After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing

 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

– James Baldwin

You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.

– Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell

Every day we scroll past photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly, they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten... This is not merely a political development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age. 

We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. 

When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference.

As the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki return once again, they do so largely eclipsed by the Trump administration’s transformation of the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary into a spectacle of militarized patriotism, historical mythmaking, and American triumphalism. The pageantry celebrates a narrative of national innocence while eclipsing one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities committed in its name. 

The more urgent question, therefore, is not simply what happened in August 1945. It is what has become of a society whose formative institutions increasingly educate people to accommodate violence rather than resist it.

The answer lies in more than what Gore Vidal once described as America’s cultivated historical amnesia. Under gangster capitalism, forgetting has become a governing principle of power. We inhabit a regime of organized forgetting that erases bodies from public consciousness even as it erases historical memory itself. It teaches us to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and to consume the suffering of others as another spectacle in an endless cycle of distraction, entertainment, and forgetting. Such regimes are not abstractions. They become visible whenever policies capable of producing immense human suffering disappear beneath the noise of political spectacle—as in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, a policy that recent analyses estimate has already contributed to “an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.”

How else are we to understand a world in which more than sixty-four thousand Palestinian children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023 while their suffering disappears almost as quickly as the headlines that briefly acknowledge it? How else do we explain the reported deaths of more than one hundred children in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, an event that barely registered before it was displaced by the next manufactured spectacle? These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a broader cultural condition in which atrocity is consumed, circulated, and forgotten with astonishing speed.

This is the deepest wound inflicted by authoritarian culture. It does not merely normalize violence; it reorganizes consciousness. It severs suffering from compassion, history from responsibility, and death from mourning. 

When the victims disappear from memory almost as quickly as they disappear from life, power secures one of its greatest triumphs: it destroys not only bodies but the public capacity to recognize their loss. In that moment, forgetting becomes the final act of violence, completing in consciousness what bombs, prisons, armies, and occupations begin in history. 

This cultural condition has been analyzed most powerfully by Robert Jay Lifton.

Robert Jay Lifton gave this condition a name: psychic numbing. He used the phrase to describe the diminished capacity to feel in the face of overwhelming violence. What begins as a psychological defense against unbearable suffering can become a cultural and political condition. Entire societies learn to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and eventually to forget. 

This condition is not merely an individual affliction, or type of “impaired mourning”; it is a form of public pedagogy. It is cultivated by schools emptied of critical thought, historical consciousness, and civic purpose; it is produced by media cultures organized around spectacle, digital platforms that reward distraction, a culture of immediacy, and political narratives that teach us to accommodate cruelty rather than confront it. Against this pedagogy of forgetting stands the difficult and necessarily troubling work of historical memory.

These questions matter because remembrance is not the same as historical memory. Official rituals of remembrance often console us by confining catastrophe safely to the past. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes in America, U.S.A., historical memory performs a very different task. It returns us to unfinished histories whose consequences continue to inhabit the present. It unsettles rather than reassures. It refuses the comfort of distance and insists that the past is never truly past when the conditions that produced it survive in altered forms. Historical memory does not ask us simply to remember what happened. It demands that we recognize how the logics that made catastrophe possible continue to shape the present.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong to precisely this kind of historical memory because they remind us that atrocities begin long before the first bomb falls. They begin when language is removed from moral responsibility, when history is erased or rewritten through the vocabulary of conquest and colonization, and when entire populations are rendered disposable before they are destroyed. Every genocide is first a crisis of language, memory, and moral imagination. 

By the time the machinery of death is set in motion, the deeper work has already been done; compassion has been weakened, historical consciousness has been dismantled, and violence has been normalized as common sense. 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand not only as symbols of unprecedented destruction but also as warnings about the political culture that makes such destruction imaginable. Few have expressed this truth more forcefully than the late Howard Zinn: What means could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? 

And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high as from Moses on the Mount.

The atomic bombings were not merely military events that concluded the Second World War. They inaugurated a new historical formation in which scientific achievement became inseparable from industrialized killing, technological rationality overwhelmed ethical judgment, and civilian annihilation could be justified through the sanitized language of military necessity, national security, and historical inevitability. Long before the bombs incinerated cities, another devastation had already taken place. Human beings had been transformed into abstractions, dehumanized through racist slurs, strategic calculations, and collateral damage.

The bomb exploded first in consciousness. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”  When language is colonized, memory itself becomes vulnerable to conquest—capturing consciousness long before it captures territory. 

Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to ash, language had already been emptied of moral responsibility, memory had been rewritten in the service of empire, and entire populations had been rendered disposable.

That moral rupture did not disappear with the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became embedded in institutions, policies, cultural narratives, and educational practices that normalized militarism while celebrating technological mastery divorced from ethical restraint. The bomb was transformed into a symbol of national virtue rather than a warning about the abyss into which modern civilization had descended. 

As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell observed, American political culture constructed an official narrative that sought not to confront the moral catastrophe of Hiroshima but to redeem it, converting an act of unprecedented destruction into a story of national innocence and salvation. That narrative did more than justify the bomb. It reorganized moral consciousness.

Lifton argued that Hiroshima did not wound only its victims; it also left a profound mark on the American imagination, fostering a culture of denial, moral justification, and emotional numbing. Yet he never regarded Hiroshima solely as a source of despair. He insisted that confronting its moral legacy honestly could foster resilience, renewal, and what he called “survivor wisdom,” restoring the historical memory and moral imagination necessary to resist future catastrophes. That insight is even more urgent today because the habits of denial and indifference he identified have escaped the nuclear age and become defining features of contemporary political culture.

Among survivors of Hiroshima, this diminished capacity to feel initially functioned as a tragic form of psychological survival. Faced with scenes too horrific to absorb, many found themselves emotionally paralyzed, temporarily incapable of responding to the landscape of death surrounding them. But Lifton extended the concept much further. He argued that the same condition also characterized those who designed the bomb, authorized its use, justified its necessity, and later defended its moral legitimacy. What began as an emergency psychological defense gradually became a cultural condition. This insight reaches far beyond Hiroshima. What begins as a defense against unbearable suffering can evolve into a political culture organized around indifference. 

A society that learns not to feel one atrocity gradually acquires the capacity to ignore others. Lifton warned that once Americans constructed what he called a “cordon sanitaire” around Hiroshima—a barrier protecting them from confronting its moral implications—that habit of avoidance spread to other forms of collective suffering. The numbing did not stop with Hiroshima. It became a way of inhabiting the world.

Nothing could better describe our present historical moment. We inhabit societies saturated with images of catastrophe. Yet rather than enlarging our ethical imagination, this relentless exposure often produces exhaustion, indifference, and resignation.

Even more troubling, it feeds a resurgent war culture that glorifies domination, celebrates militarized masculinity, and equates physical strength with moral worth. As Susan Sontag argued in her classic essay on fascist aesthetics, authoritarian culture does more than justify violence; it aestheticizes it. Domination becomes seductive, hierarchy beautiful, submission desirable, and the spectacle of power detached from the suffering it produces. 

Violence no longer appears as a moral catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of strength, discipline, virility, and national renewal. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of militarized masculinity is not simply a political posture; it is the contemporary expression of this fascist aesthetic. 

It transforms domination into virtue, physical force into moral authority, misogyny into masculine authenticity, and violence into the highest expression of citizenship. In doing so, it redefines citizenship itself, replacing democratic responsibility with militarized obedience, civic courage with warrior masculinity, and public life with a theater of force.

In such a culture, violence becomes another genre of entertainment, another spectacle in the economy of distraction. The constant circulation of suffering no longer enlarges compassion; it erodes it, teaching people not simply to witness violence but increasingly to admire, consume, and normalize it.

Lifton anticipated this transformation with extraordinary clarity. As this moral desensitization spreads, he argued, people require ever greater spectacles of violence simply to feel anything at all. Disaster becomes normalized, and ordinary suffering loses its capacity to disturb us.

Here the legacy of Hiroshima converges with the digital culture of the twenty-first century.

Algorithms reward outrage while discouraging reflection. Social media platforms monetize fear, resentment, and humiliation. Corporate news reduces war to spectacle, compressing unbearable histories into disposable images. Artificial intelligence accelerates the circulation of propaganda, conspiracy, and racial mythology while diminishing the time necessary for thoughtful judgment. We increasingly encounter suffering not as fellow human beings but as data, content, or scrolling images. Distance becomes permanent. Responsibility evaporates.

This is not simply a technological crisis. It is a pedagogical one.

Every culture teaches people how to see, what to value, whose lives matter, and whose deaths may be ignored. The most powerful educational institutions today are no longer schools alone. They are digital platforms, corporate media, entertainment industries, and algorithmic systems that organize attention itself. These institutions do more than distribute information. They shape consciousness, organize attention, and cultivate habits of feeling. They manufacture forms of identification while teaching indifference toward others.

Under such conditions, fascism no longer requires spectacular rallies or uniforms to reproduce itself. It works more quietly and, for that reason, often more effectively. It reshapes perception, colonizes language, erodes historical memory, and teaches people to regard entire populations as invaders, parasites, criminals, terrorists, or demographic threats rather than as fellow human beings. By the time the machinery of violence is set in motion, its deepest victory has already been won: the democratic imagination has been hollowed out, compassion has yielded to fear, and disposability has become common sense.

Today this pedagogy of dehumanization is once again becoming normalized. Calls for mass deportation, fantasies of ethnic purification disguised as “remigration,” attacks on immigrants, racial conspiracy theories, and genocidal rhetoric directed at Palestinians all depend upon a prior educational achievement: teaching people to regard certain lives as disposable.

That is why figures such as Elon Musk matter. They matter not because they are uniquely evil but because they occupy commanding positions within the cultural apparatuses that now educate hundreds of millions of people. When racist conspiracies, demographic panic, and authoritarian fantasies are amplified through platforms reaching much of the globe, white supremacist propaganda is transformed into common sense. Hatred becomes normalized precisely because it is repeated, circulated, rewarded, and stripped of its historical genealogy.

As Jamelle Bouie has argued, Musk’s rhetoric is no longer confined to coded insinuations or internet provocation. It increasingly echoes themes drawn from the contemporary white nationalist imagination: affirming slogans such as “First the traitors, then the invaders”; declaring that “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor”; amplifying demographic panic over declining white birthrates; and normalizing the language of racial replacement and ethnic cleansing. 

Bouie also notes the disturbing resonance between this rhetoric and the political imaginary of The Turner Diaries, where “traitors” who defend a multiracial democracy are marked for elimination before the campaign against supposed “invaders” begins. This should not be dismissed merely as inflammatory rhetoric.  Language of this kind does not simply describe the world; it prepares people to inhabit one in which exclusion, racial purification, and political violence appear not only legitimate but necessary.

Yet we should resist the temptation to describe figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Stephen Miller simply as monsters. 

As Jorge Gonzalez Arocha observes, the language of monstrosity may satisfy our moral outrage, but it ultimately obscures the deeper workings of power. Monsters exist outside history. They are imagined as aberrations, exceptions to ordinary life. Fascism is neither. It is produced within history, cultivated through institutions, sustained by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, amplified by media, and normalized through the everyday pedagogies of schools, digital platforms, entertainment industries, and political culture. When we imagine authoritarianism as the work of monsters, we mistake symptoms for causes, overlooking the social relations, institutional arrangements, and cultural forces that make such politics possible.

The enduring lesson of Hiroshima is not that monsters occasionally seize power. It is that educated people, respected institutions, celebrated scientists, compliant journalists, and ordinary citizens can become participants in systems that separate technical intelligence from moral responsibility. The bureaucrats who planned Hiroshima were not monsters. The scientists who perfected the bomb were not monsters. The journalists who celebrated it were not monsters. They were products of institutions that transformed mass death into administrative necessity and moral obligation. The greatest crimes of modernity are rarely committed outside civilization; they are committed in its name.

The political danger of the language of monstrosity is that it individualizes what is fundamentally systemic. It encourages us to search for evil personalities rather than authoritarian cultures, for pathological leaders rather than the pedagogical apparatuses that educate people into accepting cruelty, disposability, and organized forgetting. Remove one authoritarian leader and another will take his place so long as the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, and educational forces that manufacture authoritarian consciousness remain intact. That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it remains the central political lesson of our own time.

History never repeats itself mechanically. Gaza is not Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not Gaza. Their histories are different, their contexts distinct.  But they reveal a recurring political logic: civilian populations rendered disposable, overwhelming violence justified as necessity, bureaucratic language replacing ethical judgment, and technological superiority mistaken for moral legitimacy. Whenever human beings become abstractions rather than persons, the conditions for atrocity are already present.

This is why remembering Nagasaki matters. Historical comparison is valuable not because it erases difference but because it reveals recurring political logics.

Historical memory breaks the spell of moral indifference. It restores the connection between feeling and judgment, conscience and politics. It reminds us that every genocide begins not with the machinery of death but with the pedagogy of dehumanization. Long before bodies are destroyed, language is corrupted, history is erased, compassion is ridiculed, and entire populations are taught to disappear morally before they disappear physically.

Lifton believed that confronting Hiroshima could become a source of renewal because it enabled us to recover our moral imagination, relearn how to feel, and reconnect ourselves to the broader human project. That may be the most important lesson Nagasaki offers today.

The struggle against fascism begins not only by resisting authoritarian institutions but by refusing the moral indifference upon which they depend. Against organized forgetting and manufacture illiteracy and amnesia, we must recover historical memory. Against the politics of disposability, we must insist upon the irreducible dignity of every human life. Against the seductive myths of technological omnipotence and permanent war, we must reclaim a language capable of naming both truth and justice.

The authoritarian abyss is no longer a distant possibility. It has entered the present. It appears wherever democracy yields to militarism, wherever cruelty is celebrated as strength, wherever historical memory is erased, and wherever entire peoples are stripped of their humanity in the name of security, racial purity, or national destiny. The forces that produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not disappeared; they have assumed new languages, new technologies, and new justifications.

The question is no longer whether we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is whether we can recover the moral urgency necessary to prevent their logic from becoming the defining political grammar of the twenty-first century. 

Historical memory is no longer simply an act of remembrance; it has become a condition of survival. To remember is to resist. But memory cannot remain a sanctuary for conscience; it must become a catalyst for collective struggle. Its highest purpose is not simply to preserve the past but to interrupt/rupture/transform the present. Only when remembrance gives rise to solidarity, organized resistance, and the struggle to create a more just world does it honor those whose lives history has tried to erase.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

 

JD Vance makes case for imprisoning Trump with oblivious take on fraud, critics say: ‘Beyond parody’

Vice President JD Vance was accused by Trump administration critics of having a lack of self-awareness after he suggested imprisoning people that are “committing fraud against the American people.”

Vance’s comments to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham during an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” struck critics as a sound argument for prosecuting President Donald Trump. “I don’t care where you came from, I don’t care what your name is, if you’re committing fraud against the American people, all of us, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and try to throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer,” Vance said.

Trump has been accused of profiting off the presidency after earning $2.2 billion in income last year, including $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency tokens. Bloomberg News reported the president earned more money in his second term so far than his previous 60-year business career.

Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reacted to a clip of Vance by posting on X: “Local man suggests jailing own boss.”

Clinton wasn’t the only observer who came to that conclusion. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman-turned-Trump critic, posted on X: . “@JDVance calling for @realDonaldTrump to be thrown into prison. Immediately.

Wow. Huge news.” Adam Kinzinger, a former GOP congressman who has also been critical of Trump, was incredulous. “You gotta be joking,” Kinzinger posted. “This has to be AI.”

“Uh, does he know who his boss is?! Why are you making threats but not going after the biggest fraudster of them all, JD?!” tweeted another user. “Beyond parody,” one user wrote.

- Howard Koplowitz | hkoplowitz@al.com

This is the text of a letter Bernie Sanders sent to Democratic Party members of Congress

Last month, the Social Security Administration released a report finding that by 2032 the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to cover just 78 percent of the benefits of more than 70 million Americans who have earned them. In other words, if Congress does not act within the next six years, Social Security benefits will be cut by 22 percent.

We have an obligation to the American people to ensure that never happens. Just as importantly, we have a responsibility to tell the American people exactly where we stand. Americans deserve to know not only how we will extend Social Security’s solvency, but how we will address the retirement crisis facing millions of seniors today.

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Yet, more than 20 percent of our nation’s seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year, and nearly half are struggling to make ends meet on less than $30,000 annually.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found that the United States has the highest senior poverty rate of almost any major country on earth. Adding insult to injury, nearly half of older workers between the ages of 55 and 64 have no retirement savings and no idea how they will ever be able to retire with any shred of dignity or respect.

Given that reality, the Democratic Caucus must make it abundantly clear that under no circumstances will we support legislation that cuts Social Security benefits, raises the retirement age, reduces Cost-of-Living Adjustments (COLAs), or privatizes this essential program.

Instead, at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, our position must be simple and straightforward: we will strengthen and expand Social Security by requiring that the wealthiest people in this country finally pay their fair share into the Social Security system.

In 2023, the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration found that we could extend the life of Social Security for 75 years, increase benefits by $2,400 a year, lift millions of seniors out of poverty, and expand COLAs—all without raising taxes by one penny on the bottom 91 percent of Americans who earn less than $250,000 a year.

How? By applying the Social Security payroll tax to all income, including capital gains and dividends, above $250,000 a year. Today, absurdly and unfairly, there is a cap on income subject to Social Security taxes. This year that cap is $184,500. What does that mean?

It means that Elon Musk—the wealthiest man in the world, worth an estimated $690 billion—pays the same amount into Social Security as someone earning $184,500 a year. It means that someone making $184,500 pays 6.2 percent of every dollar they earn into Social Security. But someone making ten times that amount—$1.845 million—pays just 0.6 percent of their income into the system. That is grossly unfair. That has got to change.

At a time when the wealthiest people in America are becoming much wealthier, asking them to pay the same percentage of their income into Social Security as teachers, nurses, firefighters, and construction workers is not a radical idea. It is common sense. It is what the American people want.

A 2023 poll by Data for Progress found that 78 percent of the American people support legislation that would accomplish this goal including 85 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of Independents, and 72 percent of Republicans. Unfortunately, instead of clearly telling the American people how we intend to strengthen Social Security, there are now Members of Congress who are considering legislation that moves us in exactly the wrong direction.

The so-called PROMISE Act would direct four unelected members of the Social Security Advisory Board to produce, in little more than a month, a proposal to make Social Security solvent for the next 50 years—with virtually no transparency, no meaningful public input, and no accountability.

If the Advisory Board reaches an agreement, Congress would be required to vote on their proposal during the lame-duck session after the November elections when Republicans still control the Senate and the House.

If the Board cannot reach an agreement, the PROMISE Act would allow any Member of Congress to force a vote on their own Social Security proposal under expedited procedures without the opportunity to amend it or seek a compromise – also during the lame-duck session.

In other words, Members of Congress who have been defeated at the polls or who have chosen to retire could determine the future of Social Security for the next half century. Even more significantly, a political party that was repudiated by the electorate in the mid-term elections could determine the fate of Social Security. That would be absurd, anti-democratic and unacceptable.

In my view, the Democratic Caucus must strongly oppose the PROMISE Act—or any legislation that fast-tracks fundamental changes to Social Security through an unelected commission. And that is not just my view.

It is the view of the AARP, the nation’s largest senior organization in our country representing 38 million Americans who are at least 50 years of age. In a letter dated July 21, 2026, the AARP wrote:

We strongly object to fast-tracking Social Security changes through Congress, as [the PROMISE Act] would do. Strengthening Social Security should happen through regular order, in full public view, with openness and transparency—rather than through a process that limits the type of amendments and sets arbitrary procedural deadlines to short-circuit the debate. If regular order is the gold standard for routine legislative matters, it certainly should be the standard for something as important as Social Security.

We should stand with the AARP and oppose this legislation.

At a time when the very rich are getting richer while working families struggle, it is no great secret that millions of Americans no longer have faith in the political process or either major party. They see the current political system as rigged and corrupt, benefiting the powerful and wealthy campaign contributors.

If the Democratic Party is ever to regain the faith of ordinary Americans it must stand firm on the issue of Social Security. That means: We will not cut Social Security benefits. We will not raise the retirement age. We will not reduce Cost-of-Living Adjustments. We will not privatize Social Security. We will not support procedural shortcuts that make it easier to reduce earned Social Security benefits behind closed doors while limiting public debate.

Instead, we will strengthen and expand Social Security by requiring the wealthiest Americans to finally pay the same percentage of their income into Social Security as tens of millions of working people do today. That is how we prevent benefit cuts. That is how we expand Social Security. That is how we extend Social Security’s solvency for generations to come. That is how the Democratic Party begins to regain the trust of the American people.

Bernie Sanders is a US Senator, and the ranking member of the Senate budget committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress.

This is the text of a letter by Bernie Sanders.

-CounterPunch

 

"Add another chapter to the yearslong feud between Trump and Comey"

The FBI opened an investigation into whether President Trump was acting as a Russian asset after he fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, newly declassified memos show.

Why it matters: The release of the files on the probe, known as "Oxferd Comma," revives one of the most consequential episodes in the Trump-Comey saga and comes months after Trump's Department of Justice again put the former FBI director under criminal indictment.

The latest: Asked why the Trump administration was releasing memos previously marked as a "sensitive investigative matter" now, an administration official said the president had directed the White House Government Transparency Task Force to identify previously undisclosed evidence of what the administration views as government weaponization.

The official said that as the task force identifies material and declassifies it, it makes the information public and sends it to Congress.

The official said lawmakers' reaction Wednesday to the newly released material showed that even members of Congress who investigated the matter had not been fully aware of what had occurred.

Driving the news: The memos the White House released Wednesday show the FBI opened an investigation in May 2017 into whether there was any collusion between Russia and Trump's campaign during the 2016 election.

Investigators examined whether Trump was "wittingly or unwittingly" involved in activities for or on behalf of Russia, "which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States," according to one of the declassified memos.

"Based on the facts and circumstances provided to date, the FBI believes that opening this investigation is the least intrusive method to address the serious national security risk posed by the activities alleged," it said.

Context: The case was closed in April 2019, soon after former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation concluded with no charges against Trump.

Mueller's probe resulted in several criminal cases against people in Trump's orbit. However, his report found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, though it neither implicated nor cleared the president of obstructing justice.

The big picture: The newly released memos add another chapter to the yearslong feud between Trump and Comey that has shaped investigations, court battles and political attacks since Trump fired the former FBI director.

The DOJ had Comey indicted in April in connection with a 2025 social media post by the former FBI chief that featured seashells arranged to display "86 47," which some Republicans at the time interpreted as a threat against Trump.

The charges of making threats against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce came five months after a judge dismissed an earlier DOJ case against Comey on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstructing its investigation of the Russia probe.

Comey's legal team declined to comment. The White House did not respond to Axios' request for comment.

Go deeper: James Comey indicted again, this time over "86 47" photo

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details throughout.

 

"We get it, Mitch. Paid sick leave for me but never for thee."

 

Welcome to August and the kickoff to Month Three of Sen. Mitch “MIA” McConnell’s taxpayer-funded medical leave. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear recently wrote a letter demanding that McConnell make a public address or issue his immediate resignation. The hypocrisy in collecting a paycheck since June 14, the last date McConnell showed up at work, makes one thing abundantly clear: the Republican Party has zero shame.

When it comes to paid sick leave, the United States is a global outlier in its refusal to require employers to provide it for workers. Of course, this is in large part thanks to McConnell’s decades-long tenure in the Senate. In 1993, he notoriously voted against the landmark Family and Medical Leve Act (FMLA), one of only 27 senators to do so. 

Thanks to the FMLA, most employees are guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, to recover from an illness, or to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition.

[Personal note: FMLA was the only form of maternity leave I was afforded for my firstborn in 1996, and I was back on the job 12 weeks later; grateful as I was for the legal mandate that my position be held for me, our nation’s inability to ensure universal and paid parental leave is beyond a disgrace. But I digress]. 

McConnell’s FMLA vote to derail even unpaid leave was hardly a career one-off. During the height of the pandemic, he blocked various federal paid sick and family leave extensions in congressional stimulus packages — and then laughed about it. In 2022, he voted against a proposal that would have guaranteed seven days of paid sick leave for freight rail workers.

We get it, Mitch. Paid sick leave for me but never for thee.

The double standard goes even deeper. Conspiracy theories flooded the Internet over a pair of Weekend at Bernie’s-style photos, a response to public speculation as to his whereabouts (which achieved exactly the opposite of assurance that he is alive and kicking). 

But it was his companion written statement crowing about the excellent health care he’s receiving while hospitalized that was so galling — something millions of fellow Americans can barely imagine today thanks to his longstanding effort to repeal and stymie the Affordable Care Act.

McConnell’s written statement was also rife with reminders of his lifelong physical challenges from childhood polio and his fears of being on the receiving end of age discrimination. He’s not been a vaccine-denier, I’ll give him that, but his overall record on supporting truth in science and equal treatment under the law is long, self-serving, and ugly.

Meanwhile, McConnell is not even the only Republican in Congress who has been off the job while collecting a paycheck. Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. also failed to show up for nearly four months, missing every House vote from March 5 to June 30. He, too, has rallied against legislation to require employers provide paid sick leave for workers during his prior stint in the New Jersey state Senate.

When Kean eventually returned to work, he grudgingly shared that he had been receiving inpatient mental health treatment and sought to maintain his privacy. Privacy, ahh, must be nice — now unheard of for any female of reproductive age in this country. 

I dare say McConnell’s singular and most significant contribution to the downward spiral of American democracy is his engineering of the current composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, which made its first order of business decimating a constitutional right to privacy when it overturned Roe v. Wade. 

As for Kean, pro-choice groups uncovered a trove of deceptive statements about abortion he’s made over the course of his political career. Privacy, dignity, and control of one’s healthcare are similarly “me” and not “thee” rights.

[Another presumably missed vote by McConnell will be the confirmation of Todd Blanche as U.S. attorney general; Politico reported yesterday that Blanche was caught on tape pledging he would deploy the Justice Department in concert with Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the White House to curtail abortion rights nationwide].

We all surely know that the dysfunction of our democracy means the likes of McConnell and Kean have little incentive to serve, let alone empathize with, their constituents. The way they’ve flouted decency and flaunted their respective leaves-of-absence proves it. 

With fewer than 100 days to go until the midterms, the moment is ripe to make a lesson out of these stories. That entails doing more than calling out the hypocrisy — bald-faced and infuriating as it is — but pointing toward real policies like paid sick (and parental) leave, access to healthcare, and reproductive freedom and dignity, all of which undergird the benefits in which they’ve basked. We all deserve the same.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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"We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good."

 

The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States,” along with Donald Trump’s assertion that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure,” lays the groundwork for dictatorship. Elections will be sabotaged in the name of “national security.” Left-wing dissent will be criminalized in the name of “combating terrorism.” Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of protecting “freedom.”

Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people — nearly 90 percent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended blackouts due to decades of U.S. economic warfare — is an existential threat.

These accusations are not meant to be rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on power. While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history” Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the report assembles a disparate collection of organizations belonging to Cuba’s “ideological network.”

For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded as an ecumenical social justice organization by the Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network” which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States.” I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation.”

The report lists a wide variety of organizations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary — perfectly legally — facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant management, compliance and reporting. These include The Jericho Movement, Equality for Flatbush, Claudia Jones School, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, changing Frequencies, Viva Palestina US, and The People’s Forum, which the report describes as “a major activist group in Cuba’s U.S. ideological network.”

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are castigated in the same chapter. The NLG “is one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

The report continues: The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today. Throughout its history, it has maintained intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence — from the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent BLM militants and Antifa terror cells of today.

The NLG is labeled a foreign influence operation because it provides assistance to activists, whose right to legal representation is constitutionally enshrined. In 2025, the Trump administration conditioned federal funding to Harvard University on defunding and dissolving the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (HLS NLG), which provided legal assistance to individuals and student groups that opposed the genocide.

A subsection in the report is dedicated to the anti-war activists at CODEPINK and their co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans. It notes Evans’ marriage to the wealthy software entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham was attended by a “Who’s Who’ of progressivism” including co-host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and the playwright V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) who wrote “The Vagina Monologues.” Naming guests at a wedding is one of the more bizarre passages.

The report grossly exaggerates the influence of Singham’s support for left-wing organizations — described as “far-left” — while ignoring the massive sums supplied by U.S. corporations, millionaires and billionaires, as well as the Israel lobby, to both major political parties, super PACs, think tanks and advocacy networks. Israel has a far more insidious influence on U.S. politics and foreign policy than Cuba, Russia and China combined.

The State Department attacks the co-founders of The People’s Forum, Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia De la Cruz. It draws on documents that are often decades old and infused with Cold War paranoia. These include a 1966 Senate report claiming there is “overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban Government has been progressively organized over the years, to carry out its number one task — the export of Communist subversion.”

It ignores more thoughtful assessments, including a 1981 CIA estimate that acknowledged “[m]uch of the turmoil around the world is rooted in regional and local disputes of a political, social, or religious nature and has nothing to do with Communism.”

In a chapter titled “Revolutionary Tourism,” the Venceremos (“We Shall Overcome”) Brigade is characterized as one of the most “extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.” This assertion libels thousands of individuals and organizations as Cuban assets, offering nothing more than innuendo.

It lists “the founder of Mother Jones,” — although there were four founders —– along with “several other [unnamed] notable magazine editors, leaders of powerful labor unions and advocacy groups, think tank executives, and a suite of professors at top U.S. universities” as Brigade “alumni.”

Transporting humanitarian goods to Cuba is not a crime. Although the Justice Department’s extradition request from Spain of philanthropist Fergie Chambers, who provided funds to humanitarian organizations in Gaza, may see the criminalization of any person or any group that assists those suffering under sanctions and a blockade.

The report attacks members of the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy” which transported goods to Cuba “in defiance of U.S. sanctions.” It notes that 120 organizations “from across 33 countries joined the caravan” with “a suite of influential progressives,” including Isra Hirsi — daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, video game live streamer and commentator Hasan Piker — with whom I discussed my book “A Genocide Foretold” last year — former U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and “several other current and former members of European Parliament.” Even the Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Avila — who I interviewed last month after he was tortured by Israeli soldiers — gets a mention.

Those listed in the report did not become “radicals” because of Cuban indoctrination. Their politics are homegrown, formed in opposition to racism, genocide, police violence, the terrorizing and killing of immigrants and U.S. citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs and neoliberalism, along with the crimes of U.S. imperialism and militarism.

The report makes passing reference to a wide range of people on grounds so tenuous that it has to be read to be believed. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is mentioned for refusing “to denounce” a “tribute to [Assata] Shakur,” who was almost certainly framed for murder and who fled to Cuba after escaping from a U.S. prison in 1979. It dedicates two paragraphs to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for her “friendliness towards the communist regime.” The evidence provided is her participation in a congressional delegation that joined then President Barack Obama on a visit to the island.

Cuban agents, it charges, “maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Cuba has allegedly “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism [my emphasis] on American soil.”

Note the word terrorism. Note that it makes these individuals and organizations terrorists. Note that it makes them subject to draconian terrorism laws. And note that the Trump administration has committed itself to hunting down and rooting out the “radical left.”

The report charges that Cuba and its allies are mounting “a revolution against western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” It accuses Havana of “gleeful support of the George Floyd uprisings.” It asserts that “the rise of antifa” and “the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses,” can be “linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”

It characterizes the DSA as serving “as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third World List radicalism.” It claims the organization maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.” It alleges Cuba has built a “sprawling revolutionary network” that has “shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements” including the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and antifa. These networks include “powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations” in the U.S.

Cuba, the report concludes, “has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.” The broadside is chilling. It is worse than McCarthyism. It presages a savage purging of American society.

Those named in the report are condemned without evidence. They are denied due process. That the assertions in the report are distorted at best, and often fictitious, is irrelevant. Fascist propaganda is not rooted in truth. It is rooted in a hatred for liberal values, democracy and the left. It is rooted in the belief that once those condemned as human contaminants are removed, there will be a moral, spiritual and economic renaissance. We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good.

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-The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it.

 

Trump’s ‘thriving economy’ is a disaster.

Trump keeps insisting that the economy under his watch is the “greatest” ever, declaring during a trip to Michigan last week that “Michigan is thriving,” and “America is winning like never before.” This is batty. Last week, two doses of rotten economic news underscored how delusional Trump’s thinking is and provided evidence that Americans should not expect sunny economic times anytime soon.

First, “Mortgage rates jumped to their highest level in a year, dealing another blow to a long-stalled housing market that shows little sign of recovering,” the Wall Street Journal reported. 

“The 30-year fixed rate averaged 6.66% this week, up from 6.58% the week prior, according to Freddie Mac. That marked the fourth consecutive week of rising rates, as intensifying conflict in the Middle East pushed up inflation expectations and a divided Federal Reserve sowed doubt about the path of interest rates.”

Trump’s “sock puppet,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ken Warsh, who Trump moved heaven and earth to install (after firing and attempting to prosecute greatly respected former Fed chairman Jerome Powell) to obtain lower interest rates, not only has failed to deliver, but has triggered the opposite effect. Warsh spooked the markets after his appearance at the latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting, when he failed to convince investors that he is serious about fighting inflation.

Once more, Trump’s preference for sycophancy over merit or experience has come back to haunt him. 

“The verdict from one of the most closely read Fed watchers in the business was blunt. ‘Warsh didn’t convey the message clearly or explicitly, and the bond market puked on him,’” Wall Street Journal reporter Jon Hilsenrath wrote. “The evidence sat right there on the screen: the 30-year Treasury yield jumped as much as 14 basis points to nearly 5.23%, its highest level since 2007. A 19-year high, delivered in the hours after the chairman stepped down from the podium.”

Meanwhile, economic growth has slowed under Trump. 

“Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services, increased just 1.5% for the April-through June period, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers adjusted for seasonality and inflation,” CNBC reported. “Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a growth rate of 1.8%, following the 2.1% increase in the first quarter.” Separately, “the personal consumption expenditures price index, which is the Federal Reserve’s primary forecasting gauge, fell a seasonally adjusted 0.1% for the month, putting the annual inflation rate at 3.7%.”

Trump’s pathological narcissism — specifically, his insistence on surrounding himself with mediocre flunkies who refuse to challenge his delusional thinking, paired with his inability to admit error or accept any facts that reflect poorly on him — prevents him from taking any measures to change course. He will never acknowledge that his poor economic policies (exacerbated by his inflation-fueling war) have produced results far worse than his Democratic predecessors. 

Instead, he doubles down on the very things that create economic pain (tariffs, extending the war); insults voters by insisting their affordability crisis is fictional; and laughably blames former president Joe Biden, who has not been in office for more than 18 months and produced, on average, over 300,000 jobs per month.

No wonder Trump’s approval ratings have fallen off a cliff, hitting new lows in multiple surveys. 

In poll after poll, voters say Trump is not concerned about the right things. And who can blame them for thinking that Trump is not listening to their concerns, when he spends so much time spinning conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, obsessing over prosecuting enemies, raising prices by implementing new tariffs, making healthcare more expensive, and fixating on an unwinnable forever war that raises fuel prices and accomplishes nothing for the American people?

Republicans, who lack the nerve to challenge Trump’s self-destructive policies, will bear the burden in November of voters’ anger over an economic agenda that has been rubber-stamped. 

Rather than provide relief to millions who have lost healthcare coverage, or restore SNAP benefits to 4 million Americans (including 1 million children), their toadyism to Trump and the billionaire donor class has prompted them to throw tens of billions at rogue, murderous ICE storm troopers and an unprecedented $1.15 trillion on the Pentagon (which the Senate has blocked for now). 

As Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy put it, “This budget tells you everything you need to know about what the Republican Party really stands for: unlimited taxpayer dollars for war and handouts to billionaires, and not a penny left over to help the American families who can’t afford to buy groceries or fill up their gas tank.”

Trump’s unbridled corruption only heightens the accurate perception that Trump views the presidency as his personal money-making operation, the results for ordinary Americans be damned. In refusing to lift a finger to stop the orgy of self-enrichment, Republicans have aggravated the populist anger bubbling over nationwide.

Recall that the same interplay between economic malpractice and corruption spelled the end of Trump’s pal, former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán earlier this year. As in Hungary, Americans are feeling both poor economic performance and revulsion over self-dealing. 

Voters understand that Trump is interested in maximizing his wealth (which he has boosted by more than $2B since returning to office), not improving family finances for the American people. 

By a stunning 49-19 percent margin (the outsized undecided tally likely reflects Republicans too browbeaten to admit their guy is a crook), Americans label Trump “corrupt.” Trump and his right-wing media enablers can no longer conceal the glaring contrast between ordinary Americans’ economic hardship and the unprecedented self-enrichment Trump and his oligarch pals are reaping.

In sum, Trump’s personal economy may be “thriving,” thanks to $2B in ill-gotten gains since returning to office, but Americans are not. 

Republicans have every reason to fear they will pay a political price for this rotten economic record, unmitigated corruption, misguided priorities, and gross incompetence. And they should. In ceding their constitutional obligations and becoming yes-men for a fetid, corrupt, and thoroughly incompetent president, they have proven themselves unworthy of voters’ trust. Voters’ only recourse will be to throw them out of office en masse in November.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.