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Centrist Democrats Launch Smear Campaign Against Young Transgender Woman,
to Keep an Old, Straight, White Man in Power
Chelsea Manning has announced
her candidacy for the U.S. Senate
by posting a video outlining the broad themes of
her campaign. Manning, a whistleblower who
served seven years in a U.S. military brig for
exposing systemic U.S. war crimes, was held
under prison conditions so brutal that the United
Nations formally denounced them as “inhumane.”
While her whistleblowing made her a hero around
the world, Manning has also now become an icon
of LGBT equality and transgender rights with an
act of profound bravery that at least matches, if
not surpasses, her whistleblowing. She
announced her transition and demanded the
dignity and treatment to which she was entitled,
while she was imprisoned in the middle of a
sprawling U.S. military base, in a brig at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas.
Since her release from prison, she has become a
visible and outspoken advocate for the rights of
trans people. She has used her position as a
Guardian columnist to stake out a wide range of
positions, including drafting a proposed law to
provide protections for whistleblowers. She
certainly has more political experience and
activism than many other Senate candidates
previously supported by the Democratic
establishment (Al Franken comes to mind as one
example). If elected, Manning would become the
first transgender woman ever, and the youngest
woman ever, to serve in the U.S. Senate.
Manning’s opponent in the Democratic Party
primary is one of the most standard, banal,
typical, privileged, and mediocre politicians in the
U.S. Congress: Benjamin Cardin, a 74-year-old
white, straight man who is seeking his third
six-year Senate term. Cardin’s decadeslong career
as a politician from the start has been steeped in
unearned privilege: He first won elective office
back in 1966, when his uncle, Maurice Cardin,
gave up his seat in order to bequeath it to his
nephew Benjamin. With this dynastic privilege as
his base, he has spent the last 50 years climbing
the political ladder in Maryland.
Cardin has remarkably few achievements for
being in Congress for so many years. One of his
few distinctions is that he has become one of the
Senate’s most reliable and loyal supporters of
AIPAC’s agenda and the Israeli government, if not
the single most loyal. In 2015, he joined with
Lindsey Graham in kicking off the annual AIPAC
conference, causing neocon columnist Jennifer
Rubin to gush about how identical they sounded.
But Cardin’s crowning achievement came last year
when he authored a bill that would have made it a
felony to support a boycott of Israel — a bill that
was such a profound assault on basic First
Amendment freedoms that the ACLU instantly
denounced it and multiple senators who had
co-sponsored Cardin’s bill (such as Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand) announced that they were withdrawing
their support.
Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it,
establishment Democrats wasted no time in
mocking and denouncing Manning’s bid to
become the first-ever trans woman in the Senate,
instead quickly lining up in support behind the
straight, white male who has wielded power for
decades. To demean Manning, many of these
establishment Democrats invoked the primary
tactic they now reflexively use against anyone
they view as a political adversary: They depicted
her as a tool of the Kremlin, whose candidacy is
really just a disguised plot engineered by Moscow.
Leading the way in spreading this obviously
deranged but acceptable-in-D.C. conspiracy
theory was Neera Tanden, president of the largest
Democratic Party think tank in Washington. Last
night, Tanden spread a viral tweet that strongly
implied — without even pretending to have a
shred of evidence — that the Kremlin had
engineered Manning’s candidacy as punishment
for Cardin’s hard-line position on Russia:
This conspiracy theory mocks itself. The idea that
Vladimir Putin sat in the Kremlin, steaming over
Cardin’s report on Russia and thus, developed a
dastardly plot to rid himself of his daunting
Maryland nemesis — “I know how to get rid of
Cardin: I’ll have a trans woman who was convicted
of felony leaking run against him!” — is too inane
to merit any additional ridicule. But this is the
climate in Washington: No conspiracy theory is
too moronic, too demented, too self-evidently
laughable to disqualify its advocates from being
taken seriously — as long as it involves
accusations that someone is a covert tool of the
Kremlin. That’s why the president of the leading
Democratic think tank feels free to spread this
slanderous trash.
(As a side note: Tanden’s ongoing attempt to
smear all of her critics as agents of a foreign
power is particularly ironic given that the think
tank she runs, the Center for American
Progress, conceals the identity of many of its
largest donors, but admits that one of its largest
contributors is one of the world’s most repressive
regimes. If there’s any entity worthy of the type of
disloyalty innuendo that Tanden loves to spread,
it’s the one she runs.
Why have so many establishment Democrats so
quickly decided to back a white, straight male
politician steeped in privilege, while devoting
themselves to opposing a candidate who would
make history by becoming the first trans woman
ever elected to the U.S. Senate, in the process
inspiring trans youth around the world and helping
to erode the stigma that has made them so
vulnerable to discrimination and violence?
They’ve decided to do this presumably because
they find Cardin’s centrist ideology and politics
more appealing than Manning’s more radical
politics and believe that this trumps what could be
the historic value of Manning’s candidacy. They’ve
apparently decided to prioritize their own centrist
ideology over the important gender, sexual
orientation, and trans equality progress that
Manning’s victory would ensure.
One can certainly make an argument that the
license they’ve granted themselves here — to
prioritize ideology and politics over identity — is a
reasonable one. But one wonders whether they
intend to maintain a monopoly on this license or
extend it to others.
Glenn Greenwald
theintercept.com

Think Globally, Enact Locally

Times are a’changin.
When liberals begin talking about local control and states’ rights, you know
that something is afoot. Local control and states’ rights have long been a
bastion for conservative republicans, the right-wing and racists. Today, states
and municipalities are beginning to rediscover local control and states’ rights
as they find themselves on the receiving end of federal marijuana and
immigration policy.
One wonders why it took them this long. Welcome to the party.
Going Local
And what a party it is. Between states holding up their middle fingers to the
federal government on marijuana legalization, to cities, towns and counties
providing sanctuary to Dreamers in direct defiance of federal immigration law,
there’s a new wind blowing. Not to mention the two hundred municipalities
across ten states who have now adopted local laws banning fracking,
corporate factory farms, gas pipelines and aerial pesticide spraying, all
directly in defiance of state and federal laws that force those projects into
communities that don’t want them.
Getting Bold
Those communities have even gone so far as to nullify corporate
“personhood” and other rights and powers – not because it’s fun, but
because the existence of corporate powers interferes with the authority of
the people in those municipalities to govern.
Thinking globally while acting locally, while for so long used as a throw-away
line to ask people to do everything from composting to taking shorter
showers, is beginning to evolve into something much different – something
with muscle.
Rediscovering Our Authority
When institutions fail us – as almost all of our institutions have, over the past
thirty years – it means that “we the people” have to rediscover our authority
to dismantle those institutions and build new systems that reflect our new
reality. That new reality has us on the verge of destroying our own planet,
while expanding a system of corporate and governmental control that
promises to wipe out the last of our legacy of individual liberty and freedoms.
Part of that rediscovery means coming face to face with the truth that our
existing political systems – our local and state governments – have become
morbidly sluggish, and in their sluggishness, have proven to be willing
co-conspirators to the destruction of the planet and the removal of the last
semblances of self-government.
Instead of spending our time moaning about this state of affairs, however, we
have work to do.
Seizing Our Government
It’s a high mountain to climb, but as my father once said, “It’s not going to
climb itself.” Not only do we have to kick the corporations out of our
governments, we have to reprogram our own governments so they protect
us, rather than corporate interests.
That means seizing our own governments by using them to enact laws –
whether those laws be on immigration, marijuana, sanctuary cities, fracking
or a range of other issues affecting people and nature in municipalities across
this land. Those laws must directly confront state authority, federal authority
and corporate authority, which currently allow state and federal law (and
corporate “rights”) to supersede those local laws.
Not only do we have to kick the corporations out of our governments, we
have to reprogram our own governments so they protect us, rather than
corporate interests.
Bridging Issues
It also means coming together, across issue areas, so that immigration
activists are sitting in the same room as environmentalists, and labor activists
are sitting across the table from legalization advocates. Together, we must
envision a new system of law in which defiance of moldy, old legal doctrines
becomes the norm.
That means changing our system of law to one in which local and state
governments become rights-protectors when the federal government
abandons its role to do so. And it means that this new system of law not only
upholds the authority of people to use their governments in this way, but
celebrates it.
“Think globally, enact locally” may not have the same ring to it as the
original slogan, but it more precisely points in the direction we must go.
Now more than ever, there’s no time to lose.
Thomas Linzey
celdf.org

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