Republicans do not have a governing majority, argues Jennifer Rubin. What Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif.) did with her thin Democratic margin as speaker, Republicans cannot with theirs. Not without the Democrats’ help. This leaves Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in a unique position. He has the best of both worlds:
He’s not responsible for electing a speaker whose Christian fundamentalist views and financial questions make him a weight around the necks of Republicans in swing districts. He can castigate Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for his noxious views and effectively produce legislation that does not compromise Democrats’ minimum standards. At a Wednesday news conference, Jeffries emphasized, “House Republicans are unable to govern on their own. Period, full stop, no further observation necessary.”
Rubin describes what Democrats are able to do (and have) from the back seat. “Now, imagine what Democrats could do if they had the mathematical majority,” she concludes.
Gerrymandering and sluggishness have left Democrats here in North Carolina in a far weaker position. Their goal in the last few elections has been just to hang onto the governor’s mansion and win themselves just enough numbers to sustain Roy Cooper’s veto. That evaporated when former Democrat Rep. Tricia Cotham switched parties in January.
All that leads to what North Carolina Republicans are doing with their override majorities: subsidizing Mike Johnson’s Christian fundamentalism. Carolina Forward explains:
As reported by the News & Observer, the new state budget included millions of dollars in direct state grants to churches and religious organizations. Just a few examples include:
$4 million to the Mooresville Area Christian Mission (Iredell)
$1.5 million to the Community Church of Mt. Pleasant (Cabarrus county)
$100,000 to the Carolina Christian Academy (Davidson)
According to state and federal law, public money may not be used for sectarian purposes, and must be for activities that are for “public purposes only.” Spokespeople for many of the groups who received funding insisted that this is what they do. Yet it’s clear this isn’t true. Many of the evangelical churches receiving funding – for example, Mt. Pleasant’s Community Church – publicly proclaim their discrimination against broad classes of people, especially those who identify as LGBTQ. A sectarian private school like the Carolina Christian Academy does not serve the public by definition.
No similar Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist/agnostic organization received any such direct funding in the state budget, which is also a very telling omission.
Then there is the religious right (and vulture capitalists) raiding public school funding, The Big Enchilada, that largest slice of the annual budget pie in all 50 states (of which I’ve written since the aughts). Carolina Forward again:
One of the most controversial parts of the new state budget was the massive expansion of the state’s school voucher program, which subsidizes tuition at private religious schools at the expense of public schools. Under the expansion as written, the voucher program could receive as much as a half-billion dollars annually by 2032. The voucher program is expected to wipe $200 million out of North Carolina’s public school system just in the next three years alone.
This staggering amount of state money has some fraudsters seeing dollar signs. With the promise of free money from the state, with almost no restrictions or oversight (such as curriculum or testing standards) and a history of fraud, the voucher program is an almost irresistible target. Take, for example, Sam Currin, a Republican former state judge and convicted felon fraudster who recently published an op/ed titled, “Should Your Church Start a School?” The tsunami of state funds available for vouchers, with few if any hard requirements, is virtually tailored to produce a proliferation of junk “schools” aimed at vacuuming up voucher money, without any real intention to educate.
Even with far-right Christianity in decline, evangelicals are determined to create a theocracy in this country. At public expense. When that happens in majority Muslim countries, that’s bad. When evangelicals do it, it’s God’s will.
The American evangelical church, beset on one side by a rampant sexual abuse crisis and an epidemic of fraud and political hucksterism on the other, has plainly lost the political power, to say nothing of the social trust, it held just a decade or two ago. And perhaps that is for the best. It would plainly be better for any healthy religious movement to focus on the spiritual realm, instead of the political one. Yet with so much money to be made playing politics, some evangelical leaders may find it hard to resist.
For big charter companies, it’s simply about the predictable, government-guaranteed, near-recession-proof stream of public tax dollars. For evangelicals, it’s what you get combining right-wing politics with the prosperity gospel. Getting rich with God is nothing new. What is new over the last couple of decades is evangelicals treating public education dollars as a religious entitlement and a means of funding its goal of turning the U.S. into a Christian theocracy.
Funding the poor with tax dollars? That’s bad. Funding Christian nationalism with them, that’s God’s plan.
California Gov. Gavin Newson is sending a warning shot at Florida’s Ron DeSantis over abortion ahead of their anticipated clash on Fox News later this month.
On Sunday, Newsom is debuting a new TV ad that accuses the Republican governor and presidential candidate of pushing policies that criminalize women and doctors who pursue abortions after six weeks. The ad, narrated by Newsom, shows pictures of a woman and a doctor under a “Wanted” sign and states that their possible arrest is “by order of Governor Ron DeSantis.”
DeSantis signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban into law this year, upending his state’s status as an abortion haven in the South as he sought to boost his conservative bonafides in the presidential primary. Democrats, meanwhile, have capitalized politically since the Supreme Court overturned abortion protections, with anger on the left fueling better-than-expected results at the ballot box.
A DeSantis spokesperson did not respond to the abortion issue but pointed to a prior statement from the governor’s campaign saying he was eager to “expose to a national audience just how dangerous [Newsom’s] radical ideology would be for the country.”
Newsom’s ad — set to run in Florida and Washington, D.C. — continues the long-simmering feud that culminates Nov. 30 with a 90-minute event with DeSantis moderated by Fox’s Sean Hannity. The ideological clashes between the two governors elevated their respective profiles, though DeSantis has struggled to gain traction in his presidential run and Newsom has taken to questioning why the Florida governor would stoop to participating in the intramural skirmish.
But neither side wants to back down now, and each is suggesting that they have plenty of material to work with. DeSantis has ridiculed Newsom as presiding over a “woke” state in decline, pointing to California’s well-documented struggles with homelessness and open-air drug use. In recent days, he assailed Newsom for problems in his native San Francisco around the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and said the Democrat’s approach would “accelerate the decline of America.”
Newsom, who is viewed as a likely future White House aspirant, has said he’ll defend his state as well as stump for President Joe Biden in the debate. Newsom has spent more than a year trolling his GOP nemesis, describing him as “fundamentally authoritarian,” “a small, pathetic man,” and holding him up as a foil to attack conservative policies and promote his own brand of pugilistic progressivism. Newsom months ago declared DeSantis’ presidential run dead, giddily adding he “belly-flopped” and mocking him as a bad imitation of frontrunner Donald Trump.
DeSantis and Newsom also have sparred over book bans, immigration, education and guns, among other policies. Newsom’s latest ad comes more than a year after he ran TV spots in Florida contending that freedom was under attack there and inviting Floridians to move to California…
Our new Christian Nationalist Commander Mike Johnson has released all the January 6th footage which shows not every minute of the insurrection was violent, thus proving that there was no violence at all. Or at least that’s what the right wingers seem to think.
As expected, new conspiracies are being launched based on the J6 footage released by Speaker Mike Johnson, each one crazier than the next.
The hottest one making the rounds claims that someone in a MAGA hat is flashing a police badge inside the Capitol. This feeds the conspiracy that J6 was orchestrated by FBI agents dressed as Trump supporters, advanced by several Members of Congress. Just this past week, Rep. Clay Higgins claimed that busses of FBI agents disguised as Trump supporters came in “ghost busses.”
Wray: If you are asking whether the violence the Capitol on Jan 6th was part of some operation orchestrated by operatives/sources, the answer is no
Higgins: Do you know what a ghost bus is? These are nefarious in nature and were filled FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters pic.twitter.com/t8wgitZRy0
The new conspiracy, latched onto this morning by Utah Senator Mike Lee and several others, is that one of the J6ers inside the Capitol must be holding an FBI badge because, I guess, it supposedly looks like a badge. Of course, since they have been unable to prove the “fedsurrection” conspiracy for two years now with actual evidence, so they are desperate to find anything.
Of course, the problem with this new conspiracy is that we already know who this is and what he was holding because the case has already been adjudicated. The man in the photo is J6 defendant Kevin Lyons, who was sentenced to 51 months in prison, and the object he is holding in his hand is a vaping device. He is also holding a photo of John Lewis that he stole from Nancy Pelosi’s office. (Pro tip – not a Fed).
During the riot, Lyons was screaming at Capitol Police Officers that they were “f–king Nazis!” Lyons also stole a wallet with $150 cash in it from the jacket of a staffer. But this is the guy who is going to prove that J6 was really just Feds.
Here’s a video people may have forgotten about and there’s no question about what it says:
MTG has deleted this video from her Facebook page for 2 years ago, January 6, 2021. In it you can hear her calling Nancy Pelosi a traitor while also extolling the crowd that treason is punishable by death. I thought it was worth reposting. pic.twitter.com/Xurni5cOyl
Members of congress are apparently immune from any accountability for such incitement. I find it hard to believe that’s what the constitution or the law intends but it seems that’s what we’ve got.
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, a passionate champion of mental health, caregiving, and women’s rights, passed away Sunday, Nov. 19, at 2:10 p.m. at her home in Plains, Georgia, at the age of 96. She died peacefully, with family by her side.
Mrs. Carter was married for 77 years to Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who is now 99 years old.
“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” President Carter said. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”
She is survived by her children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy — and 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. A grandson died in 2015.
“Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary First Lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right,” said Chip Carter. “Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans. She will be sorely missed not only by our family but by the many people who have better mental health care and access to resources for caregiving today.”
She lived through a very tumultuous century. Born in 1927, she grew up in the depression, saw WWII, the cold war, the sexual revolution, helped her husband be elected to the Governor’s house and the White House and then spent the equivalent of another lifetime working with Carter Center on democracy, poverty and mental health. What a life.
I’m sure people have found things to dislike about her but I have never heard them,.
Another SpaceX rocket blew up yesterday. So did twitter.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about Elon Musk’s raging antisemitism but it’s causing Xitter to lose massive numbers of advertisers and even more people are leaving the platform because of it. Here’s the basic outline of what happened:
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Those were the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. In previous postings, Bowers explained the grievances that led him to commit mass murder. He shared meme after meme asserting that Jews were conspiring to flood the country with brown people in order to oppose and displace the white race. “Open you Eyes!” declared one. “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!”
On Wednesday night, the world’s wealthiest man affirmed this same conspiracy theory on X, formerly Twitter, the social-media site he owns. Like so many of Elon Musk’s acts of self-immolation, it happened in the space of a tweet. The incident began with a post from a conservative Jewish user who complained about anti-Semitic content on social media during the current Gaza conflict. “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right,’” he wrote. “You got something you want to say? Why dont you say it to our faces.” A small-time white-nationalist account soon responded by attributing this anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews:
Jewish commun[i]ties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.
You want truth said to your face, there it is.
This exchange would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide with six words: “You have said the actual truth.”
That’s about as antisemitic as it gets and in a week in which the front runner for the GOP nomination for president calls his enemies vermin, that’s saying something. Elon Musk has 160 million followers on twitter.
But then it got weirder. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-defamation League posted this:
Evidently, objecting to “decolonization” is a heroic act but disseminating the grossest of conspiracy theories about the Jews is no big deal? What? Has everyone lost their minds?
Anyway, again, this is social media becoming an even worse sewer which was already awful. But the tensions that we’re all feeling over the crisis in Israel and Gaza are very real. That’s why I found this Ezra Klein interview with Rabbi Sharon Brous so edifying. She is a very wise woman.
Ezra’s introduction is excellent as well:
Everything I’m about to talk about is hard to talk about. It is hard to talk about because it’s personal to me. It’s hard to talk about because it’s happening in the midst of an active hellacious war. And it’s hard to talk about because even when there is not a war, this is just hard to talk about.
Maybe I’ll start here. I think something we’re seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. You have older Americans, say, Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.
They have a lived sense of Israel’s impossibility and its vulnerability and the dangers of the neighborhood in which it is in. Their views of Israel formed around the Israel of the Six-Day War in 1967, when its neighbors massed to try and strangle Israel when it was young, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when they surprise attacked Israel 50 years ago.
Then there is the next generation, my generation, I think. And I think of us as this straddle generation. We only ever knew a strong Israel, an Israel that was undoubtedly the strongest country in the region, a nuclear Israel, an Israel backed by America’s unwavering military and political support. That wasn’t always true, at least not to the extent now. In his great book, “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron David Miller points out that before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel ranked 24th in foreign aid from the US, 24th. Within a few years of that war, it ranked first, as it typically has since.
We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians, and I don’t want to be euphemistic about this, an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and their security and their freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized. We knew an Israel where the leaders were trying imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become in the eyes of the world what Israel was in its own eyes, a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one.
And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi described on the show recently, that peace movement collapsed. The why of this is no mystery. The Second Intifada, the endless suicide bombings were a trauma Israel still has not recovered from. And they posed a horrible question, to which the left, both in Israel and in America, had no real answer then or now. If your story of all this is simplistic, if it is just that Israel wanted this, it is wrong.
But what happened then is Israel moved right and further right and further right. Extremists once on the margin of Israeli politics and society became cabinet ministers and coalition members. The settlers in the West Bank ran wild, functionally annexing more and more territory, sometimes violently, territory that was meant to be returned to Palestinians, and doing so with the backing of the Israeli state, doing so in a way that made a two-state solution look less and less possible.
Israel withdrew from Gaza, and when Hamas took control, they blockaded Gaza, leaving Gazans to misery, to poverty. Israel stopped trying to become something other than an occupier nation. It became deeply illiberal. It settled into a strategy of security through subjugation. And many in its government openly desired expansion through expulsion. And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu’s Israel, Ben-Gvir’s Israel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the panic in the Jewish community, about what gets short-handed as antisemitism on campus. And there is antisemitism on campus and on the left and on the right — always has been. But to read only the most anti-Semitic signs in a rally, to hear only the anti-Semitic chants, can also obscure what else is happening there. If it’s just antisemitism, then at least it is simple. They just hate the Jews. They hate us. They always have. They always will.
But a lot of what is happening at these rallies is not just antisemitism. A lot of it is a generation that has only known Israel as a strong nation oppressing a weak people. They never knew a weak Israel. They never knew an Israel whose leaders sought peace, showed up to negotiate deals, who wanted something better.
And I am not unsympathetic to the Israeli narrative here. I believe large parts of it. We have an episode coming soon on the many failures of the peace process. And the Israelis who say they did not have a partner, they are right. But that does not justify what Israel became, and there are consequences to what it has become.
There is this Pew survey in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69 percent of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel, but among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56 percent had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever.
And there are many of us who warned of this exact thing happening, who said, if you lose moral legitimacy, you will not have the world’s good will when you need it most, who said it is a problem for the Jewish state to not be seen, to not be a moral state. That it is a problem geopolitically, and it is a problem spiritually because for Jewish-Americans — and I am one — Israel isn’t simply a question of politics, it is the Jewish state. So what does what Israel is say about Judaism? What does Judaism say about it?
This has been an almost exquisitely uncomfortable space. To believe Israel had become something indefensible on 10/6. To know that it needed defenders on 10/7, to know that antisemitism is real and every century seems to have its era of butchering the Jews. To believe deeply that Jewishness is about how we treat the stranger, is defined by the lessons of exile, and to see the Jewish state inflicting exile on so many. To value all lives and see so many of our one-time allies devaluing our own.
Throughout these last few months, I’ve been extremely moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s IKAR synagogue. She has a book coming out called “The Amen Effect,” which you can and you should pre-order. I’ve read some of it.
But I got to know her through these sermons, which did something very few people have been able to do, at least for me, which is to find a prophetic voice rooted in the Jewish tradition that can hold this complexity, these questions of Israel, both in critique and defense, of Jewishness, of liberalism, of antisemitism, of identity. And so I asked her to come on the show to try to talk through topics. And to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable talking about it all. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
The interview is here. She is a truly remarkable person and I highly recommend you listen to the whole thing at the following:
Kevin Drum wrote a post that reminded me that I need to avoid social media right now like the plague — and should probably ignore stories about social media too. His very wise post about a story I posted yesterday is much more reasoned than mine was.
Here’s the latest trend story from the New York Times. It’s about—God help us—”TikTok economics”:
"Look at economic data, and you’d think that young voters would be riding high right now…"
"Look at TikTok, and you get a very different impression…"
"Social media reflects — and is potentially fueling — a deep-seated angst about the economy." https://t.co/ZtC3UTxJNp
This is the most tiresome thing ever. When are newspapers going to learn the obvious: social media doesn’t represent anything in the real world? I mean, how likely are you to post a TikTok about how your life is fine and everything is pretty good?
Not very. That’s just the nature of H. sapiens, who love to performatively gripe and complain a lot more than we like to performatively say that things are OK. The way to account for this bias is to actually ask people how they feel. Then you’ll get equal responses from everyone. Let’s try it:
Compared to 2019, young people have jobs at the same rate; they’re satisfied with their jobs at the same rate; they’re earning a little bit more; they rate their financial situation about the same; and they’re probably about as happy now that they’re recovering from their pandemic blues.
As Kevin says, it appears that nothing much has actually changed despite the propensity of people on Tik Tok and Twitter to whine constantly about everything.
I have to remind myself of that. Social media, whether twitter, Facebook, youtube, threads, Blue Sky whatever, is not reality. There is no reason to put much stock in anything you see on there that isn’t actual documentary evidence. I still appreciate the video threads that some people are generous enough to put together but beyond that it’s really not that useful anymore.
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Michael Beschloss will be along presently.
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg to speak and consecrate battlefield four months after victory, today 1863: pic.twitter.com/aiT0qRMqkm
The anniversary brings to mind something related to Gettysburg that I wrote for Dirty Hippies in 2011, “The Future They Feared”:
We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.
As I am standing in line to pay my tab, a African-American man in his forties slides into an occupied booth next to the register and sits opposite an older white man. They share a brief exchange about how his shift went. Two smiling, white waitresses come over to take his order and start a friendly argument over how he likes his toast. He is a regular.
“Toast, not grits?” remarks the older white man.
“It’s Filmore,” smiles one of the waitresses to the cook. “Burn it. He likes it burnt.”
“Dark, not burnt,” Filmore insists.
This is Virginia — the capitol of the Old South. Black man. Restaurant. Sharing a table with a white man. White women competing over who will wait on him.
It occurs to me that the prospect of the very everydayness of such a scene horrified many Virginians and others across America 50 years ago.
Some people need an “other” to fear or they don’t know who they they are themselves. It’s not just generational. It is a personality type. Many of the same types today fear poor people, gays, Muslims and Mexicans.
We are on our way to see the Gettysburg battlefield where two American armies slaughtered each other, where the Army of Northern Virginia lost its war over the right to deny rights to an entire class of “others,” and to hang onto a people’s irrational fear of the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.
Today add to the list of irrational fears transgender people, grooming, drag shows, and black history. In 50 years, should we survive the next few, no one will bat an eye.
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Working on it. Hope you are. The work is never finished.
Late Update: Heather Cox Richardson has more on the events of the day.
It’s heartening to see people who still believe in public service as a vocation. A neighbor spent his career in international development. My state representative served first in the Peace Corps. I recently met a couple who retired here after careers as Foreign Service officers.
Donald Trump calls Washington, D.C. a swamp and people eat it up in part because guys like George Santos and Bob Menendez give public service a bad name. (Even though there’s some “both sides” to that, political corruption and faithlessness does seem to have a right-wing bias.)
Yet some people still believe. They’re not the ones who become notorious in the press.
On #WorldParkinsonsDay, I'm here to share that I've been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.
I'm doing well, and I want to bring about as much good from this diagnosis as I can—including here in Congress. pic.twitter.com/bvEwzZQbqp
CBS this morning profiles Virginia congresswoman Jennifer Wexton (D). Wexton comes from a family of public servants. She’s afflicted with a rare disease, yet forgoes some speech and physical therapy to keep serving her consituents:
Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy, as Wexton said, has no cure. At this time, there is no treatment that will slow its progression, and it tends not to respond to medication, according to the National Institutes of Health. It often worsens rapidly, and most patients “develop severe disability within three to five years of symptom onset.” It affects movement — loss of balance is a common symptom — and causes slurred speech. Vision problems often develop as the disease progresses, too.
Wexton described exhaustion, missed therapy appointments and lost sleep as the effects of the recent relentless House schedule. The narrowest of margins between the parties meant she needed to be present on Capitol Hill for the dozens of votes and debates.
Her fatigue was so severe that she suspects it contributed to a painful fall at her home in Virginia four weeks ago. It was the fall that injured her neck and continues to cause her pain.
“It’s just so hard for me now,” Wexton told CBS News. Her voice and her ability to speak have been impaired by her medical condition, and her fatigue has grown.
“Fatigue absolutely does have an impact,” she said during an extended interview. “The most important thing you can do is get sleep.”
She teared up several times as she echoed the message she sent to constituents in a written statement earlier this year: “I’m heartbroken to have to give up something I have loved after so many years of serving my community.”
“I’ve been worse since September. It’s been tiring. It’s been really hard being here for the ten weeks,” she said. “It’s awful.”
Wexton will leave the office she’s held since 2019 after sge defeated incumbent Republican Barbara Comstock.
“There is no ‘getting better’ with PSP,” Wexton told the press in September. She was dignosed in April. “People with progressive supranuclear palsy typically die six to nine years after their diagnosis,” reports the Cleveland Clinic. Plus, “People with PSP also have a higher risk of falls, which can result in bone fractures and head traumas. Falls that cause serious injuries are a common cause of death among people with PSP.”
Note: This coming Wednesday marks 60 years since the JFK assassination, so I am re-posting this piece (from November 23, 2019) with revisionsand additional material. -D.H.
“Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. […]
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. […]
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth […] But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
– President John F. Kennedy, from his Robert Frost tribute address (October 23, 1963)
“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” has been a meme for anyone old enough to remember what happened that day in Dallas on November 22, 1963…56 years ago this past Friday.
I was but a wee military brat, attending my second-grade class at a public school in Columbus, Ohio (my dad was stationed at nearby Fort Hayes). Our class was herded into the gym for an all-school assembly. Someone (probably the principal) gave a brief address. It gets fuzzy from there; we either sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” or recited the Pledge of Allegiance (or we possibly did both), and were sent home early.
My 7-year-old mind could not grasp the profound sociopolitical impact of this tragedy; naturally I have come to understand it in the fullness of time. From my 2016 review of Jackie:
Understandably, the question of “why now?” could arise, to which I would reply (paraphrasing JFK) …why not? To be sure, Jacqueline Kennedy’s story has been well-covered in a myriad of documentaries and feature films; like The Beatles, there are very few (if any) mysteries about her life and legacy to uncover at this point. And not to mention that horrible, horrible day in Dallas…do we really need to pay $15 just to see the nightmare reenacted for the umpteenth time? (Spoiler alert: the President dies at the end).
I think that “we” do need to see this film, even if we know going in that there was no “happy ever-aftering” in this Camelot. It reminds us of a “brief, shining moment” when all seemed possible, opportunities were limitless, and everything was going to be all right, because Jack was our king and Jackie was our queen. So what if it was all kabuki, as the film implies; merely a dream, invented by “a great, tragic actress” to unite us in our sadness. Then it was a good dream, and I think we’ll find our Camelot again…someday.
They will run you dizzy. They will pile falsehood on top of falsehood, until you can’t tell a lie from the truth – and you won’t even want to. That’s how the powerful keep their power. Don’t you read the papers?
– From Winter Kills (screenplay by William Richert)
The Kennedy assassination precipitated a cottage industry of independent studies, papers, magazine articles, non-fiction books, novels, documentaries and feature films that riff on the plethora of conspiracy theories that flourish to this day.
Then there was that Warren Commission report released in 1964; an 888-page summation concluding JFK’s alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. This “conclusive” statement, of course only fueled more speculation that our government was not being completely …forthcoming.
2019 marks the 40th anniversary of one of the more oddball conspiracy thrillers based on the JFK assassination…Winter Kills, which has just been reissued on Blu-ray by Kino-Lorber. Director William Richert adapted his screenplay from Richard Condon’s book (Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, which was adapted for the screen twice).
Jeff Bridges stars as the (apolitical) half-brother of an assassinated president. After witnessing the deathbed confession of a man claiming to be a “second gunman”, he reluctantly gets drawn into a new investigation of his brother’s murder nearly 20 years after the matter was allegedly put to rest by the findings of the “Pickering Commission”.
John Huston chews the scenery as Bridges’ father (a larger-than-life character said to be loosely based on Joseph Kennedy Sr.). The cast includes Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The film vacillates between byzantine conspiracy thriller and a broad satire of other byzantine conspiracy thrillers–but is eminently watchable, thanks to an interesting cast and a screenplay that, despite ominous undercurrents, delivers a great deal of dark comedy.
I own the 2003 Anchor Bay DVD, so I can attest that Kino’s 4K transfer is an upgrade; accentuating cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s exemplary lens work. Unfortunately, there are no new extras; but all bonus materials from Anchor Bay’s DVD have been ported over, including an entertaining commentary track by director Richert (the story behind the film’s production is nearly as over-the-top as the finished product).
Is Winter Kills essential viewing? It depends. If you like quirky 60s and 70s cinema, it’s one of the last hurrahs in a film cycle of arch, lightly political and broadly satirical all-star psychedelic train wrecks like The Loved One, The President’s Analyst, Skidoo,Candy and The Magic Christian. For “conspiracy-a-go-go” completists, it is a must-see.
Here are 9 more films that either deal directly with or have a notable link with the JFK conspiracy cult. And while you’re watching, keep President Kennedy’s observation in the back of your mind: “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
Suddenly – Lewis Allen’s taut 1954 hostage drama/film noir stars a surprisingly effective Frank Sinatra as John Baron, the cold-blooded leader of a three-man hit team who are hired to assassinate the (unnamed) President during a scheduled whistle-stop at a sleepy California town (interestingly, the role of John Baron was originally offered to Montgomery Clift).
The film is essentially a chamber piece; the assassins commandeer a family’s home that affords them a clear shot at their intended target. In this case, the shooter’s motives are financial, not political (“Don’t give me that politics jazz-it’s not my racket!” Sinatra snarls after he’s accused of being “an enemy agent” by one of his hostages). Richard Sale’s script also drops in a perfunctory nod or two to the then-contemporaneous McCarthy era (one hostage speculates that the hit men are “commies”).
Also in the cast: Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, Christopher Dark, and Paul Frees (Frees would later become known as “the man of a thousand voices” for his voice-over work with Disney, Jay Ward Productions, Rankin/Bass and other animation studios).
Some aspects of the film are eerily prescient of President Kennedy’s assassination 9 years later; Sinatra’s character is an ex-military sharpshooter, zeroes down on his target from a high window, and utilizes a rifle of a European make. Most significantly, there have been more than a few claims over the years in JFK conspiracy circles suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this film with a keen interest.
There have been conflicting stories over the years whether Sinatra had Suddenly pulled from circulation following Kennedy’s death; the definitive answer may lie in remarks made by Frank Sinatra, Jr., in a commentary track he did for a 2012 Blu-ray reissue of the film:
[Approximately 2 weeks] after the assassination of President Kennedy, a minor network official at ABC television decided he was going to run Suddenly on network television. This, while the people were still grieving and numbed from the horror of the death of President Kennedy. When word of this reached Sinatra, he was absolutely incensed…one of the very few times had I ever seen him that angry. He got off a letter to the head of broadcasting at ABC, telling them that they should be jailed; it was in such bad taste to do that after the death of President Kennedy.
Sinatra, Jr. does not elaborate any further, so I interpret that to mean that Frank, Sr. fired off an angry letter, and the fact that the film remains in circulation to this day would indicate that it was never actually “pulled” (of course, you are free to concoct your own conspiracy theory).
The Manchurian Candidate – There’s certainly more than just a perfunctory nod to Red hysteria in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war paranoia fest, which was the last assassination thriller of note released prior to the zeitgeist-shattering horror of President Kennedy’s murder. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra was involved in this project as well.
Sinatra plays a Korean War vet who reaches out to help a buddy he served with (Laurence Harvey). Harvey is on the verge of a meltdown, triggered by recurring war nightmares. Sinatra has been suffering the same malady (both men had been held as POWs by the North Koreans). Once it dawns on Sinatra that they both may have been brainwashed during their captivity for very sinister purposes, all hell breaks loose.
In this narrative (based on Richard Condon’s novel) the assassin is posited as an unwitting dupe of a decidedly “un-American” political ideology; a domestic terrorist programmed by his Communist puppet masters to kill on command. Some of the Cold War references have dated; others (as it turns out) are oddly timely…evidenced as recently as this past week.
Seven Days in May – This 1964 “conspiracy a-go go” thriller was director John Frankenheimer’s follow-up to The Manchurian Candidate. Picture if you will: a screenplay by Rod Serling, adapted from a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
Kirk Douglas plays a Marine colonel who is the adjutant to a hawkish, hard right-leaning general (Burt Lancaster) who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general is at loggerheads with the dovish President (Fredric March), who is perceived by the general and some of the other joint chiefs as a “weak sister” for his strident support of nuclear disarmament.
When Douglas begins to suspect that an imminent, unusually secretive military “exercise” may in fact portend more sinister intentions, he is torn between his loyalty to the general and his loyalty to the country as to whether he should raise the alarm. Or is he just being paranoid?
An intelligently scripted and well-acted nail-biter, right to the end. Also with Ava Gardner, Edmund O’Brien, and Martin Balsam.
Executive Action – After the events of November 22, 1963, Hollywood took a decade-long hiatus from the genre; it seemed nobody wanted to “go there”. But after Americans had mulled a few years in the sociopolitical turbulence of the mid-to-late 1960s (including the double whammy of losing Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to bullets in 1968), a new cycle of more cynical and byzantine conspiracy thrillers began to crop up (surely exacerbated by Watergate).
The most significant shift in the meme was to move away from the concept of the assassin as a dupe or an operative of a “foreign” (i.e., “anti-American”) ideology; some films postulated that shadowy cabals of businessmen and/or members of the government were capable of such machinations. The rise of the JFK conspiracy cult (and the cottage industry it created) was probably a factor as well.
One of the earliest examples was this 1973 film, directed by David Miller, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. Dalton Trumbo (famously blacklisted back in the 50s) adapted the screenplay from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane.
A speculative thriller about the JFK assassination, it offers a scenario that a consortium comprised of hard right pols, powerful businessmen and disgruntled members of the clandestine community were responsible.
Frankly, the premise is more intriguing than the film (which is flat and talky), but the filmmakers deserve credit for being the first ones to “go there”. The film was a flop at the time, but has become a cult item; as such, it is more of a curio than a classic. Still, it’s worth a watch.
The Parallax View – Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller takes the concept of the dark corporate cabal one step further, positing political assassination as a sustainable capitalist venture, if you can perfect a discreet and reliable algorithm for screening and recruiting the right “employees”.
Warren Beatty delivers an excellent performance as a maverick print journalist investigating a suspicious string of untimely demises that befall witnesses to a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop the Space Needle. This puts him on a trail that leads to an enigmatic agency called the Parallax Corporation.
The supporting cast includes Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. Nice work by cinematographer Gordon Willis (aka “the prince of darkness”), who sustains the foreboding, claustrophobic mood of the piece with his masterful use of light and shadow.
The screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with a non-credited rewrite by Robert Towne). The narrative contains obvious allusions to the JFK assassination, and (in retrospect) reflects the political paranoia of the Nixon era (perhaps this was serendipity, as the full implications of the Watergate scandal were not yet in the rear view mirror while the film was in production).
The Conversation – Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this 1974 thriller does not involve a “political” assassination, but does share crucial themes with other films here. It was also an obvious influence on Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out (see my review below).
Gene Hackman leads a fine cast as a free-lance surveillance expert who begins to obsess that a conversation he captured between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s Union Square for one of his clients is going to directly lead to the untimely deaths of his subjects.
Although the story is essentially an intimate character study, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue, the dark atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal that permeates the film mirrors the political climate of the era (particularly in regards to its timely proximity to the breaking of the Watergate scandal).
24 years later, Hackman played a similar character in Tony Scott’s 1998 political thriller Enemy of the State. Some have postulated “he” is the same character (you’ve gotta love the fact that there’s a conspiracy theory about a fictional character). I don’t see that myself; although there is obvious homage with a brief shot of a photograph of Hackman’s character in his younger days that is actually a production still from …The Conversation!
Blowout -This 1981 thriller is one of Brian De Palma’s finest efforts. John Travolta stars as a sound man who works on schlocky horror films. While making a field recording of ambient nature sounds, he unexpectedly captures audio of a fatal car crash involving a political candidate, which may not have been an “accident”. The proof lies buried somewhere in his recording-which naturally becomes a coveted item by some dubious characters. His life begins to unravel synchronously with the secrets on his tape.
The director employs an arsenal of influences (from Antonioni to Hitchcock), but succeeds in making this one of his most “De Palma-esque” with some of the deftest set-pieces he’s ever done (particularly in the climax).
Three Days of the Condor – One of seven collaborations between star Robert Redford and director Sydney Pollack, and one of the seminal “conspiracy-a-go-go” films. With a screenplay adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel from James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor”, this 1975 film offers a twist on the idea of a government-sanctioned assassination.
Here, you have members of the U.S. clandestine community burning up your tax dollars to scheme against other members of the U.S. clandestine community (no honor among conspirators, apparently). Also with Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow.
Pollack’s film conveys the same atmosphere of dread and paranoia that infuses The Conversation and The Parallax View. The final scene plays like an eerily prescient prologue for All the President’s Men, which wasn’t released until the following year. An absolutely first-rate political thriller with more twists and turns than you can shake a dossier at.
JFK – The obvious bookend to this cycle is Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film, in which Gary Oldman gives a suitably twitchy performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, within the context of Stone’s film, to say that we have a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin (or “assassins”, plural) is difficult, because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone.
The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any prevalent narrative; and that it is by the director’s definition a “speculative” political thriller. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed that Stone himself has stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission (usually referred to as the “lone gunman theory”).
Stone’s narrative is so seamless and dynamic, many viewers didn’t get that he was mashing up at least a dozen *possible* scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when “Mr. X” (Donald Sutherland) advises New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), “Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
JICYMI-This recent episode of “The Commonwealth Club” features Mark Shaw, best-selling author of 6 books related to the Kennedy assassination, reflecting on the 60th anniversaryof the tragedy:
