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“If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.”

-- Jerry Mander

News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Fox News Has Done More to Incite Domestic Political Violence Than Donald Trump

How did we get here? Why is America a country where, in just one week, two African-American senior citizens were gunned down in Kentucky, pipe bombs arrived in the mailboxes of over a dozen prominent liberals, and 11 members of a Pittsburgh synagogue were slaughtered at a bris? President Donald Trump and the White House have strongly denied that he bears any responsibility for this streak of atrocities. In a sense, they’re right. ... It’s easy to imagine the three recent perpetrators doing exactly the same things under a President Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to conceive of all the politicized violence happening without Fox News. ... It’s tough to miss how Cesar Sayoc’s vehicle looked like Fox News in van form. ...

In 2011, Gawker obtained the 1970 White House memo from the Nixon presidential library, titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” (The original Gawker article about it is still online, but thanks to technologist Peter Thiel’s successful attempt to destroy Gawker, the memo itself disappeared from the internet. The Intercept today is republishing it.) ... The memo makes the case that Republicans needed to avoid the “prejudices of network news selectors” and get the GOP perspective on TV. Why? Because Americans are stupid, and they could take advantage of that:

“Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication,” the memo states. “The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” [emphasis in original]

At the time, there was no such thing as cable television, just the networks and local news. The memo said that the operation could “provide pro-Administration, videotape, hard news actualities to the major cities of the United States.” That is, they would shoot and edit video segments that looked like news and provide them for free to local stations, which would hopefully run them without revealing their origins. The handwriting of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, is, as Gawker pointed out, literally all over the memo. Ailes, then a paid adviser to the Nixon administration, wrote in the margins that it was an “excellent idea” — one that “should be expanded.” Indeed, Ailes said, he’d like to run it.

[check out the link for the history of Ailes' media work leading up to the creation of Fox News]

According to Gabriel Sherman, author of an Ailes biography, during the Obama administration “the right-wing media and the Republican Party started to fuse into this single entity.” In 2016, Fox helped make Trump, Ailes’s longtime friend, president of the United States. Sherman says “there’s almost no daylight now between the agenda of the White House and the agenda of Fox News. … Trump is the logical conclusion of entertainment and right-wing media taking over the Republican Party.” President George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has concluded that “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.” Or as Max Boot, another disillusioned conservative, writes, “The frightening thing is that the right-wing media will be here long after Trump and the current crop of Republican politicians are gone.” And hence eruptions of random, terrifying reactionary violence will endure as long as Fox and its friends do.

Fox has competition south of the border from the U.S. government:

US Government-Funded News Network Ran a Hit Piece on Soros That Called Him a “Multimillionaire Jew”

Five months before George Soros received a pipe bomb in the mail, a US government-funded broadcasting network produced a segment that attacked the liberal donor—a common target of conservative conspiracy theories—as a “multimillionaire Jew” and “the architect of the financial collapse of 2008.” The video segment, which aired in May, was produced by Radio Televisión Martí, a Spanish-language network that broadcasts news and propaganda to Cuba to promote US foreign policy interests. The Miami-based network is overseen by the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which is part of the United States Agency for Global Media, an independent US government agency whose stated mission is “to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

The taxpayer-subsidized video portrays Soros as a threat to Latin American democracy. Featuring ominous music and images of street violence, the 15-minute video begins with the narration: “George Soros has his eye on Latin America. But Judicial Watch, an American investigative legal group, also has its eye on Soros and what it sees as his lethal influence to destroy democracies. It describes him as a millionaire investor and stock market speculator who exploits capitalism and Wall Street to finance anti-system movements that fill his pockets.” Judicial Watch, a right-wing group, is in the midst of a fundraising campaign called Expose Soros and has been looking for evidence that taxpayers are funding Soros’ advocacy work. ...

The videos were taken down later, but archived copies of a shorter two-part version can be found on YouTube here and here. This edited version begins by describing Soros as “the multimillionaire Jew of Hungarian origin whose fortune is estimated at $8 billion.” Later, it calls him “a non-believing Jew of flexible morals.”

Worth a full read:

Blaming ‘Both Sides’ for Hate Plays Into Hands of Right-Wing Media

Media coverage of tragedies like shootings and bombings is frequently politicized, particularly when jihadism is a factor in perpetrators’ motives. In its coverage of the recent outbreak of conspiracy-fueled far-right wing terrorism, however, many media outlets have rushed to depoliticize such acts, absolving those that stoke the flames of far-right extremism in favor of castigating “both sides” of the political divide. ... The common thread in all of these tragedies is that their perpetrators were all influenced in one way or another by racist conspiracy theories that have been stoked by the likes of Fox News, Breitbart and other far-right media and internet sources, along with the continued racist and conspiratorial rhetoric of President Trump and other Republican politicians.

George Soros, a Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor, former hedge fund manager and billionaire Democratic donor, is a long-time bogeyman for right wingers, who see him as a Democratic puppetmaster who funds left-wing protesters and sponsors “invasions” of non-white immigrants and refugees. Many antisemitic conspiracy theorists, like the synagogue shooter, see Soros as the manifestation of a Jewish cabal that secretly controls the world. ... The Florida mail bomber, a fanatical Trump supporter, holds similar views regarding Soros. He made numerous social media posts that accused Soros of controlling Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum (potentially Florida’s first black governor) and financially supporting David Hogg, a survivor of the February mass shooting in Parkland, who the bomber and many other conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones believe to be a “crisis actor.” The Kentucky shooter also had a social media profile rife with far-right memes and posts focused on such Soros- and caravan-related conspiracies, among others. ...

After the attacks last week, some Republicans engaged in a farcical whataboutism that equates the weight of political “extremism” on the left with that on the right. Fox News literally interrupted their segment on a protester heckling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s dinner with the news that Obama and Clinton had been targeted with mail bombs, which they described as being in “the same vein.” McConnell later said of the toxic political atmosphere that “there have been a lot of contributions to it on both sides.” So-called “moderate” Republican Sen. Susan Collins remarked that “there have been people on both sides of the aisle who have been guilty of whipping people into a frenzy.” Of the mail bomber, Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders maintained that “the president is certainly not responsible for sending suspicious packages, no more than Bernie Sanders was for a supporter of his shooting up a baseball practice,” referring to the shooting of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise last year. Obviously Trump isn’t responsible for sending the bombs themselves, but unlike Bernie Sanders, the president employs rhetoric that both explicitly and implicitly advocates violence and imprisonment against his political opponents, minority groups and the press. The president himself tweeted after the bombings that the “false and inaccurate” reporting by the mainstream media was to blame for the attacks, and later attacked Tom Steyer, one of the bomb recipients. ...

When comparing recent death tolls from political violence perpetrated by the two sides (communist, anarchist, environmental rights and black nationalist groups on the left, with the varied strands of white supremacist and Christian theocratic groups on the right), as well as deaths inflicted by Islamist extremism, the data is quite clear. In the past decade, right-wing domestic extremism claimed 71 percent of deaths, compared with just 3 percent for left-wing extremists, with the remaining 26 percent attributed to Islamist extremism, according the Anti-Defamation League. The only year in the past decade when right-wing extremism did not top the other strands was 2016, a result of the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by a self-proclaimed member of ISIS, which claimed the lives of 49 people. Clearly, left-wing violence is near nonexistent when compared to the rising levels of right-wing extremism or the rising levels of antisemitic violence. ...

It’s painfully obvious that the president is purposefully using untrue and racist claims about the refugee march as a tool to whip up his fearful and paranoid base as the midterm elections approach, a strategy which has now erupted in senseless bloodshed. ... Yet the political violence whipped up by the president, the GOP and their media apparatuses last week was treated by many in corporate media as just one shot in an ongoing duel between equally violent left and right extremist fringes. While this blatantly false both sides–ism runs contrary to actual facts, and plays right into the hands of an increasingly fascist right wing, it just won’t go away as a media talking point.

After Last Week, There’s No Hope That the Media Will Ever Abandon False Equivalencies With the Far Right

Last week, I naively thought that the time might finally have come when there would be no room for false equivalence or equivocation from major media platforms. Consider this brief period of history: A neo-Nazi murdered 11 Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue; another white supremacist in Kentucky shot dead two black people after attempting to attack a black church; and a supporter of President Donald Trump sent out 14 mail bombs. Faced with the task of reflecting on a historic week of racist, anti-Semitic, right-wing violence, however, liberal and centrist media outlets have continued with, at best, fangless and, at worst, equivocal responses to the rise of fascism.

The response from the New York Times editorial board last weekend offers a case study in false equivalencies and platitudes under the veneer of anti-racism. The board went as far as noting that “hate appears to be on the rise,” in an op-ed which cited statistics showing that anti-Semitic and racist hate not only appears to be but, in fact, is on the rise. The board’s main solution was to call for “more good speech, from more good people.” It was a riff on a quote, also used in the editorial, from none other than Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg, who invoked the need for “good speech” as a response to his website’s failure to police Holocaust denial. The idea that “good speech” is a sufficient weapon against rising fascism — and the desires and collectivities that fuel it — is a misplaced liberal fantasy.

More relevant to note now is that even after a most deadly week of racist violence, the New York Times editorial board could not commit to racists being the problem. Instead, the editors veered once again into a pitiful both-siderism. “Mr. Trump is also setting a low, coarsening standard for how Americans should speak to and about one another. He has urged his supporters to think of his critics as traitors and enemies,” writes the board. “Some Democratic leaders appear to be concluding that they will be suckers if they don’t adopt similar smashmouth tactics.” The New York Times fails to note that deploying “smashmouth tactics” and framing opponents as “enemies” has a different moral valence when those opponents are white supremacists and neo-Nazis. I don’t mean to suggest that this was an omission: The “paper of record” has, by now, made it clear that drawing false equivalencies when it comes to “bad speech” is among its commitments.

NYPD arrests 14 Jewish protesters outside Republican club where Proud Boys brawled

The NYPD on Tuesday arrested 14 Jewish protesters outside the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York, the scene of recent violence by a fascist street gang.

The nonviolent protesters had gathered where the leader of the Proud Boys was invited to speak a few weeks ago, and a brawl ensued outside between his gang and several protesters of the alt-right group. The protesters outside the Club on Tuesday were there to call on the Republican Party to denounce white nationalism after the Saturday shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 worshippers were murdered by a man who’d shared anti-Semitic and white supremacist comments online.

Protesters were blocking the doors to the club and started a hashtag to #EndWhiteNationalism. They also laid banners on the ground to remember the people killed at the synagogue, ranging in age from 54 to 97 and including a married couple, a pair of brothers, and a doctor who treated AIDS patients before the disease had a name.

#WeAreHere at the site of this month's Proud Boy violence, asking – demanding – the Republican Party to #EndWhiteNationalism. pic.twitter.com/DX5Ofg1uuf

— meaning machine (@EricThurm) October 30, 2018

The NYPD confirmed that seven women and seven men were arrested and taken into custody but declined to provide additional comment as the arrested protesters were still being processed.

After Pittsburgh Massacre, Netanyahu Faces Backlash for Endorsing Trump and Smearing Soros

As he mourned for the 11 American Jews killed on Saturday by a gunman who believed a racist conspiracy theory promoted by the president of the United States, the writer David Simon read on Twitter that a senior member of Israel’s far-right government was on his way to Pittsburgh for a memorial service. “Go home,” Simon wrote in a caustic message to Naftali Bennett, an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who serves as Israel’s minister for the diaspora. “Netanyahu’s interventions in US politics aided in the election of Donald Trump and his raw and relentless validation of white nationalism and fascism,” Simon wrote. “The American Jewish community is now bleeding at the hands of the Israeli prime minister. And many of us know it.”

Simon was not alone in his criticism of Bennett’s visit. “NO THANK YOU,” Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace in New York, replied to Bennett’s tweet about his visit. “Your racist worldview has more in common with the perpetrator of this attack,” she told Bennett, who supports Jewish-only settlements in the Israeli occupied West Bank and the expulsion of African asylum seekers from Israel. “Naftali Bennett has eagerly normalized Trump in exchange for the codification of apartheid in Israel,” the political cartoonist Eli Valley wrote. “He shares Trump’s bigotry, he has boasted about murdering Arabs, and he should not be welcomed anywhere in the American Jewish community.”

Trump is now at the synagogue in #Pittsburgh. Cops keeping thousands of protesters about a block away. pic.twitter.com/f6WDf49maM

— Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) October 30, 2018

The Pittsburgh chapter of If Not Now, a group of young American Jews opposed to their community’s support for the Netanyahu government’s nationalist policies — including the building of a wall along Israel’s southern border to block African asylum-seekers — protested Bennett’s visit at a vigil on Sunday near the Tree of Life synagogue, where the shooting took place. “The inspiration for this attack,” If Not Now member Ren Finkel said, “is the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Trump and other Republican leaders.” When Trump visited the Pittsburgh synagogue on Tuesday, he was met by thousands of protesters, who could be heard shouting “Words have meaning!” and “Trump, go home!” by reporters with the president. ...

After Trump’s election, Netanyahu also refused to condemn the president’s repeated incitement against Soros, Simon noted, even as the president and his Republican allies fed their followers “a steady stream of conspiratorist horseshit so acutely racist and anti-Semitic that the name of a Holocaust survivor can now be invoked as a fixed dog-whistle for Jewish conspiracies against white nationalist America.” The Pittsburgh gunman cited as justification for his massacre of Jews a baseless conspiracy theory about Soros, which has been promoted by Trump’s favorite cable news network, Fox News, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican endorsed by Trump — the false claim that, as Simon put it, “a Jewish financier is paying brown-skinned people to journey to our southern border and menace our nation.”

Paul Ryan urged to censure Iowa's Steve King over alleged antisemitism

The Anti-Defamation League has sent the House speaker, Paul Ryan, a letter requesting that Steve King, the controversial Iowa Republican, be stripped of committee assignments and formally censured for what the organization said was a “disturbing series of involvements and statements … that are antisemitic and offensive not just to the Jewish community, but to all Americans”. In its letter, the ADL pointed out that King had relationships with Austria’s far-right Freedom party, which has stumbled through repeated neo-Nazi scandals; that King had deployed an antisemitic smear about George Soros, the Jewish-Hungarian philanthropist; and that King had endorsed foreign politicians linked to antisemitic and neo-Nazi groups.

The letter was the latest in a series of extraordinary setbacks for King, an eight-term congressman who has regularly been re-elected in Iowa’s fourth congressional district by double-digit margins. The national Republican party withdrew support from King on Tuesday, with a tweet from Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is in charge of defending the Republican House majority. “Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate,” Stivers tweeted. “We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.”

In response to a request for comment on Stivers’ tweet, AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for Ryan directed the Guardian to a statement the House speaker had issued in June, when King retweeted a well-known British neo-Nazi: “The speaker has said many times that Nazis have no place in our politics, and clearly members should not engage with anyone promoting hate.”

Turkish prosecutor says Khashoggi died of strangulation as soon as he entered consulate

Jamal Khashoggi strangled as soon as he entered consulate, prosecutor confirms

Jamal Khashoggi was strangled as soon as he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, then his body dismembered and destroyed in a premeditated killing, the city’s chief prosecutor has said in the first official confirmation of how the Saudi journalist died. Riyadh previously said Khashoggi died in a fight in a rogue extradition operation, and has maintained that his body, intact, was wrapped up in a rug and disposed of by an unidentified “local collaborator”.

“The victim’s body was dismembered and destroyed following his death by suffocation,” Wednesday’s statement said, bolstering Turkish investigators’ line of thought that Khashoggi’s remains could have been disposed of at the nearby consul general’s house, dissolved in acid or dumped in a well on the property.

The fresh revelations from Istanbul came on the heels of the Saudi chief prosecutor’s departure from the city after a two-day visit – underlining how little co-operation there has been so far in what is supposedly a joint Turkish-Saudi investigation. It also suggests that Turkey has more evidence to table, and the steady drip of information about the crime leaked or released by Turkish officials so far will continue as president Recep Tayyip Erdogan seeks to pile yet more pressure on his rivals in Riyadh. Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, Irfan Fidan, said discussions this week with his Saudi counterpart, Saud al-Mojeb, had yielded “no concrete result”. ...

The diplomatic crisis for Riyadh has also created significant problems for Donald Trump’s administration, which has signed arms deals with the kingdom and made the crown prince central to its regional policy of containing Iran. Turkey’s statement on Wednesday undermined the insistence of Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, that Turkey was satisfied with Saudi Arabia’s cooperation in the investigation to date.

War in Yemen: "Patience has run out in the international community"

Yemen: US defence secretary calls for ceasefire and peace talks

The US defence secretary, James Mattis, has called for a ceasefire in Yemen and peace talks to start in 30 days, saying that Saudi Arabia and its Emirati allies are ready for a deal. Mattis said that the talks between the Saudi-led Coalition and the Houthi rebels are being brokered by the United Nations special envoy, Martin Griffiths, and would take place in Sweden.

Talks planned in Geneva in September failed to take place, as Houthi representatives refused to attend without guarantees of safe passage for their wounded soldiers. The two sides have not held talks for two years. ...

“Thirty days from now, we want to see everybody around a peace table, based on a ceasefire, based on a pull back from the border,” Mattis said during an appearance at the US Institute of Peace. “That will allow the special envoy, Martin Griffiths, who is very good, who knows what he’s doing, to get them together in Sweden. That is the only way we are going to solve this.” ...

The defence secretary did not say what action the US administration would take if the warring parties did not agree a ceasefire or attend the talks. The US, along with the UK and France, supplies most of the coalition’s weaponry, but has refused to curb the flow of arms in the face of high numbers of civilian casualties and the coalition’s use of blockades and other economic measures to cut off Houthi areas, where most of the population lives, from basic supplies.

Rightwinger leads race to succeed Angela Merkel as party chair

Two separate polls have suggested that Friedrich Merz, a rightwinger with a longstanding grudge against Angela Merkel, is emerging as the frontrunner to succeed her as party leader, potentially accelerating her departure as chancellor. ... Economically liberal but socially conservative, Merz, one of many once-powerful CDU men to have been outmanoeuvred by Merkel during her long career, threw his hat into the ring straight after her announcement and is widely seen as offering the party a return to its roots after her leftwards push.

One poll, for Spiegel Online, suggested 34% of voters favoured Merz as party leader, making him clear favourite ahead of the CDU’s secretary general, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, widely regarded as Merkel’s chosen heir, on 19%. A second poll, for the Handelsblatt daily, gave the corporate lawyer a much narrower lead, with 21% to Kramp-Karrenbauer’s 18%. Both polls put the health minister, Jens Spahn, another fierce Merkel critic and Merz’s chief conservative rival, on just 6%.

CDU party delegates will choose their new leader at a congress in early December, with many observers suggesting that Merkel’s ability to see out the remaining three years of her fourth term as chancellor will depend on their decision.

US insurer sends public employees to Mexico for cheaper drugs

Owing to the soaring cost of medicine in the US, the state of Utah is offering its public employees a new incentive: $500 and a trip to Mexico to buy prescription drugs at a cheaper price.

“We can fly a health plan member to San Diego, have them picked up by private transport, receive the same drug as they would in the US from a hospital in Tijuana that meets US standards, give them a cash back incentive of $500, and still save between 40% to 60% for the employer,” said Chet Loftis, director of PEHP Health & Benefits, which insures some 170,000 public employees and their dependents.

The plan was first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. It emerged this fall in the wake of a new law that requires the state’s insurer to offer cash or other savings rewards when patients choose lower-cost health care options. Currently the plan applies to a specific set of expensive drugs used in the treatment of arthritis, autoimmune disorders, psoriasis, Crohn’s disease and prostate cancer.

According to the Tribune, in the US a 28-day supply of the MS drug Avonexruns about $6,700, while in Tijuana it might cost approximately $2,200.

How African Americans Fought For & Won Birthright Citizenship 150 Years Before Trump Tried to End It

Mexico town devastated by earthquake welcomes thousands from migrant caravan

An impoverished Mexican town nearly flattened by a 2017 earthquake has welcomed thousands of tired and hungry Central American migrants in quiet defiance of Donald Trump’s condemnation of the group. As Trump ordered 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to block the migrant caravan, residents of the southern town of Niltepec – who still live among piles of rubble that once were their homes – welcomed the caravan with homemade soup, medical tents, and diapers for children.

“We wish we had a space dignified enough to offer our visitors,” said Zelfareli Cruz Medina, Niltepec’s mayor. As she spoke, caravan members were stringing up garbage bags to use as tents in Niltepec’s main square. Surrounding buildings were scarred with cracks and gaping holes caused by the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the region on Sept. 7, 2017.

Of 1,720 homes in Niltepec, 1,602 were damaged in the quake, according to town officials, while 530 collapsed entirely. At least 100 families are still without homes, they said. ... But a willingness to help the needy comes as almost second-nature to residents of the hardscrabble town in Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest states, Cruz said. “We know now what it means to suffer,” she said. ...

The warmth of the welcome in Niltepec stood in deliberate, stark contrast to Trump’s hostility, said Jorge Luis Fuentes, a senior town official. “It’s a form of struggle,” he said. “It’s a way to demonstrate that rights are universal.”

There are three options in tackling climate change. Only one will work

The world faces a near-impossible decision – one that is already determining the character and quality of the lives of the generations succeeding us.

It is clear from the latest IPCC climate report that the first and only effective course, albeit a deeply unpopular one, would be to stop using any fossil fuels. The second would be to voluntarily minimise their use as much as climate scientists have calculated would deliver some prospect of success. Finally, we can carry on as we are by aiming to meet the growth in demand for activities dependent on fossil fuels, allowing market forces to mitigate the problems that such a course of action generates – and leave it to the next generation to set in train realistic solutions (if that is possible), that the present one has been unable to find.

These are the choices. There are no others. ...

Concern about the reliability of climate data stems from the changing role of carbon sinks of oceans, forests and soils only partially absorbing CO2 emissions. Until recently, just over half the emissions were taken up by the sinks, with the balance accumulating in the atmosphere. This is no longer the case. The present upward path of global emissions from fossil fuel burning shows clearly that “sink-efficiency” has been noticeably decreasing since 2010.

The IPCC report is also the first time that measuring and integrating carbon and feedback emissions has been acknowledged, and this is the most serious warning yet that global warming is accelerating out of control. Whereas budget emissions of carbon could theoretically be reduced by not burning fossil fuels, the release of the feedback emissions of methane from rising temperatures cannot be.

The planet's biggest shield against climate change - the Amazon rainforest - was just put under the control of a maniacal right-winger who will likely pursue a deforestation plan. This will get zero media coverage, even though it threatens the survival of all life on Earth.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 29, 2018

Bolsonaro’s election is catastrophic news for Brazil’s indigenous tribes

Brazil has just elected as its president a far-right nationalist with authoritarian tendencies and fascist inclinations. The country’s 900,000-strong indigenous people are among the many minority groups Jair Bolsonaro has frequently targeted with vitriolic hostility. “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated their Indians,” he once said. If he enacts his campaign promises, the first peoples of Brazil face catastrophe; in some cases, genocide.

There are around 100 uncontacted tribes in Brazil, more than anywhere else on earth, and all are in peril unless their land is protected. Bolsonaro has threatened to close down FUNAI, the government’s indigenous affairs department, which is charged with protecting indigenous land. Already battling against budget cuts, if it disappears uncontacted peoples face annihilation. Earlier this year, FUNAI released footage of a man known as the Last of his Tribe; a lone survivor of waves of genocidal attacks in the 1970s and 80s as loggers and ranchers bulldozed their way through the forest. These invaders murdered his entire family, his community and neighbouring communities. If the mechanisms to protect indigenous territories and prevent such atrocities, already woefully inadequate, are removed, this vital part of human diversity will be wiped out forever.

Bolsonaro thinks “Indians smell, are uneducated and don’t speak our language”, and that “the recognition of indigenous land is an obstacle to agribusiness”. He declares that he will reduce or abolish Amazonian indigenous reserves and has vowed on several occasions: “If I become president, there will not be one centimetre more of indigenous land.” He recently corrected himself, declaring that he meant not one millimetre. This has profound implications for the country’s indigenous peoples, who rely totally on their land for their livelihood and their physical and spiritual wellbeing. The struggle to protect tribal people’s lives and livelihoods, and the ecosystems they depend on, is already brutal and bloody. ...

The extent to which Bolsonaro will be able to tear up the Indians’ constitutional rights remains to be seen, but it’s clear that what is at stake is the soul of Brazil, the future of the Amazon rainforest – and the extraordinary human diversity represented by its 305 distinct tribes. Brazil has shown that where indigenous peoples’ land is properly protected they not only thrive, but so do some of the planet’s most diverse and endangered eco-systems, from the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests to the savannas. ... As the Guarani said recently: “If indigenous peoples become extinct and dead, the lives of all are threatened, for we are the guardians of nature. Without forest, without water, without rivers, there is no life, there is no way for any Brazilian to survive. We resisted 518 years ago, we fight in victory and defeat, our land is our mother. As long as the sun still shines, and while there is still fresh air under the shade of a tree, while there is still a river to bathe in, we will fight.”

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Intercepted: Donald Trump, Fascism, and the Doctrine of American Mythology

I live among the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany. And it’s terrifying

Synagogue Shooter Shares His HIAS Obsession With Far-Right Media

UK confirms reports of Chinese mass internment camps for Uighur Muslims

A Billionaire-Backed Democrat is Facing Off Against a Democratic Socialist in Berkeley. And It’s Getting Rough.

FBI asked to investigate suspected double hoax against Mueller

As Handful of Billionaire Families Grab Nation's Wealth for Themselves, New Report Details How Dynasties Rig US Economy

What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest

Progressive Groups Make Last-Minute Push for Kara Eastman, as Corporate Democrats Prep Victory Lap

Betye Saar: the artist who helped spark the black women's movement

A Little Night Music

Charlie Burse & His Memphis Mudcats - Magic Spell Blues

Sippie Wallace, King Oliver + Hersal Thomas - Devil Dance Blues

Louis Armstrong - Skeleton in the Closet

Witching Hour Blues - Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators

Screamin Jay Hawkins - I Put A Spell On You

The 5 Jones Boys - Mr. Ghost Goes To Town

Johnny Fuller - Haunted House

Big Jay McNeely - Psycho Serenade

Charles Sheffield - It's Your Voodoo Workin'

Johnny Otis - Castin' My Spell

LaVern Baker - Voodoo Voodoo

Poppa Hop - My Woman Got A Black Cat Bone

Otis Spann - Must Have Been The Devil

Tabby Thomas - Hoodo Party

James Harman - Lonesome Moon Trance