There's Just Something About Mayo Pete... And It Goes Beyond Icky

During the debate Thursday there were times I nearly shut the TV off. Those times were when the corporate conservatives on the stage were speaking: Status Quo Joe, Amy Klobuchar and Mayo Pete. The feeling drove me to run a quickie twitter poll. Participants liked Mayo least-- and by a lot. They sure seem to want to vote him right off the island:

I wonder why. As Bernie pointed out, Biden-- who's old and creepy and a clumsy liar who seems to think feigning indignation and screaming make people less likely to recognize what he's saying as lies-- has more billionaires backing him-- 44-- while Mayo only has 39 billionaires. Biden is disgusting enough for me to absolutely not vote if he's the nominee. But Mayo... is he even worse? Read this report from Max Blumenthal. It's scary and hard to believe but...

Wait, wait... we'll get there is a second. First I want to take issue with Max's first sentence: "In his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment." I don't think so. That image was crafted and perpetrated by, the same person who's been doing his press for years-- Lis Smith, publicist extraordinaire, up against random novices who don't understand the power of publicity and image crafting. Lis is the best. I would have hired her to work in the music business. There are virtually no other political publicists I would say that about. Too bad she's working for Mayo. Max's assertions about Mayo though, run far, far darker than a magical publicist.

Max asserts that the real Mayo is "a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University." Literally?

After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its founder as “a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s.” Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank’s board of advisors alongside some of the country’s most accomplished military interventionists.

Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Justice Department-- key cogs in the national security state’s permanent bureaucracy.

His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.

That friend, Nathaniel “Nat” Myers, was Buttigieg’s traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for the New York Times.

Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government’s call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg’s first foreign policy audition before a national audience.

Under public pressure for more transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some background details this December. The disclosures included a timeline of his work for various clients that stated he “stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana.”

How Buttigieg’s “full-time” role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.

Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of the New York Times in a July 2008 op-ed.

The column read as though crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that “the people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south.”

Since declaring its independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent, in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.

Several months after Buttigieg traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera reported, “The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition.”

And just a few weeks before Buttigieg’s visit, the would-be republic inked a contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat, presumably to help oversee that charm offensive.

Founded by a self-described anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition on the international stage. Ross’s client list has included the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed war against the Syrian government.

Independent Diplomat did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to Somaliland.

According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.

“There really is nothing going on in Somaliland,” Kiriakou told The Grayzone. “To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It’s not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist.”

Kiriakou visited Somaliland in 2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of “blue-eyed” American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.

To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.

“It is not the easiest place to reach and there’s no business to do there,” Kiriakou said.

Whether or not Buttigieg’s trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record-- and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.

In his bio, Nathaniel Myers identified himself simply as a “financial analyst based in Ethiopia.” According to his resume, which is available online at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.

By 2011, Myers had moved on from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change operations abroad.

Nathaniel Myers’ relationship with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of “The Order of Kong,” a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school’s Institute of Politics.

Like most members of the college-era “order,” Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018, Buttigieg chose him as his best man.

Myers currently works as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.

Wherever the U.S. seeks regime change, it seems that USAID’s OTI is involved.

In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID’s participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had “specialized in programming in places like Yemen and Libya”-- two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID’s OTI the following year.)

...To Syracuse University professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American university’s transformation into a neoliberal training ground.

“Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced” into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell lamented in a lengthy 2014 survey of the OTI’s sordid record.

“It has been painful,” the professor wrote, “to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students.”

Campbell’s comments painted a clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master’s degree at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming a “hard aid” specialist at USAID.

They also captured the psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated Bernie Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke out against the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed into the culture of McKinsey and D.C. institutions like the Truman Center.

When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party.

Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010. Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking “exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman’s belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin.”

This was not the first time Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington’s national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive client list within the arms industry. (As The Grayzone reported, the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration’s bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).

But it was Buttigieg’s fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party’s foreign policy mandarins.

A Tablet Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a “gatekeeper and ringleader” whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration’s National Security Council. Her career trajectory mirrored Buttigieg’s.

She had earned degrees at elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that performed an array of services for the U.S. military and  private spying for intelligence agencies.

Kleinfeld’s boss at the company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has lobbied aggressively for U.S. military assaults on Iraq and Iran.

...To fill the center’s board of advisers, Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of entire countries through regime change wars.

Not enough Democrats know Mayo yet to hate him, but neither do they like him much either-- other than billionaires in Napa Valley wine caves

Among the most notable Truman advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia and president of an influence-peddling operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group; the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed dividing Iraq into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw record levels of migrant deportations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine deployed by the Obama administration to justify NATO’s disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up another one against Syria.

“The Truman Project mobilizes Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda,” journalist Kelly Vlahos wrote. “Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle.”

Buttigieg listed his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the credentials that qualified him for Indiana State treasurer when he ran for the position in 2010.

Though he lost in a landslide, Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. “Mayor Pete” had not only secured his future in the Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with a seat on the Truman Center’s advisory board.

This July 11, Buttigieg rolled out his foreign policy platform in a carefully scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to “end endless wars” with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.

Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging “love letters” with “a brutal dictator,” referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

More recently, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is self-defeating in the long run.” This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.

On the presidential campaign trail, “Mayor Pete” has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in America’s longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.

A couple of significant new stats passed by this week. One is that millionaires as a class support conservative candidates, not progressives, especially not progressives advocating for substantive change. In match-ups, millionaires prefer Status Quo Joe to Trump 48-41%. And the only other Democratic candidate who beats Trump among millionaires is Mayo Pete, who edges past Trump 46% to 43%. Obviously, Trump would easily beat either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren among millionaires. Millionaires want a candidates who isn't going to threaten the status quo-- Biden, Mayo or Trump.

Perhaps more important in terms of what Blumenthal reported above was Susan Page’s report for USA Today in Monday, namely that more than 200 foreign policy and national security professionals, including dozens of veterans of the Obama administration prefer Mayo Pete over Biden. Yep… Mayo is the candidate of the chief purveyors of the security state and the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.

The text of their joint letter targets President Donald Trump, but the subtext is aimed at former Vice President Joe Biden, who touts his foreign policy experience during the Obama administration as a major asset in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. The endorsements are designed to burnish Buttigieg's credentials as a potential commander in chief and portray him as the leader of a new generation.

…The list of 218 names also includes Anthony Lake, national security adviser for President Clinton; Peter Galbraith, former deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan; Virginia Rep. Don Beyer; a dozen former U.S. ambassadors; and former officials from the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSC and elsewhere.

"Over the course of the past year, we have watched the emergence of a young leader who shares our belief in America's leadership role and values," the letter says, citing Buttigieg's "intelligence, steadiness, demeanor and understanding of the forces now shaping the world." It praises "his long-term approach to the generational consequences of near-term decisions."

…Buttigieg's ability to command robust support among those who work on national security and foreign policy issues helps him make a key case: that at age 37 and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he can be entrusted with the presidency and all that involves. Buttigieg is also a former Navy intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan.

I Bet No One Asks Biden Tonight About His Role In Creating The Northern Triangle Immigration Disaster

Status Quo Joe With Colombian President Uribe In 2017

Biden doesn't want to play the role of political piñata tonight. His record, though, lends itself to exactly that. Trump will certainly use it against him if he's the nominee and the Democrats on the stage with him tonight should go all in in testing every weak point in the most repulsive record any Democratic candidate has brought to the primary stage since his old ally Joe Lieberman. A couple of days ago, investigative reporter Max Blumenthal tackled a piece of Biden's vile record that he'd prefer to hide and that hasn't been touched by the other candidates yet: How Joe Biden's Privatization Plans Helped Doom Latin America And Fuel The Migration Crisis. I'd love to watch Status Quo Joe squirm while trying to respond to this one!

Blumenthal began by pointing out that Biden has touted the crucial role he played in "designing US mega-development and drug war campaigns that transformed the socio-political landscape of large swaths of Latin America" while he's been campaigning (umm... talking with wealthy donors; there's virtually no campaoigning at all) for the last two month. "'I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,' Biden boasted in a July 5 interview with CNN, referring to the multi-billion dollar U.S. effort to end Colombia’s civil war with a massive surge of support for the country’s military. According to Biden, the plan was a panacea for Colombia’s problems, from 'crooked cops' to civil strife." But as with almost everything Biden asserts, this was pure bullshit.

Biden’s plan for Colombia has contributed directly to the country’s transformation into a hyper-militarized bastion of right-wing rule, enhancing the power and presence of the notoriously brutal armed forces while failing miserably in its anti-narcotic and reformist objectives.

This year alone, more than 50 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia in the first four months of 2019, while coca production is close to record levels. And as Colombian peace activists lamented in interviews with The Grayzone, the US is still in complete control of Bogotá’s failed anti-drug policy, thanks largely to Plan Colombia.

Biden has also pumped up his role in an initiative called the Alliance for Prosperity, which was applied to the Northern Triangle of Central America. The former vice president was so central to the program’s genesis that it was informally known as “Plan Biden.”

Marketed as an answer to the crisis of child migration, Biden’s brainchild channeled $750 million through a right-wing government installed by a US-orchestrated military coup to spur mega-development projects and privatize social services.

The Grayzone visited Honduras in July and documented, through interviews with human rights defenders, students, indigenous activists, and citizens from all walks of life, how the Alliance for Prosperity helped set the stage for a national rebellion.

In recent months, teachers, doctors, students, and rural campesinos have been in the streets protesting the privatization plans imposed on their country under the watch of Biden and his successors.

The gutting of public health services, teacher layoffs, staggering hikes in electricity prices, and environmentally destructive mega-development projects are critical factors in mass migration from Honduras. And indeed, they are immediate byproducts of the so-called “Biden plan.”

“Biden is taking credit for doing something constructive to stop the migration crisis and blaming the concentration camps [on the U.S.-Mexico border] on Trump. But it’s Biden’s policies that are driving more people out of Central America and making human rights defenders lives more precarious by defending entities that have no interest in human rights,” explained Adrienne Pine, a professor of anthropology at American University and leading researcher of the social crisis in Honduras, in an interview with The Grayzone.

“So $750 million US taxpayer dollars that were allocated to supposedly address child migration are actually making things worse,” Pine added. “It started with unaccompanied minors and now you have children in cages. Largely thanks to Biden.”

In an interview with CNN on July 5, Biden was asked if he favored decriminalizing the entry of Latin American migrants to the United States. Responding with a definitive “no,” Joe Biden stated that he would be “surging folks to the border to make those concrete decisions” about who receives asylum.

Biden's fault?

Biden argued that he had the best record of addressing the root causes of the migration crisis, recalling how he imposed a solution on Central America’s migration crisis. “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that, just like we did in Colombia,” he said.

“What did we do in Colombia? We went down and said, okay, and I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,” Biden continued. “I said, here’s the deal. If you have all these crooked cops, all these federal police, we’re sending our FBI down, you let us put them through a lie detector test, let us tell you who you should fire and tell you the kind of people you should hire. They did and began to change. We can do so much if we’re committed.”

With the arrogance of a pith-helmeted high colonial official meting out instructions on who to hire and fire to his docile subjects, Biden presided over a plan that failed miserably in its stated goals, while transforming Colombia into a hyper-militarized bastion of US regional influence.

Plan Colombia was originally conceived by Colombian President Andrés Pastrana in 1999, as an alternative development and conflict resolution plan for his war-torn country. He considered calling it the “Plan for Colombia’s Peace.”

The proposal was quickly hijacked by the Bill Clinton administration, with Joe Biden lobbying in the Senate for an iron-fisted militarization plan. “We have an obligation, in the interests of our children and the interests of the hemisphere, to keep the oldest democracy in place, to give them a fighting chance to keep from becoming a narcostate,” Biden said in a June 2000 floor speech.

When Plan Colombia’s first formal draft was published, it was done so in English, not Spanish. The original spirit of peace-building was completely sapped from the document by Biden, whose vigorous wheeling-and-dealing ensured that almost 80 percent of the $7.5 billion plan went to the Colombian military. 500 US military personnel were promptly dispatched to Bogota to train the country’s military.

“If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, there’s no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels,” Robert White, the former number two at the U.S. embassy in Bogota, complained in 2000. “Quite the contrary. [Pastrana] says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians.”

White lamented how Washington had abused the trust of the Colombians: “They come and ask for bread, and you give them stones.”

Plan Colombia was largely implemented under the watch of the hardline right-wing President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, Uribe was placed on a US Drug Enforcement Agency list of “important Colombian narco-traffickers,” in part due to his role in helping drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s obtain licenses for landing strips while Uribe was the head of Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics Department.

Under Uribe’s watch, toxic chemicals were sprayed by military forces across the Colombian countryside, poisoning the crops of impoverished farmers and displacing millions.

Six years after Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, however, even U.S. drug czar John Walters was forced to quietly admit in a letter to the Senate that the price of cocaine in the US had declined, the flow of the drug into the U.S. had risen, and its purity had increased.

Meanwhile, a UN Office of Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation reached record levels in Colombia in 2018. In other words, billions of dollars have been squandered, and a society already in turmoil has been laid to waste.

For the military and right-wing paramilitary forces that have shored up the rule of leaders like Uribe and the current ultra-conservative Colombian president, Ivan Duque, Plan Colombia offered a sense of near-total impunity.

The depravity of the country’s military was put on bold display when the so-called “false positives” scandal was exposed in 2008. The incident began when army officers lured 22 rural laborers to a far-away location, massacred them, and then dressed them in uniforms of the leftist FARC guerrillas.

It was an overt attempt to raise the FARC body count and justify the counter-insurgency aid flowing from the U.S. under Plan Colombia. The officers who oversaw the slaughter were paid bounties and given promotions.

Colombian academics Omar Eduardo Rojas Bolaños and Fabián Leonardo Benavides demonstrated in a meticulous study that the “false positives” killings reflected “a systematic practice that implicates the commanders of brigades, battalions and tactical units” in the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians. Indeed, under Plan Colombia, the incident was far from an isolated atrocity.

In an interview in Bogotá this May, The Grayzone’s Ben Norton asked Colombian social leader Santiago Salinas if there was any hope for progressive political transformation since the ratification of Plan Colombia.

An organizer of the peace group Congreso de los Pueblos, Salinas shrugged and exclaimed, “I wish.” He lamented that many of Colombia’s most pivotal decisions were made in Washington.

Salinas pointed to drug policy as an example. “It seems like the drug decisions about what to do with the drugs, it has nothing to do with Colombia.

“There was no sovereign decision on this issue. Colombia does not have a decision,” he continued. It was the Washington that wrote the script for Bogota. And the drug trade is in fact a key part of the global financial system, Salinas pointed out.

But Biden was not finished. After 15 years of human misery and billions of wasted dollars in Colombia, he set out on a personal mission to export his pet program to Central America’s crime and corruption-ravaged Northern Triangle.

In his July sit-down with CNN, Joe Biden trumpeted his Plan Colombia as the inspiration for the Alliance for Prosperity he imposed on Central America. Channeling the spirit of colonial times once again, he bragged of imposing Washington’s policies on the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

“We’ll make a deal with you,” Biden recalled telling the leaders of these countries. “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that.”

Biden announced his bold plan on the editorial pages of the New York Times in January 2015. He called it “a joint plan for economic and political reforms, an alliance for prosperity.” Sold by the vice president as a panacea to a worsening migration crisis, the Alliance for Prosperity was a boon for international financial institutions which promised to deepen the economic grief of the region’s poor.



The Alliance for Prosperity “treated the Honduran government as if it were a crystal-clear, pure vessel into which gold could be poured and prosperity would flow outward,” explained Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of the book, The Long Honduran Night.

“In reality, the Plan would further enrich and strengthen the political power of the very same elites whose green, deliberate subversion of the rule of law, and destruction of natural resources and of Indigenous and campesino land rights, were responsible for the dire conditions the proposal ostensibly addressed,” Frank added.

In Honduras, the government had no capacity or will to resist Biden’s plan. That is because the country’s elected president, Juan Manuel Zelaya, had been removed in 2009 in a coup orchestrated by the United States.

As Zelaya told The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, the Obama administration was infuriated by his participation in ALBA, a regional economic development program put forward by Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez that provided an alternative to neoliberal formulas like the so-called “Biden Plan.”

Following the military coup, a corporate-friendly administration was installed to advance the interests of international financial institutions, and US trainers arrived in town to hone the new regime’s mechanisms of repression.

Under the auspices of the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the FBI was dispatched to oversee the training of FUSINA, the main operational arm of the Honduran army and the base of the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP) that patrols cities like an occupation force.

In an October 2014 cable, the US embassy in Tegucigalpa acknowledged that the PMOP was riven with corruption and prone to abuse, and attempted to distance itself from the outfit, even though it operated under the umbrella of FUSINA.

This June, the PMOP invaded the Autonomous University of Honduras, attacking students protesting the privatization of their school and wounding six.

The creation by the US embassy in Honduras of a special forces unit known as the Tigres has added an additional layer of repressive muscle. Besides arresting activists, the Tigres reportedly helped a drug kingpin escape after he was detained during a US investigation.

While violent crime surged across Honduras, unemployment more than doubled. Extreme poverty surged, and so too did the government’s security spending.

To beef up his military, President Juan Orlando Hernández dipped into the social programs that kept a mostly poor population from tumbling into destitution.

As Alex Rubinstein reported for The Grayzone, the instability of post-coup Honduras has been particularly harsh on LGTTBI (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual, and Intersex) Hondurans. More than 300 of them have been killed since 2009, a dramatic spike in hate crimes reinforced by the homophobic rhetoric of the right-wing Evangelical Confraternity that represents the civil-society wing of the ultra-conservative Hernandez government.

As the social chaos enveloped Honduran society, migration to the US-Mexico border began to surge to catastrophic levels. Unable to make ends meet, some Hondurans sent their children alone to the border, hoping that they would temporary protective or refugee status.

By 2014, the blowback of the Obama administration’s coup had caused a national emergency. Thousands of Hondurans were winding up in cages in detention camps run by the US Department of Homeland Security, and many of them were not even 16 years old.

That summer, Obama went to Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to ramp up border militarization and deport as many unaccompanied Central American minors as possible.

Biden used the opportunity to rustle up an additional billion dollars, exploiting the crisis to fund a massive neoliberal project that saw Honduras as a base for international financial opportunity. His plan was quickly ratified, and the first phase of the Alliance for Prosperity began.

The implementation of the Alliance for Prosperity was overseen by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), a US-dominated international financial institution based in Washington, DC that supports corporate investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.

A graphic [above] on the IADB’s website outlined the plan’s objectives in anodyne language that concealed its aggressively neoliberal agenda.

For instance, the IADB promised the “fostering [of] regional energy integration.” This was a clear reference to Plan Pueblo Panama, a region-wide neoliberal development blueprint that was conceived as a boon to the energy industry. Under the plan, the IADB would raise money from Latin American taxpayers to pay for the expansion of power lines that would carry electricity from Mexico all the way to Panama.

Honduras, with its rivers and natural resources, provided the project with a major hub of energy production. In order for the country’s energy to be traded and transmitted to other countries, however, the International Monetary Fund mandated that its national electricity company be privatized.

Since the implementation of that component of “Plan Biden,” energy costs have begun to surge for residential Honduran consumers. In a country with a 66 percent poverty rate, electricity privatization has turned life from precarious to practically impossible.

Rather than languish in darkness for long hours with unpaid bills piling up, many desperate citizens have journeyed north towards the U.S. border.

As intended, the Alliance for Prosperity’s regional energy integration plan has spurred an influx of multi-national energy companies to Honduras. Hydro-electric dams and power plants began rising up in the midst of the lush pine forests and winding rivers that define the Honduran biosphere, pushing many rural indigenous communities into a life-and-death struggle.

This July, The Grayzone traveled to Reitoca, a remote farming community located in the heart of the Honduran “dry sector.” The indigenous Lenca residents of this town depend on their local river for fish, recreation, and most importantly, water to irrigate the crops that provide them with a livelihood. But the rush on energy investment brought an Italian-Chilean firm called Progelsa to the area to build a massive hydro-electric dam just upstream.

Wilmer Alonso, a member of the Lenca Indigenous Council of Reitoca, spoke with The Grayzone, shaking with emotion as he described the consequences of the dam for his community.

“The entire village is involved in this struggle,” Alonso said. “Everyone knows the catastrophe that the construction of this hydro-electric plant would create.”

He explained that, like so many foreign multi-nationals in Honduras, Progelsa employs an army of private thugs to intimidate protesters: “The private company uses the army and the police to repress us. They accuse us of being trespassers, but they are the ones trespassing on our land.”

The Alliance for Progress also provided the backdrop for the assassination of the renowned Honduran environmentalist and feminist organizer Berta Cáceres.

On March 3, 2016, Cáceres was gunned down in her home in rural Honduras. A towering figure in her community with a presence on the international stage, Cáceres had been leading the fight against a local dam project overseen by DESA, a powerful Honduran energy company backed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and run by powerful former military officers.

The representative that DESA sent to sign its deal with USAID, Sergio Rodríguez, was later accused of masterminding Cáceres’ murder, alongside military officials and former company employees.

In March 2018, the Honduran police arrested DESA’s executive president, Roberto David Castillo Mejía, accusing him of “providing logistics and other resources to one of the material authors” of the assassination. Castillo was a West Point graduate who worked in the energy industry while serving as a Honduran intelligence officer.

This July, The Grayzone visited the family of Berta Cáceres in La Esperanza, a town nestled in the verdant mountains of Intibucá. Cáceres’ mother, Doña Berta, lives there under 24-hour police guard paid for by human rights groups.

The Cáceres household is bristling with security cameras, and family members get around in armored cars. In her living room, we met Laura Zúñiga Cáceres of the Civic Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the human rights group that her mother Berta founded.

“The violence in Honduras generates migrant caravans, which tears apart society, and it all has to do with all of this extractivism, this violence,” Zúñiga Caceres told The Grayzone. “And the response from the US government is to send more soldiers to our land; it is to reinforce one of the factors that generates violence the most in our society.”

“We are receiving reports from our comrades that there is a US military presence in indigenous Lenca territory,” she added. “For what? Humanitarian aid? With weapons. It’s violence. It’s persecution.”

The Alliance for Prosperity also commissioned the privatization of health services through a deceptively named program called the Social Protection Framework Law, or la Ley Marco de Protección Social.

Promoted by Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as a needed reform, the scheme was advanced through a classic shock doctrine-style episode: In 2015, close associates of Hernández siphoned some $300 million from the Honduran Institute for Social Services (IHSS) into private businesses, starving hospitals of supplies and causing several thousand excess deaths, mostly among the poor.

With the medical sector in shambles, Hondurans were then forced to seek healthcare from the private companies that were to provide services under Hernandez’s “Social Protection” plan.

“The money that was robbed [in the IHSS scandal] was used to justify the Ley Marco Proteccion Social,” Karen Spring, a researcher and coordinator for the Honduras Solidarity Network, told The Grayzone. “The hospitals were left in horrible conditions with no human capital and they were left to farm out to private hospitals.” “When Hondurans go to hospitals, they will be told they need to go to a private company, and through the deductions in their jobs they will have to pay a lot out of pocket,” Spring said. “Through the old universal system you would be covered no matter what you had, from a broken arm to cancer. No more.”

In response, Hondurans poured out into the streets, launching the March of Torches-- the first major wave of continuous protests against Hernandez and his corrupt administration.

In March 2015, in the middle of the crisis, Joe Biden rushed down to Guatemala City to embrace Hernández and restore confidence in the Alliance for Prosperity.

“I come from a state that, in fact, is the corporate capital of America. More corporations are headquartered there than anyplace else,” Biden boasted, with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador standing by his side. “They want to come here. Corporate America wants to come.”

Emphasizing the need for more anti-corruption and security measures to attract international financial investment, Biden pointed to Plan Colombia as a shining model-- and to himself as its architect. “Today Colombia is a nation transformed, just as you hope to be 10 to 15 years from now,” the vice president proclaimed.

Following Biden’s visit, the privatization of the Honduran economy continued apace-- and so did the corruption, the repression, and the unflinching support from Washington.

By 2017, the movement in Honduras that had galvanized against the U.S.-orchestrated 2009 coup saw its most immediate opportunity for political transformation at the ballot box. President Hernández was running for re-election, violating a constitutional provision on term limits. His opponent, Salvador Nasrallah, was a popular broadcast personality who provided a centrist consensus choice for the varied elements that opposed the country’s coup regime.

When voting ended on November 26, Nasrallah’s victory appeared certain, with exit polls showing him comfortably ahead by several points. But suddenly, the government announced that a power outage required the suspension of vote counting. Days later, Hernández was declared the victor by about 1 percent.

The fraud was so transparent that the Organization of American States (OAS), normally an arm of US interests in Latin America, declared in a preliminary report that “errors, irregularities and systemic problems,” as well as “extreme statistical improbability,” rendered the election invalid.

But the United States recognized the results anyway, leaving disenfranchised Hondurans with protest as their only recourse.

“Hondurans tried to change what happened in their country through the 2017 elections, not just Hernández but all the implementation of all these policies that the Biden plan had funded and implemented all these years since the coup,” explained Karen Spring, of the Honduras Solidarity Network.

“They tried to change that reality through votes and when the elections turned out to be a fraud, tons of people had no choice but to take to the streets.”

At the front lines of the protests in 2017 was Spring’s longtime partner, the Honduran activist Edwin Espinal. Following a protest in November of that year where property damage took place, Espinal was arrested at gunpoint at his home and accused of setting fire to the front door of a hotel. He fervently denied all charges, accusing the government of persecuting him for his political activism.

In fact, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had placed a protective measure on Espinal in 2010 in response to previous attempts to legally railroad him.

The government placed Espinal in pre-trial detention in La Tolva, a US-style maximum security prison normally reserved for violent criminals and narco-traffickers. Last October, Espinal and Spring were married in the jail while surrounded by masked guards.

“Since the Biden plan, contractors have been coming down to build these US-style maximum security prisons,” Spring said. “That’s where my husband Edwin Espinal is being held.”

“They say the company is Honduran but there’s no way Hondurans could have built that without US architects or US construction firms giving them the plans,” she added. “I’ve been in the prison and it’s like they dumped a US prison in the middle of Honduras.”

Reflecting on her husband’s persecution, Spring explained, “Edwin wanted to stay in his country to change the reality that caused mass migration. He’s one of the people who’s faced consequences because he went to the streets. And he’s faced persecution for years because he’s one of the Hondurans who wanted to change the country by staying and fighting. Berta Caceres was another.”

“Hondurans wanted to use their votes to change the country and now they’re voting with their feet,” she continued. “So if Biden’s plan really addressed the root causes of the migrant crisis, why aren’t people asking why migration is getting worse? Hondurans are voting on the Biden plan by fleeing and saying your plan didn’t work and it made our situation worse by fleeing to the border.”

Now, if Democratic Party primary voters only cared about issues! And their candidates' characters! Trump told reporters yesterday that his dream is going to come true-- the only way he could win reelection is what will happen. "I think right now, it will be Sleepy Joe. I feel he’ll limp across the line. So, what I think doesn’t mean anything, but I know the other people, I know him. I think he’s off his game by a lot, but personally, I think it’s going to be Sleepy Joe."

Who Will Be The Democratic Nominee? by Nancy Ohanian

Neanderthals... In Northeast Georgia?

Discover isn't a political magazine and doesn't get into the politics of the science stories it publishes. Something tells me, though, that lunatic fringe science-deniers on the House Science Committee, like Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell), Mike McCaul (R-TX), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Steve Stockman (R-OK City Federal Building), Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Tom Massie (R-KY), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Randy Weber (R-TX) and Chris Stewart (R-Utah), don't subscribe. They should-- if, for no other reason-- to get a better understanding of the people who vote for them. At least in this fascinating new article by distinguished science author Carl Zimmer on Interbreeding with Neanderthals.

Did you watch the Paul Broun video at the "Pit of Hell" link above? If you agree with him that the earth was created 9,000 years ago in six 24 hour days, you might as well stop reading right now, since the premises in Zimmer's essay include something about humans and Neanderthals going their separate ways about 700,000 years ago. The essay is about how the branches kept linking up again all over the world-- humans and Neanderthals interbreeding. Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich is who's been doing the work and examining the DNA, that Rep. Broun, a John Birch Society freak running for the open Georgia Senate seat (and not especially as a joke candidate), would term "lies from the pit of hell."

Some 200,000 years ago, our ancestors evolved in East Africa. They spread throughout the rest of the continent and then moved out into Asia and Europe. As they journeyed along coastlines and over mountains, they encountered Neanderthals and other human relatives. And at least once in a while, they had sex.

We don’t know the prurient details of those encounters, although it is possible that someday Reich and other scientists will be able to fill in a few of them. But the work Reich has done already leaves no doubt that interbreeding was a major feature of human evolution. Billions of people carry sizable chunks of DNA from Neanderthals and other archaic human relatives. Some of those genes may play important roles in our health today.

And politics. It certainly goes a long way to explaining why the South is still the South so long after we whooped them in the mid-1860s. White supremacists like Broun would not be happy with conclusions scientists are drawing like "today’s Europeans are not latter-day Neanderthals but African immigrants." Thems fightin' words in the backward part of northeast Georgia that elects Broun to Congress, one of America's most racist and bigoted areas.

Reich was curious about what happened when these groups came into contact with each other. Even though they would probably remain mostly separate, some individuals might interbreed. Reich wondered if he could look at the genomes of living humans and find evidence of those ancient liaisons.

Detecting these signs is not easy. Imagine that two people from very distant parts of the world—a woman from Spain, say, and a man from Polynesia-- get married and have a girl. She is born with 23 pairs of chromosomes: one set from her mother and one from her father. Her mother’s chromosomes are loaded with genetic markers that pinpoint her Spanish heritage. Likewise, her father’s DNA is unmistakably Polynesian. But as the girl’s own eggs develop, her DNA gets mixed up.

In the cells that give rise to an egg, a Spanish chromosome will pair up with its Polynesian counterpart. Segments of the chromosomes switch places. Each egg ends up with a new, hybrid chromosome. Now imagine that the girl grows up and marries a Spanish man. The DNA of her children will be only one quarter Polynesian, and the Polynesian DNA will be chopped up into even smaller segments. As the generations pass, the signs of interbreeding get even fainter.

Despite the challenge, Reich thought that detecting interbreeding could be important. It could expose some of humanity’s hidden history, or even shed light on why people are susceptible to certain diseases. When Reich arrived at Harvard Medical School, he began a study on prostate cancer that proved the value of this type of analysis by revealing the genes that make certain men more likely to develop such cancers. “Prostate cancer occurs 1.5 to 2 times more often in African American men than in European men,” Reich says. “We were able to find the reason why.”

To do so, Reich had to reconstruct the genetic history of African Americans, who came to the United States as slaves beginning in the 17th century. White owners sometimes had sex with their slaves and fathered children, thereby introducing European genes into the African American population. Freed slaves also had children with Native Americans and Latinos. As a result, African Americans today may have up to 80 percent European DNA.

...Finally, Reich and his colleagues had no choice but to conclude that Neanderthals had mated with humans. They estimated that the DNA of living Asians and Europeans was (on average) 2.5 percent Neanderthal. They had to reject a pure version of the out-of-Africa model. Instead, their model was closer to out-of-Africa-and-get-to-know-some-Neanderthals-very-well.

The patterns Reich and his colleagues identified can help narrow down when and where the interbreeding took place. Since Africans do not carry Neanderthal DNA, it would appear Neanderthals bred only with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians. One possibility is that when humans emerged out of Africa some 50,000 or more years ago, they encountered Neanderthals in the Near East.

Once humans and Neanderthals mated, the humans continued to expand into Europe and Asia, taking Neanderthal genes with them. Another possibility is that the interbreeding came later. Neanderthals lived across a vast range, from Spain to Russia. As humans came into contact with Neanderthals, they might have mated in several places... Clearly the hybrid children from these interbreedings had to have been accepted into human cultures. But we can’t say whether these couplings happened as rapes during violent battles between humans and Neanderthals or when individual Neanderthals were welcomed into human society. 

Max Blumenthal concluded his epic book, Republican Gomorrah-- Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party with an epilogue, an anecdote about Broun from 2009 called "The Anointing." By any definition, Broun is a Bronze Age throwback, a time which came considerably after we thought Neanderthals had gone extinct. He may well be the living proof that they're still alive and well. Blumenthal caught up with Broun and a couple of his crackpot friends trying to anoint a door that Obama would pass through with crosses painted in oil (or lard).

Although he was only a backbencher, Broun presented himself as the future of the House Republicans. Joining other right-wing members, he opposed the emergency financial bailout, attacked any efforts at immigration reform, and sponsored a bill to protect soldiers from images of unclad women. "Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit," Broun proclaimed. His spokesman testified to his expertise as an "addictionologist" who is "familiar with the negative consequences associated with long-term exposure to pornography."

On cave walls?

How The GOP Transformed Itself Into The Country's Biggest Walk-In Closet

Not everyone agreed with my assertion Saturday that Democrats are mentally healthier than Republicans nor with the premise that Democrats are emotionally and spiritually healthier as well. But so much of modern Republicanism is premised on hatred and negativity that just identifying as seriously Republican is toxic to anyone's well-being. Let's take one instance a look at Max Blumenthal's report on how the GOP has become, what he called "a sanctuary for repressed gay men" and how mentally and emotionally incapacitated self-loathing closet cases transformed it "into the country's biggest walk-in closet."

The pathology of Republican or conservative homosexuality doesn't start with Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) molesting pages, with Larry Craig's serial case of wide stance in public toilets coast to coast nor with the tragic ends of exposed Republican congressmen, all loudly, desperately homophobic, from Bob Bauman (R-MD), Ed Schrock (R-VA) and Jim McCrery (R-LA), yesterday's versions of the inevitable fates of Aaron Schock (R-IL), Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Instead, let's go back to Joe McCarthy's venomous little closeted sidekick, right-wing fanatic Roy Cohn, who died of AIDS still denying he was gay and still cursing the LGBT community he never quite bonded with despite his sexual obsessions.

"Roy [Cohn] was not gay," Republican operative Roger Stone remarked to legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin. "He was a man who liked having sex with me. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around."

"He was a man who liked having sex with me" means, in the objective world, he's gay. In right wing bizarro world self-loathing, gays thought of themselves as "weak, effeminate" and rejected it and rejected themselves. I've never met a right-wing closet case who wasn't seriously mentally and spiritually ill. After California gay homophobic state Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) was arrested while driving drunk with a young male prostitute, he dealt with it more forthrightly and more quickly than most Republican closet cases do. He told a reporter, "The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content... I'm just trying to tell the truth from the reality of the life I've lived, which has been an amazing life. I have had the privilege of serving in elective office for 26 years and dealing with important legislation, and I did so with a huge secret and in many ways a career built upon lies and deceit. Now that the truth is known, actually I am comfortable talking about these things."

Republican closet cases live in darkness, fear and self deception. Their lives are a lie and lying becomes the norm. All Republican closet cases are, at heart, Roy Cohn. A lifelong homosexual-- and a swell guy-- Mark Foley, long before he was caught, drunk, sneaking into a boys dormitory looking for sex, was a critic of President Clinton. "It's more sad," he told the media, "than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

Like Miss McConnell, Larry Craig was discharged from the military after a very short time-- in his case, a week, after being caught fondling a private's privates. Both Craig and McConnell, of course, have always denied that that's why they were discharged. Both made up cockamamie stories about non-existent ailments... and had their records sealed. Miss McConnell hasn't been officially outed yet. He's very careful. Craig got sloppy and was known all over Washington for his prowling in public toilets. He was a ticking time-bomb for years, a destructive and virulently, hysterically homophobic time bomb who hoped to keep his closet door shut by destroying the lives of men and women in the LGBT community struggling to live normal lives live everyone else. Blumenthal:

One month after Larry Craig's arrest in June 2007, Bob Allen, a socially conservative Florida legislator and co-chair of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, was nabbed outside a men's bathroom for attempting to pay an undercover cop to allow him to perform oral sex on him. Allen claimed, after being arrested, that he was "intimidated by [a] stocky black guy" in the restroom and offered to fellate the undercover cop so he wouldn't "become a statistic." Days later, Glenn Murphy, Jr., the national chair of the Young Republicans youth group, a rising star in Indiana Republican circles who advised candidates to use gay marriage as a wedge issue, was arrested for performing oral sex on a sleeping man during a Young Republican convention.

In October, Republican Washington state Representative Richard Curtis, a stalwart gay right opponent, was arrested after calling the police on a gay escort who had robbed him of $1,000 after Curtis refused to pay him for having anal sex with him. When a detective arrived at the scene of the crime, a cheap motel room, he discovered a plastic sack that Curtis had been reluctant to open. Inside, according to the detective, was a "light grey length of nylon rope, a plastic doctor's stethoscope, and other items I could not immediately identify." For days, Curtis, married with three children, pointed to his family as proof that he was not gay. But finally, after his escort's testimony was made public, bringing to light allegations that he was a "freak," who sneaked out to adult bookshops dressed in women's lingerie, he resigned.

The bizarre imbroglio occurred in Spokane, Washington, a conservative bastion just across the border from the Idaho panhandle-- Larry Craig's political base. One of eastern Washington's most influential Republicans, Jim West, had a draconian record during his twenty years in the state legislature, including introducing bills to outlaw gays from teaching in public schools and teenagers from having consensual sexual contact. In 2003, West leveraged his popularity among local right-wing elements to win election as mayor of Spokane.

Bets West's tenure collapsed two years later when he was accused of molesting Boy Scouts and admitted to offering internships to young men in exchange for sex. Tipped off that West had solicited sex from young men by the gay chat website Gay.com, editors of the Spokane Spokesman-Review assigned a forensic expert to investigate the rumors. Posing as a sexually conflicted high school student, the expert engaged West (who registered online as "RightBi-Guy") in probing conversations until he finally confirmed his identity.

"I could never be into the gay scene with its politics and all, West revealed during one online chat with the Spokane Spokeseman-Review's undercover reporter. "I've just seen too many guys decide once they come out that it becomes everyone else's problem to deal with. I'm not into femmy guys." In December 2005, just months after messages like these appeared on the pages of the Spokesman-Review, disgusted Spokane voters ousted West in a special recall election. The following year, he died from colon cancer.

There are few documents more illuminating about the mentality of closeted conservatives than West's online chats. For West and so many other closeted conservatives, coming out was a fad exclusive among self-indulgent, excessively self-reflexive semi-men-- or, as he called them, "feemy guys." Despite his privately acknowledged bisexuality, West has apparently decided that gaining acceptance as he truly was, amid the retrograde culture in which he was raised, was an impossible fantasy. West kept his deviant lifestyle shrouded in secrecy while exploiting his public platform to denounce that lifestyle. That was the way it had to be, after all. "If someone hires you to paint their house red, then you paint it red," West said, explaining his anti-gay voting record. "Even if you think it would look better green." In the conservative closet, those who imagined the way things might be different were "femmy." Those who accepted the way things were were still real men. In their own minds they were not even gay.

"The authoritarian character worships the past," wrote Erich Fromm in Esacape From Freedom. "What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation-- and creation is always a miracle-- is outside of his range of emotional experience."

Having submitted to the limitations of the past and internalized the nostalgia that has become so intrinsic to modern Republicanism, closeted conservatives carefully modeled their public identity after images of the rugged Middle American Everyman: a pastiche of icons from John Wayne to Rambo, from the Marlboro Man to Rock Hudson. Only by inhabiting alter egos (Maf54, RightBi-Guy) or as the anonymous, silver-haired man trolling airport bathrooms and patronizing male prostitutes with false identities (such as "Jeff Gannon" and "Rod Majors") have closeted conservatives been able to fulfill the essential urges they have denied themselves. But these secret identities, modeled after the hypersexual, leather-bound homosexual deviant of the right-wing imagination, are false too. In the vast gulf between the public persona and the private life of the closeted conservative, there is no moral core. There is no conscience, no self; there is only a void.

The closeted conservative, sapped as he is of his real identity, may never experience actual intimacy through sexual fulfillment. Sex becomes like a drug, a fleeting rush of pornographic lust that can produce titillation, but never emotional connectedness to another person. Thus he is deprived of the sensation of true love, the most life-affirming experience there is. Self-destruction, then, is the leitmotif of the closeted conservative.

"The more the drive toward life is thwarted," Fromm wrote, "the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life."

Is it any wonder closeted conservatives are so aggressively anti-gay? They project their own dysfunction and perversion onto the normal LGBT community and shudder at the thought of a gay man being involved as a teacher, officer, priest or Scoutmaster. They know what those opportunities become in their own sick lives and assume it's the same for normal people who accept themselves.