post-war Germany, the Lastenausgleich (« burden sharing ») reached as high as 50% for the largest fortunes. The equivalent tax in Japan reached 90%.

Those who endlessly claim that it would be legally impossible to tax the wealthiest, and that a 2% minimum wealth tax on the ultra-rich would be confiscatory, only reveal their profound historical ignorance. They also show their refusal to engage in rational and calm debate, based on solid empirical evidence.

Beyond the financial stakes at play, making the wealthiest households contribute would also represent an opportunity to redistribute economic power by finally granting significant voting rights to employees on company boards, as has been done in Germany and Sweden since the 1950s. Wealth is always collective: It depends on the involvement of thousands of people, not a few individual geniuses without whom the world would supposedly collapse. Income scales have shrunk by a factor of 10 in Nordic European countries since 1910, and this push toward equality has gone hand in hand with unprecedented prosperity, as a recent study by the World Inequality Lab has shown.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the left in both France and the US must do everything possible to heal the territorial rift. The electoral gap between working-class voters in major urban areas and those in mid-size cities and rural towns has reached levels not seen in a century. The urban population continues to vote for the left, but rural voters have largely shifted to the right.

This is the result of a deep sense of abandonment in the face of deteriorating public services and international competition. Only by reuniting the working class, as it did in the 20^th century, will the left be able to create a new left-right bipolarization.