#fintan o'toole

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

There is no better analysis of Trump's motivation than Fintan O’Toole’s essay in The New York Review of Books, The Ultimate Deal:

"Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that."

Another thought: Trump also collects trophies. Clearly, he considered these documents to be trophies of his inside information and status level.

Trump collected two things throughout his life: bargaining chips and status symbols (trophies). Status symbols are worthless without display. Thus, Trump displayed them on occasion to people without clearance. We know of a few. I bet there were many more.

These documents were status symbols and bargaining chips and potential get-out-of-financial-ruin cards...if sold to the highest bidder. The fact that an alarming rate of intelligence agents were killed or exposed in 2021 combined with the Saudi 2 billion dollar investment into Jared Kushner post Trump presidency ties motive together. Trump runs a shell game, constantly distracting the public while he commits treason for personal gain.

#Fintan O'Toole #The Ultimate Deal #selling us out #trophies #my boxes #status symbols #shell game #TFG #secrets #currency #money #transactional thinking #the highest bidder

[jonathanjudge]

#fintan o'toole #ireland

[nickjb]

"It is indeed true that no other democracy would dream of staging a ritual like the coronation, in which the people are declared to be loyal to the head of state rather than the other way round – and in which they get to pay for a billionaire’s extravagant celebration of his own godly humility.

But the fact that nobody else would dream of doing it is turned, in the monarchist mindset, into a point of pride. It betokens the ultimate in exceptionalism: the idea of British uniqueness. It is not just that the British are the only people who would do something like this coronation – it is that they are the only ones who could do it so perfectly.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, whatever one might think of the British, they put on a damn good royal show. Charles’s coronation is widely touted as merely the latest iteration of an ancient spectacle that has been so perfected over a thousand years that it is now bred in the bone of Britishness.

But this is bogus. The idea of the English as the masters of royal ceremony is, historically speaking, a very recent invention.

In 1860, for example, Lord Robert Cecil, a leading member of the English aristocracy, wrote in exasperation that “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial” but that his own was assuredly not one of them.

“We can afford to be more splendid than most nations; but some malignant spell broods over all our most solemn ceremonials, and inserts into them some feature which makes them all ridiculous ... Something always breaks down, somebody contrives to escape doing his part, or some bye-motive is suffered to interfere and ruin it all.”

As the historian David Cannadine has shown, the British, even at the height of empire in the 19th century, often complained of the “ineptly performed ritual” of their royal occasions. It was not until the period after the end of the first World War that they persuaded themselves that they were uniquely good at it.

The British could afford to be inept at royal spectacles in the 19th century because the monarchy was still a real power within Britain, and Britain was still the leading power in the world. The theatre of sovereignty and supremacy is not so important when you have the stuff itself. As Cannadine puts it, “The certainty of power and the assured confidence of success meant that there was no need to show off.”

The notion that Britain should develop royal ceremonial as its unique selling point depended, paradoxically, on the collapse of monarchy as the norm of European governance. The British could claim it as “something which was uniquely ours” precisely because they now had a monopoly on imperial coronations in Europe.

The older firms that used to be the exemplars of royal ritual – the Romanovs of Russia, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany – had gone out of business. (The Scandinavian monarchies of Denmark, Sweden and Norway had all scrapped elaborate ceremonial coronations as silly anachronisms by 1906.)

This implied, rather alarmingly, that God (supposedly the source of royal authority everywhere) had gone a bit iffy on the whole business of monarchy. He hadn’t done much for the British royal family’s deposed or murdered cousins.

But according to the inverse logic, the idea of a sacred ritual (all that anointing with oil blessed in Jerusalem) had to be played up even more because sacral kingship as a real thing was disappearing."

#coronation #chuckles the king #fintan o'toole

[redshift-13]

An excellent essay on the Irish experience of banning abortion.

...

#abortion #ireland #catholicism #christianity #fintan o'toole #new york review of books

[rogerclarkaudiobooks]

"Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger"

Author: Fintan O'Toole Narrator: Roger Clark Audiobook Release Date: August 10, 2010 Length: 7 hours, 46 minutes

Listen to a sample of this audiobook! 👇

Publisher's Summary:

Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalization. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world's largest exporter of software and manufactured the world's supply of Viagra. The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous - progressive social change, solidarity, major state investment in education, and the critical role of the EU - were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free-market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger. This is, as Fintan O'Toole writes, "a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess". It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history. ©2010 Fintan O'Toole (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Ship of Fools audiobook is available from: Apple Books ✰ Audible ✰ Audiobooks.com ✰ AudiobooksNow.com ✰ AudiobookStore.com ✰ Barnes & Noble ✰ Binge Books ✰ Chirp Books ✰ Everand ✰ Downpour ✰ Google Play ✰ Hoopla ✰ Libro.fm ✰ Overdrive + Libby ✰ Rakuten Kobo ✰

TIP: If you want to find more audiobooks from Roger, you can click on the "Roger's Audiobooks" tag, or you can also check out my pinned post 😉 Happy Listening!

#roger clark #roger's audiobooks #roger clark audiobooks #fintan o'toole

[therogerclarkfanclub]

"Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger"

Author: Fintan O'Toole Narrator: Roger Clark Release Date: August 10, 2010 Length: 7 hours, 43 minutes

👇Care to listen to a sample of this audiobook? Click on the media player below 👇

Overview:

"Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalization. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world's largest exporter of software and manufactured the world's supply of Viagra. The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous - progressive social change, solidarity, major state investment in education, and the critical role of the EU - were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free-market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger. This is, as Fintan O'Toole writes, "a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess". It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history."

Ship of Fools is available in audiobook format from Audible only. Ebook version is available from Google Play and Barnes & Noble. Hardcover edition available on B&N also.

TIP: If you want to find more audiobooks from Roger, you can click on the "Roger's Audiobooks" tag or in the search bar type Roger Clark Audiobooks. You can also check out my pinned post 😉. Happy Listening!

#roger clark #roger's audiobooks #fintan o'toole #ireland #economics #political science #world history

[beardedmrbean]

I bet the last thing Bernie Sanders expected upon his arrival in Ireland and Britain was to be met by angry protesters—to find himself heckled and damned as a sellout by the kind of radicals who would have been shouting his praises just six months ago. And yet that is what happened: Some of Britain's Bernie Bros have morphed into Bernie bashers.

Why? Because he refuses to describe Israel's war on Hamas as a "genocide" and he doesn't approve of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.

Quick—cast him out. Unperson him. He has ventured outside the parameters of acceptable Left-wing thought and must be punished.

It all kicked off in Dublin. Senator Sanders, who is on these isles to promote his book, Why It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, was speaking at University College Dublin. A group of pro-Palestine protesters assembled at the entrance to the venue, all wearing the uniform of the virtuous: a keffiyeh. "It's OK to be angry about capitalism, what about Zionism?" they chanted.

It got heated inside, too. Sanders was interrupted by audience members. "Resistance is an obligation in the face of occupation!" one shouted. "Occupation is terrorism!" yelled another.

Sanders kept his cool with his reply: "Good slogan, but slogans are not solutions," he said.

It continued at Trinity College the next day. Sanders was in conversation with the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. Outside, a small but noisy gaggle of anti-Israel agitators displayed a banner that said: "Boycott Apartheid Israel."

"Free Palestine!" they chanted. (Deliciously, a woman who was queuing for the Sanders event bellowed "from Hamas!" every time they said it.)

Again, Sanders was heckled by hotheads. "Ceasefire now!" they shouted. At one point, in the words of Trinity News, Sanders "threw up his right arm in frustration and looked at O'Toole, as if to ask him what would be done."

It is little wonder he felt frustrated. Sanders was there to talk about capitalism, yet angry youths kept badgering him about Zionism. He is used to a fawning response from Socialist twentysomethings, and yet now some were effectively accusing him of being complicit in a "genocide." It's quite the downfall for one of the West's best-known leftists.

The turn on Bernie is underpinned by a belief that he is too soft on Israel. The radical Left will never forgive him for initially supporting Israel's war on Hamas. Even his more recent position—he now says there should be a ceasefire—is not good enough for these people, who seem to measure an individual's moral worth by how much he hates the Jewish State.

They want Bernie to say the G-word. They want him to damn Israel as uniquely barbarous. They want him to agree with them that it is right and proper to single Israel out for boycotts and sanctions.

In short, they want him to fall into line. They want him to bend the knee to their Israelophobic ideology.

These illiberal demands on Bernie to bow down to correct-think continued when he arrived in the U.K. A group of communists protested against him in Liverpool. Normally, Sanders would have been shown only love in a historically radical city like Liverpool, said the Liverpool Echo, but this time, "the atmosphere was different," for one simple reason: "his refusal to brand Israel's actions in Gaza as 'genocide'."

Sanders' resistance of the G-word haunted him in his media interviews, too. Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, a key outlet of Britain's bourgeois Left, asked him three times if he would call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide." He refused and it went viral. Armies of ersrtwhile Bernie fans damned him as a "genocide denier."

There is something quite nauseating in this spectacle of an elderly Jewish man being pressured to denounce the world's only Jewish State as genocidal. Millennial Gentiles who want to trend online might be happy to throw around the G-word. But Senator Sanders, who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a deeper moral and historical understanding of what genocide is. And it seems he is not willing to sacrifice that understanding at the altar of retweets or an easy ride.

Good for him.

Sanders' father was born in Poland, where most of his family were exterminated by the Nazis. Sanders is a son of the Shoah, a descendant of survivors of the greatest crime in history. To subject him to the modern equivalent of a showtrial in which you demand that he scream "Genocide!" at Israel feels unconscionable. As does branding him a "genocide denier."

Why won't he call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide"? Maybe, says a writer for the Jewish Chronicle, it's because he lost so much of his family to Hitler's gas chambers and therefore he "knows what a genocide is, what a war crime is." He knows that while the war in Gaza, a war started by Hamas, is "horrible," to use his word, it cannot in any way be compared to the Nazis' conscious efforts to vaporize an entire ethnic group.

There has been a Inquisition vibe to some of the Bernie-bashing in Britain. At times it has felt cruel. The sight of fashionable, privileged Israel-bashers haranguing a man who will have heard stories from his own father about the genocidal mania of the Nazis has come across like Jew-taunting rather than political critique.

More broadly, this unseemly episode gives us a glimpse into the authoritarian impulses behind the Left's obsessive opposition to Israel. Israelophobia, it seems, is less a rational political stance than a borderline religious conviction. There are true believers, who dutifully repeat the G-word like a mantra, and sinful outliers, who refuse to treat Israel as uniquely "problematic."

One's moral fitness for radical society is increasingly judged by one's willingness to treat Israel as the most wicked nation in existence. The dangers of making hostility to the Jewish State a requirement of being a Good Leftist should be clear to everyone.

Sanders is wise to resist this tyrannical zeitgeist, and to say what he believes rather than what he believes will be popular.

Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

#nunyas news

[larkandkatydid]

Both Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves and David Treuer's Heartbeat of Wounded Knee both have this absolute unfiltered contempt for liberation movements that themselves oppress and sexually assault women. And I think they are able to do this because they are men and because that is not actually the official topic of either of their books, but I appreciate it so much.

Treuer really focuses on the murder of Anna Mae Aquash and what it reveals of the sexual exploitation of women by AIM leadership. For O'Toole it's a constant thrumming hatred and contempt for the idea that the Irish were liberated so they could torture Irish women with impunity. Love them both and miss this kind of passion when I read other books that don't have it.

[somerabbitholes]

hello! it's been a while since you've posted any essay collection 👀 would you be willing to share your favourites of this year with us?

yes! here you go —

Disunited Kingdom by Fintan O'Toole

South Asia's place in contemporary climate fiction by Evan Tims

What's the matter with men? by Idrees Kahloon (archived)

Power to the Caribbean people by V. S. Naipaul (archived)

Can Russia ever be democratic? by Kyle Orton

Death by Design by Daniel Callcut

Joshimath: once upon a town by Rahul Pandita

Exposed by Sadie Levy Gale

In the Shifting Embrace of the Ganga by Arati Kumar-Rao

(Less essay, more interview) Matty Healy by Alexis Petridis

The Roots of Global South's New Resentment by Mark Suzman

How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis by Alex Palmer (archived)

This review of Oppenheimer by Richard Brody of the New Yorker (archived)

India's new growing elite by Shekhar Gupta

There are definitely more I'm forgetting and which I will try to excavate!

#anonymous #answered #essays #reading #recs #reading list

[lambergeier]

2023 bookpost 🥳🥳🥳

43 books read this year! about 2/3rds of last year's number, but i fell off pace in summer and for the last two months and never actually have a target or care about my pace anyways, so 43 is a good solid number imho. as last year, full list with light commentary below, recs are bolded:

JANUARY

Neuromancer by William Gibson

The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation by Miriam Pawel (i am punished for my desire to learn more about the two governors brown's effects on the state of california with: family hagiography. should have known tbh)

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (SOOOOOO GOOD. apocalyptic/religious horror in 1350's france during the black plauge. for fans of the terror, and fans of people who are in love but for whom the love won't alwayshelp!)

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (hilary ilu u were one of the greatest novelists of the past hundred years it was an honor to be alive at the same time as you. this could have been 200 pages shorter. ilu tho)

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamas O’Reilly (short, sweet childhood memoir of the irish writer/comedian who, famously, tweeted that story about meeting the president of ireland on ketamine.)

FEBRUARY

Either/Or by Elif Bautman (girls can i tell you. i didn't realize this was a sequel until like 100 pages into the book. that was on me.)

Two Doctors Gorski by Isaac Fellman (ah mr fellman. lol)

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (really cool piece of fiction, first half told from the collective viewpoint of a group of regulars at a public swimming pool, second half about the one specific swimmer who's losing her independence to dementia. short, packs a punch)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (UNDEFEATED!)

One Man’s Terrorist: a Political History of the IRA by Peter Finn

Nightcrawlers by Leila Mottley (love to see local 22yos succeed wildly. does NOT mean this book was good god bless)

MARCH

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (to be clear, if you are not a cormac mccarthy fan, these books will not make you his fan. they are very much about this man's incredible hopelessness regarding a world that has invented and used the atomic bomb. what can be redeemed, etc etc. i loved them, despite a major part of the plot being consensual sibling incest, they were beautiful and phenomenal, they were not light reading)

APRIL

A Smile in his Lifetime by Joseph Hansen

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (cannot recommend the audiobook highly enough. emma read the paper copy to catch up to where i was in the audiobook so we could listen together on a car trip, and she agreesTM that the audiobook is the way to go)

MAY

Barbarian Days by William Finnegan

The Dark Lord of Derkholm by Dianna Wynne Jones

JUNE

We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (really really really cool nonfiction about ireland since the 1950s, part autobiography, more parts cultural history of a very quickly changing nation. fascinating to read this within 12 months of finn's one man's terrorist, which was a very leftist history of the IRA, and keefe's say nothing, which was an only very slightly leftist history of the IRA that was most interested in like, how compelling the history is (not a drag on it). o'toole not as big on the IRA as the other two! understandable!)

JULY

The Binding by Bridget Collins

The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander (for all fans of the history of the story of the illiad!!! short and passionate!)

Flux by Jinwoo Chong (solid new debut scifi - who thought it could still happen!)

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

The Witch King by Martha Wells (this book sucked ass!!! have mentioned this several times already this year!!!)

An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien (some things about this book were fun, many were infuriating, absolute worst had to be the insistence that in the future: therapy would solve even more problems that it does today :))

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (see my beautiful wife's post on the subject)

Stay True by Hua Hsu (beautiful, deserves the pulitzer, not 100% my thing but still very good)

AUGUST

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (the voice was hard to get used to for the first 50 pages, but i ended up really liking this tbh. i've never read copperfield, so not sure if that improved the experience)

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

The Boys by Katie Hafner (a mistake to read this, but at least the twist was funny! there wasn't anything else in the book, but only a partial waste of time at the end)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (finally read this, which has truly polarized my extended social circle, but i ended up liking it. i didn't always get what it was doing 100% of the time, and didn't so much feel compelled to find out, but i tore through it and will always be a sucker for a story about that doesn't fix you but does keep you alive. can see both sides of this debate)

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal (we have to kill every sackler. solid history of the epidemic. EVERY sackler.)

SEPTEMBER

The Season by Kristen Richardson (half-baked history of the debutante social ritual. but, not like there's many other histories of the subject!)

All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (funny, contained extensive dirtbag lesbian behaviors, but lacked some heft at the end)

In Memoriam by Alice Winn (do you s2b2? do you want some solid, tome-like origfic? do you want all of those things and also siegfried sassoon rpf? well great news!)

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (pleaseeeeeee tell me if you have read this or do read this it was SOOOOOO GOOD and i had NEVER heard of this guy before!!! fantastically written prose, everything builds with infinite dread to a single horrible punchline, i am still wowed thinking about it)

The Trees by Percival Everett (haha hey wanna get fucked up. dark dark dark comedy)

OCTOBER

Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale (really enjoyable if slightly overlong romance novel that i got off a rec list for historical romances with disabled love interests. does a really good interesting job of giving the love interest full breadth and agency despite severe processing impairment following a stroke)

Mobility by Linda Kiesling

The Rachel Incident by Rachel O’Donahughe

NOVEMBER

NO BOOK NOVEMBER MFS

DECEMBER

Not Even the Dead by Juan Gómez Bárcena (would also like to know if anyone else has read this so we can try and figure out what the fuck was going on right at the end!! also the fact that this is primarily about mexican history, written by a spaniard, with the specter of the US very prominent in the book is like. hm i would love to be able to read some mexican press reviews of this lol)

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan X. Ramsey (picked this up following the opioid book, which discussed but didn't go deep on how the country's reaction to the opioid epidemic was so vastly different from the crack epidemic. put a lot of stuff into context lmao.)

WAIT AT SOME POINT THIS YEAR I REREAD RUMO AND HIS MIRACULOUS ADVENTURES BY WALTER MOERS. I DON'T KNOW WHEN. DIDN'T WRITE IT DOWN. BUT I DID REREAD IT. 44 BOOKS. shout out to mr. moers for writing some extremely fucking creepy books for teenagers <3

okay i was gonna do more about like general trends and vibes of this year's books, also about the four books i am still reading rn lol, but i have been typing for soooooooooooo long so i'm just gonna reblog with more thots in the morning. stay prepared everyone

#book post

[lakecountylibrary]

Read -> Reading -> To-Read

Here's what's been in Beth's TBR pile lately!

✅ Just Finished:

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods

This magical novel is a love letter to books, readers, authors, libraries and bookshops. Traveling between 1922 and a modern timeline, Woods captivates the reader by weaving magic with reality. She builds extremely strong, passionate and complex women in Opaline, Martha and Madame Bowden while keeping in line with the events evolving around them. Small but special appearances by James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway will delight readers, as will locations in France, England and Ireland.

Last Call at the Local by Sarah Grunder Ruiz

A charming rom-com, especially perfect for March (set in Cobh)! Raine and Jack's charisma and connection will have readers chuckling and cheering. Jack has OCD and runs the LOCAL pub. Raine has recently dropped out of medical school, copes with ADHD and travels the world playing music. Full of lovable characters, readers will breeze through this novel and feel full-hearted after.

♾️ Currently Listening: Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen

Perfect match for viewers of series Derry Girls. Maeve Murray and her friends work in the local factory as they await the results of their exams and what they hope will be the start of their new lives—away from their small town and The Troubles.

🔮 To Read: We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O'Toole

I'm looking forward to reading this author's viewpoints on growing up in a changing Ireland. The prelude indicates a promising journey through his experiences.

See more of Beth's recs

#the lost bookshop #evie woods #last call at the local #sarah grunder ruiz #irish literature #memoir #irish history #nonfiction #magical realism #historical fiction #light reading #tbr pile #book recommendations #read reading to-read #beth's recs #LCPL recs #book recs #books and reading #booklr #contemporary romance #Irish books #Irish reads #factory girls #michelle gallen #we don't know ourselves: a personal history of modern Ireland #fintan o'toole

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

If the ninety-eight-page indictment by Fani T. Willis, district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, of Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, and seventeen other people is ever made into a movie, it should be called The Framing of Ruby Freeman. Willis gives names to, and levels charges at, some of the people who appear anonymously in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump. She brings more characters into her cast of racketeers. But her plot follows the same contours. The methods used to try to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States in November 2020 are by now familiar: making claims of electoral fraud that were themselves knowingly fraudulent, leaning on election officials to “find” votes for Trump, creating fake electors, pressuring the vice president Mike Pence not to certify the results. What makes the Willis indictment different is that its story is not only a grand narrative of what Smith characterizes as an attempt to defraud the United States. It is also the tale of a frame-up, a grotesque travesty of justice in which the power of government was used to traduce and attempt to destroy an innocent and defenseless citizen.

As such, it tells us not just what Trump did to try to hold onto power, but also what he will do if he ever gets hold of it again. There are big constitutional, political, and policy matters at stake in his campaign to return to the White House. But the kind of authoritarian rule he is trying to establish always comes down in the end to what happens to small, inconvenient people, those who become what Freeman was called in the Trump campaign against her: “a loose end.” They are lied about, criminalized, terrorized, threatened, and smeared—not by private gangs but by a gangsterized government. These are the things that happened to Ruby Freeman. What is at stake in the Georgia indictment is whether those who inflicted these intimate cruelties can get away with it and, therefore, be free to do it again.

*

Shortly after the presidential election of November 2020 Kay Kirkpatrick, a Republican state senator in Georgia, passed a complaint of electoral fraud to the office of the secretary of state, her fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger. It included photographic stills from social media posts purportedly showing Freeman, a sixty-two-year-old woman who was working for $16 an hour as a temporary election worker, fraudulently tampering with the counting of votes in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. On December 10, 2020, Giuliani, as Willis puts it, “knowingly, willfully, and unlawfully” claimed that after counting had ended for the night surveillance video footage caught Freeman, her daughter Shaye Moss, and an unidentified man “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” to be used to “infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” (Why the Dominion systems had to be infiltrated surreptitiously when they were already, as the Trump campaign insisted, rigged is a detail Giuliani never explained.)

Kirkpatrick also passed on to Raffensperger’s office Instagram posts in which Freeman appeared to boast that she and her daughter “did something to change history and we will not be silent and allow evil to control this country,” and “Thank God my baby had a plan and today we put that plan in action after those Trump supporting [sic] and Fox News thought they won and left the building.” These posts seemed to prove not just that Freeman and Moss had conspired to corrupt the election count but that they were brazenly proud of their handiwork.

In responding this week to Willis’s indictment, Giuliani tweeted that it is “the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump.” That’s an interesting choice of words, consistent with the standard Trump tactic of naming one’s own crimes while projecting them onto others. For one of the most egregious aspects of the conspiracy to overturn the result of the election in Georgia is this attempt to stitch up Freeman and Moss for nonexistent crimes. Although Willis’s narrative of malfeasance ranges even more widely than Smith’s federal indictment, it also allows us to zoom in on the sheer cruelty of what Trump, Giuliani, and their gaggle of lawyers and operatives were willing to do to ordinary people who stood in their way. The damage to the American republic is the panoramic wide shot, but in this close-up, we can see a particular kind of ugliness with a specific American history: Black people being framed, and publicly punished, for other people’s crimes.

Following Kirkpatrick’s complaint, Raffensberger’s office opened a criminal investigation into Freeman and Moss. The potential charges they faced came under three headings: conspiracy to commit election fraud, fraud by poll officers, and the use of counterfeit ballots. Conviction on the second of these offenses alone could have resulted in Freeman and Moss going to prison for up to ten years. “Teams of investigators” from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the secretary of state’s office were employed to look into these alleged crimes. Two law-abiding Black women were potentially facing the loss of their liberty, reputations, and livelihoods.

The “evidence” against Freeman and Moss was entirely bogus. Counting of votes had not, as the Trump campaign alleged, stopped when the video was shot. The county election director had instructed Freeman, Moss, and other workers to retrieve ballots that had been packed away in anticipation of counting being suspended for the night and to take them to the scanners to be recorded. All of this was perfectly in order, and a subsequent hand count of votes showed that there were no discrepancies and that no fake ballots were scanned.

As for Freeman’s supposed Instagram posts, the criminal investigation found that a man whose name is redacted from its findings had created a phony account called @rubyfreeman_georgia. On December 4, a month after the election, this man (as he told the FBI) came across another account (also not Freeman’s) that had posted her fake “confession.” The name of this second account was then changed to @rubyfreeman_georgia. Subsequently, the first man “described his account as being a fake or parody account.” This sequence of events still seems somewhat murky (and Willis does not deal with it in her indictment) but there is no doubt that more than one person was involved in inventing and disseminating the Instagram “confession” that Kirkpatrick used as part of her complaint against Freeman and Moss and that helped to bolster Trump’s wider claims of a rigged election.

The report into the criminal investigation that cleared Freeman and Moss of any wrongdoing whatever was not completed until March 7, 2023, and not published until June 20. This means that the threat of imprisonment continued to hang over the two women for more than two years. In December 2020 and January 2021, they were relentlessly targeted as the devious criminals who had stolen Trump’s victory in Georgia. As Willis records, on December 10 Giuliani showed the edited version of the video to members of the Georgia house of representatives and directly named Freeman and Moss as the alleged fraudsters. On January 2, in a now infamous call to Raffensperger and other Georgia officials, Trump claimed that Freeman was “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” that “she stuffed the ballot boxes,” and that, in Willis’s words, “Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding at least 18,000 ballots” to Joe Biden.

Between them, Trump and Giuliani thus had Freeman engaged in four different kinds of vote-tampering: stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes; taking fraudulent ballots from “suitcases” she had hidden under tables; scanning the same ballots multiple times; and using USB flash drives to access and interfere with the electronic voting machines. The combination of these techniques would make Freeman not a low-level scammer but a criminal mastermind, able to conceive and implement a multidimensional plan to generate false Biden ballots, transport them in suitcases into the State Farm Arena, tamper with the scanning machines so that they would record the same ballots more than once, and somehow interfere with the software codes of the Dominion counting machines—and to do all this under the gaze of cameras, election officials, party monitors, and the media. While themselves trying to steal the election, Trump and Giuliani were trying to create for the American public an action movie in which they were battling heroically to save democracy from a female version of Lex Luthor or Keyser Söze.

*

Was it accidental that this arch-villain happened to be African American? Hardly. If the Trump campaign genuinely believed that something dodgy was being done at the counting center, the obvious person to target was the man who gave the instructions to continue the count: the elections director, Rick Barron. But Barron, a suave-looking white man, did not fit the casting requirements. (This did not subsequently save Barron from relentless harassment by Trump supporters because he honorably defended Freeman and Moss. He resigned in despair last year.) On the other hand, Giuliani’s choice of a lurid simile, in which Freeman and Moss were allegedly passing USB devices “as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine,” linked them to familiar tropes of Black drug dealers.

But the salience of race is even harder to miss in Willis’s explication of the alleged conspirators’ attempts to “turn” Freeman. The indictment sets out how the Trump team, having framed Freeman and her daughter, then offered to “help” her if she would do what they wanted. The plan was to “to harass Freeman, intimidate her, and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit.” An explicit part of the plan involved using Black members of Trump’s racket to offer her this deal.

One of the alleged conspirators, Stephen Lee, a white pastor who got involved in the attempts to get Freeman to “confess,” told Harrison Floyd, a leader of Black Voices for Trump, “that Freeman was afraid to talk to [Lee] because he was a white man.” Floyd then recruited a Black woman, Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Kanye West and R. Kelly and a self-identified member of “the Young Black Leadership Council under President Donald Trump,” to travel from Chicago to Freeman’s home in Georgia. Freeman, who had been understandably frightened by a barrage of online and personal threats, did not answer her door, but called a neighbor who spoke to Kutti. Kutti “falsely stated that she was a crisis manager attempting to ‘help’ Freeman before leaving Freeman’s home.” Later that day, Kutti called Freeman on the phone to tell her that she was “in danger.”  

Before agreeing to meet Kutti, Freeman called the police and, according to a Reuters report by Jason Szep and Linda So, told the dispatcher, “They’re saying that I need help, that it’s just a matter of time that they are going to come out for me and my family.” Freeman then agreed to meet with Kutti in the safety of a police station. The beginning of the encounter was captured on a police body camera, which recorded Kutti telling Freeman that it may be necessary to move her and members of her family from her home, and that “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Kutti, before putting Freeman on the phone with Floyd, describes him to her as a “Black progressive crisis manager.” Another piece of theater was being staged, one in which Kutti and Floyd acted out for Freeman the roles of concerned Black brothers and sisters.

The quid pro quo for this show of solidarity was that Freeman would sign a fraudulent and self-incriminating statement vindicating the allegations made against her by Trump and Giuliani. “If you don’t tell everything,” Freeman remembered Kutti insisting, “you’re going to jail.” As so often in this whole story, there is a bizarre circularity to the conspiracy: what Willis alleges here is a crime committed by trying to force Freeman to herself commit the crime of making false claims about a crime of electoral fraud she did not commit. But in all of this dizzyingly convoluted plotting, it is abundantly clear that the desired outcome for the Trump team was a spectacle familiar from totalitarian states: a repentant traitor confessing to her crimes against the great leader. The special American twist would be that the self-confessed vile conniver would be a Black woman who tried to bring down a president who had long played with white supremacist tropes. It was no accident that many of the pro-Trump attacks on Freeman and Moss on social media not only used racist epithets but explicitly called for them to be lynched: “YOU SHOULD BE HUNG OR SHOT FOR YOUR CRIMES.”

If there are any conservatives left in the United States, they owe it to themselves to read at least these parts of the indictment and to think carefully about what happened to Freeman and her daughter. Conservatives are supposed to distrust above all the overweening power of the state and its capacity to crush individuals, strip them of their rights and reputations, threaten their families, and break their wills. The plot against Freeman has elements of the Mafia behavior that Giuliani, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was so good at prosecuting. But this was much worse than a Mafia maneuver—it was a state operation. It was led by the sitting president. Of the nineteen people indicted by Willis, four were at the time holders of federal or state governmental offices: the president, his chief of staff (Mark Meadows), a senior official in the Justice Department (Jeffrey Clark), and the Coffee County elections supervisor (Misty Hampton). What is this if not Big Government at its most oppressive?

Had Freeman not found the inner resources of courage and dignity to resist the almost unbearable pressure heaped on her by the occupant of the White House, she would have signed a false confession to crimes against the integrity of US elections. Can anyone doubt that Trump and Giuliani, amplified by Fox News and the other right-wing propaganda channels, would have insisted that she and Moss should be given exemplary sentences of penal servitude and locked away for many years? The defense of democracy, they would have cried, demanded nothing less for those who dared to corrupt the electoral process. In that, if in nothing else, they would have spoken the truth.

Fintan O'Toole :: NY Review of Books

#Fintan O'Toole #NY Review of Books #RICO #corrupt GOP #indicted #witness intimidation #Fani T. Willis

[drinkersandthinkers]

"The Irish are a people who, for better or worse, are always willing to have a conversation, tell a story, and share a laugh." ~ Fintan O'Toole

#ireland #irish #quotes #fintan o’toole

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

“It was the DUP that made it inevitable by helping to bring down Theresa May, whose “backstop” agreement would have prevented the need for any controls on goods crossing the Irish Sea. And it was Johnson who, with his usual mastery of cynical opportunism, double-crossed the DUP, created the protocol, and used it to win an election.”

[mariacallous]

Is the grievance factory about to shut up shop at last? The Northern Ireland protocol is the last outpost of the once mighty manufacturing empire that produced, in industrial quantities, self-pitying narratives of Britons oppressed by Brussels. Now, perhaps, that assembly line has finally juddered to a halt.

The paradox of the Brexit project for its own advocates is that its very success has cut off the pipeline of complaint that fed their teeming springs of outrage. The protocol was the last excuse for throwing the old shapes, the one remaining arena in which the grand game of Euro-bashing could be played. It is not surprising that there are those – Boris Johnson, much of the European Research Group (ERG), part of the Democratic Unionist party – who can’t bear to part with it.

The most obvious thing about the deal announced at Windsor on Monday is that it shows that there was always a deal to be done. As far back as October 2021, the EU formally accepted that the way the protocol was being implemented had to be changed. It made no sense for goods destined to stay in Northern Ireland to be subjected to the same checks as those that were going on to the Republic and hence entering the EU.

Pretty much everything that has now been agreed was there to be negotiated two years ago: the sharing of advance data on exports, red and green lanes, flexibility on VAT and state aid rules, an enhanced role for the assembly in Belfast in scrutinising new single market regulations. All that was ever required was normal diplomacy at the high level and nerds lower down to do the nuts-and-bolts stuff.

So why was this not done? Why was this row allowed to become a standoff that paralysed politics in Northern Ireland, when everyone knows from bitter experience that its political vacuums are filled by malign forces?

First, because of the inability of the Brexit ultras to wean themselves off the “Those Eurocrats don’t like it up ’em” mode of international relations. The complete failure of bluster and posturing in the negotiation of the overall withdrawal agreement taught them nothing. They remained convinced that the way to get foreigners to do what you want is to shout louder.

Hence Boris Johnson’s idiotic Northern Ireland protocol bill. It said, in essence: scrap the protocol that Johnson himself begged you for or the UK will start a trade war with the EU, alienate the US, override its own most basic democratic procedures and declare its contempt for international law even while attacking Vladimir Putin for the same sin. This was never going to work, but it gave the zealots the thrill of one more excursion to the cliffs at Dover to shake their fists at the continent.

There was, though, an even more profound reason to avoid realistic negotiations on the protocol. The miasma of craziness that occludes this whole terrain emanates from the inconvenient truth that the protocol is, in horse-breeding parlance, by Johnson, out of the DUP. It was the DUP that made it inevitable by helping to bring down Theresa May, whose “backstop” agreement would have prevented the need for any controls on goods crossing the Irish Sea. And it was Johnson who, with his usual mastery of cynical opportunism, double-crossed the DUP, created the protocol, and used it to win an election.

But all of this had to be denied. The Frankensteins had to disown their monster. And the way to do that was to indulge in the fantasy that what they had done could somehow be undone. This mirage was conjured from two impossible demands: that the protocol be scrapped and that the European court of justice should cease to be the final arbiter of EU law as it applied to Northern Ireland’s operation of the single market. The beauty of these demands, for those who wished to drown the whole story in obfuscation and amnesia, was that they were so fantastical. They pushed the reality of what Johnson and the DUP had achieved – a serious weakening of the union – into a parallel universe of high dudgeon and glorious defiance.

Rishi Sunak deserves credit for rejoining the reality-based community. The relative speed with which the deal has been done shows the benefits of trying to function like a normal government and seek mutually beneficial solutions to common problems. But part of the reality he has faced is that one part of the UK – Northern Ireland – has a very different kind of Brexit to all the others. Agreeing to make the protocol work is accepting the immutable fact that a hard Brexit means that Northern Ireland will become ever more a place apart within the UK.

That’s very difficult for the DUP to accept and all the more so because it is to a very large extent its own doing. It is hard to think of a worse strategic error by any political party in these islands in modern times than the defenders of the union doing so much to undermine it. It is tough to come to terms with this outcome and reasonable to give the DUP time to adjust to the fact that it has been fighting, not a losing battle, but a battle that was irretrievably lost when it put its fate in the hands of Johnson.

Yet what alternative does it have? The deal is a very good one for Northern Ireland, most of whose people will have little patience with a rearguard action against it. Sunak has called the bluff of the DUP’s allies in the ERG and their hand is in fact very weak – not least because, in the end, few people in Britain care very much about the protocol. The prospect of a Labour government will further diminish the DUP’s influence at Westminster.

The only place it can exercise power is in Belfast. The protocol deal, with its “Stormont brake” on new EU regulations, gives the assembly real powers to block EU regulations – but only if there is an assembly in the first place. There are a thousand other reasons why the DUP should fulfil its responsibilities and allow Northern Ireland’s political institutions to get back to work – but that has to be, from its own point of view, the most compelling.

Exporting Brexit grievances to Belfast was always much madder and more pernicious than sending coals to Newcastle. Northern Ireland has its own superabundant supply, flowing through both green and orange lanes. The heedless exploitation of that trade has been one of the ugliest aspects of the Brexit debacle. Now that the last drops of performative affront have been squeezed out of this tawdry drama, perhaps Britain and Ireland can get back to the slow and undramatic business of reconciliation.

[therehavebeenstranger]

my thesis advisor, james tynion iv, fintan o'toole, and jennette mccurdy all being on salon's best books of 2022 list is a lot. but??? it's also a dream blunt rotation